I’ve ditched Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in favor of CounterSide and the occasional Genshin Impact, and just the other day I got Picross S8. Best series ever, Nintendo numbah wan!

Sometime this weekend I should find the time to play the Harvestella demo. I need to check it out to inform my decision of whether to buy it on day one or wait for a discount. On one hand I’m almost certain I’ll like it, and I want Square-Enix to make more of such games. However I’m not convinced it should be in the same price bracket as AAA games like Persona 5 Royal, Shin Megami Tensei V and Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Does it have a similar level of polish and volume or is Squeenix just charging $59.99 because they can? The demo will tell me what I want to know.

But that isn’t what I’m here to talk about today. I’ve been playing a Korean mobile gacha game called CounterSide for about a month and can’t decide whether I’m in it for the long haul or whether I want to dip out and dip back in when the next chapter releases.

As I mentioned briefly two posts ago, Counterside is largely similar to other gacha games out there, but it does have an interesting (albeit ridiculously bleak) story enlivened by a high-quality localization. The side stories and event stories in particular have been very enjoyable reads. And despite having a high female-to-male ratio, it’s not entirely boring waifu bait like, for example, Princess Connect or Blue Archive.

Buuut… that’s about all it has going for it. Having exhausted the story now, I am now left with the Epic 7-type gear grind, boring gimmicky PVE events like Danger Close and raids and PVP with some of the best gear in the game locked behind it, which I hate. Once you set up your teams, the combat is largely automatic. You set your characters down and they run to the other side of the screen, attacking anyone in their way. Since combat is automatic, that makes gear all the more important, i.e. they expect you to grind but the grinding process isn’t particularly fun.

Plus you’re grinding for… what exactly? More gear so you can grind more so you can get more gear so you can… you get the picture. Gearing in CounterSide is also simultaneously much better and much worse than in similar games. Better because almost every character wants one or two main sets: Cooldown reduction, Attack Speed, HP. And only a few substats like Skill haste and Anti-Ground DMG/RES are highly sought after. And there are only four equipment slots: weapon, armor and two accessories.

However gearing is worse because there are a lot of other junk sets and stats in the game like evasion, hit, anti-[specific enemy] which exist just to waste your time and resources and ensure you spend a lot of money and rare items “tuning” promising equipment to be just right.

Also I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t like auto-battles and skip tickets much because you don’t get that feel of “playing” the game yourself. At least skipping is free, so it’s slightly better than Priconne.

I wouldn’t mind all this gear grinding if doing well in battle was just a matter of getting good gear one way or another. What is really getting my goat is the sense that specific characters are required or at least highly, highly recommended before you can clear certain stages. The guides are so unhelpful. “Just use Gabriel to eat that attack,” umm, who? “This stage is practically made for A. Horizon.” A Ho-who? Lack of flexbility in team comps is close to where I draw the line for gacha games.

This leads to the important question: why am I here complaining about things instead of uninstalling CounterSide until more content is out? The long and short is that I’m not ready just yet. I still have some low-hanging fruit to pick in terms to achievements, easy-to-get gear, unpulled tickets, TASKFORCE Plan missions, etc. I haven’t reached that “Getting stronger will take an incredibly huge amount of effort that I am not willing to put in” point that finally made me drop other grindy games like Granblue, Epic 7 or Priconne. If I quit now without getting there, I guarantee I’ll go crawling back within the week, so I might as well stick with it for another couple of weeks until I can’t take it any more. I’ve gotten pretty good at dropping games lately, so when the time is right, I’ll know.

BTW the game is still crashing every five minutes or so because why wouldn’t it? Or as Love Nikki customer service told a player, “Please try and play on a better phone.” I don’t feel like playing on Steam, so I just factor the crashes into the loading times and plan accordingly. But if you’re having the same problem, just buy a better phone or play it on PC.