I haven't played any either, but I think so.

"Gacha" refers to the system of random drops acquired via some sort of token or exchange. The name comes from Gachapon or "capsule toy" machines, which you might have seen even in the US -- think a gumball machine, except instead of gumballs there are plastic capsules with a variety of toys or collectables inside. For instance, one local restaurant near my house has one that contains DC-licensed string dolls. If I were to jam a few quarters into the thing and turn the knob, I would (presumably) be rewarded with a little string doll of a DC character but (and this is an important part for defining "Gacha") which character would be random. It might be The Joker, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman... the set contains a lot of options, and they're not necessarily equally likely.

In gaming parlance, a game is a Gacha game if some meaningful game piece is acquired in a similar way: At a fixed price in some resource (which may or may not be "premium" currency acquired primarily via real money) you draw one or more results from a pool of possible game pieces to acquire. What gameplay the game has beyond collection via Gacha could be just about anything. Some might be jrpgs, others might not be. Azur Lane is something of a light bullet hell sort of game, while Fire Emblem: Heroes is, well, a Fire Emblem game (Turn-based strategy with light RPG elements). Both are Gacha games where you use a specific in-game resource to acquire new characters, but a cursory lookup suggests that they're night and day when it comes to generosity: a "Beginner guide" for Heroes recommends rerolling (start scumming) to get an initial layout of desirable units since pulls from the gacha are scarce without investing real money after your account is established, while some beginner info for AL suggests not bothering because the resource in question is fairly plentiful, many common characters are decent for a long time, and the drop rate for rare/strong characters pretty good.

My impression is that the purest or most common expression of the gatcha game is one where the game consists entirely of gatcha-ing, arranging a team, fighting, and maybe story elements. THey are usually based on an existing franchise (Jo-Jo, Marvel, Star Wars, Fate) or at least existing concept (warships) so that players can easily grok what each character is/does.

The purest expression of the gatcha game is paper Magic.

Finished Granblue Fantasy. It was utterly stock with no variation or interesting developments.

Started Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Seems like each episode is going to be a series of vignettes? Fun, though.

Fate/Zero - Some cool and/or funny moments, but it is very much a dark story with a mostly tragic end. I would still recommend watching it for context on FSN, to get some jokes and such that pop up in FGO, but not as your entry into the Fate franchise.

SSSS Gridman - To preface this, I only watched the first four episodes, then read the tvtropes page. I feel like this was marketed and animated to an older audience than it was written for. Admittedly, I have no familiarity with the Ultraman series, so I missed a lot of the references and parallels. Yuta felt very bland, Friend #1 indirectly killed people by holding Yuta back from defeating the villain, and Rikka felt the most human. The fights were limited by the format, in that Gridman has to fail with the previous tactic, yell, then get the next attachment that unlocks whatever ability is necessary to one-hit kill the kaiju of the week. The potential victims were not developed in any way such that I would care if Gridman lost. In short, despite having a exceptional animation studio bringing it to life, the story left me apathetic.

Maou-sama Retry - A shaky first episode, but it hits its stride in the second. Having read the manga, I would say there is enough originality and charm to set this apart from your generic power fantasy pandering isekai. The MC manages to be overpowered, yet still encountering meaningful conflict via needing to use diplomatic means in order to achieve long-term goals.

UchiMusume - Get ready for wholesomeness and cuteness. While there are a number of stories where the overpowered hero adopts a daughter figure, the main character of this anime could be argued to be the daughteru. She struggles with a language barrier and later on some prejudice, but perseveres. Quite frankly, she is relentlessly sweet and dutiful in a way that lends credence to the conspiracy theory that Shinzō Abe, the prime minister of Japan, is influencing media to encourage the Japanese people to fight the declining birth rate and have more kids.

Sad to hear Gridman isn't so hot -- I've been a pretty big fan of Trigger so I was hoping it would pay off. I'll probably still take a look myself.

So, I'm 11/24 on Shangri-la and... it reeks of amateur writer. I don't want to say you can't meld together all the themes the show wants to mix, because you could, it would just take a TON of skill and care. And it would be way easier and usually better to... not. Up until this episode Karin and her cyberpunk hacking/market manipulation were my favorite part of the show, but I was already thinking "Maybe the writer should have let her drop" because it didn't really connect with the "AVALANCHE versus Shin-ra" style rebellion plot nor with the magic powers and prophecy plot. The latter (Mikuni's plot and... weird bodysnatching ghost) didn't fit with the rest of the setting, but it also got the most time devoted to it so while I would have liked that to drop early, it's clear that wasn't where things were going.

Now? First of all, the show uses symbolism like a high-schooler who just learned what that is, AND Karin's side of the story, which made sense even if it wasn't really germane to the rest, has now been invaded by the supernatural BS that doesn't make any sense at all... without actually tying her into that side of the plot -- there's still no GOOD connection.

With other complex, twisted shows like Occultic;Nine, Mekakucity Actors, or Noein I might not know what was going on... but the writing in those shows (yes, even Occultic) was good enough that I was interested in the present and wanted to see how they tied things together. With Shangri-la I'm wondering if things will tie together and suspecting/fearing the answer is "no" or at least "not in any satisfying or coherent manner"

I wasn't as enamored with Gridman as some youtubers I've listened to. That said, the story does shift around a bit. It starts as a kind of classic monster-of-the-week show with comedic vibes, but there are some very clearly established mysteries that start to take the foreground before the show, while still kind of doing the same thing, revolves around something pretty different.

In other news I watched all of Katekyou Hitman Reborn and it was atricous, all 203 episodes of it.

Anime Crimes Division isn't anime, but it's about anime and pretty amusing.

Ended up dropping Maou-sama Retry. The animation is like paper figures waved around on popsicle sticks, it got seriously distracting. I would recommend reading the manga though, it's decent.

Finished Kaguya-sama: Love is War. It was sweet and surprisingly heartfelt.

Finished Shangri-la. It was crap. Like, seriously, I thought the Outside Context climax in Darling in the Franxx was bad, but at least there the writers KNEW they were bringing in this crud out of left field. Shangri-la's ending goes about like that except its even more random and incompetent. By far. Like, it's seriously night and day. The aliens showing up in DitF is sane, normal, and well-established compared to Shangri-la's climax. At least when the Aliens show up there you have almost a quarter of the show left to explore them (though I still wish it had gone a different way). Shangri-la? I think they were still pulling new brands of complete nonsense into the last ten minutes, though for a while before that nothing seems to be predicated on what came before or have any bearing on what comes after. And in DitF at least a good portion of the road there had fun characters and good action. Shangri-la has weaksauce intrigue, maybe one or two OK characters out of a massive ensemble cast of mostly lame and sometimes annoying characters, and is really just insultingly poorly written.

Started Eureka Seven. Looks alright so far. Some bog-standard stuff, but still fun.

Probably going to be starting the Quintessential Quintuplets. Don't know what to expect.

How is this bad though?

I think that the ending was actually perfect for the series.

Not saying it's bad, just that it's particularly dark. For some people, that's a selling point. For others, it's a useful to know what they are getting into.

#KiritsuguDidNothingWrong
Well, killing that one dude who surrendered was clearly wrong, but that felt rather out of character.

Eureka 7 going strong. Today was a recap episode, but at least it provided a little new info.

Finished Quintessential Quintuplets. It was alright. There were some awkward bits and the production values weren't always the greatest, but on the whole it had more merits than demerits.

Gonna be starting Chaos;Head. It's a semicolon so I know there's going to be a lot to go through but at least it should be entertaining.

Chaos;Head is probably one of the less appreciated semicolon shows (although in fairness you could probably say that about all of them except Steins;Gate). It's likely one of the more confusing entries, and I imagine a lot of people are turned off by the main character, but I personally adore him.
I imagine it would be considered the worst entry of the franchise if Chaos;Child didn't exist, and even then it still might. I think it's my second favorite after Occultic;Nine though. I never really cared much for Steins;Gate. That said, I like it more than Robotics;Notes.

OK, I'm not totally done with it yet but... I'm enjoying the heck out of it and haven't found it all that confusing. So the universe works on Planescape rules -- consensus reality, if the right person believes something hard enough it's real. OK, that's not the 'scientific' explanation given so there are some meaningful differences in how things operate, but I was prepared enough for the setting that I was kind of predicting the twist I just got (end of Episode 9). Granted, I thought it was going to be about Rimi, but it was still in my canon of things that would make sense given the universe and established rules.

I'm actually enjoying it a heck of a lot -- more than I did Occultic;Nine (which IMO was hampered by some serious pacing issues, though it had some good strong points.), though probably not as much as I did Steins;Gate (which I really got into). If this is the "Weak" end of the semicolon series, I'm overall impressed. Of course I haven't watched Robotics;Notes or (of course) Chaos;Child so we'll see if I have a big delta from your opinion or public consensus on either of those.

I looked at MAL out of curiosity

R;N scores a bit above expectations, but otherwise I'm not too surprised. I guess it's a very inoffensive show. I think Chaos;Child would probably have a worse rating if it wasn't a sequel to Chaos;Head

It's not so much that darkness is a selling point for me, as it is that I don't really mind it. Whether things end happily or unhappily doesn't really affect my enjoyment. I think it's a great entry point though (it was mine years ago when I first watched it): it's self-contained, it has a cast full of interesting and engaging characters that grab your attention even if you don't know or care about the Fate franchise, and it brings you up to speed on everything you need to know while introducing them, so you don't have to sit through an infodump before you get to the interesting part.

It also avoids a lot of the aspects of Fate that are a bit, uh, off-putting to people who aren't its target audience, like extensive fanservice, or Emiya Shirou.