Bear with me for a bit, because this ramble will get around to a point sooner rather than later. The thing is, after bouncing off a few games this month, I went back to playing Dark Souls and Dark Souls III a lot. Mostly it’s just to try out weapons and builds that are outside of my normal roster of characters. I’m not even playing to beat the games. It’s just a nice routine while I wait for something else to tickle my fancy.
Inevitably, there always comes a point where grinding is unavoidable. I don’t mean grinding to get XP for more levels, though that can also happen if a character’s build is found wanting against certain bosses. There’s grinding to buy items, like the 20,000 soul Tower Key or the equally priced Crest of Artorias. There’s grinding to get faction items like a Sunlight Medal or Proof of a Concord Kept without going online to fight other players. (Our 4G modem would give invaders fits, so generally, I play offline. You’re welcome.) You might need to grind to get a weapon to drop that can’t be bought from any of the vendors. Then there’s grinding to get upgrade materials, continuously fighting the same guy over and over to get enough titanite for that shiny new sword the other enemy finally dropped after two hours of being stingy.
I don’t like grinding in any of these cases, but when it’s inevitable, I tuck in and get it over with because I know that in a few hours, I can get back to the fun parts. But every time, it’s just so boring that I have actually fallen asleep mid-grind. Again, it doesn’t last that long, but I would love for games to have a lot less grind to them.
It’s a pity that mobile games have reached the point where the grind is the game. I’ll be using two examples, one proper free mobile experience, and one that’s part of my Netflix subscription. First up is Dungeon Boss Respawned, which as a Netflix game has no ads or microtransactions. I’ve been playing it for months, and it’s a nice way to pass the time doing laundry or doing my business in the bathroom.
The fun part is making four member teams out of the different monsters. Some of them have special buffs that apply only to their own kin, like goblins and skeletons, so they work best with allies of the same magic race. But others are useful in whatever crew they’re added to, making them more essential at higher levels.
I’m nowhere near the end of the game yet because I’m not allowed to level up my favorite characters the way I want to. Getting shards to upgrade them requires activating various levels of their “story.” There’s not really a story, though. Each character must engage in increasingly longer grinds to get a number of shards. Fight in 30 dungeons with this monster on the team. Fight in 20 dungeon of a certain element type and 40 dungeons of any type. Now kill 100 enemies of a certain element and fight in 65 dungeons. Rinse and repeat.
But once any character levels up to a certain point, the game says, “You can’t level this guy up until you level up twenty other characters to story level 3.” Where I’m at now, I can’t level up the characters I like until I grind through to story level 4 with 50 characters. Doing that will take another month, at least.
That’s what turns a good time into a problem. The grind isn’t just inevitable, it’s the whole point of the game. Keep doing the levels over and over to grind every last monster, or else you can’t level up the monsters you like.
We haven’t even covered the other two gates blocking progress, Evos and gold. It isn’t enough to upgrade a monster. They also have to be ascended, which involves collecting little pill shaped monsters called Evos. Ascending a monster gives them a new attack, and all monsters can be ascended twice. In addition, gaining XP means the monsters level up, and each time they do, you have to spend gold to level up their abilities.
So, you’ve got a level 50 monster who just ascended and got a new attack, and now you need gold to pay for every level of improvement. Which means you’re out two million gold. For one monster. If you aren’t buying gold with the other in-game currency, crystals—doled out for completing daily goals—grinding for gold in the levels is even more tedious and slow.
The grinding nature of the game is part of the reason I will walk away from it for days at a time, because I don’t like opening the game knowing I won’t make any forward progress towards the end-game. I’m just there to grind some monsters I don’t like to make more grinding progress with the monsters I do like.
But let’s move on to Sega’s new cash cow, Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage. It’s a rhythm game married to a bunch of visual novels all taking place in the same city. The visual novel side really isn’t for me, but I completed two of them just to see what the characters were like. In both cases, they’re made up the same stereotypes: shy girl, energetic girl, quiet boy, and asshole boy. (There’s also all-girl bands, but I don’t know if I can sit through another hours long visual novel just to arrive at the same hokey ending again.)
Unlocking each chapter rewards some currency, but there’s like fifteen currencies, and each of them are doled out in such tiny amounts that purchases can only be made once a week. Ooooor, you know, you can spend real money to buy stuff faster.
That’s all normal mobile bullshit, but then there’s the rhythm game, which is well established with many other entries in Hatsune Miku’s franchise. You hit notes as they connect with a target, and your score is based on how many you hit.
NOT IN THIS GAME. You played badly? You get a C. You hit every note with a perfect score. Fuck you, you still get a C. To get a better score, you have to grind and level up every single member of the band to raise their talent level. You have to buy special upgrade items to furnish their stages, also to raise their talent levels. Those all require different currencies. Adding insult to injury, there’s a player rank, a character rank, and a character trust rank, all of which require grinding forever to “improve talent.”
Then of course you can get extra currencies as prizes if you sign up for the monthly “season pass.” So then you can pay real money for extra currencies, but you can also pay a monthly subscription to make the grind slightly less grindy.
But don’t forget, this is also a gacha game. So you start off with a bunch of 1 star losers, and you can eventually draw 4 star versions of the same characters. But since they’re level one, you either grind to raise their talent level, or you pay just to get the new 4 star singer up to the level of the 1 star singer. On top of this, there’s the “Paid Gacha,” which promises slightly higher chances of getting upper tier singers in exchange for regular cash injections. Some of the promoted gacha events in this game are also Paid Gacha exclusive, so all us minnows can go fuck ourselves with a fishing hook.
I love Hatsune Miku games. Almost every song works for me, and this is pulling songs from a lot of past games along with some new songs. But it really kills my enjoyment of the game to hit a full combo, all perfect and great notes, and still get the same score as if I fucked it all up. Skill isn’t even what’s important here. It’s my commitment to an eternal grind.
What really sucks is how console and PC game publishers have watched this rot infect the mobile market, and their take away was, “Wait, so we can sell people a full-priced game, and then we can exploit them too!” Ubisoft intentionally lowers the XP value of enemies in some of their Ass’ Greed games, then sells an XP booster so you can avoid the grind they baked in. Both Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo have locked up cars and asked for more money to gain access. And who could forget the fiasco of Shadow of War, with microtransactions and grind so egregious that the player outcry forced the publisher to cut them out?
It’s only going to get worse from here unless there’s a similar outcry on every single push to exploit the players. But there are whole genres where the players have just come to expect this kind of abuse as normal. Sports games exploit their players year over year, and the reaction is either a half-hearted shrug or a lame statement like, “Well, just don’t use the microtransactions.”
I have a different suggestion. How about we just don’t buy their games? They’re convinced that gaming is a perpetual money engine, but simple sales aren’t enough anymore, so they HAVE to exploit us or they won’t make more profits. Lately, they’ve begun whining that season passes, loot boxes, and overpriced skins aren’t profitable enough. No, now they’re actively talking about shoehorning commercials into all our games. Because ADS EVERYWHERE is what saved magazine publishers and news websites, right? Right.
No, these guys are fucked, and eventually the poison that polluted mobile games is going to lead to console and PC game publishers crashing their own markets. That will leave all of us waiting for them to pull their collective heads out of their asses to course correct back to the real point of their industry: making fun games that distract us from the dreadful entropy creeping up to consume us all.
Well…that got dark. Maybe I should cut back on all the Dark Souls binging, Anyway, see you next week, yeah?