Ex Astris (2024) (iOS, Android)
I really liked Ex Astris and I have absolutely no idea how to sell folks on it. From the outside it looks like a standard anime RPG. So, let’s look at the story and fighting, since those are two main pillars folks connect with these games on.
The story is mostly episodic and in the background. It’s divided into roughly three acts, without many cutscenes. What big story moments there are are understated and poetic. The episodic structure means it doesn’t build to a huge finale the way other games would. I like the writing and characters here, but as a part of a larger whole, not an end unto themselves. I’ll talk more about the theming later, but I don’t think “the story is so good” sets the right expectations for the game.
The fighting is semi-action based. It’s about learning the rules and timing of different moves to build combos for big damage. (Enemy attacks, naturally, can be dodged with timing-based parries.) The combo rules are rich and interesting, and it’s genuinely fun to lab out your own combos. But once you’ve figured out one you like, there isn’t much reason to vary your approach. I spent most of the game executing the same few combos over and over. There aren’t many random encounters by RPG standards, and the game is under twenty hours long, so I didn’t have time to get sick of the somewhat shallow and easy fighting. I think it’s cute; it works for a game of this length. But it’s not a real reason to jump in either, not for me at least.
So what’s left? Why’d I like Ex Astris? It’s something more ethereal and hard to grasp — something to do with the game’s mood, how it feels to exist in its world.
Most modern studio rpgs are loud and noisy. I played Tales of Berseria in the past year and it was a non-stop assault on the senses. But once you get past the fairly dense combo tutorials up front, Ex Astris is relatively subdued. It still has modern RPG nonsense like a waypoint radar and collectible crafting materials; it’s not an itchio RPGMaker game. But, compared to something like Xenoblade, it feels very restrained to me.
Dungeons in Ex Astris are hours-long and fairly empty. I spent large stretches of the game wandering vast monochrome alien architectures, listening to light character banter and gently noodling synths. I thought these sections were beautiful. AAA games spend so much money making huge, expensive-looking 3D environments, but they’re so afraid to step back and let you actually enjoy them. Ex Astris knew when to back off and let me appreciate the quiet grandeur of its spaces.
In the world of Ex Astris, the World Tree initiates a planet-wide “reset” every generation or so. All living creatures return to the lifestream and are born anew. Your avatar follows a priestess who's deliberately working to protect this cycle of reincarnation, and to preserve the memories of those alive so they can be shared with the next cycle. Each of the game’s three acts center around someone fighting to escape or end this cycle, and each time you have to stop them.
It’s like a reverse Final Fantasy X. The cycle is understood to be the natural state of things, an inescapable ending and beginning. Raging against the dying of the light is portrayed as sympathetic but ultimately misguided. I think it’s very lovely theming (although they botch it a bit at the very end).
That thematic consistency for 99% of the game is what ties the whole package together to me. This is a mood piece, a quiet twenty hour poem masquerading as a Tales game. I don’t want to oversell it; it’s ultimately a small story, and the sentimental ending did sour me on it just a little. But it made an impact on me, it’s something I want to share with friends.
This was my first Chinese RPG I played to the very end, and I had a great time. It’s a phone game, but unlock Gryphline’s other mobile offerings, it’s not a free-to-play gacha. You pay $10 and that’s it, you can play the whole game. You do not own it though — not only is it locked to iOS/android ecosystems, but despite being single-player you must log in to Gryphline’s servers to play it. I’m not sure the game is popular enough for a PC rerelease or for folks to hack around the log-in down the line. Even with emulation, it’s likely Ex Astris is destined to be lost to time before long. Does that innate impermanence compliment the game’s theming? Who’s to say…
And I don’t know where else to put this, but the shoegaze credits theme is one of the loveliest RPG vocal ending tracks I've ever heard.
Arknights (2019-Present)
I played Arknights constantly for two straight weeks. For nearly any other game that’d be enough to clear it or at least get close, but for Arknights that was enough to see maybe 2% of the total content (through the end of chapter three, specifically). I’m also not a fan of this genre even a little bit. Take my read with a grain of salt.
So: this is the most fun I’ve had with a gacha game. After extended false starts with Fate/Grand Order, Dragalia Lost, and Honkai Impact 3rd I finally feel like I get the appeal of these stupid games. I’m gonna make my best argument on the devil’s behalf first, then explain why these games are still resolutely not for me.
The main obstacle for me with gacha games is that they overwhelm me immediately with their dozens of competing systems and currencies and game modes. Arknights did its best to dole that stuff out for me slowly. But by a week in, it was still too much. When I hit that point in Fate GO, I soldiered on anyway, only half-understanding what I was doing. That was miserable, and I didn’t intend to play Arknights the same way.
This time, I took matters into my own hands. I spent two full hours pouring over the in-game UI and cross-referencing it against the fan-wiki. The wiki explained in-depth how each mode worked and when it was added to the game. If a mode was added years after the game’s 2019 launch date, I knew it wouldn’t be essential to the early game progression. By the end of the two hours, I had a reference spreadsheet covering every major UI element. This cut down on the gacha systems noise tremendously, and let me see through to the specifics of what the game wanted from me.
Gacha games are defined mostly by their meta-systems: the clicker game progression and (of course) the gambling. The clicker game here was mostly familiar to me from Fate GO, with the much appreciated “auto-play” nicety for my “dailies.” I’m not immune to the power of idle game happy-brain-chemicals-go-brrrr, and I had a lot of fun leveling and ascending my characters. Thanks to my handy dandy spreadsheet, I could see through all the piled-on nonsense and actually enjoy the clicker game.
The number-go-up brain chemical appeal here is stronger, in some ways, than in a traditional rpg. A normal rpg has an ending, a finite length. After the credits roll, the time you put into grinding up your characters no longer matters, because the game is over. But Arknights is essentially endless. There are already hundreds of maps and millions of words of story, with more still coming down the pipeline.
It helps that the grind here is much slower than in a normal rpg. That slowness adds to the sense of commitment, that I’m building something substantive brick-by-brick that will last through dozens of stories. I think this is likely the same basic appeal as leveling up characters in MMOs, another genre I’ve struggled to connect with. It feels good to understand it, at least more than I did before.
The nugget of actual gameplay in Arknights is a tower defense game. Initially it made me laugh; seeing play that reminded me of old dinky flash games at the center of this multi-million dollar media empire was funny. But I like the tower defense a lot. Arknights gets hard much faster than Fate GO, and while leveling up my units played a massive role, my strategies actually did matter as well. I found I could beat missions under the recommended level if I played and replayed them, trying out new strategies until I found one that worked.
But the tower defense wasn’t the real reason I kept playing — if it was, I could’ve just loaded up a real strategy game, like X-Com or Fire Emblem. I certainly wasn’t playing for the visual novel. Maybe it gets better later, but the best thing I can say for story sequences in early Arknights is that they aren’t as intrusively awful as Fate GO’s.
Ultimately, the tower defense and visual novel were scraps of real art meant to distract me from the fundamental emptiness of what I was doing. I was playing for the clicker game, to see my party get stronger.
Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so. Everyone needs trash in their life, something they can completely turn their brain off to. Reality TV, vtuber streams, meandering serial fanfics — it doesn’t matter what it is, so long as we can fully decompress while engaging with it. If someone gets that from grinding their dailies in a phone game, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
It’s just not for me. I struggle to stay engaged with any one game (or any piece of media really) for more than like, two or three weeks. And I don’t like reaching the end of that attention cycle without a real conclusion in sight. I don’t watch unfinished TV shows, I don’t read cape comics or ongoing manga, and I don’t play MMOs. I don’t play “episode one” or “prologue” games on Itch or Steam for that matter. I like complete stories. My decompression trash of choice is watching YouTube with my fiancee while we eat dinner, or playing grindy retro RPGs with finite endpoints. Endless live service games simply do not fill the niche for me.
So, I quit playing Arknights. On a dime. It was easy.
Is it that easy for everyone, though?
I spent 99 cents on Arknights, for one of the time-limited “starter packs” that give tons of resources to new users. Otherwise, I didn’t give them any money. I didn’t care about rolling for new characters — I was content with the many operators I’d been given for free, including several max rarity ones. I’ve never been a completionist in RPGs; I’ve never completed any Pokedexes or fused the very best demons in a MegaTen. I was limited on how much I could grind in Arknights by “daily energy limits,” which you could pay money to circumvent. But I have a full-time job, and I was already struggling to play enough daily to use the energy they gave me for free.
Gryphline doesn’t care that I quit playing. I’m not who they’re after. They want players who will spend lots of money rolling gacha for specific characters, and I’m just not wired that way.
But through no fault of their own, some players are. And those players will often give hundreds or thousands of dollars to Arknights and games like it, sometimes more money than they can afford. The fiscal model of Arknights depends on it. I find that pretty sinister, personally.
The moral component here has been litigated elsewhere plenty, so I won’t dwell on it more than that. Speaking purely to what I viscerally enjoy, I finally have enough experience in gacha games to know, resolutely, that I don’t care for them. The clicker game is fun, I get that now, but it’s also largely identical between different games. The actual art, that air-thin slice of “real videogame” that’s unique from gacha to gacha, is a tiny fraction of the experience. That ratio isn’t acceptable to me as a player.
