Recently, Square Enix announced that it was doing a new Dissidia Final Fantasy game. For a brief, blissful moment, I was hoping that we might actually have a proper new Dissidia, and not whatever that last thing on PS4 was, but no. Of course it's a fucking free-to-play gacha game. Of course it is.
I'm so sick of gacha games. I'm sick of them exploiting people, I'm sick of them being poorly designed games, I'm sick of them being the only peep we hear from once-beloved franchises, and I'm even sick of them leaning hard into the "sex sells" angle. And I say that as a card-carrying lover of anime tiddies.
The new Dissidia game supposedly has Final Fantasy characters brought to real-world Tokyo and has full Japanese voice acting. Great! Why isn't it a proper game? Because I'm sorry, another thing I'm sick of is people who scold you for "looking down" on gacha games "because they're successful".
Gacha games are shite. They're marginally less shite today than they once were, but they're still shite.
I'll give you a bit of context. Following the surprise and sudden closure of GamePro, I found myself working on a business-facing publication that looked at mobile and social games. Free-to-play games — both on mobile and, at the time, Facebook — were really starting to take off around that point, so I was paid a frankly impressive salary to suffer through playing them every day.
One that I remember specifically being encouraged to look at was Rage of Bahamut by Cygames. This, I was told, was part of a new trend for what was, at the time, known as "card battling" games. Great, I thought. I like Magic and Ascension and Dominion — this'll be a great fit for mobile.
Except Rage of Bahamut had about as much gameplay as a '90s webpage — and had an interface to match. Progressing through the game's plot literally involved nothing more than clicking the "Advance" button multiple times, watching your "Energy" bar decline with each step and your "Experience" bar increase concurrently. Occasionally you'd be thrown into "battle", during which the numerical values of the cards in your hand were added up and compared to your opponent's, and whoever had the bigger number won. There was absolutely no interactivity whatsoever — the sole "strategy" for the game, if you can call it that, was making those numbers as big as possible. And, of course, the most efficient way to do that was to pay money, which would guarantee you "rare" (higher value) cards.
Zoom forward a few years and you have games that are at least attempting to hide this formula somewhat, but they're all still, at their core, nothing but "make bigger number than opponents" games. Two of the most popular examples, Cygames' Granblue Fantasy and Aniplex's Fate/Grand Order, dress it up with fancy turn-based battles that look like they're from proper RPGs, but ultimately both are about just making sure you have valuable enough cards to overpower everything in your path.
The frustrating thing is that these games often have quite good, interesting stories to them, but the gameplay is so unimaginably tedious that I have absolutely no desire to play them whatsoever — and even if that wasn't the case, the utterly exploitative monetisation would do the trick for me.
Most of the gacha games in my experience provide various different "packs" of the premium currency required to draw new cards, characters or whatever, but pretty much every one has required that you spend at least twenty quid in order to get a worthwhile draw. The alternative is grinding, grinding, grinding through the tedious, shitty gameplay in the hopes of being given a scrap of premium currency to draw some rare cards once in a blue moon. Twenty quid can buy you multiple good games that you can just enjoy at your leisure from thereon!
And many of these games are flagrantly, transparently attempting to use quasi-erotic artwork as a means of extracting money from their player base. Azur Lane is one of the worst in this regard, with more recent competition from Nikke: Goddess of Victory, a game with more jiggling arses than I think I've ever seen, even in Senran Kagura. They'll offer a "limited banner" of some exceedingly attractive character in a skimpy outfit, and players will gullibly throw money at the game in the hopes of getting a PNG or a Live2D image of their waifu, and the cycle will repeat over, and over, and over again.
These games have no soul. These games have no value. And I wish they would go away. But after over 10 years of suffering their presence, it doesn't seem like they're going anywhere any time soon, with a significant number of companies now seemingly reliant on the obscene income they draw in (and the minimal expenses they almost certainly cost to run).
Mobile gaming is dead to me. And, apparently, so is Dissidia. At least I still have the two PSP games to enjoy.
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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