sadteaparty

probably still getting by.

i hope you're well.



Two months ago I picked up Dragalia Lost. Against my better judgement I've been the sort of person to keep up with a handful of gacha games regularly for several years now, and as much as I deeply dislike the format and the monetization of all of them, I'm also a gigantic sucker for a serial story and the certain amount of... regularity that their presence builds into my life. It's probably not the healthiest thing, but what is.


I'd followed Dragalia from the side since its launch since I'm an on-again-off-again player of Granblue Fantasy, and a certain amount of curiosity is inevitable. Hearing about it being shut down was a bummer -- I can't help but feel bad any time I hear about a gacha game (or any "live" multiplayer game) going down, because it ceases to be. Good bad or otherwise, it's a loss for someone, and also a loss of so much work that went into it, and it sucks.

But I'll be damned if they didn't actually try to wrap up the story as best they could, and gave the game an ending. That alone is more than most games of this sort can claim upon their shutdown, and is commendable in its own right. So I've been chipping away at the game for a couple of months now, working through the story and the event archives, reading event logs from the incredible Dragalia Lost Wiki (references of this quality don't exist if your game hasn't been met with a certain amount of audience passion), and trying to back-fill years worth of gacha mechanics pile-on in order to get competent enough to see what I want to see.

I'm currently at Chapter 22 of 26 of the main story, and am detouring to get through a bunch of side-story content. It's disjointed, and endearing, and absolutely full of curious design decisions that I'm still trying to sort my feelings out about. Even among gacha games, Dragalia's an odd one.

And let me tell you it is wild to play a gacha game knowing full well that there is an ending and a hard exit. The compulsion of these games is the treadmill, the continual keeping-up, the chores and the maintenance and keeping up with the ebb and flow of the communities reactions to the events and new content. To have everything still here, every system, every login bonus, every lever and widget to try to pry cash out of you or at least demand more of your time -- and be completely unable to spend a dime and also be faced with the shutdown date in the news update every day that you log in -- is truly surreal.

The devs sent out a large cache of end-game materials as a 'celebration' of sorts. It allows you to make a fair number of end-game weapons, but not in their most complete form. It's a fascinating compromise. It allowed new players the ability to outfit themselves to see and do most of the games content, but not at the highest levels. And throughout all this, the game is still rotating the banners of its gacha, just as it always has, flopping between the somewhat-kind Platinum Showcase, where you can spark any normal unit, and the standard Gala banners twice a month. All the buttons to spend the real money are still there, but you can't do it.

You'd think the development team might just fully kick down the door and give everyone everything, but so far at least, they haven't made any moves of the sort. Instead it seems to be staying kind of true to itself, as a gacha game. Even my limited experience, with my extremely limited roster, I've gotten attached to the adventurers I've pulled and even managed to spark one (and a second soon) simply on a lark, because I saw the picture and chose them without even considering their efficacy or their ability to even be used in any team I can put together.

Having been playing these games for some years now, you just get in the habit of optimizing your choices. Even if you're not being perfectly optimal at all times, it's somewhere in the back of your head, and you're either choosing to ignore it or finding some middle ground between effort and outcome, or just leaning all the way in to make the number go up.

It is weirdly liberating to be playing "one of these" and have absolutely none of that. There is no threat of future necessity, no concern about running out of a resource, no risk of one more pull. You've got what you've got, you get what you get, and come November 29th, at 10PM Pacific Time, it all goes away.


You must log in to comment.