Month September 2020

Genshin Impact: Initial Impressions

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Another week, another new gacha game. But this time, people are actually anticipating it. I’ve never seen initial hype for a new mobile game so high, or a new Chinese game. But there’s good reason for it: it looks good. And not just graphically, but actual gameplay. This game looks like it has soul.

Now granted, a lot of that soul comes from the very obvious Breath of the Wild inspiration in graphics and gameplay. But that’s what people want apparently. BotW is hugely popular, so why not go with a more anime version of that game?

I’ve been able to play this game for a bit, about the first hour or so. Of course, I’ve played that first hour several times now. I’ll give my first impressions in terms of the good and the bad.

The Good:

  • Gameplay: It’s basically Breath of the Wild. You run around an open world, climbing on things, jumping off things, gliding to places, beating up enemies, and so on. The big difference here is that, instead of Link, you use one of several characters. Each character has an elemental affinity, which you use as you’d expect, and which also give different elemental status effects. The main gimmick here is switching out characters on the fly to synergize those status and elemental effects. It’s pretty cool making a fire tornado, or freezing a wet enemy.
  • Art: The art is pretty good. Even on mobile this game just looks good, and from what I’ve seen from actual systems, it looks fantastic with some power behind it. This is the first game that I’ve played that has felt like an anime come to life. Which is weird, because it’s Chinese, not Japanese. But whatever, it’s cool. The character designs are also pretty cool. This might not be the game for you if you’re into big buff manly men, because I haven’t seen any, but if you like any other character archetype, there’s something for you.
  • Translation: There are no translation issues that I can see. I’m honestly shocked. I don’t know Chinese, but I do know a little bit of Japanese, and the English translations match that at least. The English dub is pretty bad, but the Japanese dub is fine. You can also listen in Korean or Chinese, depending on your preference. (And you don’t need to download additional data to do so, which is nice.)

The Bad

  • Gacha System: The gacha system was going to rub people the wrong way regardless, since they’re all kinda predatory. But this is the worst gacha system I’ve ever seen. First, the rates are terrible: 0.6% for 5*, the highest rarity. That’s not for rate-ups; no, that’s for ANY 5*. Next, the 5* are the best characters and weapons. This is mostly normal, but from what the Chinese testers have reported, it’s rather insane in this game: whales won’t even play higher-difficulty content with f2p’ers, it’s that bad. And to make matters worse, you need multiple copies of characters to make them stronger. Oh, and as you see above, you get equipment from the same pool, which dilutes things insanely. No one wants to draw weapons, they want characters, and this just adds insult to injury. At 0.6%, you need to roll about 120 times to get better than even odds of getting at least one 5*. But you’d better pull out your wallet for that, because the game is very stingy with free currency. For this reason, and this reason alone, no matter how good the rest of the game is, I can’t recommend it to normal people. And if you’re into gachas, I still can only recommend it with reservations.
  • Rerolling: Given the above, you’ll want to re-roll so you can at least get a decent start. Most of these gacha games give you a big up-front currency bonus to get you excited, and this game is no exception. At first glance, rerolling is easy: you just make a new account at game load, which is super easy. No registry edits, diving into files, or even having to salt emails for new accounts. However, that’s the only easy part. You have to sit through the entire opening sequence, which is full of unskippable cutscenes and dialog. It takes quite a bit of time to get to the first point you can roll – about a half-hour on mobile, but a lot less on PC (load times and control issues). That gets you your first ten rolls. But, play for another half-hour or so (again, significantly shorter on PC, if you know what you’re doing), and you can get 20 more rolls when you hit account level 7. So, either ten or thirty rolls, for either a half-hour or hour, depending on load times and how much you know what you’re doing. And, considering what I said above about how much you’re going to be rolling for a 5* (ANY 5*, not even a specific one you want), you’re going to be doing this a bunch. I’ve done four so far, and want to throw my tablet all the way to China.
  • Controls: This is mostly a mobile thing, but the controls suck. The menus and stuff are fine, obviously crafted for mobile, but, as is the case with all 3D games, it doesn’t do well with mobile. It’s obviously made for console first (it would be almost perfect on Switch, using the touch screen for menus and such, while having the sticks for movement), and even the PC controls are a bit wonky. But controlling this game with the virtual stick is most un-fun.
  • China: This is a Chinese game. That goes on your PC, potentially. That should be enough, which tells you why I’m playing on my tablet. Every piece of Chinese software is suspect: if not from the devs, or the publisher, then from the government. It doesn’t help that this comes on PC with anti-cheat at the kernel level that doesn’t turn off when the game does, nor goes away when you uninstall the game (sounds like some other (non-Chinese) game that had a lot of controversy recently). The publisher says this is “unintended behavior” and says they will fix it, but don’t worry for now it’s perfectly fine. Yah, I sure believe that.

So yah, fun game with some really bad, glaring flaws that don’t have much to do with gameplay itself. I can’t really recommend it, but I want to play it more myself. I just hope I can actually get to playing before I claw out my eyes rerolling. Time for account #5…

Hypeless

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You might have heard recently that there are a couple of new consoles coming out. I know that’s a shocker, but it’s true! Moreover, you can even pre-order them!

Well, you could, for a few minutes a week or so ago. If you missed out on that, there’s always the scalpers who actually got them.

I didn’t get one. Not that I tried. Not that I’m trying to sound cool or above it all or anything, but I just have no hype for these machines. Like, none. I don’t see myself ever getting one, from either company.

It’s not that I’m not a console guy. I don’t have anything against consoles. In fact, I have several in my room. Sure, I’m primarily a PC gamer, but consoles have their place too.

Their place is to play games only they can play. Trouble is, these newer consoles don’t do that. Microsoft has all but flat-out said they’re not even going to try for any exclusives for the new XBox. Playstation might get some, but it’s doubtful it’ll be more than a handful, no matter how Sony tries to spin the reveals from their own stream.

So, if there are no exclusives (that I want to play), why even bother getting a new machine? All of the supposed advantages of console gaming apply to PC gaming as well. None of these guys are Nintendo, bringing gimmicks to their systems (for good and ill). Thus, no hype. Again, not trying to be cool or hard or whatever, just something I thought I should talk about.

Diving Into the Cracks: Trill Symbiont

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It’s been quite a while since I’ve done one of these posts, but it came up, I thought about it, and I want to make a post about it. By ‘it,’ I mean the Trill, and the Symbionts, as suggested by the title. This will be shorter than some of my past posts, as there’s only really one main point I want to make.

As usual, I make these posts because I think the general impression about them is wrong; or, at least, I have an alternate interpretation, that I think fits the fiction better than the general consensus. In this case, that consensus is that the Trill symbiont (the worm) merges its personality with the host (the humanoid Trill), which then makes a new person, so to speak. I don’t think that’s right.

I think that it’s more the symbiont is a repository of memory of the previous hosts. I question that the worm even has a personality, as we would recognise one. They are assumed to be sentient – the worms can communicate with each other in their natural habit, and it seems with hosts, and even caretakers of that natural habitat, to a limited extent. But, as I said, I don’t know if that means they actually have a “mind” as we would understand. And it seems that, even if it does, that doesn’t matter.

While the host’s personality – or at least, their external expression of that personality – does seem to change a bit, I wouldn’t put that down to a “merging” of sorts. Part of your personality, if not a large part, is shaped by your experiences – your memories – after all. If you suddenly, as a young person, gained the experiences of at least one entire lifetime, that’d change you. Just that would be incredibly valuable – and we (the viewers) can see that, with how the access to symbionts is controlled.

It also seems that the choice of hosts is not just based on intelligence and lack of metal illness, but on personality. As in, not much of one, at least by the time Jadzia was made a host. As we can see (and as we’d expect), Jadzia without the worm is far different from Jadzia Dax. But also, as we see from those times where we get to “meet” the past Daxes, each one is very different from each other. Jadzia just seems like a quiet, nervous nerd, but Jadzia Dax is pretty much the exact opposite. Presumably the future hosts are psychologically prepared on some way

And then there’s Ezri. She wasn’t chosen to be a host, she just happened to be there when a new one was urgently needed. We get to see, real time, what suddenly getting hundreds of years of memories does to someone who isn’t prepared at all. And it isn’t a sudden re-write of personality. It’s just an addition to what they already are.

(As an aside, I wonder if the conjoined Trill has eidetic memory. I don’t think the worm would work very well without it, but does the pair experience their memory like that? Especially if the Trill in general don’t, that’d be really weird to experience.)

Ezri a cute.

WordPress Weirdness

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I haven’t been able to blog for the past few days, up to maybe two weeks. Why not? Because WordPress wouldn’t let me log in. In the past, my login would be kinda funky, where I wouldn’t be able to make comments sometimes, and could only get into the blog dashboard from the “create new blog” button on the top floaty banner that WordPress puts up to get new people to make blogs (hopefully paying money for the privilege).

If you’re constantly logged in to your WordPress account, you don’t see this, you see the links to your own dashboard, login, etc. But they changed it. Now, pressing that new blog button takes you straight to the new blog setup process, without having you create a new account first. (In the past, that would first prompt one to make a new WordPress account, as you’d expect, since pretty much every other website in existence does this – I’d use this opportunity to get into my site.)

To get around this, I tried to log in, as one does. You can log in via the menu next to the Follow button, which seems to default to the lower-right part of the page. (You can also do other things, like Report a site.) But, as soon as I logged in, I was logged back out again. So that was frustrating.

In a profound amount of stupidity, I didn’t try the next obvious thing, until just now: don’t just click that Log In button, but say “that’s not me,” which then takes you to a normal login screen, to manually input username and password. Once I did that (well, reset my password, as I forgot), I was finally able to get in. And my last post wasn’t approved apparently. But it got a like, so I guess it posted anyways? And I had a trackback that also wasn’t approved, but apparently existed still? What would have happened if I had denied my approval in either situation? I don’t know. Very weird, WordPress.

Poppin’ Party: The Music

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I realized, far too late, that in my post about Poppin’ Party (from BangDream!) I mentioned the musical style, but didn’t give any examples! I mean, “it’s basically K-On” doesn’t exactly say a whole lot to people that haven’t watched that show. So I’m going to give several examples, because this band in particular has such a varied style (within the bounds of pop rock, at least).

I also should mention that the vocals are as varied as the style. With every other band, you pretty much know who’s singing – the vocals match the character. But Kasumi is apparently extremely skilled, for a girl that just decided on a whim to form a band. Of course, this is a consequence of the voice actor being a singer first, actor second. But it’s still confusing, all the same – I’ll often be playing a song, wondering which band it belongs to, and being surprised its a PP song.

Anyways, on to it. We’ll start with the “original” songs, since that’s obviously what the story’s about (and they also tend to be the ones where Kasumi sounds the most Kasumi). I’ll try to find the full-length songs, where possible (the in-game songs generally are only a single verse or two):

This is the first BangDream song, as you’d imagine. The K-On influences are most apparent here as well.

This is one of the more poppy songs. Indeed, every time I get this confused with a Pastel Pallets song, though at this point I really shouldn’t.

Even more poppy, but it’s about choco cornets, which can only be Rimi, and thus Poppin Party.

And then there’s this, which is a lot harder. Also, it’s the S3 OP for the anime, so that’s something I suppose.

And now a few covers. I guess writing original songs for five (seven soon) bands is a little much for the devs, so there are a bunch of covers too. Oddly, none of the K-On songs are covered by Poppin’ Party.

But Haruhi Suzumiya is pretty close to K-On, right?

I just like the original, and this is a pretty decent version. Hard to do it justice while pretending to just have a five-piece band, but they mostly manage.

Just to finish this off, we have a vidya song. I like this better than the original, and the original’s pretty great. Too bad there’s no full version.

Crusader Kings III: A First Look

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As mentioned yesterday, Crusader Kings III came out. I had seen a few previews for it, and it looked fun enough, so I decided to pre-order whatever the deluxe version was. I normally wouldn’t do this, but I found a good discount, which made the whole thing the price of a single new game – fair, as I figured the base game game plus the first expansion would be about the level of a proper new game. So last night after work I booted this up.

I figured I’d start with the tutorial. I am experienced with CKII, but I wanted to see what was different, and if the tutorial would be any good. (CKII’s tutorial was the best that company had done to that point, but it still wasn’t that great.) Plus, I had a bit of nostalgia for good ol’ Tutorial Island (aka Ireland).

As a tutorial, I don’t know how good this would be for people who hadn’t played CKII. It seems like it’s holding your hand, as is proper, but it leaves a lot out. It works quite well for CKII players, though, effectively illustrating the early-game differences between the two. However, it leaves some later-game (not late-game) differences off.

I won’t talk too much about the aesthetic differences between the two games. I’m not sure how I feel about the 3d models, but they do have a charm of their own I suppose. I must admit they make the clothing pack dlc’s more enticing – well, more enticing than zero, with CKII’s 2d portraits where clothes really don’t matter in the slightest. The map is fine, too.

Surprisingly easy and quick to unify Ireland

I was going into this trying to find what was going to be left out from the previous game. These sort of games always seem to take away things from previous games, to sell them back to you as dlc. I can’t see too much of that here. The plague system seems to be gone, and the council system seems more bare-bones than CKII with all expansions, but those were expansions I didn’t personally apply anyways, so not much difference to me. Seems most of what’s missing in the base game are a bunch of flavor-type events.

There are a couple of important differences between this game and its predecessor.

  • You can, right from the start, raise up a proper army. Levies work, but they aren’t that good.
  • You don’t need to have transports to move your armies across water. This is convenient, though also takes away from idea of oceans as obstacles (not that they made that much of a difference for ai anyways).
  • Marriages of children automatically form alliances (if both spouses are landholders), instead of just making them more likely, so doom stacks are a lot bigger of an issue earlier in the game (ask me how I know this); so it pays to have alliances closer in, rather than spread all over the world.
  • The perk system that is rather important here, and can give additional options. There’s one perk in particular, which allows you to extort money from people you’re blackmailing (after you’ve found out a secret sin of theirs), that really can bring in the money.
  • Factions seem to be a lot easier, or perhaps simpler, and thus are much more important to pay attention to (ask me who I know this).

There are other differences, but I didn’t get too much into them in the short time I played.

All in all, this isn’t a game I need to play RIGHT NOW. Which isn’t a slight against it: it’s a game I can come back to and play whenever I feel like it. Which is good, because a lot of games aren’t like that. Like Assassins Creed: Odyssey, which I will go back to before I lose the plot. But CKIII, for the first time in modern Paradox history, seems to be a complete, good, game right out the box, vanilla, and not bugged to hell or anything.

August and September

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I got a lot done this month. Or at least it seems so. Not everything I thought I might do, but still a bunch.

First off, I did accomplish my goal of having a proper Blaugust, writing a new post every day. Some of them weren’t the best posts, but there was only one that was completely no-effort, so good on me. Having the prompts really helped some days. I didn’t write about everything I wanted to, but I did get to most of it. Like, I didn’t get to reviewing the Princess Connect anime, but at least I watched the first three episodes (and almost wrote about them, but then I remembered something else more timely).

I actually started two new games. First, Harspace: Shipbreakers, which I wrote about the other day; and then Assassins Creed: Odyssey, which I haven’t yet. Both are good, fun games. Both took me away from the other games I’m playing, and made me wish I had more hours in the day to play.

I also kept up with the dailies, and more, in my other games. Just dailies in ESO and STO, and significantly more in the mobile games I’ve been playing. Pokemon Masters really has revamped things with its latest major update, and it’s more fun to play; plus, it has its anniversary celebration going on right now.

I actually got back into Granblue Fantasy in a real way, for some reason. I guess it was the extra quests with the summer celebration. But I put actual effort into Rise of Beasts, and actually participated in guild wars (I think I broke my (admittedly pathetic) record for honors). I was planning on 40-boxing Sarasa up to 5*, but decided to just use the classic method after looking at all the materials I didn’t have that I still needed.

As for next month, there are definitely some thing’s I’m looking forward to. Crusader Kings 3 just came out today, and I’m itching to get into it. Genshin Impact should come out this month, I think, and that’s something else worth investigating, if I don’t think it will infest my computer with CCP funny business (it’s not Tencent, but it’s still mainlander Chinese I’m pretty sure). Craftopia is coming to early access soon, and that looks like it might be my jam.