Happy New Year 2023! And no resolutions because resolutions are so 2022!

Happy new year, everyone! Did you all have fun these holidays? I can’t believe work resumes on Monday already and school from Tuesday onwards. Normally I would say “Where did the time go?” but the older I grow, the faster the time moves and the more I get used to it. Make the most of each day, is technically my new year’s resolution, but I already spent most of today grinding hunts and runes in Epic Seven, so that’s out of the window already.

As for video game resolutions, I’ve given up on making those. If anything, it seems just resolving to play something these days makes me less likely to play it than not. Besides, I genuinely won’t have the time for most games this year, because I have a lot of personal admin to do such as considering whether to change jobs/go back to school etc etc. Video games aren’t going anywhere, but my peak earning years are dwindling. For the sake of a comfortable retirement, it’s go time! As long as I manage to finish Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and reach the end of Episode 4 in Epic Seven, that will be enough for me in 2023.

I do feel like I neglected this blog a lot in 2022, so I’ll try to post a little more often, at least once every 10 days. First up will be a roundup of all the gacha games I tried and dropped this year. My big “thing” at this time last year was sorting out my gacha games, dropping most of them and pledging not to start any more… but as I already said, I often do the opposite of what I said I would so instead I tried several other new games. I would try even more, but the majority of mobile games just don’t appeal to me. The gameplay is too simplistic, the characters are boring, similar-looking waifus, the story is meandering, neverending nonsense and the gacha is downright unfair. But never say never.

In the meantime, I’m off to bed. No more late nights for me from 2023 onwards… and I just jinxed it by writing it out. Happy New Year again!

Uninstalled CounterSide. I’d had enough

I’ve played CounterSide for approximately four months and seen pretty much all it has to offer. However I uninstalled it over the weekend for the following reasons:

1. I’d seen enough. It doesn’t offer enough new content or gameplay to make ongoing play exciting. There are regular events, but the gameplay is essentially the same and I got tired of watching the same old, same old every time. Pulling new characters didn’t excite me either because gearing them is the same old Cooldown set with the same substats for practically everyone, and deployment costs mean you can’t easily stack a deck with your favorite shinies. Some might call it strategic, all I know is it’s not my thing.

2. My phone was running out of space. Something had to give, and CounterSide wasn’t exactly thrilling me so it was an easy cut. I need to give more thought to getting a new phone next year, but I’ll finish 2022 with this one. Actually… do I really need a new phone or is mass consumerism getting to me? …And other such thoughts along those lines will be my focus for 2023.

3. I got tired of the constant crashes. Long loading times only to crash when I try to do PVP or raids took a toll on me. It was especially bad when the game took so long to load during real-time PVP that I would lose without lifting a finger. I’m no PVP juggernaut by any means, but I still have my gamer’s pride. Losing by default sucks.

4. The Re-Arm system lost me. Getting characters up to level 110 was already a pain and a half, now you have to do that AND collect dupes/decompose other characters plus spend a boatload of gold, etc etc. to get a character to its optimum state. Right now people might say “You don’t need Re-armed characters to beat the game,” but you know the game company is going to start developing content for the new higher level really soon.

It’s a normal part of gacha games to raise the level cap higher and higher with time, but TBH I find it tedious every time. If it happens before I start a game, I accept it, but if it happens afterwards, I usually bail. And that’s why I didn’t have an issue with the Shiryuu era in Dissidia Final Fantasy but dropped it shortly after the Force era started. Starting a game near launch has its advantages and disadvantages.

5. Time passed and I lost interest in the story. Chapter 7 came out globally the other day, but I already forgot what happened in the previous chapters. Something about replacers and stuff, everything being destroyed left, right and center. Now that I think of it, these “Everything has been destroyed, and everything is still being destroyed, and we can barely do anything about it” stories aren’t really to my taste. I like something a little more hopeful and active. Like the 7th Dragon games, for example, where mankind is in a similarly poor state, but where you are involved in various efforts to retake the planet (or at least just Tokyo) and restore your normal lives.

Now, to be fair, the fact that playing whack-a-mole with Corrupted Objects is a losing game is very much a plot point in CounterSide. Several characters have brought it up, and whole chapters of the story revolve around the bad guys trying to implement an alternative solution. If this were a regular console game with a fixed start and finish, I would be all on board for that, but gacha games run for years and years. I’m already tired of beating C.O.s and all the attendant doom and gloom. If I quit now, maybe I’ll have the strength to come back later and read the conclusion (I lied to myself and you).

TL;DR – As summarized in the title, I’ve had enough CounterSide for now. I might come back later, might not, but for now I’m putting it behind me and working on other stuff (ahem, Epic Seven, ahem). Dunno who needs to hear this, but the easiest way to quit a gacha game is to replace it with another, more enjoyable one. Cold turkey is just a waste of the bandwidth you’ll spend downloading it again. Anyway, there you have it. Now back to the other mobile games.

Went crawling back to gacha games

My tablet battery died and I wanted to finish a hell event in Love Nikki, so I installed Bluestacks. Then I was like, since I’m emulating android games anyway… and I reinstalled Epic Seven and Princess Connect Re: Dive. 🙈 After all I said to convince myself not to. Priconne is the same old same old, might uninstall again once the upcoming Christmas bonanza is over. It’s more fun playing with the loads of stamina you get from being away for a while, than with the pitiful drips the game gives you every day.

Epic Seven, though, spoiled me with a ton of goodies for returning players. Between that and the regular rewards, and the new Hunt missions which gave me Sigret and Vivian at long last, and the nerfing of the annoying Episode 3 stages, and the background hunting feature, and the Custom banner which gave me three characters I’d always wanted, I think I’m going to stick around for a while.

I wanted to try the new Octopath Traveler gacha game. Champions of the Continent or whatever it’s called. Unfortunately I could download and install it all right, but it wouldn’t play and none of the fixes I saw online helped either. Guess it will have to wait until/unless I get a better phone.

So far I haven’t felt like installing any of the other games I dropped in the past, like Another Eden or FF Dissidia Opera Omnia. Not that they weren’t good games, but they lack a certain je ne sais quois that would motivate me to play them again. I think it boils down to me not being convinced that they’ve fixed/will ever fix the issues that led me to drop them in the first place.

In other news I’m still playing Shining Nikki, CounterSide and Genshin Impact. Sometimes I want to play more GI, but then I remember how long it takes to load and it’s like blah. I have a great time whenever I do muster the energy to log in, but that hasn’t happened often this month.

As for Xenoblade Chronicles 3… Time to apply the ol’ “It is enough” principle? I still play with my Switch quite a bit, but it’s all Picross all the time. I’ll think about it properly when the World Cup is over and I crave more drama.

That’s enough of an update for one day. See ya!

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!