While Nintendo had a bunch of the blame cygames flawed design that was impossible to monetize because they tried to bring Granblue 1 to 1 there and that makes 0 dollars without the concept of grids.
The fact that Alchemy Stars collabs with CoDM 2 times: the first one is 1 month before the game dies, the second one is over half a year after the game dies is diabolical
Such a wasted opportunity. I wish the universe had another chance with another game with a more competent dev team and a better gameplay.
Yeah Cloud Gardens was bad, but everyone who quit the game agrees that they just didn't like the gameplay in the end. It is the one thing that just made sure the game wasn't mainstream enough to keep it afloat.
Low enemy variety, no matter the kind of content. Pirate event? Eclipsites. Summer event? Eclipsites. Underground? Eclipsites. Forest? Eclipsites. Halloween? Believe it or not, Eclipsites. It's only fairly late on that they added the Lumo Knights, and I believe one other faction.
It didn't lend itself well to unit variety. Basically, once you had your elemental teams built you were good, no real need to pull for new units. Now, sure, new units were stronger, but usually gimmicky and you didn't even need that power in the first place.
So we have a situation of fighting the same enemies with the same mechanics using the same units with the same mechanics. They never managed to introduce the variety that, say, Arknights has.
tbh, I think the base gameplay itself also had major issues. Big part of why I quit myself was the inherent massive RNG.
It was very frustrating and unsatisfying to get completely destroyed on a stage, only to try again and win super easily just because you got good tiles this time.
i think that point was largely a problem because they locked skill upgrades on dupes, because once you got the characters skill high enough most of the starting RNG was pretty much solved
It was just boring and too one not at the end of the day. Even if you liked it, there isn't much skill expression if at all.
Besides the fact that it limited team comps and strategy from the start, you could barely play the game without converters and you were stuck with them from the start until its final days.
AS events were so goated honestly. They were the epitome of 'let's see what kind of trouble we can get ourselves into'. A few of those things included:
-Hosting an idol contest
-Visiting an actually haunted house
-Getting into a desert racing competition (side quest: kill giant worm)
-Being a temporary judge in a court of love
-Attending a cult's banquet
-(Slow farm life)-maxing
There were more serious events too, but in general I really had fun with the events where we just got into some tomfoolery
I recently got my hands on the anniversary art book and when I opened it up there was a post card inside thanking players for playing the game it killed me a little </3
Additionally, I recall there used to be some GREE games on mobile that I played several years ago A couple that were Bloodborne knockoffs, and a couple of Front Mission Knockoffs.
I kept hearing horror stories about Priconne JP giving back to back limited banners after banners, so I don't know if global dodged a bullet or not in that case
Well you can judge it for yourself. 23 limited to 5 permanent, every single banners are separate 200 pity, no carryover and maybe you get enough 200 pulls in 1-1.5 month. All new limited is also meta in endgame like ele dungeon and clan battles. Don't have them? Can't proceed/do highest damage.
Also Re:Zero rerun this month and Zombieland Saga collab incoming, so there's almost no rest patch in Priconne.
The other guy didn't even mentioned the worst part yet. Each rate up banner has this thing called "master piece", these MPs are used to upgrade your "master skill", where each upgrades applies to every single character you own. The bonus stats given by master skill are all element bonus, phys/mag dmg, crit dmg, attack stats, etc. It is the most p2w thing ever because the gap you have with whales gets bigger and bigger the more you skip pull on any new rate up banners.
I personally have played Priconne since the year it was released, so I'm way too sunk cost at this point. But now I have slowly forgetting to login every few days and it's just unfortunate that Priconne is like this now. Arena groups haven't even been updated since 2023 (princess arena) - 2024 (battle arena) either. Because they don't want you to farm those climb up gems anymore.
I remember playing before it was very f2p friendly with lot of jewels being given all the times so I never got in trouble to pullā¦ but they did kept releasing new powerful units power creeping all the other one which sucks :| eventually if thereās even a system like that itās just horrible
Yeah back then they used to give jewels for milestones or 5k retweet campaign like when they released S.Shizu, but now? We might get lucky for a 1.5k jewels giveaway on a random autumn celebration.
Remember the anniversary countdown? It used to be 15 days for 1500 jewels, now the most recent one (7.5th anniversary countdown) is only 3 days for 300 jewels. Remember welfares? Yeah they don't either. The last welfare was NY Monika back in 31st Dec 2024. Every single aspect of the game's jewels has been nerfed as they pump more limited more than last year.
They even stopped making new 6 stars now, because it's easier to just slap UE2 than making a whole new animation/chibi model. It's just lazy, especially when Nakayoshi-bu didn't get 6 star yet.
Yeah, specially seeing how there are collab units, and those same collab units have summer alts, all limited, maybe it was a good thing global died with dignity
Priconne got super power creeped with greed increasing but that would have still given global several years of joy before it got really bad. Losing out on that still sucks.
Them shutting down DC so close to Nikke's massive release really makes me salty ngl. ESPECIALLY since Nikke is nowhere NEAR as generous as DC
I imagine generosity was part of its ultimate downfall, but I agree. I wish they would have used some of that Nikke money to subsidize DC for a little bit. It carried them to that point, they could have spent a little of that half-billion Nikke made its first year to give it a proper conclusion.
Destiny Child was my fave gacha im still so mad!! There were so many more stories and lore i wanted from it!! Ill never kno what happens to the succubi trio now ;;
I didn't even know King's Raid went EOS. I really loved the game for a while, but eventually they kept adding so many greedy systems that I had to drop it. The character designs were honestly top tier.
the greedy systems were fixed over time and it was in a really good state for a while.
the issue was vespa ran out of money (because of other failed project), tried to do a big patch to push people to spend more but ended up just destroying most aspects of the game, and the game was then basically on life support for about a year with this patch before EOS. was quite sad honestly.
Helix Waltz - such a fun conceit for the dress up premise, gorgeous art, interesting worldbuilding and characters. If this had lived instead of Love Nikki....Ā
A3 EN - you can tell the localizers really had fun with it. It had a lot of flair and character.
Yumekuro - at least we got the post-EOS main story completion. But I'll miss all the beautiful card art and the potential playable characters that could have been.
Your Majesty - I think the art is pretty good, the plot is kind of paint-by-the-numbers but I wish it stayed alive so we could get more music. A lot of utaite I like are singers so I would have liked to hear more of them
I miss it so much!! I will never forget doing Golem Godly for the first time ever in multiplayer and we scraped by the skin of our teeth. Never knew flipper boss battles could make me sweat like that, but it felt amazing.
Love Live: School Idol Festival along with its other sequels.
Go screw yourself, Bushiroad, and I won't even bother with your Love Live card game even when you have a good reputation with card games in general, just your branding alone is enough for me to avoid.
And to a small extent, Re:Zero Lost in Memories. It's not really a good game per se but I missed my Felt collection already even when I'm completely F2P in it.
Star Ocean Anamnesis, Sakura Kakumei, and Priconne EN
Anamnesis was beautiful and fun but Square as usual kills anything not making big bucks/ they don't like supporting too many games at once.
Kakumei was mishandled by the FGO devs and infamous director.
Priconne was mishandled and grossly localized by Crunchyroll.
BUT MY DEAREST LOSS: Tokyo Necro Suicide Mission R. I loved the story, combat, depth, collabs, and art. Never got an English release and they killed it in JP. There's a standalone VN in the same universe that's pretty cool though.
That game was truly something one-of-a-kind. Still the best battle system in any FF, gacha or not IMO.
There is a new Dissidia mobage announced today, but with the real life marketing angle and the fact that DFFOO wasn't the highest grossing gacha on the block even at it's peak I doubt the new project will be related, but I hope it is successful enough to muster intest in an offline version of DFFOO, which would be the best case scenario.
Final Fantasy Brave Exvius, last 2 years were pretty bad but the first 3 were amazing.
I also have some very niche spot for Ayakashi Ghost Guild, this game in total honesty wasn't that good, but the feels, the charm, the art and ost, I loved the story and the ost make me feel super comfy.
Same... This game was so unbelievably comfy and chill, such a good routine to start my morning with... I wish they wouldn't kill it like that... I hate jp gacha
NieR: ReIncarnation. It didnāt come as a shock, since it didnāt really get into it until after the EoS announcement, but I love Yoko Taroās work, and Iād have loved to get to know the game better.
Another one that also hurts is kingdom hearts X. Bittersweet to see KH3 paid homage to every player that had an account during its credits scene in a battle but still. The lore was just too good it didnāt have to end
Alchemy Stars... I was very devoted to the game and liked how they developed the mc, the Navigator.. It was a game I devoted a lot of my gacha time to, so it holds a special place in my heart (I wish the 3d dorm was never added as that lead to so much data bloat.)
Tribe Nine, it's a pretty tragic end to a game that didn't deserve such a fate and mismanagement.
However, "Neoneon Tribe" project is reviving the story and continuing it beyond EoS, headed by the OG creators themselves (including Kodaka) as a passion project. You can find out more by visiting the r/TribeNine sub (sorry I don't have the link handy atm but will try to edit this comment later with it).
Wow, didn't expect to see IC mentioned. Yeah, we all knew the EOS was coming. Everything has been going down hill since AOD leader was added. I was a day 1 player and played till the very end. F2P all the way too. The game was done so dirty by the devs then they screwed up even worse with their "new" game Shadow Brides after they left IC. Greed just ruined the whole game.
I remember this one died after a month of no news or updates, and right after a P2W type event dropped. I think I would have felt worse about this demise if the Discord I was in didn't pivot to Genshin haha
Afterl!fe and some other games (A3! on global and Tsukipara on JP) made me swear off joseimuke and pick up mixed cast games due to game longevity
Still canāt believe they ended it after a whole decade. Crazy because the gacha games that die tend to happen after a year or two max but FFBE ending not just global but in Japan when they made so much money in its peak is crazy
Ayakashi Ghost Guild! I feel like that was a gacha game before gacha games became a huge thing in English and I really mainly liked it for some of their top artists. I've tried Otogi but it's not the same.
Idola phantasy star I will never get over it, it was such a gem of a game and the fact that each character had both a light and dark form that they can switch between that not only changed there appearance but also skills was so cool, I have been desperately trying to fill that hole but nothing did what idola did in terms of character and combat
Dragalia, Eternal City (had to use a VPN cause it never made it to global), Exos Heroes (it was so pretty until everything got fucked up, but what a unique style), Lyn (very cool art style!)
Hasnāt EOSd YET, but the Obey Me! games were in general done so dirty being suddenly sunsetted for the developers to focus on a new game for the same franchise thatās a totally different genre. Not to mention, it most likely wonāt continue the story (of which they never finished) of the original games.
Thatās not even to mention the mediocre storytelling post chapter 16, the flanderization (if not complete character assassination) of most of the main cast, the sidelining of the less popular yet still main characters, the sanitization of the once mature plot/tone/relationships of the story and the increasing difficulty of the gameās chapter ābattlesā necessary to progress the story.
I really liked the original game, and I donāt think Iāll ever get over how it was treated. Thereās no doubt in my mind that once the new āgameā comes out, theyāll EOS the old ones faster than you can say āDevildomā.
I was actually thinking of doing a drama post on this sub when it sunsetted but there was so much bullshit I didn't know where to start.
The devs or rather the suits straight up didn't know what they were doing after lesson 16, lesson 20 if you want to be generous. The franchise became much more popular than they expected and it showed so they tried to mix a ton of things together along with the obvious trend chasing and unsurprisingly they just kept bleeding money.
Starting with how the game was originally intended for a global (non-japanese) audience with them launching EN first but then prifted to pandering solely to its Japanese audience alone with its merch and events (though couldn't blame them EN side fandom was sending the devs death threats). Even though the game was and still is more popular in the West/EN. EN Kickstarter completed all its goals and sold out in a week, it took the whole campaign for the JP side to reach goal 3. The original intended age of the target audience for the games shifted from adults to teenagers but they were releasing themed wedding rings as merch.
Who was the target audience of the franchise? No one really knew.
Or the trend chasing. You can actually point out the death of the romance portion of the game, the death of all the adult topics, the flanderization and character assassination getting worse with the characters beginning to act like teens instead of adults and the ever increasing importance of RAD as a setting with the release and subsequent popularity of Twisted Wonderland in Japan. Or how the whole idol thing only started after K-Pop became popular world wide and pushed more now with a rhythm game after ProSeka became popular. Even though the idol genre and rhythm games were dead in JP joseimuke stories when A3 came out in 2016(or 2017 iirc) and nothing was toppling Enstars in EN and JP.
When LADS came out, they brought back the romance with an extremely heavy paywall but by that time the games were dead.
The fact that I wrote all of this and I still haven't covered everything is proof that Obey Me died a well deserved death.
Tales of Luminaria (hell I only became a so called "gacha gamer" cause I made a thread asking about wtf to play after it EoS)... it had such a good concept, having each character have their own chapter that connected to the bigger main story arc, so everyone got a change to shine.
You could never really tell where a chapter was going to go... like I remember this one chapter that starts with the Exiles faction just camping, so you thought "oh its just gonna be a chapter where they travel across a forest or something" and then BAM one character starts tripping out and opens up a portal to the spirit world with their eyeball or something, which lead to one of the most interesting and unique chapters of the game where you get closer to the "Truth" of the world.
The concept was good, but as a gacha it totally failed, there was no reason to pull for weapons since monsters always scaled to your level, and the cosmetics stuff was lame af, I remember saving for months for swimsuits thinking they would wise-up, but they never came. Not to mention the devs stubbornly would not allow the game to be played in landscape mode for some reason, which personally didnt bother me at all, but apparently was a huge deal to alot of players.
I honestly would had preferred if they had just released it as a paid app, and you had to pay a few dollars for each new chapter or something, I would had gladly payed if it meant I eventually got the complete story... and well I never recovered from that, and been refering to the publisher as "SCAMCO" since then.
Shouts of to Tales of Rays also, was the best "Tales of" game for mobile, had like every character and JP got some cool collab, and I do miss it...but also I remember event being very grindy so would had probably eventually hated it lol
Aichuu, the original Love Live game, Battle Girl High Schoolā¦ basically everything I played in middle/high school minus Granblue which is still kicking.
My very first gacha which is Ayakashi Ghost Guild (before it was reborned as Otogi Spirit Agents). I really liked the card aesthetics back then (even tho much more p2w than the standard back then).
The narrative was good for me, having a part of comedy and a part of drama, as a substitute omnyouji quelling the supernatural disasters around japan. Fck Zynga for closing all their game dev projects.
Then i played King's Raid which also I still haven't recovered.
Magia Record NA. The bait and switch hurt the most, and in hindsight, it was pretty obvious. The fast tracked events, and accelerated banner schedule while delaying story content.
The amount of betrayal felt by the NA community was pretty monumental. They held an Anniversary event like a week before the actual anniversary, and then like a month later announced EoS for the server and that little to no new content would be coming until EoS arrived. People were pissed. The audacity to hold a huge celebration event where people paid money for guaranteed banners and dupes of their favorite characters, only to be told they will no longer have access to those characters soon. Thatās the kinda greed that is twisted.
The Magia Record Discord is now the Magia Exedra Discord but we still have dedicated channels documenting the old Magia Record Discord, where we can revisit the outrage and disbelief as people scramble to try and find a solution to continue playing. Serves as a reminder for when we need it.
Illusion Connect. Im not a fan of auto games but the game was actually really neat with great artwork and an insane soundtrack. I also met alot of fun people playing it.
I sometimes finding myself missing Devil Maker Tokyo.
EDIT: Also, Terra Battle. Man, I actually fucking miss that game because it was so ahead of it's time. Innovative, but mobile friendly gameplay, fire character designs, and an interesting story and concept.
Magicami, it didn't even die because the developer killed it, they were bought out and the parent company didn't want them spending time on a game that they felt wasn't profitable enough. The developers had a lot of heart and soul put into the game and it was one of the best adult gachas story wise.
Probably Utano Prince-sama: Shining Live though that's mostly because I don't like its replacement (Live Emotion)
Otherwise, it had a good 6-7 year run. Not sure if its Switch port will ever see the light of day, but for a franchise-based game, it did its job of bringing more people into the IP (me, I didn't know anything about Utapri before this)
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u/FanIllustrious1422 Oct 13 '25
Dragalia š