then you kinda contradict your point by adding this

I really don't see how that's a contradiction, I am saying that the situations are different, thus they use different sorts of characters, even the role that the nameless characters in those stories take is not relevant to how much the viewer care about them, they are used to illustrate situations.

Hereafter in particular had Sana's segment where it hit a bit too real to me, it's not the point that this specific group being shown are like this, but rather that groups like that are all too common and it wasn't Sana's first time encountering them, and even in real life, you only have to take a stroll around the internet to see how common that sort of doomer mentality is online, the them being clearly painted as one-off didn't lessen the impact of the message behind the segment.

Even FGO as much as they love to reuse few generic sprites they have, do make completely unique new sprites for characters that are important, even if just for 1 event or story.

Yeah, and they are often just as boring to me, I still to this day, over two years, have no clue what people see in Patxy... Patsy... the dog guy from LB1 whatever his name was, he came, he died, big whoop, him being a unique portrait had no impact in that, I always knew that he was going to disappear forever as soon as the chapter ended and how he disappeared makes no difference.

I guess ultimately I just don't see this point as being an issue, how the portrait looks is irrelevant to me relative to how identifiable the character is, which can be done through a name and behavior alone, Hayato is probably my biggest example of this where I am oddly invested in Aimi's little story(as much as I prefer yuri 99% of the time, I can enjoy het on rare occasions, and hey, Aimi can be allowed to be the token straight), it does annoy me at times when stablished characters like Hitomi and Junko are just not allowed to appear because they are in that aftermentioned zone of "Too important to have an undetailed portrait, not important enough to have a detailed one", but they also come up so rarely that it doesn't get too bad.

That's why I said "though at least Yu had unique generic sprite (as much sense as it makes)."

Ah, I missed that entirely, I just use "detailed" to make the distinction since there are a few other unique undetailed L2D out there, like Gilles and La Hire from Tart's event.

last edited at Jun 10, 2020 1:55PM

Well there is a least one non-magical girl that has a live2d model in Part 2 of the story Kagome Satori due to being possessed by the Uwasa of the Wind Evangelist which lets her both see magical girls and listen in on their telepathy.

Oh-oof

Well there is a least one non-magical girl that has a live2d model in Part 2 of the story Kagome Satori due to being possessed by the Uwasa of the Wind Evangelist which lets her both see magical girls and listen in on their telepathy.

The OP to part 2 largely confirms that she is going to contract, both showing her meguca outfit and, during a split second at the very start of the OP, you can see her shadow in front of Kyubey's shadow, signifying the moment she contracts, the only thing we are yet to know is what her wish will be.

Frankly, anyone who really knows how this game functions called it that she would contract the moment they noticed her L2D model, so people were hardly surprised.

The part 2 black bars intrigue me, but I will abstain from looking at them. This is interesting though because I never seriously thought about how only magical girls have animated sprites. It just seemed natural it would be that way? But it would be nice if we could at least see the faces of people like Tsuruno's father.

I did notice though how much they go out of their way to only include magical girls in most stories if they can help it. Like when established magical girl runs into some person she's never met before, is it a new person? Nope it's just another magical girl. It's almost incestuous how little contact they seem to have with other people. It's like they never meet normal people during their daily lives.

I really don't like this game's need to shoehorn in battles against random mooks which don't exist storywise purely to have battles. None of the battles in the current event exist storywise and they only put them in to just so the player would have something to do instead of making the event a pure story one with no/minimal battles.

To be fair, if they did that, there would be barely any battles and not just in events, but in main story as well. So while it doesn't really make sense story wise, I understand why they put them in there. It's kinda necessary evil. It's still gacha game after all and that's the main gameplay.

FGO has managed to cut down the random/pointless battles in their main stories so not every section has or needs a battle, so I don't see why this game can't either.

I actually have a specific opinion about the way FGO handles it, and I my perception is that cutting down on "pointless" battles is ultimately a bad thing, at least to me personally, FGO has the habit of stringing extremely long dialogue scenes in 0 AP nodes, sometimes 30 minutes worth of reading in one shot, this was particularly notable in Salem(which I also hated story wise but this is not the place to discuss that), with no breaks between scenes.

A side effect of the battles is that they provide natural break points in the story, and make going through the story much more manageable, if you have a 15 minute break at work you know you can afford to go through 1-3 story nodes depending on your reading speed, it divides the story up nicely.

Also there is the point Nevri gave that it would make really awkward to have some story types, this event in particular would've been 70 nodes worth of cutscenes and a handful of Free quests, as nothing that happens in the story gives a "justifiable" fight, and MagiReco has significantly more SoL-type events than FGO.

But it would be nice if we could at least see the faces of people like Tsuruno's father.

I actually agree with this, like I said I am somewhat invested in Aimi's thing with Hayato and I would like to at least know what the boy looks like, I don't even ask for a full L2D model, just give us a Memoria, since we get to see what Himika's siblings actually look like through a Memoria as well.

last edited at Jun 10, 2020 9:59PM

I really don't like this game's need to shoehorn in battles against random mooks which don't exist storywise purely to have battles. None of the battles in the current event exist storywise and they only put them in to just so the player would have something to do instead of making the event a pure story one with no/minimal battles.

That's been a toss-up for me, whether I enjoy it or not. For something like this which is pretty light and I don't have too much investment in, it feels alright. As Veya said above it can provide a break from all the reading. Although then I might get annoyed they don't allow auto on first try lol so I have to actually focus for random mooks. But yeah, sometimes it's fine with me so there's a break from the reading, sometimes I'm pissed at the obligatory battle because I just want to see what happens next. I don't know if they'd ever change it; the story/battle/story format has never changed in any event or story chapter as far as I know.

And when the event currency is tied to battles, at least getting event currency from story battles makes them feel more rewarding. And slightly better than grinding the same event boss over and over as it is in some other games.

FGO has the habit of stringing extremely long dialogue scenes in 0 AP nodes

For this specifically it seems like that wouldn't be an issue if they just broke up the dialogue scenes more. Dragalia Lost chains multiple story nodes together with no battles in between sometimes. Each story node probably doesn't take more than 10 minutes to go through . To be fair, the story in DL is much less substantial than FGO's. So might be sort of awkward to suddenly pause in the middle of a dramatic conversation or build in moments every few paragraphs so there can be a scene break. (I've never played FGO so I can't actually say if there are valid examples of that scenario.)

I don't even ask for a full L2D model, just give us a Memoria, since we get to see what Himika's siblings actually look like through a Memoria as well.

I didn't know that was a thing, they should do that more often.

@Veya If it's more SoL wouldn't it be better to simply eliminate (or make an alternate version) all gameplay and make it a pure visual novel instead of a hybrid game like it currently is? Besides the current way of interrupting the story sequences to fight battles against enemies that pose no challenge to a leveled team just so you can get back to reading the story isn't much better than what FGO does.

last edited at Jun 11, 2020 12:12AM

There's an adorable side to Ria huh. This event's made me more curious about her, because before this and the Sayuki event, all I knew about her was that she was an arrogant model who thought highly of her looks. She acts over-the-top and full of herself but it seems like a front? Or it's not all she is.

Also why is everybody unable to remember her name in this event? I don't get where the joke is coming from since in Moemura's side story I believe Madoka recognizes her immediately by name.

Edit: Ah the ending was fantastic. But if the real ending is based on all of the secret endings, that means what canonically happened is that they all messed up their challenges in some way. So instead of the perfect run through we see as the main story, it was imperfect all the way.

Yachiyo eats too fast and gets the book voucher instead of the grand prize. Sana canonically joins Ayaka's comedy troupe for an hour. Tsuruno is so passive/expectant that Iroha will do something Mitama interrupts them. And then Felicia chooses cookie carving, not mushroom hammering. I think that's how that can be interpreted as.

That's sweet. It gives even their "failures" meaning.

last edited at Jun 11, 2020 4:48AM

There's an adorable side to Ria huh.

She acts over-the-top and full of herself but it seems like a front? Or it's not all she is.

Ria is a weird mix of being completely and utterly self-centered while also being one of the most thoughtful people you will ever meet, my interpretation of her is that she is genuinely believes her own hype but it is in such a way that her believing her own hype doesn't prevent her from being thoughtful.

I also feel is why Ria x Mayu works, Mayu is pretty much the only person besides Ria herself that believes Ria's hype, while also seeing Ria's kindness and that only causing her to reinforce her "Oh yeah, Ria really is awesome" mindset.

Also why is everybody unable to remember her name in this event?

It's a running gag that started with Sayuki being unable to remember Ria's name in Mayu's personal story... why it is upholding here is likely because another of Ria's running gags is that she considers herself Yachiyo's rival as a model while Yachiyo is barely aware she exists, so if Yachiyo can't proper remember her, neither can Yachiyo's family or friends.

Sakura Cartelet posted:

FGO has managed to cut down the random/pointless battles in their main stories so not every section has or needs a battle, so I don't see why this game can't either.

Remember that they only started doing it after they tried to do something different with Babylonia singularity (and failed miserably), which was first to introduce 0 ap quests on regular basis outside of epilogue quests. Before that they always tried to find a way to add some plot related fight before it and even after that, they still in general try to add battles wherever possible. MR can't really do it because like 90% of it story is just dialogue and there's no fights. They can't cut out battles completely, because then it's no longer mobile game and if they wanted to actually give in story reasons for battles, they'd need to change plot significantly. Simply FGO as a franchise much more focused on fights is more suited for that kind of mobile and visual novel gameplay mix than Madoka.

Veya posted:

I actually have a specific opinion about the way FGO handles it, and I my perception is that cutting down on "pointless" battles is ultimately a bad thing, at least to me personally, FGO has the habit of stringing extremely long dialogue scenes in 0 AP nodes, sometimes 30 minutes worth of reading in one shot.

My friend really complains about all those "pointless" and repeating battles, but at least there they try to tie fights to story, MR seems to not give a fuck 90% of the time. And honestly I agree that in the end it's better to have those random fights, for variety of reason. After all we're playing mobile game, not visual novel. And yea, while story can be pretty funny/engaging they do sometimes go overboard with length, especially in those 0 AP ones.

this was particularly notable in Salem(which I also hated story wise but this is not the place to discuss that), with no breaks between scenes.

Oh yea, I definitely think that Salem was wasted potential and for the most part very painful to go through. Shimousa and Agartha were the best sub-singularities imo and half of Shinjuku was great and half was waste potential and plot that doesn't make sense.

Sakura Cartelet posted:

@Veya If it's more SoL wouldn't it be better to simply eliminate (or make an alternate version) all gameplay and make it a pure visual novel instead of a hybrid game like it currently is? Besides the current way of interrupting the story sequences to fight battles against enemies that pose no challenge to a leveled team just so you can get back to reading the story isn't much better than what FGO does.

They can't because it's gacha game first, not visual novel. If you could implement gacha in visual novel, I bet they would do it already. The main reason is selling waifus. Story is secondary and the easiest and most familiar to otaku way of presenting it is a visual novel style, so that's what they're doing, but it's not and never will be a proper visual novel. It's more of a means to a end and a way to tell a story, so you shouldn't focus on presentation too much. As I said, they need to give you fights, because that's the main gameplay of the game. Is it lazy and could be done better/more interesting? Probably, but that's what we're stuck with and it's not going to change anytime soon.

last edited at Jun 11, 2020 10:07AM

There's an adorable side to Ria huh.

She acts over-the-top and full of herself but it seems like a front? Or it's not all she is.

Ria is a weird mix of being completely and utterly self-centered while also being one of the most thoughtful people you will ever meet, my interpretation of her is that she is genuinely believes her own hype but it is in such a way that her believing her own hype doesn't prevent her from being thoughtful.

I also feel is why Ria x Mayu works, Mayu is pretty much the only person besides Ria herself that believes Ria's hype, while also seeing Ria's kindness and that only causing her to reinforce her "Oh yeah, Ria really is awesome" mindset.

It is a strange combination since being thoughtful usually means having a measure of social awareness too, which Ria completely disregards when it comes to others' views of her. This might be stretching things but is it potentially related to her wish? I know her wish had something to do with her appearance but not if there was a specific wording to it.

I'd ship it despite only having seen two instances of interaction between them, from Sayuki's event and this memoria.

Nah, she just has a incredible ego. All she wished for was being natural born beauty. If anything she might have been more aware before, but becoming stunningly beautiful actually lowered her self-awareness and boosted her ego. I think it's because after making a wish, Kyuubey rewrote reality so she was always pretty and everyone around her remember her like that, but she herself does not and so she has no life time of experience actually being so pretty, so she might have actually act so over the top and put such act to hid her lack of confidence. There's also the fact that because of her own lack of experience she probably thinks that's how person who would grow up naturally beautiful and praised constantly, would turn out to be, though still her sense of superiority and perfectness is still overdoing it way too much and it's probably something that used to be constantly suppressed, when she looked average, but now that she's beautiful, it started to grown freely and never stopped.

The thing about Ria is that her ego is way too consistent to be anything resembling an act, and it comes up even in her internal thoughts, while I feel you are right that having this turned on her at a later age rather than always having it exacerbated things, she is genuinely like this now, however the reason her being like this is.

I still have a lot of curiosity to know what Ria looked like before her wish, when you set things up like this it just gives me a pang of curiosity...

Yea, that's what I meant with last line. As average looking she might had that ego, but not the looks to back it up, so now that she has the looks, she can act the way she always felt before, but couldn't due to fearing of people saying she doesn't deserve to act like that. Her faking her confidence is partially true though, since at least in the part of her episode story when she went to Emily for advice, I believe it was straight said that she acted confident to actually hid her insecurities and that's what she wanted to get advice from Emiri for, but didn't want anyone to see her, because being seen going for advice, would imply perfect Ria is in fact, not perfect.

Well today I got my first copy of Oriko while trying (and failing) to get Swimsuit Iroha it only took me a few tickets plus some single rolls. I've spent some of my mats working on her, but I don't have enough to get her to 4★ right now.

Alright let's see what we get in this fine morning... Iroha's 5* given a release date, Touka's release banner, and reaffirming the Chapter 10 release dates as we already knew, so nothing too interesting at the end of the day.

On the plus side, I have now cleared the entire event shop for part 2 as well... a lot sooner than I was expecting too, to be quite frank, I only used pots to clear the story part.

I finished shop as well (stuff I cared about anyway) and was also surprised how fast it was. I did it pretty much on natural ap.

I'm looking forward to the next event. Cannot do much more of this nonstop event grinding without story to break it up with.

Well I'm not officially done with clearing out the event shop for both parts of the event. Will be on standby till tomorrow when Iroha's event starts.

Finally got my 5* Iroha, yaaaaaaaaayyyy

I gave up on clearing out the shop entirely, but it was close enough. Only some books and lower level awakening materials were left.

Finally got my 5* Iroha, yaaaaaaaaayyyy

Yeah it's nice finally having 5* Iroha. I love her as a character, even more than Madoka probably, so I'm happy being able to add her to my PVE team now.

Finished episode 1 + first node of episode 2, and have to wonder why Eve is a moth. Not that familiar with the mythology around them, though I know they do have associations with transformation/transfiguration. The backgrounds are lovely, they've got that grimy, end of the world look down. I also see they were very particular about how Eve is a half-witch, just so Ui can be saved. Unlike Sayaka. And every other witch.

On another note, before I knew much about Hinano, I was confused as to why she was the only 2* I owned who already had an unlockable doppel. After I learned more about her, I found out that was probably because she is awesome and getting to see her have a moment of glory in coordinating the magical girls' defense, with even Nanaka deferring to her, is satisfying.