Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

I guess "depth" and "choice" could work to describe the two, yeah.

The discussion my friend and I had was because they were trying to convince me that I was wrong to dislike the game they recommended to me. I compared it to D&D5e which has 12 different spells that all accomplish the same task but with varying prerequisites or Yu-Gi-Oh whose every card's description is a wall of text to describe the one scenario wherein that effect may be used.

They said how the game wasn't like that at all, mentioning how simple everything is. There are guides online to tell you exactly what ability to hit in which order. My response was that I don't like games devoid of strategy. And they replied, quote, "im so confused. do you want it complex or do you want it simple??"

That's what made me really think about it. I don't like when a game gives me a dozen ways to manipulate the same one or two resources. I don't like it when a game bases all of those abilities on a huge set of rules that I need to memorize and mentally scan before each use. What I do like are games with deep, layered mechanics that encourage me to consider the future impact of my decisions. Ultimately, I don't like to memorize, I like to learn.

I wasn't talking about recent years. I was talking about the mid 00s up into the 2010s.

In recent years in the west, the hype for western games has died down, since they wasted good faith built up early on or let older series die out. Mobile gaming became the most profitable gaming at some point within the last decade, so much so we got things like Diablo Immortal and that, "Out of season April Fools joke" guy becoming a meme.

No span of gaming stands on its own with its own separate reasons for the decline of certain genres. JRPGs likely trend down in Japan currently, because they weren't being made as much or as often within the early 2010s into the mid 2010s, and thusly disappeared from sales reports and became risky ventures. I'm sure the cultural thing you mentioned has merit with that too, but as far as mobile games go...

A lot of mobile games sport the gacha mechanics you mentioned, and those are addictive by nature. Are you going to invest time in a game you may or may not like, that takes time to like, or are you going to keep grinding away at the gacha that has your brain in full addicted gambler mode? Let's not pretend that the companies are trying to make us the best product. They're just trying to make us the product that sells the best and has the best potential to bring about more purchases.

I work long hours myself (48 hours minimum, mandatory, average about 50-51 weekly), and even though the shifts aren't always physically taxing (part of the problem really, active body with a worn out mind), mentally I go home each night just about deranged. All of my addictive tendencies are up. I drink more if I indulge in purchasing alcohol. I tried to take up pipe smoking (my fiancée wouldn't allow it, issued an ultimatum and everything). Got some stress balls. So I'm sure, like a lot of issues with Japanese culture and overworking, they're mostly overworked and the predatory nature of mobile games has a recursive effect on those games' success and popularity.

I think here, they see moderate increases because we have more free time, but also because folks are shaking off the idea that JRPGs are bad.

And the ones that have been coming out have been getting better again as well.

Which makes me wonder - especially since "JRPG" is a really meaningless term... If FFXVI does well, how is game journalism media going to frame it?
1. Still call it a JRPG because it's a role-playing game from Japan made by Square-Enix? "The JRPG king is back!"
2. Imply that JRPG as a genre is still dead? "All they needed to do this whole time was move away from an antiquated formula!"
3. Not bring it up at all, celebrate its success regardless of its genre because other JRPGs have actually been kicking butt lately? (Yeah right the media being reasonable >_>)

That's pretty all the commercial games lol. I also don't think people will pay that much for "bad product" even in mobile games. Many mobile titles spend large amount of resources on character design, writing and voice acting, so players emotionally love this character first. Then they are more likely to spend hundreds if not thousands for this character.

Without strong art, writing and voice acting to back up most people aren't going to spend money on something that they have no emotional attachment on. They are just stats in one game out of many, it's hard to care.

I don't think the success of mobile gacha game is just abusing gambling addiction. Maybe casino or slot machine games work this way, but mobile gacha has more things involved including social aspect and art/story aspect.

The art for most gacha is derivative anime, and generally not high effort. The highest effort that goes into them is the differences in outfit and hair, much like V-tuber frame art (like newest Fire Emblem, yuck).
I don't think I've heard praise for the writing pretty much ever. Outside of like, "Oh this actually has a pretty good story." Just, "I need Waifu X, and I've had to roll for her 600 times! T_T!"

It's still the same prospect as a slot machine. They make something desirable, and then have you pull the lever for it. Even using concepts like, "Raise friendship level with Waifu X!" and stuff like that. "I didn't want to spend so much money, but there was no way I could wait to get Waifu x!" They play to psychology all the same.

I find it funny that the argument supporting that gacha mobile games "can be good" all boils down to pretty pictures to endear one emotionally to spend money, not quality in the game product itself. That's pretty much saying that addiction is an acceptable form of entertainment.

Anime style doesn't automatically make a project high effort or low effort. "Effort" to me is based on team size/development timeframe aka budget, not style.

Persona 5 team size is about 40-70 for 4+ years, which is already much much higher than Falcom's JRPG, many higher budget mobile game title team size is often easily more than a hundred. Honkai star rail is like 500+ developers working on it which is kinda comparable to AAA budget at this point.

So I don't think anime style = cheap in any way.


In Japanese anime community Blue Archive(after certain chapter) and Heaven Burns Red is often being brought up as having good story. Some of the popular mangaka that I followed even openly praise Blue Archive which is free promotion within anime fans circles lol.

But if you don't follow Japanese anime community then you wouldn't heard about them that much. Western audience preference is quite different from Japanese.


My point is that nobody will feel like wanting waifu X unless waifu X has good art/story/VA that makes the player like them in the first place.

I really hate to mention that it is.

What do you expect? Casino is a form of addiction entertainment, mmo is also a form of addiction entertainment. Both existed long before mobile gacha. But people bash mobile gacha but not other form of entertainment. This is double standard against something more popular in a different culture.

Funny I was addicted to ffxi for 10 years, pretty much all of the mobile games I just finish the main story in 2-3 months and quit for the next. If we want to talk about game dev abusing human addiction for profit, Id argue mmo genre is the worse offender. I've heard of stories of adult mmo addicts starve their kids to death. Which mobile game has caused such level of social problem? Give me a real example please.

Blizzard even openly admitted they hire psychologists to get players addicted to WoW. You should have criticize that too.

Addiction isn't "pretty much" or "acceptable" it is necessary.

Addiction is everywhere but To me it really depends on how much social problem it has caused.

Someone with 60k yearly salary feel like spending 5k per year on gacha? You can argue it's a very expensive hobby but it doesn't really cause social problems. It's their money after all.

If someone with 60k yearly salary spend 100k per year on gacha and get into debt then I'd agree that this system is bad. But I haven't heard of such story anywhere yet.

Mmo addicts who skip school or work, ruined their lives or even starve their kids to death is far worse than spending 5k on gacha to me. And horror stories like this happened far more often during mmo golden era. I personally know someone who dropped out of college because of WoW.

If you compare the consequences I think it's clear that which kind of addiction is acceptable which is not.

Pretty common story for gacha games I've heard is dudes spending so much they wind up homeless because they shell out their rent money for gacha.

Default on car loans. Home repossessed. Displaced families. Loss of girlfriend etc.

Others spending thousands only to have the character they spent for, or the powerups they spent for be outclassed the next day.

Heard some gacha have rankings/standing boards, and some folks spend to pay to win the ranking board, and this can cost more than a house IRL.

Heard the same stories revolving around MMOs with cash shops, whether they're free to play or not for the main game.

Difference in an MMO like XI and Gacha is that XI is a longterm thing that's still going to this day, and any real money you spend on it isn't endorsed directly by the company making it (except your sub fees/wardrobe fees), whereas with Gacha, they know people develop spending problems but continue making the same and similar products without changing the practices or putting hard limit spending caps on anything.

Also, I say that gacha revolves primarily preys on people's weakness for cute anime girls, as that's the majority thing you hear about, with some bishi boys in the mix too. Appearance dominates over all other factors you mention, with those other factors only serving as the cherry on top.

Nah, gacha games can be genuinely good games, though that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be successful because of it.

FFVII First Soldier, for example, was a damn fun game.

Good variety in guns. From pistols, to Rufus' weird shotgun/railgun, to a laser cannon based on Bahamut, there was something for everyone.
Each materia was unique in how it worked as opposed to just being ice/fire/lightning flavoured damage.
You could get summon materia, which would then spawn that summon as a boss that would target any players other than yourself or your team.
The maps were well laid out with a good split of open and closed areas and plenty of secrets to find.
And every job had unique abilities that could drastically change how you played.
There was even a Chocobo breeding mechanic for people to obssess over, trying to minmax their speed or kick strength and get the colours they want.
Add on top that there were still monsters around, including bosses which could drop unique weapons/materia, and it just made for a game that never really got boring because there were simply so many ways to play it that matches rarely ended up the same.
And the gacha was limited to skins only. Completely irrelevant unless you wanted to dress up a certain way, and even then there were still long-term ways to get them without spending.

Of course, it's Square-Enix so they just had to shoot themselves in the foot somehow, hence the mobile exclusivity leading to a rapid death due to server failures, ***wifi connections, and touch screens being complete *** for controlling a game like that (which they knew ahead of time because the game had built-in controller support).

But the game itself was good.

Link please?

This article is closer to a large scale interview with whales in Genshin.

https://kotaku.com/genshin-impact-whales-hoyoverse-gacha-gambling-spending-1849734889

"it costs around $444 to guarantee a particular character through the game’s pity system, which increasingly stacks the percentages in your favor as you pull. If you’re going for a specific featured weapon, the figure is $592."

The amount of money that players need to spend to get something that they want doesn't go up indefinitely, it stops at one point because of pity system.

"Within those constraints, no one I spoke to was in serious financial trouble, "

This is similar to personal experience interacting with mobile gacha player friends irl. Although they spend more money that what normally we would spend on a console game, they never get into financial trouble and able to quit when they feel like it.

Personally I know more people irl ruined their lives with mmo 10-15 years ago than gacha games now.


MMO is definitely more addictive than gacha(which isn't mmo) from my experience playing them. I am guessing social pressure in mmo played a part too. In mmo wanting a strong character in the community offers incentive for people to keep playing hardcore. In gacha you just read some story, pay(or don't pay) for whatever waifu that you want after you read the story, then quit and wait for the next update.

There are some mmo with gacha mechanics, which is probably kind of games that you described. but I was mainly talking about story focused kind of games that mainly focuses on storytelling and selling waifu with stories, and less about mmo/pvp focused games.


So whether an addiction is harmful is determined by money only but not time? If a mmo addict spend $12 monthly fee but play 40hours a week and ruined their lives then isn't more harmful than the same person spending several hundreds on a game but able to keep their jobs?

I know people who skipped classes to play mmo and dropped out of college 10+ years ago, this was real story happened in life and more than once. To me a student who spent 40hr per week on a video game and failed school is worse consequence than spending few hundred on a game but didn't skip class. But my opinion is that time > money though, as long as it's money that you can afford and earn back. Once you lose time you lose it forever, and it'll take away your time on other more important activities too.

If people want to claim gacha is harmful, then the same standard has to be applied to MMO. Liking mmo as a genre shouldn't stop us from viewing it's problems objectively.

I just want to point out that some games only have a soft pity system, and some still don't have a pity at all.

Bleach Brave Souls has no pity still, going on 8 years now. The best you get are step-up banners that give you an increased chance at a "featured" character (typically 9 or so featured on a banner, with only 2~3 of those actually being new), but never a specific one.

DBZ Dokkan Battle is an example of soft pity; you get coins with each pull which you can use to buy the characters you want once you have enough. Except the characters aren't available to buy when they first come out, so if you don't want to wait 4~6 months for them to return (or 1~2 years in the case of the Super Dragon Ball Heroes banners), you need to keep pulling past the pity amount.

Not to mention games that encourage or outright require you to get duplicates of drops for them to even be worth using.
FFBE War of the Visions is easy to guarantee pity on a character (I just pitied Sephiroth, Alphonse Elric, and King Bradley all within 2 months, while also pulling Yuffie and Roy Mustang before pity, without spending a penny), but you need something like 15 copies of them to get them to the point at which they're worth ***all, let alone performing their best. Though there are other ways to get the dupe materials, they take a long time so if you want to use the character when they're new (and most relevant), you need to keep pulling. And if they're limited like any of the proper FF characters or the FMA collab, then most of those alternate methods just outright aren't available anymore as soon as their event ends.

Pity systems are great in theory, but every company that adds one will always add a way to get people to keep spending past it anyway.

I guess in this case I can kind of agree that games with zero pity system can be predatory. After hours of googling I finally found one case of somebody gets into financial crisis because of gacha. But that person is a rare case who already suffered from severe mental illness (therefore they are way more susceptible to any kind of money spending that make them feel good) AND that game has no pity system.

For most average gamer from what I've seen they tend to save money until the character that they want to buy are available through the pity system. So very rarely I see people get into trouble in mobile game community personally.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/ilkhed/whale_horror_stories/

https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/onzmoh/what_was_your_biggest_spending_regret_in_a_gacha/

https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/u9blki/regretful_experiences_with_spending/

https://www.wired.com/2012/08/gacha-watch-buyers-remorse/

https://kotaku.com/genshin-impact-whales-hoyoverse-gacha-gambling-spending-1849734889

There's loads and loads more. The only difference between Gacha and MMO addiction is that the MMO's is visibly intrusive more immediately, whereas Gachas doesn't become visible until you hit financial ruin. There's still better ways to spend your money, for MMOs you could say better ways to spend your time, but I'm pretty sure MMOs offer less regret and are easier to break away from.

For every ruined life by either, there's still way more people who didn't ruin their lives, just had some regrettable decisions.

I wish I could get playerbase counts for gacha, but I can't. But I'm pretty sure they reach a wider audience than MMOs, as MMOs have never been held in high esteem by the majority of people, even the most popular ones, and they are also harder to access than gacha.

I have played some gacha games in the past, but only the ones that I could get away with not spending a dime.

I would have all gacha mechanics banished to the Shadow Realm if I could, but if they're going to exist then I would prefer to see them in unique titles separated from major franchises.

Which leads me into FFVII: Ever Crisis. My soul hurts because I thought my gacha days were over but I want to play it for the story. I only have the faintest glimmer of hope that it won't be a terrible experience.

Does it? If I am going to make a list of my biggest regret in life, spending 2 years of my life making a ffxi mythic in 2011-2013 was definitely top 3. I wish I can get the time back and make this mythic in 2020 within 3 months instead. But what's past is past.

Funny, if I spent $5000 or even $10000 for a mythic and get it immediately instead of 2 years of pain, I wouldn't regret nearly as much right now.

I feel for ya. The ease of access to REMA in modern age is definitely something enviable by the past. Back then I couldn't ever commit myself to more than an Empyrean, and that was with my friends at the time dragging me through the much easier, simpler process lol.
I couldn't do either though. I'm not wealthy enough to drop 5k on an in game item. Hell, when I spent about 3.8k on my desktop/monitor and stuff, I felt like I was spending too much money heh. I'm poor lol.

I would imagine it'll be similar to the other FF mobile games, where the story is easy enough with free stuff to get people interested and is the main source of free currency, but the limited time events will be where they push you towards paying, whether it be through difficult fights that require paying for gacha stat sticks, or rankings/leaderboards that require paying for stamina refreshing.

This is going to be the only legit way the world outside of Japan gets to play Before Crisis and the Dirge of Cerberus multiplayer stories after all, not to mention the actually new content around young Sephiroth and the First Soldier group. If people can't even get to that because they haven't rolled the right weapon, they're certainly not going to stick around.
So if all you're interested in is the story, I'm confident it'll be easy enough to get through.

I'm a sucker for those alt costumes though. Cloud's Advent Children-inspired samurai outfit looks awesome, Zack and Aerith's prince/princess costumes are gorgeous, and Aerith's red/black outfit in the new trailer is hawt. SE already have their hands in my wallet on this one. ;w;

https://www.rpgsite.net/preview/14341-final-fantasy-vii-ever-crisis-is-shaping-up-to-be-a-properly-impressive-adaptation

My question becomes: will there be something beyond the story where the gacha does matter? Remains to be seen. "The story" is referenced here a lot so it makes me believe there's another component to the game.

There'll obviously be events and such, otherwise there's no way to monetize the weapon gacha if the story can be completed without it.
The real question is what the incentives to do the events will be. More premium currency? Event-specific alt costumes or weapon skins? Special playable characters like Sephiroth?

My 16 CE has shipped \o/

stealing the package from your mailbox purely out of spite

***you know where i live

Duo'd Achuka on BRD and RDM with Apathetic AJ :)

Not the biggest thing ever, but we did it in a single party of us and trusts (which was probably not smart in hindsight but whatever).

Something really cool about Calmwind on Bard using Rudra's Storm over and over heh.

Having a gacha mechanic purely for cosmetics doesn't make a lot of sense. I get the feeling that there is more to it than that.

Also, Final Fantasy Record Keeper had a story section where all of the fights had locked-in equipment and abilities, but it was a very small and underutilized portion of the game. It's quite possible that Ever Crisis does something similar for the main stories with the rest of the game presenting battles with more customization.