Help, I’ve Fallen In A Hello Kitty Gacha Hole And I Can’t Get Up!

Leave it to Hello Kitty and her cohort of cute pals to be the ones that bring me down into the painful mobile gaming trenches.

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Gacha games and I don’t mix.

First of all, I have a fairly addictive personality – runs in the family. If there’s a chance for me to throw money into a trash can for a chance to get something, odds are I’ll bite. I’ve gotten better about this in recent years, mainly because I hated being broke all the time, but that itch is still there.

Second, I really just don’t like the way most mobile games play. Fate Grand Order and that knock-off Madoka Magica game lost my interest pretty fast. Every mobile Dragon Ball Z game I’ve ever played is a bummer. Granblue is too complicated for me, and the same goes for Dragalia. I was into Fire Emblem Heroes for a while, I guess, but bounced off it pretty hard after a few weeks.

But several weeks and dozens upon dozens of levels later, one of these things has finally gotten its hooks into me. Leave it to Hello Kitty and her cohort of cute pals to be the ones that bring me down into the painful mobile gaming trenches with the rest of y’all.

Wait, Back Up – What’s The Game?

Hello Kitty Friends is a mobile game from Superawesome, a developer focused on “making the internet safer for kids” (according to their website.) The basic thrust is that it’s a blend between Candy Crush Saga and an interior design sim, with a whole bevvy of Sanrio characters thrown in as a winnable prizes.

As the player, you’ll solve simple matching puzzles that throw in new gimmicks as the game goes on. Each shape is a different disembodied head of a popular Sanrio pal, like Pompompurin and Kuromi, and you’re responsible for lining their cherubic little faces into large clusters and clearing lines. Clear big enough clusters and you’ll net special items, which you can then combine to earn huge combos and clear levels faster.

As you progress, you’ll use currency you gain from solving puzzles to buy different decorations for a Sanrio friend’s home – a simple but cute element, as it’s the room you’ll see displayed above every puzzle board. You’ll also collect a whole roster of different characters through gacha rolls and special events. They’re all just different Sanrio characters in different costumes, but y’all – they’re really cute costumes.

Take Me Down To The Gacha City

And this is where the game gets you.

Like any good gacha game, each Sanrio character has a different rank in Friends. They’re graded on a letter scale, from C to S, and the idea is to slowly get better units as you progress through the game. The problem is that said progress happens way too fast, to the point where you’re thrown headfirst into some intense and frankly baffling spikes in difficulty. Even as a lifelong puzzle game enthusiast, this game gets real tough, real fast – in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of quarter-munchers like Puzzle Bobble and Magical Drop.

Obviously, then, you’re more tempted to roll for new characters – or grind currency for a chance to combine six units to make a better unit… which also costs in-game money. Crafting better units costs more currency, and the amount that the game asks is more than you’ll make in a single week of gameplay. Therefore, it’s uh… a bit difficult to actually combine units on the regular, unlike other gacha games.

Naturally, then, you’re more likely to resort to rolling for better characters. This costs a premium currency, which you only get from spinning a wheel, snagging daily log-in bonuses, or (naturally) paying money. When you factor in timed events, where you have the potential to get rare units for a week or so, the message this game is trying to send starts to feel pretty obvious.

“Fuck you, pay me.”

Why Are You Doing This To Yourself?

Yet I keep playing. Despite recognizing how scummy some of its practices are, and despite how it represents everything I hate about mobile games, and despite how tired I am of watching stupid word scrambler ads to get free rolls… I keep playing. This is the only game I’ve played every day, consistently, in ages.

So why? First of all, the core puzzle game is actually very good. In terms of Candy Crush clones, it’s one of the better ones of those. The boards are ingenious, and really, if you don’t want to grind out better characters, it’s not impossible to just get better at the game with practice. Despite all the ways this game wants to nickel and dime you, actually progressing isn’t that hard if you know what you’re doing.

Second, this is one of the few modern puzzle games I can play without my colorblindness screwing everything up. There aren’t colorblind options, but the design is ingenious for people like me, as each piece is a separate, distinct shape, and not a homogeneous square with another shape inside. This means that if you can recognize the different characters, which are clearly divided by bold outlines, you won’t get tripped up by similar colors.

The last reason? Well…

This Is The Only Good Hello Kitty Game In Years

Despite being a ubiquitous global icon, Hello Kitty hasn’t had much luck in the gaming department. She’s mostly relegated to forgettable shovelware, outside of rare successes like Hello Kitty: Roller Rescue and Sanrio Cup: Pon Pon Valley. The past decade, in particular, has been cruel the iconic cat/girl/???, with abysmal games like Hello Kitty Kruisers doing little to improve on the franchise’s video game outings.

So, even if the game has some fairly predatory microtransaction practices, the game itself is exceptionally well-made. There’s a lot of love put into the puzzles, and a lot of fun fan service in the costumes. Solving puzzles and collecting cute Sanrio friends is a great loop, and despite just how many reservations I have about the monetization, I can’t deny that it’s a polished, smart, and addictive morsel of a game.

Am I proud of the fact that I spent twenty bucks last night just to get more GIFs of My Melody in different costumes? No. But this is my fate. Hello Kitty has her hooks in me, and I can’t see her ripping them out any time soon.

So I’ll hang on for one more roll.

One more puzzle.

One more shot at getting an S rank My Melody. My sweet, sweet rabbit daughter.

Link Source : https://www.thegamer.com/hello-kitty-friends-gacha-mobile-game-sanrio/