The "What Are You Playing Today" Thread

[Merc]

I've been getting into Granblue Fantasy while practicing the ol' social distancing. Gameplay-wise it's not much, but it has nice art and the goofy JRPG story is fun as a way to pass the time.

Strike-through Granblue Fantasy, replace with "Genshin Impact", and pretty much same statement word for word.

Genshin is the first gacha/loot-box type free game I've played, and I can see why people would dump a lot of money in this sort of game. As a free game, it plays fine enough even without investing money though, which is nice right now when pockets have been getting tight.

[Anastasia]

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Finished, including the bonus boss. The end game is indeed the weakest part of the game, but a good time was still had. Even on hard mode the difficulty completely collapses by this point, I cruised through with no challenge whatsoever.

[Jason_Miao]

Recompiled, and have been replaying Star Ruler 2.

Wow, talk about a game that got shafted by release dates.  Broke the space-4x mold in many ways, but Stellaris released shortly afterwords.

[Anastasia]

Dragon Quest 11 S

I'll spoiler block this since this is mostly a spoiler filled commentary.

[spoiler]

I stalled out on the original DQ11 a bit before Sniflheim in Act 1, but I got the upgraded version and should finish it this time. I'm up through Octagonia in act 2, just got Jade back. I find myself comparing DQ11 to FF6. Both follow the same story arc, the heroes pursuing a noble goal but it all goes wrong and the world suffers a calamity because of it. They're very much twins of one another in this aspect so far, but I feel DQ11 is a much weaker game.

As I play Act 2, I compare it to FF6's WoR. The more I play it and I feel how things are still directed and set up, I come to a conclusion more and more. I don't think the game trusts the player. It never wants to let the player feel like the world's genuinely in danger. Sure, it puts up an act but it always leavens it. It won't stick to its own guns. Puns abound, lightness comes and the OST (a huge weak point as it is) so often acts like things are still cheery in the world.

It doesn't trust the player to take a serious situation seriously. It doesn't trust the player with a more powerful ambiance. It doesn't trust the player to explore the world - you're carefully nudged along a determined path in act 2, even if it gives an illusion of freedom at times. It doesn't trust the player with an item creation system that isn't carefully curated to be controlled by the game.

[Dracos]

I concur, even though it's been a while.

[KLSymph]

I've been getting into Granblue Fantasy while practicing the ol' social distancing. Gameplay-wise it's not much, but it has nice art and the goofy JRPG story is fun as a way to pass the time.

It has been one year since my post above, so here are my current thoughts on Granblue Fantasy.

In conclusion, it's fine. I enjoy it enough to continue playing it.

Granblue Fantasy is my first and only gacha game. It's a JRPG-style game where you collect characters, weapons, and summons. You can pay money to do that faster, but I've played this entire year completely free-to-play, and that's viable. You can join other players in cooperative play, both in public raid rooms and by creating private "crews", and I've been playing entirely in my solo crew, which is also viable.

The story is, broadly speaking, written well. There are monthly new side-story events which I enjoy reading, though the main story updates rarely (only once during my time). These stories have a good variety of drama and comedy.

The artwork is worthy eye-candy, with the caveat that it has improved over the years, which means the art from the earliest years is startlingly worse. The early character art is just real derpy. Unfortunately, this includes the first art you'll see when you start playing the game and it includes the main characters' art which doesn't get updated in new material for some reason.

The music is great. Here's the final battle track from the currently-running story event. It works better in story context and during the fight than on its own, of course, but it's a reasonable representation of quality.

The gameplay is extremely mediocre from the perspective of someone who hasn't played other gacha games. To oversimplify, you have a small team of characters and you fight enemies by attacking, using skills, and calling summons. Unfortunately, the decision-making involved in building teams, activating skills, or timing actions is very uninteresting for a very long time because the game does not seem to be balanced toward those things until you are a seasoned player with a large pool of characters.

The game requires grind. Improvements to a player's power (and therefore access to high-level content) is mostly derived from equipment, which both needs to be farmed and to be upgraded from farmed materials. This ultimately means you need to farm regularly, which does not work well with the mediocre gameplay. The only saving grace is that as you grind, your power will increase to the point that the grind becomes easier. At some point, you will have the right mix of characters and powerful enough equipment that you can take advantage of the full-auto system, which runs battles for you without your clicks, allowing you to do other things while it's going. There is not much margin between repetitive manual combat encounters and trivial full-auto encounters, where you can wedge some meaningful combat decision-making. I wouldn't play this game for the gameplay, is what I'm saying.

If you don't mind grinding and enjoy JRPG-esque story content, I can recommend trying this game. If you're looking for some kind of skill-based activity, no.

[Anastasia]

I concur, even though it's been a while.

It's a shame. DQ11 is one of the best bad games I've played in a long time. I want to like it so badly, but the game can't get out of its own way.

[Anastasia]

Granblue Fantasy

Sounds interesting, if not my personal cup of tea. How are the characters?

[KLSymph]

Sounds interesting, if not my personal cup of tea. How are the characters?

The characters in Granblue Fantasy are surprisingly good. The main downsides are 1) there are many of them which means there's often not a lot of content for a specific character unless they happen to feature in a story event, and 2) many characters are collectibles from gacha which means you get them randomly over time (unless you spend money) and you tend to collect characters out of order with your exposure to their story. But within those constraints, the character stories are worthwhile. The lucky ones that receive significant character development are well-written. The many generic characters based on anime/JRPG stereotypes tend to get fleshed out with details that make them interesting. Character art is good (minus the early derp art). Character voice acting is done by professionals, and some have their own in-character songs. Quality fanart is available for the popular characters if you want more waifu/husbando material.

[Anastasia]

Sounds interesting, if not my personal cup of tea. How are the characters?

The characters in Granblue Fantasy are surprisingly good. The main downsides are 1) there are many of them which means there's often not a lot of content for a specific character unless they happen to feature in a story event, and 2) many characters are collectibles from gacha which means you get them randomly over time (unless you spend money) and you tend to collect characters out of order with your exposure to their story. But within those constraints, the character stories are worthwhile. The lucky ones that receive significant character development are well-written. The many generic characters based on anime/JRPG stereotypes tend to get fleshed out with details that make them interesting. Character art is good (minus the early derp art). Character voice acting is done by professionals, and some have their own in-character songs. Quality fanart is available for the popular characters if you want more waifu/husbando material.

That doesn't sound too bad, at least. What's the overarching plot, anyway?

[KLSymph]

The basic premise is that you are the teenage captain of a skyfarer crew, which is essentially a team of mercenaries flying around in an airship, and you go around the world meeting people in trouble and solving problems. The main story plot at the beginning is that your missing father sent you a letter to meet him at a mythical location out in the world, so you put together this crew and fly around searching for how to get there. Along the way, you're hunted by an evil empire who wants to recapture the little girl with mysterious power traveling with you. Later on you're opposed by a more powerful evil monarch.

So it's a well-tread JRPG setup, though the execution of the details is at least reasonably good. There is a Granblue Fantasy anime with two seasons that follows the early story, more or less, but I feel it makes the story seem even more generic than it already is.

Doesn't matter, nobody expects the main plot to progress in a timely fashion so it's not a major component of day-to-day play. The immediately relevant story content is in the monthly side stories, which explore the meeting-people-solving-problems idea. There are various side-storylines running, and they're pretty varied in subject matter. For example, the current-running story event is about fighting invaders from the moon (this is a world where transportation tech is on the level of blimp-like airships) which is the continuation of one of the oldest storylines. In addition, collaboration events with other anime/game series, the most recent being Kimetsu no Yaiba (Demon Slayer), occasionally come along with their own (presumably non-canon) storylines.

There is also a gag comic that updates a few times a week. It lags behind in translation by about six months or so.

Granblue Fantasy itself is officially English-translated (fairly good translation, some awkwardness here and there), but you'd need a bit of setup because registration is not in English and there's no official mobile app on English app stores. Playing by web-browser is recommended.

[Dracos]

Relieving some octopath traveler.  Capitalism Ho!

"What's a brothel?" - Tressa

[thepanda]

Back on streets of rage 4. Survival mode completely revitalizes the game.

[Anastasia]

Tales of Arise

Is good. Feels better than Tales of Berseria in many ways. Not too far in but I'm enjoying it a lot more than Berseria. Chemistry between the two mains helps.

[Anastasia]

Tales of Arise is still good.

The only problems I see are two fold. 1. They way they curb experience is tiresome. You're clearly meant to be in a narrow level band and the game enforces this. It's not impossible to overcome, but it is highly tedious. 2. The game really wants you to buy DLC. Notably there's a bunch of level up DLC.