I arrived late to the gachapon party, but being highly susceptible to Skinner box "push button, get pleasant neurotransmitter output" game design, it was only a matter of time before I got into one. To date I've tried Final Fantasy Record Keeper, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, Girls X Battle 2 (briefly), Fire Emblem Heroes (VERY briefly), and Arknights, this last of which I'm currently playing and continuing to enjoy. (Genshin Impact also counts, though that one has its own thread, and I wasn't able to play much of it due to technical issues.) I'm finding their design fascinating, sometimes morbidly, so I figured I'd spin up a thread about them!
Word of warning: this genre can be ... unethical. These games are absolutely purpose-built to prey on people who are "bad with money" or have impulse control struggles, be it from executive dysfunction, tendency to addiction, etc. Approach with caution, and if you've got risk factors, maybe stay away, or work with an accountability partner or the like to cap how much money you spend on it.
The core feature of a gachapon game is that you collect your crucial game pieces--typically characters, but they might be weapons, spells, tanks, or whatever--via randomized "pulls" or "rolls" from a pool of possibilities of varying strength and corresponding rarity. But the genre has a number of other elements that seem to come up a lot:
Star ratings. Rarity and strength of your pulls get rated with "stars", on a scale of at least 1-5, but I've seen games push the top end all the way up to 12 stars! Sometimes these ratings are immutable, and sometimes there's a mechanic where you can upgrade a unit from one star rating to the next. Across the board, though, the more stars the better, and the more exciting it's meant to be when you see lots of them on a pull.
Stamina. Each chunk of gameplay, a battle or quest or what-have-you, costs you a resource that replenishes over real-world time. If we're being extremely charitable, we could say such a mechanic encourages players to take breaks. In practice, though, it's a monetization function: you can speed up the meter by consuming other resources available for purchase with cash money. Enjoying the game and want to play more? Pay up!
Widget-based advancement. Typically, winning a battle with a unit doesn't afford it any "experience" to make it stronger, like in a traditional RPG. Instead, you buy levels for your characters using other collectible currencies. As the game goes on, these currencies proliferate, with many, varied, increasingly rare geegaws needed to push your meeples to their full potential.
The first hit is free. Early in the game, you get lots of everything. Many freebie pulls; Stamina replenishes as fast as you can use it; you get more than enough advancement tokens to keep pace with the difficulty of the content. As you progress further, however, the gap widens between the resources you need and those that are readily available. More and more grind, downtime, and/or of course microtransaction purchases, are needed to continue forward.
Frequent limited-time events. The most basic is the "banner", where certain units are only available for pull during a limited window, or have a higher chance to be obtained during that time. But it's also common to have side storylines with difficulty spanning the same range as campaign content, but which can only be played for some weeks; or even entire game modes available on a temporary basis.
The male gaze (?). You've heard the sexist term "waifu"? These games often lean right into that. It's not unusual for the character roster of a gachapon game to consist largely or entirely of animesque women, and for those characters to feature idealized body types and sexualized outfits.
I've got some follow-up posts percolating to dig into how the games I've played implement and vary the above tropes, but I'll pause here. Let's talk gacha! What games have you tried? What other (possibly sketchy or sinister) design patterns have you seen?
May RNG bless you all!
Word of warning: this genre can be ... unethical. These games are absolutely purpose-built to prey on people who are "bad with money" or have impulse control struggles, be it from executive dysfunction, tendency to addiction, etc. Approach with caution, and if you've got risk factors, maybe stay away, or work with an accountability partner or the like to cap how much money you spend on it.
The core feature of a gachapon game is that you collect your crucial game pieces--typically characters, but they might be weapons, spells, tanks, or whatever--via randomized "pulls" or "rolls" from a pool of possibilities of varying strength and corresponding rarity. But the genre has a number of other elements that seem to come up a lot:
Star ratings. Rarity and strength of your pulls get rated with "stars", on a scale of at least 1-5, but I've seen games push the top end all the way up to 12 stars! Sometimes these ratings are immutable, and sometimes there's a mechanic where you can upgrade a unit from one star rating to the next. Across the board, though, the more stars the better, and the more exciting it's meant to be when you see lots of them on a pull.
Stamina. Each chunk of gameplay, a battle or quest or what-have-you, costs you a resource that replenishes over real-world time. If we're being extremely charitable, we could say such a mechanic encourages players to take breaks. In practice, though, it's a monetization function: you can speed up the meter by consuming other resources available for purchase with cash money. Enjoying the game and want to play more? Pay up!
Widget-based advancement. Typically, winning a battle with a unit doesn't afford it any "experience" to make it stronger, like in a traditional RPG. Instead, you buy levels for your characters using other collectible currencies. As the game goes on, these currencies proliferate, with many, varied, increasingly rare geegaws needed to push your meeples to their full potential.
The first hit is free. Early in the game, you get lots of everything. Many freebie pulls; Stamina replenishes as fast as you can use it; you get more than enough advancement tokens to keep pace with the difficulty of the content. As you progress further, however, the gap widens between the resources you need and those that are readily available. More and more grind, downtime, and/or of course microtransaction purchases, are needed to continue forward.
Frequent limited-time events. The most basic is the "banner", where certain units are only available for pull during a limited window, or have a higher chance to be obtained during that time. But it's also common to have side storylines with difficulty spanning the same range as campaign content, but which can only be played for some weeks; or even entire game modes available on a temporary basis.
The male gaze (?). You've heard the sexist term "waifu"? These games often lean right into that. It's not unusual for the character roster of a gachapon game to consist largely or entirely of animesque women, and for those characters to feature idealized body types and sexualized outfits.
I've got some follow-up posts percolating to dig into how the games I've played implement and vary the above tropes, but I'll pause here. Let's talk gacha! What games have you tried? What other (possibly sketchy or sinister) design patterns have you seen?
May RNG bless you all!