website/content/posts/arknights-review.md

title	date	draft	description	type	tags
Arknights Review	2023-10-22T23:55:20Z	true	A review of the Chinese mobile game Arknights (明日方舟)	post	review game fun

I'm not aware of any internationally successful Chinese animes or mangas, but somehow several Chinese anime-inspired video games have managed to take the world by storm, namely Genshin Impact (there are some people in my dorm who play it, and play it loudly and intensely) and Arknights. Now Genshin Impact doesn't seem particularly interesting to me. But Arknights is a free-to-play tower-defense-RPG game with puzzle and strategy elements, so I thought it would be a fun way to improve my Mandarin and I gave it a try. In August while I was in China, I saw someone playing it during a train ride from Ningbo to Cangzhou, and I've also seen at least two other MIT students playing it, so it seemed worth trying out.

OK, so let's start with actually creating an account for the (Chinese version of the) game, which is already a huge pain. If you download the game from the Arknights website, you need a Chinese phone number when creating an account, which I don't have. I also considered playing the Taiwanese version of the game, but I don't want to struggle with reading traditional Chinese. The solution is to download the game from Bilibili, so you can use a Bilibili account to log in instead, which can use any international phone number. But now there's another obstacle: you need to verify your ID for some lousy CCP nonsense. Now I'm not a Chinese citizen, so I tried going through Bilibili's online form for verifying your ID for games (which is a separate form from verifying your ID for the Bilibili website for some stupid reason), but I guess they just ignored my request or something. Finally, I found on Reddit that you can use Xi Jinping's ID for this, but that seemed to risky so I used a different person's ID recommended in the same Reddit thread, and surprisingly, it actually worked! Now I just hope I don't get banned for this.

OK, with all of that nonsense out of the way, I can finally enjoy the game! First, there's a ridiculously long amount of intro cutscenes and tutorials, but after that, stuff got interesting.

First of all, the game is fairly grindy. There aren't many levels, and you have to do them over and over again to collect certain resources. The autodeploy helps, but it's still annoying. I think no game should make you do the same thing thrice, and it seems like repetitive grinding is the only way to collect certain resources. Another tedious aspect is the base-building stuff, which I think shouldn't be in the game in the first place. Which brings me to my next point: there are way too many damn currencies in this game, and there aren't many ways to convert between them. There's the normal currency, the currency for levelling up characters, a currency for recruiting new characters, six different currencies in the store, and it's very annoying and time-consuming to deal with all of this. At least it's easy to play the game without having to spend real money. I think you only need real money if you want to speed things up and do less grinding, but I'm not really in a rush for anything.

Moving on to the next rant: Arknights is not a puzzle game. The closest thing it has to puzzles are "paradox simulations", which are high-difficulty levels with only a few solutions, but the thing is, characters in Arknights mostly just have one use. There's no need to wrack your brain about how to use the characters in creative ways. You just do reasonable stuff, and if your characters have a high-enough level, you'll beat the level.

Another annoyance is that the retry loop is very long. If you make a mistake and lose a level, it takes quite a few annoying seconds to show the results page, restart the level, go through more loading screens, and then do everything you were doing before prior to the mistake just to get back to where you were before. I guess this just means I should plan things out better in advance though.

I've also run into a lot of race condition situations, where sometimes autodeploys just fail due to race conditions. I assume the autodeploy is fairly deterministic and uses the same RNG seed and such, but there's enough nondeterminism so that race conditions can and do happen. This also might be because often times when my characters are just barely leveled up enough to beat a level, I end up with very scuffed and complicated solutions involving lots of enemies just barely getting defeated right before they cross my gate.

Now for the good aspects of Arknights: it is indeed a very nicely-made and polished game, which is not surprising given how popular it is. The characters are mostly cute (but not really sexualized) and the story is adequate. I don't particularly care much about the story (and I don't think this game is a really and RPG either, since your actions don't influence the story), but I guess I should pay more attention to it since that's what will improve my Mandarin. Whatever.

I don't think I learned that much Mandarin from this game either, but it's not like playing a single game will instantly make me a Mandarin master. Given that I already knew enough Mandarin before playing the game to understand roughly what was going on, I wasn't expecting to learn that much new stuff anyways.

Subjective quesiton: How "Chinese" is this game? Personally, I felt like I was just playing an American or Japanese game but localized into Mandarin, so not very. But then again, this is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi-fantasy game, not an RPG set in dynastic China, so I wasn't expecting much in the first place. Most of the OST is in English. It definitely seems like the developers put in a lot of effort to make the game have a global appeal.

One last fun question to ponder: given that Genshin Impact and Arknights have achieved a lot of popularity but a lot of people don't realize that they're Chinese games, will Chinese animes and mangas (I guess donghuas and manhuas would be more accurate terms here) also achieve international success in the next few years without most people even realizing it? There's a very good video about the animation industry in China that you should watch, so I'm just going to assume you watched it and roll on ahead. Currently, a lot of animation work is already contracted out to Chinese studios (fun fact: one episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender was animated by a North Korean studio), so there's definitely manpower available, and combine that with China's large population (which was recently surpassed by India). So I think we just need to wait and this will happen. My prediction is within the next five years. Of course there's the wild cards of whether China's economy will crash or if the CCP will invade Taiwan, but I consider both of those to be unlikely despite all the claims (hype?) that these are imminent. Then again I'm not an economist or political analyst, so maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. I created a reminder in my calender for exactly five years in the future, and we'll see how my three predictions unfold. 2028 just sounds scary. See you then.