The first time I launched Arknights: Endfield, I was thinking about Pokémon. 

When those games first arrived on Game Boy, I was a snooty teenager who thought he was too old to play them. Then I watched Pokémon become a cultural phenomenon and spent years subconsciously thinking I’d blown my opportunity. 

There was always an onramp—available in many colors, on many generations of hardware—but I’d erected a mental roadblock for the same reason that it feels difficult to get into comic books: Getting up to speed and merging into competence seems intimidating. But eventually, I got over myself, played a Pokémon game, learned to speak its language and love the franchise. 

Many years later, I found myself in a similar position, this time with gacha games, a genre named after a word I’d never heard of and didn’t understand and that suddenly seemed to be everywhere after Genshin Impact’s release. At least I can report that I didn’t make the same mistake. At least I can say that I’ve dabbled in some of the biggest entries. 

What I couldn’t say, until very recently, was that I genuinely got comfortable with gacha games. 

Enter Arknights: Endfield, my recent and best attempt to really learn a new video game language. My journey to fluency confused me, overwhelmed me, taught me, and humbled me. It also made me a fan. 

Gacha catch ‘em all

I thought that I didn’t know what a gacha game was. I was mostly wrong, thanks to ‘80s department stores.

When I was a kid, small enough that my mom had to drag me along when she went shopping, my favorite stores were the ones with machines in the lobby. And my favorite pastime was begging my mom for a quarter so that I could maybe put it in a slot, turn a metal crank, and get a rock-hard gumball or a dusty plastic spider ring, delivered in a domed, clear plastic capsule. 

Turns out, that’s more or less a gacha machine, though they’re admittedly way fancier than the machines at Hills were in 1987. They had capsules, and there were toys inside of them, but the Japanese versions date back to the 1960s and came with a name: gachapon or just gacha. 

Before I sat down to play Arknights: Endfield, I did some research because I felt like I should understand better what a gacha game would be. I wanted to know what to look for, and that’s what I learned: What was once the physical act of turning a crank to get a prize has become digital and applied to video games. 

In video games, the idea is that there’s a giant prize pool filled with a bunch of stuff you want, and a bunch of stuff that you don’t really want. So, in gacha game language, you pull (I like to picture the bar on the side of a slot machine) and get (ideally) fabulous prizes. 

This concept, it turns out, is not rocket science. But the way it works specifically in games is a little more complicated. Armed with a hummingbird’s beak full of knowledge that I gained while downloading Arknights: Endfield from the Epic Games Store—including the EGS gacha game explainer—I dove in.  

So much game  

Arknights: Endfield’s opening salvo is 30 minutes of adrenaline-fueled fantasy sword-heavy combat, zipline-powered exploration, and traversal across a snow-covered tundra whose grand finale pits me and a group of allies who materialize just in time to neutralize a boss the approximate size of a mountain. 

The base game isn’t all that different from that introductory mission, offering near-constant opportunities to swing my sword, chain explosive attacks together with my teammates, explore an open world, and earn a wild amount of currencies of many kinds for my efforts. 

Arknights: Endfield is a story-heavy game, with cutscenes full of characters and storytelling along every path I took. After the explosive introduction, I awoke from a 10-year nap aboard the OMV Dijiang, Endfield Industries’ base and my home. I learned that I am the Endministrator, which is clearly an important position here in this spaceship, which sits in low orbit around a planet-sized moon called Talos-II. We gather resources like Originium from the surface, refine them, and create things with them on the Dijiang. 

I learn this in exactly the same way that my character learns this, from a woman named Perlica who’s here to help me remember that I’m a leader, a fighter, an inventor of Edisonian caliber— a big damn hero, in other words. And as it turns out, so is she. 

As I play through the campaign, I naturally meet new characters, some of whom are available to join my four-person (gigantic, humanoid pandas count as people) crew of fighters. Perlica instantly becomes my favorite and constant companion. 

The missions they send me on aren’t terribly complicated, the combat is fast and flashy, defined by pulling off spectacular moves as you build up meters with every hit. Keep hitting a button, and every character in your party gets in on the action, demolishing enemy health bars in large, horizontal chunks. 

Then I started to get my Talos-II legs. 

For more than 10 hours, it felt like nearly every mission taught me how to do something new in Arknights: Endfield. That includes the significant construction component, which is like a game within the game. Not only do I need to find and gather resources on Talos-II, but I need to refine those resources into useful components and craft things like armor out of them. The game does an exceptional job of teaching me the basics, but the Epic Games Store guide about mastering manufacturing turned my cursory knowledge into a deeper understanding. 

And I wasn’t lost. I kept thinking, “You know, this isn’t so bad.” 

I also kept thinking, “Where’s the gacha stuff?” It took more than four hours for Arknights: Endfield to introduce pulls, and that’s when the game demanded a little more from me. 

Seeing through the Matrix

It’s funny. I didn’t realize how apt it was that I thought about Pokémon. Turns out, the series about catching them all has a kind of harmony with gacha games, where you collect operators or allies who fight alongside you. Catching ‘em all in Arknights: Endfield is about assembling an awesome team. 

Every day, I’d play hours of Arknights: Endfield, and every day I’d get the game’s daily rewards. Some of them flew way over my head, but I realized that there was no need to stress about it. The game did nothing less than tell me what I need to know when I need to know it, and I figured that it would be the same for the gacha system.

But I really wanted to start pulling. There was a literal lever in the game, and it called to me sweetly. 

On my fourth consecutive day of playing, I was rewarded with a host of items for logging in, just like every other day. I understood so little, but I felt more comfortable, and decided to read each item’s description. I learned to my absolute astonishment that I was guaranteed a six-star character—the highest-possible pull in the game. Then I went in to do it, saw the list of characters, and froze. I hadn’t the faintest idea who I should choose. 

And here’s the beauty: Just like in every other part of Arknights: Endfield, I didn’t have to know right now. I trusted the developers to tell me at some point because they’d earned it. I’d learn, I figured, when they wanted me to learn. 

And then the next day, I saw through the Matrix. 

I’d received a bunch of Chartered HH Permits for playing and logging in. Turns out the HH stands for Headhunting, which is Arknights: Endfield’s name for pulls. So I went into the menu, confirmed that I had a bunch of them, and then navigated over to the Headhunting menu from there. That’s when I realized that I was guaranteed to pull a six-star character in a certain number of pulls. And I had plenty of pulls available. 

And suddenly, I saw it, just like this in my brain: 

• You earn currency that allows you to pull. 
• You pull. Maybe you get lucky. Probably you get something that’s just fine. 
• The game takes pity on you and guarantees an awesome thing after a certain number of pulls. 
• The result: You pile up currency until the awesome thing is guaranteed. 

No time like the present! The time for hedging was over, and I pulled and pulled, and the next thing you know, I had a six-star character. 

And I got it. I understood the appeal. It’s all about earning the right to pull for random prizes from banners. That’s gacha. 

My six-star Lifeng became the newest member of my party, there to help wreck the baddies and save the world. And boy, did I smile every time I looked at my new party member. I did that. I finally worked it out. 

So much to learn

I’ve had the exact same thoughts about two wildly different games in the last month or so. While wrapping my mind around Crimson Desert and Arknights: Endfield, I keep thinking, “Man alive, there is so much game in this game. Whatever the maximum amount of game is that you can fit into a game, this has got to be it.”  

I am a world-class overthinker, and my brain is always scanning for my failings, convinced that I’m missing the obvious and doing the thing (where by “the thing,” I mean “everything”) wrong. Maybe, I kept wondering as I played Arknights: Endfield, I’m just such a sweet summer child who doesn’t know enough to know what he doesn’t know. 

Well if that’s true, I embrace my present ignorant bliss. There is nothing about this game that seems artificially gated. There is nothing in my first 10-plus hours that made me feel as if I should be trading real-world money for in-game rewards. I’ve got more stuff than I know what to do with. Maybe that’ll change one day when I deeply understand everything. But that day is not today, and unless and until that happens, I’m content to just get so much game for free and learn as I go. 

I spent about 15 hours playing Resident Evil Requiem earlier this year. It’s the kind of narrative, AAA, campaign-heavy game that I adore. That cost me a bunch of money, and I’m happy with my trade of money for Capcom’s fun. I’ve played nearly as much of Arknights: Endfield, and I’m enjoying the heck out of it. It cost me zero dollars and taught me more than I’ve ever known about gacha games. That’s a pretty great deal, if you ask me. 

If this brand of adventure has you curious, the Epic Games Store is full of gacha games from Arknights: Endfield to Genshin Impact, Infinity Nikki, Honkai: Star Rail, Snowbreak: Containment Zone, and Wuthering Waves. At this point, I think I’m hooked, so if you bump into me, be sure and say hi, Endministrator.