The gacha is kinda important in gachas so I'll start with that. There's 3 main things you'll pull: characters, dragons, and wyrmprints. Characters are obvious. Dragons give statboosts to the character they're attached to, and sometimes some other special effects. Wyrmprints are cards that u slap on to people and they have skills on them (they also give stats but it's so small that you really won't notice them). Pulling dupe characters gives you eldwater which is just the game's version of feathers to promote characters. Dupe dragons and wyrmprints can be used for merging, and they both cap at +4 instead of +10. Even then don't worry, as the game offers items to add merges to dragons and prints! Also dragons and prints can't be promoted or anything like that, a 4 star dragon will stay 4 stars. The game is also still young enough so that 4 star dragons and prints are still completely viable (heck even one 2 star print is a great budget option for some events). You are not able to choose between summoning a character, dragon, or print. You will get pitybroken by wyrmprints.
Edit midway as I'm typing this, but one FANTASTIC thing is that units are introduced at whatever rarity they normally are at. For the banner right now, the new units are Laranoa (a 5 star) and Fleur (a 4 star). You don't have to guess which unit will get demoted, which I think is just a FEH thing anyways and Dragalia does what every other gacha does.
Every character and dragon has their own story about them, and the character stories are actually pretty lengthy! You also get some stuff for reading them so that's cool too. A few characters feel kinda trope-y, but most don't imo which is really nice.
Most progression isn't locked behind the gacha, but it's locked behind a
ton of grinding instead. For the most part, F2P can get the exact same loadouts as a P2P player, the only difference is that the P2P is going to finish faster.
There's a few underwhelming units, but all units will work for most of the content. The High Dragon Trials are the endgame content, and those will need specific units (you'll only need to build 1 unit for each since the game has co-op and you can team up with 3 other people to deal with those). And even some of the underwhelming units have gotten directly buffed. Free units are usually kinda meh, but some turn out really good. Free dragons are almost always garbo sadly.
There's a castle courtyard that you can customize with different structures (basically the new Aether Resort but USEFUL). The structures can give you items to level up stuff, or give your characters stat boosts. ALWAYS make sure that something is being upgraded, there's a lot of stuff to go through.
The main story is nice enough (better than Feh but that's not saying much), the 1 flaw I have with it is that it takes foreverrrrrr for them to add more stuff to it. The last chapter was added in December I think? There's plenty of small events in-between and they have nice small stories though.
The half-anniversary is still going on rn so it's a good time to try it. There's also the fact that you can spend $8 to get
literally any 1 thing you want from the standard summoning pool right now, and that's going on for about 2 more weeks (remember when Feh sold us NY!Fjorm or Laevatein for $75? lmao) so that's cool too. I plan on buying Xander because he's a great unit but also an idiot so he's exactly what I want.
That's probably about it. Uh what else......... Notte is a true gorl saying what we're all thinking at all times.
Like here at 2:13 and 10:15. She also said Sweet Sassy Molassy and that's a thing now. Yeah I think that's everything important.
Another midway edit but the game eats up a lot of space, usually around 3 to 5 GB's. Just so u know in case that's a concern.