Story: the cheapest mode in the game

Story mode does three things. It teaches you the mechanics, it unlocks the rest of the mode menu, and it feeds your units XP. The narrative is the least important of the three, which is a strange thing to say about a mode called Story, but it is true and it explains why players who treat it as a tutorial to be rushed end up stuck.

Think of it as the mode that generates the raw material every other mode consumes. Challenges want a team. Virtual Realm wants a good team. Ultra Boss wants a genuinely built team. Story is where a team becomes any of those things, and it is the only place that happens for free.

Units gain XP by being placed in runs and surviving them. That is the whole levelling mechanic, and it means levelling is a by-product of playing rather than a currency you spend. It is the only upgrade layer in the game with that property. Etherealize costs shards you cannot recover. Traits and relics cost tokens. Levels cost time you were spending anyway.

Which gives Story an economic role that no guide seems to say out loud: it is the mode that makes your account stronger without spending anything. A player who runs Story with their intended core six is banking value. A player who runs Story with whatever the tutorial handed them is banking value into units they will bench, which is the same amount of play for a worse account.

So the one real decision in Story is not which stage to run. It is which six units are in your team while you run it. Decide that early, check whether any two of them are half of one of the 9 confirmed Synchro pairs, and then let the mode do its job.

The mode menu is not open from the start. Story is what opens it, which makes progression through it a gate on the rest of the game rather than an optional side activity.

This has a subtle consequence for how you should read other guides. A page that tells you to farm Raids on day one is giving advice you cannot follow yet, and that is usually a sign the page was written without opening the game. The honest sequence for a new account is Story first, Challenges alongside it as they unlock, and everything else when Story has taken you there.

Early Story is forgiving. You can place almost anything, upgrade on instinct, and clear. Then somewhere in the middle it stops being forgiving, and the players who breezed through the opening find they are suddenly leaking waves with a team that felt fine an hour ago.

What changed is not that your units got worse. It is that the mode has started checking things the early stages did not: whether your damage is actually levelled, whether your element coverage is real, and whether you are upgrading towers in the right order with your in-run Gold. All 7 elements sit on an advantage chart, and a team that ignores it can beat the opening stages on raw stats and then hit a wall the moment the stats stop being enough.

The fix is almost never a summon. It is levelling the six you field, and Story is where you do that, which means the answer to being stuck in Story is usually more Story.

Other sites have those tables. Look at one, then ask yourself a simple question: where would a person get a wave count from, other than counting? If the page does not say, and none of them say, then you are reading a number that was generated rather than observed, and you are about to plan an evening around it.

We would rather be the site that says "we have not counted yet" and then actually counts.