Stuff has been happening in the mobile games I’ve been playing, too. Granblue Fantasy has gotten its big collaboration event with the OG Love Live crew (which is linked to the 2nd gen Love Live crew event from last year). Dragalia Lost got a sequel to the previous summer event. Princess Connect has a rerun event from last summer going, but also is celebrating its half-anniversary with free 10-rolls, so that’s something too.

I have to say, for both GBF and DL I like the direction of the events compared to the previous. Both the older events (though DL’s was only a month ago) were pretty straightforward, “thing is threatening the place, so we gotta fight it”. Which was weird for the LL event, because the LL girls were entirely useless pretty much the whole time. I mean, you’d expect newbs to be useless, but they were really useless. At least the events in both games gave some character development to the main cast, but they were otherwise pretty normal, “everyone gets along to face the trial” stuff.

These new events though were a change of pace. For DL, I really liked the exploration of self-doubt and social fear on Cleo’s part, and how Siren helped her learn to cut loose and have fun, despite her own challenges (which is odd, since Cleo was all about “tanoshii pahty” back at Dragon Christmas, but whatever, I guess dancing around in a bikini on stage is different from hosting a party in a skimpy santa dress). Of course the event had a happy end, but it was nice that the “threat” was “people might not come to a concert because they are afraid of the singer for good reason,” (her name is Siren, after all) rather than some monster or another.

The LL collab in GBF was a bit more traditional in structure (there are monsters and such), but I think it utilized the LL girls a lot better this time around. Of course, it also helps that the OG LL girls are much more fully realized characters than their sequel counterparts. I’m only tangentially interested in LL, and I have to say the characters her caught me better than in last year’s collab, where it seems everyone just revolved around the main girl Chika. I gotta say, though, that Nico or Maki seem like better main character material than Honoka, but that’s probably just a LL thing more than a GBF thing. The fact that there is some conflict between the LL girls in this rather stressful situation – not much, but just a little banter and chops-busting – adds a bit of spice to what could have been a very saccharine outing.

I appreciated how the LL girls are clearly out of their depth here, but aren’t useless either. Some of them even take the time to learn some good magic stuff. And they actually utilize their skills to help the people of the town, in a way that makes sense, and is self-sustaining (or it would be, if we didn’t know what was coming). I also like that there’s an actual reason the LL girls come to the GBF world, and it wasn’t just some random thing like all the other idol collabs. There’s just a lot of good worldbuilding in this event that I like.