The Post-Easter Food Coma Rehab Post

So, if you survive Easter, congrats, and to better digest the lamb and chocolate induced coma, i’ll soapbox about some things about upcoming reviews and the blog as a whole.

First, i would like to spend some time and then review in EXPRESSO form Arknights Endfield, i have it installed on PS5 but i wasn’t sure, despite me quite liking the original Arknights… as long as i could since i’m a F2P player that doesn’t spend money in microtransactions, period, so eventually i reach the “bottleneck” where they expect you to pay to actually get some progress done before you expire, i get bored and move on.

Still, i have been curious about it, so we’ll see.

Despite earlier planning to do Melee May in a redux fashion, it will happen, though i compromised with a rewrite.

This as i planned to slow down output in order to do some maintenance, organize the reviews proper in categories, that stuff, which i still plan to do during the usual mid-August hiatus, but i would like to do some during May, so if there are less reviews than usual, that will be the reason.

As you might have notices since we’re almost at the two digits mark, i’m committed to keep Platformation Time Again going and hopefully be somewhat costant of a featured rubric, and eventually i will expand the rubric with a specific tier/type about collections, since these are becoming more and more common, as the industry and publishers are scraping up anything that might have nostalgia value to it, heck, they even did remaster-port the Zool games.

On a closing note, One Piece Month will still happen but most likely in a redux fashion, due to how some other returning rubrics will happen, as i will explain later down the line.

[EXPRESSO] Blue Archive iOS | Gacha, Girls & Guns

More gacha? Want more gacha? There’s always more gacha to talk about, not so much play as often gameplay it vestigial obligation or barely there so it can technically be considered a “videogame” and not a “JPEG slot machine”. And because these things always wants all your time. And money.

What kind of free-to-play anime gacha game is Blue Archive?

The story (as far as explained by the prologue) it’s basically A Certail Magical Index via Girls Frontline and a touch of Girls Und Panzers, minus the magical elements and sci-fi robots, so it’s a basically an island full of academies and anime girls students & prefects (all sporting halos, animal ears, etc) going around with weapons, riding tanks in broad daylight, and you’re the “Sensei” that shouldn’t be there but it’s now de facto leader tasked to resolved the current crisis.

Even if you’re amnesiac, like in Arknights, for example.

It’s fairly generic niche anime bungum.

Gameplay it’s mostly what expected, as you witness your selected team of 3 characters (plus supports) automatically proceed, shoot (and take cover if possible) through the battlefield, leaving you to basically just use skill cards for special attacks, buffs, etc

Each unit uses a specific type of gun, it’s more proficient in a specific type of terrain and belongs to a certain class, but that’s it, ultimately it’s about picking the right team combinations, the rest it’s windowdressing.

There is a grid based “strategy map” to move the units around before the auto battling segments, which reminds me of Girls Frontline…. minus lots of strategic elements. So ultimately it’s very similar to Princess Connect, a waifu collector “bonsai game”, with some decent character designs and good production values.

I will admit i enjoyed this one a bit more than Priconne, but not by much.

[EXPRESSO] Arknights iOS | Medicated Nation

Arknights ios splash screen.PNG

So yeah, Yostar’s new gacha game, looks a lot more like Girls Frontline (or an anime take on The Division) than Azur Lane but isn’t any of that, it’s a tower defense thingie with people befitted of the ever popular animal ears, because. The vague plot sees you as the amnesiac leader of pharmaceutical-commando company Rhodes Island, in a world afflicted by Catastrophes, bringing destruction and the precious mineral known as Originium, which infects people with the mysterious disease of “Oripathy” ( awakening powers but also being lethal in the long run), and you fight the other factions at play, the cultish Reunion and the military force of the city of Chernobog.

Plot is decent, character design good for this type of game, and gameplay wise – as i said -, it’s a tower defense affair: you put units on the available grid spaces to stop the enemy units from entering through the gate/s at the end. If anything, the surprisingly long tutorial-prologue will get you up to speed to the basics and Arknight’s minor but nice additions to the formula. The usual free-to-play bullshit isn’t that bad either, as the game gives you useful items to start with (not just crap), but of course wants you to roll the gacha for characters with an alluring design by using real money.

Aside from some inusual design choices, like characters who don’t receive exp directly from fights (instead you gotta use xp item received as rewards to level them up), Studio Montagne’s game is fairly good in itself, with a good introduction of new enemy types and objects to keep things interesting, using actual gameplay to keep you coming back, instead of just using the typical psychological hooks to make you log in something way repetitive that basically plays itself (hi, Azur Lane).

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