Mobile Games, Gacha, Android/IOS games

[sheet]

The **** is wrong with gacha players? You play a "game" that requires constant credit card purchases and act surprised someone targets your credentials. You get what you deserve.

[Valter]

The **** is wrong with gacha players? You play a "game" that requires constant credit card purchases and act surprised someone targets your credentials. You get what you deserve.

Service games (which is what you mean with 'constant credit card purchases' games, which is not required but that's beside the point) nowadays are better than a lot of singleplayer ones because it's the most profitable model. Bad model, good games. And more devs will increasingly adopt this practice. Simple as, get with the times old man

[methoxetamine]

The **** is wrong with gacha players? You play a "game" that requires constant credit card purchases and act surprised someone targets your credentials. You get what you deserve.

Service games (which is what you mean with 'constant credit card purchases' games, which is not required but that's beside the point) nowadays are better than a lot of singleplayer ones because it's the most profitable model. Bad model, good games. And more devs will increasingly adopt this practice. Simple as, get with the times old man

I would quite frankly prefer to be put to the guillotine

[Finarfin]

The **** is wrong with gacha players? You play a "game" that requires constant credit card purchases and act surprised someone targets your credentials. You get what you deserve.

Service games (which is what you mean with 'constant credit card purchases' games, which is not required but that's beside the point) nowadays are better than a lot of singleplayer ones because it's the most profitable model. Bad model, good games. And more devs will increasingly adopt this practice. Simple as, get with the times old man

I would quite frankly prefer to be put to the guillotine

[Finarfin]

I'll admit that Gacha Games do have quite the quality and content to them but the nature of these games just puts me off and I can never really get invested. I would rather pay €/$140 for a Weeb-RPG than play a Gacha-RPG.

[sheet]

Opening the game and being prompted to spend more money is part of the game experience. Playing the game and being artificially and excessively hindered from making progress or improving loot via time gates or item rarity is part of the gaming experience. If you enjoy a game that has these experiences because... is there a plot? Is it anything with more depth than your typical anime fair? If you enjoy a game that has these user experiences, you are mentally a slave. In any other time period, you would have been better served as machine gun fodder in some dismal faraway warfront.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Opening the game and being prompted to spend more money is part of the game experience.

Sheet, have you even played the new generation of genre games talked about in this thread? You do not open Genshin Impact and get a pop up banner in front of your face. Timegating/paywalling story progression hasn't been a thing in well over a decade. Even Granblue didn't do that. Powerlevel only matters in the optional endgames that most people do not engage with.

You might want to consider reading the Honkai Star Rail review to get a grasp of what they are like now, though HSR does not have an open world like most of the other current wave.

is there a plot?

Yes. The quality varies. A lot of GBF's storylines are better than box purchase JRPGs and VNs I have bought, including mainline Final Fantasy games.

Is it anything with more depth than your typical anime fair?

Most of the settings and far more unique than what I see in your average box purchase anime game or in anime shows. GBF is made by ex-Final Fantasy talent and has a very creative world fleshed out by beautiful art. Haven't seen anything like that in actual anime in a long time, or a JRPG with environments that good since the PS2 Final Fantasy titles. Arknights was very unique with its moody atmosphere and tacticool and industrial aesthetic (I will soon come out with the Arknights artpost, there is too much great art to collate!). HSR is unlike anything else I have seen. And so on. It'd be easier to list the few high production value gachas nowadays that don't have things to write home about.

[Valter]

Opening the game and being prompted to spend more money is part of the game experience. Playing the game and being artificially and excessively hindered from making progress or improving loot via time gates or item rarity is part of the gaming experience. If you enjoy a game that has these experiences because... is there a plot? Is it anything with more depth than your typical anime fair? If you enjoy a game that has these user experiences, you are mentally a slave. In any other time period, you would have been better served as machine gun fodder in some dismal faraway warfront.

[DecadeRiptide]

I tried negerness to everness on pc and its exactly the same as every other game but performs worse

Had 43 FPS on "balanced" settings. There's unskippable endless cutscenes, there's those horrendous hit stops, and there's a furry character you're forced to play which was a bit shocking tbh (am I getting old?).

The combat was insanely boring. Just click anywhete on your screen and Ur character does stuff and doesn't really die.

Spent about 10 minutes and uninstalled. couldn't put up with the endless cutscenes and dialogue. I just want to play the ******* game. None of it makes any sense anyway, it's all just ridiculous made up anime stuff. Performance was just shocking idk what to say

Super boring. Idk how anyone can actually enjoy this kind of slop?

[Kalarion]

I've started playing Dragon Quest: Smash/Grow, it's pretty fun so far. It plays like Dark Cloud's expedition segments, going from room to room and fighting their mobs. You get blessing power from defeating them, which gives you temporary abilities specific to that run. The gacha is in equipment.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Himeko Nova has been officially announced. She has a mech? Does it only appear in an ultimate animation for a few seconds like Jing Yuan's Lightning Lord summon? Or will it be on the field for much of the time like with Pollux (if you weren't incentivized to immedietely blow it up)? The leaks say she has enhanced skills which suggests a powered up state or form, so maybe she dons the mech in her powered up state?

[Manny V]

any plants vs zombieheads?

[Oyster Sauce]

any plants vs zombieheads?

Reflourished is good

[logincrash]

I never actually play games on my phone, nor do I watch YouTube on it.
Had to waste some time in a waiting room today and decided to try out some games from the app store.
It's just a total niggerhell of ads. I have never wanted to snap my phone over my knee more than while being bombarded with an ad after ad.
Marketing people should be killed on sight. Don't even torture them; just put a bullet through the skull.

[Oyster Sauce]

I never actually play games on my phone, nor do I watch YouTube on it.
Had to waste some time in a waiting room today and decided to try out some games from the app store.
It's just a total niggerhell of ads. I have never wanted to snap my phone over my knee more than while being bombarded with an ad after ad.
Marketing people should be killed on sight. Don't even torture them; just put a bullet through the skull.

Mobile games became redundant when phones started being able to run PS2 emulators

[logincrash]

The Russian word for "Hell" is "ad." It's pronounced "ahh-d" and comes from the Greek "Hades," but it's still a little funny.

[Kalarion]

I never actually play games on my phone, nor do I watch YouTube on it.
Had to waste some time in a waiting room today and decided to try out some games from the app store.
It's just a total niggerhell of ads. I have never wanted to snap my phone over my knee more than while being bombarded with an ad after ad.
Marketing people should be killed on sight. Don't even torture them; just put a bullet through the skull.

Couldn't disagree more, public torture would make a great civic gathering time.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Honkai Star Rail 4.3

The Fate collab part 2 has been announced! Featuring Gilgamesh and Rin! Sadly Gilgamesh has been stripped of his golden armor, just like with Saber in round 1.

I was hoping that they were going to do Fate/Zero servants like Iskander and Diarmuid.





Gilgamesh and Rin Tohsaka are here

[Finarfin]

Guess I'll install it real quick.

[ManjuShri]

Brotato is f2p on mobile. The best Survivorslike in terms of my playtime on PC.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

New Granblue Fantasy: Earth-Sky Oath story chapters are out. Pretty entertaining. We are on our second island in the Ecksegrande Skydom and each island arc moves at a fast pace. Novelty in visiting new towns, meeting new characters, lots of jokes thrown out, the baseline level of the VA work is good, etc. The new cat primal, Matagot (voiced by Anri Katsu), was pretty great. Would be neat if he became playable.






There is a developing subplot featuring Sandalphon as he teams up with a Wolvir (one of the many new races that arrived from the underground Earthern realm below in the Grand Uplift). Sandalphon was oddly unvoiced. Apparently his VA, Kenichi Suzumura, is on hiatus due to his health.




The most intriguing part to of this new saga is the consequences of the Grand Uplift. We get to see a flashback where the Earthern realm people in the underground world felt the ground shaking and had to flee out of their houses right as the land they were on was throttled above and then impacted into the floating sky islands and got stuck together. All of their structures have been destroyed. So now the population of every sky island has suddenly jumped with these new, impoverished arrivals from below. Worse, a lot of them are suffering because of the change in climate. There is also discontent since they are pretty much forced to obey and live in Skydweller kingdoms, with their own lords being unable to hold power since their estates were destroyed in the tectonic movements. There are movements trying to figure out how to return to the underground world below, though they would have no homes to return to and would be in the same predicament of a refugee having to assimilate into another nation.

Some islands are doing better than others. On the new Ecksegrande Skydom island of Kreshstein, the Earth dweller arrivals that are having to build a shanty town on the edge of the island, far away from the developed center inhabited by the Sky people. Back in the Phantagrande Skydom, in the wealthier Valtz mining and metal processing city, the Earth dwellers are able to be better integrated into Tzaka's kingdom.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

HSR's 4.4 beta has gone live.

Himeko and her mech animations have been leaked.






They are now introducing combo attacks into the game with Saber + Gilgamesh and Archer + Rin. Mihoyo experimented with them in ZZZ with Ben + Koleda but never did that again.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Honkai Star Rail

I have finished the 4.3 story. Oddly, despite getting first billing on the key art, Blade doesn't actually do that much in this patch. The patch is about Himeko.

► Show Spoiler

This is the first in a very long time that all of the Astral Express crewmembers have been together (not counting the 3rd anniversary streamer event).




The first 1/3rd of the story was rather dull. This chapter is extremely exposition heavy but has poor audiovisual presentation as people stand around in an inn and talk about the deep lore backstory of changing Aeons and people who lived hundreds to thousands of years ago. But you have no visuals to attach to the characters/subject being talked about, which makes it a little difficult to retain who is who and who did what to who. Same issue I had with Gujian 3 when they are walking through the cave and talking about all of these long dead people, and I shortly dropped that game after that. Detective Ashveil's "deduction" of who dunnit is not as impactful as it could have been.




The middle of the patch is pretty neat. You hop on a boat and travel to the ends of Planarcadia where the artificially constructed reality/dreamworld is breaking down. At that boundary is a hotel/senior center for imagenae (the artificially dreamt up beings in Planarcadia), who are being forgotten by the people of Planarcadia. They go there to live out their last days before getting on another boat to cross the dream-reality threshold and completely disentegrate. The ideas and skits you glimpse are neat.








Apparently you can let the impersonator furbo die, which was neat. Off of the top of my head, I do not recall there being any other quests in this game that lets you pick between different outcomes like this.




I was not particularly feeling the aesthetic theme of Planarcadia, which was tacky retro/pixelart videogames and consumerist manga. I would have preferred for the more serious space Japan aesthetic we were promised before the Japan-CCP fiasco caused Mihoyo to scrap that and delay this 4.X expac to do a visual makeover of it. This is segment in 4.3 is the only time that the aesthetic has worked for me. Here they do the Toy Story thing where you have consumerist entertainment product characters who came to life, but their franchises are short lived and the people lose interest and move on from them, so the artificially created entertainment/toy being has an existential crisis.


We gotta see this at some point, along with the Washtopia.





The last 1/3rd of the chapter is once again exposition heavy about dead people who lived a long time ago, but better presented with visualization of the flashbacks. So it turns out that the Real Himeko is dead. Our Himeko is an imagenae who was created by the Real Himeko as an ideal version of herself before she succumbed to disease.













It is neat how the boss' ultimate is a perversion of the Astral Express.




Okay, so what is the exact nature of Our Himeko and her mech? What this 4.X Planarcadia storyline has established is that Imagenae are sustained by Wishpower, which is a phenomena native to Planarcadia. The Interastral Peace Corporation annexed Planarcadia and has spent a century and a half trying to replicate its Wishpower outside of that world to no avail. This is also very similar to the 2.X Penacony expac where the creatures envisioned inside the Dream kingdom of Penacony like Charmony Doves and the robo T-rex chef cannot exist outside of it. Furthermore, this 4.X storyline has been emphasizing how Imagenae creations eventually lose their power when not enough people continue believing in them, and eventually cease to exist when nobody is thinking about them or remembers them at all.

But Our Himeko boarded the Astral Express and left Planarcadia to travel around the universe 15 years ago. How is it possible she still exists outside of Planarcadia? Was Our Himeko able to conjure that mech at any time during the rest of the game? And how could she manifest a mech only she thinks about and believes to be powerful? In the 4.1 patch, it was stated that the will/beliefs of the population of Planarcadia as a whole was needed to give motion to a giant mech of that size.







If Our Himeko had a mech all along, why didn't she tell Welt? Welt would have immedietely wanted to come here to Imaginate a mech for himself ASAP.

Mortenax Blade is great mechanically. Like with Ashveil, he automatically makes any team he is placed in better. He places a zone that reduces all enemy DEF by 30%, and additionally increases the damage they take by 50%. It causes Blade to force taunt all enemies, and reduce his incoming damage taken by half. Also, he gains charges for his followup attack whenever he takes damage (easy because all enemies are taunted), or whenever a party member attacks an enemy. Also, if you have another Nihility character in the party (like Acheron), then he increases the party's ultimate damage by 75%. He synergizes very nicely with Ashveil who has a lot of followup attacks to juice up Blade with charges (and Blade juicing up Ashveil with charges) and Ashveil also having lots of damage amplification buffs and debuffs. You can also place Blade and Ashveil and opposite ends of the party formation to reduce the amount of damage Ashveil takes, since the latter is fragile.




My only complaint is - like with Ashveil - he only has 2 to 3 abilities you are going to be seeing very often due to how often he gets juiced up with charges and attacks. I am spoiled by Castorice and Phainon who had more abilities to look at, though Castorice was poorly designed and you are incentivized to never use her scythe + dragon claw attack and to just detonate Pollux immediately...

When Ashveil released, it was leaked that he, Mortenax Blade, and Aventurine SP would be a part of a 4 man team (4th member was then unknown). It has been leaked that Aventurine SP will be elation, and like Mortenax he has a trace that changes his kit depending on if there are other party members of a certain path present. My guess is that if he is the only Elation party member present, then he will somehow convert the frequent follow up attacks from Ashveil and Mortenax into Elation damage.

The leakers are saying that Aventurine SP releasing in 4.5 will have his Ten Stonehearts suit from the Myraid Celestia as an outfit. Mr. Reca is apparently coming down the line as a Remembrance healer and will be the sustain for the 4 amigos. Mortenax is an HP scaler and right now Hyacine (also a Remembrance healer) is the only healer in the game who increases the party's max HP and thus directly boosts Mortenax Blade's DPS, so I am guessing Reca might be able to increase HP somehow. Maybe he massively increases the HP of a single party member instead of the whole team like Hyacine.