Which Is The Worst Practice: Paying For Gacha Or Paying For Energy?

When Crystal of Atlan launched a few days ago, I decided I’d download it and give it a go. Obviously, I play a lot of anime-themed games, but most of them are primarily single-player with characters being obtained via gacha – something Nuverse explicitly states they don’t do. That’s not to say they don’t have gacha. They absolutely do. It’s just for things like outfits and pets. All the possible characters are available to play now.

That being said, this is an MMO. You’re not out here collecting husbands and wives. What’s more, you start out with the same base character as anyone else playing your class and have to work your way through the game to create your own identity. As Matt pointed out in his recent editorial, character identity is an important factor in MMORPGs. It’s a bit of a turnoff not to be able to create your character the way you’d like from the start. Hell, well-established MMOs with a reasonably good character creation system still end up with mods that allow players to make their character even more “theirs”.

That said, having to customize my character over time wasn’t a killing point of the game for me. If I’m honest, nothing really was. I’ll likely keep playing it here and there. The story’s okay, and the combat is fun. That is… as long as you can keep playing. Yes, the game has energy systems. You spend energy to go into dungeons, the main combat situations in the main story quests. You spend stamina to do things like gathering. Eventually, you’ll run out of both for the day, and that’s kinda that.

When I mentioned playing the game to a friend, he noted that he heard the game has an energy system. But, he didn’t know if they’d made any adjustments to it to make it more friendly to Western players. After all, it works well in places that legally limit the amount of time players can spend in a game. We are not those people, however. My discovery is that so far, for me, the limitations don’t seem that bad. But I can absolutely see where other players will be increasingly frustrated when they run up against it.

Of course, the game offers players ways to recharge their energy using batteries. And while there are ways to acquire batteries via gameplay, they are also available for real-world cash. So, this leaves me wondering which is worse, having players roll for characters via gacha, or having players pay to be able to keep playing the game longer than their allotted daily time. In my experience on the gacha side, it is entirely possible to create a reasonable team without spending much, if any, cash. Of course, if you want to obtain the “best at the time” character and level them up, then yeah, you’re spending money. But that’s not necessary. Particularly as you’re effectively playing a single-player game in a lot of cases.

On the other hand, a lot of folks only have so much time to invest in a game. Between things like school, work, and other obligations, some people may only have a Saturday to sit down and work their way through a game. That’s hard to do when you run up against the energy wall. Of course, just like you don’t have to spend a ton of money rolling on gacha characters, you don’t have to keep playing that day. It’s a decision you have to make as a player.

For me, I do find the energy situation a bit more frustrating. I can live with it. I can certainly walk away from the game for the night. (Or, at least I can this particular one. I certainly didn’t stay up til 4:00 am one night playing through the most recent Honkai: Star Rail content only to get a "to be continued". Nope. Not me.) But it’s a bit aggravating when I’m in the groove. And I do, honestly, feel for those that set aside a specific day to play only to find themselves in a situation where they have to wait til their energy and stamina replenish or drop some cash.