Atelier Shallie Plus – Lousy at first

Saying Atelier Shallie Plus was “lousy at first” implies that it’s no longer lousy. But actually it’s still kind of lousy as of chapter 6. It’s just that the game has improved a lot compared to the first few hours so I don’t mind as much.

My final post about Shallie will most likely be positive (depending on how they resolve the whole Dusk thing), so I’m going to use this post to cover the stuff I don’t like, leaving more space for fawning and flattery next time.

– Way too much time was wasted in the first few chapters. I get the whole Japanese fetish with “working together” and “building bonds” and stuff, but this is the third game of the Dusk trilogy. The past two games were sufficient for that kind of stuff. I expected a hard-hitting, straight to the story kind of game.

What is the Dusk and how are we going to solve it? We still aren’t any closer to finding an answer than we were in Atelier Ayesha. In fact, nobody in Shallie has made a serious attempt at solving it. Since the game started, I’ve been running around doing meaningless trust-building exercises like killing rats and rabbits. If anything, Ayesha was the most focused of the three games on the issue, mostly due to the presence of Keithgriff and Odelia. Shallie feels like a serious regression, though there’s still time for things to pick up. They have to pick up because this is the last game, I just wish they would do so from the start. The game is too vague and all over the place.

And I should mention that we STILL aren’t seeing people suffering from the so-called effects of the Dusk yet. Shallie tells us that water sources are drying up and her people are in a pinch, but we haven’t seen any of them yet. Instead she’s chilling out in Stellard, a city with plenty of (allegedly drying up) food and water and the rare monster attack. Instead of the game world getting darker and more serious as the Dusk progresses, it’s getting lighter and fluffier and more inconsequentional.

– Too many jerks. Raoul and Gerard Perriend were introduced as rude, mean and selfish purely so Gust could soften them over the course of the game. As a result, they start out unnecessarily prickly and unfriendly, barking and snarling at poor Shallie over things they could explain kindly and politely. Then later on they’re supposed to be friendly, caring and supportive…? Either they’re buttering her up so they can better exploit her, i.e. they’re jerks, or the writers forced them to be mean at first and nice later, i.e. Gust are jerks. Either way I remain unmoved.

Now to send it in a care package to Raoul…

Their presence just makes things unpleasant because every bit of story progression is controlled by the Cooperative or the Corporation so I can’t avoid them. I’ve come all this way just to be a lackey to two <bleeps>. I never thought I’d say this, but I really miss the freedom and self-determination of Atelier Ayesha. Without a time limit I thought for sure Atelier Shallie Plus would be a fun, free-wheeling, go where you want and do what you want kind of game, but instead you’re so tied to the whims and orders of Central AND the Cooperative AND the Corporation that you don’t get to progress anything on your own. Boooring.

Still on the subject of massive jerks, I should mention that Katla recently sank to new lows by planning to hoard and sell water in a crisis. There’s a huge gap between “cute and mischevious” and “ISIS wants to recruit you” but our little Katla is doing her best to straddle both points. Kefka would be so proud. Wait… Kefka… Katla… they’re practically identical! I see!

I don’t care, just get on with the story!

– Too many unnecessary events. Especially between the two Shallies. Was there even a need to have a second Shallie? We already did the two protagonists thing in Atelier Escha & Logy, that was enough. Shallie 2 doesn’t add anything. She’s just there so we can have scene after scene of Shallistera and Shallotte patting each other on the back. “Oh you’re so wonderful.” “No you.” “No, you.” “No you, tee hee.” And that’s just those two, not even getting in the multitude of pointless events involving Solle, Homura, Escha, Logy… As I said, I wouldn’t mind so much if this wasn’t the third and final game of the series. FOCUS, PEOPLE!

This witch again? She’s everywhere.

– Minor inconsistencies create confusion. From memory, there was an event where Kortes and Shallie speak about the Water Festival in their village, then later on the subject of a Water Festival in Stellard comes up and Shallie is like “What’s a Water Festival?” What’s amnesia, Shallie? There’s also the issue of the Eastern Continent, where they can’t seem to decide whether it’s unexplored territory that was recently discovered or whether they used to trade regularly until the sand dragon showed up. Which is it?

– A little earlier, I would added “The game world is too small” and “There isn’t enough alchemy” to the list of complaints, but the world recently opened up and I just got a few new books to play around with, so I’m busy as a bee. It’s a bit annoying that you aren’t told when stores restock with new books/Miruca gets new weapons (alchemy level maybe?) so you have to stalk them all the time. I’m playing on Hardcore so the various area bosses are a good workout too. When I finish this post I’m heading right back to Crystal Valley to kill a few more of them for phat loot.

Anyway, that’s it for a brief overview of the stuff that bothered me when I started Atelier Shallie Plus. The time-wasting was and still is extremely frustrating, but now that there are more places to go and the story “seems” to be picking up, I’m fairly optimistic about how things will turn out.

Pokemon Picross sucks and my 3DS charger stopped working again

Why Pokemon Picross sucks

Because it’s a puzzle game on a stamina system. Every move you makes consumes one point of stamina. And each stamina point takes a whole minute (!) to refill. An allegedly free game with a very heavy pay-to-play component. You need game currency to unlock stages, but it’s incredibly hard to get without paying.

For example I need 100 picrites to unlock Area 07, but my only source is daily missions, which only give me 6 picrites a day. DAY. And there are 25 areas, with rising unlock costs. If it takes 2 weeks to unlock Area 07 then… I’m not even going to attempt to do the math, I’ll just drop the game and be done with it. Nintendo, if you want money, just do like the other Picross games and have a set price.

Luckily, after this worthless experience I still have My Nintendo Picross: The Legend of Zelda and Sanrio Characters Picross to satisfy my love of Picross. When that’s done, I’m seriously considering wiping out all my saves and starting from scratch. Moar plz Nintendo?

Why my 3DS sucks

Because it has always been a cursed piece of kit and always will be. I’d be happy to take the blame for being bad at taking care of my stuff if it wasn’t for the fact that my PSX, PS2 and PSP are still working after many years no problems there at all. Nintendo DS, ancient, but still works. Wii, same. BUT THIS 3DS? It just hates me and has never recognized me as its master, that’s all.

Current issue: after the charger stopped working last time (yes, of course this isn’t the first time, why would it be), I bought not just a new charger but also a charging dock. I figured that moving the charger from place to place might be responsible for the failure, so I tried to keep everything in one spot as much as possible. Well, it worked for 2 and a half years so I guess that’s as good as it gets.

Actually I knew this would happen sooner or later, so I bought a USB charger as a backup. But since the 3DS is cursed, it’s only a matter of time before that stops working as well. Because why not? Before that happens, I’ll have to play the last few 3DS games I’m interested in: Persona Q, The Alliance Alive and Etrian Mystery Dungeon. I also started the Story of Seasons recently, but it’s boring so I’m thinking of dropping it, more on that some other time.

Oh, and I also started Atelier Shallie Plus. I was feeling a bit Atelier-ish this weekend, plus I want to solve this whole Dusk problem once and for all, so I took the plunge. Still only in the prologue. Shallistera’s route seems more story-focused so I’ll do that first, and then if there are significant differences in the routes I’ll do Shallotte’s as well. Updates on that one some other time.

Witch Ring Meister – Finished! It was fun

Witch Ring Meister is yet another simulation game from inutoneko, the Japanese indie developer I’ve been following for years. My last post was about Soul Smith of the Kingdom, another of their games. Normally I like to let time pass between games in the same series/genre. Unfortunately I’m going through a gaming rut right now where I don’t feel like playing anything with lot of talking in it. Which describes 90% of the games on my backlog. So… yeah. I’d rather play an idle clicker than any of those million-dollar quality JRPGs, bite me.

I rightly criticized the “English” “translation” of Soul Smith last time, but I’m happy to report that the translation of Witch Ring Meister isn’t half as bad. It’s still clearly done by a non-native speaker, but at least it makes complete sense now. I still played in Japanese because I didn’t want to take the chance, but I’m happy to see them going in a more quality direction.

Though I’ve gotta wonder, is it really that expensive to hire a proper translator from the start? Or at least an English editor? It bugs me when a game gets a bad translation because most video games will only get one localization ever. They need to make it count. Especially when it’s a game I enjoy, I feel sad that people aren’t going to get a good experience purely because some shoddy localization company cut a few corners. Mrrghhh. But anyway, Witch Ring Meister‘s translation is passable so feel free to try it if you’re interested.

Story: Marietta is a witch who wants to become a ring designer. Her father, who owns a jewelry store, wants her to study magic instead. Finally they arrive at a compromise where Marietta works on rings for a while, and if she can win the prestigious Miss Design Award he’ll let her follow her dream. Don’t we all wish we had a rich daddykins who would bankroll our wildest business plans? I know I do.

Gameplay: Marietta works on designs and prototypes together with her staff and a team of jewelers. Better staff, better jewelers = better rings.

My main menu right before winning the first Miss Design award.

Ring crafting takes the form of a clicking game. Get enough of the orange Work panels clicked and your production is a success. Then you can use the blue Advice panels and the purple Magic panels to get bonuses. But watch out for your HP and the time!

It’s not too hard, and you can one-click automate the process if you want, though if you really want good bonuses you’ll do it manually. For best results you’ll clear single panels that are in the way so you can link up larger swatches of color, saving time and HP. And if you fail there’s always Quick Load so don’t worry too much about it.

Once you’ve made a ring, you put it in your store and mass produce it to generate more funds to make more rings and hire more staff. As time goes on, the rings lose popularity and stop selling as well. Then you can either put them in a catalog to increase Marietta’s stats or use them as reference samples to create new, hopefully better rings.

Here’s what the catalog looks like:

The various elements of the rings directly affect the stat boosts you get. E.g. fire magic = more craft power, water magic = more HP. You need to use powerful rings as samples, but you also need to use them to power yourself up. It’s a balancing act. Usually if it’s a really good ring with a high rank or good skills I’ll use it as a sample, otherwise into the catalog it goes.

This is the Idea Note screen where all the magic of coming up with new rings happens.

That’s my Idea Note screen around the time when I won the first Miss Design award. The thing to note is the area in the middle with Technology, Staff, Shop, etc. You’re limited to creating rings around that level, give or take a rank. Since I have Bs there, my rings are coming out B+, B, C+ with the occasional A. If you want to make better rings, you’ll have to invest in better staff, invest in better jewelers who can source better material and invest in your shop. Which all takes money, money, money.

BTW, here’s my Idea Note screen around the time I won the second Miss Design award and finished the game. Posted for no reason except I’m a show-off:

Z+ is the highest rank you can get in the game. Am I awesome or what? Ufufufufu~ Since I’m at it, I might as well post my main menu from around that time as well.

I’m gonna be soooo rich when someone invents a way to convert game money to IRL money…

Enough boasting, back to the game. Here’s the shop screen where you can add all kinds of facilities to… your shop? The city of Ishwald? Seems like you pay for new facilities in the city to drive the economy so you can make more money. It’s the only reason I can think of why you have stuff like hospitals on the list.

TBH I felt that aspect was a bit nonsensical. Like instead of building restaurants and stuff, it would make more sense to have the same menu but fill it with marketing campaigns, renovations, store design options, etc. The kinds of things that would really drive sales in a real jewelry store. Not that Witch Ring Meister is realistic or anything, but random stuff like this just bugs me.

Moving on, here’s the staff screen where you can hire and fire workers:

As I mentioned, their combined stats for each category (Technology, Service, Popularity) affects the quality of the rings you can make. The better your staff, the better your stuff. So it’s in your own interest to pop into the Staff screen regularly to swap in better recruits if you can find them. Luckily they don’t mount any FFT-style guilt trips when you fire them, so fire away. Where they do play hardball is when you try to recruit talents that are way above your Shop’s level. Then you either pay through the nose or play some obscure negotiation game which plays like how I imagine Minesweeper would play if I could actually play Minesweeper.

This is the kind of game Quick Save was invented for.

Let’s see, what haven’t I covered yet… Ah yeah, skills and companions. Companions are the usual Ishwald crew. Nowadays the character stories are all optional, so I haven’t read any in ages. I got fed up with the story not going anywhere meaningful fast. If Shio and Fill don’t get together in the next game, I will riot.

Their main purpose is to give you boosts when you’re making rings. They give Marietta craft chips that can refill her HP, increase ring popularity, reduce HP loss during crafting, etc. They also have individual character skills you can buy with AP. These refill your HP, add more panels of a certain type, stop the time, etc etc. Late game, spamming Fill’s “Random Work” + Shio’s “Enhance Work” should be enough to complete most rings in the first move, leaving you with plenty of time stack bonuses.

That’s another thing I have against Witch Ring Meister: it gets really easy after a while. Quite apart from the fact that you can’t be game over’d, it’s too easy to succeed at crafting and the penalties for failure are really low. It’s good if you don’t want stress, and I enjoyed it anyway, but a Hard Mode would have been nice.

Last thing to cover: the Skills menu. Apart from character skills, Marietta can also spend AP on boosts that affect the whole game. Things like lower crafting damage, easier Contest requirements, better staff in the recruitment pool, etc.

The blue line under a skill means it’s active that month. The red line on top means the skill can be ranked up and upgraded further. The sucky thing about these is that the number (0, 90%, 100% etc) represent the chance of the skill to proc that month. So it’s meaningless to invest in a skill unless you have the AP to take it to at least 70% immediately. Also some of the skill effects are rather poorly explained, which is a bit irritating.

But enough talk. How is Witch Ring Meister as a game? TL;DR it’s awesome. I don’t have to do anything, I just point and click and the game plays itself. But the panel game is a lot of fun. It’s sort of strategic-y, sort of a race against time, sort of a rage against the cheating developers. What’s even more fun is slowly, but surely getting better rings. At first you can’t win even the easiest contest, your rings are all cheap kitsch, hardly anyone comes to your store and your HP is pathetic. Then you get better rings, you get better stats, you’re making good money, you’re winning everything, nothing is impossible for you. You’ve got it made!

But only in the game, not in real life. Boo hoo hoo.

There are only three things I have against the game.

1. I’ve mentioned it before, but it gets easy too quickly. I’m not looking for a hair-rippingly frustrating experience, but I did want to spend a bit more time racking my brains. It needed more contests, more goals, more achievements!

2. The limited number of rings you can sell and samples you can keep is frustrating. 5 of each was a bit annoying because it limits your earning potential and creativity.

3. A lot of stuff is poorly explained in the game. Especially the process for getting better rings. I had to check a FAQ to figure out that everything matters so you should upgrade everything stat. It was also from a FAQ that I learned you had to click character skills when crafting rings to active them. I thought they were automatic. Etc etc, it needed better tutorials.

Apart from that, I had a great time and stayed up all night at least twice just playing. It’s the first inutoneko game I’ve finished since Harvest Green in 2017 and I only managed it because this is so simple and undemanding and yet deep.

TL;DR: Witch Ring Meister is great fun if you like simulation games and growth narratives in a colorful, stress-free, idle-friendly package. At 30 hours for completion, it’s a good time filler too. I’m really sad to be done with it, but I’d been feeling a bit blah about gaming lately, and this has given me the spring back in my step. Yay!

Soul Smith of the Kingdom – Helps pass the time

Soul Smith of the Kingdom / 王国のソウルスミス is a training/management simulation game by inutoneko, a Japanese indie game circle I’ve been following for years. Last time I played one of their games, I mentioned that they had started releasing games in English on Steam. I had heard the quality wasn’t the best, but I thought I should check one out anyway. After comparing the opening sequence for the English and Japanese versions… I went with the Japanese. Sorry, localizers. I’m sure you’re trying your best but… no. It’s not good.

Not to kick them while they’re down, so I’ll give just two examples. I found the English sequence in this video, btw (gotta give credit where it’s due). The narration is in German but the game is in English.

Example 1 (English)

Example 1 (Japanese)

This “childe” they’re screaming out is actually “若” in Japanese. The word by itself does/can mean “young” or “child” and in this case, the daughter of their boss. But in English you don’t call your boss’s daughter “childe.” You can use her name, or you can call her “Miss” or some other title, but what is this “childe” business? Childe Roland?

Example 2 (English)

Example 2 (Japanese)

I already explained the main character is their boss’s daughter. She’s not “my childe”. Also that “Smith” in the corner should be “Smiths” since there’s more than one of them. Even if the translator didn’t know – which is likely because game translators frequently translate from raw scripts without reference to the game – an editor should have caught it and added a simple S before release.

Beyond that, what is this “Have one till tomorrow”? In Japanese it is “今日は飲み明かしましょう！” I.e. “Let’s drink the night away!” or “Let’s drink till we’ll drop!” or something along those lines. “Have one till tomorrow”… strictly speaking, all the words can be found in the English dictionary, but that’s as close as you can get to the sentence making sense, much less being close to the original Japanese.

So a brief comparison was enough to persuade me to stick to the original, at least for Soul Smith of the Kingdom. Other games might have better localizations, I don’t know. And I should added that outside the opening scene and optional story scenes, there’s very little to read in this game so a bad translation doesn’t have to be a deal breaker. Especially if you can’t read Japanese.

Now, on to the game itself.

Story: The main character is Nine Andelioar, a genius blacksmith from a famous blacksmithing family. Her father decides that while Nine is good at blacksmithing, she lacks management and training skills. Thus he bans her from smithing until she can train blacksmiths capable of fully forging the ultimate sword known as the Soul Smith.

Gameplay: It’s described as an “idle-clicker” i.e. a game that requires very little input from the gamer. You can leave it in the background and check in from time to time and still have fun somehow. In theory. Here’s the main menu:

The basic layout is this – you hire apprentices and set them to work making and selling weapons. You use the money you earn from this to expand your depot so you can hold more materials, buy useful skills and items from the market place, level your smiths up so they can make better stuff. Once they’ve grown as far as they can, you transfer them to another company branch and hire even better smiths.

Soul Smith of the Kingdom is called an idle game because weapon forging and selling is mostly automatic. As long as they have enough material, you just tell them what to make and they’ll make it forever and ever, no breaks, no strikes, no need to even pay or feed them. It’s a literal sweatshop, but the workers are so happy and excited to be there so don’t feel bad for them.

The thing to note in the menu screenshot is the “Soul Chance!!” in blue next to two of my smiths. It’s only when a blacksmith can fully grasp the “soul” of the weapon they’re making that they can be said to have mastered the art of making that weapon. Or something like that. During a Soul Chance, a countdown appears and the forging gauge slows down. If the smith can fully forge the weapon before the countdown reaches T0, they’ll get the Soul of the weapon. The first time this is done on a weapon it will also unlock a new weapon recipe. And it will add 1% to the completion gauge in the top left corner, which is at 60% in the screenshot above.

Here’s a list of the kinds of weapon you can make. You can see I’ve gotten the souls of 60 out of the 100 weapons in the game. Thus the little blue “Soul” next to them. The legendary Soul Smith sword is No. 60 on the list, so you don’t have to finish the whole chart to get the ending. There’s a second ultimate weapon, the Olivier, that is No. 90 on the list and which earns you a second ending, but that’s too much work so I quit after the Soul Smith.

Let’s see, what more should I cover… Maybe the hiring process. To hire better smiths, you need to raise the proficiency of your forge (think of it as fame or expertise) and pay huge sums of money to attract good talent. The more money, the better. See the bold numbers like 4 4 6 5 7 on the right side of the screenshot above? Those are smith/weapon proficiency levels of various elements. If a weapon requires a proficiency of 2 in fire and 4 in light, a smith with those abilities will have a very easy time forging it. Easier time = faster speed and greater profits + much better chance to succeed in getting a Soul.

Here are the stats of one smith in more details. The D Z and C represent Skill, Talent and Inheritance, which mean various things but I’m too lazy to explain. The blue boxes are Awakened Boosts, basically skills that help in forging like giving you extra money or a better rate of triggering Soul Chances. This smith has 4 4 6 5 7 proficiency in the elements, which is excellent, and I had to do a lot of reloading to get him. CP affects the speed of forging, also very important and raised by leveling up. The list of skills below the Skill, Talent and Inheritance bars are Nine’s skills/Friend skills that affect smithing.

Smiths can only be developed up to a point. After that you’re just throwing money in to little effect and it’s time to let them go and hire newer, better workers. But before they go, they can pass on some of their Awakened Boosts to others.

That’s what the “Inheritance” bar affects. With a lot of effort and time, you can eliminate useless skills and stack the deck with skills that help with triggering and succeeding in Soul Chances, bringing you closer to the end of the game.

Since Nine herself is stuck in the forge supervising and managing smiths, the work of gathering the necessary materials falls to the usual cast of the Ishwald games. Who also don’t get paid and don’t take breaks and have to hand over everything they find in the dungeons to Nine. But at least she gives them sweet weapons, accessories and level ups, so that’s good.

There’s way too much going on there to unpack in one post. The important thing is to pick characters with good skills to contribute to your pool of Friend Skills that affect the whole party/your forge. For example both Fill and Marietta have Critical Smith skills that raise the likeliness of succeeding in Soul Chances. Xian has a skill that gives boosts to attack. Palcheresse can get you better prices for your weapons. ETC.

Characters also excel at different things inside dungeons. So if you want to collect more loot and materials, you can put characters with high loot drop rates together. If you just want to clear levels and delve deeper, use people like Ruvel and Shio to get the job done. But there’s no need to overthink teams too much. It’s all automatic so just strengthen the team with fresh weapon upgrades from time to time and everything will be fine.

Last things to mention before moving on to whether I liked Soul Smith or not: Manasource and Souls. Two other currencies apart from cold hard cash. Manasource is used to unlock characters and also unlock, upgrade and sustain Friend skills. You get it from fun… yeah, some of them are fun… fun minigames, treasure chests and achievements.

This minigame makes my brain tingle.

It’s the need to stop regularly to earn manasource via minigames that stops Soul Smith from being the perfect idle clicker. In an ideal world you would gather good blacksmiths, set them to work on a weapon, come back in a while to see if they’ve gotten the soul, switch them to another weapon and go away again, etc. And I did do that, but Friend skills are really helpful, so what I would do was play a lot of minigames to build up a lot of Manasource and then idle until it was almost all gone, rinse, repeat.

Souls are earned by succeeding at Soul Chances. Only the first success counts towards game completion, but subsequent successes earn Soul points that Nine can spend on skills.

There are skills to enlargen the dungeon and the market, skills to give you a better selling price for your goods, skills to raise smith CP, etc etc.

What I thought about Soul Smith

Soul Smith of the Kingdom is one of those games I enjoyed a lot when I was playing it, but now I’m done I’m not sure what I saw in it. I enjoyed some of the minigames. I liked (?) the hiring process, though it involved a lot of reloading. Trying to find the right people with the right balance of skills is harder than it looks. I also liked getting new weapons and upgrading my adventurers so they could delve deeper into the dungeons. And it’s really satisfying when you finally manage to successfully get a weapon’s soul after many attempts.

Getting the Soul Smith weapon soul is a good goal and a good place to stop. After that raw luck starts to play a much larger part in Soul Chances instead of skills and stats. Can you trigger enough Critical Smiths to win or not? It’s all down to luck. You also need a LOT more money to get talent that can forge 5+ proficiency weapons. This means you’ll have to let the game idle for much longer while your smiths earn money, only to blow half of it on one worker and then start again. It’s tedious beyond the Soul Smith point so I’d say 60% of the game is fun, the other 40% seemed so tedious I couldn’t be bothered.

TL;DR – Soul Smith is not too complicated, not too involved, will keep you busy for about 10 hours. It’s good if you don’t want anything deep or long-winded, apart from that it’s nothing special.

Paradise Bay is going down – and I think I know why

I’ve been so busy lately I haven’t had time even for casual fare like Candy Crush Soda Saga or Paradise Bay. A few days ago I finally checked in to Paradise Bay only to discover the following message:

If it’s too small to read, it says:

“Bon Voyage! Trademasters, it’s with a heavy heart we must inform you that on May 17, 2019 we will terminate service fo Paradise Bay. On that date the game will no longer be playable. As of March 18, all In-App purchases have been turned off and allplayers credited with ten million Gems to use as they desire. Thank you for spending your time with us, and we wish you the best on all your future adventure! – The Paradise Bay Team.”

As for why it’s going down, it says a lot that this notice went out on the 18th of March and a “big fan” like me only saw in it early April. When I wrote a post about Paradise Bay a little over 2 years ago, I commented, prophetically, that: “I’m a little worried they’ll take it down for non-profitability since it’s so easy to play for free but, eh, not my problem.” Welp, looks like I’ve gotta get me a psychic hotline because my prediction came true. And I think I know why.

But only “think.” I don’t work for King or keep up with the latest news in casual game-land. So take everything I’m going to write below with a pinch of salt. It’s just that as a player who considers myself a fan of Paradise Bay, as well as someone who dabbles in other casual games, I could tell the writing was on the wall for this game two years ago and the results are plain for all to see.

TL;DR – It wasn’t profitable enough

Paradise Bay is no Anno 2070, but it’s still a large game with a lot of moving parts and graphics. A game like that will take a lot of money and man-hours to develop, design and maintain. It just had too many moving parts compared to King’s other games like Candy Crush. Apparently it was run by a company named Z2 that King bought some years ago for $45 million. That probably explains why it’s a more complicated game that doesn’t really fit the simple puzzle games King made their fortune off.

A lot of stuff going on in one little screen

Furthermore, unlike those simpler games, Paradise Bay was also story and event-based. This means even more effort and money spent on brainstorming, programming, testing and bug-fixing events, constantly trying to keep players engaged and more. I’ve seen a figure of “$200 million generated by Z2live in the past few years” being bandied around online. That’s a vague and poorly-sourced claim, but even if it’s true, how many years is “a few years”? One? Two? Five? How much of that revenue is actual profit? What were the most recent figures? I bet it cost a ton to run a game that didn’t make much in return. Especially when you consider that King by itself makes over $200 million every quarter…

The thing was, Paradise Bay was too laid back. Too easy to not play. Too stagnant. Even a fan like me could go by for weeks without playing and come back to meet very little change. No new systems, no new challenges, no new plants to grow, no new maps, no nothing. The only thing you’d miss out on were a few pet stickers, which are hardly essential. In January and February they experimented with free and paid login bonuses but again, the best rewards were pet stickers. Pets are reasonably cute, but they don’t do anything, they’re just kinda there, so eh.

I think another reason why Paradise Bay went down is because they failed to build any meaningful communities within the game. That’s why most gacha games are so big on guilds and parties. They want players to develop a sense of camaraderie that keeps them coming back. I’m sure there are a lot of people who would like to quit a certain online game, but they can’t because they would miss all their buddies they fool around and chat with. Or they would feel guilty about letting the team down.

Paradise Bay didn’t have any of that. You can’t chat with anyone in the game. You can’t ask anyone for help or say thank you after they help you. You can’t find specific people or link up with them. There are ways to do that on Facebook outside the system, but not everyone has Facebook or wants to use it for this kind of thing. In a relaxed farming game like this, there should have been lots of ways for people to interact, trade stuff and help each other out in eventss. And the more benefits there are from playing with others, the more likely players are to rope in their friends and family into playing as well. In theory.

Paradise Bay also faced the issue that most of these “putter around and collect cute stuff” games face: storage. You’re always running into storage limits, which stops you from producing or collecting as much stuff as you would like. Even worse, the space on your island is tiny, with very limited room for expansion. So even if you collect 100 cute but useless pets, you won’t be able to display most of them. The same goes for all the tiles and furniture and other ‘rewards’ you get from events. This is part of the reason why I stopped playing the very similar Rakuen Seikatsu Hitsujimura, quite apart from the fact that they broke my heart as a free player. Deliberately, I might add. Which matter we might discuss another day, or maybe not, it’s not that interesting.

The world map has looked like this for over a year, nothing new to explore.

Hmm, where was I. Yes, I was saying how Paradise Bay doesn’t have many events, the events aren’t very rewarding, the rewards you get aren’t useful and you don’t even have enough space to display them. For my part as a player none of these were big deals. I mentioned before that I liked the laid back nature of the game. Play when you want, for as often as you want. But from the gaming company’s perspective, a game that people don’t feel compelled to play is a game people don’t feel compelled to spend money on. Which ends up being a game that costs more than it’s worth to run.

I need 400,000 EXP to level up and your ‘challenge’ gives me only 1500. Am I a joke to you?

It’s worse than that, even. As part of their shutting down campaign, Paradise Bay has given all players 10 million gems to spend. Wow! Ten million! In a game where you could only get maybe 3 or 4 a day for free, wow! What am I going to do with them?… And then I realized, there’s nothing to do with paid currency in this game. You can expand your storage a bit, meh. Or speed up production a bit, eh. It means nothing to a patient gamer. The game also has a gacha system where you can draw for pets, but I already told you, pets are useless. That’s why Hitsujimura gradually moved away from pets as cuteness to pets as mega weapons of war where if you don’t have the right one you can forget completing the event, oh, and the reward for the event is good stuff which will make the next events even easier, i bet you wish you had those pets now, huh, huh? Tch. That game.

Poor Wesley will never be able to ask Sita out.

In short. Paradise Bay was a lot of fun to play because it was so laid back – no pressure to play, no pressure to spend. There wasn’t much to do in the game, but that just made it a nice change from the constant grind in almost everything else I normally play. Unfortunately, for Activision Blizzard/King, that’s not what they want from an allegedly free game. It was clear that what made Paradise Bay so attractive for me was also what would lead to its demise. When I saw the notice, I thought “Wow, it lasted longer than I thought,” not “Oh no, what a shock!” It’s a tough life out there in casual gameland.

To draw the curtain on Paradise Bay, I’ll take screenshots of all my characters to remember them by: