100% Orange Juice - Breaker Pack DLC

This is the seventh DLC pack released for this game and oh boy, do I have a lot to say about it. The first thing I'd like to talk about is the fact that this is one of the first dlc packs to include new playable campaigns in the single player. Yes, I said campaigns because it actually comes with two of them! The stories for both campaigns are pretty enjoyable with some nice character moments for Star Breaker, Sweet Breaker and a few others. The actual gameplay is just okay to me, but to be fair, that applies for pretty much all the campaigns. Playing against CPUs on preset boards and events just isn't very exciting compared to playing with actual people and the randomness that comes with that. I consider the campaigns a nice bonus more than anything and the only real reasons to play them are if you enjoy learning about the characters or you want the achievements and cosmetic items for beating them on higher difficulties. With all that said, let's talk about the characters now, starting with Sweet Breaker. [u]Sweet Breaker[/u] Sweet Breaker has 6 HP, 0 ATK, 0 DEF, 0 EVD, and 6 REC. She has a pretty high amount of HP and neutral stats so you can use most cards with her pretty effectively and the only real flaw with her is their higher than average REC if she gets KO'd. Sweet Breaker also has a passive ability where for each reverse card a player she battles is holding, she gains +1 to ATK, DEF, and EVD. There are only two ways for somebody to end up with reverse cards. The first is through the trap "Sealed Memories" which reverses the hand of the person that lands on it for 3 turns. The other way is through Sweet Breaker's hyper, "Melting Memories". Melting Memories when activated will permanently reverse the cards that are currently in your opponents hands and shuffle them. One of the cards that was in their hand will also be discarded and replaced with a card from the deck (which will also be reversed). This hyper can be devastating to any character that relies on having specific cards in their hand for their game plan. They will also be under threat of being attacked by Sweet Breaker who will have higher stats against them until they get rid of all the reversed cards in their hand. Melting Memories is a pretty solid hyper overall, but it does have a few drawbacks. The minor one is the norma 3 requirement, which isn't too hard for Sweet Breaker to reach. The major drawback is the cost for activating it: 5 stars per card reversed. This can quickly drain you of stars if you use it when everybody has a full hand and you'd ideally want to circumvent the cost somehow if possible. Sweet Breaker is a fine enough character that I don't have any issues with. Their neutral stat-line and versatile hyper means that you can play Sweet Breaker in a lot of different ways and have success with her. I think that they're worth your time if they sound interesting to you, but now we have to talk about the elephant in the room: Star Breaker. [u] Star Breaker [/u] Let's start off with the stats as usual. Star Breaker has 5 HP, 2 ATK, 0 DEF, -1 EVD, and 5 REC. Having +2 ATK for base stats is a very powerful trait to have even today and Star Breaker gets to enjoy having a good HP stat and neutral DEF too so she's not as easy to KO as most +2 ATK characters are. The only weak point stat wise is the EVD, but Star Breaker can usually defend at least a few times in battle before having to rely on it and you won't need to rely on it at all if you KO your opponent before they attack! She seems like an amazing character so far, what could go wrong? "Can only choose Wins norma." Those five words for her passive are so short and yet, are the main thing that completely ruins this character and makes Star Breaker one of the worst characters in the game. How can this be so detrimental when Star Breaker has such good stats for battling? Well it all comes down to the Stars norma and how much easier it is to achieve than the Wins norma is. Stars are much easier to acquire than wins are in this game. Everybody is constantly gaining stars even if they're not really interacting with other players. It can be totally feasible to just focus on gathering stars and avoiding confrontation with other players to win, and that is a big problem for Star Breaker. Star Breaker can't afford to be passive because she's unable to win through gathering stars. All stars do for her is fund the costs of her cards, so she has to go on the aggressive constantly to try and get wins, but this usually doesn't work out for her for many reasons. For one, if people have played against Star Breaker before and know that she is going to try battling them, they're going to do their best to stay away from her and avoiding giving her the chance to battle. This issue is especially bad on larger boards where the homes are farther away from one another and it can make it feel impossible sometimes to get close enough to battle other players. Another issue that Star Breaker can have is that she often suffers from success. This may sound weird given I already called her one of the worst characters, but it goes back to the issue of Stars norma again. Star Breaker is constantly gaining stars both passively and whenever she does KO something in battle and that can actually be a problem. In the games where Star Breaker is doing well, she becomes a walking piggy bank filled with stars just begging to be KO'd by somebody so that they can use those stars to get Stars norma and win the game. Perhaps Star Breaker also has a busted hyper that can help h- No, it barely helps her at all. "Star Blasting Fuse" is a hyper that requires norma 3 and costs 30 stars and it places "Invisible Bomb"s on 3-5 random panels depending on the size of the board. Having a hyper that places traps randomly is already a very questionable design choice for a character that needs wins as much as Star Breaker, but what does the bombs actually do? Well they're invisible to everybody except the person that places them and when somebody lands on a bomb, they get reduced to 1 HP... and that's all that they do. They don't even do anything if somebody who is already at 1 HP lands on them, they get to waste your bomb for free and If you land on them, they just get defused too (why???). So to get value out of Star Breaker's hyper you have the following things go right: 1. Be close enough to the person that set off the randomly placed bomb 2. Roll high enough to be able to reach them and start a battle 3. Have the opponent fail to evade or not use a card to survive For having all those things go well, you get the privilege of... getting 2 wins and a bunch of stars you can't really use. The more realistic scenario is either the person who landed on the bomb is far away enough from everybody that being at 1 HP doesn't matter too much or somebody else will be nearby and KO them, getting a bunch of stars out of the crappy ass trap spamming hyper you spent 30 stars on instead. Even better is when the bombs end up on bad panels that are on side paths so nobody will want to land there and your hyper does basically nothing. So for the downside of only being able to use Wins norma, you get a character that is one point better in DEF than Yuki and has a hyper that is somehow more situational than something like whatever the hell Tomomo has for a hyper. Why does this poor character have to get stuck with such an awful downside when she's barely any better than her fellow +2 ATK characters? Star Breaker really has nothing going for her besides above average stats and that's a shame because she's such a cool character. I think the idea of a wins only character in a game full of star gatherers is good, but not in her current state. This character has needed a rework since the day she came out, but it never came. Safe to say, but I don't recommend getting this pack just for Star Breaker, she is truly awful.