#the game just feels so... grindy. even the dialogue. I think it needs a speed button

[throwaway-yandere]

imagine getting 3 whole wishes for anni,,,

what are your thoughts? i genuinely don't have any desire to return to genshin seeing the anni rewards, so what do you think?

😋 anon

I think haven't opened Genshin since I pulled Navia on the new year ngl. She's still not built. I'm sorry my daughter. I hope I get Stellar Reunion once I open the game on the new update ig HAHAHAHA

To be fair it's not really the anniversary since it's lantern rite, but I was under the impression that Hoyo prioritizes that more than the actual anniversary since it's a Chinese company. But the rewards are virtually no different from the previous years so I can't really complain too much.

However, it's the year of the DRAGON.

Rex Lapis, Archon of Liyue, has a DRAGON form.

I thought it would put more emphasis on him rather than Ganyu-Shenhe-Xingqiu skins haha. Is it weird I'm lowkey getting offended on Zhongli's behalf??? Probably. I just think he deserves so much more if we already set up that Yaoyao became playable since it was the year of the rabbit.

Gaming's cute tho. Maybe I just have an ENG VA bias since it's my boy Caleb but I'd try to play him. Other than that, I'm just not as excited. I waited for Cloud Retainer for so long but even though she's here now, I feel... virtually nothing. I seriously love Cloud and featured her having more screentime than Zhongli in a fic before. I wish there's something more that makes me want to continue playing but respectfully, none ;-;.

If you'd ask me which team of devs feel like they care for their players, it's the Honkai devs for both games no doubt. There are long intervals wherein I don't play the game yet I feel a lot more "welcome back"-ed, including the improved "resin" system. They just keep listening on how to enhance QoL and I appreciate them so much.

But take my opinions lightly. I like H:SR since I feel like it was a game tailor made for me. I have a preference for turn-based games (Persona, FE) and I enjoy H:SR's brand of humor, the latter especially.

[writingonjorvik]

Can We Discuss Passive Cooperation?

Another topic I can mostly discuss before the interview. Y’all, I promise it’s coming out soon. We’ve got one more person to hear back from, but with the recent outbreak and work from home situations, things will continue to get backed up. I promise it will be out soon, hopefully within the next week or two so you can listen while you run around doing Soul Riding. With that said, let’s get into this actual topic.

So if you’ve been following WoJ for a while, you know that I think SSO is lacking in providing on that MMO experience. And I also know statistically that that isn’t necessarily a popular opinion that folks want to see more. However, I think a lot of folks think when I say I want more multiplayer experiences, they mean content that’s locked behind having to PUG, and that’s not it.

Again bringing up GW2, one of the reasons I love it is because of its passive cooperation. There are a lot of ways that game encourages you to interact with others without needing to be in a group. Did someone die? You get experience for rezzing them. Is there a big event going on? Everyone participating gets experience for jumping in and helping. Want to do a meta? Just follow the one commander willing to give instructions and you’re good. That doesn’t mean GW2 gets it perfectly. There are plenty of folks who can be standoffish in more difficult content, but overall, the game has a really solid passive cooperation built into its PvE and reward players for playing together, without locking off a lot of its content by forcing them to.

And that is what I want to see more of from SSO. Right now, the only really supported co-op mechanics are all PvP, which in a lot of ways goes against the laid back vibes of SSO. Other co-op activities, like picnics and the disco, have only gotten minimal updates over the years. By in large, the only other co-op scene is role plays, and that’s got its own can of worms. Not that it’s bad, but it can be a little bit to get into. There are very little incentives to interact with others, to include that a lot of players want a block all option, something I hope doesn’t get added outside of maybe a reduce players loaded bar of some kind. This is supposed to be an MMO after all. While it would be nice in photo mode, it’s supposed to be multiplayer.

So, what are some ways SSO could bring more cooperation without forcing people to interact? Well, here are just a few suggestions to get folks already in groups and out of groups to interact more:

1. Quest Support

I think while SSO’s story should always be soloable, I think having extra dialogue options for bringing a group with you, particularly for people who like SSO canons where there are multiple chosen ones, is fun. It also adds a much easier way to help other players find hidden objectives if you can actually see their quest goals too, even if you can’t complete it for them. Things like being able to catch hens with friends or help them get their fish for the day are all options that would make some more grindy options more tolerable. Also, with the new quests building in this “candidates” potential, I think there’s more room in the narrative for other powerful druids.

2. Championships

I know I just said we don’t need more PvP content, but championships really need an update. I’ve talked about this before and in the interview, but I really feel like these need an update to feel rewarding again to do, and also combat small groups of players dominating these races.

3. Kudos

Something else that got brought up in the interview, so here’s your little sneak peak for now. Was suggested there is some kind of system where you can give kudos to a player for being helpful. This would be particularly helpful for encouraging players to help out newer players, to host events, and generally be a chill person. Potentially could be linked to some kind of reward, like the team can review players who got a lot of kudos in a month and give them rewards, or as a recommendation for future ambassadors and moderators.

4. Dungeons

I am only going to talk about this very briefly, because I have a full post planned on this topic and it’s in the interview, but I think some kind of escape room dungeon system would be amazing, particularly if some kind of instruction pinging system were added to the game.

5. Team Competitions

Ok, again with a PvP suggestion, but I know folks had hella fun in the old SML meet-ups where we did team competitions or club competitions. Even if it’s just 2v2 to fit in the current group system, that would be great. And I imagine clubs would have so much fun with that system, or dressage teams if we could ever make our own courses in game.

6. Events

I already talked about this in events and I’m sure the system is catching up, but what if during the Yule Goats, everyone collecting the goats built towards closing a portal? Like, there are still the basic ones as there were before, but repeating the whole day, every 15 minutes, another group portal opens up and everyone in the area needs to bring 10 babies as a whole effort. There’s no talking required, and it adds another source for a relatively grindy currency.

7. Other systems I’ve already suggested

Imagine getting to collect crafting supplies as a group. Imagine running around with friends to find the things you need to finish your home. Imagine a neighborhood system in Jorvik City for housing and getting to go see your friends’ homes in game. Imagine a daily login rewards system where doing group races is an option. Imagine these systems in game.

8. Co-op collection

Combined with the pinging section mentioned above, I think there should be a collection you can only get with friends, like that one star near Forgotten Fields. I think it should be separate from the stars, so there are these soloable collections, but there’s also this one you can do with your friends. Maybe they’re a little more challenging, or precursors to a bigger system (like a dungeon system), but I just think it would be cool. Even better if it’s replayable, so you can play it again every day for a small reward, and also so you can go back and help new folks gather them too.

9. Club Collections

Riding clubs so desperately need an update. But like, what if there was something to do while you’re in them? What if there were club only collections to unlock and/or upgrade the club hall? What if there were tools for making club races? What if riding clubs just got an actual update after SIX years? Look, I think this is just an underloved feature and I want to see it updated.

10. Community Objectives

I loved the “get to this many races” social media thing SSO did. I think they should do that more often, though with a variety of challenges that can be measured in game and don’t require social media. If there was a bi-weekly or even monthly goal like that, to get the community to get on and engage on something frequently, it’s more likely then that people will connect. It is technically co-op, on the biggest scale and I just think that would be amazing to see more of. 

11. More Fox Hunts

Another topic I recently brought up, the fox hunt. Y’all, I loved this and doing this was the most engaged I felt with the community since the first batch of stars. I want to see more of this moving forward, with loads of hidden achievements put in to encourage the community to get out there and look for secrets and work as a team with different skill sets. Just, there’s something amazing about seeing the community come together for something like this, and I love it.

12. Incentivizing Co-op

I think another thing SSO doesn’t do well is actually encouraging people to play co-op. Doing races in a group doesn’t provide any reward outside of achievements and champ rewards. There’s no reason to go back and do races in a group outside of maybe getting pictures in the circus. I know this gets into balancing economy, but having some kind of reward for actually doing group races would be a great way to encourage people to actually do those over just soloing the races with a group, like how most people will do group training. Like double horse exp, or a shilling reward, or something that makes doing a race in a group worth it outside of...bragging rights? Even if these were like, temporary tonics you could buy, like lures in Pokemon Go, but for horse exp, that would be something. I guess this depends on how competitive you are, but there’s not really a reason mechanically to get you to do races this way.

13. New Race Modes

I know this is another big system one, but imagine the Cloud Kingdom race with friends. Imagine the chaos of everyone bringing Shires to block everyone’s view of the race. Imagine a very basic item system with like a knockback, a stop, and a speed boost (all things already in the Cloud Kingdom race) as magic items. I suggested a full on 5v5 magic training race in the finale of SSL’s map which I still think would be amazing to teamwork out closing the seals and getting out while the other team hunts you down to run out the clock. Just like, these things would be amazing.

14. PUG Menu

I think a PUG menu is vital to not only easily finding groups to say do collections with or get help with quests, but also to get club and role invites out of Global. Why advertise in Global when you can just open the PUG menu and find or make an open group? It just organizes it a lot better, and it would probably cut down on spam.

And I’m sure there are a dozen more, but until I think of them, what are some of the things that would encourage you to play with others? Do things like the Chaos Stampede encourage you to hang out with the community? Is there some kind of co-op content that would get you to engage more with new players? Be sure to let me know!

[afriendlyirin]

Yo-Kai Watch 1 review

Reposting this because I ran afoul of the link bug. @staff​ Fix your website.

Tumblr is a hellsite and I do not respond to comments here. Go to the blog post at Dragon Quill dot net if you want to comment.

I recently tried out the first Yo-Kai Watch game, out of curiosity for what the rest of the mons scene is doing.

My most important takeaway is that anyone who says Yo-Kai Watch is trying to copy or replace Pokemon has clearly not only never played the game but never played any other mons game either and probably thinks Pokemon has a copyright on the genre. The two franchises share a target audience, but otherwise they could not be more different. Yokai talk and are presented as distinct characters, yokai cannot be commanded, and most shockingly of all, the protagonist isn't silent!

As for the game itself, it is a godawful grindy mess that can barely be called a game. But it has some interesting ideas, and I enjoyed the creature designs.

There is basically no gameplay in this game. Yokai fight automatically according to a basic AI with no input from you, so you can quite literally win battles by doing nothing. (There is even a speed-up button to facilitate this.) The only actions you can take are to use items, cure their status ailments through an action-command minigame, activate their supermoves, and swap out your active and reserve yokai. However, the game is so easy that you'll rarely have to do any of that outside of boss fights. Supermoves can basically clear a regular encounter in one use, but regular attacks will usually hand you victory pretty quick too.

The befriending mechanics are even worse. I did not think they could make Pokemon's mechanics worse, but wow, after playing this I am amazed at how much I took for granted.

So, because yokai get to be treated like people, you don't recruit them by shoving them in capsules until they're too tired to break out. Instead, they have a random chance of approaching you after a battle and saying they like the cut of your jib, so they'll agree to be summoned by you any time you need them. This is very cute and raises far fewer questions than Pokemon's version. It is also absolutely terrible as a gameplay mechanic. You can do exactly three things to improve your chances: Throw food at them during the battle, use a yokai with a special ability that makes befriending more likely, and, very rarely, if the battle drags out long enough, you might get a befriending bonus as one of many possible random drops from an event that occurs in the middle of battle. You can only feed a yokai once per battle, you will only know if you've befriended them after the battle is over, and you can only befriend one yokai per battle (out of a possible three). There is absolutely nothing you can do to actively pursue befriending; there is no action you can take in battle that makes it easier like Pokemon's status effects, you cannot keep burning items to increase your chances, you can't even drag the battle out because yokai will attack automatically. To make this even worse, you can't even easily farm encounters like you can in Pokemon, as yokai only appear in specific spots and only one can appear there at a time (if one appears at all!). If you fail to befriend one yokai, you may not encounter it again for some time. (This was the case for me with Happierre, who the game seems to expect you to get quite early, but I never could because he only appears in one very tiny location and if you whiff it, good luck finding him again. Ugh.)

The yokaidex also has really baffling organization. Instead of being numbered by order of encounter like in Pokemon, each type of yokai has its own separate section of the list, and they're ordered seemingly arbitrarily. Your starting yokai is smack dab in the middle of the list, and I don't believe it's possible to encounter entry #1 until the second area. Yokai are also grouped by "family" like in Pokemon, except that the evolution mechanics here are extremely bizarre and inconsistent; usually you have to fuse two specific yokai (or sometimes, a yokai and an extremely rare item you may never even know exists cuz random drops lol), except very rarely you can just level them, not that the game tells you which is which. The game in fact encourages you to constantly replace your team because yokai all have tiered power levels like in Shin Megami Tensei, so you have no reason to keep an outdated yokai in your party long enough for them to evolve through level in the first place. It's just an absolute mess. What was the logic behind this, seriously?

To add insult to injury, they apparently looked at event pokemon and said, "You know what our mons game needs? More of those." There are an absurd number of yokai who can only be obtained through extremely rare in-game events and gacha machine results, and an even larger number who can only be encountered in the postgame. Seriously, I finished the game without even seeing more than half the total yokai. Why??? I genuinely could not believe the final boss was really the end of the game, just because I had barely scratched the surface of the dex.

So yeah. As an RPG, this was a huge disappointment, and as a collection game, it was a constant exercise in frustration and futility. I know Pokemon has lots of room for improvement, but wow, it's like they surgically removed everything it managed to do right.

As for the plot, it's more involved than most Pokemon games, but only just. Every quest is: Something happens that is obviously yokai mischief. "I know this is crazy, but hear me out: Could this incredibly weird and abnormal thing happening in a game called Yo-Kai Watch be happening... because of yokai???" says Exposition Fairy. You walk five steps/talk to someone who is very obviously possessed. "Aha, my Yokai Senses are tingling! A yokai is doing a bad thing!" says Exposition Fairy. "Oh, no, that's bad, we need to stop them!" says Generic Video Game Protagonist. And then you beat the yokai until they stop doing bad things. Repeat times 100.

Seriously, every single freaking time the protagonists are COMPLETELY SHOCKED that a yokai is once again the reason this NPC is literally covered in evil purple smoke because what is subtlety. Why do fantasy stories do this. Why. Stop wasting my time.

And yes, there is an uncomfortable undercurrent of "the spooky goblin man made me do it". Literally the tutorial quest is the protagonist's parents having a fight, and you solve it by beating up the "makes couples fight" yokai that's taken up residence in your living room. It's... okay for a simple kids' story, I guess, and maybe it comes across differently in a Japanese context, but yikes.

Then all of a sudden at the very end you learn that the Yokai Evil Chancellor, who evilly took over after the Good and Noble Yokai King died, is responsible for all the yokai acting up, so you go into the yokai world and beat him up to the tune of a Power of Friendship Speech™ and I could not care less because I was introduced to the guy five minutes ago. So we can't even expect RPGs to have moderately better writing than action games anymore.

They also make the very confusing decision to have a voiced protagonist, despite not giving the protagonist any personality or backstory or agency or anything that would justify giving him a voice in the first place. He is a completely ordinary kid with a completely generic protagonist personality. He either says exactly what I was thinking, in which case I'm just annoyed I have to read through redundant dialogue, or he says something very slightly different, in which case I'm jarred out of the experience because SCREW YOU GAME YOU DON'T SPEAK FOR ME. They don't even have a practical reason for it, because they have an exposition fairy! I thought the entire point of exposition fairies is to provide information a silent protagonist can't, but instead it just means every cutscene takes twice as long because I have to sit through my avatar metalgearing everything the exposition fairy says.

I wonder if they originally were intending to go with a silent protagonist, but changed it at some point for... some reason?

The silver lining here is the yokai themselves. It is... really the only redeeming feature. The yokai all have absolutely delightful designs, and because they don't have to be ostensibly bound by real ecology, they can go completely wild without it feeling out of place. Thanks to the fact they talk and are treated like real characters, I'm not at all bothered by how many of them are human-like, and nor do we have to ask the question of where they're getting their tools and accessories. But the animal yokai are wonderful as well, and despite how varied the designs are they all felt like they had a clear, consistent aesthetic. I really enjoyed discovering new yokai and analyzing all the little details in them.

And yes, I thought the punny names were hilarious. Because the overall tone is less serious than Pokemon, they can have so much more fun with them without it feeling like breaking character. I particularly got a chuckle out of "Heeheel" and "Fishpicable" -- the fish yokai in general were on-point.

Additionally, though the actual plots of the quests are deep as puddles, I did enjoy how many of them used yokai in such varied ways. In addition to stopping yokai who are influencing people to behave badly, there are also quests where you need to bring in a yokai to influence someone positively, such as giving someone the motivation to do something they're apprehensive about or discouraging someone from an unhealthy obsession. Several quests even involve using a yokai you had to stop in another quest. There's even one where you use a yokai to influence someone, only for them to take it too far, requiring you to stop the yokai you summoned in order to put things back to normal. It certainly raises some interesting ethical questions that the game could have acknowledged a bit more than just in that one quest, but overall I thought it was a clever use of the concept and did an excellent job of reinforcing that yokai aren't just a purely negative force, but a part of nature we can coexist with.

So many of the mechanics I complained about really do make sense from a lore perspective -- the game completely avoids the ethical quandaries raised by Pokemon, and I never at any point felt like I was exploiting my yokai partners or doing anything selfish, even despite the same "gotta catch 'em all" element. Yokai explicitly consent to joining your team; you recruit them by paying attention to what foods they like and showing you are willing to make a real sacrifice to provide for them; and there's none of that stasis capsule nonsense either, yokai friends basically give you the equivalent of a calling card and are only summoned when you need them. (You can actually talk to several recruitable yokai who have fixed hangout spots in the city, which I liked.) Similarly, it makes sense that you shouldn't be able to control their every action. These things just happen to be really unfun game mechanics. But it does make me think that Pokemon could stand to take some lessons from this franchise... just not the ones they actually did. Stop trying to steal their aesthetic, Pokemon, your distinct brand is what makes you strong.