That’s how Azur Lane was introduced to me when I started playing it in September 2018 and they were not wrong:
What with the anime version of it having finished recently, I thought it was a good time to talk about why I like it. I realise a “hornier KanColle” doesn’t mean anything to most of y’all, so let’s explain a little bit of backstory. KanColle, or “Kantai Collection” (Fleet Collection) is a browser game that was the result of some clever clog realising that if otaku liked WWII warships and otaku liked cute girls, they’ll love WWII warships reimagined as cute girls. Which they did. Released in 2013, KanColle dominated Japanese fandom for a good number of years, spawning off manga adaptations, an anime series and movies and tonnes and tonnes of fan mader material, often lewd.
Azur Lane took the core idea from KanColle, traded in the nationalism of the original game for 200 percent more horniness and made the game mobile native rather than browser based. What it also did, unlike the original, was included WWII ships of all nationalities, not just Japan and made the Allied countries the explicit good guys. Kancolle always had a bit too many hairy handed nationalists as its fans, Azur Lane just has an international community of moral degenerates. and while all the loli FBI jokes grow tiresome quickly, I prefer it to WII revisionism.
Azur Lane’s core gameplay is as a bullet hell side scrolling shoot-em-up. You have a fleet of six ship girls, three in the frontline (either destroyers, light or heavy cruisers) with three backline (battleships/cruisers and aircraft carriers) ships off screen you can call in for support. You manoeuvre your ships to avoid as much as possible enemy fire while they shoot automatically at them, then call in an air strike or bombardment when ready, or launch torpedoes. If you’re lazy like me and your fleet is strong enough, you can do this on autopilot. Ships level up through battle and each won battle drops loot of various kinds which you can use to strengthen the ship or their equipment. You can also get new ships this way. The main story has thirteen chapters, each with four maps, each of which needs three to six or seven battles to resolve. Combat is relatively easy as long as you level your ships properly, make sure their equipment is decent quality and you have upgraded their skills. There’s a lot of min-maxing you can do if you’re so inclined, or you can just brute force your way through by over levelling.
But of course the true gameplay isn’t the battling; it’s the collecting. If you play this long enough, most of the time you will do the battles on autopilot while doing other things. The combat is fun, but the real pleasure for me is growing my collection, getting that little dopamine hit when a new ship girl is acquired. Fortunately Azur Lane makes it relatively pain free. The gacha currencies (‘wisdom cubes’ and coins) can be easily harvested in game and buying new ships is cheap, either 1 cube/600 coins for the light pool (destroyers/light cruisers) or 2 cubes/1500 coins for the other pools (heavy cruisers, battleships, carriers and subs). There are also the event pools, which is where you usually do your gacha once you’ve played the game for a while. This is where the limited event ships can be got, usually at a slightly higher percentage than normal.
Apart from that, you can also get news ships from drops during combat, with some being exclusive map drops event. Most infamous are the fox sisters, Kaga and Akagi, who drop from level 3-4, so you will encounter them relatively early in your playing. With only a 0.75 percent change of either of them dropping, you’ll spent a long time there if you want them both. It took me four, five months to get them. And they’re just the first of several good map drop only ships you want to have. In total the English version of the game has 438 ships, though a fair few of those are retrofits, leveled up ships that get new artwork and sometimes voice lines.
I’ll admit, I’m just playing this for the sake of collecting all the ships and because of the cute ship girls. There isn’t that much depth to Azur Lane; the actual story is a mess. But it’s entertaining, hits that collecting bug I got and the content is diverse enough to keep interesting. Be aware though that it’s very heteronormative and full of the usual unsavoury elements you can expect with any otaku orientated game like this.
