alright buckle up gang because gacha games and i have a HISTORY (it's a pretty middling history, honestly - i was f2p as a point of pride. it's still very fascinating for me to analyse in restrospect, however!)

it's been ~1.5 years since my final day with this game, after playing it every single day for ~1.5 years. i'd dabbled in gacha, before this - i had a brief fling of like a couple months with mr love: queen's choice, and then maybe like a super brief attempt with a couple other games before that, which i dropped almost immediately because back then i didn't know how gacha worked. i was much more used to buying a full game outright, rather than committing to something for free with rolling content. mr love: queen's choice in particular taught me that gacha was a real time investment! keeping up with your dailies is basically a full-time job (a life lesson that you can clearly tell was learnt by a jobless dummy).

the point is, my attention span simply doesn't hold up for that long, and so i figured gacha and i just weren't all that compatible. so when the tears of themis release day announcement cropped up on my timeline, i did my best to ignore it. sure, it looked gorgeous, and i adore mystery in my otome, and marius von hagen with his passion for art and his penchant for teasing and his 'i'm going to be insufferable and you will love me for it' attitude looked like exactly my type of fictional man. but i was only gonna play it for a month and inevitably get bored, right? my perfectionist tendencies were only gonna drive me up the wall when i had to face the reality of missing out on content in order to stay f2p.... right??

it turns out i have the willpower of sugar paper, because release day came and went, and i resisted... and then the very next day i caved and downloaded it. and i immediately became obsessed. i know genshin impact was a big hit and all, but i really wasn't expecting mihoyo to pull out all the stops with their otome side project! the main cast were all charming and had real promise of depth, and rosa herself was an intelligent protagonist who could hold her own, and the setting and initial hook to the story really roped you in. marius was in fact insufferable and i did in fact love him for it. what can i say, i know my tastes.

the more i stuck with this game, the more i also realised the ways in which gacha truly appealed to me. it's extremely satisfying, personally, to see the gradual progression i made each and every day, whether it was levelling my cards or hoarding tears or finally triumphing in the latest trials of themis stage. or, boiled down simply: i like to see big numbers go up. i like to know i'm the cause of that. i am an easy audience and proud.

the strategizing around how to use my tears, too, was pretty addicting. since the cn server released a year ahead of us, we had the benefit of knowing exactly what events were coming and could plan around them and decide which cards we wanted to prioritise. the community around it was delightful! we could all get excited about current AND future events together, and the anticipation collectively drove us all a little insane. mullet marius was a personal attack on me, actually. extremely rude. you'd best believe it's a good thing i dropped the game before he became available to me, because at that point i had 450 tears saved up and would've gleefully dropped them all on that birthday event, given the chance.

honestly, for all the time i invested in this game, and for all the fun i had filling my friends in on the latest updates in what became fondly known amongst us all as my 'hot men game', it seems kind of harsh to only give it 2.5 stars! but at the end of the day, it was that investment that hung like a shadow over my head, for the whole year and a half that i played it. every day i played was another weight tipped onto the sunk-cost fallacy scale that i refused to admit existed. every excruciating board game event was multiple hours out of my week, all for a badge that was kind of cute, i guess (truly, the board game events were the WORST. where was the fast forward button for those?)

the writing felt like it got worse over time, too. i think it was a combination of that, plus the months of time we had in-between story updates to forget everything going on, which ultimately had me rapid-tapping through the latest story segments just to be able to log out sooner. special shout out to the absolute vibe whiplash that is episode 06-26, where rosa and artem investigate a probably murderer-inhabited abandoned archive together, except for every decrepit old room in which you discover The Horrors, you then get to walk side by side with artem down a corridor (⸝⸝๑ ̫ ๑⸝⸝⸝) and gaze at his face in the moonlight (⁄ ⁄•⁄ω⁄•⁄ ⁄) and talk about your favourite lip balms together (´∀`) right before MURDER GLASS CAGE DEATH TRAP TIME. whose idea was this. mx. writer please reveal yourself i just wanna talk-

at the end of the day, my experience with this game cemented a lot of what i feared about gacha games - that games built this way, to keep players invested in playing and paying for as long as possible, are inherently going to depreciate in quality over time. there isn't a planned structure to these stories - no balance between beginning, middle and ending. instead, there's a beginning, and then for as long as the game keeps making the company money, there'll be a plethora of middles, all drawn-out and meandering and aimless. then, when the player base dwindles and the money runs out, there'll likely be a rushed, unsatisfying conclusion. that doesn't feel like a great way to go out after a game i might've spent multiple years playing! and so i thought long and hard about this possibility, and whether i still had any desire to keep going, and then i made the unceremonious decision to delete the app and just... stop. it was pretty anticlimactic, really.

i have a lot of respect for the people who gel with gacha games! this level of commitment is admirable, especially if you're still genuinely enjoying the game after all this time. but there are just so many games out there i want to play, and being able to play them is much more attainable when i'm not in a full-time relationship with one that isn't finishable. and hey, call me traditional, but i'm quite attached to stories that have an ending. it suits me much better to be able to pay just once, and own a complete and holistic video game experience.

so thank you, tears of themis! you were a hell of a journey, and i don't regret the experience. i wish luke all the best in figuring out how to not die, and marius in growing his hair back out, and artem in taking care of his chapped lips, and vyn in whatever the hell he's up to. and, most importantly, i've still got my fingers crossed that one day, rosa will be able to complete a whole goddamn car journey without our worst friend Accident Faker trying to commit insurance fraud. you might call me delusional, but i still believe it can happen ;v;