I’ve played CounterSide for approximately four months and seen pretty much all it has to offer. However I uninstalled it over the weekend for the following reasons:
1. I’d seen enough. It doesn’t offer enough new content or gameplay to make ongoing play exciting. There are regular events, but the gameplay is essentially the same and I got tired of watching the same old, same old every time. Pulling new characters didn’t excite me either because gearing them is the same old Cooldown set with the same substats for practically everyone, and deployment costs mean you can’t easily stack a deck with your favorite shinies. Some might call it strategic, all I know is it’s not my thing.
2. My phone was running out of space. Something had to give, and CounterSide wasn’t exactly thrilling me so it was an easy cut. I need to give more thought to getting a new phone next year, but I’ll finish 2022 with this one. Actually… do I really need a new phone or is mass consumerism getting to me? …And other such thoughts along those lines will be my focus for 2023.
3. I got tired of the constant crashes. Long loading times only to crash when I try to do PVP or raids took a toll on me. It was especially bad when the game took so long to load during real-time PVP that I would lose without lifting a finger. I’m no PVP juggernaut by any means, but I still have my gamer’s pride. Losing by default sucks.
4. The Re-Arm system lost me. Getting characters up to level 110 was already a pain and a half, now you have to do that AND collect dupes/decompose other characters plus spend a boatload of gold, etc etc. to get a character to its optimum state. Right now people might say “You don’t need Re-armed characters to beat the game,” but you know the game company is going to start developing content for the new higher level really soon.
It’s a normal part of gacha games to raise the level cap higher and higher with time, but TBH I find it tedious every time. If it happens before I start a game, I accept it, but if it happens afterwards, I usually bail. And that’s why I didn’t have an issue with the Shiryuu era in Dissidia Final Fantasy but dropped it shortly after the Force era started. Starting a game near launch has its advantages and disadvantages.
5. Time passed and I lost interest in the story. Chapter 7 came out globally the other day, but I already forgot what happened in the previous chapters. Something about replacers and stuff, everything being destroyed left, right and center. Now that I think of it, these “Everything has been destroyed, and everything is still being destroyed, and we can barely do anything about it” stories aren’t really to my taste. I like something a little more hopeful and active. Like the 7th Dragon games, for example, where mankind is in a similarly poor state, but where you are involved in various efforts to retake the planet (or at least just Tokyo) and restore your normal lives.
Now, to be fair, the fact that playing whack-a-mole with Corrupted Objects is a losing game is very much a plot point in CounterSide. Several characters have brought it up, and whole chapters of the story revolve around the bad guys trying to implement an alternative solution. If this were a regular console game with a fixed start and finish, I would be all on board for that, but gacha games run for years and years. I’m already tired of beating C.O.s and all the attendant doom and gloom. If I quit now, maybe I’ll have the strength to come back later and read the conclusion (I lied to myself and you).
TL;DR – As summarized in the title, I’ve had enough CounterSide for now. I might come back later, might not, but for now I’m putting it behind me and working on other stuff (ahem, Epic Seven, ahem). Dunno who needs to hear this, but the easiest way to quit a gacha game is to replace it with another, more enjoyable one. Cold turkey is just a waste of the bandwidth you’ll spend downloading it again. Anyway, there you have it. Now back to the other mobile games.
