For progressive folks like me who enjoy bishoujo/moe fanservice but might feel turned off by the deliberately hostile fan community around this game, let me try a pitch from the left for why you should play this game:

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Blue Archive has genuinely incredible, borderline radical stories about young people. Adults (or robot/eldritch-like adults) create the misery in Kivotos (a student city the size of a large country) and want to exploit, scam, or control these kids. With your guidance, and your ear to listen to their problems, you guide your students into growing, learning, and protecting their lives. You are a powerless outsider who are no match for the weapons these girls carry, and you do not have a halo to protect you. The only thing you have is your empathy, your compassion, and your utterly endless drive to make sure that your students do not suffer from the choices made by adults. You are the one who will carry the sins of their world on your shoulders, so they can live out their school lives. You are their Sensei, and you use they/them pronouns btw.

Sensei ends up counseling all kinds of clubs from different schools, from the STEM-centric Millenium Science School to the British/Catholic Trinity General School. In the communist school of Red Winter Federal Academy you will interact not just with a doujin club who loves yuri doujinshi, an exiled club of which one member turns an impromptu hot springs resort (don't ask) into an opportunity to spy on the other girls naked, and the Stalinist Red Winter Office, where Cherino (or "loli Stalin" as i like to call her) is on constant purges to stop the reactionary forces of... the striking Labor Party...? Minori, the leader of the Labor Party, has taken on the quest of eternal revolution against all capitalists and dictators.

Another club you help is the former spec ops club RABBIT Squad as they're homeless and squatting in a public park. The local business leaders (Adults) want them gone so they can gentrify the area, and they've bribed a leader in the student police clubs to help them carry out their profit-driven mission by arresting the homeless, squatting club.

There is plenty of yuri in the game, despite some people's best effort to try to hide this. Not only does Nodoka peep on other girls bathing, the Knowledge Liberation Front reads and writes yuri manga, Ako keeps (literally!!) drooling over Hina, Tomoe is fully obsessed with Cherino, Kaho will do anything for Chise, Koharu is very interested in her savior Mika, and Hanako... Hanako has stood in front of the entire city, in a live broadcast, and proudly proclaimed that every single student in these all-girl schools should just ♥♥♥♥ each other.

In addition to all the students, Sensei (they/them) is never really explicitly gendered, and according to the developers is supposed to be a neutral player insert. Sometimes the writing goes out of its way not to gender them, offering you options such as "onee-san" or "onii-san", and sometimes they're *not-explicitly male* but still pretty "male-coded"... But either way, Sensei is a self-insert. If your Sensei is a lady, then the whole ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ game is nothing but yuri.

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As you might've noticed, to enjoy this game you will need to either be completely chill with or actively enjoy high school students flirting with their adult advisor and vice versa, and with prominent fanservice of the students. A large majority of the characters range in ages between 15-17, a couple are 18 (but still your students) and a couple are around 11. A fair amount of the 15-17 year olds have loli body types, but there are plenty of larger, big-boobed students if that's what you're into.

If all that is a deal breaker for you then I would not recommend this game. For everyone else, it is brilliant. For me, I like a gacha game where doing dailies is mostly menuing and is doable in 10-20 minutes. And so much of the presentation of the game is fantastic, not only the visuals but the music is absolutely top-tier stuff. As I've tried to allude to in the long section at the start of this review, I really do find the writing to be very good politically, without being preachy or being mean to anyone undeserving, it's just good to great storytelling! The Eden Treaty moved me to tears...

As always, *do not* play a gacha game if you have issues with gacha, gambling, or addictive games! They will ♥♥♥♥ you up.

And don't forget to love and cherish Hina with all your heart.