This Free-to-Play JRPG Might be Your Next Game to Play on the Side

Some tricky and complex idle games have often been disguised as free-to-play JRPG gacha games. These games get you hooked on getting new characters, building them up, and running a team to clear content automatically.

Playing them manually becomes mundane, but playing them as a strategy/management RPG game, similar to idle games, makes it more fun to play on the side.

Etheria: Restart, a free-to-play futuristic dystopian JRPG, ticks all the right boxes for an exciting free-to-play JRPG gacha game, which will be released on June 5, 2025, and it could be worth your time—or should I say your phone’s time?

If You Haven’t Tried a Turn-Based JRPG Gacha Game Yet, Etheria: Restart Could Be Your Entry into the Genre

Before talking about Etheria: Restart, here’s some context about gacha games you should know beforehand. The systems in most gacha games have always had a proven track record of success through their gameplay cycle. Players get an extremely low chance of getting an overpowered character through pulls, but you won’t get enough pulls unless you play consistently every day for the rest of the game’s lifespan. You’ll learn patience through not paying or holding off until you can get enough pulls for the game’s pity system.

Most of these gacha games will give you strong characters to finish the game’s solo content, including more pulls or summons to keep consistent players rewarded. That is the nature of these games, but Etheria: Restart keeps it all well-balanced.

The game doesn’t immediately throw you into several different currencies, packs, and countless microtransactions, but a story and characters you can get into.

You’ll start learning the ropes of building a team to clear out missions and other content, giving you the joy of discovering new characters with different builds.

Your immediate goal is to find a team that works well, and the game’s auto-battling system is sort of a “standard” where you always want your team to perform as well as a manually-controlled one.

This is where things get exciting, as you learn more about Etheria: Restart’s massive cast of Hyperlinks and try to figure out who works well with which characters.

Getting lucky in some summon banners could get you some awesome, rare SSR characters that will just force you to brainstorm builds, grind out equipment and upgrades, and maybe finish tougher challenges.

Once you get a good team, that’s when the long grind starts, looking for perfect gear with high % stats or the highest speed gear to manipulate the turn-based system to your advantage.

Things snowball immediately, especially when you reach the PvP. While I didn’t get to try PvP as much, it’ll favor players willing to pay money for a stronger team. Yup, it is a pay-to-win game. But if you overlook the PvP aspect and focus on the PvE elements, it’ll get you hooked as a casual player.

Casually Playing it on the Side Removes the Fear of Getting Left Behind

While looking at other extremely powerful teams might discourage you from playing PvP and maybe the game, you can look at it first from a different perspective. If you look at the game as a free turn-based RPG with the occasional euphoria from luckily getting an SSR character, it is a deeper RPG idle game with a lot of extra fun steps.

Set up a great team and keep auto-battling the latest mission to farm materials. Finish the daily, weekly, and event missions to start stacking your currency. You’ll eventually stockpile enough currency, which you can use to get more Hyperlinks or strengthen your team even more.

You can mindlessly let the game run, farming the hardest content your team can do until you run out of energy for the day.

Once you find the time, you can adjust and play around with teams, Hyperlinks, and builds to continuously finish harder content, which will earn you more materials or currency in the future.

Sounds like an idle management game, right? But it is much, much more than that.

As someone who has played countless gacha games, including one remarkably similar to this one, like Epic Seven or Granblue Fantasy, polished games like Etheria: Restart are hard to come by, and it is definitely worth trying, whether you are new to the genre or down on your luck in other gacha games. Put the game on your phone or second monitor and let it auto-battle while doing something else.