This RPG Was My First Gacha Game, But It Will Also Be My Last

The core concept of immediately drew me in. I've always loved, and have always wanted to be able to play a similar game on the go. The involvement of composer Hitoshi Sakamito made this one too good to pass up. Going into it, I knewwas a free-to-play gacha game. As a dabbler in things like and, I knew the FTP playbook all too well: seasonal content, battle passes, "" currencies, et cetera. But I had never played a gacha game before, and I was determined not to spend a single red cent.

In the back of my mind, I always thought I knew how gacha games worked. If you didn't pay, you'd get a finite number of "," which you'd use to summon new characters. The stronger a character was, the less likely they'd be to appear. I was okay with that: I love a challenge, and was willing to play with a less-than-ideal roster. Plus, I figured if I liked the game enough to keep playing it, I'd eventually manage to rack up enough characters worth investing in, just by sheer probability. But the reality of its character roster was far more frustrating. If other gacha games work similarly, then I'm all too happy to write the entire genre off.

In our roundtable interview with Zenless Zone Zero producer Zhenyu Li during a media event, we asked about gacha grind and got an interesting answer.

The problem is thatit’s not the strongest characters, but the ones with cool, unique mechanics that make the tactical gameplay interesting who are hidden behind a paywall. As a matter of fact, it's not difficult to get purely powerful characters at all: the game's story quests dole them out like candy, and I pulled two Legendary-tier characters on my very first try. They carried me through the first few sets of missions with ease. But they were boring to play, and I kept waiting for the tactical side of it all to get more interesting. That never happened. Even after I had unlocked a handful of abilities, my characters could really only attack, defend, or heal.

So I began looking into the other