I think a lot of the stigma that surrounds gacha games is due to how oversaturated and predatory the average gacha is. A lot of what makes people hate gacha is that they're always very formulaic. Most people tend to hate the monetization system because of inherent bad reputation it's aquired over the years and thus view all the gachas as the same cashgrab the next one is, but also a lot of it stems from that 95% of gacha games use overly sexualised characters and makes it very obvious it's just trying to sell you a hot anime waifu to make its money. Personally, the reason why I like limbus so much is because it does neither of those 2 things and has actual diginity to not have snarky monetization systems, which is also a big reason as to why I love Projectmoon so much and can excuse the issues Limbus Company has at times
limbus company would still be better if it wasn't a gacha. It's good, for a gacha, but it's still held back by its need to be a live service and power progression is still shafted by being tied to how many pulls you've made and how many exp tickets you've grabbed. The game's forced to be easy because it's now marketed to the lowest common denominator, AND not everyone's going to have good IDs. If you got rid of everything that made it a gacha, it would litteraly just be a better game. (aka library of ruina.)
@@ihave2cowsThe thing is, limbus company is the game that is going to back ProjectMoon finacially. So honestly, for me the gacha elements of limbus is a necessary evil for the future games of ProjectMoon. With the added plus of increased exposure, since ProjectMoon's games have always been a little more on the underated side of things
I still wish that the pass are redeemable without paid Lunacy, because not only that I wanted Sinclair announcer, I also want to redeem about 200 fragments box.
@@kirbypsicopata29 I understand why they did it, and like I said, its good for a gacha game, but it doesn't change anything I said. Game still would have been better if it wasn'ta gacha. as an aside; I understand that this is going to be a hot take, and it's a little bit rude of me to not wish success to others, but I honestly would rather have the developers remain a small team focused on making quality games even if it takes longer periods of time than trying to expand and create more faster. The project moon universe as it is right now is so good because they've had a small, tightly knit team thus far. The worst things that have happened to the series happened because of outside influences and attention drawn from third parties. And the more the universe expands, the more we're going to have third parties coming in and watering down the quality. take type moon for example. everything that was an original creation (not a remake) by nasu has been good, but the series has been hyper-inflated with a bunch of other authors that have made the quality of the series wildly inconsistent. It wouldn't be too much of a problem if these were all spinoffs, but everything in the fate universe is canon, and it seems with the introduction of mirror universes in project moon that its going to be following a similar route. And I would personally really rather not have that. That's not to mention the outsourcing they've done to other companies that resulted in the absolutely awful business practices of fgo itself either. Like, dont get me wrong, Limbus Company is my ride or die right now, but I'm still worried about the future of project moon. Expansion isn't always a good thing, and we've already seen the consequences of pulling in outside attention. There's no guarantee that it's going to survive another scandal, or that it won't find itself in a position where they get investment from a shitty publisher like nexon or something.
The "more than 2 bibles of text" is actually not quite accurate, it's more text than 3 bibles according to a Tumblr user and that didn't include Module stories and the alternative game modes.
@@Tsunulhonestly didn't like chapter 11 but 12 was pretty good and didn't really drag for longer than it needed plus Kal'tsit didn't meet anyone to philosophy to so not munch on long winded dialogues.
Just thinking about it, Gatcha isn't a genre, technically... It's a sales strategy The random pull system is designed to make you want to spend money It doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the story
"It doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the story" Eh... yes and no. I can't say for other titles, but in Genshin Impact, a limited character's rerun is often tied to an event. For people like myself who's been playing at or close to the game's release, it's increasingly obvious that the devs prefer to use the game itself as a form of marketing, i.e. "Hey, check out this character in this new limited time event! Aren't they cool? Don't you want them in your collection since they're so cool?" This is how you get some characters who have 3 banner reruns in a calendar year while another barely gets more than a cameo for almost 2 (if you know, you know). Whether or not event stories are as important as the game's main story will depend on who you ask (particularly regarding character lore), but depending on who your favorite character is, it can be immensely frustrating to have to wait _literal years_ to be able to add them to your collection, not because "it's simply not their turn yet" but rather because the devs couldn't find anything for them to do in-game.
Well.. the gacha mechanic itself might just be a sales strategy, but at this point "gacha games" is something a lot more than just a sales strategy because of all of the implicit game mechanics that you just expect to see in any gacha game. Every gacha game I've ever seen comes with things like a limited amount of energy per day, tons of daily and time limited quests, and you also expect character strength to scale nearly infinitely (not technically infinite, but the barrier for getting a "maxed out" character is so high that it's basically impossible to reach without shelling out ridiculous amounts of money). Those kinds of things have huge implications on the gameplay of a game, and while you could argue that you technically could have a gacha game that doesn't do those things.. in reality, gacha games basically always do those things.
idotic take 1. your game needs to release multiple characters every several months => not everyone is fleshed out 2. blatant fanservice storytelling - mutliple playable characters simping for MC for no reason 3. no deaths - because killing a playable character doesn't make $$$ and there are a lot more. gacha limits story extremely
@@thecolorgreen9022 it really depends on how the developers handle the game. it's more of a skill issue for the developers or the amount of effort the put in the game. As I have only been playing arknights I can only give examples using it. 1. Arknights releases characters which have been introduced years before in story while new character releases are accompanied by events that tells their story 2. Most characters joined the team not because of MC but because of their own agenda or their existing relationship with other characters. 3. One of the most beloved NPC in the game is dead and there are no rumors of her coming back as a playable character. and lastly some of the popular characters in the game are the "free" ones.
@@thecolorgreen9022 Welp, guess i have to clarify The Gatcha system doesn't have an impact on the *type* of story the game uses (horror, fantasy, sci-fi) In this case, all the playable characters are friends but there's also literally nothing stopping developers to release villains and antagonists as characters. Hoyoverse just doesn't wanna
worse thing about gacha is not the gacha but the grinding, you're obliged to keep farming for progressing or building unit daily which makes it less of a game where you want to just login and have fun then stop whenever you want without needing to clear some obligatory mission everyday
Yeah, it would be much better if for example you only had to play once weekly, like maybe a longer time than daily to compensate for not playing, but still not getting punished, I saw star rail is kinda doing it already with their battlepass and even easier dailys, literally just have to spend energy in auto mode and done, while genshin takes longer and im kinda tired, I thought with genshin updating the dailys it would be much closer to star rail ones but not completely, better for doing events or explore skipping dailys, but prefer star rail way of spending the energy that you would do anyways
@@asoret yeah mission where they want you to do something you wouldnt do normally when playing the game is the worse, i still have bad memory of genshin ballon escort and some mission dont have efficient portal placement so i still need to run to it, while some gacha daily can be completed by just playing the game normally
yeah, gachas stop being a game and turns into a chore if you plan to go F2P, you have to do all the boring daily and time limited sh*t because it's the only way to get the game's most valued currencies, if it was any other game, i just don't do the quests that i find boring, in Skyrim i chose not to do the barenziah quests, in GTA 4 I chose not to find all 100 pigeons, in Assassins Creed 1 i chose not to collect all 100 flags because they're boring but in gacha games, they usually lock the most valuable currencies behind the most boring ass quests and limited time quests even!
Limbus is my favorite gacha, and admittedly I’m biased as someone who’s loved all of PM’s games, but it reminded me that gacha games, while definitely more susceptible to scummy and predatory practices, are just as able to tell good stories and have engaging gameplay as any other genre.
@@ThirdKindredCuriambro i remember in ye olden times sseth wanted to review lobotomy corp but got filtered by the gameplay, lmfao also for an adhd guy lob corp is a piece of cake
Let me remind you that Limbus Company is a gacha game made by a team of people with no prior experience making gacha games. Same with Library of Ruina and Lobotomy Corporation being a card game and a management simulator respectively. This is what makes them so unique in my opinion I tried getting my friend into Limbus recently and described it as "a gacha game made by people who have never made a gacha before. In a good way." and I think there's some truth to it
I will say that the main reason why the last two games gameplay was good and actually felt balance is because they had a lot more time and a system to design around. Not to mention have time to grow it. Most gachas to my knowledge focus on a system and do build around it but it’s mostly just linear growth ie power scaling. Most mechanics they do add is character based instead of system based. Oh and PM’s favorite mechanic RNG doesn’t work as well to strategize around because of this
@@paledrake not at all. EVERYTHING in Limbus is canon, down to identities. You canonically get little cards of them out of Mephistopheles' engine that you put into your little window thing that transforms sinners in fighting
I came into Arknights for the edgy character designs but stayed for the amazing lore/story/worldbuilding/characters/music/gameplay. Arknights as a whole does nearly everything right when it comes to being an enjoyable game/IP. I'm a day 1 player and will definitely be a final day player.
I do agree its music is great and with a great story and the dedication for us people to read is just astounding. I mean Lone Trail literally sent us to the Skies above.
Lack of advertisement, and also when less people know or play the game, people will have less motivation. Most people in this world do stuff or play things because it's "popular", not because it's to their liking.
iirc pgr had a very controversial launch reception. their bundle costs were uneven around regions and too high for beginner players. I heard they improved their pricings later on
Lets hope that wuthering waves will not drop dead soon after release and will bring attention to its developer and in turn to pgr. Kinda like genshin did to honkai 3. Let Kuro rise as a game development studio, they deserve it.
I feel like the publisher stopped advertising Punishing Gray Raven after its initial release, I don't play the game and the only time I see any kind of advertisement for it was the 2 or 3 months before and after its release.
Yes it didn't got much advertisement, also some people like me love playing gacha on pc with emulators, but until they released the official pc version it took a lot, and the controls were pain there, also that this is a fair game without auto mode, asking you more to do things by yourself
If you want offline game, at least paid games and not free games, i don't like offline free games, because the ads and in app purchase, i love offline game without in app purchase and ads like Terraria and Stardew Valley, they are perfect for me, for Minecraft Bedrock Edition, like little suffer by marketplace, but at least, i'm appreciate to Minecraft to same as Java version but sadly not full.
You forgot that Limbus Companies story isn't just build on two other games, but also 3 different sidestories of different style. We have Distortion Detective as more or less a book, we have Wonderlabs which is more like a colored manga/comicbook and we got Leviathan which is (mostly) a classic manga. Every entry into PM's lore is a different thing that all ties itself together and almost everyone playing Limbus Company is in it for the story.
There was game I played that wasn’t primarily a gacha since you could only gacha for cosmetics. It was called final fantasy first soldier and it was a great experience. Unfortunately the servers went down couple years ago because clearly it wasn’t valued as much by the developers as it was by the fans.
I was surprised you did not mention Limbus on the disconnection between gameplay and story, being the one where that disconnection is almost non-existent, I appreciate Project Moon keeping the trend they started on LobCorp where gameplay and story are connected and explained in-game
"Would you pay for your gachas?" No, absolutely not. Because there is no way in hell i could afford that much. I do have money but its barely enough for me to live, the cost of living here is much lower making my money even less valuable, and also almost all my payment methods are disabled. So an opportunity to have so many great games available at my fingertips at the cost of missing out on a lot of collectibles... It is worth it, for a lot of such gachas. But if the game ain't good then frfr what the hell am i enduring this for? As a side effect, trying to keep up with so many games and daily grinds drains my already limited time. It really just feels like work. And since there is no payment, it is a self-inflicted slavery. I'm tired boss... I like good games. I don't mind gacha. I just hate the grind.
with all the time you spend trying to be F2P you could've just gotten over time and earned more money than you saved in gachas OR alternatively, just don't play gachas, it's an advice i wish i could easily apply to myself......
@@f.b.l.9813 at this point i specifically don't want to spend money on gachas, and i don't think i could even if i wanted to, considering all the sanctions and blocks... and i kinda stopped playing most of the gachas i tried, only limbus remaining because its a PM game, so i guess i did stop playing gachas... instead now i play MMOs and still grind them like a job lmao nothing changed
For me gacha games are a blessing. Most countries in Asia dont buy games in general, we only buy a device and just play games that are free. even if gacha is bad, im grateful to be able to just play the game and experience it for free. My parents dont allow me to buy games and only allow me to buy devices to use and thats even with the main reason is for school etc. Even if gacha games grinding felt like hell, the amount of cool stories and gameplay, hell even gacha games makes me think how to manage my currencies so i can actually maximize my acc and not destroy, basicly money management. Thats my opinion on gacha games
yea a lot of us here in Asia surprisingly do not get consoles or good pc's to even play games on. where I came from, my family would always buy handhelds that have a ton of games on them, you know those 99 in 1 cartridges? yeah those, or handheld systems that allow downloads, like the PSP. And yeezus christ, was my country basically a PSP piracy den back when the PSP released. And you cannot go for second without hearing a bunch of people say "Tara, ML tayo" (meaning, Come on, let's play Mobile Legends) Yeah speaks volumes that the mobile market is big here in Asia.
I'm a pretty loose spender in games I like and one of the many reasons is I know that there are a lot of people who actually cannot spend on games for one reason or another. It's literally an investment in the community for the game, especially since most of those same players are able to find out all the stuff I don't have time to learn and share it, saving me time and as a result money. Still, though, that's no excuse for the game to be "bad". If the game is bad, it really is just either marketed to the wrong audience or inaccurately designed. Do not assume that just because you're "blessed" to get something for free, that it is justified to be low quality. Most of the games I love have far less financial and production support than many of the gacha games that I can't stand, it's simply a matter of design choices. I honestly think that the market for gacha games expanded so rapidly the developers did not have the time to adjust. Over the next few years, I think they will come to satisfy many more types of gamers and as a result even become more consumer friendly. We can see they are already going in that direction in big ways with more console crossover and PC clients.
@@reyhan0447ah yes the average phone user in Asia who explicitly stated they only have a phone is going to play apex or tf2 on it. Surely you have good reading comprehension
I can see your point if view, if there was this market when I didn't have any console, but only a phone, gachas would've been a blessing I still somehow survived on emulators, and when other big games like Minecraft and Terraria began getting ported, things started getting better, I was like 12 at the time so buying was a big no, but piracy was easy
I love arknights above all gacha games are for the fact that you could buy character costumes using in game premium currency pretty dirt cheap. I hate when a game sells a character skin that you need to use real money to buy, it's annoying.
My biggest issue with the genre is the commitment they ask from you. Log in every single day to do some repetitive task because if you don't you'll miss out, or to play menu simulator for a couple of minutes if the game has a sweep system, and frankly I don't know which is worse. On top of that, time limited events that you have to do *right now* even if you feel like playing something else, so the game no longer feels like leisure but some weird responsibility you've taken on. I absolutely loved Genshin, but day after day of dailies and artifact grinding burned me the hell out, and then the second GAA event came out right when I'd *finally* gotten around to starting Elden Ring and I didn't want to stop playing that. By the time I felt like playing Genshin again, it was just around Nahida's release and I realize after being inactive for so long I had basically nothing for her and that just completely discouraged me from going back. I've had that problem with a lot of gacha games I've tried, to the point where there's others that look super interesting (like PGR and Star Rail) but I stop myself from trying them because I'm afraid the same thing will just happen again. At this point I stick completely with FGO and Arknights, and in the latter I've already been ignoring some time limited content (didn't even touch Reclamation Algorithm and Pinch Out). All I can say is that AK fortunately tends to make its most interesting content permanent eventually, and in FGO's case since I've been playing since the NA release I have such an absolute mountain of resources and apples that I don't feel bad about quickly rushing through events over a weekend and just letting my stamina sit there for most days. One thing I think you didn't mention, btw. Gacha games tend to have massive balance issues, and I'm not talking about the power creep. Because the main game needs to be balanced around players being able to beat it with low rarity units and low grind, it can very quickly become horribly unexciting and downright boring to endgame players. I'll keep using Genshin as an example since I already brought it up (but Ak and most others seem to have the same issue to various degrees). My initial exploration of Monstadt and Liyue was full of excitement and tension, and many combat trials were genuinely challenging. But later on I had Ganyu and Zhongli and Raiden and a whole bunch of other strong characters, several of them kitted for the Abyss, and the high of the power trip quickly gave way to weary boredom. It's like an eternal paradox of wanting new characters because they seem cool, and knowing the game will get increasingly boring as my account gets more powerful.
I think this is one of the strengths of Honkai:Star Rail. Sure, with it's auto battle system its dailies are very much menu simulator. But it's also a turn based jRPG, and those things are Menu Simulator: The Genre. So at least it's catering to people who already like that.
@TonyDrake4 Don't worry about it its still newbie friendly, it have stage replay and every new event is a new mechanic, but not too new from the old ones like a variety of the existing one. The community is big enough that we have guide for clear (3star can still do it). (Just remember to follow the mechanic, I use old ops for new content the 5 star weird niche ops, use your brain a bit and youre ok to go) the non-limited ops are even more OP then limited one (Logos, Ascalon,...). Common 6 star is stronger than Rare 6 star (p.s 4 star ops are the strongest rarity in game kekw). We are given free ops that most of them is viable in endgame contents, some non free ops (need to gacha) are outright worst than free stuff (the irony). Except for Wisadel the recent limited most OP limited haven't come yet to GB or wait for a year till you see her again. FOMO in Arknights is like non-existence (except collab events that involve dying franchise like Ubisuck that have a possibility of never returning, cause Ubisoft is dying out). We have some Qol update too, although some questionable one like 6X max auto clear, lets face it this game is in Unity and live service at that, the code change will break the game still bettter than most gacha that almost never have Qol updates (FGO, Granblue). Theres more about Arknights I haven't listed yet but 90% of the contents are permanent after sometime so you don't miss out except collab or CC# (masochist mode). Not only do Arknights the 2nd and possibly Path to Nowhere the 3rd (haven't played this enough) ARE 2 tower defense rpg game that have diversity in strategy and are popular enough on the game market, the 1st one is Pop Cap PvZ games which is more pay to win than the above 2 gacha game (another irony). Don't worry, I fully know how predatory gacha is, after careful consideration Arknights is the most relaxing for casual. The lore are posted on a seperate web from fan contribution (I simp for the material designs in INVENTORY Tab and NPCs and armories in this game). Non-overly fanservice game contents, the skin that have skin reveal in Arknights in comparison with other gacha games look like a grown up that have a shit sense of adult dress code vs a sexual woman who hooked up a lot of guys.
@@Dragor33-rg7xj Ch'en got me in this game but couldn't really understand the mechanics since I never tried Tower Defence before. I remember someone once said to me that "only pull on limited banners not other ones"
@@leeroyjenkins3702 so true. The main menu theme for Arknights, the Kether 3 battle theme in Library of Ruina and the battle themes in PGR are ASMR to me.
I've said it before that FGO looks like a damn flash game from 2008. Shit is so low budget they apparently don't have the resources to spare to give animation updates to servants from the first year the game came out. Where the game stands out are as you said, the story and its character designs both visually and writing wise. The latter of which I'll talk about. Its got bits and pieces from all kinds of genres. Men and Women of every shape and size. You look at Artoria, Mecha Eli and Ivan the terrible and tell me they're from the same game. A knight, a mecha girl and a giant elephant man. Shit is wild. It's one of the few gachas I've seen (although I don't play a ton) where the male characters receive enough attention that you can tell they were trying. Look at King Hassan and tell me that is not the baddest looking mofo you ever seen. He oozes bad assery. The men in FGO go from femboy to *MAN* and everything in between. The female characters in the game vary a lot too. Like, yeah they're designed to be sexually appealing but they're not always trying to bang the MC. In most modern gacha it feels like all the girls are so down bad for the MC that they don't really care to do much else. In FGO, they still a lil down bad for the MC but their personalities vary from wacky, serious, silly, virtuous and so on. They're fun imo (Jalter is best girl. Fight me.) That's partly why I still read it. That and as you said, the story is a banger. Anyway, that's my two sense.
I can say one benefit they have is being free to download, so you can try it out and delete if you didn't liked it. Another one is that they're still games that you can play for free despite all the gacha and monetization, many of people I know that never played any games or only played mobile ones tried genshin because it was more unique comparing to other mobile games and liked it. Yes you have to put lots and lots of work and salt to it, but for countries where games and consoles/gaming pcs are very expensive and not everyone can or want to afford it(or don't know/want to pirate), I'll say they're fine for casuals even if gachas are more predatory, and being free means they'll get more recognition comparing to full games because everyone can just download it for free, reason why genshin and something like among us became popular On that note, recent "full" games that you pay for are also don't feel full now because of stuff like preorder bonuses that can kinda be counted as fomo, day 1 dlcs and cosmetics for money, ik people will say don't buy it if you don't want to,but it does feels like instead of having it in-game naturally, they rippef it off from the game and sell it separately so that they could get more money, you pay more than game's original price. Or game that ask you full price but it released in absolute garbage state
Btw my comment doesn't exactly praises gachas as someone who played both fullprice games and gachas, I still have plenty problems with it like how it's more time-consuming, all the predatory tactics like fomo, powercreep, ect., and i will always will prefer full games over gachas, just about them being accessible is one of their advantage, better of for worse. But I will also say that the state of full games(at least some aaa games, Nintendo does fine but they also do some dumb decisions) aren't exactly better, EA and Square showed it, and bazillion shovelware games that has audacity to charge money, and I think people should support indie or actually good devs that don't do anti-consumer practices like fromsoftware
My experience with these style of f2p games is that they start off by appearing to be more player friendly but then just gradually make it more and more unfriendly the further you get into the game until it becomes absolutely insufferable. It's happened so many times that I don't even bother trying them anymore personally. I pretty much see f2p games as a red flag at this point (unless the only thing you can buy are cosmetics) - I think I might actually be *less* inclined to try a f2p game personally, though I'm obviously in the minority about that.
Have to give FGO some credit when it come to the handling power creep, it probably the best on the list. In game like Genshin copies are essential while in FGO they are more of a luxury for most characters, not to mention that a lot of welfare or 3 stars are legitimately useful.
Since you play Azur Lane, you already "know" what the game's true source of income is. It's definitely one of the few that can survive without a gacha system for a long time.
The market for cosmetics in gacha is alot smaller than those of convenience or competitive advantage. It's only a matter of time for them to fail. No idea what manjuu is thinking.
Speaking of Lingering Echoes, it was the first event where I actually read the story even though I started late february last year in time for dororthy's event. Gotta say 10/10 first story, fucking bawled my eyes once I saw LE-8 before, after and the story episode after that
i recommend trying Laterano one next (Guide Ahead) several main characters - including semi-antagonist, a lot of religious and non-religious philosophy, great drama, exciting reveals and conflicts i swear, some of AK events can literally be adapted into books or movies (like current movie adaptation of Lonetrail)
@@kevinseraphin5456 It's called Mega Man X DIVE Surprisingly good reception. It has all 5 mainline Mega Man protags, including some side characters like Roll and some Bosses being playable like Leviathan from Mega Man Zero
Got into Limbus company 2 weeks ago, as a F2P the combat mechanic is fun and I got addicted to the story! But dang Fried chicken tho... and I can no longer eat a single apple ever again. Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Counter Side, Brown Dust 2, Limbus Company, Reverse 1999, Arknights have well written story and lore imo.
Add Guardian Tales, it has good story and *ACTUAL* good gameplay. I like the small QTE sometimes, and in one stage you get to play something akin to a FPS. Definitely one of the ore fun gacha games.
@@xenolad4943 Its pretty good too, but I can't keep up with the science fiction theme very well as I like a pinch of realism to it or some form of logic for it to work, but still better then a certain game that show us 2D waifus jiggle physics while shooting something. 😂
You make a lot of good points. For a long time now, I've been trying out new gacha games as they release and came to conclusions along the line of "This is actually a pretty good game, just not good enough to put up with the business model." And honestly, in that regard, all the daily missions and grinding etc are worse for me than the actual gacha/gambling. If they were games where characters are perfectly usable out of the gacha and pull currency is something that just passively accumulates on the account without the need to log on each day, so I only need to pay attention to them when I get an email notification about a new event/banner/whatever, I'd probably still be playing a whole lot more of them. On whether I'd be paying for gacha games if they had like a subscription/expansion model, well, the above probably does a good job hinting at my answer. Yes, if doing so also cuts out a lot of the life service chaff. Probably not, if it means all I skip is having to pull from the gacha. Like, I don't play Genshin anymore, but just getting all the characters and then having to grind up the material and artifacts up for them sounds like an active punishment that'd make me quit the game all over again. Which does bring me to Limbus Company, the only gacha game that ever made me spend money. (Of course, the amount of money I spend is way less than whales spend on gachas, so it's not like that's an achivement the industry would actually care about.) And the fact that it not only lets me get all the stuff, but also convert those shardboxes into thread to make sure I have to do less grinding to uptie whatever I want is a large part of it. A bigger part of it is that the lack of ascencion materials means there was less stuff to grind in the first place. Just Exp and Thread, clean and simple. (Although, I'd appreciate it if the season pass also gave EXP tickets, or something. Or, well, kept giving tickets once you hit "max" level. God knows, the level cap increasing each season is easily my most disliked aspect of the game and it can only get worse as I have to spread that EXP over more and more IDs if I want to use them outside of base MD. I can't imagine hitting a level spike each canto is improving the new player experience either.)
Gachas worst part its the time sink if you are f2p, or just the dailies and weeklies, I want to play other games instead of wasting two hours a week in the mirror dungeon. I have almost 300 hrs in Limbus and I can only count the cantos and first railway as the only times I had real fun. I'm also afraid we'll have a situation like TypeMoon where everything other than the gacha is in development hell. Actually blocked Limbus social accounts to detox, and they bring out my favorite ego Magic Bullet. I'm cursed.
I'm in a weird spot with Limbus. I hate thinking about doing mirror dungeon or doing my dailies but I don't really mind going though Simulated Universe in Star Rail and grinding other games. Mirror Dungeon and the Thread/EXP nodes just feels really bad to go though for me.
Personally i like playing the MD so cant talk too much about that part, tho i can easily understand since it takes time to finish (myself between 3-4 hours since i take it slow). As for exp tickets if i need some for a setup for md or new ids i do them in background, runnin win rate and start from time to time while watching something or playing isaac etc. Tho there is the fact that im playing on pc so there is that too. Additional part is making a team that will be reasonably chill with win rating the highest exp lux. Currently writing this while i auto the 5.5 event d: . I guess there is also the fact that i can do same thing while typing on discord, watching vid, doing limbus exp and running arknights auto from time to time (tho uninstalled arknights 2nd time now since am not ultra into tower defense enough to play gatcha td).
> I'm also afraid we'll have a situation like TypeMoon where everything other than the gacha is in development hell Bro, Type-Moon just released Fate Samurai Remnant some 3 months ago, a PC/sonsole action game. And FGO is now doing a collab event with it. And that is not mentioning the other ones that released only like 1-2 years ago like Tsukihime Remake and Melty Blood remake (now with additional FGO retcon to make the lore more consistent). And I'm not even including the anime adaptations (Fate Stay Night Heaven's Feel arc, FGO Babylonia adaptation, etc.) which aired WHILE FGO is in service. Saying Type-Moon got hardstuck to committing to FGO alone is just straight up wrong. If anything, Project Moon is the one that hasn't released jackshit from the moment they launched Limbus Company.
Now that we know about the Ruina port to PS4 and Switch which just released, I think we can be confident that PM will be able to develop more content while also doing Limbus
Not like it is really a "redemption" for being a gacha game, but I still want to bring out that Hypergryph (Arknights devs) use some of the money they got to make cool stuff for fans, like quality merch, badass live concerts, great music production overall, anime adaptation, weebs convention, etc. They also use them to produce new games. So far we know about 3 new games from HG and only one of them is gacha. Though the most coolest and important one is charity donation and help they doing. Wildlife protection, endeavors in education sector and help to those who suffered natural catastrophes are the most known ones.
Many do that actually, mihoyo made multiple schools everywhere and manjuu donated a ton to charity too, its just marketing afterall Only if HG wasnt terrible ad budget management and actually worked on a single game instead of 4 others (you missed one btw)
@@kyarumomochi5146 oh I have seen enough everything you says about arknights never good always has something to complain. Not just this video almost every other that is related to arknights video have you complaining. that is so pathetic.
There was a free moblie game that, i assume, existed to mock gacha games. I can't remember it's gameplay too well, but pulling for strong characters was incredibly easy to do, and the gameplay loop was a compressed version of the average gacha gameplay. It would, however, end up becoming a dress up/scene creator that would be infamous for spawning the most questionable of content.
I fully agree with FGO. Gameplay is ass, gacha is ass, outdated UI, no auto mode, hell you can't even make a proper account yet i'm still playing that game 8 years later. Hard to recommend the game itself, to get people to try it i feel like you have to introduce them to the Nasuverse first then they'll come on their own.
For something like Arknights and a lot of other gacha game they have to be gachas. There is no other format that will be able to fund a live-service game with new events and side stories every month and a continuing main-story. There is no other (profitable) format of game available to tell a story like this.
Speaking of gacha games, anyone remember Dragalia Lost? Used to play that until the game basically died (back then, I got several limited edition crossover characters, including two Fire Emblem characters (I got Marth and Tiki), Mega Man, Rathalos, Fatalis, and Joker, Morgana, and Sophia (from Persona 5)).
Another point in Limbus Company's favor is that, unlike any other gacha I've seen, you only get a cast of 12 characters with different versions you can play. So when a new unit gets released, the game doesn't have to cook up a whole backstory for you to get invested in. It's just an alternative version of the same weirdo you already know and love, just in a new light. This makes for much tighter character writing and development and far less effort on the audiences part to keep track of everyone.
Aren't they also technically a non-canon alternate timeline version of those characters too? So story-wise you don't lose anything if you don't pull. Aka you don't need to feel pressured to pull for characters to keep up with the story because it's all not connected to the story being told anyway.
@@franciscoreza8295 I think that's the only reason why I might actually pick the game up after I finish LoR, because I can play the story and not give a F about the gacha shit.
There's a reason most gacha's die in a year and the ones that don't have a year worth of mediocre at best slop to get through before you get to play the good part, gacha games basically force devs to squeeze as much money as possible out of the game for the lowest possible cost at their beginning because the company that created them either can't or wont give the game and devs proper funding and expect it all to come from the playerbase. It's the same problems that most MMO's have except the company is literally gambling on people gambling, they're going to be made as cheaply as possible until the big bucks whales roll in because creating a gacha game with any kind of investment is an insanely massive risk most aren't willing to take without minimising the finnancial risk as much as humanly possible.
Thought I'd add my list of elements frequent in gacha games that have no relation to virtual gambling but are common anyway: >abundant religious theming and nomenclature >post-apocalyptic, dystopian, or otherwise crapsack world >discrimination, often against the playable roster's in-group but not necessarily >physically and mentally corrupting forces >dark alter egos, often caused by aforementioned corrupting forces >sci-fi or sci-fi influenced setting
great video! tbh as a PM fan, ever since limbus company was announced and all the backlash that ensued after, I’ve been thinking a lot about gacha games as a model and how… good or not good they are. for context, I wasn’t really one of those people who was upset over limbus being a gacha because I’ve been exposed to gachas my whole life. I’ve been playing lots of niche gacha games way before Genshin and even FGO were a thing. was an F2P in nearly all of them too, but not by choice, I was a dependent back then, and since most of those games were exclusively in Japanese app stores there’s no easy way to pay for app purchases as a non-Japanese resident. for the most part, those games were run-of-the-mill idol rhythm games (think Project Sekai but way easier haha). So why would I play those games? It was very innocent reason: because they were technically free. I had rather stingy parents who weren’t into games, so asking them to buy me a console or PC or just any full-priced game in general was a challenge. Many full-priced games were too expensive in their eyes too. So allegedly “free” games were a great loophole for that. There were some other things that did draw me into the games, such as their great music or animations. In the end though, I could just quit them easily and vicariously live through other people’s playthroughs or uploads of the content in the game when the grind got too stressful for me, so the FOMO wasn’t so bad for me. Of course, I feel like with games with a lot more story or gameplay content to offer, the FOMO can get real. I think part of why gacha is successful now is because it’s highly successful in Japan (and some other Asian counties, but Japan is the root of gacha I believe). In a western perspective, gacha is divisive because gambling is often seen as an awful, potentially life-ruining thing. But in some asian countries, especially Japan, gambling is seen as “normal”. I mean look at the horse race betting and pachinko machines there; gambling is like an everyday thing for the average Japanese man. The massive success gacha has in Japan has led others to attempt to use the model in other markets, but of course that’s a hit-or-miss unless something in the game is just that good, like you said. Being released in global did not work for one of my favorite run-of-the-mill gacha games, A3!, because admittedly it was pretty barebones as a game and even though I liked the story, it’s not like the bestest or most thought-provoking story ever, so it ended global service early while the Japanese server remains strong today (and that also explains the presence of a ton of successful Japanese gacha games that have little to no hope of a global release). Overall, I understand that gacha is a bad model for consumers. I do get stressed out by the daily grind at times and it sucks. It is obvious that it is ridiculously lucrative for developers, so unless massive intervention is done, gacha games will still exist. Honestly though, I have to say that I wouldn’t be into games as much if it weren’t for gacha games, which is both a blessing and a curse in my perspective hahaha
I got into Arknights thanks to the music they made and upload. I just love the music they put out and many styles too!. Arknights is the first and only Gacha game I play since I have the same thinking you said on the video about arknights. also for me I hade NO idea what a Gacha game was and I was thinking Arknights was a simple mobile game with ads and things like that like the other mobile games.... oh boy.. I was so wrong but in a good way. then I did find out what a Gacha game was hahah.
i think one of the big factors to why gacha games are still played by a lot of people even though the genre itself sucks is because they are actively updating and this makes the game's community be very active aswell.
No its mainly because they are free and many people have gambling addictions even when they are f2ps There are countless gacha games that hardly get updates and still has tons of players
@@kyarumomochi5146 you'd know if you've ever played a game that announced they would be entering maintenance mode or a date for eos. ive been through more than half a dozen already, dragalia, dffoo and brave frontier to name a few, and the story repeated itself every time. the player base drops to like 20-10% of its former total from one day to another. people just stop caring once they know there wont be any more updates again. you can see the same phenomenon of active game updates = active community = active players in mmorpg games too, and they (usually) dont have heavy gambling elements as the main thing. ff xiv for example has a community that is very similar to any gacha community out there, and incredibly there are still people playing wow to this day, they dont seem to be able to quit at all.
@@czsgenesis The thing is gachas main monetization is to appeal to hyper whales that will keep paying even at the last seconds of the game, its one of the reasons why its such a Succesful market anyway Also i had seen countless EOS games that still got revenue even when eos was announced to come, people are extremely wild these days man
Outside of gambling players, this is true. Updates make new characters which feeds comic market which feeds the community. Also new characters usually means new playstyle or new shiny collection to look at. Meanwhile people aren't only playing for the game. Maybe for the story or music alone. Other maybe because it jogs their managerial sense which explains why play a bad game and put effort in the "passive" activities. Other to keep up with the market preferences. Other for social aspect it brings. Or people want games they want to play at commute or secretly at work for keeping morale up. I know it's gambling that fuels this game and their main audience, but damn people are really diverse out there. Also people are smart enough to make up reasons that weren't the case before.
No matter what gacha game I played, I always experience these 3 problems from them. They are incredibly demanding, sometimes inconsistent with stories, and I am not a fan of gacha games. But, despite that I did enjoyed Arknights for a while until I got tired of it.
I've been playing Genshin for more than 700 hours since I started over a year ago on mobile, and everyday there's always something to look forward to, the rewards are way more generous than you think. Playing for the first couple hours, I feel baffled knowing that it's a free game. And so far it's only taking 28++ GB of my storage. The communities suck toes tho.
I think you said it best about PGR and why I love action games gacha games with multiple version of a characters Honkai Impact 3rd The characters growth is not just in the writing but also in gameplay, having multiple characters show how they matured thorough the years like the devs telling the story with the how the characters fight Early Kiana gameplay is brash and inexperience but the lastest version of her is elegant while still being playful Kiana Early Lucia is plain and robotic but her newest version is cheerful and confident
I play Limbus, being a PM fan, but the gameplay is still in the process of getting there. The recent IDs and MD3 are convincing me they are getting there, though.
I think it is a matter of perspective. The common stereotype is that Gacha games are predatory in nature due to microtransactions found within. However, the Gacha, in my opinion, is good if the game can be enjoyed by a F2P
After playing a lot of gacha games over my time, I’ve come to realize a big component of me enjoying a gacha… No PvP. PvP pushes pay to win, cheesy/auto gameplay, and other issues that make the game sink into a cash grab. Just some food for thought!
agreed pvp sucks ass seeing your team gets humiliated 10 times in row are the worst those who love it is a whale, have too much time or a masochist i hate counter side for doin this making the limited pull currency with pvp currency like in arknight green ticket shop u can unlock more shop even further back of the shop making me grind more and gets even more humiliated even then u need to do atleast 6 win or 12 loss just to get basiclly daily currency for the extra limited currency not only its fukin grindy its fukin iritating because its pvp u cant even skip then bluearchive has pvp im so damn gratefull its so limited on how much u need to interact with the pvp
Oddly i could play pvp game like PUBG or Sim racing casually. Meaning just playing 2 hours once a week, having fun, and dont think it outside game. Meanwhile in gacha even if its non PVP, i have to remind myself to do dailies, strategizing where to spend stamina, who to built, what day i can farm certain materials.
@@Rcck.7282 that’s because in competitive games, you compare your skill level per game. In a gacha, PvP is straight up how much you grind and pay for most games
One huge counterargument. gacha games are expensive as fuck to maintain. graphics designers, developers, artists, musicians, voice actors, hiring these people cost money. Also, it's well known that a while after release, the popularity of the games will wane. Hard. There's a reason why gachas end of service all the time. Often, the gacha model is the only reason why a game gets to survive for a long time, and gets to tell a very long story. Many gacha games have good stories, this isn't a coincidence. The gacha format's inherent length allows for more time for exposition and adding more details, as well as more lore and, as the characters are literally the focus of the game, rewards great character writing. This allows the writers to really go ham with the stories and worldbuilding, which isn't really an option in single purchase games even with dlcs or most other live service models due to the cost issue. Project Moon changed to a gacha from releasing normal games for a reason.
Counter argument for that counter argument. Gacha games generally don't release in a complete or fulfilling state. They have enough content for some characters and story but add on to it over time which will be funded during the first few months of gambling. It's a live service practice that removes a lot of development costs most non gacha games deal with because they need to release in a completed state unlike gacha games. Short term artist and VA work isn't that high either. Gacha games generally reuse images and don't use a lot of audio recordings for the story (there are some exceptions but this also applies mainly to visual novel styled stories in games). Most gacha games end due to being low quality cash grabs. FGO being an exception because it did start off REALLY bad but survived due to the pre-established and loyal fanbase. Gacha games also are predatory by nature due to FOMO practices and gambling which help prolong their existence rather than being super high quality from the start. According to some people (I'm too lazy to confirm this info) Genshin Impact is an abnormally high production cost gacha game and it was estimated to be around 150 million usd which it made back within a month or two and the extra funds went into future content and now future games like "star rail" and "ZZZ". Elden Ring was mid to low production and it cost around 200m. Now imagine how little most other gacha games would cost compared to Genshin. Also imagine how much Elden Ring's cost compared to a AAA game. This also shows each game should be looked at individually and not generalized which we both did. If you want more concrete info to go off of try researching some games yourself like "ZZZ" and "Black Myth: Wukong" or other games. Personally, I found most gacha game's stories and worldbuilding not very engaging. All MiHoYo games I disliked and while I did enjoy Arknights' story it's just not concise so I end up not reading its story too after a while due to not respecting my time. FGO is a very mixed bag as there are some good writing but also really bad ones. I recently tried Nikke but I can't take it seriously due to the fanservice and Granblue Fantasy tries to be too safe in the writing so it doesn't feel unique. I have a lot more examples but generally I can't care enough which is my main point. This is also very subjective.
@@nadaburner i relieved that some gamers with a good critical thinking like you exist. Bec trust me, there will be always someone who counter argument about how predatory the gacha game is. Someone like you is mostly the one who wake them up. I cant blame them, they probably someone who waste too much time or too much money on the game. So what they will do when they realize they are wrong, when they already sacrifice too much money or time for that game. Justification.
11:20 Yeah, can confirm that it’s hella ass, even moreso considering I made a whole planner for banners for this damn game (but that’s just insanity + dedication to Gilgamesh on my part lol). There’s a lot I can trash FGO on for, from the gacha rates, lack of QoL in general, ass early story + early interludes, lack of animation updates for earlier servants, or even *not having a goddamn account bind system*-the list is goddamn **endless**. But as you said later on in the video, the main reason why people continue to play the game is for the story, whether it’s the main story or the event story (of course there’s also the characters, but that also sort of interwoven with the story-adjacent part too + with how they’re characterized). Most people’s favorite Lostbelt in the game is Lostbelt 6, which is *absolutely* understandable, the story and the characters are peak, especially Oberon. But for me, my personal favorite is Lostbelt 1 for multitudes of reasons. Without doing a *whole* deep dive into why I love it so much now since spoilers (of course), it sets up the reality and danger that Guda is in now and hits us with the realization that “Oh. Oh god *this* is what we have to deal with now?”. But hits me the most in that LB is two specific characters and how they’re portrayed in it *because* of the history behind them-one has a history of a previous Fate IP and the other in irl history. The latter one hits me so much harder because it’s one of the very few portrayals of them that truly understands who they were in life in relation to another character and gives them proper *justice*. Again, it’s one of those thing where I would go in-depth if it wasn’t for spoilers. But that also brings up one of the other reasons as to why I (and some people) continue to play the game-the *characters*. If there’s one thing that Fate has over other gachas (and other medias with historical characters), it’s how much they shine light to so many different historical figures in history, even despite the oddities and weirdness with some of them combined with the fact that FGO has a bias towards adding Japanese historical figures (since y’know, JP based game lol). There’s a lot of people that I would’ve never heard of in my lifetime if it wasn’t for this game, and with some of them it got me interested enough to look up their history. There’s a lot I can say about this game in general but it’s getting into ramble territory now lol Tl;dr: Fate fan makes an essay on why they’re not completely insane for continuing to play this damn game as their first actual comment on this channel LMAO
Thanks for giving me a reason to tell my friends that literally will kill me if they see me play Limbus a reason why how I actually play for the story and not the femboys. I appreciate it!
I dunno if you read these comments, but if you have the time, it would be interesting to see a deep dive on the Uma Musume boom. It's often written off on the western side of the globe because of both its over the top premise and gacha nature, but it's still earned 2 billion dollars in mobile game revenue alone and not only is being endorsed by the horse racing associations of Japan, but it also has an actively enforced anti rule-34 stance for its IP (so no pron allowed) despite coming out Feb 2021, so I think it's worth looking into for a video.
Uma Musume was something that always caught me by surprise. I don't really know how it got so popular. Not saying its undeserving of its popularity but since we don't got it in the west I was always curious why it blew up in Japan.
The thing about gacha is they rack in a lot of cash. So it can create a paradoxical puzzle here. The game might not be as good without all that cash flow to make it good. So while a good gacha game may be good despite being gacha it also wouldn’t be good or as good without that gacha.
Because 99.99% of the "game" is doing daily tasks to earn gacha currency and wait for character you want and then get them with 100% guarantee and then repeat which actually boils down to incredibly grindy game that virtually forces you to grind everyday due to resources, including points allowing you to farm, being timegated and having a cap, you can't just login on sunday and farm for a week's worth, you need to login everyday or you miss out. And of course, if you spend any money it costs hundreds of dollars.
Funny how you mentioned destiny 2 xD. On the other side of the spectrum, there is warframe, another f2p which it's premium system is one the most healthy ones I've seen. Althought it's not a gacha, it's 10 years and still ongoing lifespan shows that this kind of old f2p system still works and respect the player's time even more
A game without RNG being better is subjective. You can say the same about "Gacha", meaning RNG elements for stuff like RPG's and even the original Gacha, card games. I wouldn't want my game of YGO or Pokemon where every match is uniform, the same factory made progression, the same factory made outcome.
I disagree. I love genshins gacha elements and it makes getting characters very rewarding. The only instance in which I would want it to be gacha free is if it wasn’t a live service game, but gacha as a whole doesn’t really work well in non live service games.
@@InFiNiTeO7 ''I wouldn't want my game of YGO or Pokemon where every match is uniform, the same factory made progression, the same factory made outcome.'' But it is, once they know the best decks for the current meta, it would be repeated in most of the matches to absurdity
Based take, honestly I play Arknights, reverse 1999 and limbus but I would love for them to be « real » games and not gacha. Only limbus makes me feel like I’m not missing on anything by not paying huge sums
Yeah. I whish there was no gacha involt in Reverse. But so far the gatcha sistem seems veary forgiving, the stories are good (main story, event storeis), lovable characters, and the devs so far seem to care about both the game and it's community. It would be nice if it was a more normal game, but then I don't know if we still would get to have the events, and the characters who are not in the mainstory. Sorry if I sounded stupid.
@@compact6038oh that,they make sorting the currency for some reason,once being free and one being paid currency.. i think you already know this because it already 3 week
I'm late to the party here - great video! - but I think AK also deserves a shout out for the music. I noticed the backing music for this half hour video is AK tracks. I've also thought it's interesting whether the design of a game can make the RNG nature of gacha a strength. In AK new players will have very different experiences with the gameplay just off of who they pull early. Strategies have to be created to fit your available team. It takes having a very deep roster and a lot of diversity while having every character be useful, but I think they pull that off - over 300 characters and 65 subclasses.
Recently, devil may cry: peak of combat released and I wanted to try it out, because I had never played a dmc game before. It turned out to be a gacha game, in which I spent a whole 2 hours clicking on menus to collect rewards and around 30 minutes actually doing combat(which is very clunky, for some reason). I think that the pressure from upper management to make a game that will make infinite profits stops the developers from making a game that is actually fun.
I think FGO plays like this: If you can get to Camelot and read it, the game gets your attention, so you reach Babylonia and the game binds your soul to it. I swear, i was not that into FGO when i started, but the moment i got to Babylonia i was done. I've NEVER liked or even PLAYED a single visual novel in my entire life, and i hate reading a shit ton of dialogue in between gameplay cause i think it breaks the pacing, but in FGO? I WAS THERE INVESTED AS FUCK, TAKING MY TIME TO READ EVERYTHING, IT'S JUST TOO GOOD!!! Also was the moment i fell in love with a fictional character for the first time in my 21 years of being a weeb, Ereshkigal is just majestic.
For me, the only dominant factor is the story and the characters. Any gacha gameplay, even if it is innovative, tires in the long run, what keeps me going is the interest in reading, I think of them as visual novels with gameplay. That's why I only play Path to Nowhere and Limbus Company, they're phenomenal from that point of view.
I love Arknight, but sometime the story can get abit long. so most of the time i go to youtube for a summary of the current event , the only event i read in game are lonetrail and originium dust
People think FGO is some waifu gacha game but it turn out to be first and foremost, a VISUAL NOVEL. With turn-based combat attached on it. On live service. Which is funny considering Fate/Stay Night was being delivered as an eroge and people think they get hardcore seggs and naked women everywhere. Turns out it's an epic gamebook with audio and still images.
FGO supposed to end with Part 1 but since fans wanted more of FGO, Nasu (the author of Fate/stay night) decided to continue on writing more chapters and other improvement to the games in general as years progresses.
Being a fans of a gacha that barely makes any money compared to the one you mentioned, I think a gacha business model might be a necessary for the dev. The dev I follow seemingly want to use video games mainly as a storytelling medium. If playing a console/premium game for the story is comparable to watching a feature length film, playing a live service game is comparable to following an ongoing TV series, you get more content from live service/TV series and they tend to have more active community. On the dev side, running a live service game will have less upfront cost than developing a premium games (especially AAA titles, in which some upcoming gachas seem trying to reach that level of production quality), they have room and continuous funding to add more content, etc. If the dev I'm following were an "idealist" who insist on only making premium games, they were likely can only make 10 hours worth of play time every 4-5 years, that is if they don't went bankrupt first.
Story? what story, when you play FGO on JP server and can't even properly read japanese. Let be honest, the only thing that keep FGO alive is the IP (and also the uncensored arts: hmmm summer Kama...). the Fate IP is such juggernaut that despite having one of the lowest production value of the presented in the video, it has one of the highest revenue (second only to Genshin for the games presented in the video). Gameplay wise, back in the time I was still playing FGO, it was so simple that basically anyone could be a theorycrafter (which is a pro for me). What I like the most about Genshin isn't the exploration of the open world itself or the lore (I really don't give a crap about lore in games most the time) but rather the level of polish and the childish and bittersweet atmosphere that the developers managed to recreate in the openworld (a bit like the classical fairy tales).
Gacha is a revenue model more than a 'proper' genre tbh. Many of the smaller games are, well, tower defense or very bare-bones mobile RPGs. It doesn't have to be like that though - certainly Genshin and Star Rail are, like, actual games. You can explore in Genshin as a standard open world action-RPG with minimal interaction with the slot machine, for instance.
if u want to ask how long fgo lore is out of the 8 base story chapters the shortest one is speedran into a movie, a normal one is speedran into 2 movies and the longest one is a 24 episode well made anime series thats not counting the other 16 main story chapters(SOME ARE LONGER THAN SAID ANIME) dozens of events and for god knows how many characters's personal stories which all take up between 3-45 minutes, fgo is probably the largest when it comes to story without a competition in sight
Genuinely if half of these games were actual RPGs/Strat games, Fans would be multiplying like crazy Gacha as a genre and term is like a fuckin anchor for half these games, and the fact that stuff like animation and other non gacha games connected to these titles can be the best the story and company can offer shows that Tldr: Gambling as a gameplay method sucks ass and we need more shit like Fate Samurai Remnant and Arknights the Anime
Developers are in the business of making money, not fans. Gacha is simply the most profitable and stable monetization, these games wouldn't even be made without gacha. Also, Genshin is probably one of the most popular game ever.
My favorite game is Reverse 1999 because it feels unlike any game I have played. I hate anything too anime, so I was very happy that Reverse 1999 took a more artistic and sophisticated art style instead of the oversaturated anime style. Would you say that Reverse 1999 deserves the title of a good gacha game aside from its gorgeous aesthetics?
Well the thing is because its a gacha they get rewarded for making big updates/content and keeping games alive. More players means more Engagement in generall thus more revenue. In nature gachas are somewhat predatory but the monetization is the reason they keep going as hard as they can (not talking about these quick money grab gachas)
you can say gameplay is good in a gacha when you don't wanna tap the "AUTO" button. and when grinding don't stall your progression in the story (like NIKKE) Or when your rate for geting a character is so insuferable small you feel like you born by a very bad star (FGO) or when grinding is so, so, sooooo bad you start to reconsider your life choices (FGO, Priconne, Blue Archive, Arknights) there's a lot of reasons to hate or question gachas, a lot of reasons to like gachas, and because of that balance, you will NOT see any changes about this genre, gachas are part of gaming "ecosistem" and are to stay. as much as i hate or like it, it's a complex topic. there's pros and cons, but it's up to the individual to choose walking on this path.
Bingo it’s a chosen hell. It’s kinda crazy because I swear the biggest streams are the viewer pulls for gacha . Some of us are aware that we are participating in a form of gambling , so it’s easier to take an “ L”, but for-serial , when people don’t get that summon/recruit/etc it’s a bad game
@@Duderock007 i call gachas are bad in a daily basis, i still play some of them regardless of my luck. if the problem with gachas are only how lucky or unlucky one can be with the pulls, you are just a crybaby.
@@F0xdash once again it’s a hell People choose , I accept the fact I won’t get a character, just got my first five stars in an eleven pull in FGO last GSSR I had a copy already and the other one was meh . It is what it is , I’m just clarifying some continue to play gachas and it’s either rain or shine depending on their pulls Some content creators joke around about how you should be of legal age to play gachas due to the fact kiddos lose their minds over not getting a character .
Arknights player: NOOOO what do you mean we don't have sweep after X years trash qol changes (please ignore annihilation being sweep) My brother in sui siblings we've had auto deploy since day 1 and only have 2 potions per week, fgo is stuck at manually doing everything AND and you get dozens of apples per month. Keeping my phone on while watching youtube videos is such an insurmontable effort fr fr. I'm thankful i don't spend in fgo i can easily imagine how painful it must be for whales to upgrade all the units they get from the extra pulls, that grind takes *days* off your life, not hours, with every new event, it's that bad.
@@pougetguillaume4632 Actually the maxing characters part is the easiest of any gacha i've played, so much so that when i get a new servant i can simply max it in less than 1 hour. Now, events on the other hand yes those are grindy, lotteries are especially bad.. game needs an auto mode really badly.
@@Kumire_921especially for player's who's already finished ascending all servants they already own, it's make it so you have lots of exp fodder once another lotto comes out
The talk of gacha games with the gacha removed kinda reminds me of Midnight Suns-which has several things that make it feel like it was supposed to be a gacha (a half dozen different currencies, 2 types of loot boxes, relationship values tied to leveling up heroes) before they switched to just being standard 'game+expansion' monetization at the last moment.
I've got a few games I follow and think to myself, "this would have been great as a stand alone cartridge or something" but the ability to drip feed content and story over time is a lot more interesting to me than I expected. I would love to see more games get a treatment like Mega Man X Dive Offline where they bundle the content into a stand alone package after the game goes offline, just because I hate seeing games disappear.
The reason I will never play a gacha game is because, no matter how fun it is at their core they are still a product that is trying to make money, which on paper im not opposed to. Give me one of these games that has a really good story and fun (if simplistic) gameplay and charge me 30, 40, 50 bucks for it and ill buy it. I dont like the whole "its free to play! but not really, give us as much money as you are willing". There comes a point in all of these games where they do everything legally in their power to entice you to spend an indeterminate amount of money on them, a lot of them being gambling addiction tactics because its so easy right? Just one more dollar, just one more roll, that super awesome OP 5 star character is right there, go get her! Not realizing in 3 months you have spent several hundred dollars on this "free" game like its bleeding you dry one tiny paper cut at a time. And you know, in a few years when the game is no longer profitable and they shut down the servers and you lose access to everything you purchased who cares, right?
which is why me and my brother are sticking with offline single player console games cause 1) they don't need internet to play and 2) everything you need to progress and beat the game is in the game itself; all you need is are tiny bit of luck and the most important one: SKILL.
Even if people paid for these game as normal full priced games, in the long run gacha/f2p is more profitable and makes it easier to reach a wider audience. Better for both the company, and the games, as there are more funds to invest further into the games. I doubt games like Genshin would be able to keep up with their tight update schedule with another monetization system, and we also can not forget about the massive material promoted by these companies (from fanworks to IRL events). IMO Gachas games are the natural evolution of MMOs, epecially the F2P ones, and compared to those, they are significantly better, due to actually having constant updates/ I can see where the money is going. Thats why I rather pay for stuff in Genshin than Warframe, even though the latter has a better monetization system.
Non-gacha player here who played Arknights and PGR on the strength of their gameplay. I've since fallen off both games, and while I have overall fonder memories of Arknights, PGR is the game that I *desperately* wish there was a fifty dollar PC game I could just play.
What I think is funny with AK is the recent 4.5 anniversary for global had a banner with Viviana and virtuosa, two very anticipated characters in NPC jail. On release, Viviana was trashed on and people really did not like her as a unit compared to her NPC version
from what I have seen is because her kit is dissapointing, considering how strong she was in the story, it's like releasing patriot and somehow making him weaker than mudrock
i actually enjoy the grindy parts of games, so azur lane is my favourite one, it also helps that cubes aren't hard to collect, while UR characters are released with enough time between each new one, so you can save up on cubes and not have to actually spend money for them, + i like the story
This is why I'm actually glad Granblue is making a full fledge jrpg or other genre like vs. Being 7 years slave to grind is kinda tiring even the game is very generous. 😂
The funny thing is PGR basically wipes the floor with every other game in this video, simply for the fact that its gacha aspect ruins it the least. In order to get every single new character, all you have to do is play the game for 5 minutes every day and do weeklies on three days. Also, not a gacha specific thing, but you can blaze through the story so fast if you're a new player. Just get three A-rank characters to max which at most might take like 2 weeks and you're done. The biggest hurdle in PGRs story are arguably the first couple chapters rather than any level requirements.
Tbh, in Limbus you can just ignore gacha at all. PMs made economic in their game very loyal even to full f2p players, but if you buy battlepass, then you will get stupidly large amount of shards selectors. Players with bp can buy anything from dispenser without any trouble and completely ignor gacha system (until Walpurgis Night)
The same can be said for gacha like genshin and star rail. If you ignore 1 thing, even with just f2p you can clear all contents. But if you want to full star abyss or moc then prepare for a massive grind or multiples carefully planned purchases, sometimes both.
@@anhduc0913 yeeh genshin felt like... you are punished for wanting little less or little more from the game, with me frankly just quitting it after finishing sumeru and realizing how much of a pain it is
@@anhduc0913 I think the difference is in limbus you can easily get every unit in the game without rolling the gacha, not that you can do everything in game with base units (which you can't at a certain point). So you aren't gated off from using the cool new units, since you can get them for free the second they're released. It's also helped by the fact that PM just throws free currency at the player.
gacha games are content farms, they copy and clone each other and offer little to no new things to the gaming industry. In fact, I'd argue it ruined the gaming industry.
The problem is not the gambling system per se, it is how much the games makes you regret not having a character, a good example of this is Genshin, like, the abyss is always aimed toward the newly released characters and the game literally creates an artificial dread toward characters:"If you don't pull now who knows when there will be a rerun", while other games like Arknights deal with this much better making all the content playable with 3/4 stars and with support units, hell, even Nikke has a better system where units are pulled into standard banner and wishlisted, the idea of a character in a video game being irreperible because of a banner system is literally one of the most predatory system out there. Another thing to consider is how much the game wants you so suffer with daily grinds, and even here Genshin doesn't sit well with the fact that dailies are a separate thing from the artifact loop and that you have to do stages every time to earn rewards, for god sake, raid functions or autoplay should be a norm.
I'm probably too casual as I just play with my friends who also don't have time and energy to keep up with the community and their feedback amidst more important irl work to do But yeah it's always interesting how different experiences can be for playing the same game! I don't touch the abyss and really don't think I've done artifact domains more than 4 times every month. From this perspective everything's playable with my team of 4 star and personally I don't feel like there's much suffering to the daily grinds (especially if I don't even log in daily 😂) BUT we DO feel the gacha aspect when the story/event is related to the newly released character hahaha. When you don't get them on that banner/rerun, it definitely sucks for a moment 😅 Also if am enjoying Genshin without dread but you say Arknight and Nikke are even better, I might have to give one of them a try!
One of the things that gives gacha games a very bad reputation is that since 2014 when gacha games were only a niche thing, these games were notorious for having very short lifespans. I've seen tons of gacha games that didn't even last 2 years, and 2023 saw a ton of gacha games that didn't even last a year. Prior to that, I've seen only a few gachas not last more than a single year, like Grancrest War Quartet Conflict, AFTERL!FE, and The Last Summoner which only lasted 11 months. Terra Battle 2 only lasted 12 months exact.
I think a lot of the stigma that surrounds gacha games is due to how oversaturated and predatory the average gacha is. A lot of what makes people hate gacha is that they're always very formulaic. Most people tend to hate the monetization system because of inherent bad reputation it's aquired over the years and thus view all the gachas as the same cashgrab the next one is, but also a lot of it stems from that 95% of gacha games use overly sexualised characters and makes it very obvious it's just trying to sell you a hot anime waifu to make its money.
Personally, the reason why I like limbus so much is because it does neither of those 2 things and has actual diginity to not have snarky monetization systems, which is also a big reason as to why I love Projectmoon so much and can excuse the issues Limbus Company has at times
limbus company would still be better if it wasn't a gacha. It's good, for a gacha, but it's still held back by its need to be a live service and power progression is still shafted by being tied to how many pulls you've made and how many exp tickets you've grabbed. The game's forced to be easy because it's now marketed to the lowest common denominator, AND not everyone's going to have good IDs. If you got rid of everything that made it a gacha, it would litteraly just be a better game. (aka library of ruina.)
@@ihave2cowsThe thing is, limbus company is the game that is going to back ProjectMoon finacially. So honestly, for me the gacha elements of limbus is a necessary evil for the future games of ProjectMoon.
With the added plus of increased exposure, since ProjectMoon's games have always been a little more on the underated side of things
I still wish that the pass are redeemable without paid Lunacy, because not only that I wanted Sinclair announcer, I also want to redeem about 200 fragments box.
@@kirbypsicopata29 I understand why they did it, and like I said, its good for a gacha game, but it doesn't change anything I said. Game still would have been better if it wasn'ta gacha.
as an aside; I understand that this is going to be a hot take, and it's a little bit rude of me to not wish success to others, but I honestly would rather have the developers remain a small team focused on making quality games even if it takes longer periods of time than trying to expand and create more faster. The project moon universe as it is right now is so good because they've had a small, tightly knit team thus far. The worst things that have happened to the series happened because of outside influences and attention drawn from third parties. And the more the universe expands, the more we're going to have third parties coming in and watering down the quality.
take type moon for example. everything that was an original creation (not a remake) by nasu has been good, but the series has been hyper-inflated with a bunch of other authors that have made the quality of the series wildly inconsistent. It wouldn't be too much of a problem if these were all spinoffs, but everything in the fate universe is canon, and it seems with the introduction of mirror universes in project moon that its going to be following a similar route. And I would personally really rather not have that. That's not to mention the outsourcing they've done to other companies that resulted in the absolutely awful business practices of fgo itself either.
Like, dont get me wrong, Limbus Company is my ride or die right now, but I'm still worried about the future of project moon. Expansion isn't always a good thing, and we've already seen the consequences of pulling in outside attention. There's no guarantee that it's going to survive another scandal, or that it won't find itself in a position where they get investment from a shitty publisher like nexon or something.
@@ihave2cows yeah thats fair mate
i love arknights lore, but at this point its more than 2 bibles of text, i would need to stop my life to read everything
I heavily feel this, I haven't even read Chapter 12 yet, don't got the time.
The "more than 2 bibles of text" is actually not quite accurate, it's more text than 3 bibles according to a Tumblr user and that didn't include Module stories and the alternative game modes.
@@Tsunulhonestly didn't like chapter 11 but 12 was pretty good and didn't really drag for longer than it needed plus Kal'tsit didn't meet anyone to philosophy to so not munch on long winded dialogues.
@@shadymann9468 2 bibles was a rough estimative that i made some time ago, good to know that someone did the actual maths
@@shadymann9468and most of it is just water
Just thinking about it,
Gatcha isn't a genre, technically...
It's a sales strategy
The random pull system is designed to make you want to spend money
It doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the story
"It doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the story" Eh... yes and no. I can't say for other titles, but in Genshin Impact, a limited character's rerun is often tied to an event. For people like myself who's been playing at or close to the game's release, it's increasingly obvious that the devs prefer to use the game itself as a form of marketing, i.e. "Hey, check out this character in this new limited time event! Aren't they cool? Don't you want them in your collection since they're so cool?" This is how you get some characters who have 3 banner reruns in a calendar year while another barely gets more than a cameo for almost 2 (if you know, you know).
Whether or not event stories are as important as the game's main story will depend on who you ask (particularly regarding character lore), but depending on who your favorite character is, it can be immensely frustrating to have to wait _literal years_ to be able to add them to your collection, not because "it's simply not their turn yet" but rather because the devs couldn't find anything for them to do in-game.
Well.. the gacha mechanic itself might just be a sales strategy, but at this point "gacha games" is something a lot more than just a sales strategy because of all of the implicit game mechanics that you just expect to see in any gacha game. Every gacha game I've ever seen comes with things like a limited amount of energy per day, tons of daily and time limited quests, and you also expect character strength to scale nearly infinitely (not technically infinite, but the barrier for getting a "maxed out" character is so high that it's basically impossible to reach without shelling out ridiculous amounts of money). Those kinds of things have huge implications on the gameplay of a game, and while you could argue that you technically could have a gacha game that doesn't do those things.. in reality, gacha games basically always do those things.
idotic take
1. your game needs to release multiple characters every several months => not everyone is fleshed out
2. blatant fanservice storytelling - mutliple playable characters simping for MC for no reason
3. no deaths - because killing a playable character doesn't make $$$
and there are a lot more. gacha limits story extremely
@@thecolorgreen9022 it really depends on how the developers handle the game. it's more of a skill issue for the developers or the amount of effort the put in the game. As I have only been playing arknights I can only give examples using it.
1. Arknights releases characters which have been introduced years before in story while new character releases are accompanied by events that tells their story
2. Most characters joined the team not because of MC but because of their own agenda or their existing relationship with other characters.
3. One of the most beloved NPC in the game is dead and there are no rumors of her coming back as a playable character.
and lastly some of the popular characters in the game are the "free" ones.
@@thecolorgreen9022
Welp, guess i have to clarify
The Gatcha system doesn't have an impact on the *type* of story the game uses (horror, fantasy, sci-fi)
In this case, all the playable characters are friends but there's also literally nothing stopping developers to release villains and antagonists as characters. Hoyoverse just doesn't wanna
worse thing about gacha is not the gacha but the grinding, you're obliged to keep farming for progressing or building unit daily which makes it less of a game where you want to just login and have fun then stop whenever you want without needing to clear some obligatory mission everyday
You either pay with your money or pay with your time.
Yeah, it would be much better if for example you only had to play once weekly, like maybe a longer time than daily to compensate for not playing, but still not getting punished, I saw star rail is kinda doing it already with their battlepass and even easier dailys, literally just have to spend energy in auto mode and done, while genshin takes longer and im kinda tired, I thought with genshin updating the dailys it would be much closer to star rail ones but not completely, better for doing events or explore skipping dailys, but prefer star rail way of spending the energy that you would do anyways
@@asoret yeah mission where they want you to do something you wouldnt do normally when playing the game is the worse, i still have bad memory of genshin ballon escort and some mission dont have efficient portal placement so i still need to run to it, while some gacha daily can be completed by just playing the game normally
yeah, gachas stop being a game and turns into a chore if you plan to go F2P, you have to do all the boring daily and time limited sh*t because it's the only way to get the game's most valued currencies, if it was any other game, i just don't do the quests that i find boring, in Skyrim i chose not to do the barenziah quests, in GTA 4 I chose not to find all 100 pigeons, in Assassins Creed 1 i chose not to collect all 100 flags because they're boring but in gacha games, they usually lock the most valuable currencies behind the most boring ass quests and limited time quests even!
@@f.b.l.9813i played GTA 4 and AC they're not boring... Wwhhha whhatt??
Limbus is my favorite gacha, and admittedly I’m biased as someone who’s loved all of PM’s games, but it reminded me that gacha games, while definitely more susceptible to scummy and predatory practices, are just as able to tell good stories and have engaging gameplay as any other genre.
Everyone can have their own opinion on Limbus’ gameplay, but lmao at me insulting LoR by liking it. Truly a PM fans don’t read moment
@@keyboardtaskforcephi-3689 the three games have good and engaging gameplay wdym
@@ThirdKindredCuriambro i remember in ye olden times sseth wanted to review lobotomy corp but got filtered by the gameplay, lmfao
also for an adhd guy lob corp is a piece of cake
MINE EVERY DAY ALL DAY INSTEAD OF SPENDING MONEY
I would have loved to see that review@@axious9613
Let me remind you that Limbus Company is a gacha game made by a team of people with no prior experience making gacha games. Same with Library of Ruina and Lobotomy Corporation being a card game and a management simulator respectively. This is what makes them so unique in my opinion
I tried getting my friend into Limbus recently and described it as "a gacha game made by people who have never made a gacha before. In a good way." and I think there's some truth to it
I will say that the main reason why the last two games gameplay was good and actually felt balance is because they had a lot more time and a system to design around. Not to mention have time to grow it.
Most gachas to my knowledge focus on a system and do build around it but it’s mostly just linear growth ie power scaling. Most mechanics they do add is character based instead of system based.
Oh and PM’s favorite mechanic RNG doesn’t work as well to strategize around because of this
just the perks of a live service game it just ain't gonna change too much as that wud just be a different game entirely
Don't you get all the characters through the story in Limbus? You just get like non-canon "skins" of them through the gacha?
@@paledrake not at all. EVERYTHING in Limbus is canon, down to identities. You canonically get little cards of them out of Mephistopheles' engine that you put into your little window thing that transforms sinners in fighting
@@warmwater9509 Oh, well that sucks...
Me who enjoys F/GO gameplay: it's joever...
I simply tap on my silly little skills and use my silly little Noble Phantasms
you must really get to a higher plane when doing lotto farming I guess.
@@xLuis89x I do actually. Lotto farming is like a glorified fidget spinner to me, very relaxing to use my fingers while I watch a long video
Tbqh FGO gameplay(combat) can be quite fun. If only everything else in that game expect story wasn't straight from 2008
I came into Arknights for the edgy character designs but stayed for the amazing lore/story/worldbuilding/characters/music/gameplay. Arknights as a whole does nearly everything right when it comes to being an enjoyable game/IP. I'm a day 1 player and will definitely be a final day player.
I came for the waifus stayed for the gameplay.
Came for the curiosity, stay for lore,gameplay and characters
I do agree its music is great and with a great story and the dedication for us people to read is just astounding.
I mean Lone Trail literally sent us to the Skies above.
@@playingsometimes7290 Ill have to finish it someday, i had exams during the time it was out
I came for Genshin for the open-world, elemental action combat, music and some of the waifus, stayed for sunk cost fallacy and stockholm syndrome.
Sad to see the lack of acknowledgment for Punishing Gray Raven in the comments, that game is severely underrated!
Lack of advertisement, and also when less people know or play the game, people will have less motivation. Most people in this world do stuff or play things because it's "popular", not because it's to their liking.
iirc pgr had a very controversial launch reception. their bundle costs were uneven around regions and too high for beginner players. I heard they improved their pricings later on
Lets hope that wuthering waves will not drop dead soon after release and will bring attention to its developer and in turn to pgr. Kinda like genshin did to honkai 3.
Let Kuro rise as a game development studio, they deserve it.
I feel like the publisher stopped advertising Punishing Gray Raven after its initial release, I don't play the game and the only time I see any kind of advertisement for it was the 2 or 3 months before and after its release.
Yes it didn't got much advertisement, also some people like me love playing gacha on pc with emulators, but until they released the official pc version it took a lot, and the controls were pain there, also that this is a fair game without auto mode, asking you more to do things by yourself
We need more offlines after they close service like Megaman X Dive. Dragalia Lost is an example.
YES! I always say this 😭
Wtf there's a megaman gacha???
Metal Slug Attack Reloaded says hi.
@@OffTheRailGamingwas, megaman x dive as stated above, but it was closed beta, so when they released global they just made it offline
If you want offline game, at least paid games and not free games, i don't like offline free games, because the ads and in app purchase, i love offline game without in app purchase and ads like Terraria and Stardew Valley, they are perfect for me, for Minecraft Bedrock Edition, like little suffer by marketplace, but at least, i'm appreciate to Minecraft to same as Java version but sadly not full.
You forgot that Limbus Companies story isn't just build on two other games, but also 3 different sidestories of different style. We have Distortion Detective as more or less a book, we have Wonderlabs which is more like a colored manga/comicbook and we got Leviathan which is (mostly) a classic manga. Every entry into PM's lore is a different thing that all ties itself together and almost everyone playing Limbus Company is in it for the story.
There was game I played that wasn’t primarily a gacha since you could only gacha for cosmetics. It was called final fantasy first soldier and it was a great experience. Unfortunately the servers went down couple years ago because clearly it wasn’t valued as much by the developers as it was by the fans.
Yeah, sounds like a Square Enix gacha game... They kill those at the drop of a hat.
@@Tsunul they gave the game a nice old British Handshake
i'm think Identity V too, you just gacha for the skin. Especially with S skin in essence which is limited.
I was surprised you did not mention Limbus on the disconnection between gameplay and story, being the one where that disconnection is almost non-existent, I appreciate Project Moon keeping the trend they started on LobCorp where gameplay and story are connected and explained in-game
Like that's the bare minimum for any game outside of gachas
😂@@cosmefulanito5052
"Would you pay for your gachas?"
No, absolutely not. Because there is no way in hell i could afford that much. I do have money but its barely enough for me to live, the cost of living here is much lower making my money even less valuable, and also almost all my payment methods are disabled. So an opportunity to have so many great games available at my fingertips at the cost of missing out on a lot of collectibles... It is worth it, for a lot of such gachas. But if the game ain't good then frfr what the hell am i enduring this for?
As a side effect, trying to keep up with so many games and daily grinds drains my already limited time. It really just feels like work. And since there is no payment, it is a self-inflicted slavery. I'm tired boss...
I like good games. I don't mind gacha. I just hate the grind.
with all the time you spend trying to be F2P you could've just gotten over time and earned more money than you saved in gachas OR alternatively, just don't play gachas, it's an advice i wish i could easily apply to myself......
@@f.b.l.9813 at this point i specifically don't want to spend money on gachas, and i don't think i could even if i wanted to, considering all the sanctions and blocks... and i kinda stopped playing most of the gachas i tried, only limbus remaining because its a PM game, so i guess i did stop playing gachas... instead now i play MMOs and still grind them like a job lmao nothing changed
For me gacha games are a blessing. Most countries in Asia dont buy games in general, we only buy a device and just play games that are free. even if gacha is bad, im grateful to be able to just play the game and experience it for free. My parents dont allow me to buy games and only allow me to buy devices to use and thats even with the main reason is for school etc. Even if gacha games grinding felt like hell, the amount of cool stories and gameplay, hell even gacha games makes me think how to manage my currencies so i can actually maximize my acc and not destroy, basicly money management. Thats my opinion on gacha games
yea a lot of us here in Asia surprisingly do not get consoles or good pc's to even play games on.
where I came from, my family would always buy handhelds that have a ton of games on them, you know those 99 in 1 cartridges? yeah those, or handheld systems that allow downloads, like the PSP.
And yeezus christ, was my country basically a PSP piracy den back when the PSP released.
And you cannot go for second without hearing a bunch of people say "Tara, ML tayo" (meaning, Come on, let's play Mobile Legends)
Yeah speaks volumes that the mobile market is big here in Asia.
I'm a pretty loose spender in games I like and one of the many reasons is I know that there are a lot of people who actually cannot spend on games for one reason or another. It's literally an investment in the community for the game, especially since most of those same players are able to find out all the stuff I don't have time to learn and share it, saving me time and as a result money.
Still, though, that's no excuse for the game to be "bad". If the game is bad, it really is just either marketed to the wrong audience or inaccurately designed. Do not assume that just because you're "blessed" to get something for free, that it is justified to be low quality. Most of the games I love have far less financial and production support than many of the gacha games that I can't stand, it's simply a matter of design choices.
I honestly think that the market for gacha games expanded so rapidly the developers did not have the time to adjust. Over the next few years, I think they will come to satisfy many more types of gamers and as a result even become more consumer friendly. We can see they are already going in that direction in big ways with more console crossover and PC clients.
You do realize a freemium game doesn't need to be Pay2Win or have inherent advantages by whaling ? Just look at TF2 or Apex Legends
@@reyhan0447ah yes the average phone user in Asia who explicitly stated they only have a phone is going to play apex or tf2 on it. Surely you have good reading comprehension
I can see your point if view, if there was this market when I didn't have any console, but only a phone, gachas would've been a blessing
I still somehow survived on emulators, and when other big games like Minecraft and Terraria began getting ported, things started getting better, I was like 12 at the time so buying was a big no, but piracy was easy
I love arknights above all gacha games are for the fact that you could buy character costumes using in game premium currency pretty dirt cheap. I hate when a game sells a character skin that you need to use real money to buy, it's annoying.
My biggest issue with the genre is the commitment they ask from you. Log in every single day to do some repetitive task because if you don't you'll miss out, or to play menu simulator for a couple of minutes if the game has a sweep system, and frankly I don't know which is worse. On top of that, time limited events that you have to do *right now* even if you feel like playing something else, so the game no longer feels like leisure but some weird responsibility you've taken on. I absolutely loved Genshin, but day after day of dailies and artifact grinding burned me the hell out, and then the second GAA event came out right when I'd *finally* gotten around to starting Elden Ring and I didn't want to stop playing that. By the time I felt like playing Genshin again, it was just around Nahida's release and I realize after being inactive for so long I had basically nothing for her and that just completely discouraged me from going back. I've had that problem with a lot of gacha games I've tried, to the point where there's others that look super interesting (like PGR and Star Rail) but I stop myself from trying them because I'm afraid the same thing will just happen again.
At this point I stick completely with FGO and Arknights, and in the latter I've already been ignoring some time limited content (didn't even touch Reclamation Algorithm and Pinch Out). All I can say is that AK fortunately tends to make its most interesting content permanent eventually, and in FGO's case since I've been playing since the NA release I have such an absolute mountain of resources and apples that I don't feel bad about quickly rushing through events over a weekend and just letting my stamina sit there for most days.
One thing I think you didn't mention, btw. Gacha games tend to have massive balance issues, and I'm not talking about the power creep. Because the main game needs to be balanced around players being able to beat it with low rarity units and low grind, it can very quickly become horribly unexciting and downright boring to endgame players. I'll keep using Genshin as an example since I already brought it up (but Ak and most others seem to have the same issue to various degrees). My initial exploration of Monstadt and Liyue was full of excitement and tension, and many combat trials were genuinely challenging. But later on I had Ganyu and Zhongli and Raiden and a whole bunch of other strong characters, several of them kitted for the Abyss, and the high of the power trip quickly gave way to weary boredom. It's like an eternal paradox of wanting new characters because they seem cool, and knowing the game will get increasingly boring as my account gets more powerful.
I think this is one of the strengths of Honkai:Star Rail. Sure, with it's auto battle system its dailies are very much menu simulator. But it's also a turn based jRPG, and those things are Menu Simulator: The Genre. So at least it's catering to people who already like that.
yeah, gachas aren't fun video games in the long run, it feels like a job, a chore...
I want to go back to Arknights but sadly i missed out alot of things there and forgot alot of things 😥
@TonyDrake4 Don't worry about it its still newbie friendly, it have stage replay and every new event is a new mechanic, but not too new from the old ones like a variety of the existing one. The community is big enough that we have guide for clear (3star can still do it). (Just remember to follow the mechanic, I use old ops for new content the 5 star weird niche ops, use your brain a bit and youre ok to go) the non-limited ops are even more OP then limited one (Logos, Ascalon,...). Common 6 star is stronger than Rare 6 star (p.s 4 star ops are the strongest rarity in game kekw). We are given free ops that most of them is viable in endgame contents, some non free ops (need to gacha) are outright worst than free stuff (the irony). Except for Wisadel the recent limited most OP limited haven't come yet to GB or wait for a year till you see her again. FOMO in Arknights is like non-existence (except collab events that involve dying franchise like Ubisuck that have a possibility of never returning, cause Ubisoft is dying out). We have some Qol update too, although some questionable one like 6X max auto clear, lets face it this game is in Unity and live service at that, the code change will break the game still bettter than most gacha that almost never have Qol updates (FGO, Granblue). Theres more about Arknights I haven't listed yet but 90% of the contents are permanent after sometime so you don't miss out except collab or CC# (masochist mode). Not only do Arknights the 2nd and possibly Path to Nowhere the 3rd (haven't played this enough) ARE 2 tower defense rpg game that have diversity in strategy and are popular enough on the game market, the 1st one is Pop Cap PvZ games which is more pay to win than the above 2 gacha game (another irony). Don't worry, I fully know how predatory gacha is, after careful consideration Arknights is the most relaxing for casual. The lore are posted on a seperate web from fan contribution (I simp for the material designs in INVENTORY Tab and NPCs and armories in this game). Non-overly fanservice game contents, the skin that have skin reveal in Arknights in comparison with other gacha games look like a grown up that have a shit sense of adult dress code vs a sexual woman who hooked up a lot of guys.
@@Dragor33-rg7xj Ch'en got me in this game but couldn't really understand the mechanics since I never tried Tower Defence before. I remember someone once said to me that "only pull on limited banners not other ones"
One point that was missed was the music in some of these gachas are god tier. Genshin, PGR, Arknights all have great music.
@@leeroyjenkins3702 so true.
The main menu theme for Arknights, the Kether 3 battle theme in Library of Ruina and the battle themes in PGR are ASMR to me.
He didn't even mention how awesome and epic fgo music are
@@bencenagy5459.. LoR isnt a gacha.
I've said it before that FGO looks like a damn flash game from 2008. Shit is so low budget they apparently don't have the resources to spare to give animation updates to servants from the first year the game came out.
Where the game stands out are as you said, the story and its character designs both visually and writing wise.
The latter of which I'll talk about. Its got bits and pieces from all kinds of genres. Men and Women of every shape and size. You look at Artoria, Mecha Eli and Ivan the terrible and tell me they're from the same game. A knight, a mecha girl and a giant elephant man. Shit is wild.
It's one of the few gachas I've seen (although I don't play a ton) where the male characters receive enough attention that you can tell they were trying. Look at King Hassan and tell me that is not the baddest looking mofo you ever seen. He oozes bad assery. The men in FGO go from femboy to *MAN* and everything in between.
The female characters in the game vary a lot too. Like, yeah they're designed to be sexually appealing but they're not always trying to bang the MC. In most modern gacha it feels like all the girls are so down bad for the MC that they don't really care to do much else. In FGO, they still a lil down bad for the MC but their personalities vary from wacky, serious, silly, virtuous and so on. They're fun imo (Jalter is best girl. Fight me.)
That's partly why I still read it. That and as you said, the story is a banger. Anyway, that's my two sense.
I can say one benefit they have is being free to download, so you can try it out and delete if you didn't liked it. Another one is that they're still games that you can play for free despite all the gacha and monetization, many of people I know that never played any games or only played mobile ones tried genshin because it was more unique comparing to other mobile games and liked it. Yes you have to put lots and lots of work and salt to it, but for countries where games and consoles/gaming pcs are very expensive and not everyone can or want to afford it(or don't know/want to pirate), I'll say they're fine for casuals even if gachas are more predatory, and being free means they'll get more recognition comparing to full games because everyone can just download it for free, reason why genshin and something like among us became popular
On that note, recent "full" games that you pay for are also don't feel full now because of stuff like preorder bonuses that can kinda be counted as fomo, day 1 dlcs and cosmetics for money, ik people will say don't buy it if you don't want to,but it does feels like instead of having it in-game naturally, they rippef it off from the game and sell it separately so that they could get more money, you pay more than game's original price. Or game that ask you full price but it released in absolute garbage state
Btw my comment doesn't exactly praises gachas as someone who played both fullprice games and gachas, I still have plenty problems with it like how it's more time-consuming, all the predatory tactics like fomo, powercreep, ect., and i will always will prefer full games over gachas, just about them being accessible is one of their advantage, better of for worse. But I will also say that the state of full games(at least some aaa games, Nintendo does fine but they also do some dumb decisions) aren't exactly better, EA and Square showed it, and bazillion shovelware games that has audacity to charge money, and I think people should support indie or actually good devs that don't do anti-consumer practices like fromsoftware
The Sims 4 in a nutshell
My experience with these style of f2p games is that they start off by appearing to be more player friendly but then just gradually make it more and more unfriendly the further you get into the game until it becomes absolutely insufferable. It's happened so many times that I don't even bother trying them anymore personally. I pretty much see f2p games as a red flag at this point (unless the only thing you can buy are cosmetics) - I think I might actually be *less* inclined to try a f2p game personally, though I'm obviously in the minority about that.
Have to give FGO some credit when it come to the handling power creep, it probably the best on the list. In game like Genshin copies are essential while in FGO they are more of a luxury for most characters, not to mention that a lot of welfare or 3 stars are legitimately useful.
Since you play Azur Lane, you already "know" what the game's true source of income is.
It's definitely one of the few that can survive without a gacha system for a long time.
Dock space obviously
@@SouperRiskyyyfr 🔥🔥
pixiv artists
The market for cosmetics in gacha is alot smaller than those of convenience or competitive advantage. It's only a matter of time for them to fail. No idea what manjuu is thinking.
@@ganshrio7336 League of legends, a free game that lives essentially by people buying skins : ☠
Speaking of Lingering Echoes, it was the first event where I actually read the story even though I started late february last year in time for dororthy's event. Gotta say 10/10 first story, fucking bawled my eyes once I saw LE-8 before, after and the story episode after that
Lingering Echoes is straight up one of the best stories in Arknights.
i recommend trying Laterano one next (Guide Ahead)
several main characters - including semi-antagonist, a lot of religious and non-religious philosophy, great drama, exciting reveals and conflicts
i swear, some of AK events can literally be adapted into books or movies (like current movie adaptation of Lonetrail)
Kriede Noooooooooooooo!
FGO, the playable visual novel, with a shitass gacha system tacked to it. Man, I need to grind again today. Someone free me from this hell
Back into bond farming you go solider, that pity ain’t gonna save itself
the hell you walk into
-Archer
The Megaman gacha did what you described when it stopped being updated and apparently that worked pretty well
1 - There was a megaman gacha???
2 - "when it stopped being updated" good to know it worked prettyy well for a game that was already abandonned x)
@@kevinseraphin5456 It's called Mega Man X DIVE
Surprisingly good reception.
It has all 5 mainline Mega Man protags, including some side characters like Roll and some Bosses being playable like Leviathan from Mega Man Zero
Got into Limbus company 2 weeks ago, as a F2P the combat mechanic is fun and I got addicted to the story! But dang Fried chicken tho... and I can no longer eat a single apple ever again.
Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Counter Side, Brown Dust 2, Limbus Company, Reverse 1999, Arknights have well written story and lore imo.
Don’t forget girls frontline
Add Guardian Tales, it has good story and *ACTUAL* good gameplay. I like the small QTE sometimes, and in one stage you get to play something akin to a FPS.
Definitely one of the ore fun gacha games.
How about Punishing Gray Raven?
@@xenolad4943 Its pretty good too, but I can't keep up with the science fiction theme very well as I like a pinch of realism to it or some form of logic for it to work, but still better then a certain game that show us 2D waifus jiggle physics while shooting something. 😂
genshin could have a better lore if it wasn't poorly written
You make a lot of good points. For a long time now, I've been trying out new gacha games as they release and came to conclusions along the line of "This is actually a pretty good game, just not good enough to put up with the business model." And honestly, in that regard, all the daily missions and grinding etc are worse for me than the actual gacha/gambling. If they were games where characters are perfectly usable out of the gacha and pull currency is something that just passively accumulates on the account without the need to log on each day, so I only need to pay attention to them when I get an email notification about a new event/banner/whatever, I'd probably still be playing a whole lot more of them.
On whether I'd be paying for gacha games if they had like a subscription/expansion model, well, the above probably does a good job hinting at my answer. Yes, if doing so also cuts out a lot of the life service chaff. Probably not, if it means all I skip is having to pull from the gacha. Like, I don't play Genshin anymore, but just getting all the characters and then having to grind up the material and artifacts up for them sounds like an active punishment that'd make me quit the game all over again.
Which does bring me to Limbus Company, the only gacha game that ever made me spend money. (Of course, the amount of money I spend is way less than whales spend on gachas, so it's not like that's an achivement the industry would actually care about.) And the fact that it not only lets me get all the stuff, but also convert those shardboxes into thread to make sure I have to do less grinding to uptie whatever I want is a large part of it. A bigger part of it is that the lack of ascencion materials means there was less stuff to grind in the first place. Just Exp and Thread, clean and simple. (Although, I'd appreciate it if the season pass also gave EXP tickets, or something. Or, well, kept giving tickets once you hit "max" level. God knows, the level cap increasing each season is easily my most disliked aspect of the game and it can only get worse as I have to spread that EXP over more and more IDs if I want to use them outside of base MD. I can't imagine hitting a level spike each canto is improving the new player experience either.)
Man does this tempt me to get back into Genshin and Punishing Grey Raven after I've stopped playing them both for a good while.
Gachas worst part its the time sink if you are f2p, or just the dailies and weeklies, I want to play other games instead of wasting two hours a week in the mirror dungeon. I have almost 300 hrs in Limbus and I can only count the cantos and first railway as the only times I had real fun. I'm also afraid we'll have a situation like TypeMoon where everything other than the gacha is in development hell.
Actually blocked Limbus social accounts to detox, and they bring out my favorite ego Magic Bullet. I'm cursed.
I'm in a weird spot with Limbus. I hate thinking about doing mirror dungeon or doing my dailies but I don't really mind going though Simulated Universe in Star Rail and grinding other games. Mirror Dungeon and the Thread/EXP nodes just feels really bad to go though for me.
Personally i like playing the MD so cant talk too much about that part, tho i can easily understand since it takes time to finish (myself between 3-4 hours since i take it slow).
As for exp tickets if i need some for a setup for md or new ids i do them in background, runnin win rate and start from time to time while watching something or playing isaac etc. Tho there is the fact that im playing on pc so there is that too. Additional part is making a team that will be reasonably chill with win rating the highest exp lux. Currently writing this while i auto the 5.5 event d: . I guess there is also the fact that i can do same thing while typing on discord, watching vid, doing limbus exp and running arknights auto from time to time (tho uninstalled arknights 2nd time now since am not ultra into tower defense enough to play gatcha td).
> I'm also afraid we'll have a situation like TypeMoon where everything other than the gacha is in development hell
Bro, Type-Moon just released Fate Samurai Remnant some 3 months ago, a PC/sonsole action game. And FGO is now doing a collab event with it. And that is not mentioning the other ones that released only like 1-2 years ago like Tsukihime Remake and Melty Blood remake (now with additional FGO retcon to make the lore more consistent). And I'm not even including the anime adaptations (Fate Stay Night Heaven's Feel arc, FGO Babylonia adaptation, etc.) which aired WHILE FGO is in service.
Saying Type-Moon got hardstuck to committing to FGO alone is just straight up wrong. If anything, Project Moon is the one that hasn't released jackshit from the moment they launched Limbus Company.
Now that we know about the Ruina port to PS4 and Switch which just released, I think we can be confident that PM will be able to develop more content while also doing Limbus
How's limbus? Im a 1 day of player but it didn't hook me alos combat and story felt off so I'm lost what the hell is going on limbus company gams?
Not like it is really a "redemption" for being a gacha game, but I still want to bring out that Hypergryph (Arknights devs) use some of the money they got to make cool stuff for fans, like quality merch, badass live concerts, great music production overall, anime adaptation, weebs convention, etc.
They also use them to produce new games. So far we know about 3 new games from HG and only one of them is gacha.
Though the most coolest and important one is charity donation and help they doing. Wildlife protection, endeavors in education sector and help to those who suffered natural catastrophes are the most known ones.
Many do that actually, mihoyo made multiple schools everywhere and manjuu donated a ton to charity too, its just marketing afterall
Only if HG wasnt terrible ad budget management and actually worked on a single game instead of 4 others (you missed one btw)
@@kyarumomochi5146 Must be a pathetic live to hate arknights for no reason.
@@C1pher187 If you take this as hating then its even more pathetic
@@kyarumomochi5146 oh I have seen enough everything you says about arknights never good always has something to complain. Not just this video almost every other that is related to arknights video have you complaining. that is so pathetic.
@@C1pher187 Womp womp?
There was a free moblie game that, i assume, existed to mock gacha games. I can't remember it's gameplay too well, but pulling for strong characters was incredibly easy to do, and the gameplay loop was a compressed version of the average gacha gameplay.
It would, however, end up becoming a dress up/scene creator that would be infamous for spawning the most questionable of content.
Are you talking about Lunime games (they created Gacha Life, Gacha Studio, you know the drill)? That last part feels like a giveaway for me
Lumine games? Like gacha club and gacha life
Lunime peaked with Gacha World and that barely touched the bottom of the Mariana Trench
I fully agree with FGO. Gameplay is ass, gacha is ass, outdated UI, no auto mode, hell you can't even make a proper account yet i'm still playing that game 8 years later. Hard to recommend the game itself, to get people to try it i feel like you have to introduce them to the Nasuverse first then they'll come on their own.
Farming is so bad even the fanbase came up with FGA lmao
actually peak writing from tsunul?
For something like Arknights and a lot of other gacha game they have to be gachas. There is no other format that will be able to fund a live-service game with new events and side stories every month and a continuing main-story. There is no other (profitable) format of game available to tell a story like this.
It has suzuran😭
50%:Personal Experience
Everybody Else: LIMBUS COMPANYYYYYYYYYYYYY
Speaking of gacha games, anyone remember Dragalia Lost? Used to play that until the game basically died (back then, I got several limited edition crossover characters, including two Fire Emblem characters (I got Marth and Tiki), Mega Man, Rathalos, Fatalis, and Joker, Morgana, and Sophia (from Persona 5)).
Another point in Limbus Company's favor is that, unlike any other gacha I've seen, you only get a cast of 12 characters with different versions you can play.
So when a new unit gets released, the game doesn't have to cook up a whole backstory for you to get invested in. It's just an alternative version of the same weirdo you already know and love, just in a new light.
This makes for much tighter character writing and development and far less effort on the audiences part to keep track of everyone.
Aren't they also technically a non-canon alternate timeline version of those characters too? So story-wise you don't lose anything if you don't pull. Aka you don't need to feel pressured to pull for characters to keep up with the story because it's all not connected to the story being told anyway.
@@paledrake true
@@franciscoreza8295 I think that's the only reason why I might actually pick the game up after I finish LoR, because I can play the story and not give a F about the gacha shit.
There's a reason most gacha's die in a year and the ones that don't have a year worth of mediocre at best slop to get through before you get to play the good part, gacha games basically force devs to squeeze as much money as possible out of the game for the lowest possible cost at their beginning because the company that created them either can't or wont give the game and devs proper funding and expect it all to come from the playerbase. It's the same problems that most MMO's have except the company is literally gambling on people gambling, they're going to be made as cheaply as possible until the big bucks whales roll in because creating a gacha game with any kind of investment is an insanely massive risk most aren't willing to take without minimising the finnancial risk as much as humanly possible.
Thought I'd add my list of elements frequent in gacha games that have no relation to virtual gambling but are common anyway:
>abundant religious theming and nomenclature
>post-apocalyptic, dystopian, or otherwise crapsack world
>discrimination, often against the playable roster's in-group but not necessarily
>physically and mentally corrupting forces
>dark alter egos, often caused by aforementioned corrupting forces
>sci-fi or sci-fi influenced setting
great video!
tbh as a PM fan, ever since limbus company was announced and all the backlash that ensued after, I’ve been thinking a lot about gacha games as a model and how… good or not good they are.
for context, I wasn’t really one of those people who was upset over limbus being a gacha because I’ve been exposed to gachas my whole life. I’ve been playing lots of niche gacha games way before Genshin and even FGO were a thing. was an F2P in nearly all of them too, but not by choice, I was a dependent back then, and since most of those games were exclusively in Japanese app stores there’s no easy way to pay for app purchases as a non-Japanese resident. for the most part, those games were run-of-the-mill idol rhythm games (think Project Sekai but way easier haha).
So why would I play those games? It was very innocent reason: because they were technically free. I had rather stingy parents who weren’t into games, so asking them to buy me a console or PC or just any full-priced game in general was a challenge. Many full-priced games were too expensive in their eyes too. So allegedly “free” games were a great loophole for that. There were some other things that did draw me into the games, such as their great music or animations. In the end though, I could just quit them easily and vicariously live through other people’s playthroughs or uploads of the content in the game when the grind got too stressful for me, so the FOMO wasn’t so bad for me. Of course, I feel like with games with a lot more story or gameplay content to offer, the FOMO can get real.
I think part of why gacha is successful now is because it’s highly successful in Japan (and some other Asian counties, but Japan is the root of gacha I believe). In a western perspective, gacha is divisive because gambling is often seen as an awful, potentially life-ruining thing. But in some asian countries, especially Japan, gambling is seen as “normal”. I mean look at the horse race betting and pachinko machines there; gambling is like an everyday thing for the average Japanese man. The massive success gacha has in Japan has led others to attempt to use the model in other markets, but of course that’s a hit-or-miss unless something in the game is just that good, like you said. Being released in global did not work for one of my favorite run-of-the-mill gacha games, A3!, because admittedly it was pretty barebones as a game and even though I liked the story, it’s not like the bestest or most thought-provoking story ever, so it ended global service early while the Japanese server remains strong today (and that also explains the presence of a ton of successful Japanese gacha games that have little to no hope of a global release).
Overall, I understand that gacha is a bad model for consumers. I do get stressed out by the daily grind at times and it sucks. It is obvious that it is ridiculously lucrative for developers, so unless massive intervention is done, gacha games will still exist. Honestly though, I have to say that I wouldn’t be into games as much if it weren’t for gacha games, which is both a blessing and a curse in my perspective hahaha
I got into Arknights thanks to the music they made and upload.
I just love the music they put out and many styles too!.
Arknights is the first and only Gacha game I play since I have the same thinking you said on the video about arknights.
also for me I hade NO idea what a Gacha game was and I was thinking Arknights was a simple mobile game with ads and things like that like the other mobile games.... oh boy.. I was so wrong but in a good way. then I did find out what a Gacha game was hahah.
"They don't have femboys" made me cackle like an idiot when I saw Lithos from PGR lol
i think one of the big factors to why gacha games are still played by a lot of people even though the genre itself sucks is because they are actively updating and this makes the game's community be very active aswell.
No its mainly because they are free and many people have gambling addictions even when they are f2ps
There are countless gacha games that hardly get updates and still has tons of players
@@kyarumomochi5146 you'd know if you've ever played a game that announced they would be entering maintenance mode or a date for eos. ive been through more than half a dozen already, dragalia, dffoo and brave frontier to name a few, and the story repeated itself every time. the player base drops to like 20-10% of its former total from one day to another. people just stop caring once they know there wont be any more updates again. you can see the same phenomenon of active game updates = active community = active players in mmorpg games too, and they (usually) dont have heavy gambling elements as the main thing. ff xiv for example has a community that is very similar to any gacha community out there, and incredibly there are still people playing wow to this day, they dont seem to be able to quit at all.
@@czsgenesis The thing is gachas main monetization is to appeal to hyper whales that will keep paying even at the last seconds of the game, its one of the reasons why its such a Succesful market anyway
Also i had seen countless EOS games that still got revenue even when eos was announced to come, people are extremely wild these days man
@@kyarumomochi5146 Actually, I'm curious. Drop me the game names and its player counts. I need some few to try.
Outside of gambling players, this is true.
Updates make new characters which feeds comic market which feeds the community.
Also new characters usually means new playstyle or new shiny collection to look at.
Meanwhile people aren't only playing for the game. Maybe for the story or music alone. Other maybe because it jogs their managerial sense which explains why play a bad game and put effort in the "passive" activities. Other to keep up with the market preferences. Other for social aspect it brings. Or people want games they want to play at commute or secretly at work for keeping morale up.
I know it's gambling that fuels this game and their main audience, but damn people are really diverse out there. Also people are smart enough to make up reasons that weren't the case before.
No matter what gacha game I played, I always experience these 3 problems from them. They are incredibly demanding, sometimes inconsistent with stories, and I am not a fan of gacha games. But, despite that I did enjoyed Arknights for a while until I got tired of it.
I've been playing Genshin for more than 700 hours since I started over a year ago on mobile, and everyday there's always something to look forward to, the rewards are way more generous than you think. Playing for the first couple hours, I feel baffled knowing that it's a free game. And so far it's only taking 28++ GB of my storage. The communities suck toes tho.
@@rmp.attackerfake9446 what activities in genshin you would still doing if it dont give you anything like primo, mora, exp, materials, etc.
I think you said it best about PGR and why I love action games gacha games with multiple version of a characters Honkai Impact 3rd
The characters growth is not just in the writing but also in gameplay, having multiple characters show how they matured thorough the years like the devs telling the story with the how the characters fight
Early Kiana gameplay is brash and inexperience but the lastest version of her is elegant while still being playful Kiana
Early Lucia is plain and robotic but her newest version is cheerful and confident
I play Limbus, being a PM fan, but the gameplay is still in the process of getting there. The recent IDs and MD3 are convincing me they are getting there, though.
I think it is a matter of perspective. The common stereotype is that Gacha games are predatory in nature due to microtransactions found within. However, the Gacha, in my opinion, is good if the game can be enjoyed by a F2P
After playing a lot of gacha games over my time, I’ve come to realize a big component of me enjoying a gacha…
No PvP. PvP pushes pay to win, cheesy/auto gameplay, and other issues that make the game sink into a cash grab.
Just some food for thought!
agreed pvp sucks ass seeing your team gets humiliated 10 times in row are the worst
those who love it is a whale, have too much time or a masochist
i hate counter side for doin this making the limited pull currency with pvp currency like in arknight green ticket shop u can unlock more shop even further back of the shop making me grind more and gets even more humiliated even then u need to do atleast 6 win or 12 loss just to get basiclly daily currency for the extra limited currency not only its fukin grindy its fukin iritating because its pvp u cant even skip
then bluearchive has pvp im so damn gratefull its so limited on how much u need to interact with the pvp
Oddly i could play pvp game like PUBG or Sim racing casually. Meaning just playing 2 hours once a week, having fun, and dont think it outside game. Meanwhile in gacha even if its non PVP, i have to remind myself to do dailies, strategizing where to spend stamina, who to built, what day i can farm certain materials.
@@Rcck.7282 that’s because in competitive games, you compare your skill level per game. In a gacha, PvP is straight up how much you grind and pay for most games
I feel like im the only person who enjoys pvp and online content even as f2p the games feel lonely without that community aspect imo
One huge counterargument.
gacha games are expensive as fuck to maintain.
graphics designers, developers, artists, musicians, voice actors, hiring these people cost money.
Also, it's well known that a while after release, the popularity of the games will wane. Hard.
There's a reason why gachas end of service all the time.
Often, the gacha model is the only reason why a game gets to survive for a long time, and gets to tell a very long story. Many gacha games have good stories, this isn't a coincidence. The gacha format's inherent length allows for more time for exposition and adding more details, as well as more lore and, as the characters are literally the focus of the game, rewards great character writing. This allows the writers to really go ham with the stories and worldbuilding, which isn't really an option in single purchase games even with dlcs or most other live service models due to the cost issue.
Project Moon changed to a gacha from releasing normal games for a reason.
Counter argument for that counter argument.
Gacha games generally don't release in a complete or fulfilling state. They have enough content for some characters and story but add on to it over time which will be funded during the first few months of gambling. It's a live service practice that removes a lot of development costs most non gacha games deal with because they need to release in a completed state unlike gacha games.
Short term artist and VA work isn't that high either. Gacha games generally reuse images and don't use a lot of audio recordings for the story (there are some exceptions but this also applies mainly to visual novel styled stories in games).
Most gacha games end due to being low quality cash grabs. FGO being an exception because it did start off REALLY bad but survived due to the pre-established and loyal fanbase. Gacha games also are predatory by nature due to FOMO practices and gambling which help prolong their existence rather than being super high quality from the start.
According to some people (I'm too lazy to confirm this info)
Genshin Impact is an abnormally high production cost gacha game and it was estimated to be around 150 million usd which it made back within a month or two and the extra funds went into future content and now future games like "star rail" and "ZZZ". Elden Ring was mid to low production and it cost around 200m. Now imagine how little most other gacha games would cost compared to Genshin. Also imagine how much Elden Ring's cost compared to a AAA game. This also shows each game should be looked at individually and not generalized which we both did. If you want more concrete info to go off of try researching some games yourself like "ZZZ" and "Black Myth: Wukong" or other games.
Personally, I found most gacha game's stories and worldbuilding not very engaging. All MiHoYo games I disliked and while I did enjoy Arknights' story it's just not concise so I end up not reading its story too after a while due to not respecting my time. FGO is a very mixed bag as there are some good writing but also really bad ones. I recently tried Nikke but I can't take it seriously due to the fanservice and Granblue Fantasy tries to be too safe in the writing so it doesn't feel unique. I have a lot more examples but generally I can't care enough which is my main point. This is also very subjective.
@@nadaburner i relieved that some gamers with a good critical thinking like you exist. Bec trust me, there will be always someone who counter argument about how predatory the gacha game is. Someone like you is mostly the one who wake them up. I cant blame them, they probably someone who waste too much time or too much money on the game. So what they will do when they realize they are wrong, when they already sacrifice too much money or time for that game. Justification.
I like how you mentioned everything about Arknights except of soundtrack that you used through almost the whole video
11:20 Yeah, can confirm that it’s hella ass, even moreso considering I made a whole planner for banners for this damn game (but that’s just insanity + dedication to Gilgamesh on my part lol).
There’s a lot I can trash FGO on for, from the gacha rates, lack of QoL in general, ass early story + early interludes, lack of animation updates for earlier servants, or even *not having a goddamn account bind system*-the list is goddamn **endless**. But as you said later on in the video, the main reason why people continue to play the game is for the story, whether it’s the main story or the event story (of course there’s also the characters, but that also sort of interwoven with the story-adjacent part too + with how they’re characterized).
Most people’s favorite Lostbelt in the game is Lostbelt 6, which is *absolutely* understandable, the story and the characters are peak, especially Oberon. But for me, my personal favorite is Lostbelt 1 for multitudes of reasons. Without doing a *whole* deep dive into why I love it so much now since spoilers (of course), it sets up the reality and danger that Guda is in now and hits us with the realization that “Oh. Oh god *this* is what we have to deal with now?”. But hits me the most in that LB is two specific characters and how they’re portrayed in it *because* of the history behind them-one has a history of a previous Fate IP and the other in irl history. The latter one hits me so much harder because it’s one of the very few portrayals of them that truly understands who they were in life in relation to another character and gives them proper *justice*. Again, it’s one of those thing where I would go in-depth if it wasn’t for spoilers.
But that also brings up one of the other reasons as to why I (and some people) continue to play the game-the *characters*. If there’s one thing that Fate has over other gachas (and other medias with historical characters), it’s how much they shine light to so many different historical figures in history, even despite the oddities and weirdness with some of them combined with the fact that FGO has a bias towards adding Japanese historical figures (since y’know, JP based game lol). There’s a lot of people that I would’ve never heard of in my lifetime if it wasn’t for this game, and with some of them it got me interested enough to look up their history. There’s a lot I can say about this game in general but it’s getting into ramble territory now lol
Tl;dr: Fate fan makes an essay on why they’re not completely insane for continuing to play this damn game as their first actual comment on this channel LMAO
Thanks for giving me a reason to tell my friends that literally will kill me if they see me play Limbus a reason why how I actually play for the story and not the femboys. I appreciate it!
Hong lu and sinclair 🤨🤨🤨
I dunno if you read these comments, but if you have the time, it would be interesting to see a deep dive on the Uma Musume boom.
It's often written off on the western side of the globe because of both its over the top premise and gacha nature, but it's still earned 2 billion dollars in mobile game revenue alone and not only is being endorsed by the horse racing associations of Japan, but it also has an actively enforced anti rule-34 stance for its IP (so no pron allowed) despite coming out Feb 2021, so I think it's worth looking into for a video.
Uma Musume was something that always caught me by surprise. I don't really know how it got so popular. Not saying its undeserving of its popularity but since we don't got it in the west I was always curious why it blew up in Japan.
The thing about gacha is they rack in a lot of cash. So it can create a paradoxical puzzle here. The game might not be as good without all that cash flow to make it good. So while a good gacha game may be good despite being gacha it also wouldn’t be good or as good without that gacha.
Because 99.99% of the "game" is doing daily tasks to earn gacha currency and wait for character you want and then get them with 100% guarantee and then repeat which actually boils down to incredibly grindy game that virtually forces you to grind everyday due to resources, including points allowing you to farm, being timegated and having a cap, you can't just login on sunday and farm for a week's worth, you need to login everyday or you miss out.
And of course, if you spend any money it costs hundreds of dollars.
Funny how you mentioned destiny 2 xD. On the other side of the spectrum, there is warframe, another f2p which it's premium system is one the most healthy ones I've seen. Althought it's not a gacha, it's 10 years and still ongoing lifespan shows that this kind of old f2p system still works and respect the player's time even more
1:01 Who is the character in the middle.
I think the question is would the game be objectively better without Gacha elements. The answer is always yes
A game without RNG being better is subjective.
You can say the same about "Gacha", meaning RNG elements for stuff like RPG's and even the original Gacha, card games.
I wouldn't want my game of YGO or Pokemon where every match is uniform, the same factory made progression, the same factory made outcome.
I disagree. I love genshins gacha elements and it makes getting characters very rewarding. The only instance in which I would want it to be gacha free is if it wasn’t a live service game, but gacha as a whole doesn’t really work well in non live service games.
@@abombernation3254 Gambling addicts do tend to find winning rewarding
@@InFiNiTeO7 ''I wouldn't want my game of YGO or Pokemon where every match is uniform, the same factory made progression, the same factory made outcome.''
But it is, once they know the best decks for the current meta, it would be repeated in most of the matches to absurdity
Based take, honestly I play Arknights, reverse 1999 and limbus but I would love for them to be « real » games and not gacha.
Only limbus makes me feel like I’m not missing on anything by not paying huge sums
Yeah. I whish there was no gacha involt in Reverse. But so far the gatcha sistem seems veary forgiving, the stories are good (main story, event storeis), lovable characters, and the devs so far seem to care about both the game and it's community.
It would be nice if it was a more normal game, but then I don't know if we still would get to have the events, and the characters who are not in the mainstory.
Sorry if I sounded stupid.
I started playing limbus today, I'm literally confused it and banner it shows paid 😦😯
@@compact6038 you can do a single pull per day with paid lunacy, the rest of the pulls are with in game ressource.
@@compact6038oh that,they make sorting the currency for some reason,once being free and one being paid currency..
i think you already know this because it already 3 week
I'm late to the party here - great video! - but I think AK also deserves a shout out for the music. I noticed the backing music for this half hour video is AK tracks.
I've also thought it's interesting whether the design of a game can make the RNG nature of gacha a strength. In AK new players will have very different experiences with the gameplay just off of who they pull early. Strategies have to be created to fit your available team. It takes having a very deep roster and a lot of diversity while having every character be useful, but I think they pull that off - over 300 characters and 65 subclasses.
Recently, devil may cry: peak of combat released and I wanted to try it out, because I had never played a dmc game before. It turned out to be a gacha game, in which I spent a whole 2 hours clicking on menus to collect rewards and around 30 minutes actually doing combat(which is very clunky, for some reason). I think that the pressure from upper management to make a game that will make infinite profits stops the developers from making a game that is actually fun.
I think FGO plays like this: If you can get to Camelot and read it, the game gets your attention, so you reach Babylonia and the game binds your soul to it. I swear, i was not that into FGO when i started, but the moment i got to Babylonia i was done.
I've NEVER liked or even PLAYED a single visual novel in my entire life, and i hate reading a shit ton of dialogue in between gameplay cause i think it breaks the pacing, but in FGO? I WAS THERE INVESTED AS FUCK, TAKING MY TIME TO READ EVERYTHING, IT'S JUST TOO GOOD!!!
Also was the moment i fell in love with a fictional character for the first time in my 21 years of being a weeb, Ereshkigal is just majestic.
For me, the only dominant factor is the story and the characters. Any gacha gameplay, even if it is innovative, tires in the long run, what keeps me going is the interest in reading, I think of them as visual novels with gameplay. That's why I only play Path to Nowhere and Limbus Company, they're phenomenal from that point of view.
I love Arknight, but sometime the story can get abit long. so most of the time i go to youtube for a summary of the current event , the only event i read in game are lonetrail and originium dust
People think FGO is some waifu gacha game but it turn out to be first and foremost, a VISUAL NOVEL. With turn-based combat attached on it. On live service.
Which is funny considering Fate/Stay Night was being delivered as an eroge and people think they get hardcore seggs and naked women everywhere. Turns out it's an epic gamebook with audio and still images.
0:45
idk why but nikke was the last gacha i was expecting from you
but cultured nonetheless
I tried it out in the past, wasn't fully my cup of tea. Thing is tho, when I answered the interview I didn't read how it said "in the past month" lol
The biggest downside to gacha is if the game dies, that's it. I wish they could just make it into an offline game when it comes to that point.
FGO supposed to end with Part 1 but since fans wanted more of FGO, Nasu (the author of Fate/stay night) decided to continue on writing more chapters and other improvement to the games in general as years progresses.
Being a fans of a gacha that barely makes any money compared to the one you mentioned, I think a gacha business model might be a necessary for the dev. The dev I follow seemingly want to use video games mainly as a storytelling medium. If playing a console/premium game for the story is comparable to watching a feature length film, playing a live service game is comparable to following an ongoing TV series, you get more content from live service/TV series and they tend to have more active community.
On the dev side, running a live service game will have less upfront cost than developing a premium games (especially AAA titles, in which some upcoming gachas seem trying to reach that level of production quality), they have room and continuous funding to add more content, etc. If the dev I'm following were an "idealist" who insist on only making premium games, they were likely can only make 10 hours worth of play time every 4-5 years, that is if they don't went bankrupt first.
Story? what story, when you play FGO on JP server and can't even properly read japanese. Let be honest, the only thing that keep FGO alive is the IP (and also the uncensored arts: hmmm summer Kama...). the Fate IP is such juggernaut that despite having one of the lowest production value of the presented in the video, it has one of the highest revenue (second only to Genshin for the games presented in the video). Gameplay wise, back in the time I was still playing FGO, it was so simple that basically anyone could be a theorycrafter (which is a pro for me).
What I like the most about Genshin isn't the exploration of the open world itself or the lore (I really don't give a crap about lore in games most the time) but rather the level of polish and the childish and bittersweet atmosphere that the developers managed to recreate in the openworld (a bit like the classical fairy tales).
How many arknights song you want in the video?
Tsunul: Yes
Focus on the tip of my sinclair man talks about gacha games that they have played
Gacha is a revenue model more than a 'proper' genre tbh. Many of the smaller games are, well, tower defense or very bare-bones mobile RPGs. It doesn't have to be like that though - certainly Genshin and Star Rail are, like, actual games. You can explore in Genshin as a standard open world action-RPG with minimal interaction with the slot machine, for instance.
if u want to ask how long fgo lore is
out of the 8 base story chapters the shortest one is speedran into a movie, a normal one is speedran into 2 movies and the longest one is a 24 episode well made anime series
thats not counting the other 16 main story chapters(SOME ARE LONGER THAN SAID ANIME) dozens of events and for god knows how many characters's personal stories which all take up between 3-45 minutes, fgo is probably the largest when it comes to story without a competition in sight
Genuinely if half of these games were actual RPGs/Strat games, Fans would be multiplying like crazy
Gacha as a genre and term is like a fuckin anchor for half these games, and the fact that stuff like animation and other non gacha games connected to these titles can be the best the story and company can offer shows that
Tldr: Gambling as a gameplay method sucks ass and we need more shit like Fate Samurai Remnant and Arknights the Anime
Developers are in the business of making money, not fans. Gacha is simply the most profitable and stable monetization, these games wouldn't even be made without gacha. Also, Genshin is probably one of the most popular game ever.
I would pay 20$ to play a mobile game. Honkai with all the characters unlockable through progression could easily be full price off the bat.
My favorite game is Reverse 1999 because it feels unlike any game I have played. I hate anything too anime, so I was very happy that Reverse 1999 took a more artistic and sophisticated art style instead of the oversaturated anime style. Would you say that Reverse 1999 deserves the title of a good gacha game aside from its gorgeous aesthetics?
Oh yeah most definitely, I did a review of it. Reverse 1999 cooks.
@@Tsunul I recently watched your review, and it was absolutely amazing. Could you please review the game again soon? Version 1.3 looks incredible
Bruh, I saw Isabel from Revived Witch and I kid you not, a bit of sadness came over me.
Well the thing is because its a gacha they get rewarded for making big updates/content and keeping games alive. More players means more Engagement in generall thus more revenue. In nature gachas are somewhat predatory but the monetization is the reason they keep going as hard as they can (not talking about these quick money grab gachas)
you can say gameplay is good in a gacha when you don't wanna tap the "AUTO" button.
and when grinding don't stall your progression in the story (like NIKKE)
Or when your rate for geting a character is so insuferable small you feel like you born by a very bad star (FGO) or when grinding is so, so, sooooo bad you start to reconsider your life choices (FGO, Priconne, Blue Archive, Arknights)
there's a lot of reasons to hate or question gachas, a lot of reasons to like gachas, and because of that balance, you will NOT see any changes about this genre, gachas are part of gaming "ecosistem" and are to stay. as much as i hate or like it, it's a complex topic. there's pros and cons, but it's up to the individual to choose walking on this path.
Bingo it’s a chosen hell. It’s kinda crazy because I swear the biggest streams are the viewer pulls for gacha . Some of us are aware that we are participating in a form of gambling , so it’s easier to take an “ L”, but for-serial , when people don’t get that summon/recruit/etc it’s a bad game
@@Duderock007 i call gachas are bad in a daily basis, i still play some of them regardless of my luck. if the problem with gachas are only how lucky or unlucky one can be with the pulls, you are just a crybaby.
@@F0xdash once again it’s a hell
People choose , I accept the fact I won’t get a character, just got my first five stars in an eleven pull in FGO last GSSR I had a copy already and the other one was meh .
It is what it is , I’m just clarifying some continue to play gachas and it’s either rain or shine depending on their pulls
Some content creators joke around about how you should be of legal age to play gachas due to the fact kiddos lose their minds over not getting a character .
FGO remains the baseline of shit rates and least QOL
Arknights player: NOOOO what do you mean we don't have sweep after X years trash qol changes (please ignore annihilation being sweep)
My brother in sui siblings we've had auto deploy since day 1 and only have 2 potions per week, fgo is stuck at manually doing everything AND and you get dozens of apples per month. Keeping my phone on while watching youtube videos is such an insurmontable effort fr fr.
I'm thankful i don't spend in fgo i can easily imagine how painful it must be for whales to upgrade all the units they get from the extra pulls, that grind takes *days* off your life, not hours, with every new event, it's that bad.
@@pougetguillaume4632 Actually the maxing characters part is the easiest of any gacha i've played, so much so that when i get a new servant i can simply max it in less than 1 hour. Now, events on the other hand yes those are grindy, lotteries are especially bad.. game needs an auto mode really badly.
@@Kumire_921especially for player's who's already finished ascending all servants they already own, it's make it so you have lots of exp fodder once another lotto comes out
The talk of gacha games with the gacha removed kinda reminds me of Midnight Suns-which has several things that make it feel like it was supposed to be a gacha (a half dozen different currencies, 2 types of loot boxes, relationship values tied to leveling up heroes) before they switched to just being standard 'game+expansion' monetization at the last moment.
I've got a few games I follow and think to myself, "this would have been great as a stand alone cartridge or something" but the ability to drip feed content and story over time is a lot more interesting to me than I expected. I would love to see more games get a treatment like Mega Man X Dive Offline where they bundle the content into a stand alone package after the game goes offline, just because I hate seeing games disappear.
The reason I will never play a gacha game is because, no matter how fun it is at their core they are still a product that is trying to make money, which on paper im not opposed to. Give me one of these games that has a really good story and fun (if simplistic) gameplay and charge me 30, 40, 50 bucks for it and ill buy it. I dont like the whole "its free to play! but not really, give us as much money as you are willing". There comes a point in all of these games where they do everything legally in their power to entice you to spend an indeterminate amount of money on them, a lot of them being gambling addiction tactics because its so easy right? Just one more dollar, just one more roll, that super awesome OP 5 star character is right there, go get her! Not realizing in 3 months you have spent several hundred dollars on this "free" game like its bleeding you dry one tiny paper cut at a time. And you know, in a few years when the game is no longer profitable and they shut down the servers and you lose access to everything you purchased who cares, right?
This was a surprisingly well put-together video. I was just expecting jokes, not actual insight.
which is why me and my brother are sticking with offline single player console games cause 1) they don't need internet to play and 2) everything you need to progress and beat the game is in the game itself; all you need is are tiny bit of luck and the most important one: SKILL.
Even if people paid for these game as normal full priced games, in the long run gacha/f2p is more profitable and makes it easier to reach a wider audience. Better for both the company, and the games, as there are more funds to invest further into the games. I doubt games like Genshin would be able to keep up with their tight update schedule with another monetization system, and we also can not forget about the massive material promoted by these companies (from fanworks to IRL events).
IMO Gachas games are the natural evolution of MMOs, epecially the F2P ones, and compared to those, they are significantly better, due to actually having constant updates/ I can see where the money is going. Thats why I rather pay for stuff in Genshin than Warframe, even though the latter has a better monetization system.
20:41 background music name please
Non-gacha player here who played Arknights and PGR on the strength of their gameplay. I've since fallen off both games, and while I have overall fonder memories of Arknights, PGR is the game that I *desperately* wish there was a fifty dollar PC game I could just play.
What I think is funny with AK is the recent 4.5 anniversary for global had a banner with Viviana and virtuosa, two very anticipated characters in NPC jail. On release, Viviana was trashed on and people really did not like her as a unit compared to her NPC version
from what I have seen is because her kit is dissapointing, considering how strong she was in the story, it's like releasing patriot and somehow making him weaker than mudrock
1:46 how very dare you, Ideal City was such a fun read
i actually enjoy the grindy parts of games, so azur lane is my favourite one, it also helps that cubes aren't hard to collect, while UR characters are released with enough time between each new one, so you can save up on cubes and not have to actually spend money for them, + i like the story
I'm so glad I started playing Limbus Company. I love everything about it.
This is why I'm actually glad Granblue is making a full fledge jrpg or other genre like vs. Being 7 years slave to grind is kinda tiring even the game is very generous. 😂
The funny thing is PGR basically wipes the floor with every other game in this video, simply for the fact that its gacha aspect ruins it the least. In order to get every single new character, all you have to do is play the game for 5 minutes every day and do weeklies on three days. Also, not a gacha specific thing, but you can blaze through the story so fast if you're a new player. Just get three A-rank characters to max which at most might take like 2 weeks and you're done. The biggest hurdle in PGRs story are arguably the first couple chapters rather than any level requirements.
is there a list of a 1 time buy game? and what are the problems with 70-100 dollar games?
Tbh, in Limbus you can just ignore gacha at all. PMs made economic in their game very loyal even to full f2p players, but if you buy battlepass, then you will get stupidly large amount of shards selectors. Players with bp can buy anything from dispenser without any trouble and completely ignor gacha system (until Walpurgis Night)
The same can be said for gacha like genshin and star rail. If you ignore 1 thing, even with just f2p you can clear all contents. But if you want to full star abyss or moc then prepare for a massive grind or multiples carefully planned purchases, sometimes both.
@@anhduc0913 yeeh genshin felt like... you are punished for wanting little less or little more from the game, with me frankly just quitting it after finishing sumeru and realizing how much of a pain it is
@@anhduc0913 I think the difference is in limbus you can easily get every unit in the game without rolling the gacha, not that you can do everything in game with base units (which you can't at a certain point). So you aren't gated off from using the cool new units, since you can get them for free the second they're released. It's also helped by the fact that PM just throws free currency at the player.
gacha games are content farms, they copy and clone each other and offer little to no new things to the gaming industry. In fact, I'd argue it ruined the gaming industry.
The problem is not the gambling system per se, it is how much the games makes you regret not having a character, a good example of this is Genshin, like, the abyss is always aimed toward the newly released characters and the game literally creates an artificial dread toward characters:"If you don't pull now who knows when there will be a rerun", while other games like Arknights deal with this much better making all the content playable with 3/4 stars and with support units, hell, even Nikke has a better system where units are pulled into standard banner and wishlisted, the idea of a character in a video game being irreperible because of a banner system is literally one of the most predatory system out there.
Another thing to consider is how much the game wants you so suffer with daily grinds, and even here Genshin doesn't sit well with the fact that dailies are a separate thing from the artifact loop and that you have to do stages every time to earn rewards, for god sake, raid functions or autoplay should be a norm.
I'm probably too casual as I just play with my friends who also don't have time and energy to keep up with the community and their feedback amidst more important irl work to do
But yeah it's always interesting how different experiences can be for playing the same game! I don't touch the abyss and really don't think I've done artifact domains more than 4 times every month. From this perspective everything's playable with my team of 4 star and personally I don't feel like there's much suffering to the daily grinds (especially if I don't even log in daily 😂)
BUT we DO feel the gacha aspect when the story/event is related to the newly released character hahaha. When you don't get them on that banner/rerun, it definitely sucks for a moment 😅
Also if am enjoying Genshin without dread but you say Arknight and Nikke are even better, I might have to give one of them a try!
One of the things that gives gacha games a very bad reputation is that since 2014 when gacha games were only a niche thing, these games were notorious for having very short lifespans. I've seen tons of gacha games that didn't even last 2 years, and 2023 saw a ton of gacha games that didn't even last a year. Prior to that, I've seen only a few gachas not last more than a single year, like Grancrest War Quartet Conflict, AFTERL!FE, and The Last Summoner which only lasted 11 months. Terra Battle 2 only lasted 12 months exact.