hello/baboo ! | my name is jess (she/her , 21+) but i usually use a variation of anemone for some game stuff. a gaming blog after my current hyperfixation of heartopia. gamer info under the spoiler! dni if under 18, thanks!
blog note: so uh i will be honest, i hyperfixate on games like once or twice a year and then not play for the rest of it. this blog will probably still be active by reblogging relevant info haha
had a love affair with a word solitaire game that ended in this. it was just so frustrating having to watch ads or use coins that i got for completing several levels get wiped out in one hard one. it just felt fruitless.
like a toxic relationship i might redownload it again but god i will not like it.
had a love affair with a word solitaire game that ended in this. it was just so frustrating having to watch ads or use coins that i got for completing several levels get wiped out in one hard one. it just felt fruitless.
like a toxic relationship i might redownload it again but god i will not like it.
Hi! This is @bouncybrain who made the Heartopia post (it’s a side blog)! I saw your tag about someone trying to rebuke the facts in my post—I was curious so I went to go find it. If it’s the one with the obnoxious, giant pink gif, it’s okay! The OP supports ICE so their critical thinking abilities are questionable regardless :)
hello!! this is a late reply but thank you for responding! this is also a sideblog so i was able to block that account from my main as well. thank you for that post! hopefully the heartopia devs could learn a thing or two for now and the future ☆
I don’t have all her spells showcased here (at least I don’t think?) because this is only a preview of her character.
Fairy Tail: Fierce Fight is a 3D action mobile game developed by HONGKONG SKYMOONS INTERACTIVE CO., LIMITED for Android and iOS devices. It’s officially licensed by KODANSHA… though updates for the game seem infrequent.
The amount of playable characters is limited, with only 40 available. Neither Freed nor Bickslow are present, Evergreen being the only playable Raijinshuu member along side Laxus. It would be really cool to see them in 3D like this though!
im gonna be soo honest i have not been as gamey as i have been between travelling and moving stuff around BUT in my brief moments of free time i do enjoy little games like sled surfers, cooking jam, and royal cooking!! also, the trio of bacon + pancake + burger ....unbeatable. will try to post more soon !!
Check the additions in the reblogs of this post for full context.
I mean, it was kind of obvious from the moment you check the gacha system, but Heartopia is run by a company that does not give a shit about the users, their in-game experience, or their community experience outside the game using official community spaces.
And it’s not just from the global launch—players from their own country have been ignored this entire time, too, and they’re a year ahead on updates and events compared to us. Don’t forget the Chinese players have also been ignored and dismissed as you read through this.
If you’re going to read through this and defend them “because they’re a Chinese/Asian company” get out. They exposed themselves to the global market, it doesn’t matter their country of origin, and you’re being racist by defending their actions just because they’re an East Asian country. I will defend China—I’m Chinese-American—because people in America hate China just because some old white guy in charge said they’re at fault for apparently everything wrong with this country when they’re clearly not, but I also won’t defend Chinese companies that go global and show their ass to everyone. Don’t come in here and tell me it’s just because they’re Chinese/Asian, they have the ability to think critically and take responsibility the same as the rest of us.
There’s a lot to talk about, including racism, bigotry, community management, generative AI, and general game shortcomings. This discussion will be going beneath the cut only because it’s going to get really long. If you want more comprehensive picture evidence, go to my post linked above and check the reblogged additions.
I’ll be speaking as a player of the global launch, as that’s what I had access to. Please remember to think critically while reading—I’m not all-knowing, I only know one language, and I have my own opinions.
The worst of it: racism and bigotry is rampant in the game and the Heartopia player community.
The game itself isn’t free of racism. Only recently did they release an update that included a dark-skinned character acting like a monkey and making monkey noises after eating a mushroom you, the player, are unable to eat. They apparently removed this, but I never got that far because I deleted Heartopia; people in the Discord were saying it’s gone so who knows, because I didn’t get much opportunity to read those messages before I left there, too.
The darker skin tones available for use are… pitiful. This is not excusable because they’re a Chinese/East Asian country and I am fucking sick and tired of people excusing a lack of variety and inclusive options because of that. My father—100% Made in China—has definitively brown skin that doesn’t lighten beyond definitively brown. There are Blasians—black Asians—that live in China or Japan or Korea and were literally born and raised there. The only excuse for locking black hairstyles behind paywalls (aka not available for default character creation) and being extra light on literally any other features for players of color is greedy racism.
There was a Reddit post on the unofficial, player-run r/Heartopia that showed players roleplaying as ye olde slaves, putting on the darkest skin tone and the dreads that aren’t free and going out to other players’ gardens. According to the poster, they were permabanned for reporting this. (The post is currently not available as-is on the thread—screenshots can be found in the reblogs of my original post linked at the start.)
Their Discord (officially sanctioned, which I joined through the game itself giving me the link) is full of racists and bigots who spew their hatred across every channel they can get their hands on, whether through discussion or use of slurs or posting hateful images. They were barely punished for this behavior, if they ever were. This includes during the incident in the post I linked above, where initially players defending the racism of an NPC with dark skin acting like a monkey were actually left alone, and their messages were not immediately deleted. Not until the staff got caught up in the storm and decided everything must go.
Instead of punishing players in the Discord being dicks, they punished players trying to communicate properly, calmly, and explain what was happening to the confused users who came in amidst the Silencing (again). Messages were deleted en mass, cooldowns applied liberally (from an hour and up to six), and users muted or outright banned for speaking out—at first, for speaking out too loudly, and then speaking out at all.
This is not the first time this has happened.
Heartopia uses generative AI. I don’t give a fuck about live translation AI, that’s not the point.
A while ago they made a shit-ass announcement that yes, they use generative AI in the game, and yes, they’ll tell us if they use it again. No, they didn’t apologize for using it nor did they say they were going to stop. They did keep their word and tell us they were using generative AI in the update for rewards from the penguins.
The Discord, of course, didn’t like this. Fancy that. They built up a community of creatively-minded people through a game that allows and encourages making music, painting, writing, designing clothes, and customizing furniture. Then they went “by the way fuck artists because generative AI is inevitable and we’re going to use it even though we have plenty of money to afford 100 artists” and actually did it.
Three times.
The Chinese players said no. The beta players said no. The global release players said no.
And nothing changed.
The global release uprising was what I witnessed in person. None of the staff bothered to do anything about trolls and generally hateful people that shoved their way into very civil conversations after anti-AI discussion was shuffled off to be hidden in one thread. Then they nuked at least three or four threads because of “bad behavior” when anti-AI users were simply attempting to protect their peace from trolls and bigots who kept coming in and dropping slurs and ableism and racism in the chat (and didn’t get even a mute, much less real disciplinary action).
Their fanart channel was removed and turned into a forum channel. They added an “AI” tag to the forums. Yes, they encourage posting and sharing art in the very same place they’re encouraging and sharing AI-generated slop.
These people know fuck-all about managing a community, much less one this large. Someone needs to train them. On everything.
Everything about the community is horribly managed. There apparently aren’t active devs in the Discord, so what’s the point? They had bug report and suggestion channels they nuked after the AI Silencing. It didn’t matter.
The staff in charge of taking care of things like bad-faith users… don’t give a fuck. Some staff acted like a twelve-year-old freshly given power but unwilling to take accountability for their actions while using said power (fucking Meimei). Some staff apparently don’t do shit at all. Some staff don’t say anything and then nuke more than half the messages in the Discord because people are rightfully upset but they don’t want to do anything proper to manage the uproar.
They would rather silence everyone than allow for proper communication, which is stupid because that just exacerbates everything. I saw so many people say they were leaving during the Racism Silencing because they were sick and tired of the rampant power-tripping unprofessionalism of the Discord staff—things built up and they couldn’t take it anymore.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I left before my hour (then two hour) cooldown was up.
The devs don’t seem to care that the community wants them to FIX THE DAMN VIBE CODING IN THE PETS FOR FUCK’S SAKE! In fact, they only ever fix things in a timely manner if it affects their financials, and even then they might not fix it all the way, just enough to placate the half-a-braincell players. They have a bug with their paid features what feels like every significant gacha update.
The gacha is so much worse than it looks from out here. Some peoples’ homes and garages cost them thousands in real-world currency, if not more.
For the primary gachas they want you to pull for, they use “expedition passes” which can only be gotten in very, very low quantities while playing the game. You’ll have to purchase more with real-world currency in order to actually get everything you want from these gachas. And I do mean have to, because there’s no other way to earn this gacha currency. Which makes it worse than literally every other popular gacha game out there.
I believe people averaged out a rough $300-$400 USD to get everything in one of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic gachas. There’s one for each of the Mane Six, so that’s six gachas at 300/400 each, or $1,800/$2,400 to get all six.
I’ve seen multiple users with all six cars parked on their plot.
That’s without mentioning the other, non-MLP:FiM gachas available. There’s two outfit ones (masc and femme) and one for furniture/building materials. I don’t remember any numbers for this (it’s very difficult for me) but I know it’s got to be close to $1,000 USD to get one full outfit, and more than that for the furniture/building materials.
You can, of course, play the other two gachas (with three color palettes to choose from) without paying for the opportunity! But only if you’re willing to save every single blue gem you get. Ever. You have to Scrooge this shit. Or you’ll have to give in and… pay real-world currency in order to get the entire ensemble, because the luck to “win big” is insanely low and I don’t think I’ve seen more than like two people get the one outfit piece that wins you the whole set. Ever.
“It’s not even a core part of the gameplay thoughhhhhh,” people like to whine. Hi! Not the fucking point. The fucking point is that it’s no longer teehee I need to grind for primos when it involves a currency you can only get with your real world money.
As soon as it’s something locked purely behind paying for it with your hard-earned paycheck, it’s real fucking gambling. It isn’t just virtual waifu gambling anymore. These people are dropping hundreds if not thousands on this game for virtual little graphics that can apparently be taken away if they’re a little too vocally not racist. And there’s no other way for them to have gotten there. It’s not hunting down every single obscure chest in an area for the last few free primogems. It’s not completing every daily and weekly quest for a handful of gems. It’s not even logging in every day for five of them. It’s buy them or have nothing.
This is more predatory than predatory gacha should have ever been. I don’t even know if it’s, like, legal for the Apple Store or Play Store or whatever to host Heartopia when it’s got gambling like this in it or if the buffer of “it’s a virtual currency they’re buying so it isn’t directly their money going into it” saves them.
The game is just a fucking buggy, laggy, half-hearted mess.
I thought maybe it was just release bugs, y’know, you fix things up to release it somewhere new and suddenly you’ve got a termite infestation.
No. No, it’s just like that.
Animals are just going to float, stationary, across your screen from one place to another instead of using any of their actual movement animations. They’re going to clip into the terrain’s geometry and disappear forever. They’re going to clip you into the geometry. They’re going to float ten feet in the air.
Your pets are going to disappear into the roof of your home, because roofs must be built on top of floors, and your pets don’t give a fuck if there’s stairs or not, so they’re just going to merge through the floor into the roof until they decide they’re done. Your pets are going to phase through your walls. If your house is raised then they’re going to phase through into the space beneath your house more often than not. They’ll phase through your oven and fuck up your cooking, forcing you to move and/or burn what you’re making. The cats, specifically, will randomly decide not to show you their interaction bubbles, and force you to either enter and exit the building mode (which can take forever) or ignore them because there’s nothing else you can do about it. You can’t even plant your crops around the stupid dog that’s been glitched turning in circles in the middle of your garden plots for the last ten minutes.
Interaction bubbles disappear in general. They fail to display properly. Inventories don’t always work properly. Sometimes you get stuck in a menu or stuck outside a menu just because the game forgets you hit the button you wanted to.
Half the tighter clothes clip through the under layer they use during animated emotes and most of the ice skating moves. There’s no reason for that but they fail to properly animate the clothes all the time. Which doesn’t make it better.
The lag is fucking ridiculous. It’s worse than most things I’ve experienced and I’ve tried to play current-update Hoyo games on a laptop from 2016. It doesn’t matter where you are in a server (“town”) or how many people are on it, you’re going to lag unless you’re special. It gets exponentially worse the more whales are on your server, because they’ll have these massive mansions stuffed full to the very very limit with their gacha wins and you’re not going to get more than 5fps even standing on the farthest point from user houses, much less when you’re trying to just walk across the island into town center.
Yes, this does mean the lag can ruin the timing or accuracy when doing hobbies like cooking, cat/dog training, and snow sculpting where you have a time limit and/or multiple buttons to hit, and I was playing this on an iPad with plenty of screen room. Lag still fucked me over plenty of times. Sometimes it was literally impossible to play for ten minutes without a massive lag spike from some dumbass whale loading in and killing everything.
There were even bugs where user images on their in-game profiles were mixed up! Someone I know had a friend’s icon in place of their own on their “ID” and that friend wasn’t even online when it happened. How does that happen?
I don’t think anybody on the dev team is good at English. If they hired someone for it I’ll redownload Heartopia because it’s that bad.
This isn’t me being racist, it’s me looking at things like ridiculously simple grammar mistakes, or spelling mistakes, or just outright inconsistent or missing localization. I missed at least two different conversations because all the localization files for English were missing. I’d say 90% of dialogue has at least one or two grammar mistakes, and even more than that depending on the length. Hell, I think they machine translated everything and then went “yeah close enough” and sent it out without rereading anything. Or having a native speaker reread anything. One of the more prominent things I encountered all the time with localization was a bonus that activated randomly, called “Bread with no Flour” and—sorry, no, I mean “Meal with No Rice” which—hang on, wait, it says “Bread with no Flour” in your hobby book but “Meal with No Rice” when it activates—and they’re both wrong, because it should be “Bread With No Flour” or (OR!) “Meal With No Rice” (doesn’t use up ingredients when cooking them, so you get a “free” second whatever that was).
Thanks to @inspacedia for the addition in the replies here that the Brazilian Portuguese localization is also a joke. I suspected but didn’t know for sure how bad it was across languages, and… honestly if I asked too many questions in the Discord I would probably have gotten banned. If anyone else has more information on the quality of other localization attempts, feel free to let me know if you’d like to see it added here, as well. Just because I’m monolingual doesn’t mean you all don’t deserve a voice in this discussion, too.
So, yeah, they don’t really seem to care all that much about the actual user experience beyond “are they going to give us more money and if yes, how much more can we get them to spend than that.” There was a place to point out these localization issues and bugs in the Discord but, y’know. Turns out they didn’t know any of that, anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even making a book cover had to be puzzled out by users because not only did it not have a corresponding canvas available like clothes and furniture did, but it could warp so it wasn’t the same dimensions as the painstakingly (expensively) discovered dimensions from users. Like, yeah, it’s close, it’s good enough, but it’s not even easy. It’s unbelievably difficult for something that should’ve been easy. The warping for images is, frankly, irritating.
Clothing and furniture templates only showed you the most generic, basic outlines for whatever you chose to work on. The pants had individual belt loops you could color, but it didn’t show you where, and the button on pants, hats, and other similar things were all individually able to be colored but only if you scrutinized every single pixel on the canvas. Which sucked.
I don’t want everything I own to be fucking PINK.
If you’re masc or don’t like pink you’re pretty out of luck. Majority of stuff is femme and most likely pink. You could get idk a month’s worth of good masc outfits out of the clothing store if you’re not so strict on the definition of masc, but they have hoodies and basketball shorts so you’re fine.
Furniture comes in mostly pink. You’ve got very limited options for buying furniture compared to clothes, and most of the time it’s fucking pink. If it’s not pink it’s beige. If it’s not pink or beige it’s white. If it’s not pink or beige or white it’s light mint.
You want red? Too bad, most of the reds are more purple than red. Yes there is a distinction. I’m using images here because this pissed me off so much. What do you mean you don’t have MORE THAN ONE REAL RED?????
Yes those are ALL RED. If I wanted pink or yellow or purple or a baby blue or something “girly” I would have more to share but it’s honestly embarrassing that they went “yeah you can buy all clothes there’s no body types there’s no fashion restrictions, boys wear skirts girls wear suits” and then they went “but also fuck you if you’re masc have a fifth of the clothes femmes do.”
I don’t talk about my house. There’s still only one real red color. I had to give up and add blue. Brown. Green. Black and white were the MVPs.
“But you played it for a while!”
Yeah and I’m done. I dropped Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. Not because they hated their users (not convinced Hoyo likes their free users at all, but they don’t hate us) but because their stories, for story-driven games, were so fucking boring and took too long and talked to us like babies. Heartopia doesn’t have much story and it’s supposed to be cozy. Actually it’s frustrating and nothing that matters has actually changed and also their events have sucked because why are you talking to us about fucking climate change and you’re advocating for the use of generative AI???
Heartopia doesn’t care. Stop playing. They don’t care about what you do.
Also they’re not fixing the pet AI I don’t think they know how to code at this point
"Short steps, deep breath. Everything's alright," a voice whispered to me.
This someone knew me.
But I don't recognize them.
A/N: this is a just short story I made in 2 hours and published it in HEARTOPIA!! it’s heavily inspired by the video game ‘To The Moon’ & its ending theme song ‘Everything’s Alright’ by Laura Shigihara. uploaded it here since I also consider this my art.
01
"Short steps, deep breath. Everything's alright," a voice whispered to me.
I couldn't look up.
My head, it felt heavy, as if something's keeping it down. I can't see ahead of me. My feet were trembling.
All I knew was that someone was guiding me by the hand.
When I don't move, they'd stop. When I take a step, they'd take two steps forward.
This someone knew me.
But I don't recognize them.
Their face, their gentle voice, it felt foreign, unknown. And yet, their warmth was familiar. Their presence hugged me like a warm shower on a cold night.
02
"Chin up," they said. "Look at the sky."
The gentle wind caressed my face, and I finally mustered the energy to see the scenery before me. Orange, violet, yellow, with a hint of blue. The full moon shone like a lone jewel in the vast space.
Beautiful, I thought to myself.
"When this world is no more, the moon is all we'll see," they said. "If that happens, would you like to fly away with me?"
'What a cheesy question!' I wanted to quip, but my mouth felt like someone has sewn them shut.
I continue to look up. The stars looked like pearls. Some of them line up perfectly, like they were fated to meet.
03
Tears escaped my eyes. Like stars falling down.
I could feel their gaze at my sob. It was silent. They stood there, searching for the truth behind my weeping.
"I can't really seem to read you," they mumbled.
'Neither can I.'
My heart often felt like a heavy burden. I just couldn't stop the noises in my head. I don't know if I'll ever be normal - I don't know if I'll ever be okay.
He squeezed my hand ever so gently, a reminder not to get lost.
I turned my head to face them.
As I expected, I've completely forgotten what they look like.
04
What was the color of their mouth? Were they chapped like mine?
Did their nose have a bump on the bridge? Did it look flat, or upturned?
And their eyes - would it light up whenever they see me? Did they ever look at me with such fondness?
I can't remember.
But there's warmth in his presence. The type you can nestle into.
There's a reason why he's here with me.
I finally found my voice. "If the stars all fall down, I won't mind."
I squeeze his hand back.
"If you're with me, then everything's alright."
To The Moon
As I lay here dying, withering away, can you please grant me one wish?
I want to go to the moon.
If you fly me to the moon, I feel like I can meet somebody there—and fulfill a promise I have long since forgotten. If I can somehow reach that place, I feel that everything's going to be alright.
Rewrite my history. Make me an ambitious astronaut and dress me up in an orange spacesuit. Place a helmet over my head and let me ride a rocket ship. Count down to four, and launch me into space.
I wanna yap about transformers themed Heartopia stuff ^-^
Pay me no mind lol
So I'm designing a room for my f/o bot, I'm still just starting out designing it but I wanted to share a little since I'm having fun doing it
He's gotta lay down somewhere, right? I mean it's his room-
To live in-
And it's gotta be big enough to fit him ^-^
I'm adding the transformers prime screenshot for comparison!
How I made it is by the penguin sofa recipe you learn from the current fashionwave event rewards! You unlock it at level 27! And I just painted it grey! And stuck six of them together!
And on the shelving unit blue cubes of what may appear to be energon with a straw :p
In the fashionwave event you learn the frost coffee recipe thing and that's what I use for energon because why not lol!
I'm also designing one for my sire/dad Ratchet! I'm gonna give him a lot of what you see here too! And in the game you can get an orange sedan which I basically headcanon as an alt mode of Ratchet's ^-^
Thank you for letting me yap-
I'm very happy hehe
I'll be adding Autobot logos in both rooms when I unlock drawing at level 16! I'm currently at 12...
prguitarman
ellievsbear
germansingergirl
