#playing gacha

[kyogre-blue]

I started Endfield yesterday, and I've been slowly chipping away at its nightmare starting section.... I'm still not done.

That should give you a general idea of how it's going.

The one nice thing I will say is that Endfield does have a skip button, and today I've started using it because this stuff is just so pointless and also long. I do wish they'd done something about the scenes where you have to hand something over. It's not handled all that well atm.

Aside from that, the game does look good in a general sense, but 1) it gave me extremely dire warnings to just use a different device when I tried to install it on my laptop (not sure if it would have run, since I ended up getting a new computer), so that all comes at a price that is imo excessive, and also 2) the prettiness is largely kinda generic and pointless?

Like, you go to the starting area and you are stuck there for hours. And the starting area is just a generic wilderness. It looks nice, yeah, but who cares. I've seen this before. There is almost nothing setting it apart. It's to the point that the reasonably interesting character designs look very out of place because we're always just running around in the woods. But the woods are peppered with tech stuff, so like... it doesn't even have a nice sense of being out in the wild. Genshin at least felt like a fun fantasy, and the open world gave the impression of being expansive and fun to explore. While Wuwa had that post apocalyptic feel (in Jinzhou, anyway) that had a different flavor.

Plus, Wuwa's movement was so, so free compared to this. Endfield stamina and dodging feel so much worse, it's honestly surprising.

The story is uh. Well, I've heard it gets better when you get to the obligatory China section, but so far it's sliding between bad (the confusing, overdone intro) and boring (most of Valley IV). The worldbuilding isn't being delivered particularly well, and the MC glazing is Rover levels. The only positive(?) is that they haven't done the harem stuff. Otherwise, they've hit practically every negative possible.

And don't even get me started on the factory tutorials. For the factory system itself, I honestly can't even tell whether it's good or bad or what because the way it's being presented is just so poorly done.

I'm really trying to struggle through to the academy section to see if it does get better. But man. MAN. It's been hours. I am suffering. And I haven't even mentioned the combat yet (it's bad).

[mks-is-demigirl]

-It wasn't long ago that my friends and I downloaded Gacha Club (just for fun), and, well....

I'm not “that good” making OCs anymore on it😅 (and, honestly, I don't really know why I found fun to do that in Gacha/j)

[mks-is-demigirl]

-I don't know how to use this new Gacha.. :')

[kyogre-blue]

Played about 2.5 hours of Wuthering Waves tonight. I was hoping to unlock the dailies, but I only made it to Union level 4, which I think is too low, but whatever.

My impressions are fairly mixed, but given how many gachas I've now started and dropped pretty much immediately, WW is doing quite well for itself.

I have to say tho that I deeply pity it for how much it will be compared to Genshin.

For positives, I think WW has a rather solid opening section. I focused on the main story to advance the Union level faster, but it seems like you get your main tutorials out of the way fairly quickly and can go and explore from there. Given the complaints I have about being railroaded in other games, that's nice.

Additionally, I think the story is nice if unremarkable. It's paced better than Genshin early parts imo, which were ridiculously rushed, and it benefits from having multiple characters who talk to each other and have different personalities. Yangyang, Chixia and Baizhi invite the harem jokes, but they are a friend group who decide to look after this amnesiac they found. They frame it as a combination of responsibility and friendliness, which I think works. Aside from that, yes, the game certainly leans into the MC being someone super special and important, but it's treated as an actual mystery and the current driving point of the narrative. Plus, the male MC is rather cute, so I can forgive a lot.

Compared to a whole bunch of other gachas, I am actually mildly interested in seeing where this is all going.

For the neutral points, WW actually has a fairly different tone and vibe than Genshin. The colors are more muted, the music is notably less upbeat, and there is a vaguely scifi aesthetic underlying the setting. It also has a lot more... what I read as Chinese cultural influences. You do start in the China region, but there's also stuff like the goofy gourd gadgets everyone has. I have a general impression of what mythological thing is being referenced, but it really does come off as goofy. However, those details are kinda... cute? narm-charm? I guess, when you consider that it's a Chinese developer. It also just has a different flavor from the most common settings, which is always a nice change.

For the negatives, I think the game does lack a few points of polish compared to Genshin. The movement controls feel kinda floaty, the designs (especially the adult female ones) are just not as competent or appealing, the proportions on the models look a bit off at times, and there are even minor bugs, with stuff like dialogue boxes being unable to fit all the lines of text (with no log feature in the scenes themselves), the auto advance moving too quickly and cutting off voice lines and sometimes even making it impossible to read the text fast enough, some awkward visual elements, textures loading kinda poorly, etc.

All of those are very small details and I'm not going to stop because of them, but they do create a certain impression in accumulation.

Examples:

The bottom of the image was also the bottom of the screen. A line or two of the text is just invisible, and this happens quite often.

Weirdly sized and spaced apostrophes.

Bad spacing on the wishing menus.

Weirdly poor textures on this guy. This happens once in a while. There are also very obvious cases of pop in that can get quite distracting during story scenes.

For the spacing stuff, I do play in windowed mode, but like... that's an option they give you. It shouldn't be like this.

All that aside, I'm going to continue for at least a while, though I plan to take it very casually, maybe even as a non-wishing account. The exploration and story can probably be cleared even with welfares... I hope.

[mks-is-demigirl]

-“Felling like a handsome cowboy”🌹✨

[mks-is-demigirl]

-Wires..

[mks-is-demigirl]

Testing the new Gacha: Lavender <3

[mks-is-demigirl]

-×Emuiy on my style+Edit×

@emuiy