Resleriana: What happened?

Before I begin, I want you to understand this: I genuinely enjoyed Resleri. I am sad that global is ending service. I am sad about the state of JP. For all the problems that Resleri has faced, for all the bad decisions it's still going through -- I still want to believe in it. It's harder and harder though.

Resna is an adorable lead, and I will forever have the hots for Valeria. There was some great usage of existing series characters. For instance, Shallistera is a great supporting character in the first few chapters, and she reflects on her time in Atelier Shallie to excellent effect. I always looked forward to the story updates! Helps that the scenario is by Takahiro, who I am a fan of due to his work on Yuki Yuna and World Dai Star.

The gameplay was also fun. I was too much of a scrub for some of the challenge content and I'm not afraid to admit that. But I did enjoy trying! I enjoyed swapping my party around for the perfect -- or even the goofiest -- setup. I enjoyed being made to try teams I would never have considered before. I enjoyed getting my speed just right so I could hit specific timeline panels. Team building is great.

And you know what? I enjoyed incrementally making my team stronger and stronger over a long period of time as well.

Let's start the teardown.

Gacha Terms

Wish

Resleri's term for a gacha pull. At the start of the game, you got a free daily pull.

Gems

The currency used for wishes. You could also buy a lot of other things with them. These were divided into "paid" and "free" gems, though many paid gem packs would give you both types. The best value gem packs would refresh every banner; you can bet whales would snap those up every time.

Whale

A big spender. There are also terms for people who don't spend as much as a whale, such as dolphin and minnow.

Memoria

Usually acquired from gacha. A picture that you can equip to your characters for stats and other gameplay bonuses. These can be leveled to 30 for better stats. You need five copies of a Memoria to get the maximum bonus.

Spark

This term is unofficial, but widely used within gacha. When you 10 pull on a banner without the use of tickets, you earn 11 Legend Medals. When you get 150, you can purchase any character from any point in time. With 200, you can purchase a Memoria from the current banner. It is easy to acquire any specific character you want, but getting Memoria can be painful.

Pieces

While you need copies of Memoria to get the max bonus, for characters there is an alternate and much nicer path to getting them maxed. Drawing a duplicate character grants you their 'pieces' which help you get them to 5 star status, as well as some 'Brilliant Wishing Stones' that you can exchange for more pieces. On top of that, there is a quest you can do daily that simply gives you their pieces. You get 9 pieces for free, and can spend 50 gems for 6 more; this applies to an entire team of five. Takes a while, but any character you like will get to 5 stars no problem. This gives benefits in combat and synthesis.

Tickets

A normal 10 pull costs 3000 gems. With tickets, this price is halved. Every banner, you can buy 20 tickets. These are also handed out for free as login bonuses and sometimes as part of events (basically, you can get 20 free tickets sometimes)

Memory Crystal

Instead of having five copies of a Memoria, you can use crystals to rank up a Memoria as well. The most reliable (free) way of getting them is getting a fragment each week. Once you get 10 fragments, you can exchange for a crystal. This pace is glacial, making this resource incredibly precious.

Banner

The game will promote certain characters and Memoria, usually when they are new (reruns do happen), and give them increased gacha rates. When you pull from the gacha, you are pulling on a specific banner that runs for a limited time. What's notable about Resleri is how fast the banners come out -- every 7 to 10 days, which is faster than industry standard. After a banner, it takes some time for characters/Memoria to be added to the standard gacha pool, so you won't be pulling them for a while if you miss them. You can spark a character any time, however.

Game Flow

To properly address what went wrong and what went right, I need to talk about the overall way you were expected to interact with the game.

As you would expect in a gacha format, the story initially released with three chapters and this was intended to keep the players rather busy for a while, especially as EXP was more scarce at this point.

As you play through the chapters you would fight enemies for random reasons, or you would trudge through a dungeon. These dungeons and some of these 'random' battles (score battles; you would be graded on performance) would be included elsewhere in the game as your primary means of acquiring materials. You would face harder and harder versions of the dungeons and score battles to get better rewards as well as gems for first time clears. Score battles started out with three difficulties, dungeons started with nine.

I will be clear: dungeons suck. They were a waste of real life time. When I say you have to trudge through that, I'm rather literal. You watch the characters walk through the areas, gather materials, and fight five groups of monsters. If you fail, back to watching the same thing. And you had to do this level by level to get to the best rewards. At least, that's how it was for a long time; they did eventually receive QOL updates. Dungeons got a tenth level added for an additional challenge some months after launch and I will forever wonder who thought that was a good idea.

Events associated with banners usually had score battles over dungeons, but they followed the same formula. They charged tickets to attempt the battles, which you would get from normal usage of your stamina everywhere else.

On top of getting better and greater quantities of items, clearing challenging content was important for certain synthesis recipes.

Early on in the game, synthesis mana was an incredibly precious resource. You were allowed to gain 6 over the course of a day -- this was incredibly painful when you consider the rates to get good items. To create any item, you'd need two characters and a final item to impart traits on the item. The traits chosen are random, but your chance of a rank V trait grow with more character stars and with your in game rank.

And this was more or less the state of the game at the beginning.

The beginning

When the game released in JP, it was a rough start. The most obvious problem is that they grossly overcharged for pulls (6000 Yen for a 10 pull). But there was more -- stuff global similarly never got to see.

Resleri is a team building game, but you were absolutely punished for experimenting with your team, as there was no way to reset the resources you invested into a character and put those elsewhere. This meant you were committed to any poor team building choices you made. As an example, it's very easy to believe Keithgriff and Raze are decent breakers because they are 3 star characters. Surprise, your 1 and 2 star breakers, Marion, Escha, and Shalistera, are far superior. You can imagine lots of JP players sticking it out with suboptimal teams.

On top of that, there was no ability to spark characters, making it much harder to finish teams. And during this rough launch period, the first event wasn't that good with a rough difficulty, lack of story, and underwhelming reward.

If there is one thing I will say about Gust, it's that they are receptive to feedback. They don't always take the lessons I'd like them to take from feedback, but they ARE listening and have a long history of doing so. (This includes the international community; I encourage you to answer their surveys after each game's release.) About two weeks into the game they addressed the major issues players had. And in the following weeks, they continued to address some of the nagging issues; losing in dungeons stopped consuming your stamina, you got a warning when exceeded the level cap, UI elements got resized, and so on.

Thank you to our JP beta testers for going through this pain so global didn't have to. Questionable why the game launched in that state though.

As a footnote to all this, they ran a JP ad that more or less treated the player as a wallet, and this understandably caused a stink. The JP Discord server had emote reactions enabled on announcement posts; a number of reactions were ATMs and poo emoji. They disabled this feature after the controversy.

The problems that global still saw

Despite all the changes made before global launched, there were still some issues that we saw. First, the monetization of the game was still poor. Obviously, the game has to make money somehow. There were two methods available -- you could watch ads for some gems and stamina (this feature never made it to Steam due to platform rules), or you could buy a variety of gem packs. Gems could be used to pull on the gacha, or you could buy other small things with them. The value of these other things is quite limited. At launch, I bought a stamina and XP pack for a couple bucks. That was really the only spending option I felt viable -- everything else was for higher spenders. Low spenders didn't have anything good to grab, and this issue remained for a long, long time.

There was this campaign early on that wanted you to exchange referral codes with other players to receive gems. The max reward would apply when five people added you. Problem: you can only input one code. The best way to guarantee you got one person to add you would be to arrange a three-way trade (you cannot add the code of someone that added yours). As someone that ran a Discord during the global launch of Resleri, it encouraged terrible behavior. People would go everywhere they could -- the middle of my Discord's discussions, Steam discussions, Reddit, the official Resleri Discord -- drop their code regardless of what the rules were or how rude it was, and leave. AND THEY RERAN THIS SHITTY EVENT LATER. Yeah, I'm bitter.

Finally, their community management SUCKED. They heavily pushed their official Discords, even giving gems for joining. They operated under the idea that they could offend nobody if they never said anything. Discord was treated as a direct line to deliver game news to you and nothing more. There was ZERO community engagement.

In the NA and EU Koei Tecmo servers the community managers will talk to you sometimes! They'll answer inquiries and sometimes forward issues. That's more along the lines of what I'd expect from a Discord server. Resleri is just silence. And the moderation was nearly nonexistent. You can tell they only did anything when the staff was clocked in, and they took no volunteer mods to help. Spam would remain up for days no matter how much you reported it, and there were some really, really gross people there that went unchallenged.

Unmoderated hellscapes are a great look, Koei Tecmo, good job!

For a fun side note, the global Discord closed recently, and can you guess what they spammed as they closed the channels one by one?

Mood.

The Half Anniversary to Summer

After the rough beginning, the quality of the game was fairly stable and in a decent place, if rather fast with its banners. Quality of life upgrades kept coming in, more content was added, characters from after the launch pool became sparkable, the base gacha pool was finally adding more characters, the difficulty was still tuned fairly well, battle turn panels went from random to fixed, and the PC version finally launched. And, yes, global launched during this period, starting the tradition of 'global got QOL upgrades sooner than JP did'.

We reach the Half Anniversary -- and the game looked damn good at the time.

• The first pass for small spenders -- gave extra mana, stamina, cole, and EXP.
• They were still adding good QOL updates (reducing mats needed for some recipes, reducing score battles from three difficulties to two, more skippable animations).
• The story was popping the fuck off.
• There was a pretty good selector gacha (spend money to get two characters of your choice).
• Leader skills were added to characters, breathing life into some crappy characters (Elie, Judie) and making strong ones stronger (Izana).
• You could finally use a character and their alts in the same party.
• Emblems were added as extra goals/bonuses to attain.
• Simple synthesis was added, making the new player experience a little better. (It was still not that great.)
• Max mana was increased from 6 to 10 and recovered every hour instead of every five hours.
• Older events became available again as "revival" events, meaning you could pick up the exclusive items and watch the stories again, as well as try new challenges.

The future of the game was looking pretty good at this point.

Gust absolutely seized the moment. Immediately after this we had a month long, high quality event, Resleriana Academy. I'm talking a special OP and ED, a decent three part event story, Femsterk, strong characters, everything the fans could have asked for. There was truly no better time to be playing this game.

Then the event ended. We see they ran out of steam.

I realize Academy is a tough act to follow. I was expecting something worse than it. But we got Onsen, where you'd think they'd have fun with fanservice here. As there was no story to this event, the effort level was pretty low; there was nothing to it other than an excuse to see Klaudia's armpits. (She was a very strong character at least.) Though, they at least did let you do dungeons out of order around this point. Before you had to clear every slow dungeon in order; after this point you could go straight to level IX if you wanted. Dungeons are suffering, just trust me that this was big.

After this was Chapter 12, which was honestly fine. Then we had an underwhelming no story Atelier 27th Anniversary event. Thus, immediately following the absolute peak period of the game, we had some of the most underwhelming content. And it never quite recovered from this, though it isn't all bad ahead. Chapter 13 landed, the Bride event was fine, the Dusk event immediately after it sucked, and then it was followed by Chapter 14. Story updates are always solid.

Fun fact: the first Halloween banner was skipped on global. Best guess on why is because there was an item that was way too good for being so early. By this period, the Halloween items are mostly outclassed. So the event was inserted between Chapter 12 and the 27th Annivesary; I'd call that a good thing, honestly.

Now we're at the next major event -- the four part Atelier Summer. Straight up, it was not as good as the Half Anniversary to Academy arc. But it was a higher effort project than they'd been pushing out, and it brought some big changes.

• More gems were handed out as login bonuses and weekly missions.
• You were allowed to "focus" a character or Memoria of your choice on a banner -- they'd have a 1% chance of appearing. (Yes, non-gacha players, this was nice.)
• You can now spark Memoria. This costs 200 Legend Medals instead of the 150 a character would cost, and it was only available while the banner was still going.
• The free daily pull was removed because more gems were added. Instead, they distributed 10 tickets as a login bonus -- this was either a first day bonus or a fifth day bonus.

The end of Summer presented a problem -- the most disgusting power creep Memoria they could have released. It was, bar none, the best Memoria in the game. The ability to spark Memoria at this point was not at all coincidental. They know what they did. It was also the first banner that only released a Memoria. Until this point, the banners were generally two characters and a Memoria, or two Memoria and a character.

Fun(?) fact: When Summer ran on global, there was a part of the event where you were supposed to turn in items for some rewards. The type of item was supposed to change daily, but whoever was running global never bothered. Very lazy, but I am glad I did not have to change my items and could keep reusing the same Bolt themed ones.

There is something during this period, however, I left out.

Roman Tournament

Shortly after Academy, the Roman Tournament was introduced. This is a competitive event in which players would compete to deal the most damage within 40 turns. After the tournament finished, they'd run another featuring enemies of a different element. Initially, this was for one week each, but this was adjusted to two weeks later on. The intent, I assume, was to get you to use on-element attackers to clear the content. They did not go nearly far enough to enforce that.

This was a turning point for monetization.

Tournament introduced a major incentive to whale -- to rank higher than everyone else. This could involve really degenerate Memoria setups. A normal F2P or low spend player might have a single copy of a Memoria. They will, without further thought, level that Memoria to 30 and get the max stats off of it. A whale might have multiple copies of that Memoria, in part to set it to a desired level for the tournament. The primary reason to do this? Specific speed values. Speed tuning is huge in Resleri combat, and the best players plan every single turn in the Roman Tournament. Right down to RNG elements such as "I need to roll a crit on this turn" and "Resna needs to get hit on this turn".

It shapes a lot of the decisions that happen ahead of it -- suddenly, that stupid Summer Memoria and the reason you could suddenly spark it makes sense. There were other things. Armpits Klaudia was actually great both in standard content and in the tournament. There was a strong bolt Memoria released during the bolt tournament. I can't say I entirely begrudge them their money making attempts, but this did eventually spiral.

The First Anniversary

After Summer, we essentially get tons and tons of story events surrounding and celebrating the first anniversary. That is, Chapters 15 through 19 without any interruptions. Some of the chapters were released in two parts, but this is still quite a lot of story. And it is actually GOOD. If there is one thing I will never gripe about, it's the story.

There is, however, a significant management shakeup happening here. After Chapter 15, the codeveloper of Resleri, Akatsuki Games, stepped away, making Koei Tecmo solely responsible from that point forward. It's difficult to say how that affected the game. I'm not a fly on the wall, I don't know who was calling the shots, what advice was given, or who made what. I will comment on the quality of the game and you can draw your own conclusions. If you want to pursue the Akatsuki rabbit hole further, I will lazily point you toward Tribe Nine; I heard it had quite a troubled launch.

Here are the key features during this time period:

• A pass that gives you gems daily, totaling a 10 pull (3000 gems) over a month, plus 200 paid gems. A long overdue low spend option, crazy this didn't exist on launch.
• Tons and tons of gems as login bonuses, in celebration.
• Dungeon materials were added to score battles. Dungeons were to be entirely removed two months after this, and renewed at a later date. Dungeons still have not returned.
• Easy and Very Easy were added as difficulty options, which is excellent for the new and casual player experience.
• Events in which you can interact with the characters.
• Story gacha can be drawn for 72 hours after finishing the relevant chapter.
• Massive updates to the equipment menu. Items could be equipped to multiple characters at the same time, as long as they were not in the same party. This meant far less gear swapping.
• Mana was increased from 10 to 20, and bottled mana were added so you didn't have to spend all the mana you received immediately.
• The second selector gacha where you could spend to get two characters of your choice.
• A new way of acquiring character pieces was added. You could simply buy the pieces with paid gems after pulling the character. This would only be available for three days. Later, some free gems became available, but for a very limited time -- not even the full duration of the banner. FOMO.

Additionally, a side game, Resleri RW, was announced. To this day, we still have not seen more than a teaser. This was still showing crazy confidence in the game.

Though the story was strong as ever, the gameplay had been lagging behind for a while. There was a brief segment where the game was a touch too hard -- they got the feedback that the players weren't keeping up, backed off, and they weren't making any waves in the meta. The non-tournament meta was to build a team around Izana, Academy Resna, or Exodia your way into a full Ryza/Klaudia team. You will easily bonk most content with these teams. What's notable about these team comps is that they tend to feature one attacker and an entire support squad. The defenders and breakers that could keep up were those that functioned like support units -- they increased damage. Though breakers were powerful during the launch state of the game, enemy stun gauges inflated so high that it was very difficult for breakers to break enemies, meaning few of them were useful.

There were a handful of good characters released around the First Anniversary. Saskia, Sophie, Ayesha... But one character stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Awakened Resna is the beginning of the end. She was a giant mistake. Her power was so incredible she invalidated every attacker that wasn't an AOE specialist -- and she was better than them too! There was no undoing this unprecedented power creep. The banners immediately following her were, frankly, underwhelming comparatively. The kits did not hold up, and several outfits were underwhelming "1.5" versions of their standard ones.

Also, the Roman Tournament? All Resna.

The Present

Thus begins the era JP is in right now -- whale bait and power creep. Before I get into the weeds, let's go over the standard game changes.

• Bulk synthesis is the biggest improvement.
• The level cap was raised to 100 through very limited, non-refundable resources.
• Some recipes would enjoy boosted rank V trait rates. This would rotate periodically.
• Rental parties were added for certain challenging content, reducing the need to have all the units.
• A high difficulty, competitive Legend Challenge was added to events.
• Another pass was added, which allows you to buy a few specific Memoria.
• Enemies take more damage when stunned.
• A new method of acquring non-gacha Memoria copies. They'd give you one copy for clearing the event, and the other copies had to be earned. Some through the event shop, some through doing various things in the gacha (such as pulling everything on the banner). The Memoria this applies to is crappy, but I can't say I'm a fan of added gacha pressure.

The power creep begins by releasing what I like to refer to as the Lara simps -- new characters belonging to the Lara Kingdom. These characters are stupid. They are damn good and can actually compete. And after that we get quite a number of very strong characters. Let's talk about a specific few characters that spilled through the floodgates -- Magda, Criselda, and Lara. What do they share in common? They're breakers!

The state of breakers being near useless earlier? We are now in a breaker meta. On top of boosting damage, they simply made two of our newest breakers auto break enemies. We're also firmly in the era of 'skills have paragraphs of effects to read', which accounts Lara's power.

For game content, one of my theories is that they ran out of time for Halloween (which happened around Chapter 19) and released it as a Memoria only banner. The characters depicted on that Memoria -- Firis and Ilmeria -- would have had partially done assets at the time. This was later completed and released months later in a different event. I'll just show the pictures and you can decide if you agree.

A number of events released with no story, such as the second Salburg and New Year's. Valentine's did have a multipart story, but it was odd in a idfferent way. Last time, we got a clearly on-theme maid Escha. This time, we get Plachta and Klaudia. In their Sophie 2 and Ryza 3 designs. If that wasn't lazy enough, the next banner as of this writing will be Ryza in her Ryza 3 outfit. I'm... not impressed. And y'all. I have the hots for Klaudia. That Klaudia specifically. But I ain't about lazy outfits. Something is busted in their dev pipeline, has been for a while. Another notable thing is that a lot of these banners are single character banners; they used to do a lot more two character banners.

Upping the ante as much as they have with character power has absolutely ballooned top scores in the Roman Tournament, and it's clear with the Legend challenges that they seek to expand the competitiveness of the game. When it comes to characters -- whales will more than likely get what they need for the hardcore content. The story is different for Memoria. Even whales will not get all the Memoria they want, and I have a most egregious example. Remember the Summer Memoria that outclassed everything in the game? It made a 'mistake': any attacker can use it. That's not very cash money of you.

This 'problem' was corrected with a set of SEVEN Memoria, one per element. These Memoria were immediately thrown into the general gacha pool, making them hard to get. Then they followed this up with an aggressive banner to squeeze whales out of their cash to get guaranteed random(!) ones. You could whale the hell outta this and not get what you wanted.

Frankly, you gotta respect your whales. You make the content and they will come. Squeezing, FOMO, and power creep will only work until they get fed up and quit.

We're headed into the 1.5 Anniversary, and the main story is still consistent as ever. My positive outlook ends there. Outfits and banners are getting lazy. Only formulaic, combat-centric content is released with every event. They're making every attempt at getting you to buy Memoria.

What Went Wrong

I can only answer this from the perspective of someone who knows Resleri. I don't quite know what global gacha players expect, and neither can I comment on why the Japanese market is more receptive. I don't play gacha other than Resleri. I barely even engaged with Atelier Online, may its localizer Boltrend rest in piss.

Some people will think the biggest mistake is that the game made the core fanbase mad by being a mainline game. I don't think the mainline status of the game changes much about who would enjoy the game, it just changes how the core fanbase talks about it. And, yeah, it got undeserved negative attention for that reason.

Resleri is a hardcore game. This is nice for your whales and invested players, but it leaves casuals and newer players in the dust. A good example of this is that it took an entire YEAR to add easier difficulty options to the story. The game's content can be hard. Resleri is a team builder, you do in fact need a variety of units to clear content, and you need a decent grasp on gear. Even when the meta got stale you might have reason to bust out a different defender. Rental teams were introduced to some battles to help reduce the team building requirement, but that still means figuring out the intended solutions.

Most of the content in the game appeals to hardcore people. The elemental towers, where you are forced to use everything in your box? It's fun! It's challenging. It rewards you with cool recipes. Do casuals care? Every story update gives you a set of challenging (in theory) battles. Every event does the same. When events get their revivals, they come with more challenging battles. Just about everything in Resleri is a score battle of some sort.

This is a problem. I think Summer in particular was a huge missed opportunity. It had a special home screen and everything, but there wasn't any content to truly shake up the monotony of constant combat. Just very shallow attempts and lots of timers to get more resources. There weren't any engaging minigames. The best we got, which Resleri loved reusing, was just submitting items according to certain criteria (traits, type of item, etc.) for some rewards. The animations were cute, at least.

Content is just coming out too fast. No time to let the game breathe, no time to plan out your events properly -- or in some cases, your character kits. Gotta shove some battles in and hope people want to pay for the banner. We absolutely did see some banners and events suffer for this hard schedule. I'd kind of feel better about "we're taking a break" over "have this event with no story" or "here's a banner with only a Memoria". Nope, gotta make money. Not like I don't understand that perspective, but your method ain't working, KT. You do not need to push out a banner every 7 to 10 days.

Which of course leads to a rather obvious problem -- monetization. We know whales keep the game running, but you can't underestimate the value of those 5 dollar a month options. Let the minnows spend; it took far too long for GOOD budget options to appear. (Yes there were trashy ones.) Character selectors are neat, but those appear about every half year.

The most pressing point with monetization is Memoria. While you can reset characters, except for the items you use to get to level 100, you cannot reset Memoria at all. This is the problem. Again, you need five copies of a Memoria to get the max effect. But you also need to level your Memoria to 30 for the max stat bonus. Without resets, five copies is not enough to be competitive. To hit certain speed values, to see specific turn orders, you may need some Memoria at strange levels. This is the single biggest problem the game is facing. If you aren't richer than god, it's hard to justify pulling 10+ copies. The whales are fatigued.

I've also mentioned the noob experience a few times. Fact is, it's hard to catch up on a newer account. You're basically screwed on any Memoria that released before you started and it takes a while to get your character levels to match the current content. Event recipes are also limited time, so it's very possible you just missed something rather good and have to wait for the event to come back (though by that point it likely got power crept). Rerolling is nicer than at the start, at least, and the easier difficulties are nice. But onboarding remains rough.

This final point is more fundamental and game changing. If Resleri had real exploration rather than the 'on rails' dungeon style, I think this game could have knocked it outta the park.

Global jumped off a sinking ship. But I'm still sad about it.