It’s interesting and puzzling to me how Chrono Ark never seemed to develop any sort of real fandom despite selling 300,000+ copies and having an interesting story, amazing atmosphere and art, a high level of polish and a large and memorable (also hot) cast of characters. It seems like pretty much everyone who played it loved it, except the people who got walled by the early skill check boss, but I’ve never come across any sort of fandom community.

I’ll occasionally stumble across someone like Altairis— I highly recommend her YouTube channel if you are trying out the game but struggling to master the mechanics— or the maniac cohost user who made a four-hour Chrono Ark video essay, but they always seem to exist in a vacuum, just posting into the void. There are also a couple of vtubers like Doppio who are big fans but clearly it’s not something that is popular enough for them to stream regularly.

Perhaps the fandom is mostly Korean? I occasionally stumble across Chrono Ark fanart by Koreans that never turned up on pixiv, danbooru, etc. I can find Japanese stuff easily but I’m not really tapped into the Korean web and don’t know where people congregate and post this kind of stuff. More likely I think the reason Chrono Ark will always be a cult game is that it’s kind of a deckbuilder’s deckbuilder. It truly shines when you’ve played everything out there and gotten bored of the same old routine, returning games after a half an hour when you realize they’ve got nothing to offer but Slay the Spire mechanics with a half-assed reskin.

With the official announcement by the studio head that they’ll be developing another game due to Chrono Ark’s financial success, I’m hoping it will have a similar trajectory to Lobotomy Corp, where a cult classic debut game with enthusiastic fans launched a tiny Korean company into the mainstream and got the belated recognition it deserved.

I used to play a ton of Cataclysm: DDA like a decade ago but fell off it pretty hard due to the increasing prioritization of the devs’ “simulationist” philosophy which was both completely excessive and wildly inconsistent. It mostly served to make the most basic elements of survival intolerably overdesigned (you are not eating enough Vitamin A here is a stat penalty, no, we will not tell you it’s because you don’t have enough Vitamin A :]) while preserving bald-faced bullshit like characters being able to learn “dragon-style kung fu” where your physical damage scales with your intelligence stat, allowing your clumsy weakling to explode enemies into meat chunks by flailing your noodle arms against them. This is presumably because the kung fu nonsense was the baby of someone who had too much clout for the simulationists to feel it was worth their while to stick their necks out, and their time would be better spent making sure your character would become severely underweight and have to sleep 18 hours a day if you ever so much as looked at a bicycle.

Also the destruction of the original lore and its replacement with goofy, over-explained time-travel shit by the same people in order to make the high-tech elements of the game more “realistic” was absolutely idiotic and ruined the entire vibe of the story, which was previously incredible and just mysterious enough to be compelling. I literally used to read the timeline lore page for fun because it was so bleak and atmospheric and now it’s just embarrassing fic about the devs’ Mary Sue Exodii faction, whom you now have to kiss up to in order to access any of the game’s more interesting mechanics which used to be freely available.

Seeing dozens of new videos of people playing the weird unpopular game I’m unhealthily obsessed with is giving me the kind of giddy dopamine rush I historically have mostly associated with crystal meth use

It’s absolutely absurd that it was this guy’s second project ever