keep seeing ppl mentioning arknights and literally the only thing I know about it is there's an anime girl who is a snow leopard but I guess that's a pretty good pitch

seems legit

I've hated every one of These Sorts Of Games that I've ever played but I keep hoping to find one I like bc everyone else seems to enjoy them and I derive no joy from disliking things

"Rhodes Island"

hmmmmmmm I don't hate playing this

I mean it's literally just tower defense with catgirls but I haven't played tower defense since like circa-2008 flash games so I'm not INHERENTLY bored with the concept...

it feels really weird to me how every gacha game has an identical menu labyrinth where you manage chars and juggle 200 different resources to upgrade like every individual stat and facet of the game

and then they only actually differ in "what do you do when you're not in menus"

like I've only played a handful of these but they're all INCREDIBLY clear about, like, "Here is the Player Retention System, and here is the Actual Videogame Part" and the videogame part isn't even like the third-biggest button on the main menu

it's interesting bc there's very clearly a *design convention* going on here, like once the industry figures out a set of game-design tropes and genres etc there's actual VALUE in not reinventing too many systems bc audiences reward familiarity

so these always feel sort of alien and jarring when I play them, like "why are these all the same game and why they so utterly uninterested in letting me play the actual game part"

but like Western AAA "climb towers to reveal icons" prob feels the same from outside perspective?

I don't really have a point to make here, exactly

just, it's a really weird feeling to wade into Genre work that's very obviously aimed at an audience with a deep familiarity that I very much lack

like I can't even tell if I *would* like the genre once I got over the initial jank, bc at this point I can't even tell what it's TRYING to do. Like what's the appeal for someone who plays these sorts of games, and what's interesting and singular about this one specifically

this is surprisingly non-horny for the genre

everybody wears cool baggy anime techwear it kinda owns

This is pretty fun tbh. The tower defense stuff is much more of an Actual Decent Videogame than a lot of other gachas I've tried

According to the internet you eventually hit The Monetization Wall and then the whole game becomes utterly insufferable to play but it's cool for now

The setting for this game's plot is kind of rad but so far the actual writing is just insufferably bad :(

every single scene is just like pages and pages of text in which literally nothing happens except "a bad guy appears"

like this seriously makes jrpgs look TERSE

The plot stuff's all just VN-style talking portraits with no animation, which is fine, but instead of a narrator or anything even slightly graceful the characters all just DESCRIBE THE SCENE TO EACH OTHER

Like a villain appears and everyone goes
"She's walking towards us!"
"She's surrounded by glowing energy!"
"Look out!"
"Agh!"
"Ungh!"
"[Player Name]!"
"[Player Name] just barely dodged her attack!"

imagine, like, literal paragraphs of this, before and after every combat section

the ｌｏｒｅ is honestly pretty rad

Magic Cancer epidemic breaks society into warring city-states. Protags are a *pharma corporation* turned Outer-Heaven-style mercenary faction, in order to fund/defend their search for a Magic Cancer cure in the absence of any global stability

Half the cast is dying of Magic Cancer, (which gives you superpowers before it kills you, ofc) and the player character is supposed to be a neurosurgeon who discovered they're also a combat tactics savant

It's an extremely cool premise but the writing's really letting it down