Into the maintenance mode long night it goes. Honestly surprised it didn't happen sooner, losing the JP side right at the start because of some PR idiocy was a hefty blow to the long-term prospects of the game as it was. Had some fun with the game, had some not fun, but I was here when it started and I'll be here as it ends. Not actively playing though, I haven't even had it installed for ages and now would be a terrible time to resume.
Oof. I heard the news. I hadn't actually played in a while and never got over the grind to build up good teams/gear for the harder content. Still, I enjoyed the stories and characters. I'm sad to hear this.
I'll probably re-install even if only to catch up with the campaign.
3DS Friend Code:
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Oof. Disappointed we won't make it to the fourth anniversary. But hopefully this means they'll wrap up the story in a way that's somewhat meaningful.
Sad, but not unexpected.
I have seen people blaming Nintendo, generally due to a sentiment that cygames is more willing to keep a project on life support in zombie mode to keep the lights on while Nintendo is more inclined to wash their hands and move onto a new project. I think mostly due to RoB's refusal to die but RoB is kinda cygames' baby.
3DS Friend Code:
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
I have seen people blaming Nintendo, generally due to a sentiment that cygames is more willing to keep a project on life support in zombie mode to keep the lights on while Nintendo is more inclined to wash their hands and move onto a new project. I think mostly due to RoB's refusal to die but RoB is kinda cygames' baby.
I do personally think this is Nintendo's decision. They've been shutting down the vast majority of their underperforming mobile games. I imagine in the end we'll only see them keep the top performers: FEH, Pokemon Go, Animal Crossing (probably?) and I assume Pikmin Bloom is doing ok so far?
But yeah, I wish they'd at least keep the lights on. Let me keep playing with what I already have even if you aren't gonna develop more stuff. I do hope they'll do something with the IP - I think it's really cool.
I also hope that they do something with the IP since I also love the cast and story. I just fear that Nintendo's involvement might prevent that from happening.
My opinion of Nintendo is that as a company they're a dinosaur that's ultra-conservative in their actions and slow to learn new things. That they coast on the power of their name rather than needing to outperform the competition. That they'd rather leave money on the table than risk a failure, as seen in how they habitually under produce their hardware releases and perpetually leave their customer base at the mercy of scalpers than dare risk having some unsold units on the shelves.
In regards to the Dragalia IP, I worry that it will be caught in a terrible limbo between:
A: Nintendo will be unwilling to lease it out for collabs and new games unless it's guaranteed to be an extremely profitable smash hit since in their eyes they don't want to risk the quality of their name being tarnished.
B: Nintendo will be loathe to relinquish the rights to the characters since they're like a dragon sitting on their hoard and the fact that it is THEIRS is enough of a reason to never part with it. I also don't see Nintendo becoming financially burdened to the point where their hand may be forced to part with it.
If it were just cygames, I could expect the characters to keep making appearances in some of their other products like a short collab story and alt-art cards in Shadowverse or something.
It also sucks in that Nintendo could have done so much more to advertise the game, especially during the game's start. Hell, simply doing something like putting Mym in Smash Bros would have been virtually free to Nintendo and would have been a huge advertisement for Dragalia that would have brought in a lot of new blood. But that just gets around to being like Nintendo's actions in under-producing consoles. If the idea of adding Mym or any of the rest of the cast to Smash was ever brought up, I think that Nintendo would rather leave money on the table than risk adding what they perceive as a potential dud character to Smash.
3DS Friend Code:
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Nintendo obviously had a part in the closure, but I think it's naive to try and frame it like Cygames is without "fault"
They have a long list of games they've developed over their lifetime, and most of them are no longer around, they just mostly never saw English releases outside of Priconne
It just wasn't making enough profit. That's the long and short of why gachas die. If Dragalia had been able to get the Japan player base it might have turned out differently, but ultimately Global can't sustain a game on its own. We're a peripheral market at best. Worth the cost to translate and localize, not produce exclusively for.
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
It just wasn't making enough profit. That's the long and short of why gachas die. If Dragalia had been able to get the Japan player base it might have turned out differently, but ultimately Global can't sustain a game on its own. We're a peripheral market at best. Worth the cost to translate and localize, not produce exclusively for.
Yeah it's this ultimately. Everytime they would show those graphs of Nintendo mobile game profits Dragalia was near the lower half. It outperformed stuff like Dr. Mario, etc but then Nintendo shut those games down for underperforming already. So I imagine it's basically at the absolute bottom of the graph at this point.
This was the newest one I could find on google (based on the date range maybe we'll get an updated one at the end of the month?):
I'm guessing it's been making even less money lately which is why it got axed. (Meanwhile I suspect Fire Emblem and Mario Kart will literally never die with those kinds of profits)
Dragalia really scratched an itch for a long while there: great music, challenging gameplay, fun characters, etc.
Similar gameplay? Hmm. Maybe Guardian Tales would be up your alley? Good music, decent active gameplay, fun characters, very good story.
For more Cygames stuff there's also World Flipper, which is honestly kinda like Dragalia gameplay just everything is one arena and it's pinball, or Princess Connect, though that's an auto battle game at its core. They both have the characters you want though, just WF story is a bit more mundane as of what I've seen for now. It's nice, just not setting my passion ablaze with theories yet though the latest chapter might be laying some kindling
That April to March timeframe is their fiscal year, so yeah I'd expect an update to that graph next month.
A few thoughts about the game:
I assume it's probably very difficult to onboard as a new player now that basically no one does matchmaking anymore. I'm guessing the parts where you previously could co-op to get through a boss to get mats to upgrade your weapons are now hard-stops gated by weekly bonuses giving you those mats instead.
The fact I have multiple capped currencies and nothing to do with them sucks and indicates poor design around those currencies. Similarly, I don't have enough low level materials in other cases because they either don't let you convert the higher level materials backwards (*cough* Agito *cough*) or they require so many of the lower level materials that it's effectively doubling or tripling the number of higher level materials you need (*cough* Gold Mines *cough*).
For me there was no reason to engage with the top-tier difficult content more than once. The difficulty in setting up whole new teams to deal with the buff-scrub and forced-healing mechanics was too high compared to the reward of getting mats for some more wyrmprints and wyrmprint slots. I can fully access the story (both main and in events) with my current team, so there's no push to get stronger from that avenue.
They needed to either commit to full English VA or cut it entirely. The half-assed way they handled it just increased their budget without benefiting them all that much.
Alliances didn't really do much besides give a tiny amount of mats per day, mats that don't really matter because of the glut. The friend system handled the "sharing" aspect other games normally restrict to clans/alliances.
I never once felt the need to pay money for this game. I've always had tons of free tickets and/or gems whenever a character I really liked the design of came out and the pity rate system is so generous that I almost always got them within 100 total pulls.
The Kaliedoscape was a good idea to try and encourage players to use all of their characters, but it's just too big of a time commitment, both in completing it and with using the rewards.
--The completion side's bad due to the combination of gear randomness and character mechanics making it so only a few characters are able to complete it. I'd expect buying buffs to make other characters more capable of beating it, but even with 10+ in all buffs, I don't feel all that much more powerful. Also since the bosses require debuffing to beat, you have to make sure your magic inventory's full of debuffing spells if you're not on a character that can do that themselves.
--The reward side's bad due to there not being enough filtering to make finding the good wyrmprints easy enough to use them. The completion ones with stronger element-locked and weapon-locked bonuses are the ones most people will want to use, but you can't filter for them.
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
edited March 2022
Yeah, I've been enjoying Princess Connect a lot (but the gameplay is different, it's an auto-battler). But it's also done by cygames so it has a very similar "feel" to Dragalia in terms of presentation and writing and stuff. Also to everyone's surprise, even though it's being run by Crunchyroll they've been extremely generous with free summon tickets and stuff so far. I'll also say it's very f2p friendly. Outside of like seasonal characters you can grind for almost every character for free over time (it's similar to how you unlock dragons by doing story missions for the essences). And unlike Dragalia they're still constantly adding 1*s and 2*s to the pool so there's a lot of characters you can easily pull without going for their focus banner (3* is the equivalent of Dragalia 5* for summoning... you can upgrade to 5* but it's done with the same grinding stuff I just mentioned or amulets you get for pulling dupe characters). Princess Connect also has Clan Battles which is honestly something I'm shocked they didn't try to do in Dragalia. It's basically a row of monsters and you get 3 attacks per day with the goal being to see how many your clan can kill (and then you get rewards based on your rank at the end).
That April to March timeframe is their fiscal year, so yeah I'd expect an update to that graph next month.
A few thoughts about the game:
I assume it's probably very difficult to onboard as a new player now that basically no one does matchmaking anymore. I'm guessing the parts where you previously could co-op to get through a boss to get mats to upgrade your weapons are now hard-stops gated by weekly bonuses giving you those mats instead.
The fact I have multiple capped currencies and nothing to do with them sucks and indicates poor design around those currencies. Similarly, I don't have enough low level materials in other cases because they either don't let you convert the higher level materials backwards (*cough* Agito *cough*) or they require so many of the lower level materials that it's effectively doubling or tripling the number of higher level materials you need (*cough* Gold Mines *cough*).
For me there was no reason to engage with the top-tier difficult content more than once. The difficulty in setting up whole new teams to deal with the buff-scrub and forced-healing mechanics was too high compared to the reward of getting mats for some more wyrmprints and wyrmprint slots. I can fully access the story (both main and in events) with my current team, so there's no push to get stronger from that avenue.
They needed to either commit to full English VA or cut it entirely. The half-assed way they handled it just increased their budget without benefiting them all that much.
Alliances didn't really do much besides give a tiny amount of mats per day, mats that don't really matter because of the glut. The friend system handled the "sharing" aspect other games normally restrict to clans/alliances.
I never once felt the need to pay money for this game. I've always had tons of free tickets and/or gems whenever a character I really liked the design of came out and the pity rate system is so generous that I almost always got them within 100 total pulls.
The Kaliedoscape was a good idea to try and encourage players to use all of their characters, but it's just too big of a time commitment, both in completing it and with using the rewards.
--The completion side's bad due to the combination of gear randomness and character mechanics making it so only a few characters are able to complete it. I'd expect buying buffs to make other characters more capable of beating it, but even with 10+ in all buffs, I don't feel all that much more powerful. Also since the bosses require debuffing to beat, you have to make sure your magic inventory's full of debuffing spells if you're not on a character that can do that themselves.
--The reward side's bad due to there not being enough filtering to make finding the good wyrmprints easy enough to use them. The completion ones with stronger element-locked and weapon-locked bonuses are the ones most people will want to use, but you can't filter for them.
I don't know, they've been dumbing down the difficulty level HARD in the last year or so. I feel like it's not too hard for someone new to come in and at least make their way to Agito without much of a struggle. Those things are much easier to solo so not finding co-op matches is probably fine. There is probably a huge complexity factor though. I know I came in maybe a year after it launched and I was a little overwhelmed.
Alliances are meant to be guilds for players to tackle co-op stuff together. You're kind of right that they're not super important but I think that was the intention. I feel like Kaleidoscope was getting better but they won't have time to fine tune it now. They just nerfed it a lot though which cuts down the time commitment. I thought it was a really good idea though, it just needed some adjustments.
The money stuff is hit or miss for me. I felt that way for a long time, and then the last year or so my luck has been bad and I've actually been spending a lot in this game. To be honest, the closure is kind of a relief for my wallet. Not gonna lie :P I guess they didn't have enough idiots like me tho :P
Honestly main reason I stopped playing Dragalia is because of the movement. My fingers are fucked up, always have been, and expecting minute movements is not gonna happen. And high end content demanded those movements to move, do high DPS, dodge mechanics, activate skills, and do pretty much everything else.
Had Nintendo brought the game to Switch, where I could use a controller, it may have been a different story.
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Warlock82Never pet a burning dogRegistered Userregular
Honestly main reason I stopped playing Dragalia is because of the movement. My fingers are fucked up, always have been, and expecting minute movements is not gonna happen. And high end content demanded those movements to move, do high DPS, dodge mechanics, activate skills, and do pretty much everything else.
Had Nintendo brought the game to Switch, where I could use a controller, it may have been a different story.
^ ok this, 100%. I hated manual movement in this game. The only reason I *still* play it is because a lot of the content is auto-able and I actually find that kind of fun. Some of the auto comps also required using weird characters which I found kind of fun
But yeah, for the longest time I've thought this would be great on a console with an actual controller. Turn the franchise into like a Secret of Mana style RPG where you're building up a big roster of characters and each has different abilities that might be useful for different situations. I still really would love to see this.
For a while I had designed and 3D printed a case for my phone that gave my phone handles like a gamepad so that I could more comfortably hold the phone and position my thumbs on the screen. But it was kind of a half-assed attempt that I eventually gave up on.
I wish that they would have had a PC client or allowed emulators. I play Girls Frontline a lot, and while I use my phone for the basics I always bust out the keyboard and mouse for super-serious events.
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Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Dragalia really scratched an itch for a long while there: great music, challenging gameplay, fun characters, etc.
Similar gameplay? Hmm. Maybe Guardian Tales would be up your alley? Good music, decent active gameplay, fun characters, very good story.
For more Cygames stuff there's also World Flipper, which is honestly kinda like Dragalia gameplay just everything is one arena and it's pinball, or Princess Connect, though that's an auto battle game at its core. They both have the characters you want though, just WF story is a bit more mundane as of what I've seen for now. It's nice, just not setting my passion ablaze with theories yet though the latest chapter might be laying some kindling
Tales of Luminaria has similar one finger gameplay and plays in portrait mode. I also really like the weird episodic format and the bizarre UI that's overly active but also attractive.
But it's a bamco game, I don't expect it to make it to anniversary.
Dragalia really scratched an itch for a long while there: great music, challenging gameplay, fun characters, etc.
Similar gameplay? Hmm. Maybe Guardian Tales would be up your alley? Good music, decent active gameplay, fun characters, very good story.
For more Cygames stuff there's also World Flipper, which is honestly kinda like Dragalia gameplay just everything is one arena and it's pinball, or Princess Connect, though that's an auto battle game at its core. They both have the characters you want though, just WF story is a bit more mundane as of what I've seen for now. It's nice, just not setting my passion ablaze with theories yet though the latest chapter might be laying some kindling
Tales of Luminaria has similar one finger gameplay and plays in portrait mode. I also really like the weird episodic format and the bizarre UI that's overly active but also attractive.
But it's a bamco game, I don't expect it to make it to anniversary.
Bamco and Tales spell its doom. Crystaria didn't even get a half anniversary I think.
I'm honestly surprised at the quality of music that comes out of these gacha games. Most of my experience comes from the tracks from Girls Frontline since it's the game I follow most, but my experience with Dragalia was always one where they consistently set a pretty high bar.
Just as a clip to share, this is the ending theme from the most recent event in GFL: https://youtu.be/mchEGdxcpeg
But back to Dragalia, there are tons of good songs from the game. The two immediately jump to the forefront of my mind are "We are the Lights" and "Stealth Dance."
I'm ok with paying for Gacha. I view the act of paying as being comparable to other consumable aspects of an entertainment budget. Like seeing a movie in theaters, enjoying a nice meal, paying for a round of golf, etc. Things that I pay money for to enjoy in the here and now but won't persist forever.
That said, a LOT of gacha games are pretty scummy in terms of predatory practices and skimping on the value per dollar. You have to be fully aware of your budget when spending on games, and a lot of the time they make it all too easy to just swipe swipe swipe.
I'm fine paying for gacha IF I'm buying something concrete. Dream ticket or guaranteed limited SSR? Yes. $80 for enough currency to roll three times? Nope.
There's two CD album releases of Dragalia Lost music in Japan that I thought about importing at one point but ultimately decided against. Now I'm thinking about them again.
Well, was blessed with both Nedrick and Primal Brunhilda in about 30 rolls. Still have enough powder for Gala2 with Gala^2 Euden and Zethia. I really like the Primal Dragon fights, tough but fun. ...sigh...
Gacha sucks, and so do other game of its ilk that aren’t gacha. Probably need a name for whatever Western devs foist upon us.
Mobile is just a wasteland, and it’s super depressing to think just a decade or so ago when it held so much potential. Like a lot of them, I got into Dragalia for a few weeks until you see how convoluted the game is set up to extract money from you, and the literal game itself feels lost in all the mechanics constructed not because they feel good or add to anything, but because they’re another avenue for payment or to obfuscate that.
Nintendo, just turn this into an actual game and charge like ten bucks for it.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
They just sent out enough materials to almost max out high dragon and agito weapons for anyone who was behind on that.
Into the maintenance mode long night it goes. Honestly surprised it didn't happen sooner, losing the JP side right at the start because of some PR idiocy was a hefty blow to the long-term prospects of the game as it was. Had some fun with the game, had some not fun, but I was here when it started and I'll be here as it ends. Not actively playing though, I haven't even had it installed for ages and now would be a terrible time to resume.
what was the big PR idiocy that sunk the JP version? sounds juicy
Posts
https://dragalialost.com/sp/en/news/detail/3038
I'll probably re-install even if only to catch up with the campaign.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Sad, but not unexpected.
A few gacha games have moved into an offline mode, but it's rare.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
I do personally think this is Nintendo's decision. They've been shutting down the vast majority of their underperforming mobile games. I imagine in the end we'll only see them keep the top performers: FEH, Pokemon Go, Animal Crossing (probably?) and I assume Pikmin Bloom is doing ok so far?
But yeah, I wish they'd at least keep the lights on. Let me keep playing with what I already have even if you aren't gonna develop more stuff. I do hope they'll do something with the IP - I think it's really cool.
My opinion of Nintendo is that as a company they're a dinosaur that's ultra-conservative in their actions and slow to learn new things. That they coast on the power of their name rather than needing to outperform the competition. That they'd rather leave money on the table than risk a failure, as seen in how they habitually under produce their hardware releases and perpetually leave their customer base at the mercy of scalpers than dare risk having some unsold units on the shelves.
In regards to the Dragalia IP, I worry that it will be caught in a terrible limbo between:
A: Nintendo will be unwilling to lease it out for collabs and new games unless it's guaranteed to be an extremely profitable smash hit since in their eyes they don't want to risk the quality of their name being tarnished.
B: Nintendo will be loathe to relinquish the rights to the characters since they're like a dragon sitting on their hoard and the fact that it is THEIRS is enough of a reason to never part with it. I also don't see Nintendo becoming financially burdened to the point where their hand may be forced to part with it.
If it were just cygames, I could expect the characters to keep making appearances in some of their other products like a short collab story and alt-art cards in Shadowverse or something.
It also sucks in that Nintendo could have done so much more to advertise the game, especially during the game's start. Hell, simply doing something like putting Mym in Smash Bros would have been virtually free to Nintendo and would have been a huge advertisement for Dragalia that would have brought in a lot of new blood. But that just gets around to being like Nintendo's actions in under-producing consoles. If the idea of adding Mym or any of the rest of the cast to Smash was ever brought up, I think that Nintendo would rather leave money on the table than risk adding what they perceive as a potential dud character to Smash.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
They have a long list of games they've developed over their lifetime, and most of them are no longer around, they just mostly never saw English releases outside of Priconne
Yeah it's this ultimately. Everytime they would show those graphs of Nintendo mobile game profits Dragalia was near the lower half. It outperformed stuff like Dr. Mario, etc but then Nintendo shut those games down for underperforming already. So I imagine it's basically at the absolute bottom of the graph at this point.
This was the newest one I could find on google (based on the date range maybe we'll get an updated one at the end of the month?):
I'm guessing it's been making even less money lately which is why it got axed. (Meanwhile I suspect Fire Emblem and Mario Kart will literally never die with those kinds of profits)
Any other mobile game with similar gameplay?
Dragalia really scratched an itch for a long while there: great music, challenging gameplay, fun characters, etc.
Similar gameplay? Hmm. Maybe Guardian Tales would be up your alley? Good music, decent active gameplay, fun characters, very good story.
For more Cygames stuff there's also World Flipper, which is honestly kinda like Dragalia gameplay just everything is one arena and it's pinball, or Princess Connect, though that's an auto battle game at its core. They both have the characters you want though, just WF story is a bit more mundane as of what I've seen for now. It's nice, just not setting my passion ablaze with theories yet though the latest chapter might be laying some kindling
A few thoughts about the game:
--The completion side's bad due to the combination of gear randomness and character mechanics making it so only a few characters are able to complete it. I'd expect buying buffs to make other characters more capable of beating it, but even with 10+ in all buffs, I don't feel all that much more powerful. Also since the bosses require debuffing to beat, you have to make sure your magic inventory's full of debuffing spells if you're not on a character that can do that themselves.
--The reward side's bad due to there not being enough filtering to make finding the good wyrmprints easy enough to use them. The completion ones with stronger element-locked and weapon-locked bonuses are the ones most people will want to use, but you can't filter for them.
Edit:
I don't know, they've been dumbing down the difficulty level HARD in the last year or so. I feel like it's not too hard for someone new to come in and at least make their way to Agito without much of a struggle. Those things are much easier to solo so not finding co-op matches is probably fine. There is probably a huge complexity factor though. I know I came in maybe a year after it launched and I was a little overwhelmed.
Alliances are meant to be guilds for players to tackle co-op stuff together. You're kind of right that they're not super important but I think that was the intention. I feel like Kaleidoscope was getting better but they won't have time to fine tune it now. They just nerfed it a lot though which cuts down the time commitment. I thought it was a really good idea though, it just needed some adjustments.
The money stuff is hit or miss for me. I felt that way for a long time, and then the last year or so my luck has been bad and I've actually been spending a lot in this game. To be honest, the closure is kind of a relief for my wallet. Not gonna lie :P I guess they didn't have enough idiots like me tho :P
Had Nintendo brought the game to Switch, where I could use a controller, it may have been a different story.
^ ok this, 100%. I hated manual movement in this game. The only reason I *still* play it is because a lot of the content is auto-able and I actually find that kind of fun. Some of the auto comps also required using weird characters which I found kind of fun
But yeah, for the longest time I've thought this would be great on a console with an actual controller. Turn the franchise into like a Secret of Mana style RPG where you're building up a big roster of characters and each has different abilities that might be useful for different situations. I still really would love to see this.
I wish that they would have had a PC client or allowed emulators. I play Girls Frontline a lot, and while I use my phone for the basics I always bust out the keyboard and mouse for super-serious events.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Tales of Luminaria has similar one finger gameplay and plays in portrait mode. I also really like the weird episodic format and the bizarre UI that's overly active but also attractive.
But it's a bamco game, I don't expect it to make it to anniversary.
Bamco and Tales spell its doom. Crystaria didn't even get a half anniversary I think.
Nah, Granblue's got that locked down
Just as a clip to share, this is the ending theme from the most recent event in GFL:
But back to Dragalia, there are tons of good songs from the game. The two immediately jump to the forefront of my mind are "We are the Lights" and "Stealth Dance."
What are some other favorite songs from Dragalia?
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
Also the disciples music was all great.
the first and only gacha character i whaled for
he taught me the most important lesson in life, which is never spend real money on gacha
That said, a LOT of gacha games are pretty scummy in terms of predatory practices and skimping on the value per dollar. You have to be fully aware of your budget when spending on games, and a lot of the time they make it all too easy to just swipe swipe swipe.
Armchair: 4098-3704-2012
yes, on those rare occasions when you are not actually paying for gacha, sure, it’s fine.
Mobile is just a wasteland, and it’s super depressing to think just a decade or so ago when it held so much potential. Like a lot of them, I got into Dragalia for a few weeks until you see how convoluted the game is set up to extract money from you, and the literal game itself feels lost in all the mechanics constructed not because they feel good or add to anything, but because they’re another avenue for payment or to obfuscate that.
Nintendo, just turn this into an actual game and charge like ten bucks for it.
what was the big PR idiocy that sunk the JP version? sounds juicy