Apparently Konami announced a new Suikoden game! Hooray! Hold your horses there, Bucko, they announced that it's a free-to-play mobile game with microtransactions. How do you feel about that?
If your first reaction to this was violent revulsion, congratulations, you still have good sense. But I've seen a surprising amount of resistance to the perfectly reasonable viewpoint that a beloved series getting a free-to-play mobile game is shit. And I think we're long past the point where we should be making excuses for this sort of thing.
"But phones are the most popular gaming platform!"
This argument has been trotted out for nearly two decades at this point, and it doesn't mean anything. Yes, you can point to numbers, and based on raw figures, there are probably more people playing games on phones than on any other platform — possibly all platforms put together. But those numbers don't mean anything.
Instead, we should be focusing on the quality of the experience. And while there certainly are games for phones that are peers of full-price PC and console games, designed to keep you feeling invested and involved in the gameplay over the long term and make you feel like you got value for money, the overwhelming majority of them are free-to-play, microtransaction-infested shitholes that inspire some of the most formidable instances of Stockholm syndrome I think I've ever seen. (And the phone games that are the peers of PC and console games… are probably available on PC and console.)
Pro-tip: if you ever have to use the phrase "it feels like a proper game" when you're playing a mobile phone game, that game is not a good game. Likewise, if you ever have to utter the phrase "well you don't have to spend any money at all", you have already lost the battle.
I've been through my gacha phase, during which I said both of those phrases on more than one occasion.
I played some Fate: Grand Order, some Granblue Fantasy, Arknights, Azur Lane, Goddess of Victory Nikke, Final Fantasy Record Keeper, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius and Dragalia Lost. I even played some obscure ones even further back — anyone remember Ayakashi: Ghost Guild? Brave Frontier? Valkyrie Crusade? Didn't think so. Anyway, one thing was constant with all of these games when I played them: I spent more time trying to find the "proper game" in each of them than they really deserved, and came away from each and every one of them wishing that they were something else: something more substantial than boring interaction-free story sequences followed by battles that required no strategy beyond "equip items to make big number". Final Fantasy Brave Exvius came the closest to feeling like an actual Final Fantasy game, but it was all smoke and mirrors; the "wandering around town" part had no substance to it whatsoever.
Not one of them felt like an actual game. And I gave all of them tens of hours in an effort to understand their appeal. And I was forced to conclude that, indeed, they were little more than thinly veiled casinos where you gambled real money in the hope of getting the picture (and sprite, if you're lucky) of the hot anime girl you most wanted to fuck.
And in some cases, the "sex sells" aspect of this was so flagrantly transparent — Azur Lane and Goddess of Victory Nikke are particularly outstanding in this regard — that it's actually offensive. Not because of the content of the artwork, which, let's be clear, is absolutely lovely and super-sexy when taken in isolation, and totally fine that it exists in and of itself. The offensive thing is how that sexy artwork is used to manipulate lonely, horny players into spending way more money than any of these games deserve.
So I swore off them, and I am seeing nothing about this new Suikoden game so far to suggest that it's going to be any different.
Is this elitist? Supposedly it is. But as someone who has been involved with video games since their very earliest days, I absolutely cannot look at a mobile phone game that asks you to pay up repeatedly and without limits, and which ties both mechanical and narrative content to what is effectively gambling, and see it on the same level as a game developed for PC or console where you buy it once, pay up front and then play it as much as you want without it even looking in the direction of your wallet.
Because let's face it, this is exactly the form the Suikoden mobile game is going to take. No amount of fancy 2D-3D HD pixel art on polygonal backdrops is going to change the fact that it will be gacha hell at its heart. The number of musical tracks on its soundtrack does not mean that it is going to be a good, fair game. And because games like this are "live service" games, folks who could be making a proper new Suikoden game for PC and console, like people actually want, will be doomed to continually churning out content for this until it is inevitably "sunset" in a year's time when they realise that no, they actually can't take on Genshin Impact.
There's been a lot of talk today about people being overly negative about this, not having played the game and suchlike. And look, I get it. I hate it when people are negative about things they haven't played.
But this is different from someone talking shit about a game that you like. There is considerable historical precedent for a free-to-play mobile game based on a beloved franchise to be a pile of predatory, manipulative bullshit that closes down six months after launch because no-one ever actually wanted it.
And I have seen zero reason so far to believe that a Suikoden mobile game will be any different. I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but I am not holding my breath.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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