Arknights, or, How I Learned to Stop Waffling and Admit I Hate Tower Defense

Last year I got pretty hard into a mobile game. This is something that normally doesn't happen, but this was Gundam Battle: Gunpla Warfare, which is in the genre of Toy Giant Robot games, which loyal followers will know [I have had a history with.] In fact, the only reason I really fell out of that game was because there came a point that the game would crash every time I tried to load into an action level. It didn't stop me from logging in for daily rolls for a few months after that point.

Since I hadn't fallen hard for a phone game before that, it was my introduction to some mobile game concepts, and one feature in particular was auto battle. That game's auto battle turned a given level into a conversion machine that turns stamina meter directly into drops and exp. It worked on the principle that you had proven that you could complete the level with satisfactory ease, so it didn't even bother to load the level and just went directly from pre-mission to mission complete screen. And you could just keep mashing that button and spend you entire stamina meter in less than 5 minutes. It was nice, it was beautiful, it was so efficent, and I think it has spoiled me.

This experience is what set the scene for everything that Arknights has made me realize. The first real opinion I had about Arknights is how unbareable it was to have to watch the entire level play through for the auto battle.

I don't know why they've done their auto battle the way they have. There's something interesting in the idea that the replays could be unreliable, and I've seen it both come up and say REPLAY UNSTABLE - COULD GO WRONG as well as seen it stay completely normal until the very last moment when an enemy just wandered thru where it never had before for no explicable reason. It's...interesting? But not good. "And as an added bonus, sometimes the 'automatic don't-worry-about-it' function is sometimes it just fucks up!" Like, I feel like if I did that it would be because there was a bug I couldn't work out, and so I "fixed" it by narativizing it a little bit. But even if it wasn't an intentional feature, then what was the original reason to force the level to be watch and not just assume successful completion?

While the decisions made here confuse me, it wasn't the source of the distain I found myself experincing. It wasn't until I was grinding a level for dorm room decoration drops that it realy crystalized for me.

"Huh," I say out loud to myself, laying in bed, "Tower Defense as a whole sure are reverse autoscrollers, aren't they?"

I'm not a speed runner, so I don't consider autoscrollers the bane of my existance or anything, but seeing levels finished quicker and quicker is a nice metric for how my skills at the game are improving. In an autoscroller, that feedback of "less time spent here" is removed. So even if autoscrollers don't inherently drive you nuts, they are also inherently never going to give you that measure of pride for how much you've improved in your time with the game.

So TD's are autoscrollers, and autoscrollers don't make you feel like you've improved. But as is usual with my specific bad brain, after I figured out what I didn't like about it, I kept thinking about it.

There's an argument that I should like TD's on some level, because you can look at them as puzzles of where and when to layout your towers. And I love me some puzzle games. Give me a Tetris Attack puzzle mode any day of the week.

["perfect move" puzzle modes][zachtronics games machine building puzzles][machine iteration puzzles, each puzzle in a single new problem your machine has to deal with, without losing it's ability to handle all previous puzzles][The big point being - you see if your machine handles each next problem, not 10 problems in a row that you don't learn about until you fail to it][and that's where it turns into Persona 3 realizations, if you're not playing with a walkthru, you don't know what you've failed to spec for until you've reached it with the wrong spec. But then when you do play with a walkthu, why is it even structured as challenges, just make each path successful you just have to pick between paths, and not pick paths and also maybe fail it and waste your time and opportunities.][fuck games]