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I don’t like gatcha games. There is no complicated reason for that, it’s just that, well, first of all, I am a gay man, so there you go. But also, I pretty much always just get bored of them and stops playing them, and it doesn’t take very long for that to happen.

The big exception to that, however, has been Zenless Zone Zero, and they did that by essentially releasing a game that’s the complete opposite of Genshin Impact in every single way. But also, more specifically, would be the character named Banyue, where once again is the complete opposite of everything that you could expect from a gatcha character – and I do mean everything.

Think about it. What does it mean to be a premium agent? Are they the strongest in the meta? How about a young, sometimes very young, voluptuous woman? Well, Banyue isn’t any of that.

As a result, he had what is most likely the weakest launch in the entire game’s history. Though conversely, what results is the single best character to ever come out of a gatcha game. Banyue truly feels like the only time where they didn’t give a fuck about meta performance or banner sales.

He breaks many of the unspoken rules about gatcha games and I think that just makes him all the much cooler.

Banyue plays like no other agent, being the single most difficult to operate, in a genre that glorifies brainrot and easy dopamine. He functions more like a fighting game character than anything else, his main source of damage being his combos that require you to press his EX button at the end of each attack chain – and he has a lot, and I do mean a lot of those.

This attack pattern is unique to him and him alone, being the only agent that uses his energy bar more like a resource than a bonus ability. And when his adrenaline bar fills up, he transitions into his “awakened state” which gives him a whole new set of attacks that when chained manually, combos into the hardest attack in the game.

Learning this character was a nightmare for it’s primarily young, imbecilic audience, whom plays with one hand and jacks off with the other. There was no hand-holding besides an auto-attack function for his awakened state, which would also decrease his damage because fuck you, that’s why. The developers actively forced you to try hard with him.

A release like this has never happened before, not just here, but in all of their gatcha games. Banyue isn’t really a low floor, high ceiling type of character. No, you actively have to learn him well or you’re screwed, which is the kind of ballsy design we don’t see as much of these days, that I absolutely love.

Let’s talk about his design. In gatcha games, you may seem to start to notice some reoccurring archetypes pop up. This can be Lara Croft, maids, a twink boy, an actual child, etc. And then you have this, this glorious 11 foot tall, stainless steel lion man juggling balls in his hands.

In a game like this, most characters tend to follow a very ridged character model to cut back on time and development. Banyue completely blows that out of the fucking water, and is the first to not just look generically cute or sexy. This may have sacrificed mass appeal, resulting in some backlash, but he had a strong cult following from day one, which is far more rewarding.

While most weren’t emptying their wallets for him in droves or anything, to be fair, those who did love him, loved him. And fans of his were flooding social media with memes about him, which shows how much of a favourite he was becoming regardless of his presumed standing in this game’s meta.

This was one of the few cases where people were pulling for a gatcha character directly for fun, which is rare, whom most of the time, usually have a strong meta incentive behind them.

Banyue was getting dragged through the mud, spoken of on YouTube and on Reddit as being trash – but when the banner day finally hit, a hard community divide formed with people calling him the greatest thing to ever happen to this game (such as myself) or just shit. There was no middle ground.

But there were still some people who were going crazy for him, and the fact that the developers made his game-play as hard as it is, and the reward not as crazy insane, showed the risks that they were taking with him. He was a labour of love through and through, and it shines through in every facet of his design.

Banyue is a rare treat, not falling into irrelevancy because his core audience is gonna keep him alive no matter what. And with him now ranking consistency as one of the top fire DPS’s, that is, if you know how to play him right, I think he ended up right where the developers wanted him to be.

He’s a high skill-ceiling character with insane room for mastery, and while that does scare some of the more casual players off, it’s a design stance I can respect.

Banyue is a great showcase of what happens when the developers just do what they want without caring about sales, especially in an industry with immensely high revenue standards, and an emphasis on mass appeal and power creep.

The lion truly did not concern himself.

He’s a character with “low reward”, hard to master game-play, and a design that doesn’t really try to appeal to everybody, but that to me, is a part of the reason why he’s ended up as the best gatcha game character of all time.

...and yes, I bought one of those boob mousepads. If you someday end up with a gatcha waifu, you’re supposed to get one of those boob mousepads of them, it’s tradition at this point.