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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.
You know, I have to respect it. Their actions resulted in the company making changes to the storyline and firing the writer responsible. I can only dream of Western developers having such respect (or fear!) for their players. I think Chinese and Korean gamers are so defensive about their games because they can look over here and see what happens when the industry gives an inch to the type of people who hate the average player of games. If they detect a whiff of someone like that fucking with their games, they go full nuclear scorched earth. As a result, developers over there are a lot more careful about their actions.
You can protest that it is silly, or that creators should have artistic freedom. To some extent I agree, but again — look at what we're getting out of American AAA studios. It is difficult to imagine a company in literally any other business (besides other sectors of entertainment) having that much contempt for its audience. Imagine a power tool company hiring people who casually talked on twitter about how they hated the average person who uses power tools, and wanted to use their position of influence to make the new generation of power tools appeal to that person less. This is just Wednesday for big game companies, though.
And come on — at the end of the day, GFL is a waifu collecting game. If I were writing for of those, the literal last thing I would ever do is ruin the wish fulfillment fantasy of the story. That's the entire point of the game, that's why people are paying me money. There are places for such storylines and it's not wrong for them to exist, but it is baffling to me that the company who trades on waifuism would ship such a story for what is to my understanding one of their flagship characters.
I agree that the Chinese/Korean gacha gamers, united by their schizophrenia, are a memetic force to be reckoned with (I've seen one hilarious negative Steam review in Japanese which went something like "I was told there would be NTR and I'm disappointed there isn't any, false advertising" but I can't find it now). I can even tentatively agree that Reverse Collapse was unfortunate but acceptable splash damage from the controversy, same developers after all. If all you have is a downvote, you need all the power multipliers you can get if you hope to enact actual change. If Western gaymers had 10% of their unity, camaraderie and total shamelessness, Western gaming might not've become a culturally lost cause. I have a fledgling theory better fit for the CW thread, that this and related incidents in games are local eruptions of a larger conflict, that of self-inserters (who enjoy competent MCs) vs. shippers (who enjoy diverse fleshed-out casts), and even more broadly men vs. women (whose areas of interest in gachas specifically run almost directly counter to each other), and the overall state of the gender war in a particular region/country will by itself tell you a lot about the state of games it produces.
Still, the audience having sway over the writing is a double-edged sword: Chaos Zero Nightmare, a Korean deckbuilder gacha, has had its Raymond moment (decent r*ddit summary) literally immediately upon release, and compounded with rumors of internal mismanagement eventually forced the director to make an "Emergency Livestream", a public apology, and a big shuffle at the studio, with the creative lead and some of the (female, as is tradition) writers getting removed. One
obsessed schizocommitted poster dutifully maintains a list of fuckups on namuwiki.The story from that moment on has taken a sharp, almost jarring swerve towards the audience's apparent wishes, every waifufag's desires have been granted to the best ability of the writers (which to be honest is still not much). Most of the girls in the new chapters take an immediate interest in
SKKthe Captain, Chapter 1 in particular (the biggest offender, as the source of the Owen incident) got rewritten entirely - with a new twist of your loyal bodyguard Renoa, previously the butt of reverse-NTR jokes, turning out to actually be some sort of time goddess from the future who is personally and intimately familiar with the Captain, and literally gives him the plot device to turn back time which is a key quirk of the Captain's station and a prominent mechanic of the game. Male characters are almost entirely absent from the new story chapters, and one particular male that occurred in the story before the rewrite was, I shit you not, referred to by female pronouns in the new chapters that came after the rewrite (I'm honestly surprised Owen hasn't gotten retconned into a girl, as Raymond apparently was come global release). Whether KR translation error or actual retcon I'm not sure but uhh... based?All of this is to say that while the KR audience largely got what it wanted, the game didn't actually get better in the story department, and if anything the omnipresent MC wank and the whole new-girl-every-banner dynamic that being a gacha necessitates, all in a setting that was originally intended to be grimdark elder-gods space opera stuff, and still retains the dressing of such... idk, maybe Asian gacha players are built different but even as a waifufag myself I can't take it seriously, it's way too on the nose. The handling of the MC in particular feels to me like the writers are desperately trying to ape the infamously-based GFL Commander, without understanding what makes skk work as a character of his own with a presence in the story despite also driving around a veritable whorehouse of T-Dorks, all of which lust after him to various degrees. Which is a real shame, CZN is another example of a gacha that is actually a good game at its core.
Those CZN links are a real rabbit hole, I hadn't been aware of that controversy. It's a shame about the writing issues, as I am really liking the game's art and character design from what I saw. It does seem like the game was rigged from the start for CZN, though, with the original writer being pushed out, so it's hard to see a situation where that happens and the writing is good no matter how they handle the fanservice.
I would like to see your theory on these incidents fleshed out in a longer thread. It really does seem like a proxy for the gender war. Even unrelated things are downstream of this - proximity voice chat in Halo 3 was removed because too many women were made fun of in comms. I think by this point most men into these kinds of games understand the shape of the conflict fairly intuitively, as all media and elements of media made to appeal to them have been systematically attacked in the same way again and again for the last decade+. A lot of them will admit that there is an impasse between the sexes and that it's best if games are made differently for men and women, a position I find very defensible. In my experience women who get involved in these battles are unfortunately not as honest about preferences. A lot of them get upset at fanservice, can't seem to accept the idea of something being made to appeal to men, and will agitate to have those things made to appeal to them. The me of ten years ago was much more sympathetic to women wanting to be included, not I see it and get annoyed because, well, I've played these games before. Now there is plenty of media made to cater to their tastes, but that never seems to be enough.
Part of me thinks Western games becoming how they are is an inevitable and unavoidable consequence of the Civil Rights Act, and no amount of gamer rage could have prevented it. If it's illegal to maintain a bro culture that values bro things in the office, you're going to see that reflected in the product. If you're successful enough, eventually you're going to have to comply with CRA hiring and workplace requirements, and if you don't do it fast enough, you're going to get body slammed by the government for millions and take a massive reputational hit. A court ruled that Riot Games requiring its employees to play their games to be a discriminatory hiring practice against women. I don't know how you can maintain a good culture for making games under conditions like this. I'm not sure if CN or KR have an equivalent law, so I can't say for sure.
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I have the same response I gave to @Grant_us_eyes - they can go wild complaining about the issues they have on GFL2 reviews and forums, I don't appreciate them taking the drama to another game, the issues they had with GFL2 did not apply to Reverse Collapse. They may share the same universe but as far as I know it has completely different characters from the main GFL and GFL2 games with the exception of a few cameos.
When you see a game being review bombed, it's normal to want to know why. Sometimes it's legitimate, like Silksong butchering the Chinese translation. But when the review bomb is because people did not like what developers did with an entire other game, that's a level of pettiness that I actually don't respect, especially because it's a game I ended up enjoying and almost didn't' buy because of the lower rating. Lower review rating = less sales = lower likelihood another game being released.
I'm someone that mostly only plays games developed by Asian developers and Indie developers and almost never Western AAA games, so I understand their concerns quite well. I even previously wrote about Korean gacha gamers before mostly in their defense. But there is a line between players passionately advocating for the games they want and just being unnecessarily vindictive. I will note that I do not know Chinese so the information that I had access to comes from English sources which naturally will be more biased towards the EN community and against the CN community, but here's a post that seemed to summarize all the drama and has some understanding for Chinese gamers and providing sources and comments from both sides of the controversy:
https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ifexp8/video_games_the_cuck_chronicles_a_saga_on_the_cn/
According to that post, Chinese gamer harassed the voice actor but there doesn't seem to be any supporting evidence for why they did so other than her being the voice in the drama. This also goes into the entire cancel culture concept, I'm sure it's different in the Chinese community but to me it seems there is a remarkable difference between anger towards someone who has contempt for gamers and lets that contempt seep into the work, and someone who just happens to be in the crossfire for doing the work they were hired to do. I don't see evidence of the voice actor showing contempt for gamers and if there was any I'm sure that context would've been included. Even then, I've never been a fan of cancel culture (in the west typically tactics employed by the blue tribe), so I also don't condone a group of Chinese gamers employing cancel culture tactics to harass people that had little to do with the source of the controversy. It'd be one thing if the voice actor is tweeting anti gamer stuff and egging on the playerbase, but that didn't seem to be the case here.
There's also a difference between wanting a company to change directions to go back to course in the direction you want, versus active wanting to sabotage everything related to the thing you dislike as punishment. Obviously #notallchinesegachagamers, but there was a significantly loud enough group of Chinese gamers that actively wanted to kill GFL2. Here's a funny thing that happened:
Side observation, it also seems like the Chinese gacha gamer communites have their own share of trolls and fans of different games go to war with each other. As an outsider this is the information about the drama happening in Chinese gacha games I get to read about. I don't know how common this type of behavior is but it's quite funny to read about.
But this also lead to an active campaign to kill the sales of Reverse Collapse by review bombing it, which again is a completely separate game, and how I learned about this controversy to begin with. 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.
A big issue seems to be how different customer bases view the purpose of a review on a global platform like steam. It's pretty common sentiment amongst Chinese gamers that reviews are a way for their issues to be heard considering steam forums are banned in China. We saw something similar happen in Slay the Spire 2, which was review bombed about half a year ago by Chinese players that didn't like the direction the game was going in. In this particular case, since it was issues specific to the game itself, their complaints are legitimate as they saw the game moving towards a direction they didn't like. But for pretty much everyone outside of China, the game continued to have high ratings even with the changes. Steam tries to mitigate this issue by having overall ratings and language specific ratings, but the overall rating is featured first. Cursory reading seems to indicate that a lot of this is downstream of popular Chinese influencers/streamers who play Slay the Spire 2 in a very different way, so the Chinese audience has a different idea of how Slay the Spire 2 should play compared to everyone else.
This seem like one of those situations where differences in culture on how people use a platform leads to friction between player bases. Actually, Chinese players review bombing games is a topic in and of itself, as I previously mentioned sometimes they seem relevant and even necessary, but other times it just seems to be extremely petty and vindictive. Looking around various gaming forums, steam, reddit, it does seem like most non-Chinese gamers have a pretty negative perception of Chinese gamers though due to how many popular games have been review bombed by Chinese gamers, which can also be downstream of the general anti-Chinese sentiment that seems to be part of Western (or mostly American) culture.
I enjoyed that post of yours, I'd had it saved from a few years back. I get what you're saying, but I guess I disagree that Reverse Collapse is not a valid target, as long as you grant that this type of pressure campaign is acceptable or necessary. It's a game by the same developer with a release date somewhat lined up with the GFL2 controversy. If you're trying to put the screws on a company for taking a direction you don't like, there are few targets more fair than review bombing their other games. It's not just an East Asian thing; Bethesda's whole catalog has been review bombed on steam during paid mod controversies centered on individual games. It's a bit unhinged, but there just aren't that many real avenues for players to influence the direction of these games, so they're going to reach for any lever they can pull, and it's a big, easy lever to pull. Funnily enough, I also found out about the controversy through Reverse Collapse, so if the players' aim is to drag the company's name through the mud through any means necessary... it clearly worked for both of us.
I feel bad for the voice actor in this situation, she obviously didn't deserve to have that happen to her. I would like to say that should never happen, but realistically it probably just isn't possible to have a playerbase willing to go this far to defend their games and not get ugly collateral damage like this. If everyone involved was level-headed enough to not go after unrelated people, they'd probably be level-headed enough to just not freak out in the first place, and then bad actors never get pushed out of the industry. I hate to say this at risk of sounding like a mind killed partisan, but the optimal number of wrong scalps to take is probably not zero.
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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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