What Are *Onmyoji* Players Really Hooked On? | QDaily 2016 Game of the Year

Onmyoji launched a "recall a friend" event on New Year's Day — a remarkably unusual move for a game less than six months old.

1. A Game That Eats Your Liver

On the last day of November, Piko uninstalled Onmyoji, a mobile game she had played for nearly three months. She marked the occasion with a Weibo post: "Did something big today — uninstalled Onmyoji."

For Piko it was a hard, draining decision. In the game she had already hit the level cap of 60 as an "onmyoji," and on top of all the time she had poured in, she had spent more than 30,000 yuan on in-app purchases. Work had grown busier as the year wound down, leaving her no room to spare — but the bigger reason she walked away was that she had "slowly started to feel worn out."

"The grinding really was nonstop, every single day. I even ended up at the hospital to have a stye lanced because I was grinding so hard," she said.

"Grinding" (gān, literally "liver") is a term that caught on among gamers over the past two years. It means pouring huge amounts of time and energy into a game, sometimes through the night. At her worst, Piko slept only three hours a day. What finally broke her was a major update in November: it nerfed certain characters and gear, and made all her grinding and spending feel wasted.

You may never have played the game Piko is talking about, but you have probably seen your WeChat or Weibo feeds flooded with friends showing off SSR cards and "soaking up good luck." Onmyoji is a turn-based card RPG for mobile, set in Japan's Heian period and released by NetEase in September 2016. Its anime aesthetic, gorgeous art and character design, voice work by well-known Japanese actors, and easy-to-learn controls all helped make it the most popular and talked-about Chinese-made mobile game of 2016.

The game launched on the App Store on September 2. In under two months, NetEase announced it had reached 10 million daily active users. According to App Annie data from last October, Onmyoji ranked first in global iOS revenue that month, and it still sits in the top three on China's top-grossing chart.

But Onmyoji has drawn steady criticism since launch: its structure borrows heavily from the Korean mobile game Summoners War; the overall progression has been deliberately stretched out; the gacha has no pity system; some events are poorly designed; and the grind — the endless repetitive farming — is genuinely tedious and exhausting.

Piko's experience may strike a chord with many Onmyoji players: they know every one of its tricks, and stay hopelessly hooked anyway.

2. "If You Want to Get Stronger, Put in the Work"

At odds with her Lolita fashion and love of all things cute, Piko's favorite part of the game was "dueling" — one-on-one combat against other players.

In real life, Piko is intensely girlish: she loves decorative tape and sticker journaling, keeps Disney plush toys piled around her apartment, and has seven cats. But in the game's virtual world she is fiercely competitive, and laughs at herself for being "way too serious about it."

"This game really does demand time, money, and brainpower — you can't skip any of the three." Leveling up shikigami and farming good omitama (the game's equipment) were both prerequisites for breaking into the server's top 50 duelers. Piko once took a shikigami to six stars in five days, on three hours of sleep a night.

But every duel she won brought a rush of pride and optimism. Looking back on that most passionate stretch, Piko never once stopped to ask why she was pushing so hard for Onmyoji. All she felt was: "I was just happy."

Qian Di downloaded Onmyoji at the end of September and then spun out of control.

The last game to grip her like this was the PC title JX Online 3, but once she graduated and started working she went AFK (Away From Keyboard) for good. "Something like JX3 that eats up all your time — after you start working, think how tired you are coming home every evening. You just want to lie in bed and watch a show on your iPad. You're not going to sit up straight and play a proper PC game. That's just too tiring."

Time seemed to weigh more once she joined the workforce. Qian Di is from Hunan province; after university, she followed her parents' advice, took the civil service exam, and landed a government job in Shenzhen. Work grew more complicated and hectic toward year's end. Around six, Qian Di would come home alone, get everything sorted, call her parents — and it was already nine.

But real life always seemed to be missing something.

After moving to Shenzhen on her own, Qian Di's life had changed a great deal. She was far from her parents and hometown; former classmates had scattered across the country; she had no close friends nearby. She sometimes pictured what life would be like if she went back to work near home. "I want to go back, but I can't. There's no point being here alone — you just turn into a bit of an oddball. Either you read, or you play games, or you go to the movies or wander a mall by yourself."

She used to wind down before bed with a show or a book, but now Onmyoji had swallowed a big chunk of her free time.

"Mobile games are still a bit kinder to working people like us, even if you spend more money." Of course, "kinder" was only relative — she still grumbled about the game's time-consuming progression: "The grind is brutal. After grinding out one six-star, I feel completely drained, like my whole self is wrecked."

To level her shikigami Ubume to six stars, Qian Di would typically spend two hours on a day off in the morning burning through the game's stamina, another hour or two in the afternoon, and three or four more in the evening — roughly six or seven hours of play a day.

She tried to talk herself into some restraint: "Someone like me can take it or leave it. Even if my stamina isn't used up, I'll just sleep when I'm tired, or watch something if I feel like it." On weekends she made herself spend a day out of the house and started wandering malls alone more often — a deliberate way to keep herself from being such a homebody.

At the same time, she knew clearly that the game would give her nothing back. "Basically the investment is out of all proportion to any real return. We play games to enjoy the process, don't we — so I've honestly never cared whether the account I poured all that time into is worth anything in the end."

3. Beyond Competition — What Else Does Onmyoji Offer?

Eggy, a 24-year-old who works in advertising, had never spent money on any mobile game before — but she made her first purchase for Onmyoji, dropping a few hundred yuan. It was not a large sum, but it still exceeded what she had expected to spend before she started.

"Whaling" (kèjīn, from the Japanese kakin) is the term for spending real money in a game. SSR cards are the rarest in Onmyoji, and because the gacha has no pity system, Eggy eventually gave in and bought a handful of small value packs.

The truth is, she is not the type to spend on mobile games, and she rarely sticks with any one game. "I almost never spend in games. I tend to cool off after a while and gradually stop playing — it's not the kind of thing that drags on forever — so I usually feel spending is a waste, since I'll lose the urge to play before long."

Eggy's whole office was playing Onmyoji. Working late had become routine for the team, and the seven o'clock "hunting battle" in Onmyoji turned into the cue for a nightly office-wide event. The moment it began, whoever spotted it would shout the alert: "Hunting battle's starting, it's starting!" At their colleague's "summons," everyone pulled out their phones and joined in.

For someone as steeped in anime culture as Eggy, the fact that a game this thoroughly anime-coded could pull in so many "people from completely different worlds" was a little baffling. "After all, it's rare for a game to be played by hardcore otaku and normies at the same time." "Normie" (xiànchōng, a term popular in anime circles, also from Japanese) refers to someone whose real-world life is full enough that they have no need for fictional worlds.

Eggy would not count herself a normie. On the contrary, she sees herself as a serious homebody, usually spending her weekends watching the latest anime. She had played plenty of anime-style mobile games — Love Live! School Idol Festival, Dream Boyfriend 100 — but none of her real-life friends were into them. "The only person around me more of a homebody than me is my boyfriend — and he doesn't play Onmyoji."

Game designer Daniel Cookman has argued that when players choose between playing with strangers and playing with people they already know, they are really choosing between "building new relationships" and "reinforcing old ones." In most cases, he and most players prefer to reinforce existing relationships — partly because the payoff is greater, and partly because those bonds tie more visibly to everyday life.

Eggy belongs to the "reinforce old relationships" camp. She has no interest in befriending strangers in the game, but feels Onmyoji has given her a new sense of social belonging. "At the very least, it's given me a lot more to talk about with friends. I never expected to become a top player anyway. But friends compete a little — like, I have an SSR card you don't."

Her biggest goal right now is to pull the shikigami Ibaraki-Doji. "I'm not a student anymore — I earn a salary, and if I really want to spend, I'll spend. I won't go crazy and drop tens of thousands, but if there's something I really want, I could probably justify a few thousand yuan."

Erica, who has spent more than 10,000 yuan on Onmyoji, tends to treat it as a collection-focused raising game.

Erica has been a gamer for over a decade — mostly single-player and raising games — and almost never touched mobile games. A friend's recommendation, plus her fondness for the Japanese art style and the voice cast, made Onmyoji the first mobile game she played seriously and the one she spent the most on. "The shikigami are adorable — each character has a backstory, and their little gestures really suit their personalities. Take Zashiki-Warashi, whose whole job is to hand buffs to the big players — you just find that so cute."

Whenever Erica falls for something new, she goes through an intense "honeymoon phase." She remembers being obsessed with BL fiction — she read through nearly every piece of it available at the time, to the point of knowing some novels by heart. Now she had transferred all that devotion to Onmyoji. At her most dedicated, she spent more than ten hours a day grinding.

She has always been willing to spend freely on what she loves. She has now put more than 10,000 yuan into Onmyoji, and friends tease her as a "10,000-yuan household" (an old term for the newly well-off). "I'm the kind of person — give me a reason to spend, and I will. Tell me to buy a membership, and I'll go buy it. If I like something, I'm willing to pay for it. There just weren't any mobile games I liked before, so I didn't play them — but once I play one, I'll happily pay for it."

"Because of this game, I bought a lot less during the Double Eleven and Double Twelve sales," she said. "Out of love, maybe — or maybe just impulse. It's hard to stay rational when you're spending money on a game."

Even though Erica knows her enthusiasm comes and goes fast, she has no regrets about what she put into Onmyoji. She enjoys the fun it brings her now, and is often touched by small kindnesses from strangers when playing in groups. She reflected: "You really do need to team up — it's just more fun playing together." It is a feeling of "not being alone in this world": in a game you love, you are "surrounded" by other players who affirm one another and share the same sense of what they're doing and why.

She never stops to ask why she has given the game so much time and energy — the challenges and setbacks mostly dissolve into a feeling called happiness. "It's only when I'm suffering that I start to ask why I'm suffering."

Erica used to do marketing at a multinational company, but quit a while ago and now has far more time for what she wants. She feels she recently worked something out: "Now that I'm already down this road, I feel the money was worth it — that's enough. Money is trivial. Time and your state of mind matter more than money."

4. Onmyoji's Grind: Blessing or Curse?

Grinding is not unique to Onmyoji. For most games, playing well demands huge investments of time and energy — including countless failures and obstacles.

Music games like Ensemble Stars! and Love Live! School Idol Festival, and even dress-up games like Miracle Nikki, all require plenty of grinding for good rankings and rewards.

Game designer Raph Koster argued in A Theory of Fun for Game Design that a game is only "fun" while you have not yet fully mastered it.

In a sense, failure keeps a game appealing, and the hope of success just out of reach is often more thrilling than success itself. But for a good many players, Onmyoji's design really is over-tuned even by the standards of Chinese mobile games.

In Onmyoji, shikigami top out at six stars. Leveling a two-star shikigami to three stars takes a few two-star "fodder" cards, and leveling a five-star to six stars takes five five-star fodder cards. Chu App once ran the numbers in a piece titled "Onmyoji Mobile: Grinding for the Sake of Grinding": to get one six-star character, a player has to level 360 two-star fodder cards, on top of vast amounts of repetitive material-grinding — making Onmyoji roughly ten times as demanding as its model, Summoners War. Even the author of that piece, already used to Summoners War's grind, wanted to quit Onmyoji within a week.

On top of that, the high-tier gear in the game — the omitama, or soul gems — has very low drop rates. Assembling a full set is no easy feat, and upgrading the omitama themselves requires large quantities of omitama as fodder.

To extend the game's life, Onmyoji has taken a player-unfriendly approach: it deliberately blew up the difficulty of leveling gear and characters well beyond what Summoners War asks, sharply raising the cost of progression. Meanwhile, some genuinely interesting elements worth developing have been played down in the current version.

Yet Onmyoji wears the skin of a Japanese anime mobile game over the skeleton of a Korean one — which is exactly why many players first assumed it was not Chinese-made. Seen this way, a large share of Onmyoji's players were meeting this genre for the first time: some had little prior mobile-gaming experience, while others were used to the "sweep" auto-complete features of more casual Chinese mobile games — which made Onmyoji's grind feel especially alien.

Looking at its overall design, Onmyoji is decidedly not a fast-food game, and that is part of what makes it compelling to so many players. But some of the recent official events seem to work against that very identity.

5. Those Who Left

For a heavy mobile game as demanding as Onmyoji — one that asks for both grinding and spending — many players burn through their enthusiasm fast and leave. Xiaono, a game designer, found that about sixty percent of the people around him had quit because Onmyoji was too grindy. Those who stayed were mainly hardcore anime fans and heavy gamers.

Eggy's most immediate sense of the game lately is that her own enthusiasm has faded and that many friends are playing far less too — plenty of high-level players have simply abandoned it.

Piko re-downloaded Onmyoji for the recent New Year events, but has sharply cut her investment, choosing to become a casual player. And the few friends who had been grinding alongside her from the start have gradually dropped out too.

None of this may be the experience of just a handful of players. Onmyoji launching a "recall a friend" event on New Year's Day — for a game barely six months old — is a remarkably unusual thing, and in some ways reflects real player attrition.

Although Onmyoji is one of the most popular mobile games around right now, mobile games tend to have short lifespans — and nobody knows how long before players lose interest.

Erica knows full well that her passion for any one thing rarely lasts. "I've been through so many obsessions, and most of them follow the same arc." She actually prefers it that way: "Even when new storylines come out later, I'll probably just play through them casually — keep it very limited. This stretch of time is probably enough for me."

Three years with JX Online 3 taught Qian Di that whether she can stay devoted to a game comes down to whether her friends are there too. She loves playing and talking about games with people she knows in real life. "We have a group chat, and it's full of strategy posts all day long — a bunch of tech nerds working out the best returns, how to fight; they're all PvP players. I just watch from the sidelines and enjoy the chatter." Her friends are eager helpers, always thinking through her duel team compositions.

"Honestly, the reason I'm still playing this game is that my friends are in it." She believes everyone eventually tires of any game. "Online games may outlast other games a little, but I think any game has at most a year before even the most dedicated player gets bored. After that, holding on to players isn't about how many new modes you add — the only way to keep people is through the emotional bonds the game has built."

Eggy's view is much like Qian Di's: "If my friends haven't quit, I usually won't either."

Qian Di doesn't know when she'll leave Onmyoji, or when the next game will come along that truly grabs her. But she feels one thing matters most: she hopes that when that next game arrives, there will still be a group of friends to play it with her.

(At the interviewees' request, Piko, Eggy, Qian Di, Erica, and Xiaono are pseudonyms.)

Cover image from: Onmyoji official website