YMMV / Blue Archive

• Adorkable: The reason why Rikuhachima Aru became so popular. It doesn't take five minutes from her introduction for cool outlaw facade to shatter into a million pieces and give way to the lovable dumbass behind.
• Anvilicious: When the games aren't exploring the fun and light-hearted aspects it focuses on how it's never acceptable to have children suffer in any situation. Tricking a group of children to abide to one will by using forces unfathomed by them? Not cool. Sacrificing one of them to obtain power greater than ever? Evil. Robbing them of a bright future by brainwashing them to become your personal Child Soldiers? Diabolical.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: A good number of people and artists are aware of this game thanks to the fanart and doujins, particularly of the Bunny Girl versions of Karin and Asuna (when these two are minor characters in the game, and the bunny-girl event is only one event of many).
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Kotama is a must-bring for any boss or Total Assault stage, since she has a skill that passively boosts the entire team's damage, and her EX skill further boosts the damage of students in her AOE. One of the upshots of this? She's a one-star base character. Short of peevishly refusing to roll on the gacha, ever, or refusing to ever do Total Assault or buy her elephs from the shop, you will get her, and quickly.
  • Many players, newcomers and veterans alike swears on Serina for a good reason; she's one of the few characters in the game that are capable to reposition any of one of your frontliners to any position you wanted with her EX skill, while also moderately heals them for a good chunk of health. Being a mere 1-star unit you can easily get from any gacha banner means that almost every player will have access to her whether they're just beginning or already reaching lategame. Even if you're not investing much on her, she will always useful regardless of your current composition.
• Continuity Lock-Out: Special Operations: Decagrammaton Edition a supposedly recurring event, as its name explores Decagrammaton and its lore which by itself wasn't much to miss but the event also explores each of the oracles (raid bosses) stories and how they affected the game story, starting from Binah first appearance story and what Division is before turned into Chesed. While the event itself as previously stated a recurring event the reruns also have been really slow, though this has been averted as its now a permanent event conciding with the game's 3rd anniversary update.
• Crack Pairing:
  • There are very rare instances where artists would crack-ship Black Suit with Sensei for laughs, despite him being one of the more vicious villains in the game. His Heel–Face Turn during Chroma's invasion and him actually considering Sensei as a friend might have something to do with it.
  • Many, jokingly or otherwise, pair Maki up with Binah, based on how she’s one of the most useful units against the raid boss, thanks to her reducing Binah’s high defense and being Piercing to the giant mechanical snake’s Heavy armour with Binah typically depicted having a crush on Maki. The developers seem to be aware of this, if at least of Maki’s viability against Binah, with her having been one of the students helping fighting off the Chroma rendition of Binah alongside Abydos and Problem Solver 68 during Volume F.
• Demonic Spiders: Menacing Shield Automatons with Special armor will be the bane of one's existence once they start appearing, thanks to their main difference from their standard counterparts being a sweeping barrage while their shield is raised, allowing them to cut through even Mystic-type students like butter.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Because of how fanservice-worthy just about everything in the game is, you can pick almost any character (with the exception of a few like Beatrice) and there's a very high chance that character will have their more serious aspects of their characterization thrown away and put aside for memes and fanservice in fanart. Naturally, this means some of the characters that are played dead-serious in the narrative in at least one point, such as Mika and (sometimes) Black Suit are not exempt from this.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Of all the student groups, the most popular is Millennium's Cleaning & Clearing Club, which features girls engaging in a mixture of secret agents disguised as Meido. And of them, Karin and Asuna are very popular, especially after Bunny Girl versions of the group came out that promptly made those two, by far, the most popular characters in the entire game (at least to people who haven't played it). Once she rejoined her group and became playable, Toki became one as well, receiving her own bunny girl variant shortly afterwards.
  • Once the Global version was finally released, so many people fell in love with Hina, due to her hard working and deeply caring nature, the gap between her powerful & cool side and her sweet side, and her bottled up need to be pampered, that a lot of EN/GLB fans began seriously asking where the hell the Gehenna-focused main story volume was, so that there'd be an obvious avenue for getting more Hina content.
  • Despite her introduction during a PV being her EX literally tossing herself in a garbage can, Miyu quickly got a following of plenty of fans and fanart within less than a month, even before her actual release. Her low self-esteem and cute demeanor apparently inspires "must protect" vibes.
  • While Hibiki has been relatively well-received, mainly due to how versatile she is for gameplay, the moment her Cheerleader alt was revealed, her popularity EXPLODED. This is to the point that her reveal on Twitter has managed to rival Bunny Karin and Bunny Asuna, and has seen an extremely rapid incline in fanart in the first week alone.
  • Out of all the members in FOX Squad, Niko has gotten the most fanart, thanks in part to her sincere friendliness, matching her soft appearance.
  • Kisaki is quite the example, currently being an NPC yet gaining a great multitude of art after only having three lines in her first appearance during Volume F. Her proper appearance later only further increased her popularity.
  • Similarly to Kisaki, Takane had become quite the hit with fans, despite being an NPC in the event she appeared in.
  • The petite, meek-looking Joint Task Force mobs (nicknamed, "JTF Mob-chan") were fairly popular background characters when first seem in Volume 3. When Ichika was released during the Trip-Trap-Train event, fans were elated to see the JTF mobs featured prominently in her EX Skill and victory screen animations. This prompted an explosion of memes and fanart for the JTF Mobs that matched the hotly anticipated Ichika in popularity.
  • Amongst the raid bosses, Binah is probably one of the more recognisable, in part of being a gigantic, mechanical snake, of which leads to their name being used as a comical synonym and fans jokingly pairing them up with Maki.
  • The CCC twins from Highlander Railway School, Hikari and Nozomi, whose appearance was only shown briefly in V1C3 Part 1 preview, gained a lot of attention and tons of fanarts two weeks before their appearance. Once the chapter gets released, it exceeded expectations of the fanbase, epecially when they do some silly moves while ramming the train Abydos Countermeasures Task Force with their Multi-Track Drifting.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Anubis has been christened by the fanbase as "Kuroko" ("Kuro" being Japanese for "Black") due to both the prominence of the color black in her outfit, as well as her being a dark side of Shiroko.
  • Arisu is lovingly teased by her fans calling her a Roomba, especially after she got her meido alternate variant. She's also been called a "Refrigerator" by fans because of her railgun resembling a fridge at a certain angle.
  • Iroha is jokingly dubbed "poison" and "Eroha" by the fan community, as a result of some canon-friendly doujinshi where she seduces Sensei.
  • Kirino is nicknamed "Kiana Kaslana" by both fanbase after players noticing the similarity between each other, not just by character design, but also their ditziness, their choice of weapon (in the case of Kirino she only uses single pistol in the game proper), and their surprising proficiency at short range combat.
  • Before their full names were released, Hikari and Nozomi were dubbed "Shupogaki" by the fans, which effectively translates to "choo-choo brats" due to their mischievous personalities and being students of the train based Highlander Railway Academy.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • A minor, possibly one-sided rivalry (from their side) exists with Azur Lane due to it being another project (the Japanese version) of Yostar's funded at its expense, how a few characters take heavy inspiration from the other game (main example being Asuna's heavy similarity to Belfast, at least in looks), and how ill-timed the two buxom bunny maids were released during a time of Azur Lane's developers being under heavy restrictions, thus caused an unfavorable comparison. Things have quieted down due to the feeling with Nexon handling the game everywhere else, Yostar won't be likely to invest too much into it now. That and with how the English version is being handled, not being a threat to Azur Lane's English version.
  • A more heated rivalry (mainly from the Blue Archive side of things) recently, suddenly, and quickly flared up to a noticeable degree with fans of Nintendo and fans of the gaming company's numerous franchises. It started when a Korean video creator had a fan video of Shiroko in Animal Crossing get very much Screwed by the Lawyers. This caused many Blue Archive players to start putting harsh criticism on Nintendo and its fans, most believing that said victim of Nintendo's Fan-Work Ban habits was punished too harshly.
• Fanfic Fuel: The parallel timeline where Shiroko Terror originates from and the other possible shots of the 4th PV where it shows the alternate outcomes to past story plots.
• Fanwork-Only Fans: Because of the absolutely adorable and/or well-looking Improbably Female Cast, a number of people are aware of the game almost entirely due to the massive amounts of fan art that most characters have received with a hefty sum of them being some sort of Rule 34. What the characters are actually like and how the story being infested with suprisingly dark moments for a more-or-less lighthearted waifu gacha is pretty much lost on a lot of their fans who mostly care for just how hot most characters look.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Arknights since both games are published by Yostar in Japan. Furthermore, some fans like to (jokingly) speculate both games are set in the same universe with fans joking the Arknights character Ambriel, a Sankta (angel) infamous for being a tax-dodger, finally paid her taxes which led to funding the schools of Blue Archive. The Guide Ahead side story also furthered the comparisons and memes.
  • The global version’s release of the Hatsune Miku collab event caused a bit of this with the fandom of Project SEKAI. It certainly helped that Miku herself, while far from being a Game-Breaker, is still fairly decent for a support specialist, and that Saki Fujita reprised her role as Miku from Project SEKAI and Project DIVA extend.
  • Quite a number of players are also fans of Girls' Frontline due to similar interests of girls with guns. This is especially true for those who like Girls' Frontline but have grown tired of its sometimes downright depressing atmosphere and want experience something a little more lighthearted.
  • With Bocchi the Rock! mainly thanks to the fact that the creator of Bocchi has made a couple of Blue Archive doujinshi and some of the characters in blue archive have the same VA’s as the main characters in Bocchi.
• Game-Breaker: There are several students who are very powerful.
  • Tsubaki is widely considered to be the best overall tank in the game. She has very high defense, a taunt skill to interrupt enemy skills, and a self heal ability when her HP reaches a certain percentage, which makes her solid for PVE content. She also shines in PVP because she has Special armor, which gives her resistance to most of the high tier single target damage dealers, and students with Mystic damage (much less ones that are any good at dealing damage in big bursts) are relatively rare. The best part is that, as a two-star character at base, she's not guaranteed from the gacha, but she's not that difficult to get. She's since dropped off in usefulness for PVP due to the introduction of more Mystic students, including Mashiro (Swimsuit) and Iroha to act as counters to her, but she's still extremely useful in PVE.
  • Iori is practically a universal pick for any stage and boss with Heavy or even Special armor, as her EX skill is relatively cheap yet deals massive burst damage to targets and even deals AOE damage, making her one of the most effective Piercing damage characters in the game. This is also despite having Red affinity in 2 terrains, doing little to dull her damage while heightening it greatly when in the appropriate terrain. Having 2 Hard stages where her Elephs can be farmed, it’s also possible to grind up for Iori, itself being a lengthy progress, but nevertheless an option if one hasn’t rolled her yet or simply to save up on Eligma.
  • Ako completely turns the game on its head, as she has passive abilities that increase a unit's critical hit damage while also healing a random student every 45 seconds, and her EX skill massively boosts the critical hit chance and damage of a single student. This opens up new strategies where a player can stack Ako and Kotama's (or Himari's) buffs on a single student and deal massive damage (Azusa and Mika are two of the poster girls for this tactic for their absurdly-powerful EX skills, but there's plenty of girls who can similarly bring the pain like this). Because of this, Ako basically trivializes Total Assault's Hardcore difficulty, and she is practically required to even beat Insane difficulty.
  • Ui makes some units with high EX cost more useful and viable in many content, on top of buffing their attack as well. This makes her one of the most valuable students to get and is also a key in clearing harder raids and PVE challenges.
  • Iroha is the first Tactical Support student that is actually useful, and she is extremely so, thanks to the massive burst damage and AOE potential her Tiger tank is capable of. Her EX Skill cost will initially be a hefty 8, but with level ups, it can be reduced to 7, then 6. And because she deals Mystic damage, this makes her extremely valuable in Perodozilla raids and PVP.
  • Hoshino (Swimsuit). Front-line supporter with the ability to massively increase allies' Explosive damage, and additionally heavily boost their ATK stat for a long period of time. By herself, she is bulky, periodically heals herself, and can partially refund the spent skill cost on her EX skill.
  • Himari is considered as broken as Ako (coincidentally, both were released in November in their respective years) thanks to her massive attack buff on one unit (can extend its duration with UE2★), as well as having a sub that generates cost faster (that can stack with other cost regen units like Cherino and swimsuit Hoshino with EX active), allowing for more skill rotation. Unlike Ako however, she has more use other than raids with her sub alone, and she is a great reroll target for players because of that.
  • New Year Fuuka works on the same principle as Ui, halving EX costs, albeit only for one use rather than two, but instead of buffing attack, she buffs allies' critical damage, which is amazing for units like Mika.
  • Mika is an incredible damage dealer with a kit loaded with insane damage potential. For starters, her sub-skill makes it so that all attacks deal critical damage, as well as increasing damage dealt while decreasing damage taken, on top of her having great Evasion. Her normal skill not only deals damage after every fifth normal attack, but drops a meteorite on the enemy on the third proc that deals upwards to 339% of her attack. Her EX skill deals up to 1540% of her attack to an enemy, which doubles depending on how high the target HP is. Pair her up with the aforementioned Ako or especially New Year Fuuka, then you have a unit who can shred bosses to pieces, complete with ignoring any critical hit resistances they might usually have to hit at her full force. And as an extra bonus, being an Anniversary unit, she starts with Green affinity on two terrains, helping her deal even more extra damage.
  • Hina in her dress alt, has an awesome kit that has high stats and multiplier, with her EX activation can buff her explosive effectiveness (thanks to her sub) and has immunity to Taunt CC, and once she sets up her skill, she can use it up to 3 times against the enemy (and all with high stability) with damage almost doubled at the last EX firing. Not only that, she can also buff her explosive effectiveness and accuracy on battle start, permanently! She also has innate defense piercing stats to top her ridiculous high multipliers. However, note that using her requires some skill as her AoE is like Haruna and you need to practically aim on targets due to her small AoE range.
• Game-Breaking Bug:
  • Utaha’s EX and Normal Skills. On their own, they can be incredibly helpful, the former being capable of baiting enemy attacks when put close to them, if also forcing them to move and the latter especially strong with the second tier of her Unique Item unlocked, making it go from 1 turret to 3, both versions firing at a good pace with decent HP and stick around for a while. What puts them here though is that whenever the turrets, big or small, are summoned forth while the player is selecting an EX skill, it will immediately force the player out of doing so. This both forces the player to select a Skill again and will suddenly return the game to normal speed when they may very well be slowing it down to time one or more Skills perfectly, potentially taking a way some precious seconds and thus stopping the player from using EX Skills at the right moment.
• Growing the Beard: Vol 3 Eden Treaty arc are widely considered this to fans, being one of the more serious written story and gives lots of lore regarding Kivotos, it also introducing to lots of fan beloved characters from Mika to the Arius Squads being the first students to become a serious threat to the allies.
• Love to Hate: To say that people despise Beatrice with a passion is an understatement. What with her trying to kill Sensei and making the students in Arius miserable to the point that even Sensei is openly disgusted with her, all while putting herself on a pedestal above everyone else yet fans absolutely love hating her due to how much of a Foil she is to Sensei and being one of the most undeniably evilest characters in the game.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Kaya Shiranui becomes this after Chapter 2 of Volume 4, where her whole plan of instigating a coup against the GSC was foiled because she literally can't take the workload and gets a flat-out Humiliation Conga from there. Cue fandom jokes of her being some sort of Karmic Butt-Monkey that's just seemingly built up as a serious threat while failing to actually deal much harm.
  • Seia Yurizono gets poked fun at for being a major character from Trinity yet having no voice actor, unlike her fellow Tea Party members, Mika and Nagisa. This only intensified when it was revealed that the 3rd anniversary banner was for Gehenna students and that the student for the fest banner was Hina’s dress variant, and got even worse when various NPC cast members received voice actors before she would in the 2024 animated adaptation.
  • Between having 100kg thighs, exasperated with babysitting the younger Millennium students (particularly the Game Dev Department), and being romantically shafted by other students who also wants to win Sensei's heart, Yuuka Hayase has received this status as of late.
• Memetic Mutation: Per the orders of SCHALE and the General Student Council, please refer to the dedicated page for all the memes surrounding Kivotos' many, many students and their many antics.
• Memetic Troll: Due to always giving the results of the gacha to players, the fandom jokingly picture Arona as a brat who will mockingly give Sensei Blues and Golds, which only grant 1 star and 2 star students each. Lighter depictions have her give Sensei these while unaware it’s Purple they actually want which give 3 star units. On the other end, Plana is depicted as the complete opposite, giving Purple, among other gifts players actually want with Arona incredulous at as much.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The PVP mode is widely considered one of the worst parts of the game. This is mostly due to certain characters being clearly better at PVP than others, and the only way to realistically get them all outside of aggressive rerolling is to drop a copious amount of money on gacha rolls. It's not uncommon to see the upper ranks of the leaderboard showing the exact same team lineups. And even if you have the ideal team lineup, you're still not guaranteed to win as all PVP battles are automated so you are at the mercy of RNG. Fortunately, PVP is not a critical part of the game and can be ignored completely. Expect to see the following atrocities committed by the AI:
    • Not using Tsubaki's taunt skill to start off a fight.
    • Wasting skills on overkill, both in targeting enemies that are already nearly downed and in healing students that are barely hurt.
    • Wasting cost on skills resisted by the enemy, or on an incapacitated ally.
    • Getting a sniper to run to cover... which is located on the front lines.
    • Ignoring the tank completely and sniping the sniper in the backlines before even glancing at anyone else.
    • And of course, the dreaded 1v1 Tsubaki VS Tsubaki matchup, which, without one side having highly-powerful Mystic special students to one-shot the opposing Tsubaki, is almost a guaranteed loss by time out.
  • If you've saved stamina up to the cap of 999, there are several actions which the game refuses to let you take until you use up some of that stamina. While the implicit reason for this is understandable (not wanting to waste extra stamina that would go over the cap), it's completely unnecessary - gaining stamina that pushes you over the cap simply dumps the excess into your mailbox to pick up later, which raises the question of why gaining stamina when you're already at the cap can only do the same under the specific circumstance of gaining it from daily challenges, and in fact the vast majority of the activities the game locks off at the stamina cap, like taking part in Total Assaults or picking up your daily pyroxenes from PVP, have no reason to lock you out because they never even give stamina.
  • The Warning Screen. Popping up whenever Bosses appear, they render you completely unable to use any of the students’ EX Skills for about a couple seconds, which may very well mess up your strategy and either get your students KO’d or cause too much time to be lost. One noticeable example is the 5th Challenge in the Clumsy Sister and the Magician Event where the warning screen will flash 4 times, each whenever Barbara appears, which can very well occur one soon after the other if you take down too many mooks quickly and all while you’re dealing with a bombardment of mooks, who can very well KO your students while you’re unable to do anything. This can be worked around by having an EX Skill selected, time slowing down for everything but the warning screen, letting it disappear with barely any time wasted.
  • The disproportionate importance of critical rate and critical damage in Total and Grand Assault is commonly criticized by players, since it encourages "Crit Malding" where players build teams specifically to maximize critical rate and damage in the hopes that they can get a perfect run with all critical hits to clear the boss in the fastest time. This makes getting maximum score and ranking less about making intelligent teambuilding or gameplay decisions, and instead about who is willing to grind what is effectively a Luck-Based Mission to try and get that perfect run.
• Signature Series Arc: The final volume Where All Miracles Begin, being the one big main story update to connect the other volumes that has been previously told in omnibus style featuring "every" single characters that has been introduced while introducing new fan favorites such as Shiroko Terror and Plana. The vol F received praises among the fandom not just for it's high quality in story-writing but it also explores the game main theme which is being a responsible adult in a world of children, being told in form of Sensei and their Bad Future counterpart Phrenapates.
• Tainted by the Preview: Many potential players were put off by the fact that Nexon is the company that developed the game and is publishing the global version, since Nexon had an infamous reputation for destroying its own games through highly predatory monetization services. Largely downplayed, as the game itself remains mostly untouched. One notable exception is the inexplicable removal of a line where Hoshino is referred to as 'Horus', though it's possible that the English localization team worried this made certain aspects of the setting too obvious too early. The global version also notably launched with several major quality of life improvements that were initially unavailable in Japanese servers.
• That One Boss: There are a few, particularly the ones for Total and Grand Assault.
  • Goz is one of the least liked bosses in Total Assault. First of all, he has Special armor, and Mystic damage students typically are harder to come by than Piercing or Explosive. Secondly, both of his phases require constant movement and positioning due to AoE damage zones he summons so you need to bring a student that can force your entire team to reposition. Third, and most annoyingly, is his second phase where he will create two copies of himself which take no damage, though deal basically no damage in return and swap positions with them, so you either have to look for a very specific and easy to miss tell or simply just guess to find the real Goz. (This was thankfully rectified later with a more easier tell through the cards around Goz and his clones.) And then, you need to have a student that force the team to focus fire on the real Goz otherwise they'll likely be wasting all of their DPS on the clones. As a result, Goz is disliked due to the need of a very hyper specific team composition that requires several rare characters, the most vital of which are Sports Yuuka and Summer Izuna. Fortunately though, Sports Yuuka and Summer Izuna at least have enough utility that can they be useful for multiple bosses.
  • Gregorius is similar to Goz in that he requires a very specific team composition in order to deal with the numerous mechanics involved in his fight. The biggest sticking point is that Gregorius needs to have debuffs stacked on him to give your team the damage bonuses they need to whittle down his ridiculously large HP pool. Then, you need to pay attention to an organ in the center of the map that will buff or debuff allies or enemies depending on its facing, which you need to turn by attacking it. Then you just need to deal with the numerous mobs and AoE damage Gregorius dishes out and assuming you can survive all that and keep the debuff count up, you need a very powerful Explosive AoE damage dealer to nuke down the mobs and chunk down Gregorius' HP. Of course, the only real viable team composition that can defeat Gregorius requires rare gacha students like Summer Miyako, Summer Saki, Minori, and Mine, but they are only good against Gregorius and nobody else.
• That One Level: Scrimmage maps are generally considered some of the most difficult content to full clear in the game since instead of fighting standard enemies, you must battle a team of students from a certain school. Of course, the the computer gets several major advantages over you in that there is no cap to its team numbers and it can spam all its students' skills since it doesn't have to worry about skill points. The Trinity scrimmage stages take the cake though, because of the ridiculous number of healing support students they have access to. Even if you can eventually defeat the entire Trinity team, you'd be hard pressed to do it in less than 2 minutes with the amount of healing they can use to stall you out.
  • The penultimate episode of Volume 3 Chapter 3 is considered the sole moment of the story where the player might hit a roadblock with the gameplay. In a radical departure from the rest of the story till then the player is required to use their own units instead of overpowered preset units. Not only that but the fight itself is against Hieronymus, and while it is weaker than its raid counterpart it periodically summons a wave of Justina Saints and the player has to finish the fight with only one team. It is highly recommended to have a team of at least level 50 characters to beat it.
• Values Dissonance: Unsurprisingly, for some people, the idea of a teacher having a romantic relationship with their students has turned them off from the game, because quite a few of the girls' personal stories veer into the trope to varying degrees — whether from subtle and cute, to blatant and all but shouted out.

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