Collaborations are a popular thing with long-running games, at least in Japan. They’re often used as a means of cross promotion with existing properties, or just plain promotion of new properties. They tend to be promotions of both sides: the players of the game the collab might check out the other thing, and fans of that other thing might come play this game. I say “thing” because they could be other games, or a movie, anime, or whatever (Final Fantasy Brave Exvious famously had a collaboration with…Adriana Grande).
That’s all well and good, but in an RPG of some sort, those collabs often come with a some sort of story. Since these collabs might not even be in the same genre, they might try to justify their inclusion into the RPG. The lazy way is just to use a dimensional portal, or some other use of Multiverse; for example, this is what is used in Dragalia Lost, though at least this is justified already from the game’s story (and Fire Emblem Heroes as well, which was actually used to some good effect in the last collab). But not all games use this, at least not exclusively.
Today we’re going to look at Granblue Fantasy’s inclusion of collabs into its story (or rather, have already looked at, because that’s what the image at top is). This game uses pretty much every way you might think to include characters from other franchises in a way that isn’t too crazy:
First, those franchises are considered already a part of its world. Some of these aren’t too jarring, since they are already medieval fantasies, like Princess Connect or Slayers. But Street Fighter (modern) or Attack on Titan (industrial fantasy)? At least GBF can justify this by saying it’s just another isolated island in the sky.
We do have one isolated example of merely being a different timeline. This is easy to do, since Gachapin and Mukku are just characters, rather than using an entire fictional work. Also, it’s from a comedy event, so things don’t need to make sense.
The next is same universe, but different worlds. As in, the characters could hop on a space ship and travel normally. This makes sense for Pretty Cure, since that’s a thing that happens in that show (though teleportation works faster, and is what is used here). For Persona, the GBF world is connected to the same collective unconscious as the Persona series. (This also has the implication that PreCure and Persona are the same world.)
This next one – same multiverse – is what I described previously. In GBF all of these examples use the same effect for how the characters get to the GBF world, so that implies that it’s the same mechanism. (I don’t know why the Shadowverse collab used this, but it did.)
The last one is a little more off. I used “different multiverse” just because it’s a different mechanism (in story). In those, the various characters don’t get physically transported to the GBF world. It’s basically a “it was just a dream” plot device. This is my least-favorite method – it just seems so cheap.
Dragalia Lost is one of those games I really like for some reason. I’m not terribly good at it, and it’s not the best game, even in its genre, but still I keep with it. I think it’s mostly due to the story. There’s just something quite charming about it.
Not to say that it’s particularly good or anything; it’s not winning awards anytime soon. And that’s a shame. I know story is just an ancillary thing for this sort of mobile game – this one actually has gameplay – but the devs think it’s obviously still important for the fans, since they’ve put more of a focus on getting more story out, and faster. But…it leaves something to be desired. With just a little more depth, a bit more thought than the basic jrpg tropes, especially in the main story, and it could be something really special here.
To put it simply, the game’s protagonist (Euden) is the seventh child (of eight) of a good king. Said good king dies at the beginning, after getting possessed by The Great Evil. The Great Evil (not it’s name, just what it is) then possesses the younger twin sister of the MC, Zethia, who also happened to be the figurehead of the local dragon-worshiping religion (ie, the fantasy pope gets possessed by the fantasy devil) – and therefore is not a potential heir to the throne. Then said Great Evil decides she/it is going to take over the kingdom, and does – and renames the kingdom from Generic Eurofantasyland to The Evil Empire.
Right there, there’s something potentially interesting. See, one needs to have a claim on the throne, in order to claim the throne. (At least politically.) Zethia had no claim, so she has no authority to claim. Now, being The Great Evil, she has phenomenal power, and that creates an authority of its own. But that power needs to be demonstrated first. From all that we can tell, Zethia just walked onto the throne and claimed it, no opposition (besides from Euden’s little band, who’ve been branded as kingslayers – one of the few things the story gets right in this area). Not only did Zethia not have any claim in the first place, but she’s also the eighth child of the king. What about the other six or so? We quickly learn (and it makes sense) that a few don’t care about ruling, or are otherwise unfit to do so. But that still leaves at least one, and probably more, that should contest this – most notably the oldest, who naturally was assuming he’d be the next king (and has the ambition and ability to do so). But no, we see all of Euden’s older siblings simply fall in line, and none of the nobles dispute such a breech in propriety. Oh, and no one seems to really care that Zethia, the Fantasy Pope, remember, renamed the kingdom to basically be The Evil Empire – the evil world-conquering empire ruled by and worshiping The Great Evil, whom the kingdom’s founder vanquished. No big deal I guess – even to the religion she’s the head of, which is specifically opposed to said Great Evil.
And that just takes into account the internal palace politics. What about the international scene? At least the game takes some time to flesh out its world a bit: there are the not!forest elves (Sylvans), who nominally are part of this kingdom, but not really because they all live in the inpenetrable woods (and are thus exotic to humans – except for all those generic Slyvan NPC’s that show up in town scenes all the time); the other generic Eurofantasy kingdom to the north that is apparently somewhat hostile but not really since we get some of them as gacha characters; the not!Venice merchant city-state to the west; the not!China somewhere to the east (but not too far east); and the not!Japan, also not too far to the east. How do all these react to this turmoil? Asides from the not!Venice, we don’t really know – and even in this case, we only know something because the MC asks for their help, for an alliance.
And then there’s the issue of Euden and his band. At the beginning Euden and friends find an abandoned castle – abandoned, because it was hidden in a magic forest with magical mist. They use this as a base to harass the Evil Empire, and to help the various people messed up by said Evil Empire. Eventually there’s a sufficiently-large amount of refugees that Euden actually is able to declare independence from Evil Empire. What comes of this major event? Not a whole lot. Besides going to not!Venice to get an ally, things just proceed in typical JRPG fashion: save villagers from monsters or The Evil Empire, go to parties, throw parties. entertain foreigners, fight off the occasional Evil Empire patrol, and so on. The game’s story rarely uses the fact that Euden is a ruler to much effect. Sometimes, late in the story, he commands an army, or something, but generally he’s just a jrpg protagonist going around with his jrpg party gathering allies. And of course there’s the typical gacha stuff where he interacts personally with just about every character, in a manner befitting a jrpg protagonist, not a ruler (they say king; but duke, or maybe even count, would be more appropriate).
In just these few worldbuilding, political areas, the game somewhat falls flat. And it’s a real shame, because this isn’t just another typical jrpg (or even western rpg) story. They could have actually done something special here, but they didn’t even think out the implications of events in their own story. And that’s the real kicker – I think a lot of people look down on mobile rpg stories because the stories tend to do this. It seems most stories aren’t written by proper writers, but by people high up on the dev team – often the directors themselves – and that can lead to these situations where there are good idea seeds, but the seeds aren’t allowed to grow and mature, at least not properly (tonight’s story update is probably going to be a good example of this, but that’s spoiler territory). It’s just lost potential.
I’m going to be honest here: this was really hard. Sure, one or two of these won’t surprise anyone who’s been reading the blog at all, but beyond the obvious? I just don’t know. Lately, a lot of things that used to animate me…don’t. But, I will persevere.
Pizza
I love pizza. Really love it. I eat it as much as I can, which is obvious looking at my physique. Up there is a picture from one of my favorite places, Shakey’s. Haters gonna hate, but I love that style for some reason. But I love pretty much all pizza. Deep dish, paper-thin, lots of toppings, just cheese, whatever, I love it. Sure, there are pizzas I don’t like, and I of course have my preferences, but pizza is one of those things that excites me, just thinking about it. I look forward with great anticipation every pizza day, all week.
Astronomy
I don’t remember if I actually was the one that took the image on the right, but I was definitely the one who analysed the data to make it.
When I was a kid I really loved space. Then I kinda grew out of it; or perhaps more accurately, lost exposure. Your typical high school just doesn’t focus on that. When I went back to uni I took a 101 course in Astronomy, as an easy elective for my Physics degree. Sure, it was that, but it rekindled my excitement for astronomy. I took a few more astronomy classes, but reigned it in, as I needed to eventually graduate. But I figured I’d take the rest of my science electives in astronomy. Unfortunately, the timing didn’t work out for that (some classes only offered a certain semester, which were gatekeeper classes for more stuff, etc.), but I did get to do some actual work and research with the telescope, which was awesome (even though I had a 4am shift for work…). If I had to do it again, I’d skip out on Physics, and go into Astronomy.
Star Trek
This was one of the obvious ones. Hell, I named my blog after Trek. I love Star Trek to death. Good Trek, that is. Or even mediocre Trek. But not the bad stuff. That’s part of why I haven’t been able to get excited about much lately: one of my greatest loves is just plain bad, and has been for most things since Enterprise ended about 15 years ago. All the new official canon is bad or terrible. Can’t get that thrill anymore about any announcements, because all that can come of that is disappointment. At least the old stuff is still there, and I love talking about that at every opportunity. I even still play STO, despite it going the way of the dog too.
Gacha Game Stories
I like game stories in general. I know most game writers aren’t the best, but I tend to like them anyways. I of course get most excited for RPG’s, because they usually have the most, and best, story. But I put gacha games here in focus because they deliver on a regular basis. Sure, they tend to be merely context for image and sound files for whatever gameplay there is, but that’s what I love about it. As I said, I’m not expecting an epic, or a classic, but just something decent (in fact, in a future post – maybe tomorrow – I’ll talk about some things that would improve the stories in a couple of games I play). I like the background. I like the context. I like that they are short. And I love the delivery schedule the best. The games I play deliver some new story or another at least once a month. Even MMO’s generally take several months between story content updates; they might be meatier in comparison, but they’re just as disposable. In an earlier era, I’d probably be the guy devouring every pulp sci-fi magazine; these gacha game stories are a modern equivalent, I think. And, as I posted towards the beginning of the month, I really dislike it when people just dismiss the stories as trash, without engaging with them. Tell me why you think it’s trash. I just want to talk about these, have a discussion, theorycraft, worldbuild, headcanon, I don’t even care what you think as long as we’re talking. That’s exciting.
I’ve been playing mobile gacha games for a few years now. I’ve been paying attention to the various trends and what’a popular and whatnot for that time. Some of my most-played games fall into this category after all, and I think watching them in general is just a good idea. Over that time, I think I’ve seen a lot of what tends to work. And I’ve seen a few things that don’t work. So, in case any of those big game producers making a new game are reading this blog today, I’ll spell it out for you, and solve all your problems.
The first part is to know your audience. This might seem like a simple thing, but a lot of games go out there thinking their audience is EVERYONE! Sure, that’d be nice to have, but the reality is, not everyone will want to play your game, at least at first. “Everyone” is quite the accomplishment. But you should know that the typical audience for these sorts of games are adult males with jobs, especially those over 30, at least for new IP’s. If you’re one of the lucky ones with a licensed property, you’ll have your audience – though it will still be somewhat older, because you’re going whaling, and whales need money, serious cash. Like, hundreds of spare dollars a month to throw at your gacha. Kids don’t have that (and it’s also kinda scummy to market this sort of thing to kids, but that’s a secondary concern).
Once you know your audience, you know how to cater to them. If it’s adult males, as it most likely is, it’s pretty girls. Waifus, if you’ll pardon my misuse of weeb parlance. But, but what about cool guys?! Everyone loves cool guys, that’s why they’re the protagonists of so many games! Sure, they’re the protagonists. You can even make the protagonist of your game a cool dude. But you don’t draw protagonists from the gacha, typically. That’s a bad plan. Most dudes don’t want to spend money on dudes (unless it’s their birthday). They’ll spend money on women, though, even women they have no chance on being with (in this case, because the women aren’t even real). The gacha doesn’t have to be ALL girls, but it should heavily weigh that way. Remember, every time a guy draws a male character, unless that character is quite overpowered, there will be disappointment.
There, that’s it. That’s all you’ll need. Oh, and marketing. Lots and lots of marketing. No matter how awesome your game is, not matter how appealing your characters are, it won’t matter one little bit if no one knows about it. Word-of-mouth works, but those people have to get into the game first, in order to tell others about it. Fan artists are especially useful here. But again, if they don’t see your characters in the first place, they can’t make art of them and spread your message on Twitter for free. Even a big-name publisher won’t mean anything, if there’s no marketing. Mobile games are a dime a few dozen, and essentially disposable – getting your name, and art, out there will make you stand out from the competition.
July was pretty simple. Pretty much did the same thing as usual: ESO, Dragalia Lost, a bit of STO, Granblue Fantasy, Pokemon Masters, and so on. That’s the thing: when you have so many games that are every-day-games, you don’t get much chance to play other games. But, I did manage to fit a couple more in.
First, V4. It’s Nexon’s new (to the West anyways) mobile MMO. Yes, you can play on PC, but it’s obviously built for mobile. I won’t be giving a whole review in a post, because it doesn’t deserve one. It’s terribly boring, especially on mobile. Basically just auto and press buttons when they show up. Not terribly deep, nor engaging. I dropped it after three days. The story is nothing at all. Extremely generic. And the mobile aspect limits one of the few good things these Korean grinders have: character customization. It’s relatively limited here, though compared to some other games it’s still decent enough. But you still end up with some soulless character, no matter what you do. Oh well, it’s free to try out if you want.
Next, I got Destroy All Humans. I loved this game on PS2, and was quite excited for the remake. And the excitement actually was justified. I am going to do a full post review, once I finish it. It’s not a perfect remake, but nothing ever is, and the good well outweighs the disappointments. From the sales figures we can estimate, it looks like this sold even better than originally, so there’s a decent chance the superior sequel will also get a remake (and I’ll finally be able to finish it – a game-breaking bug/scratch prevented finishing the PS2 game).
For the next month, I’ll continue on my present course. I have a new character in ESO that I’m leveling, a High Elf healer, so that will take some effort. I’m getting better at Bang Dream, though I might have hit a skill plateau. Granblue Fantasy has daily missions for the next little bit, as part of their summer celebration. STO will have its summer Risa event starting next week, so I’ll be participating in that (the ship isn’t the one I wanted, but what’re you gonna do?). I of course need to finish Destroy All Humans. Pokemon Masters got a major update, which actually significantly changes how you interact with the game, so I’ll be keeping up with that too.
I think I’ll also make a list of the games I’m keeping up with for the near future, what I’m planning on playing, what I’ve dropped, and so on. That seems like something that might help me keep focused.
This is of course a thorny issue. All games will eventually end. But, traditionally, you buy the game itself. In a lot of MMO’s, among other games, you can buy in-game items for real money. Sometimes a lot of money. But still, the game will go away someday. In a game you actually own, you can at least look at the item in your inventory, or on your character. But if a MMO, or gacha game, or any other sort of game where those items are stored on an exterior server, dies, that’s it, poof goes the item.
The article was more talking about emulators and stuff, so the person who bought whatever could potentially continue enjoying their purchase. That’s not what I’m going to go on about, though. I’m more talking about the very idea of in-game purchases, and my philosophy on these.
The way I see it, it’s not “is this item worth the money?”. It’s not. It’s just a part of a game. It’s not real. No, the real question is “will I enjoy the game enough in the future to justify spending the money?”. Of course, I take the actual whatever into consideration when making that purchase, since being without can potentially change the answer. But I look at the game itself as the product. Will I get $X of enjoyment in the future from this game? Does the publisher deserve $Y for providing this game for however many hours I’ve played it? Will I play for Z hours in the future?
Let’s look at a couple examples. First, ESO. That is a buy-to-play game. However, there are also in-game purchases, as well as a subscription. I have no problem buying games themselves – I do it all the time (even ones I have no intention of playing any time in the near future!). But paying extra, when I can play just fine for free? This, however, is one of those times where not making the purchase would have made me not have nearly the enjoyment I’ve had otherwise. I got a sub, which includes an infinite craft bag among other perks. But without this craft bag doubt I’d still be playing the game – crafting and gathering is a big part of how I play. It’d be a serious pain without it. In fact, even at the beginning it was, which is why I subbed very soon after I started. I haven’t bought any in-game items otherwise, though. (I did buy both expansions, but that’s different.)
For a negative example, let’s look at STO again. At the anniversary this year, there was a big ship pack being sold. Very big. All the hero ships from the shows, with new end-game versions. Some of these were lock-box-only before. But being such a big ship pack, it was expensive. Years ago, I would have bought it, no question. But this year? I decided against it. I didn’t think that I would enjoy the game in the future to the tune of $150+. Or maybe not even $30. With the way the game’s going, I thought it’d be best to stick to f2p for now.
Purchasing in-game items as in-game items is a losing move, I think. You absolutely will lose them. I guess it’s alright if you think of said items as perishables, like food: the food will go away, but the immediate benefits are worth the cash. I mix this approach with what I said above when it comes to gacha. No, buying these rolls isn’t worth it, in-and-of-themselves, even if I get exactly what I want the first time. But the act of rolling is fun, in a sense (I imagine it’s kinda like what gambling feels like, though I’ve never done that), and I do generally figure that I’ll get further enjoyment of the game worth that amount, even if I don’t.
In Dragalia Lost right now there is a new banner, and something not done yet. It’s a Gala banner (meaning limited (recurring) thing, and double SSR rates), but this time it’s a dragon. Mars, specifically. And he’s really damn good. This isn’t powercreep, it’s a powerleap. Now, honestly, I don’t care. I mean, sure, it’d be good to get him, since my strongest fire dragon is a SR. But, double rates for every other SSR are definitely tempting. Now, this is kinda bait, since we currently have a limited banner for the colab with FEH, and part two of that colab later on (the first part is a rerun from last year’s FEH colab), but I don’t really care about FEH at all. (I think it’s weird to collaborate with other gacha games, but it happens all the time so whatever.)
I also have a lot of resources for rolling, since I’ve been saving. Before rolling I have 126 single tickets, 11 ten-rolls, and 106,098 crystals. At 120 crystals per roll, that gives me a total of 1120 rolls available. Now, I did say I don’t really care about Mars, and I don’t. But I do have a lot of single tickets, and those will be annoying to roll all at once (since whenever I roll, I use those first), and the more I get, the more annoying they are. So, the plan is to use 100, see what I get, and post that. Just for fun, I’ll also post which ticket got me which thing, just to see the distribution.
But that would be boring (it’s only 100 rolls, and there’s no drama if I don’t have a target)! So I’m going to do some math. While I might be a janitor now, my training is as a teacher, so today I’m going to teach about probability, since we’re kinda sorta gambling here. The gambling fallacy is that, as time goes on not winning, that just means it becomes more likely that the win is just coming up: the longer we lose, the closer the win will be. But of course that isn’t true; each event has the same probability, every time.
HOWEVER, that doesn’t mean cumulative probability is the same. And it’s relatively easy to figure out in this case: either win (SSR) or lose (not SSR), so there’s only two possible outcomes for each event. But as I just said, what really matters is the cumulative probability. Sure, I only have a 6% (.06) chance of winning each roll (and thus a .94 chance of losing), but cumulatively I can figure out odds for any number of successes. The thing to remember is: if you say AND, that’s multiply; and if you say OR, that’s addition.
I just wanted a picture here.
Let’s just take the chance of not getting a single win. This means we just lose, right? .94 chance? But if that were true, no one would ever pay money for gacha. And of course, it’s not true. It’s .94 for each chance, but there are 100 events (in my case). So, the first roll has a .94 chance of failure. But the second has to also fail, and the third, and the fourth. AND. So, .94 AND .94 AND .94 AND so on, a hundred times. Multiply it all, and it comes out to .94^100, which is… .00205, or a 0.205% chance of not getting a single success. Sounds good, right? Seems you’ll almost certainly get your SSR!
Thus, let’s look at the case of getting a single SSR. That means you have one success (.06) AND 99 failures (.94^99). Multiply that together, and that gets… .000131, or 0.0131% chance. But wait, you say, how can that be? If the chances of getting none are so low, how can the chances of getting more than one be even less? And of course, the more successes, the less likely it gets! (Since replacing a .94 with a .06 only makes the probability smaller every time we do it.) Well, we only looked at one case – we didn’t say whether the success was the first, or the 50th. And that matters; or rather, it doesn’t matter which draw was the winner, as long as we drew one. So, it could have been the first, or the second, or the third, or… OR. Remember, with OR we add. So we have to add the probability of each possible group. Since there are only 100 possible groups, and each group has the same probability, we can just multiply that first answer by the number of groups, which gives us .0131, or 1.31%. Much better!
You can of course do this for the case of two SSR, or three, or any number, up to the total number of rolls (in this case, 100). The math to figure all this out is called binomial distribution. The equation goes like this:
P(k out of n) = n!/(k!(n-k)!) pk(1-p)(n-k)
Where the total probability P of k wins (with a probability of p) out of n trials is all that business. The first part is the number of groups you’ll get, and the second part is the probability of each group.
Now, this can be annoying to calculate out with a calculator, so fortunately you can easily figure this out in any spreadsheet with a simple command. Which is what I did. And doing it this way makes graphing it easy too. So I did. You’ll see I did two graphs: one of each individual case by themselves, to see which is most likely; and the other is how likely it is to get at least that number. The first one is self-explanatory, so I won’t talk about it. The other is a little more involved. Basically, it’s just another OR thing. If you get at least zero SSR, you’ll get zero OR one OR two OR three OR… so you add up each individual probability. Or, you can just do what I did, which is reverse it. Since the total probability is 1, you can just subtract the total probability of all the ones less than what you’re investigating from 1. So, since you can’t get less than zero, than the probability of at least zero is 100%. The probability of one is 1-P(0), or in this case .998; of two is 1-P(0)-P(1) which is .985, and so on. Hopefully your spreadsheet functions also have a way of figuring out that cumulative total as well.
How you all feel right now.
So I’ve said all that to come to this: according to the charts above, the highest probability of SSR’s here is five or six, though even considering all that, it’s still only a bit above 30% chance of that; could be less or more. This shouldn’t surprise us, since the stated rates are 6%, and so doing 100 rolls should get about 6. Indeed, if you had a lot of trials of 100 rolls, the graph would look a lot like the top graph, just smoothed out.
When I picked up that Lin You super early, I thought that this would be a pretty hefty haul. Then I went almost 60 more before getting another winner, which was getting me a bit worried – this wouldn’t be much of a post without a decent haul. Then Maribelle came, and I thought that would be the end. But no! Two winners in a row! That’s pretty crazy.
So, a total of five, which is completely expected. Two of them, Maribelle and Ariel, were new, so that’s nice. No Mars, but I really wasn’t expecting or wanting it. Might do this again, if the new FEH characters are desirable.
It’s that time again: summer means swimsuits, which means alts in skin-showing bathing gear (there’s a difference between bathing suits and swimsuits; it’s very important). Dragalia Lost revealed its (first?) summer banner, and Granblue Fantasy and Princess Connect have released their new banners as well.
First, Dragalia Lost. Big news: this summer banner is not limited! All these girls are going into the permanent summon pool. Meaning I don’t have to spend my crystals for them now, which means I can roll for the actually-limited Gala Cleo. Which I got, after using all my tickets, but only one ten-roll of crystals. Very nice, and I still have 200 rolls saved up.
I know that feeling.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I like alts, at least in games like this, because I’m already attached to the characters, so getting more story for them is great. New characters always waste time introducing themselves, while alts are already known. In this case, Cleo’s story gives us some lore in addition to a story about her.
Anyways, the current summer characters here are Julietta, Celeria, and Ranzal, and Siren the dragon. If Celeria were limited, I’d roll everything for her. But she’s not, so I’ll probably get her next dream ticket. I imagine Reddit is pretty salty about this, since the gold rarity (I’m just going to call it SSR, because that’s basically what it is) are all girls, and Reddit is gay, and Ranzal already has an alt.
Granblue Fantasy’s summer characters are limited, as usual. We get Jessica (yukata version, which I honestly much prefer to the bikini alts), Europa, and Lancelot+Vane, with Satyr as the summon. We knew all of these since the weekend, as they were revealed at the grabble convention, but we didn’t know art or rarity or whatever. Reddit was really butthurt about these, too since a) Jessica already has a summer alt; b) this is Jessica’s first SSR, and it’s a seasonal limited; c) Europa basically just came out, and she already gets an alt; and d) Vane and Lancelot get yet another combo unit, and SR at that. I don’t agree with any of these complaints, but I do understand them. As for me, I won’t be rolling this banner; there hasn’t been a broken, must-have summer unit yet (though most of them have been quite good), and the most desirable has generally been the last to be revealed (also, S. Ilsa isn’t sparkable this time, and I want her).
As for Princess Connect, we get S. Makoto this time. Looks like she’s specifically made for Clan Battle and event bosses, since she gets stronger the fewer enemies there are. Useless for Arena, of course. Don’t know what Reddit thinks of this one, because that sub is dead.
Dating Sims on the Holodeck 