Comments

Don't believe in yourself! Believe in me! Believe in the Kasumi who believes in you! Your drill is the drill that will pierce the Earth! Wahahahaha

He had have enough of Hitogami's bullshit

XionGaTaosenai said:

Pity systems, exp boosts, and rate ups aren't what define a game as a gacha game - that would be like saying that Overlord isn't an isekai because its protagonist never gets hit by a truck.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't an Isekai the definition of "A character from reality/another universe end up being in another reality/universe" ? Doesn't need to be hit by a truck or die first before making the jump. Can SAO be considered an Isekai ?

Ship construction in Kantai Collection are randomized

Yes

and event rewards in Kantai Collection are randomized

No

and as far as I know, there is no non-randomized way to obtain the vast majority of shipgirls.

Yes and no. New introduced girls can be a random drop in an Event map, or a Map Reward. But if you're not playing said Event, then you have to wait until said girl can come back. Fortunately, for like 98% of the girls, missing one isn't the end of the world and you can perfectly clear an Event without mandatory ships, it will be more random because you have less odds in your favor.

I had assumed that there was some way to obtain resources faster or run events more often by spending real money

There is a way to do that, but boy oh boy even the Devs encourage you to NOT do that because it's absolutely not worth the money. Why spent 100 yens for 200 ressources when you can just setup 4 ships for 90 minutes in a single expedition, and play something else while waiting for them to come back ?

Saying that Kantai Collection is morally above any other gacha game that does the same thing is preposterous.

It doesn't bait you with shiny rewards or waifues girls, it all depends on the players' tastes at this point. Kancolle doesn't want your money, it want some form of engagement. How much engagement then more or less determine at which difficulty can you play Events, and guess what ? Even at the lowest difficulty, you will get the new girls anyway, but not the extra equipments that will reward the players that put more efforts and time into developping themselves enough so they can tackle harder difficulties in Events.

Myschi said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't an Isekai the definition of "A character from reality/another universe end up being in another reality/universe" ? Doesn't need to be hit by a truck or die first before making the jump. Can SAO be considered an Isekai ?

That's the exact point I was making. There are a lot of tropes like "Truck-Kun" and cheat abilities that have become common enough in modern isekai that they're basically cliche, and if you were asking a modern reader what tropes they associate with isekai those tropes would definitely be near the top of the list, but you don't have to have those tropes specifically in order to qualify as an isekai, and there are plenty of classic and foundational works in the genre (particularly older examples) that lack them. In the same vein, pity mechanics and rate ups are definitely dominant tropes associated with gacha games, but they aren't strictly required in order for a game to count as a gacha game - all you strictly need is a core gameplay loop that simulates the operation of a "virtual gachapon machine".

Kantai Collection lacks a lot of the features associated with modern gachas, but that's primarily a product of its age and the fact that it was made before developers learned all the tricks to most efficiently bait players into spending money - KC is the "prototype gacha" that walked so that the others could run, and its success is definitely what inspired the glut of gacha games that we see today. KC pioneered the whole idea of a gamified harem fantasy that all of these other gacha games are built around, and while a lot of more recent gacha games have gotten even worse in that regard, I still very much blame KC for starting the snowball rolling in the first place.

Also, as a Touhou fan who was around to see the initial rise of Kantai Collection, I see a KC fan complaining about whatever the newly popular gacha game is and all I can think is... "first time?"

XionGaTaosenai said:

That's the exact point I was making. There are a lot of tropes like "Truck-Kun" and cheat abilities that have become common enough in modern isekai that they're basically cliche, and if you were asking a modern reader what tropes they associate with isekai those tropes would definitely be near the top of the list, but you don't have to have those tropes specifically in order to qualify as an isekai, and there are plenty of classic and foundational works in the genre (particularly older examples) that lack them. In the same vein, pity mechanics and rate ups are definitely dominant tropes associated with gacha games, but they aren't strictly required in order for a game to count as a gacha game - all you strictly need is a core gameplay loop that simulates the operation of a "virtual gachapon machine".

Kantai Collection lacks a lot of the features associated with modern gachas, but that's primarily a product of its age and the fact that it was made before developers learned all the tricks to most efficiently bait players into spending money - KC is the "prototype gacha" that walked so that the others could run, and its success is definitely what inspired the glut of gacha games that we see today. KC pioneered the whole idea of a gamified harem fantasy that all of these other gacha games are built around, and while a lot of more recent gacha games have gotten even worse in that regard, I still very much blame KC for starting the snowball rolling in the first place.

Also, as a Touhou fan who was around to see the initial rise of Kantai Collection, I see a KC fan complaining about whatever the newly popular gacha game is and all I can think is... "first time?"

By that definition Pokemon is also a gacha game. And getting pregnant is also a gacha game.

People just see "browser game with a lot of characters and random mechanics", so immediately think it is a gacha game, forgetting that a core mechanic of such games is the monetization of the gacha mechanic itself which KC lacks any aim of it. The construction poll doesn't form part of the core of the game.

Also dont be an hypocrite blaming KC considering Touhou was one of the first ones coming up with an all female cast of cute moe-anthropomorphic youkai girls way before KC or shipgirls were a thing.

Admiral_Shippai said:

By that definition Pokemon is also a gacha game.

There is indeed a Pokemon gacha game. It's called Pokemon Masters EX.

Admiral_Shippai said:

Also dont be an hypocrite blaming KC considering Touhou was one of the first ones coming up with an all female cast of cute moe-anthropomorphic youkai girls way before KC or shipgirls were a thing.

What does this have to do with anything? Touhou wasn't a gacha, or even a collection game. Touhou didn't start anything, and certainly isn't the first to feature an all female cast. If someone was to be blamed for the "collectible waifu" genre, it would absolutely be KC, but I wouldn't even know if they were actually the first.

Admiral_Shippai said:

By that definition Pokemon is also a gacha game. And getting pregnant is also a gacha game.

I was hoping someone would bring up Pokemon! Pokemon is definitely a borderline case - I personally wouldn't call it a gacha game, but if someone else came up to me and sincerely argued that it was, I'd be willing to hear them out. The two big distinctions are that a) you don't have to spend any numerical resources in order to encounter more wild pokemon, and b) there is a non-randomized way to obtain any pokemon you want in the game, which is trading with other players.

The first point may seem like a pointless distinction, especially when comparing to a game where the resource "spent" to roll the gacha can be obtained by grinding, because in both cases you're ultimately just spending time to do both once the smoke and mirrors are taken away. but it's all about psychology - having to numerically spend a resource in order to roll the gacha makes it feel "more valuable" in the player's mind and encourages them to roll more. The trading, however, is the bigger distinction. Every part of Pokemon's design, especially in its earlier iterations, is meant to encourage players to meet up and trade with each other, and the "gacha" that is wild pokemon encounters is no different. You're not supposed to "roll" over and over again until you get exactly what you want, you're supposed to poke around just long enough to get something valuable that you can then trade for whatever you actually wanted. Note that the strongest and most desirable pokemon in the game - legendaries - tend to be explicitly non-random in how you encounter them, which means that if there's a legendary that you don't actually want long-term, and a "regular" but rare pokemon that you do want but don't want to bother with trying to "roll" for, finding another player who will be willing to trade the rare non-legendary you want for your unwanted legendary is relatively easy. Then again, the physical goods that you get from actual gachapon machines can obviously be traded, so if tradability disqualifies something from being a gacha, then actual gachapon machines wouldn't qualify. Like I said, Pokemon is a borderline case, and there's merit to either interpretation.

Meanwhile, I had been led to believe that ship construction is the primary means via which you're meant to get new units in Kantai Collection, and that outside of your starter ship and a select few early quest rewards like Shirayuki and Akagi, there's no surefire guaranteed way to get any ship - Myschi said that event rewards in KC aren't randomized, but I distinctly remember people making references in comics and comments to having to run events multiple times in order to get what they wanted. And I haven't seen any reference made to players being able to trade shipgirls between each other.

As for your second point, pregnancy can't be a gacha game because it's not a game, and the process of childbearing can't reasonably be called a "gameplay loop". If you do want to apply game logic to the process though, I will say that if you could only "roll" a particular gacha once every 9 months, and then had to wait 20 years before you knew for certain what you got out of that "roll", we would be having a very different conversation. The whole point of a gachapon machine, virtual or otherwise, is that you can crank the lever over and over again until you get the exact result you want, and having kids simply... doesn't work like that.

Also dont be an hypocrite blaming KC considering Touhou was one of the first ones coming up with an all female cast of cute moe-anthropomorphic youkai girls way before KC or shipgirls were a thing.

The difference is that Touhou doesn't have a faceless self-insert for lonely nerds that 90% of the cast have the hots for for no discernable reason (with the other 10% being incestuous lesbians in order to facilitate "girl-on-girl is hot" fantasies). Touhou very much stands out for how little romance and "fanservice" it has - even the yuri is at least 95% invented by fanworks, with the characters in canon mostly just being huge assholes to each other. Touhou is an industry leader in female characters who don't feel like they were designed for the gratification of lonely straight dudes, and it was never the all-female cast or the moe-anthropomorphism that I was taking umbrage with, but the "gamified harem fantasy", or as BlindVigil put it, "collectable waifus", which Kantai Collection absolutely had a central role in popularizing, regardless of whether or not they were the literal first to do it. Take out the self-insert admiral and let the girls lead themselves, and Kantai Collection would be ten times better.

Tachyon still crazy.

NNescio said:

Tachyon still crazy.

Every official art make her unhinged, and I like that

I love her expression. It looks like she's not sure what's about to happen

Nice

300 apologems for waiting an extra 2 hours and ultimately downloading 13 gigs, I'm fine with that.

So cute 🥰

ao

Akihabara atre

Another Touhou collab, 2024-05-03

35° 41′ 53″ N, 139° 46′ 20″ E

What if we kissed at the Touhou windows?

You will be forever trapped in a toxic relatioship where it does not matter how good your actual girlfriend is, you'll miss your 2003 ex-girlfriend. The one you can't let go even when it has been two decades since the last time you dated her.

So I try logging in twitter this morning to find they are once again forcing everyone to call it X and now the whole page is dark mode.

Annoyingly for me is how this affects my logging into Skeb. Usually it just logged in right away since the account was already linked now it not only asked me authorize access all over again but seems like it will keep doing that if I clear the browser. I'm guessing Skeb will need to update something on their end to ensure it stays that way.

Her name should probably be read Ukitsu, not Ame + Tachibana. The tag and TLs should prob be updated accordingly.

Lance123 said:

Those aren't meant to be the trans colors. The pink is for girl, the blue for boy.

And where exactly do you think the colors in the trans flag come from?

Alphaelectric said:

I love that this piece was supposed to be a dig at the trans head canon of these two characters but somehow the straight pride being in trans flag colors makes it somehow satirical, an accidental ally?

I mean, it's not headcanon that Brisket's trans but go off

helljumperhelljumper said:

I mean, it's not headcanon that Brisket's trans but go off

It's always so easy to know who's a 'huge fan' that only ever played Strive.

[deleted]

T4T is the purest form of love

Urgh, Yamato is not trans. One piece has whole island for trans, seems cult has forgotten about them.

For example Bentham/bon is badass and closer to trans than Yamato.

This is dope

Based

For context if unviewable on twitter

This looks like the reaction from my chat group when I said I found Beatrice to be attractive.

ryoka13 said:

This looks like the reaction from my chat group when I said I found Beatrice to be attractive.

As post #5995114 puts it, just because she’s hot doesn’t mean she’s attractive.

Valiran9 said:

As post #5995114 puts it, just because she’s hot doesn’t mean she’s attractive.

See, the problem is I DO find her personality attractive, not just her looks. I love her type.

ryoka13 said:

See, the problem is I DO find her personality attractive, not just her looks. I love her type.

I get being into the crazy ones, but you need serious help.

Incineration said:

I get being into the crazy ones, but you need serious help.

I look for the red flags. But red also happens to be my favorite color.