Today was supposed to be a good day. It was supposed to be the reveal of A25, the 25th mainline Atelier game. Not familiar with the Atelier series? Read this for details.
Anyways, A25 was revealed today at 9PM JST, which means it was early in the morning for me. So if this one announcement went well, I should have had good news to start the day with. But then A25 was revealed to be the antithesis of everything I like about this series: a mobile gacha game.
Abandoning traditional roots
Atelier games are niche JRPGs. They don’t sell in huge volumes and aren’t AAA quality; titles need to appeal to the core audience to sell. That’s why all mainline games so far have maintained a similar theme (kind of): a slice-of-life-ish crafting JRPG.
Then the Ryza trilogy came and changed a lot of things. These games sold very well, relatively, and grew the audience. The increased sales led to incredible growth in my opinion. I’m playing Ryza 3 as of writing this article, and I’m impressed by the improvements it’s made over Ryza 2, despite the games only being released about one year apart. Atelier games have become a lot bigger and better in just a few years, and I’m certain Ryza is responsible for that growth.
And so after the Ryza trilogy ended, people were wondering what was next. What was Gust, the developer, going to do next? Everyone was expecting a new protagonist and story, something fresh. And then Gust comes in with… a mobile gacha game. It has microtransactions. Online connectivity. F2P-model and gambling. It’s designed for phones.
Why? Why take a series that has survived for over 20 years by serving one niche and completely invert it? Gust isn’t new to gacha games by the way. They tried before with the Atelier series and it flopped hard. So why do it again? The company doesn’t have the brand power of Honkai or Fate.
I’m not against Gust innovating or breaking tradition. I’ve seen them experiment plenty of times; the prototype that Firis was, Ryza’s ATB and quasi-open world, and spin-offs and remakes. I want to see something new too, but not a mobile gacha.
I hate gacha games
Mobile games, mostly gacha, are all the same in the grand scheme:
- Encouraged to log in daily until EOS
- Infinite world expansion, no conclusive end to story
- Makes money off microtransactions and gambling
- JPEG/Live2D collecting “game”
I’m not interested in these games, that’s why I don’t play them. If I want to play a game, I want it to be paid up front, not encourage me to “log in” every day, and actually have an end to the game. I hear of some people that “rotate” gacha games by doing dailies for one, then another, until they “rotate” through 5 games. I think that’s insanity, I would never be able to commit to multitasking like that. I hear stories of leviathans that spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to min-max JPEGs. I’d rather pay a fixed sum and get a finite amount of entertainment.
I think gacha games have really watered down what a game can be. Sure, I get that most people have terrible attention span and are simply too dependent on their phones for everything. Everything revolves around the phone in today’s world, which I also hate (rant for another day). But, while this might be a boomer take, I think you just can’t beat the experience of playing something immersive in front of a monitor or TV.
At the end of the day, the reason for making a gacha game is obvious: money. A successful gacha game can farm whales really hard, and people are always tempted by this potential glory. Gust is free to pursue as well, merely at the expense of completely abandoning their core audience that has sometimes stuck with them for over a decade. I’m on year 6 now.
A26 cope
I doubt Gust would suddenly abandon their core audience to appeal to mobile tappers. A26 should arrive later on, and it should be another mainline title. It’s just disappointing to see a gacha game be considered a main project.
Hard to believe that it’s already been 11 months since I posted positively about Ryza 3, but here we are. Two years ago, Sophie 2 was announced. That was the first time in a really long time I was actually hyped for a game. Ryza 3 was cool too, when it was announced last year. I’m not that into the Ryza series, but I was curious to see how her trilogy would end.
Whatever happens to A25 and Gust, I hope it can be made up with A26.