Breaking the Habit, With Hoyoverse and YouTube

Hello. If you’re here, you’ve probably discovered this blog through the many gacha-related videos I’ve published over the past few years. Starting with Star Rail, my involvement in the community became increasingly active, to the point where gacha games became, for several years, my primary interest.

I thought many times about changing genre and habits, but each of those attempts led nowhere. Anything else I tried simply failed to evoke the same emotions.

Within the gacha space, I’ve tried titles from nearly every major developer. Yet the only games that consistently remained on my taskbar over time were Hoyoverse gacha games. Gradually, I convinced myself that this was mainly due to the visual quality of their work: few studios can afford such precision in character design, and both story and soundtrack support extremely well the sensation of collecting characters and optimizing teams.

[In Hoyoverse games] The dominant feeling there is one of lack. Everything is fast: animations, combat, meta shifts, character optimization, reward cycles. Animations and designs are constantly overloaded with detail, lights, and colors.

Support, yes—because story was never the true focal point of a gacha game for me. Most of my time was spent thinking about new characters, team compositions, synergies, meta. It was a puzzle to solve, with clear constraints and well-defined investments.Despite being an expensive hobby, it was the only one I truly focused on, and I believed it could be an excellent foundation for creating YouTube content. In that way, I could combine usefulness with pleasure, and even though talking about costly games is controversial, I felt they genuinely belonged to me.

My real-life job takes roughly part-time hours, so everything seemed manageable.

And yet, I kept feeling a strange pressure: the unmistakable sensation that my world was not under control. At first, I thought it was simply the attention my primary job was taking away from YouTube, and from the time I felt I should be dedicating to games. Over time, I realized that this instability was also affecting my ability to concentrate on anything else. My way of engaging with the world often requires creativity and novelty, so I initially attributed this feeling specifically to that need.

Still, creativity and novelty continued to be scarce.

The truth is darker than what I was able to admit to myself on a daily basis. I had tried to quit Hoyoverse gacha games twice already, uninstalling everything—only to find myself, almost without realizing it, with those applications installed again on my PC.

That alone is a very strong warning sign. I am not troubled by changing my mind in life; in fact, I consider it one of my strengths. In this case, however, changing my mind was only a partially free choice.

Recently, I’ve been playing Gryphline’s new gacha, Arknights: Endfield. As strange as it may sound, playing Endfield reminded me of old-school single-player games. There were many activities to do, not necessarily in a fixed order, and I felt like a curious child running back and forth, discovering this or that, progressing through one system or another.

It had been a while since the last time I've been feeling like living an adventure, without pressing bounds - even if the game does have many, and still keeps the same model.

Something similar happened during the period when I played Final Fantasy XIV extensively. I never felt forced to play, and even though I was very lonely at the time, I felt at peace spending time with my American friends and exploring different playstyles. I progressed through the story without haste and enjoyed the exemplary soundtrack by Masayoshi Soken, accompanying the fantastical locations of a world I always perceived as peaceful and welcoming.

Gridania always felt like a second home to me. And it's not even the only place that gives this feeling in the charming universe YoshiP and crew were able to realize.

This contrast helped me understand the fundamentally different approach I have toward Hoyoverse gacha games. The dominant feeling there is one of lack. Everything is fast: animations, combat, meta shifts, character optimization, reward cycles. Animations and designs are constantly overloaded with detail, lights, and colors. This is clearly a stylistic direction Hoyoverse favors, one that runs through all their games and becomes increasingly pronounced, especially in the newer ones I was still following.

Given how I’m wired, this consumes an enormous portion of my attention, to the point of preventing me from thinking about anything else—other video games included. Not out of love for challenge, nor for narrative quality, but purely because of that whirlwind of colors, animations, music, and character design that stimulates my senses in an extremely intense way.

Yesterday was the second-to-last day before the end of the spending-based event in Zenless Zone Zero. I was one step away from opening the store and buying more packs to obtain all the event rewards, which require an astonishing amount of money in a very short time span. Something inside me resisted. It wasn’t simply about spending money—I enjoy investing in what I love. It was the sensation of being pushed to do something that no longer aligned with my priorities.

It does feel like something that I never want to go back to: it's like pressing you to spend in two ways, as if one wasn't enough.

Hoyoverse undeniably celebrates beauty, and does so effectively. Through aesthetic beauty—and at times narrative meaning as well—it encourages players to spend money. Recently, this has been particularly evident in both Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero, especially during specific periods.

It holds players’ hands gently, guiding them along its path. At the same time, it constantly reveals ever more distant frontiers, accessible only through continued investment of resources.

I don’t want to dwell on the moral implications of this, as they can vary widely across cultures. What I have understood is that this approach simply no longer works for me. Twice, I chose to place the beauty offered by these games—this intense, overwhelming experience—above the freedom of movement and choice that I’ve always valued as a player.

I have also chosen to unlist the entire YouTube channel dedicated to Hoyoverse gacha games.

Video games have always been, for me, a place to catch my breath, to feel safe when the world confronted me with difficult challenges. A space where I could move freely, a multiverse inviting me to travel between realities whenever I wished.

It is out of nostalgia for that freedom that yesterday I decided to end my experience with Hoyoverse gacha games. As foundational as aesthetic beauty is for me, I recognize how freedom and creativity can generate different forms of beauty—ones that are difficult to find when living constantly under deadlines and under the persistent sensation of lack that this type of gacha system communicates every day.

I wanted to share this podcast with you partly to remind myself of this choice, and partly to continue my attempt to create content in Italian. Not for success, but as a form of an open diary.

My dream is that, one day, this diary will become a public square.

Yesterday, however, I learned that waiting is sometimes the key to everything. I will be patient, and I will wait for you here.

If you’ve lived through similar experiences, feel free to share them in the comments, or write to me on Discord at the nickname neroatlas if you feel more comfortable talking directly. I would be glad to hear your story and to share choices that may align—or even diverge.

As part of this decision, I have also chosen to unlist the entire YouTube channel dedicated to Hoyoverse gacha games. This is a permanent choice to close that chapter and focus fully on projects that reflect my current priorities and creative freedom.

Either way, I wish for both of us that video games may continue to enrich our lives.