Game looks fun, but how F2P friendly is it?

[Aldath]

I've heard mixed things about the current state of the game and its future, but I'm willing to give it a go depending on how friendly it is for non spenders.
I know it uses dupes and weapon gacha but, how necessary are they? How much is a F2P gonna miss out by not swiping the card? How hard is it to build characters? Is it meta heavy or can you do waifu over meta with enough skill?

[PFC Demigo [29th ID]]

Game is friendly but DPS Check on who you bring and what weapons.
You can clear Content even with a Purple Team aside the most difficult content with Timers that you need to kill Boss quickly which required the Meta Squad.
F2P not much to miss out aside just breezing Content or just Meta or w/e.
Gacha is very friendly with a 50/50 and Guarantee that is carried to every Banner including the Pity Count.
All the Negative most of the time are NIKKE players or EN VA players or people crying not knowing the game literally has Gamepad support (Steam Input sucks).
Dupes for weapon not necessary unless you MinMaxing for Dmg for easier clear.
If you don't like spending much, could always just buy the Monthly Pass and if you feeling Extra the Standard Battlepass which can be easily clear, spend a but more and you can get a Skin and more items on the Premium.
Also game account especially if it's Google, you can play from Mobile, EGS, Steam and PC Standalone Client.

[( ಠ‿ಠ )]

You're handicapped by the energy system. It times gates how much you can progress quite heavily. The first few days you'll get to level 40-45 no problem. They throw free items at you so often that you'll be unable to pay attention to what you're getting until around day 5 or so, where you start to run out of resources and stop getting things thrown at you. I imagine that's intentional, as now you're suddenly level 40+ and they may expect you to associate that with a sort of sunken cost fallacy type deal.

After that, it's a daily grind with less and less progression. Then they start throwing other things at you to worry about leveling, like logistics officers, so you end up needing resource materials for your character leveling, your weapon leveling, your logistics officer leveling, and even cash generation to do the actual upgrading, and it all gets filtered by energy costs real hard.

It starts to stretch to multiple days to get things done, so you log in, autoclear content for whatever resource you're trying to farm, and then have nothing to do and sign out. The multiplayer component is fairly weak, and though it doesn't cost energy to play, you'll tire of that after a few runs.

Without throwing money at the game to 'recharge early', the bottom falls out relatively fast and the game's own mechanics self sabotage its potential. It's a shame, too, because the base gameplay, while not overly complex, is still fun enough.

Otherwise, if you want a game with a similar feel but is a more robust experience, you're better off playing Sword Art Online: Fatal Bullet. It's a spin off game from Sword Art Online's usual stuff where you play as characters in a different game that uses guns, primarily. Has a lot of similarities and also has multiplayer. It's not F2P, but you get what you pay for (and the game goes on sale several times a year, as with other Bamco titles).