It’s the end of November, which means it’s the end of IntPiPoMo. I said at the beginning that I wouldn’t have any problems making the goal of 50 pictures, since screenshots count. Well, unfortunately I almost never post from the computer where all my screenshots are, so I only count 29 entries in the past! Can I do 21 in one post?
Of course I can. Should I? Probably not! But I will anyways!
I figure most of these will come from Star Trek Online, not only because it’s the game I’ve played the most, but because it’s one of the most screenshot-worthy games I’ve played. Well, at least for the purposes of IntPiPoMo: I have a bunch from, say, ESO, but most of them are just of amusing dialogs, so I don’t really count them.
Just two admirals shooting the breeze…and the poor adjunct that has to stay and watch…
Ah, the good ol’ Placeholder Nebula
Some people have interesting names for their ships.
Found some ERPers on Old Risa, and I decided to have fun too!
The mission creator was pretty limited, but with some creativity could still create good art.
Need a big guy for those big chairs
Don’t talk to me or my son or my son’s spider ever again
Too early to celebrate?!
Revenge on the tentacle monster?
This really deserved to win the screenshot contest, if I might say so myself.
Even little ships look big from down here.
Put in time-out for being bad.
No one could insert any innuendo into this picture at all.
Whew, close fight!
Kinda want to know what happened here, kinda don’t.
There we go, that should make 50, and then some. Kinda sad I had to make a make-up post like this, but on occasion it’s fun to go through the old screenshots to see what I was thinking about back when.
-Black Friday is kinda a disappointment. I was hoping to get a PS4 or Switch on a big sale, but no dice. Still sad I missed them last year. PC game sales seem similarly dire. Though I still got two games: Star Traders: Frontiers, and City State. And I’ve actually given the latter a play (verdict so far: I don’t really get it)
-No Granblue Fantasy anime review this week. Not because I didn’t watch it, or that I don’t feel like reviewing it, but because there’s nothing much there. I didn’t even take a single screenshot. The Ferry arc is finished. Gran falls for the headspace attack despite explicitly being warned (and repeating that warning himself); I think the mirror match should have been Djeeta instead. More Gran/Lyria shipping. We get a tiny bit of backstory to Ferry, and Drang.
-Speaking of GBF, the new event is great. Whoever did the writing for this should really get into sports announcing – it’s very hype. Lyria is cute as usual, but also very, very dumb. I’m glad the new kid wasn’t some miracle wunderkind type. While I think it’s great that events are using more already-established characters, I think they went just slightly overboard this time (like, Cathrine wasn’t strictly needed).
-MegaMan event in Dragalia Lost is really lame. I mean, I get that the early games were rather…limited in the scope of the story, but they could have done a bit more here. And just rehashing the dragon fights is super lame.
-World Flipper is pretty fun. I don’t think it’s worth spending any money on, but it’s a fun diversion. I think it’s the first Cygames mobage that actually fulfills the idea of “spend a few minutes here and there playing”. But it’s definitely the D-team here: no co-op lobbies, no quick-join, not even voiced main stories. And of course, not compatible with my Chromebook. Good thing it has cute girls, or else it wouldn’t be worth even downloading and rerolling. But still, fun gameplay. Though I don’t think mixing pinball and bullet hell is the most obvious choice.
(I think from the title you can gather that there be Spoilers here.)
So yah, I finally beat it. Actually it was several days ago, but I’ve only now found time to write this little update. As I said previously, I was really hankering to get back into Cities: Skylines, and I figured I was pretty close to the end (they had that “go meet up with everyone important” that often precedes the end bosses in these games), so I decided to run for it.
My gear at that point was pretty good, I thought. I’d gotten some things to 999 quality, and even if I couldn’t get everything there, I could get pretty high up there. I didn’t bother with reforging my gear though, since a lot of the best stuff is apparently post-game materials, and I didn’t want to have to bother with the entire process of remaking things later. On top of that, I just went with the accessories that I had equipped as I was going through the game: they hadn’t made that much of a difference at that point, so I figured I was strong enough to just use what I had, and went for the final boss.
Well, I was wrong. My weapons were strong enough, but the armor wasn’t good enough. Considering I wasn’t even close to the top tier there, made sense. So I went and made some new armor (at a higher tier, but I didn’t bother min-maxing it, since I was playing on Normal), and then went back and tried again.
Back when I did Atelier Lulua, I had quite the difficulty with the final boss. I think I beat it the first time, but it was by the skin of my teeth, after a significant amount of preparation, I thought. This time, I went in with little direct preparation, and while I didn’t get it the first time, I did get it the second go pretty easily. Well, it was also close. I didn’t anticipate the second form, so that was a fun deflation from the feeling of victory after I defeated the initial form. (And I expected it to get back up after the final victory, the way the camera hovered over the boss for a bit.) I think it was more that the Lulua boss had a bunch of annoying mechanics, and that I wasn’t nearly as effective with alchemy throughout the game as I should have been. But also there was that anticipation I had, reading the guide online. For Ryza, there was (and at the time of writing, still is) no boss guide, so I just went with whatever.
That didn’t take too long, so I was excited to move on to the next game. But we weren’t done yet! I expected that the resolving the last conflict (restoring the island’s power) would be a pretty simple deal, over in just a little bit. But no, there’s actually a whole new quest dealing with that. And, while this wasn’t quite the post-game, the first step to end-game crafting came at this point, with which the unlimited gem engine could begin (duping red stones, then using those to make philosopher’s stones, then reducing those for gems for a very high gem profit).
But, all things must come to an end. And the ending to this is rather sudden, at least for Ryza. Everybody decides that they’re moving on after this, literally. Empel and Lila of course are travelers, and since they’ve accomplished their goal here (sealing the portal), they are off to do the next one. Lent is going out adventuring, which was always his goal. Surprisingly, Tao and Bos are leaving together to go to university, to better understand the ruins and all that. And of course Klaudia is moving on with her dad, now that the business deals have been finalized. Which just leaves Ryza: the one who wanted to leave home the most is the one that ends up staying.
Well, at least for the time being. After all, we have to leave room for DLC, and a sequel. Scuttlebutt is that the next game in the trilogy will be another Ryza game. This game has been, by far, the best-selling Atelier game, and obviously Gust wants to capitalize on it. And unlike all the other protagonists, there is just a lack of finality to this story. A lot of “well, goodbye…until we meet again!” moments in the ending. And while there’s a lot unresolved with the island, which is Ryza’s nominal reason for sticking around, it isn’t anything that couldn’t be resolved off-camera between games. So there’s no story reason to not get another Ryza game.
The game feels pretty short, to be honest. I beat the game with 37 hours of play time, which is less than all of the other Atelier games on my Steam account (the next-shortest, Atelier Sophie, was 42 hours). Granted, I did no DLC content at all (since none had come out until today), but that’s still pretty quick. And I also spent a lot more time (I feel) on alchemy and getting good at that.
I think part of it is that it’s so easy to avoid combat and just go with alchemy – I wasn’t even at the final combat level of 50 when I beat the last boss, which, from what I gather, is not common, since it’s easy to grind combat levels. The new system with the alchemy bottles means that you can get materials from gathering that you would normally only be able to get from monster drops. That just makes things go a lot faster. And combat in general is just faster-paced, with the ATB-like system: turns out a lot of time is spend going through menus in battle in these games, which you can’t really do here.
And in general the story seems a lot more fast-paced than the previous games. Here it almost seems to happen in one season: at the beginning of the game, there’s talk about how it’s almost drought season, and at the end it’s a race to beat the boss before said season (because the enemies hate water). But the events of the game can’t logically fit in that time period. Just Ryza’s growth on its own puts a lie to that notion: she goes from nothing to great alchemist during the course of the game (as usual); unless she’s Alchemy Jesus, there’s no way that’s plausible. (And she’s not – Empel praises her for her talents, but in no way does he indicate that she’s anything particularly special, unlike Sophie or Totori.) I think it’s just that the feeling of urgency in the game makes the game seem to go by faster.
Speaking of DLC (we were?), the first batch dropped today. The standard extended music selection (with music from all the Atelier games, and some of the other recent Gust games), some weapon skins, and Lent’s and Tao’s side stories. Also being sold is a season pass, which gets the above, character stories for the rest of the main cast, a beach episode, a new super-hard zone, and swimsuit costumes. Each of the side stories (except maybe the beach episode) will be $6, so I’m thinking I’ll do that instead of the season pass (which is $55). No sign of new characters yet, and I don’t recall seeing them on the Japanese road map.
Overall, a good game. I’ve said many times that I don’t like paying full-price for a game, or even close to full-price, but this was worth it for me. It was a change to the formula, but I think it was for the better. I look forward to seeing the new games in this series.
I just don’t know what to think anymore. With all the paid shills, bot shills, and blind fans, mixed with blind haters, counter-shills, and general cynicism of the internet in general, I can’t figure out what to think about most any game, but the new Pokemon main games in particular. I wasn’t fixing to get them or anything – I don’t even have a Switch, for starters – but there’s a whole lot of opinions out there, with completely contrasting views. Some are easy to get – Pokemon has been getting more casual lately, which is somehow possible, so I get those complaints with those games. And I get the graphics complaints, and general cut corners complaints seem to be almost universal. But whether those matter, in the end? I can’t figure it out.
It doesn’t help that people in general compare the Pokemon games to other Pokemon games, and not contemporary games in general. Some of that is, again, understandable – people who’ve liked previous games in a series want to know how new ones stack up to what they know. But even general purpose reviews do this too, for their final analyses, which are what the marketers and general audiences actually seem to base their decisions on.
I’ve never actually used her at all.
It greatly amuses me when people get all mixed up between fictional characters (especially cartoon characters) and real life. Recently, GBF got a new playable character, Kou. He showed up in an event last year, and he was pretty popular with certain segments of the fandom, for various reasons. Of course, as an anime boy, he’s portrayed with a certain attractiveness, like 99% of all non-joke anime characters. He even has a somewhat sensual artwork (which I’m not going to link because I don’t have a proper screenshot I made, and it’s an IntPiPoMo post), with a potentially provocative implication behind it. So far so good, right? Well, with these new characters comes a profile, which often includes the age. And Kou is twelve! The twitter/reddit fans got all sorts of indignant, claiming how gross this all is, etc. As if liking this one picture suddenly makes one a pedo or something. And it isn’t as if that hadn’t been Kou was about that age from the first event, let alone this one – his look and actions fit a lad about that age, in both events, even if he is a bit more serious than usual. But no, now it’s unacceptable, as there’s a number.
Get the same sort of reactions, from the same sorts of people, whenever this happens. It’s just a cartoon mate, no problem (especially if there’s no porn). Same thing with any other anime character. Ryza’s age was recently revealed to be 17, and some wag went on /v/ to see if they would react the same (never mind the fact that “she has to be 18 or it’s pedo” is a very California/New York thing, not even true in most of the US, let alone the world). Of course, it being /v/, that bait was not taken, but instead reversed: what an old hag! can’t like her anymore! etc. That’s the proper seriousness with which one should take their animu waifus.
That’s why you wait until you’ve seen them, duh.
Man, I really want a pizza. I’ve had maybe one pizza since my surgery back in September (I can’t actually remember), when I used to have one about once a week. But what I want is a Detroit deep dish, not just any pizza. There aren’t any places around here that do that, at least not that I’ve seen, and not at 10pm for sure. Well, there’s Little Caesars, but that’s it, and understandably not what I’m rally going for here. But I guess it will have to do. There used to be a place right by my house, that was pretty cheap, actually pretty good, and had a good variety, including this style (though I think most people call it “pan” pizza, but that also seems to mean different things to different places). But that place got bought out by a more boutique joint (which I think went under itself, since there’s a new name). What I really would like is a Shakey’s around here – I know people are down on it, but I like that style. Obviously not a pan pizza, but it would be a frequent stop of mine in general, if there happened to be one around here.
One of the things I enjoy in life in general is knowing the scale of things. I’m a pretty visual person, so that allows me to get a better grip on things, and allows me to play with it in my imagination. It’s one thing to know that X ship is Y meters long, but knowing how it looks next to other things helps me to get that picture in my head.
And, when scale is established, in whatever sort of art, I like it to be right. If it’s something that uses an already-established world, I like things to be consistent – one thing I have against all Trek after 2009. Another thing I dislike is how some things are stated, but the visual evidence is counter to it. Mostly what I’m talking today about concerns city stuff, especially in city builders.
When a game has negative achievements.
It grinds my gears more than a little when a place in a game is said to be a great city, a small town, or anything in between, and we don’t see it. Open world games are generally quite guilty of this. Now, I realize that, until fairly recently at least, having a realistically-sized city was practically impossible, for several reasons. A big city, or even a small town, with proper NPC’s, would be very taxing on bad hardware (consoles), and crafting that would be hard on the devs even taking that out of consideration; procedural generation is a possibility, but that’s boring for the player (see Daggerfall). That consolization is a big issue: both Oblivion and Skyrim were heavily impacted by having to fit to X360 and PS3 specs. The Witcher 3 is the best about this, but even there there is some small scaling down in most places.
And then we get to the city builders themselves. Again, there are hardware limitations that we have to consider – for older stuff. But it’s always bugged me that I can’t really make a proper city in something like Cities: Skylines or SimCity 4. I think it might be somewhat possible with SimCity 4, but you have to build it piecemeal, and not have it be one continuous city, with all the gameplay limitations that come with that.
Sounds like a nice place to live.
Cities: Skylines has other issues. Look at the above picture: on the right, there is “low-density” housing: one- or two-story dwellings, with some sort of lawn maybe. On the left, there is high-density housing: skyscrapers and such. If you look closely, those both have the same footprint, generally. That’s crazy. More on that in a bit.
And, if you look on the bottom, with the stats and such, we have 84k people. Obviously, a city of this level of development would have many, many more people. And, if you follow the in-game progression, this is supposed to be a major city; my city irl feels like a mere town, and yet has 100k people. This is something I’m more willing to look past, though: simply add a zero on the end, and it ends up being much more believable and appropriate for the scales the game can reasonably run at.
My bigger problem is with the scaling of space. The devs have given out a scale for this game: 8m per side for a square. That means we can build cities from real life into the game. At least in theory. The above is the main part of my hometown. Each buildable block is 2km x 2km. Thus, the main part of my small town fills almost an entire block, since it is one mile square, which is about 1600m square. Above, you can see the difference between the layout of my irl town, in the right and center, with the normal density of buildings and roads for the game, on the left. Way different. So different, it breaks the game to try to be real.
And, at 8m squares, you get buildings with small footprints. The growable buildings here (the ones the game builds itself) are I believe up to a max of 4×4 squares, maybe 5×5. That gives up to 40m a side, for buildings that are quite tall. Up to, because they tend to have a plot around them. There are plopable buildings (player-placed) that are much bigger, which is ok, but those tend to be limited.
For me, it’s so immersion-breaking to have these huge, hyper-dense cities. I want to be able to rebuild the towns and cities I’m familiar with, to see how traffic breaks, or if the place could survive as it is, in-game. But I can’t. And it bugs me. Oh, how I wish for a city-builder with proper scale! But I doubt it will happen anytime soon, not until the console goes the way of the dodo.
As a general rule, I don’t buy new games. I don’t like paying a lot of money for a game that hasn’t been thoroughly vetted by hundreds or thousands of people, especially anons. That, and I just plain don’t like paying a lot of money for any single game – a decade of Steam sales and used games that give me just as much enjoyment as if they were new doesn’t help me see the point in paying the full asking price of anything. Plus, add in the usual “Ultimate Editions” these days, that tend to have all the DLC, expansions, bug fixes, etc., it makes me really not want to buy a brand new game.
And that last bit is basically the thrust of it. I really don’t like buying incomplete games, and then being asked to pay for the privilege of having the whole thing. I can get behind using DLC as a way to extend the life of a game – more of a good thing is usually better, particularly after there’s been time to fully appreciate what was already offered. A good example of this DLC usage is The Witcher 3: the base game was a whole and complete experience from day one, and then stuff is added to it (and it doesn’t hurt that what was added were pretty much complete games on their own).
Of course, what set this off is Atelier Ryza (after all, it’s one of the few new games I’ve bought in recent memory, and certainly the first within the time of this blog). As previously chronicled, I got this as soon as it was available. As you might expect of a game these days, there is DLC planned for the future. Unfortunately for me, it’s the sort of thing that should have been in the game in the first place.
Some people think that there are going to be more endings added. I don’t think so. I think this is going to be like Atelier Sophie, which only had one, single ending, in a series where one of the few claims to fame was the varied and sundry endings possible, with often ridiculous requirements.
No, what I’m thinking is that there are going to be character stories and playable characters added. There game just feels kinda incomplete with the amount of characters we get: six total. And they’re all “main characters” too – they’re all significant parts of the story. In games like this, you tend to have other side characters that can be part of the party as well. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that there’s plenty of room in the UI for additional spare party members…
But even worse is that it’s pretty obvious just who these DLC party members would be: Bos is the first one, since he all but joins the party at a point in the story (no spoilers needed for that: it’s obvious from the second or third interaction). Then there’s Pamela, who is dressed like an adventurer this time around. Agatha is next because we need a traditional protector/knight type, which is strangely missing in the cast. Last likely candidate is Kilo, for both story reasons, and because she’s the last one that doesn’t have full-NPC-face (if you’ve played the game you know exactly what I mean) and isn’t an old man. (I’ll discount Lumbar, both because he isn’t involved too much in the story, and because he looks like a regular NPC.) At least it’s not as bad as Atelier Lydie and Suelle: one of the major characters, who definitely should have been in the party (since she goes on all the adventures with everyone else) is only playable as DLC.
(An aside: I like how this game hasn’t tried to be cute with, or pointlessly localize, the character names, like so many Japanese translations do. All the silly names are kept intact (like Lumbar), while the names are not changed to be even more “silly” (like Esty Dee…). So often low-quality translations will change the names, just because the translators didn’t think they “sounded right.” Making names more “realistic” or familiar to the Western audience, when that isn’t necessary. Dragalia Lost does this with almost every name: for an extreme example, Rejina, Rojina, and Rujina are changed to Rena, Ramona, and Renee; but even things like Lucas being changed to Luca, or Najaf(u) to Naveed.
However, one strange thing was having “Moritz-san” and “Lubart-san” being translated as “Mr. Brunnen” and “Mr. Valentz”. Normally, it makes sense to translate “-san” as “Mr./Mrs./Ms.”. However, I think it’s pretty significant that people, even prestigious important people like Moriz, or prestigious, important strangers like Lubart, are refered to by their given names, rather than their family names as is usual in Japanese (and Japanese games). So it wasn’t even an east/west culture clash thing, but a whole thing about translators missing the point.)
Not to say that having extra DLC characters is bad or anything, but just that having obvious story characters excluded, either because of lack of time or intentionally just to make more money, is. It’s selling an incomplete game for full price. Same thing with possible game systems. I can’t think of anything here for this game, fortunately, but I’ve seen other games sell whole mechanics as DLC (like ESO selling whole classes).
Now, remember that I said the problem of buying new games. Well, all these obvious DLC’s aren’t even available yet. They almost certainly won’t be by the time I’m done with the game, considering they aren’t out now even in Japan, which had several months lead time. So, do I come back and play a game again, without so much as an alternate ending? No, don’t think so. I rarely ever replay games, especially long, linear jrpgs. No matter how much I like it, I doubt I’ll be coming back to Atelier Ryza after I beat it. So all that DLC effort, which I want, and am missing, will be wasted. Sad!
This guy at least has a unique face, so maybe he has a chance too.
Over the past several days, I kept seeing stuff about this NaNoWriMo thing on blogs and Twitter and whathaveyou. I’ve never seen this before, but there are a lot of these sort of promotion things. I figured it had something to do with writing, since it was up on blogs and author Twitters, but I wasn’t sure what it really is. Another sort of blog writing thing (didn’t we just have Blaugust?)? A generic writing thing? I was too lazy to just google it, though, so I just left it at that.
Well, I came across something else somehow, and learned what this stuff is. It’s for novelists. That explains a lot. But it definitely isn’t something for me. Not only is 50k words alone a big NOPE from me, but a novel doubly so. While it may be true that everyone has at least one story in them, it’s definitely not that they have a novel in them. Including me. I can write competently, but not in a terribly interesting manner. Or rather, not in a way that would make a book interesting; I’m much more for short-form, informational stuff, in an informal setting. Maybe; you be the judge of that.
So that’s a bust, but there is something I can do: IntPiPoMo! When I saw that, I thought it was another nice thing…until I saw that screenshots count! It’s like a blogging festival made just for me. Screenshots are a thing I do.
And the best part is, I don’t even need context! Not that that’s ever stopped me before, but it has slowed me down a tad, since I generally try to post stuff that fits first, before going to the random stuff just to break up some paragraphs. So, let’s get the show on the road, with some screenshots by Yours Truely:
A related aside: I’m a bit bummed that Steam took away that nice feature that showed a pop-up after you closed a game, where you could put your screenshots from that session on the cloud. Now it has to be done from the Screenshots section of your profile, manually. Which means I have to remember to do it.
I still use Althemia over Gleo, because many of her bones are indeed alluring.
Ok, an actual original picture: That time I forgot I didn’t have a pizza cutter, even though I was sure I actually had one.
Start Summerset Expansion (mostly for jewelry crafting)
Do Halloween stuff in the various games that have them.
Get and start Atelier Ryza
So how did I do? Pretty much what I thought I would. Star Trek Online had another TFO event (Kobayashi Maru rerun), which I’ve been doing. I had 14 TFO daily tokens saved up from previous events, so I was able to start right into the dilithium pickups. Usually I wouldn’t bother, but getting several days’ worth in less than ten minutes a day is pretty compelling. The rest of the games have just been logging in for the bare minimum, mostly. Dragalia Lost event dailies have required a lot more effort than I’d like, mostly because the rewards-per-action are ridiculously low, compared to what the daily is asking for.
In ESO I did indeed finish the Ebonheart Pact storyline. It was a bit more involved than I thought, requiring finishing a sufficient amount of the main quest. And it also turns out the the three main quests merge to one last zone (which is the worst zone in the game, imo: Coldharbour), and then you can finish the main story too. So I did. Then I figured, while I’m here, I might as well start the Aldmeri Dominion questline, since that was my supposed original questline. I figured I’d just do the starting zone, since that’s usually pretty short, then get into Summerset proper. Well, again, plans changed. That first Altmer zone is pretty compelling. Or at least the Queen is. Couldn’t just abandon her. But I also wanted the jewelry crafting stuff. Turns out, you just need to do one quest to get the jewelry writs, which I had long fulfilled the conditions for. Popped in, did that, went back to the Altmer quests. Finished the second zone, on to the third.
Halloween stuff, did that. Not too much to say about the gacha Halloweens, since they were mostly in the early parts of the month, at least for the new stuff. ESO’s Halloween has proven longer. There’s more to do, just for the dailies. Gave up on doing FFXIV’s Halloween – I wasn’t going to get to that game anytime soon, and I’m not subbing a month for a day, a week tops, in content.
I did pop into Astellia Online’s free weekend (pt 1). I didn’t hear about it until it was half-over, and was just planning on trying the second free weekend. But then ESO servers decided to crap out, so I was left with a bit of free time. Character creation was odd: they clearly had specific characters in mind for specific roles, and the character creator is mostly in varying up those specific characters. Mage gives you a freakish doll-loli-thing (a lot like the doll pet you first get), and getting that to be human-looking was a chore. And sizing her up even 25% still leaves you with a shrimp. Otherwise, nothing to write home about. It sounds like a fun story, but I wish the translation was actually competent.
And of course, Atelier Ryza came out. And I played it. So far, liking it a lot. It’s a slower burn than other Atelier games, I think, but that’s fine by me.
As for my future plans, I think I’ll just keep on keepin’ on. ESO will probably get relegated to “daily only” status as long as I’m playing Ryza. I’m feeling a hankering for something a little different; maybe after that, I’ll get back into Cities Skylines, since I went through the expense of buying all the DLC.
For Black Friday, I’ll be on the lookout for Switch and/or PS4 sales, leaning heavily towards the Switch. Possibly also RDR2 for PC, depending on how I’m feeling when it comes out. I don’t know if that’s a “Buy full price” game for me: I liked RDR a lot, but I don’t know if I liked it that much.
Yes, I did just happen to have these Atelier Ryza screenshots handy; how can you tell?
Dragalia Lost recently had an update that adds higher difficulties to the High Dragon Trials. Said HDT’s were the game’s end-game content, so now they’re even more end-gamier. In addition, there is a time trial, with leaderboards for the top 25, and prizes depending on where one ranked in total (percentage-wise). With this update came a new tier (well, two tiers) of weapons, which required doing the new tiers of HDT’s to get the materials for.
Needless to say, people got mad. And stupid. Trouble is, until these things came out, the game was pretty easy, even at its hardest. With not too much grinding (though still too much for me, Mr. Casual), one could max out their buildings and gear, which would help trivialize most content, even the HDT’s, with just a modicum of skill. However, this update introduced the first real esports elements. Now people couldn’t have everything with a bit of effort in a short period of time (using resources they’d already stashed up), but they would actually have to put in a serious effort, and use some actual skill. This change dashed the expectation of many vocal players, but I think would be good for the game overall.
Serious lack of self-awareness, there.
Like pretty much all these games, Dragalia Lost depends on whales. But whales need reasons to whale, in this game – there’s just so much competition out there for that precious whale dosh. There are traditionally two big reasons to whale in a gacha game: esports or waifury. (I’m going to include all sorts of ‘I need this character because they’re my [X]!’, including husbandos, fujoships, etc., because the waifu man reigns over all these.) Esports is the more reliable way to whale whales, since competition is something the devs have the most control over. Meanwhile, going after the waifu enthusiasts depends wholly on the whims of the players, while the devs can only try to create appealing designs for their fanbase; the most reliable way to go after these players is to make alts of characters that have already proven popular.
For Dragalia Lost, the esports game has been severely lacking, because there hasn’t been any real, official competition in any way. Sure, you can whale, git gud, and all that, but who are you comparing your skills too? And who can you show off to? The best one could do would be upload clears to Youtube or Twitter. However, even in a coop game like Granblue Fantasy one can race other players directly in a raid, to see how much damage each person can do before killing the enemy, and it is shown immediately at the bottom of the screen. Now, with the time-trial leaderboards, good players and whales can have it all: actual hard content that uses their resources, skills, and experience; a way to compare their skills directly to other players; and a way to show off to each others and all the plebs.
Now, that hasn’t exactly gone over well with some of the non-esports players and whales. Like I said, many were used to only putting in an modicum of effort to get all the prizes. There actually is a bit of a grind to get the top-tier weapons, which requires actually completing the HDT’s multiple times. And a lot of players don’t have the skills or gear for that. Which makes them mad.
Personally, I see this as a “git gud and stop crying” situation. Lots of whiny babbies out there saying the game has gone to crap just because they can’t access everything within two or three weeks of it happening. Very entitled, and I don’t use that word lightly.
Also, people crying because they can’t pub everything. For good or ill, pubbing is a major thing in this game. If you don’t have some other way of organizing things, which is pretty hard since the guild function in this game is pretty limited, then you’re stuck pubbing. And, while there are filters to pubs, they aren’t really reliable. You’ve basically got might filtering (basically gear score), which doesn’t mean that the players actually know the fight. And there’s no way to kick players inflating might, or using the wrong gear, or whatever, so people just put up ridiculous might requirements for their rooms. Lots of people looking for carries.
Not to say there aren’t problems with the game, or this situation. I’ll point them out here:
First, the HDT’s are very punishing. They have a lot of OHKO attacks, which means that not only are runs over if anyone makes a single mistake, but healers are pretty much useless – if they’re not absolutely necessary due to ‘everybody WILL take damage’ mechanics. In this game, the trinity isn’t dps-tank-healer, it’s dps-support-healer, since tanks can’t really do anything in this game. Which means dps is all-important, which means being anything besides dps requires that unit to contribute more dps than is lost by not using a proper dps unit. Since pubs generally don’t have the eports skills to not make mistakes, this means a lot of pubs fail.
Second, Gala Cleo. It’s not often that a single unit will run/ruin an entire meta, but there she is. She’s got everything: buffs, heals, dps, debuffs. That all on its own would make her a top-tier unit, but not broken like she is. The thing is, her buffs stack with each other. Meaning, if you had a full team of Gleos, you’d potentially have HUGE buffs, or constant uptime on said buffs. On a character that already is pretty good dps, this is completely broken. Take the stacking away, and she’s merely very good. But as it is, in most any content you’d take Dark characters to (and others you wouldn’t), she’s best-in-slot, no good if you don’t have her. And it’s not like dark is hurting for good units either, but when you’re competing with BEST UNIT IN GAME BY FAR, good isn’t good enough. And it’s not like taking away the stacking buffs would be a huge nerf to the unit, pissing off the players that whaled for her, since without that she’s still one of the best units in the game.
The culprit herself.
Third, while the HDT’s are a bit of a grind…there’s nothing to do after it’s over. “Good” grinds put stuff behind RNG, or otherwise make it so even the best players have to continually run content for various reasons. If they don’t, they won’t play. They’ll play the esports content, but nothing below that. One way around that is, as mentioned, RNG for a lot of stuff, so players need to run things again and again and again to get what they want; this is the traditional MMO raid gear setup. They’ll grumble, but they’ll do it, if there’s enough incentive to do so. Another way is to have the lower-tier content give resources that are still important to higher-tier players, through trade-ins and the like. Granblue Fantasy generally does both of those: RNG to get the gear pieces one needs, and trading in lower-tier gear to get the resources needed to upgrade that high-tier gear they actually use. Dragalia Lost doesn’t do either: run the HDT’s enough times, and you’re guaranteed to get what you want, with no reason to go back later (yet).
Why is this important? (Aside from the fact that devs want players to engage with all the content they spent time on, I mean.) It’s because newer players need help going through the lower-tier stuff. They can’t learn to git gud if no one is willing to help them out. This game is a coop game, which means it needs players to coop with. As has been seen in just these past few weeks, if all the good players are doing the higher-tier stuff, because they’re done with the lower-tier stuff for whatever reason, then the low-tier stuff will not be very doable for the low-tier players. In this specific instance, there’s literally no reason to do the Standard difficulty for the HDT’s, because higher difficulties give all the same mats, in higher amounts, as well as the stuff needed to upgrade to the higher-tier weapons. So the Standard HDT’s are floundering.
All of these are things the devs can actually control. I think fixing these three items would be greatly beneficial to the fun of the game, and for the enjoyment of the people playing the game (two different things, since some people don’t like fun). Right now, a lot of the fans are crying for no reason, saying the game is dead for no reason, like they always do. But, there is truth to their complaints, and things can be improved.
Tomorrow is Halloween, so here’s some pumpkin stuff for Halloween.
It was a day earlier than Steam said, but a day later than Google said. But I started last night. Played for a few hours (5.3 according to Steam), and it still feels like the tutorial. There’s something to be said about that, but obviously I can’t give a full review at this point.
Game starts as these sorts of games often do: the protagonist (Ryza in this case) is bored of their little farm town, and wants to go on an adventure. If you’ve ever seen The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Ryza is basically Haruhi, but without the crazy. She drags her two friends along into all sorts of trouble (with the subsequent getting in trouble after getting caught); one goes quite willingly (basic meathead/future warrior type), while the other hates all the danger and such, but he’s every 80’s nerd stereotype, so of course has no actual spine to resist Ryza’s force of personality (plus, if he stayed behind, he’d have no protection from the town bullies, also straight 80’s stereotypes). And, as usually happens, the kiddos get in over their heads, only to be saved by someone more experienced: in this case, an alchemist and his assistant/bodyguard.
If the above sounded kinda vague, it’s because I don’t remember any names. Not entirely a bad thing: the friends are their own guys, who have their own interests besides being dragged along with Ryza’s whims. But that also means they’re not quite in the forefront when stuff happens. So far, this is just a slice-of-life adventure for a girl, who’s life just happens to include killing monsters to take their parts to make stuff with. I’m sure we’ll get into a grander adventure in time, but for now it still feels like the training wheels are on. Appropriate, because Ryza et al are still noobs, but a five-hour tutorial seems a bit much.
Mechanicaly, however, this is a big departure from previous Atelier games. The battle system is ATB, like FFVII and the like. This really changes things up. Everything is very fast-paced, especially since you can’t queue up commands (yet, at least). So, while you’re trying to figure out what to do on your turn (you only command one person at a time, though you can switch at any moment at all), everything else is advancing as well. Also, items don’t get used up – you have a certain amount of points, which get used up as you use items. You can “spend” items to refill those points, which leaves said spent items unavailable to be used until you return home from base. I’m not sure how I feel about all this, yet, so I won’t make a verdict.
Also, alchemy is different from the past. Here, you fill in a grid with items, which replaces the block puzzles of the Mysterious games. Adding different items in can unlock other places in the gird, which enables unlocking different bonuses to the item. Some grid spaces require certain items, while others only require certain categories. I’m not sure what things are actually required, though, to make the base item. Unlike previous games, there are no set recipes, because you can fill in the grid mostly how you want. Again, not really sure how I feel about this, but I’m becoming more used to it.
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed what I played of it. Unfortunately, this is Halloween season in various games, and ESO in particular requires some actual participation for the dailies (the event is a huge grind if you want to actually get anywhere, because of the huge RNG component to it). That will limit my playtime substantially, but still, I’m looking forward to what time I do get with the game.
Dating Sims on the Holodeck 