Test of Saint Seiya Legend of Justice: a gacha RPG faithful to the manga

Immerse yourself in the universe of the Knights of the Zodiac with our Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice test, the new gacha RPG from Wanda Cinemas Games, available for download on Android and iOS. Whether you're a fan of the 90's anime series or not, discover with me the Saint Seiya universe, its mechanics and finally, whether or not it will fit on your phone.

Saint Seiya Legend of Justice test: an idle gacha with a scenario faithful to the original work

Let's start this Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice test with its basic principles. The title is played in portrait mode, which is quite convenient in transportation or if you are doing two things at the same time. Your only in-game objective is obviously to make the best knights composition possible.

With your first team, go on a PvE assault in the story mode. The main chapter progression quest allowed me to discover the manga original story that I had only heard about.

Despite a nice start, the story of Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice lacks cinematics to enhance it. The vocabulary is hard to understand when you don't know the license and you feel here that fan service is at the heart of the experience.

This may put off many players who will not be able to get into the storyline, but for me, I took the time to research the story and it made me want to go see the anime.

The PvE content variety in Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice

Besides the story mode, there are 4 additional single-player PvE modes:

• The Twelve Palaces, which you will have to conquer step by step without regenerating life points, but choosing a new bonus for your team at each step. Along the way, you will also find additional knights to support your composition, stores with reduced prices and quizzes with bonus chests.
• The Dimension of Exile, which works like a challenge tower, with a knight and his team to fight per floor to loot big rewards.
• Memory Space, which is for me the most pleasant PvE mode, because it's the one that offers the most freedom and where you really feel like a actor in the story. You can move on an unknown map and discover all its secrets, choose which enemy to attack first and which chest to retrieve.
• The Maze of Visions, a PvE mode with team constraints per level with a rather unforgiving difficulty. In exchange, expect a large amount of loot that will facilitate your progression in midgame and endgame.

To overcome all these levels with increasing difficulty, you will have to vary the knights by choosing among 6 attributes and 5 professions. As usual, some characters have obvious synergies that you can abuse to boost your power. However, I found the element synergy combos quite weak at low levels with little impact on combat performance.

As a result, even if you dig into the equipment, the balance of the composition and other small boosting systems, Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice remains much more casual than the current references on the market like Summoners War, AFK Arena, Dislyte or Idle Heroes.

An automatic mode that facilitates progress

Being an idle title, Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice relies heavily on automation of many aspects of gameplay. From fighting to starring up knights, to creating your composition, everything can be done in a few clicks of automation. From the editorial side, we always find it a pity that titles put so much emphasis on the auto mode which hides or harms a part of the strategy by sending back under the carpet a part of the developers' work.

Here, unless you have an extremely difficult level to pass, the casual aspect of the title means that in the first 6 chapters, you can do almost everything in auto mode without worrying, which is too bad in our opinion.

However, some people are not bothered by the auto mode, since we are always happy to see that the knights have farmed resources in our absence or to be able to do something else while farming to progress faster with the AFK rewards and the level sweep.

Classic but effective gameplay elements

Other gameplay aspects include mostly the usual gacha mechanics:

• Several summoning banners with different currencies, including one in friendship points. With that and the free summoning stones, you can try to unlock bronze, silver, gold knights from the 90 available Knights of the Zodiac. The roster is small enough for now that you get the feeling you can collect them all, which is quite nice. Besides, new knights are coming regularly, like Seiya in the Sagittarius armor, to expand your collection.
• Using weak heroes as feeding material for the elevation of the rarest knights.
• A resonance system, that allows you to have additional characters at the level of the weakest knight in your composition. Once unlocked, resonance will be your best ally in bringing a little extra strategy into your choice of knights.
• Creating or applying to join a guild, accessing a new store and a daily boss in PvE.

Even though Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice was only recently released, the Wanda Cinema Games' title already offers guild combat in PvP to compete against all the other groups on the server. Climb the ladder to get as many rewards as possible, but be warned, PvP is pretty unforgiving for free-to-play players, so don't hesitate to wait a week or so before getting into a guild fight.

And don't worry, if you especially like competition, more PvP is coming, with the Master Tactician skill competition. At this point, you'll be able to participate in a classic competitive mode where you'll use max level knights to defeat your opponents' knights and where only true strategic knowledge of the game will give you the edge. You can also try your luck in the arena by attacking another player or taking revenge on an attacker.

I regret that the servers and friends lists are almost all full which takes time to sort out unnecessarily.

A quality soundtrack and visual novel scenes

Let's go to the graphics and atmosphere of this Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice test. Despite some interface issues that could be fixed to improve the in-game navigation, if you are a Saint Seiya fan, you will be transported by the atmosphere of the title from the first minutes. The visual novel style of the cut scenes could be more immersive, but it still allows you to live or relive the classic scenario of the manga imagined by Masami Kurumada.

Embark on Seiya's first adventures in search of his sister until the epic battle against Poseidon in the depths of the ocean. Help Seiya protect Saori, the reincarnation of the goddess Athena, along with the other Knights of the Zodiac.

The big strength of the title is especially its soundtrack. The music, played through headphones or loudspeakers, immediately plunges you into the 90's manga atmosphere and pushes you to start a fight just to hear it again. On the other hand, the scenario is a bit too condensed, especially when you don't know the Saint Seiya universe.

For the fans, the service is there and you will find some of the punchlines that marked your childhood. For the others, like me, you will surely miss some vocabulary at the beginning but it especially aroused my curiosity enough to go and see the original series on the internet. In any case, you'll have to revise your constellations for a long time to not confuse the characters.

If I summarize, as far as the atmosphere is concerned, we rediscover a rather cliché but endearing scenario that will please mainly those who already know the anime, as well as excellent background music during your game sessions. Finally, some shortcuts in terms of features and interface may block new players who are not familiar with the series.

A business model with good ad management

As for the game's business model, there are a few important points to highlight in our Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice test. First, I didn't have any mandatory ads during my playthrough. The only ones you can watch allow you to do an extra basic summoning every five minutes or spin a Wheel of Luck to get more rewards. Overall, it's mostly a nice way to keep playing for a few more minutes as a player.

Apart from the ads, Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice relies mostly on the sale of packs to stay available for free. For the time being, the packs are quite expensive for their return value.

In free-to-play, some players report that the drop rates are too low or that the difficulty scale is blocking them, but at our test of Saint Seiya Legend of Justice, the progression is not particularly constraining. I would even say that my sessions are longer than on other idle games that block free-to-play players very quickly.

Conclusion of Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice review

Despite some interfaces that could be optimized and a dose of automation that won't please all players, the conclusion of our test is that Saint Seiya Legend of Justice is a good idle gacha RPG that will immediately take you back to the 90s with the unforgettable soundtrack of the Knights of the Zodiac.

However, as it is an idle game, I advise you to focus on PvE if you are a casual free-to-play player. With all the game modes, you'll have more than enough to do, unless you really like to grind to reach a decent level in PvP.

That concludes our Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice test, available for free download on Android and iOS. To discover other recent mobile releases, visit our new Android and iOS mobile games page.

This Saint Seiya: Legend of Justice test was made in collaboration with the publisher Wanda Cinemas Games, but we do our best not to let this influence our opinion of the game.

Positive points

• Script faithful to the original manga
• Excellent soundtrack
• No compulsory advertising

Negative points

• Tricky vocabulary for novices
• Auto mode too present
• Lack of impact of synergies