At first glance, you might think Arknights: Endfield is another anime gacha game in the style of Genshin Impact. And you’d be mostly correct. It certainly starts out that way. But then you’re asked to build a base to mine and process materials, and suddenly you’re knee-deep in a factory building game that has nothing to do with collecting anime characters.
This is the trick that Arknights: Endfield is playing on all the people giving it a try now that it’s released, and many players are discovering that there’s been a factory builder inside them all along.
Who said this game have 50% action and 50% factory? from r/Endfield
YouTuber Braxophone calls the factory building “the great Endfield filter” in their beginner’s guide video. While parts of it are optional, you really do have to engage with it to craft a lot of useful items for combat and leveling up your team. There’s even a blueprints system that lets you borrow factory designs from other players if building one from scratch isn’t your thing. To maximize anything in Endfield, you can’t ignore it—which is kind of great, if you ask me. I’d much rather have something that veers away from the daily quest structure of every Hoyoverse game and actually brings something new to the table.
The fact that Endfield is making a bunch of people realize there’s an entire genre of games that will suck up all their free time is just a funny byproduct of a well-designed system doing its job. There are plenty of other gacha games to play out there. Endfield is for the people who know that XP and loot is a fool’s game; the real power comes from building an industrial empire one conveyor belt at a time.
