There is a game called Summoner's Call.
Developed by Nexus Inc., this mobile title, subtitled Hyper Roguelike Summoning RPG, was launched two years ago. To celebrate its second anniversary and its monumental achievement of 100 million downloads, we’re taking a deep dive into the game that has taken the world by storm.
Summoner's Call is already a global sensation, but for those who have yet to experience it, allow us to introduce you.
When Summoner's Call first appeared on app storefronts, many gamers were skeptical. Wasn't this just another generic, mass-produced mobile game? But through sheer word of mouth, its popularity steadily grew. Now, it stands as a phenomenon enjoyed not only in Korea but across the entire globe.
So, what is the secret that propelled Summoner's Call to become the world’s number one mobile game? Let’s examine its most compelling features.
First, the Nexus Summon.
This keystone system, the culmination of five years of development, randomly combines thousands of distinct patterns to generate a virtually infinite roster of unique heroes. In other words, whether you summon hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of times in Summoner's Call, the probability of receiving a duplicate hero is nearly zero. It defies all common sense, but Summoner's Call made the impossible a reality.
And yet, even that revolutionary system pales in comparison to the game’s true masterstroke.
Second, the Sentient Core AI.
A few years ago, the world was captivated by a match between a world-class Go champion and an artificial intelligence. The battle of the century ended in the AI’s victory. Watching that historic moment, this reporter couldn't help but wonder if we were witnessing the dawn of the super-advanced AI we’d only ever seen in science fiction films.
Ironically, that AI revolution began not in a research lab, but in a game company.
The secret to what makes the tens of millions of heroes in this game so compelling is this: Nexus applied a level of hyper-advanced artificial intelligence, once thought to be decades away, to what is ostensibly just a mobile game.
The heroes of Summoner's Call feel and think for themselves. Send a hundred different heroes into the same stage, and you will get a hundred different reactions. They make demands of their masters, assert their own will, and will sometimes obey orders and other times refuse them.
This becomes even more astonishing in battle, the core of the game. Even without direct commands from their master, heroes will devise their own effective strategies, employing different tactics and formations for every fight. Their stat growth varies even with identical training, and the process and outcome of a battle can differ wildly between heroes of the same level and grade.
Because of this, the hero tier lists and rigid training guides common to other games simply don't exist here. Every single one of the thousands, or even hundreds of millions, of heroes in Summoner's Call feels like a unique individual.
This is the biggest reason Summoner's Call has been nicknamed ‘the devil’s game’.
It’s just too realistic. The heroes in the game may be nothing more than constructs of data, but their realism is staggering. To this day, the developer, Nexus, has refused to reveal the detailed algorithm behind it all. Not long ago, a Chinese mega-corporation attempted to acquire the developer for hundreds of billions of dollars, but the offer was rejected.
Third, the Roguelike elements.
"Ugh, I'm out of things to do."
"There's no content left."
These are the familiar laments of the most dedicated, hardcore players in any game, proof that for most titles, development speed can never keep up with content consumption.
A Nexus employee once famously said in an interview: “A super-hardcore user who drops tens of millions of won and does nothing but play all day? Let them try to beat our game.”
When that interview was first published, many users scoffed. But now, two years after release, not a single player has reached the end of Summoner's Call’s main dungeon. And this is in a climate where countless users have poured in not just tens, but hundreds of millions of won, and many invest more than eighteen hours a day into the game.
Summoner's Call also adopted a hardcore rule: permadeath.
When it was first announced, players were incredulous. When a hero dies, they are gone for good. A hero you spent millions of won and hundreds of hours on could vanish in a single battle. In the early days, this was considered the game’s greatest flaw and drew the ire of countless users.
Of course, Nexus never revised the rule. Instead, as time went on, more and more players began to see it as one of the game's most attractive features.
As one enthusiast argued: “The heroes of Summoner's Call are programmed with such precision they could be mistaken for actual humans. If they can be ‘born’ through summoning, isn’t it only natural that they can also die?”
Furthermore, the stages in Summoner's Call change randomly; no one can predict what kind of mission will appear next. And since the AI handles the battles, there is little room for the master to intervene once a mission has begun.
On top of this, there are dozens, even hundreds, of unpredictable variables. A hastily assembled party might miraculously clear a dungeon of transcendental difficulty, while a 6-star elite squad gets completely wiped out on a low-level stage.
Nothing in Summoner's Call is fixed. It is constantly changing, constantly in flux.
Some critics pose the question: "Then what’s the point of the player? Are we just spectators? Isn't it all just a luck-based crapshoot? A broken game with no real strategy, where you only win if you pull a high-star hero?"
To those people, I would like to introduce a master from Korea.
His account name is Hermes. He is the only Korean in the world’s top rankings and a legendary player known as the Arch-Strategist.
And yet, he isn’t number one.
That’s right. Hermes is only fifth in the world rankings. Given his rank, calling him the world's greatest master might seem ironic.
However, he is mentioned more often than the number-one player and is the only ranker to have earned the honored title of Arch-Strategist.
The reason is simple: he has legendarily bad luck.
Summoner's Call’s summoning system is divided by grade. Free summons can yield heroes between 1 and 3 stars. Paid summons range from 3 to 5 stars. The community generally agrees that to become a top ranker, you need at least five native 5-star heroes, as higher-star heroes are usually far more powerful. While it's possible to evolve a 1-star hero to 5-stars by collecting materials, players unanimously agree they're a pale imitation of the real thing.
Which brings us to the master named Hermes.
He has performed approximately 4,500 paid summons, yet he has not obtained a single native 5-star hero. It's a pathetic record compared to the rankers immediately above and below him, who each possess dozens of native 5-stars. He has only a single high-ranking 4-star hero to his name.
And yet, he proudly maintains his position as the number one player in Korea and number five in the world. This is the ultimate proof that Summoner's Call is not a luck-based game and that player skill and management can overcome the odds.
While masters cannot directly intervene in combat, they can develop their heroes in other ways. They can identify a hero's talents and potential that can't be quantified by a status window, design efficient training regimens, and assemble parties optimized for their individual strengths.
Hermes proved that while a native 1-star hero is generally weaker than a higher-rank hero, they are not unconditionally weaker.
It is no exaggeration to say that the entire meta of Summoner's Call can be divided into two eras: before Hermes shared his strategies, and after.
In addition to this, the list of revolutionary changes Hermes brought to Summoner's Call…
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▼ [Comments – 3135]
[Lv.51] KewlCat11
Likes: 8742 / Dislikes: 6644
– No, seriously, why did the reporter start off fine and then go completely off the rails? Is it really appropriate to praise a single user in a feature article about the game? Did Hermes slip you some cash, reporter?
└[Lv.17] ForGlory
Likes: 513 / Dislikes: 672
– All Hail Hermes!
└[Lv.3] YouSaidIt
Likes: 13 / Dislikes: 5
– One of the writers here is a high-ranking member of Hermetics. Why hasn't the editor fired him yet?
[Lv.21] FigurineFan
Likes: 11 / Dislikes: 13
– Honestly, I don't get why Hermes gets so much praise. Isn't he just another whale?
[Lv.76] WyvernDream
Likes: 3 / Dislikes: 5
– What the hell is Hermetics?
[Lv.31] <Anonymous>
Likes: 0 / Dislikes: 0
– This place is just a Hermes fansite. I heard you need his autograph to get promoted to ‘excellent member’ status here.
└[Lv. 76] WyvernDream
Likes: 4 / Dislikes: 3
– That’s ridiculous.
[Lv.7] OrionFollower
Likes: 1132 / Dislikes: 2564
[This comment has been hidden.]
– I wanna lick OrionFan’s ass! slurp slurp
[Lv.22] CashLordChris
Likes: 811 / Dislikes: 532
– Putting the article's impartiality aside, you can't ignore the influence Hermes had on Summoner's Call. Before Hermes went public with his account, everyone thought this was just another pay-to-win game, no matter how well-designed it was. It’s not an exaggeration to say the entire meta changed because of him.
└[Lv.15] AncientScholar
Likes: 4 / Dislikes: 9
– Here we go with the Hermetics again!
[Lv.22] CashLordChris
Likes: 321 / Dislikes: 157
– Did I say something wrong? Seriously, weren't all the other Korean top-rankers pushed out by foreign players? Right now, Hermes's the only one left. For Korean players, Summoner's Call is Hermes, and Hermes is Summoner's Call. To put it bluntly, if Hermes had even a single 7-star hero, he'd be challenging for the number one spot in the world.
[Lv.7] OrionFan
Likes: 325 / Dislikes: 1132
[This comment has been hidden.]
– I wanna lick Siris's armpits! slurp slurp
└[Lv. 15] DigitalShackles
Likes: 913 / Dislikes: 132
– This idiot posts the same crap in every article about this game. Why haven't the mods banned him yet?
[Lv.1] Aya0479
Likes: 13 / Dislikes: 11
– All Hail Hermes!
All roads lead to Hermes!
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