I tried another gacha game. I’ve got friends who are really into some of them (the ones that are pretty high-qaulity, generally speaking), so when one showed up that included one of my favorite things ever (factory building and resource management), I figured it was finally time. Plus, I needed something else to play on my Tuesday nights that didn’t require much of an emotional or mental committment. Arknights: Endfield seemed like the perfect thing, especially after watching Let’s Game It Out’s video about it. After all, LGIO is what got me into Satisfactory, perhaps my favorite entry in the resource management and factory building genre and second only to minecraft in terms of survival/crafting games, and he made it look so fun! So of course I tried it out. Unfortunately, it hasn’t really lived up to my expectations and has even fallen further and further from them as I’ve played. Even without getting the the gacha side of things, honestly. There’s enough free stuff there that I don’t feel tempted to pay money for anything and the whole “gambling on loot boxes or random draws for heroes” thing never really appealed to me. I get absolutely nothing out of the process other than more piles of junk I need to sort through or turn into one of a couple dozen currencies. The game’s menus feel labyranthine, I frequently can’t find what I’m looking for unless I click through every single menu option and even then I’m not guarranteed to find it. For exmaple, I kept accidentally opening a menu that showed my resources in to production numbers back before I could actually automate anything and now that I’ve got a bunch of stuff automated, I can’t find that menu for the life of me. It’s so much clutter! There’s so many menus, sub-menus, limited-use currencies, weirdly expiring items, and on and on and on. It never ends.

Which is unfortunate because when the actual factory stuff is properly humming along, it’s a lot of fun! It’s easy to scale up quickly, very convenient to build, and incredibly stream-lined. It’s also all locked behind story content that is interesting sometimes but too wordy by far. I wouldn’t mind as much if the voice acting was engaging or interesting, but a lot of the dialogue feels… well, not wooden exactly, but there’s an owl-headed guy who talks a whole lot and he has exactly one tone of voice that I would describe as “someone trying to make owl noises with all their words while talking like they’re explaining how ‘all this could be yours for just six payments of nine-ninety-nine!’ after being on-air for four hours.” It gets grating incredibly quickly because every single conversation with this very vocal and early-plot-important NPC runs headlong into the fun barrier that is waiting for him to have said enough of his dialogue for me to click ahead to the next line. Or, as I’ve begun doing lately, skipping every single custsceme and “helpful” pop-up. I have never played a game that has introduced a detailed mechanical system like factory building and resource management that has simultaneously beaten me to death with every single detail of it while also making me wait until I was mutliple hours into the game and had already figured out gear and level to tell me how combat ACTUALLY works. It’s honestly kind of boggling and I wish I hadn’t already filled out all those player experience serveys because I feel like I could do them all proper justice now in a way I couldn’ when I got them after being logged in for an hour.

What really gets my goat, and I will admit upfront that this is probably what is going to make me stop playing this game and it’s just dumb as hell, is that so many of the characters are vaguely animal or lizard themed and all but a VERY small handful of them have both animal and human ears. Animated, physics-enabled animal ears that twitch and move and point towards sounds and then human ears that look like they were an asset some character designer realized they couldn’t remove and then half-heartedly tried to hide behind eveyrone’s haircuts. I’m not super keen on the rest of the outfit/characters designs I’ve run into so far, but that’s mostly just not my prefered aesthetic. I’m not one for near-modern sci-fi style with layers, mesh, zippers, and neon. I like fantasy-ass clothing and character designs. I want weirdly piled fabrics, odd bits that seem to hold themselves in place despite the laws of physics, and big hats that are clearly magical in how little they impact the hair of the preson wearing them. Simpler stuff, too, most of the time. Which means I’d probably enjoy any other number of gacha games more, especially since I know some of them actually have good stories. Arknights: Endfield just… doesn’t. I can’t make myself care about anyone I’ve met since there’s so much nothing going on. It’s incredibly dull.

So I’m pretty sure I’m going to uninstall the game and just deal with my hankering for resource management stuff by going back to Satisfactory or setting up a Minecraft server. Well, probably not the last thing becaue fuck Microsoft, but I am going to get my management fix elsewhere and probably just not spend my time on any kind of gacha game. They really want you to log in every day in order to unlock a whole bunch of whatever, but I have to admit that structures like that in games make me want to stop playing them since all they want is to make you log in, not make you stay logged in. I’m also very obstinate, dislike being constrainted, and know when I’m being manipulated and gacha games bring all of that out in me pretty hard. Some more so than others, of course. I fell out of Genshin Impact after only a few days because I got bored, wasn’t really playing with my friends anymore, and wasn’t hooked enough by what I’d seen to play by myself, so it’s not like that game drove me out. Arknights: Endfield definitely is, though. Maybe I’m only seeing all this stuff because it’s the only one I’ve gotten this deep into the systems of, but it really feels like an endless chore list and not in the way I enjoy. I have to do the chores I’m assigned–the unending drudgery of the main storyline–in order to actually do any of the stuff I like since I couldn’t even get conveyor belts or automatic mining until after I’d done a bunch of level 20 content (which is the top of the first difficulty tier) and that sucked. It was so boring and moves so slowly that I have no idea what’s going on. It doesn’t help that they keep parading out these generic-looking NPCs that I have to talk to for every little thing. So, yeah. Gonna uninstall it, write off those hours as a lesson learned/a new thing tried, and turn my attention to something hopefully more rewarding.