Two weeks to pull Drake as NIKKE's GREAT VILLAIN UNION version goes live on September 3

Goddess of Victory: NIKKE is a free-to-play shooter RPG built by the Korean studio Shift Up and published by Level Infinite, in which you command squads of android soldiers called Nikkes in a world where humanity has retreated into an underground city named the Ark. At 10:00 on September 1, 2026, Proxima Beta, the company that operates the game for Level Infinite, announced a new version titled GREAT VILLAIN UNION for September 3 [1]. As of September 3, 2026, that day is today, and the tightest window in the whole update belongs to the special recruitment for the new SSR Nikke, which shuts at 04:59:59 on Thursday, September 17 [1].

A returning Nikke, not a new one

The new SSR Nikke is written in the release as ドレイク：グレイトヴィラン, or Drake: Great Villain, voiced by Sumire Uesaka. The release does not present her as a first appearance. It says she has come back in a powered-up form [1], which makes this an alternate version of a character the game already had.

The way to get her is the special recruitment. Recruitment is NIKKE’s word for its gacha: you spend a currency earned in play or bought with a payment for a random shot at a character. The window runs from the end of the September 3 maintenance to 04:59:59 on September 17, which is exactly fourteen days [1]. Whether Drake stays available in any form after that is not addressed in the release.

Six windows inside those fourteen days

The rest of the schedule, as printed in the same notice [1]:

• Story event GREAT VILLAIN UNION: from the end of the September 3 maintenance to 04:59:59 on September 17.
• Seven-day login event DAILY EVIL DEED: the same window as the story event.
• Archive ARCANE ARCHIVE: opens after the September 3 maintenance. No closing time is given.
• Union Raid: 05:00:00 on September 4 to 04:59:59 on September 10.
• Champion Arena, Beta Season 38: begins September 10.
• Co-op Operation: 12:00:00 on September 11 to 23:59:59 on September 13.

The story and login events stay open the full fortnight, so a slow start costs nothing there. The short ones are Union Raid, the guild-versus-boss mode, at six days, and Co-op Operation at two and a half. Those are the two dates worth writing down.

Every clock in this notice is Japanese

The release that has been checked is the Japanese one. It was distributed by Proxima Beta, every time in it is Japan time, and the September 3 maintenance itself is listed as 11:00 to 18:00 [1]. A gamebiz article posted at 12:57 the same day reproduces the same dates and times [2]. Schedules for other regional servers do not appear in the document.

On money, the release says only that the game is free to play with in-app purchases. It carries no price, no numeric version number, and no platform list [1].

The practical first step is to open the notice for whichever server you actually log into. The dates above are Japanese ones, and nobody has yet put in writing what happens to Drake once these two weeks are over.

Sources

[1] Proxima Beta Pte. Ltd. 『勝利の女神：NIKKE』最新バージョン「GREAT VILLAIN UNION」まもなく実装！「新ヴィラン連合」始動！. PR TIMES, September 1, 2026.

[2] gamebiz. Level Infinite、『勝利の女神:NIKKE』最新バージョン「GREAT VILLAIN UNION」を9月3日に実装. gamebiz, September 1, 2026.