With All These Complaints About Hoyoverse Games, I Want to Take the Opportunity to Recommend a Gacha Game that does Female Representation Well (Reverse 1999)

Over the last week I’ve seen a ton of posts complaining about ZZZ and Hoyoverse games in general (Genshin, Honkai Impact & Star Rail), specifically about the sexualization of female characters and especially minors, as well as the online communities surrounding those games.

This made me want to talk about my current favorite Gacha Game, Reverse 1999, as both a positive entry in the genre, as well as proof that you can absolutely make a Gacha Game as a Chinese developer without sexualizing the heck out of every female character.

Setting

Reverse 1999 is an alternate history setting where magic wielding Arcanists have been openly living (and frequently clashing with) humanity for basically all of history. In 1999 the world started periodically reverting backwards in time and as the main character Vertin and her companions you various different places and eras in an effort to find the cause of the phenomenon, while clashing with different groups also seeking to stop or take advantage of the phenomenon.

Costumes

Everyone in this game is fucking fabulous. I mean, just look at the picture above or this character list. With game being a globe- and time-trotting adventure, everyone’s period appropriate clothes usually take center stage and are treated as just as important as the characters themselves, and the game never lets sexualization get in the way of that. (Looking at you, “90% of female characters wear these nonsensical detachable arm sleeves so their clothes don’t get in the way of masturbating to their armpits”, Genshin Impact)

While there absolutely still are skimpy, sexy characters like Blonney, they’re a clear minority and generally restricted to people where it feels in character. For example, Blonney in particular first got introduced during last year’s campy Halloween event, as the “mean slut who dies first” archetype, though much like everything else in that event she things turned out quite differently from first impression and I really like her as a character.

Like, it’s still a gacha game and sex sells obviously, but unlike Mihoyo, the R1999’s developer Bluepoch doesn’t seem to be willing to compromise their own characters just to make them a bit sexier and show a bit more skin and that’s such a refreshing change of pace.

Characters

In general I like the character writing in R1999 quite a bit more compared to Hoyoverse games. Don’t get me wrong, there are Mihoyo characters I absolutely adore, and Kiana, Mei, Bronya and Hua from HI3rd especially will forever remain among my absolute faves, but at the same time a lot of Hoyo’s character writing really formulaic, like a lot of the time they just started out with a concept like “hot lady knight” and went on from there.

Especially in their newer games they also tend to sanitize morally gray characters lot, as to not let their dark aspects get into the way of sales.

Meanwhile Reverse 1999 seems to take a diametrically opposite approach in this regard. The characters tend to feel a lot more raw. A lot of them are morally gray, creepy, or just plain weird in some way and I love them all the more for it. The game definitely isn’t shy about dealing with some pretty heavy themes like war, death, childhood trauma, abuse and mental illness either.

Oh, and I should mention that it’s really nice that the protagonist Vertin is a full character with her own motives and in-universe backstory, rather than just a blank slate for people to project onto, which is definitely a plus.

Representation

While Reverse 1999 doesn’t have any confirmed queer couples beyond the “wink wink, nudge nudge” we’ve seen from games like Genshin Impact and Star Rail, several female characters have openly and pretty unmistakably expressed crushes on other women. And when the game makes a butch character, they make a BUTCH character. (That’s an official promotional video btw)

Sadly no gay men yet AFAIK, but we have a canon non binary character who uses they/them pronouns.

As for racial representation, there still seems to be a bit of a bias towards fair skinned characters, though, the two Indian, one Mexican and one Hawaian characters we’ve met so far seem to have appropriate skin colors. For everyone I can judge they also seem to have put in a lot of effort to have the voice actors do the proper accents. The voice acting in the game is pretty phenomenal on general.

I also like that for the most part developers have for the most part avoided just playing into cultural stereotypes. For example, the first Indian woman from the game happens to be not some Indian stereotype or deiety, but a passionate astronomer and astrologist who got kicked out of university after she was discovered to be an arcanist

Basically, when you meet a new character from a new region of the world, they always feel like just some person with their own unique traits and identity who happens to come from that region, rather than someone who is supposed to represent that region in its entirety. None of them feel like token representation.

Sexualization of minors

Thankfully there’s basically none of that to be found here. In fact, Reverse 1999 notably doesn’t just allow kids to be kids, it also allows teenagers to be teenagers.

Hoyoverse games tend to have that kind of weird and slightly uncomfortable thing where at somewhere between 10 and 14 years old, characters suddenly jump from “loli archetype” kids (i.e. Klee) to “ambiguously adult” (i.e. Noelle, Fischl), with all the responsibilities, independence and sexualization that entails. I had honestly grown desensitized to it ovrr time, but it was such a nice change of pace when I noticed that R1999 would regularly have characters who are in their mid-teens but still clearly treated as the children they are by the narrative and artwork, rather than ambiguous adults whom it’s okay to lust after.

As an example, the latest characterMarcus is 17 years old, which in a lot of gacha games would probably mean she’s old enough to be the CEO of her own company, yet here her story arc is 100% a teenage coming of age story and she’s incredibly precious. (Yes, Marcus is a girl’s name, apparently. No, this doesn’t get addressed. The game is kind of like that sometimes.)

Community

Disclaimer, I only tend to play the game sporadically every now and again and I also tend to stay away from the places with the most community drama, so I might have missed something, but so far, at least here on reddit, I’ve pretty much only had positive experiences with the R1999 community. For example I’ve experienced r/R1999 as the kind of place where people can and will have discussions about characters’ sexualities and lgbtq identities without it immediately turning into a giant clusterfuck, like it seems to happen literally every single time the topic comes in the genshin impact or honkai impact subreddits.

There also seems to be a general consensus to not lewd the children and to keep it back with the older teenagers, which should of course be a given, but here we are.

Gacha

This doesn’t really affect the topic of if the game is respectful towards women, but I just wanted to mention that out of all the gacha games I’ve played, R1999 has felt by far the most fair as a F2P player.

The character gacha works pretty much as expected in terms of pull chances and pity, but there’s no weapon or artifact gacha at all, meaning unless you’re going for Portraits (aka Duplicates/Constellations) you never have to split your gacha resources between getting new characters and making you existing characters stronger. The game will typically offer a character’s best in slot Psychube (aka weapon) as an earnable reward during their story event and otherwise it (or a good alternative) can be bought with resources at the shop. Everything else is just upgrades with materials you get from dailies, crafting and events. Upgrading a character fully can still take a bit of time, but doesn’t feel remotely as frustrating as in most other games I’ve played.
Also, the game has recently started reruns of old limited time story events, which is really great in case you missed something.

Conclusion

If you’re playing Mihoyo games primarily for the gameplay, unfortunately Reverse 1999 can’t really hold a candle to it. It’s basically a visual novel with mildly challenging and fun-if-you’re-the-type-for-it card based battle stages.

However, if you’re primarily in it for the characters and story and are tired of Mihoyo constantly compromising their female characers’ designs, clothing and personalities for sex appeal (including minors) I highly recommend you give the game a try. It definitely holds up in terms of story, art, voice acting and music too.