I am tired of gacha games. That’s it, I have opened my heart to you after suppressing it for the entirety of 2025. After having big expectations at the end of 2024, the year 2025 has only trampled on my hopes and left me with a gacha burnout. And, I am not alone! But being a human, I, too, am susceptible to hope for a better future. Thankfully, this time my wishes may finally come true. With Arknights Endfield right at the horizon, we might finally have a gacha game that will let me escape this typical gacha burnout.
The Gacha Burnout in 2025 Has Me Begging for Salvation
The year 2025 has not been the best for gacha games. Long-running games like Honkai Star Rail and Genshin Impact have more or less disappointed me greatly, while Zenless Zone Zero never grabbed my attention. The only silver lining for the community was Wuthering Waves, which did offer something different. But in the end, the gameplay loop remained the same for it as well.
Honkai Star Rail was the game I loved for the storytelling and turn-based combat. But this year, the Amphoreus arc was more or less a disaster, and every new game they added to the game had essentially the same mechanic. Now, Genshin Impact made some great improvements in storytelling. Nod-Krai has been clearly doing much better than Natlan, but the overall gameplay loop has remained the same.
In many ways, I have become tired of exploring the same world with rehashed puzzles, pulling for the same characters with only big damage numbers to offer, and stale end-game content that is just a boss rush at this point. Even Miliastra Wonderland has not lived up to the hype, but that might change in the future with more developers arriving on the platform.
The only gacha games that have succeeded this year are those that limited gacha mechanics to cosmetics only. Thankfully, I see a savior on the horizon that might save me from this terrible gacha burnout.
Arknights Endfield Is My Only Savior in 2026
Arknights Endfield is set to release on January 22, and I cannot wait to get my hands on it. The game looks absolutely incredible, and every early access footage has been praising it. What makes it so good? First of all, Arknights Endfield is the successor of Arknights, which is widely believed to have the best storyline among gacha games. Next, the game features a vibrant style with an instanced world.
The combat doesn’t follow the same pattern as other gacha games, where you switch between multiple characters. Instead, your party fights alongside you. You can only control one character at a time, while the others will be controlled by AI. When your allies use certain actions, you can create a combo with them to defeat the enemies faster.
But the biggest highlight of Arknights Endfield is not the combat or exploration; it is the ability to influence its world at your whim. Arknights has a mechanic named AIC Factory. This factory literally allows the player to create buildings all over the world, which include ziplines or boosters. So, you don’t essentially have to rely on the game’s teleport points to fast travel from one location to the other; you can create your own!
But that’s not all, this AIC Factory allows players to efficiently farm for materials that are used to level up characters. Farmming character materials in other gacha games is the most ridiculous and tiring mechanic. Half of my characters are sitting at level 1 in those games for exactly that reason. Being able to set up a way to passively farm any material I want, so that I can purely spend my time playing the game, is an outstanding mechanic.
Arknights Endfield Is the Gacha Revolution We Need
Gacha games have never allowed players to make drastic changes to maps, and for many valid concerns. First, there is always a concern of optimization as gacha games are often ported to mobiles. Next, changing the map may change the dynamic of certain missions. Although these concerns are valid, it has also caused the genre to go stale.
Arknights Endfield, giving players the freedom to build on the map, should be something other games also follow. Those who play gacha games tend to give it a huge chunk of their free time. Much of that time generally goes to farming for materials, which is not a fun task. Instead, now players can take the survival games approach and build across the map in their free time.
If Arknights Endfield becomes successful on release, we might finally see such a change in other gacha games as well. Simply imagine being able to build structures on different parts of Teyvat. Allowing players to build their home outside in the open world, instead of being limited to the Serenea Tea Pot, would have been game-changing.
So, what’s your opinion on Arknights? Do you think it will be a major success next year? Let us know in the comments below.
