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PaperclipPerfector
2d ago
(text post)
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
The users of 4chan's /v/ (video-game) board often post titillating images (both official and unofficial) of characters from various gacha games—Goddess of Victory: Nikke, Blue Archive, Senran Kagura: New Wave, etc. Occasionally, they also post videos (both official and unofficial) making fun of the rather pitiful-looking gameplay in Goddess of Victory: Nikke. However, it recently occurred to me that I had never seen any gameplay of other gacha games.1 Therefore, I investigated Blue Archive (source of such prominent sex symbols as Ichinose Asuna, Izayoi Nonomi, and Hanekawa Hasumi), and found it more of a game than I was expecting it to be.
The gameplay is mostly, but not completely, auto-battling. You set up a unit of six characters (girls wielding guns), of whom four are "strikers" who traverse the 3D battle map and two are "specials" on the sidelines. (On the battle map, the strikers are represented with chibi/SD 3D models, significantly different from the 2D art that you see in the menus.) The characters have both passive skills that activate automatically and active skills that must be activated by the player.
Each character is a tank, a damage dealer, a buffer, or a healer. Enemies include grunts (rifle infantry, small flying robots, etc.), snipers (they hide in the back and attack the player's damage dealers, encouraging the player to counter-snipe them with his damage dealers' active skills), minibosses (large humanoid robots, tanks, etc.), giant bosses (in certain game modes), and even duplicate playable characters with their own active and passive skills.
Characters and enemies also have weapons and armor (two separate characteristics) in a simple rock-paper-scissors system. Prior to each mission (which, in the main story mode, comprises multiple separate battles on a very simple strategic map—there are several other modes), you get to see what enemies you will be fighting, and must assemble your unit in order to take advantage of this system accordingly.
Outside of gameplay, the interface is surprisingly good for something that obviously was designed for phones. There's no right-click, but left-clicking on any item reveals a drop-down menu listing all the places where that item can be obtained—not just "you can get this item by completing missions", but "you can get this item by completing Mission 4-3; click this button to go to that mission"! Keyboard shortcuts, including use of the Escape key to cancel, also have been implemented.
This game has been accused of catering to pedophiles and ephebophiles. If you care about that:
Nearly all the playable characters explicitly are listed in their biographies as being under 18.4 As mentioned above, during actual gameplay the characters are represented, not with sexy 2D art, but with unsexy chibi 3D models.5 However:
Each active skill plays a fancy animation when you use it. When performed by characters who wear miniskirts, these animations often include suggestive camera angles, all the way up to (non-blatant) panty shots. Additionally:
Some enemies are delinquent students, presumably in the same age range as the playable characters. In that capacity, they show up in battle maps (again, as unsexy chibi 3D models) wearing miniskirts, with (blatant) panty shots in the dozens when they are knocked unconscious.
After 20 hours of play, the game seems reasonably fun to me. But my new-player bonuses haven't yet run out, so I haven't yet had to deal with the stamina system.
1Other than Gundam Battle Operation 2, whose praises I have sung before. Unfortunately, however, that game is PVP-focused, and in that context has so few players on PC that queue times for matches on that platform are absolutely intolerable.2,3 As determined from my multiple terabytes of recorded footage, I played it from 2023-05 (the PC launch) to 2024-08 (when a bug was causing the game to repeatedly crash during matches and then give me a penalty for leaving the matches early), and from 2025-02 to 2026-01. RIP.
2Unless you go out of your way to play only during the narrow daily peaks in player count. And, even if you go to all that trouble, the other players may be filling the queues for frantic high-cost matches (e. g., Unicorn Gundam vs. Kshatriya) and leaving empty the queues for slower-paced lower-cost matches (Zeta Gundam vs. Gundam Mk-II).
3The game also is available on PS4 and PS5, where it allegedly has more players. But I definitely have no interest in buying one of those.
4According to the wiki, the ages of the playable characters (including variant forms of the same character) are as follows.
Therefore:
Or, alternatively:
5Insert obligatory link to community of people who find chibi characters sexy. I hear Lalafells are pretty popular lately among the sexual roleplayers of Final Fantasy 14… Slightly more (but still not very) seriously, see the artistically impressive Deformed 48 Positions (also loosely translated as Chibi Kama Sutra, but actually referring to a separate Japanese concept).
Tangential and not your point, but this is a pretty controversial topic in the game.
At least on the America servers, there is a strong standard against sexualizing Lalafells, and the sexy clothes and nude mods you'd find for every other species are completely forbidden among mod hosting sites and in-game communities. Since mods are all clientside and require a modded centralization service to show up on someone else's client, that's pretty effectively enforced in the community.
There was some brief drama when one of the main centralization services got taken offline after legal action from Square Enix and there was a scramble to choose its replacement from a number of forks, and if I recall correctly one of the more popular options was eventually blackballed by the community due to their position on sexualization of Lalafells.
I've heard from a friend of a friend about some individual ERPers that go for that sort of thing, and even accusations of being associated with such people can be enough to split apart a community. Though admittedly that's as much because FFXIV is an incredibly drama-heavy playerbase as anything.
There's a little more going on in the backstory to Snowcloak/Lopporit Sync. Even back before Mare Synchronous got blammed, Lopporit was pretty well-known as a Schelling Point for both lalafell and 'aged down' character models. Since the underlying tools depend on a transmitting bulk files to every client, there's also a lot more pressure involved.
That said, while my impression in-game is that lalafell Mare Synchronos/Lightless users are rare enough and any advertising basically non-existent (where a male hrothgar with Mare/Light references is not a surprise), from people who are in to the ERP side of things lalafell or Twin roleplayers are something they have to go out of their way to avoid.
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I've heard Girls Frontline also has good gameplay for a gacha game. Watched a friend play GFL2 on steam which seemed to have XCOM style 3d grid based combat but it also had an autoplay mode.
I haven't played it because I refuse to play gacha games anymore but I did play Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery which is a standalone title by the same developers also in the GFL universe. It's a tactical turn based RPG with a pretty lengthy story and time travel mechanics. Despite the graphics looking like a mobile game I ended up completing the game 100% (Steam says I have 140 hours on it). You can consider the story to be told in a similar format to visual novels and the script is 300,000 words long. The prologue cutscene of the final chapter takes 2 hours if you let all the voice lines fully play out. Also the game is considered on the more difficult side even amongst people that play tactical rpgs and some of the later missions can take up to an hour with how many enemies there are so it's a pretty hefty time investment to complete this game. I like tactical rpgs though so it wasn't an issue for me.
Time travel is big part of the game and even death is explained as Jehuty (the female protagonist of the game) sending herself back in time via a "reverse collapse" mechanism. You have to play through 4 timelines (essentially replaying story missions in each timeline but with a twist of having the knowledge of the future which changes what you have to do in the missions) to unlock the 5th timeline which has the true ending.
There was a discussion previously here on TheMotte about downer endings and I'd say the ending of Reverse Collapse would count as one since the main character Jehuty has to sacrifice herself to essentially save the world. There's too many plot points to explain but the ending reveals Jehuty was able to go back in time via mind transfer by swapping her consciousness with Lusica which is essentially a clone. Said clone is instrumental in the bad guys plan to destroy the world, and in the original timeline Lusica was the only entity left alive, which she found was too lonely, so she makes a deal with Jehuty to have them swap consciousness in the past to change the future. Because Jehuty loves Mendo (the other protagonist) and wants everyone else to live she agrees to let Lusica take over her body and to let herself be the one captured by the bad guy instead (there's an in game explanation for why this has to be done this way but I can't remember why). At the end of chapter 5 Jehuty swaps places with Lusica (Mendo and everyone else has no idea this swap has happens). Lusica presumably goes on to live on as Jehuty while Jehuty goes by herself to have one final last stand before she lets herself be captured. T
The final mission plays on this one last stand theme and is reminiscent of Halo Reach's ending where you try to survive for as long as you can but you ultimately cannot win. The enemies spawn endlessly and only get stronger and stronger until eventually you lose and get captured. The mission itself is sort of a mix between rougelike (rougelite? vampire survivor likes?) mechanics where you get bonuses you can pick from every number of turns and the standard turn based gameplay you've been playing for the entity of the game and can be replayed endlessly. I think it's pretty interesting and a gridbased tactical turn based roguelike survival could be a standalone game if that mission had more polishing.
Having played through this game I have to admit it did increase my interest in the GFL lore and universe, although I still refuse to play the two mainline games due to it being a gacha game. Apparently a lot of these gooner gacha games with waifus have pretty depressing storylines and settings. Nikke takes place in a post apocalyptic earth, although the gameplay as mentioned in the parent post seems to be quite something. Arknight (at least the orignal mobile game, dunno about endfield) also takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, but the gameplay here is more like a strategic tower defense, and friend says the game is quite friendly for those that are f2p and that people have beat end game missions with low tier units so it seems strategic play probably has more importance than having the highest tier waifus. It seems to me the writers of these games stories wanted to create some sort of grimdark, post apocalyptic dystopian world but they also need to make money so they put sexy gooner waifus to capture the gacha playing audience.
The game itself has some interesting facts such as it is a remake of a remake. It also has a remaster of the of the remake you can play after completing the game (completely optional and has 0 achievements) which has the much more bland original story (and blander gameplay mechanics). The original game was strictly a visual novel that the developers made before they made Girls Frontline and the remake was a turn based tactics game, and the remaster of the remake is a mostly faithful recreation of the original remaster.
Another fact, apparently Chinese gacha players got angry that in GFL2 a female character has close relations with a male NPC character that they felt they were being NTRed because only the player should have any sort of relationship with their gacha waifus so they review bombed Reverse Collapse instead. Chinese gacha players seem to be a different breed entirely.
It's a bit more involved that this; the character in question was from GFL1 and represented the QBZ-14 rifle - which, for those not in the know, is the national rifle of the Chinese army, so there's a bit of national pride involved there. Second, when the company that owns GFL took a look at the matter, resulted in an official statement involving potential corporate sabotage, atleast one fired(female) writer, and a flood of original writers coming back from working on thier side-project Project Neural Cloud and noting a marked increase in writing quality from the early game in GFL2 to the current.
So there's a bit more teeth there than just 'blooh blooh chinese weebs are weird fucks'.
That really doesn't have much bearing on review bombing an entirely separate game. There's evidence on the Reverse Collapse discord of CN players admitting to wanting to review bomb the game, the game actually got reviewed bombed and was at 37% positive at launch before settling at 78% positive in all languages (and 93% positive in English). You can look at the steam reviews over time and the only period with bad proportion of negative to positive reviews is when the game first launched, and if you filter by time played most of the negative reviews have barely any time played, clear signs of review bombing.
I don't care too much for drama happening in GFL1 and GFL2 but I do care people review bombed a game I ended up enjoying which could have an impact on the overall success of the game and subsequent future games beings developed. The EN and CN GFL fans can duke it out or whatever but as a mostly outsider looking in from the perspective of someone wandering why the game got review bombed the information I had access to on explaining why the game got review bombed did not paint CN fans in a positive light, and even if their anger is completely justified and I agreed with whatever issue they had with GFL2 that should not lead to review bombing a completely separate game.
Ah, skimmed over the review-bombing portion. A fair opinion.
I confess to being just a tad thin-skinned about the topic, as I've found people who bring up the entire 'GFL2 Chinese gatcha players' tend to run either toward casual bigotry and/or the kind of people whom would be making fun of nerds back in high school, with a strong whiff of grifting/tourism 'how do you do fellow gatcha players'.
Still, like I said. Understandable, coming from your PoV. Admittedly, I haven't played Reverse Collapse, mostly due to my first exposure being GFL and knowing how, uh... look, I know how these guys go in their writing. It's good stuff, don't get me wrong, but there's only so much existential depression I can take.
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The pictures on these pages are weird. They look AI-generated, but at the same time I'm not entirely sure they are.
Given checks notes ~450k hits on danbooru and the game coming out in 2021 (huh, somehow I thought it was older than that), I wouldn't be surprised if a decent chunk of this game's assets and fanart got into the training corpus for various imagegen models, and as such looks AI-generated because it, among many others, actually contributed to the emerging telltale sloppa style. Back when I was screwing with Stable Diffusion as it was gaining traction (and playing Genshin Impact at the time), I remember plugging "tags" of popular named characters into the prompt - no LoRAs, just rawdogging the base checkpoint with tags like
ganyu_(genshin_impact)- and getting surprisingly close results just from that alone; of course it would mix up clothes and stuff, especially if there were other things in the prompts, but the overall "vibe" of the character generated would be broadly recognizable.More options
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Much of the imagery and audio in this game has noticeably lower resolution/fidelity than one would expect in a PC game, presumably because it was just copied from the original mobile version.
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