OVER THE FULLERENESHIFT

30/11/2024 - Kantai Collection, Theoretically

Today is a rather short post compared to the previous ones, sorry! Kantai Collection is one of my favorite ideas for a game ever - but despite that, I've barely played it. It should be perfect - I prefer being able to run games in-browser, and I find gacha games fun. But for some reason, I can't seem to get into it.

Note: Please take everything I say here with a grain of salt - I am writing this from the perspective of someone who has barely played any KanColle. If I say something really stupid that annoys you, you can always complain on my guestbook - I'll try my best to fix any mistakes.

Kantai Collection

If you don't know, Kantai Collection, or KanColle, is a browser gacha game about World War 2 ships as anime girls. If that sounds weird, that's because it is. As someone who finds warships interesting, likes anime art styles, and likes women, along with the general atmosphere of KanColle, this is all pretty great. What makes it even better is the gacha - gachas are basically just gambling, which is what makes it addictive, but the gacha in KanColle is more than that. Instead of being the monetization scheme, it's part of the gameplay; when you pull in KanColle, you'll get different ships based off what materials you use and how many. And your shipgirls aren't permanent - if one of them dies, you lose her forever. This means the gacha rewards are more expendable resources, and discourages too much grinding for a specific character. You can't use real life money to pull on the gacha either, so this encourages a lot more strategy. Theoretically, this should be one of my favorite games - but it isn't.

Shortcomings

The biggest problem with KanColle is that it's only available in Japan. There are many ways to bypass it, but it's still a pain - tools I've tried, like poi, have simply not worked. The most consistent approach I've found is KC3Kai, but it's all in Japanese and is Chromium-only. The Firefox alternative I mainly use, which allows serving custom assets (like using a mod to translate everything) is using a cookie bypass + KCCacheProxy, but that just stops working sometimes. Another annoying limitation is KanColle is HTTP only, and most modern browsers attempt to force HTTPS.

Why I don't Play it

For me, the appeal of browser games is 2 things - no downloads are required, and everything is all contained within a single space. I can have so many different tabs all inside of just a single app - nothing taking up my taskbar more than it needs to. But since KC3Kai is Chromium-only, I have to use ungoogled-chromium while maining Firefox, which defeats my main reason for preferring browser games, and having 2 entire browsers open at the same time, while it isn't that bad, it isn't great either.

It's fine though, right? Can't I just use KCCacheProxy with Firefox? - Kind of. Other than than occasionally breaking for no reason, KCCacheProxy is just a proxy; KC3Kai and poi have much more useful tools and stats, things such as ship health. This seems like just a minor inconvenience at first, but it's pretty bad.

KanColle battles are done mostly automatically - this isn't a problem; I like games like that, where I can focus on other things while leaving it on in the background. However, as I mentioned before, if a ship dies, she dies permanently in KanColle. After every battle, there's an option to continue or retreat, and of course if your ships are at low health, you would want to retreat. The only problem? The screen on which you choose to retreat or continue does not show any stats at all. You have to be actively keeping track of what happens in-game to know what decision to make - that, or using external tooling, which simply doesn't seem to be possible on Firefox.

Conclusion

Everything about KanColle, I like very much - in theory. In practice, it's a pain to play it. I might be willing to do it during school, but after attempting to set that up, my school WiFi blocks the specific IP KanColle is hosted on, weirdly enough. One other tool I've gotten to work is Electronic Observer, but it has all the same problems as KC3Kai; no translation, and having to open a separate window for it.

Since KanColle's theme is one of my favorite parts, a similar game is Azur Lane. It's nice, but recently, it's been focusing more and more on fanservice and the original theme of ships has been largely abandoned in newer designs. Oftentimes the rigs just float there, and are barely representative of the namesake ship.

If anyone knows something that can help or something that I said that's terribly wrong, please let me know and thank you for reading!