2024 was, officially, my most offline year ever. In between moving cities and all the bureaucracy that involved, I was also tasked with finishing university, searching for an internship, and finally landing my first full time job since I resumed my studies. In between all of that, one thing I did not have much time for in this chaos, was video games. But I still managed to get quite a few under my belt (and miss even more, I’m so sorry Jun Maeda)
But there is one genre that is perfectly suited for playing in 15 minute spells when you’re in Mexico’s City world-leading horrible traffic and moving at a rate of a metre per minute. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen and inbetween, gacha. This is the year I hit that gacha pipe so hard I can’t ever go back and no, I swear I do not have a problem.
Dishonorable Mention: Atelier Resleriana
Let’s take out the rubbish for a start, I really wanted to like this game. The Atelier games suffer from just about every malady in the JRPG world and yet they have cultivated such a unique identity and atmosphere that each time they cross into my orbit I am happy to have them crash land right into my schedule.
The series has been going through something of an identity crisis ever since the Mysterious series with each new set of titles trying to put their own spin on the 20+ year old formula. I would be remiss to ignore that the main takeaway Koei Tecmo took from the success of the Ryza series was “fanservice, and lots of it”. This isn’t necessarily bad, but I always thought it was a poor fit for this series.
Resleriana is more or less a direct offspring of this line of thinking, in which having your favourite characters all meet up and make nice, and occasionally wear revealing outfits, was supposed to carry a mediocre package through.
This isn’t the first time Atelier ventured into the Gacha space, but their intentions with this one were clear from the start. Resleriana might just be the prettiest game I’ve ever played, with the best looking models, animations, shaders, and even facial expressions I’ve seen in an anime style game. Not through fidelity, but artistry. Even the routine crafting of items was a veritable audiovisual experience that still makes me smile when I think about it. If you were a fan, you were being serviced, even if you weren’t a pervert.
And yet Resleriana could not escape the most basic traps of the Gacha genre: Overly simplistic gameplay, encounters tuned to be cleared with auto-combat, massive grind requirements early on, and a sharp drop on the presentation after the opening chapters.
What’s more, Resleriana stumbled on obstacles that one would imagine were already solved issues in the gacha space, like the lack of a decent monthly pass. As of the time of writing, the global servers of Resleriana have announced an EoS and I am not in the least surprised. I wanted to like this game but it just gave me nothing to hold onto. Don’t jump in before the EOS, but I highly recommend watching the cutscenes on youtube.
5: Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage
Many years ago when I was a different person altogether, I carefully schemed for this game to be the destruction of my erstwhile past-self.
Don’t get me wrong, I still installed the JP version on launch night but try as might I could not carry my dekinai ass through the original 8 stories at launch. So Project Sekai, as it was then known, stayed in my pocket as a supplemental piece to the Project Diva releases. I ignored the story, and whenever I felt like playing a song not in the diva series, I would return to it, ignoring all gacha aspects. This relationship remained largely the same when it was released globally as Colorful Stage, apart from me occasionally using the free rolls they give out for events like Christmas, New Years, and Anime Expo of all things.
No routine survives contact with the Mexico City streets, and I quickly found myself in great need of activities that would kill 5 to 15 minutes at a time, so I finally delved into the game quite seriously, and as expected: I fell in love.
There isn’t that much to say about Project Sekai, because as both a rhythm game and Visual Novel it is perfectly adequate. Superb, even, but there is no masterclass of anything here. I have to confess to my attachment being purely sentimental. I have truly come to love the Sekai Kids, the often derided show-stealers that make this not so much a Hatsune Miku game as a game featuring Hatsune Miku.
Crypton knows their audience, perhaps all too well, and these kids are pretty much all made mould perfect to draw out maximum sympathy from anyone who’s allowed a big part of their life to be occupied by Miku’s songs. Even the white-bread-with-whole-milk band, Leo/Need get a lot more fun to be around when you realise their most defining traits as a unit is just how much they all love Miku. Which is about as relatable as you can get in a game like this.
And once you start dealing with much more immediately grabbing ensembles, like eccentric theatre kids WonderlandsXShowtime, and perpetually-online and mentally-troubled girls Nightcord at 25, it’s hard to imagine a better set of characters to represent a musical scene such as vocaloid. Especially over last year, all these kids have finally taken huge strides and began to evolve past their initial goals to progress onto new stages of their lives. And I’m just so happy for all of them. The Miku Gacha did, in the end, consume my life like I always wanted it to, and I’m very happy for it.
4: Punishing Grey Raven
Never let it be said I am not perfectly predictable in my eccentricities. Those in the know are already laughing at my transparency, but if you aren’t, let me fill you in: Punishing Grey Raven had a collaboration with Black Rock Shooter last year, at least in the global servers.
I have to say, this game does not make good first impressions. With the first 8 chapters being quite possibly the worst told and most inane storyline I’ve had the displeasure to meet in a game. It looked like butt, it sounded like butt, and it read like butt.
But I kept trudging through it, because I wanted my Black Rock Shooter, and was surprised to learn that this game does reach much higher peaks than its troubled beginnings might suggest.
It’s all in the presentation. The format, tone and simple preferences of the imagery do not lend themselves to particularly heady or complex discussions. It does have some pretty interesting ideas for an action story, and when it pulls its head out of its tacticool camouflaged arse, the presentation can actually be quite stellar.
Like a lot of gacha, to talk about the combat is fairly difficult because though there are underlying systems, the characters all have their own unique features to incentivise rolling. In my case, I got very lucky. The Home Team player for PGR during the Black Rock Shooter crossover was “Lucia: Crimson Weave” and I have to admit to have absolutely fallen in love with this woman’s sword style.
I could care less how to optimise her damage or do her optimal rotations, but just the very act of switching through her stances, using her dodge-into-riposte at max charge, and firing dozens of sonic blades at my enemies is addicting and dozens of hours later I still take her into every stage with me. Even after rolling a much more powerful DPS character with all her gear, she remains my favourite in this title. And she is one of very few gacha characters I’ve played that translates “having movements that look cool” into movements that actually feel incredibly cool to be in control of.
And now they’re getting Dante as a collab next year so they got me in good, folks.
3: Wuthering Waves
Kurogames cannot get the beginning of their games right to save their lives. I had been looking forward to this game since roughly 2022 when I first saw gameplay of it, and had it summarised to me as “Genshin Impact with better combat”. I would posit it’s more like, Genshin Impact with faster, but more conventional combat, but that’s neither here nor there.
At its core, this game is Genshin Impact, so I should have taken to it immediately. And yet the first few hours are so torturously boring, from the dialogue that suffers from both too-much and not-enough explanations, courtesy of too many rewrites, to being saddled with two characters that together roughly make up one whole personality.
I dropped this game roughly 6 hours in after I felt no compulsion to log in the next day, and forgot about it until the release of Camylla, whom I felt compelled to roll for purely because she kinda looks like my beloved Herscherr of Sentience.
Once I jumped back in and made my way through the 1.0 storyline I found out it does not get better. At all. At most the original package of the game contains a couple of cool but meaningless setpieces, and two conversations that threaten to get interesting and have more to say but never quite get there.
Still, I persevered into the further patches. Onto the area called “Mt. Firmament” where the visual presentation takes a fairly large leap, and the stories actually latch onto and develop a character (albeit with some slightly odd timing). Accompany it with a pretty cool and fairly massive dungeon, a cool ending sequence and some SSX-like sliding action, and I was pleasantly surprised.
Pushing further into the area known as “The Black Shores”, Wuthering Waves was ready to make me feel ridiculous for ever doubting it. Not only taking some really cool set piece and presentation tips from Nier’s constant perspective changes, but refining its visuals even more, and pretty deftly weaving some honest-to-god sci-fi bullshit into what had been a mostly fantasy setting until now.
The plotline also got a lot more interesting, tackling some pretty basic philosophical questions in an actually grounded and thought-out way. At this point it sort of starts to overplay the trope of the woman who loves you in a way that is more poetic or religious than sexual but of all the ways I’ve seen that play out in anime before, I’ve never seen one quite like the shorekeeper. So while it might be a little on the poor taste side, I can’t deny it’s interesting. Though it probably says a lot that such an esoteric relationship is kind of just a mainstay of anime tropes now. And even stranger that it appears twice in this game, back to back, and both women have blue hair.
By the end of the “Black Shores”, my thought was that Wuthering Waves might have exhausted all its ideas for setpieces, as the ending sees a couple of repeats, but also that they had exceeded themselves in almost every way, and by the end my feelings on the game were unrecognisable from that bitter taste at launch.
At time of writing, Wuthering Waves is riding high on critical praise on the back of its “Rinascita” 2.0 patch, which is supposed to be the best thing since sliced bread you can gamble for, and while I think most of the people singing its praises are doing a very poor job, I have no trouble believing Wuthering Waves could push that envelope. I will see for myself soon enough.
2: Granblue Fantasy: Relink
The older I get the more games reside in my memory and heart more than my hands. Whilst playing it, I did like Granblue Fantasy: Relink but didn’t think it was anything too special. A dungeon crawler, a little clunky, a little unfocused, and a little janky that served as Cygames’ very-troubled first step into traditional gaming.
And yet with the passing of the months it just makes me smile. I can picture its cities and hills a lot better in my mind than I can locales, real and digital, that I’ve traversed way more, and find a lot of its encounters have such well-designed sets and memorable scores that I can’t forget experiences as mundane as fighting a bunch of goblins in an Arena.
I can’t really recommend this to many people, because in truth, it is incredibly flawed, and it places so much of its stock on back-loaded endgame content that is now virtually impossible to do without a dedicated group of friends, and yet, it made me happy.
If its job was to carry me further into the Skydoms of Granblue, I have successfully been lifted up to those clouds and I’m happy to remain here if CyGames will toss me some more bones. I am not playing that gacha on a browser though, I am just not.
1: Bang Dream: Girls Band Party
I know, I know, I know. Hear me out ok? Alongside my metamorphosis into a cockroach that will eventually be found dead in my room, you know, because of all the gacha I play, I further specialised my bug-like qualities into some rhythm gamer specialisation. The reasons are simple, and go hand-in-hand with the gacha turn: Mobile friendly, and playable in very tiny intervals. After a long day, playing 3 to 5 songs feels like a much more complete game loop than dedicating 15 to 30 minutes to just about any other genre.
Bang Dream was not originally a title I had much interest in, with Colorful Stage already having my bases covered on this type of rhythm game. But somewhere last year I discovered the beautiful anime Bang Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! and became a fanatical convert. I installed the game somewhere in the summer, and idly tapped away at challenges and dailies, waiting for the story of the MyGo!!!!! girls to make it into the global release.
Sure enough, it was fantastic all over again, I cried. I’m not ashamed to admit it, this is almost entirely a story pick, but it is a really good story, and one that has breathed new life into Bandori in its native Japan as well as conquered neighbouring China for a good reason.
Story is not all that Bandori has going for it, though. The UI and UX is by far behind ProSeka, and MyGod that optimisation is so bad it will make you cry —seriously, around September this game was being held together by sticky tape and hope— but if you can run this without it crashing at every turn, it’s actually a really good rhythm game.
In some ways, though they are incredibly similar, I think it might be better than Proseka. For once it does demand a hell of a lot more precision with your inputs, which made it pretty humiliating to have to crawl my way through the difficulties all the way back down from “normal” just because my butter fingers couldn’t tap quiiite perfectly in the designated spot.
When it does work it nails that “dancing with your fingers” feeling a lot better than Proseka does, at least for me, and for the settings I settled in for both games. And let us not forget, Bandori has a rehearsal mode, something Guitar Hero had in 2009 but in 2020, android diva Hatsune Miku could not spring for.
For a genre of games so utterly rooted in both repetition, and perfection, the fact that this is not in ProSeka is kind of an outrage, and it makes Bandori just far and away the better choice for anyone that really wants to get good at the rhythm game parts of these titles. And believe me, someone like me needs all the practice they can get.
