Aight, let’s talk about CounterSide a little bit

Hey there, Miss Completely Irrelevant

I’ve ditched Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in favor of CounterSide and the occasional Genshin Impact, and just the other day I got Picross S8. Best series ever, Nintendo numbah wan!

Sometime this weekend I should find the time to play the Harvestella demo. I need to check it out to inform my decision of whether to buy it on day one or wait for a discount. On one hand I’m almost certain I’ll like it, and I want Square-Enix to make more of such games. However I’m not convinced it should be in the same price bracket as AAA games like Persona 5 Royal, Shin Megami Tensei V and Xenoblade Chronicles 3. Does it have a similar level of polish and volume or is Squeenix just charging $59.99 because they can? The demo will tell me what I want to know.

But that isn’t what I’m here to talk about today. I’ve been playing a Korean mobile gacha game called CounterSide for about a month and can’t decide whether I’m in it for the long haul or whether I want to dip out and dip back in when the next chapter releases.

Favorite scene in the game so far XP. The look on her face, hahahaha

As I mentioned briefly two posts ago, Counterside is largely similar to other gacha games out there, but it does have an interesting (albeit ridiculously bleak) story enlivened by a high-quality localization. The side stories and event stories in particular have been very enjoyable reads. And despite having a high female-to-male ratio, it’s not entirely boring waifu bait like, for example, Princess Connect or Blue Archive.

Buuut… that’s about all it has going for it. Having exhausted the story now, I am now left with the Epic 7-type gear grind, boring gimmicky PVE events like Danger Close and raids and PVP with some of the best gear in the game locked behind it, which I hate. Once you set up your teams, the combat is largely automatic. You set your characters down and they run to the other side of the screen, attacking anyone in their way. Since combat is automatic, that makes gear all the more important, i.e. they expect you to grind but the grinding process isn’t particularly fun.

Plus you’re grinding for… what exactly? More gear so you can grind more so you can get more gear so you can… you get the picture. Gearing in CounterSide is also simultaneously much better and much worse than in similar games. Better because almost every character wants one or two main sets: Cooldown reduction, Attack Speed, HP. And only a few substats like Skill haste and Anti-Ground DMG/RES are highly sought after. And there are only four equipment slots: weapon, armor and two accessories.

However gearing is worse because there are a lot of other junk sets and stats in the game like evasion, hit, anti-[specific enemy] which exist just to waste your time and resources and ensure you spend a lot of money and rare items “tuning” promising equipment to be just right.

Also I’ve mentioned in the past that I don’t like auto-battles and skip tickets much because you don’t get that feel of “playing” the game yourself. At least skipping is free, so it’s slightly better than Priconne.

Back when I had 100,000+ stamina and didn’t know what to do with it. Natsukashii

I wouldn’t mind all this gear grinding if doing well in battle was just a matter of getting good gear one way or another. What is really getting my goat is the sense that specific characters are required or at least highly, highly recommended before you can clear certain stages. The guides are so unhelpful. “Just use Gabriel to eat that attack,” umm, who? “This stage is practically made for A. Horizon.” A Ho-who? Lack of flexbility in team comps is close to where I draw the line for gacha games.

This leads to the important question: why am I here complaining about things instead of uninstalling CounterSide until more content is out? The long and short is that I’m not ready just yet. I still have some low-hanging fruit to pick in terms to achievements, easy-to-get gear, unpulled tickets, TASKFORCE Plan missions, etc. I haven’t reached that “Getting stronger will take an incredibly huge amount of effort that I am not willing to put in” point that finally made me drop other grindy games like Granblue, Epic 7 or Priconne. If I quit now without getting there, I guarantee I’ll go crawling back within the week, so I might as well stick with it for another couple of weeks until I can’t take it any more. I’ve gotten pretty good at dropping games lately, so when the time is right, I’ll know.

BTW the game is still crashing every five minutes or so because why wouldn’t it? Or as Love Nikki customer service told a player, “Please try and play on a better phone.” I don’t feel like playing on Steam, so I just factor the crashes into the loading times and plan accordingly. But if you’re having the same problem, just buy a better phone or play it on PC.

Shepherd’s Crossing port for Switch, yaaay!

We gaming fans are a stubborn lot. I had already accepted that Shepherd’s Crossing was a dead series outside of the gacha game, but I still stalk the developer (Success Corp) every couple of weeks, juuuust in case they change their minds. Imagine my joy when I checked in today to find out they’re porting the original Shepherd’s Crossing to the Switch, coming out on 10th November! 😍

Here is the official website. The official name is Hakoniwa Bokujo Hitsujimura (箱庭牧場ひつじ村) which means something like umm “Miniature Ranch: Sheep Village.” “Shepherd’s Crossing” is just the name the localizers came up with. If you’ve never heard of the series, that’s no surprise. It’s pretty obscure but it’s a series of farming simulation games. You can think of it like Harvest Moon‘s poor cousin which leads a much more interesting life. It had things like beekeeping, hunting, meat products and combat before those things were popular in farming games.

The original started out on the PS2 and was ported to the PSP, where I played it for a while in 2011. The most unusual feature was the complete lack of money, requiring you to barter goods for everything you needed. Interesting idea, pretty frustrating. The Switch port is going to add more item slots and a guide to make placing fences easier (only those who played know the suffering). Hope they make seeds easier to get as well. And do something about those frustrating battles.

After the original came Shepherd’s Crossing 2 on Nintendo DS. I won’t say too much about it because it is one of my favorite games of all time, and I have written several posts about it. To be honest, 90% of the reason I’m so excited about the updated port is the potential for a similar release of SC2. Day one buy. Then there were about three different online browser games, the most recent of which I played for a long time and really liked until it got too predatory. It’s in maintenance mode now.

So the good news is we’re getting another release of Shepherd’s Crossing. The originals are out of print, at least in English, so if it gets a localization then that’s a new way for people to experience it. The not so good news is that despite the game’s launch being just over a month away, there is barely any news on the website about the characters, systems, animals, nothing. That’s just not how marketing works. You can compare it to the extensive promotion that Square-Enix is doing for Harvestella, which also launches in November and is much fancier and better known. IDK why Success would want to launch their farming game in the same month. That’s just setting up for failure. And then when it bombs they will say “See, we knew people didn’t want more Shepherd’s Crossing” and then refuse to make any more. Waaah.

Still they’ve done the bare minimum, which is to put up a website. And adding content won’t be too hard since it’s an old game. And they did make some Youtube trailers, if you’re curious about what the game looks like in action. Japanese only, though.

Goodbye Harvestella, I need to buy the Shepherd’s Crossing port to make way for my SC2 port. Ideally I’d like to get it in English but I don’t know if that will happen any time soon. Looking forward to this!

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 on hold while I play Counterside and Genshin Impact

Ashera who would be mai waifu if this was a waifu game

What the title said. I haven’t dropped Xenoblade Chronicles 3, I’ve just been too busy with real life stuff to really get stuck in. But somehow I can always make time for casual games and gacha games, because they’re just designed with the busy person in mind. Of course they’re designed to steal the time of the busy person, but the important thing is you can get in and get your fix and get out in 15-20 minutes or less, whereas I have to play at least an hour of XC3 to feel like I’ve really done anything. Of course by the time you’re done spending 15-20 minutes on four different gacha games, that hour will have already elapsed, but to quote a famous mangaka, I don’t think about that and neither should you.

Doesn’t hurt that I already can’t remember what I was last doing in XC3… Saving… something? Oh yeah, I was doing sidequests instead of going to… that place… to stop… that guy. Ah yeah… That game is great for the exploration, and I enjoy the sidequests, but the rest of it… Anyway, I’m still busy with work until mid-October at the earliest, but I’ll try to make time on the weekends to finish Xenoblade 3 so I can play other things on my Switch. I’m almost out of Picross games too, S8 when?

Genshin Impact, I just popped in for the anniversary rewards. And I hadn’t logged in for a while so they gave me some returner bonuses to keep me logging in. This is like the 4th or 5th time they’ve given me this stuff, you’d think they would just stop bothering but hey, free primos without having to do tedious events, yay. While I’m at it I’m progressing the archon quest so I don’t have to tiptoe around spoilers. And I’d like to unlock all the waypoints so I can zoom around the map easily, but man, Sumeru is HUGE. It’s going to take days to unlock everything, which I don’t have the energy for, so for now I’ll focus on this archon quest thing. Nahida is so cute, can’t wait to pull her.

Counterside – Yet another gacha game. I heard there were free pulls and that the game isn’t all “girls girls girls girls girls” but actually has useful and relevant male characters, so I gave it a try. Today is my… fourth? fifth day? I’m not too impressed with the combat, which I just auto 90% of the time, but the story is pretty interesting and the translation/localization is very well done.

Good translation is important. Don’t let anyone bamboozle you with “Just be grateful you’re getting to play it” crap. How the story reads has a big effect on how it is received. Bad translation is a waste of money and time and an insult to everyone involved. I felt that anew when I played the latest event in Love Nikki. The game is notorious for its slipshod translations, but this time they got someone competent to do the Flying Bird story translations. The result was like night and day – the event stories were actually interesting, easy to follow and even moving, in Neva and Shade’s cases. I almost wondered if I was playing a different game by accident.

But back to Counterside. I’m enjoying it apart from the fact that it crashes every five or ten minutes. Every game on my phone crashes every five to ten minutes, actually. I’d like a new phone, but it runs everything else just fine and isn’t that old, so I can’t justify an expensive new phone just for gacha games I might drop soon. Oh yeah, Counterside also crashes and hangs permanently and has to be reinstalled whenever I try to join a raid. Maybe I should get a new phone after all…

Anyway, since I just started CS, I’ll let some time pass first before writing some proper review-ish type thoughts on it. That’s enough of an update from me for one day. Back to work!

100 hours into Xenoblade Chronicles 3 – Climb every mountain, ford every stream (spoilers)

IIRC I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2 around the 100-hour mark. I killed the boss, did some perfunctory extra exploration and that was it. There was a lot I didn’t like that about that game (and a lot I did), but the biggest was having the map filled in for me already so there were no fun moments trying to fill in every inch of a map and discovering fun new things along the way. I certainly didn’t spend an entire playing session swimming along the edges of an ocean in XC2 like I did in Xenoblade Chronicles 3 last night. Good times. I just need one more dead body to get Colony 15’s affinity up one star so I was scouring the map for corpses. Luckily there was no one around at 2am to hear me muttering “Here, dead body dead body dead body♪” to myself.

What have I been up to in the 45 hours since my last post on XC3? Oh you know, same old, same old. Play the story a little, explore a LOT, play the story a little. I asked for more stages in an earlier post and so far XC3 has delivered in a big way. We’ve had the jungle, we’ve had the ocean, now a big ol’ snowfield just opened up for me to prance about in. This is the way!

I’ve even shelved Genshin Impact‘s Sumeru update for now. I’ll need it to sustain me when I’m done with Xenoblade and start feeling the need… the need to… uh, what rhymes with “need” and means “explore every pixel of a game world”? Anyway, that.

But it’s not all exploring, I have made some progress with the story. Just a little, not too much. I learned my lesson from XC2 where I beat the last boss too quickly and lost the will to play, so the last boss here is gonna be waiting for me for a long, long time. The world and its timeline are a little unclear right now but evidently the baddie has been hanging out in a movie theater for aeons and aeons. Another 100 hours won’t hurt.

NGL that meat looks hella good, whatever it is.

To gather my thoughts on the story further… we got away with our stupid plan from last time. We finally reached the City we were aiming for and my party found out and easily accepted how humanity was supposed to live all along, i.e. growing up, having kids, getting old and dying, instead of living for 10 years and returning to the “Queen.” Who is a robot btw. The real queens are snoozing elsewhere and my current goal is to go wake them up.

Lessee, what else happened… oh yeah, there was another crazy hare-brained scheme of waltzing into the enemy camp. Lots of shenanigans and a couple of skipped cutscenes later, and Mio has a new body! So we don’t need to worry about her croaking for a while. Turns out Alter Noah is “Noah who made some bad choices in the past” and Alter Mio is “Mio who is suffering from Noah’s bad choices” and somehow present Noah and present Mio are in love because they have always been attracted to each other for aeons and aeons of repeated trial and failure to either kill the big bad (Z) or escape their short lifespans.

Oh they’re definitely expecting you. Y’all ain’t slick.

I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I hate the kind of romance where people are in love just because they are “soul mates” or their past selves were in love so somehow they also have to be in love. It’s so lazy, and I absolutely don’t see the romantic attraction between Mio and Noah beyond “the story says so.” They’re more like good off-seer buddies than anything else. I’d buy Lanz x Sena before I bought that (actually I quite like Lanz x Sena). But not Eunie x Taion, no matter how much the writers try to force it. That said, the last thing I’m playing Xenoblade 3 for is romance, so as long as they keep the new areas flowing, I’ll overlook the nonsense.

Oh yeah btw, did you shed a tear or two when Mwamba, Cammuravi or Ethel kicked the bucket? Better get a refund on those tears, because they’re all revived later. …What? It says “spoilers” right in the title of this post. All things considered, Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is a rather optimistic game, which is why my party can keep carrying out stupid plans without getting flattened to a paste. Or, possibly, in other timelines they did get flattened but I happen to be playing the one timeline where everything goes swimmingly. It’s all kind of vague right now, but it should get clearer as I keep playing.

Time’s a-wasting, back into the fray!

What I’m playing at the end of summer 2022

You tell ’em, Manana!

Summertime blues~ Let’s round up all the games I’m playing/want to play/should be playing right now.

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 – It came, I’m playing it and I’m taking my sweeeeet time about it. I’m supposed to be doing [important spoiler mission] right now, but it can wait while I explore vast areas of nothingness. If you’ve ever complained about an open world game having large, empty spaces just for the sake of having space, you can blame gamers like me. 70 hours and counting, will probably update around the 80-hour mark, once I finish [important spoiler mission that will surely move the plot forward but is not so important that I can’t dilly-dally for 20 hours first].

Love Nikki – I think my wardrobe percentage hit about 30% recently, and I’ve crafted almost all of the Evolution and chapter suits. I’m now turning my attention to others, especially low diamond-consumption ones like Pragya Princess. Normally I would complain about the uselessness of Momo’s guide feature in suggesting suits to craft (it suggests recolors, then once you color them it suggests you recolor them back) but it’s pointless because the publishers don’t seem to care about QoL. There are some welfare suits and a housing pavilion coming up in the next couple of weeks, so I’m looking forward to that and having a pretty good time.

Shining Nikki – Dropped it at the beginning of the year and picked it up again for the first anniversary, which did not disappoint. Gifts and giveaways out the wazoo and a powerful UR Cool suit with a powerful (but hideous, seriously) outfit, and I enjoyed reading the story in a sadistic kind of way. Plus since I hadn’t played in so long, I had plenty of main story quests to catch up with, so that kept me busy for a while. Right now I’m bored again, so I’m thinking of uninstalling for a while until Nikki’s birthday in December when there’s sure to be more good stuff.

Genshin Impact – Sumeru released at last! This will merit its own post once I’ve had a chance to explore a little more and once I’ve finished the archon quest. Huge map is HUGE, and this is only 50% of its true power! (smashes scouter) Ideally I’d like to write after I’ve gotten Lesser Lord Kusanali, because it is my mission to collect all the archons. But since no one knows when she’s coming out, I’ll play a little longer and write some quick thoughts.

Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia – Dropped it. I was kind of enjoying it at first, and the game is RIDICULOUSLY generous, possibly even topping Romancing Saga Re; Universe, but they lost me with the fiddly Force and Shinryu era. I hate gimmicky battle systems. I’ll probably write more about it if I do a “Games I dropped this year” post at the end of the year, because I did play for quite a while.

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius – Speaking of gimmicky battle systems, look what we have here. The battles themselves are very straightforward, and I’ve been auto-ing my way through most of them. But I can tell things are going to get complicated with the sheer number of support skills every character has. Skills to reduce damage, skills to buff others, skills to infuse elements, skills to trigger other skills, etc etc. I’ve been around the block a few times, I know how this goes. Love the ridiculously huge numbers, though. 10,856,234,909 in a single turn, anyone?

I was enjoying the story too until they introduced the “obligatory amnesiac mystery girl whose name starts with F” and then the main character’s friend started going all broody and moody on us. Urghh… Currently playing to collect all the 6th anniversary rewards and any compensation given for the Facebook login issues the game is currently facing. After that, I’ll uninstall it until I have more time for theorycrafting and grinding.

Tower of Fantasy – Played for about two weeks after it launched but it kept crashing, especially when I had to do anything multiplayer like Joint Operations. I kind of wanted to get into it so I’d have a “standby game” whenever I was bored/not feeling Genshin Impact, but the technical troubles were too many and the game wasn’t good enough to make me want to overcome them.

Undernauts and Tokyo Xanadu eX+ – On hold because my computer has been taken hostage by Sumeru. Once the excitement wears off and GI gets stale again (and it always does), I’ll get back to them, or maybe start something new.

Epic Seven – No, I haven’t gone back to this. I’m really tempted because their 4th Anniversary is starting in a few days and they’re pretty generous with the giveways. But the fundamental issue I had with E7, which was the ridiculous amount of grinding for good gear and the lack of PVE content haven’t gone away. Even if I get shiny new units, I still have to grind to gear them, and then all I can use them in is the labyrinth, which I hate, the Tower, which is too short, the story, which I like but which takes too long to gear up to clear, etc etc. Basically I’m just convincing myself not to go back, and I think I’ve succeeded so I’ll call it a day.

Right, that’s enough of a roundup for today. It’s helped me to get my priorities in order, i.e XC3 > GI, fit in Love Nikki here and there, and drop/suspend the rest.

Before I forget, Ranshima Monogatari ~ Lair Land story, a dating sim I played way back when I had time for dating sims, recently came out in English on Steam. Check it out if you like Princess Maker-style raising sims, and if you want to chase both husbandos and waifus at the same time. And no, nobody paid me for this plug, I just enjoyed the game that much and hope more people can play it. See you all later!