Games worth discovering

TapTap Game of the Year 2023 #7: Reverse: 1999 - breaking the gacha game stigma

5K View2023-12-15

During the nearly two years I’ve been at TapTap now, I’d estimate that I’ve played and reviewed dozens of gacha games—maybe even coming up on the triple digits by this point. Some of them have been solid, a few have been pretty great, and most have been money-grabbing trash. But none of them have grabbed me in quite the way that Reverse: 1999 did.

What is it that sets Reverse: 1999 apart? Well, the biggest thing is exactly what keeps players returning to the gacha over and over again: the characters. There are over fifty playable characters to collect, but unlike in most gacha games, the lower-tier characters aren’t always just boring, low-power nobodies. They’re also all showcased via a really lovely art style.

Ready to time travel? Reverse: 1999 is a sci-fi RPG with incredible battles and characters

https://m.taptap.io/post/6095461

Just look at the selection of three-star picks. There’s Alien T, a floating UFO who can tank hits from enemies for you. Or there’s Bette, a silent film-obsessed young woman who wears a Charlie Chaplin-esque curled mustache at all times. Or John Titor, a nerdy girl who carries a bulky old IBM computer with her at all times and who is named after a notorious time traveler urban legend. Or, hey, how about Sputnik? You know, the Russian satellite? Yeah, that’s a three-star character you can pull from the gacha in this game.

And that’s just the three-star characters, and just a few of them. Reverse: 1999 crams so much personality into all of its characters, which makes even the worst gacha pulls less frustrating. It helps, as well, that the game is fairly generous; I’ve been able to make lots of progress and unlock a big crew without putting much money into the game beyond unlocking the seasonal battle pass.

That personality is all carried over to Reverse: 1999’s off-the-wall yet charming story. The game is set in a world where time was never able to progress past 1999 due to a strange anomaly called the Storm, and you have to put together a crew of weirdo time travelers to journey into the past, find the cause of this problem, and stop it. It’s goofy fun boasted by strong translation and some of the best voice acting I’ve ever heard in a free-to-play game.

The final piece anchoring all of Reverse: 1999’s great parts together is a simple but rewarding turn-based combat system. Battles here are resolved using cards that are drawn based on which characters you have in your party. But you can choose to move cards around, putting together pairs to create extra-powerful attacks that can stun or more powerfully damage your opponents. It’s a very elegant battle system, the kind that almost felt too easy at first before I made a little progress and realized just how devious and challenging some of these battles can get.

Reverse: 1999 isn’t the only gacha game that made TapTap’s Game of the Year list this year—stay tuned to see what else made the cut!—but it may be the most surprising pick. I’ll just say this: As someone who plays tons of gacha games for my job, I totally understand anyone who’s bored of or burnt out on this style, or instantly skeptical of any game that uses this kind of system. Reverse: 1999 broke through my personal cynicism towards gacha, though, and I believe it’s worth giving a shot for you too.

Check out the rest of TapTap's Game of the Year 2023 picks at this link, and share your own choices in the comments or by making a post and using the tag #TapTap GOTY 2023.