## 2025-11-02 **Duet Night Abyss** is such an interesting game to me. Originally conceived as a gacha game — which we all know I’m [[The Push and Pull of Gacha Games|a huge fan of]] — it ended up pivoting, changing to a **Warframe**-like grinding system to unlock characters instead. I had not heard of the game before I learned about this shift, but it immediately put the game on my radar. I know I was being played to some extent. The devs probably realized that they were about to drown in an overly-competitive market like I would in EVO pools. Subsequently, I assume they made this switch to stand out, and stand out they did. But I don’t care that I’m being played. Let them play me! If you remove your gacha from your game, I will check it out. About 15~ hours later, what I’ve found is a game that is worth a look, with some caveats. I think the most shocking thing about **DNA** to me is how engaging I’ve found the story to be. It’s no Shakespeare, nor is it the videogame equivalent of Shakespeare, [[Nine Sols is a Masterpiece|Nine Sols]]. But! It’s well-paced and somewhat intriguing. Given this is a former gacha, I fully expected it to have a plot similar to those games: namely, filled to the brim with bloated dialogue and too many Proper Nouns. **DNA** is merciful in this regard, thank *God*. The premise is simple, which lets you focus on the characters, which are all cute or interesting in their own way. For a 1.0 story, it’s pretty good! Especially the second chapter, which had me on the edge of my seat wondering what would happen next. **Duet** didn’t just take **Warframe**’s character and weapon unlocking system — it basically stole that game’s whole flow, to an extent. It has the bullet jump. It has the mods. It has gun floating. It has the simplistic melee combat. So far so good. What it doesn’t have is **Warframe**’s complexity. As of writing, characters have one skill and one ult, and a few passives to consider. There isn’t 10 years worth of content to run your newly unlocked characters through, and it isn’t quite as polished. If you were looking for an anime replacement to Digital Extreme’s seminal game — or as I like to affectionately refer to it, **Weebframe** — you won’t find it here. At least not yet. But that lack of complexity works in my favor, personally. **Warframe** is impenetrable to me with its myriad systems and progression tracks and scattered plot. **Duet Night Abyss** is a fresh start, and its simplicity has made it easy to get cozy with it. I doubt things will stay that way, as any long-term, live-service game will always add layers with time. But for now I’m happy to just make the numbers go up a couple of hours a day. The unlock system is probably the best part of the game. Once you start nearing the end of 1.0, you can begin to grind for characters and weapons. This basically requires you to spend tickets to run missions over and over again to get shards of a character until you get 30 total to unlock them. Reading this and not getting it will make me undoubtedly sound like an insane person. But I love a good [[Podcast Games|podcast game]]. Each mission takes about a minute, and I’ve gotten the two characters I wanted to unlock in 20~ runs. You can keep going for dupes to further build a character’s strength, but I want to find a favorite before I commit to that level of grind. Plus, I’d take grinding missions for half an hour to get a character over pulling a slot mission a million times to get them any goddamn day. You can also just buy a character outright, but that costs $50 so I wouldn’t recommend it. Yet *even then*, that’s *still* cheaper than pulling for them in a gacha. How did we ever let things go this far, chat? We gotta take care of that. *However*! This game’s biggest con is that it still has a gacha, specifically to get character costumes. This sucks and I hate it. It’s easier to ignore because a costume is so different from a character that can fundamentally change / improve how you play the game. But a bad system is a bad system, and I won’t be playing that game. Just let me buy a costume outright in **Warframe**. I’ll do it! My dumbass went crazy with Loba skins in **Apex Legends**, and that’s a first-person shooter where I rarely ever saw it! I’m not smart with my money when I know I’m not being swindled! That caveat aside, I’m quite enjoying **Duet Night Abyss**. I’m curious to see where it goes once I truly start to hit endgame, which is when a game of this type usually begins to show any real mechanical flaws. But as of now, logging on for an hour or two a day to mow down monsters and level up All of the Everything has been a pleasant time. Fuck gacha, all my homies hate gacha.