Not but after patch it is very far from Softcore , very far . That ' s what a friend told me , of course <| sep |> Plus he ' s too old 44 is nowhere near too old to play John Stewart . <| sep |> Attackers are not good early on in the game , defenders and tanks would be better for story progression . I don ' t know what units you have , however i would recommend doing some 101 pulls in hopes of getting a good 45 star mon to help progress . Good farmable mons are water seiren and wood mona , and its generally better to use gems to summon until you can clear higher level golem dungeons as you can more or less infinitely farm when buying energy . Sap monsters usually gem with defence and hp , as sap is based on 5 % enemy hp not based on attack . Some things to help story progression is friends that use higher levels mons as leader and be used by you once a day to help clear a otherwise unclearable stage , or doing 101 pulls and getting better mons that way . During story progression i found it better to get 3 units to max level , and power level the remaining unit i planned to use to clear the next stage depending on weakness . It is better to farm gems in golem dungeon later on .