Azur Lane Celebrates 5th Anniversary with “The Fool’s Scales” Event

Azur Lane is currently holding its 5th anniversary event with livestreams, events, new characters and additional catchup systems for new players. A “gacha” game, Azur Lane revolves around collecting its characters – anthropomorphised historical ships, both real like HMS Warspite BB, USS Enterprise CV, and KMS Bismarck BB, and even a few never realised “paper” ships that were planned but never built such as USS Kearsarge BBV and HMS Plymouth CL, both designs from collaborating with World of Warships. These characters are trained and equipped and used to fight in bullet hell combat against the Siren threat, an actually pretty damn cool story that (mostly…) unites the previously opposed historically based alliances of the Azur Lane (Allies) and Crimson Axis (Axis) against them. The event will be live for two weeks so there’s ample time to get in and play it if you’re new to Azur Lane.

5 years

Maintaining and expanding a game to such an extent over 5 years in such a competitive environment is no mean feat. A new major event every 2-3 months with additional smaller events in between, there has rarely been a dearth of content for players of Azur Lane. Every anniversary has a great event celebrating the last year and covering what’s coming in the upcoming year alongside gifts for players, merchandise in the online store, beautifully animated and voiced Pvs and more. The entire patch notes can be read on the wiki or on the official site. Some amazing 4k wallpapers were also released for the celebration:

New event

This year the major in-game event is Fr*nch based, focusing on shipgirls from the Iris Libre and Vichya Dominion fleets, the politics of that schism (any WW2 enjoyer should understand the origin of that split…) and integrated with the ongoing storyline of Azur Lane facing the Siren threat. I won’t spoil the event story – the Azur Lane stories are surprisingly good, and I always enjoy slowly going through them as the event proceeds. The rewards of the event however are fair game! The ships will be covered below, but the event comes with several nice new things in addition to them. USS West Virginia BB will be getting a retrofit, making her more powerful after a moderate investment to upgrade her, it’s always nice to see an older girl brought up to modern standards like this. The event shop, using currency from repeating the event maps holds a host of rewards as usual including the ability to straight-out purchase one of the new shipgirls, and a new Cruiser gun that looks to be Best in Slot (BIS, usually situationally) by a small margin which is always nice to get.

One of the useful extra features of events is the limited access to new stages which often have a drop that is good to farm. Of particular note are the D1 and D2 stages which drop a BIS Destroyer High Explosive gun and a great Cruiser High Explosive gun respectively – matching the Iris predilection for burning the sinners in holy fire. The Azur Lane Wiki event guide is useful as always.

French ships

Azur Lane has a ludicrous roster of characters at this point, closing in on 600 shipgirls with their own artwork and voice lines from professional voice actors, and this event adds another 6 for the previously lacklustre Fr*nch fleets. Although being Fr*nch they’re still going to be lacklustre! (Rule Brittania sounds in the distance) Anti-Fr*nch banter aside, Clemenceau has some great expressions and the skills of some of these shipgirls bring interesting factional synergy, and Guichen CV adds one of the most sought-after ships – a dedicated healer, otherwise exclusive to the Royal Navy faction. I play Azur Lane as a collector and am happy for every new shipgirl we get and will definitely be grinding hard to ensure I get, train, enhance, level, max limit break and equip all of these shipgirls.

Drawing inspiration from elegant palace dress designs, five dedicated new shipgirls are available in the Construction Pool. Four of the standout shipgirls including the Super Rare Battleship Clemenceau, the Super Rare Light Cruiser Guichen, the Elite Battleship Lyon, and the Elite Heavy Cruiser Suffren, are now enjoying a rate-up in this limited Construction Pool. Commanders have an opportunity to score the Super Rare Aircraft Carrier Painlevé either through construction or by venturing out to the event stage for an exchange and Elite Destroyer Kersaint by clearing event stages.

Recruitment event

One of many catchup systems in Azur Lane to make it easier for new players to engage with more content, a new recruitment event started which rewards players for (re-)joining the game.

This is a great time to get into Azur Lane if you’re interested in anthropomorphised shipgirls and bullet hell games. Running for five years and still going strong, there’s a lot to catch up on but numerous catchup systems have been implemented, including a recently launched server (Little Enterprise) with additional catchup built in. The game is the most fairly monetised gacha I’ve played. You’re able to get max limit break all the characters just by playing the game consistently with most monetisation coming from character skins and quality of life permanent improvements (like more dock space or dorm rooms) rather than consumables.

Azur Lane can be played for free on the Google Play Store for Android or the Apple Store to play on your phone. A common way to play is to use an emulator like LDPlayer9 to play it on your PC.

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