Boontaker wrote: ↑
May 16th, 2025, 05:10
Are there any gacha games with an actual storyline? They all just look like Asian gnosticism with a coomerbait paint job.
Granblue Fantasy, made by former Final Fantasy talent including Hideo Minaba, Akihiko Yoshida, Tsutomu Narita, and Nobuo Uematsu. It is very story heavy, pretty much a Final Fantasy game and visual novel but available on your phone, with optional endgame stuff if you want to do that. I was took notes down and lots and hundreds of screenshots when I started going through that game's story and its story events years ago, but sadly I never found any forum that was interested in discussing it. On here I have posted
writeups on my thoughts of three storylines. I also covered the Relink spinoff game.
The first arc starts off meh as there is a lot of "and then monsters showed up so we have to have a fight!" stuff happening over and over, but eventually they dropped that and just embraced the visual novelness. I started getting really invested by chapter 40 when you capture the Black Knight and then go down to the jail cell to her and realize she is not evil, so you break her out and go save her homeland of Erste, whose name has been hijacked by a military junta. And then there were so many parts of the story that I liked after that. The epilogue to Erste. Reinhardtzar and how he has been sobered by the reality that governments tend to be corrupt and that it is hard to find one worthy to fight for. Fif agonizing that her dear friend is a wanted mass murderer with the authorities closing in on him. Freyr seeing his comrade Baldr off when the latter decides to desert the Astrals. The scene when Phoenix reveals herself to the Enneads. The tidbits whenever GBF touches upon logistics or businesses, especially in relation to the sky world. When characters and eventually entire islands are being erased from history and only Gran - due to his temporal protection - is able to realize the enormity of what has been lost and no one else understands the true nature of the war they are fighting. Etc. Also lots of funny scenes.
I also liked the second arc and the currently running third arc, which will hopefully get a conclusion this year. There are also a few side storylines I quite like, such as the one about the Dragon Knights and their two small kingdoms of Feendrache and Wales which are now becoming swamped with lots of terrorists and rebels. The game has an inbuilt English localization, is very generous (I have over 500 characters just from logging in during the Anniversary/Summer/Christmas events), and does not require any grinding to see its story. So I strongly recommend it.
If I had a complaint, it's my same general issue with Japanese fiction as a whole, which is that after a while you realize that the worldview of these writers is that they don't want to believe in evil or accountability. They want to believe that everyone is some nice, civilized person like themselves and nobody really has malicious intent, and that war is innately evil and never just. They don't want to admit that there is a God or an absolute right or wrong and that a lot of people reject God, and that evil exists and there is a moral imperative to destroy it, etc. So there is a metric ton of murderers and traitors getting redeemed or antagonists getting a second sympathetic look, which is nice at first but then becomes frustrating after a while. And ofcourse a lot of scapegoating everything onto demons.
Also, the other complaint is that years pass and there are several couples but they are never allowed to get married.
GBF revolutionized gachas. After that it became standard for gachas to be very story heavy. Fate/Grand Order, Ark Knights, Girls Frontline, and then eventually Genshin and Honkai Star Rail (though also heavily influenced by Trails according to the developers), etc. However, I have yet to have found another gacha that had a story as engrossing as GBF was to me. Mind you, I really like GBF's story in spite of the obvious hamstring of the gacha business model which is that the characters you are reading about are highly unlikely to die, change in a drastic way like get old or get married or maimed or retire, which removes a lot of the tension. The 3D Chinese gachas in particular suffer from most of the screentime being spent with characters standing around and giving dull exposition dumps, rather than characters having tense conversations between each other and things actually happening.
