hello
hi
since my very good horse daughters now have a quarantine zone for their further adventures, I can instead post about how I have fallen into a pit of phone gambling anime applications, all while assuring you that I do not have a gambling problem
Honkai Impact - okay, let me reveal my shame: I actually enjoy the combat design in Genshin Impact. characters are fun, bosses are neat, the abyss is a neat mix of brain teaser and execution. however, since every character is arguably 80-90% similar and the main difference between their kits are two buttons, things can get stale sometimes.
Mihoyo recently put up Honkai on Steam so I was like “fuck it, I’ll give it a try”. and my first reaction is that the game part is fine (it’s Bayonetta but you’re a team of three animes you gamble on) and I start thinking “yeah, I’ll get those login bonuses but otherwise not engage”. but eventually I start poking at characters and learning their kits and going into Honkai’s abyss and it’s like, jesus, the combat design in this dumb phone game is fucking impeccable. if stuff in Genshin was even half as wacky as some of the stuff I’ve seen in Honkai, it would have taken over the world by now (please ignore that the game made 3 billion dollars in its first year)
I dig this game and also I pulled the currently featured unit off her banner therefore it is good
Ragnarok Origin - so this is the… third? fourth? time they’ve tried to make Ragnarok Online a thing again
it’s Ragnarok Online to a fault. it is almost identical to the game I wasted so much time with 20 years ago, except I’ve changed and the few things they did add doesn’t change the fact that I’m spamming a damage skill and chugging potions like a man possessed to grind. essentially I changed (shocking) and the game didn’t
also the gacha was all cosmetics and since RO was only ever a couple of steps removed from being a graphical chat room, doing this set off all kinds of red flags in my brain
Blue Archive - I think this just launched in English. it’s about watching schoolgirls with guns run through a level and murder enemies and occasionally you push a button and they do a murder skill. it seems really well made but it’s pretty much an auto battler and as much as those games are well made (well, not Raid: Shadow Legends, somehow the most aesthetically bankrupt mobile game thing I’ve ever interacted with), they just bore me. I want to push buttons, dammit
also somehow I pulled a schoolgirl who is also a maid and I find this offensive (yes, I know, it’s probably too late to be drawing the line here but please give me some credit)
Dragalia Lost - actually I’ve played this before and I think it’s cool but I haven’t really gone too deep into it. mostly I want to talk about how embarrassingly good Cygames is at presentation because how many games have a vocal theme looping on the main/management screens or a rolling demo of the main character just marching through the world and passing by his buddies. even doing pulls has better music than most games could ever dream of having
also I like that the game is equal opportunity horny and it has buff dudes and buff dude dragons mixed in with the half-naked ladies and lady dragons (which checks out, Granblue is much the same way)
mostly I think it’s weird that DL is a Nintendo game but they never talk about it. they’re content to let it grind away quietly in the background while they throw crap like Dr. Mario World against the wall and watch it flounder and die. it feels like a thing that should have blown up or gotten a port or used as an IP somewhere else instead of “just” being a weird phone game
also I’m greatly concerned because the Gold Ship vtuber channel did a thing where she beat a Cygames dev at Shadowverse and her prize was being put in every Cygames game and I have to reckon with the reality that Nintendo-owned characters and horse girls will interact, if even for the briefest of moments
I would like to reiterate that I do not have a gambling problem but I do enjoy the dopamine hit from pissing away free pulls and no one can judge me for this