What game are you playing?

[wndrbr]

Oh and btw:

► Show Spoiler

[Breathe]

I think those "Suckless" guys are onto something, software is getting more and more bloated every year and that includes game engines. The entire fate of the AAA industry relies on Unreal Engine, and that means Tim Sweeney/Epic calls the shots. IF Unreal Engine 6 fixes the myriad of issues 5 has, I'm sure it'll be at the cost of something else.

Someone needs to bring down UE right now. I hate looking at it.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I am continuing Honkai Star Rail

► Show Spoiler

I saw that the current banner for Hyacine was clocking out, so I decided to do the free trial. It was a team with Remembrance MC (pet class), Castorice (woman with a scythe who summons a large fairy dragon), Hyacine (magical girl/princess with a little unicorn pet that can deal damage and heal), and Ruan Mei (woman with a lute). Wow. The quality of the ability cutscenes - both the camerawork and the animations and the effects - is spectacular, especially when you have autobattle turned on and you are watching these happening back to back. It's like watching one of Ufotable's 30 second ad commercials for FGO due to how fast everything is happening.






The first three of these characters also have pets, effectively doubling the amount of characters you get to look at, and to me the more the merrier. So I decided I want to get those three pet characters. Sadly I missed the Castorice banner, but I lucked out and got Hyacine on my very first 10 pull.




So now I just need to wait for the Castorice rerun (hopefully in a couple months), and then maybe I will have reached Amorpheous by then and have unlocked the Remembrance path for the MC. Only question is who to fit into the fourth slot. Would be neat if a fourth Remembrance/pet class character (hopefully a man) gets released, maybe one who can tank with the pet. Or maybe I will just go for that Lucilius clone Phainon releasing soon, since he has spectacular animations too.

I am trying to understand and upgrade Hyacine, but now I have run into the same issue I had with Genshin's and WuWa's interfaces. I open up the character page, click on one ability or trait or relic and then I am met with several paragraphs of text filled with word salad. I have to constantly flip between tabs and menus to understand what these word salads are referencing, and I have forgotten what I have just read. On one of the menus, there is an option for a "simplified" description of an ability, but it is hardly better. This is insane. This is the same issue with WoW where you either need a PhD to understand parse all of this paperwork and legalese or consult out of game tl;drs on the forums (hope there aren't any reworks that invalidate the info online!), but not even WoW or GW2 ability and item tooltips are this lengthy. Not even card games are this unintelligible.











This is a lot of paragraphs and tabbing back and forth between menus just to say "Hyacine has a pet, she can heal, and her pet will automatically deal AoE damage based on how much healing Hyacine has done and the combined max HP of the party".

It also does not help that all of these effects are abstract and only exist in menus. It is not like the Legion expansion of WoW where you can get legendary boots with effects on them that you can take on and off of your character, or getting a legendary ring or cloak that causes a visual effect on your character to occur when the effect activates.


I have noticed that the game is using THEY and THEM for the gods/aeons. At first I found this be a little confusing, wondering if it maybe it was some sort of nonbinary agenda thing. But now I am thinking that maybe the localizers are actually trying to refer to the gods/aeons with a capital letter pronoun, like how we use He and Him for God.



However, aside from Argenti, literally no one in the game so far - be it story characters or background NPCs - appears to be devout, be it attending a church or temple (non exist) or talking about how they are going to pray to their god for help or perform a ritual sacrifice or talking about how they don't want to dishonor their lord, etc. Trails is almost as secular with the world ostensibly worshipping Aidios and yet none of the characters go to Church or pray or think about Aidios when contemplating drastic measures, but at least there were churches in nearly every town. So here it feels like the aeons are a complete nonentity in the lives of the people, which makes the use of capital THEY and THEM strange when there isn't enough fervor to support it.


The night time delves of Xianzhou look very nice with the fantasy purple sky, the floating platforms and skyskiffs over white clouds, the skyline backdrop, etc.










It is disappointing that any cutscene movement that is not people standing around and talking happens in a compressed pre-rendered cutscene, so you can't take higher resolution screenshots.

What do her horns do? Are they soft and fleshy? Can they break off? Why haven't I seen anyone else walking around with fleshy horns and a thick fish tail?




The story is pushing the ever insidious "immortality bad, living a short life full of suffering is good!" mantra that you see a lot in Japanese popcult media. No, immortality is not bad. It was the original state Man was intended to be in before the Fall, and is the state he will be restored to. It is living forever in a Fallen world that is that is hell. The writers are secularists who do not want to accept that men and the world have fallen and that they need to be restored.

These ceramic or wooden fishbowl robots are neat.




"Cohabiting"?




The Pacific Rim/mind meld sidequest was neat.

The deer boss looked cool.






It is odd how Dan Heng story wise is in another party in a different pocket dimension city/delve elsewhere on the worldship, but in gameplay he is still right here fighting with me in my party.

You can hear the anguish in the faceless knights' voice.






I am pleasantly surprised that there are timed, missable quests that become inaccessible upon main story progression in a live service game. I am struggling to recall this happening elsewhere.




Wait, Bailu and Dan Heng cannot have children? Darn, that really is a sucky race to be born as.




The cult cell infiltration sidequest was neat, one of the few instances where the writing and voice acting was good enough to carry interest in spite of the mediocre presentation of characters standing around yapping and a far away zoomed out camera.

[Roguey]

Finished the White Lion and Black Witch DLC for Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children. I saw a number of Steam reviews say that it's tuned for powergamers so I dropped the difficulty down from easy to story and yeah, it was still very demanding. I was still making it through the missions in one go until I got to the penultimate one where it's 2 versus 40. Failed over and over again, ended up grinding xp through my failures to get them both to the maximum level, finally managed it (though even then I had to reload a checkpoint twice on that last try). With the last mission I decided I had had enough and used the graciously-provided in-game cheats to make it through it on the first attempt.

Didn't care for the gameplay, writing was just as long-winded and clumsy as the base game, my primary motivation in completing it was acquiring CGs of hot cartoon babes.






Nevertheless, I will not be buying Crimson Crow even though it adds another babe. Steam reviews say it only gets harder from here and yeah I'm not going to pay them for the privilege of punishing me like some masochist. Maybe I'll find the motivation to watch an LP.

[Rasheesto]

Bleach: Hanatareshi Yabou (PS2 Emulated)

Simple turn-based RPG that follows the anime story with some small additions here and there.

► Show Spoiler

Kubo is unforgivable for ruining one the best couples in shounen.

[Tweed]

Currently playing Dead Rising 2.

Unlike the first game, the sequel was made by a different studio (this time from Vancouver, not Japan). It's kinda mid, feels like those formulaic horror movie sequels that repeat the same beats as the original, but with different actors and in a different setting.

Again you're in a small open-world area filled with crowds of zombies, again you must survive for three in-game days (plus one in a bonus chapter) while rescuing survivors. The survivors are repeated (there's one guy who refuses to follow you until you give him some food, an old lady that requires you to carry her, etc), the plot beats are repeated (there's an intrepid reported that says "fantastic" upon snapping photos, you get to visit the underground tunnels, at the end of the last day the military arrives and starts shooting at you, etc etc), the map is different but the overall structure is very similar (multiple areas interconnected with each other via an open-air park area and a shortcut in a bathroom), character progression is the same.

The only new features are co-op (didn't play it) and craftable combo-weapons. Combo weapons are lame, because they make other non-combo weapons obsolete, and because it's hassle to craft them (they get broken after a few hits, so you must re-craft them again). I ended up playing through the whole game only using a baseball bat with nails and a pair of bladed gloves because the infinitely respawning crafting components were located next to the safe room.

Another problem the game has is that the new devs had to use a different engine due to the first game's engine being documented in Japanese. For some reason they couldn't re-create the same game feel, so DR2 feels sluggish and weightless in comparison to DR1. Main character moves like in slow motion, guns feel lame now, zombies fly around like they're made out of cardboard instead of flesh, hit detection is worse. The mocaped animations also have less oompth to them (DR1's animations were keyframed by hand, and felt very good and energetic).

They developed it under the supervision of the Japanese team which is why it didn't turn out as bad as DR3 or the disaster that was DR4, but yeah, it's a lot sillier and closer to Zombieland than Dawn of the Dead. The only craftable weapons worth making are the knife gloves and blambow anyway. The redneck snipers are probably supposed to be reminiscent of the sniper family in the first game, but of course that also had to be turned up to 11.

Off the Record is better and runs better.

[Irenaeus]

Finished the White Lion and Black Witch DLC for Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children.

(...)

Didn't care for the gameplay, writing was just as long-winded and clumsy as the base game, my primary motivation in completing it was acquiring CGs of hot cartoon babes.

Okay, who replaced the original @Roguey with a normal guy? Reading this post I had to look out of the window into the sky, the mountains, the sea, take a deep breath and make sure I wasn't hallucinating.

[wndrbr]

Off the Record is better and runs better.

yeah, I knew that Off the Record is the better version of DR2. But my inner autist said that skipping the original game would be gay, so I played the original and ended up burning myself out of trying the improved release.

[Roguey]

Okay, who replaced the original @Roguey with a normal guy? Reading this post I had to look out of the window into the sky, the mountains, the sea, take a deep breath and make sure I wasn't hallucinating.

Playing a game on the easiest setting while complaining that it's still too difficult is on the Post-Retirement Roguey Brand. And I've always liked attractive cartoon women since my age was in the low single-digits.

► Show Spoiler

[Oyster Sauce]

Okay, who replaced the original @Roguey with a normal guy? Reading this post I had to look out of the window into the sky, the mountains, the sea, take a deep breath and make sure I wasn't hallucinating.

Playing a game on the easiest setting while complaining that it's still too difficult is on the Post-Retirement Roguey Brand. And I've always liked attractive cartoon women since my age was in the low single-digits.

► Show Spoiler

Have you tried Our Red String?

[rusty_shackleford]

gross, l*sbians

[Finarfin]

Bleach: Hanatareshi Yabou (PS2 Emulated)

Simple turn-based RPG that follows the anime story with some small additions here and there.

► Show Spoiler

Kubo is unforgivable for ruining one the best couples in shounen.

Haven't watched Bleach but do you mean Ichigo X Rukia ?

[Roguey]

Have you tried Our Red String?

Don't like the art style or the crudeness of the hardcore scenes.

gross, l*sbians

All these women are only Just Friends with each other.

[Rasheesto]

Haven't watched Bleach but do you mean Ichigo X Rukia ?

Correct.

[GhostCow]

Haven't watched Bleach but do you mean Ichigo X Rukia ?

Correct.

They were never a couple and there was never a hint of romance. People who are butthurt about this are deranged.

[Oyster Sauce]

Haven't watched Bleach but do you mean Ichigo X Rukia ?

Correct.

You might as well make a new account right now if you're planning on sticking around unless you want to be known as Rajeeshto

[Finarfin]

Haven't watched Bleach but do you mean Ichigo X Rukia ?

Correct.

They were never a couple and there was never a hint of romance. People who are butthurt about this are deranged.

Rukia seems to be the better character tho

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Haven't watched Bleach but do you mean Ichigo X Rukia ?

Correct.

They were never a couple and there was never a hint of romance. People who are butthurt about this are deranged.

I remember from the anime that I felt like Rukia and Ichigo were supposed to become a thing, with her living in a closet in his house, and ofcourse her taking central focus in Ichigo's life. bringing him from the dreary mundane world into the supernatural world where his life has more meaning, where he belongs. Orihime felt like someone Ichigo knew, but not someone he loved. But it was Rukia that Ichigo set out on a dangerous infiltration mission into the Soul Society to rescue, the objective of a 30+ episode long quest fighting numerous powerful foes and possibly becoming a hunted fugitive running from the Soul Society for the rest of his life. And then for Rukia, Ichigo clearly means much more to her than almost everyone else in her life given that she stuck around living in his closet rather than returning to the Soul Society at the first opportunity. Also, orange hair + black hair looks better than orange + orange.




I also felt that aside from maybe the archer guy (I think his name was Ulquiorra?), none of Ichigo's mortal friends really mattered, be it in the narrative or to him as much as the other Soul Society villains and officers did. I felt that Ichigo had much more of a brotherhood going on with Renji than he did with Chad. So Ichigo's mortal friends are kinda left behind in their own circle, and I thought that out of them Orihime would have done best with Ulquiorra. Also, black + orange looks good.

[GhostCow]

That's not really have romance works in real life. Ichigo and Rukia were just close friends and nothing more. There was never the slightest hint of romance or attraction. Orihime at least showed that she had a crush on him a few times throughout the series near the end. Kubo just isn't a very good writer and is especially bad at romance. Most shounen writers are. Toriyama was somewhat famously bad at it.

[Rasheesto]

They were never a couple and there was never a hint of romance.

Incorrect. Even if you didn't notice the obvious, it was also revealed pretty early that Rukia had feelings for Ichigo. At best you could argue that it was one-sided but even then there was too much teasing throughout the anime to actually believe that.

You might as well make a new account right now if you're planning on sticking around unless you want to be known as Rajeeshto

Whatever

Rukia seems to be the better character tho

Naturally, it was no coincidence that they had such a great chemistry, was pretty obvious that the initial plan was for them to end up together, but of course the flat-chested heroine will not win against the big-chested one, at least that was the case a decade ago, other popular shounen followed the same pattern.

[GhostCow]

They were never a couple and there was never a hint of romance.

Incorrect. Even if you didn't notice the obvious, it was also revealed pretty early that Rukia had feelings for Ichigo. At best you could argue that it was one-sided but even then there was too much teasing throughout the anime to actually believe that.

Post a clip from the manga or anime that shows this

[A Chinese opium den]

Jannies, segregate the thread please.

[methoxetamine]

Jannies, segregate the thread please.

It's not our fault the west can't make a good game to save their ******* lives

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Zenless Zone Zero

Taking a break from my HSR playthrough to check out ZZZ. Bring some eyebleach. Ye have been warned!

► Show Spoiler

I was browsing through art on Pixiv when I found this illustration for ZZZ. Seems like Mihoyo has become the Chinese Blizzard and people who play one of their games will play and draw fanart for their others. The panda guy caught my attention, and when I looked him up it turns out that he is a playable character! He is currently on banner. So I decided to check out ZZZ, hoping to get enough premium currency to grab him.




Hrm interesting 90s/early 2000s flavor with the fat TVs and the VHS tapes.




It is frustrating how the game immediately launches you into a long cutscene sequence without allowing you go into the options menu and switch to the Japanese dub.

Interesting that they are doing lots of comic CG slides for the cutscenes. I wonder if they have one or two people drawing these fulltime.










The game "lies", and makes a good first impression with the much more animated intro cutscenes than the sterile Genshin/HSR/WuWa character animations, but for some reason the devs are still weaving in compressed, prerendered cinematics that aren't being rendered by your machine at a higher resolution for better screenshots. And it is not practical to play this game on mobile for reasons I while get into later. And then as the game goes on, you get less and less of those much more lively animated cutscenes and get more and more people statically standing around yapping.

Once again, we can pick the gender of the MC. The girl's face is very cute. Too bad the rest of her outfit is dumb. Also, I don't create women protagonists.




Not a fan of the MC wearing a dumb t-shirt rather than a more dignified button up shirt. Shame there is no visual character customization in these 3D Chinese gachas so you can better tailor the experience. But here with the way he is posed and is animated and the way he is voiced, he at least feels like he knows what he's doing. The Genshin/HSR/WuWa characters were so statically animated it was hard to glean much from them besides being methodical.




I like how the camera zooms in to give us closeup shots when talking to NPCs.




Why does one of the heroes look like a prostitute?




Interesting. The MC does not go out adventuring, but instead sits in a chair at home and connects his mind to a remote controlled body like Reeve in FF7 or Avatar.








The platforming sections where you control the rabbit drone/robot are a neat way to spruce up the experience. I like the cartoony animations on the robot.




There are some Tales Of-esque skits with 3D character models statically facing the camera, but this time there are character screens cutting in and out of the picture like in a Tomino show.




They are improving upon the HBS Shadowrun thing where there is a fake internet with some things to click on and read fake news articles or fake forum threads.






Well I browsed through the gallery of all of the playable characters released so far, and only found two cool designs, both being the bears. To fill the third slot, I would pick the guy with the spike/piledriver thing on his arm.








Otherwise, the rest of the roster looks like a fashion disaster. There are some dubious character designs in here. God forbid someone walk in while you are playing this game while these characters appear onscreen. There is no way you could play this game on your phone in the lunchroom (how much mobile data does it consume?). You would have to walk out of the building to where you car is and play in there.












At first glance I thought that this "guy" was a girl.











There is a problem with the character gallery menu, which is that the background is black/grey, but you have characters in black clothing being imposed over that background so it is hard to tell the two apart.


Oh boy, it's yet another bazillion different materials I need to level up/upgrade my characters.




Wandering around the city section.








Nice, I got the acceptable 3rd slot character on my first regular banner 10 pull. Unless he was a scripted giveaway for new players.




Wow, I got Pan Yinhu on my very first premium banner 1x pull. So I can just save my premium currency for the Ben rerun at the end of the month, and then I will have a full team of characters I like.




There is a neat sidequest type where you control a virtual character who is hopping from TV screen to TV screen like some sort of top down game, going through mazes and looking for treasures.




Okay, I spent a lot of time rereading the tutorials and doing the tutorial missions and reading through Pan Yinhu's walls of ability and trait text. Once again, these Chinese game devs make very long winded and overcomplicated explanations for what should be very basic Ys action combat. You have your normal attack, your special attack, and an ultimate ability. You can either dodge or press RB when a mob flashes to dodge/riposte, with the RB button having a party member attack too. There are three elements and using the correct element against a mob will deal bonus damage. And there is an Anomaly thing I forgot. And then for Pan Yinhu when you press the Y button for his special attack, you actually have to either press it 3 more times to use it up or press RB to swap characters and he will automatically use the 3 charges.

Got Ben on my 3rd 10x pull of the normal banner using the freebie Master Tapes, so now I have a full team of people I like. Pick the wolfman butler from the free S rank selector.

Example of combat. Note that I am playing using the bears who are the slowest characters in the game (both slow movement speed, and longer attack animations = less button presses required), and it is still too fast for me. If you play with the "normal" characters like the sword wielding girl Anby, the gameplay is ludicrously fast.




Welp, I sunk several hours into this and I think I have seen enough for now. Don't want to play more. I won't uninstall it right away but I will be resuming HSR for the foreseeable future. First, the game has usual issues. Big managerial problems where you have to tab back and forth between far too many different tabs and menus to collect your tidbits of premium currency, or to check out those red exclamation point ! alerts, characters having an obscene amount of text and nouns for every single ability and trait they have rather than being written like a normal description for an action game character's controls, lots of running around to the next cutscene where characters stand around and yap statically, etc. I cannot recall any memorable music. It's going for that weird cartoony retrofuturistic 1990s/early 2000s punk vibe that Drift City in 2007 did, but at least that had some neat tunes too. The vast majority of the characters are pretty hard to look at, being overdesigned or having awful outfits. You still have that unimmersive gameplay of having a "party", but you are really alone playing by yourself with your allies not fighting alongside with you, and the gameplay incentivizes you to do that immersion breaking instant swapping of characters to use their special attacks on cooldown (or in this case, once they have regenned enough energy).

The action is a little more kinetic than Genshin's, but if I were to play an anime action game then I would rather play a real one like Ys or Nioh where I get all of the characters for my box purchase and don't have to put up with a bazillion mats or managerial issues or lots and lots of running between cutscenes to watch characters stand around and yap in a boring way.

ZZZ has a much more coherent way of handling the dissonance that happens in these 3D Chinese gachas where you are adventuring with a party in the story, but since you didn't buy them from the gacha they are not with you in gameplay. In ZZZ, the MC is not doing any adventuring or bonding with the party members. He just hires the random gacha characters and has them form a party, and then they go do a mission his behalf. But this isn't really innovative. Prior gachas where you played as a commander like Azur Lane also did this.

[methoxetamine]

Zenless Zone Zero

Taking a break from my HSR playthrough to check out ZZZ. Bring some eyebleach. Ye have been warned!

► Show Spoiler

I was browsing through art on Pixiv when I found this illustration for ZZZ. Seems like Mihoyo has become the Chinese Blizzard and people who play one of their games will play and draw fanart for their others. The panda guy caught my attention, and when I looked him up it turns out that he is a playable character! He is currently on banner. So I decided to check out ZZZ, hoping to get enough premium currency to grab him.




Hrm interesting 90s/early 2000s flavor with the fat TVs and the VHS tapes.




It is frustrating how the game immediately launches you into a long cutscene sequence without allowing you go into the options menu and switch to the Japanese dub.

Interesting that they are doing lots of comic CG slides for the cutscenes. I wonder if they have one or two people drawing these fulltime.










The game "lies", and makes a good first impression with the much more animated intro cutscenes than the sterile Genshin/HSR/WuWa character animations, but for some reason the devs are still weaving in compressed, prerendered cinematics that aren't being rendered by your machine at a higher resolution for better screenshots. And it is not practical to play this game on mobile for reasons I while get into later. And then as the game goes on, you get less and less of those much more lively animated cutscenes and get more and more people statically standing around yapping.

Once again, we can pick the gender of the MC. The girl's face is very cute. Too bad the rest of her outfit is dumb. Also, I don't create women protagonists.




Not a fan of the MC wearing a dumb t-shirt rather than a more dignified button up shirt. Shame there is no visual character customization in these 3D Chinese gachas so you can better tailor the experience. But here with the way he is posed and is animated and the way he is voiced, he at least feels like he knows what he's doing. The Genshin/HSR/WuWa characters were so statically animated it was hard to glean much from them besides being methodical.




I like how the camera zooms in to give us closeup shots when talking to NPCs.




Why does one of the heroes look like a prostitute?




Interesting. The MC does not go out adventuring, but instead sits in a chair at home and connects his mind to a remote controlled body like Reeve in FF7 or Avatar.








The platforming sections where you control the rabbit drone/robot are a neat way to spruce up the experience. I like the cartoony animations on the robot.




There are some Tales Of-esque skits with 3D character models statically facing the camera, but this time there are character screens cutting in and out of the picture like in a Tomino show.




They are improving upon the HBS Shadowrun thing where there is a fake internet with some things to click on and read fake news articles or fake forum threads.






Well I browsed through the gallery of all of the playable characters released so far, and only found two cool designs, both being the bears. To fill the third slot, I would pick the guy with the spike/piledriver thing on his arm.








Otherwise, the rest of the roster looks like a fashion disaster. There are some dubious character designs in here. God forbid someone walk in while you are playing this game while these characters appear onscreen. There is no way you could play this game on your phone in the lunchroom (how much mobile data does it consume?). You would have to walk out of the building to where you car is and play in there.












At first glance I thought that this "guy" was a girl.











There is a problem with the character gallery menu, which is that the background is black/grey, but you have characters in black clothing being imposed over that background so it is hard to tell the two apart.


Oh boy, it's yet another bazillion different materials I need to level up/upgrade my characters.




Wandering around the city section.








Nice, I got the acceptable 3rd slot character on my first regular banner 10 pull. Unless he was a scripted giveaway for new players.




Wow, I got Pan Yinhu on my very first premium banner 1x pull. So I can just save my premium currency for the Ben rerun at the end of the month, and then I will have a full team of characters I like.




There is a neat sidequest type where you control a virtual character who is hopping from TV screen to TV screen like some sort of top down game, going through mazes and looking for treasures.




Okay, I spent a lot of time rereading the tutorials and doing the tutorial missions and reading through Pan Yinhu's walls of ability and trait text. Once again, these Chinese game devs make very long winded and overcomplicated explanations for what should be very basic Ys action combat. You have your normal attack, your special attack, and an ultimate ability. You can either dodge or press RB when a mob flashes to dodge/riposte, with the RB button having a party member attack too. There are three elements and using the correct element against a mob will deal bonus damage. And there is an Anomaly thing I forgot. And then for Pan Yinhu when you press the Y button for his special attack, you actually have to either press it 3 more times to use it up or press RB to swap characters and he will automatically use the 3 charges.

Got Ben on my 3rd 10x pull of the normal banner using the freebie Master Tapes, so now I have a full team of people I like. Pick the wolfman butler from the free S rank selector.

Example of combat. Note that I am playing using the bears who are the slowest characters in the game (both slow movement speed, and longer attack animations = less button presses required), and it is still too fast for me. If you play with the "normal" characters like the sword wielding girl Anby, the gameplay is ludicrously fast.




Welp, I sunk several hours into this and I think I have seen enough for now. Don't want to play more. I won't uninstall it right away but I will be resuming HSR for the foreseeable future. First, the game has usual issues. Big managerial problems where you have to tab back and forth between far too many different tabs and menus to collect your tidbits of premium currency, or to check out those red exclamation point ! alerts, characters having an obscene amount of text and nouns for every single ability and trait they have rather than being written like a normal description for an action game character's controls, lots of running around to the next cutscene where characters stand around and yap statically, etc. I cannot recall any memorable music. It's going for that weird cartoony retrofuturistic 1990s/early 2000s punk vibe that Drift City in 2007 did, but at least that had some neat tunes too. The vast majority of the characters are pretty hard to look at, being overdesigned or having awful outfits. You still have that unimmersive gameplay of having a "party", but you are really alone playing by yourself with your allies not fighting alongside with you, and the gameplay incentivizes you to do that immersion breaking instant swapping of characters to use their special attacks on cooldown (or in this case, once they have regenned enough energy).

The action is a little more kinetic than Genshin's, but if I were to play an anime action game then I would rather play a real one like Ys or Nioh where I get all of the characters for my box purchase and don't have to put up with a bazillion mats or managerial issues or lots and lots of running between cutscenes to watch characters stand around and yap in a boring way.

ZZZ has a much more coherent way of handling the dissonance that happens in these 3D Chinese gachas where you are adventuring with a party in the story, but since you didn't buy them from the gacha they are not with you in gameplay. In ZZZ, the MC is not doing any adventuring or bonding with the party members. He just hires the random gacha characters and has them form a party, and then they go do a mission his behalf. But this isn't really innovative. Prior gachas where you played as a commander like Azur Lane also did this.

Why do you play gacha? I can't wrap my head around it, I'd rather quit gaming forever than ever touch one

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Zenless Zone Zero

Taking a break from my HSR playthrough to check out ZZZ. Bring some eyebleach. Ye have been warned!

► Show Spoiler

I was browsing through art on Pixiv when I found this illustration for ZZZ. Seems like Mihoyo has become the Chinese Blizzard and people who play one of their games will play and draw fanart for their others. The panda guy caught my attention, and when I looked him up it turns out that he is a playable character! He is currently on banner. So I decided to check out ZZZ, hoping to get enough premium currency to grab him.




Hrm interesting 90s/early 2000s flavor with the fat TVs and the VHS tapes.




It is frustrating how the game immediately launches you into a long cutscene sequence without allowing you go into the options menu and switch to the Japanese dub.

Interesting that they are doing lots of comic CG slides for the cutscenes. I wonder if they have one or two people drawing these fulltime.










The game "lies", and makes a good first impression with the much more animated intro cutscenes than the sterile Genshin/HSR/WuWa character animations, but for some reason the devs are still weaving in compressed, prerendered cinematics that aren't being rendered by your machine at a higher resolution for better screenshots. And it is not practical to play this game on mobile for reasons I while get into later. And then as the game goes on, you get less and less of those much more lively animated cutscenes and get more and more people statically standing around yapping.

Once again, we can pick the gender of the MC. The girl's face is very cute. Too bad the rest of her outfit is dumb. Also, I don't create women protagonists.




Not a fan of the MC wearing a dumb t-shirt rather than a more dignified button up shirt. Shame there is no visual character customization in these 3D Chinese gachas so you can better tailor the experience. But here with the way he is posed and is animated and the way he is voiced, he at least feels like he knows what he's doing. The Genshin/HSR/WuWa characters were so statically animated it was hard to glean much from them besides being methodical.




I like how the camera zooms in to give us closeup shots when talking to NPCs.




Why does one of the heroes look like a prostitute?




Interesting. The MC does not go out adventuring, but instead sits in a chair at home and connects his mind to a remote controlled body like Reeve in FF7 or Avatar.








The platforming sections where you control the rabbit drone/robot are a neat way to spruce up the experience. I like the cartoony animations on the robot.




There are some Tales Of-esque skits with 3D character models statically facing the camera, but this time there are character screens cutting in and out of the picture like in a Tomino show.




They are improving upon the HBS Shadowrun thing where there is a fake internet with some things to click on and read fake news articles or fake forum threads.






Well I browsed through the gallery of all of the playable characters released so far, and only found two cool designs, both being the bears. To fill the third slot, I would pick the guy with the spike/piledriver thing on his arm.








Otherwise, the rest of the roster looks like a fashion disaster. There are some dubious character designs in here. God forbid someone walk in while you are playing this game while these characters appear onscreen. There is no way you could play this game on your phone in the lunchroom (how much mobile data does it consume?). You would have to walk out of the building to where you car is and play in there.












At first glance I thought that this "guy" was a girl.











There is a problem with the character gallery menu, which is that the background is black/grey, but you have characters in black clothing being imposed over that background so it is hard to tell the two apart.


Oh boy, it's yet another bazillion different materials I need to level up/upgrade my characters.




Wandering around the city section.








Nice, I got the acceptable 3rd slot character on my first regular banner 10 pull. Unless he was a scripted giveaway for new players.




Wow, I got Pan Yinhu on my very first premium banner 1x pull. So I can just save my premium currency for the Ben rerun at the end of the month, and then I will have a full team of characters I like.




There is a neat sidequest type where you control a virtual character who is hopping from TV screen to TV screen like some sort of top down game, going through mazes and looking for treasures.




Okay, I spent a lot of time rereading the tutorials and doing the tutorial missions and reading through Pan Yinhu's walls of ability and trait text. Once again, these Chinese game devs make very long winded and overcomplicated explanations for what should be very basic Ys action combat. You have your normal attack, your special attack, and an ultimate ability. You can either dodge or press RB when a mob flashes to dodge/riposte, with the RB button having a party member attack too. There are three elements and using the correct element against a mob will deal bonus damage. And there is an Anomaly thing I forgot. And then for Pan Yinhu when you press the Y button for his special attack, you actually have to either press it 3 more times to use it up or press RB to swap characters and he will automatically use the 3 charges.

Got Ben on my 3rd 10x pull of the normal banner using the freebie Master Tapes, so now I have a full team of people I like. Pick the wolfman butler from the free S rank selector.

Example of combat. Note that I am playing using the bears who are the slowest characters in the game (both slow movement speed, and longer attack animations = less button presses required), and it is still too fast for me. If you play with the "normal" characters like the sword wielding girl Anby, the gameplay is ludicrously fast.




Welp, I sunk several hours into this and I think I have seen enough for now. Don't want to play more. I won't uninstall it right away but I will be resuming HSR for the foreseeable future. First, the game has usual issues. Big managerial problems where you have to tab back and forth between far too many different tabs and menus to collect your tidbits of premium currency, or to check out those red exclamation point ! alerts, characters having an obscene amount of text and nouns for every single ability and trait they have rather than being written like a normal description for an action game character's controls, lots of running around to the next cutscene where characters stand around and yap statically, etc. I cannot recall any memorable music. It's going for that weird cartoony retrofuturistic 1990s/early 2000s punk vibe that Drift City in 2007 did, but at least that had some neat tunes too. The vast majority of the characters are pretty hard to look at, being overdesigned or having awful outfits. You still have that unimmersive gameplay of having a "party", but you are really alone playing by yourself with your allies not fighting alongside with you, and the gameplay incentivizes you to do that immersion breaking instant swapping of characters to use their special attacks on cooldown (or in this case, once they have regenned enough energy).

The action is a little more kinetic than Genshin's, but if I were to play an anime action game then I would rather play a real one like Ys or Nioh where I get all of the characters for my box purchase and don't have to put up with a bazillion mats or managerial issues or lots and lots of running between cutscenes to watch characters stand around and yap in a boring way.

ZZZ has a much more coherent way of handling the dissonance that happens in these 3D Chinese gachas where you are adventuring with a party in the story, but since you didn't buy them from the gacha they are not with you in gameplay. In ZZZ, the MC is not doing any adventuring or bonding with the party members. He just hires the random gacha characters and has them form a party, and then they go do a mission his behalf. But this isn't really innovative. Prior gachas where you played as a commander like Azur Lane also did this.

Why do you play gacha? I can't wrap my head around it, I'd rather quit gaming forever than ever touch one

I became curious about gacha because of Granblue Fantasy, which was made by former Square talent. Hideo Minaba, Akihiko Yoshida, Nobuo Uematsu, Tsutomu Narita, etc. It turned out to be a very story heavy game - almost visual novel like - with excellent art, near full Japanese voice acting, great music, and a tremendous amount of different classes. I think they are up to 77 different classes for the main character now.

The first few miniarcs start off was just okay, but around chapter 40 I started getting really invested into the main story. They get pretty creative with how they script movement in the visual novel segments. The voice acting is really compelling at times. I think it is more satisfying than several mainline Final Fantasy plots, and is more deserving to be a mainline numbered Final Fantasy title than certain recent entries that have almost no actual classic FF talent working on them or FF spirit. The characters are very likeable. I also thought that some of the side stories were pretty good. In particular I like the Dragon Knights' storyline about the brotherhood of the four knights, and the drama going on with Percival and his two brothers.

I also did not have very many issues with GBF. There are three annual events where the game showers you in free draws and crystals. I have over 500 characters just from logging in during these events over the past 7 or 8 years, more favorite characters than I can fit into my parties let alone my most favorite party (the Dragon Knights). I have never had to grind to progress through the story or to obtain a character. There is some managerial issues - mainly when it comes to setting up your equipment for the first time. There is a limited amount of items your inventory can hold at once (about 300 weapons and 300 summons) but again the annual events shower you in stuff and it becomes tedious trying to melt down your inventory so that you can bring in more stuff from the mailbox to meltdown. So eventually I just gave up on that and I don't clear out my inventory anymore and just have thousands of items stuck in my inbox, haha.




The other caveat is that because GBF is a gacha that advertises and sells individual character fantasies, most of the characters can never substantially change. They can't get scarred or dismembered or crippled and forced to retire, or get married and decide they don't want to risk adventuring anymore, or grow old and retire and become a woodworker, etc. Very few people get together because that would turn off people who wanted to imagine that character as their waifu/husbando. The trajectory of the Dragon Knights story seems to be that Aglovale is going to abdicate the throne and pass it to his worthier brother (or split the kingdom of Wales with him), but that seems unlikely to happen while the game is still running (or maybe next anniversary event will conclude the Dragon Knights storyline and it will happen then?). Etc. And because it is a liver service game, you usually do not get definitive endings, since these games keep going on and on until eventually the plug is pulled.


So GBF got me in the door with checking out gachas. Then the Chinese began pouring fabulous amounts of money into hiring hundreds of devs and spending hundreds of millions on marketing their new higher production value 3D gachas, which got me curious. But these 3D gachas also became topical amongst the forums I hang out in, so ofcourse I want to check out what the other people are checking out. Unfortunately I have found them to be lackluster in a lot of respects. The managerial issues are magnified. There is a lot of "story", but the moment to moment experience is not as enjoyable due to the usually mediocre presentation of having a zoomed out camera from 3D characters statically standing around, the NPC models are jarring compared to the player characters, there is a lot of running around from NPC to NPC and loading screens so the experience feels more sluggish, etc. The action combat ones do not feel satisfying and feel lonely, the open world experience where you have to open hundreds of chests that give tidbits of premium currency is dissatisfying, nothing changes in the open world like towns getting wiped off the face of the earth, the games are very stingy with giveaways and their rates are exorbitant so it is difficult to make a full party of characters you want, etc. The hitrate of the music is low.

However, I still like this novel brand of Chinese artbook fantasy, the Japanese voice dubs are pretty good and make the story experience more tolerable. I am kinda interested in HSR's world and the main cast of characters, even if the moment-to-moment presentation of the story is lackluster. The ability cutscene animations are great. The game has proven more entertaining than FF7 Rebirth (which I already dropped twice to play Trails Through Daybreak 2 and Sakura Wars 2 instead), and right now I feel it can hold me over until Trails Beyond the Horizon's release in a few months or the Monochrome Mobius sequel.

[Norfleet]

Man, and I thought WhiteSquare was bad, but this display of wildly uncontained weebery was just insane.

[methoxetamine]

Zenless Zone Zero

Taking a break from my HSR playthrough to check out ZZZ. Bring some eyebleach. Ye have been warned!

► Show Spoiler

I was browsing through art on Pixiv when I found this illustration for ZZZ. Seems like Mihoyo has become the Chinese Blizzard and people who play one of their games will play and draw fanart for their others. The panda guy caught my attention, and when I looked him up it turns out that he is a playable character! He is currently on banner. So I decided to check out ZZZ, hoping to get enough premium currency to grab him.




Hrm interesting 90s/early 2000s flavor with the fat TVs and the VHS tapes.




It is frustrating how the game immediately launches you into a long cutscene sequence without allowing you go into the options menu and switch to the Japanese dub.

Interesting that they are doing lots of comic CG slides for the cutscenes. I wonder if they have one or two people drawing these fulltime.










The game "lies", and makes a good first impression with the much more animated intro cutscenes than the sterile Genshin/HSR/WuWa character animations, but for some reason the devs are still weaving in compressed, prerendered cinematics that aren't being rendered by your machine at a higher resolution for better screenshots. And it is not practical to play this game on mobile for reasons I while get into later. And then as the game goes on, you get less and less of those much more lively animated cutscenes and get more and more people statically standing around yapping.

Once again, we can pick the gender of the MC. The girl's face is very cute. Too bad the rest of her outfit is dumb. Also, I don't create women protagonists.




Not a fan of the MC wearing a dumb t-shirt rather than a more dignified button up shirt. Shame there is no visual character customization in these 3D Chinese gachas so you can better tailor the experience. But here with the way he is posed and is animated and the way he is voiced, he at least feels like he knows what he's doing. The Genshin/HSR/WuWa characters were so statically animated it was hard to glean much from them besides being methodical.




I like how the camera zooms in to give us closeup shots when talking to NPCs.




Why does one of the heroes look like a prostitute?




Interesting. The MC does not go out adventuring, but instead sits in a chair at home and connects his mind to a remote controlled body like Reeve in FF7 or Avatar.








The platforming sections where you control the rabbit drone/robot are a neat way to spruce up the experience. I like the cartoony animations on the robot.




There are some Tales Of-esque skits with 3D character models statically facing the camera, but this time there are character screens cutting in and out of the picture like in a Tomino show.




They are improving upon the HBS Shadowrun thing where there is a fake internet with some things to click on and read fake news articles or fake forum threads.






Well I browsed through the gallery of all of the playable characters released so far, and only found two cool designs, both being the bears. To fill the third slot, I would pick the guy with the spike/piledriver thing on his arm.








Otherwise, the rest of the roster looks like a fashion disaster. There are some dubious character designs in here. God forbid someone walk in while you are playing this game while these characters appear onscreen. There is no way you could play this game on your phone in the lunchroom (how much mobile data does it consume?). You would have to walk out of the building to where you car is and play in there.












At first glance I thought that this "guy" was a girl.











There is a problem with the character gallery menu, which is that the background is black/grey, but you have characters in black clothing being imposed over that background so it is hard to tell the two apart.


Oh boy, it's yet another bazillion different materials I need to level up/upgrade my characters.




Wandering around the city section.








Nice, I got the acceptable 3rd slot character on my first regular banner 10 pull. Unless he was a scripted giveaway for new players.




Wow, I got Pan Yinhu on my very first premium banner 1x pull. So I can just save my premium currency for the Ben rerun at the end of the month, and then I will have a full team of characters I like.




There is a neat sidequest type where you control a virtual character who is hopping from TV screen to TV screen like some sort of top down game, going through mazes and looking for treasures.




Okay, I spent a lot of time rereading the tutorials and doing the tutorial missions and reading through Pan Yinhu's walls of ability and trait text. Once again, these Chinese game devs make very long winded and overcomplicated explanations for what should be very basic Ys action combat. You have your normal attack, your special attack, and an ultimate ability. You can either dodge or press RB when a mob flashes to dodge/riposte, with the RB button having a party member attack too. There are three elements and using the correct element against a mob will deal bonus damage. And there is an Anomaly thing I forgot. And then for Pan Yinhu when you press the Y button for his special attack, you actually have to either press it 3 more times to use it up or press RB to swap characters and he will automatically use the 3 charges.

Got Ben on my 3rd 10x pull of the normal banner using the freebie Master Tapes, so now I have a full team of people I like. Pick the wolfman butler from the free S rank selector.

Example of combat. Note that I am playing using the bears who are the slowest characters in the game (both slow movement speed, and longer attack animations = less button presses required), and it is still too fast for me. If you play with the "normal" characters like the sword wielding girl Anby, the gameplay is ludicrously fast.




Welp, I sunk several hours into this and I think I have seen enough for now. Don't want to play more. I won't uninstall it right away but I will be resuming HSR for the foreseeable future. First, the game has usual issues. Big managerial problems where you have to tab back and forth between far too many different tabs and menus to collect your tidbits of premium currency, or to check out those red exclamation point ! alerts, characters having an obscene amount of text and nouns for every single ability and trait they have rather than being written like a normal description for an action game character's controls, lots of running around to the next cutscene where characters stand around and yap statically, etc. I cannot recall any memorable music. It's going for that weird cartoony retrofuturistic 1990s/early 2000s punk vibe that Drift City in 2007 did, but at least that had some neat tunes too. The vast majority of the characters are pretty hard to look at, being overdesigned or having awful outfits. You still have that unimmersive gameplay of having a "party", but you are really alone playing by yourself with your allies not fighting alongside with you, and the gameplay incentivizes you to do that immersion breaking instant swapping of characters to use their special attacks on cooldown (or in this case, once they have regenned enough energy).

The action is a little more kinetic than Genshin's, but if I were to play an anime action game then I would rather play a real one like Ys or Nioh where I get all of the characters for my box purchase and don't have to put up with a bazillion mats or managerial issues or lots and lots of running between cutscenes to watch characters stand around and yap in a boring way.

ZZZ has a much more coherent way of handling the dissonance that happens in these 3D Chinese gachas where you are adventuring with a party in the story, but since you didn't buy them from the gacha they are not with you in gameplay. In ZZZ, the MC is not doing any adventuring or bonding with the party members. He just hires the random gacha characters and has them form a party, and then they go do a mission his behalf. But this isn't really innovative. Prior gachas where you played as a commander like Azur Lane also did this.

Why do you play gacha? I can't wrap my head around it, I'd rather quit gaming forever than ever touch one

I became curious about gacha because of Granblue Fantasy, which was made by former Square talent. Hideo Minaba, Akihiko Yoshida, Nobuo Uematsu, Tsutomu Narita, etc. It turned out to be a very story heavy game - almost visual novel like - with excellent art, near full Japanese voice acting, great music, and a tremendous amount of different classes. I think they are up to 77 different classes for the main character now.

The first few miniarcs start off was just okay, but around chapter 40 I started getting really invested into the main story. They get pretty creative with how they script movement in the visual novel segments. The voice acting is really compelling at times. I think it is more satisfying than several mainline Final Fantasy plots, and is more deserving to be a mainline numbered Final Fantasy title than certain recent entries that have almost no actual classic FF talent working on them or FF spirit. The characters are very likeable. I also thought that some of the side stories were pretty good. In particular I like the Dragon Knights' storyline about the brotherhood of the four knights, and the drama going on with Percival and his two brothers.

I also did not have very many issues with GBF. There are three annual events where the game showers you in free draws and crystals. I have over 500 characters just from logging in during these events over the past 7 or 8 years, more favorite characters than I can fit into my parties let alone my most favorite party (the Dragon Knights). I have never had to grind to progress through the story or to obtain a character. There is some managerial issues - mainly when it comes to setting up your equipment for the first time. There is a limited amount of items your inventory can hold at once (about 300 weapons and 300 summons) but again the annual events shower you in stuff and it becomes tedious trying to melt down your inventory so that you can bring in more stuff from the mailbox to meltdown. So eventually I just gave up on that and I don't clear out my inventory anymore and just have thousands of items stuck in my inbox, haha.




The other caveat is that because GBF is a gacha that advertises and sells individual character fantasies, most of the characters can never substantially change. They can't get scarred or dismembered or crippled and forced to retire, or get married and decide they don't want to risk adventuring anymore, or grow old and retire and become a woodworker, etc. Very few people get together because that would turn off people who wanted to imagine that character as their waifu/husbando. The trajectory of the Dragon Knights story seems to be that Aglovale is going to abdicate the throne and pass it to his worthier brother (or split the kingdom of Wales with him), but that seems unlikely to happen while the game is still running (or maybe next anniversary event will conclude the Dragon Knights storyline and it will happen then?). Etc. And because it is a liver service game, you usually do not get definitive endings, since these games keep going on and on until eventually the plug is pulled.


So GBF got me in the door with checking out gachas. Then the Chinese began pouring fabulous amounts of money into hiring hundreds of devs and spending hundreds of millions on marketing their new higher production value 3D gachas, which got me curious. But these 3D gachas also became topical amongst the forums I hang out in, so ofcourse I want to check out what the other people are checking out. Unfortunately I have found them to be lackluster in a lot of respects. The managerial issues are magnified. There is a lot of "story", but the moment to moment experience is not as enjoyable due to the usually mediocre presentation of having a zoomed out camera from 3D characters statically standing around, the NPC models are jarring compared to the player characters, there is a lot of running around from NPC to NPC and loading screens so the experience feels more sluggish, etc. The action combat ones do not feel satisfying and feel lonely, the open world experience where you have to open hundreds of chests that give tidbits of premium currency is dissatisfying, nothing changes in the open world like towns getting wiped off the face of the earth, the games are very stingy with giveaways and their rates are exorbitant so it is difficult to make a full party of characters you want, etc. The hitrate of the music is low.

However, I still like this novel brand of Chinese artbook fantasy, the Japanese voice dubs are pretty good and make the story experience more tolerable. I am kinda interested in HSR's world and the main cast of characters, even if the moment-to-moment presentation of the story is lackluster. The ability cutscene animations are great. The game has proven more entertaining than FF7 Rebirth (which I already dropped twice to play Trails Through Daybreak 2 and Sakura Wars 2 instead), and right now I feel it can hold me over until Trails Beyond the Horizon's release in a few months or the Monochrome Mobius sequel.

Do you pay or are you F2P? I've never actually played one to really judge them properly but the entire model just puts me off both for monetization purposes and the fact that it's designed for mobile. The only one I've really been interested in but still haven't checked out is Wizardry Variants Daphne, it's supposedly amazing

Also did you play Granblue Fantasy Relink? That was my only experience with GB and I loved it, I played on launch while the multiplayer was populated and it was a blast. That game is the one time in my life I ever wished a game was "live service", it would've been great to get continued updates for it

Man, and I thought WhiteSquare was bad, but this display of wildly uncontained weebery was just insane.

Of the last 60 games I've completed only 2 of them were made outside of Asia, and one of those was Ghost of Tsushima which is spiritually Jap at least. It's not easy being a complete gigachad but somehow I manage

[Val the Moofia Boss]

did you play Granblue Fantasy Relink?

Yup. Posted about it as I was playing through it at launch last year. It was my HQ GoTY 2024 pick. Hope the team releases a new game soon. Wish that it wasn't set in a rehash of Phantagrande, though.

Part 1
Part 2
Review

Do you pay or are you F2P? I've never actually played one to really judge them properly but the entire model just puts me off both for monetization purposes and the fact that it's designed for mobile. The only one I've really been interested in but still haven't checked out is Wizardry Variants Daphne, it's supposedly amazing

I have never paid. The key for the stingy gachas is to go in knowing that you might only be able to save for one or maybe two of the 5* star characters, so you have to narrow it down to your absolute most favoritr characters. Also, often they try to hook you into doing yout MMO tier daily quests that waste your limited lifespan. Avoid that at all costs.

[DemoGraph]

ZZZ. Bring some eyebleach.

Hater!

God forbid someone walk in while you are playing this game while these characters appear onscreen.

What are you, underaged?!

Why does one of the heroes look like a prostitute?

Because that spawned an ungodly amount of (admittedly mediocre) porn.

Welp, I sunk several hours into this and I think I have seen enough for now.

Yes, it's, regretfully, bad.

It's going for that weird cartoony retrofuturistic 1990s/early 2000s punk vibe

And it's GUROLIOSU.
I also dug some aspects of the setting, though it's a kitchen sink one.