Digivolving, I guess
So, in the middle of last year, I dropped YGO cold turkey. I know I mentioned before that I dropped it the last time I mentioned it on here, but I did eventually have the urge to scratch the Dinomorphia itch and hopped back in. YGO, as horrible a game as it is, is very good at scratching the part of my brain that likes to problem-solve and optimize, so I sorta “relapsed” and gave it another chance. But, like with anything, I have my limits; YGO is not a very good game. At all. It fucking sucks, and not in the fun way a lot of older fighting games do. It’s just not a consistently good time, and it does not respect your time. I’m a grown ass man; I’m less and less tolerant of the idea of losing to an 85-minute spreadsheet combo through no real fault of my own with each passing month. Yes, I said month, not even year, my nigga. We got shit to do. If I have to play a card game, I would prefer it not be one where constantly saying “go next” is the norm. Shit is corny after you deal with it long enough.
So when the homie told me about an online Digimon simulator, I uninstalled YGO with the quickness and got to learning. Now, I am not a Digimon head. As an anime fan that grew up in the 2000s, I have seen a Digimon anime, but I genuinely cannot tell you which one it was or the names of most Digimon off the top of my head. I remember that I liked it, but that’s about it, really. So while I have some passing familiarity with some of these cards, I’m mostly approaching this as a newcomer, picking the cards I like mainly off of aesthetics rather than any childhood love.
The Digimon TCG started back in 2020, being the 7th iteration of a physical Digimon card game and releasing alongside Digimon Adventure. It has a surface-level similarity to Duel Masters that endears me to it very hard. The win condition is essentially the same—you and your opponent have 5 shields, called security in this game, and you have to break all 5 and then attack them directly to win. You, obviously, attack them with your Digimon, and Digimon can have effects like being able to block an attack, attack the turn they’re summoned, break multiple shields when they attack, etc. This aspect of the game is very familiar to me as a Duel Masters nerd of sorts, and I love it. The more unique aspect of Digimon is its energy system. Every point of mana you spend makes the bar in the middle go further towards your opponent’s side; once it crosses over to their side, your turn ends right then and there, and they have that much mana to work with. If you start at 0 and spend 4 mana, your turn ends there, and your opponent now has 4 mana. Now, to prevent you from “choking” your opponent too hard, if you end your turn without giving them any mana at all, they’ll automatically start from 3. This introduces a lot of give and take and, in my experience, really makes pushes matter. You can’t just slam down a big old beater and sit pretty because you probably just gave your opponent hella resources to work with to deal with it.
The other big gimmick in Digimon is evolving. Instead of having to play out all these bigger, more powerful Digimon raw, you can gradually evolve them up for cheaper costs by evolving them on top of Digimon lower in level than them. You’re essentially growing your boss monster. There is a breeding area where you can hatch a digiegg and evolve it and eventually move it to the battlezone proper.
I haven’t explained everything about the game, but that’s a very quick and dirty TLDR. The game is very fun and has some cool decks to play. So far, I’ve tried BlackWarGreymon variants, Mastemon variants, and a couple of others. I intend to play this game a lot more with the homie; it’s a genuinely good time.
If you wanna try out the game, there is an online simulator. Here is a google doc with a download link for said simulator
No Zen Zone
Back in July 2024, Hoyoverse dropped their latest gacha game, Zenless Zone Zero. It’s a 2000s aesthetic action game that plays a good bit like Honkai Impact 3rd. Honestly, the game was pretty good. The designs were really to my liking, the music was good, and I was a fan of both the actual combat and the TV-traversal gameplay. However, I am not a man who wants to legitimately juggle multiple gacha games, so I ended up uninstalling it after about a month. Then I heard the game was having a big update patch and giving away a free 5-star. I’m very much in cruise control mode in Genshin, so I decided to give ZZZ another shake. They have since removed the TV mode due to player feedback but have otherwise made the game more enjoyable. Seriously, I’m in fucking shambles about the TV mode being gone; I liked it a lot.
I also have to give Hoyoverse credit; they do a very good job of endearing these characters to you. I love most of my roster, the fucking weirdos.
Right now, I have 3 teams: - Zhu Yuan, Anby, Nicole - Harumasa, Grace, Rina - Soldier 11, and 2 of Ben/Lucy/Astra Yao
The Soldier 11 team is by far my favorite to play, and S11 herself is in the running for my favorite character. She’s up there with Grace. Her playstyle consists of just assaulting the enemy with fire-infused normal attacks, and it’s very satisfying.
Zhu Yuan was my first limited character, and she’s pretty straightforward—shoot them in the face. She works very well out of the box with Anby and Nicole, which I am very happy for.
Harumasa was the free 5-star mentioned earlier. His team basically has him and Grace act as a Batman & Robin duo of sorts, dealing damage while Rina buffs them with her weapon, supportive gear set, and her passive that gives them a PEN buff (PEN is a stat that lets you ignore a portion of enemy defense).
“Meta” and the lack thereof
When you talk about gacha games, eventually, there will be conversations about meta and power creep. Even in a game like FGO, which is basically a visual novel with some turn-based combat stapled to it, people took to branding certain units as “meta” because they’re very useful for farming. Hoyoverse games are no stranger to this, partially due to the very apparent increase in power in their released units over time and partially due to the way their communities like to engage with their combat (speedruns).
I personally find these discussions to be very asinine, but they pop up all the time around these games. I can’t speak for games like Star Rail, which I don’t play, or Honkai Impact 3rd, where I was simply too new to the game to experience the consequences of their power creep, but I can say that whatever “meta” people gas themselves into talking about in Genshin does not matter, which is why I find the talking points asinine. Has there been power creep? Yes. New characters tend to make bigger numbers and even have more convenient artifact sets that just give them free crit stats. I can’t even try to deny the power creep. However, older characters and 4-star characters can still clear the content just fine, so it functionally does not matter. It’s like going, “Hey man, this car they just released is way better than the one they released a while ago.”. Like, yeah, you’re right, but why in the flying fuck would I lose my mind that there’s a better option than the thing that works perfectly fine? Now, there are speedruns. Like I mentioned, hardcore fans of Hoyo games tend to lean into speedruns; they like seeing and comparing how fast they clear stages, and certain characters are generally better at this than others. Now, aside from the fact that I consider competing against people that likely spend enough on this game to fund it an exercise in futility , my main reason for dismissing “meta” conversations like these is the lack of an actual metagame. “Oh my god! Everybody’s playing Miyabi in Zenless right now. She clears in .0000067 and 3/45ths of a second, bro. You don’t even have to click anything; she just shows up and clears! It’s insane! She’s everywhere! She’s the meta!” What the fuck am I supposed to do with that information, Charlie Brown??? This is a single-player game! There is no inherent ripple effect from everyone playing Miyabi. Everybody picking Miyabi does nothing, and, more importantly, you can do nothing about it. Snake-Eye was the best deck in YGO all last year; people could do things about that, plan around it, and beat it, even. If you know the top-tier characters in a fighting game, you can learn the matchups and also potentially counter-pick these characters. What the fuck are you supposed to do about someone pulling up with an M6 Miyabi and deleting everything with 1 click? Nothing. And the same applies to whatever silly character they make next that will have bigger numbers than her. There’s not really anything to do or talk about, so all the meta talk just goes nowhere. It doesn’t fucking matter.
The only way this can even scratch relevance is when the content scales in such a way that older units cannot do new content. It does matter if they make content that makes a character like Miyabi the floor. Right now, it does not matter at all that Miyabi outdamages Ellen; Ellen can still tear through content all the same. Miyabi’s mere existence does not do anything to Ellen’s ability to beat endgame content. That will change if they inflate the enemy HP values to such a degree that you need Miyabi levels of damage. And this is less about “meta” now and more about power creep and how devs try to keep their games challeneging after constantly raising the ceiling, but it’s where a lot of these conversations come from. And to be frank, a lot of these players have not experienced real power creep. Make these people go play YGO, where their favorite deck just cannot keep up and will lose to the modern competition 9/10 times on a good day instead of crying that the new character clears 16 seconds faster than their favorite, who still clears comfortably anyhow, in a single-player game.
Lessons Learned from Genshin
One thing that is very apparent with ZZZ is that they have listened to all the things that people do not like about Genshin. A lot of my gripes with Genshin do not even exist in this game. It’s why my gameplay experience the past month has been so smooth. I genuinely don’t have anything to complain about that wouldn’t be a general gacha game complaint. You can farm for anything on any day, you can fight weekly bosses all you want, you can skip story segments you’re not interested in, the minigames are fun, there are events that are turned into permanent content, etc. All the things that people hate about Genshin Impact are just not in ZZZ at all. I’m very grateful for that, but as someone that still logs into Genshin, it makes the fact they haven’t circled back around and fixed things there way more insulting.
End
Yeah, this was just me talking about what I’ve been enjoying to start the year. I’ve also been playing some Melty Blood and listening to some Open Mike Eagle. Hope you’re all staying safe out there.