If you’re lucky enough to draw that SSR character you’re chasing, you’ll only enjoy their full potential once you ascend them (meaning, of course, that you need to gamble for them again). Maybe you can bypass the loop altogether and buy your 10x draws and guaranteed four to five-star pulls directly. You’re pressured to shell out for premium currency to refill your stamina meter and daily completion limits, or to accelerate that loop with skip tickets. But, in a traditional gacha, that loop is unsustainable by design, for the sake of selling solutions to manufactured frustrations with artificial urgency.

The hallmarks are all there: the chance at a rare virtual reward, the flashy opening animation, the repetitive gameplay loop. Regardless of how I started, I arrived at a realization somewhere between my seventieth and eightieth Rowlet egg: I was playing the distilled ideal of a gacha game.īreeding for a shiny Pokemon or one with a perfect set of intrinsic stats is like boiling the gacha model down to its most fundamental components. Or maybe it’s just because it’s physically impossible to see a shiny Rowlet and not want to be its best friend. Maybe it’s because my partner found a shiny Growlithe within an hour of picking up Pokemon Shield and I am a jealous child. Maybe it was my curiosity over how hard a Darmanitan hatched with a perfect attack stat could hit. Over the summer, I slipped into a monster-breeding fugue state in Pokemon Sword. Luckily, I’ve found a guilt-free replacement for when the gacha pull hunger hits: eggs - or, as intellectuals call them, “nature’s lottery.” Even though I’ve been spared the worst of his predatory tactics, only costing me a few bucks here and there (and more of my time than I’m proud to admit), the fun I’ve had along the way directly enabled him to sharpen his techniques for those more vulnerable. It’s like having a pleasant rapport with a confirmed conman. But a necessary asterisk marks that love - the same one that adds a sickly tinge of guilt to the fun I’ve had in games with paid loot boxes and during the couple casino trips I’ve made with friends. I’ve loved my share one glance at the list of games tied to my Google Play library provides more proof of that than you’d ever need. I have a complicated relationship with gacha games, which means I have a complicated relationship with gambling.

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