With almost 70 games under their app portfolio and over 100 million downloads from their releases on the Google Play Store alone, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Inc. continues to bring popular manga and anime franchises to mobile gaming platforms. This time, Asta, his rival Yuno, as well as other characters in the Black Clover series comes alive in the stunning new strategy RPG, Black Clover Phantom Knights, which is available for both iOS and Android platforms.
Black Clover Phantom Knights has only been around for less than a month but has quickly earned over a massive following in several countries. While the game utilizes some common elements from other titles within the genre, some features and game mechanics provide a fresh new feel to the game in its entirety. Acquiring heroes come mostly from gacha-oriented summoning, yet there is a built-in reroll feature for the first one and the game provides very generous starting resources to obtain more.
Various character classes and skill sets make for potentially limitless party rosters as you engage in various PvE and PvP content. Even if you are not a fan of the Black Clover series but enjoy strategy RPGs that present a wide variety of tactics, then check what Black Clover Phantom Knights has to offer and revel in a unique strategy RPG experience!
It may seem overwhelming at first as Black Clover Phantom Knights engages you through an initial battle as part of the tutorial and information on the basic mechanics are provided. While you may not necessarily be able to entirely pick it all up at that point, there will be plenty of opportunities later to revisit each concept. Beyond the quick guides that you go through on first attempts at any new feature, there is an index of guides you can read through via the “How to Play” button you can access through the settings. To visit the set of guides, tap on the main menu button at the upper right side of the screen, choose “other”, and finally tap on the button.
With the availability of auto mode, Black Clover Phantom Knight is easy to pick up and play and you are guaranteed to secure easy wins early on. As you make progress through your adventure, a more thorough effort is needed with regard to imposing strategies before and during each battle. If you find yourself stuck in a particular endeavor or simply looking for more efficient means of progressing through the game, check out this detailed Black Clover Phantom Knights beginner’s guide, as it comes with a number of useful tips, cheats and strategies!
1. Progressing Through The Main Story
Like many RPGs, especially ones that are based on manga and anime, Black Clover Phantom Knights holds a main quest that follows the protagonist’s adventure. Though you do not necessarily have to use the particular characters in the story, each battle you engage in grows stronger with each step and without enhancing your characters along the way, you will soon be unable to clear the challenges ahead.
Beyond the immediate rewards you receive by successfully defeating each story stage, doing so earns you experience points needed in levelling up your account. This ultimately results in unlocking some features as well as having a higher in-game stamina cap to let you push through with more activities later on. Additionally, the initial stages within the story campaign should serve as a good staging ground to try a variety of rosters and formations as well as familiarize yourself with the units you have in your collection.
2. Maintain A Balanced Team With A Good Mix Of Roles
Each character in your roster falls within a specific character class or role which determines their specialization in combat. While it may happen that you prefer using your favorite characters in the manga or anime, or perhaps even go for the characters you have within the higher rarity tier, the most effective teams rely heavily on having a good mix of the available roles with each unit deployed on the proper position in the formation. You can later on deviate from the suggested one and even go for auto formation for starters but considering efficiency and long-term planning that involves investing in some of your characters, you should begin to keep an eye on some units whom you feel will stay within your main team early on.
As such, be sure to look into each character you have and try to choose the best ones for each role. There are 6 different roles available in Black Clover Phantom Knights and each team has a maximum of 5 slots. Keep in mind that you do not necessarily have to consider each role but at the very least have a defender, attacker, and healer as the more basic ones especially for starters. Just a briefer for total newbies, attackers specialize in dealing damage to enemies while defenders excel in receiving damage and defending the rest of their teammates.
Buffers provide strengthening to the team with various effects that boost stats or provide various special effects while jammers are debuffers who instill negative effects or status ailments on enemies. Healers are the support roles who provide health recovery for the team. Last, but not the least, are Extras unique to Black Clover Phantom Knights. Extras do not specialize in any particular role but have unique abilities or high stats.
Always consider a character’s role in determining the best position for him or her. Typically, defenders man the front lines, attackers can be on either front or mid, while the buffers, jammers, and healers stay at the back. Be sure to look into each character’s stats to see how flexible they can be as far as position is concerned.
Beyond roles, be sure to tap and hold on your preferred characters’ portraits to see more details regarding that character. The first tab relates to that character’s stats which can help you decide on where to place that character in case there are more than one viable options. Pay close attention to each character’s skill sets as well, even the ones you have yet to unlock. There are many characters that fall within the same class and yet have huge disparities as far as stats and skill sets go. This can be an important point to consider when choosing between two characters of the same role. Lastly, some characters with formation mastery unlock new formations for your squad.
3. Be Selective When Enhancing Characters
On top of the quick reroll on your first draw that practically guarantees a 5-star character, events and gifts you will receive early on will net you loads of black jewels that will enable you to summon an abundance of characters to choose from before you proceed with your quests. While you should consider 5-star characters ahead of the rest for their potential, also consider using lower tier ones especially if you need a particular role in your formation that cannot be aptly held by other high rarity units in your roster.
You will most certainly acquire more black jewels and be able to summon better heroes as you continue to make progress. With that, you should be very selective when it comes to enhancing each of the heroes you use. In essence, you can categorically divide heroes you use into two groups: one part is for those whom you are certain will form part of your team long-term; the other part are just there until you get someone better to replace him or her. In this consideration, you should only enhance the latter group enough to meet the demands of the current challenge while you can invest a bit more heavily on the first group.
You can earn experience points or grimoire points (GP), rather, as you use each character in battle. Different grimoire point requirements are needed to unlock stat boosts in the character’s respective grimoire table. More tables are unlocked as new star levels are reached and you can customize unlocking nodes to prioritize one stat boost over another. In truth, grimoire points earned in combat will hardly suffice for you to continuously succeed through one fight to the next. There are white ash slates you can use to grant your selected units extra grimoire points for distribution.
To access the character enhancement screen, simply tap on the main menu and choose brigade, then enhance character. You can click on the (+) sign beside each character’s GP and then choose to consume available resources to grant them extra GP. Again, consider how long you will be using the character before you decide how much GP you will invest in him or her.
Beyond enhancement, characters can also be evolved and raise their star level to a maximum of 6 stars. Naturally, it will be more expensive to get a 5-star unit to 6 stars so, again, you should be very selective as to which unit you wish to invest resources on. You need specific character sheets as well as yul to perform an evolution and while character sheets are specific for each character, you can also use highly rare phantom sheets as substitutes.
4. Engage In Other Quests To Progress Further
As you complete main story quests one after another, you will naturally be faced with a challenge that may be difficult or even impossible to defeat given the overall strength of your current team. Although you can always push for more enhancements if you have resources to spare, another advisable option is to venture into other available quests to further boost your progress.
One of the features you will unlock early on are the free quests you can engage in situated on different regions: West, North, and East. Note that the starting stages within each of these regions all bear the same power level recommendations. As such, the best approach is to cycle through each one progressively. Once you have completely beaten an area in any region, you can freely deploy a team of characters to earn some passive rewards from them.
Initially, you will only be able to deploy a team of characters but as you reach higher levels, more teams can be deployed. You can tap on the deploy button at the lower left side of the home screen to initiate team deployments to unlocked areas. Simply choose a region, a location, and a trio of characters to deploy to start their adventure. Take note of the time the deployment ends as you would want to expend all attempts at deployment daily.
Each character you unlock also unlocks a character-specific quest. These quests are short yet initially more challenging than some quests like the main story and the free ones. You can acquire some materials here that you can use to enhance and evolve specific characters so be sure to prioritize characters that you use on your main team.
Like dungeons in conventional action and strategy RPGs, Black Clover Phantom Knights has a wide variety of honing gates to offer. Each one, however, requires using honing keys to unlock and partake in. Training gates is potentially where you would want to spend some time on if you want to wear brigade rank EXP. There is an Enhance Relic Gate that lets you earn enhance materials for your relics. Even if you are not yet short on Yul, you would want to farm more from the Treasure Gate as you can never have enough of it.The Enhance Grimoire Gate and Enhance Knight Gate are the ones to frequently visit for grimoire board enhance materials and white ash slates respectively.
Be sure to also spend time on Defend the capital to earn some relics as well as boss sheets. Even the beginner difficulty levels in this game mode are tough and will probably stretch longer than the usual fights but the rewards are worth it.
On top of all these usual quests and dungeons, always take note of time-limited events that offer great rewards.
5. Complete Missions For More Rewards
Although you obtain plenty of rewards immediately after each battle you partake in, more are actually available based on how each of these battles relate to the accomplishment of mission objectives. To be sure, make it a habit to look into the panel missions that you can easily access through the missions icon at the right side of the home screen. Take note that there are daily missions that refresh each day and then there are grand missions that relate to milestones of your accomplishments.
In any case, looking into each of the objectives slated here will serve as a guide for you to determine features and game modes you may have missed especially as a beginner. Accomplishing these early on will definitely benefit you as a lot of the basic necessities and resources you need to move forward can be earned here.
6. Always Check Your Presents For Rewards
A lot of the rewards you earn from events a well as completing missions do not directly go into your inventory. Some of them are redirected instead to the presents, which serves as an in-game mail or=f sorts. As these rewards typically expire after a certain number of days, be sure to claim each and every bit of rewards you earn before logging out of the game each day.
7. General Battle Tips
As with most RPGs that feature an auto mode, it is important to know early on that these auto modes should only be used if you have a huge advantage over enemies and will win against them regardless of how you play. As challenges become stronger, you should always consider playing manually as you will always play better than auto mode even if you are a beginner. As auto mode uses skills automatically, being able to time using these skills on your own will lead to a much better team performance.
Beyond manual activation of skills, switching formation within combat can also lead to certain advantages based on the situation. As auto mode will never take advantage of this feature, playing manually and being able to perform this in battle already puts you at an advantage. Before the start of combat, you may want to re-check available formations for your squad as well. Depending on your characters and their formation mastery, you will unlock some formations that may be better suitable for your chosen class of characters. Beyond positioning, some formations also offer extra advantages on some stats so be sure to look through it via the bottom left side of the formation screen.
That sums up our Black Clover Phantom Knights beginner’s guide. While the game certainly holds a lot more features and details to cover, what we shared and discussed should suffice to set you to a good start within the game. Be sure to explore numerous possibilities as you mix and match characters to test on repeat quests. It takes some time and patience to really see the potential of each unit as well as eacj possible formation you can come up with. If there are other tips or strategies you are aware of and would like to share them with us, feel free to do so via our comment section!