#i do not like the live2d version though. looks REALLY off in a REALLY bad way

[nanjokei]

what are your fave mobile games??

to be honest i don't really play that many at the same time but ill talk historically, it makes the most sense anyway. btw this got really long

OG show by rock - one of the most fun mobage rhythm games EVER, the portait orientation 3 button setup looked deceptively easy but it has some of the most evil, vile beatmaps ive ever seen in a mobile game. AND THAT'S CRAZY!!! never gonna forgive sanrio for killing it and making its successor a shitty bandori clone (og sb69 was bound to die anyway bc it had insane rarity creep, but the cheap seeming bandori clone successor that didn't even have half the original bands at the time of EoS two years into launch was a huge slap to the face). the art in the cards was so much more charming than the ones in the new game, they weren't bad but you, me, her, he, them, everyone, we all KNOW what had more soul. i think the only thing the new game had over the old one is the interactive aspect via the homescreen live2d. also cause yasu was in it

fate/grand order - still my forever game, its a game where i dont feel pressure to do anything, you can use anyone you love. i can stop playing for weeks and come back and not feel an insane sense of FOMO which is an issue with a lot of newer mobage. i think a lot of people outsource their opinion on fgo exclusively from negative opinions which makes me kinda sad. the story is great, you can pick up the game at any time, and to those who find that kind of thing important: farming gems is easy. i say give it a shot yourself. ofc there are questionable things given the original source and its origins, not to mention the premise. but i do believe that despite its flaws i think people should reevaluate it fairly and not base it on the time they downloaded NA for 10 minutes and didn't roll an ssr right away after 20 rolls.

mahoutsukai no yakusoku - i'll be honest i have chosen not to play the game properly until an english version comes out bc i do not want to play a clicker in a language i am not very proficient in. HOWEVER. unironically one of the best stories i've read in mobage history, characters are great, i think it has wide appeal and the devs seem to understand that "joseimuke" paradoxically is something that can be enjoyed by all kinds of people (also it is a series that is kind to both fujoshi and yumejoshi. coexisting peacefully afaik). super recommend the story if you like magic, worldbuilding and interesting characters!!! bunta is a great writer. im a fan of idolish7 as well so i can vouch (also you can select your protag's gender which isn't crazy but in a game like this, i super appreciate it)

#compass - horrible game don't play this

love live school idol festival - i want you idol twitter and adjacent cunts to put respect to her name. RESPECT. SIF has never gotten her flowers from any of you facetious little slimeballs and you can deny it all you want but not only was this the blueprint but it also was probably what got you into the things you like in the first place. in a world where every other rhythm game is a bandori clone, i smile knowing SIF2 will keep the spirit of SIF alive (hopefully). the cards were cute, mu's discography is certified classic and anyone denying it in 2023 hates fun, and despite how archaic it was and its MANY flaws, i believe firmly that it deserves respect not only as an idol game but as a mobage in general. it really broke ground being localized when it was.

nikke - definitely top 10 most shocking things of the century that i played this and am still playing. its uh, very flawed, the wall sucks and once you hit that plateau in power level the struggle to catch up to content power walls is kinda depressing, but it has a lot of heart that keeps me logging in and talking to my girls. it's still unabashedly horny (though its a trick actually, a lot of the characters are more covered up than expected and it REALLY pisses a lot of the game's fanbase off), but i'm really enjoying the story. i think my pleasant surprise is so insanely high that it deserves a spot on here-- i think if you let it cook it mostly won't disappoint you. i love most of the characters :) korean kamige

argonavis AAside - i miss you. argonavis still lives, so i do not mourn what is living, but dabues was a special little game because it did not contain the evils of bandori. the gacha was fair, the spark ceiling was 100 rolls(!), but it was mismanaged from the start, fuck dena. im sad the new game will be a clicker but i will be there for argonavis no matter what. was pretty much what garupa should strive to be in terms of A GAME but unfortunately such days do not come to pass.

honorable mention cause its EOSing soon probably and im too bitter to talk about it positively rn given the current shitshow the jp version is in (ily global): vanguard zero, also megido72 because i only started playing it in december but im enjoying it a lot so far. i guess dream!ing also gets a mention. i will not elaborate

this is a postscript but i've played a lot of kusoge for tapjoy rewards and let me tell you. people playing regular well known japanese/korean/chinese mobage do not know the shit and crap that comes from the dregs of the play/app store. you do not know what a kusoge is until you've grinded earnestly and faithfully in shit like state of survival for an entire month. after those experiences i have Truly learned what it means to be a shit game

[blacksurvivalnostalgichanges]

William:Got third of green burns on my car yesterday.

Nadine:...third-degree?

William:No, it was just the third time Lenox roasted me while I was driving.

[lori-hime]

I haven't written much about what I've been up to lately, so here's some word salad updates~ 🥗

NijiGaku Anime

So I started watching the new LL. I hadn't been keeping up with SIFAS' story, but I did read some of it when it first came out. I gotta say, I'm really enjoying all of the changes they decided to make for the anime version of the story, to both the characters and story. It's starting to feel like something coherent. The story in the game was ok, but the main thing that interested me was the interactions with Muse and Aqours, overshadowing the actual "plot" and even Nijigasaki themselves. But the anime really made me interested and excited about the story and characters again. I would be a little annoyed about the personality and dynamic changes, but honestly, I'm used to it by now. LL always ends up doing this sort of thing, and the personalities only seem to become solidified after the anime airs.

A little disappointed in Kasumi's change in some vague ways I don't really feel like describing, but honestly it balances out because Ayumu is fantastic now (previously one of my least cared for of the group.) Yu's personality is surprisingly super gay fun and I'm really excited for her and Ayumu's dynamic in particular. They're so cute. Seriously feel like I'm gonna ship them hard.

I also really like Rina's initial personality in this. Not only is she bad at expressing emotions through her face, but she also seems bad at expressing them through words too. I feel like this is gonna be much more interesting than her already being cutesy and genki like in the promo stuff and SIFAS.

When Karin was first shown, I had mixed feelings. At first I was like oh god I'm gay and she's beautiful. But the whole sexuality flaunting thing kind of put me off for several reasons I don't really wanna get into explaining. I really didn't know how to feel. I started liking her a little more during SIFAS, when she competed against Muse in DDR and lost... started feeling like I was getting a glimpse of her real personality without the whole sexy idol persona. Although not much has happened in the anime with her yet, she's giving me Nozomi vibes and I love it. I actually think if I had gone into this without previous knowledge of the characters, I'd be betting she'd become my fave for sure.

My list has gone from Kasumi > Rina > Kanata / Emma > Karin > Ai > Setsuna > Ayumu > Shizuku to Yuu > Ayumu > Kasumi / Karin > Rina > Kanata / Emma > Ai > Setsuna > Shizuku

Still biased a bit towards characters that have shown up more in the first two eps, so it'll undoubtedly change. But It's really interesting how much the characters I already felt I had good placements for changed so much.

Edit for episode 3, because I didn't post this fast enough. Student council speedrun was fantastic. Yu continues to be incredibly gay. I wonder how this episode will affect the ships people will gravitate towards. LL has always been a fairly monoship fandom, heavily gravitating towards specific pairs. Of course that's largely the fault of canon itself, often pushing and developing single ships. Well, I suppose we saw a big change with Aqours, though, especially with season two. But even then, the ships tended to stay at least between girls of the same year (aside from my rarepair, shout-out to YohaRiko.) Now, I wonder. From the very beginning, before Yu even had a name, it felt like they were really pushing the shippy stuff @ the viewer. I wonder if that’s still gonna be the angle. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it yet. I really want to see more YuAyu rather than YuSetsu, but I can't really be mad at more gay content unless they try to make it a DEEP story and then fail to resolve it but haha they'd NEVER do that, I'm sure!!

As for the others... I'm guessing they're gonna push RinAi, KarinEmma, YuuKasu, and maybe YuuShizu? My original guesses were that AiKarin would be a thing, evoking NozoEli v3. But I guess that'd be too predictable a third time. KarinEmma sounds like it could be cute and sweet, RinAi feels like it has adorable potential, and YuKasu vs. YuAyu sounds like it could have some good comedic rival-y potential, given they don't make Kasumi super serious about it and make it really angsty. Not that a cute idol show would ever do such a thing haha!!!!!

Higurashi Gou

Also started Higurashi. I doubt many people know this, but I used to be a major Higurashi fan before I got into Touhou. It was my main "fandom" I guess, even though there wasn't really that much of a fandom to interact with comparatively. Anyway, despite that, I didn't think I'd get into this remake super hard... but I'm really loving it so far. The art style is really pretty and eye candy, and it turns out it's a direct continuation of the story rather than a remake. Very excited to see where it's going, and also to see a lot of my baby Rena again.

An interesting difference to me as I'm rewatching are my feelings for Keiichi. While I don't hate him, over the years I've really grown tired of the generic male leads (especially in harem anime) like him. Of course, he's definitely not AS generic as they come, or maybe perhaps that's just my bias from when I used to really like him. The me back then found him unique enough to stand beside the girls. Nowadays, I definitely can't say the same. At least he doesn't grate on my nerves as much as most other harem anime protags do, however. I feel like despite lacking the quirks that make the girls so likeable and unique, he still has something going for him... perhaps the fact he's framed as inherently different from everyone else, because he comes from the city, and the way he acts a bit more realistically to the scary things that are happening. Although those things are obviously explained away later, at least for now I still accept him for what he is, old bias or not.

Genshin Impact

Been playing Genshin Impact religiously and loved every second of it. Though I've caught up with the main story content, so sadly it's slowed down. I'd never heard of this game before it came out, so I was absolutely wowed that such a game was f2p. I've heard a lot of people criticizing it because they added gacha in at the last minute, and I definitely understand being annoyed through the pov of someone who was anticipating it. But part of me is still really thankful that the game is free at all. I suppose that full but paid 60 dollar game would still be a better experience, but because of my non-existent budget situation, I may not have ended up playing it at all.

Aside from the arguably shitty monetization practices, however, the game is fantastic. It really is as similar to BoTW as people have mentioned, and I really appreciate that. BoTW, from a gameplay standpoint, is absolutely my favorite game. It's exactly what I want from any given game. So I really appreciated this. The story and characters of Genshin are also really interesting. I really like Qiqi, Venti, Fischl, and Xingqiu, among others. I spent a while rerolling for Qiqi or Venti 5*s, and eventually got an account with Qiqi. Venti on the other hand I've been trying to roll for but sadly haven't gotten. I have 1 roll left before the banner ends, so hopefully.. My friends whaled him for me. I swear I tried to stop them! I owe them my soul...

HoloLive, Pikamee & Vtubing

I briefly started getting into HoloLive a little while ago. After the Aloe stuff, I started worrying a bit about how the company handles these situations as well as the girls' freedoms and how much of their donation money they actually get.. (I made a post about it a while back.) After a while my worries died down a bit, but then came back full force with the Coco and Haachama situation. After that and one too many uncomfortable sexual jokes, I decided to just distance myself from HL. It's a shame, because I really enjoyed their personalities, but it was making me feel uncomfortable more often than not.

I told myself it’s fine, I’ve got Pikamee if I ever feel like watching vtubers again. And then like a week later... Well, it’s not really something I wanna talk about here, but she made some posts on twitter that made me too uncomfortable to continue watching her either.

On a much lighter note... A friend of mine showed us how to use prprlive and facerig to use the Touhou CB Live2D models, and Asa and I played around with Mokou, Kaguya, and Lyrica’s. It was quite fun, and I do look forward to using the Kaguya one for private streams on one of my servers. I’ve actually always wanted to try out vtubing stuff myself, but not really publicly. Of course, the costs for getting a model drawn and made specifically for me are too much for something I’m not really committing to, so this is perfect. I’m excited~

Touhou Cannonball & Kagura Thoughts

It’s been a long time since I talked about Touhou CB on my blog, and I’m pretty sure I left things on a pretty bad note. Mainly dissatisfied with Mokou’s portrayal for pretty shallow reasons on my part, despite they game having just started and having a lot of room to grow. And grow it did. While I quit pretty early in because of that, Asa decided to take over my account. She realized that it was pretty easy to upgrade any given character you had to a 5* without having to rely much on the gacha. She ended up playing a lot with the goal of upgrading everyone we had. I came back to it around July and actually had a lot of fun with it. The cast had gotten much bigger and we really enjoyed playing on multiplayer. It wasn't the best game ever from a gameplay standpoint, but it definitely had it's charm. The announcement of its death, although unsurprising, came at the worst time. Asa and I actually cried a little when we saw the announcement, ngl. The game had such good, wholesome, Touhouy vibes to it. Nonetheless, we made the most out of the last month or so after the announcement. We played a LOT of multiplayer and had a lot of really cute and good interactions with other players. Near the end, we realized that Lyrica was the only character from the normal banner we were missing, so we grinded like crazy (mostly Asa) to try to get her... we ended up getting a number of 5*s but none Lyrica... she eluded us to the very end. It was quite sad, but how hard we worked for it still felt satisfying somehow. We were able to max out our multiplayer level and complete a ton of goals we wouldn’t have otherwise.

So after this bittersweet experience with Touhou gacha, and all the scummy things I've been hearing about Lost Word, I've been thinking like... I'm done with Touhou gacha, at least for now. Don't wanna hear anything else about it for a good while. And then the 25th anniversary hits and they announce Kagura. Ugh. Please, give me a break. Needless to say, I'm gonna have to give it a try. Touhou is my life, I love rhythm games, I love Touhou music, and I love character collecting games. And I've been waiting for something to replace SIF gameplay in my heart for a long time. I'd banked my hopes on SIFAS but it's really barely a rhythm game so.... at least now that I've gone through CB's death and seen how cruddy LW is, I'll have lower standards and not get my hopes up too high.

If you got this far, thanks for reading my rambles and have a good day~