#when its NOT in a gacha game format

[bittertomato]

Wait, SAKURAI WROTE TUNGUSKA SANCTUARY???

Here I was, thinking it was bad due to being an attempt at shoving what should have been a whole-ass story chapter into a short Raid event, but in hindsight, it being the product of Sakurai's writing does make sense, and in that case, Tunguska Sanctuary's probably the de facto worst thing they've written to date... right?

Please tell me there's nothing worse made by them on the horizon, my heart can't take it.

Haha yeah. Quill had told me Tunguska's disappointing writing was why they never advanced in JP, so I went in prepared. It was shorter than Olympus and Heian Kyo, so I didn't fry my braincells as much as back then. Plus I'm still riding on my Lostbelt 6 high.

My main gripe with Tunguska is that it was a story that was meant to focus on Koyanskaya, but it gave us 8 entire chapters of Taigong wank and not a single appearance from Koyanskaya herself until near the end. It soured me from Taigong's character until I saw an analysis of him and warmed up to him just a little after the event ended. And the end resolution was literally, "What if we turned Talk-no-Jutsu into an actual way to resolve a convoluted situation which didn't need to be convoluted in the first place."

An egg, really?

I don't think there's anything upcoming (i.e., currently on JP) that's what I would consider worse than Tunguska. I actually haven't read any of the fan translations of the chapters myself so I can't speak for myself. But for the main story chapters...

I think Higashide (the guy who wrote Fate/Apocrphya) wrote Traum? Quill just went through it and said it seemed pretty good until the end when it felt like the ball had dropped a ton. They said it still can't compare to how disappointing Tunguska was, which is a good sign I guess lol.

Nasu wrote Lostbelt 7, and as far as I've heard it seems fine (not on the same level of hype as Lostbelt 6, but also pretty good too if not dampened by the slow release after its hype). Ironically, Koyanskaya is in Lostbelt 7 and when Quill finally got to reading it, told me it feels like Nasu and Sakurai did not communicate at all with how Tunguska should be written.

Ordeal Call I also sounded ok. Again, dampened by the slow release (there's a reason why people nicknamed it "Ordeal Stall").

But as disappointing as Tunguska was, the contents of the chapter itself still can't top the utter cringe that is known as the Agartha chapter. That was just bad. Sakurai's writing may be flawed, but she hasn't written anything that's blatantly horrible like Agartha lol.

[alicenpai]

im curious would you ever draw genshin or hsr? have a nice day!!

hi!! hmm i did draw a venti once, when the game first came out he was really popular and i liked the colour scheme + thought his penchant for liquor was hilarious. but no generally im not interested in genshin impact or honkai star rail... the super elaborate character design style (while pretty) + gacha format is not my cup of tea.

mad respect for the game and its fans tho who create such great fan works, i save a lot of the fanart. here's venti!

[coconox]

my 2 cents on the state of whb

i've been contemplating about my thoughts on this game since i never really sat down and processed it, and a month of not playing the game and just keeping up with fandom content/official game news i think i can properly format my words (hopefully idk lol)

if you're looking for a specific section dw i'll properly format everything under the cut so you can just scroll till you find whatever you're looking for (also head's up it's insanely long i'm sorry but kinda not sorry i wanted to just put all my thoughts into one post rather than multiple)

SMALL INTRO

for some context on my experience, i have been playing this game everyday since launch/day 1, i was f2p up until i got juno's card, which i'll talk about later, but just know in advanced that juno was the only case where i've spent money. i uninstalled around the time the announcement was made in regards to no posting full stories of paid content, so almost month ago, and only reinstalled recently to grab certain items to add to the spreadsheet that i've been maintaining since november (aka a month after launch)

i've said it privately to a couple of close friends but i'll say it publicly here: imho, i think they released the game way too early even with the fact that they delayed launch 3 times.

i understand a handleful of bugs are from the fact that the public servers are significantly larger than test servers, but playing this game after the servers kinda stabilized feels like we are the test players, like we're constantly given rough drafts rather than the final copy.

the localization is rough to say the least, but i think i've been so used to it from other gachas that i've played that it didn't really ruin the experience for me,,, except when the text would switch to an entirely different language HJGFDHJGK

from visual bugs to gameplay bugs to voiceline bugs, there's been a lack of communication in terms of what has been fixed and what is still a wip. instead the players just have to "fuck around and find out" in terms of whether something has been fixed or not.

as i continue to state the issues with this game and its direction i'd like to put a disclaimer that i am by no means an expert in any of this stuff lol. i'm just a guy who nerds out over math, spreadsheets, and video games and everything i'll be saying is my personal opinion based on what i've seen/experienced.

THE ISSUE(S)

SOLOMON SEALS AND GACHA

i think the first mistake was them adding solomon seals in the first place. based on what packs in the past looked like, it looked like red keys were originally designed to be for debut characters, but instead they throw a curve ball and add ANOTHER gacha currency that was essentially p2w only up till some point early this year. this ultimately led to there being 2 standard banners, both of which essentially do the same thing except one doesn't have A/B/C-ranks. the fact that now even with realm of seraphim, in order for f2ps to have enough to guarantee with seals, they need to save for a year and a half. that is WAY too long for ONE character. this is of course worst case scenario of needing to hit pity, i'm aware you can get characters early but you should never always expect you'll get early in gacha games, i learned that the hard way during my idk how many years i've been playing gachas lol

i personally think that there's no winning across any of the gacha banners. there's no pity for either of the standards, and debut L/S-ranks have imo too high of a pity for what we're actually receiving per week. we essentially get more or less 1 pull per week in terms of red keys, yellow keys, and seals through dailies/weeklies alone, though of course that can vary cause of the rng key boxes, monthly login rewards, etc.

PANCAKES

there seems to be a general pattern that i've noticed of rather than confronting an issue directly they try to create something new in hoping that fixes the issue instead. an example of that would be the pancake shop.

the old pancake shop was fine as is, we could get a multi for relatively cheap price and get pie boxes everyday (albeit they're rng but pies are pies). what they could've done was add the L-ranks and skip tickets or whatever new thing they wanted to add into that old shop, adjusting the currency wherever necessary. yet instead they just remove the old system entirely and replace it for a new one that no one really asked for? while having the L-ranks in shop are nice, an entirely new system wasn't necessary to make that one relatively small addition. having A+-ranks and lower give gold and books was also not necessary, we have resource stages containing those 2 things and it's very accessible to everyone. what resources we are lacking in however are tears and pies, which are arguably more important than gold and books since those 2 currencies are the core to ascending/lvling characters and their skills.

PIES

i've emailed pb in the past in regards to if there will be other permanent methods for obtaining pies, and their response was holy coin portal and events. those two are NOT stable enough for pie income considering the prices of skills. if there's instances in unholy board where we need to level a character's skills, i'd expect there to be some sort of resource stage that would allow us to get pies so that we can easily obtain that skill level requirement.

"META" GAMEPLAY

i'll explain the quotes in a bit but i do want to put a disclaimer that whb was the first time i've experienced a full on tower defense style gameplay for gachas. i was already familiar with how it works kinda because of neural cloud even though the game as a whole is more like an auto-chess game of sorts, but some story gameplay had tower defense mechanisms and i learned a fair bit from playing that. personally i also haven't played arknights since i'm trying to cut down on the amount of gachas i play but i am aware of its playstyle through friends who like to attempt to drag me into playing it cause of certain characters that i might simp over (*cough flamebringer cough insider cough chongyue cough*)

disclaimer aside, trying to piece together what characters work and what don't genuinely hurts my brain. i put "meta" in quotes because realistically there's only 1: all L-rank light types, ideally at least 1 tank, maybe 1 healer (though a tank can act as both), rest be whatever dps you'd like really (preferably satan considering the fact he can be extremely reliable without his ultimate unlike a few characters). of course, everyone will have a different opinion on what they deem as meta, but that's the general idea i'd personally follow based on what kind of battles have been given to us, what characters are available, etc. the rest tbh are just "cope and seethe" for lack of a better term.

there's a huge type advantage with light and dark types, and i really wish they could buff the other elements more just show they have some spotlight too. i also wish there were more non-light L-ranks. as of making this post, out of the 23 L-rank characters there is currently only 1 non-light L-rank, and it's juno, an L-rank fire marksman.

the part that really "hurts" me the most (don't really know what other word to put here LOL) is the fact that this game is going in a very specific direction of just dps'ing through everything and hope you clear the stage before the enemies kill you.

this game has a huge and imbalanced ratio between dps characters and support characters regardless of element. the fact that we only have 5 healers (NOT including lucifer (victory) considering he's technically a marksman and the healing is from his artifact and not in his skills) and 8 tanks, whereas marksman and close-rangers have twice or thrice the amount is absurd. what pains me more is the fact that for tanks, if you don't have mammon, you're screwed. arguably the best non-mammon option players have that's accessible is bimet. valefor and eligos share the same kit with the fact that their downfall is the possibility that they could be instakilled the second they pop their ult. healers on the other hand are somewhat more lenient. if you don't have lucifer, marbas is your next best, then gamigin (marbas and gamigin can technically be placed interchangeably since their healing differs by 0.1%, it just depends on who you have), then morax, then maybe buer but he only heals 1 unit at a time rather than multiple but i digress. healers still have multiple and very reliable non-L-rank alternatives whilst tanks really only have 1. i really, really hope there's more support units in the future cause man this sucks.

NIGHTMARE PASS

spending $50-$70, on paper, is significantly better than spending ~$400 for a character, and that's really the only "good" thing about it 💀

$50-$70 may feel like nothing to some players, but to a majority, that is a portion of a cost towards food, groceries, rent, etc. basically, i'd assume a majority of people would prioritize surviving than watching pixels on a screen.

i understand at the end of the day pb is running a business, but for kings to be fully locked behind a paywall knowing for a fact that a majority of the player base are 1. casuals/f2ps and 2. are here for the kings is absurd. plus with the fact that typically nightmare pass characters aren't added to standard and aren't always 100% guaranteed to rerun in the future just puts the nail in the coffin for me.

i think it makes more sense for non-kings like juno to be in nightmare pass because it's just additional fun and silly content that arguably won't be tied to the main lore and whatnot, maybe referenced as a silly bit here or there but it'd be more of an easter egg than something important that you absolutely need to know.

personally i bought juno's pass because i love his design, kit, and voice. story was kinda meh for me personally but i really just cared more about the va and gameplay. gameplay-wise, he certainly does not disappoint as a gehenna support unit. but do i regret purchasing him? yes and no. oddly enough this was probably the first i've ever felt guilty in terms of buying something i wanted in a gacha game. yes i regret it in terms of i'm no longer really playing this game anymore, which is unfortunate considering i barely made it through half a year of this game's release. yet at the same time, no i don't regret it because he is a really fun unit. for example, when it's gabriel's rotation in realm of seraphim, juno's, leraye (nostalgia)'s, and leraye's ultimates absolutely DESTROY gabriel in a matter of like <10 or so seconds and it's so satisfying to see. i also just really like his va, scratches a very particular itch in my brain.

anyways before i get sidetracked over appreciating juno, the fundamental flaws of nightmare pass are essentially

you shouldn't need to buy both tiers to get the character. you should realistically need to buy the highest tier and by default it unlocks all previous tiers below it

ui is a bit confusing. i still don't get why f2ps have to unlock parts of nightmare pass that they can't even access/obtain. there should be a clear separation between what f2ps get, what advanced tier gets, and what premium tier gets.

it's too expensive. most bp's i know are ~$10 at the highest tier, though that's considering the fact that bp's i'm familiar with only give cosmetics rather than actual units

from what i've heard through the grapevine, beel (bath) is basically in the same formatting as all the other currently existing bath cards, which are all currently obtainable through gacha. beel has no reason to be in nightmare pass. it genuinely makes no sense as to why pb put him there aside from getting money and that in-turn alienates a majority of the fan base since we can't even view the prologue of card stories if they're a nightmare pass character.

when nightmare pass was first released during christmas, everything was in chaos. the fact that a nightmare pass character needed the other two limited gacha characters gameplay-wise is absurd (mind you, this was before we were given the chance to earn seals through weeklies). everything was too expensive, and rather than an enjoyable christmas event it felt like a "merry christmas, now give us money" kind of situation. i think nightmare pass should not be happening as frequent as it is now. the gap between gabriel and juno was perfectly fine (4 month gap btw), but for a nightmare pass to happen back to back on top of gacha events is too much for both f2ps and p2ws.

the point of buying packs, bp, anything that costs real money in a gacha game is so it makes your gameplay experience easier, paying shouldn't be the main component of your game. personally based on what i've experienced through playing gacha games you should theoretically be able to pull for almost every character on debut just by playing dailies/weeklies/events, yet here we get a bit over a multi per patch (this includes playing realm of seraphim).

DICTATING FANDOM INTERACTIONS

i wholeheartedly believe a fandom is what keeps a game alive. a hindrance to the fan base is a hindrance to the game, which can be seen with the aftermath of pb announcing that legal action will be taken if full stories of paid content are shared publicly. while i understand from a business standpoint that pb would want to enforce the "no sharing full story" thing for paid content since they want players to yk, buy the card, like i mentioned in the previous section, the majority of the player base just cannot afford it.

the people who posted full stories wanted to share to those who cannot afford it, some people may not want only tidbits of the story but rather the whole context, especially those who enjoy dissecting character lore but don't have the irl funds to fully experience it themselves. some people may even want to archive it, cause honestly no one knows how long this game will stay up and we want to archive story so that it's something we can easily look back on. to essentially make players borderline terrified on trying to figure out whether or not it's ok to publicly post stuff in relation to any sort of story content is absurd.

there is also that loophole of what is defined as a paid story. when events end and get put behind a paywall, does that now count as paid story or is that still ok? what about debut L-ranks that are behind seals and there's a 3 month downtime till they're added to standard? or is it just referring to nightmare pass characters? paid stories in the context of the state of the game right now is insanely broad, it's practically at least 50% of this game (i'm exaggerating (or maybe not i wouldn't be surprised if that was actually the case)).

i understand no datamining, while it technically speaking isn't illegal, it's disrespectful to the devs, but a lot of these call to action methods they're announcing are rather extreme imo.

with the most recent cards either being put to standard 3 months after their banner ends or flat out paywalled and not 100% guaranteed to have a rerun, story content as of late has been very sparse. what people want most is a main story update, which we were originally promised to be updated every 3 months and it is now month 6 and we still have nothing.

EVENTS AND EVENT STORIES

event stories being locked behind a paywall after the event ends is probably the first time i've ever seen a gacha game do this. most of the gachas i've played either don't archive event story at all and just rerun it every year, don't rerun or archive the event at all (i.e. if you miss it, cope and seethe), or they archive it for FREE. it feels insanely greedy how EVERY event story needs payment if you ever want to backread an old event.

what also concerns me is the fact like instances like gamigin's event or beleth's event carry so much lore for their respective region and that may never show up in main story, which then screws new players over in not knowing the full context behind every region. events like minhyeok's or bimet's are fine in the sense that it doesn't carry that much lore in comparison to the more recent events. the first few events were like silly banter and getting to know a bit more about the cast.

also changing the event shop from daily pies to a set limit per account was an awful choice it just emphasizes my point earlier of how unstable obtaining pies are in this game.

FULFILLING PROMISES

i think while it was a smart move to list what's gonna be implemented throughout the year, they shouldn't have stated deadlines on when they're doing so.

the following are the things that still aren't implemented yet as of making this post:

new daily chats (expected within february)

friends system (expected within march)

birthday system (more specifically celebrating your bday) (expected within april)

new main story chapter (new chapter expected every 3 months)

if pb were to just say "here's what to expect in 2024" and NOT give specific months, that's fine, but giving these specific months sets an expectation that they would complete it within that timeframe. main story for example is probably the one people have been anticipating the most. by now as of july, if we were to follow the expectation pb gave us, we would currently be on chapter 7, or at the very least chapter 7 would've been released some time this month. we have not even gotten chapter 6 yet. chapter 5 was released in january. it has been 6 months since the last main story update. failing to meet these timeframes will make people upset, because it was mentioned in the announcement that it's 1. a promise (i hope i'm not the only one that takes promises seriously) and 2. in bold yellow text, "what we can realistically expect to see in 2024." the only promises that were fulfilled on-time were the ones in january, the rest have been delayed by at least a month. if you're giving a timeline of what's happening, announce if there's any changes to that timeline, because not doing so will make players believe you were lying to them even though you probably aren't and are instead just falling behind schedule.

i think what hurts more to me is the fact that they aren't publicly communicating these delays. it shouldn't be our responsibility to find out why or when something isn't happening within the timeframe they promised (e.g. by emailing them), it should be up to the devs to communicate that publicly to us. i'm not saying they should overshare what's going on behind the scenes, it can simply just be a simple announcement of "hey, we're very sorry but we're having some technical difficulties with this certain feature and we need more time. here is some compensation in the meantime, thank you for your patience and again, we're very sorry." it's that simple.

FINAL THOUGHTS

i mentioned back in my intro that i feel like this game was released too early purely because the fundamentals of making a bare minimum decent gacha game are just not there. if every patch update has people complaining on what's just recently been added/removed, you're not fully listening to what the audience wants. while i understand pb is a small business, a business is still a business regardless of size and criticism/feedback is necessary especially in a game dev setting.

i've followed this game's news ever since it was teased, which was december of 2022, i've lurked/participated in the fandom (on here at least) ever since september of 2023. i've felt a rollercoaster of thoughts and emotions of "omg this is so great" to "why is this even a feature," hoping that over time the game would get better, but the only thing that's improved was server stability (and even that's still a bit rocky 💀).

a huge part of my stay was just being a lurker in the fandom. i genuinely appreciate all the creatives who fulfill asked prompts of characters, make ocs, fanart, write theories, reactions + many more. i love seeing other people's works/opinions and having just a lively fandom made it all more fun.

but at this point this game is just not for me. i've really only stuck around to read mammon's lore but since main story hasn't been updated in 6 months i'll really only chime back in when there's finally an update. it still amazes me to this day that my patience lasted this long. i think i've covered everything i wanted to cover but my memory is swiss cheese so if i forgot something,,, woops 💀

as for the future of the spreadsheet for those who check back on it, it's still being managed by myself and windy, who has been a huge help since day 1 of creating the build lists and team comps and i honestly can't thank her enough for also enduring this pain of a game with me as we've worked on this spreadsheet together hgjdfgh (luv u bestie 🫶). though it's written in the narrative that both of us will eventually quit updating it entirely if this game persists on not having any signs of improvement. when that day comes i'll make sure to post an announcement about it.

as for myself i'm probably still gonna lurk in the fandom/keep an eye out on game news. i doubt i'll be making any fanart anymore unless if i really have the motivation/boredom for it, but currently i'm revamping the "aesthetics" of this account so nothing's really set in stone. maybe i'll make a few whb rambles here or there if some game news really irks me but for the most part i've already been in the process of moving on to other things.

if you've stuck around this long to read this mess of a post, thank you for sticking around and have a cookie, you deserve it 🫴🍪

[idollandhero]

I think in a year we'll look back at our time with Idol Land and think of it like a weird dream. A time when there wasn't a Pretty Series show announced and everything was in limbo. A time where King of Prism was a dead franchise. A time when songs were performed at Pretty Series live shows that wouldn't premier in the anime for years. The game teaser in every single Pretty Series announcement only for it to be delayed again. The YEARS long gap between episodes 2 and 3. The DISASTROUS launch. When we realized it was just a reskinned version of the switch game. Or when we discovered that it was mostly made by some unrelated dev who had only made one failed mobile otome game before Idol Land.

The Pretty Series' pivot to focusing on AiPri & KinPri instead of Idol Land & DanPri makes the past few years of Idol Land content, and the past less than a year of Idol Land actually being out, feel like an illusion.

It's frustrating because the concept of a PriPara mobile game sounds fantastic! When I play games like SIF2 or Idolish7 or whatever I think about what could have been. Was it money problems? or time problems? Or some combination of both. Regardless I can't help but yearn for a game with a budget that this franchise deserves.

And the web anime was great! But only 12 episodes, and its own budget problems, plus the games delay keeping it finished and in limbo for 2 years! (+ the lack of any western fansubs picking it up, seriously how is do we still only have subs for up to episode 6) meant that it never got the place in the spotlight it deserved. Some people speculated that it was meant to air on TV because the episodes are formatted as such, but with AiPri starting in that slot the same month the show is ending that doesn't seem to be true.

It's hard to say where PriPara is going from here. It's the series 10th anniversary and the arcade game is being shuttered to push players towards AiPri Verse instead. Idol Land's anime finale is going to air to little applause because it's stuck on an app with less than 20,000 active users, and in the same month as the launch of the new series that's slated to be a real PreCure competitor.

Idol Land's EOS hasn't been announced yet, but the missing Nino birthday coord, the April monthly update with entirely rerun coords, and the fact that Idol Land is getting very VERY close to running out of content from the switch game. Well, if not EOS I expect this game to go into maintenance mode pretty soon.

Yeah idk what my point here was exactly, but man Idol Land really was a blur. Sometimes I think we understate exactly how inexperienced the devs really were. The game doesn't have any type of Google Play integration, and when the game launched the account recovery only lasted 15 minutes. I have a newer phone and the game isn't compatible with my hole punch front camera. There's just a black bar there. I only have this problem with older games, anything made in the last 4 years doesn't have this problem except for Idol Land. I honestly think the lack of region locking is because the dev doesn't know how to turn it on. Someone on discord reported that they've been buying gold, and then contacting Google and asking for a Play Store refund. It's worked multiple times and they are not banned. How is a ban for chargebacks not something they implemented day one. Also this game doesn't have any deals or discounts, ever. It's hard to believe that, like every game I've ever played has a buy two and get 50% off the second one bundle. But it's like the devs don't know how to implement anything past basic gacha mechanics. I could also ramble about how expensive the prices are, but I've done it before I won't do it again. Also the photo room, it's implemented pretty badly. You upload a photo for the background and it crops it weird and squishes it and makes it blurry. I didn't know this at launch because it was a paid feature for like six months. The pass itself was a horrible value unless you were buying it specifically to get the episodes early, you got exactly how the amount of gold you paid for. Why not just buy the gold then. But they either realized that, or were preparing for end of service; because they took it down. I'm rambling about things the devs messed up but I haven't even mentioned the first three months of the game. There's been so many points in this game's history where playing a promise was borderline impossible for one reason or another. This game didn't feel finished until that November update that included immediate promises. God there's so much more. The photo competitions just being about editing for some reason. Also they went away, so clearly those didn't work. The amount of coords they've implemented that were broken in some way. Sometimes it was the wrong coord entirely, sometimes the cylume didn't work. It's like the dev team is so small that there's no QA people. Also on that note, Open Dream Land was just fixed in the mid March update. The game went more than 6 months where one of its two unique charts was off sync. Also remember the voice bug, that lasted forever.

I'm sorry I just started rambling lmao. This is the problem when I write posts with speech to text, I say way too much. Ultimately I enjoyed my time with Idol Land, but it's existence feels surreal. Especially because 80% of the features from this game I can turn on my switch after end of service and play, and it's free because I already paid once and never have to pay again. I even have Waku Waku O'Clock on Switch. One day, probably soon from the way things are going, I'm going to wake up and not be able to play Idol Land on my phone ever again. But instead of reminiscing of this game, I will think about the game that could have been if Idol Land got as much love as Prism Rush did.

KASHIKOMA ✌️

[cool-jpgs-of-wizards-with-swords]

every day the earth trembles under the weight of my potential. I have a 6 hour video essay about arknights and its ludonarrative in me and you motherfuckers are so lucky. So the thing about it thats the most interesting to me, right, is that there's a Magic Material in the worldbuilding. It's called Oriron. It grows in large, crystalline formations, which disperse a harmful dust which causes infection. Individuals infected with Oripathy die. All that medicine is able to do is slow it down. When they near death and after, those who are infected with oripathy start releasing that same dust that causes infection in others. When enough dust is released, it creates a "Catastrophe;" which can take various shapes, but invariably creates MASSIVE deposits of Oriron which fall like comets from the clouds of dust. Cities in the world of arknights have had to be built on moving platforms that roam across the countryside in order to avoid these catastrophes. (Mortal engines vibes btw.)

This material is also how technology, industry, and magic, all function in this world. Utilizing tools with Oriron, you can utilize it to do literal magic. It's also destroying the entire fucking world. Infected get to use the oriron inside them to do magic instead. neat! This kills them. Slowly, but it does.

Arknights is a gacha game. It's built on the same addictive spending models that have ruined so many fucking lives.

The premium currency of the game is. Oriron. Well. Orundum. There's like 60 different kinds of oriron which are all different upgrade materials because again, Gacha game. It's.

In Arknights, you play as "The Doctor", a figure working for a Pharmaceutical Company that is trying to cure oripathy. Amiya is the idealistic leader of said company. I haven't gotten to all the details about her past with the doctor or much of the lore. But her entire goal is to not betray her ideals of being able to be a force of good in a world that's utterly fucked. Because of. The Premium Currency Of The Game.

Anyway the arknights true ending is a free-to-play fangame because the structure of arknights as a media property WILL not allow it to end. And whether it was intentional or not, the fact that the premium currency of the game is also Magic Supercancer DOES make this a more poignant point for me.

In the end, to give Amiya the future she wants to see, we, the players, as doctors, need to see the real cure for Oripathy. We cannot accept the continued use of Oriron for industry. There are hundreds of thousands of disenfranchized Infected, who might be able to help us transition from a society that depends on oriron to a society that does not.

[reccyls]

Ikemen Sengoku Birthday Event Guide

Starting from this year (2023 in JP, 2024 for EN), Ikemen Sengoku is implementing a new format for birthday events compared to previous years. This new event type is called a Banquet Event and it has a couple of quirks, hopefully I can explain how the event plays in this post.

Basically, Ikemen Sengoku is going to be taking some elements from Ikepri's party events, but not all of them. First of all, you can't earn the birthday CG for free: you still need to buy that from a 900 coin set as usual, and it comes with all the normal stuff: the story, the CG, some castle avatar items, etc. The main difference is that the story of this event is earned slightly differently from a story event, in that you do battles/lessons to earn points and raise your Banquet Level, which at certain milestones will give you the event story to be saved into your collection. There are other milestones like avatar items and item rewards (closet space, gold, castle gacha tokens, and boyfriend gacha tokens)

How to play is explained below:

Like the Ikepri and Ikevamp birthday events, you do lessons/glam-offs/etc whatever it's called in order to earn points to raise your Banquet Level. What is new to Ikesen is that owning certain themes will increase the points you get from doing battles, just like how having cards of the birthday character will give you bonus points in Ikepri's party events.

Differences from normal story events:

Uses its own stamina system; you can't use normal parfaits or shaved ice to restore stamina. Thus it will run concurrently with other events and not interfere with the stamina needed for those

There is no event friend system here

You do not read the event story and then pass checks. You will instead raise your party level, and at certain thresholds, the event story will be given to you and saved in your collection

The number of points you get per battle can be increased if you own certain themes

Similarities with normal story events:

Lucky time schedule works as normal. There are 2x and 3x lucky times

There are items you can buy that give you event points, as well as items to buy that refill your stamina

You can win or draw event battles like usual. Draws give you half the points of a win.

This is what the game looks like when you enter an event battle:

The deck of cards at the bottom is the list of themes you have that give bonus points. In my case, I only have 1 theme of Masamune that gives bonus points, which is this year's birthday story. As you can see, it gives me +3 points.

The game will automatically select any themes you have that give the highest point bonuses, so you don't have to worry about going through your collection to see if you have something or not.

One thing of note is that there are lucky times (currently there is a 2x lucky time active in the screenshot). As with usual story events, they double the points you get, but they only double the base points. Bonuses from themes are not doubled. To put it in a numerical example:

Winning a battle gives 100 points normally. So if I won a battle, I would get 103 points, since I have a +3 bonus.

During a 2x lucky time, only the 100 points are doubled. Thus I get (100 x2) + 3 = 203 points. I do not get (100 + 3) x2 = 206 points.

Bonus Themes

So, which themes give bonuses exactly? Here is the list for Masamune's birthday event:

(yes I haven't done Masamune's route yet, sssh)

To summarize, you can get the bonus themes from the following:

Buying themes included in special birthday sets

Prize themes from previous years' birthday events (these are ranking rewards for JP, but I believe they were turned into Early Clear rewards for EN?)

This year and last year's birthday story CGs

Pulling them from the special birthday boyfriend gacha

Main route CGs (only the main route counts, the eternal route CG, the extra CG added to the main route, and sequel CGs don't)

So, what are the rewards and the milestones? I don't have a super clear idea of the number of points you need for everything yet, but here is the list of rewards for each party level:

I saw someone on Twitter imply that you need around 25,000 points total to reach the 4th part of the story, but I'll be back to edit this (and reblog with an update) if/when I get close in order to confirm it.

Meanwhile, here are all the avatar items for each level, as well as the early clear bonuses:

Early Clear Bonuses:

Is it F2P?

From my experience and a bit of guessing, I think that it'll be possible to achieve all 4 parts of the story as F2P. However, I'm not sure how much further you can get beyond that. Getting points can be pretty difficult, especially since you can't use normal stamina or glamor items to raise your banquet level.

I'll update here at the end of the event with how far I managed to get, simulating what it'd be like as someone who only played Masamune's route and didn't buy any sets/stories or get any themes from the birthday gacha.

I don't feel like I explained this very well at all so if anyone has any questions or if there's anything about this event that's unclear, please feel free to ask!

[sonusresonet]

♛ ; PINNED POST/STARTER CALL

♛ - Independent and Selective "ROVER" from WUTHERING WAVES. Not spoiler free, and adheres/focuses on canon game lore. Please refer to the rules and about page for info before interacting. OC friendly, and multiverse/ship are A-OK! By liking this post, you give me permission to plot, send asks, and interact with you!

♛ - Personal blogs, please make sure not to reblog RP, headcanons, and my writing posts. I will block if you do.

♛ Info

♛ Rules

♛ Verses (TBA)

♛ Mobile Rules under the cut!

I. General

This blog will be between low to medium activity with dark themes present including war, violence, death, etc.

I will tag as any spoilers as I can, but it is not spoiler free and will act on whatever is revealed in the main story of WUTHERING WAVES + some theories that go on about the overall lore and Rover's identity.

I expect basic RP etiquette and will do the same.

I've been on tumblr rp for a while but am just returning now. I'm behind on the terminology now used so please be patient if I don't get something right away. I will be just doing basic formatting when writing.

I want to just write so I won't be paying attention to drama.

I go by Aki and Mun & Muse are 25+.

II. Writing

Each interaction will be its own and not collide with others unless talked about beforehand with both parties.

I'd like to focus on Wuthering Waves verse itself so I will be following canon first and foremost. I don't mind divergencies as long as its nothing major/world changing.

This blog is multi-ship and ships will be built on chemistry and interactions.

I prefer multi-para but don't mind one-liners and short interactions. I like plotting but also don't mind a thread started from an inbox meme, etc. In general, I'm cool with anything.

Feel free to send any memes no matter how old they are! I'll find them eventually.

I play a lot of gacha/anime games so I'm more than happy to create a verse for crossovers.

III. Following/Tagging

I don't have any real triggers and will tag the usual ones accordingly if I reblog something that falls under it. (Most likely not though)

If I follow then I would like to interact at some point. I will unfollow though if no activity between us occurs but will try and reach out when I feel confidant enough too.

As stated above, I want to focus on Wuthering Wave's world as a priority so I'd love interactions from all characters that want to be involved in the world.

[corporatedespair]

also if any of yall were around back when i expected this to be a gacha series (yes im being serious i planned for this to be a gacha series originally, this was only scrapped because the gl2 studio update didnt drop and i got impatient IT STILL ISNT OUT BTW)

you might remember i had made and released an edit or two for an intro! like uhh, splash art.

here they are. theyre old and no longer representative of the final product. yes, they had custom "ultimate-like" clothes (i still find daves rose theming and the fact buck is wearing a more androgynous-styled celestes outfit kinda cute)

ofc, im no longer able to use these due to the fact its no longer a gacha-centric thing and theyd be both really out of place and tacky...

however...

...that doesnt mean there arent going to be splash renders... (the cathal one is directly inspired by the previously made gacha one, btw!!! just a bit of different posing)

also in case youre wondering, even if gl2s studio update was released i wouldnt go back to trying to make this a gacha series. because:

i since grew out of my gacha thing

ive already committed myself to making this a game. ive always wanted to make a fangame and now i finally am, and i think thats kinda cool despite it being A LOT HARDER than a gacha series.

there are multiple things i want to do that can only be done in a game format, not in a video format. things like slight variations in dialogue depending on previously made choices, freetime events you actually choose, and also multiple "meta" elements. hell, theres even a thing ive been planning real close to the birth of this project, a really big thing.

d293PyB0aGlzIGJpdGNoIGlzIHJlYWxseSB1c2luZyBiYXNlNjQgdG8gYmUgc25lYWt5PyBvaywgb2suIChyZWZlcnJpbmcgdG8gbXlzZWxmIFRIRSBBVVRIT1IpLiB5b3UgZGVzZXJ2ZSB0byBrbm93IGZvciBiZWluZyBjbGV2ZXIsIGkgZ3Vlc3MuIHNlY3JldCBlbmRpbmcu

[project-sekai-facts]

thinking about it stresses me out and i can't explain it well but making the world link events take up an entire event slot instead of it running alongside a different event is such a horrible idea imo, especially if it takes this month's lim banner entirely. and i think it's impossible considering vbs's one is in january and there's the new years fes anyways? unless they make new years perm again like in 2021 but it's going to be so fucking annoying and predictable for any fan that's been waiting for a lim for a while, especially vsers because it basically confirms that the devs STILL aren't treating them like the actual characters and putting them in events with the ocs (let alone having to wait until AUGUST for more fucking lims, yea like we need another fucking one-year gap /s). its genuinely irritating for me if they end up deciding that and not making next event lim. plus it makes the next event from now only six days considering this gacha ends October 31st, and with the event gap, the event has to end November 5th or 6th. and this wl event lasts 12 days and no event has lasted either of those lengths in jp (not to mention the weird fucking chapter-by-chapter thing going on?). sorry for acting angry but i really am disappointed if this ends up being the case without any fucking warning it makes no sense!

yeah the WL event just feels like it needs some work. obviously this is the first one so there's gonna be some problems here and there but this feels like it's pretty messily put together, even for a first run. i understand it taking an event slot because otherwise you'd have to tier two separate events at the same time and that'd just be difficult, but just the sheer amount of time it takes up is too much. maybe shorten the chapters to 2 days from 3, 12 days is too long. it's just gonna be really draining and a pain in the ass to tier, plus it makes the event before it really short. like seriously, 7 days for the MMJ event? i mean the current event is only 8 but normally cheerful carnivals last about 10 because of the format. i mean MMJ wouldn't perform as well as a N25 banner anyway so maybe they're just throwing the 7 day event on them for testing purposes.

since VBS is directly after new year colofes+lims I'm guessing WL lims don't count as actual lims. maybe they don't have hairstyles, i mean they said about MR2 unlocking special cut-ins, so maybe they do that instead of hairstyles. i wonder if they'll be like a bday card where they have their own rarity or something because if the game is willing to run them directly after a fes banner they can't be all that rare? maybe they reappear on future WL events like how all fes cards are on every colofes banner.

i get the feeling that the WL event won't have a specific character focus. they didn't announce a song other than the 3rd anniversary campaign one, so unless they're deciding to count that as Kanade's 4th comm then it doesn't look like this has a specific focus. well, apparently each part of the event/story is focused on a different character so that makes sense I guess. also the 3rd anni campaign commissions are meant to release monthly, and these events are getting dragged out until well past when all unit will've gotten their comm.

i think a lot of adjustments are gonna have to be made to the event starting from the VBS one. like the whole thing feels messy right now. and maybe it's because they haven't really told us a whole lot about how it works still, but there's obvious problems from the get-go like the duration and the amount of gacha cards on top of the fact they're now rerunning 3 lim gachas at a time. how badly does this game want our money they earn way more than any other idol game on the market.

[wishforged]

2024 top hits

good media, would consume again

where the two flowers meet

an unexpectedly poignant visual novel with a lot of engrossing twists and turns. I really like stories where characters are driven to near-madness by grief; it's such an enormous emotion. currently pay what you want on itch.io.

charisma house

a multimedia project with wonderfully idiosyncratic characters and a main story posted to youtube in the form of short videos. also funny as hell which isn't a surprise considering the main writer also worked on gintama. my music taste is poisoned bc of these joseimuke projects but I loved the songs too

we don't know ourselves: a personal history of modern ireland

extremely readable and honestly hard to put down even though it usually takes me forever to read longer nonfiction books. also im kind of a weeaboo for ireland. loved the "personal history" format, which contextualized events in the author's life with concurrent political and social developments in ireland.

dungeon meshi

it's so lovely to encounter female characters like marcille, falin, and izutsumi (among others.) it also feels so validating and nice to see a complex central character of south asian descent in kabru. a very warm and kind story and I'm looking forward to season 2 of the anime...

honkai star rail 2.1 main story patch: "into the yawning chasm"

specifically, the story mission "all the sad tales" did it for me -- there is a video of me crying while playing through that part lol. playing from the pov of a character slowly having his mind broken as you progressively confront the emotional scars in his past, chasing his child-self through a warped landscape -- yup, sequences like these are why video games are one of my favorite storytelling mediums. which I did not think I'd ever say in reference to a gacha game...

detective conan anime

I've been watching episodes of this like every day lmao so I had to include it... endlessly watchable and comforting in its formulaicity. I'm looking forward to meeting some of the other central characters soon...

birth of kitaro: the mystery of gegege

idk anything about the source material but this was very captivating as a stand-alone nonetheless. a beautiful horror story... I need to rewatch it

the uses of literacy

I randomly picked up a used copy of this in a bookstore when I was vacationing in another country and found it to be really applicable to current culture and how people interact with media today, despite being written in 1957 and focusing specifically on the British working class.

tashiro-kun, why're you like this?

I have nothing insightful to say about this bl manga rn but it's genuinely so uplifting and funny and sweet lol

movie honorable mentions: conclave, lawrence of arabia, drive-away dolls, challengers

[popsikul]

The idea of a housamo anime or manga adaptation sounds amazing; the engaging story and episodic VN format are suited for a series perfectly. There are a few issues however, such as how they would implement a main character who has no set appearance. Chapter 12’s revelations complicate this even further, to the point where there would have to be at least one big change to the plot when moving to another form of media. On top of that, the game’s main audience is very niche, having a small playerbase of some queer people in japan and the US, and even smaller audiences in other countries. The game has some political and complex themes in it, and with the character designs heavily focused on attracting gay men it would struggle to garner the attention of larger audiences. The event stories contain about as much content as the main story itself, with some of it being plot relevant or including things that aren’t in the main story — some would be INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT to fit into a series and others just outright impossible. Housamo could have some amazing visuals in an anime, but LW just realistically does not have the budget for that. Even if they used copious fanservice to gain more pull, they already do that with the gacha mechanic that is pretty much funding the entire game. Despite all that though, it COULD accrue its own audience as an advantage of having such a unique story (at least, an audience of people who accept seeing men in speedos instead of women in bikinis). Unfortunately, something like that is pretty far off as it is now. LifeWonders is probably already aware that the best way for them to grow is by keeping up what people demand and that they can supply, that being gacha games.

[neomedievalist]

finished canto 4. got kicked out immediately for maintenance before i could see the credits. laughed a bit. and then just got really frustrated. Me when i make my game in a format that actively undermines its story. and i dont just mean literally in the sense of maintenance kicking me out and ruining the emotional beats, i mean how the hell are you going to make a critique of capitalism and exploitation in the most exploitative and manipulative medium there is?

i have seen so much defense for limbus by saying it doesnt really count as a gacha game, it's not like the others, oh they give you so much free currency, whatever, the devs are oh so quirkily incompetent. and im gonna be honest i dont really care! the format of a gacha game is not only exploitative it's exclusionary. people without a consistent internet connection cannot experience this story. people who are susceptible to addictive tendencies, especially mentally ill people, who i DARESAY are the majority of fans, either must avoid the game entirely or get unhealthily addicted to it or manipulated to spend money on it.no one is saying that the devs specifically wanted to manipulate people, but the game exists in a format that is foundational on psychological manipulation of vulnerable individuals. and yeah i dare you to tell me it's not that deep!

not to mention how at the same time the story is being compromised morally, it's being actively compromised with things like maintenance but also the incredibly slow release schedule. i wouldn't care that the next canto is in october if it was just released as a complete entity as seperate chapters like umineko or deltarune. it's the fact that it's a ROADMAP. i think we're all thinking it and don't want to admit it--there is a really, really high possibility that limbus never gets to finish this story before it becomes no longer financially viable and the servers shut down. the fact that we're waiting so long for this in anticipation and also being constantly marketed to in between the gaps is just. it's just not acceptable to be honest

[fictionfixations]

sometimes dialogue is formatted okay to fit in the box but sometimes its just. not 😭

(i dont have screenshots but there was like dialogue a bit after this where it WAS long but it was properly fit in the box so it DOES exist sometimes it just doesnt. at least the full thing is visible in the logs, i know a game that also has dialogue cut off and it doesnt fully appear in logs 💀)

anyway YUUTA BANNER SOON RIGHT???

for once im actually saving in a gacha game. usually i just immediately use all my pulls cause i dont really care who i get with the exception of gachas where pity does not save over limited banners so its like if i dont save at least 100 pulls im not guaranteed to get any SSRs and it all gets wasted cause im never seeing it again when banner ends so.

but like. i guess. i kinda wanna be more careful with who i pull. i mean i dont know what they do 💀 i cant read of course (joke) but im kinda prioritizing my favorites. i have my favorite. so like. now its pairings i guess. and i like the pairing of toge and yuuta so 👍

honestly playing this game reminds me of when i played hsr on mobile 😭 sometimes it crashes. also it makes my phone really fucking hot

anyway is this game on pc? i thought it was cause i saw some people playing it on pc but it seemingly isnt?

[coconox]

the end of the gacha arc

ignore the fact that this is the first post in a while in which i actually ramble about something, but i thought it’d be fitting to go out with a bang to the end of playing a certain genre of gaming that altered my brain chemistry for better and for worse.

this post will contain a mass list of reviews/thoughts/reflections for every gacha game i’ve played, or at least, every gacha game that i remember playing. i will be going in chronological order from the first gacha that i played to the last, but the quit times for all of them will definitely be out of order, but i’ll list that ordering at the very end.

the formatting of these reviews will be as follows:

my ★ rating out of 5

status (e.g. f2p, casual, spender, competitive)

thoughts on the game and fandom experience overall*

why i left

* with story and fandom experience there was usually a 50/50 chance i would look into it, a lot of the times i was just there for the gameplay so i may not comment much on some stories/fandoms

there will be a lot of lightning rounds/chapters since my memory is either pretty foggy or pretty neutral lmao— should be expected but heed my warning as there will be spoilers, and now without further ado, here is my history on playing gacha games

chapter 1: honkai impact 3rd

★★★☆☆ status: f2p, casual

you’d think i’d have more memorable experiences with honkai considering it was my first gacha game, but honestly the only thing i vividly remember was wanting to collect every character in-game and failed miserably cause my luck was awful. needing to hit pity almost every time all while being f2p sucked, and since i rarely pulled for gear it just made my experience not that great since i would barely get the bare minimum rewards for memorial arena and abyss.

apho was a nice break from everything, i really liked the vibes of the first one which is definitely foreshadowing another game i’ll be talking about later. 

i don’t really have much really any fandom experiences. most interaction i would have is with my armada which i left a long time ago. there were very nice people there so at least i left the ‘fandom’ experience on a high note :]

overall, my experience based on my memory was kinda meh. i got tired of trying to keep up with every patch and just left since there were just other games that i found more rewarding at the time.

chapter 1.5, honorable mention: guns girl z

★★★⯪☆ status: f2p, casual

while in my honkai phase, i also wanted to check out hoyo’s previous game, which honestly was very fun while it lasted. the semi-side scroller/pick-up-and-play was what i was (and probably still am) into at the time, and i really liked the art style. there were a few hiccups here and there with localization (especially when the text would go off screen 💀), but it didn’t really bother my experience all that much since i was more gameplay focused than story focused. honestly, only reason i left was cause glb servers shut down. if they didn’t shut down (or if i was persistent enough to continue with a cn acc) i would’ve definitely played it for a lot longer.

chapter 2: genshin impact

★★☆☆☆ status: spent on bp once or twice i forgor, casual

i was originally gonna skip this game entirely when i first heard of its announcement, but one of my irls kept bugging me to play only to quit as soon as i fully caught up 💀

while i did read the main story, like i said, i was originally gonna skip this game entirely since honestly, it just didn’t pass the vibe check for me, and that vibe check was correct LOL. story to me just didn’t feel that interesting. while there were some fun tidbits here and there, i kinda clocked out after inazuma’s story.

around the time i joined was when childe was first debuting, and i really wanted him as his playstyle was vastly different compared to the other characters at the time and i just like him as a character when i encountered him in story. aaaand then that’s when i discovered that genshin had a 50/50 pity system and got spooked by mona. honestly i could’ve just left right then and there considering the reason i got into the game in the first place pretty much left as soon as i joined, but i liked the world exploration enough to where i stuck around for way longer than i should have :p 

if honkai didn’t already give the hint that i can’t get every character, genshin DEFINITELY sealed the deal for me. from the 4 years i’ve played this game i’ve won 50/50 maybe like 5 or 6 times? i never really kept a tracker but the main point is my luck was awful LOL. getting like 60 primos per day for pulls that are 160 each and have a hard pity of 90 just didn’t really sit right with me. i know there’s soft pity and all that but i hate that that even exists in the first place. idk i’ve grown to expect the worst case scenario and i hate trying to calculate how many primos i need to get a character that may or may not appear earlier than hard pity.

spiral abyss was meh for me, i didn’t really participate in it much unless i was either extremely bored or was desperate for primos.

fandom experience i avoided it as much as possible. i don’t even need to explain why given what has happened over the past years 💀

overall, i mainly just liked the exploration part of the game. it kinda became that one game i would play if i was extremely bored and had nothing else to do and just wanted to keep myself busy. max exploring sumeru was awful tho. i never want to experience something like that again.

chapter 3: punishing: gray raven

★★⯪☆☆ status: spender, semi-competitive

i assume this is the chapter most of my moots will scroll to to find my thoughts on this game LOL (luv u all 🫶).

i was originally interested in this game cause i saw lee in the promo art LOL, and also cause my honkai armada was gonna try it out and i wanted to join the hype. thankfully, because i had prior “experience” through honkai, pgr’s gameplay wasn’t that big of a learning curve as the main difference was the orb system.

story within the first 8 chapters is relatively slow, but it introduces you to the main squads you’ll be seeing throughout the story and it starts to pick up pretty quickly after that. the darker atmosphere definitely appealed to me more than i realized, and it kinda clicked that this is what i wanted honkai to be: lower pity, very f2p friendly, it’s not required to follow a meta to get max rewards, etc. 

during my lee simping era my experiences with the fandom were a bit, mixed,,, on one hand i’d have a group who are fully supportive and even add fuel to the flame of simping over lee together, and the other i’d get slandered for liking him, even jumping to conclusions as to who i am as a person (e.g. my only personality was that i liked male characters).

as much as i wanted to avoid the latter, those groups of people were in the same guild server as those of the former, and for essentially 2 or so years i felt a strong sense of not belonging yet persisted in pushing that feeling aside in hopes that it would change. spoiler alert: it did not, in fact, it got even worse.

posting on pgrtwt or in the guild server felt like i was stepping on glass, and i hated that feeling. being an admin in the guild server never felt like i existed, despite putting in a fair amount of contribution to the server. it felt like i was working overtime for a project that very little to no one cared about. if you wanna try looking for me there, head’s up, you won’t lol, i left the guild server a long time ago and i’m in a better place than if i were to be stubborn and stay. i’ve become a folklore at this point with my sudden disappearance which i find really funny.

but in general, as a former artist of the fandom and a former casual player, the environment now just doesn’t feel safe, at least everywhere except tumblr lol

the game itself wasn’t as bad as it is now, i’m only saying it’s bad now cause of the recent synchronization plan of having 3 patches happen all within a month and that just feels very overwhelming considering it’s all happening so suddenly and we just have to deal with it. based on what was shown in cn, future patches also just don’t interest me anymore. i kinda lost motivation to log in after noctis patch, but stuck around till qu’s patch just cause i wanted the matching cerberus skins lol. 

i’ve made quite a handful of friends whom i still talk to and appreciate to this day, but the nail in the coffin for me was the fandom experience, especially during pyroath's announcement. again, it doesn’t feel safe for artists or casual players. it feels like the meta is forced down your throat and if you don’t follow it you’re wrong. when alpha was first debuted after launch the amount of backlash i got for rather building a physical team with lee was absurd. i felt awful trying to make friends in the community, which bled into my feelings about the game. because i had majority negative experiences in the fandom, those feelings ended up transferring over to the game.

story kinda lost me after they started introducing the multiple timelines. it also lost me when there’s so much lore compared to gameplay in each chapter and to me that felt very heavy in a bad way. like i couldn’t really get a breather till i’m done with the chapter overall (i prefer to read story in one sitting since if i space it out i easily forget what happened prior and would need to start from the beginning). i also don't really like how skk is dragged everywhere. i'd prefer for skk to only appear when gray ravens as a whole appear, and have different squads shine with how they manage themselves without any of skk's involvement.

small side note the character designs confuse me from time to time. i kinda wish they looked more robotic to yk, emphasize that they're constructs, rather than appear more human-like just so their m.i.n.d stays stable or whatever.

overall it was fun while it lasted. i definitely have fun memorable moments like staying up all night in vc malding through phalanx just to get all the collectibles offered, or co-oping cause we needed to mald for a co-op gabriel collectible. the fun memories will always be cherished, but it doesn’t excuse the unhealthy environment provided by the loud incels of the community.

chapter 4: alchemy stars

★★★★☆ status: f2p, only bought skins, casual

love, love, LOVE the artstyle. the game also being strategy-focused was honestly so much fun, tho i’m a sucker for puzzle/strategy games. i pretty much only pulled for characters that i liked, so i rarely ran out of lumambers unless if i wanted to get characters that had back to back banners. story i didn’t really pay that much attention to, but from what i’ve heard it was also amazing. i rarely felt bored when logging on, and i just had a very fun time. i didn’t really expect leaving as soon as i did, but life got pretty busy and i just slowly decreased my playtime till i stopped altogether. if it wasn’t getting an eos, this game would definitely be up there for one of the games i would’ve played long-term if i didn’t have such a hectic schedule.

chapter 5: project neural cloud

★★★★☆ status: f2p, only bought skins, casual

joined cause of aki, stayed cause of story. each sector had a nice ratio of gameplay to story. it didn’t give you so much lore dump all in one go and battles are timed at the right locations to get sort of a breather from everything. it having auto-play and eventually auto-clear features made dailies SO much more easier to manage, it felt like one of those games where it was story first, gacha later. tho in my experience, really the only teams that i had to keep changing were my sniper teams, adding in clukay, clotho, and eos and managing how their synergy works. my warrior team was basically hatsuchiri, magnhilda, aki, and some other healer/support, and that team held up pretty well. to be fair i also played very casually, so the gacha part was the least of my worries since i was more interested in story. i think out of all the gacha games listed here neural cloud is gonna be the one i miss the most. i loved the story, the strategy gameplay, the characters, it just hit every check box for my kind of game i would play long term, except for the part where it’s a gacha game at the end of the day. i may just end up reading story elsewhere since there has to be some sort of archive of all the chapters so far.

chapter 6: tower of fantasy

★★⯪☆☆ status: f2p, casual

from the little i’ve played it seemed fun, my gacha experience wasn’t all that bad but i was mostly there for exploration and playing with friends. i left solely cause tof could barely run on my ipad, it crashed every like 5-10 mins and i got pretty tired of it :’]

chapter 7: obey me & obey me: nightbringer

★⯪☆☆☆ 0.75 of a star per game /hj status: f2p, casual

i’m merging the 2 into one chapter since my thoughts on them are very similar.

for the original obey me, i honestly still don’t get why the story continues past lesson 20. they could’ve fleshed out mc’s relationship between everyone while they were still there for the exchange program. a LOT can happen in one year, yet for example belphie hating humans kinda just goes away once he finds out mc is lilith’s descendant??? also beel, which was one of my favs, doesn’t really get much more out of his character aside from ‘he eats a lot’ which is so ????? like i get he’s supposed to be the sin of gluttony but surely you can characterize him more than just him wanting to eat a lot and feeling guilty about lilith. of course, i could be missing a few key details given i quit not too long after i started playing, but it just didn’t sit right with me and my brain just never came to terms with it, so i left LOL

nightbringer i honestly just got tired of playing the same songs over and over, i rarely stuck around for story and idk why they needed a separate game altogether.

the events and gacha in both games don’t feel that rewarding. as someone who has been f2p in both, trying to get characters that i want *cough, mammon* is like challenge impossible given how unforgiving the rewards are.

idk this game just wasn’t for me. given they’re supposed to represent the 7 deadly sins, you’d think there’d be more heavier themes brought up, but it just feels like i went to a school about how to be a wizard and the 7 people i met just so happen to have the names of the 7 sins.

chapter 8: what in hell is bad?

⯪☆☆☆☆ status: f2p minus juno, casual

oh boy, where do i begin,,,,

honestly mammon was a love at first sight moment for me so that’s really why i joined the game LOL 

the concept seemed interesting enough, especially when each of the kings actually dive into the good and bad of their respective sin. what threw me off the most was how much i hated the mc more than any of the devils or angels HGJFDHGK. idk it’s like their only personality is being addicted to corn, which i personally hc it as a coping mechanism for a mental health issue that we’re unaware of just yet. however as much as i wanna talk about story, there really isn’t much story that’s given in the first place since main story updates are insanely slow and majority card stories are borderline or straight up paywalled given the in-game income received. f2ps have been struggling since launch, spenders are probably getting tired of spending nearly every patch, and we’re constantly given empty promises cause the company underestimates the production time to execute said promises. we essentially wait for like almost half a year for at most 5 mins of main story excluding the tedious gameplay in between each story segment.

if you want a gacha tower defense game, just play arknights. whb doesn’t even know how game balancing even works. i even made a whole spreadsheet to show how rough this game is in terms of building their characters. they build the character’s kits as if no one levels them up, skill levels are way too expensive given our daily/weekly/monthly income, and not everyone can afford getting a character’s sig. 

this game is clearly meant to be more story focused, but again, there’s very little story and all past event stories are paywalled too, which limits f2p experiences.

there’s a clear meta of using only light characters, or more specifically, light L-rank characters, which sucks cause then that means all other elements are essentially deemed useless with how powerful light element is against all other elements except itself. there is also a noticeable pattern of there being very little to no supports, as if the devs intentionally planned on making the gameplay essentially ‘just krill everything before they krill you’ which is insanely dumb. mammon and lucifer being the only good tank and healer respectively (hell, even mammon can be a better healer than an actual healer) is just very disappointing. we have more than enough snipers and close-rangers— GIVE US MORE SUPPORTS.

for it to be more story focused, it is also very, VERY roughly translated. the constant misgendering just made me wish they kept mc as gender neutral so that the devil’s tango scenes can easily apply to everyone.

afaik they’re also currently in the works of creating a pg-13 version of this game, most likely so that they could release whb in their own country. which on one hand is understandable, but on the other, there’s already so many flaws and bugs with the *current* version of whb, and they’re just gonna amplify that with the other version. i just wish they could focus on debugging the game rather than borderline ignore it unless if it stops the user from logging on.

overall this game is very, VERY p2w. while the concept of the kings’ portrayals was interesting, the execution has been pretty lackluster. the gacha rates are awful and will worsen as more characters are added to the pool. no pity on either standard banners, pity on limited banners is way too high given the f2p income, currency income for limited and standard banners is very, very low. lots of bugs, mistranslations, even the bare minimum of game balancing isn’t even there. it feels like we’re the beta test players for a game that has yet to give its full release and not actual players playing a fully released game. quite honestly this is probably the worst gacha game i’ve played, you can probably even see my descent to heavily disliking this game through previous whb rants lol. only upside is that the fandom (on tumblr at least) is very chill, i love reading people’s interpretations about the blorbos.

chapter 9: wuthering waves

★★⯪☆☆ status: f2p, casual

i honestly just played for the exploration aspect LOL

given it was released during my summer break, wuwa just became that one game i’d play out of boredom. the playstyle’s fun since it gave pgr vibes, but the story was kinda meh for me. the lore dump at the very start followed by some of the dialogue not showing up kinda threw me off and i just stopped paying attention altogether. at least there’s a skip button so that’s a plus.

every time i lost 50/50 i kept getting lingyang which kinda sucked. don’t get me wrong i love the littol meow meow, i even picked him right after i got verina, but i did NOT need more copies of him LOL. aside from that my pulls were actually better than i expected. got early for yinlin and changli and early on their sigs respectively too.

fandom is just as rough as pgr’s but on a larger scale imho. tried to steer away from it as much as possible and that’s honestly for the better.

i really just stayed around for yinlin, mostly cause she’s wuwa’s vera and i love vera a “normal” amount. ended up leaving after max exploring everything cause i was just bored. school was starting back up again and wuwa just didn’t pass the vibe check.

conclusion

order of which i left these games from first to last:

guns girl z

honkai impact 3rd

tower of fantasy

obey me

obey me: nightbringer

alchemy stars

what in hell is bad

wuthering waves

genshin impact

project neural cloud

punishing gray raven

i think the biggest lesson i’ve learned in this era is that i’m very stubborn 💀

you may or may not be wondering why i’m quitting gachas altogether despite saying in a few reviews that i would continue playing some of them if they weren’t a gacha game, but the answer to that is just the gacha cycle needed to end and 2/3 of those games have been/are getting eos’ed 💀. there’s definitely better places where i could be spending my time and money, like investing in my oc universe and saving up for when robo ky is in strive.

will i ever go back to gachas in the distant future? i doubt it. i think i'm finally burnt out from it to where if i see it again in the future, i'd just have bad flashbacks appear and not want to play it.

i felt like a broken record throughout some of these reflections, but anyways, that’s all i wanted to ramble about honestly. i’ve been working on revamping my oc universe and my toyhouse by extension since i really wanna go back and actually finish what i started

that’s all folks! ty for reading 🤏🍪

[canmom]

「viRtua canm0m」 Project :: 002 - driving a vtuber

That about wraps up my series on the technical details on uploading my brain. Get a good clean scan and you won't need to do much work. As for the rest, well, you know, everyone's been talking about uploads since the MMAcevedo experiment, but honestly so much is still a black box right now it's hard to say anything definitive. Nobody wants to hear more upload qualia discourse, do they?

On the other hand, vtubing is a lot easier to get to grips with! And more importantly, actually real. So let's talk details!

Vtubing is, at the most abstract level, a kind of puppetry using video tracking software and livestreaming. Alternatively, you could compare it to realtime mocap animation. Someone at Polygon did a surprisingly decent overview of the scene if you're unfamiliar.

Generally speaking: you need a model, and you need tracking of some sort, and a program that takes the tracking data and applies it to a skeleton to render a skinned mesh in real time.

Remarkably, there are a lot of quite high-quality vtubing tools available as open source. And I'm lucky enough to know a vtuber who is very generous in pointing me in the right direction (shoutout to Yuri Heart, she's about to embark on something very special for her end of year streams so I highly encourage you to tune in tonight!).

For anime-style vtubing, there are two main types, termed '2D' and 3D'. 2D vtubing involves taking a static illustration and cutting it up to pieces which can be animated through warping and replacement - the results can look pretty '3D', but they're not using 3D graphics techniques, it's closer to the kind of cutout animation used in gacha games. The main tool used is Live2D, which is proprietary with a limited free version. Other alternatives with free/paid models include PrPrLive and VTube studio. FaceRig (no longer available) and Animaze (proprietary) also support Live2D models. I have a very cute 2D vtuber avatar created by @xrafstar for use in PrPrLive, and I definitely want to include some aspects of her design in the new 3D character I'm working on.

For 3D anime-style vtubing, the most commonly used software is probably VSeeFace, which is built on Unity and renders the VRM format. VRM is an open standard that extends the GLTF file format for 3D models, adding support for a cel shading material and defining a specific skeleton format.

It's incredibly easy to get a pretty decent looking VRM model using the software VRoid Studio, essentially a videogame character creator whose anime-styled models can be customised using lots of sliders, hair pieces, etc., which appears to be owned by Pixiv. The program includes basic texture-painting tools, and the facility to load in new models, but ultimately the way to go for a more custom model is to use the VRM import/export plugin in Blender.

But first, let's have a look at the software which will display our model.

meet viRtua canm0m v0.0.5, a very basic design. her clothes don't match very well at all.

VSeeFace offers a decent set of parameters and honestly got quite nice tracking out of the box. You can also receive face tracking data from the ARKit protocol from a connected iPhone, get hand tracking data from a Leap Motion, or disable its internal tracking and pipe in another application using the VMC protocol.

If you want more control, another Unity-based program called VNyan offers more fine-grained adjustment, as well as a kind of node-graph based programming system for doing things like spawning physics objects or modifying the model when triggered by Twitch etc. They've also implemented experimental hand tracking for webcams, although it doesn't work very well so far. This pointing shot took forever to get:

<kayfabe>Obviously I'll be hooking it up to use the output of the simulated brain upload rather than a webcam.</kayfabe>

To get good hand tracking you basically need some kit - most likely a Leap Motion (1 or 2), which costs about £120 new. It's essentially a small pair of IR cameras designed to measure depth, which can be placed on a necklace, on your desk or on your monitor. I assume from there they use some kind of neural network to estimate your hand positions. I got to have a go on one of these recently and the tracking was generally very clean - better than what the Quest 2/3 can do. So I'm planning to get one of those, more on that when I have one.

Essentially, the tracker feeds a bunch of floating point numbers in to the display software at every tick, and the display software is responsible for blending all these different influences and applying it to the skinned mesh. For example, a parameter might be something like eyeLookInLeft. VNyan uses the Apple ARKit parameters internally, and you can see the full list of ARKit blendshapes here.

To apply tracking data, the software needs a model whose rig it can understand. This is defined in the VRM spec, which tells you exactly which bones must be present in the rig and how they should be oriented in a T-pose. The skeleton is generally speaking pretty simple: you have shoulder bones but no roll bones in the arm; individual finger joint bones; 2-3 chest bones; no separate toes; 5 head bones (including neck). Except for the hands, it's on the low end of game rig complexity.

Expressions are handled using GLTF morph targets, also known as blend shapes or (in Blender) shape keys. Each one essentially a set of displacement values for the mesh vertices. The spec defines five default expressions (happy, angry, sad, relaxed, surprised), five vowel mouth shapes for lip sync, blinks, and shapes for pointing the eyes in different directions (if you wanna do it this way rather than with bones). You can also define custom expressions.

This viRtua canm0m's teeth are clipping through her jaw...

By default, the face-tracking generally tries to estimate whether you qualify as meeting one of these expressions. For example, if I open my mouth wide it triggers the 'surprised' expression where the character opens her mouth super wide and her pupils get tiny.

You can calibrate the expressions that trigger this effect in VSeeFace by pulling funny faces at the computer to demonstrate each expression (it's kinda black-box); in VNyan, you can set it to trigger the expressions based on certain combinations of ARKit inputs.

For more complex expressions in VNyan, you need to sculpt blendshapes for the various ARKit blendshapes. These are not generated by default in VRoid Studio so that will be a bit of work.

You can apply various kinds of post-processing to the tracking data, e.g. adjusting blending weights based on input values or applying moving-average smoothing (though this noticeably increases the lag between your movements and the model), restricting the model's range of movement in various ways, applying IK to plant the feet, and similar.

On top of the skeleton bones, you can add any number of 'spring bones' which are given a physics simulation. These are used to, for example, have hair swing naturally when you move, or, yes, make your boobs jiggle. Spring bones give you a natural overshoot and settle, and they're going to be quite important to creating a model that feels alive, I think.

Next up we are gonna crack open the VRoid Studio model in Blender and look into its topology, weight painting, and shaders. GLTF defines standard PBR metallicity-roughness-normals shaders in its spec, but leaves the actual shader up to the application. VRM adds a custom toon shader, which blends between two colour maps based on the Lambertian shading, and this is going to be quite interesting to take apart.

The MToon shader is pretty solid, but ultimately I think I want to create custom shaders for my character. Shaders are something I specialise in at work, and I think it would be a great way to give her more of a unique identity. This will mean going beyond the VRM format, and I'll be looking into using the VNyan SDK to build on top of that.

More soon, watch this space!

[syrupspinner]

i defeated/completed Indigo Park

im not used to playing games this big, i mean were talking almost 9gb here

i dont play enough horror games. even then, most of my experience is with action horror like idv where its more of a theme, and rpgmaker games. mascot horror is a bit outside my wheelhouse, but i am aware of it. who couldnt be? i can only imagine its the genre when you wanna make a profit going indie. while the genre itself was popularized when fnaf really took off, this format of a setpiece-heavy horror fps with light puzzle elements was really popularized by poppy playtime. and garten of banban. and rainbow friends. and-

anyway, ive been told that this project is headed by the youtuber UniqueGeese. i cant say im familiar, but it looks like theyre really experienced when it comes to mascot horror. its really neat to see someone with roots in critique and transformative content break out and make their own game. judging from the sheer quantity of videos, he sure seems to know what hes talking about, so its neat to see how the experience of a player translates to developer.

either way, it feels like this was a passion project, not a cash grab. sure, its free, but so is a lot of first chapters. it reminds me about how gacha games give you a bunch of free rolls when you first sign up. well, thats an unfair comparison (at least in indigo parks case), this feels more comparable to a demo for a full game. its not just an enticement, so it feels easier to pay for the rest of the game incrementally instead of watching youtubers play, it feels like a surface-level experiment to give the inevitable next episode something to build off of

so hows the game, anyway? well, its short. the credits rolled about 50 minutes in, and i was taking my time. there wasnt really a gimmick or anything, either. like, there wasnt a thing to make the gameplay stand out or make the puzzles unique. hell, there werent puzzles, the closest was turning around to see a missing gear or two. its refreshing to see something so straightforward, but im worried than not having something special and distinct will make it get lost in the crowd. which is a shame! i had a lot of fun, and id love to see a chapter 2. all i ask is that there be some more accessibility options. i really appreciated the subtitles, but maybe some mouse sensitivity settings would be nice. other than that, just a really solid and charming horror game!

also, full and somewhat nsfw disclosure. the only reason i know about this game is because furries i follow are down horrendous for rambley. they either want to fuck the shit out of him or get transformed/hypnotized into him. i have no idea if this was on purpose? like, when i look at that gangly blue thing from poppy playtime, i think "oh its a cute thing thats scary-fied, for the demographic of kids that wouldve loved sonic.exe and creepypasta a generation ago". its just transparently targeted, yknow? with rambley, i have no idea. like, hes cute in a mascot way, but i think its the personality that mainly draws people in. hes a cute little fella who loves trains and wants you to have fun, and also he sounds like basketball from bfdi. he might count as a shortstack too? hes targeting such a niche that i dont think it could be targeted; like, roald dahl didnt know about inflation, he just invented a new subgenre of kink by accident. i dunno, honestly hes not really my type, but more power to you if you wanna ride his train