After seven long years, I think it's finally time.

I've been checked out for long enough. Lately, it feels like the game just wants to demand too much of my time in order to play it. I don't know how I can have a full team of maxed-out bonus units and still need two full weeks to finish the EP on a farming event. Or put parties together for the slew of time-limited equipment/crown events we get every week. CoW can be fun but I don't have the time or energy to do it anymore (especially now that they're recycling bosses, yawn). Same with Dark Visions. Pulling is miserable, with how diluted the NV pool is. I used to spend EX tickets as soon as I got them, now I've just been stockpiling them because what's the point unless they give us a rate up (which it sounds like isn't coming with NV in JP).

This latest Facebook fiasco did me in. Not out of annoyance or frustration, it was just too good of a vacation. I've been doing dailies since coming back, but now that I've got my compensation I think I'm ready to leave. I always thought I'd rage-quit when I ran out of resources trying to pull some top-dog unit, but it turns out I was too conservative for that to ever happen. So instead I'm leaving with enough lapis in the bank to pity several units (less if they're premium) if and when I ever return, which I'm pretty sure I won't. This is definitely the last gacha I ever play.

Some highlights for me:

• Fusing my Magitek Terra into regular Terra back before I knew what gacha was or how collecting was supposed to work
• Failing to pull Gilgamesh and Onion Knight despite spending over $100 on each. Then nearly quitting back when Noctis was released and I couldn't pull him. Burned all of my tickets in frustration, ready to close the game forever, only to have to him pop out of a rainbow. Last 7 years could've been very different for me if that hadn't happened. That little guy carried my team for the longest time, with his huge bag of tricks. They sure don't make units like that anymore.
• Creating the original FFBE Oddsbitch, which I think was instrumental in educating a lot of folks about just how badly the odds are against you in this game
• Running the gacha surveys in the main sub for about a year, including writing a cloud service that did image recognition on screenshots to automate the process for everyone
  • We were able to catch Gumi with their hand in the cookie jar, when they secretly gave us reduced rates on 4* -> 5* upgrades on the 4*-min tickets vs JP. (They even begrudgingly admitted to it when they finally redid the rates.)
    • If I can leave y'all with one lesson, it's to never, ever, ever, give Gumi the benefit of the doubt. Ever. They are running a casino. They are not your friend, however much they'd like you to believe you are.
• I wrote some blues songs about FFBE, you can search the main sub for them if you're curious.

​

All that said, allow me to leave you with some final thoughts I've been working on.

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Fat Chocobo has turned me into a bully.

Every morning I get up, sit on the toilet, pull out my phone and open up FFBE. I collect my login rewards, do daily summons, send gifts and the like. And usually the first thing I do when I'm done with all of that is go and beat the everloving shit out of this monstrous bird and take his fragments, which themselves represent mere pennies towards upgrading my units.

And if he doesn't give me what I'm looking for? I quit the battle and do it again.

"Who's going to take the challenge today?" he murmurs plaintively, in pathetic denial of how the next few seconds will go for him.

I don't even take any specific action. One of my frenzied units carves him up from beak to tailfeathers before his imaginary "challenge" can even commence.

"Kweeeh! That was a good workout," he bleats, blood spurting from his nostrils. I check what he has left me. "Not enough," I mutter quietly, shaking my head. Quit and start over. Again, my unit slices him wide open, bird guts spewing forth like lava from a volcano. "Kweeeh! That was a good workout." I shake my head. Again. And again. Finally, I peer into the bag he has left me and I see it. Seven shiny little tokens. Sometimes more. Nearly worthless, but they're there. "We're good," I muse. My units depart, leaving his mangled corpse behind to decay on the grass, I imagine, fluids slowly draining into the soil. And then we rest. But it's a short reprieve until tomorrow.

I hate him. I hate his bloated, carnival prize body. I hate the dumb LARP-ing costume that he wears. He's a fat, ugly nerd that I mercilessly torment every day before school. I hate myself for what he has turned me into. But I still hate him more.

I wonder, does he even realize what it is I want from him, that I demand from him, up there in that tiny, bruised and battered bird-brain of his. Surely he doesn't, or he would relent on the first try, rather than willingly suffer this endless torment. No matter. Nothing matters. He will bleed, until I get what I came for. And then tomorrow he will bleed again.

I'm not proud. My wife and children, they don't know this ritual. I could never tell them. They wouldn't understand. I'm not certain I do.

Sometimes I make up excuses. He wouldn't show up like this every day, again and again, if he wasn't okay with being constantly pulverized into ground turkey. He must want it, on some level. But I know he's too stupid for that. Animals don't think about the consequences of their actions. They just chase their impulses. And his impulse is to die, by my hand, over and over again, so that I can be closer to perfecting my units by an amount so small that it may as well be a rounding error. Or maybe his costume is real, and he's actually royalty. Inbreeding would certainly go a long way towards explaining his idiocy.

"Kweeeh! That was a good workout." His dying warble echoes in my brain. A sad creature too profoundly stupid to even process what's happened to him for the umpteenth time. He deserves his fate, I tell myself, to be snuffed out of existence, only to be endlessly reborn and snuffed out again.

I want to scream. I want to grab him by the Spirit Halloween ruff around his neck and scream into his face. "Don't you understand, you idiot bird, we don't have to do this. You can just give the shards. Give me seven of them. I know you have them. WE DON'T HAVE TO DO THIS". I can't even tell if he can see me from beneath his squinted eyelids. He just stiffens in my grasp, breathing laboriously under his layers of duck fat. "Who's going to take the challenge today?" he finally squawks out in bewilderment, and I release him, sobbing. I take a moment to collect myself. I breathe. Outside, the sun is rising and new light is spilling onto the grass. I proceed to murder him, again and again, my ears deaf to his cries of pain and misery, until I have what I want from him.

I stand up, flush the toilet, and get on with my day.