Soapbox: How Nintendo Unexpectedly Taught Me To Love Gacha Games

It’s all peanuts compared to 3ds Nintendo Badge Arcade

I mean, at the end of the day Gacha mechanics are still transparently predatory and introduce artificial scarcity and gambling-like mindsets to game design.

I'm not sure it's a good thing to "learn to love" them...

«How Nintendo Unexpectedly Taught Me To Love Gacha Games»
Well, gachya games don't deserve anyone's love. Gachya games are gambling apps. People throw money at gachya games, instead of buying (and thus commercially supporting) single-player games or paid online games. But I must say that I'm not fond of paid online games, however.

Just be FTP if you’re worried about “predatory” tactics. If you worry about any possible weak will you have then just remove payment options.

Currently play five FTP gacha on my phone because they are good time wasters while I’m on transit on way/leaving from work. Only like three of them I spend an insignificant money on (the other two I have not spent a penny) considering how long I played some of them. Genshin for example I played for a few years and only spent like $60 at this point which is hardly a “scam”.

Personally I don’t see FTP mobile gacha any worse then monthly subscription MMOs that has additional transactions within the game anyway. Sure some gacha are more scummy then others, but I just stay away from the scummy ones.

Most of the scummy ones end up EoS quick anyway while the main gacha I been playing been around for years and likely still be around for further years. If I played a MMO that would have resulted in a significantly more money sink spiral if I was on WoW or FFXIV at this point.

Only gacha I don't mind is the kind used in Xenoblade Chronicles 2, what currency you need is earned in game and not so rare that you have to pay actual money for it regularly like with FTP games.

XB2 is gacha on training wheels which always made me laugh when I saw people years ago (even still today) act like it’s just like a mobile gacha. It has the basic frame, but with practically none of the “negatives” that comes with it

• Game doesn’t ask you for real money for further pulls
• You only need to pull a rare blade one time and your done (removed from draw pool at that point which is good for you). No “draw it five more times to max it” angle. Only repeats you get are commons.
• the drop rate for rare blades are stupid generous that no FTP gacha would actually entertain. To further enforce it XB2 introduced multiples ways to further boost your odds significantly of getting specific blades. From Legendary Cores that boosts your odds to type framing so you can focus on a specific group of blades.
• You get several rare blades without even doing the gacha. Some you get automatically from your next pull attempt. Several of them being one of the best in the game. Most gacha won’t do that.
• IMO the most significant difference is the stupid amount of pull resources you can easily farm. Actual gacha eventually makes it so your “gated” with heavy breaks on your pull resources gain after you get all the free front loaded stuff and either expect you to progress slow or progress fast with money. In XB2? You can literally farm Legendary cores easy as early as Mordain. They even did an update for NG+ that gave you further ways to get legendary cores.

For context Kosmos is the rare blade that has the lowest pull odds to get, but factoring in legendary cores, food, trait focusing, and if you already pulled everybody else I got her within 5 min of pulling.

“ To explain why I gawked at this pseudo-gacha mechanic…”

Gawked? Did you mean to say “balked”?

"While I very briefly tried Dragalia Lost on the basis of it being a new Nintendo IP, I completely ignored the likes of Dr. Mario World and Mario Kart Tour."

Ironic you all went on to cover almost every MKT update and event yet barely covered Dragalia. You didn't even cover any seasonal events or anniversaries.

As someone who learned that they can have a bad habit of spending way too much money on these things, I am more than happy to not play any of these gacha games anymore.

I'll be staying far, far away for my own health and well - being.

Those early years of mobile gaming truly were amazing, so many unique and innovative titles. Looking at the endless ocean of exploitative tripe on the App Store now, it’s hard to believe there were once good mobile games.

@Vyacheslav333 I got lots of characters in Fire Emblem Heroes since it launched in 2017.

I've paid zero. Nothing. Nada. So far.

I don't understand how someone could pay 60+ dollars for what's actually free in game if you just wait.

I feel like that's the wrong lesson to take away from Fire Emblem and Dragalia.

The lessons I took away were "slavery is cool when you need to fight inter-dimmensional Nordic gods" and "Bang a dragon, kill God, and then kill the God that made God, repeat step 1"

The problem with gacha is that its biggest negative point is also the main thing that makes it profitable. If every game came with a spending cap of say $10 a day, that would at least make it harder for dumb kids and gambling addicts to empty their bank accounts into them, but I'm not sure if the business model would even work with that kind of restriction. I've done a pretty good job of limiting my spending, putting I think $20-30 dollars into FEH passes and something like $10 into a Dragalia special summon over the last seven years, but a big part of that is how absurdly expensive the premium currency seems compared to whatever amount you get just for playing the game. If FEH knocked down orbs to 20 for a dollar, they might have actually tempted me to try maxing out all my favorite characters, instead of settling for the one copy of each I can usually manage for free. I guess I should be thankful they've kept the price so high.

I was well into Fire Emblem Heroes, pumping money for the best wafui's. I finally quit about a year+ ago, now I just use it for Platinum Points for Club Nintendo.

Nothing can ever make me love gacha games. I really don't mean to be spiteful or anything but I really just despise the practice as a whole and it's a big reason why I won't ever delve into mobile gaming. Well, one of my big three reasons anyway (the others being the controls and the battle of the phone battery (life)).

Imho, phones are for phone calls and texting. And these days a bit of internet on the side. But games? Nah. Especially not gacha ones.

And no, gacha games on consoles, handhelds, and/or PC are no better.

I play Fire Emblem Heroes and Pokémon TGC Pocket but I’d never spend money on them, it just isn’t worth it.

The game with gacha elements I enjoyed most was Mass Effect Andromeda's multiplayer. Good rate, no money required, and gave you fun new tools to play with different from what showed up in your friend's file.
I like that feeling of personalized playing that comes with getting everything at random, but of course it's typically tied to aggravatingly aggressive greed. And in the end, the greed always gets worse.

I personally enjoy some Gacha games. Obviously I like Azur Lane. But I never really put money into them. A couple times I was generously gifted an iTunes card and used it for that. Other than that, you can still enjoy them free to play. Azur is actually very generous with cubes and stuff to let you build ships. There’s a lot of Gacha games that actually let you just play without needed to constantly pump in money.

@Arawn93 Drop rate in XB2 is only generous at first. If you have no idea what you're doing (aka most people on a first playthrough) then you'll end up with astronomically low odds at getting all the rare blades by endgame. But for all the normal people like me who didn't know about how this mechanic worked, they'll be scores and scores of hours beyond a point that they'd want to start over to stack the odds in their favor. I spent over 300 hours in XB2 for my first playthrough and only managed to pull about 75% of the rare blades.
I guess you could say Nintendo unexpectedly taught me how to hate gacha games.

That's how they Geccha. ^-^

I just want to state that I think every single game mechanic Xenoblade 2 took from mobile games made it a worse video game and that I'm bewildered, even without monetization issues, that anyone would want this. If you combine the core crystals with all the other repetitive stuff you're dragged into the menus to do without any joy or fun or even interest, it probably took up at least 40 hours of my playthrough and dragged the game's incredible core gameplay and music and world design and aesthetic down so far below where it would've bene otherwise. Xenoblade Chronicles 2, could've been, maybe even should've been, one of Nintendo's best games of all time, and it wasted my life with stupid nonsense to prevent that from being true. (because god knows I played the previous Xenoblade Choronicles games and thought they were just too short :V)

I've also been playing that one Kirby 3DS game that has f2p style monetization, which is also by miles and miles and miles the worst Kirby game, and that's with the threat of me spending money on it already gone as the 3DS eShop is now shut down. But without that, the game is like 90% daily apple picking, with most of the rest being constantly fighting the same maybe 12 bosses.

So even without touching mobile games myself, and even without my inherently very negative opinion of them from the outside, my experience with these games mechanics is EXTREMELY negative from even Nintendo first party games outside of mobile games, even without the terrible monetization.

I gotta give a shoutout to Kirby Triple Deluxe and Planet Robobot with the Keychain/Sticker gatcha systems. It was even better in Kirby and the Forgotten Land with the figurines.

@gojiguy You're right: it is absolutely NOT a good thing to love gacha mechanics.

They need to be regulated, not embraced.

@gojiguy from a free player's perspective, gacha mechanics are but another incarnation of randomized loot. It's MTX that nurture a gambling mindset of "buying a chance to get a desirable here and now", but among the audiences with the maturity and mental agency to manage their finances (others tend to warrant supervision and help even outside gaming anyway), these MTX recurrently fight a losing battle on the bang-for-buck arena due to offering [mere shots at possibly getting] select items with the straight face pricetags that can yield you one or several entire games over in the retail domain. And freemiums themselves can be easily enjoyed in their own right once you know how they tick (from currency influx via logins/events to the FOMO dissipation in the face of "banner" recurrence), especially if you're a JRPG nerd viewing the alternative grind as a point of interest in the first place.

@Yosher controls are a longtime but, in all fairness, comparatively more recent issue. Older smartphones like Nokia's Symbian lineup had enough buttons to facilitate a decent gaming experience, particularly in the emulation sphere. My Nokia E61 was my first introduction to Fire Emblem (through GBA's Blazing Blade), for instance, although I would end up a newer model and no way to transfer savefiles before I was even halfway through Eliwood's campaign.

@kkslider5552000 because they added to the game's enjoyment factor. Obviously not for everyone (nothing under the sun ever accomplishes that), but getting new blades and tending to their affinity charts has been one of the most addictive loops in my own playthrough and one of the biggest culprits behind its 260+ hour length to date. This "worse game" also remains the best-selling entry in the franchise to date with not a cent coaxed out of players on the aforediscussed gacha front (unless you count the DLC core pack but they're dwarfed by plenty of much juicier stuff for the pass price, and I still haven't even used any of them myself😆), so go figure.

Yeah no. I played gacha games and got addicted to it. I was f2p for about 2 years, but eventually I subscribed to services I simply felt I couldn't live without, which opened the flood gates to spending more actual money on the gambling side. I went down a cost sunk fallacy hole and to keep up the grind I played almost non stop. I stopped playing real games and the time sink was taking time away from my relationships. After I quit I went from maybe beating one game a year to beating a game or 2 every month and managed to make time for my relationships.

I ask people don't go down the rabbit hole I did. I started out healthy and in control, but eventually I sold my f2p card, my soul, and my life.

@nhSnork That's fair enough on the controls, though even if mobile had ''perfect'' controls, that wouldn't fix the other two major issues I have with mobile gaming, hahah. I think there's some gadgets out there that should make mobile gaming better though? And some controllers probably even work with it. Provided the games you'd play 'em with would support a controller to begin with. But at that point it's like, why not just play on PC or whatever.

Nope. Can't put lipstick on that pig.

That's, like... the weirdest flex of "gambling addiction mechanics really work and they worked wonders on me" that I can remember reading. You okay?? I don't know how you treat Stockholm Syndrome for gaming... :/

If Gacha games paid us to play them, then I would love them. Because seriously it feels like a job with all of the limited time/daily stuff in the games for me nowadays.

Gacha games are getting better with quality in certain areas these days though, so hopefully the gacha mechanic/UI part gets better in the future for newer gacha games as well. Same with all of the limited time/FOMO stuff. Daily login rewards/missions should be banned and replaced with something else so when you get burnt out, you don't have to play the game everyday. (The whole routine of logging in the game and getting all daily missions done and then turn off the game is tedious and just ruins the games for me in the long run.)

@babybilly On my first play-though I paid attention to the in-game tutorials. I didn’t use any external guides. It’s how I didn’t throw away pulls for no reason.

By NG+ it was mainly just the NG+ blades, dlc blades, and Kosmos left. By then I DID look at external guides and sure enough explained Kosmos objectively had the lowest odds then it told you all sort of tips to get her easy (most of which I knew via the tutorials). It’s worth noting I didn’t try to speed run the first playthough since that isn’t how I play. I do side stuff along main progression.

If you used all the mechanics in the game that tipped the pull odds in your favor then even Kosmos being the last “RNG” rare blade wasn’t something that took long for me to pull. The collecting and “completion” aspect was also just overall quicker because like I said before you only needed 1 copy and you are done. XB2 had no MLB mechanics for their units which is VERY consumer friendly if you know anything about gacha norms.

That is how I typically play a game in general on first play blind. I didn’t get “poor drop rate” vibes at any point of my entire time on XB2 especially as someone VERY familiar with how actually poor drop rates can be in legit gacha games.

That said XB2 tutorials could have been MUCH improved since I can understand some people being clueless on some of the more nuance features in the game. Lot of people to this day still ask about food for example.

On another note you don’t even need to play gacha to be “exposed” to these practices these days.

Lot of normal games (regardless if console, PC, or mobile) for example implement battle passes these days that has “you can only get all this stuff by paying money period doesn’t matter how long you saved” tiers. Most of the fighting games I play regularly jumped on that train for example lol.

That kind of crap is more FOMO predatory inducing then any FTP gacha I play that doesn’t even use battle passes lol.

Luckily the gacha that I do play that have battle passes are not as FOMO inducing since it’s mainly just extra loot you would have got thru normal play anyway and maybe a costume that would be on sale separate anyway later or a weapon that is far from BiS.

I do play FEH and a rhythm game called Project Sekai (which has some gacha elements) but the mechanics are pretty annoying and, like what some have said, could be considered predatory and kind of ruin the games. The only time I spent money on a gacha game was FEH (only $10 for some subscription service on there, which was ok) but after that I pretty much decided to never waste money on gacha games or to actually pull from gacha banners in the games and just use what I have in them. FEH is ok and I do like some of the characters, setting and gameplay, but it isn’t awesome and I found that the story is sometimes poorly written and isn’t memorable or strong.

I feel like some gacha games encourage you to spend money and gamble for something that you are not guaranteed to get (which definitely isn’t good for a natural spender like me) but there are definitely some games that do the gacha elements way worse than others, though luckily FEH and Project Sekai let you get in-game currency and it’s optional to spend real money on them.

I played Fire Emblem Heroes on and off for a few months. FE probably has my favorite line up of characters out of any franchise but the game still couldn't hold legs for me, it's really shallow.
I recommend just importing the trading cards (idk if that's still reasonable though the TCGs been defunct since 2020) if you need a FE flavored kick to your gambling addiction.
I can't really say I'm fully against gacha games cause I've been playing Zenless Zone Zero every day since it released, but I'm aware of the predatory tactics it and most others employ to get you to spend ludicrous amounts of money on tiny amounts of content.
Needless to say my love of ZZZ does not translate to a love for gacha games, it's just a singular game I find fun enough to push through the gacha mechanics. But I think @nessisonett nailed it on the head, Nintendo could serve up the exact same predatory slop that all the other slimeball companies put out and there will always be a contingent of fans who will say it's okay when they do it.

I had maybe around 60% of the rare blades in XC2 during my first run.

But in NG+, I found really fast way to collect them all.

First, I had nearly 20 legendary core crystals previously collected.
Then, I turned off automatic saving on my Switch and I saved my save file only manually to cloud. I saved the game and uploaded the save to cloud.
I used the legendary cores and when I was not satisfied with the number of attempts, I deleted my save and downloaded it back from cloud. I repeated this process with saves and uploads every time I pulled some rare blade, and also deleted it again many times. Even then, it took me some time to get Kos-mos but I completed them all in 1-2 hours or so (including those from Torna).
Then I went and filled all the nodes on every blade lol. That was much more time consuming.

The only gacha mechanics i like are in games like Kirby and the Forgotten Land or Tears of the Kingdom, because in those games you aren't spending real money, plus you can save scum if you really get screwed over. In those games its fun because theres still a risk/reward element but you're not causing yourself real financial harm

Nope!
They are a waste of time!

@UltimateOtaku91
XenoBlade 2 had the worst!
All those hours farming Core Crystals! Just to get the same damn Common useless no-field skill Blade!

Same Vibes: "How My Kidnappers Unexpectedly Taught Me To Love Them" - Written by a Kidnapping Survivor with Stockholm Syndrome.

People with addictive personalities tend to gravitate towards Gacha Mechanics because they itch a scratch. Which is fine as long as they have enough self awareness of the time (and possibly money) that they are spending and know when it is time to turn off the app.

For me, with ASD and an unhealthy desire to 100% games, I LOATHE to waste my time and money on something that is random. So I tend to avoid games that have gacha mechanics as best I can. But for example, I almost 100%ed Dark Souls Remastered recently, I am just missing the Ghost Blade drop from the screaming ghosts that hold babies. Anyone who has tried to get this weapon before will know the suffering, only two of the ghosts exist, they are in a location that is far from the nearest bonfire, drop rate is 1% without modifiers, up to 4% chance max. I have made a pact with myself that I can try a number of attempts in a day until I get it. But I need to limit how much time I waste on it daily. But until I get it, it will sit on my mind that I don't have it.

So as you can imagine, if I get into Gacha games I would be screwed. They are a toxic swamp nightmare for people like myself. And when we were kids, I noticed my sister playing the Rocket Corner slot machine for eight hours straight a day because she found it fun. I am too well aware of the dangers of these type of mechanics.

Gacha should never be spoken about positively. They are dangerous and predatory and should be banned from gameplay mechanics. The only exception to random drops should be that you ALWAYS get something that is new. So the randomized pool shrinks with each item obtained.

@Vyacheslav333 By all intents, most are single player games. They are not offline most of the time, some not until they EoS if you are lucky.

@gojiguy For starters, a good gacha game is suppose to encourage you to improvise a strategy through what you get randomly, while also having the ability to earn currency to buy the character after a hard set amount of rolls. And gacha with these kinds of mechanics do exist.
As I think I mentioned in the gacha game thread, a game like Blue Archive, for example, wants you to save your gems rather than recklessly spend them, so you can actually get the character you want, because they can be obtained after 200 GETs if luck isn't in your favor.

After skimming through the article in a way that was longer than a "skim", I don't think the core text lives up to the title, cuz it feels like it doesn't truly explain why someone would love gacha games....

@Arawn93 "Sure some gacha are more scummy then others, but I just stay away from the scummy ones.

Most of the scummy ones end up EoS quick anyway while the main gacha I been playing been around for years and likely still be around for further years."

As someone who defends gacha games myself, I think the scummy ones are probably the ones doing a lot of damage here. Mostly talking about gacha games that feature Goku or some other popular anime franchise. Compared to a original IP gacha, those games try to cheat their player base by exploiting their loyalty, where an original one needs to earn and maintain not just loyalty, but trust with their player base too.
But a lot of people who do not know about gacha games, do not know about these nuances...
It's probably best to try to help newcomers understand these things before they consider downloading these games. The fact that there's still gacha games that don't have a pity system either is mind-blowing.
Even Fire Emblem Heroes, never got a pity system update, so it's business model still horribly outdated in a much player friendlier industry now.

@TanukiTrooper "And when we were kids, I noticed my sister playing the Rocket Corner slot machine for eight hours straight a day because she found it fun."

Just a note in my case, but that minigame in FireRed is probably why I don't gamble IRL, since I found out "the hard way" in game and was kind of struggling for a bit afterwards. Good hard lesson for a game to teach wise spending, or more accurately, find ways to "cheat" the system if you can.

Dude...you need to go outside more.

Gachas are just fine as long as you have a functioning brain and dont pay for digital pulls for digital things that go poof when its no longer profitable for a company to work on them.

"Cites Xenoblade Chronicles 2 as a positive example of gacha."

No. Just no.

@bippity_bop This was my thoughts exactly lmao, I don't see the point of this article.

The gambling addict tries to justify their gambling addiction

The gacha mechanics in XC2 is the game's biggest issue. It doesn't cost money, but it cost a lot of time.

@Olmectron And wait 'till the game's servers will be shut down? 😂
@Samalik I know.

Shook by everyone who liked the Xenoblade 2 gacha, easily the most frustrating thing about that game by a mile.

@themightyant FYI just in case you don’t know: If you “did everything right” as in you seriously started to try to specifically pull for her in optimal conditions then the drop rate for Kosmos would be high as 60%~ (which has been confirmed years ago my multiple players in the community) which I shouldn’t have to elaborate that is stupid good odds for the “rarest unit” in gacha standards that would be capped at like less then 0.1%.

FYI when I pulled Kosmos my optimization wasn’t close to that, but was significantly higher where she still had a 40~% drop rate percentage after the math was calculated. So yes it was less “me being lucky” and more “I rigged the odds much closer to my favor. like the game mechanics allowed where I comfortably got her in 5 min. Still had a large pile of Legendary Cores never used along with other rate boosters.

Sounds like you were either just unlucky or you missed some key steps to boost your drop rate. As I mentioned earlier: Lot of the finer details of XB2 are not super clear (that includes for the gacha) and could be better explained to get more optimal drop rates.

@yohn777 It’s not really shocking.

As much as it surprises the non gacha gamers here (especially the ones that go “gambling addiction” as if “gaming addiction” is any better lmao both are potential money sinks): Gacha is popular.

People like the hunt to collect things and XB2 had that aspect that XB1, X, and XB3 lacked. Well XB3 has heroes, but that was not at the same scale compared to the amount of rare blades you can collect. XB2 didn’t even have the real money aspect so it’s hardly “predatory” that some people paint gacha with a broad brush on.

If Gacha was THAT unpopular that it would tank a game then just like how people are also annoyed about fanservice in XB2: it wasn’t at a significant number considering XB2 to this day is still most sold XB game.

@Arawn93 Lol I don't think gacha was any selling point of XB2, just a confusing surprise for 90% of everyone who booted it up. It probably has the best sales due to it being the first large scale rpg in the first year of switch. Also they had the physical release for Torna, which no doubt increased sales even more. Even though some were disappointed it wasn't more like the original game, I imagine that due to the initial disappointment of XCX that many more people were interested in XB2 than XCX, which was quickly considered by most just a spin off.
Nothing to do with the gacha crap. Good for you and others that y'all like it, I didn't though and obviously others didn't think it was great either. It's an extremely time consuming mechanic in an already very long video game.

@themightyant Again you don’t need to be that hardcore to get her relatively easily.

I didn’t even have to get at that far. My drop rate was “just” at the 40%~ range which if you knew gacha standards that is a steal since you would be lucky to get a 1% during a “rate up” in typical gacha.

Hell you could still get her relatively easy if the drop rate was like 20% (which isn’t hard to do since that gives you way more leeway on lot of optimization that saves you a ton of time. Only reason why I was more closer to 40% was because my “grinding” was the result of doing all the side content anyway. Again I’m not speaking from a speedrunner main story only PoV, but from a completion PoV. )

Also Legendary Cores become common as candy (not hard to do with far from optimized drop rate boosters the game provides) at like the mid point of the game (nevermind even more so during NG+) so as long as your drop rate was at the double digits it is still realistically a 5 min~ session of pulls. Still had a ton collecting dust after I got her.

@themightyant Not sure what you are trying to argue about? Citing a few people’s here’s either bad luck or non optimal pulling methods (what is more likely happening here) here isn’t a “gotcha!” you think it is. You can’t argue against literal objective mathematical numbers you can get.

XB2 has been out for years with plenty of times for fans in the community to play and replay the game several times to discover and refine their play throughs. There are TONS of people outside of this site (even on video) that got Kosmos with 5 min of of specifically trying to get her so I don’t understand the amount of downplaying that is happening here?

It’s objectively a fact you can get Kosmos easy if you utilizing the game mechanics to your favor so if you are still arguing against that then I don’t know what else I can tell you? :/ A few users on NL isn’t the XB2 player base as a whole.

@Arawn93 I'm not sure what YOU are trying to argue about. Also the random people you corroborated that apparently didn't have a problem don't encompass every players experience with XB2, either. Why do you think we're telling you it doesn't work the way you think it does? We weren't arguing for the sake of arguing, it's math, it's chance. Stop with the confirmation bias. Don't you think that people telling you that they did the exact steps you took & had different results means you should at least question what you knew? But no, you doubled down over & over & over again lol. Touch grass, man. Please stop telling people things are "objective facts" when they aren't.