An obscure gacha game running for two and a half years just got flamed for *giving away* a free character — and honestly, it's one of the most absurd operational fiascos in the gacha sphere. Soul Tide's new doll Phirodoshi was locked behind Main Story Chapter 18-6 instead of being added to the gacha pool, a decision the devs probably thought would incentivize story progression. Instead, it detonated the entire community.
Some context: Soul Tide is a Master Love (ML) puzzle-RPG that's been clinging to life on the edge of irrelevance for years. The game throws gacha currency at players like candy — rolling a new character is basically effortless, a five-minute affair with zero stress. Power creep is glacially slow (a launch-day lightning team is still tier 0-1), and character building is expensive, so veteran players often pull new units and bench them immediately. For most remaining players, the real endgame isn't combat — it's unlocking the personal story and dating scenes with their waifus.
Here's where the main story becomes a problem. Soul Tide's campaign splits into maze puzzles and turn-based combat. Veterans can brute-force fights with raw stats, but the puzzle design is genuinely torturous — one-line-drawing, QTE, stealth sections, teleport traps, gravity puzzles, unskippable cutscenes everywhere. Chapters 8-10 and 16 are infamously nightmarish. Even following a video guide step-by-step, each chapter (6 stages) takes one to two hours to clear. One commenter described the stealth section in Chapter 9: after dying to the boss and retrying, the game forced them to redo the entire stealth sequence from scratch — 10+ minutes wasted.
Making things worse, Soul Tide had a long-standing mechanic where character shard dungeons were randomly generated from a pool that expanded as you progressed the story. The rewards were roughly the same regardless of difficulty, meaning players who pushed further into the story got stuck fighting nightmarish bosses while those who stayed early breezed through easy ones. As a result, huge numbers of veteran players deliberately stalled their story progress for months or even years — and they're now nowhere near Chapter 18.
So the community's rage boils down to this time-cost whiplash: what used to be a 5-minute gacha pull followed by feeding some food items to max affection and enjoying dating scenes has now become a 10+ hour gauntlet of puzzle hell. One top-voted comment cut straight to it: 'This story mode is so trash, even dogs wouldn't play it.'
But here's the funny part — this drama thread accidentally became an advertisement. Curious onlookers read about the overflowing gacha currency and asked, 'Wait, can you really pull everything that easily?' Veterans confirmed: full roster in 3 months, 100 tickets and 200 pulls worth of currency left after 6 months, 50-pull pity, universal spark every 200 pulls. A gacha paradise — until you realize the actual gameplay loop is mind-numbingly tedious event grinding with 'pointless click-here-then-there repetition.'
As for how the game makes money? Skins, ASMR voice packs, lewd L2D animations, and... marriage rings. But production capacity is abysmal — two new skins every two months at best. Revenue has been flatlining for ages; the studio only survives because the boss is a trust fund kid and the game is published by Hero Games (英雄互娱). Even Chinese gacha revenue trackers keeping Soul Tide on their charts was called 'a miracle' by commenters.
The absurdity of this whole fiasco: in a game where gacha currency is so abundant that pulling characters is trivially easy, moving one character from the gacha pool to a story-clear reward was perceived as a betrayal. It exposes the fundamental disconnect in Soul Tide's design — players are here for the 5-minute waifu pull and dating sim content, not for hours of puzzle-solving torture. The devs turned a 'free gift' into a punishment, and the community made sure they heard about it.
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