2026AUG21

Lately I've been playing a lot of Onmyoji and Wuthering Waves with both of them being pretty well-known gacha games. Onmyoji is a bit older than Wuthering Waves, but I found myself coming back to it after feeling a little bit lost on what to play after a long day at work. Of course, only an insane person would say that playing gacha games after work is relaxing. But for me it honestly is.

What makes Onmyoji frustrating as compared to Wuthering Waves is how the units (called shikigami) need to be built. Certain characters need more or less speed than others, or crit damage, or hp, etc. Just at a glance, you cannot tell what character needs what unless you look at the comments of the character. Not every shikigami has a comment that tells you the ideal build, and it's more likely that the comment could be several years old. I am aware that most gacha game communities benefit from the kindness of the community, and Onmyoji is no exception. There is a Google spreedsheet of that shows the viability of each shikigami in every gamemode, and there are builds that are shared by others in Reddit and community run forums and websites. I am the sort of person who likes to figure things out on his own, but I am of course not immune to being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of possibilities gacha games tend to have for building characters.

To build up a shikigami, souls need to be equipped to further boost their stats. In Wuthering Waves, these are instead called echoes. Both games have these assignable "weapon" like items that have a main stat and several substats that can make characters more powerful. What is grating (and this is of course common in gacha games lol) is that these substats are rolled randomly and are a gacha separate from the gacha of summoning the characters. So let's say I am shooting for a typical damage type build where I'll need a lot of attack, crit (critical hit percent) and crit damage. Ideally, all of the assignable souls / echoes that I give my characters will have these substats. My luck is.... horrid, for lack of a better word. So hence, my souls and echoes are not the best at the moment.

The only way to get better souls or echoes is to simply keep playing more of the game. But of course, these are gacha games! There must be limiting metrics, such as AP (action power) that allow you to do certain tasks in these games. It's frustrating because if you want to build up a character, you'll need to spend AP, but once you run out, you have no choice but to wait (or pay.... lol) for it to regenerate back. This is annoying, because that means I only really get to work on one character at a time per session that I'm playing. When I'm in the zone, I don't wanna focus on just one character! I want to be able to level up and power up all the units I want!

Now, dear reader, you could be thinking, "Why the hell is this guy playing these games anyways?" I LIKE SEEING BIG NUMBER GO UP OKAY. I KNOW THESE GAMES ARE PREDATORY AND WANT YOUR MONEY!!! And I will protest that notion by being the most annoying free to play gacha player in the universe.