Friday, September 17, 2021

Play Log: Mostly Mobile

 I'm back!  For a bit.
So in all truth, I haven't really been playing a lot of videogames and I sure haven't been watching much anime.  But I can talk about what little I have gotten around to.

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU (Season 3)
In all truth, I hadn't really watched any anime in around two years, but I came back to finish off Yahari.  It's one of my favorite series of the modern era, and I absolutely wasn't going to miss the conclusion.
Unfortunately... I came away kind of disappointed!  People will and have written long, drawn out essays pulling apart this series moment by moment, but I'm not really here to do that.  I'm just here to say that this season was hard to watch for me at times.  Yeah, I was on team Yui.  But even putting that aside, I felt like the role she was forced to play here was pretty poor.  We get multiple scenes and episodes across the season of her being forcibly sidelined and just kinda being forced to deal with it.  While I suppose her ending of accepting the new status quo was supposed to be relieving, to me it really just felt tepid.  

The other half of this issue though wasn't just how they wrote Yui's story, but how they wrote Yukino's.  While Yui is forced to play the tragically pining character who we as viewers must acknowledge will not get what she wants, Yukino is thrust into the spotlight through spurts of character development that felt uneven at best to me and often straight up unearned.  How she became the person she is in the final episode is honestly still somewhat unclear to me.

It was a double-whammy of one character being forced to suffer almost expressly so another could excel, and that's not a great feeling.


That all said, the series still retained most of its other strengths.  While it might not be a stretch to say I was exhausted by the main trio's dynamic by the end, other inter-character dialogue continued to be excellent.  Looking back over the course of the entire series, I think Komachi, Haruno and Iroha are far and away the best-written characters in Yahari, and I thoroughly enjoyed pretty much every scene involving them.  Komachi and Hachiman's conversations feel incredibly authentic, Iroha is a witty character with interesting layers, and Haruno plays the straight man to many of the series' idealistic values with a mix of cryptic cynicism and good-natured teasing.  Sometimes, for brief moments, Haruno feels like the closest thing the series has to an antagonist, even though I generally think her position has more to do with a vast difference in perspective and experience rather than any antagonistic intentions.

Anyway, I enjoyed the series overall, but I liked the second season more.  I plan to read the light novels eventually to see if the character development is handled better there.

Arknights

This is what the last year or so has mainly been for me, in terms of game time.  I like tower defense, and I like RPGs, and Arknights is basically a tower defense game where your "towers" are characters.  This is a pretty niche comparison, but it's not unlike Defender's Quest, for those who have played it.  That's a pretty good game, by the way.

Anyway, Arknights is a Chinese game by developer Hypergryph, published internationally by Yostar (who also handles Azur Lane).  It's set in a post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by oripathy, a terminal disease that comes from originium, a mineral of sorts.  The problem is that originium is also prized for a variety of applications, energy being big among them.  In Arknights, much of the world's technology is fueled by originium.  Oripathy is a highly infectious disease though and has so far proven incurable, so society has become divided between those who are infected and those who aren't, with the infected frequently being ostracized or having their human rights infringed on.

You play as the Doctor, an enigmatic figure who is recognized as a strategic and tactical mastermind and also a leading member of Rhodes Island, an independent medical organization whose mission is, at least on its face, to fight oripathy and aid the infected.

Arknights' world and characters are pretty interesting, and its clear that there's a lot happening under the hood.  While it is ostensibly a pharmaceutical company and does indeed have a large staff of medical experts working on figuring out oripathy, RI is pretty clearly a political entity as well, and it employs a force of PMCs known as operators, who are also typically the units you use in gameplay.

Unfortunately, it's kind of hard to enjoy this world, mainly because the writing is usually very stilted, roundabout, and vague.  Characters can have entire conversations with each other and manage to talk around the actual point in such a way that once the scene is concluded you still might not actually be sure what the purpose of it all was.  The result is that its VN-style story scenes are, more often than not, a chore to get through unless you're prepared to really try and squeeze as much context as possible out of each and every line.  I'm inclined to think this is less a localization problem and more a failing of the original writers, though the odd translation error or grammatical screwup doesn't help.

Furthermore, the game makes absolutely no effort to keep you updated on when events are taking place relative to each other, chronologically.  Aside from the main story, you have many side event stories that run the gamut between canonically having happened in the past or actually taking place in the future, far ahead of where the main story is.  The game almost never spells these things out for you though, so the best you can do is try to piece it together from context clues.  It's pretty hard to stay engaged with a story when you really don't even know the order that the events happening in.  I've more or less thrown up my hands and resigned myself to trying to enjoy each of the event stories as self-contained arcs, with little consideration to how they fit into the broader tapestry.

I do quite like the characters in the game, though.  Hypergryph did a great job finding talented VO and artists to build memorable and interesting characters.  The world of Arknights is adjacent to ours, with analogues to major states like the US and Russia present.  But most people living in it have animal features (cat/dog/rabbit ears, lizard tails) for... reasons?  That's just the world it is, I guess.  Probably to sell more merch.

Gameplaywise, this is a free-to-play gacha game, which means there's plenty of reason to be guarded.  I'm not that experienced with gacha games for the same reason, but having put over a year into this one I think it's pretty fair.  Characters are classified in order of rarity from 1 to 6 stars, with higher rarity characters typically being more sophisticated.  The rates for getting high-rarity characters are fairly pitiful, but they do have measures in place to ensure you're guaranteed to roll a 6-star at least periodically.  Furthermore, nearly all of the content in the game is designed to be doable with easily obtainable 3/4 star teams, which you can find plenty of evidence of on YouTube.  If you stick with the game, it's also possible to slowly build up gacha currency without ever paying a dime, though as is typically the case with F2P games you're going to need a lot of patience and the ability to accept that you can't have everything.  Personally, I buy their $5 monthly pass, which combined with some planning and research has given me the resources to get me nearly all the characters I've wanted so far.  I'm also not someone who gets hung up on trying to ace endgame content though, so your mileage may vary if you're the sort who prefers to aim high.

As is typical with tower defense games, you have one or more spots on a map to defend, and enemies arriving in waves that you need to kill before they reach said spots.  You do so by deploying operators, who are characters in the game.  Operators are broadly classified into eight categories.  You have Defenders, who are classically tank-like characters who can take a lot of damage but aren't the best at dishing it.  Snipers are your traditional ranged units who also tend to be the best at hitting airborne enemies.  Guards are your bread and butter DPS units who aren't always the toughest but will probably be the meanest.  I have to speak in generalizations though, because even within each category there's a ton of variation.  Guards and Snipers especially come in all shapes and sizes, from explosive-lobbing AoE Snipers to Arts Guards who exclusively deal magic damage.  The challenge comes from figuring out what composition of units from such a diverse pool will effectively ward off the enemies in each stage.  And as with any good tactics game, there's rarely if ever only one solution.

I've quite enjoyed myself with this game.  It's not without its flaws (the writing isn't the only qualm I have), but it's specifically a good mobile game, in that I can engage with it for hours or minutes and get something done either way, and it doesn't demand fast reflexes.  And did I mention I really like some of the characters?

Punishing: Gray Raven
This game launched very recently worldwide, just this month in fact.  I heard about it through some rumblings around the Arknights community and, knowing that it's often best to get in on the ground floor with F2P games if you have the opportunity, have been tooling around with it casually.  This game's future on my phone is uncertain.  The core gameplay is both technically smooth and pretty satisfying, but I know it will only get more difficult as I get deeper in, and I'm not convinced that a challenging action game is really what I want from a mobile game.  I'd rather have a controller for when things get difficult, and I'm not the sort of person who is interested in carrying a controller around for my phone; I've been there, and I'm over it.

Moreover, while PGR is a good action game at its core, it's a good action game wrapped in an F2P superstructure.  You mostly roll the machine to get new characters and weapons, and you level up your abilities and such using a bunch of different currencies and resources that will no doubt become scarce as you get deeper in progression.  I could play this good action game wrapped in F2P trappings, or I could play another good action game like DMC or Bayonetta where I don't have to deal with the extra fluff.

Finally, unlike with Arknights, I'm not sold on PGR's characters, world or story so far.  Basically, it's another post-apocalyptic world, where humanity has been decimated by some sort of virus that destroys organic matter and corrupts machines, called the Punishing Virus.  The remnants of humanity have escaped into outer space and are now fighting a proxy war with the corrupted machines on Earth that, upon being infected with the virus, have become single-mindedly devoted to the extermination of humankind.  You start the game as the human commander of Gray Raven, a unit of combat androids that is deployed down to Earth on missions investigating a new type of machine that has emerged lately.

If this premise and setting sounds startlingly similar to the outward premise of Nier: Automata, you're not alone.  I think 2B and company are even featured at some point as limited crossover characters.  At any rate, neither the story nor world are really hooking me so far, and the character designs (which I think are honestly pretty important to the success of a gacha game) have been pretty so-so.  

This game seems to be going the route of having multiple different versions of the same character across the rarity spectrum, where the S-ranked version will look and play different but will still be more or less the same personality and have the same VO.  These are androids and consequently can be reconfigured with different frames and weapons, so it makes sense in-world, too.  It also seems to be possible for lower-ranked characters to actually go up in rarity and maybe be statistically comparable to their peers, although I don't think a B-rank character that makes it to A-rank will have as sophisticated a gameplay kit as a proper A-rank character.  

You could look at this and see it as them skimping out on making actual new characters and maybe trying to save on VO costs, but I don't actually have much of an issue with it because different versions of the same character do seem to play very differently.  And at least compared to Arknights, each character has had a lot of VO work done for them.  I also like the rank up system; it feels like a smart compromise for people who really like a given version of a character and want to keep them relevant farther into the game.

I guess the short version of all this is that while I think PGR is a good game, I'm not sure it's a good mobile game, and I'm not sure I feel like giving it the attention I expect it will want as I get deeper in.  The good news though is that I've figured out how the auto system works, so in theory it could be possible to complete the dailies in a few minutes?  I'm not sure yet.

Genshin Impact
The game that's all the rage, lately.  I've been on and off with Genshin.  I played a little around the time it first released but it didn't pull me in.  Then I came back again to try for Eula, and didn't get her so I put it down again.

I'm the sort of person who is really deeply attracted to strong character art and animation.  It's a big part of the appeal for me in Kingdom Hearts and Nier Automata, for example.  I love Genshin's character design.  It's colorful, friendly and expressive, and the animation oozes personality.  As much as I don't love the moment-to-moment gameplay, I still find myself thinking about the game, wanting to spend more time in the world with its characters.

Whereas I previously played it on mobile, I've now downloaded it on PS4 and decided to give it a third try there.  I'm going to take it really casual, and just see how I feel about it that way.

Another Eden
Yeah, this was the year of me dabbling in gacha games.  Arknights is currently still the only one I've paid any money into, though.

I tried Another Eden after seeing it mentioned in a reddit thread as a game that both respects your time and doesn't have as much FOMO going on.  I'm not 100% sure I agree with the former evaluation but it is far and away the most laidback gacha game I've played.  It doesn't really have any daily or weekly missions to keep up with, no energy meter, and there's no time-limited content; anything added to the game is there indefinitely.  The only reminder the game really gives you that it is an F2P gacha game is a soft prod to watch an ad for some free currency.  The in-game currency store is stashed in the options menu, and the gacha machine is a sleepy world of dreams that doesn't get in your face.

In many ways, AE feels like a JRPG first and an F2P game second.  It's a heavily story-driven game, with sprite-based cutscenes and lots of world travel.  It uses a turn-based battle system, with a 6-person party (3 active, 3 in reserve) that would be right at home in a late 90's console JRPG.  You get new characters mostly by rolling for them in the gacha machine, but the game gives you a stable of story characters as you progress; and interestingly, it's possible through grinding resources to rank up characters into higher rarities, like in PGR.  Unlike in PGR though, you are literally upgrading them into their higher rank version, not just a statistical upgrade of their base rarity, which means they get all the abilities and such along the way.  It's a flexible, if grind-heavy system that allows patient players to often skip the gacha entirely.  In Another Eden this is called the Another Style (AS)/Extra Style (ES) system, where a given character might have a higher rarity AS or ES that is the same character but better or different.  You can pull an AS character from the gacha just as you would a wholly different character, or you can work through the process yourself.  Either way, you can swap freely between each version of a character that you have.

This is somewhat important, because Another Eden utilizes a strictly paid currency for most of its worthwhile gacha banners.  You can roll on basic banners with a currency that is built up slowly over time doing quests, but from what I can tell there is absolutely no way to roll on the majority of the featured banners without using a special currency that can only be purchased.  Genshin uses a similar split currency system for its featured banners, but the difference is that Genshin lets you convert your F2P currency into paid currency.  Not possible here in AE.  What's more, Another Eden doesn't have any sort of monthly pass or subscription, like all the other games I've written about here so far do.  You either buy the paid currency in somewhat expensive lump sums or you don't buy any at all.

I put around 12-15 hours into Another Eden before deciding it wasn't really for me.  It's a competently made JRPG, with a reasonably engaging story, decent music and characters and a general interface and flow that is well-suited to mobile.  There were a couple of things that ultimately made me decide to put it down.  The first was the grinding.  Another Eden has a lot of fluff.  It's littered with side quests that are unapologetically just banal fetch quests that your main character agrees to do because he's the archetypical Good Guy(TM) and a huge sap.  There's literally a quest where he meets a random little girl who's heard super heroic, larger-than-life things about him and demands he go fight a bunch of monsters to prove he is actually who he says he is, and he agrees because... he cares about proving his identity to some random little girl?

You could just ignore these quests, but they award gacha currency, XP, and materials for upgrading your gear, which are all worthwhile.  Your alternative for getting these things is to just go out into the world and fight monsters a bunch (which you'll do anyway to keep up with the story levels), but that won't get you any currency.  This is not a problem that is unique to Another Eden; it's an obvious trope in games that the good guy in games is a huge dope that will do ridiculous stuff just because the NPCs ask them to.  Another Eden is maybe among the worst offenders of it, but it's more that I just kinda don't need another game doing the same thing that a lot of games have been doing for decades.

The other thing was that I like my stories to end eventually.  This is always the thing I have to watch for with online games that try to be story-focused, as it's inherently not in their interest to have a properly paced story that comes to a natural conclusion, because then they have to figure out what happens after that.  It's an issue that I think FF14 has walked a fine line with over the years, sometimes triumphantly with Heavensward and sometimes frustratingly with patch content.  It's also a small part of what drove me away from Granblue Fantasy and Shadowverse.  I don't know if Another Eden's story ends, but I didn't feel all that optimistic about it, considering they're still adding new chapters now.  If the game had more compelling gameplay and characters to fall back on, I would be less inclined to worry about it, but in my opinion Another Eden is a competent JRPG, not a particularly standout one, where gameplay is concerned.  

I think if I were someone pining for the olden days of JRPGs where it was just simple characters going on an adventure, Another Eden would hold more appeal for me, and that's the sort of person I would also likely recommend it to.  It's a competently made old-school RPG that you can play on your phone for as long or as little as you want.  It even has some core staff from Chrono Trigger working on it.  But I'm not really that person, and so I decided to duck out.

Hitman 1-3
I had gotten Hitman 1 and 2 gradually from sales, and had been meaning to play them because I enjoyed Blood Money and Absolution.  I initially dabbled in each before deciding to just go buy 3 and play the entire trilogy in 3's engine.

What a great experience.  IO really made something special with these games.  They look great, they're deftly written, and they have so much depth.  Nearly every location is packed with things to mess around with and discover, it's phenomenal.  It's all the rage for people to rank their favorite Hitman levels, but I think this post is already very long, so I'll just say which level from each game I found to be the most memorable.

Hitman 1: Hokkaido.  I tend to like snowy levels, and Hokkaido is the first level in the trilogy that throws a few wrenches in the formula.  First, you're not allowed to bring any gear in because the place is tightly secured, so everything is acquire on-site.  Second, access to deeper parts of the level is tightly controlled with an ID chip system, which made your choice of disguise even more important.  Conversely, I can see this being frustrating for people who prefer Suit-Only runs, but I for one prefer to embrace the Hitman games for their social stealth mechanics.  Hokkaido also has some of the more interesting scripted kills.

Hitman 2: Whittleton Creek.  This one's a little tricky, because I liked Mumbai a lot as well and think Mumbai had somewhat more interesting mission stories.  But there's something about stalking around a sleepy suburban neighborhood filled with caricatures of American life that I find incredibly entertaining.  Especially because one of them is almost certainly a serial killer and they're not on the target list.

Hitman 3: Dartmoor.  This one was difficult as well because I think every single Hitman 3 level had some interesting twists going on except maybe Chongqing (I respect Chongqing though because of how kindly it treats Sniper Assassin players).  Dartmoor's just resonated with me the most.  There's one mission story in particular that turned what could otherwise have been a pretty standard level into something with a completely different flavor, as you can basically commandeer the role of a private investigator.  Not only that, but it's one of those rare levels where you're not the only one who is out to get your target.

I haven't messed around with Haven Island, New York, or any of the other non-story missions/locations yet.  I'm definitely looking forward to it, though.