I have not and will not spend money on a gacha, DOA or not. Also we obviously have completely different views on "fun", fun to me is not just constantly going to each festival one by one and spamming skip for 1-2 hours just to earn enough event tokens to buy ONE pose or something. Even if you can buy the auto pass that supposedly does the tedious work for you, that's still not fun, you're not even interacting with the game at all by that point lmao
You don't need to grind the gacha to do that though, you can get that experience literally on twitter or pixiv. YOu can also just mod the SSR's into the game via Costume Customiser as well. I know because that's exactly what I do whenever I touch XVV I just use mods.
To be absolutely fair, level 40 for your top characters is pretty low. I mean that’s my bare minimum for girls I know I will never level and it only takes a couple days of low effort to get there.
You have to get one Venus to at least level 60 before you have a proper system built for the game and once you do build a system for it you will discover that there is actually quite a bit to do.
I’m at a place where leveling is quite difficult. Especially since Tina isn’t actually the greatest character ever even if her single shot power is really good.
I notice my Reika and Yukino are quickly chasing after Tina’s stats despite being over ten levels ahead.
There is more complexity to the game than people let on. Especially for people that don’t go after every weekly trendy or can’t afford to gamble their real money which is totally understandable.
Like I said I haven’t spent a cent on DOAXVV and have well over 200 SSRs and all available characters other than Shizuki whom has not gone free yet and Meg who is not even in the Steam version yet.
Players that don’t pay have to strategize with their in game currency and it can be done with proper management. So I don’t see it as a gambling sim more than I do a management sim.