This Week in Anime

Gacha Money Now

Steve
Do you know what the problem with society is, Chris? People are so preoccupied with gotcha journalism when they really need to care about gacha journalism. I may not be a journalist, but I know a thing or two about spending real money on fake rainbow crystals, so let's put on some gloves and do this autopsy.

The past decade has given rise to quite a vast and diverse ecosystem of collectible anime girl jpegs. And you really can't talk about free-to-play/gacha/mobage/whatever synonym you want to use for these games without looking at their relationship with anime. Whether they're the genesis of a marketable IP, promotional accompaniments, side project fan-pleasing extravaganzas, or terrible mistakes, plenty of anime walk hand in hand with these mobile casinos.

Yeah, Love Live! is an illustrative example both because of that and because of its age. Like, School Idol Festival lasted just shy of a decade, and speaking personally, it was the first game I ever played with a gacha mechanic. Because if I'm loyal to anyone, I'm loyal to Nico Yazawa.

I distinctly remember grinding one of the events extra hard to rank high enough to get a special Nico card. And shortly after that, I stopped playing. Fill in the blanks.

It was a weird introduction to the ecosystem since I don't even think of rhythm games when I think of gacha games anymore. And we should note, too, residing in America, we're only exposed to the stuff that gets big enough to be exported and localized. So our exposure to these games will be necessarily different and narrower than someone living in, say, Tokyo. This introduces its unique set of quirks because, as you can imagine, the market in Japan and the market in the US can look and act very differently.

An even more stark example I came across is Monster Strike, which was, at one point, the top-grossing mobile game worldwide. It got a wildly popular anime with two seasons, alongside a bunch of films/ONAs, yet it wholly floundered in the English sphere. I barely even heard of it. Why? The game relied on local co-op. Suitable for the population density of Japan, but not so much across the Pacific. When they tried exporting it, they abandoned plans to allow remote online co-op, and it died on the vine here.

It's a sunk cost to the producers, but I won't start feeling sympathy for them anytime soon. Even in cases where the anime is a derivative work of the game, many of those shows work perfectly fine on their own. For instance, Princess Connect is a fun anime, plain and simple. Who cares about interactivity when you get to watch Carl make silly faces?


And the parts where the anime does pull explicitly from the game as a game tend to be jokes anyway. It has my favorite riff on the silent player-insert character trope by making Yuuki a useless baby-brained chosen one who has to get shepherded around by the other characters.

To me, the platonic ideal of a gacha game is a means of funding a blank check for visionary anime creators to go hog wild. If they're fundamentally evil and predatory, then the least they can do is give us some incredible art in return. So I salute all of the Revue Starlight players for putting their hard-earned dollars into my favorite anime film of 2022.

The only way they could make Uma Musume more of a gambling singularity is if they turned it into a pachinko game. And yeah, of the shows we've covered so far, it hews closest to the garishly baroque character design philosophy that has come to define the popular image of gacha games (and VTubers, for different but related reasons). But season two is also one of the best and most devastating sports anime I've ever watched.

Plus, it has Rice Shower and her dumb little hat that I love more than words can express.

And, I mean, that's also the thing. Many of these games throw character design spaghetti at the wall because they know at least some will stick for somebody. And some of those somebodies will have fat wallets.

Yeah, they are gambling but objectively worse because at least a casino gives you a shot at getting some of your money back. For ordinary people, they're money holes, and it's just a matter of how big a hole you can dig for yourself before you stop. And because they prey on the same compulsions that gambling does, they can be just as destructive. There are plenty of real-world examples, but I'd like to bring up my favorite fictional one:

Like, in the middle of everything else Odd Taxi nails impeccably, it also delivers the most incisive portrait of modern mobile gaming I've seen in recent fiction.

It's so glamorously insidious! One of the best parts about that Odd Taxi episode is how it draws a line from basic compulsions like collecting and shows how it ripples out into things like social status, luck as providence, the twisted morality of rationalizing these decisions to yourself, and the brain chemistry these games prey on. None of this is new—my childhood was full of collectible card games, which are the most direct antecedent of gacha as we know it now. But it's the rapid globalization and multimedia aspect of gacha that I find most fascinating.

The allure of the grift seems more omnipresent than ever, especially where the investor class is concerned. I suspect that's also why we saw such a surfeit of mobile game tie-ins in the 2010s. Investors probably looked at successes like Fate/Grand Order and said, "We want that!" So you got games for properties like Princess Principal—a series that in no way begged for a game adaptation, let alone one with a gacha system—that lasted maybe a year or so at best before the plug was pulled from lack of interest. All in the pursuit of a quick buck.

It's pretty challenging to make a video game and even more difficult to make a video game that incentivizes people to play daily but also keeps itself welcoming to new players from as broad a demographic as possible. Add on top of that the inherent fickleness of the market. Speaking from firsthand experience, there's no way Fate/Grand Order, for instance, would have lasted if it didn't begin with a built-in fanbase. The early chapters are a dragging narrative, and the gameplay needed a ton of QOL improvements to approach a level resembling "tolerable." Those would have sunk a smaller franchise.

There's a lot about this landscape that doesn't make sense. Like, let's look at the opposite of BanG Dream!'s example, and the funniest one of those is definitely Kemono Friends. The anime was produced by a small no-name studio and debuted after the mobile game had already shut down. It was an afterthought and a victim of unfortunate timing. But lo and behold, the anime becomes a dark horse viral success, and singlehandedly revives the franchise.


Happy ending, right? Nope, because that was followed by an epic bag fumble by Kadokawa, who kicked the original team off the anime's second season and ruined almost all of the fanbase's goodwill. Now, I don't know if or how that affected the franchise's profitability—maybe it was the right move on that front—but it felt like a tone-deaf response to hitting the proverbial jackpot. But then again, the gacha economy is built on irrational responses to improbable odds.

Realistically speaking, the Steve card is Rare at best, and you immediately break it down into experience or materials as soon as you pull it. No one plays Steve. Steve isn't part of the meta. And on the subject of honesty, one of my favorite gacha anime is Last Period, a comedy that frequently and directly pokes fun at its gambling mechanic. It has an entire episode about the hero becoming destitute because he can't pull the high-rarity character he wants.

I'm biased because I think gacha is inherently evil, but the best and only way to integrate game mechanics into an anime is to take the piss out of them. However, even something like Last Period can only go so far. That same episode ends with a disclaimer to "pull responsibly" because the players are their geese laying the golden eggs at the end of the day. No matter how tongue-in-cheek you get, you're still beholden to capital.

Thank you for giving me the perfect opportunity to bring up Last Period again because one of its episodes is an entirely inexplicable Higurashi collab.

Like, Fate/Grand Order, you can forgive for featuring other Type-Moon franchises. That makes sense. But then you have my other main vice, Arknights, which so far has done events with Rainbow Six Siege and Monster Hunter.

And on the subject of Rainbow Six Siege, it's worth mentioning that the economy of many mainstream multiplayer non-mobile games is similarly gambling-dependent. They just tend to call it loot boxes instead of gacha. It's all the same. Only one is more likely to give you anime wives/husbands.

And man, I don't know. Even if I willingly (and mostly sparingly) participate in it, I still feel weird about this predatory practice becoming such a common and largely unregulated part of the industry. It's cool when the money appears to fund indulgences like the Revue Starlight movie or blockbusters like the Fate/Grand Order – Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia anime. But you also have to wonder just how much of the gacha investments get put back into the people who make the games and their related works and how much gets funneled to a select group at the top of the food chain. I mean, I'm sure the answer is unsurprising.

I hope that, as more of the games shut down, people might become more aware of the whole genre's inherent ephemerality, which will, in turn, temper excitement and spending. But I know that's optimistic. At the very least, it's healthy to acknowledge that none of these games, even the biggest ones, will be around forever. That isn't good for game preservation, but probably best for society.