Every game has its own vocabulary — and why we don't flatten them

A database covering 21 games faces one early decision: force every game into a shared schema, or keep each game’s own shape. Almost every cross-game site takes the first option, because it makes the code simple. It also destroys most of what makes each game legible.

Here is the concrete case for the second option.

Nobody agrees on what to call a unit

The level axis is the range our stat calculators run over. Where a game layers promotion or Insight phases on top of levels, the axis runs continuously across them so the phases can be compared — Arknights’ 220 is E0 Lv.1–50, E1 Lv.1–80 and E2 Lv.1–90 laid end to end, not a level cap of 220. A dash means we do not publish a growth-curve calculator for that game, or its calculator runs on something that is not a character level: Umamusume’s is a 1–5★ axis and Blue Protocol: Star Resonance’s is a skill track, and printing either in this column would invite a comparison it cannot support.

Hololive Dreams ranks its gacha cards, not its talents, and Star Resonance ships classes rather than a rostered cast — neither has a rarity tier to report, which is itself the point of this page. Duet Night Abyss reads 100% at 5★, and we are not presenting that as a fact about the game: its own rate table lists a 4★ character tier, so the share is unreportable until that tier is carried. It is flagged in our own build checks rather than smoothed over.

21 games. 19 different words for the same concept, and not one shared rarity scale.

Three things the table shows that a flattened schema would hide

1. The top rarity is not a fixed number of stars

Blue Archive’s best students are 3★. Arknights’ are 6★. Dokkan’s apex is LR, above UR, SSR and SR. DIGIMON UP runs eleven grades ending at EX+. Zenless does not use stars at all — its agents carry letter ranks, S and A, in a field the game calls rank rather than rarity. Silver and Blood grades its cast S, A, B. And two games here do not rank their roster at all.

A database that normalised all of these to “rarity 1–6” would have to invent a mapping. Is Blue Archive’s 3★ equivalent to Arknights’ 6★, because both are the top? Or to Arknights’ 3★, because both are three? Both answers are defensible and both are wrong, because the games are not measuring the same thing. So each game keeps its own field, its own scale and its own label, and its pages say so in its own words.

2. “Top rarity” means something completely different per game

Look at the share column. In Star Savior 85% of the roster is top-rarity; in CookieRun: Crumble it is 3% — two Cookies out of seventy.

That is not a difference in generosity — it is a difference in what the category is for. In the high-share games, top rarity is simply the normal state of a playable unit and the real distinctions happen elsewhere. In the low-share games it is the whole chase. A tier list, a rate table and a roster filter all mean different things in those two worlds, and a column that flattened them would make every cross-game comparison built on it quietly wrong.

3. The level axis is not a level

The axis column runs from 5 to 220 and the numbers are not commensurable. Arknights’ 220 is three promotion phases laid end to end; Star Savior’s 200 is a single ladder; Limbus stops at 45; Epic Seven’s heroes cap at 60. Comparing “level 60” across two of these games is not a comparison at all, which is why every stat figure on this site is quoted with the axis it was measured on — and why max-level stats are the wrong number to compare.

What we do instead

Each game keeps its own vocabulary, its own facets and its own scales, and the cross-game comparisons are built only on quantities that genuinely mean the same thing everywhere — pulls to a featured unit, the shape of a pity system, what a roster costs to raise. Those are the comparisons worth making, and they are possible precisely because the rest was not flattened. What you can look up for each game lists the whole surface.