Throughout the years, there have been a few gacha games that I’ve been interested in playing. But, despite giving them the old college try, I always drop them in a matter of weeks. There are several reasons for this, but chief among them is that gacha games aren’t structured like a traditional, offline, single-player game. With most, I can’t sit for a few hours on a given day and commit to a play session. Even if I do, the design choices that drive these types of games eventually hit me in the face like a sock full of pennies. Truth be told, I’m only able to enjoy gacha games once they’ve been turned into offline games.
Gacha games are, first and foremost, allegedly free-to-play titles. They are designed to earn money via microtransactions for pulling characters, weapons, and resources that translate into game time. These games are designed to entice people to eventually spend money. And believe me, money will be spent. They are extremely lucrative products after all. And sure, some games are relatively generous with free resources, while others are Fate/Grand Order (if you know, you know). I just hate this stuff. And I don’t just mean the predatory design, FOMO banners and events, and psychological triggers that make engaging with these systems actually addictive.
First, there’s the lack of a cohesive design. Generally speaking, a lot of content in gacha games is designed to be unlocked and consumed. In a gacha game there’s no such thing as a “party member joining the team.” You have to pull on a banner to (hope) to get the character and, in some cases, you can get a character as part of the main story.
Even when there are some particularly interesting designed sections and worlds, like the Amphoreus arc in Honkai: Star Rail, they are still surrounded by the trappings of a gacha game. New characters and banners need to come out on a regular basis to keep the model going, even if that means a strong narrative needs to take a hit to accommodate these new characters.
Then there’s the expiration date. It’s very likely that, once I start playing a gacha game, I’ll have a window of about two to three years before that game is completely unavailable. Such is the fate of games like NieR: Reincarnation, Dragalia Lost, Dissidia FF: Opera Omnia, or FFVII Ever Crisis. And the list goes on.
Guess what though. There’s an easy solution to all of these issues. Enter the gacha game turned single-player. I first heard of this phenomenon a few years ago, with the release of Little Noah: Scion of Paradise and Mega Man X Dive Offline. And just within the last year, Octopath Traveler 0, Another Eden Begins, and the upcoming Final Fantasy Resonance (based on the defunct FF Brave Exvius) will join the ranks.
Turns out, it was through the process of gacha games becoming offline premium games that I realized something—I never wanted to play a gacha in the first place. I like the ideas, characters, art, and potential a lot of these games hold. But as long as they continue to be products designed to be consumed first, with game design and narrative choices as second thought, these games can’t win me over. It’s when the source material gets repurposed into a traditional, cleaner experience that I can finally appreciate them for what they are, without the burden of gacha design and the fear of when they will shut down looming over.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.siliconera.com/gacha-games-only-get-good-when-offline-ports-appear/
