This post is really more about me, but I think there’s something to take away for anyone. In short, I’m getting less and less happy about playing Princess Connect! Re:Dive (Priconne for short) Global, and a big part of it is that I also play JP and I also play several other mobile/gacha games out there. You might too, or not. Anyways, in 2022 what is going on in Priconne Global is just irking me, and I’m writing this to get it out of my system.

For background, I played the Japanese version of Princess Connect! AND I am an active player of Japanese version of Princess Connect! Re:Dive, in addition to the Global version. The company managing and developing the game, Cygames, manages its own release in Japan. Cygames also licenses the game for local distribution. Notably, the mainland China release became very popular a few years back (how time flies…). There are also Korean, Taiwan/HK, and Thai releases until the Global/English release about a year ago. Crunchyroll Games handles the Global release.

I really enjoy the game! Enough to play the same game twice. In a nutshell, Priconne is very much a “content” driven RPG where regularly the game updates with events, main story quests, and new characters, all which builds on previous revealed content to tell a story to describe its kind-of mysterious world. Being a player of the OG Priconne game, that predated Re:Dive, it’s pretty natural for me to get drawn in to the setting and the layers of mysterious things around it. I also had more time to take to the wide cast of characters so everything was mostly familiar to me from the get go for Re:Dive. You can read more in my earlier posts.

The various regional localizations of Priconne has to also follow this content release strategy where everything is slow-dripped at a certain pace. Some “down time” that the original release had was cut, but most of that was in the first year and things don’t really slow down after that. For reference, we celebrated Priconne JP’s 4th anniversary just earlier in the month. [You can buy this sandwich press lol.]

Being a popular Japanese game is fine, but it isn’t a chart-topper–more like Priconne’s niche is being easy to play, deep if you want to dig deep, and a lot of top notch QOL-ness come with the game. In a way the best comparison I can make is that Priconne is the Everquest-to-WoW leap from all those painful Asian farm-for-everything-based-off-a-guide mobile games. Even later entries (like, say, Konosuba, which is quite new! Or Kirara Fantasia, etc.) are significantly more painful to play. Priconne remains a standard bearer to make mobile games less of a menu hell, that the UX has to be a key deliverable to keep a game relevant in the 21st century. It is the kind of game that can allow players to play other games, because it takes so little time comparatively.

That said, nobody says you can’t play Priconne based on spreadsheets and spend hours to farm everything–many people do precisely that. When China opened up to the game (noteworthy for having local-only releases of characters based on lol Hashimoto Kanna) this only intensified. In fact it’s probably safe to say the CN player base is larger than the JP player base at this point, especially from an oversea perspective.

I am quite thankful for all the Chinese players who sank their love, hard work, time and money into Priconne! Overall they have enriched the experience with things like the currently-best Arena database and other guides. Some are outright better than pro sites like Gamewith when it comes to meta and dealing with fast-moving or player-based changes.

Unfortunately this also means by the time Global gets its latest content, that stuff has been juiced by every other release that started before Global. Unless you go out of your way to not look up anything, there’s nothing about the “meta” (as opposed to “being what’s popular” but the game on top of the game) that hasn’t been spoiled from start to finish. This is the unfortunate thing about Priconne–it was a game where almost all the hints you need to be successful are in the game by default. There are tons of ways to experiment on your own to figure out the game, and now in English you can read and experience that yourself…but few probably will.

That isn’t really a big problem by itself, if one at all. As someone who plays JP Priconne, I still enjoy playing Global despite having first-person knowledge of everything that’s going to happen in the game. It’s as if I know what the FAQ says, but I didn’t have to follow one. Instead, what I miss is all the things in a game that was constantly honed over 4 years that isn’t in a drip-release game that is the same game 3 years behind. Many of the QOL changes in Priconne JP would be so great in Global, as I am feeling exactly those pains now. Funny thing is, by the same token Priconne JP has evolved on top of those QOL changes that the meta-meta is about different things, so a different pain is setting in.

The best example I can provide is the Clan Battle. Basically clans are guilds, and you and your clanmates have a certain numbers of tries to beat up NPC bosses to rack up the highest cumulative score. A game-wide ranking battle among all clans ensues, once a month. It requires a lot of individual coordination and a fair amount of teamwork to compete in the top 10%. That said, for the rest of us, it still can be gleamed by spreadsheets, but Priconne has this “recommend” feature that builds in the teams you can use right in the game, basically bypassing the need for them for most players. This once-a-month event is really the main reason why a lot of people are hard in, as it is also one of the biggest draw from the OG Princess Connect game (clan versus PVP). One thing you need to do a lot in CB is trying out various teams. In JP, we can use 4x speed. But in JP the game is about finding teams that don’t all use the same meta (in the slang sense) characters, so there’s a lot of jigsaw-puzzle-type sort of matching going on. In Global right now it’s dur-derp given the much fewer combination of characters available to work with, but Global doesn’t have 4x… It doesn’t even have “recommend to select” as a feature yet–it’s not even about knowing who to use (derp), it’s having to pick it out of your character list. Again, trying out teams is arguably the most time-consuming part of CB, and it can be tedious. Why not make this easy already?

Basically, not only Priconne Global is a pre-COVID mobile game showing its age compared to Priconne JP, it’s a pre-COVID mobile game showing its age compared to its contemporaries. I tried Blue Archive JP when it launched and I liked it, but it clearly had a lot of launch problems (and I stopped). A year later now I am playing the Global release, and I am having a blast. In a lot of ways BA is a step down for me compared to Priconne (long story here), but it has a façade that is clearly built in this decade. I don’t know, that should count for something–a whole lot, probably, especially for an gacha galge. And to heap on top of that, Priconne Global has nothing truly new to look forward to, unless you count hand-me-down UX improvements that Global could have had much sooner rather than later? Or having all of its meta and meta-meta game juices squeezed out by millions of Japanese and Chinese players before I can enjoy it in English? I am waiting patiently for my New York Carl memes. Maybe Crunchyroll can self-insert its mascot like Hashimoto Kanna’s characters in Priconne CN, lol.

[That said, BA meta is a PITA too and unlike Priconne, not knowing that meta is almost killer. There are hints to what to do to play the game well, but the gameplay depth just doesn’t get served by the game’s façade, so you really have to engage a community and do external research to get somewhere. Also, BA PVP is utter trash, coming from Priconne. You can tell the creators of Shadowverse at least knows how to apply basic rock-paper-scissors balance tricks to a gacha game architecture. I can go on, but BA is basically superior despite its many shortcomings–largely due to that façade.]

As I said, this is more a “me” problem than a general problem. If I bothered to love Priconne’s commu (ugh) I probably would play Global to enjoy its fun translations alone. And they are fun. I just can’t stand how Priconne dialog UX insists to animate no matter how fast you click on it, so it’s really slow (relatively) to scroll through a bunch of one-liners, sound effects, or one-worders. I still have countless reasons to love the game–this is why I play it in Japanese despite being unable to navigate it well in a foreign language in the very first place. It also happens to turns out that, the reason to not play Priconne Global is because a superior version exists, and that’s the Japanese release.

Maybe this is also reflective of an information asymmetry. Maybe unlike AAA vidya discourse, there isn’t something like this holding together all the Asian gacha mobile games in English. Or rather, people (often self-professed “gamers” lol) are too busy complaining about censorship and lootboxes to talk about things that are actually important to players? If Priconne JP is not available to you or you refuse to deal with its barriers, so be it. Knowing the forbidden knowledge in this way may worsen your experience if you only play Global. But in a way these gacha games live in ghettos, and that’s messed up. Most players don’t engage in a whole lot of it. Maybe people in the QooApp community (or similar) can speak to this, but that audience is really skewed a certain way due to race and geography (and not available on IOS). If people came away with a bad impression of Priconne Global because it’s not as good as its contemporaries, I understand it, but it is also a form of injustice because Priconne is a much better game than Priconne Global.

There, I’ve had my say. Maybe it’s finally time to hang it up and reclaim my average of 15-20 minutes a day of playtime.

PS. If you’ve been enjoying S2 of the anime in the past couple weeks, this is basically the heart of the setting that carried me from OG to Re:Dive, early on. I hope they explore also more the OG universe, but I doubt the anime will get anywhere close even if 4 more cours were added. The whole lead up to the end of “Act 1” of the main story is a lot of fun. Possibly magic they may not fully recapture ever again…speaking as someone who wasn’t too allured by Act 2.

This is my current mobage workload:

• T1: Playing a lot (log in several times a day, do all the stuff):
  1. Princess Connect! Re:Dive
  2. THE IDOLM@STER Million Live Theater Days
• T2: Playing occasionally (daily logins only, with bursts of normal play):
  1. THE IDOLM@STER Shiny Colors
  2. Magia Record (EN)
• T3: Playing rarely (log in occasionally–just to gacha really):
  1. Hachigatsu no Cinderella 9
  2. THE IDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls Starlight Stage
  3. Granblue Fantasy

I didn’t mention it on my blog much, but I have been playing Princess Connect! Re:Dive since its launch in 2018 and have been playing it regularly ever since. We are about 1.5 years since launch. I still enjoy that game a lot. Let me write about it.

Basic information and review:

Gameswith
English Reddit
JP Wiki

Princess Connect (Pricone for short) franchise, which first launched in 2015 as a browser game, shut down in 2016. Princess Connect! Re:Dive (Pricone or Pricone-R) launched in 2018 as a mobile app game as a continuation. Pricone-R was originally an Android/iOS game, now also available on PC via DMM. An anime has been announced with no air date, but Studio Wit has extensively provided animation for the app/PC game.

Why do I play it so much? Because it scratches a RPG itch that sort of is at the core of the Cygames RPG theme, yet unlike their other entries, Pricone manages to provide all the flavors with the least amount of filling. “Grinding” this game usually means playing a set 30 or so minutes a day, which completes your dailies and maybe spending a bit of extra time to “tower” or “PVP.” For people who actually are into grinding, this game is going to run dry pretty quick. For people already playing other things or have obligations in RL, it’s an easy thing to keep tabs on and is not laborious.

Re:Dive also balances well between free and paid play, and given its PVP slant there has to be decent balance for the game to still be taken kind of seriously 1.5 years into it. In usual Cygames fashion they are pretty generous with in-game currency, and instead monetize by providing frequent and cheap options to augment your teams. Spending the currency to improve your existing team members usually trumps spending it on gacha, but both do happen.

What I refer to by the Cygames RPG theme I mean generally the following: a stats building core in traditional JRPG sense, the usual rock-paper-scissors damage/defense model, evolving meta (a bit like Shadowverse except it’s with characters and not expansion sets), and clan battle and coop events. In some ways if you are familiar with Cygame’s original properties over the years, you can see those themes progress from one game to the next. In that sense PriconeR reflects a level of maturity in both Cygame’s development process and experience in game design.

One huge way PriconeR reflects mature development process is how it is one of the best quality-of-life games, both in the UI design and in terms of mechanics. Over the last 18 months the game consistently improved its user interface, and updated to add several common shortcuts and to removed mechanics that reduced player enjoyment/added tedium. It’s very clear they are tracking how players are playing the game in a very direct sense, like what menus are being opened and what stages people run, not to mention obvious things like which characters people are raising and using with others and where.

There used to be a player-matching PUG mechanism that gave out pretty decent rewards, but the fights for that feature were so easy that it was just pure grind. The challenge was actually doing the PUG part. That feature got axed pretty quickly because most of the time the players are dealing with the matchmaking interface rather than actually playing the game. You can see that they even upped the reward to get more people to play prior to axing it, but a lot of people cannot be arsed to wait for matches.

Visually, the game is a cute-girls-gets-stuck-in-a-mmorpg kind of a theme. It is very cute and generally the visuals roll between the SD models that you see in the 2D game engine and the full-on anime visuals, or the 2D static graphic for the dialog/adventure game/VN portion. There is a lot of skeuomorphism which adds color to the whole experience of this rustic RPG vibe circa Ragnarok Online. Once in anime mode, though, the game, complete with Kouhei Tanaka-style sounds, reminds me more of Sakura Taisen. The next-episode preview bits for its in-game events and main story chapters drive that home.

Actually the composers for the game range a lot. Tanaka wrote the main theme, but just eyeing through the in-game music store (you can unlock songs from events and the story to use as in-game menu BGM) you see composers like InoTak, for instance. Which is lols.

Day-to-day play

Usually Princess Connect! Re:Dive means clearing the daily quests. It requires stamina (generated over time, the primary gameplay driver) to clear 20 nodes, 3 hard nodes, do 1 Arena battle, do 1 Princess Arena battle, buy mana once, skill up a character, star up a piece of gear, give someone in your clan an “ii ne,” do 1 dungeon battle, do 4 “explorations,” and you get 100 free stamina from noon JST and another 100 stamina at 6pm JST. Occasionally there are events, which are self-contained areas which have their own daily and event-specific quests, plus the monthly Tower of Luna daily and Clan Battle daily.

To do the daily quest as someone in UTC-5, I log in once in the morning and once at night. You have a “room” (similar to Deresute) in which you can grow and farm bonus stamina, exp pots, skip tickets and mana. Harvesting twice or three times a day keeps everything under their maximum limit. Also, that lets me collect the daily quest stamina. So I would probably do the “early day” stuff and finish as many quests as I care for when I log in at night after work, and log in once in the morning to clear out the accumulated stuff in order to finish all the dailies.

I would probably play a bit harder on evenings for Clan Battle nights to save the clan battles for the morning, since it require using up 900 stamina. It’s just easier to wait for the bonus daily stamina. Tower I generally hate so I try to play it only when I’m in the mood for, and have time for.

Since I have been playing the game fairly closely since launch, the routine also carry me at the top of the player level cap all this time, as the level cap extends once or twice a month. Having access to all the content probably makes all this easier from the start. Events are a breeze to grind through, where the challenge is in only clearing the VH boss with 1 try, and the exhibition mode/special mode. In recent months the game has been sort of trying to be more relaxing in order to allow late comers to enjoy the later content.

Meta

Given the PVP drive of the game, there is a lot of advantage for being first mover. To use a recent example, the latest meta-altering character, Neneka, dropped into gacha as a limited character about a couple weeks ago. For the first 2-3 days people were easily topping Arena and Princess Arena. Now it’s full of people with 5* Neneka (and 6* Kyaru) a week since. To get 5* Neneka to rank 14, that is a fairly significant investment that even I was able to make (despite being mostly a free player).

There is definitely an online community for the game in which a meta exists, either because that’s what “gamers” read on the internet or seen others do. Obviously, a social game that is Pricone, with clans and all, people talk about what works and what doesn’t. This especially matters when it comes down to arena and princess arena, which are really just a giant puzzle where if you can recognize the hand the opponent fields, you can figure out your counter. The fun is figuring it out, mostly, because it’s not so fun to play janken when you know what your opponent throws, unless you just want to enjoy winning (and it is enjoyable).

This is at odds with the social/meta nature of this Cygames game (think Shadowverse) where people competitively come up with “teams” (or decks) in which you can beat via some kind of RNG (since you can’t control play). If your team is “rock” enough against an opponent team that is “scissors” enough, you will more likely win than not. So in the end everyone tend to pick teams that are really the rock/paper/scissors that has the most difficult counter. It isn’t even like janken where you have to guess, or like “arena janken” where you have to think about if the opponent’s teams are like rock or paper or scissors, it’s just a matter of balance.

So when a new winning combo drops due to a new character, it becomes fun again. Until the meta settles or is altered (like how Neneca is kind of replaced by Kyaru 6*), it’s kind of fun again.

Conclusion

This game fits my lifestyle. Reality is I don’t have a lot of time to sit down and play. Console games are rough. I can do stints with Steam, although lately my PC needs an upgrade to really enjoy that. Half of that time I am either watching anime or sportsball, or catching up with tons of free seiyuu content online in radios or promotional talk shows or weekly streams. I can grind, and the game has grind-type content if you want it, but I’m never forced to do that, nor does grinding convey so much advantage. I can just put in my 20 minutes a day if that is all I have time for. I can even skip if I really want to.

The game is also fun, which is why I have not gotten bored with it. The QoL changes over time makes the game less painful to other entries. The art and voice over (fully voiced game) is top notch and the anime style really apes from that Sakura Wars-shaped hole in my life.

It also helps that the main story is kind of interesting, although I don’t really care too much about the characters themselves. It is a serious game with silly characters and I’ve had enough of those. They are features I don’t need, but enjoy, and maybe others like them more.

So overall this is a great little gem of a game that could take off in the right situation. In South Korea the game apparently is doing very well, and it isn’t too bad in Taiwan/HK/Macau either. I believe there is even a Chinese knockoff of it now. Pricone shows that a quality product that does many of the little things right will still find an audience.