You've probably never heard of this mobile game Darkness Rises. In 2018, I broke my previous phone, the Sony Xperia Z3 which I had for four years, so I figured it was time for a new phone. I went with the Samsung Galaxy S9+. Very powerful phone, so I decided to try out some games to see how well it could run them. I saw an ad for Darkness Rises, so I gave it a try.
It was a pretty fun game for what it was. It's an action-RPG where you spam the attack button and use abilities and wait for their cooldowns to expire to use them again. The story levels were bite-size, roughly 30 seconds to a minute, perfect for quick bursts. You could even play them on auto, set it for repeat and put your phone down and let it play itself while your character gathered experience, gold and gear.
It was also one of those games where it had a gem currency that was used for pretty much everything. To its credit, the game was very generous handing them out and also had daily and weekly objectives to earn more along with main quests that rewarded with you with large lump sums. After a while, though, the game began to hit a wall.
You have seven characters you can make, but are encouraged to make and play with as many as you can as they give stat bonuses. The more you play, the more bonuses. Each character has a power level which is determined by attack, defense, HP and other stats. The story and adventure levels have power level checks, and although you can work around higher requirements if you play yourself, evading and using skills at proper times, the auto AI is rather inept and struggles with the normal recommendation.
After a while, it became too hard to clear these stages. In order to get my power level up, I believe past 1 million at the point I first quit in 2018, I had to use gear to enhance my current gear and farm essences to raise my base stats while also continuing to do daily and weekly objectives. Well, it got to be so much work that I found myself playing the game almost the entire time while I was at work (letting it run itself, not physically playing it 8 hours at work). I got tired of it and quit.
This year, I made an insane reading challenge of trying to see how quickly I could read Elmore Leonard's 46 books, and about half way through, I began to doze off a lot and was slowing down. I decided I was going to play Darkness Rises again, because it would be a great way to keep myself awake, checking the phone while the game played itself, and it worked. I managed to read those 46 books in less than two month's time.
A lot happened during those two years I stopped playing. For one, they raised the level cap from 60 to 100 and introduced several new worlds for their story and adventure mode. They also raised the rank of their top tier S gear to S++ and a week after I restarted, they raised the rank again to L, which stands for Lucky, not Legendary, which is what I would have went with. Anyway...
They set up a new event of objectives to get players up to a power level of three million to get them through the first new world, but very quickly after that, the power level requirements spiked exponentially. I found out that by the time you finish the new worlds on their hardest level, your power level requirements are around 30 million. That level of growth is insane and nearly impossible to reach as a returning player who hasn't played for a couple of years. So, how do people close the gap from 3 million to 30 million?
Well, it's all about the Rank L gear. In order to get a piece of Rank L gear, you need to forge two identical Rank S++ pieces that have been grinded up to level 60. Seems reasonable, but it's very hard to obtain Rank S++ gear without dumping a shitload of gems into their loot boxes. Even if you do, it's hard to get the EXACT piece of gear you need. Now here's where the game became ruined for me.
Once you get two identical max level Rank S++ pieces, you can fuse them together at a 30% success rate. That is real low. It takes a lot of time to earn just one. For instance, they have an event every two weeks that if you earn enough points, you're rewarded with one Rank S++ weapon chest, but in order to get enough points, your phone needs to run probably six to eight hours a day. It also costs millions of gold to grind a new piece of S++ to max level, and then five million gold to attempt the fuse, and if you fail, you lose one of the gears you tried to fuse. Yep, destroyed. However, if you don't want to lose that piece of gear, you can always use a Guardstone, which can only be obtained by outright buying it in a bundle for 30 dollars. Or, you can use rate up stones to increase the success rate by one percent per stone, but you can only get them in bundles for 30 dollars, or in Hell, which is their post game content. Yes you can earn rate up stones to help you get your power level up to 30 million... which you're already up at 30 million by the time you access Hell...
Now, get ready for the math. Bundles containing 20 rate stones, and I think 10 million in gold go for 30 dollars. In order to get a 100 percent chance of a successful fusion, you'll need 70 stones and each character has 10 gear slots, meaning you'll need to buy 700 rate up stones. You'll need to buy 35 bundles at 30 bucks, which is 1,050 dollars. Then, you'll need to do that again for six more characters, so if you want a 100 percent success rate for every Rank L fusion in the game for all your characters, you'll have spent 7,350 dollars! That isn't even taking into account having to spend 10 dollars a week for a weekly pass that rewards with you with morph stones just in case you want to try to speed up the process changing the S++ gear you don't need into one you do. I don't even know how much extra that would cost (let's assume it took you a year, so 520 bucks).
7,350 dollars! That's insane, and that's just ONE aspect of the game's premium content. There are loads of costumes to buy as well, and you'll only really get great ones if you buy them in batches of ten with gems, but in order to fuse THOSE, you need to break down a shitload of costume pieces you spent gems to get in order to get fusion materials. I never even bothered to explore that part of the game.
And if you're serious about PvP, only the best leagues have players with power levels upwards of 30 million, and you can be damned sure not a single one has reached that point in the game without spending a few hundred dollars AT LEAST. Either that or they never stopped playing from day one and got really lucky with their pulls. So, I quit again, seeing that naturally achievable goal a very LONG ways away. And remember, if I want to do this the natural way, I need to run my phone 24/7. I don't think I want to continue to run this game and burn my phone out...
But even after quitting again, even while writing this blog, the game is beckoning me back. I know the game is bullshit, but it's the feedback loop that my brain is having a problem with breaking away from. I would get these little rushes of serotonin every time I saw my numbers go up, and I just wanted them to go up and up. It got so bad, I was even trying to rationalize spending the money for successful Rank L fusions. Granted, I wouldn't come close to spending 7,350 dollars even in a few months time, but thinking that I could spend that amount of money even over a year or two's worth time for a shitty ass cellphone game worried the fuck out of me. So, that game is staying off my phone from now on.
It's that feedback loop Darkness Rises applies that we see so many other cellphone games - and even console games now - employ that predicates itself on addictive personalities. Remember, I have one of those personalities as I struggled to quit both FFXI and FFXIV. To my credit, not every cellphone game can grab me. I quit Mario Kart Tour after two weeks, largely in part to them resetting my progress with every new circuit they swapped out. Fire Emblem Heroes took me a while to quit, and Animal Crossing Pocket Camp didn't stick with me for more than a couple of months. In comparison to those last couple games, I quit Darkness Rises much quicker, but the pull to stay on was FAR stronger. I even reinstalled Darkness Rises a couple times before a finally quit.
I just can't justify that kind of fuckery anymore. Sure, it started out generous, but the asking price for those damn fusions is just beyond insulting. What's sad is that there are people who won't think twice and snap those bundles up whenever they need them. I don't get it... I don't understand how people spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on a cellphone game, but balk when a cellphone game dares to charge you a one time price of five or ten bucks... These aren't games; they're trappings, and it's why I will never take the cellphone game industry seriously.
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