Been haunted by service games lately and the desire to play them for reasons inscrutable to me

Got into the beloved gachage Arknights, and it's been competing with Final Fantasy 14. FF14 I have a history with and some pretty special, interesting(?) conditions around, but more on that later or never in this garbage post

So, in my head, I look at both of these games and I see this promise. This promise of a LIVING, BREATHING story. You know when I was a kid, you know that just didn't happen. When you put in Final Fantasy Seven into your Sony PlayStation Entertainment System NTSC region, that was the whole game. You played it and you were done. The only other story you were going to get was from the shitty tech demo movie many years later and the expanded universe games and the 2020 remake and maybe FF7 was a poor example but you get my drift.

When I first picked up a phone game in 2013 - Granblue Fantasy - I was taken in by that expanding story promise. And indeed, I think these games deliver, mostly, on that promise. People go back to these games, they experience the story, they gather on the Twitter and the Discord and the Tumblr and talk about them "Oh gosh did you see the newest Granblue Ossan Sauna adventure? Sandival finally bared his ten inch manhood it ruled" etc

And I see this and I feel fomo. Like, damn, I see people playing these updating stories with some of the shittiest VN or JRPG presentation known to man and I'm crying like a soyjak that I'm not in on it

I can't really tell what I'm after. Do I just want to be in on the conversation? Is this just me, as often, seeking social interaction through media and art conversation? Am I just falling into the net that's like, you know, that old otaku joke from like 2015 talking about how there's too much manga and anime and games so otaku/nerds didn't actually have anything to talk about... except for Fate Go. Except for gacha. The big hub games that bring us all together. In Japanese gacha games are called soshage, or social games. And boy are they

Anyway I have the silly idea that I want to be caught up on Arknights. Just slog through its insurmountable text, gawk at its shitty enshutsu, and enjoy the story kino within. I sound harsh on it, and I am, but honestly the gameplay is fire and the world is interesting and the side stories are quite good I enjoy them!