Finished Shin Megami Tensei V after 72 hours. It was kind of fun, actually

shin megami tensei v nahobino in battle

Fun, but not memorable. I would have passed it by without a final word if I hadn’t heard recently that Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance was coming out. I thought it would be a spin-off like SMTIV: Apocalypse, but no, they just added more content and re-released it. Which is like RRGGGH, I just bought this thing and now there’s a better one out already, grr. This usually doesn’t happen to me, because my laziness and large backlog means I take ages to buy a game in the first place, but publishers are re-releasting and remaking anything and everything these days, so it was inevitable that something like this would occur.

That said, it’s just a minor annoyance but hardly the end of the world. Of course I’d want to get the best bang for my buck when I buy a game, but once I play something, that’s the definitive version of the game as far as I’m concerned. For example, I hear there’s Persona 3 Reloaded coming out soon, but in my opinion, there were no other Persona 3s after Persona 3 FES. FF7 Remake part 2 came out, but I have FF7 at home in my Playstation X, so we’re cool.

Back to the topic of Shin Megami Tensei V. I think I explained my thoughts about it quite thoroughly in earlier posts, so today I will just do a quick summary of the pros and cons, say something about the story and the ending I got and call it a day.

PROS

Collecting and fusing demons, like I said already. You won’t find me playing a lot of (or, indeed, any) Pokémon on this blog because I have Pokémon at home in the form of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series. That’s not to say I dislike Pokémon, but after playing one or two of them, I’ve had enough. And I honestly feel like I’ve had enough of SMT as well after this mediocre offering, but we’ll see how I feel if/when SMT VI comes out.

Demon menu SMT V

I dared to risk a screenshot

Not having any party members. Technically the demons you summon are your party members, but you know what I mean. So many JRPGs with whiny party members with long tedious backstories and trauma to overcome, so you have to sit through a lot of talking and arguments etc etc blah blah, I’m getting too old for that stuff. When it works, it works great. When it doesn’t work, I want to rip my hair out.

You can simply choose the route you want to be on. No need to play three times for separate routes, though you will be penalized if your past behavior doesn’t align with your final route. That’s pretty handy.

Decent number of sidequests. I like sidequests, especially when they’re not too tedious. I could have used another 100 of, especially of the “kill this monster” type, but I was satisfied with what I got.

CONS

Horrible map so I kept getting lost. Again I complained about this already so I won’t start.

Soundtrack was crap. I had a lot of work recently, so I was listening to game soundtracks to pass the time, and I couldn’t make it through more than a few tracks of SMT V‘s. It was just noise.

Slow start with wasted hours in the beginning. I started a New Game+ out of inertia but was so annoyed by the memory that I quit.

The other characters were either annoying or hardly present. You barely know them anyway, so you don’t feel anything about all the pathos they’re going through. Like whatever, can you send me to a new area so I can catch new demons now? Dishonorable mention goes to the whole school arc which was just an excuse to kill some girl whose name I’ve forgotten. What was the point of that arc anyway? In the end everybody died. If they had asked me nicely, I would have offed them all in five minutes so we could get back to the real action.

Story and Neutral ending

Um, I already forgot most of it. Something about the “God” of the Bible actually usurped a world throne somewhere and declared himself God? Where did the throne even come from… anyway, Satan wasn’t really bad but they were all demons or whatever and “God” kicked them all out or whatever. But later Lucifer killed him??? But didn’t take over the throne himself??? So it’s open to whoever, and at some point Tokyo was destroyed by demons and replaced by God… I AM SO LOST.

IIRC the Law route has the angels pretending Lucifer didn’t kill God and… umm, IDK. I didn’t do that route. The Chaos route was all about saving Tokyo. IIRC one of my classmates and the president of Japan want to take over the world’s throne so they can restore Japan. In fact, not even Japan, but Tokyo. That one flew clear over my head because it was so “Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo,” like “Screw anyone who’s not from Tokyo,” right? It would be too reasonable if they wanted to save the whole world while they were at it, so Atlus made sure to exclude 99.9% of the world from their grand plan.

So, the Neutral route… and the Neutral ending I got… Nope, barely remember a thing either. IIRC I had to fight both the Law and Chaos representatives, who had turned into demons because why not. Then instead of assuming the throne and shaping the world, I chose to destroy it. Which, apparently, changed very little. Demons still kept attacking Tokyo, and angels and demons kept fighting for lack of anything better to do, and I’m just up in some ethereal plane watching them. Yeah, aight, whatevs.

Presumably, the true ending to everything will be revealed by beating the True Neutral route on New Game Plus (or your first playthrough if you can be bothered to grind to level 94 and beat the secret boss). I don’t even care enough to YouTube it.

TL;DR

I wish I had written this a little earlier when Shin Megami Tensei V was still fresh in my mind. SMT V isn’t particularly memorable, and I kind of want my money back but I’m glad I played it. Despite the lukewarm comments above, I did enjoy roaming around doing my own thing for the most part. If I weren’t so lazy, I would look into more Last Ranker-style games where you don’t have to deal with party members at all, not even demons or created ones.

Currently playing: Epic Seven and Love Nikki, my surviving gacha games. On the Switch I’m playing a puzzle game called Voxelgram. I’m almost done with all the puzzles, then I’ll either play Oninaki or start Persona 5 Royal. On the PC I accidentally re-started Atelier Lulua the other day. No time for any console games this week though, too much work to do. Long live gacha games!

Done with Romancing Saga Re;Universe for now

Just completed a 130-day login streak, where I got down and dirty with Romancing Saga Re;Universe and explored all its nooks and crannies, doing all the story chapters and events that later went away in the 3.0 overhaul, doing plenty of Spiral Corridor (180) and Remembrance Battles as well as catching up to the latest story.

My initial thoughts about Romancing Saga Re;Universe are captured in this post I wrote years ago, trying to talk myself out of playing it. It worked for a while, but eventually the other stingy gacha games wore me down and I fled for comfort to the arms of RSRU. It’s not as ridiculously generous all the time once you run out of welcoming bonuses and the like, but it is still far better than most other games I’ve played, both in terms of gem income and in terms of regular giveaways. There’s always something being given away for free, sometimes useless stamina but often gems, tickets, characters, even excellent SSS weapons. For the freebies alone, I’d rate this game 1000/10.

The reason I dropped it is because of the gameplay loop. Or lack thereof. You get the latest characters, grind them up, use them for some content, newer and better characters come out, newer and harder content comes out, repeat the process endlessly. It’s fun to get shiny new characters, and the high gem income in the game makes it possible for even F2P players to get the majority of powerful characters. Equipment is not gated by gacha or even by hard content, so you can get the best weapons, armors, accessories etc. without breaking a sweat.

It’s just… it gets tiring after a while. Get characters, use characters, get more, use more. And the constant powercreep gets me down. The Orlette I pulled when I first returned was recently powercrept by an even better Orlette, same for the Esper Girl I got, and I know it will happen to all my other characters sooner or later. So on one hand I like getting new characters with flashy and powerful new moves, but on the other hand there’s a very “Why do I even bother” feel about the whole affair.

In a very recent update (February 2024), Romancing Saga Re;Universe finally did the sensible thing and gave us offline farming, a.k.a. “Memory Rematch.” The game records the skills you use in a match and the time it took to clear it, then reruns it for up to 24 hours in the background. No more leaving your phone on charge overnight or getting a second phone just to grind stats forever. It was a much-needed and very welcome addition to the game, but ironically it also made it much easier for me to drop the game.

The first reason is that RSRU became a pure idle game where you just log in once or twice a day, check your stat growths, queue up more matches and dip. That isn’t my idea of a “game,” or at least not one I want to stick with for any length of time. It’s very easy to forget to even load the game once a day, and I haven’t missed it since I uninstalled it yesterday.

The second, bigger reason is that it will make it very easy for me to jump back into the game whenever I’m ready to. I was reluctant to drop it at first because I was thinking of all the hours I would have spend grinding up the latest styles when I returned, but this Memory Rematch system takes all the pain out of it. I even saved enough gems for a pity so I can get whoever the latest and hottest style is if/when I jump back into the game.

When will that be? Honestly, not any time soon. It really isn’t much of a “game,” much as I enjoy the bright, happy colours, the killer soundtracks and the bountiful freebies. However, thanks to it my interest in the SaGa games has been revived, so I’m going to work on those for a while, especially Romancing Saga 2 and 3, Scarlet Grace and SaGa Frontier 1 since I already have those. If I miss Romancing Saga Re;Universe after I’m done with all that, then maybe I’ll dive back in again. Until then, it’s goodbye to this game.

Tried and dropped Atelier Resleriana – Too sluggish and too stingy

I haven’t played any Atelier games in a while (last proper game was Firis in 2020 IIRC), but I still have a lot of love for the series. A lot of good memories, lots of fun times spent crafting and adventuring, good times. The more recent entries have just left me cold because the focus has been less on that crafting and adventuring and more on character interactions (that never go anywhere in the long run) and “cute girls doing cute stuff” which hasn’t been interesting to me in a loooong time.

But still, Atelier is Atelier, so when I heard a new gacha was coming out, it was like “hey, free Atelier game!” What’s not to like, right? The answer is “plenty.”

The game ran poorly on my phone

The game felt like it had been dipped in coal tar, with everything moving slowly and looooong loading times to do and open every single thing. Every time I want to open a quest, every time I want to switch to a character, every time I want to do anything in this game whether it’s crafting or fighting or just opening the store, it takes forever and a day. Even the skip option doesn’t help because there are still unnecessary scenes to watch before and after. The poor user experience is honestly the biggest reason why I dropped Atelier Resleriana. I may have sat through worse in the Playstation era, but it’s the 2020s now and I’m not doing this to myself any more.

I lowered the graphical settings to see if that would help, but instead I got an ugly game that still ran terribly. It’s possible that the game runs better on Steam (apparently emulators don’t work) but nothing else about it made me want to try a different platform.

The gameplay wasn’t what I had hoped for

When I play an Atelier game specifically, versus your run-of-the-mill JRPG, I want to craft stuff first of all, and I want to forage and go adventuring while I’m at it. For all its many, many flaws, Atelier Online: Alchemist of Bressisle at least let us run around maps and gather all kinds of stuff to make many new things with. Atelier Resleriana takes more of an Atelier Sophie approach to things, with a very small number of largely useless recipes which must be unlocked by jumping through increasingly annoying hoops. Foraging is also no fun, firstly because of the aforementioned sluggish pace of movement and secondly because of the long drawn out fights you have to go through every time you enter a new area.

That brings me to the combat. Which I actually liked, to be honest. I liked the system where you have to juggle the types of attack you use and pick the best time to use items to avoid giving the enemies too many advantages. What I didn’t like was how tanky even the most basic mob was due to the “break” system. I don’t like games with break mechanics, it’s almost always a way to draw out fights by giving enemies extra HP without explicitly calling it extra HP. And, again because of the slowness of the game itself, every turn and every attack felt like wading through mud, so it quickly became a chore I wished I could avoid. Still the Burst system is something I’d like to see done better in a more interesting game, with more skills and options than just spamming S2 and sometimes S1.

I had bad gacha luck

Self explanatory. Part of why I play gacha games is for the dopamine hit of pulling rare characters and other nice things. I pull crap, I don’t get my hit, I don’t want to keep playing. Actually I didn’t do too badly because I had Rorona for attacking and Escha for breaking and they made a good team, but it wasn’t fun seeing people boasting about their super-meta Ryza, Marie, Sophie etc., etc. and knowing it could have been so much better. “That’s a you problem,” you say. Yup, it’s a me problem, and that’s why me quit the game.

The gem income was poor

I hate stingy games. It doesn’t cost you anything to give players a few more rewards, Koei-Tecmo. Especially in a game that just launched and isn’t that great. Giving 50 gems here and 50 gems there when a 10-pull costs 3000 gems, do you think you are Genshin Impact or something? You want me to scrimp and save and get those 3,000 gems and pull crap, and then feel good somehow? Heck no. I’m a little spoiled by Epic Seven and Romancing Saga Re;Universe (developed by the same Akatsuki Games) where you can easily get enough currency to pity several characters a year. Since I know it can be done better, saving drips and drabs for months to get pity at 45,000 gems in Atelier Resleriana sounds like torture. Nope, not doing that to myself either.

The first event was boring and the rewards were pitiful

The game’s first event was a “Score Battle” thing where you have to fight the same boss in stronger iterations and try to deal lots of damage against it. First off, that’s boring and pointless. Like, seriously, what for? Who plays an Atelier game for this? In any case the event was only around for a week and by the time I thought my party was strong enough to fight the stronger levels, it had already ended. The rewards looked like this:

Just increasingly expensive character EXP items and tiny amounts of money. That’s it. No weapon, no event character, no Memoria, no strengthening or synthesis material, nothing interesting to make it worth slogging through pointless battle after pointless battle. The first event of a game is where the developer is supposed to hook players with fun gameplay, an interesting event story and lots of rewards, but this had none of that. It could have been added to the permanent quests and nothing would be missed. I despaired of the future of the game and made up my mind to quit at that point.

The story wasn’t bad, but not enough to stick around for

Cute girls being cute just isn’t my thing any more (was it ever? not sure) so I confess I fast-forwarded everything after the first few scenes, so I have a vague idea of what happened, but not why it matters or why I should care. I figure it’s the writers’ job to make me care, not mine to force myself to care about someone’s alchemy journey. What’s so great about being an alchemist when you can barely make anything you want? Too boring.

Last I saw, some mysterious organization was attacking Valeria and she and her friends barely escaped. You just know that mysterious organization will be after them for 200 chapters before eventually being replaced by even badder guys, and very likely it will turn out the bad guys weren’t so bad and they’ll become available to pull in the gacha etc etc, blah blah. And that’s not even mentioning the roadblocks where they stop you from progressing the story until you clear X dungeon (very boring) or X score battle or whatever. Just let me play and get my ass kicked, then no one will have to order me to go do other content to get stronger.

TL;DR: I’m still open to trying new gacha games, but I’ve got the attention span of a hamster these days, so anything new needs to look good, play smoothly and give me lots of rewards to hold my attention. Atelier Resleriana is not horrible, but it’s not great either, and as a supposedly mainline Atelier game, it is disappointing and completely unsatisfying. I still have at least five “real” Atelier games left to play, so I think I’ll spend my time and energy on those instead.

Epic Seven 2024 update – Made it to Champion V! (plus tips for making your own journey)

In AI arena, of course, not Real-Time Arena. Smilegate actually scared me for a while when they announced a Lion Heart Cermia RTA skin, because the two Cermias are some of my favorite characters, but luckily they walked it back shortly afterwards. I like Briar Witch Isera too, but I don’t use her nearly enough to care about a skin, phew!

In the past I’ve repeatedly stated that my focus in Epic Seven is PVE, not PVP, but several factors occurred that made me broaden that focus just a little bit to encompass Guild Wars and then AI Arena.

1. I ran out of easy PVE content to do. I still need to do Rift, Nightmare Raid and Dagger Sicar achievements, but those are all serious endgame modes which I will chip away at little by little. Especially since I need to build a number of characters specifically for them, like Haste, Brieg (Elvira recall FTW), Surin, Ran, Mascot Hazel, Suthan, etc etc.

2. I joined a guild where Guild Wars was mandatory, and I liked it there, so I had to do GW. In the past I’ve mainly been in casual GW-optional guilds, which is nice and relaxing in its own way, but the rewards of a serious Guild are much better. And in the course of doing GW, I discovered that my characters’ builds weren’t bad at all, and I could actually compete against the average opponent. Plus the process forced me to learn which characters countered which ones (Fribbels GW Meta Tracker helps a ton), who had which passive and how to trigger/avoid it, etc. After that, AI Arena is just Guild Wars on steroids, so it was an easy scale-up.

3. I got two heroes that made climbing in Arena much, much easier. The first was Dark Corvus, who I got from the ML Headhunt event. I intended to use him in Guild Wars, and I do occasionally do that, but he does great in Arena as well when paired with Iseria, Destina and a flex character.

The second character was Elvira, who by shutting down Fighting Spirit made it much, much, much X1000 easier to deal with characters I had been fearing like Navy Captain Landy, Lionheart Cermia (she’s only cool when she’s on my side, otherwise she’s a menace), and Abyssal Yufine. The latter two especially become putty in my hands once Elvira is around, because their scariest weapons are sealed. In fact I run Corvus and Elvira together sometimes against them, and it is a sad, sad sight. For them, that is.

If you squint right, you can pretend it’s a Sigurd Scythe double pull.

4. It was just time. A sense of growth and progression is important for me to keep playing and enjoying a gacha game, so after a couple of years in Challenger V, it was time to finally make the push. Does this mean I might push for Legend once I’ve been in Champion for a while? Never say never, but my first love is still PVE so right now I want to do the new Ancient Inheritance and start working seriously on Nightmare Raid teams this month.

Tips for making the journey to Champion V

So, Champion V in arena, YAY! Those 800 skystones a week are pretty sweet. Now I can unlock past events without making too much of a dent in my skystone stash, really looking forward to that. Epic Seven main stories are so-so and all over the place, but I enjoy most of the side stories. Eulogy for a Saint was great. I thought it would be overrated because of all the praise, but it was good stuff. I liked the Lord of Summer one too. And the Christmas post-Episode 3 story with Alencia, that was good closure.

Louder for the people in the back!

Aww, so nice and hopeful. This is why you shouldn’t get involved with the wrong guy.

If you want to make your own journey to Champion V but have been putting it off for whatever reason, here are four tips that helped me and that you might find helpful too.

1. Figure out what’s stopping you from climbing. For me it was intimidation/fear because everyone looked so much stronger than me and I hate losing. What I actually did last month before starting the journey was to give myself numbing therapy: a whole week where I challenged absolutely every party on the Challenger V list without exception, just to get used to losing and also try out different parties and counter strategies. It’s like how in judo you first learn how to fall correctly, in PVP you must first learn how to lose and be okay with that. Lose, lose and lose again until it’s like, yeah, aight, next!

This girl menaced me until I learned that a well-built Senya can just pop her like a pimple.

If it’s gear stopping you from climbing, do a big re-gearing with the next Free Equip buff and give your best gear to your PVP heroes. I realized that PVE characters usually don’t need the top of the line gear. If the roadblock is learning who counters who, use resources like YouTube, Epic Seven RTA stats, Fribbels GW Meta, etc. and just fight, fight and fight again.

2. Focus on countering a few specific teams. For me, I built two Arena parties – one the Dark Corvus one I mentioned above, and another with Unbound Knight Arowell, Lionheart Cermia, Roana and a flex character (usually Elvira or Mediator Kawerik). With that team, I aimed for parties that dealt a lot of counter attacks, like Abyssal Yufine, Savior Adin (be careful with her tho) and Navy Captain Landy.

Elvira shut down their fighting spirit, LHC procced her S3 off their attacks, Roana’s passive healed like crazy, and Arowell mitigated damage and kept us all alive.  Once I had that engine going climbing through the ranks became a formality. Of course there were still a few surprises and losses here and there, e.g. Angel of Light Angelica can strip Elvira… in fact AOLA just sucks, but for the most part it was quite a smooth process. TL;DR study common defenses, see who you can beat, and build to counter them specifically.

Even in Champion V, you can seen from the screenshot above that the same characters appear again and again: Ocean Breeze Luluca, Abyssal Yufine, Belian, ae-Karina, etc etc. If you have a strategy for taking care of common Arena heroes both individually and as a team, you don’t have much to fear.

3. As for who to build specifically, a lot depends on the gear you have and how it rolls. More speed and attack, aim for cleavers. More def and HP, aim for bruisers, that kind of thing. IMO almost any character can work at the Challenger level if their gear is good enough. I always hate those gacha games where you have to build specific characters X or Y with no substitutes or else that content is closed off to you forever. In Epic Seven that usually isn’t the case. And that means you can’t underestimate any character because they could be on a wacky build with 300 speed and 5000 attack just lying in wait like Jaws.

This goes double and triple for any character who was formerly meta but now has “fallen off.” “Fallen off” does not mean “weak!” Don’t make that mistake for a second. It means they can be countered fairly easily with the right characters and right gear/artifacts, but that they can still destroy your team if you go in blind. Special mention goes to Apocalypse Ravi and Violet, brrr.

The only really fast character I have. When he works, he really works.

All that aside, here’s who I actually built and found useful in my climb: Lionheart Cermia (MVP), Roana (co-MVP), Unbound Knight Arowell (needs just a little more bulk), Shadow Knight Pyllis (needs switching to Counter set), Dark Corvus (needs more HP), Zahak, Iseria (PVE build), Briar Witch Iseria (squishy), Destina (needs bulk and speed), Mediator Kawerik (somewhat overrated IMO but most likely mine just sucks), Martial Artist Ken (run him with a cleanser or build Eff, or he’s hard to use), Elvira, Senya (also hard to use but when she works, phew!).

I also built/half-built the following characters but didn’t use them much in my climb (but I still use them in Guild Wars, which counts as PVP): Violet (my overall E7 MVP, hard-carried me from Episode 1, still carries today, Automaton Tower champion, occasionally 1v3s GVG, just haven’t found room for him in Arena), Conqueror Lilias (can’t get her fast enough), Straze, Mercedes, Choux, Seaside Bellona, Savior Adin (mine’s a bit squishy), Byblis (works fine but hard to find room for her).

I have many, many other characters besides, which I use for various purposes like farming hunts, but these are the ones I tried out specifically for PVP. If you have a good number of these, or any of the recent super powers like M’Landy or AYufine, you’ll be able to work something out quite nicely.

He won. Barely, but he won.

4. Don’t worry too much about your defense team. I mean, do your best to have a good team with solid gear and everything, but don’t expect much from them. I’ve tweaked and re-tweaked mine, tried different combinations, and still didn’t manage better than a 25% defense win rate once I started climbing past Challenger III. Some defenses are more annoying than others, but there are no unbeatatable defenses, so don’t stress it. You get more points for winning than you lose for being defeated, so if you keep using your arena flags strategically, a few dozen losses are not the end of the world.

Though if you’re lucky, your defense team can get you a promotion, so don’t ignore it either.

Hope this helps someone! I could post my attacking teams, but honestly they aren’t anything special, and you would get more mileage out of checking the Fribbels Hero Library for top-tier builds. There’s even a Fribbels Gear Optimizer that helps you outfit characters in gear you currently have. I haven’t used it before because despite my issues with gearing, fumbling around with gear is still part of the fun for me, but maybe when it’s time to push for Legend I’ll give it a go.

Nothing else noteworthy to report for Epic Seven. I’m having a lot of fun lately, though I will force myself to take a 16-day break at some point this year so I can get this year’s returner bonuses as well (Smilegate wisely made it only once a year). But apart from that I’ve got a lot to keep me occupied, so I will be playing it for a while longer.

I even got SSS+ in Hall of Trials once. Aiming to make that more frequent.

Other gachas I’m still playing: Love Nikki, Romancing Saga Re;Universe (version 3.50 with background farming just came out today, so awesome) and I recently started Atelier Resleriana. I’ll post about that one shortly, after I drop it. Until then!

Quick update, apparently you only need to win 5 times in Champion V to hit Champion IV:

Yay!

Update 2: February 28th:

All of a sudden there is a lot more variety in the defenses, so the “cherry-pick your way up” strategy won’t work any more.

I need to build more characters, especially those I’ve been neglecting like Zio, Moon Bunny Dominiel, Ran, Eda, Lua, Nakhwol, Last Rider Krau, Politis… the list is endless, but I’m going to need more variety to tackle different defenses. The important thing is GEAR! The grind never stops. I should also roll those 1,000 skystones to try and get mystics for the Custom Mystic banner coming up tomorrow. Epic Seven has got me good!

Uninstalled Genshin Impact for 2024

They should have used Nahida if they really wanted to guilt-trip me.

Genshin Impact almost qualified for the “Games I dropped in 2023” list, but was spared because I uninstalled it on a whim on January 1st instead. I’ve taken many breaks from GI in the past, but this is the first time I went so far as to uninstall it. I thought I would have second thoughts after a day or two, but no, I honestly hadn’t touched it in a while before then so it makes no difference in my life. It’s just taking up hard drive space at this point.

Why did I uninstall Genshin Impact?

I’ve played it long enough and enjoyed it enough that I’m wondering why myself. Up until the end of Sumeru, I played it very regularly, so I honestly think Fontaine has a lot to do with it. Firstly, the story was flat out depressing and off-putting, as I mentioned in my last brief post on Genshin Impact. Not just the main archon quest involving Furina being mentally tortured for centuries, but also the whole serial killer sub plot.

In fact, mainly the serial killer sub plot because the game wouldn’t let it go. Even after I finished the archon quest, I played Furina’s character quest hoping for some much-needed catharsis, but nooo. Let’s spend an hour talking about this really great person who got murdered by this guy, along with many others, and let’s read all about her last moments in excruciating detail because that’ll really make players feel good, right?

Also while it was good that Furina was forgiven (?!) by the people of Fontaine and returned to the stage in her character quest, I still felt rotten about all she had to go through. It’s bad enough that she got little acknowledgement for her suffering, but then Paimon had to act like an utter twat and rub in her fallen status. Nyaah nyaah, you’re poor and lonely now. Seriously, Paimon? Even if you don’t know her history, is this how you behave to your friends? Friendly to slimebags like Lyney and mean and nasty to poor little Furina? If I didn’t hate Paimon before, I do now.

And speaking of Lyney and his pals, having to pal around with the Fart-hooey is another reason I didn’t enjoy Fontaine. That organization as a whole has done, has tried to do, is unapologetically continuing to do so many bad things on and off screen, but somehow I have to get myself jailed to save the guy who almost drowned an entire city to please his boss? And I have to work with the shady, dishonest kids to do that in the most boring arc ever? Now I think of it, the beginning of the end for GI and I was when there was a free Freminet given away in an event and I was like “Why the hell would I want that?!” At that point, I had already mentally uninstalled, and January 1st was just a formality.

Apart from the story, the combat is still fun but both working on my parties and fighting enemies has gotten stagnant. Now that I’ve gotten a decent party and grown fairly strong, the sense of progression and growing stronger that I enjoy in gacha games is severely reduced. Doing battle quests and mini-games with my party is still fun in its own way, but not as much as it was when I was relying on kind strangers to help me beat Pyro Regisvine. Good old days.

My major characters all have good enough equipment, and all I was doing in recent times was grinding for optimum artifacts – the quickest way to take the fun out of a game. Crap artifact to decent = big jump, everyone’s happy. But after that the gains are marginal and it gets annoying fighting the same domain 20 times in a row to get 50 pieces of trash. At least the similarly frustrating Epic Seven offers background battling now, but you know Mihoyo will never go for that because they think their game is sooo wonderful.

And it is, really. Objectively speaking. Playing Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and Shin Megami Tensei V recently made me appreciate the exploration in Genshin Impact all the more. The maps are huge, and I can go all over the place as long as I have stamina. Instead of being stumped by a tiny ledge that forces me to take a long detour, I’m climbing literal mountains on just a bowl of almond tofu. And the graphics are gorgeous too. Best of all, it’s completely free! I can put up with a lot of frustation in exchange for “completely free,” let me tell you.

That’s why despite all I have said above, Genshin Impact is only dropped “for 2024.” Although the story leaves me cold and pulling and gearing characters isn’t as exciting as it used to be, the exploration is still rock solid. If I reinstall in late 2025 (God willing), both Natlan and Snezhnaya and maybe some other cool places like the Mare Jivari will be out, and I’ll be able to explore, and explore, and explore, and explore… Whew! So see you then, assuming the game is still running and I still care!