17 Years of Gacha Gaming 🎰

Whoa can you believe it, this place has been around for 17 years! Soon this blog will be graduating high school and going to blog college! 🥹🎓

I feel like most of this year I spent playing gacha games so I want to go more into detail about those and then briefly go through all the games that we’ve played. Sadly to say, most of the games weren’t really that good, were just straight up bad or were mediocre that I figured there’s not even a point of doing a ranking for this year’s post.

Love & Deepspace

Alright so I’ve been playing LADS for almost 2 years now. At one point I really wanted to quit. In fact sometime this year I did uninstall it from my phone though I kept my emulator running. I was getting sick of the fact that they had released a plethora of new battle companions, behind a massive gacha paywall, with more annoying battle buttons and the fact that you could have absolutely dogshit card deck and still annihilate bosses simply because powercreep. The new features they added, sleeping, journals, period tracking (that sucks ass btw) have been completely useless to me and so I was still back at square one with “not enough materials to level my cards and battles being overtuned to match all the power crept new companions.” For some reason I came back for the wedding and honeymoon beach episode and the Love no Deepspace Sama events (multibanners seem to pull me in I guess?!) I’m holding out for the 2 year anniversary in January to see if they make any significant changes. One of those changes needs to be a massive increase in materials for leveling cards and they need to update the freaking main story!! There was literally one main story update this year!! The rest were just AU banners and new companions and a bunch of stupid paywalled outfits. I am swearing to myself (and my stream viewers) that if they don’t make these changes I will finally leave the game and if I care that much about banners I’ll just watch them on Youtube like I always do lol. 🤣

Persona 5: The Phantom X

Nagisa’s milkshake brings the girls and boys to the yard

Honestly, I did not think I was going to be playing this for this long. I had expected to quit after my initial post about it. However it seems like complaints were heard and for the most part they have improved things and they buffed a lot of the units on global which started to make many fights very trivialized except the super hard ones they expect you to use the latest gacha units on. There’s been events every 2-3 weeks to catch up to China and Korea and the P5 collab events have been really fun seeing the gang interact with all the new characters. There’s definitely been some annoying mechanics but I found that I can just “skip” the annoying events/parts of the game (looking at you Metro of Undesire) and just play the parts I want. I mostly look forward to the social link dailies cause they can be really funny. I’m 100% F2P but I have Makoto, Summer Tomoko, Chord and Futaba and plenty of gems saved up for when Haru comes next week…so overall I feel like it’s been generous enough that I can clear battles and still do events without feeling like I’m walled or stuck behind anything in particular (unlike a certain gacha game above this 💀).

Infinity Nikki

Nikki has been an absolute joy. It’s like a tumultous relationship of ups and downs where sometimes you get these amazing updates and outfits, but then at the same time you get endless reconnecting bugs and game bugs in general that makes it quite a riveting experience. 🤣There are so many beautiful outfits, housing updates, animals to groom and with the 2.0 update that came out at the end of November, there’s plenty more whimstars to catch and clothing to craft. Some reasons were hilarious like the Long Momo season, some were just tragic yuri with multiple yuri dragons and some were a slog with annoying whodunnit case solving that I needed to reference the discord. The final season was a wild frenzy of 3 teams bombing each other with points on a game board and people got so serious it was crazy. My team ended up winning but there was definitely a lot of salt to go around for something that’s supposed to be a cozy game. Overall it’s been a crazy ride but they have monthly updates so it really gives me something to look forward to in a world where every day is a day of shitty news about how my country is being run into the ground. 💀

Final Fantasy XIV

Yea so uh I still play FFXIV! The most notable update that happened in the past year is Vieras finally got hats! Not 100% but at least 90% and enough that I actually stopped using the Viera hat mod. While I do think the modder’s work is still a much better quality than what Square Enix released, at least I know that whatever hat I can see, others can see too. Dawntrail sub patches have become a bit more interesting after 7.3 and 7.4 seems promising with the new Arcadion as well as them finally unlocking the glamour system. There was an XIV forum thread for like 5 years asking them to allow everyone to wear gear from other jobs…and looks like they have finally decided to do it. Now you’ll be able to wear those cute Scholar culottes with all of your outfits. I’m really excited but I’m also sad because my dresser only has like 10 slots available. Hopefully once we can wear other jobs gear I can get rid of all the duplicate earrings/necklaces/bracelets that I have for tank/healer/aiming/casting in there and make some room. They announced fanfest but I decided to skip it this time too since last time some guy thought it was funny to spread Covid19 to everyone and because wtf tickets are now like $260?? Combine with flight/hotel I’d be paying like nearly 2k for me and Kanade to go to California for this nonsense. I’ll just enjoy fanfest shows from the comfort of my computer screen (and also Kanade has been officially unemployed for a year so uh we’re trying to conserve money.)

Otome Games (lol)

I feel like I spent a lot of this year hearing Tachibana Shinnosuke

Alright well to be fair I did play ONE single otome game in 2025 – 9RIP. Surprisingly I actually liked it. I wanted to buy the FD but thanks to an orange clown and his posse, the tariffs have basically ruined any hopes I had of importing games anymore. I know I have the digital option, which is what I usually do anyway, but yea, Kanade unemployed, trying to save money (which is why the majority of the time I am f2ping gacha games lol.) They announced quite a lot of new FDs for games I’ve played that I am interested in…but maybe if either of us gets a new/better paying job or it gets picked up in English and goes on a deep discount sale (which is why I bought 9RIP in the first place – it was like $10 or something.) Weirdly enough, I played quite a lot of non-otome VNs this year probably because they were easily obtainable via various sales. Meanwhile if Otomate ever even has a sale, it’s maybe 10% off at best on some game I’ve already played.

Vtubing

So because I was constantly having issues with lag with my vroid models I decided to venture into the land of live2D. That’s right I drew, and rigged my own live2D model within the 42 day trial period (and made a bootleg one for Kanade that didn’t involve much since he’s off camera.) There was a lot of struggling and I had hit a few walls where I thought I was gonna give up and just spend money on one of those customizable models…but in the end I prevailed. You can check out my Bluesky thread about my progress it’s very interesting to go back and see how far I had gotten. I want to thank all the amazing people who posted tutorials on youtube and the amazing people who gave me advice and tips in the Live2D discord. I’m thinking of making a video listing all the tutorials I used and how I did things but there’s so many of those out there so not sure if it’s worth it, but we’ll see.

One of the last outfits I made before my trial expiring was a Nikki dress for all my Nikki streams

My favorite part about live2D, aside the fact that it takes up less ram on my PC and doesn’t lag, is all the possibilities you can do on stream. All the different props and actions are so much easier to program into vtube studio but with vrm you need to use Vnyan or whatever other program and Unity and that shit can get confusing REALLY fast. I remember with Unity you had to get a specific version or all the buttons/commands were in completely different places. I am so done with 3D modeling (blender was bad enough when I was doing XIV hair modding) and from now on I am only making live2D assets for myself. My free trial has expired but for making basic outfit/prop attachments, it works completely fine. I’m still a newb when it comes to prop rigging and I try to make use of whatever free props I see floating around.

Anyway that about covers the majority of what my gaming year was like so here’s some thoughts on all the games we’ve played and reviewed in chronological order beginning December 2024.

Despera Drops

Wow I completely forgot that I played a 2nd otome game since my last anniversary since I played it in December. This game did get licensed in English but overall it was a disappointment to me because of all the rushed endings for the LIs. The Cgs looked awkward in some places too and just overall the plotline was wacky and felt unresolved. It left me a bit unsatisfied, and well the heroine just really annoyed me in general which made the entire thing worse for me than probably most other people.

Trails Through Daybreak II

This game had way too many bad ends. Too many. It was so many I ended up doing a counter on stream and it was 23 (almost 24 but I happened to dodge one by accident?!) I only stayed for the Van x Elaine shipping…it was all that kept me going through this nonsense.

Trails Beyond the Horizon (Kai no Kiseki)

This game was interesting because it felt like they just wanted to give everyone a bit of nostalgia by bringing back the Cold Steel characters (mainly Rean and Crow). As always I was here for the Van x Elaine shipping even though the game was really trying to push him with Agnes (which luckily did not become canon lolol sorry VanAg shippers!) Anyway the game definitely left off on a cliffhanger so hopefully Falcom releases the next one in the series sooner rather than later.

Nayuta no Kiseki

This game was bad in 2 ways. One, the system was garbage. Garbage physics, garbage mechanics, like a terrible Super Mario simulator in half-assed 2D/3D plane. The second, all the terrible outdated anime jokes in the first 2 hours of the game. Needless to say when I go to a rage inducing platform section I ended up uninstalling.

Mahoutsukai no Yoru

Aozaki Aoko is the model visual novel heroine. If you give me an otome game with a heroine like this, I will instantly like it (Cupid Parasite, Variable Barricade). Therefore, because of that, the game was such a joy and honestly it’s jarring about how the sequel game was such a disaster in comparison.

Tsukihime: A Piece of Blue Glass Moon

My god, how did Shiki turn out to be such a shitty protagonist after his shishou was Aozaki Aoko!? It’s unbelievable what a scumbag he is!! He just sits there thinking with his dick like 90% of the time. He’s so fucking annoying and angsty oh my god!! I don’t even want to play the rest of these remasters….I am so done with this mfer lol. 🥴

Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight

I had started the game a while back and then dropped it but decided to finally finish it. It’s not really any different than the P5 dancing game so there’s not really much to write home about here. Only thing I will say is most of the songs were terrible rap remixes so that really made the game a lot less enjoyable than its predecessors.

Persona 3 Reload

As you can see, it was mostly a visual remake. Because of this nothing really felt new aside the few social links that weren’t in the female protag route and were in the male one (like Makoto playing an MMO with his homeroom teacher lol.) While I shipped Makoto and Yukari, I definitely feel like there was a lot of issues beforehand and it made me like her a little less. Also, it felt like the female protag could bang like every dude but in P3R you really were only supposed to get with one girl. Makoto was also soooo much less fun than Kotone that I will truly say, Atlas fucked up bad by refusing to add her route in the remake. The social links were just so much worse this time around.

Valkyria Chronicles

The system was absolute garbage and without cheats, I would never have cleared. Actually without Kanade, I would have never cleared it because we finished the game with me never touching a single battle.😎🤪 At least I finally got closure for the anime ship from like 20 years ago!

Digimon Survive

The entire game in a nutshell. I ended up watching the true ending on Youtube because no way in hell I was gonna sit through this whiny child bitchfest for another 10 hours.

9 R.I.P.

I remember initially avoiding this game thinking it was gonna be yet another Diabolik Wifebeaters but it turned out to be a surprisingly cute game with a few horror elements sprinkled in. None of the love interests were abusive (well except the Tachibana groomer pedr0) and at some point when I have my money straightened out, I do want to buy the FD.

Copycat

I thought this game was gonna be like Stray but it was like a more depressing edition of Little Kitty Big City. It was full of cat haters and abusers from Australia and frankly even if you love cats I highly do not recommend playing this. Just awful narrative all around.

Stella of the End

Dude lying out his ass there. Anyway, depressing Key visual novel but with a really really annoying protagonist. Felt like a Nier ripoff most of the time and too many hateable characters for me to enjoy it. The only character that has growth mentally and physically is the girl – while everyone else seems to just be there to boost her character maturing over time.

Anonymous;Code

Honestly I should have just played Chaos;Head instead, but I don’t want to play a game full of guro shit non stop pls. So instead I settled on this and it ended up being like Daybreak 2 with constant annoyingly placed bad ends and stupid reset endings.

Dishonorable Mention: Buried Stars

We actually never bothered reviewing this game because we pretty much ragequit it after about 2 hours. Unfortunately being in my backlog for years, I could not refund it. Aside from all the terrible name differences between English and Japanese audio, the actual system was a burning dumpster fire even worse than Digimon Survive.

A few final thoughts here. As I mentioned earlier, Kanade’s been unemployed for a year after a layoff due to the absolute dogshit job market right now. At this point anything helps, whether you buy a magnet, or subscribe on Twitch or just simply use my Amazon affiliate links, every bit helps us. He’s been trying to get a job, but because of that, our finances are tight and so I generally don’t really buy many games anymore. I only bought 2 games recently because I got some birthday money from my family – and they were on sale for 50% off. 😅 That’s why the majority of my game time is now occupied by free to play gacha games and if I ever spend money, it’s like $1-2 once in a while I earn from scanning my grocery receipts into Google’s app. 💸 I know at this point I’m “washed up” (because who even reads blogs anymore now that AI is flooding most written content these days?) but I still enjoy my hobbies and I’m just sharing my enjoyment with whoever’s there to watch it with me. ☺️

As always big thanks to those who stopped by the stream, subscribed, bought merch or donated to us. Big thanks to those who still stop by the blog after all these years when I no longer even blog about otome games. It’s thanks to all of you that I still have the motivation to continue this hobby instead of packing it up or fading into oblivion like most people who started around my time have. I only have about 0.9 gigs of media storage left on this blog before I have to pay for more so I’m going to consider either hosting from an outside image site (like the olden days) or simply removing old blog posts. I’ve already removed a lot of image intensive FFXIV gallery posts but I might start just straight up removing old non-review related posts….but we’ll worry about that when we get there. 😎