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Towards the end of last year, I wrote a personal lament for Koei Tecmo’s Dynasty Warriors series. In a cold business maneuver, the company has moved away from their in-house franchises towards more and more licensed IP games. These franchise tie-in games make more money and as such can have larger budgets. Their original franchises still get a drip-feed of content, but it’s nothing like their heydey of releasing multiple installments per year.
Well, apparently I was only partly right about the death of Dynasty Warriors content. I recently abandoned my crusty iPhone XR in favor of something more modern, and in an attempt to catch up to everything I’ve been missing I took a wander through the App Store. I learned that in last year there were two different Dynasty Warriors mobile game releases in the US, both officially licensed — and both essentially repurposing older DW games into modern nightmarish “gacha” games for phones.
If you’re not familiar with Gacha titles, they dole out large colorful character libraries through the “magic” of random loot boxes. You get a free “pull” of the figurative slot machine every day, but every other chance at a new character must either be earned through many hours of play or through real money purchases. They start…
