Semantic Nonsense: My state of Free-to-Play

With summer fast approaching, and streaming services already savagely culled, my spring cleaning moves on to my phone. And along the way, we’ll close some open narratives from past writings on the subject.

But we’ll start with the tl;dr: I may soon find myself in a situation where I have freed myself of Gacha games royale (at least until I make good on my threat to try Another Eden… assuming I like it).

I did try Diablo: Immortal — seeing as I have a phone and all — but it ended up being lame in such a meh way that it wasn’t even worth doing a review post about. There just wasn’t enough material to make it worthwhile.

Echos of Mana started off nice enough, but became unpleasantly grindy, in the sense that the grind was all there was to do if you weren’t buying your way to (a random chance for) stronger characters. It also took up a LOT of time, as there was no skip function at all, and the AI was devistatingly stupid for putting things on autopilot to be viable.

I only pop in to Final Fantasy Record Keeper during anniversary events, and that’s mostly to check out any new music they may have come up with (they tend to be really good with remixes).

I eventually quit Star Trek Timelines last year due to repeated sketchy actions by the developers and lying to the playerbase’s face about them. This was by far the gacha game I had spent the most on, justifying the spending by comparing it to my old collectible card game spending. But it was also the one that demanded I schedule my life around its competitive weekend events or else not get any rewards worth earning. Generally speaking, a highway man allows you to choose between your money and your life; Timelines wanted both, and I ought to have dumped them for that long before the game became damn close to spyware.

Speaking of CCGs, I suppose this list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Yu-gi-oh! Duel Links, which I was having fun with for almost a year until they lost my data. I had no interest in starting over, so that was that.

Everything else I played was short-lived; just things I tired out and didn’t like.

So this brings us to what is currently the sole survivor of this verbal battle: Dragalia Lost.

As reported previously, this game is on borrowed time; only about a month remains before the final new content drop is… dropped.

With that in mind, it probably should have been easy to just limit myself to playing the new story as it comes out and not spend an extra second on additional play. And yet I do so anyway.

I’m slowly but surely wrapping up extra tasks in the game. Collecting materials for the higher weapons to clear the optional quests. Leveling up characters I didn’t intend to use in order to read their stories. Figuring out what accolades would be reasonable to earn with the resources I have. In other words, it’s business as usual for me despite the impending doom.

And while I appear to be wholeheartedly throwing good time after bad, I’m not throwing good money after bad. Dragalia Lost has never demanded much on that front, anyway. It was to the point that whenever I did throw a few bucks in, it was out of some strange feeling of guilt. This notion it had earned *something* from me that I hadn’t paid. To that point, now that no new characters are being introduced, I managed to collect 251 out of 298 possible characters and 123 out of 133 possible dragons, and what little money I spent made almost no difference on the collection front.

Heck, I’m close enough that it’s possible I finish those collections just by spending currency earned in game during maintenance mode, if I still feel compelled to continue after the final two parts of the story are done, assuming Cygames will grant opportunities to recruit crossover characters that haven’t been available since their crossover events.

Still to come, though, is wrestling with the concept of a live service game ending while I was still playing it; a fate that until now has never befallen me. Will I feel it was all a waste? Or will I think of it like any other game I enjoyed but never replayed? Time will tell soon enough.