Things have slowed down at the day job. We're only seeing a couple dozen clients at the local Covid clinic. Nice to see that there's still some concerned persons in the community, but the writing is on the wall.
It's leading to long days, and long days means I'm looking at my phone more and more to pass the time. When I do, more often than not, I'm finding a squad of five jiggly-JPEG gun girls battling against a thousand faceless robot foes.
I can't put this game down.
GODDESS OF VICTORY: NIKKE is doing, as far as I can tell, nothing ground-breaking in the gacha space. Evaluated as a traditional video game, the tutorial is terrible and overloads the new user with 648 mechanics screens and prompts. The lore is wordy and dense, and I find that the developing story doesn't marry to the action properly. I'm told that I'm a useless commander and my Nikke, who are not really women but are women-shaped machines or something, are duds yet we carve our way through thousands of enemies with seemingly infinite ammunition. Sometimes the enemy shredding is effortless and sometimes I have no idea why I'm losing despite my squad power level being more than enough for the task.
So to anyone who has played the likes of Arknights, Dislyte, and so forth, more or less on par for the gacha mobile experience.
My opinion on this style of game... fluctuates. Genshin Impact held my interest for at least 30 hours (or about what I'd put into a modern AAA) before certain norms in the genre caused me to lose interest. I don't love how the progression of my characters is often tied to how many weapons and characters I can pull from the gacha system, and I prefer games where my fighting and questing levels my party. Gacha games come in a variety of genres, and I've spent money on some and quickly uninstalled others.
So why is Nikke the one I'm playing daily, when Genshin Impact and Arknights are better games in this space?
It's not the jiggly-JPEGs
Firstly, as a designer, I am very much interested in vertically designed mobile games. While I plan to do a mobile version of True Love Covers All Bases! after its PC release, the project that will follow it is something I want to design with mobile firstly in mind.
The way Nikke uses the bottom third of the screen in the battles to help aim the weapons of the characters, and having their active abilities and other commands in easy reach is something I've not really had a lot of experience with. While I wouldn't say it's a masterclass in UI design by any means, there's a lot there for me to dissect and evaluate as good and useful.
Secondly, this is a game with dating mechanics! Though very standard in delivery, with gifting and unlocking scenes and pushing affection meters up and up, this layer of the downtime between battles has merit to me. I have many friends that would never look twice at a gacha game and yet they themselves have found attachment to Nikke purely through developing relationships with the girls, and building up a busty girl squad to lead into battle. For them, perhaps, the jiggly-JPEGs may have more sway.
It matters because while I happen to be in the business of making dating games, I don't play an overwhelming number of them myself. And much in the same way that shooters have layered RPG elements into their core gameplay over the years, I think character dating is a layer that can benefit both the mechanical investment and the story investment for a player into a new game.
I could leave the end-of-the-world plot on the bench same as I did with Arknights, but Nikke has already sunk its teeth into my and piqued my interest with a variety of likeable girls. I'm thankful that the main supporting lead Rapi (who also happens to have one of the more exposed, jiggly-JPEG rears in combat) is established as a stiff, duty driven sort of woman that quickly softens. The use of a text-messaging app between the characters that lets them message you between battles is also stimulating; while Persona remains one of the greatest JRPGs of all time, on repeat playthroughs I find the characters texting me a little TOO much for what I'm willing to engage with. Nikke provides better pace.
Nikke only exists to take your dollars
Ultimately, while I do have plenty of nice things to say about Nikke, it's still a gacha game.
There's an enormous amount of titillation in the design of the characters, and in how the framing of the battle system means most of the time the girls are crouched and with their backs turned, often eccentuating their legs, breasts, and butts.
It's not pretending to be anything more noble than what it is, a free-to-play gacha game, but I think for my own purposes there will be a limit where the design cues and inspiration will end, and leave me with a relatively unfriendly monetization model compared to the likes of Arknights.
The game is still in its early days having only been released towards the end of 2022, but I do feel a little punished as an early adopter for how quickly I've hit duplicates on most of the essential characters. In most gacha there's some offset for obtaining duplicates but I exhausted those on the core rarity characters almost immediately, and despite making up most of the total roster, the drop rates on the SSR characters is just abysmal.
While this could be an indication of growing pains for Nikke, it was enough to drop me from playing Dislyte, and I'm hesitant to put any money into a product that can't provide some measure of growth for doing so, such is the barter for the gacha game.
Until I hit that wall however, I'll continue to command these thicc, leggy gun-girls into battle and take them to the ferris wheel back at our outpost base once we've saved the world. Surely an apocalypse, with booty wobbling company such as this, can't be that bad after all.