tribe nine was an arpg conceptualised by the creator of danganronpa and developed by akatsuki games; as you'd expect from anything tangentially attached to danganronpa, it featured an eclectic and fun story with crazy twists, and had a really interesting and cool visual style.

i was looking forward to this game since it was announced, participated in the first closed beta test, and played the game right at launch, and played the game a whole ton. yesterday night, the game announced end of service, so i wanted to blog about this game that i really loved.

why did it die?

this is going to be mostly my opinion, but it seems like the community is generally in agreement about the reasons it died. in essence, i think tribe nine was a great game, but it wasn't a great gacha game. the main reason behind this is that the game just didn't have enough reasons to spend; you could clear basically all content in the game with just 2* characters, 3* characters didn't require any merges to perform really well, and the equipment gacha also didn't really need to be interacted with either because the f2p loadouts were more than adequate.

the game was higher budget than it could really feasibly survive with given the lower profile; the game looked like an actual real pc game that you'd pay for, but i don't think there was ever a world in which it made enough money to offset this. further, given the quality, they couldn't push out updates or events or new characters very often, so there was a lot of time where it was kind of hard to find a reason to log in.

the game was also honestly way too generous with its gacha. the only money i spent was on the battlepass and the $7 package for 60 daily orbs, and i got all 3 banner units, with merges on tsuruko and aoyama, and i still had enough to hit hard pity, and i didn't even grind all of the places that i could have for more orbs.

basically: the game was too focused on being a good, regular game that it kind of just forgot that gacha games need to give people a reason to spend money.

closing remarks

honestly, more than anything, i'm just sad that the story is never going to be completed. tribe nine's story was definitely among the best stories i've seen in a gacha game, but it's never going to get an ending anymore. a big part of tribe nine was its mystery, and those are never going to be answered. there were also some characters from the tribe nine anime that i was looking forward to seeing again, but that's just that.

i've had a gacha game that i loved die before, and people who know me will surely know what i'm talking about, and it's, of course, dragalia lost - but at least dragalia lost got a beautiful, phenomenal happy ending. i don't know what to do with tribe nine though. i really, really loved the game, and now it's over just like that - even the few events that were going to be coming out during this chapter were cancelled. it's just unceremoniously and suddenly gone.

i'll get over it, but i dunno. i was really in love with this game for a solid few months and played it every day. i don't think i'll still be thinking about it forever the way i will with dragalia lost, but i know i'll still think about it for a while. and i think i'll remember it for even longer.