I haven’t played a lot of gacha, with most of my time in the genre being spent in Final Fantasy Record Keeper a while back. There wasn’t much story in that one. It was essentially a JRPG combat machine (specifically in the classic ATB style) with collectible characters. I had a good time with it, but I didn’t find it friendly enough to play in big chunks.
On the other hand, Sword of Convallaria, an upcoming tactical RPG gacha by Chinese developer XD, has a story to tell and fleshed-out characters to tell it. An early stand-out is Rawiyah, a boisterous “strong-looking woman” who positively shines as the heart of her mercenary order. The game certainly has something to say, being gripping from the opening scene: dark, bloody, and not pulling any punches. If you’re into pixel art, it looks fantastic, on par with similar grid-based battlers like Triangle Strategy. There’s also a top-notch soundtrack, with Hitoshi Sakimoto at the helm.
The problem is, the story is broken up into separate play modes, there to fuel the player’s currencies (I counted at least a half dozen). There’s a cute home base at the center of this, a launching point for The Fool’s Journey, a linear path of short battles through a shifting void. We’ve seen this setup before in free-to-play games. Calling the mode generic may be too strong of a word, as it does try to tell its own narrative. It still wasn’t where I wanted to be.
The main story requires currency per chapter, so I left off my run with the demo after paying for a run through an additional story segment, about four hours in. I don’t want to get invested in this story and these characters any more than I already am if the currency model isn’t generous, and I don’t have a good indication either way of that at this point. Sword of Convallaria would be a slam-dunk purchase for me if it had a traditional setup, but I’m going to wait and see how it shakes out after the full launch.
Yeah, that much is fairly common from what I’ve seen. With Record Keeper at least, the energy system wasn’t too bad unless you were binge playing. Most of the game’s revenue was probably coming from the gachapon itself for gear and unlocking new characters. I remember hearing SQEX wasn’t thrilled about the offset release schedule outside of Japan, because players could decide ahead of time which characters/events to target instead of staying on the treadmill.
It appears some sort of grinding for keys (the main story currency) is going to be necessary, it’s just a matter of how much or how much real money they will cost. Time gating in particular is something I’m going to want a report on. If I can drop keys/real money for unlimited access to an entire story arc as it’s released, I’ll consider it. If even that path is time gated with “Chapter 2 available next week!” on top of that in order to pad out their release schedule, I’m not interested.