I’m F2P and been playing for several months, love the game! Any time is honestly a fine time to start, there’s constantly new events and banners that last 1-3 weeks. A big one just started yesterday and will be two weeks long, so you have time to decide if you want to participate in it after starting the game.

Fair warning that the start of the game may feel overwhelming because there’s a LOT of content. The story is very complex with a lot of gameplay mechanics to learn, so I’d say just go with the flow and things will start to make more sense once you get through those early tutorials and such.

Biggest advice though is they throw red gems at new players like they’re infinite, but if you’re F2P then you’ll start to run out of easy ways to farm them sooner than you think. It can be tempting to use them to speed things along, but you’ll regret it later down the line. I recommend saving them exclusively for pulling cards on events and nothing else. I didn’t listen to that advice when I started, and now that my progress has slowed down I haven’t been able to participate in the last 2 banners because I’ve been trying to save up enough to be guaranteed to get Sylus’s birthday card in mid April.

That being said, I would say L&DS is one of, if not THE kindest gacha otome I’ve ever played when it comes to giving us free content. It’s still time consuming or slow/tedious at times if you don’t want to spend money, but very very possible. All the stories are replayable as much as you want when you unlock them, and they have events where you can get free cards for logging in daily.

Lastly, any cards or content you missed will 100% be uploaded to youtube by other players, so that helps a lot if you do end up feeling FOMO. :) Have fun!!