I was half asleep when I tweeted that out. This blog post is an attempt at unraveling wtf I was on about.
If you're one of the 78 people (??? where did you all come from) who liked that tweet, whatever you thought that tweet was about, you're absolutely right and correct. This blog post is just additional yapping.
One of the staple of gacha games (as a game genre) is that they're Attachment Simulators facilitated by making Numbers Go Up, in that you pour your favour to a character by building them and giving them the best equipment. Arknights kinda buck this trend because the process of building your character is more straightforward, and each stage asks you to be tactical with multiple characters. The gameplay is kind of more puzzle-like, which you don't usually want to do again, than it is a comfortable repeatable grind as in other gachas.
JRPG usually gives you a world that you linearly progress through with a story-explore-battle dynamic. Fire Emblem is also this but it melds the structure differently, in that the explore-battle phase is replaced by a "map" level. It's different enough that sometimes it gets categorized with SRPG instead of its JRPG brethrens. Melding "exploration" into the battles gives it a more rigid structure, encouraging you to think of the characters as units in your army, moreso than a "party member" as in other JRPG.
So what I'm saying is that both Arknights and Fire Emblem are oddballs in their respective genres—in that if you think of a "genre" only as having specific traits, they might fail some criteria one way or other, but they're still undoubtedly part of their genres.
The venn diagram of "JRPG" and "RPG with turn-based single battles" largely overlap, but Fire Emblem lies outside of that. Likewise, the venn diagram of "gacha games" and "grindslop numbers go up" is almost a full circle but Arknights—actually fuck Arknights can be grindslop too. I guess some people like rock farming? I don't though! Why would you put yourself through that. "I wanna max level and M3 all the characters I like" whyyyy okay fine you can still play Arknights like a grindslop.
But it's still true that, in both Fire Emblem and Arknights, instead of seeing each character on their own, you're more encouraged to look a one character as part of a larger whole: each one is a single unit in your army.
Or maybe all these is just woolgathering around the point which is that they both have cute little version of the characters walking around/placed in a grid. I do like seeing my little guy go Atk Range +1.
