Alongside the launch of this year’s GudaGuda event, we have a banner featuring GO’s first-ever limited three-star. Aside from considering the quality of the banner’s flagship SSR, many of you are wondering whether the hype train behind Izo is worth your time. Alongside Okita Alter and Okada Izo there’s a bevy of Craft Essences to consider. This one’s full of new stuff!

The GudaGuda 3 banner is worth your quartz with good options in most slots. Watch out for Izo’s pretty poor rate-up if you’re after him, though, and keep a budget in mind. He may be a silver card, but unless you’re after Okita as well, his price is probably higher than you imagine!

Banner Composition

This banner is a daily rotation for its lower rarity slots, but Okita features as a solo SSR every day. If you’re after her, you can pick any day, but I would still recommend the slimmer ones. The full roster for the banner includes Majin Okita Souji at SSR, Archer EMIYA and Lancer Li Shuwen at SR, and finally, Medea, Rider Medusa, and Izo at R. A lot of the other cards on offer are completely unlimited and the other R rate-ups are even available in the Friend Point Gacha. In short, I would recommend waiting at least a day.

The smaller rotating rosters in between each full display feature just Izo at R, and one of the two SRs. First EMIYA, then Li Shuwen. Between the two of them, Li is story locked and EMIYA is unlimited. EMIYA does, however, boast an overall better kit once his strengthenings are factored in thanks to Li’s lack of staying power. It’s ultimately a coin toss which SR you should roll on since they have completely different roles. EMIYA is a bit of a jack-of-all trades where Li is a dedicated Arts boss-killing Lancer. Only you’ll know which your current roster could use more.

The Craft Essences aren’t particularly amazing outside of their drop bonuses for the event, but they’re not bad either. Like most event CEs, each boosts the drop rate of the currency that matches its rarity during GudaGuda 3, but that’s a short term benefit. As such, if quartz is tight, evaluate them without the limited-time benefits.

Imperial Capital Grail War is a 10% Buster/Quick/NPGen Up, and like most 3+ stat CEs it’s amazing on a select few characters who want all of the things it offers and otherwise pretty medium. Notably, Okita Alter does use it fairly well, and they share the banner. Your mileage may vary. 

At SR we have Sakamoto Detective Agency, another triple stat offering with a paltry damage cut, 8% Arts Performance, and 10% NP damage. Unfortunately, it isn’t a great fit for the banner characters like the SSR CE so it’s a harder sell. It’s okay on Li and Izo. 

R CEs aren’t generally much to write home about, and Fang-Sharp Shadow Blade doesn’t buck the trend. It’s a vastly worse Another Ending. If you’re new it wouldn’t be bad on Izo, especially if you manage an MLB. 

Okada Izo Details

Class: Assassin

Rarity: ★★★

Attribute: Man

Stats & Internals

	Attack	HP
Lv. 70	6,879	8,844
+Grails/Silver Fous	10,310	12,991

Base NP Charge – Attack: .79%/hit NP Charge – Defense: 4%/hit

Star Gather Rate: 97 Star Generation: 25%

Deck: QQAAB NPA Hitcounts: Q – 4 A – 2 B – 1 EX – 5 NP – 4

Skills and NP

Man-slayer A

Increases damage against Humanoids for 1 turn (50% at Lv.1 → 100% at Lv. 10)

Increases Crit damage for 1 turn (20% at Lv. 1 → 30% at Lv. 10)
Cooldown: 7 turns → 5 turns

Eye of the Mind (False) C

Applies Evasion to self for 1 turn

Increases Crit damage for 3 turns (16% at Lv. 1 → 32% at Lv. 10)

Cooldown: 8 turns → 6 turns

Swift and Powerful as a Falcon A

Increases own Star Gather Rate for 1 turn (300% at Lv. 1 → 500% at Lv. 10)

Cooldown: 5 turns → 3 turns

Noble Phantasm: Shimatsuken

Deal damage to a single target (900% at Lv. 1 → 1500% at Lv. 5)

Overcharge – Increase own Star Generation for 3 turns; activates first. (+100% at 100% → +200% at 500%)

Passives

Presence Concealment C

+8% Star Generation

Should you roll for Izo?

If you are on the fence about rolling for Izo or grailing him, he is worth it.

Many Gacha players would find the idea of asking whether or not one should roll for a low rarity character very strange. In a bevy of other games, the silver and lower cards come very easily and their uselessness is proportionate to their drop-rate. Here in GO, Salieri gave us the first taste of hard-to-roll R’s who are absolutely worth the time, and Izo makes a very solid bearer for that torch. In a now-famous live stream, the developers revealed that he was the most grailed character of his release year in Japan, and for good reason.

On the surface, he already features solid internals for the usual Assassin job. With his Presence Concealment factored, he has a good chance of producing stars even with Arts cards. Shimatsuken’s lingering buff shoots this to the moon and makes his chains produce a staggering amount of stars, particularly if you stack it. It isn’t uncommon to see Izo’s Extra card producing 15 stars by itself and we haven’t even started talking about his skills.

He’s not all star production, though. Izo is staggeringly good at bursting down 1-to-2 gauge bosses! While his kit is dead simple, it makes him very good at something many multirole characters struggle with; getting out of the spotlight. As a Falcon only has a one-turn uptime, but its cooldown is equally small.  This allows you to carefully pick when you want Izo to reach out and do his worst without him getting in the way of his fellow damage dealer on subsequent turns. This would usually have upsides and downsides because many similar skills have a 5 turn cooldown. With a 3 turn, you’ll find far fewer situations where you’re stranded without access to his damage.

Man-slayer gives him access to the damage to deliver, particularly with his NP. The most common bosses are servants, and at the time of Izo’s release every Servant is humanoid (Yes, even Hessian Lobo), in fact, humanoid is easily the most common enemy trait. You can make a potent one-two punch by using Shimatsuken with Man-slayer and following it up to clear the next gauge with Eye of the Mind and As a Falcon providing strong crits.

Perhaps most importantly, Izo’s already decent numbers completely lack card performance and basic attack up buffs, both of which are very easy to source from CEs and Supports. A decent NP level Shimatsuken is competitive with many SSR characters when pointed at humanoids before considering the possibility of grails. If grailed to 90, High-NP Izo does more class-neutral NP damage than Jalter with self-buffs and he scales better with external buffs. 

Majin Okita Souji Details

Class: Alter-Ego

Rarity: ★★★★★

Attribute: Man

Stats & Internals

	Attack	HP
Lv. 90	12,465	12,696
+Grails/Silver Fous	14,645	14,909

Base NP Charge – Attack: .77%/hit NP Charge – Defense: 4%/hit

Star Gather Rate: 99 Star Generation: 10.2%

Deck: QQABB NPB Hitcounts: Q – 5 A – 3 B – 3 EX – 5 NP – 7

Skills and NP

Kyokuchi A

Increase own Quick and Buster Performance for 3 turns (20% at Lv. 1 → 30% at Lv. 10)

Cooldown: 8 turns → 6 turns

Persistence B

Charge own NP Gauge (20% at Lv. 1 → 30% at Lv. 10)

Increase own Star Gather Rate (300% at Lv. 1 → 500% at Lv. 10)

Cooldown: 8 turns → 6 turns

Boundless A

Increase own NP Damage for 1 turn (20% at Lv. 1 → 30% at Lv. 10)

Apply a single attack of evasion that lasts 3 turns

Cooldown: 7 turns → 5 turns

Noble Phantasm: Zekken, Mukkyusandan

Deal damage to all enemies (300% at Lv. 1 → 500% at Lv. 5)

Overcharge: Reduce their buster resistance for 3 turns (30% at 100% → 50% at 500%)

Passives

Magic Resistance B

Increase debuff resistance by 17.5%

Independent Action A

Increase critical damage by 10%

Should you roll for Majin Okita?

If you aren’t looking into Okita for nonmechanical reasons, give her a pass.

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room; Alter-Ego is not a particularly good class on its face and the kit of an individual Alter-Ego is forced to pick up the slack. Many characters in the class have been buffed to unusual extents to find a place for themselves. Thus, the question stands: does Okita rise above her class? The answer is a little complex, and ultimately I think she manages to be good but not great. 

Suffice it to say that at the end of it all she’s mostly an NP specialist, and with Class Advantage she barely manages to squeak out a win over other characters in her role’s neutral damage. In fact, the top performer in AoE NP damage, Iskandar, outpaces her with his neutral. Not exactly a stellar showing given he’s bad into one class and she’s bad into three.

What she does have going for her is that she has an NP battery to go with that damage. While it’s not the 50% that upper-end batteries have, 30% does enable a much wider pool of farming CEs compared to characters who lack a battery. Still, Boundless is a single turn damage buff, so even if her battery could put her in a position to NP back to back waves like 50% chargers, her damage degrades heavily on one of the two turns.

Persistence does feature a star weight buff in addition to its NP battery, and this opens up one particular niche. Since Kyokuchi is a multi-turn buff that covers most of Okita’s deck, she can be very good at clearing second wave miniboss farming nodes. These are less common than standard normal-normal-boss nodes, but they come up often enough it’s worth mentioning. You achieve this by critting down the miniboss and then NPing the final wave. She can also do the opposite with a decent star production buff, though that’s a much more common capability. Using supports to NP both waves 2 and 3 and produce stars with her high (21 on 3 enemies!) hit count creates a situation where she can use the buster resistance down on her NP to handle a boss in the final wave with a few crits.
As a tiny upside, during the event she launches, she has a passive 100% damage buff. This makes her briefly amazing if you can immediately boost her after rolling her in this event. That buff doesn’t stick around, though, so it’s hard to give it any bearing on her overall quality. Okita has a waifu reputation, but know going in that she’s merely decent. I wouldn’t feel bad about rolling for her, and you’ll definitely be able to use her if you try, but it won’t be difficult to find better options.