How I got hooked to Gacha Games
I’ve been trying to get around to explaining how I got hooked on free to play games. These aren’t just free to play games in a regular sense, but most are story-driven, have a particular sense for aesthetics, and most importantly, consider their narrative an important part of the game. All of this is insidious though: these games incorporate a lottery-based system in the similar vein vending machine toys, or Gachapon. These Gacha incorporating games require you to build teams of units you get based on luck to beat levels in an ever-updating game. I have only stuck to one gacha free-to-play game, but the circumstances are more than just developing a gambling addiction. No, there is a lot of engagement that goes around when playing a gacha based mobile game.
I have been hooked to Fate: Grand Order, or FGO. Here, you play a nameless master who performs contracts with heroes and villains of mankind’s history and mythology and summons them into battle. Each of ‘servants’, as they are called in the story’s universe, aid you in trying to restore key points of history where mankind has met turmoil but thrived to stop the extinction of the human race. All the servants have distinct roles in teams, have speaking roles, and are designed to fit certain aesthetic requirements to hook the player. Fate: Grand Order is part of the Fate franchise of Japanese media where one of the most recognizable characters is King Arthur portrayed as a woman. FGO uses the framework set by previous entries in the franchise to build hype, capture interest with iconic fan-favorite characters as playable units and develop new characters to keep the game alive. Or put a swimsuit on King Arthur rake in a ton of cash.
One of the reasons why I’m invested in Fate: Grand Order is because of my previous experiences with the franchise. I find the concept of the Servant system to be incredibly fascinating and the characters to be extremely endearing and memorable. The main author: Kinoko Nasu and invited authors such as Gen Urobuchi have developed powerful stories about ideology, coping with extreme tragedies, interactions between the past and the present, and packed it all in historical revisionism and the occasional slice of life. Granted, not all the entries in the franchise are stellar: Fate/Apocrypha is known for being extremely mediocre and poorly executed with a protagonist nicknamed “Cardboard”, and Fate/Extra: Last Encore encompasses the worst parts of the alternate story of the Fate/EX universe. However, I still love the franchise and I respect it as a whole.
FGO can be legitimately compelling; reading through the light novel portions reveals the story about a last-ditch attempt to reconcile the evolution of man with its inevitable end at its own hand. The main antagonists tend to be referred to as BEASTS, similar to the Beasts of the Apocalypse that herald the end of civilization. The BEASTS are inherently a product of desires or flaws of mankind and to overcome a beast is to reconcile past errors in mankind’s history. That is to say: each BEAST is a test to determine if humanity can learn from its mistakes. Teaming up with different Servants from mankind’s history to battle other Servants and BEASTS is a spectacle of different powers and interpretations of myths come to life, becoming more bombastic as more servants rally around your cause.
While I sing the praises of FGO, it isn’t without its flaws. The Gacha system can be annoying to deal with when you have a string of bad luck and don’t get your desired servant after saving for months on end. Some of the main story beats and side stories can be of questionable quality due to shallow comedy and shoddy writing. Waiting for the updates and farming for items can be a chore, and newer players face a larger gap to getting into a comfortable system of grinding and playing than those who have been playing since the game’s release. Also, those who don’t keep up with the game end up missing events and free goodies such as powerful free units and extra premium currency and materials. However, despite these flaws, this game means a lot to me.
There is another factor that does into playing FGO: the community. And this isn’t just about the community in general, but the fact that a lot of my friends also play FGO. I have around 3 different chats dedicated to Fate Grand Order, and it is a frequent topic amongst my peers and friends. I frequently go to a friend of mine for advice, as well as venting my frustrations for his powerful luck is the envy of my almost powerful luck. I talk about the lore with friends, discuss current events, and also share our passion for certain Servants by ranting, yelling at each other that their favorite Servant is garbage, or sharing fan art. All of these things help keep the game alive not just in the sense that it is continually played and funnels money out of our wallets, but it keeps it alive as a topic among us dorks as we fawn over what is effectively animated sprites.
What happens with FGO with me, happens to many people with other games such as Granblue Fantasy, Azur Lane, Fire Emblem Heroes, Langrisser, Epic 7, Shin Megami Tensei Liberators, and other of these gacha games. They are fans of the narrative, the aesthetic, the franchise, or all three. As such, games like FGO and SMT Liberators have a large audience of fans that it panders to. Not all of these are successful in retaining players after their release. I played SMT Liberators for a while, but the story felt like a watered-down version of a concept they already did in the franchise while the mechanics of the Gacha system did not mix well with the fusion aspects that the SMT games are known for. I also played Fire Emblem Heroes, but I deleted it as the game became more complicated and the characters, I wanted the most wouldn’t be released until much, much later.
The only other mobile games that I have been trying to catch up/play are Magia Record and “Puzzles and Dragons”. Magia Record has a similar game style to FGO and is also a side story to the Madoka Magica anime with its own plot and sub-stories. “Puzzles and Dragons” was my first mobile game and is still a fun puzzle game to kill time. Otherwise, I haven’t invested what I have invested in FGO, both time and money-wise.
And that is one of the main things: I have invested way more than I ever thought in FGO. I haven’t spent the amounts of money that certain friends of mine have on the game, and I shouldn’t. But I still have given 90 bucks to FGO. I don’t regret it since the purchases are very sporadic and it was during times that I had disposable income, but the game can truly get someone addicted to it. Considering how 2019 has been an extremely harsh year for me, it’s a miracle I’m not finding refuge in collecting overblown pixels gotten via pure unadulterated luck.
Gacha games can be compelling, but they are still built on an exploitative system. While a lot of these games do have methods of incentivizing engagement without spending money, such as free premium currency, events, good low rarity units, and the like, the practices that go into gacha games are still nefarious, especially with certain games offering really low rates for the highest rarities. FGO is notorious for having a 1% drop rate for the highest rarity servants, which means even if you save for months on end you still have a very real chance of not getting what you want. And even if you do get a high rarity servant, it might not be the one that is promoted in the gacha. While high rarity servants are not needed in FGO, as evidenced by the general community beating hard events with low rarity servants, it is hard to resist the allure of having something that’s ‘rare’. This model of game design will be intrinsically predatory but I do believe that there is sufficient good in these games to merit cautious exploration.
