Reverse: 1999 is a 20th Century Time-Travel Strategic RPG developed by Bluepoch Games. It’s a game I’ve been eagerly anticipating all year, ever since I was first made aware of it.
After investing dozens of hours into the most recent test phase, it left me wanting more. A lot more. This is a game I couldn’t put down.

Reverse: 1999 is a very unique Gacha game. It’s highly narrative driven with a very strong focus on story. And after playing for dozens of hours, I can say with certainty that I was gripped.
The narrative was compelling, completely voice acted. Admittedly, there are very few Gacha games out there that I think could potentially compete with either the voice acting or story present.
The short of it is that something catastrophic happened on the last day of 1999, and as a direct result, time has unraveled, flowing backwards, a phenomenon known as “the storm.”
We take on the role of the Timekeeper, and attempt to find out what caused this disruption in time and remedy it before it’s too late.

The story, which is a central focus of the game features some absolutely stellar voice acting. The game is dubbed in English, and every character has unique regional accents dependent on where they’re from.
British, Italian, French, Russian, Cantonese. I don’t know how they managed this, but it is by far one of the most impressive dubs I’ve heard in a game of this type.
There are numerous characters, which all take center stage at various points in the game. The English dub helps bring the game and the individual personalities of each respective character to life, regardless of unit rarity.
And the characters aren’t your traditional “hot husbando or waifu” – quite the contrary. We have characters warped in TVs. A floating apple with a bow tie. Seriously, take a moment here to appreciate some of the incredible cast – all of which are rendered in full Live2D.

And that’s just scratching the surface. This is a game with both a deep, dark, emotionally complex story but also some of the lightest, quirkiest characters you’ll come across, making for a fun blend of depth that you won’t be disappointed with.
Think STEINS;GATE, but playable.

Speaking of playing, gameplay is a targeted towards players that are interested in strategy or turn-based combat.
On the one hand, it’s pretty easy to understand.
Characters have multiple different abilities, followed by a more powerful, ultimate ability. In combat, you deploy multiple characters, and are presented with abilities in the form of cards towards the bottom right of your screen.
If you have duplicate cards of the same rarity – 1*, 2* or 3*, you can actually merge them together to increase their power level, but they need to be of the corresponding rarity for this to work.
Characters and enemies have elemental affinities, which function like a game of rock-paper-scissors. Which is where the strategy element comes in to play. The game, on the surface, can be very easy if your goal is merely to slowly push through the story without much forethought.
However, it can also be exponentially more complex the deeper you delve into character, elemental and ability synergy.

In terms of character power and progression, characters have individual levels. Levels are capped, and broken through via the Insight mechanic. The more you upgrade your characters, the more powerful they become, both statistically, and with regards to their abilities and passives.

While the main focus of the game remains the story, which you progress through via battles, there exists another feature that I found to be surprisingly entertaining to dabble in: The Wilderness.
The Wilderness functions similarly to traditional “bases” found in other Gacha games. And while typically, bases are primarily flat, with no exploration, no real purpose outside of farming resources – no interaction with your Waifu’s, Reverse: 1999 does things a little differently.
Reverse: 1999 allows you to manually alter the very foundation of the Wilderness, expanding the world size, placing down buildings, objects, and even your husbando’s and waifu’s, watching them traverse what you’ve created.
That is something I absolutely did NOT expect and will admit I probably spent a little too much time in trying to create something that looked passable as a world. I probably didn’t succeed, but hey, that didn’t stop me from trying.

This is a game that took me by absolute surprise. Never did I anticipate I would enjoy this as much as I ultimately did when I first saw the trailer for it.
Being taken across and becoming immersed in key moments and locations throughout the 20th century, the absolutely gorgeous Live2D character models, the stunning environments, the fun turn-based combat system, the incredible English dub cast, the complex yet fun narrative.
Everything about Reverse: 1999 screams “quality.” And they have absolutely delivered.

The best part of this? The game is both PC and mobile compatible, meaning you can play this on either platform. As someone that prefers playing on PC, I can log in and play this on my PC without issue. That’s something the vast majority of Gacha games don’t allow for.
Again, there’s just so many things this game does right – and I guarantee you I’ve overlooked numerous.

Tower of Fantasy is a stunning cross-platform free to play open-world action MMORPG developed by Hotta Studio, a subsidiary of Perfect World, and published Globally on PC and Mobile by Level Infinite, and PlayStation by Perfect World Games.
At present there is no cross-play functionality, requiring anyone wanting to play on the PlayStation platform to start the game from scratch.

Tower of Fantasy has quite the loaded history – before launching globally, the game was riddled with hackers, exploiters, and abusers that often took advantage of known duplication bugs.
They had plagiarized Honkai impact, and preceded to act like it was an accident, they plagiarized another creators trailer, and projected blame on to a studio that they outsourced their trailer to, overall showing a severe lack of competence and humility.
2 thirds of a year later the game launched globally, and saw the exact same hacks, exploits, and duplication abuse replicated. These were all issues that had long since been fixed in the Chinese version – but the studio was too lazy to apply the necessary fixes to the global incarnation of the game in preparation of this happening.
Negligence or incompetence? Probably both.

Nevertheless, this was all fixed in subsequent patches. And while the game has firmly established a reputation as a running meme in the community – the game after reaching Domain 9, in 3.0, is a drastic improvement with very few hacks, exploits or issues.

But with 2024 just a few months from now, is Tower of Fantasy going to be worth playing? Is it worth starting? Will it even still be alive, receiving new, regular patch content? Let’s take a look.

3.2 released early in September, introducing the new Joltville section of the region into the game. It featured an expansion to the story, a new type of ball to collect, and a few new characters to obtain.

3.3 looks like it’s going to introduce the Marshville section of the region into the game, which is a frigid region covered in ice. We also have the introduction of mommy Lin Han as a character, along with other characters.
There will be an expansion to the story, leading into the upcoming 4.0 – including new events, game modes and balancing adjustments to PvP.

3.0 released on June 27th, 3.1 released on August 8th, and 3.2 released on September 5th. While we don’t have a guaranteed definitive release date for 3.3 as of writing this, it’s a safe bet to assume it’s coming in October at some point.

3.4 seems to be introducing the incredibly alluring flute Waifu Nan Ying into the game, followed by Yan Miao. There will be new skins, new events, new game modes – both PvE and PvP, and from what I read online, a potential Anime collab.
Which would be a good move, as NIKKE, another Gacha game published by Level Infinite has had numerous collabs that have all been very beneficial to its growth and success. Chainsaw Man. NieR Automata. There was no mention of Aquaville – the final region in patch 3.4, however, nor a note of its release date.

There has been no real, concrete news or information pertaining to patches beyond 3.4 – some players speculate 3.5 will feature Aquaville. It has to, right? And at least 2 new characters to pull for.

And that’s the future for the remainder of 2023. 3.3 likely to release in October, 3.4 in November, and 3.5 probably in December, unless complications arise in preparation for 4.0. 2024, of course, is going to begin and follow the game through 4.0.
But content cadence isn’t the only topic of importance. So is revenue. Revenue dictates the quality of patches, and the content released therein.

So let’s take a moment here to look over Global revenue for the last year. This is specifically Mobile revenue, using a few different revenue tracking apps online. This doesn’t include console or PC revenue, which could be double, triple, or even half the mobile earnings, nor does it include Chinese revenue.
So to reiterate, these are rough estimates and not definitively indicative of total gross revenue across every platform.

Before we discuss numbers though, let me take a moment to thank our incredible Patrons over on Patreon who allow for me to do regular videos like this, covering MMOs, Gacha games and more, every single week. You guys are incredible. Now back to the video.

In September 2022, Tower of Fantasy made $20 million dollars.
In October 2022, it made $6 million dollars.
In November 2022, it made $9 million dollars.
In December 2022, it made $6 million dollars.
In January 2023, it made $2.8 million dollars.
In February 2023, it made $2.9 million dollars.
In March 2023, it made $2.8 million dollars.
In April 2023, it made $2.7 million dollars.
In May 2023, it made $1.4 million dollars.
In June 2023, it made $1.2 million dollars.
In July 2023, it made $1 million dollars.
In August 2023, it made $1.3 million dollars.

Financially, at least from the estimates made online for mobile revenue, Tower of Fantasy isn’t doing too well. From what I recall, however, PC makes more than mobile as more players opt to make purchases via PC but it’s unconfirmed by what margin.
Making anywhere from $1-$5 million dollars per month Globally, disregarding China is definitely not a bad number though. That’s more than Azur Lane, Punishing Gray Raven and numerous other popular Global Gacha games, however they’re also not massive, open-world games and require much less of a financial investment when it comes to new content.
And Azur Lane, Punishing Gray Raven and others all make tens of millions of dollars within China, whereas Tower of Fantasy’s Chinese revenue from what you can find online seems relatively low.

Tower of Fantasy has a solid, if not relatively linear trajectory: Every 4-6 weeks release a new patch, have new Waifu to spend money to obtain, make some balance adjustments, introduce some fun new game modes – which Tower of Fantasy is really good at by the way. And the odd region every 2 or so patches.
Earlier this year I would’ve said I didn’t see much of a future for the game, but 2024 seems pretty bright. I don’t think we’re going to see a resurgence of popularity, but it’s definitely going to remain relatively stable where it is. At least until Wuthering Waves or Mugen release.