Soul Smith of the Kingdom – Helps pass the time

Soul Smith of the Kingdom / 王国のソウルスミス is a training/management simulation game by inutoneko, a Japanese indie game circle I’ve been following for years. Last time I played one of their games, I mentioned that they had started releasing games in English on Steam. I had heard the quality wasn’t the best, but I thought I should check one out anyway. After comparing the opening sequence for the English and Japanese versions… I went with the Japanese. Sorry, localizers. I’m sure you’re trying your best but… no. It’s not good.

Not to kick them while they’re down, so I’ll give just two examples. I found the English sequence in this video, btw (gotta give credit where it’s due). The narration is in German but the game is in English.

Example 1 (English)

Example 1 (Japanese)

This “childe” they’re screaming out is actually “若” in Japanese. The word by itself does/can mean “young” or “child” and in this case, the daughter of their boss. But in English you don’t call your boss’s daughter “childe.” You can use her name, or you can call her “Miss” or some other title, but what is this “childe” business? Childe Roland?

Example 2 (English)

Example 2 (Japanese)

I already explained the main character is their boss’s daughter. She’s not “my childe”. Also that “Smith” in the corner should be “Smiths” since there’s more than one of them. Even if the translator didn’t know – which is likely because game translators frequently translate from raw scripts without reference to the game – an editor should have caught it and added a simple S before release.

Beyond that, what is this “Have one till tomorrow”? In Japanese it is “今日は飲み明かしましょう！” I.e. “Let’s drink the night away!” or “Let’s drink till we’ll drop!” or something along those lines. “Have one till tomorrow”… strictly speaking, all the words can be found in the English dictionary, but that’s as close as you can get to the sentence making sense, much less being close to the original Japanese.

So a brief comparison was enough to persuade me to stick to the original, at least for Soul Smith of the Kingdom. Other games might have better localizations, I don’t know. And I should added that outside the opening scene and optional story scenes, there’s very little to read in this game so a bad translation doesn’t have to be a deal breaker. Especially if you can’t read Japanese.

Now, on to the game itself.

Story: The main character is Nine Andelioar, a genius blacksmith from a famous blacksmithing family. Her father decides that while Nine is good at blacksmithing, she lacks management and training skills. Thus he bans her from smithing until she can train blacksmiths capable of fully forging the ultimate sword known as the Soul Smith.

Gameplay: It’s described as an “idle-clicker” i.e. a game that requires very little input from the gamer. You can leave it in the background and check in from time to time and still have fun somehow. In theory. Here’s the main menu:

The basic layout is this – you hire apprentices and set them to work making and selling weapons. You use the money you earn from this to expand your depot so you can hold more materials, buy useful skills and items from the market place, level your smiths up so they can make better stuff. Once they’ve grown as far as they can, you transfer them to another company branch and hire even better smiths.

Soul Smith of the Kingdom is called an idle game because weapon forging and selling is mostly automatic. As long as they have enough material, you just tell them what to make and they’ll make it forever and ever, no breaks, no strikes, no need to even pay or feed them. It’s a literal sweatshop, but the workers are so happy and excited to be there so don’t feel bad for them.

The thing to note in the menu screenshot is the “Soul Chance!!” in blue next to two of my smiths. It’s only when a blacksmith can fully grasp the “soul” of the weapon they’re making that they can be said to have mastered the art of making that weapon. Or something like that. During a Soul Chance, a countdown appears and the forging gauge slows down. If the smith can fully forge the weapon before the countdown reaches T0, they’ll get the Soul of the weapon. The first time this is done on a weapon it will also unlock a new weapon recipe. And it will add 1% to the completion gauge in the top left corner, which is at 60% in the screenshot above.

Here’s a list of the kinds of weapon you can make. You can see I’ve gotten the souls of 60 out of the 100 weapons in the game. Thus the little blue “Soul” next to them. The legendary Soul Smith sword is No. 60 on the list, so you don’t have to finish the whole chart to get the ending. There’s a second ultimate weapon, the Olivier, that is No. 90 on the list and which earns you a second ending, but that’s too much work so I quit after the Soul Smith.

Let’s see, what more should I cover… Maybe the hiring process. To hire better smiths, you need to raise the proficiency of your forge (think of it as fame or expertise) and pay huge sums of money to attract good talent. The more money, the better. See the bold numbers like 4 4 6 5 7 on the right side of the screenshot above? Those are smith/weapon proficiency levels of various elements. If a weapon requires a proficiency of 2 in fire and 4 in light, a smith with those abilities will have a very easy time forging it. Easier time = faster speed and greater profits + much better chance to succeed in getting a Soul.

Here are the stats of one smith in more details. The D Z and C represent Skill, Talent and Inheritance, which mean various things but I’m too lazy to explain. The blue boxes are Awakened Boosts, basically skills that help in forging like giving you extra money or a better rate of triggering Soul Chances. This smith has 4 4 6 5 7 proficiency in the elements, which is excellent, and I had to do a lot of reloading to get him. CP affects the speed of forging, also very important and raised by leveling up. The list of skills below the Skill, Talent and Inheritance bars are Nine’s skills/Friend skills that affect smithing.

Smiths can only be developed up to a point. After that you’re just throwing money in to little effect and it’s time to let them go and hire newer, better workers. But before they go, they can pass on some of their Awakened Boosts to others.

That’s what the “Inheritance” bar affects. With a lot of effort and time, you can eliminate useless skills and stack the deck with skills that help with triggering and succeeding in Soul Chances, bringing you closer to the end of the game.

Since Nine herself is stuck in the forge supervising and managing smiths, the work of gathering the necessary materials falls to the usual cast of the Ishwald games. Who also don’t get paid and don’t take breaks and have to hand over everything they find in the dungeons to Nine. But at least she gives them sweet weapons, accessories and level ups, so that’s good.

There’s way too much going on there to unpack in one post. The important thing is to pick characters with good skills to contribute to your pool of Friend Skills that affect the whole party/your forge. For example both Fill and Marietta have Critical Smith skills that raise the likeliness of succeeding in Soul Chances. Xian has a skill that gives boosts to attack. Palcheresse can get you better prices for your weapons. ETC.

Characters also excel at different things inside dungeons. So if you want to collect more loot and materials, you can put characters with high loot drop rates together. If you just want to clear levels and delve deeper, use people like Ruvel and Shio to get the job done. But there’s no need to overthink teams too much. It’s all automatic so just strengthen the team with fresh weapon upgrades from time to time and everything will be fine.

Last things to mention before moving on to whether I liked Soul Smith or not: Manasource and Souls. Two other currencies apart from cold hard cash. Manasource is used to unlock characters and also unlock, upgrade and sustain Friend skills. You get it from fun… yeah, some of them are fun… fun minigames, treasure chests and achievements.

This minigame makes my brain tingle.

It’s the need to stop regularly to earn manasource via minigames that stops Soul Smith from being the perfect idle clicker. In an ideal world you would gather good blacksmiths, set them to work on a weapon, come back in a while to see if they’ve gotten the soul, switch them to another weapon and go away again, etc. And I did do that, but Friend skills are really helpful, so what I would do was play a lot of minigames to build up a lot of Manasource and then idle until it was almost all gone, rinse, repeat.

Souls are earned by succeeding at Soul Chances. Only the first success counts towards game completion, but subsequent successes earn Soul points that Nine can spend on skills.

There are skills to enlargen the dungeon and the market, skills to give you a better selling price for your goods, skills to raise smith CP, etc etc.

What I thought about Soul Smith

Soul Smith of the Kingdom is one of those games I enjoyed a lot when I was playing it, but now I’m done I’m not sure what I saw in it. I enjoyed some of the minigames. I liked (?) the hiring process, though it involved a lot of reloading. Trying to find the right people with the right balance of skills is harder than it looks. I also liked getting new weapons and upgrading my adventurers so they could delve deeper into the dungeons. And it’s really satisfying when you finally manage to successfully get a weapon’s soul after many attempts.

Getting the Soul Smith weapon soul is a good goal and a good place to stop. After that raw luck starts to play a much larger part in Soul Chances instead of skills and stats. Can you trigger enough Critical Smiths to win or not? It’s all down to luck. You also need a LOT more money to get talent that can forge 5+ proficiency weapons. This means you’ll have to let the game idle for much longer while your smiths earn money, only to blow half of it on one worker and then start again. It’s tedious beyond the Soul Smith point so I’d say 60% of the game is fun, the other 40% seemed so tedious I couldn’t be bothered.

TL;DR – Soul Smith is not too complicated, not too involved, will keep you busy for about 10 hours. It’s good if you don’t want anything deep or long-winded, apart from that it’s nothing special.

Paradise Bay is going down – and I think I know why

I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t had time even for casual fare like Candy Crush Soda Saga or Paradise Bay. A few days ago I finally checked in to Paradise Bay only to discover the following message:

If it’s too small to read, it says:

“Bon Voyage! Trademasters, it’s with a heavy heart we must inform you that on May 17, 2019 we will terminate service fo Paradise Bay. On that date the game will no longer be playable. As of March 18, all In-App purchases have been turned off and allplayers credited with ten million Gems to use as they desire. Thank you for spending your time with us, and we wish you the best on all your future adventure! – The Paradise Bay Team.”

As for why it’s going down, it says a lot that this notice went out on the 18th of March and a “big fan” like me only saw in it early April. When I wrote a post about Paradise Bay a little over 2 years ago, I commented, prophetically, that: “I’m a little worried they’ll take it down for non-profitability since it’s so easy to play for free but, eh, not my problem.” Welp, looks like I’ve gotta get me a psychic hotline because my prediction came true. And I think I know why.

But only “think.” I don’t work for King or keep up with the latest news in casual game-land. So take everything I’m going to write below with a pinch of salt. It’s just that as a player who considers myself a fan of Paradise Bay, as well as someone who dabbles in other casual games, I could tell the writing was on the wall for this game two years ago and the results are plain for all to see.

TL;DR – It wasn’t profitable enough

Paradise Bay is no Anno 2070, but it’s still a large game with a lot of moving parts and graphics. A game like that will take a lot of money and man-hours to develop, design and maintain. It just had too many moving parts compared to King’s other games like Candy Crush. Apparently it was run by a company named Z2 that King bought some years ago for $45 million. That probably explains why it’s a more complicated game that doesn’t really fit the simple puzzle games King made their fortune off.

A lot of stuff going on in one little screen

Furthermore, unlike those simpler games, Paradise Bay was also story and event-based. This means even more effort and money spent on brainstorming, programming, testing and bug-fixing events, constantly trying to keep players engaged and more. I’ve seen a figure of “$200 million generated by Z2live in the past few years” being bandied around online. That’s a vague and poorly-sourced claim, but even if it’s true, how many years is “a few years”? One? Two? Five? How much of that revenue is actual profit? What were the most recent figures? I bet it cost a ton to run a game that didn’t make much in return. Especially when you consider that King by itself makes over $200 million every quarter…

The thing was, Paradise Bay was too laid back. Too easy to not play. Too stagnant. Even a fan like me could go by for weeks without playing and come back to meet very little change. No new systems, no new challenges, no new plants to grow, no new maps, no nothing. The only thing you’d miss out on were a few pet stickers, which are hardly essential. In January and February they experimented with free and paid login bonuses but again, the best rewards were pet stickers. Pets are reasonably cute, but they don’t do anything, they’re just kinda there, so eh.

I think another reason why Paradise Bay went down is because they failed to build any meaningful communities within the game. That’s why most gacha games are so big on guilds and parties. They want players to develop a sense of camaraderie that keeps them coming back. I’m sure there are a lot of people who would like to quit a certain online game, but they can’t because they would miss all their buddies they fool around and chat with. Or they would feel guilty about letting the team down.

Paradise Bay didn’t have any of that. You can’t chat with anyone in the game. You can’t ask anyone for help or say thank you after they help you. You can’t find specific people or link up with them. There are ways to do that on Facebook outside the system, but not everyone has Facebook or wants to use it for this kind of thing. In a relaxed farming game like this, there should have been lots of ways for people to interact, trade stuff and help each other out in eventss. And the more benefits there are from playing with others, the more likely players are to rope in their friends and family into playing as well. In theory.

Paradise Bay also faced the issue that most of these “putter around and collect cute stuff” games face: storage. You’re always running into storage limits, which stops you from producing or collecting as much stuff as you would like. Even worse, the space on your island is tiny, with very limited room for expansion. So even if you collect 100 cute but useless pets, you won’t be able to display most of them. The same goes for all the tiles and furniture and other ‘rewards’ you get from events. This is part of the reason why I stopped playing the very similar Rakuen Seikatsu Hitsujimura, quite apart from the fact that they broke my heart as a free player. Deliberately, I might add. Which matter we might discuss another day, or maybe not, it’s not that interesting.

The world map has looked like this for over a year, nothing new to explore.

Hmm, where was I. Yes, I was saying how Paradise Bay doesn’t have many events, the events aren’t very rewarding, the rewards you get aren’t useful and you don’t even have enough space to display them. For my part as a player none of these were big deals. I mentioned before that I liked the laid back nature of the game. Play when you want, for as often as you want. But from the gaming company’s perspective, a game that people don’t feel compelled to play is a game people don’t feel compelled to spend money on. Which ends up being a game that costs more than it’s worth to run.

I need 400,000 EXP to level up and your ‘challenge’ gives me only 1500. Am I a joke to you?

It’s worse than that, even. As part of their shutting down campaign, Paradise Bay has given all players 10 million gems to spend. Wow! Ten million! In a game where you could only get maybe 3 or 4 a day for free, wow! What am I going to do with them?… And then I realized, there’s nothing to do with paid currency in this game. You can expand your storage a bit, meh. Or speed up production a bit, eh. It means nothing to a patient gamer. The game also has a gacha system where you can draw for pets, but I already told you, pets are useless. That’s why Hitsujimura gradually moved away from pets as cuteness to pets as mega weapons of war where if you don’t have the right one you can forget completing the event, oh, and the reward for the event is good stuff which will make the next events even easier, i bet you wish you had those pets now, huh, huh? Tch. That game.

Poor Wesley will never be able to ask Sita out.

In short. Paradise Bay was a lot of fun to play because it was so laid back – no pressure to play, no pressure to spend. There wasn’t much to do in the game, but that just made it a nice change from the constant grind in almost everything else I normally play. Unfortunately, for Activision Blizzard/King, that’s not what they want from an allegedly free game. It was clear that what made Paradise Bay so attractive for me was also what would lead to its demise. When I saw the notice, I thought “Wow, it lasted longer than I thought,” not “Oh no, what a shock!” It’s a tough life out there in casual gameland.

To draw the curtain on Paradise Bay, I’ll take screenshots of all my characters to remember them by:

Bye Wes! Sorry you never got to marry Sita!

We never got to find out if you liked Wes…

Your pets are too expensive. If you don’t want to give them up for adoption, just say so.

Watch that coffee consumption Pike. Too many lattes will make you fat.

Keani. The eternal voice of reason.

Finn was so cute and funny.

I wanted to hear more adventure stories from Clara!

Farewell and thanks for all the memories!

Granblue Fantasy at level 170 – Good things come to those who refuse to grind

URBLAAARGH MRGRGROGH!
That means “Good morning and welcome to another update on my Granblue Fantasy progress!” As I mentioned a year ago, I’ve quit pretending I’m capable of quitting this game. It’s just that I’m largely satisfied with my grids and have no serious intention of upgrading (what’s Magna 2? Is it tasty?) so a yearly progress report is more than enough.

Earlier posts from my Granblue Fantasy journey:
Levels 1-13 (I must admit that contrary to my fears at the time, stamina limits never materialized. I have more AP than any sane gamer could ever use)
Level 40 (so cute, I actually thought I could stop playing any time I wanted)
Level 50 (to think that now Proto Bahamut raids are as common as dirt and I have like 500 Champion Merits…)
Level 80 (lol, that “fire” grid. I miss those days)
Level 90 (I was so proud of MVP’ing those Omegas)
Level 103 (my grand “I quit” post. Yeah, about that quitting thing…)
Level 140 (the more things change, the more they remain the same)

What have I achieved in a year?

⚔Built a Varuna grid. I had to spark twice for a second Murgleis and a Blue Sphere, but there’s nothing hard about pressing the ‘Draw’ button a few hundred times. I was hoping this Anniversary Roulette would overlap with March’s Legfest so I could spark a third Murgleis at a discount, but not even Cygames is that generous. I’ll post the grid later with the rest of my stuff.

⚔Got 17 characters up to level 100: Gawain, Altair, Lady Grey, Yuel, Sarunan, Cagliostro, Charlotte, Magisa, Arulumaya, Lancelot, Siegfried, Vaseraga, Uno, Vira, Silva, Amira, Yngwie (most recent). A few others are between 99 and 91: Scathacha, Hallessena, Metera, Ghandagoza, Albert, Jeanne d’Arc.

⚔Made 8 out of the 10 eternals. I have everyone except Eahta and Funf now. If I could scrounge up another 45 Rainbow Prisms right now, I could get Eahta. Maybe this is a good time to use those Cerulean Stones. I mean, what else are they good for? There we go.

I’ll beat him up later, there’s no rush. After all, apart from Siete and FLB Uno, none of them have made it to my party front lines. They boast so much in cutscenes, but they’re not impressive at all. I’m only getting them all because I have nothing else to do with my time and stamina.

⚔FLB’d the following summons: Lucifer, Bahamut, Tiamat, Colossus and Yggdrasil Omega. I don’t need to FLB Leviathan, Celeste and Luminiera because I have Varuna, Lucifer and Bahamut. Lucy and Baha were a PITA because of the Silver Centrum requirement, oh how I hate those things.

For the others, I find Magna 2 trains tedious and Magna 2 battles unrewarding. I get irrationally angry when I put in a lot of effort only to get Soul Animas and fodder weapons, and at my age I need to watch my blood pressure (only half-kidding). So I just joined whatever raids I found in the wild for many, many, many months until I finally had enough anima for the FLB.

I finished all three just recently, just around October/November. And then of course March rolls around and Cygames increases the anima drop rate… I have nothing to say :-<

⚔Got my first MLB Arcarum summon: the Sun. I was aiming for Judgment, but then I realized what a tedious process it was with the Primach anima and Silver Centrums (again) so I picked the one everyone says is the most useful. …Except I hardly ever use him because I use Auto-Battle 90% of the time these days. But I’m still working on FLB’ing the Sun for lack of anything better to do. I also want Justice for my water team, but one thing at a time.

⚔Made an Ultima Sword without hosting Proto Bahamut HL or fighting Ultimate Bahamut HL. I leeched for the Proto Baha horns and painstakingly bought Ultima cores from the pendant store, one a month for almost a year. Would it have been faster to just fight UBaha HL? Of course. But I don’t wanna, so there. I can’t tell if I’m getting any benefits from the Ultima Sword, but I must be… right? I’d have to remove it from my grid, test, put it back, test… faster to assume something that annoying to get must be really powerful.

I made the sword Wind because I heard it was a good mainhand. It’s only just now that I’m typing this that I realize… I’m still using the Revenant Dagger as my Wind weapon. Not only that, but the last Proving Grounds event dropped an even better mainhand? …I don’t know what is going on any more. Granblue Fantasy is just too frustrating when it comes to stuff like that.

Stuff I haven’t done and like to pretend I won’t do but maybe I will

– Haven’t unlocked any new classes except Glorybringer since I finished Tier IV last year. The mastery bonuses aren’t worth it IMO.

– Haven’t uncapped any weapons or summons to level 200. I know up to level 100 is called MLB (max limit break?) and 150 is FLB but 200? SLB? ULB? MFSLXYZB? Whatever it is, I haven’t done it. And I just checked the requirements for Lucifer…

Actually very reasonable except those Malice Fragments. Guess I should FLB Lumi quickly and run native Lumi x borrowed Lucifer instead.

– Haven’t unlocked the new light and dark Seraphic weapons. I checked just now but I’m gated by Rainbow Prisms. AGAIN. And I won’t be surprised if Primarch animas and Silver Centrums are needed further down the line, because why not? Let me use Cerulean stones to find out… Yuuuuup. At least there are no Silver Centrums.

– Haven’t unlocked any of the Arcarum Oracle characters. Naturally, since I haven’t FLB’d any Arcarum summons.

– Haven’t added a single Magna 2 weapon to my grids. Thanks to the Anniversary weapon ticket, I can get one if I want. I just don’t know what’s worth it. I hear Grimnir Harps and Earth Axes are good. How many and what should they replace? I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue.

– Haven’t fought the new Huanglong & Qilin or Akasha or Tiamat Malice or whoever the latest ultimate mighty boss de jour is. I’m not even sure what they drop. Something about FLB materials or a new kind of weapon? Are they even any good? When I think about all that effort for something that might be outdated when the next FLMLSLB ultra weapon comes out, I feel so lazy. My regular magna grid will have to suffice.

State of the Grid Address

And with that, it’s time to post my current grids, barely upgraded over last year’s edition! Just like all those FIFA and MLB and NFL video games. Parties, grids and summons in approximate order from most powerful to least.

Water, water everywhere

I started out as a Wind main but Varuna is so hardy and HP-ful and easy to build that Water is my go-to party these days.

When I spark the 3rd Murgleis, it will replace the Wilhelm fist, which is cutting into my HP. The issue is that this party crits pretty often, which I credit to the Wilhelm. What to do, what to do… Eh, I’ll worry about it once I actually have that Murg.

Varuna for double Varuna. I have Bonito but no desire to spend Sunstones on him and no Kengo, Vajra or Summer Grea to take advantage of Kengo memes. Lucifer is for healing and stats, Baha for charge attacks and stats, Yggdrasil is for healing cap up and stats. Athena for… legacy reasons? I’ll replace her with Justice if/when I build her. Or better still, I’ll replace her with MLB Grand Order for the drain. Right after I finish this post.

I used to wonder where people got all those + marks for their weapons and summons, but you’ll pick them up naturally as you play. Especially as you do HL battles and Arcarum. Doubly especially if you gacha draw frequently.

The nice thing about mainhanding a Murgleis is that between the 35% damage cut on ougi (which is pretty much on demand because I usually run Berserker) and Uno’s damage reduction options, I actually have really good sustain. This party doesn’t go down easy at all. If I could just hit harder so battles don’t take so long.

Speaking of battles, I beat Xeno Ifrit NM120 in two turns in the most recent re-run. I remember how unbeatable he seemed the first time round. And now it’s almost as if they nerfed him, I can’t believe it’s still the same boss. Progress like that is why I can’t stop playing Granblue Fantasy.

I’ll be sniping MVPs everywhere this week, so if you see me, say hi!

You Light up my Grids

I haven’t replaced the last gun yet because it’s not that easy to get Lumi swords. That, and I’m sure there must be something else that fits better in that slot, like the enmity dagger Metatron dropped for me the other day. Same for the EX Katana in the top, is it really the best I can do? And there might be better mainhands out there as well. Plus the new Seraphic harp might have a place as well. This is where I should do some research and find out what’s optimal for a light grid, and I will, but not today. I’ve come a long way with Light but I’ve still got a long way to go.

Nice HP, guys! I’m shuffling through my light characters these days, trying to find the best party. FLB Sarunan is really useful for survivability. Jeanne and Albert are both useless. Lucio doesn’t bring much to the table except that nuke. Silva’s custom debuff is nice and she ougis a lot, but she lacks the sheer murder power of her Water counterpart. You can pry my Summer Heles from my cold, dead hands. Etc etc.

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the Wind…

Almost the same as last year’s grid. If you track my Wind grids over the years, you’ll see only minute changes because Wind is really easy to build. That’s why I still recommend it for easily-confused newbies.

I’ve got a Windhose from Proving Grounds, but I’m not sure where it fits in. I don’t want to replace the sweet multi-attack I get from the dagger but I don’t want to let the guns go either so guess the dagger has to go. 🙁 And now that Xeno Sagi is back with a new weapon, maybe there’s a place for that Arkab fist in here as well. Just kidding, no way I’m grinding for that thing this month. Maybe next time.

Solo to 80% and call for help. It’s the only sane way to play. As with Light, I’m currently experimenting with various party configurations. This is one is… hmm, it works but it’s not very flashy. I’ve heard so much about Scath, but I’m not seeing her powers at all. Thinking of replacing her with FLB Metera for the endless delays. Plus I just got Summer Yuel, Birdman and Carmelina to fool around with as well.

Fire in the hole!

I think there’s some perverse spirit within me that compels me to sabotage my Fire grid whenever I can. That must be why I replaced most of my FLB Colossus Canes with 0-star Ancient Ecke Sachs. It’s also why after so many Xeno Ifrit events I still have only one Ifrit Axe and no Ifrit Sword. That’s why I won’t call this grid “weak” because it’s nobody’s fault but mine.

Until I actually fought him, I thought Grimnir was supposed to be a joke character. What kind of joke character hits like that?! If that’s how they roll, then what are the “serious” ones supposed to do? 999999 Skyfall every turn? Grimnir is just ridiculous. Because of him I had to cycle a carbuncle back into my summon pool for the first time in like a year, and I’m not even convinced one is enough.

One of these things is not like the others

It took a while to find a good anti-Grim party. Agielba is really the star of the show, soaking up Tempest Storm with Armored+Substitute and healing back to full with Drain. Summer Ilsa is there solely because she can occasionally paralyze him after his special attacks. Magisa is there for the Blind, but I’m open to replacing her with someone who can cut damage. Maybe Summer Io.

Soon, Grimnir, soon…

BTW, the Agielba-Summer Ilsa-Magisa combo is for Grimnir/Proving Grounds only. I’m still trying various party combinations, just like in Fire and Light. Yuel, Summer Grea, Theresa, Magisa, Shiva, Summer Percival, anyone I can get my hands on. I’m not happy with any of them. They don’t hit hard, they’re squishy, they have all these buttons to press. *sigh*

The Dark side of the game

I’ve got a good team that hits hard and doesn’t die as easily as you might expect. The only downside is their low, low HP compared to other parties. That means it’s easy to achieve and maintain enmity, but it also means they can’t handle triggers very well.

I’m looking to replace that Cortana because of the HP issue. I need something that provides the same multi-attack boost without the downsides. Just realized I still have a Celeste Axe in there. Yes, that’s getting replaced too, just as soon as I figure out what to replace it with. I’ll have to explore Avatar’s library and see what comes up. The fish mainhand is actually a skin for a Qilin sword. All my mainhands are skinned  because who doesn’t like whacking bosses with a fish or dandelion or fluffy pink pillow?

Colossus’ spot is reserved for the day I fully uncap Anubis-sama. Bahamut is such a cool looking lizard, isn’t he?

Finally a party that takes full advantage of the Ultima Sword. This is the party I feel least inclined to tinker with, simply because Dark doesn’t have any other characters I want to use. That said, Vira’s slot is up for grabs because her kit overlaps with the Chaos Ruler I usually run. I considered running Berserker with a Hermanubis mainhand instead but somehow… hmm. I’ll give it a try sometime.

Salt of the Earth

This is the party that puzzles me the most. It doesn’t feel like I’m doing anything wrong, but they’re just so weak without buffs.

They hit like sissies, I just don’t understand it. I mean, this is the standard Earth grid, right?

Give or take a few elements. I guess it’s true that all those swords should be replaced with Alexiel axes. Maybe I need a better buffer than Arulumaya so I can compensate for the lack of hard hits with Earth ATK+, multiattacks and crits. Oh right, I called Siegfried “meh” last time. Forgive me Sieg-sama, you’re actually pretty awesome when you get to level 100. Not to mention you and Threo are the only Sabre-specialty SSRs I have.

Lessee, what happens if I run Chaos Ruler and a team of Threo-Sieg-Arulu with this grid instead…

Nothing happens because I’m too busy writing this post to test it. Okay, laziness doesn’t pay, let’s beat up a dummy for a second.

The damage per hit is still crappy, but MC and Threo are doubling or tripling almost every turn and Sieg is no slouch either. I still need a reliable buffer though.

A little introspection

📕Do as I say, not as I do: You really shouldn’t buy Ultima cores with prestige pendants. Really. Pendants are better spent on hard-to-get weapons and distinctions. I’m including this warning here just in case anyone feels inclined to follow in my footsteps. I’m a very lazy and very patient player and you really shouldn’t emulate everything you see me do.

📕If something is too annoying, wait for a while and maybe it will go away – Cygames is fairly decent about making things easier for players over time. They often tweak drops, requirements, exchange limits, etc. Some examples off the top of my head:
-At first we could only get 1 Legendary Merit a day, now it’s limitless.
-Dimension Halos used to transform randomly, now the rate is 100%.
-Now you can fight Ifrit and other showdowns whenever you want.
-Event character loyalty requirements have been eased.
-Co-op was a pain so they gave us solo co-op.
-Hard+ raids take the frustration out of collecting anima and SR weapon fodder.
-AP for hosting Omega raids went down, BP fills up faster.
TL;DR If there’s a feature or a grind that you find too troublesome to bother with, ignore it for a while and see if things get better. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but at least you avoid burnout while you focus on other things.

Better drop rates for everyone!

📕Stay up to date with the meta: All my grids are what was “optimum” when I was starting out. Sometimes not even that. Granblue Fantasy has moved on since 2016 so find out what’s current in 2019. It doesn’t matter when you’re just starting out because just about any on-element weapon will make you stronger. But around level 101 you should start paying attention. If nothing else, it will save you from FLBing more weapons than you need and other huge wastes of time.

📕Characters will level up fine by themselves – I hear a lot about ‘sliming’ characters up to level 100. I’ve never done it myself but I’ll comment anyway: unless there’s a reason to rush or you hardly play the game, they’ll get to level 100 just by staying in your party for a while. You don’t need to force the process.

The Grancypher must be overloaded by this point

📕Most event weapons and summons are useless long-term – I worked so hard trying to get and 3-star event weapons when I started and almost none of them are in my grid now. In fact… scrolls up… only the samurai guys’ light katana and the collab fire axe are from events, and both are due for replacement. It’s not like I didn’t get any use from them or that you shouldn’t try to get good stuff from events. Just don’t stress out over them because they’ll be gone in the long run.

📕Start gathering Rainbow Prisms and Silver Centrums ASAP: As well as other annoying-to-farm items like Primal anima and white dragon scales. If you have BP to spare, join a Xeno raid or Grand Order raid, and jump in any primal raids you find (also a good source of creeds). <– BTW, I don’t actually do any of this. But you should.

Don’t forget: you’re here forever

That’s enough for a yearly grid update, isn’t it? Even after 3 years I still have so much to work on in Granblue Fantasy. It’s a testament to how Cygames is always trying to keep things fresh… or tedious. Freshly tedious. And it’s another reason why you shouldn’t burn yourself out trying to get anything in this game.

A lot of the comments I get on Granblue Fantasy posts are from relative newbies stressed out over their progress. To them I say: chill. Either you’ll be playing for a long time and you’ll eventually beat all those bosses and get all those weapons… Or you’ll drop the game from frustration and all the effort you put in will be wasted. Wait, you don’t want to hear that, do you? It’s true though. It’s just JPEGs on a screen, don’t take it so seriously.

Next grid update will be another year from now, or a bit sooner if anything interesting happens. Until then, it’s back to my regular gaming schedule. So long!

Finally grinded enough to beat Cumulus Vex (DQVII)

I should probably say a few words about how sweet it feels to get revenge, but after all these months I didn’t feel anything. Fighting and training to get strong enough to beat your old nemesis is actually a boring pain in the neck. It’s much cooler in kungfu movies than in real life.

And after all my grinding, going up a level each, giving everyone an advanced class… that damned Cumulus almost killed me again! I was just lucky he didn’t use that wind vortex attack too often, because every time he did Aishe would drop dead. Yes, that Aishe who I turned into a Sage who was supposed to support me with Multiheal. I spent more time resurrecting her than she did healing my party. The real key was putting Oomph on my main character and letting him blast Cumulus with his most powerful attack. DPS > Sustain.

If I had lost that battle again I would have dropped all Dragon Quest games for good, not just Dragon Quest VII. As it is we’re still in business. Sort of. Technically. The reason it’s taken me two weeks from finishing Atelier Escha & Logy to beating Cumulus Vex isn’t because I was spending all that time grinding but because I was spending all that time playing the Picross e series.

I can’t help it, it’s too darned addictive. There’s a definite use-it-or-lose-it aspect to the puzzle solving, but once I shook the rust off my mind I was back in business, baby! I’ve even managed to solve a lot of the Free No-Hint puzzles I gave up on last time. The trick is… Turn off the 3DS! Or put it to sleep or something. Do something else for even 10 minutes and come back and suddenly the next answer jumps out at you. It’s amazing.

Well enough about that. What to play next. I’ve got a lot of half-finished games out there, not just DQVII. But the truth is, they all bore me. I’ve seen what they have to offer, I need something new. Or better yet, more Picross. Maybe I should wipe all my save files and start anew… Yes, yeeeees… It’s been a while since I played anything on the PS2, DS and PSP so maybe something on one of those next time. Maybe an otome game? Or maybe more Picross. Piiicrrosss….

Finished Atelier Escha & Logy Plus with a little help from YouTube (spoilers)

I explored the Fallen Ruins and beat the last boss fair and square. That being the case, I can say I legitimately finished Atelier Escha & Logy Plus. It just happpens that I had 240 days left on the clock and I could only skip forward 10 days at a time. Meaning I’d have to sleep and wake up 24 times just to see an ending… Or I could save myself the trouble and watch the endings on YouTube at 2x speed. Guess which one I chose.

Now I’m done with Escha & Logy, I don’t feel like writing much. But I will say again that it’s 20 times better than Atelier Ayesha and a very satisfying experience. We don’t get the full story behind the Dusk or why the crops are failing, but at least we know that we don’t know, so that’s progress. After dragging it out so long, I’m sure Gust will finally solve the mystery in Atelier Shallie, but I’m not in any hurry to get to it. After all, just like in Ayesha the characters claim there’s crop failure and food shortages, but my container is stuffed with giant pancakes and bowls of soup so I don’t know what they’re talking about.

After they came up with so many items in Ayesha, I didn’t think Gust had anything left, but surprise surprise, there’s a TON of new items to make in Escha & Logy. Soooo much stuff. So many accessories and weapons and armor. Alchemy is also more important to the plot, so you don’t feel like you’re wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere on synthesis.

Characters… Hmm. I didn’t like Logy or dislike Escha as much as I thought I would. They were okay, I guess. Everyone was okay. I liked the paucity of repeat characters, though 0 returnees would have been my ideal number. We got a bit of romance with Escha and Logy, even though I don’t really buy it but I’m not invested enough to argue. Even the last boss was somewhat sympathetic, though it was weird how everyone was suddenly claiming to be her friend and preaching the power of friendship when they’d never even met her before. These JRPGs and their friendship fetish…

TL;DR – It was good, I had fun, lots of time for exploration and synthesis and a heartwarming story with a good ending. If Ayesha hadn’t been so awful I would have looked for more to complain about, but this is such a breath of fresh air after that. Now I feel that Gust has done right by me. I’m looking forward to playing Shallie in a while, but my alchemy itch has been well-scratched for now, so I’ll get round to that in a couple of months. Or I might jump to Sophie for a change of pace and return to the Dusk series later.

Schedule for March: I was close to the end in Tokyo Xanadu eX+ so final push for that next week. This weekend is dedicated to a Do-or-Die attempt to get back into Dragon Quest VII. If I can’t beat that stupid cloud boss by Sunday night, I give up forever. I also need to do a final reckoning with Chaos Rings III and talk about my progress in Ys: Memories of Celceta.

Update 3 days later: Let’s talk some more

It’s been a nice restful weekend. I hung around doing nothing for a while and suddenly I’m feeling more chatty. So let’s talk about the few things that are still bugging me after finishing Atelier Escha & Logy. The main thing is Logy’s so-called “character development,” which was very forced and in fact non-existent IMO. For most of the game he’s just a normal, cooperative worker. Then come end game and he’s spouting all this stuff to Escha about how she helped him change and learn to work with others, blah blah blah. Like, what?

All that changing actually took place in his backstory off-screen. Before the start of the game, in Central. That’s where he went ahead with the airship development and got his friend injured. When he shows up in Colseit, he has obviously learned his lesson already. He’s helpful, works well with others, doesn’t complain even when others hold him back, even the objections he raises about the airship are all sound and rational, and he gives his all to complete the project regardless… Sounds like I’m writing a college recommendation for the kid, haha.

But seriously, Logy is already a changed man when he appears in Colseit. You could argue that he had changed mentally before he arrived and that working with others helped him put those changes into practice. Even then, it would be due to working with everyone in the town, not just Escha. The whole thing felt like an attempt to shoehorn the usual “Power of Friendship” trope in there so we could lecture the boss before beating her. That, and a forced attempt to add romance to the game. I so don’t see it but at least it’s not as creepy as Katla and Micie.

If they really wanted to make sense of the whole “I changed thanks to you” plot, they should have put more effort into showing Logy’s initial reluctance to work with or trust anyone instead of making him so supportive from the start. This is where people will say “Oh but you missed the scene where…” Actually I did miss/skip a few scenes, but only a few. Three in fact.

The first is the one where Logy tells Escha about his past and then she throws herself into his arms and starts crying. I was so dazed, like seriously? Why are YOU crying? This isn’t about you. I figured it would be one of those anime scenes “Wah, don’t blame yourself I’m here for you waaah” kind of things, but I was so annoyed I skipped all the dialogue so… yeah. Not everything is about you, you frivolous pink-haired frou-frou faux-cutesy charlatan.

No seriously, why is this brainless bint the one crying here?

The next scene I skipped was the animated scene where the airship tries to approach the Unexplored Ruins and there’s all this turbulence and stuff. They try to make it look like there’s a chance of failure, but of course there’s no way they won’t succeed so don’t waste my time.

Same thing with the third one I skipped, where Escha is late to the ship when the ruins are crumbling and it’s like aaah, what will she do? Obviously the writers would never let a main character fall to her death, so I skipped to the inevitable conclusion where she ends up safe and sound. That said, I made the same assumption in Chaos Rings III and got a nasty shock the other day… Gotta find time to continue the story and find out what happens. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Anyway, that’s enough about Escha and Logy. I should probably say something about the 6-man battle system, since I enjoyed it quite a bit. Might be my imagination and the fact that I didn’t play on Hard, but battles moved much faster, characters were more powerful, items were much more useful. There were tons of area attacks so you could clear useless mobs in one strike, and there were specials all over the place but the animation never got tedious. Gust really learned a lot from the mistakes of Atelier Ayesha.

Synthesis: Once you got good items and replicated them through the homunculus, it was easy to unlock all the properties on any item you made. BUT it’s still a pain in the ass to put non-standard effects on items. You know, that tedious process where you have to make item X with property Y, then use X to make another item Z to transfer property Y to the final item, etc etc.

You’ve never heard me complaining about this process before because I flat-out refuse to do it. Any content that cannot be cleared through standard means will simply not be cleared. Luckily in all the Atelier games I’ve played, this sort of chicanery is only necessary for optional bosses. That was the case here, so Child of Terror and Dreadnaught can stay over there and terrorize anyone they want, I’m done.

Right, now I feel I’ve said whatever I wanted to say about this game. Normally I advise people to play games in chronological order, but you can just skip Ayesha and go straight to Escha & Logy, you won’t lose anything. Though you’ll appreciate the latter so much more if you play the former first. All your complaints will vanish because it could be so much worse. You know what, just play the games as they came out. Now back to Picross Dragon Quest VII.