Two cents from someone whose played the game for seven years:

It used to genuinely have a lot of history baked into it and was actually fairly educational and fun, with a lot of character designs involving snippets of the ships history, and abilities reflecting them as well. Scharnhorst wears an eyepatch in reference to her accidentally blinding her radar in some of her early engagements. Warspite has insane accuracy and doesn’t miss to reference her impressive performance at long ranges (still holds the record to this day!). Hood even has those stupid Anti-Aircraft rocket launched mines on one of her turrets.

However.

The entire game has at this point devolved into a generic jrpg with the cage connection of characters being named the same thing as a ship, nothing else really. It’s also completely moved away from “diverse amount of characters of various appearances” to “fucking watermelons on their chests. All of them. And have them wear functionally strips of rags all the time. Yeah.”

I miss old Azur Lane with girls in uniforms and (more) proper outfits….