#gbf is too grindy

[stellamarium]

a post in which i talk about why i like lunaliya (my current self-insert's character/ design) + her journey to how she came to be her current self

this got longer than expected, so i'm putting it under a cut

Initially, I started out with just using OCs specific to each fandom (ex. Phaenna for GBF and Serafina and Serenity for C/ode V/ein (characters/ designs I no longer own)). The one OC I stuck with for the longest time was Alice for F/ire E/mblem (created June 2018)

Alice was basically "me", both in terms of character and design. At the time, I mostly/ primarily self-shipped with just Alfonse, so I kept her for three years before moving her into storage.

Eventually, I kind of started losing interest in FEH (it got too grindy for me). I dipped my toes into a few fandoms like G/enshin, C/ode Vein, etc.

I didn't like the idea of making new OCs every time I got into a new fandom (too much effort(?) + I get anxious(?) if I have too many OCs bc it starts to feel like clutter to me for some reason)

In the end, I ended up making Liliana (no longer owned; created August 2019) to be a multi-fandom OC.

She was completely different in which she still retained some aspects of who I am, but for the most part, her character and design were different and separated from myself.

I didn't stick with her for too long though, and I didn't particularly felt as attached to her.

I then made Stella (created October 2019) who was kind of a self-insert OC but also kind of a mascot?

I liked her design and the art I did of her fullbody, but because I used her as a mascot, I couldn't really stick with using her for self-ships too. It felt too embarrassing(?)

Some time later, I then designed the first iteration of Lunaliya (previously named Avi; created April 2020)

I wanted to go back to using "myself" and making her a self-insert rather than another "OC", but I really hate how I look (even if pretty-fied and anime-fied, I don't think I would look appealing), so I came up with this compromise of having her use a veil.

It was... kind of hard making art of her with a veil though since it limited expressions, and I didn't like that, so I wanted to redesign her, bringing her to her current design iteration.

I don't remember when I first made this redesign (my files say the earliest is Feb 10 this year, but it could have been earlier), but the thing I like about Lunaliya is that she's this nice balance of "OC" and "self"

The hair gradient is actually similar to when I got an ombre look for the first time (using the same colour too), and I really liked how it looked when I got it. I also just really like dual-toned hair on characters in general, so I stuck it on her, even though I no longer colour my hair due to costs/ lack of commitment to manage it. The baby hairs are something I have too, and I'm almost always blowing them away lol

As for her eye colour, I just like the look of gold eyes (or rather, I like the colour gold as an accent). My eyes are a dark brown (that they almost appear black), and I genuinely hate them. So I gave her eyes that I don't hate (':

I decided to give her makeup bc... I like makeup on characters. I like having more colours to play with on their face lol. I don't wear makeup myself though.

In terms of body type/ shape, yeah, it me. I think the only thing I'm proud(?) of when it comes to my body is that my legs (and arms) are long. In terms of skinniness, I'm skinny but like... almost unhealthily so. I'm very "bony", meaning my bones are very predominant/ visible, so parts of my body like my clavicle, knuckles, etc. are very distinct.

In terms of character, she's... relatively basic? And by that, I mean, rather than trying to stick to "one character", I like to change it up depending on the fandom she's in. Like in T/wisted W/onderland, she tends to be more snarky/ playful, whereas in O/bey M/e, she's more shy/ reserved. She still keeps certain aspects (like being formal/ polite for the most part), but she's really more like a "blank slate" that I can mould into whatever I want to fit whatever narrative I want for the fandom I'm chucking her into.

So anyways, the reason why I like Lunaliya so much is because she's a good balance of "OC" and "self", meaning I don't feel too "separated" from her, but at the same time, she isn't too closely similar to myself that I end up inadvertently hating her.

Lunaliya is parts "actual self", "idealized self", and "I think it'd be interesting to add this to her character", and I like that. I want people to associate that design with me (or at least, me when I'm self-shipping lol).

It genuinely makes me really happy whenever people tell me that think Lunaliya is pretty. Because I think her design is more basic compared to my other/ usual OC designs (like so:)

So to those who ever complimented Lunaliya's design and/ or called her pretty: thank you. You have no idea how happy that makes me. There are times in which I hold doubts as to whether or not her design is "too boring", so when people compliment her, I get all warm and fuzzy inside.

thank you for coming to my ted talk (and for reading all of this)

[novirp13]

Alchemy Stars x Legend of Zelda crossover~

Both of them are named Navi, but only one of them is an annoying lil...thing! 🤣

Seriously, shut the crap up, Navi! 😑

...not u, Navigator. You're a precious cinnamon roll 🥰🥰

This is the fourth game that I played because of Persona 5 collab event. God dang, I don't even like Persona 5 😅

[astrxealis]

question

how new player friendly is gbf?? you, cal, and belial are gonna drag me down the hellhole fr.../lh

hehehe >:)))

tbh it might be a bit confusing at 1st, but i'd say it's pretty new player friendly !! side stories give free characters (some ssrs even), in your first few days of playing you get 10 draws daily, there's a lot of freebies given out ... it might be a bit overwhelming tho w seemingly a lot of stuff going on, but yeah i'd say it's def pretty new player friendly !!

if u do end up playing gbf ... belial, cal, and i await in this lovely hellhole /lh 💪🏼✨ LDHWJDJAKKA ;D

[thessaliah]

Hey, I know you play gbf. I kinda want to get into it so i was wondering is it good story-wise and gameplay-wise? Is it any better than FGO? For me personally the story plays an important role for getting into franchise... but i also like how they handle life events (so different from fgo wow) and how they design their characters.. its good

Gameplay: It's far more grindy than FGO. A lot more grindy, but it's got a newbie campaign currently with the Demon Slayer collab (with 3 free SSR units that are solid) that helps you to set up Magna/Omega Fire. You pace yourself, join a crew who might help you, and just keep in mind there's no need to rush anything unless you really want to be competitive.

Music/graphics: The sprites are chibi-ish, but the artwork, and ost are impeccable. It’s a seriously good soundtrack.

Gacha/Characters: This is both better and worse than FGO. Worse because you need to have good summons and weapon grid and not just characters, but better because there's a safety net (sparking in a banner, tickets-including siero ticket you can purchase with 150 gold moons, that lets you choose anything including unsparkable units). The rates are better too, and there are campaigns of daily free 10 rolls sometimes (there’s one right now) and gachapin roulette (starts this 22nd). So this is a good moment to start. There's something for everyone here, although there will be more girls in skimpy clothes, there are Holiday male units including Summer, Christmas, Halloween and (last year) there was even a Valentine one. There are also free SR and SSR units in the sidestories (those are old events you can access), and broken grindable SSR you can slowly build known as the Evokers and the Eternals. You can see the character designs in those links.

Plot: The story is... hit and miss, it’s slow but the end of the first Arc and the beginning of the Second Arc it’s actually solid for a RPG. The setting is really great, a world made of floating islands you explore, that has a myriad of fantasy species. But it is even less updated than FGO lately, it feels like is stagnant and not going anywhere. Is this bad? No, because the real meat is the side story/events. This is a point that differs from FGO. Not all have the same quality of writing, but you can sort by themes, there are flavored ones following a certain group or characters. Including an endearing mecha parody trilogy (soon a new installment) called Robomi saga, the Society/Foe that is more sci-fi thriller conspiracy involving the Moon dwellers, the more high fantasy arc of the Dragon Knights (inspired by Arthurian Legends, Siegfried, etc but reimagined as original characters of the setting), some humor/SOL ones that do a recap of what happened until now (like the ones with the Lowain Bros), the ones who are about Alchemy (with Cagliostro and her disciple as usual protagonists),  and not forgetting the "event" that has cannibalized the main story and has become the actual focus on the A Team: the genesis/angel saga that began in the 2017-2019 anniversary Trilogy, What Makes the Sky Blue? and it is continuously updated after it finished in other events and also story-cut raids you can access like "Tower of Babyl” (if it’s too high ranked, you can see the clears in youtube). The video game Versus which is also a spinoff the angel/genesis saga. The genesis saga usually involves a huge cast crossover when it gets serious. Unlike FGO, you can access the events in the sidebar: Sidestory, some will ask requirements of completing the main story at a certain point.

I’m not sure if this is important, but there’s barely forced romantic scenes outside personal Valentines/White Day or character “Fates” (their interlude), the main story and events don’t really have that kind of pandering which I find more appealing (to keep that mostly to rolled  units if you really want to have it).

This is something like an extra, but like FGO belongs to a bigger universe, there’s a lot of Cygames previous characters (usually updated for Granblue setting) in the game, in particular, it derivates from Rage of Bahamut (as one of the many worlds made by Bahamut, but softer than ROB). It’s not necessary to know any of them beforehand, but just a heads up of why some “exported” characters might have privileges to be made SSR immediately.

[thetigerisariver]

I have managed to crawl to the level of understanding of gbf where I'm not constantly going "what the fuck is this shit". I am even begining to understand some of the ways to build a weapon grid... The way this game works is somewhat obtuse but now that I got into it I actually like it, even though the grindiness is too fucking much, sometimes.

I don't fully understand how to build a team exactly, but the wiki has been helpful and I'm here to play my faves, obviously.

[murasaki-murasame]

After a billion years of waiting, the 2nd anniversary digest is out, and even though it didn’t talk about quite as much stuff as I expected, the stuff it DID show off was extremely good on just about every level, and oh boy do I have some thoughts about it, lol.

I’m not even sure where to begin with this one, lmao. There’s so much stuff they talked about, and so much stuff they DIDN’T even talk about. Like how they didn’t talk about the October events and banners even though they’re teased at on the 2nd anniversary website, which I guess means we’ll have to wait longer for info on that.

we also didn’t get any info on a collab, but I assume they’re going to announce that at the start of November and have the collab itself release a few weeks later.

I’m kinda sad that they accidentally leaked out the existence of guns, but I still got to experience all the shock and surprise about it, so that was fun. I’m really surprised that they’re adding a new weapon type so late into the game. Especially since they don’t seem to be planning to retcon any old adventurers into being gun units, which means that they’re going to make up a super tiny portion of the pool. But I still really like how they work, from what we’ve seen of them.

It’s great that Joe got a new gun alt who everyone gets for free, but it really feels like they screwed him over by making him a 3-star, lol. He’s probably gonna get immediately replaced by any light gun units they introduce after this point. But it’s still nice to see him get some love. He was the perfect unit to go for to showcase the new weapon type.

All the changes to weapon and wyrmprints are extremely overwhelming, so it’ll probably be a while until I have an actual opinion on them. But thus far I think it’s fine, but we REALLY need the ability to save wyrmprint set-ups so we don’t have to spend so much time shuffling them about again and again.

It’s kinda sad that it’s such an eldwater sink if you want to equip the same print to multiple units, but it’s much cheaper to do that with event prints, so you can still fill your team out with some good prints. And on the other hand, this is actually why I’m fine with the fact that so many prints are almost identical now, since it means you have way less of a need to actually spend eldwater to get extra copies. There’s like 4+ different prints that all give 30% skill damage, so you’d never actually have a reason to bother getting extra copies of any of them, if you at least already had all these prints before this update. It does make it harder to keep track of if you end up using like 15+ different prints across a whole team, but still, the eldwater cost is more or less avoidable if you just use different prints with the same effects.

I think the weapon bonus thing is going to be the most grindy, long-term part of this update, but I’m cool with it. It gives everyone something to slowly work towards, like when you’re at the stage of leveling your dojos. The issue is that people will want to max their weapon boosts as quickly as possible, but it’s clearly not designed to be rushed like that.

It’ll all take a lot of getting used to, but I’m happy that they’ve drastically cut down on the amount of weapons in the game, and made the progression system more linear. Once everyone gets used to it and more people start playing the game after this update, it’ll become more natural.

We also got a bit of an overhaul to the textures and lighting/rendering for all the 3D models, which still feels like a really strange decision to me. It gives them a really different sort of aesthetic, and I have mixed feelings about it. I think if they made it a bit less ‘harsh’ I’d really like it, but at the moment there’s a bit too much contrast between the lighting and the shading, and the black outlining just looks a bit odd.

We also got the big adventurer balance change, and even though it’ll be a while before we’ve got all the new numbers and stuff for everyone, I already get the feeling that Vice is gonna end up way worse than he was before this. Which is sad, since outright nerfing people always sucks, but I get why they did it. It messed with the balance too much to have a 3-star be in like the top 3 for DPS units across the entire game. At the very least they gave him poison on his S1 so he can afflict that more often now, instead of it just being on his S2.

Just going by what they’ve said, and what we can see in-game, one of the really big changes seems to be how basically all of the healers except Grace now have strength buffs on their S1s, which basically all seem to be 15% for 60 seconds. Which is a really interesting way to make healers more relevant, but I like it. I think it doesn’t stack, so you won’t get as much buff uprime as with dedicated buff units, but it at least means they contribute SOMETHING to the team’s DPS.

One other notable change is how T-Hope now has a 15% strength buff on his S1, which makes it pretty much exactly the same as Patia. So that should make auto eCiella a lot faster, with how often he gets that skill off, lol. This was something I expected him to eventually get via a spiral, but in general a lot of stuff in this balance patch feels like mana spiral upgrades in all but name, which is neat.

Lots of characters also got more status punisher stuff, which should hopefully at least make more units stronger. Most of it’s all pretty self-explanatory, but it’s kinda interesting that Norwin is now a poison punisher unit. I guess it’s one way to make him somewhat relevant to the shadow meta, lol.

They also buffed the older gala units, which is great. At least this way they can put off on establishing the precedent of gala mana spirals, by just directly buffing the old ones. We’ll see how it turns out when all the exact numbers have been datamined, but it seems like they’ve addressed the main isseus with G-Mym, G-Sarisse, G-Ranzal, and G-Euden. 

I also noticed that they added defense debuffs to a fair amount of units, and made a lot of existing defense debuff moves land more often, so that’s interesting.

I’m also pretty excited to try out Pipple with this balance patch, since he now gets a 30% strength buff for himself with his S2. It at least makes it so that it’s always worth using whenever you can.

They didn’t announce anything about new endgame bosses like we expected, but it does sound like we’re still getting some eventually, and it’ll just come up later. Which is a good idea, probably, since we need some time to keep focusing on Agito stuff.

And on the note of the Agito fights, and current endgame content in general, I really like the addition of solo versions of all of them. For one thing it means a new wave of first clear bonuses, but it also means that you can pretty much entirely avoid co-op if you want to. The solo fights seem to give less rewards, but hopefully still enough that you can just stick to doing them exclusively if you want to. I haven’t tried any of it out, but it sounds like they’re all balanced around solo play, which should make it way more easier to do them than it was to try and solo fights that were designed for co-op.

It’s also kinda funny to me that even though they said we’re getting another tier of difficulty for the Agito fights, the only thing we know that we’re getting from it is fancier skins for the Agito weapons. They’ll probably still get stat boosts, but I could see them pretty much just being cosmetic upgrades.

They also upgraded the amount of weekly chests for HDTs and Agitos to five, and it sounds like we’re gonna start getting double drop events for them soon, so that’s great. In general I think this whole update will make it way easier to actually do endgame grinding, especially with the solo fights.

And then there’s the elephant in the room, which is the new battle royale mode. I haven’t tried it yet, but honestly I actually like the sound of it, lol. I absolutely never expected that they’d add something like this, especially since it’s effectively PVP, but it actually sounds perfectly fine. It’ll probably get tweaked as time goes on, but it sounds like you barely even get any extra rewards from it by winning compared to just dying immediately, and the whole mode is designed to have you start from a blank slate where you and everyone else are at the same playing field, so it’s basically entirely skill-based, and you don’t even need to be good at it to get rewards.

I wasn’t even sure how they’d handle PVP in an action RPG like this, but I think this is a good way to go about it.

We’re also getting a return of the time attack mode, which is . . . worrying, but hopefully now that people are much more familiar with both HDTs and Agitos, it’ll go by a lot more smoothly.  I’m surprised they’re even touching this concept again after how badly it was received the first time, but I’m curious to see how it goes. I know a lot of people really liked it, so hopefully it’s balanced so that you can ignore it if you want to, without feeling like you’re missing out on too much.

They also finally got around to adding sparking, which is great. I honestly wasn’t really expecting it at this point, but after the patch notes got revealed yesterday I figured this was probably gonna happen. I know some people would wish it had been introduced earlier, but I’m glad it’s finally a thing. I still don’t think it’s as much of a make or break issue for me as it is for others, but it’s still pretty much an objective bonus over the old/current system. My main concern with sparking, though, has always been that it might lead them to notably tanking the amount of summons we can do each month as F2P players, which would cancel out the good parts of sparking, but I doubt they’d do that.

Either way, it seems to work in exactly the same way as GBF, in that each summon gets you a unique bit of currency, and when you get 300 of it, you can trade it for a featured unit of your choice. But also like with GBF, your sparks reset after each banner and turn into different items that you can exchange at a store for regular in-game items, so your 300 summons all have to be on the same banner, and you can’t just accumulate a spark by summoning across several banners. Though one thing that seems to be different to GBF is that summons done with diamantum give you twice the amount of sparks, which is really interesting, since it really cuts down on the amount of money you’d need to spend to get a spark that way. It’d still be super expensive to do an entire spark just through diamantum, but 150 summons with diamantum is still way cheaper than 300, lol.

If they keep our monthly summon income about the same as it’s been thus far even after they add sparking, I think that we’d be able to do a spark every 6-8 weeks just from event and log-in bonus rewards. At the moment we get around 150-200 summons per month just from all that, so it seems like it’ll be WAY faster to save for a spark than it is in GBF [where outside of specific holiday periods that have free summon events you’re probably looking at 4+ months of saving to be able to spark].

This at least means it’ll be way easier to plan out my hoarding, since I know that as long as I have 300+ summons saved, I can at least spark a new unit I want. And there’s always the possibility of just getting them early and being able to quit while I’m ahead.

And on the note of summons, we’re also getting 330 free summons total between the anniversary and the end of October, which is absolutely insane. Sadly you can’t save up sparks across banners, so you won’t be able to do a spark JUST from that, but it’d go a long way to helping supplement a spark on a specific banner.

It looks like we’re gonna get a short pre-gala of sorts soon that’ll contain all the previous gala units, but I’m probably gonna skip that, outside of the free pulls. The only one I don’t have from that set is Gala Alex, and at this point I’d rather just chase her when she’s in a future gala remix. If it’s anything like the same type of bonus gala we got for the first anniversary, all the featured units on this banner will probably have lower than normal rates to make up for how many of them will be on the banner, so it’d just be a really low-value banner for someone like me who already has all but one of them. I’m also not even sure if I’d be able to get all the way to 300 summons that quickly.

Either way I’m more interested in saving for stuff like Halloween, Christmas, new gala dragons, and New Years.

We’re also getting Gala Zena on the anniversary itself, and I think everyone saw her coming, lol. She’s not a gun unit, though, which is actually a bit lame, even though I figured it wouldn’t happen. Her being an attack-type light staff unit is really interesting, at least if she ends up working like Heinwald, but I’m still not sure if I’d be interested in actually spending resources to try and get her.

The gala banner is also going to have the new girl from the anniversary event, and a Midgardsormr alt. Though it sounds like he’s going to be non-limited, so he’s not our wind gala dragon.

The anniversary event also sounds extremely interesting. It sounds like we’re time-traveling back 1000 years to when Ilia created her religion, and she seems to basically be a punk biker girl, which is extremely cool on so many levels. It also kinda looks like Zethia is going to be the MC of this event, and it might not even feature Euden and co, which would be a nice change of pace.

I thought Ilia might be our new welfare unit, but going by the preview image for the event it looks like it’ll be Mordecai, who looks like he’s gonna end up possessed by Morsayati or something, since he looks a lot like Morsayati’s human form we’ve seen a few times. I hope he’s a gun unit, just so we can get more of them, but we’ll see how it goes.

I’m guessing that Ilia will eventually be playable, but maybe just for the 3rd anniversary event or something.

We also got a tease at the next three main story chapters, which all look really interesting. It seems like the Archangels event is going to pretty immediately become important to the story, and now we’re heading off to North Grastaea. We’re also going to be going to the fairy kingdom eventually, which is cool, especially since the teaser for it heavily implied that Notte will become a playable character then.

Which also reminds me that we’re probably eventually going to get a gun unit from the main story, since we have all the other weapon types already, but I doubt Notte will be a gun unit, lol.

Going by the teasers, I also get the feeling that Leonidas and Chelle will be our next two gala adventurers, and at least one of them, if not both, will probably be a gun unit. I think one of the shots of Leonidas had a gun visible in it, but Chelle’s also apparently the one who introduced guns to the world, so who knows how that’ll turn out. At the very least they did say that we’re gonna start getting new gun units soon, and we might get a lot of them really quickly to help fill out the pool. Which also means that some of the new holiday units might end up using guns, so that’s also worth saving for.

I also get the feeling that we might take a break from gala dragons for a while, since we’ve basically run out of good options for them. But who knows. We still need ones for water and wind.

Hopefully with the spark system in place I’ll be able to spark on at least the Halloween and New Years banners, since those are my top two priorities, but we’ll see how it goes. It’s always scary to enter limited holiday banner hell season, but at least they introduced sparking right before it all starts. At the moment I think I’ve got like 150 summons saved up, but I’ve still got most of my reset co-op rewards to go through, and I haven’t touched the Halloween event they added to the compendium, so that’ll add a lot. I think the anniversary log-in bonus will also give us like 2k wyrmite, and if the retweet event succeeds we’ll get an extra 1.2k wyrmite. So as long as they don’t tank our monthly summon currency, I should be able to spark on Halloween if I can commit to saving for it. Which is much easier said than done, lol.

All in all I think I really love this update, but it REALLY changes the entire game, so it’s gonna take a long time to get used to. And thankfully even with the introduction of stuff like sort-of-PVP, it doesn’t look like they’re going in any sort of P2W direction with the game.

Also, there’s still the 45-minute Game Live presentation set to come later tonight, but I’m not expecting that to tell us much, since it’ll probably be targeted at new players. I’m still holding out hope for a Switch port announcement, though.

[cinnbar-bun]

hello! i’ve never done a matchup before and all the ones you’ve done so far have been really cute to read, so i hope this desc is enough! And I’d like this to be for GBF too! ))) I’m a short 5ft tall INTP Libra, I’m Bi but for this uh let’s stick to males for this! I’m really introverted and terrible with small talk, but I like making sarcastic/sly comments & stupid jokes/puns to make people laugh. I like moving at my own pace and can be stubborn as well. (1/2)

2/2; INTP libra person☆) I act aloof around almost everyone even friends, but I’m really observant and attentive to others when they look anxious/stressed (I’ve been called the Mom™ friend bc of this). Despite that, I’m actually very anxious/self-conscious of myself in public but I try to not show it;; As for hobbies, I like cooking/baking, shopping, playing grindy video games, and sight-seeing! I also really like animals and love spoiling them.

A/n: I’m back boooos!! Lemme just take my time trying to finish these 

I match you with Drang!! 

Drang is (quite literally) a sly dog who can’t help but double down at how cute you are! You reminded him a bit of Sturm, but over time he grew to love how caring you are. 

He is more of a bystander and prefers to look beyond the veil of what’s given, but he can’t help but want all your attention on him. You being the Mom™️ Friend makes him crave it more since you just love caring for him. He is very over dramatic whenever you do do anything nice, and always brags about he’s got the ABSOLUTE MOST CUTEST MOST ADORABLE PARTNER EVER AND IF YOU THINK OTHERWISE YOU ARE AN ABSOLUTE IDIOT. Sorry, just stating facts honey. 

Right away he saw through your facade and thought it was admirable and cute how you would try to present yourself as stronger. He doesn’t mind you being anxious, in fact, he brings up the idea of making secret codes that only the both of you know so he can help you if you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation. 

He also loves your sarcasm and jokes. He has plenty of his own so you two go back and forth, and he thinks of it as a challenge to try and change your mind if you’re being stubborn over something. Drang has plenty familial instincts and holds you as a high regard in his life. On the outside many might see him as overzealous and dramatic, but when it’s just you two he makes sure you’re pampered and loved. 

He enjoys sightseeing with you and since being with you rejects all other food if they’re not made by you. Sturm wants to strangle him because he INSISTS that this food will in fact, kill him, because you yourself did not prepare it for him so his body will physically reject it. She loves that you take care of him but MY GOD DRANG CAN YOU JUST DO YOUR JOB???

[magical-girl-anemone]

Me: “YEah i’m not that big of a fan of GBF. It’s really too grindy for my tastes and i much prefer playing FGO’s story than GBFs. no big deal.

GBF:

Me now:

[siodium]

new game new game~~~ (ﾉ ◉‿◉ )ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

yes yes it’s an otome VN

i find myself picking up VNs more than RPGs these days cuz they’re a lot less grindy??? i’m already grinding gbf (thanks endless magna fest) and mapes so games that don’t require much time or effort are more desirable atm

STRESS-FREE GAMES LET’S GOOO

also i picked up reading again!!! words don’t hurt me!! but my eyes become 3_3 afterwards

ANYWAYS this game is called bustafellows

i couldn’t find it up for preorder in any local store?? so i opted for the digital version (at this rate i may need to get a better SD card......)

the mc has the ability to go back in time in the body of another person for a short period of time which sounds like ✨ Potential ✨ idk it’s not the best idea to mess with fate so i’m curious to know which direction the game will take

the Boys have efficient money generating $$$ jobs (lawyer, hitman, plastic surgeon, coroner and underground bossNEET) and names (helvetica?? the font?? wHY)

i’m only at chapter 3 as of this post but so far it’s very lighthearted and i’m really enjoying the interactions between the charas

no romance is happening yet (i’m doing limbo’s route first) but we’ll see how it goes

OH OH this game is fully voiced too!! for the ppl who don’t like to read text!! even the mc is voiced O: incredible

[vr2]

*turn around in shorts that say its time for my fuckin opinion on the ass* hey sweaty read to choke on my bns hot takes for uh lets see here uh ... t-two thousand words....

first of all... im pretty easily entertained so if u fail to do that its so like something has gone horribly wrong. i can enjoy pretty much anything halfway decent and i hate nitpicking on shit. but nitpicking implies small problems and sometimes the problem is the whole fucking thing. but man the direction bns has been going in is like. it really be like that, it really be just the most blatantly boring and uninspired it could go and here’s my fucking video essay that i will not do you the honour of being read aloud since the force of my opinion would crush your skull like a grape if spoken in the real world. 

first of all. i generally didnt have a problem with act1 bns story, i honestly thought it had some cool characters, some COOL as fuck cutscenes and as a person that loves lore juice a lot of the characters held a lot of promise and the diary was a fun read despite being the absolutely worst most stupid way to deliver any sort of lore content.

the circular narrative, the tight ending and the callback to all the characters was pretty well-rounded, a little but hammy but adopting the hongmoon kids nad becoming the master of your school was pretty novel. i really felt like there were so many new places to go with this dynamic, like bns could do something new by giving the mc more stakes in other characters rather than being a complete wildcard drifter.

but they keep doing this fucking thing were they repeat story themes in a way thats become incredibly unwelcome. i can understand why npcs would become recurring characters, why certain objects etc are still relevant but the fact that beat for beat the endgame again is divine mandate, mushins there, namsoyoo in danger and someone gets killed off for the sake of idk tragedy i guess. 

i think the worse thing is that the game tries to be tongue in cheek about its tropiness and normally id be like ok cool but the tropes are executed just so fucking blandly and soullessly its kind of insulting like. they really absolutely did not fucking try in the slightest for this one. not at fucking all. 

ryu saying ‘oh it would be so bad if you passed out form poison at an inconvenient time’ and the obvious death flags from bunah and bunyang are incredibly grating when you have absolutely no fucking stake in the story, know exactly whats coming cause the writing repeats itself over and over and know the exact same beats. 

at the very least most people can stand tropey anime, hell you can even ENJOY it if you are absorbed into the world and characters and the tropes are executed well. but this story is wholesale just same fucking shit slightly different npcs. it feels like they tries to manufacture drama in the most blatantly cheap way and it really lets itself down. i could honestly see them killing ONE of the kids for cheap and dirty tearjerking but man all of them leaving you alone again with jsy is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo unebelievably lazy. we have entered asian tv drama levels but at least those are fucking interesting. even the dance number in this act was shit.

i think the most annoying thing is that bns is one of the first mmos i played way back when and i still genuinely like the game up to a point and i like the world and characters. im literally always moaning bout how they did fuck all with the eight masters but gave them the barest most tantalizing hints of interesting characterisation in the diaries. but i think that’s all you need. it doesnt need to be 24/7 ballz to the walls worldending tragedy shock tactics to be entertaining. it somehow feels like they played it so incredibly safe that they looped around and made the worst decision possible and i just really wish theyd hire just your random ass average fucking ln writer cause theyd at least make shit entertaining. like the long form story telling of a truple a game thats reaching nearly 10 acts now should definitely be better than this like. what a fucking way to drop the ball.  

now. my second bone to grind. tell me why they actively REMOVED? ALL SIDE QUESTS? what kind of game, especially an mmo would fucking remove its OWN lore? why would that make any fucking sense? especially for how lore-light this game is but how vast its world is like sidequests felt like the absolute BARE minimum way to furnish this admittedly underdeveloped world. they at least gave us that slight illusion of depth and some of them were even fun! interesting! i still remember the sidequest where you go on a ‘hostage rescue mission’ to save an npc’s son who was kidnapped by lycandi and the npc who fucking gave you the mission murders his own son in front of you cause he was bumpin with the lycandi like. it’s not fucking riveting writing but it gave some more context to the places you visit, it’s SOMETHING about the supposed people that inhabit the world and it clearly makes some places more memorable than just ‘cool sky desert’, ‘cool sky city’, ‘cool sky village’.

im vaguely aware that this was done cause it ‘confused players’ who thought they had to do blue quests to level up to endgame and firstable idk why bns pushes endgame as the only ‘good’ part when its like in my humble opinion really fucking boring. you know people play mmos for different reasons? not just to reach lvl 100 super tier omega hongmoon thornbuster breakre 5000 and be no.1 in pvp. just looking flashy and good combat isn’t really enough to compete these days. im guessing its a push to the esports scene but also like you really want to serve one side better by doing relateively arbitrary thing that fucks over pve ppl? like? 

also there ARE genuinely people interested in the world and content and story as exemplified by all the oc and various comics and even even some official webcomics like i honestly dont think nc at all in any way nurtures that side of their mmo nearly enough especially when you see how healthy and thriving ff14 and other communities are in their oc scene. the sheer fact that people still stuck around despite the experiene of playing bns being patently awfully optimised and an uphill battle in every single way is testament to the fact that maybe some people just genuinely like the game? gutting it is absolutely antithesis to that.

i actually cant wrap my head around purposefully deleting lore cause it makes ‘grinding to endgame’ too confusing like does the story take that low a priority? the fucking ACTUAL game and the story is less important than people mindlessly burning themselves out to endgame, grinding dungeons and buying lootboxes like you cant do in literally every other game anyways? why would you get rid of some of the only shit that makes your game even slightly different? like im not out here saying it was the most revolutionary great shit but at least the side quests TRIED to give a modicum of flavour to bns. like they at least attempted to add to all the zones and make them places rather than set pieces were story happens to you then you leave and never come back. it doesnt even have to be revolutionary amazing writing to do that it just needs to be serviceable to give even the slightest sense of depth.

but for some reason rather than idk. just tell people theyre just flavour text and theyre not compulsory or just toggle on/off the fucking blue quest markers you decide to fucking? nuke the already translated (which someone no doubt paid for), completely unintrusive, absolutely functional, if somewhat tedious sidequests? making the whole fucking game even MORE barren and lifeless? FOR FREE? what a fucking deal.

 i literally cannot understand this clownery this absolute idiot idea could only have been concocted by the specific brand of stupidity found only in corporate sales dept. but like i think its also emblematic of how this game has no creative direction other than make Money which is fucked cause theres genuinely many parts of this game that i enjoy from like characters, music, visuals theres A LOT of promise in bns even if it takes a lot of legwork to get to it. as much as people give htk shit he absolutely made this game what it is visually and thematically, the soundtrack fucking rocks, theres some solid characters and story elements, a lot of the game still holds up visually and som of it dare i say looks fucking good. give bns a try its free to play.

maybe ive just been spoiled by fgo and gbf and literally every other popular game ACTUALLY trying to write good shit. trying to give their readers lore, trying to make things genuinely ENJOYABLE as a game should be rather than a part time job. but man i always forget after act1 bns really reveals why its never broken out from being a midweight grindy mmo