luminavt

[luminavt]

[luminavt]

Oh to be the anime girl featured in the background art of a popular Future Bass song...

[luminavt]

It's June 2nd, we've made it another day.

[luminavt]

Using Social Media less helped.

I'm not just saying it. I felt it.

When I quit using Twitter/X and instagram? I realized how badly it was screwing with my cognitive bias. Being on social media trains you to see the WORST in people and the world because its all you see.

People being smartasses, people thinking they're funny for saying the rudest stuff. Just constant bitterness all the time.

People irl were being nice to me all the time, and I "appreciated" it. However, I took it with a grain of salt.

The decision to not exposing myself to disgusting, rude, or extremist people made the day to day moments feel different.

I felt people's pleasantries a lot more deeply. I told the old lady at Wal-mart thank you after checking my receipt and she smiled sincerely because I was nice to her. I went to the new pizza place that opened up and he delivered my food with enthusiasm, he was genuinely happy to have customers, and I gave that energy right back to him.

Those little moments? They were ALWAYS there, but I didn't -feel- them because of how social media showed me the worst of people

My day felt better because I was paying attention to MY day for once.

[luminavt]

I remember when having 1000 followers actually was a big deal. Because that was 1000 people wanting to see YOUR stuff.

Now algorithms on Youtube, instagram and twitter throw so many followers at you because the users are just trying to train their algorithm to SHOW them the kind of stuff they like.

The follows you get from there take so much more effort before they truly start paying attention to you.

I can only recall like 20-30 of the 500 people I followed on twitter before I quit and most of those were actual friends.

[luminavt]

[luminavt]

Fantasy Life i: The Girl who Steals Time : LuminaChannel's Review.

The Anime RPG sub-genre tends to be linear but well crafted RPGS, or open world live services with multiplayer, but bogged down with monetization, and time gating that prevents you from playing on your own schedule.

Fans of RPGs with a cuter, anime art style usually settle for one of the two. However, this sequel to the 3ds cult classic original dares to defy this trend and make something fans have wanted for over a decade. This game has so much to cover I CAN'T make a short review.

So let's jump into it.

Fantasy Life i introduces the Open World rpg experience by inviting you to play 14 different Lives at your own pace. Lives are job classes that fit into 3 major categories: Gathering, Crafting and Combat. The game presents challenges utilizing these 3 core Life types to open up the games varied systems. Combined, they all come together in a loop contributing to bigger systems. Giving a feeling of always having something new to work on and preventing burnout from its simplicity.

Combat Lives aren't complicated. There are no cooldowns on items and skills so most fights involve spamming your strongest attack nonstop. Strategy will be mostly be about timing your attacks and item use and universal dodge. This makes the game a great introduction to Action RPGs.

Gathering Lives involve a simple minigame of finding the weak spot and efficiently using your SP and party members to gather different resources. It's primarily a stat check, but as you play you'll figure out how to optimize your gathering as the best rewards come from successfully timing the finale with your strongest action.

Crafting Lives use a minigame where the faster you clear the task, the better the result of the item. Each minigame involves different combinations of Tap, Hold, Rapid Tap, and Rotating to successfully craft. Your base stats influence how quickly each round fills the meter. For Furniture and Art, this can result in a TOP indicator increasing its sell price, and gear can result in bonus stat lines!

The main story will mostly involve combat, gathering resources, and upgrading the lives to make items and equipment. The additional systems attached to these core lives make the game feel grand in scale and add depth to these 3 core systems.

The 4 major gameplay modes are Ginormosia (The Open World), Town Building, Island Questing, and The Treasure Groves.

Town Building involves recruiting strangelings, people who will join your island and seek residence once saved. In single player they can join as your party members or use their life skills for you. Allowing you to successfully craft, fight, and gather more difficult targets. Each party member has unique support effects as you gain affinity with them. You'll have plenty of reason to raise them all for the hardest challenges in the game.

Island Questing is the main story world. A good foundation of progress is made here. Through tour guide challenges and quests, you can earn a ton of recipes that will enrich your Town Building and Crafting. The islands are most similar to the original structure of the first 3ds game. From boss gathering targets to combat life bosses, this area gives you everything you need to prepare you for the content new to Fantasy Life!

Ginormosia is the most impressive addition. This open world area is filled with spawning challenges as you build up exp to rank up the world. By doing so you collect rarer drops that will get you some strong gear for your lives. Taking strong inspo from Breath of the Wild, shrine challenges spread through the world will help you unlock a solid set of town residents.

Treasure Grove is where the rarest items can be found and ideal for focused resource gathering. The dungeons level up the deeper you go, with challenges that stat check all 3 Life Types. Since NPCs can only utilize a single life, it's here that multiplayer becomes the go-to option to succeed.

There's a lot of game here. All of the lives contribute to your progression through all 4 major game types, and multiplayer makes the experience even better.

This summary doesn't even cover advanced mechanics, like the ability to "age" your crafted weapons in Treasure Groves and gain a 3rd hidden stat. . All of these progression elements are paced evenly throughout the game. Preventing players from being overwhelmed, yet still avoiding the "Fun starts at endgame" trap that so many live service games fall into.

The game isn't without faults though. Monster aggro is very spotty at times and I've lost it in a boss arena, causing bosses to regain HP. Multiplayer locks you out of accepting new quests and certain interactions. Combat can feel a bit TOO simple for anyone experienced with action RPGs, but this is a matter of preference, less experienced players and cozy gamers will be better served with this simplicity.

Overall. This game should not be missed if you like RPGs and cute aesthetics. Its a rare combination for a game to be cute yet solid in its mechanics and gameplay. The game achieves depth through multiple simple systems coming together, its a game that can be played at your own pace and still be enjoyable. Which is refreshing compared to online service games where it only gets fun "at the endgame". I highly recommend this game!

[luminavt]

Fantasy Life i has lived up to and exceeded all of my expectations.

There's one thing I want to put special focus on:

So many games in the past decade designed for long term play gate meaningful progress behind time gated mechanics, or require daily login, or timed events for rare items.

This game has only one mechanic, the Celestia Flowers, but after you collect your daily limit from multiplayer, the cost is negligible. Then when you rank up your island: it becomes even CHEAPER to revive strangelings.

It's like they started with a bad idea in the game "no, this will make our game worse, let's not." and ultimately made a more playable game.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the direction Fantasy Life was going in, before the delays and the efforts to save the game. It feels awkwardly implemented. As if they started to make strangelings harder to get, then backtracked.

It made me aware of how normalized it is to use timed events and dailies to artificially inflate playing numbers and engagement.

It's nice that this game doesn't have that. It truly is a game that I can play on my time. Which makes me want to play more.

It can be a grind, but its a game I grind on -my- time. Going back to that is refreshing.

[luminavt]

[luminavt]

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[luminavt]

Despite everything I posted about Level-5, I might still end up playing and streaming Fantasy Life: i.

As I said before. There's no objective proof that ai was used specifically on THAT game. I'll still keep an eye out for any news to the contrary.

It's hard either way though. The game was a comfort during a tough time in my life so I'd really like to experience it.

[luminavt]

Here is the article showing the ai generation use in full detail! Level 5 is embracing it.

This post is made for informational purposes. Full post summary here!

[luminavt]

Level-5, Fantasy Life:i and Generative AI Stable Diffusion.

The Developer of Fantasy Life: i, Level-5. Just announced a lot of delays for their upcoming games at Level 5 Vision 2024: To the World's Children.

In this presentation, a lot of the games showed off BEAUTIFUL and unique looking art styles and character designs. They stand out from what a lot of current anime games were offering.

I watched it live on stream and my stream community enjoyed seeing it all. However the very next day?

We learned through this article posted above, that the developer had started to embrace using Stable Diffusion, a form of Generative AI, for the Art Assets in three of its games. Megaton Musashi, Yokai Watch, and Inazuma Eleven are shown in the official government presentation.

As someone who is very passionate about Fantasy Life i?

Seeing the company you grew up loving embrace a form of Generative AI that doesn't collect the data of their original works without explicit consent is HEARTBREAKING.

However, I want to be as clear and accurate as possible.

There is very clear evidence that Level 5 is embracing Generative AI for the games listed in the video. There is no clear evidence that these techniques were used in the development of Fantasy Life: i. This post is being shared with you for your awareness.

Fantasy Life for the 3ds is one of the most magical games I've ever played.

The game had so much charm that I showed a minimum of 6 different friends, and upon just watching me play it? They immediately went to buy the game themselves.

It was so charming, so simple yet aesthetically pleasing that anyone could appreciate it for what it was.

This game was developed by Level-5.

The fact that Level-5 was the developers is what got my eye on this game in the first place. Ever since Dark Cloud 2 for the Playstation 2 I fell in love with what these developers can do.

Dark Cloud, Ni no Kuni, Rogue Galaxy, I fell in love with the developers ages ago and what they do meant a lot to me.

It feels awful that I cannot feel comfortable supporting the developer as a whole anymore.

I don't fault anyone if they choose the purchase the game still because ultimately, i know the game means a lot. Part of me still wants to experience the game.

However, its clear that Level 5 is one of the developers who plan to fully integrate Gen Ai into their development cycle going forward and I wouldn't be surprised it's why they have so many delays in all their games. As they may be adapting to a new workflow.

As someone who heavily endorsed this game as a streaming vtuber, I felt it was only fair I spread this information. Thank you.

Link to the article will be on my following tumblr post for full context.

[luminavt]

FGC Players that say their S-Tier main isn't that good and Low Tier mains that think their char is slept on:

[luminavt]

I'm 20 hours into this game, enjoying streaming it but WHY DOES HE LOOK LIKE THAT.

This Man Was Designed

[luminavt]

Feryquitous is such an amazing artcore artist.

All of her songs are beautiful and the melodies make me daydream elaborate stories in a way most other genres can only hope to.

Monochrome Anomaly has been particularly stuck in my head for the past 2 months.

Maybe I should look up deemo and see how the game plays too while I'm at it.

[luminavt]

I'm even more excited for this after watching this trailer!

Echoes of Wisdom aims to blend the modern BoTW era of Zelda with older school Zelda concepts and it looks satisfying.

I'm looking forward to this one not being an exercise in resource management and Shiekah Slate powers.

Instead as an overworld that's dense with environmental puzzles that we'll use our ever growing collection of Echoes to solve and navigate.

There's also some cute outfits to look forward to, dress up gets me very invested rather quickly.

2024 is such a packed year!