I've mostly been using this tag for semi-random shitposts, but the thrilling conclusion of Blue Archive's story* makes for a fun one: The addition of Shiroko (Terror) to the roll of gacha characters to talk about.
I imagine most folks wouldn't care much about spoilers to a gacha game they won't play anyway, but if you are, spoiler warning I guess.
Shiroko (Terror) - who I prefer to call "Big Shiroko" is an alternate future version of the very second Gacha Character of the day, Sunaookami Shiroko. She's the crux of Blue Archive's "Final Episode" storyline*, and the series of events that just concluded on Global (and a few months ago in Japan) speak not only to Shiroko's appeal but to the development team at Nexon's particular mastery of project management as it relates to keeping the game going.
*The "Final Episode" storyline isn't final at all, as the game's main campaigns continue. Instead, my personal theory as to why it was called that is because gacha games are born with limited lifespans at the start. The reason you see news items about this or that unsuccessful gacha game being shuttered after 6 months or a year is because games like this tend to be pre-budgeted. They produce content for campaigns, characters, events, and updates, then launch, and then get scheduled to be shut down if the game isn't sufficiently profitable (or cheap to operate) by the time they run out of content they produced and the money guys don't feel like, well, gambling on future growth.
Nexon makes a lot of service games, and Blue Archive's team surely knew this, and so planned out the whole campaign with this as its conclusion. That way, if the game flopped, they'd have enough runway left (or at least enough internal support at nexon) to use the "Final Episode" plot as the story's natural conclusion.
Note: I have done ZERO research to support this theory, but I feel it in my gut. So much of the game's pacing and buildup makes sense taken along with interview comments that they'd been thinking of this storyline for five-odd years.
And it shows in the plotting for the Final Episode. The city is wrecked, the whole grew goes to space on a battleship, and as you fight you realize that Big Shiroko is the final boss, the evil, grown-up version of the girl from the app icon, backed by your dead body from a Bad Ending timeline, powered by outer god energy just long enough challenge and fall before you, the player, the better to find a safe place for their last remaining Student.
