Having never played gacha games but getting a good laugh out of this, is this really a thing people play? How different is the real gameplay?

▲

pynappo 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Generally speaking I think the allure of modern-day gachas is providing a near-premier gaming experience (like paid RPGs, open-world games, etc.) while being free-to-play, at the cost of slowly encouraging you to spend a lot of time and/or money to get better characters in order to actually keep up with the end-game content and/or PvP side of the game.

If you commit to playing the gacha for an extended period of time, the system of:

- daily rewards that encourages you to play for a couple minutes each day to get enough currency to get good characters from the gacha

- newer characters being better than older ones (in visual design appeal and/or power-level)

- harder end-game content requiring better rosters of characters (or more grind)

- sales on the premium currency used to pull

- the ol' sunk-cost fallacy

all combine to encourage players to spend money over time

In this regard, the game in the post obviously does not have the scope of a game that actually costs money, and doesn't have the goal of getting you to spend money, but it does cover the grind and gacha part of pulling for different rarity characters and such.

▲

applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, this is nothing like a real gacha game at all. Gacha games have a wide variety of mechanics, and can have significant depth to them. Trading card games were the original gacha games, and those have entire competitive scenes with tournaments, etc. (Magic the Gathering, Yugioh, Pokemon TCG). Digital gacha games are similar. In a real gacha game you aren't rolling for a static number, you're rolling for a package of numbers and modifiers and mechanics that feed into a complicated combat system, and there's tons of strategizing around how you combine different packages of numbers together in deckbuilding/teambuilding, plus the decision-making in the battles themselves.

Gacha is really just a monetization approach. The mechanics that accompany it are the real draw, and you can have card games, RPGs, tactics games, action games, etc.

▲

wordpad an hour ago | parent [-]

You have all that with Gacha pulls and battle system.

	▲	applfanboysbgon 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The battle system is too rudimentary to capture the essence of gacha. Insofar as gacha lends itself to gameplay mechanics and not just monetization, deck/teambuilding is absolutely integral. Obviously, the game is a parody, but even as a parody I think it does a poor job of capturing that aspect of building and experimenting with your deck/team. Which is fine, not a criticism of a silly little app, but the person I was responding to asked if this is what real gacha games play like and why people play them and I do not believe this is sufficiently representative.

▲

3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

▲

auszeph 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think the idea is that many games in essence boil down to this. Gamified random number generators.

It's really well done, and hilarious.