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mysaldate · 8 months ago

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AFK Journey review by a beta tester

AFK Journey came out yesterday and I see it getting quite a lot of attention so I figured I'd at least put this out there so that people don't go into it expecting something it's not.

I have been in the testing of this game and continued to provide feedback all the way from the alpha test back in the fall of 2021 and through all the beta testing that started in April or May last year. I have also been aiding in making lore-focused streams about AFK Arena for over a year and seeing as AFK Journey is supposed to be set in the same world, this will be relevant later. I have also been contracted to make officially-backed videos about AFK journey – a deal I left for a number of reasons, not least of all the reasons I have for writing this post. Now with credentials out of the way, let's get to the actual review.

The visuals take your breath away

Let's start with something positive – this game is gorgeous. Farlight Studios have outdone themselves yet again and after the vibrant and futuristic world of Dislyte, their take on Esperia is surprisingly tame, in a good way. The colors are soft and lovely, the models look amazing, and the customization screen of the main character is awesome! The characters look great and move in a smooth fluid fashion. Ult animations, idle animations, and the overall feel of the characters as well as the skins added into the game thus far are all nice and fit into the wider world well, not to mention look wonderful and clean, a lot of effort and skill went into making them. Sadly, if we ignore the skins and ult animations, this has been the case since the alpha without any major changes.

Gameplay could be improved upon

I will be up-front about this, I don't care about gameplay all that much. However, I have to say, the game is not open-world, despite claiming to be so. If you venture off the paths, you get stuck on fences, stuck on bushes, stuck on rocks, or just prevented by an invisible wall. There is no swimming, no climbing, no gliding, or most other things we came to associate with open-world games. The vertical gameplay is a plus to be sure and you get to pick characters to follow you around without having to use them in battles which makes the exploration more fun. The overworld puzzles are creative and fun too! The real issue comes with... everything else. At the start, fights in the overworld are easy. However, they will scale up way faster than you can level and you will soon be adding an additional roadblock to the list: enemies. The combat itself is creative but requires attention as the autoplay function is usually wonky at best and outright damaging to your party at worst. AFK Journey is not living up to its AFK title either. One thing I found really annoying was the story progression not being tied to the AFK rewards. You have to grind a separate set of battles to increase the AFK rewards you receive. The AFK rewards and story also still cap each other so you won't be able to progress in one without progressing in the other.

Outside of the main story, the game offers multiple game modes. If you don't enjoy PvP, be warned that the game puts great emphasis on doing your PvP arena every day and being good at it if you want to build any good characters. The game also has a labyrinth mode which tracks your health across multiple battles and allows you to gain upgrades as you go. This mode is somewhere between AFK Arena's and Dislyte's in terms of fun. It is more varied than AFK Arena's which makes it more fun and less repetitive, however, you have a limited number of characters you can bring in which severely limits how varied your gameplay experience might be. It was also recently nerfed to the ground and now poses little to no challenge. Honor Duel is another PvP mode in which you buy upgrades and then fight randomly generated players with supposedly the same level of upgrades as you. If you can claim eight victories before three losses, you win the run. However, the factions and characters are currently so imbalanced that depending on your luck, you may not win a single battle in a run or you might breeze through all of them without any effort.

The gacha element is pretty much non-existent. If you scrounge up enough resources to pull, you likely won't get anything much. You'll be relying on hand-outs of pulls and PvP shops to build your characters. AFK Journey should not be called a gacha game. It is, at best, a game with rare gacha elements.

Co-op is a lie

While AFK Journey does have a cooperative mode, in the form of connected guild dungeons, it is not really what it advertises to be either. All your guildmates can separately whale on some enemies together and depending on how you do, you will receive rewards that are generous compared to what the rest of the game offers. You can lend your friends your characters but they'll be the ones fighting with them, not you. The most social aspect of the game is seeing other players around the map and spending your friend points to buy different animations to perform at each other. The chat function is also pretty bad, though not as terrible as it is in AFK Arena.

The guilds and friends to add also don't work cross-server. So if you have a friend on another server, you won't be able to see them or talk to them or enjoy even the limited interactions that are actually in the game.

The story is disappointing at best and nobody knows the world

You may have noticed I've been avoiding talking about the story of a story-focused game. This is where the biggest disappointment lies. Let me preface this by saying, the story didn't always use to be this way. It used to be actually really really good back in the alpha and even at the start of the beta. However, in the last three months, the game underwent five or six complete rewrites of the main story, each worse than the last. As things stand right now, there is no nuance in protagonists or villains, there is a literal diarrhea conversation (like an actual conversation, several scenes long) for no reason, most of the story could be summarized on one page and the rest is pointless bickering that makes every other character utterly unlikable. The main character is an amnesiac going by the title of "Magister Merlin" despite the fact that Merlin from Arthurian myths, whom this is clearly based on, is an existing character in the world of Esperia.

In terms of lore, AFK Journey is not even close to what it promised. It promised to be a game set in the world of AFK Arena – a world with surprisingly rich and interesting lore that has been built up over the years. Unfortunately, it is very much not that. Not only are important world events treated as nonexistent, not only does the writing erase character relationships and dynamics, but the writers couldn't have even been bothered to learn the basics of the world they're working with. Factions get swapped around randomly for no reason, and important factional politics have been flipped on their heads. An organization that is supposed to be an outcast is now the ruling class, the timeline is all over the place, and even the names of things are not only inconsistent with AFK Arena but also inconsistent with Journey's world itself. The loading screen already breaks the world by telling you magic didn't exist until the "Fall of the gods" which is supposed to have happened recently, yet the entire time you will be running around ruins of magical civilizations from ages long past.

Speaking of the gods, there are characters who straight-up don't know what a celestial is. If you know anything about Esperia's lore, you know how important religion is to its history and how jealously the gods guard their authority. The thought of someone having completely no idea of what they were is strange, to say the least. The game also invents new gods instead of using preexisting ones with the same function and even disregards events relating to the gods that changed the course of Esperian history – such as the death of Esperia's primary goddess Dura. In fact, AFK Journey doesn't even consider Dura important enough to have a model. Once again, this is the primary goddess of this world. As for the characters brought over from AFK Arena, they have been butchered beyond recognition. The warlord of an entire country who slew countless enemies is now a pacifist whose only interest lies in spicy food, a hard-working girl who, for the sake of her family, developed her skills until she was recognized by the stars and became the fulfillment of a prophecy is now an angry Mary-sue who was always perfect and didn't actually need to work for anything – and gets offended if you suggest otherwise, the list goes on.

The sound design is refreshingly good – for the most part

As a game with voices, we have to talk about those first. The voices, for the most part, are alright. None of them really stands out as particularly amazing, though I do like a few of them more than the others. I like Fay's voice quite a bit. Sadly, none of the characters from AFK Arena is voiced by the same person anymore, and in most cases, it is a massive downgrade. And that isn't talking about the worst offender of all – Valen, one of the main characters you'll have to listen to the whole time. Valen used to have a voice that fit his character – suave and kind of bold and full of life. Now he sounds like he's still going through puberty, and he's a whiny crybaby at that.

The sound design outside of the voice acting is great. Once again, this is a very strong point for the game. The music and background noises are great and even the menu sounds are not disruptive in the least. If anything, they feel natural to the world.

PC client could as well not exist at all

This is coming from second-hand knowledge as I have played AFK Journey on phone but so far the reviews I've seen appear to be as follows: Game lags when walking, freezes when trying to talk to NPCs, and is prone to crashing. Mobile devices perform better for AFK Journey than PCs do.

The mystery of translation

Back in January, the only publicly admitted localizer has been fired from the project. About a week and a half ago (around 10 days before the game's launch), the official Discord posted an application form looking for translators for the game. Apparently, the game has several translations already out at this moment, but none of them particularly good. Some are even so bad it's sort of funny. In a really... pathetic sad way. It probably doesn't help that they're still looking for translators as we speak.

In conclusion...

I wish I could recommend AFK Journey, I really do. I've been excited about this game ever since its announcement and I've been providing as much feedback as I could throughout both alpha and beta. The organization has been awful and the game suffers for it. Internal changes happened a few months back and since then, everything about the game just fell apart. Even things that were good before got ruined and now all that remains is pretty visuals and nice music with nothing else worth paying attention to. It is a major letdown when it could've been incredible. The game is nothing it was advertised as – it is not an open-world game, it is not a gacha, and it is most certainly not set in the world of AFK Arena.

I hope the people who decide to play it can still find some fun in it regardless.

#afk arena #afk journey #lilith games #lilith #gaming #mobile gaming #gaming news #gamers of tumblr #gamer

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cattimeswithjellie · 4 months ago

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Stream Recap, ImpulseSV, 6/28/24

((Another slightly shorter one because there were no interactions with other Hermits, but it's always nice to listen to Impulse while he's building. He's also setting up his video prank, which is pretty funny in retrospect.))

2:50 Impulse opens the stream in studio view, playing the Hype Train noise. He is impressed with the way Chat keeps managing to time the hype train to right when he brings the stream live. Chat asks about Decked Out, but that is not the plan for today. It will be soon, though! First, he’s got to make a video. He fiddles with his audio settings and thanks subs and donos. IRL stuff with window replacement has put Impulse way behind on getting his new video done. He did do one thing yesterday, though. He asks chat if they want to see. Chat does indeed.

6:00 Impulse opens game view. He is standing on a glass AFK platform over an ocean. He shows off a massive quad-tower Gnembomb creeper farm that is pouring creepers into the kill chambers. He humblebrags that it is “Adequate” and “should do.” Chat declares it acceptable. He turns off the farm and talks a little bit about the building process for the farm. The farm has produced a large amount of gunpowder but stopped just short of overflowing the farm. Impulse is pleased. Chat asks if there’s going to be late-night Hermitcraft After Dark streaming tonight. Impulse admits that they were going to do it tonight but they blew it. They’ve all been so busy, they just didn’t plan anything. Chat is disappointed.

10:30 The build plan for stream today is to make a storage area for the farm that does not require swimming around underwater and is also big enough to allow for longer AFK sessions. Impulse goes to collect supplies. Chat asks if he can’t just do a conduit, but Impulse wants a cool glass tunnel. This stream will be a little short, he says, because he is going to see Inside Out 2 with the family. Chat tells him to bring tissue, he is upset by this news. Impulse must hide the fact that he is a big softie! Chat encourages him that real men aren’t afraid to cry. He thanks subs and donos and does the birthday you-yo for all the birthdays. He does not have enough glass, so it’s time to go dig sand.

15:30 Chat asks what Impulse needs all that gunpowder for. Impulse asks rhetorically if there’s possibly anything on the server that needs a lot of blowing up. Chat suggests Bdubs’ house but no, it is Magic Mountain! You can’t make a volcano without exploding a lot of TNT. Today is not for explosions though, just making TNT. Chat is disappoint. Impulse relents and says he will blow up at least one TNT today. As he digs, he talks with chat about 90s sci fi movies. He thinks there were too many Resident Evil movies. Many chatters have never heard of movie theaters that are also restaurants. Impulse shares memories of going to the dollar theaters with his mom as a kid, movies that were already out on video. Chat taunts him for being old, or commiserates with him about being old. Chat misses Blockbuster video.

25:00 Impulse misses picking up physical media and looking at the back cover to decide what to watch. He wonders what happened to all the people who wrote copy for the back of DVD and VHS boxes. Do they all write greeting cards now? Or maybe they still do the same thing, some DVDs are still being sold, right? VHS players aren’t even being made anymore. Impulse and Chat discuss converting physical media to digital formats, Impulse refuses to admit any piratical tendencies on-stream. Chat nostalgically remembers Napster. A chatter asks if Impulse likes WWE wrestling, he says he used to when he was younger but not so much anymore. If one isn’t into it these days, the whole thing can seem a bit cringe.

32:00 Impulse reminds chat that he is blowing up Magic Mountain for the sake of all his friends who are spending so much time digging. He hasn’t seen the results of the court case yet so can’t talk about it, but he wants to see Bdubs’ perspective very much. Impulse was too busy building the creeper farm to sit in the gallery, but he got some info from Skizz after the filming. They had stuff to talk about! Episode 100 of the podcast is coming right up and needs to be planned for. He reminds Chat that the second Joel episode of the podcast came out today. Impulse thinks Part 2s are even better than Part 1s, because everyone is relaxed and in the interview flow from the start and there’s no warmup period.

36:30 Impulse returns to his base and informs chat that his coffee is gone. He needs a hydration break because it is 110F outside and that is important. He plays Grian’s Work song for the break. After he comes back, he and Chat reminisce about all the awesome stuff that happened in Season 7. Chat remembers Impulse raising his whole base by one block. Impulse laughs about how he did it all between episodes instead of timelapsing the whole thing, what a weird way to do so much work. Chat suggests maybe he was just tired. Impulse admits they did go really hard in Season 7. Chat uses the idea of space volcanoes to try to negotiate for three TNT detonations this episode. They also remind Impulse that the first use of Proximity Chat was in Season 7, the episode where Bdubs revealed his barber shop. It was a very fun episode, and Proxmod has changed the way they do everything.

44:40 Impulse sends good wishes to Scar, who just had his surgery. He hasn’t heard anything yet but hopes for quick recovery. Scar is a real trooper, always keeping a positive attitude. Chat is in full agreement with all of this. Impulse stops by Bop N Go to repair his shovels and stays to play the Bop Song for Chat. Chat tells Impulse that Pearl is playing Decked Out again. He laughs and says she’s on her training arc, she’s definitely addicted. He goes back to his storage room and looks for sponges. Chat tells him to look in his Utilities Chest, he says that’s a nice name for his junk drawer.

51:00 Impulse heads back into the nether with his wet sponges, realizes he’s forgotten his hoe and turns right back around. Chat makes the expected jokes while Impulse searches through his chests and wonders if he even has a hoe. He may need to craft a fancy hoe. Chat thinks he gave the hoe to Skizz. Impulse creates a diamond hoe and enchants it, naming it iDaHoe. Chat likes it. He tries to sleep and gets the monsters nearby message. “No there’s not,” he says and steps through the waterfall door to be immediately shot by a skeleton. He shoots it back and sleeps. He debates putting Netherite on the hoe and decides against it, then goes out and finds a zombie with a fancy hat. Now he is really really ready to go do sponges.

58:00 Impulse goes back to his base to grab glass to use with his newly dried sponges. A Lupus Nocte song comes up on his background music and he talks about how he likes their songs this season for the cyberpunk vibe. He thought about using one for his timelapses, but Scar and Pearl are already using the best ones. ((Longtime watchers may recognize “Howling” by Lupus Nocte as Scar’s ��Super-Fast-Build-Mode” music.)) He organizes his work shulkers as Chat asks what happened to Beefstick (Impulse’s cow) Beefstick is fine, he has wandered out of the base but is still in the cyberpunk city. He thinks a conduit would be good for construction but can’t remember how to do it. Chat tries to help him, but it turns out he does not have sufficient nautilus shells. He asks Chat if Grian or Gem would mind. Gem only has one nautilus shell. Impulse openly questions her commitment to fishing. He searches Grian’s chests, pretending he is looking for seven nautilus shells he put in a random barrel the other day. Chat is not fooled, but play along for the sake of the bit. They also remind him how to get into the secret room. He tries, but it is sealed up for some reason. Impulse sneaks in through the double-secret back way and finds a stack and a half of nautilus shells. The conduit is back on!

1:06:00 Impulse sees Beef online and sparks a conversation about TCG. He is excited about all the new cards but doesn’t know how much Chat knows already and does not want to post spoilers. A chatter tells him that his new card looks great, but they are one of the artists and got a sneak peek. Impulse is also excited about Beef’s impending fatherhood, which is very cool. He knows Beef is going to be a great dad. A chatter mentions how Impulse, Skizz and Tango have been grouped up as “The Arizona Dads.” Impulse acknowledges that they are, in fact, all dads who live in Arizona. Someone else points out that this makes ZITS “Three Arizona Dads and a British Guy.” Impulse acknowledges this is true and that he wants to whine about how Zed needs to come to the States for a visit, but he was here just a few months ago for the charity stream.

1:09:00 Impulse goes through the wrong portal because he is not paying attention. He doubles back to the creeper farm while talking fondly about the charity event and all the fun they had on the roadtrip. He’d love to do something like that once a year. He starts building the conduit, but realizes he did not bring enough prismarine. Chat tells him how to get the lesser effect from a smaller conduit so he doesn’t have to run home again. He starts building the underwater tunnel. As he works, he talks about how cool it is having guests on the podcast and getting to see the other side of a lot of streamers. He and Chat talk about the difference between streams and content made for YouTube. Lots of stuff that wouldn’t be “good content” for YouTube is available on stream for people who want to see more stuff. It’s nice that viewers get to have options. He sets up a storage system of twelve double chests per creeper tower, figuring that will allow him to AFK for 24 hours.

1:18:00 Impulse needs a biobreak, but is it risky to take one while standing underwater? He decides to try it, but make it a quick one with no music video. Cubito Impulse survives two harrowing minutes alone underwater. Chat is a little disappointed. He asks Chat if he should make a big glass platform underwater or a system of glass tubes. Chat wants tubes, so he starts making tubes. He doesn’t have good underwater enchants on, so it’s quite painful to make any mistakes and need to mine up the glass. He talks with Chat about how much it sucks to get sick in the summer, especially on vacation. He was doomed to get sick on his cruise. He tells Chat he is hoping to release his next episode Sunday, and there will be updates on a lot of things, including the tunnel to the bunker. He does some birthday you-yos and mines out the door he forgot to add to the tunnels.

1:30:00 Impulse is running out of glass and he still hasn’t made any TNT. A thunderstorm is causing a ton of noise, but chat likes the ambiance. A chatter asks if Impulse will make a TNT autocrafter. Impulse points out that TNT is shaped crafting that requires special timings, so it would be pretty tough. He hasn’t tried that kind of autocrafting yet. He tells Chat the Old Man Story of the Day. Impulse struggles with insomnia and sleep issues, so he went to a sleep expert to try and solve some of that. Apparently a lot of insomnia was caused by lack of oxygen to the brain, and he was diagnosed with sleep apnea severe enough that he was basically suffocating himself every night. He got a CPAP machine and has been using it for four nights. The first night was tough, the second night they stayed out late, but the last two days he has felt fantastic. He feels old having to sleep with the machine, but he can’t argue with the results. This could be a game changer for him! He feels a little dumb for not getting it addressed for so long. Chat reminds him that anybody of any age can need a CPAP. There are quite a few chatters who also have CPAP machines ((and a recapper! CPAP machines are slightly uncomfortable magical sleep devices.))

1:40:00 Impulse returns to his base for more hoppers and tells Chat they should be glad for all the dad jokes he tells. Dad jokes are good for everyone, he read it in a study somewhere. He goes back to the farm and tells Chat about the CPAP’s reporting system that sends sleep data to his doctor to prove he is using it. He places the last hoppers and begins sponging out the tunnels. He tells more dad jokes. Apparently a man who has more oxygen in his brain has a lot more mental acuity for dad jokes. Chat suffers. Impulse has lost his hoe again. He finds it and gathers up the wet sponges. He thinks Skizz has been secretly borrowing his hoes for unknown reasons. Chat continues to suffer. Impulse loves it.

1:48:00 Impulse checks over the creeper farm to make sure none of the water flow got accidentally sponged, but it looks good. He dries all his sponges and explains the TNT making plan again. He shows off his large amounts of gunpowder and decides to use froglights to make the tunnel look cool. He doesn’t have froglights. He needs to stock his ender chest with more actually useful stuff. He quizzes chat on how many shulkers of sand it will take to make a double chest of TNT. Chat really doesn’t know, but they say ten a lot. He agrees with ten, but in the time it takes him to get back to the farm, the chatters who know it is eight have won the argument. Impulse congratulates everyone on having given their brains a workout today. He adds long stripes of froglights down the ceiling of the tunnels and muses that maybe it’s not a good thing that Etho gives him free froglights. He cannot be trusted to make good froglight design decisions. Chat points out that Impulse hasn’t done very much advertising for the froglight shop yet. Impulse goes way out of his way to do the math on how many shulkers of sand are needed to fill a double chest of TNT. ((The easy math: 1 stack of TNT=5 stacks of Gunpowder, 4 stacks of Sand. 1 shulker of TNT=5 shulkers of gunpowder, 4 shulkers of sand. A double chest is just two shulkers, so 1 double chest is 10 shulkers of gunpowder, 8 shulkers of sand.))

2:00:00 Impulse heads back to his base, commenting “rude” on a self-kill notice from Beef. “tell me about it,” Beef replies. Impulse collects quartz stairs for his tunnels. Skizz is in Twitch chat and wants to know about Beefstick. Impulse looks around and realizes that Beefstick has actually made it out of the Cyberpunk city and is wandering around near the walls. Impulse makes a lead to bring him home. He stands in front of the fencepost his horse is tied to and complains he doesn’t have a fencepost anywhere, then clears his throat and claims he was just testing Chat. Chat is merciless about his Tango-esque powers of observation. Chat asks if Impulse is going to sue Keralis for the horse shenanigans. It was months ago now, but it still doesn’t sit right. He will think about it. He places the quartz ceiling stairs hastily, realizing that it has been two hours into the TNT creation steam and he has not created any TNT so far. Chat suggests adding a rocket factory to this setup, since the gunpowder is flowing so well.

2:09:00 Impulse collects 10 shulkers of gunpowder for the TNT. He needs a lot more sand but if he collects two more shulkers he can at least make one TNT shulker. Chat tells Impulse that Tango also needs tons of gunpowder for his TNT farm. Chat wants to buy sand from Scar, but he might be sold out. Impulse goes to check. On the way, he checks on his elder guardian leaderboard. Two days left and he is still in the lead! He buys a shulker of sand and is mystified by the fact that buying sand by the stack is much more expensive than buying it by the shulker. Chat explains bulk discounts. Impulse pays a massive amount to buy another shulker worth of sand, thinking that it will at least make Scar happy when he gets back. Chat is on board with that.

2:16:00 Impulse makes a shulker of TNT. He’s working quickly because he is running out of time before the movie! He tells chat that everyone needs Item Scroller mod, it is the best clientside mod he owns. He tells Chat he is feeling very “go big or go home” with this project and wants at least two double chests of TNT to use on Magic Mountain. ((Impulse is setting up his “big reveal” for the episode he will release two days later.)) For now, though, he has promised to actually detonate three TNT for Chat before the end of the stream.

2:22:40 Impulse flies up to the top of Magic Mountain and finds a nice flat place to TNT. Chat votes for one blast at a time, so Impulse places and detonates a carefully-chosen TNT blocks from the shulker. Chat is pleased to blow things up! He decides to stack the next two and blows a bigger hole, then tells Chat to imagine what he could do with a double chest, placed in Etho-method. Chat asks what the Etho method is, Impulse says “You’ll see.” Chat explains that Etho method involves autocrafting TNT minecarts and detonating them all at once for a BIG explosion. Impulse shows off his bunker tunnel but tells Chat they will need to watch the video to see more explosions.

2:29:00 It is time for Impulse to wrap things up, but he needs a moment to stand and admire his tunnel at 30% brightness. He turns on shaders as well, Chat agrees that it looks very good. He wraps up the stream and reminds everyone to watch the video on Sunday, it’s going to be a good one! Impulse raids into Pearl and ends his stream.

#hermitcraft #stream recap #impulsesv #sorry i forgot the readmore at first that is my bad

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