Rabbit’s Reviews #391: Aozaki Aoko (5* Foreigner)

If there’s anyone in the broader Nasuverse who deserves a really cool, really strong kit, it’s the Aozaki sisters. They’re among the few characters who regularly show up across Nasuverse works, and they’re both (in different ways) terrifyingly capable individuals. They originated in different works (Kara no Kyoukai for Touko and Tsukihime for Aoko), but Mahoutsukai no Yoru is in large part about their history and relationship. Sadly, it looks like we’re only getting Aoko here. But still! The Aozakis are great.

Does Aoko’s playable version live up to her reputation, though? Well… it’s complicated.

Aoko is complicated, in fact. She’s without a doubt the most mechanically complex Servant we’ve seen to-date, thanks in large part to her core gimmick: when she uses her NP, she transforms into a completely different Servant, with different stats, different skills, and a different NP. Base Aoko is a quirky support with unusually strong cards and some neat utility completely unique to her—but she’s held back by having low overall numbers, excessively long cooldowns, and effectively no NP. Super Aoko, meanwhile, is an AoE Arts DPS with a remarkably high damage ceiling, AoE Buster and Extra cards, a 100% self battery, and a skill that grants 50% charge and 2-turn cooldown reduction to allies—but in exchange she has extremely inconsistent damage output, low persistent steroids, even longer cooldowns than Base Aoko, and a demerit that makes her third skill nearly useless in most cases.

Taken together, Aoko is worse than the sum of her parts. The fact that Aoko has to take a turn to swap forms severely limits her for short fights, while for long fights her inability to swap back leaves the gimmick itself as nothing more than a gameplay annoyance that exists for flavor. Base Aoko is not powerful enough to be worth using on her own merits in most cases, and while Super Aoko is fairly strong in and of herself, she’s contending with quite a few caveats and annoyances even beyond losing a turn at the start of every fight. There are many slight design changes that would have made Aoko feel a lot better to use and that would have helped her compete with other high-end units, but as-is she’s mostly a bundle of missed potential in a very flashy wrapper.

I’ll also add the same caveat here that I did for Bazett’s review—over two years ago now—which is that initial opinions on Aoko have been very split, ranging from “truly amazing unit” to “worst SSR in the game.” I’ve come down somewhere in the middle, but given how weird Aoko is, it’s possibly new tech will be discovered or new supports will be released that increase her value in the long-run. I probably undervalued Bazett at the time of her release, and the same may be true here.

…That said, many of the same things that worked in Bazett’s favor cut against Aoko. While Bazett functionally operates one turn faster than most Servants, Aoko is one turn slower by default, which introduces more risk and danger in every fight. Bazett’s core gimmick ignores many of the things that one might have expected would shut it down, while everything from buff block to buff removal to plain-old high-damage crits can interfere with Aoko’s gameplan. Aoko also swings at neutral against most things, while Bazett gets semi-class-advantage against several classes—and even beyond that, the reward for playing into Bazett’s gameplan is massively higher damage than any other ST unit, while even in her best case Aoko’s only slightly above a top-end neutral Arts attacker, and then only for one turn.

Bazett and Aoko are, of course, very different units, but they’re alike in that they’re both utterly unique in how they work, which makes Bazett a useful point of comparison. Where Bazett’s kit goes “what do we need to make this work,” Aoko’s goes “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if we did this,” without following through on the sorts of small design choices that would be needed for her kit to really sing.

All that said, even if Aoko’s actual power level is on the low side, her kit is absolutely extremely unique, and if you aren’t interested in things like time- and turn-efficiency or objective CQ strength, Aoko can be a lot of fun to use. She’s a Servant to bring if you want some variety and are in no danger of losing. This isn’t the worst thing in the world—she could be boring and bad—but it’s a bit frustrating when there are several (in my view) obvious ways she could have been fixed, and when the Servant in question is lorewise one of the most powerful in canon.

Aoko has a very good stat spread in both forms. In her base form, she has mid-low attack and mid-high health, which is entirely reasonable on what is ultimately a supportive kit. Once she switches to her super form, though, Aoko is tied with Kukulkan for highest attack of the SSR Foreigners, although she has the lowest HP of the bunch in exchange. An offensive stat spread is what you want from a DPS, so the low health is more than fine—though it does mean Aoko technically loses a bit of health if she switches forms while at full health.

Internals-wise, base Aoko is a bit iffy. Her Arts card NP gain is slightly low for her deck, and her Quick is unremarkable. She’s also not great at active NP gain, due to only having a single Quick.

Super Aoko, meanwhile, is even worse off. She loses a Buster card and gains an Arts card, and her Arts and Quick NP gain both go from being below-average to being truly terrible. Super Aoko is heavily reliant on NP refund and batteries to gain meter, and her card type buffs also skew towards Buster—which means four of her five cards are borderline useless. The Arts cards can be used for making Arts chains, but they won’t do much in terms of damage or NP gain.

This is particularly frustrating considering the unique property of Aoko’s Buster and Extra cards: they’re AoE. If Aoko had two or (ideally) three Busters, you could spec her for Buster crits and ignore her NP entirely. It wouldn’t be as reliable as NP-looping strategies, but it would still be a good chunk of AoE damage over the course of three turns. Instead, Aoko’s stuck with only a single Buster, which means even if you can increase her Buster crit damage, she only gets to do a Buster crit once per three turns—and if want to commit to card-lock strategies with Summer BB, you’re resetting for a single card, which you only have a 1/3 chance of drawing on your first turn. It’s… not great.

It gets worse, too! Since the two Aoko forms don’t have the same deck, Aoko’s cards transform when she does—which is to say, one of base Aoko’s Buster cards becomes an Arts card after she NPs, and by default there’s no way of telling which is which! If you set up an NPAB chain, for example, it may change to NPAA while you’re in the middle of attacking, which, given Aoko’s kit and internals, is a clear downgrade. You can partially work around this by putting an identifiable command code on Aoko’s “real” Buster—it’s the far-right one in the Command Code menu—but it’s strange, to say the least, that this is necessary. Of all the odd design choices in this kit, it’s this one that feels the most out-of-place.

To add insult to injury, Aoko’s AoE cards have their damage halved, which substantially limits their practical damage ceiling. If you’re fighting multiple enemies with relatively even amounts of health, this isn’t a huge deal—half damage to three enemies is still functionally 150% of normal damage in total—but it does hurt Aoko’s performance against a single target, and it limits her ability to handle enemy groups with a single bulky target mixed in with trash mobs.

It's also worth noting that AoE cards are considered separate attacks from single-target ones, as well as from each other. What this means is that, like when using an NP, AoE cards prompt a check for whether the target is dead. This has pros and cons. A typical brave chain, for example, can only pop at most one guts without an NP in the mix. Aoko, by contrast, can pop four in one turn—the most of any Servant not named Bazett—by doing (for example) an ABA chain. Since her Buster and Extra cards are both AoE, they both prompt the check for whether an enemy is dead (and, thus, whether a guts should be triggered) before and after they execute, allowing each of the four cards in the chain to trigger a guts. The same logic applies for switching targets—Aoko can potentially switch her “primary” target mid-turn if one of them dies when an AoE card prompts a death check.

On the flip side, a typical Servant can do a BAA chain, kill with the Buster card, and continue swinging at the 0 HP enemy for overkill-fueled NP gain with the rest of the cards. If Aoko were to kill with her Buster in that instance, the rest of the cards would be blocked, because the end of the Buster would prompt a check for enemy death. This further hurts her effective card-based NP gain, though it does also mostly keep Super Aoko from wasting Magic Bullets swinging against dead enemies, which is nice-ish.

In typical Extra class fashion, Aoko has a ton of passives—and she picks up two more when she transforms. She has E-ranked versions of Entity, Territory Creation, and Item Construction. All of these are nice passives in general—Entity gives passive star gen and debuff resistance, Territory Creation boosts Super Aoko’s NP, and Item Construction helps the defense debuff on Aoko’s NP land. Unfortunately, being E-ranked, all of these have negligible values, making them barely better than nothing at all. At least Entity gives 2 stars per turn regardless of rank.

Base Aoko’s final passive is Magician, representing the fact that she’s one of the few known characters in the Nasuverse capable of using True Magic—magic that does something that’s impossible to accomplish via non-magical means. The passive gives 20% debuff resistance, death resistance, and buff removal resistance. The debuff resistance sort of offsets the fact that Entity is such a low rank. Death resistance, meanwhile, is very niche, but when instant death does proc it is (naturally) very bad, so this is decently nice to have. Buff removal resistance, meanwhile, is great. 20% isn’t high enough to rely on, but it may save you on occasion. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t prevent either of the buff removal effects that happen as a result of Aoko’s own kit—when she expends a Magic Bullet, it’ll always be removed successfully, and her NP will also always successfully remove the effects of Base Aoko’s second skill.

Magician also converts any Invincible buffs on Aoko to Anti-Enforcement Defense. This is mostly a positive, as it means Aoko is effectively immune to pierce invuln effects. It does, however, slightly interfere with Castoria teams. Castoria’s hit-based Anti-Enforcement Defense from her NP doesn’t stack with other sources of the buff, which means if Aoko gets an invuln from any source—Castoria’s third skill or Super Aoko’s own first skill, for example—she becomes unable to receive Castoria’s hit-based defenses on that turn. This adds a layer of complexity to trying to stall with Castoria, since both of those skills push Aoko’s damage, meaning she either has to use the skills prior to your NP chain turn, or you’re faced with a steep survivability-damage trade.

Once she NPs, Aoko gains access to her two other passives: Magic Bullet Expansion and Magic Circuit (Rotation)—the latter of which is, in fact, Base Aoko’s second skill in passive form. Both of these are excellent. Magic Bullet Expansion gives Aoko two Magic Bullet stacks (which I’ll explain in a bit more detail in the next paragraph) per turn, while Magic Circuit provides 3 critical stars per turn, as well as 10% NP charge per turn for the whole team. There’s a good case to be made that Magic Circuit is the best passive skill in the whole game—10% partywide NP gauge every single turn is excellent, and the stars are a nice bonus, too.

Magic Bullets are Aoko’s core gimmick—arguably even more so than her form-switching. Every time Aoko uses a Quick, Arts, or Buster card, she expends a Magic Bullet to gain a 50% attack buff for that specific attack. Assuming Aoko has no other attack buffs, you can read this as, “If Aoko has Magic Bullets available, she swings like a Berserker on her normal cards.” It’s not quite that good in practice, though, as its proportional value drops the more attack buffs you already have in play, and buff block can block it.

When Aoko uses an Extra card, meanwhile, she expends all available Magic Bullets, gaining an extra 50% attack for each Magic Bullet stack. This sounds cool in theory, especially considering Super Aoko’s Extra hits in AoE… but even in the absolute best case—a level 120 NP5 Super Aoko with gold fous, a max attack CE, class score, her third skill, and 20 Magic Bullets prior to the brave chain—Aoko only deals about 85k off her Extra. This does jump to 150k if triggered by an AAA chain, attack buffs from a support can marginally increase that, and you can double it against Man-attribute targets with double Koyan… but, again, this consumes all your Magic Bullets, which means not using them for anything else, which is a huge loss. In most cases, this effect actually means you’ll want to avoid brave-chaining with Aoko, since you get the most value out of spending Magic Bullets on her Buster card and NP.

And speaking of Aoko’s NP, while in Super Aoko form, Aoko’s NP can consume up to 10 Magic Bullet stacks to gain a 10% Supereffective mod for each. With 5 Magic Bullets, she’s swinging like a Berserker, and with 10, it’s as if she has full offensive class advantage. This is the primary source of Super Aoko’s power, but in order to leverage it fully, you have to be careful about using Aoko’s cards. Her cards are uninspiring in general anyway, so the end result of all this is that you mostly don’t want to touch Aoko’s cards so that you can save as many Magic Bullets as possible for her NP.

For appends, Aoko actually has options, as all three are potentially useful to her. Mana Loading has the usual benefits, and in Aoko’s case it’s especially helpful for helping her reach that first NP faster—though the longer a fight drags on, the less a slightly faster start matters, and Aoko inherently lengthens fights. The Extra Attack buff, meanwhile, is potentially nice if you find yourself Brave chaining a bunch… though the fact that Aoko’s Extra expends all her Magic Bullets means you likely won’t want to use it much in practice. Aoko’s last append is Anti-Saber damage, and while it isn’t a huge increase, it’s at least useful for bonus damage against a common class. Overall, Mana Loading is still probably the most useful, but the others can be situationally better, especially for long fights.

Ascension Materials

Stage	Cost	Materials
2	100,000	x10 Forbidden Page x10 Octuplet Crystals
3	300,000	x10 Aurora Steel x10 Divine Leyline Spiritron
4	1,000,000	x10 Lamp of Evil-Sealing x10 Scarab of Wisdom
Max	3,000,000	x10 Fragment of a Twinkling Star x10 Ether Light Collector

Skill Enhancement Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200,000	x10 Forbidden Page
2 → 3	400,000	x10 Octuplet Crystals
3 → 4	1,200,000	x12 Scarab of Wisdom
4 → 5	1,600,000	x12 Aurora Steel
5 → 6	4,000,000	x12 Divine Leyline Spiritron
6 → 7	5,000,000	x15 Ball of Rainbow Thread
7 → 8	10,000,000	x15 Fragment of a Twinkling Star
8 → 9	12,000,000	x15 Ether Light Collector
9 → 10	20,000,000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Append Skill Materials

Level	Cost	Materials
1 → 2	200000	x10 Shell of Reminiscence
2 → 3	400000	x10 Serpent Jewel
3 → 4	1200000	x12 Lamp of Evil-Sealing
4 → 5	1600000	x12 Reactor Core of Dawn
5 → 6	4000000	x12 Flaming Oni Lantern Plant
6 → 7	5000000	x15 Small Bell of Absolution
7 → 8	10000000	x15 Ashes of Forgetfulness
8 → 9	12000000	x15 Flower of the End
9 → 10	20000000	x1 Crystallized Lore

Aoko has two full skillsets—one pre-transformation, and one post, though it’s important to note that Aoko’s cooldowns aren’t reset when she transforms. Both skillsets are mixed bags. Aoko has a lot of effects, and some of them are quite powerful, but the skills also come with drawbacks, from long cooldowns to awkward effect combinations to literal demerits. It’s really unfortunate to have a bunch of what should be strong effects that don’t come together to make a strong skillset. Recommended skill order is 1>2>3.

As a support, base Aoko is comparable in power to a middling SR support. Her closest comparison is to Helena, who also provides a tricolor buff and partywide charge on long cooldowns. This is not a flattering comparison. The only reason to use Base Aoko over most SSR supports, or even the better SR supports, is for her demerit negation. The closest thing to “optimal” a support Aoko team will get is two primary color supports, one of whom you plug out for Aoko, supporting a Servant whose demerit is particularly debilitating.

Take Frankenstein, for instance. She has fairly good refund and good damage, but she stuns herself on her NP. In the past, you could work around this with someone who provided debuff immunity, but 3-turn debuff immunity effects are rare and prior to now were limited to Servants who can’t boost Fran’s NP damage or refund. A team of Ruler Skadi/Fran/Ruler Skadi/Aoko keeps Fran from stunning herself while also providing an extra 20% charge per turn—better than Fran gets from Night or Santa Karna.

Support Aoko setups are unlikely to enable anything that’s better than a conventionally optimal team, but they might let a favorite Servant function more effectively than usual if they have an otherwise-debilitating demerit. Keep in mind, though, that Aoko’s third skill has low uptime, so you’ll be waiting around a while if you need it to be off cooldown before you can do things again. For many Servants it will effectively extend the time you have to wait for a second buff cycle.

Anti-synergy aside, a stall-focused DPS Aoko does work best with Castoria. The strategy is the same as usual—you take Reines or Lady Avalon or Tamamo as your third support, and you set up a DPS->Support->Castoria NP chain every three turns. You can also use First Star on occasion if you’re desperate for party charge or cooldown reduction.

Tamamo gets a special shoutout here. Aoko’s first skill is on slightly too long of a cooldown to use it for every NP, but throwing in a Tamamo NP once every three turns syncs it up perfectly, meaning Aoko should have more or less full Magic Bullet stacks for every NP. Tamamo also takes the edge off the long cooldowns on Aoko’s other skills, which is nice.

Super Aoko also has some potential as a Van Gogh partner. Since Aoko has the Entity passive, she benefits from Van Gogh’s hefty crit buffs. In exchange, Aoko gives the Van Goghs some passive NP charge, and she can use her third skill in a pinch to fuel Van Gogh NPs and to reduce their cooldowns. This team is a rare case where Aoko will usually prefer to use First Star over her own NP—although she still can’t use it all that often, for cooldown reasons.

As a fastplay DPS, Aoko has three main options: go all-in on crits, skip a turn and then tri-loop, or use another Servant to cover turn 1. I’ll go over each of these in order.

For a crit-focused Aoko, you want double Koyan. With two Koyans, Aoko can use her first skill three times in the first turn of combat, after which she can NP. Ideally, you want to draw Aoko’s “real” Buster card on the first turn and swap one of the Koyans for Summer BB so that Aoko can use her Buster three turns in a row. This will likely take some resetting—you only have a one-in-three chance of drawing the card you need—but as long as no one dies this guarantees you your AoE Buster crit for those three turns. It’ll amount to a lot less damage than a typical NP-looping setup, in addition to the luck component, but it’s an option.

If you want Aoko to tri-loop, you need a Castoria/Castoria/Oberon team, with Mana Loading on Aoko. You start with the two Castorias and use their batteries on Aoko on turn 1 (saving one of their 20% charges for later), so that she can immediately NP. You also use Aoko’s first and third skills, for extra damage. On turn 2, you use Aoko’s 100% battery to access her first NP, and you add the Castorias’ Arts buffs, at which point Aoko refunds about 15% per enemy. If there are three enemies, and if Aoko gets a bit of overkill, she can refund 50% for turn 3. Her passive NP gain brings her to 60%, and then the remaining Castoria battery paired with Oberon’s 20% charge brings her to 100%. Aoko uses her first skill again, and that paired with the extra NP gain from the second Castoria gives her about 20% refund per enemy. With at least two enemies, Aoko refunds 40%, and her passive charge plus Oberon’s 50% charge secures the loop on turn 4—although she’ll lose a bunch of damage on that turn between having fewer Magic Bullet stacks and the Castorias’ attack buffs having worn off.

To summarize, in a perfectly optimal setup, Castoria can BG loop 3/2/x nodes, but she has to waste a turn to do it on the front end and her highest damage will be on the second wave instead of the third. It’s, uh, not great.

The third—and likely best—way to run a fastplay Aoko is to treat her as a two-turn Servant. The strategy here is functionally the same as the one above, but since you only need two NPs from Super Aoko, she can loop anything. She doesn’t even need Mana Loading—you use all Castoria skills turn 1, use Aoko’s battery turn 2, and Aoko refunds about 20% turn 3 against a single enemy with overkill factored in, which is enough for her own passive charge and Oberon’s batteries to secure the loop on turn 3. Aoko’s damage on turns 2 and 3 is really high—in fact, she slightly outdamages even Summer Ibuki against non-Earth targets, and she breaks a million damage on turn 3 if she’s NP5 and level 120.

The drawback to this is, of course, that she does no damage on turn 1. You can work around this with a Servant with a sacrificing NP—Arash, Habetrot, Chen, and Soujuurou all work for this, if their damage is high enough. In Chen’s case, you’ll need Mana Loading on Aoko so that you can afford to toss one of the Castorias’ 20% charges to Chen. Habetrot and Soujuurou, meanwhile, are both high enough in cost that they prevent you from running a full set of SSR CEs, which can be a drawback for farming.

Essentially what this means is that a maxed-out Aoko can farm anything, provided the first wave has pretty low HP. Given how high-end farming nodes tend to shake out, this is likely more restrictive in practice than requiring specific wave compositions or niches, on top of being slow in real-time and potentially cost-prohibitive. Having neutral damage as high as Aoko does puts her in rare company, but her damage isn’t so high as to be unique. If what you want is an AoE generalist, you’re better off investing in someone more flexible, like Summer Ibuki or Summer Melusine… but Aoko isn’t completely unworkable, at the very least.

A DPS Aoko typically wants either the Black Grail (or your highest-damaging alternative), or Kaleid. Black Grail is much better for damage, but Kaleid lets you immediately change forms without needing support batteries or extra turns of buildup. For a crit-focused Aoko supported by Koyans, though, you might get more value from a CE that provides Buster and/or crit buffs, provided it’s also a full-attack CE that you’ve leveled for the extra stats. As a support, though, the best thing you can give Aoko is 2030. She won’t be using her NP, so providing extra stars is the only thing that’s really worth much.

Given Aoko’s low base NP gain, it’s not a bad idea to stick NP gain CCs (or especially the one flat 10% charge gain CC) on her Arts cards. You can also give her utility CCs like star gen or healing, or crit damage CCs to offset her otherwise-low crit damage buffs. You should definitely stick a crit damage CC on her “real” Buster card, at the very least—and make sure you remember which CC it is so that you can identify it before she’s transformed.

Aoko is not a spectacular unit, but she is highly unique, and if you want the specific gameplay she provides, warts and all, you might as well give her more stats. She’ll make good use of them, at least. She’s also notable for being able to reach 90++ levels of damage when taken to level 120, though there are enough caveats on that to make it a questionable proposition.

Alright, so, where does all this leave Aoko? She has a very high damage ceiling, but she does no damage on turn 1. She has AoE cards, but she doesn’t have the deck or kit to leverage them. She has very powerful skills, paired with excessive cooldowns and extremely painful demerits. She’s utterly unlike anyone else in construction, but uniqueness doesn’t necessarily translate to power.

She is, ultimately, a mid-range Arts farmer. Like other middling Arts farmers, she can clear some nodes, but the majority of them will be beyond her—albeit not for the same reasons as most. She also has some unique (though not all that practically useful) CQ utility, and if you’re not invested in playing optimally, she has some unusual strategies and teams available to her.

This isn’t a terrible place for a Servant to be, but it doesn’t really fit for Aozaki Aoko,  the wielder of the Fifth True Magic. It’s also unfortunate given how much effort went into her art and her kit design. This is a Servant who should be great, and instead she’s just meh—a lot of potential, held back by tons of small annoyances. If what you want is power, there are plenty of better options, and if what you want is unique gameplay… honestly, there are better options there, too. Aoko is flashy, but despite everything, she’s still more conventional in strategies than Servants like Bazett or Van Gogh—or even Soujuurou, for that matter.

At the very least, though, her Magic Bullet gimmick is fun for random strategy-free teams meant to clear trivial nodes. If you’re not going to bother with optimization, and you’re not worried about losing, you can stick Aoko in a team with two other random Servants and enjoy her excellent animations and the occasional spike of damage. So… make of that what you will.

As sad as it makes me to say, I cannot recommend her. Aoko’s just not that good.

Overall: 7/10
Single-Target DPS: 3/10
AoE DPS: 7/10
Survivability: 6/10
Offensive Utility: 5/10
Defensive Utility: 4/10
Farming Usefulness: 7/10
True Magic: 5/5+?