DFO
So, I’ve made a lot of progress in DFO since the last time I posted, and my roster looks a good bit different. I’ve made a Specialist, a Male Grappler, a Paramedic, and a Chimera, the latter two being new classes introduced recently. I also made the tough call to delete my Sword Master, Ghostblade, Dragoon, and Female Crusader. DFO is very fun, but not fun enough to play double digit characters on the regular. I like a lot of classes, but there is only so much time in the day. Wasn’t a fun choice, but I’m not feeling close to burnout anymore, so it was obviously the right one.
I’ve made real progress on my other 3 existing characters; all 3 of my Dark Templar, Female Nen Master, and Shadow Dancer are all primeval tier with varying degress of distinct fusion stones on. They all also have primeval weapons. To put that in layman’s terms, I have their strongest tier of weapon and have unlocked the full potential of their equipment’s gimmick/effect and can now put special stones on their gear that give both damage and QoL effects. I’m real proud of getting my SD to primeval tier, especially. She’s gonna get more love, but pushing my FNen and my DT currently takes priority. These three characters are my characters who can do the Nabel Raid properly, and there’s a new raid coming in January, Inae, that has a very high fame requirement. My DT and Fnen are farther along, so they have the better odds of being able to run it when it drops if I focus them.
Specialist is a really dope class. He fights with beam swords and laser weapons. Really great range, really good utility, and lots of damage. People kinda oversold how long his cooldowns are. The way people talk about his cooldowns, I expected to be suffering once I was in set fusion stones that just gave damage instead of the utility ones from last cap that gave CDR. He’s fine without them. Granted, I’m biased since the set I have him on, Overwhelming Nature, does a lot of object damage, so even when his cooldowns are coming back, I can dish out damage by just doing his basic string and triggering the set’s object damage. Still, I imagine I’d still feel similarly if I was on a stat-stick set like Death in the Shadows.
Paramedic is a lot more of my kind of buffer than the crusaders. She can’t heal, but she gives very sturdy shields, and her buffs have infinite range. She also essentially plays like a dps despite being a buffer. She builds up her guage by attacking and spends that guage to buff damage, give shields, buff speed, etc. She feels way more natural to play after playing a class like FNen or Specialist compared to FSader. My only complaint is that I can’t make her brown. No matter how you make your paramedic look in town, once she’s in a dungeon, she’ll change to her proper sprite, so no matter how brown I make her in town, she’s back to being a Wonderbread Woman when the fighting starts. Otherwise, 10/10. I will say though, investing in buffers is expensive. I was lucky since she debuted with an amp event, but amping her gear to make her buff stronger still ran me around 40 million gold when it was all said and done. And then I got her a better title and creature than the starter boost ones. And then I got her some better enchants. Very expensive. Still, I was well-equipped for it, and she’s pretty damn strong now. Plus, the amps, the most expensive part of all this, will never be powercrept. That was essentially a one-time deal with great upside.
Chimera has a fun gimmick. Her playstyle is basically that one image on Moon Knight going “random bulshit, go!”. SHe tosses out a bunch of bullshit and can pick up her weapons to reduce her cooldowns. Very novel. She does great damage, too.
Male Grappler is just as fun in here as he is in DNF Duel. 10/10.
I will take this time to air out a bit of my greivance with the DFO playerbase. There are way too many elistist people on this game, man. Too many people on this game play 20-something characters and treat playing like a job. They cringe at the idea of actually fighting a boss at all because they plan to fight the boss with all 20+ of their characters and want to just get it over with. I can’t fathom playing that many characters. I almost lost my mind with 11. I could never do 20. And I wouldn’t want to. I don’t like treating games like a job. I don’t wanna balk at the idea of actually playing the video game I installed on my fucking computer. My god, there some bitches on this game, man. Tons of people who won’t take you in their party unless you’re comically overgeared so that they don’t have to actually fight anything. Bunch of busters, I tell ya.
Guild Wars 2
So, as an update to my Journey in Guild Wars 2 - That game is so fun. GW2 is kinda the opposite of DFO, really. DFO doesn’t have a lot going on outside of the weekly content. They’ve kinda stopped making it a “full game”, so to speak. The game is the weekly content + whatever farming you’re doing. GW2 is the opposite. This game is just “go stumble into an adventure,” and it feels good, man. I’m still early in my story, but it is genuinely holding my attention. Also, playing with friends is really easy. Had a couple of nice sessions with some fighting game buddies.
If I’m going to recommend a MMO to someone, it’s gonna be Guild Wars 2.
Blue Archive
There’s a question out there that has been asked for years, literally a decade now, actually -“What if FGO was actually good?” FGO’s story is great, easily the best in the gacha space, sit down Hi3 player. The story is great, but everything else about the game is kinda ass. The gameplay is alright, but the general QoL in the game sucks. Very slow to implement QoL features, no story replay, farming and leveling units is genuinely ass, etc. So that has left us with a question - “What if the game was good, too?” Enter Blue Archive, a gacha game that came out in 2021 that fills the same niche as FGO.
Blue Archive and FGO are cut from the same cloth - They’re both gacha games that prioritize their stories and characters; their gameplay is alright with some very good peaks, but the reason people are playing is because the story and characters are engaging and worthy of our attention.
The game’s been very pleasant. The story is very good; It’s sold me on every group that’s been focused on so far. I love these misfits. Standouts for me so far are definitely Serika, Azusa, and Momoi; I’d go to war for these girls, man. It’s a bit weird to describe, but the premise of the story is that you, the player character, go around this state-school place called Kivotoes and help students in trouble. It can get kinda heavy; this game definitely went places I didn’t expect it go going off the expectations I built in my head from the fanart. Still, Blue Archive is a hopeful story. They wanna get you and the girls outta there with a bow and a smile, and they’ve been really good about setting up payoff so far.
The story is pretty funny, too, honestly. It’s always a good sign when I can just think “This is so fucking stupid” with a smile on my face, and BA has given me at least one moment like that in each of the three story arcs I’ve read. I can’t lie, one moment near the end of volume 3 got a belly laugh out of me. It was too good. If you know, you know.
Gameplay is kinda weird to talk about. It’s kinda an auto-battler, I guess. I haven’t done endgame content yet, so I probbaly shouldn’t speak on it too much, tbh. Still, there is some team-building to be done, and I like that.
As for the rest of the game, it’s pretty damn nice. A lot of events are made permamnent, so you can enjoy them at your leisure, you can redo story as much as you’d like, farming is incredibly fast because you can sweep stages you’ve already done in the past, the UI is decent, no RNG on gear drops so leveling up characters is straightforward. There’s also no RNG gear; kiss my black ass, Hoyoverse! All in all, game good all around.
As far as the gacha is concerned, it’s more akin to something like GBF than a Hoyo game. There is a counter up to 200, and it goes up every time you roll. If you get to 200, you can get any of the on-banner units. What separates this from something like Hoyoverse pity is that you can do this regardless of whether you got the unit already or not. For example, I had to use this to get Saori. I did 200 pulls and didn’t get her, so I relied on this to get her. However, even if I did get her, I’d still be able to trade that in and either get a dupe of her or get one of the other rate-up characters. I hate losing 50/50s with all my heart and soul, so I’ll take this, honestly. More highroll potential, too. The game has been kind to me on this front, can’t lie. Got Rio and a dupe of her, plus Dress and normal Saori. Feeling good about myself. Feeling very good.
But yeah, in conclusion, while I will never recommend a gacha game to another sentient human being, Blue Archive is good. What if FGO was good? It’d basically be Blue Archive.
Witch On The Holy Night
Aoko Aozaki is a character I am primarily familar with through Melty Blood, and ever since Type Lumina launched some years back, I’ve steadily played more and more Melty over the years, both Type Lumina and Current Code,to the point that it’s probably the fighting game franchise that I’ve played the most after Guilty Gear, so I’ve seen and even played more and more of Aoko in these past few years. I always thought she was cool, but never knew what her deal was. I just knew that, like mostly every other character you see in Melty, she originated from a Visual Novel lots of talk of Visual Novel talk in this post, huh?. That VN’s name is Witch on The Holy Night
, and it actually got an updated rerelease of sorts for Switch, PC, and Playstation a few years ago. I played the demo back when it launched, and I got the game on a steam sale a few months ago in order to take my first dive into a proper VN.
Ace Attorney is probably my first Visual Novel, even if I never stopped and considered it one. And then in the past few years, I actually played Fate Grand Order, which is a Visual Novel first and foremost if we’re being honest. And this year, I started playing Blue Archive, which, in a similar vein to FGO, is a VN before anything else. But Witch on The Holy Night is a good bit different from all those games. See, VNs are usually this sort of interactive story where, while there typically canon/intended endings, you, the player, are supposed to make choices that can change dialogue, alter story paths, and even let you fuck up and die if it’s Fate/Stay Night. But WOTHN is a far more linear experience. It’s like a cinematic book reading. There are no brancing paths or bad endings, you don’t make choices, etc. Instead, you are treated to a very cinematic telling of the story. The game is fully-voiced, has plenty of CGs, has a wonderful OST that’s always in the background, and the general experience of going through the story is smooth. I have no complaints whatsoever, but it’s important to point out that the game is an anomaly of sorts, especially for Nasuverse VNs.
Now, talking about the actual story and characters, I am more than satisfied with that I experienced. Aoko is a great, if bitchy, protagonist. I was honestly surprised by how much of a bitch she is here; she has mellowed out a lot by Melty Blood, but that makes sense considering how much time passes between the events of this game and the beginning of Melty Blood. The main word I can use to describe Aoko is headstrong; she knows what she wants to do and she’s gonna try her best to do it her way. And luckily for the rest of the nasuverse, she’s got a heart of gold, more or less. She won’t be happy about it all the time, but she’ll do right by people, and that’s what makes her endearing in spite of how bitchy she can be.
And that lets me talk about Alice, who is the most quiet of our three protags, but she leaves a pretty good impact nonetheless. She’s the Yin to Aoko’s Yang, the water to her fire. They trust each other, but they definitely don’t like each other all that much. Still, they make an alright team, and Aoko’s interactions with Alice help us learn to like her. This is less a process of something like learning some traumatic past and bonding over that or something and moreso just seeing two roommates who mostly tolerate each other be themselves around each other. Alice can be a little quirky, a little petty, and the more we see her hang around Aoko, the more opportunites we get to see that. It makes her more of a person even though she spends a lot of this book trying to murder people, be they our other protagonists or the actual bad guys.
The story’s very good and presented so well. It feels unfair to compare the VNs I have played to this game because the presentation is just off the charts, man. Talk about production value. I was not joking earler when I called this a cinematic book reading, mane. And I don’t wanna talk too much about the story because that’s the whole point of reading it, but I do wanna say it’s fun adventure with a lot of magic bullshit and a lot of good character work. It’s also just pretty damn funny. You should come out of this with a smile on your face if you try it, and I think you should. Game’s cool, and I’ll try to revisit it when I’ve had enough time away from it. In the meantime, I think I’ll go read OG Tsukihime .
Spawn
One comic I got into over these past couple months is Spawn . If you’re not tapped in, Spawn is basically the biggest and longest-tenured indie comic out there. Shit’s been running since 1992, and not in typical comic book fashion, mind you. When you say a comic has been around a long time, anyone that knows how comics work will asumme that there’s been an ungodly amount of reboots. Spawn is not like that. Spawn is more akin to a manga in the sense that it’s been this one continuous narrative this entire time. Has that narrative stayed particularly coherent this entire time? Fuck no. But it’s been the same story nonetheless. You can unironically start Spawn at issue #1 and that would be a fine thing to do. Still, the series is aware that it’s long as fuck, and there are jumping on points of sorts littered throughout it if you’re interested in getting caught up to speed pretty quickly. There’s even a whole universe now, with several different books offering different looks into the Spawn world.
Now, Spawn…is not very good. At least not in the beginning. It’s cool as hell from the jump, but from the couple of early issues I read, I’d be a bold-faced liar if I tried to call it “good”. The comparison I like to draw to this is RWBY. RWBY is a very cool series that had a bunch of cool ideas and characters. Their use/execution of those ideas and characters? Not the greatest if I’m being completely honest. Still enjoyable, but we gotta be honest about why we stepped through the door and stayed seated. Similar deal with early Spawn. Now, it does get better. At what point in between Issue like 6 I was on and 296 where I jumped to did that transition begin? I can’t fucking tell you, but know that it gets unironically good eventually.
The premise of Spawn is basically that this government agent dude gets killed and he post-humously gets enlisted to be a soldier for hell and gets caught in a bunch of nonsense between a war between heaven and hell. That is simplest way I can describe all of this. There are multiple layers of nonsense going on, and I will leave it to you to experience said layers personally like I have. It’s all well, but the really cool stuff has been the expanded universe. Books like Spawn Universe, Gunslinger Spawn, and Medieval Spawn all have more of my attention with their interesting casts. And that’s not even all of the Spawn books. There’s King Spawn, Rat City, and a bunch more. If the writing in the main book ain’t grabbing you, hop on one of the others. The OG Spawn creator isn’t the best writer, but the people he brings on for the other books are pretty solid, so if you at least like the premise of Spawn, one of these books is bound to to be to your liking.
Spawn’s really cool, and I enjoy his multitude of books. He also started my descent down the Image Comics rabbit hole. I may or may not read Invincible at some point now. Time will tell.