After a shaky start, Akatsuki Games’ brutal action RPG TRIBE NINE is seeing its positive ratings on Steam increase – moving from Mostly Negative to Mostly Positive. This is due to swift action by the developer to improve the game’s gacha system, which was unpopular at launch due to its low drop rates.
The free-to-play game was co-created by Too Kyoo games, headed by Danganronpa’s Kazutaka Kodaka, which handled the original concept, character design and music, and Akatsuki Games, which is in charge of planning, development and operation.
A limited-time demo of the game released last October as part of Steam’s Next Fest 2024 attracted lots of attention, especially outside Japan. Akatsuki Games reported that 70% of demo players were English-speaking.
Despite the demo building hype, TRIBE NINE did not get off to a smooth start when it launched on February 19. It attracted over 10,000 players on Steam, however, the initial reviews were very mixed. At one point, the game slipped down to a Mostly Negative rating with only 38% of reviews being favorable.
Akatsuki Games subsequently announced that they would be making changes to elements of TRIBE NINE, especially the game’s gacha system, Synchro. The system lets players pull characters and gear in exchange for a currency called Enigma Entities. However, players were unhappy, both with the low probabilities (e.g. three-star/SSR pulls had a 0.6% drop rate), and the difficulties of earning Enigma Entities through simply playing the game, citing that the beta version had been more generous with currency.
On February 26, Akatsuki Games announced a big overhaul of Synchro, increasing the drop rate for three-stars from 0.6% to 2%, and significantly raising the pickup rate from 0.3% to 1.5%. Drop rates for two-stars were also bumped up from 5.1% to 8%. The number of Enigma Entities players can earn through gameplay has also been increased.
It seems that this announcement, and other planned updates to the game swayed Steam players towards more positive feedback. Positive reviews made on and after February 26 praise Akatsuki Games’ response, with comments including “A gacha game that actually listens to the player,” and “Insanely dope game with developers that listen (extremely rare for a gacha).” At the time of writing, the game has a Mostly Positive rating, with 70% of reviews being positive, a far cry from only 38% of reviews praising the game at launch.
While the most noticeable change is to the gacha specifications, Akatsuki Games is also tweaking other elements of TRIBE NINE. For example, efforts have been made to improve gameplay experience during exploration and combat, with movement speed being increased and the addition of a Take Down feature, which lets you instantly defeat enemies that are of a similar level to you.
It will be interesting to see if the reviews become even more positive as the effects of the March 3 implementation of the overhauled gacha system are fully felt.
TRIBE NINE is available now on the PC (Steam), iOS and Android.
