#even if the combat is like. mash button and win lol

[0fps]

zenless zone zero initial impressions! tldr; i'm having a BLAST

ough where to even start. i'll try to talk on things by category, but story-wise i basically made it to the part you meet the AI named fairy

i also consumed 0 beta content so i actually went into this pretty blind.

story/characters

i'm not really far at all to say whether the plot itself is good or bad, but god DAMN are the characters pulling their weight (in a great way)

i genuinely love the much more comedic/silly aspect they're going for here (especially since most of the previous gachas i've played are much more serious in tone), the public security guy just shouting a billion profanities at the beginning was hilarious

i'm glad they've started with a relatively small and focused cast, and each one has had a chance to shine and i genuinely love all of them so far lol, they're all so fun

i also love that the mcs really feel like their own characters that you just play through as opposed to self-inserts. i actually had a hard time picking which mc i wanted to be but i ended up picking wise (who i only just noticed has bags under his eyes?)

in terms of visuals, i LOVE how its a mix of comic-book styled story-telling (which are SO fun to read through, I really also love looking at all the illustrations, that alone makes the story infinitely more engaging) and animated cutscenes, and then your more generic visual novel-styled dialogue scenes

i very much appreciate that they let you rewatch the animated cutscenes (which is mostly just so you can replay the chapters but still) - now i don't have to be stressed about recording everything for giffing and eating up my storage! i do wish you could remove the subs though (maybe there is an option for it I didn't look too closely)

i will say, they don't really bother with the worldbuilding, they kind of just throw you into a situation and you pick up context as the game moves on. i actually prefer this from a story perspective, as its showing not telling (damn didn't know hyv could do that), and the main story itself is straightforward so far so i loved it there

BUT once we got "outside" the main story and started going through the "everyday gameplay" stuff it was just a lot and i do think we needed a bit more handholding lol. i only kind of knew what I was looking at or what things were because i've played hyv's other games. like the wishing system actually felt SUPER glossed over which was kind of surprising for a gacha game? like it didn't even make me WANT to pull (and i didn't)

edit: on the above point, i guess i didn't play far enough, they start gradually introducing things the more you progress, so it's fine i think lol

combat/gameplay

the combat feels awesome as expected, but it also feels a bit too button mash to win right now

particularly with all the character swapping i feel like i have no sense of what's going on and i just press buttons when the ui tells me to. sure it feels good but there's also no particular intent with it.

i also don't have a good sense of what triggers the chain attacks yet, right now it just feels like it happens when it happens

but i think it will become more intuitive as i get used to the combat and the difficulty arises, i was definitely already getting the hang of timing the character switch parry thing which is sooo satisfying to get

i also demo'd all the standard (?) characters and surprisingly rina was by far my favorite! god she feels SO incredibly smooth to play, i'm probably going for her first (haven't pulled for anything yet, i'm not spending ANY type of currency until i better understand what everything is)

runners ups were nekomata and grace, they were also super fun! koleda was probably my least favorite

i'm also a bit surprised how much i like the ranged characters, i think i might like them more than the melee ones which is a first for me. it might be both their speed and because when you're not super up close to the enemy all the time its easier to see the indicator to parry

the cunning hares trio are also all really fun to play, billy is probably my favorite he just zooms all over the place lol

music/audio

surprisingly i wasn't paying too much attention to it, but from what i did listen to it sounded perfectly suited for the environment. i do wish the battle music switched up more during the hollow dives though

there was one track that plays in the home base area that i ABSOLUTELY adored though, and i was excited to hear the track from the stock up web event lol

for the dub i usually switch to the mandarin dub but the english dub has actually been really fucking good? so i might actually stick with the english dub for this one

it also helps me because there's a lot of segments here where its hard to play and read what they're saying at the same time

graphics/performance/ui/mechanics

i'm surprised the game defaulted to 30fps, but it really feels like it runs like butter at 60fps. i did have to adjust quite a few settings though because i think some gave me a bit of motion sickness, but its all good now

game itself runs super well, i only experienced lag when i had a bunch of combo chains going on at once, but is more or less very smooth

my one gripe is how zoomed in the camera feels, i wish we could zoom out a bit more. kinda ties into why i think i like the ranged characters more

the UI also feels kind of unintuitive tbh, there's a LOT of stuff and a lot of menus and weird buttons for a lot of things and its just overwhelming. kinda feels like they leaned a bit too hard into trying to make things look "cool" and "unique" as opposed to what's "practical"

like for example maybe i'm just stupid but it took me way too long to figure out how to select characters for a party because its that sideways arrow thing on the right lol

[antirepurp]

digimon world 4 is like if a game was good but also bad and piss-easy but also ball-crushing difficult

[tainbocuailnge]

ive played all the story chapters and a bunch of side missions and tried out a handful of characters so now it’s time for The Official Lance Tainbocuailnge Review Of Fate/Extella Link if you’re like me and were kinda on the fence about buying it after extella massively let you down

tldr; gameplay is actually fun and varied with loads of different objectives and the same servant can be played in different ways so it doesn’t get boring. main story is a bit disjointed and most servants only have a quick cameo but it gets charlemagne’s plot beats down well enough and the silly everyone-knows-everyone banter is delightful. everything looks better, the world actually feels populated, and there’s a lot of care put into special interactions. link will not disappoint you like extella did

the gameplay has much more variation than just press button use moon drive repeat. you’ve got a mix of regular attacks that lead into various combos and active skills with cooldowns. each servant has like 7 of them, generally some combination of damage skills buffs and debuffs, and you can set 4 at once so there’s a degree of customisability to how you play each servant even within the fighting style they’re inherently geared towards. servants with similar regular movesets (like cu and scathach) still have decidedly different active skills so they don’t feel interchangeable. certain moves from servants that were already in extella are generally reused either at the end of some combo or as an active skill which for me goes a long way in still making it feel like the same game, just better

attacking builds moon drive meter, and fighting enemies while moon drive is active earns you np meter. this means you can use your np as often as you can charge it instead of the pathetic One time it was in extella and you can just blow up a whole sector without remorse. you can also end moon drive early with a weaker version of your noble phantasm. some active skills are labelled as class skills and if you use those in a combo against a servant you get the button mash attack that extella had. altogether it really gives the sense of an all-out servant battle

allied servants are much much much more proactive. they’ll actively go out and conquer sectors for you and will try to join you wherever you’re fighting the boss servant. if your allies are nearby more of your active skills will get the class skill property and they’ll join you in the button mash attack. before the battle you also set two support troops, who will randomly join in on your combos or defend you when you’re in a pinch. hakuno is also out on the field, so combat is much more a team effort than before

stage objectives are varied too, there’s field effects, map jamming, hunting down messengers before they can call for reinforcements, escorting allies to specific locations, waves of shadow servants, lancelot disguising himself, robin or lishu going invisible, iskandar or darius with endless armies, drake or gilles bombarding from afar, all often used in various combinations too. on top of that the extra stages will provide random additional challenges so even replaying the same stage will be different every time. 

there are four difficulties (that I’ve unlocked) but I haven’t tried any of the higher ones yet so I don’t know what they change to make it more difficult other than enemy level. there are like. i think at least 50 maybe even 100 extra stages to play after you’ve cleared the ~30 main story battles that continue until servant level 200 or something so there’s a lot to do even after you’ve gone through the story. servants unlock by clearing story battles and I didn’t realize this until very late and was very pissed off that the game wouldn’t let me use cu but that’s on me. the money is power system is still in place so you don’t have to manually train any new servant you want to try out you can just powerlevel them. install skills are also still in place and you do need to level servant bond if you want to use any decent number of those

there’s a pvp mode too but I haven’t tried it yet so no comment on that beyond i bet skilled lancelot players are The most annoying motherfuckers to fight against

graphics are a huge step up from extella. reused areas got a complete visual makeover while retaining the same feel. everyone’s models got spruced up and now they don’t look plastic anymore. there is an unreal amount of care put into sculpting karna’s asscrack. the ost actually slaps beyond the main theme this time as well as featuring some ol reliable CCC tracks. everything looks much more polished

the story is somewhat disjointed because of both the large cast and the splitting routes. the story splits up at various points to create an excuse to make different battles but it means a lot of things happen at approximately the same time in slightly different ways and it can be confusing to keep up with what happens in which order. for that reason I suggest looking closely at what path leads to which ending and playing all the quests of each converging branch before moving to the next day. the story seems to go out of its way to be ambiguous in when what happens exactly and how it’s even supposed to follow the events of extella so I think it’s best to look for the themes and the fun lore details over the linear coherence

overall the atmosphere is pretty silly and servants constantly banter back and forth even during tense situations, but it lands the occasional serious moment well enough imo. charlemagne and karl are the only ones who have any significant story focus but since they’re the only newcomers it’s not like the other guys particularly need the screentime. charlemagne himself is a pretty silly and lighthearted guy so he goes along well with the general feeling and it actually works in favour of his heavier plot beats because of the contrast. I grew attached to him incredibly quickly, not in the last place because he gets hyped about every single person he meets and it’s hard not to get excited too

the servants who weren’t already in extella generally get to show up more in the main story than the already familiar faces but most of them don’t have much more than a cameo. having a lot of people just randomly roam around with no idea what’s going on goes a really long way in making the moon cell feel populated beyond the people directly involved in the story so I actually like it a lot. they came up with like 3 different convenient plot devices to give you servants to fight without worrying about what that means for the alliances and it gives room for a lot of cool character moments

a good chunk of the extra stages come with their own mini stories told through the combat dialogue which adds to the liveliness of the setting. my favourite so far is the one where liz and nero try to hold a concert and hakuno frantically tries to explain to charlemagne in the middle of combat why it’s absolutely vital to keep them from doing that

everyone seems to know everyone so a lot of story dialogue is banter in varying degrees of playful versus vicious between both likely and unlikely combinations of servants and there’s a lot and i mean a LOT of care put into specific interactions. if two servants even remotely have an opinion on each other there’s special dialogue for it, and I even picked up unique dialogue for when archer acts as support troop for cu which no doubt means it exists for other combinations too (altho that’s not subtitled so i dont know what they’re saying there i could just tell it was the usual bickering because of the tone lol). some servants have unique win quotes from hakuno, she calls gilgamesh by his nickname ‘gorgeous’ for example. servants will sit around your home base and have a default line to say but sometimes they have lines that refer to each other instead. compared to how barren extella was, link is overflowing with the sense that these people have lives outside the current conflict and se.ra.ph is a thriving and vibrant world for them to live in

there’s a scene where karna and arjuna use their noble phantasms against each other in mutual destruction and it fucking RULES

[ravenwolfie97]

1, 6, 20

What music have you discovered or listened to lately?

- Honey, you already know you finally broke me to listen to A Picture Perfect Hollywood Heartbreak, and I thank you for that. There’s also HYDE who I had just started listening to not long before that.

What movie(s) always comforts you?

- In all honesty, I really don’t watch movies. I have a lot that I like, but I don’t have one that I regularly go back to, and I haven’t even watched one fully since the quarantine began (except when we watched Spirited Away i guess). Steven Universe is my current all-time comfort and the Movie has probably been the last one I’ve seen, even though it wasn’t for too long.

If you had to recommend ONE video game, what would it be and why?

- The World Ends With You. Great art, great music, excellent dialogue, and just a very fascinating world and plot. It’s also fun to play because you just mash the touch screen until you win lol (technically the arrow and face buttons are also used for combat but you don’t have to use them and i don’t bc it’s too distracting) :p