A huge anime action game is stripping out its gacha loot boxes to be reborn as a full-fledged MMORPG, and I can't wait

Do you ever wonder what happened to Tower of Fantasy? The free-to-play shared-world anime game that I fully expected to make it onto our list of the best MMOs? The one that got some good buzz on Twitch back in 2022 as a potential Genshin Impact killer? Then you might be surprised, elated even, to hear that it's getting yet another big rework in just a few days to bring it closer to the original expectation of it being a shared-world anime adventure MMORPG, while keeping it separate from the regular version that I can only assume still has some staunch defenders.

Released worldwide in the second half of 2022, it didn't take Tower of Fantasy very long at all to, as the kids might say, "fall off,"  as players either quickly exhausted all there was to do or struggled to connect with what ultimately felt like a dead MMO thanks to how the action game filtered players across its open world.

Update 2.0 came just a few months later, quickly catching the worldwide servers up to the Chinese version of the game released the year prior. That fixed things for some, but it felt as if the damage had already been done. What followed was a fairly standard cycle of updates as seen in the other big gacha hits of the time, but the hype died down as more and more alternatives hit the market. In fact, the Steam page is still highlighting a patch that released over a year ago.

Now, Tower of Fantasy seems poised for another big rework of its major systems. The 'Warp Server,' dropping in just a few days alongside version 5.5, is a branch of the main game that sheds standard gacha mechanics to bring the game closer in line with that original MMORPG vision.

It includes things like a 'Crew Base' used to interact and trade with other players, 'GvE Crew events' that allow experienced players to boost newcomers, ways for teams to trigger Combo Attack animations (likened to those in Granblue Fantasy Relink by someone we'll get to shortly), as well as "six new life classes" including the Explorer, Cooker, and Forger.

It's billed as a "major leap towards the future of the game," and while the intricate details are still a little scarce outside of the Q and A video above, a player testing the Chinese version of the game posted a fairly in-depth look at the changes to Reddit just a few weeks ago, revealing the other three life classes to be (roughly translated) Alchemy, Fishing, and Taming. You can apparently only learn two at a time, so trying your hand at a third means resetting one of your other classes, making it more World of Warcraft than, say, Final Fantasy 14.

The biggest change here is, for many, the shedding of the gacha system. Weapons and characters can now be earned and upgraded through regular daily play, mirroring how recent gacha release Duet Night Abyss removed its loot box mechanics between beta and launch, earning it some solid attention that helped it break out of the pack when it launched alongside more hotly anticipated rivals like Stella Sora and Chaos Zero Nightmare.

Stat rolls on gear seem to have been reworked to be a tad less tedious, too, with level requirements and different-colored tier rarities bringing character growth more in line with traditional RPGs. And with stamina requirements taken out of the equation, you're free to grind as much as you like. Unless you overpower a co-op experience with raw strength, you "absolutely need at least a tank and healers," remarks our Reddit tester, bringing the game vastly more in line with a traditional MMORPG.

Does that alone fix the recent issues with accounts supposedly being wiped after a poorly communicated migration? No, absolutely not. But if you bounced off Tower of Fantasy at launch and didn't buy into its monetization practices, a fresh start with an entirely new system might be just the ticket.

Our aforementioned Reddit poster galavanting around the Chinese server claims it "finally feels like a proper anime MMO with plenty of group activities" that "encourage proper teamwork and interaction between players." And after falling off this one hard in 2022, back when we still believed Bandai Namco's original Blue Protocol vision would make it out of Japan, all I can say is, "finally." And with it launching on November 25, we're only a couple of days away.