Princess Connect! Re: Dive is an exciting hero collector adventure RPG from Crunchyroll Games, where you play as the Princess Knight, solving problems and interacting with the colorful denizens of Landosol, a fanciful world of swords and magic. Take up arms with the friends you’ve made across Landosol’s many guilds, and enjoy your journey, your own story, as the world’s mysteries slowly unfurl, together with your fragmented memories.
With your many teams of swordswomen, adventurers, magicians, kick-ass idols, one-punch cats, brawlers, knights, and improbable occupations in-between, no challenge is too big, no food unreachable, and no heights insurmountable for your skills (and Union Bursts)!
If you are looking to strengthen your heroines and dominate your enemies then be sure to stay with us and read on, as we have compiled a comprehensive beginner’s guide for Princess Connect! Re: Dive!
Prologue: The Start Of Your Adventure
You begin your journey with your comrades being blasted into oblivion by the Omniscient Kaiser, and a brief respite, courtesy of the mysterious Ameth greeting you in the dream world post butt-whooping, has her assign you a guide: the ever faithful and loyal Kokkoro.
One short, cheerful song, a stray Pecorine devouring your lunch, saving a random Yui from monsters, and helping out a passed out catgirl later, you must now scrounge up funds otherwise you and said faithful and loyal guide will die of starvation.
Combat Mechanics: It’s Actually Pretty Straightforward
The combat mechanics in Princess Connect! Re: Dive is simple. Your characters have two gauges under their portraits: The green gauge representing their health and the blue gauge representing their “TP”, which when filled allows said characters to unleash a powerful technique called a “Union Burst.”
Each character has unique effects tied to their Union Burst, as well as different skills which are unlocked as they Rank Up, but more on that later. Once a character’s portrait is outlined in yellow and has a big “OK” flashing on the righthand corner, tapping said portrait will unleash their Union Burst, expending all their TP in the process.
Once a character has learned skills from her Rank Ups, she will use them periodically over the course of the battle. Unfortunately, you can’t command your characters to use skills the way you can with Union Bursts, so for now just trust them as they go about battling for you.
Right now, the fastforward and auto buttons are greyed out, but when they do get unlocked a few minutes later you’ll be able to speed up how fast the battle plays out and make it so your characters use their Union Bursts the instant their TP gauge is full.
After the quick combat tutorial, you’re greeted with more plot and a rather spiffy opening cinematic. What awaits you is the beginning of your journey, and of your grind to find out just what the heck is going on in this world. Welcome to Princess Connect! Re: Dive, and welcome to the Main Quest screen!
As you can see, you start off in world 1, and each world has several nodes, the likes of which feature enemies that will escalate in difficulty as you progress through the world. Said enemies will also drop equipment you can use to help rank your characters up, as well as mana, rupies, Player EXP, and bond points, though these are things we’ll get to in a bit.
Before you go into your node of choice, please take note of the items shown before you deploy into it! The 3 items on the pre-assembly screen aren’t the only items you’ll get from the node, but they do have the highest drop rates, with the leftmost one being the most likely item to drop upon completion.
Allow me to warn you now though, just because they’ve a higher likelihood of dropping doesn’t mean they’ll always drop for you. Please be prepared to grind out specific items to rank your characters up, especially in the later levels! For now, please direct your attention to the Party Assembly Screen.
Every time you enter a quest, you’re sent to this screen to set your party up. Who you select here will determine who will fight in said quest, as collecting every character and simultaneously throwing all of them into an enemy encounter would make the game too easy and also set your phone on fire from the frame-rate spike.
Take note of the “position” each character is assigned to as well! You can see what position your characters fill in by looking to the lower right of their portraits.
Red-arrowed front units will be your “tanks”, taking the most damage and drawing enemy aggression. Yellow-arrow middle units generally provide versatile utility and a healthy amount of supplemental damage, and Blue-arrow back units are your primary damage dealers.
You can have any combination of positions, so if you want to field 5 front units at the same time, go for it. However, it is generally a good idea to balance your positions out to make sure your team can both stay alive and deal a healthy amount of damage.
On another note, you can’t manually change character positions, so if you for any reason at all want your Karyl or Kokkoro to be up front, they’re unfortunately stuck where they are. Some characters also stay further forward or backwards than others, but that distinction is something you’ll need to experiment with on your own as you unlock them.
Clearing a node consumes stamina, which regenerates slowly over time. There are also other ways to gain stamina, such as refilling it with jewels, level-ups, missions, and decorations, though we’ll review this again later in the article.
A successful node clear gets you a star ranking according to how many of your units were knocked out, and if you make it through the node with nobody getting KOed, you get 3 stars and a jewel reward, your premium currency which you can spend on many things.
Once you’ve cleared your first node, Kokkoro kindly directs you to the Characters screen, where you’ll see both the characters you’ve unlocked and characters you’re yet to unlock. She also directs you here to teach you how to power your units up, so let’s follow what she asks us to do.
1. Powering Up Your Characters With Rank Ups And More
Each character can equip 6 pieces of equipment, and each equipment boosts their stats, with specific stats being boosted by specific equipment. You don’t have to worry too much about what to equip on your character though, as their needs are unique; they’ll equip literally nothing else but the specific items shown on their screen.
Once you’ve slotted in a piece of equipment, you then have the option to refine it, sacrificing mana and spare equips or refinement stones to increase the boost they give. The higher the equipment’s rarity, the more resources it takes to refine them, though the boost in power is usually worth it.
After slotting in all 6 pieces of equipment, you can now rank up your character! Ranking a character up will give them a boost to their overall stats, as well as unlock a new skill on ranks 2, 4, and 7 respectively. You can view the effects of your character’s Union Burst and skills on the aptly named Skills tab on their status screen.
Please note you do not have to fully refine all your character’s equipment to have them be eligible to rank up; as soon as all 6 pieces are equipped, you’re free to rank your character up, refined or not. And if you did refine any of their equipment, you’ll be partially refunded for the resources you expended on rank up with some refinement stones according to how much you refined them. However, you will not be refunded any of the mana you spent, so if you’re running low on that, do proceed with some caution.
If you are wondering where to find the equipment you need for each character, you can press the “How to Obtain” button to bring up a menu with a list of stages where the required equipment drops. Certain equipment are composed of either several shards or lower rank equipment and recipe items, though the process for them is pretty much the same: collect the required number of pieces and craft the equipment, and then repeat as needed until you have all you need to craft them.
On the rightmost side of your character’s status screen, you’ll find the “Ascension” tab, which allows you to “rank up” your units once you’ve collected enough of their Memory Fragments. There are varying ways to acquire these fragments, and the required number for ascension goes up as your character ranks up.
Upon ranking up, your characters get a very significant boost in every stat, and upon reaching rank 3, their Bond Stories are completely unlocked, allowing you to learn more about your favorite unit while giving them even more stat-boosts and getting free Jewels in the process!
Alright, let’s be real, this is a hero collector. Which means we’ll probably want to spend all these Jewels we’ve accumulated on one very specific thing which Kokkoro is directing us to try out next:
2. The Gacha System
Full disclosure: Every unit available at the start of the game is either grindable or will be grindable in the future! Whether it be from Hard difficulty Main Quests, or by buying their Memory Fragments from the various ingame shops, or even getting said Fragments as drops from the later unlocked dungeon, pretty much everyone at the start will be yours to field given enough time!
However, with the Gacha, you get to unlock certain units much faster, as well as have the chance to pull for future units which are limited to only being acquired through the gacha.
There are several gacha to pull from: The Normal Gacha, which gives you Memory Fragments, equipment etc., the Premium Gacha, The Jump Start gacha, which wears off after a week and can only be pulled from with paid premium currency, and the Focus Gacha, which is the only Gacha to have this special thing called “Character Exchange Points.”
3. Sparking Aka Guaranteeing Your Favorite Characters, Long-Term
To elaborate, throughout Princess Connect! Re: Dive’s lifespan, several “banners” will come and go, each banner having a focus character which has a much higher likelihood of being “pulled” when you roll the gacha. This higher likelihood isn’t a guarantee, though what you can to do guarantee a character is to save up 300 rolls worth of Jewels (around 45,000 Jewels, free or premium) and spend them all on one banner.
When you roll on a banner, you get “character exchange points” for every character you pull, regardless of if you have them or not. Collect 300 of those points and you can trade them for the focus characters on the banner! This is called “Sparking”, and was a law created in Japan to make sure you wouldn’t spend too much money on your games to get the character you want.
If you get a character you already have when you pull from any gacha, you get Divine Amulets, a currency you can trade for Memory Fragments. The amount of Divine Amulets you get depends on the character’s base rarity.
4. Princess Festivals: Future-Proofing Your Jewels And Teams
A quick tip on Jewel usage here: If you really want to maximize your Jewels, save up enough to spark on a “Princess Festival” banner, which doubles the rate you get 3 star units, from 2.5% to 5%! These banners also feature highly sought after limited units who often drastically power your party up once you get them up to speed. Saving for a spark on Princess Festival guarantees your 300 pulls will have the highest likelihood of getting you the rarest and most relevant units.
How do you tell when Princess Festival banners are coming up? Helpful resources like the English Princess Connect! Re: Dive subreddit and international PriConne discord servers, among other places, have a list of all of Japan’s banners in the order they appeared.
As a Global player, this will allow you to scout and plan ahead to save up for the units you really want while possibly being able to spend excess jewels here and there, as long as you have enough Jewels to spark when your desired banner comes up!
Now, Kokkoro luckily will give us a guaranteed 3-star unit, again the highest base rarity you can pull, then have us field her in our party. You’re also given free reign for the gacha and for the rest of your adventures. She’ll chime in here and there when you unlock new modes to talk about their functions to you. For now though, let me give you a quick rundown of what they’ll be like, as well as some things to consider for the future.
5. Stories: Deepening Your Bonds
One of the most important parts of the Story section is that virtually every scene in this section of the game gives you Jewels on your first playthrough, as well as stat boosts if you’re viewing a unit’s bond story. Once alternate versions of certain characters are released, these bond story stat boosts carry over to every character with the same name.
Once you’ve cleared node 1-4, Kokkoro will walk you through your very own Guild Story. The Guild stories allow you to take a peek at how you and your other characters grow in their respective guilds, as well as just how their guilds were formed in the first place.
Canonically, your Princess Knightly self is part of Pecorine, Kokkoro, and Karyl’s Gourmet Guild, made by de-facto leader Pecorine thanks to her desire to eat the best foods together with you and your newfound friends, as well as spread the joy and intimacy of a shared meal all throughout Landosol. As you’ll discover in the character stories though, it seems you’ve somehow been able to run into each character at least once over the course of a month of trying to get by with Kokkoro, forming the beginnings of your bonds with them, which are covered in your unlocked characters’ Bond Stories.
6. How The Battle Arena Works
The Battle Arena is a coliseum-like space created by the enigmatic Minerva, supposedly to test your skills as well as further her own agenda. As interesting as the plot threads surrounding her are, what we should focus on now is the fact this mode will be one of your main sources of both Memory Fragments and Jewels.
Defeating your opponents in the Arena gives you Jewels depending on what rank they are, and upon reaching certain thresholds will increase the amount of Arena Coins you passively generate. These Arena Coins can be used to purchase Memory Fragments and equipment in the Arena Coin shop. Your ranking also affects the amount of Jewels and Mana your acquire from the Arena’s daily gifts.
How the Arena works is also fairly simple: Instead of fighting monsters, you’re fighting actual characters instead. You’ve probably gotten a taste of this in Main Quest Hard Mode, with some characters hitting you with their skills and Union Bursts. Unfortunately, instead of just one character, you’ll be dealing with a team of 5, with their skills, damage, Union Bursts, and stats depending on how well your opponent has raised them. You’ll also need to field a defense team of your own to fend of challengers aiming for your rank.
Luckily, you’re not at a disadvantage as an aggressor since you can pick one of three teams you’d like to challenge. If it looks like the teams you’re up against are too strong, you can also elect to refresh the list of teams to hopefully find a weaker opponent. Overall power, found under your opponent’s Player Level, is a good indicator of how strong your enemy is. Team composition however, will make or break your chances of success.
Keep an especially watchful eye on which units are in the front position. If Miyako the teal-haired pudding ghost is up front, that means your physical damage units will be at a disadvantage. If the constantly taunting red-haired Kuka is up front, then magic damage units will be disadvantaged. When you see a Nozomi the ginger-haired twintailed idol manning the front, that means the enemy team is built to accommodate for either damage type, though she’s not as effective as the aforementioned Miyako and Kuka.
There are some teams built to withstand lots of physical damage, some built to take magic damage easily, and some that want to outright kill you before you do anything. Becoming familiar with each character’s role and taking the time to note what damage type they deal when you fight them will help you build a good knowledge base, slowly giving you a knack for figuring out just what sort of team you’re fighting, as well as giving you ideas on how to structure your own team.
Ideally, you’ll want to aim for making an arena team with all your members fully equipped and upgraded at the highest possible rank and, after a significant amount of grinding, 5 stars. You’ll also want to look at expanding your roster of usable characters to counter certain teams, though this will come naturally to you as you play.
7. The Princess Arena: Even More Player Vs. Player Chaos!
Take literally everything you know about Battle Arena, multiply the amount of eligible parties by 3, and pray you have enough characters decently leveled to survive. That’s the Princess Arena in a nutshell. Upon completing Main Quest node 8-15, Minerva’s machinations unlock and “upgrade” your current Arena mode into this one, giving you yet another avenue to earn Jewels, Memory Fragments, and the satisfaction of having your squads scale the ranks yet again.
Though that last little detail right there is the defining difference between this Arena and the one you previously unlocked. Squads, with an ‘S’ at the end.
Instead of watching one squad do battle against another, you have to field 15 units, divided into 3 parties, and have them fight your opponent’s parties in a best of 3 match. Another thing to note is the winning squad does not carry over into the next fight; Party 1 fights enemy Party 1, Party 2 fights Party 2, and so on. If Party 1 wins against the enemy party, it does not get to fight the next party.
That being said, take a look at your opponent’s total power values and spread your units accordingly. You only need to win 2 fights, not 3, and the order you win does not matter. That means you can lose the first fight then win the succeeding two by placing your strongest units in Party 2 and Party 3, or adjust your team compositions accordingly.
Similar to the Battle Arena, ranking up here will give you Jewels, higher passive coin generation to purchase equipment and fragments from the Princess Arena Shop, and better daily rewards. Once you’ve reached this stage though, it’ll definitely be safe to say you aren’t a beginner anymore.
8. The Dungeon: Resources And Great Drops Abound
The dungeon has you fight a series of battles, with all but the last one against randomly generated parties of increasing difficulty. The Dungeon’s final battle is against a boss that’ll give you a stamina-producing Guildhouse decoration upon its defeat, and the amount of nodes you have to clear, as well as the amount of equipment, dungeon coins, and mana you acquire are dependent on the dungeon’s difficulty.
Each “floor” will again have a randomly generated team of characters you need to beat, with your reward for defeating them being mana, equipment, and the occasional Memory Fragment.
If your current party is defeated in a dungeon battle, your dungeon excursion does not end and the damage you dealt to your enemies remains. If you have any spare characters leveled up, you can form a party with them to hopefully finish the job.
It is better to attempt the hardest dungeon available to you than to rerun the easier dungeons. Harder dungeons give more dungeon coins and drop better gear, and the way they’re scaled makes it so that you should get at least as many dungeon coins as you normally could in the previous difficulty when they’re first unlocked.
9. The Guildhouse: Your Base Of Operations
The Guildhouse unlocks after clearing Chapter 2-1, to the absolute delight of Pecorine, Kokkoro, and Karyl (though she’ll never admit to it.) With your Guildhouse unlocked, your lodgings and food are no longer a problem storywise, and you get to finally have a base of operations for your Gourmet Guild, courtesy of Karin the guild assistant. Upon receiving your Guildhouse from Karin, you’re free to decorate it with all manner of furniture and watch as your guild members and friends converse with each other and interact with what you’ve installed!
You can assign which characters will lounge around on each floor of the Guildhouse, with a maximum of 5 per floor. You can select these characters as they’re going on about their lives and give them gifts, earned by using skip tickets in Main Quest stages, to increase their Bond Levels and unlock new chapters in their respective stories which will give them a respectable boost in stats.
You can upgrade Guildhouse furniture with rupies. Ideally, you want to prioritize upgrading Karin’s Table, as the extra skip tickets add up nicely to help alleviate your grind. It is also very good to upgrade the Snack Table when you can as well, as it can store and provide more and more stamina as it levels up.
Some decorations, such as the dungeon drops, Karin’s Table, Mana Drop Device, and others will gradually store items for you to pick up every once in awhile. (You have to wonder if she ever even goes home, or where she lives since she’s always there when you go to your Guildhouse).
10. General Progression Tips And Strategies For The Adventuring Princess Knight
Don’t stop trying to progress through your Main Quest! The Grotto unlocks at 2-5, Dungeon at 2-12, with more dungeons unlocking as you clear the Main Quests, the Battle Arena at 4-6, and Princess Arena upon completing every normal Main Quest stage. Essentially, as long as you continue to rank up, equip, and ascend your units, you’ll be able to smoothly progress throughout the game. Don’t try to raise too many of them at the beginning so you can progress faster though.
Please make sure to always do all your daily missions. Player level is one of the main barriers to progress in this game as your units’ levels cannot go above your own. Pushing as far into the Main Quests as you can is also essential to your progress, as the farther you get in story mode, the more farmable equipment you have access to, allowing your units to progress through their ranks.
Luckily, all your daily missions plus whatever additional node-clearing you need to do can be accomplished in as little as 30 minutes to as long as an hour and a half depending on how much extra stamina you want to spend grinding for equipment. Princess Connect! Re: Dive is one of the least demanding games on the App Store, so go ahead and progress at your own pace.
Sometimes it’s better to keep your characters at a fully equipped and upgraded rank instead of ranking them up right away. This is especially true when you rank them up from rank 5 to rank 6, as a fully refined and equipped character at rank 5 is significantly stronger than a rank 6 with no equipment. When any character reaches this point in their growth, make sure you at least have half the gear for their next rank ready to equip so they don’t suffer too much from the loss in stats.
Don’t be afraid to splurge on mana and resources for upgrading their equipment either, as the game will give back half the resources you spent when you rank them up. Unfortunately, the game doesn’t refund the mana you spend on the resources.
The order of the equips displayed on the stage previews matter, with the most common drop being on the leftmost spot on the preview. The drop rates are lower for the middle and right equips, and hard mode stages have a much higher drop rate for them compared to normal mode.
Grotto quests, which really aren’t much different from Main Quest nodes, give large amounts of EXP potions or Mana, depending on which stage you select in the Grotto menu. You can only play 2 of each quest in a day regardless of difficulty, for a total of 4 stage clears.
You’re also guaranteed two skip tickets for each stage clear, which is nice. If you have time to spare, it’s a good idea to let your characters auto-battle these stages instead of skip ticketing them so you get the whole 8 tickets instead of say, just 4 if you decided to skip them. If you’re hurting for time or tickets, don’t forget your daily grotto clears provide a total of 8.
Depending on your team composition, stocking up on Emerald or Turquoise Earrings for future rank-ups would be a good way to spend excess stamina, as many equipment recipes and characters will need these. Since you’ll want to build Kuka, Miyako, and Nozomi eventually, stocking up on Emerald Earrings specifically for them will help you immensely with the lategame grind.
You can get Memory Fragments for Ascension from hard mode stages, random dungeon chest drops, and the Arena, Princess Arena, Divine Amulet, and dungeon coin shops. The future Clan Battle shop will also have shards available for you to buy.
Make sure to splurge on the bonus shop every time it pops up. It helps to keep a good reserve of items regardless of rarity, especially if you’d like to have new characters become instantly ready for fielding in the arena.
Take note of whether the buy buttons under the shop equipment have red diamonds on them, as they indicate if a character in your possession needs the item for ranking up. Stocking up on refinement crystals, especially enhanced and superior crystals, will also be helpful for your characters when you have the mana to spare. With that said, try to restrict yourself to raising 5 to 7 characters for now, especially since ranking them up will become more time and resource-consuming at higher levels. You can worry about your team compositions for the Princess Arena later on.
Again, it cannot be overstated that you should only focus on 5 to 7 characters maximum until you reach at least level 60. Leveling, gearing, and ranking even one character up to rank 7 and ascension level 3 or 4 will take enormous amounts of time, stamina, skip tickets, mana, perhaps even crystals and real money depending on how invested you are in the game.
Hopefully, the tips and tricks we outlined above will help you on your journey throughout the wonderful world of Landosol! If you have any comments or suggestions regarding our Princess Connect! Re: Dive beginner’s guide, please feel free to leave them down below!