Twinkle Star Knights Introductory Guide

What is Twinkle Star Knights

Twinkle Star Knights is a FANZA game on the DMM platform. It's a spiritual sequel to the 2008 game Twinkle ☆ Crusaders but not a direct sequel so it can be enjoyed without reading or knowing anything about the previous game. The game features Turn-based gameplay with high quality cut-ins and fully voiced stories and characters. The game is completely in Japanese so it is strongly recommended to know Japanese if you want to enjoy the Story, Characters or Events.

The game has all ages versions on Google Playstore, Apple Appstore and DMM platform. It also features a R18 version for adults on the FANZA platform.

The game also has a PC version on the DMM platform with both All Ages and R18 versions but it is worth noting that the DMM versions of the game require a Japanese VPN to log in or access the DMM platform. You can turn off the VPN after the game launches as the region block is only for DMM and not the game itself. A popular free and easy to use choice for VPN is Proton VPN.

What is the gameplay like

The game features turn based gameplay with both Manual and Auto modes of gameplay. The first thing you'll see after starting a battle is the Rocket Start
You want to click on the screen when the big yellow circle overlaps the rocket start circle. The three results that can be obtained are OK, GOOD and PERFECT. OK will advance your units by 3CT, GOOD advances by 6 and PERFECT advances by 10.

After the Rocket Start, the combat screen looks like this.

Whoever reaches the line located at the middle of the screen gets to act. There is no limit of how many actions either side can take so your team can chain actions one after the other if you play your abilities correctly but the enemy can also chain many actions together if you allow a particularly dangerous boss to act.

Attack means what it says, attack the enemy using a normal attack or any of your skills. You can select which enemy to attack and whatever enemy you attack will be knocked back. Shielded enemies (Depicted with a shield under the enemy HP bar) are immune to knockback while the shield is up. Other enemies might also be immune to knockback depending on that stage's mechanics. Using skills consumes EX points from your EX bar located at the bottom of the screen. Attacking without using any skill will allow you to regain some EX points.

The Unison feature happens when two or more characters reach the line at the same time. If Unison is triggered, all the characters that reached the line will act together. The selected "Unison leader" will act first then the rest of the characters will act left to right and at the end, an Unison Attack will be triggered which will regain you EX points. Pressing the Unison button manually will make the character wait until the next character arrives at the line and trigger an Unison attack with them. Keep in mind that your character will do nothing while waiting for the other character so if an enemy arrives at the line while you're waiting, they will act instead and the Unison will not happen.

If enemies and allies reach the line at the same exact time, a Rumble will happen. Rumble will compare the attack of both sides and the losing side will take damage and a forced stun. Both sides will also be knocked back a short distance (4CT~)

Charge will cause that character to retreat back without attacking. You will also charge your EX bar by 2.5 of what you would have gotten by normal attacking, the charged character(s) will receive a +50% boost to attack while in charge mode and EX gauge increase of normal attacks while in charged mode is increased by 25%. The charge mode will disappear after the character's next action. If a character is attacked while charged, they will receive double the knockback so be careful with it.

Introduction to Team Building

You want to build a team that has Action CT reduction, Attack Buffers and Puller characters. Popular newbie friendly characters that meet one or more of these needs are Koharuko and Luriel. Note that both of these require to be upgraded to 3☆ to unlock their secondary skill. Luriel is still useful at 2-star but Koharuko's bread and butter is only unlocked at 3☆ so you don't want to use her if she isn't 3☆.

Ideally your team should have one strong attacker that you're going to base your team around and the rest of the team is dedicated to supporting that character. Action CT has a cap of how much you can reduce it so ideally you only need enough to reach the cap quickly then fill the remaining slots with buffers and/or puller characters. If you've built your team properly then you'll be able to achieve 1CT which allows your team to take repeated turns one after the other without allowing the enemy to act which is necessary when tackling challenge content.

There are many viable or Strong attackers in the game and most of the game is very easily clearable with sub-optimal teams so don't stress out too much over meta or you'll heavily regret it since the only mode that cares deeply about meta is All-Out War whenever that mode rolls around and Challenge Mode towers that rerun so you can just simply clear them on the rerun if you weren't strong enough to clear them on their first run. Having one strong team with good synergy is enough to clear 99% of the game's content with the other 1% being said Challenge Content that might make you swap people out to play around a gimmick so it's very possible to simply enjoy the game's story and collect your favorites without stressing over needing to roll X or Y character to clear content

Standout gacha characters that will make your life in the game a lot easier include characters like Angel Venus and Demon Fiona due to them being very strong characters and having two races at the same time which makes doing modes such as Racial Exchange much easier so you might want to keep an eye out for them if they rerun.

What is the Gacha like

The Twinkle Star Knights Gacha is simple and works on a per-banner pity. Roll 200 times on a banner for points and at 200, you can exchange points for one of the featured characters in that banner. Make sure to spend said points before the gacha banner leaves the shop exchange because they will turn into gold when it expires!. As for currency income, the game tends to be very generous with their gem handouts and you can expect to be able to guarantee one character every 1~2 months depending on events. Certain important events like Anniversary or Half-Anniversary can give up to two pities worth of gems plus free rolls but it is still important to practice good resource management if you aim to be F2P.

What is the Daily Cycle like?

Tasks

Push Main Stages as far as you can. You want to reach 33-E, meaning World 33, Stage E in hard mode and sweep that for weapons to equip on your characters. 47-D is the next stage you want to do for weapons and armors when there's no event up that requires stamina to farm.

Events are the main thing you'll be checking daily as you want to clear events for welfare characters, resources, gacha currency and more. Certain events require you to farm and sweep event stages for currency while other events don't require stamina to play and allow you to use your stamina during that time on events instead. Make sure to always be using bonus characters whenever you're sweeping for event currency or event tickets, either make a team with bonus characters yourself or press auto to allow the game to make you a team with bonus characters.

Stamina based events with shops want you to spend Stamina on the event to clear out shop. If the event has a welfare that you want to max out then consider using pots to refresh or do daily cheap refreshes, 3 refreshes a day from pots or gems should likely be enough to max out a character but this number might decrease depending on if you have any bonus characters that would give you more event currency.
Subjugation events have a single boss that goes from level 1 to 20 and a level 100 difficulty after defeating the level 20 boss. You obtain boss tickets to challenge the boss by spending stamina anywhere in the game and 1 ticket means 1 challenge. You can use additional tickets to give your team members a 'boost' to their stats for one battle if you find the boss is too hard to beat at your current state. The final difficulty will always take 10 tickets instead of 1 to fight.
Box Gacha events require you to spend Stamina elsewhere in the game to obtain box gacha tickets. You use said box gacha tickets for pulls in the box gacha that contain various rewards. Big rewards stop at Box 9 while Box 10 and beyond only offer the same repeating rewards.
Tower events are a new event tower that requires you to climb X amount of floors and you get rewards for 3-staring each floor. These are usually challenge content but sometimes there can be some easy towers aimed at new players such as the Xmas tower or the New Years tower.
All-Out War is an event where you fight a difficult raid boss that requires to build teams with an element and race restriction in mind. (Angel and Thunder, Water and Demon, etc etc). The boss will gain a shield at a certain point of the fight and you have to use the characters the game told you about to break it in X amount of turns. All-Out war bosses require 2 teams for the first 3 difficulties then the boss will require 3 teams, each with its own restrictions. This is typically content beginners shouldn't worry about but it might be fun to see how far you can go if you want a challenge or do the easiest stages for some coin income to spend on the All-out War event shop.

Money, EXP and Resources can be sweeped daily and you want to sweep them daily because these stages give you the resources needed to level characters.

Racial Exchange is a boss fight with increasing difficulty modes. You get 2 tickets daily and start at the lowest difficulty mode. You want to progress through the difficulties and defeat the boss for medals that can be used for character specific accessories. The mode is called Racial Exchange because it wants you to use specific races depending on the currently available rotation. Allies that are not of the correct race will deal reduced damage so you want to use the race the game wants you to and characters of the correct race will have a BONUS icon on them so you can identify them at a glance.
It is possible to clear the 2nd hardest difficulty with characters of a different race than required depending on your power level but it is impossible to clear the hardest stage without using the required race due to the 100% damage reduction to characters not meeting the requirement.
Once you clear any stage for the day, you can sweep your remaining ticket on the difficulty you just did if you want.

Tower mode is a series of towers available for you to clear. There's regular tower (Neutral) and rotating element towers that rotate depending on the day of the week. You can only use characters of the specified element in those towers and you can only do 3 stages per day per tower so remember to do these daily. Neutral tower is always open and you can play it as much as you want.

In short, your daily cycle would be

Sweep Exp/Money stages
Sweep resource stages
Check events and/or Sweep events (Sweep Main Stages if no events that require Stamina)
Clear Racial Exchange (If it's up)
Clear daily rotating element towers