#as a creator i do not like them and they kind of unbalance the worldbuilding

[prof-peach]

Have you had any encounters/experiences with Virizion? I've heard they've had bad experiences with humans in the past, but curious how they react to the lab or gardens, or if they keep their distance?

Other than the rare sighting of one Raikou on the island, and the passing of the occasional Zapdos if we're unlucky, no legends or myths make their way to the Island thankfully.

We do not focus our interests on them, and are more than happy not having them around. Such powerful and difficult individuals bring a lot of troube with them more often than not, which endangers our staff and the patients here.

Never met one, never plan to, rather steer clear of that category of pokemon completly. Even a tiny Shaymin can kill on reaction if wanted. Best thing for us to do is to give them a lot of space and stay away unless theres no other option at all.

[dappersheep]

Food Fantasy: An Analysis on what killed a Golden Goose (1/3)

So first things first, disclaimers! I do not claim nor pretend to know every nook and cranny, ins and outs of the history of FooFan's conception, existence and uncertain future. I do not own the game nor its characters, only the opinions and thoughts stated hereon out.

This was born to vent out my frustrations with how a game like this was abused poorly by its own developer and publisher instead of being nurtured to become its full potential that could have overshadowed and remained better than the likes of Tencent's Tales of Food --I could dream, but it honestly had the potential to be.

Out of respect for the main tag, I personally will not be tagging this post and the following two with the main tag. If you want to tag it yourself with it, that's your choice. Only followers of my blog will see this.

This analysis is divided into three parts: Funtoy, Elex, and the Community. It starts under the cut. Well let's get started.

Funtoy

Ah yes, the creator. The developer. You'd think that with their sudden rise to fame during their global launch, they'd have used the massive profits they earned within the first quarter of 2018 to improve certain things about the game and then trickled it down as quickly as possible towards Global, right? Yeah, I thought so too.

After playing the game since launch, I've seen and experienced way too many things that just hammer in the fact that this is one of the most unfair gacha I've played in years. Some reasons being the following:

(Note: These are experiences ONLY on Global's version, it may also apply to CN being the original server)

⦁ The game's gacha model is aimed towards maximum predation on its players. F2p are forced to either spend some money (and thus tempt them to keep spending after getting a taste of it), or risk not even getting a good ascension of the unit to be useful at all. Paying for the event packs also doesn't guarantee that you would be able to secure a spot in the ranks. In fact, if you can't comprehend how the battle mechanics work, you could even de-rank. Fun way to burn that 800$, huh? At least you have the skin from rebates.

⦁ A little less known thing and probably theoretical at worst, the long joked about spaghetti coding of the game along with an outdated spine technology for the sprites could very well be the reason why a 2D game like this experiences the shittiest lags. Also how easy it is to hack this game with the right know-how.

⦁ Speaking of bad gameplay mechanics, did you know you could spend over fifty Mirrors and not get that final enhancement from +9 to +10 simply because there's absolutely no tangible safety net before +10?

⦁ If you're F2P, this game is terrible in giving you resources to stockpile. Because Funtoy certainly doesn't have a lot of weekly/monthly or even friendly events wherein you can get resources without spending another kind of resource. The Hawthorne event's rewards are lackluster at best, Bingo is severely limited in what it gives, and Recall also doesn't give much for a big event that only happens (supposedly) every 6 months. Did I also mention that daily resource rewards also kinda suck compared to how much you burn in just one event?

⦁ Monthly subs are a scam. Yes, you heard that right. My point of comparison here is Arknights. A monthly in AK allows you to have enough to 10-pull after 30 days, on top of a bit of stamina to help you. In FooFan? You have two monthly subs that do different things and even then, you won't have enough to 10-pull by the end of 30 days, nor is the stamina you get enough to even stockpile and ease the pressure of your need to save for the Gates or that stamina event that suddenly popped up.

⦁ A conga line of 'Must procure this unit at a high ascension to do well in the following events!'. You missed the first Pizza event? Missed the first Turkey event? God forbid, you weren't able to 5* your Beer on his debut? Well sorry, that 5* Black Tea of yours isn't gonna do squat to give you good damage. No, your 2* B-52 also isn't going to do much of anything with his lackluster damage capabilities. If you want a chance to get those event URs again, you have to wait for their pool with laughably limited pulls... and a bloated price to even pull.

⦁ The events starting after the first iteration of Turkey event get even more paywalled. As far as I remember, by the time Minestrone rolled around, an F2P with ample crystal resources can only get 2* at best. 3* and above are paywalled.

⦁ The game has incompetent balancing. The devs themselves likely have little experience in gameplay design and balancing, especially for a game with a growing roster of characters . A prime example of them launching a character not knowing it would pretty much unbalance the game? Look no further than Beer. The guy had to have a couple of nerfs done to him because he was just too meta. You know what's sadder? Before the 'switch' to Brave meta, almost all meta units was built to benefit off the Beer meta.

⦁ Artifacts. Do I even have to explain how the introduction of such a game feature so early into the lifespan of this game essentially fucked over the balance even more? Not to mention, all the more reason you'd be crying with the Gates of Trials demanding so much out of your stamina and crystal resources. F2Ps are again, the ones that suffer in this part. What's their reason? Profit, of course.

⦁ The nerf of resto chests. This was the primary source for people who were saving up stamina for the Gates... until Funtoy decided they were being too generous to their playerbase and dropped the stamina probability rate to 1% or less.

⦁ Terrible UI layout and design. Come on, be honest now, you've lost several thousand of your hard earned crystals buying screws in the fishing shop because you didn't notice that shiny warning in small text and a green button with the crystal image slapped on it, didn't you?

⦁ Look at all these SRs! All of them! Wow, they even outnumber the Rs by at least 80! What's that? There's more URs now too compared to Rs and Ms combined? That can't be real. But seriously, you'd think Funtoy could make some of these SRs into Rs and add them to the perm pool/shard fusion so people aren't stuck pulling Macaron or Dorayaki every time. They could have also populated the Team Up rewards with SRs instead of Rs. But you know... that won't bring them profit. Haha... haha.... Oh and I haven't even told you about the SP class...!

⦁ Lore. Yes, I'm sure by now you're aware that the in-game lore is different from the ones in the non-SP Food Soul bios, in the SP Food Soul bios that sort of ties in with the New World story (that global will never be getting btw). At this point, Funtoy handwaves the confusion away by saying, 'they're all different timelines'. Yes yes, an easy and cliche move to explain how shitty the writing direction went after a while. I don't know what happened, all I know is that lore got weird(er) when they introduced SP Rice.

⦁ They. Keep. Adding. More. Characters! They fail to see that a lot of their earlier players have imprinted on the first few waves of Food Souls and they sadly also fail to properly give some of them more story expansion... or skins. At the moment, they're shelling out so many JP-centric Food Souls because... as I see it? They're pandering to the last bastion of whales they have.

⦁ Merchandise. And I mean a variety of merchandise that isn't using the same official art every time. Like they couldn't afford to commission a couple of artists one or two times to make unique merchandise that would sell. They started too late on that train, and they even made it too hard for anyone not in CN or JP to even procure what already exists. Not to mention, they keep using the same 'popular' set of characters for their merchandise and never really expanding out to making merch for other characters.

These are all the things I can list off at the top of my head why Funtoy as a developer sucks ass. They could sweeten their words all they want, it won't change the fact that they've certainly made way too many bad decisions and found out about it too late, and now they're desperate to keep Food Fantasy alive to keep their profits coming in to make whatever that cat girl game they have and that supposedly 'side-game' FF2 they announced.

There may have been problems out of their control that I or you do not see, but one thing is for sure, they were blinded by greed for the money they were raking in on all their servers at the start, and never actually bothered to invest in more manpower in the right places to improve the game, both gameplay-wise and worldbuilding wise. It's actually saddening that this game could have been so much more with several QoLs and a more fleshed out lore, perhaps even spacing out the number of new units they keep introducing while going back to giving their old units more attention.

That's it for Funtoy. We're moving onto Elex in the next part and boy is that also a trip.