I've been playing gacha games since Genshin Impact's launch, and there's always have been a question about them, that kept haunting me all the time, regardless of which gacha I was focused on at the time.
Which game should I still be playing?
The question seems to be hard to answer, intrinsically. I've been trying to answer it many times, with different outcomes. Why is it, that I find this difficult to choose? After all, it should be easy to understand if it's fun for me to play a game. In this article, I'll try to explain the underlying mysteries of this dilemma, and why it exists, for me, at all time, with decisions being always blurry.
But first, let's jump into the past.
A long, long time ago...
When I was a kid, there was not much internet to check game news on. All games I played were offline, and news usually came to us via newspaper. I couldn't find the original issue I wanted to quote, but, while I may be lucky asking friends and updating you, Internet provided me with something reminescent of that.
This is how I got to know about a new genre and game: Fire Emblem. Path of Radiance was, at the time, a masterpiece I would have never discovered as a kid, if not randomly on a newspaper we happened to buy with friends: "Nintendo: La Rivista Ufficiale". When I got the game, it inspired me so much I ended up writing a fantasy of my own. After all, games weren't as pervasive as they are today, so we could do our stuff (study, write, spend time with friends) and opening games whenever we felt like it. And I did feel like opening Fire Emblem!
The Fire Emblem series, in a way, pioneered character-focused games. In Path of Radiance you can get your units by talking with them during battles, as the narrative unfolds. All the characters have special dialogues with other characters you can read at the base, as well as their little backstory, aesthetics, and nation they belong to. It's not as different as characters in gacha games. What I'd like to highlight, though, is the main difference between a game like Fire Emblem, and the games I play nowadays.
Time is (Not) in Your Hands
Time was in your hands: you could continue your story, and meet new characters, whenever you had time to do that. This is not true with any live service game. And there is no game I play that is not live service.
In a way, games progress regardless if you play them or not. If a game just wait for you, you don't need to choose. And in fact, this is the feeling I had as a kid: games were worlds to discover, there for me at any time. Funny enough, they're still there for me, if I want to visit a new one, or nostalgically go back to one I already know.
5 months back, I published this video: I was feeling very nostalgic about my first gacha, and wanted to go back to it: to play it casually, but, at the same time, relive the experience I felt when spending time in Dragonspine, the enthusiasm that brought me and my cousin to explore a new fantastic world, and dream while listening to the soundtrack.
With the new Imaginarium Theatre coming out, I thought it would've brought me back. After 5 months, though, I had to give up again. I tried to play through the story, but the sheer amount of undubbed dialogues, and the inability to speed through it (click and fast-read, a skill I developed for gacha) was... too much.
Therefore, Genshin ended up being in the "games I don't play bucket" again.
Only 5 Minutes
So then, what could be part of my daily routine? I tried playing games that offered a much more flexible gameplay loop. Recently, two games came out, that aligned with the same model: Ash Echoes, and Girls' Frontline 2.
A good thing about less popular games, is that you can help the community. I managed to make guides that weren't on the net at all - something that rarely happen these days.
The pinnacle of this has been the Nexus guide I made for Ash Echoes. I was so happy to make something internet still didn't have in English. And I was rewarded with players trying to learn the game: each comment made me feel good about it, happy that I was taking care of the channel.
Only 5 minutes?
I don't know if this is true for everyone, but, if there's something I like, I give a lot of myself to it. I feel like it becomes part of me, and I need that feeling of connection with anything that is part of my daily routine. If it doesn't work, I feel uncomfortable.
This is what happened with Ash Echoes' community: knowing that a player was muted for 24 hours for having controversial takes cooled me completely towards the game.
That thought has been right in my head for much more than 5 minutes. Hence, the idea of "this game will only take 5 minutes per day" is never true, being all games an environment of their own.
As you can see in this video, I was so happy about the model and quality, that I was sure I'd stay committed. Even if the game wasn't as popular as Hoyoverse ones, I was very happy to have it in my day - for five to fifteen minutes. I think the game that was closest to this concept was Girls' Frontline 2, and, there too, I felt like I was doing "too much" every day, and, on top of that, I couldn't understand the reason why I was playing it in the first place.
A Journal Without Entries
On the first day of the year, I asked myself: what if I focus on games I like the most, instead of working on so many? It's not a new question, but it's what I keep asking myself when I feel overwhelmed.
I spent time playing Zenless Zone Zero, and had much fun: the story is immersive, the gameplay is engaging, and I cried, and laughed, with the events unfolding before my eyes.
I played a bit of the challenges on stream, as you can see here, and this inspired me enough to go try single player games I left in the bucket for a long time, overwhelmed by live service ones.
...and had fun! Exploring many worlds is, really, for me... but doesn't this bring me back to the same issue as before?
On January 1st I took this decision, and shared it in YouTube's community tab:
I felt like a knight fighting for a land that wasn't really of the same colors. Playing games that never "belonged" to me. After this decision, I tried to cut off as many gacha games as possible, based on the feeling of being trapped in an endless, meaningless loop of content creation that wasn't bringing me anywhere. The ones I considered stopping playing were:
Ash Echoes: the community felt cold.
Girls' Frontline 2: I wasn't sharing the experience with anyone.
Pokémon TCG Pocket: the metagame felt very predictable.
Star Rail (!!): the daily grind was repetitive.
All of those things are true - but it does apply to any game I play. For instance, I can say that:
Pokémon Unite: has an imbalanced ladder, and it's not as popular as before
Aether Gazer: is not as popular as I'd hope, and some challenges are too easy
Zenless Zone Zero: some character designs are not to my liking.
So... does this mean I should quit playing games?
The Real Deal - and How to Handle It
As much annoying all those things they may be, the real problem hides elsewhere: it's much more about attention handling and money: gacha games can take a lot of both. I felt like I needed to keep much of my attention there, and spend money up until I had every item “needed”. In the end, it looks like to me, the solution is common, and lies within something that is beyond this: keeping horizons open.
With a wide horizon, it’s naturally hard to hyperfocus on this feeling of “lacking” something. Keeping my activities varied, I feel much more free to enjoy the game regardless of what I expect myself to have or do in those games.
Then again, of course, I should budget them, both in terms of time and money. But it should come natural, with this clear in mind.
There‘s something else I have the itch of sharing, which relates to “community pressure”. I wrote a couple other articles about this, that you can find here:
It’s a simple concept: in gacha games, the “peer pressure” of doing something, like, for instance, collecting multiple copies of a character, or, in the related article, rare titles, is very strong, as people that play gacha all “want” that, regardless of if they do it or not.
I still don’t have an answer about how to handle that, besides… well, just avoiding it! We have a community discord you can join in the making, but I plan to make it a place where this kind of pressure, that usually comes from just talking about the games’ metagame, doesn’t exist.
And with that, I really wish I can find the balance I dream about to:
Keep playing the games I love
Talk about those games with you all here, and on YouTube
Have much free time to explore, and talk about the experience of exploring here as well
With this in mind, I have no limits, and will hopefully be able to cover many more games!
What about you? How do you feel about gacha games’ pressure?
How do you feel about gacha games’ pressure?
0%I enjoy the experience and feel free
0%I sometimes feel like I need something, and this stresses me
0%I always feel lacking: it’s the gacha hell!
That’s all for this post! Happy to have you here,
this is Nero Atlas,
logging in.
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