Sometimes I think about gacha games and experience emotions previously thought only known to cosmic horror protagonists
Made the mistake of scrolling the hellsite again and saw another incredibly stilted update announcement tweet from some gacha, complete with the awkward and forced nickname for the players, the overdrawn splash art for some dude I don't recognize, and an end date for whatever banner it was advertising before it was seemingly even live, and like.
I'm not kidding when I say it genuinely drives me insane thinking about how I've landed in a timeline where it is considered Normal and Okay that there's a significant chunk of video games as an industry now where the product is just 'throw infinite money down a hole to see what RNG spits out at you so you can maybe get incremental gains at a game you don't really like playing that much and a jpg to look at'.
And people will be proud about it too!! You can't fucking follow artists anymore without seeing like 10 Arknights or Blarchive pulls in between every piece they make. People for some reason feel an immense need to telegraph how good or how bad their luck is, as if that's like... a conversation. As if I'm supposed to have something to say or feel about them getting the wrong 10 anime men and women on this slot machine pull.
And when you complain about how it feels that this is the modern dystopian reality of games culture, you'll get people ears-deep in sunk-cost fallacy telling you that 'no, no, it's okay! it's not actually that bad, this game is actually really generous, I promise!' You know, without really talking about the part where you need to treat the game like a second job and plot shit out way in advance to have resources to throw at the FOMO-generating limited time runs for all the new meta characters or whatever.
Also it's all vaporware the moment the company decides they're not making a large enough infinity of money from the product, by the way. Literally, I have friends (you're probably reading this right now, sorry you're catching a stray here) who will spend all day posting about a gacha they Pursued Further after the English servers had a surprise end-of-service, literally starting their progress over in a language they're still learning, for the Privilege of experiencing the infinite auto battler grind a second time, because the version of the game they put thousands of hours and ??? dollars into, uh, No Longer Exists. Just overhand pitched straight into a black hole. It's pure insanity that this isn't even abnormal. This just happens sometimes. There's no part of this equation that isn't malicious.
I think the worst part, or at least the most insulting, is that the industry itself has done so much to condition or outright gaslight people with this kind of shit. A friend of mine who plays MiHoYo's games has shown me some dialogue in Star Rail that's, just, well and truly the most cringe shit in the universe, where Silver Wolf or whatever (who isn't even a wolf, I should be allowed to kill that character designer with hammers) literally takes the piss out of you for not rolling on the gacha enough, and it's Meant To Be a Funny Joke Ha Ha π Isn't It Funny That She Has Bad Luck On The Gacha π I Bet If You Rolled On It Right Now You Would Get Better Results Than She Did π and it's legitimately fucking MADDENING to me that they think they can get away with that shit, and that they HAVE, because people were posting that conversation like it was comedy gold, and not the vibeo jame's equivalent of a Simpsons joke becoming reality 15 years later.
I feel, like, completely insane out here, never having touched the genre in any tangible capacity, watching this just... become normal. The most I've ever fucked with a 'real' gacha was this one time a friend convinced me to try learning mahjong, so I spent like an afternoon with Mahjong Souls on their recommendation, and I literally felt like a grandma because I couldn't even figure out which currency was what and how to even get any of it. My dumb ass couldn't even find the actual cash shop if I WANTED to use it, because there were so many fucking nested menus of meaningless garbage because there's so many mechanics all presumably designed to justify all the shit you can pull off the gacha that you don't care about. I did not stick with that game if you can't tell.
This, by the way, is all just the things that I think are like... tangibly, objectively, not only bad but Actively Harmful about this entire genre-- whether it's harmful to individuals, video games as a medium, or Society At Large, this shit is Harmful and I honestly believe that. I literally cannot stand for the continued normalization of industry behavior like this. It's malpractice, it's toxic, it's rotten at its very core, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it.
I wanna delineate the things I call 'objective' from the rest because if you want me to get into subjective shit: I think gacha games are utterly vapid wastes of human creativity, because even 'the good ones' HAVE to, by nature, justify quantity over depth. Because they're all literally just focused on being a fucking skinner box that dispenses jpgs of 6* Units sometimes, the developers don't have any obligation to do anything other than crank out characters for the purpose of filling up the slot machine with garbage. So what'll happen is you get lured into a game with the promise of 'oh my god who is this!! I love her holy shit' and then find out that she's like, an outdated 3* unit with eight voiced lines of dialogue and absolutely zero real actual scenario writing associated with her. But watch out! Maybe that just means she's due for an alt in a few months, and she'll finally get an event with cutscenes and story fleshing her out!! Better be ready to spend potentially infinite money so you can get her, and rep your fave!!! There's maybe potentially the threat of something that could be cool happening with something you care about!!!! You know, before the game is done with that, and resumes pulling names out of a hat to decide who Else it's about, a couple at a time, for the next several years, none of which you're as invested in as the one you actually like.
And literally all I'm thinking is 'wouldn't it be so nice if this character existed in a product that had any intellectual integrity whatsoever. Wouldn't it be nice to just have this girl in a Story I could consume ethically. Maybe it could even have a beginning, middle, and end, with an arc throughout that means she'd get to be dynamic and display growth. Imagine how cool that would be.'
Because apparently, we live in hell, and that's not normal anymore.
This is all to say that gacha games were a mistake because the meta was solved years ago, because Monster Hunter already exists. I just spend 10-20 minutes attacking the lootbox with a sword that is also an axe which explodes, while it roars and shoots fireballs at me in protest. AND the gameplay is actually fun? Fucking insanity. Anyways if anyone wants to play with me sometime, by all means hit me up. I've been getting back into Generations Ultimate lately on a whim and it's still so fucking good. God I missed Valor Charge Blade.