In 2020, Capcom launched a mobile gacha game based on Mega Man X titled Mega Man X DiVE. The title was primarily developed by a Taiwan-based studio, and so you might think that it was some kind of cynical cash grab due to… you know, the game’s being a gacha title and so forth. But when the game reached a point of profits falling until it was due to be shut down, the Taiwanese studio protested and asked for a slight additional budget in order to build an offline version of the game.
So granted, the studio developed Mega Man X DiVE Offline, a version of the game that has been completely rebalanced so that it has no gacha elements, everything is offline, and the whole game minus a couple of crossover events has been made available forever. It’s an interesting look at having another option for gacha games, and it provides a clear opportunity to examine what a gacha game looks like when it undergoes what is, for lack of a better term, a complete gacha removal.
Which is why I think it’s especially worth noting that this version of the game is still kinda not great.
Now, as someone who is a long-time fan of the Mega Man X series, I can confidently say that Mega Man X DiVE Offline is not the worst title in the series because Mega Man X7 exists. It might be the worst if you just count spinoff titles, though. It’s not because it’s hot garbage; I bought the offline version at launch, and I’ve played it quite a bit. But it’s just not a very good MMX game from first principles.
For starters, the game features an auto-lock-on system, which removes a lot of the task of positioning from the game. Every character has access to an air dash and a double jump, which means that every single platforming segment is developed around that. Worse, though, it also means that any pretense of advanced mobility is immediately gone. There’s no notion of playing different characters to access secrets, because that’s just not how the game is laid out.
Not that this is all that shocking because there are no stages to select, no boss weapons to collect, no power-ups to acquire in stages. It’s just light platforming and shooting. That is what the game is meant to be. And that’s without getting into the gacha elements at all.
You might argue that these are unfair criticisms to level against the game because it isn’t trying to be any of those things. And fine, that’s fair enough. But here is where the problems truly begin because the least desirable characters in the game are some of the first characters you can get, starting with… X.
X is, you might note, the character the series is named after. But he’s your starting character, and thus he’s just… not good. And while the game does a lot of work to make sure that it gives you currency to acquire in order to buy new weapons and characters directly instead of doing a gacha draw, that actually compounds the existing problem that some characters, weapons, and so forth are just better than others.
A comprehensive rebalancing of the entire game was, I am sure, outside of the scope of the game’s offline development. I am not going to be mad at the developers because the armored-up version of game-specific character RiCO is substantially better than a lot of other characters. But the fact that you don’t have to rely upon randomly getting her and can just save your currency and buy her means that there’s no reason to ever play with anyone else once she unlocks.
To a certain extent, sure, this is intentional. The game was made by people who love the franchise and wanted to let players hop and shoot through fun stages. Having to strictly choose a character would cut down on the fun, and it makes more sense that, for example, you can just use a version of Iris modeled after her brother Colonel to go through the game if you prefer that.
But it also kind of exposes the weaknesses. When you strip away the gacha elements, the underlying game does not reveal itself to be an incredibly deep experience but one that’s kind of shallow and based around using dozens of level-up systems in concert, then blowing past everything. I would definitely argue that the offline version is probably a better game, but so many of its flaws are not a result of the business model but a result of basic design principles.
See, the game wasn’t meant to be a full MMX game. It was meant to be a game in which you platform with characters you already like and get to do so in a fun new fashion. It’s been several years since most of the characters featured in this title have gotten a new game, and the fact that the game lets you use the Rush Super Adapter with Mega Man might be a bit shallow, but we haven’t gotten to do that in actual gameplay since 1995. (Why this wasn’t DLC for Mega Man 11 I will never know. Heck, that game could have used some DLC, period. Wait, I’m getting off-topic.)
What does all of this mean when we’re looking at gacha titles? It’s easy to forget, but at the end of the day gacha titles are not simply games that are developed and have their business models slapped on top of them. MMXDO shows what happens when you rip out the gacha elements, and while it doesn’t ruin the game, it also doesn’t automatically fix the issues with the game. I would go so far as to say it compounds most of them. Having access to all of the game’s events whenever you want makes it clear how shallow they actually are, for example.
In other words, the gap between the game as designed and the perhaps idealized version of the game is one full game. You cannot just remove a core part of the game’s design and have it still function perfectly. And gacha games do have the gacha as a central element, whether you like it or not, and as we’ve discussed, many of the core assumptions of gacha design have a knock-on effect throughout the game.
That’s what makes this particular example so interesting. We see what the game looks like without the objectionable elements, and it isn’t actually ideal that way either. You could argue that it’s an outlier and it was just not a good enough game to begin with, but again, the developers were clearly lovers of the franchise who were trying their hardest. There is no plausible way to argue it was just a cheap cash grab.
Which means that as we get closer to finishing out this Gachapwned miniseries, we need to take one more look back at something that I have very deliberately left off. It’s pretty clear that yes, gacha is a predatory monetization scheme; it’s also clear that while gacha games can function without that monetization, it doesn’t make the games necessarily good. So is the gacha… part of the fun? For that matter, why do we have forms of fun that we know are bad for us in the first place? Because in order to understand this business model, we have to understand that the gacha pull isn’t a secondary element. It’s a core component.
Many MMORPG gamers recoil from the term “gacha” – and for good reasons – but the subgenre is still raking in money from players, and it’s worth a deep-dive. In Gachapwned, MOP senior reporter Eliot Lefebvre tackles the highs and lows of the infamous gacha game genre and how it affects the MMO industry.
