#grimlight

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Soul Tide (2022 - Present)

I didn't even stick with this for a week. I hate almost all gachas where the player characters have the magnetism of shitty harem anime protagonists. This game had that and a VERY inconsistent artstyle between all of its playable characters.

Fortress Saga (2023 - Present)

This shouldn't even really be here since it's more of an idle game than a gacha one, but it has the same shitty monetization as other gacha games and I didn't want to dedicate one post to one game since it's the only idle game I played.

This was fun for maybe the first hour, then it was addicting (but in an unfun, nasty way) for the next 20 hours. It's a shame because I do like the general concept (it's called Fortress Saga since you're running a Howl's Moving Castle-esque castle), but it's designed to be extremely addicting.

You do tasks that will get you pulls, and then you use those pulls to complete tasks which will get you more pulls, and you can use those pulls to complete more tasks to get more pulls to complete more tasks to- you get the idea

Didn't feel like I was playing a game, it felt like I was getting played by the game. I think certain types of people should REALLY avoid this.

Path To Nowhere (2022 - Present)

AKA "I can fix her" the gacha game

This game has some interesting things going for it. Even though I dislike "harem anime protagonist" syndrome, you can at least choose to be a female harem anime protagonist. It may have probably been designed with straight audiences in mind, but a not insignificant portion of the fanbase seems to be queer, so that's pretty neat.

...Unfortunately I just couldn't get into the gameplay. I thought it was just Arknights, but this game confirmed that I cannot play gacha tower defense games AT ALL. Gacha RPGs? I can deal. Gacha tower defence games? Absolutely unplayable to me.

Higan: Eruthyll (2022 - Present)

I thought I'd check out this game, because it's not doing so hot and an end of service announcement may be imminent. It's still not canned yet but I got nothing. Nothing to say about the budget Genshin designs, the story or the auto battler gameplay.

Grimlight (2022 - 2024)

I stuck with this one for a while, mostly because I'm going through a whole "South Koreans doing their own takes on western fairy tales" phase (other things that currently interest me are Lobotomy Corporation, Not Sew Wicked Stepmother and A Wicked Tale of Cinderella's Stepmother. I'm just hooked man).

The story is essentially Kingdom Hearts and the character designs (in the portraits at least) are very nice. There's not much of an actual game though. It's an auto battler so you're not really doing much of anything. The tiny battle sprites don't do the character designs any justice. And when the game's 'cancellation' was announced I had no real reason to continue.

Langrisser Mobile (2019 - Present)

The last game I dropped. It got me to stick around for 3-4 months, which almost no other game did. I think this is actually pretty decent if you're looking for a PVP game, that's just not what I wanted. Having to do PVP matches every day *just for my dailies* ended up being a big reason I dropped it.

The other reason is that progress is sooooo slow. I actually wanted to see how the main plot would get resolved. But 80% of my story progress was in the first month. After that it'd take weeks of grinding just to see the next story cutscene / fight. Then after progressing by one stage, you're back to grinding again.

Even gameplay progress is slow. I thought twice about dropping Grimlight since I had so many characters unlocked. But in Langrisser, I was still using the same 4-character team (Leon, Vargas, Almeda and Liana) from the beginning with only 2-3 new characters I actually picked up and was using (Varna, Bernhardt and Rozenciel).

I respect the game for having some of the coolest crossovers in any gacha (they got Slayers, Valkyria Chronicles 1, Yu Yu Hakusho, Gintama, even Pop Team Epic), I also *love* that dork Almeda, but if I ever play more Langrisser, I hope it's through remasters of the original games.

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There is one final game I played, but unlike the others, I didn't actually drop it:

Reverse:1999 (2023 - Present)

That's right this was actually just a roundabout way of saying "I am now a Reverse 1999 fan".

I don't want to get into it now, but it feels more like "Touhou if it were a gacha game" than Touhou LostWord, which at this point, barely has anything to do with Touhou, if we're being honest. There are more of these "alternate universe" characters (read: OCs that are only loosely inspired by Touhou characters) than there are actual Touhou characters in LostWord.