This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Minh-1987 on 2025-02-09 15:53:59+00:00.
I have been missing this game lately, and there is no better way to relive the memories by shifting through good ol' dramas, of which there are plenty, but I will go through one of the biggest incidents in the game's lifetime.
Also to preface: The majority of the drama happened on Reddit & Discord (same group mostly), Facebook, and the Brave Exvius forums. Since Facebook search is actual garbage and the forums has been down permanently for quite a while so the majority of sourcing will be from reddit.
The Recap
You may have heard of a certain Final Fantasy game with multiple insane pop star and TikToker collabs, and this is the one. Final Fantasy Brave Exvius (FFBE) was a gacha game developed by Gumi released in 2015 and ended service on October 2024. Despite being a gacha game of a beloved franchise usually means the company is banking on nostalgia to milk the playerbase, one of FFBE's main shining point is its original story and characters which gets a lot of love from both the players and the developers (balancing-wise). The game is also known for the challenging battle system which gets so complex & convoluted that players needed to make a list of abbreviations with dozens of entries, or a flowchart/spreadsheet to parse whatever the hell the enemy's doing.
The Gacha & the Crystal Ball
Many should be familiar, but a gacha game is a game where people use premium resources which can be earned in-game or purchased with real money in order to 'pull' for new characters or items. Lootboxes, basically. In FFBE, the premium currency is called Lapis and you only pull for units (characters). Gacha games are sustained by a handful of heavy spenders called 'whales' or 'dolphins', but the majority of the player base is always going to be 'minnows' (small, occasional purchases) or F2Ps (free-to-play a.k.a players who spend zero money).
Gacha games have multiple ways to entice people to spend resources on the shiny new thing. For casual players like fanservice skins or nostalgia baiting. For the hardcore gameplay-focused ones, it's through powercreeping, which is the process of making new units better than the old ones, and eventually requiring you to use new units to even stand a chance at the new content. Of course, the majority of the player base, being minnows or F2Ps, can't pull on every single new unit there is, so they will save up and only pull on a banner that gives the biggest improvement to their team. But to know when to pull would require knowing the future and what level of improvement is good enough...
Coincidentally, there were two versions of FFBE, Japan (JP) and Global (GL). JP is 6 to 10 months ahead of GL in content, and GL usually just port that content over with rarely any changes, so players would know exactly what unit to pull for to get the biggest bang for their buck and would only pull on those banners exclusively. Of course, the GL devs would sneak in a global-exclusive (GLEX) buffs/units or shift the release schedules around a bit to get people to pull outside of those banners, but usually it doesn't affect the popularity of the hyped power spike banners. There are even slogans for those banners, like "Hoard for Hyoh" or "Accumulate for Akstar".
The game also has a group of dataminers running the Wiki who would update the player base with new information like stats or skill parameter the moment the info goes live. New data is usually pushed to the game during maintenance on Thursday (which would get datamined), and the banner for new units go live on Friday, so there is a one-day period where new units would get evaluated to see if it's worth pulling or not. This is especially important for GLEX unit of which people have zero information on as opposed to JP units where all the worthiness is already well known several months in advance.
Speaking of Akstar...
The Swordsman of Legend & Rumors of Easter
It was in July 2018 when Akstar was released as an unit in JP, and he's perfect. Cool one-eyed one-armed one-legged man with katana. Calls the main character a worm and becomes his mentor. Comes with a badass CG animated super attack. And most importantly, he can cook. Also he was a big power spike, easy to gear, easy to combo without external assistance, very self-efficient as he can do all the related offensive buffs and debuffs himself, and the banner was great value for lapis as you are guaranteed to get one after a certain number of pulls. In GL, it has been decided: he was THE unit to pull for. Wallets are closed until his arrival. The Accumulation for Akstar has begun. At that point in time, GL was around 8 months behind JP and just got through the previous big hype banner with Hyoh mentioned above, and having people hoard for over half a year would certainly not be good for business. So Gumi hatched a plan...
On April 2019, a month before Akstar's projected release date, two new GLEX units were announced to celebrate Easter: Esther (damage) and Sylvie (support). Initial reception was pretty lukewarm, mostly because they are complete unknowns compared to the big A-shaped spike that everyone is hoarding for, and at that point GLEX units were pretty hit or miss. Most of the hype was for buffs to old units and some event items, but nothing much for the units themselves.
[Special unit equipment] that are only fully useful for the units they are from? Easiest skip ever. Was kind of eggcited (dammit) for the Easter event but this is a bit of a downer.
Some users are hoping for an excuse to pull but only for petty reasons:
I hope Esther is as strong as Akstar (yeah, right). I'm sure most players will disagree with me but I think Akstar's sprite is so ugly...
There was practically zero hype for the units. But they didn't know...
The Visions of Bunny Domination
It was the Thursday before the Easter banner. The game went under maintenance, and as always the dataminers soon extracted data and laid out everything for all to see.
The two were absolutely fucking broken.
Preliminary calculations showed that Esther would deal double of Akstar's damage. Even if you leave her with mostly zero gear, she would only deal 10% less damage than Akstar. Esther was also very easy to use with very consistent big damage, while you would need to dance around with various different buff skills for Akstar for a while before he gets going. She is also supposedly nearly as good as the next big power spike unit, which is at least another 8 months away. So pull for Esther now and you never have to spend any lapis for a year.
Friendship with Akstar is over, now Esther is my best friend.
Sylvie herself is also no slouch either. She has all the support skills that would be divided into multiple units: heals HP and MP, cures status effects, variety of buffs & debuffs, lets anyone combo... The endgame content bosses at the time were huge on checking your elemental resistance, called elemental tetris bosses, and she basically invalidate that gimmick entirely. AND she can act like a pseudo-tank.
She is too crazy. I don't even think there is a support unit in JP that match what she offers ...
How in the fuck did they look at Sylvie and think that she was a fair and balanced unit? I mean I'm not pissed but holy shit
Apparently folka (best new support unit) wasn't future proof after all.
she is future proof ..but not GLEX proof lol
Now, dear readers, as the gacha-adverse person you are, probably expected the rates to be low or the banner to be expensive, but no. [The banner has the same safety net as usual, the rates are the same as always, and the two aren't time-limited so people who hoard their Select Summon Tickets can instantly get one or both of them 2 weeks after the banner with zero money spent.](https://www.reddit.com/r/FFBraveExvius/comments/bewnen/gl_gac...
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1ilhqma/video_games_final_fantasy_brave_exvius/