Really, really final word on Atelier Online + a few tips

The last area released before I dropped Atelier Online

I hear “that garbage Atelier Online game” finally got released in English this week. It doesn’t mean much to me because I dropped it already, but I figure some people might make their way here wondering whether it’s worth playing or not. To them I say yeah… it’s worth a try, but don’t spend any money on it.

Normally I hate to do this because I know “free to play” games aren’t really free. Both Koei/Gust and the localizers Boltrend put a lot of money into it, and it’s the small paying population that makes a game free for the rest of us. But in Atelier Online‘s case, any money you put in is going to be wasted, because game content will dry up almost completely after roughly 15 months.

I know that because even though I threatened to quit the game in May 2020, I actually kept playing almost daily until October 2020 and then sporadically until I finally dropped it for good in January 2021. Atelier Online is DEAD in Japan. Very little new story content, what little appeared was just marking time with no real seriousness. One new area released in all that time. If you’re interested in the story or lore or the world of Bressisle and want to explore new continents and stuff… yeah, forget it. Not gonna happen. Same old events repeated and recycled, same rewards, same old battle strategies. No new gacha characters after March 2020, so if you’re interested in a particular Atelier character, it’s best to Google it and check if they ever came. Dead means dead.

I hung in there till October 2020 because that’s when the game’s anniversary is. If the developers were going to make any grand announcements about updates or new features, that would have been the time. Instead they just gave a lot of free rolls and a small update to the Mirror World arc IIRC, and that was it. The writing was on the wall.

Despite all that, however, I wouldn’t discourage anyone from playing Atelier Online. It was a very pretty game, I liked the soundtrack, it scratched my crafting itch somewhat, the crashing issues improved after a while. I also enjoyed getting stronger with better equipment all the time, and the people on the Atelier Online discord were very nice and helpful. It wasn’t all bad.

So if you are able to go in with your eyes open, fully aware that this game will go nowhere, then who am I to stop you? It’s much the same logic as watching or reading a series that was cancelled or dropped without a proper ending. As long as you know from the start and can manage your expectations, there’s no problem.

So you can ignore my advice about not spending money as well. If you want to spend money, knowing you’re not going to get much in the long run, go for it. If you must spend on the gacha, focus on characters. New gear comes out all the time, but because of the nature of the Atelier series, the character pool is pretty limited. The free characters like the MC and Sorrel etc. are all completely crap. They have to be crap, otherwise no one would pull characters from the gacha. Don’t be like me and waste time and EXP and food levelling them up.

Besides, you can only have a party of 4 characters anyway, so don’t bother with more than four or five. IIRC the best characters when I quit Atelier Online were Escha and Vervain? Verbena? (the pirate girl, forget her name). Totori was best for spamming items. And there were one or two others. I think Willbell was the best magic user, but magic is mostly meh in this game. You should probably consult a proper tier list and not take my word for it. Pick your party as soon as you can and use dupes from other characters to unlock their levels. It’s what I wish I’d done instead of stupidly trying to raise everyone naturally. Heaven forbid you’d want to use a lot of Atelier characters in an Atelier game, grumble grumble…

Back on topic, though, I think newbies starting out will have a pretty good time. When I joined the game had already been out for a while, so a lot of the events were permanently available. Summer events, Valentine, Christmas, etc etc. Experiencing all those in real time with a group of friends (IRL or discord because the game’s co-op options are junk) would be fun. It wasn’t for me because I had my eyes on the garbage story with its garbage roadblocks (since the game was almost dead when I started and events weren’t really a thing), but you don’t have to make the same mistake. And remember to focus on getting candy and cole above all else.

Also don’t worry too much about combat. It’s not that hard, most of the time. Forget about using items like bombs and unis to deal any meaningful damage. They’re just there to boost your skill gauge. Every battle was just spam items to boost skill gauge, get off huge skill chain, end battle. Either you have enough strength for that burst damage or you don’t. But that’s a problem for you to worry about. I got out while I could.

So if you want to play Atelier Online, go ahead. I got about 2 months of fun out of it. Sure, I played for much longer than that, but got only two months’ worth of fun out of it. But when it was fun, it was really fun. And I’d probably still be playing if it wasn’t so obviously dead. Go for it and try to have fun!

Update: Koei-Tecmo finally announced that the Japanese version of Atelier Online is shutting down on March 31st, 2022. They’re just burying the corpse at this point.

Love Nikki: Dress Up Queen – “Dressed up” does not equal “fashionable”

…What? I told you I was a lost cause. Save yourselves!

I had to do a spot of extended babysitting earlier this month because of reasons. To keep my niece entertained, I downloaded Love Nikki: Dress Up Queen on my tablet and let her try it. Why that game in particular? Because I’d seen ads for it (which turned out to be false and non-representative of the actual game, but that’s a matter for another day) and it looked harmless enough for a second-grader, so I thought why not.

As for how I ended up playing the game myself after she went home, and how I ended up spending enough money on it to reach VIP 6 level… well… Umm… I’d love to tell you how, but I don’t quite know myself. I think initially it was because she would ask for help whenever she couldn’t pass a stage – which was often, because Love Nikki isn’t really about fashion. So I got involved in helping her pass stages. Then I got super involved in the crafting aspect of creating new suits because videogame crafting has always been my “thing.” And one thing led to another and now, here we are.

Story

Nikki, an ordinary pink-haired girl, and her ordinary talking cat Momo are whisked away to the magical world of Miraland by a mysterious woman. They discover that Miraland is a world where everything, absolutely everything including war and politics, is decided through style battles. Can Nikki style her way through a political quagmire and return to her original world? … Of course not, otherwise the game would end. I actually enjoy Love Nikki‘s story, what little sense I can make of it. And I hear it gets very serious and dark later on, but with the road blocks the game loves throwing in my way, I probably won’t find out till late 2022.

Gameplay

When you read the title “Love Nikki: Dress Up Queen,” you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s a mobile game about fashion and styling. It’s not, though. It says “dress up,” it doesn’t say anything about “look fashionable” or “wear items that look good” or anything outrageous like that. Love Nikki is actually about throwing together random items with high stats so you can pass stages and get pretty pictures as virtual rewards.

It works like this: every stage has a theme. Every piece of clothing has tags that correspond with a style or a theme, e.g. “Simple,” “Elegant,” “Office,” “Swordsman.” They also have grades like 1-5 hearts and A-SS in certain qualities. So you receive your theme, then you match the pieces to the theme, creating an outfit. Throw in some skills like smiling or dissing your rival (there’s almost always a rival) and then, if your score is high enough, you win.

And that’s why my niece struggled with the game. The poor child was trying to play Love Nikki like a proper fashion game and selecting clothing that actually looked good and made sense as an outfit. Hahaha, so cute. An experienced RPG player would know that you always go with the gear with the highest stats, fashion be damned. So if a stage calls for “elegant and mature” clothing, you don’t wanna look like this:

You want to look like THIS!

Common sense, practicality, aesthetics, not blinding onlookers… none of that matters a whit. Just throw on the rarest pieces with the highest stats and wing it. And if you’re not sure what best to wear, your assistant Momo will flat out tell you what garish combo you need to clear the stage. Creativity? What’s creativity in the face of a walking fashion Chernobyl?

The only place where fashion and looking good actually matters is the Competition, a mini-game where the developers set a theme and players do the judging. But that’s a whole ‘nuther kettle of fish with its ultra-specific themes that require a small subset of suits, backgrounds and accessories (often paid or super grindy) to get a high score in.

The TL;DR is that Love Nikki is not about fashion. It’s about grinding/farming/paying for suits with high stats so you can pass challenges. Not only will you fail stages if you don’t dress crazy enough, but the game will also stop you regularly and force you to grind and craft suits you don’t even want before you can progress.

Come to think of it, actually there’s precious little else you can do in this game besides grinding for suits. The Competition takes a few seconds to set up. The Stylist Arena takes about 10 minutes a day once you have “good” suits set up. Dreamweaver is similar to story mode where you need specific suits/grinding items to pass. And then… that’s it.

love nikki dress up queen stylist arena battle

Whoever wins, we all lose.

The rest of the game is about spending puny bits of stamina to gather fancy-looking suits of clothing. Some of which are really lovely, but many of which are too far-fetched and over the top for me. It’s not that the clothes don’t look nice. They really, really do and I love the colorful 2D art. It’s not too bright, not too pastel, not too girly, not too drab, and there are some very creative items! It’s a great-looking game. However, personally I’m much more attracted to practical-looking clothes. A super-fancy suit like this…

..just raises all kinds of questions. Wouldn’t those sequins be scratchy? Why is she sitting on broken glass? Imagine the cost to make it, the size of the dry cleaning bill… And where would you wear that dress to? I’ve lived on this earth for decades, and the only ball I’ve been near is football.

I mean, looking for realism in a video game about fighting war through style battles is… not advisable, but when I have to spend real-life time and energy gathering such suits, I prefer the ones that require me to do fewer mental gymnastics. Not to mention the simpler ones are easier to get too. It’s fun to play with them in the Free Dressing option, despite the bittersweetness of knowing you will rarely “use” them in-game because the boring normal stuff almost always has dismal stats. It’s all about the stats, I’m afraid.

Pay to Win? Free to Play?

Now, let’s talk about how I came to spend… hmm, about $50? on this game when I’ve been playing many other, better gacha games for longer and never spent a penny. I should preface this by making it clear that you can totally play and enjoy Love Nikki for free. No ads, no pestering, no nothing. There are a few things you can’t get without paying money, but there’s sooo many others available that you won’t even notice. In fact, you’ll often hear people in the fandom saying they’re “V0” i.e. “VIP level 0” = they never spent anything on the game. Roughly 90% gacha games are F2P (free to play), so that’s the normal way of things.

What makes Love Nikki a little different is that you get permanent benefits for spending money even once. Most games, you buy your crystals or your primogems or whatever, you spend them and get your shiny goods and that’s it. Until the next time you spend money. In LN, in addition to the shiny JPEGs, you also get a boost in status that gives you minor rewards in perpetuity. For example, now that I’m V6, I’ll get all this stuff every day:

Plus 15 extra max stamina, +20% to Arena and Competition round prizes and discounts on new items, all for as long as the game will last. If you’re in it for the long haul, the extra boosts will add up significantly over the years.

Naturally the developers aren’t stupid. They’re not giving you all this out of the goodness of their hearts. A lot of these privileges cost premium currency, a.k.a diamonds to unlock. For example, in theory a V6 player can challenge the Stylist’s Arena 17 times and win up to 85 Starlight coins a day. In practice, 12 of those challenges will cost 20 diamonds each, i.e. 240 diamonds a day for the full gamut. Meanwhile the game only gives 60 diamonds for free daily (120 with a monthly card), so where does the deficit come from? Yup, they expect you to spend more IRL cash on diamonds.

Plus they deliberately jack up the prices of clothing you need to pass stages.

…but I won’t. Having bought two monthly cards for extra daily diamonds and a bunch of starlight coins to jumpstart my story progress and build a decent wardrobe, I think I’m good for now. It’s pretty clever of them to provide “privileges” that require you to spend more money to take advantage of them, though. I should take note of that for the real world applications. Hmm…

Aaaanywaaay, I’ve been playing Love Nikki for less than a month, so if I’m still interested in the game and have the time to spare, I’ll talk more about the story, characters and gameplay progression another day. This is enough for a preliminary post.

What else am I playing?

Nothing much. I stopped playing Genshin Impact for like 2 months, but I picked it up again last week because I hear the summer islands are only temporary and will be going away soon. So much exploring to do. I also have two archon quests to catch up on and the Vagabond Sword thingy and the Dodoball tennis thing to do. And the game has login bonuses this week, yay.

In “proper” gaming news, choice paralysis continues! I was googling PS3 emulators the other day, and I think maybe my desktop computer could run one? Maybe? There are only three PS3 games I want to play: Ar Tonelica Qoga, Time and Eternity (rip Imageepoch) and Persona 5, so I definitely don’t want to buy a whole console just for three games. Not that I have the time to play them, but I’ll look into the emulation route and see. Shhh, don’t tell Sony.

In other news, I got my laptop fixed, so I can continue Tokyo Xanadu eX+ if I want to. But I think it’s time for me to admit I just don’t want to finish it so I can move on. I keep wanting to do a final roundup post for it, which would require a final roundup play session, which I’m too lazy to do. Not to mention all those games I tried for an hour and thought they were kind of cool but feel too lazy to continue playing, especially since I know they will only disappoint me in the end. I don’t want to think any more, so bring on the casual games!

One Hour Review: Dragon Quest XI – 30 minutes were enough

Exactly what is say in the title. The point of the “One Hour Review” series is to figure out what a game is about and whether I’ll like it or not. In the case of Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age, this was quite unnecessary. I won’t go so far as to say “All Dragon Quest games are the same,” but if you’ve played one, you know pretty much what to expect from all of them.

The turn-based battle system is the same, the moves are largely the same, the general feel, look and sound of the game is the same. The main difference is usually the story, major characters and the upgraded graphics between installments. Therefore the only point of checking out the first hour was to see whether I liked the story and characters or not.

In the first 30 minutes, we had a “chosen” baby get attacked by bad guys and swept away to a little village, then a time skip, then he becomes an adult and sets off to find his true destiny. That’s how far I got in the first few minutes, and that was enough for me… to decide I don’t feel like playing Dragon Quest XI for a while.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s clearly a very high-quality game. But it’s also clearly going to take a looong time to finish, and if it’s like the other Dragon Quest games I’ve played, I’m going to be visiting a lot of different towns and villages and solving all manner of minor and major problems as I inch slowly and painfully towards a conclusion. I’ve got to be in the mood for something like that, but after my long drawn-out experience with Dragon Quest VII, it’s going to take a while for me to get into that mood again.

What gives me the most pause is the battle system and the encounters. I’ll be honest, I’ve never liked the DQ battle system. It’s too clunky and repetitive, unnecessarily so. Encounters are also way too frequent in most of the games I’ve played, and if you do avoid grinding somehow, you’ll sooner or later run into That One Boss that expects you to have been beating every mob since level one to progress. I really have to be in the mood for that one.

Long story short, 30 minutes is enough Dragon Quest XI for me. I can tell it will be a good game, and maybe one day in the future I’ll be in the mood to play it. For now, it’s going way to the bottom of my backlog until the day I really need a solid, generic JRPG to sink my teeth into.

Five Minute Review: Trials of Mana. For my first trick, I will murder a defenseless puppy…

I came across the Trials of Mana demo while browsing through the games on my bro’s Switch, and I realized, I’ve never played any of the Mana games before. In fact, apart from Legend of Mana, I don’t know any of the others. I know there was one on the DS, maybe one on the SNES? I know they’re action RPGs and there are cute rabbit-type monsters in them. I’m very into action RPGs these days (in theory. In practice I just play Happy Color and Wordscapes all the time) so I thought, why not.

I started the Trials of Mana demo and it looked very bright and colorful. From Square-Enix, so the basics should be sound. Bunch of protagonists to pick from with different stories… uh-oh, where have I seen that before… Many places, in fact, but there’s always room for one more. I picked the beast boy because he looked interesting, and that was my fatal mistake.

Oh, so his name was Kevin. I’d forgotten.

Barely a minute after I started playing, I was introduced to the boy’s cute wolf puppy. I… actually don’t like animals very much in real life. But the puppy was cute, and they quickly squeezed in a backstory about how the puppy was orphaned, and the boy and the puppy bonded over their mutual motherlessness. I thought “Aww” for just a few seconds.

Then it happened.

Puppy gets possessed by bad guy. Puppy attacks boy.

Boy “awakens” to his beastman blood. Boy beats puppy to death.

No… boy doesn’t beat puppy to death…

Square-Enix forces Player to beat puppy to death!

And it’s a tutorial to boot, so they hold your hand every step of the way. Press A + X to rip off his little ears. Tap B to stomp on his curly tail. Hold Y to silence his adorable yapping forever. Not in so many words, but they might as well have. I’m actually starting to see the humor in it now. I mean, who even does that? Who proposed this in a staff meeting, who signed off on it, who programmed it, who tested it… I shook my head for a long, long time.

And like I said, I’m not an animal lover. Not a fan of live, uncooked animals, anyway. Plus a puppy wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’ve killed or the worst thing I’ve ever done in a video game. I just question the good sense of 1) starting a game on this kind of tone and 2) using this kind of event for a game’s battle tutorial. It seems like a foretaste of things to come, i.e. Square-Enix is saying, “Trials of Mana is this kind of game, you sure you want to continue?” I wasn’t sure, so I played another couple of minutes to see what would happen (nothing, also boy’s dad is an idiot) and then moved on with my life.

BTW, this means I have zero idea what Trials of Mana is all about apart from PETA-baiting. For all I know, it could have a super-epic story with a grand soundtrack and the combat might be all kinds of wonderful. Unlikely, but not impossible. So in theory, I’m not ruling out trying a different protagonist’s storyline with the hopes that I might a discover a hidden but slightly distasteful gem. For now, though, I am well and truly turned off. Back to Happy Color!

One Hour Review: Civilization VI – Incompatible genre

Every once in a while, a gamer should try an unfamiliar gaming genre. Y’know, just to shake things up a bit. Either it will be a big success and you’ll expand your gaming repertoire, or it’ll be so-so or a failure, and then you’ve learned more about yourself and what works for you. Since I have the Switch for another two weeks, this is a good chance to try games I’m sort of curious about, but not enough to shell out good money for.

Hence Sid Meier’s Civilization VI, which according to Wikipedia, belongs to the category of “Turn-based strategy” and “4X.” I’ve played a 4X demo before (a vaporware game known as Territoire). It was a really boring, pointless and disappointing experience for me, but it was just a game in development. Civilization VI, on the other hand, is the latest game in the best-known series in the 4X genre. There’s no better game to play if I want to know what 4X is all about.

Buuuut, as you can guess from the title, I did discover what it was about, and I did discover that it’s not for me. I only played an hour or so of the tutorial, but even that was a struggle to get through, for a few reasons:

  • I don’t like sitting idle for a long time. You have to spend the first 50 or so turns producing a variety of units, researching technology and exploring the world, all of which takes a lot of time but doesn’t produce any immediate results. It’s not like you click “Gimme a scout” and immediately get a scout. You ask for something, wait for several turns and eventually get it many turns later when you’ve even forgotten what you wanted it for.
  • I don’t like games where I have to think too far ahead. It’s the same reason why I don’t like chess, or any strategy game that actually requires, you know, strategizing. The easy JRPGs known as “turn-based strategy games” like Fire Emblem don’t really count. And even those are too tedious for me to play these days.
  • I don’t like micromanaging. There are too many elements to think about in this game. You need to produce food, produce all kinds of units, research technology, explore the map, fight enemies, defend your cities, build new settlements, meet new NPCs, form diplomatic relationships, establish trade routes, etc etc. That’s the little I got through in under one hour in Civilization VI, but it was already too much for me.
  • I don’t like development games where enemies attack me out of the blue. In fact, I don’t like development games where enemies attack me at all. It really stresses me out in every such game I’ve played, and I just realized I mentioned it back in 2014 when I played Territoire… and re-reading that post, I discovered I own Civilization IV? Where did I put those CDs? I’d love to play Anno 1404 again… Back on topic, the prospect of combat was the dealbreaker for me, TBH. Everything else I could have figured out with time and experience, but I just didn’t like the thought of random marauders showing up to ruin my hard work. I prefer the kind of turn-based strategy where the enemies kindly and politely wait for me to arrange and equip all my units and click “Okay now you can attack” before they come. I mean, that’s just me.
  • TL;DR 4X games just aren’t for me. I don’t even think it would be fun to watch it being played because it takes so long for anything to happen. But I’m glad I tried it, because I do see the quality, at least in theory. And it makes me appreciate the Anno-type games more, which take the same idea but let everything happen sharpish so I don’t get bored.

What’s next before the Switch goes away: I started playing the expansion of Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Torna the Golden Country or something like that. IIRC it’s the first expansion to a game I’ve ever played? Maybe I can think of it like a fan disk. Either way I soooo don’t care about the game and the characters. I don’t know why the Xenoblade games always elicit that reactions from me, it’s kind of crazy. Maybe they try too hard to make me care, and so the rebel in me goes “Nyeh!” Anyway, as long as the exploration and combat are good, I’ll take what fun I can get. I also need to give Dragon Quest 11 the ol’ One Hour try, so I’ll probably post about that before too long. See ya.