Lately, it’s become a bit of a burden for me to follow the story of some gacha games. Back when I started my first gacha, FGO in 2018, it was the only gacha I ever had to invest in, with the story and events making it very easy to enjoy and manage. Nowadays there are just too many gachas to keep up with. Is that just me? Sometimes it’s more convenient to skip event dialogue so you don’t fall behind. With the story, sometimes I don’t even bother anymore, or new updates just make it harder to come back at a good point in the schedule and pick up where you left off. It gets a little overwhelming at times, and it makes me feel conflicted more than anything else. I really love these games, but sometimes I can’t even play them the way I want to without some compromise or constraint. As more and more Gacha games are released, this problem becomes even more apparent. How do you manage this problem with the time you have?
Not me! I used to be into GBF, mostly because of the story, but now I just don’t care anymore. I play now HSR and ZZZ, but I end up skipping all non-main story, and just mashing through the main story dialogue (but maybe that’s because for some godforsaken reason HSR doesn’t have a skip button.) I also tried Reverse 1999 and Path to Nowhere, which I heard have amazing stories, but I ended up skipping everything after the intro chapter.
It’s not that the stories are bad, I just don’t have the mental energy to get into them anymore. I just want to play the game.
If anyone knows of a story-lite gacha, please recommend. I know of Puzzle and Dragons (a classic, I know), but after 10-11 years the gameplay is too convoluted for me to keep track of.
I do but I focus on titles I’m actually invested in and drop the ones that feel more like a chore/checklist. I play mostly for the story anyway so if it’s not grabbing me enough to keep up with it then there’s no point skipping through just to progress. It can be difficult (FOMO is a mean thing) but that’s the only reasonable way to approach this unless you’re a Richie McRich who can spend all of their time playing games.
There was a time when I played 4 or 5 gacha games at the same time (on top of playing “normal” titles) and while it was doable, when I decided to prioritize and take a break from some of them I realized they weren’t something I NEED in my life. I’ve been drifting between 1-2 games ever since, with just one being a constant throughout the years.
There’s also a question on what exactly are you interested in in those games? Is it playing them and experiencing both story and gameplay or is it just wanting to keep up with the former? If it’s the story, many communities have YT or online compilations of all the events that can be enjoyed without spending the time to prep and go through events - could help alleviate some pressure from FOMO.
For FF7 Ever Crisis, yes.
For FGO, I used to be a big fan early on for the myth / history stuff, but it’s been years since the story is always pretty shit and barely fanfiction level. The last story I cared about was all the way back in Babylonia and Solomon (Japanese version so a while ago), some stories here and there have been pretty good (Atlantis, Avalon, a bit of the Yamatai events, anytime Nasu picks up the story writing himself) but it’s always drowned in a ocean of garbage fluff dialogs or shitty characters, the crawl is just too long. The very nature of the waifu game will always give me horrible whiplash in the way characters change their whole personality and how they interact with each other, and the super forced redemption scenes, not even counting how often it keeps forcing terrible characters. To me, most of the writing is just bad fanfiction of something that was already fanfiction (of the actual mythological and historical figures), I can’t deal with that so I skip everything now.
At some point I also used to play Marvel Future Fight and King of Fighters Allstar, and I did use to follow the story (for the extremely rare drops it gave out), but I dropped those long ago.