Dragalia Lost
In 2018, Cygames and Nintendo released the mobile gacha game Dragalia Lost. At the time, I had no interest in playing because I had heard that it was a clone of Shironeko Project and Nintendo had sued Colopl over some aspect of the movement and attack system in the game. Dragalia Lost's servers shut down in 2022, a pretty average lifetime for a gacha game. But I recently discovered that the game has a thriving fan-maintained private server (actually, two of them). Playing Dragalia Lost through its private servers has helped me reflect on how 1) Dragalia Lost is actually good and 2) getting to play it in its end-of-service state is probably how I would love to experience a lot of gacha games.
First, I want to talk about gacha games in general. I sort of swore off gacha games in graduate school as I realized that I did not want to play live service, microtransaction-based games that relied on FOMO for time-limited events, an endless story that would never actually resolve, and resource-gated grinding. Yes, at the start you have these exciting systems to learn, you get tons of free pulls for cool characters, and you progress fairly quickly, but soon enough you spend most of your time hitting the autobattle button and a little bit of it team-building or trying harder content. Plus, the episodic nature of main story and events means that not only do you forget what happened 4 months ago during the last lore-relevant event, the writers have probably also changed and forgotten about some vaguely foreshadowed story beat. Also, at any point the developers might add some mechanic that invalidates half the meta (and thus whatever you were grinding towards). Getting to play a “finished” game on a private server fixes all these issues and lets you focus on the good parts — it's great! All the story and game mechanics are final, even if the story's coherence is still somewhat doubtful at times. The server devs can set the banners to whatever they want, which in DL's case is either rotating banners or all banners organized by type, so there's no longer pressure to pull because a collab character is super good but vanishing in a week, or something. The community is still there, and more passionate than ever. And both private servers have ways to speed up grinding and progression; for example, one offers a free 10-pull every day, and the other drops the premium currency on every quest. You can really play at your own pace while still enjoying the game with others and getting those dopamine hits from the gacha or from progression.
In fact, playing DL has made me recall that one of the things I really loved about gacha games which I feel is rarely replicated in single-player games is the way progression works. There's a set of things to do — progressively harder content, new game modes, etc. — and although there is a meta, for the free-to-play player (and really, everyone who isn't a whale) your life is basically trying to optimize your play around your gradually improving personal constraints and basking in slowly hitting progression milestones regardless. Maybe you rerolled for that one broken character, but you still have to cobble together a team around them using whatever else you've got. Sure, eventually you'll get everyone, but for now, there's a lot of satisfaction in managing to put together a jank but workable team that can still challenge hard content. Maybe your fire team only has B and C-tier units, but that doesn't mean they can't synergize into something greater than the sum of their parts. Maybe you finally finished getting the materials for a weapon, and you get to revel in your temporary badassery until you run up against another wall, hence more grinding. Maybe you just do your dailies and one day you pull that character you've really wanted. The almost roguelike nature of how you advance through the game is great because, unlike roguelikes, you don't lose everything when you die, and in theory keeping at it for long enough means you'll be pretty good. In the past, I would always worry that I wasn't doing “enough” with my limited energy or resources, but I realize now that, regardless of all those exhortations to spend just a little more money to get things a little faster, all I should do is show up and play however I want. Modulo end of service, everything will come in time.
OK, now let's talk about Dragalia Lost. First of all, the music is fire. DAOKO has a ton of range and basically all the songs are hits. I got the soundtrack album on my second day of playing. Second, it's very different from Shironeko Project. Yes, the controls are the same, you pay resources to unlock nodes to strengthen your characters, and you construct buildings that boost your stats, but everything else plays quite differently. In no particular order:
Dragalia Lost is really meant to be played with other people. All the quests have your whole team on the screen attacking and using skills at the same time, and most can be challenged either solo or co-op. The bosses have mechanics that would be familiar from MMOs, such as requiring players to stack on each other to reduce damage, baiting AoE attacks, trapping one of the players in a prison, etc. To mitigate AI failings on mechanically harder quests, AI-controlled characters (which is the norm if you're playing solo) take reduced damage and are actually exempt from some attacks.
Some aspect of progression comes from pulling stronger characters and dragons, and there are some gacha pulls that are quite broken. However, quite a lot of it is due to weapons and wyrmprints, which are mostly gated behind grinding. The weapon progression is linear and also depends on how much content you clear; generally, you challenge the next tier of content using weapons from the previous tier. Meanwhile, wyrmprints are used to give characters extra passives, and you can equip up to eight (!) on a character, so that's a lot of space to customize and create synergies across your team.
Skills cannot be spammed. Instead of MP, you charge a skill by attacking enemies, and cannot generally store multiple charges, and there is some care required to time skill usage correctly. Also, in later challenge quests, the dangerous boss attacks cannot be dodged with skills, so you actually have to have some mechanical skill.
There's some feeling that the storyline is actually relevant to the other content. You unlock more challenge quests that are storyline bosses as you progress, and some story content is locked behind appropriate progression in other areas, such as leveling up the castle and smithy. The story characters get alternate versions that are actually good! And the story actually wrapped up, though this is partially due to the writers trying to do so when end of service was announced.
The power creep is present, but pretty measured. It's mitigated somewhat by introducing an extra 20 nodes (“mana spiral”) to older units. The main creep is not stats, but just much more utility from later characters, but even older units can hold their own.
I have two main complaints about the game: that having dragons are really important, probably more than good units because units have wyrmprints and you need to pull dupes for dragons, and that Kaleidoscape is way too long for the randomized rewards you get. Seriously — 80 of basically the same set of floors?? Besides that, I am having a lot of fun and would highly recommend!