Last week, Sega released their new gacha game helmed by Yoko Taro: 404 Game Re:Set. This game’s premise was that each character would be an anthropomorphized arcade game that you would control as you fought against the evil corporation known as Sega. The game had a relatively successful launch, with a million players downloading the app within a week.
Over the last week, Sega has been rolling out log-in campaigns to get players adjusted to the game. These campaigns began with launch week rewards that gave players hundreds of gacha gems to the current campaign where on different days of the week, different nodes would have increased drop rates. The first of these increased drop rates was for sub quest materials yesterday, May 3rd. The increased drop rate was nearly negligible as the drop rates for materials in sub quests are the most painful grind in the game.
Today’s campaign for increased drop rates in dungeons, however, was the complete opposite. What was supposed to be a simple double drop rate increase to get players a little extra money, exp, and accessory upgrade materials is currently giving players nearly 15,000 times the amount of rewards they usually receive! Instead of receiving about 9,000 Sega Credits upon dungeon completion, players have received upwards of 65 Hundred Million Sega Credits every time they cleared a dungeon.
This glitch seems to have been an oversight with the game’s skip mechanic. Upon replaying an already completed stage or whole dungeon, players will have the option to skip. Playing through the dungeons normally today will give only the expected 2x drop rate on items, but players who instead hit the skip button will receive these massive rewards. To put this into perspective, let’s quickly go over the game’s economy and see how much these few hours of 7,000x drop rates will affect players in the coming months.
To start off with, let’s talk about the Sega Credits that players are getting millions of. Nearly every action the player takes when upgrading characters in this game will cost a few thousand Sega Credits. Upgrading a character’s skills will often at most take about 50,000 credits while other upgrades such as increasing a character’s star level will cost around 200,000. The most expensive thing I have encountered in the game is upgrading a character’s code; which costs about 1.5 million Sega Credits.
Sega Credits also had their own shop in the game’s menu where you could use them to buy upgrade materials for both your units and accessories. I hadn’t used this shop before today as I feared running out of credits in case I needed them. Not only do I not have that fear anymore, but I bought enough materials from this shop for it to sell out!
Sega Credits grinding wasn’t slow so far, as there are a few daily nodes that players could grind for Credits and the current Virtua Fighter event gave a lot of Credits upon grinding. However, I did still run out of Credits three times in my first week of playing the game. Now that a single playthrough of a dungeon gave me 65 hundred million I will likely never have to grind for Credits again.
Another item being dropped to outrageous degrees in dungeons currently is EXP. Anyone who has played a gacha game in the past knows that upgrading characters with exp dropped from nodes can be a pain. 404 Game Re:Set has been relatively forgiving with exp drops so far, but I could have seen it becoming an issue in the future. I, of course, say “could have seen” in the past tense, as now, instead of having about 20 spare exp for upgrading my units, I have over 22,000 ready to use at any time in the future. The idea of grinding EXP is in the past as all my units will instantly hit max level from now on.
Finally, there is the item that the double drop rate on dungeons was supposed to benefit the most: accessory upgrade materials. Both accessories and these materials only drop in dungeons, so players were prepared to grind these a lot today. As with the other two materials I just talked about, players are getting more accessory upgrades than they can imagine! This glitch just made the second hardest material to grind in the game an absolute breeze!
As we sit down and grind dungeons to our hearts content, 404 Game Re:Set players can’t help but wonder how this will affect the game in the future. Obviously, Sega will soon hit the server maintenance button to fix the glitch before players max out every item, but what action will they take after? If they revert the game to a state before the glitch to take away this overload, that will cause outrage among players as it is possible they will take away legitimately earned rare accessories from people. By that same coin, though, not reverting this change could affect the game’s economy forever. The idea of increased drop rate campaigns and handoffs is a lot less enticing when players have maxed out on everything within the first week of playing. No matter what choice Sega makes, this glitch happening this early on in the game’s lifespan will have long reaching effects for at least a year.
While we all await Sega’s response to this glitch, I and many other 404 Re:Set fans shall be grinding dungeons while we can. There may not exist an official English community for this game but if you’re interested in learning how to play this fun Japanese exclusive game, please join the Unofficial 404 Game Re:Set Discord for guides and menu translations
This is hilarious, hope it gets fixed soon though. Don’t know of many 3D shoot-em up gacha games.