5 Gacha Games That Won’t Just Steal Your Money
From the outside, it’s easy to look at gacha games and see them as a culmination of all the worst excesses of mobile game monetization. Instead of a tightly designed core gameplay experience, where each new playable character is introduced in a purposeful manner and expands on or contributes to the established mechanics perfectly, players essentially pull a slot machine lever and are handed new characters more or less at random. It’s basically gambling!
This attitude is understandable, but it ignores two truths that anyone who’s ever really delved into gacha gaming understands. The first is that, well, pulling the slot machine lever is fun, damn it. There’s something exciting about not knowing who’s getting added to your crew next, or about finally getting the ultra rare character that you know will really round out your crew. Can this system be used to exploit people who are unwilling or unable to stop themselves from spending money? Absolutely. But, when balanced correctly, it can also provide a thrilling experience not dissimilar from opening a fresh pack of Magic: The Gathering cards and flipping through to see what rares you snagged.
Which brings us to the second truth: Although there are plenty of gross examples out there, not all gacha are greedy money sinks. Plenty of mobile developers have realized that in the long run, it’s much better for them, the audience, and the ongoing health of the game to be generous with characters and in-game currency. There’s always going to be a way for whales to dump their money into getting the latest, greatest banner pull, but in the best gacha games, that goals is neither necessary nor a particularly lofty task for those who want to pursue it without paying.
To celebrate our love gacha this week, we got the two biggest gacha fanatics on the staff to put together a list of five great gacha games that provide an incredible, engaging experience without making you open up your wallet constantly.
We’re starting with probably our most sugary title on the whole list. Developed by Devsisters and launched in 2021, Cookie Run: Kingdom is a free-to-play action RPG featuring a medley of PvP and PvE gameplay options. This is a spin-off of the Cookie Run franchise that expands the cute endless runner gameplay into the realm of base-building, dungeon exploring, and gacha rolling.
204264Most of Cookie Run: Kingdom’s gameplay focuses on prepping your team before fights begin and then letting the auto-battling system take over. To win battles, you’ll need to build up a collection of characters and treasures that provide stat boosts or castable abilities.
But like most gacha games, there are no primary goals to accomplish besides simply playing whatever mode you enjoy. There’s something for everyone, whether it’s dungeon chapters, guild events, upgrading your civilization, and more. You’re allowed to explore the game at your own pace without being pushed toward the story mode or PvP gameplay. And in that freedom, Cookie Run: Kingdom encompasses all the things that we love in good gacha games.
Not only is Cookie Run Kingdom packed with sugary goodness, but it’s also quite generous. The developers continuously roll out rewards via spontaneous in-game mail or mini-events hosted regularly. The game is updated monthly with a new seasonal battle pass and new cookie banner releases. And although some cookies may be stronger than others, a month of consistent play will net you enough diamonds to score half the roster all on its own. After playing Cookie Run: Kingdom nonstop for six months, we can happily say it’s one of the best play-to-win gacha games out there.
Destiny Child features real-time battles, tons of content across numerous storylines, events, and world bosses. With so many narratives crossing back and forth from the main storyline and between characters, Destiny Child seemingly never runs empty of ways to entertain as a gacha game.
196147Like any other gacha, the goal is to build a suitable composition of recruitable characters (known here as Childs) for every battle. You can take all sorts of steps to make each Child stronger, including leveling, enhancing rarities, obtaining cosmetics, and more. After you start a battle, your characters will automatically attack, but you can pick the opportune moment to use the Tap, Slide, and Drive abilities, which will help deal more damage against the enemy. If you prefer a fully hands-off approach, the game also has convenient auto-play and triple-speed timer buttons, so you can grind hassle-free.
If you’re looking to play an easygoing gacha game, Destiny Child mostly doesn’t require worrying about specific stats or builds until end-game content. The game hands out helpful boosts to newcomers, leveling their characters to fifty and tossing out five-star Childs like it’s no big deal. That means that running into progression walls is rarely an issue in Destiny Child, as the game’s pretty generous.
Destiny Child is by far one of the most successful play-to-win gachas, which is a major accomplishment in a genre where the norm is overmonetized, pay-to-win schemes designed to take players for all the money they can. Destiny Child is narrative-rich, content-filled, and if anything contains too many waifus to adore all at once.
In a sense, Fire Emblem Heroes is pulling double duty in how it overcomes expectations: Not only is it a genuinely user-friendly gacha game despite the genre’s norms, it’s also, against all odds, a legitimately great mobile interpretation of Nintendo’s beloved Fire Emblem strategy series. If you have any affinity for this franchise or if you’re looking for one of the best and most generous gacha games on the market to take a first step into the genre, you can’t do much better than this one.
36046The key to Fire Emblem Heroes’s success is that the game practically throws both specific free heroes and general gacha pulls at players. A fresh player can easily build up a crew of forty or fifty heroes within just a few days of playing, and that includes some five-star rarity behemoths. Of course, the game can afford to be generous—as of this month, there are over eight hundred unique playable units that can be summoned. Thankfully, Nintendo is good about running seasonal banners and special events focused on getting access to specific heroes.
All the fan service and free gacha pulls in the world wouldn’t matter if the game wasn’t fun to play, but Fire Emblem Heroes delivers on that front as well. The strategic, turn-based battles play out on smaller maps than in the core Fire Emblem games, and the permadeath that defines the series for hardcore fans isn’t available here, naturally. But it’s still an excellent, satisfying facsimile of what has made Fire Emblem a Nintendo mainstay for over thirty years now.
Fire Emblem Heroes also does story better than almost any other gacha game (except perhaps one that’s later on this list), with a captivating tale full of interdimensional war, drama, and court intrigue. And that story just keeps on expanding. Nintendo has introduced a new “Book” of story content every year since the game’s 2017 launch, alongside dozens of side chapters, limited time events, and asynchronous PvP modes. There’s enough here to keep you playing for months, maybe even years, without catching up, and you don’t really need to spend a dime to do so unless you feel like it.
Remember when we mentioned there being at least one gacha game that does story better than Fire Emblem Heroes? Welcome to Last Cloudia! This gorgeous, pixel-art gacha game does old-school Final Fantasy-style JRPG storytelling better than any of the numerous Final Fantasy gacha games. If you want to go on a rollicking journey across an imaginative world full of appealing characters, dramatic plot developments, and plot twists galore, this is the game for you.
177036The best part of all? You can experience that story to its (current) conclusion for absolutely zero dollars. Last Cloudia provides players with plenty of free gacha pulls, as well as some specific characters that are accessed just by progressing the story. The world map is also full of side quests and all sorts of other hidden secrets that makes just “exploring” (by scrolling around and tapping on things) honestly kind of a joy.
The one downside to Last Cloudia is that its actual combat system, while beautiful to watch, is quite a bit less engaging than much of the competition. Most battles can be won by just mashing the “attack” button until your character’s super-special ability is ready and then using that to wipe the screen. Alternatively, you can just turn on auto-battle and let the AI handle it while you enjoy the gorgeous visuals and the team-building and character progression challenges that are the real heart of the gameplay here.
Oh, and if you have a soft spot for other popular Japanese games, anime, or manga, there’s a good chance Last Cloudia has done or will in the future do a collaboration with your franchise of choice. The game just wrapped up a great Persona 5 Royal collab that saw several of the main characters from Atlus’s masterpiece become playable recruits in Last Cloudia. They’ve also done events themed around Attack on Titan, Devil May Cry 5, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Nier: Automata, Dr. Stone, and more. We played very casually during the Persona 5 event and still managed to get every single unit available!
Basically if you’re looking for a great JRPG experience on your phone or a great gacha that doesn’t drain its players of money, Last Cloudia is a wonderful pick.
After playing some Soul Tide earlier in the year and then getting distracted by other games, we were reminded to return to it by our Shanghai colleague (and absolute gacha master) @Anya. And boy are we glad Anya brought it to our attention! This game has an extremely strange and difficult-to-explain gameplay loop where you take the anime waifus you’ve pulled from the gacha and explore grid-based mazes with them. Within those mazes, you can find bonuses, puzzles, and, of course, combat encounters that play out in a fairly traditional (if a little static) way.
230988The gameplay is unique enough to stand out from the pack, but where Soul Tide really sets itself apart is in its approach to character-level storytelling. The main plot is nothing to write home about, but each of the game’s twenty-plus characters (all young anime women, as a warning) has tons of unique cutscenes and story events that play out as you improve your relationship with them. There’s even a dating game element for those who want to progress to that level with any specific characters. But what makes all of this side story content great is that each of the “Dolls” in Soul Tide has a unique and strongly developed personality, and those attributes come across well in the fun, often silly scenes.
For example, here’s a scene of my waifu of choice, Asuna, just randomly pulling out the gun that she secretly owns during a friendly picnic. Thanks, Asuna! This is why you’re my gal.
Some Soul Tide players initially complained about the game’s non-traditional approach to gacha, but for our part, it has grown on us the more we’ve played. See, in this game the playable characters share a single rarity, and when you pull the gacha, you’re pulling for a chance to win characters, verves (equipment), items, and character shards all on the same sheet. It’s a strange system, and some gacha gamers adamantly dislike any game where the gacha includes gear. However, it’s really not as bad as it might first seem, and the Dolls themselves feel very well-balanced regardless of who you’re lucky enough to get.
Soul Tide may not be our first recommendation for a gacha beginner, but if you’re someone who’s played a lot of the other games on the list and you’re looking for a lesser-known change of pace, give it a shot!
💬 There’s our list of our current favorite, wallet-friendly gacha games! What do you think? Any games on our list that you particularly love or that you feel we totally missed the mark on? Or are there some great user-friendly gacha titles you think deserve to be mentioned alongside these choices? Let us know in the comments, and we’ll keep your feedback in mind for future lists!
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