Gacha RPGs have built a reputation for cute anime girls fighting simple, turn-based battles, but Limbus Company, a new gacha RPG released by Korean developer Project Moon, slaughters both preconceptions. Offering a dark, intense, and compellingly character-driven narrative, the game’s explorations of trauma, violence, and insanity in its ten central characters build a deep and fascinating story.
At the same time, the game mechanics in Limbus Company provide compelling deviations from typical RPGs that will flip your expectations upside down. To help you get into a complex game, this Limbus Company beginner’s guide will walk you through rerolling, combat mechanics, and team building, before listing a few units you might consider rolling for.
How to Reroll in Limbus Company?
Rolling is quite simple in Limbus Company as skipping through tutorial content (which can be replayed) will provide you with initial currency. Your mailbox will also give material for free rolls. If you are not lucky with your first pulls, then the “Options” menu enables an account reset to quickly start the process over. Rerolls can be done in under a minute, though the account reset process is currently not as easy on Steam.
You are highly recommended to link an account to Steam after rolling Limbus Company on a phone or emulator. Rather than giving entirely new characters, the gacha pool of Limbus Company provides “Identities” for the game’s ten central characters, offering new outfits, visuals, and movesets in order to suit the game’s focused, character-driven storytelling.
You can also pull ultimate moves, known as E.G.O., from the gacha. Identities go from one star or 0 up to 000 rarities. In general, most E.G.O and higher rarity Identities will prove useful—a few standout characters will be discussed later on, after explaining Limbus Company’s fundamental mechanics.
Gameplay Walkthrough
After you’re finished rolling, it’s time to dive into some stellar story chapters and introductory battles. The complexity of the mechanics in Limbus Company makes this game stand out from simpler, sterile gacha RPGs, but combat can be difficult to understand even with the provided tutorials. The following breakdown battle screenshots will demystify the unique systems and help you enjoy Limbus Company.
Learn the Basics of Sin Affinity
On a basic level, Limbus Company involves an understanding of two mechanics: Sin Affinity and Skill Damage. Sin is this game’s version of elements, with characters having greater or lesser resistance against attacks of particular Sin Affinity types.
The bottom of your screen will feature a board containing all the character skills to choose from, with each skill card corresponding to a Sin, like Wrath (red) or Lust (orange). The characters are ordered from left to right on the board containing these colored skill cards, sorted in terms of character speed. As battles progress, characters randomly gain extra action slots or columns on the board. Here, the Sinner, Ryōshū has two action slots, so the first two columns on the board are for her skills.
As you chain together skills across the board, picking one from each column to decide your Sinners’ actions, choosing skills of the same color will boost their damage, as indicated by the term “Lustres” appended to skill cards. Sin Affinity is not just an elemental system, but also a resource critical for passive skills and ultimate E.G.O. moves.
Passive skills may be triggered by using specific Sin Affinities in a turn, while ultimate movies draw from your bank of Skill Affinity resources, built up over the course of a battle. If you fail to arrange the required resources, you simply can’t use the Sinner’s E.G.O., just as in the following image.
Manage Your Skill Affinity for E.G.O Ultimate Attacks
It is crucial to manage your Sin Affinity in Limbus Company to unleash the characters’ devastating moves, which inflict damage while also triggering passive effects. The use of E.G.O does lower a character’s sanity stat, which may be raised by defeating enemies and decreased by losing battles. The toll which ultimate moves take on your characters poses interesting strategic consequences. And the movies are visual treats, playing to the game’s art style very well.
What do the Numbers in Battles Mean?
As you select skills, Limbus Company hits you with a barrage of numbers and data that can be disorienting for the battle-hardened RPG aficionado. Let’s break it all down!
The text at the top of the screen, here reading “Dominating,” will give you a solid idea of your probability of success in clashes between your characters’ skills and enemy attacks. The percentages on top of the skills simplify damage bonuses, based on character resistances and skill effects.
The 5 to the right of the player’s “Leap” Skill card, near the center of the screen, is the move’s base Skill Power. To determine the winner between your skill and an enemy’s attack, the game first adds Coin Power to this base number.
Moves are associated with a particular number of coins (here three coins), and each coin has about a 50% chance of adding a Coin Power to the Skill Power. Sanity, decreased by E.G.O moves, lowers this chance. So, the 11 here represents the maximum Skill Power the skill may be boosted to, with the three coins flipping heads and providing their Coin Power.
Use Skill with Higher Power Damages and Debilitates
In Limbus Company, the skill with a higher total value, base plus coin bonuses, wins the conflict, and the defeated character loses a coin. If a skill has 3 coins and you lose a skirmish, then you still have two more coins, and two more chances to come out on top. But the loss of a coin means that your attack will lose one potential Coin Power boost; it is easy to spiral into defeat after one loss.
Once a participant of a battle has no coins left, the victor will deal damage for each coin they have remaining. The damage dealt is calculated by a completely different skill stat, Offense Level, and is boosted if your attack is greater than an enemy’s defense stat. Characters also have defensive skills they may activate instead of attacking, which can deflect unfavorable enemy attacks to other allies.
Learn Your Sinner’s Passive Skill
Outside of simply dealing damage to your enemies, you can also trigger skills for extra effects. For instance, Skill 1 for Shi Section 5 Ishmael, “Flying Sword,” provides the character with 2 poise, boosting crit chance, if you hit the enemy with two coins.
The character status screens of Limbus Company provide helpful information on skill effects, power values, as well as the characters’ status weaknesses. Outside of resistance to certain Sin Affinities, characters are strong or weak against the three types of attacks: strike, slash, and blunt. Again, using Shi Section 5 Ishmael as an example, she resists slash attacks but is weak against strike damage.
How to Build Your Team in Limbus Company?
Clearly, this game has mechanics to master. But many of these numbers and calculations can be simplified if you approach team-building by looking at basic synergies between your characters.
The combat of Limbus Company is built around elements, but also status effects which boost your damage and allow you to control enemies. The Rupture status, for example, increases your damage as you apply more stacks of the effect to enemies. I rolled two characters with skills and passives related to Rupture and built the rest of my team around characters who buffed Rupture damage.
Outside of status synergies, an easy strategy towards team-building is to make sure that you have the Sin Affinity resources to use your characters’ E.G.O. moves. In the character select screen, a Sin Affinity panel to the right will let you know if your character skills provide the resources necessary to use your devastating ultimate attacks.
To summarize, a good way of constructing a team is to search out characters with synergized status effects and find characters who provide buffs, to maximize your strongest Sinner Identities. Then, make sure your team has the Sin Affinities needed to trigger their E.G.O. abilities.
Finally, as a lesser concern, look for characters with Affinity colors that match your main damage dealer, to help trigger passive abilities and gain Lustre boosts. Posing a cool feature, even characters outside of the five you select for a battle can provide benefits through support skills.
Recommended Characters for Beginners
As you get past the initial chapters of Limbus Company, you will see a sharp increase in difficulty deep into Chapter 2. Focusing on status synergizes and building up the Sin Affinity for your strongest E.G.O attacks will help you clear this content—but you will also benefit from having a strong character to build a team around. Briefly, let’s take a look at three powerhouse Identities.
[Kurokumo Wakashu] Hong Lu
Though this character is only 00 rarity, rather than the game’s most elusive 000 rarity, this identity for Hong Lu is a monster. With active skills that provide devastating damage and passives that maximize the effectiveness of his constant applications of Bleed, this character outputs debilitating damage without the need for team buffs. That being said, a Bleed-based team will get you far, by empowering this overpowering butcher.
[Kurokumo Wakashu] Ryoshu
A standout unit to pair this Identity for Hong Lu with is 000 rarity [Kurokumo Wakashu] Ryoshu. This identity possesses fantastic abilities which control enemies while maximizing Bleed damage dealt. She can construct a fantastic Bleed team, with or without [Kurokumo Wakashu] Hong Lu.
[Blade Lineage Salsu] Sinclair
[Blade Lineage Salsu] Sinclair can roll some heads. The character is able to output serious damage with their third skill “To Claim Their Bones,” whose Coin Power of 14 is able to dominate enemy encounters. A successful attack with this skill applies debilitating stacks of Paralysis and Bleed, while also benefiting from Sinclair’s ability to maintain high stacks of Poise which increase the odds of inflicting critical hits.
The speed of this character offers a weakness offset by his passive skill, which boosts Skill Power for your slowest unit. Offering serious damage while able to build the Sin Affinity needed for his base E.G.O attack, this Identity for Sinclair is a self-sufficient, destructive force whose versatility works great in various team comps.
Limbus Company Promises Sin and Surprises Worth Trying Out
Limbus Company certainly has some rough edges—current releases of the game have issues with performance and bugs, and the combat mechanics can be difficult to comprehend, let alone master. Even so, the title’s gritty storytelling and unique art style are a breath of fresh air for RPG gachas.
This guide will help you get started with combat and team-building—leave a comment on how you’re approaching the gameplay, and which Sinners you find the sweetest, as this game and its meta continue to develop.
