How To Save The World And Look Good Doing It

What feels like it must be a few weeks back now, I gave the opinion I was almost done with Noah's Heart. I mentioned I was only logging in briefly each day to do the few daily tasks I had to, so I could earn tokens to progress the latest season's storyline. Each stage in the tale now required more tokens than ever before, while the stages themselves took less and less time to complete, meaning my effective playtime outside of dailies had shrunk to little more than a few minutes each week.

Naturally, no sooner had I committed that claim to print, everything changed. Literally one day later, my Noah's Heart sessions expanded to a couple of hours a day, just like they had been before and I once again found myself playing the game to the exclusion of anything else except my new game crush, ROSE Online.

Not that I was out there, exploring the world or progressing the main storyline or anything obvious like that. What I began by doing was trying to work out how to increase my combat rating in Fantasy Arena, a side-hustle in which phantoms battle phantoms. That led me to spend hours staring at stats and switching enchantments and from there things just seemed to spiral.

I'm so happy I don't even care!

 

Enchantments are crafted so I ended up taking a long-overdue look at my Careers, which is what the game calls tradeskills. I was wondering why I hadn't received a prompt to visit my trainer to level up and when I checked, I discovered I was roadblocked. I couldn't max my Masterchef career while I was undercooked in Prestige.

Prestige is a stat that "Refelects the degree of respect the character receives", something that would certainly have an impact on the career of a Chef. It was also something I'd never paid the least attention to since I started playing. Until then whatever Prestige I enjoyed had just taken care of itself.

On further investigation, it transspires that Prestige is raised either by adding NPCs to your Album or by rasiing your Adventure Level (Something quite different from your Character Level.) which, unsurprisingly, requires to go out into the world and adventure. Without going into the arcane details, let's just say doing either of these things requires playing the game in a manner that might not unreasonably be described as "properly".

Nothing's going to rain on my parade. Not even rain!

As I've said before, one of the most admirable aspects of Noah's Heart is its immaculate in-game documentation. Absolutely everything can be mouseovered to reveal a full information trail. I was easily able to isolate exactly which NPCs I needed to find and talk to so I could add them to my album but that still left me with the onerous task of actually going out into the world and looking for them. For once, autoquesting was not an option. 

All I had to go on was a description and a location. Off I set and. of course, once I was out there, roaming about, I ran into various Encounters (A kind of proximity-triggered quest), Matrixiums (Matrixia? Not entirely clear on the etymology.), chests, photo opportunities and sundry other gameplay elements, all of which led me to play the game in what, from a distance, might almost have looked like a normal manner. And much fun it was, too.

You're my absolute idol!

As I was doing all that, I began looking more closely at some of the things I'd been working on before I drifted into self-maintenance and I realised one of them was almost in sight of completion; my plan to worm my way sufficiently into Jennie Watt's affections that she'd hand over the pattern for her signature look, a fetching dungaree and blazer combo I'd been coveting for months. 

To get my hands on it I needed to raise my Affection with her to Level Twelve, which is about as creepy as it sounds, especially when you consider that to do it I had to shower her with gifts.

You get a lot of gifts suitable for bribing phantoms just in the normal course of events but the impact of most of them is relatively small and the totals required are substantial. The easiest and quickest way I've found to get a Phantom to like me is to cook huge quantities of high-quality food and hand it all over like some kind of obsessive feeder. The implications do not bear close analysis.

After much potato and turnip digging and several periods of recovery to allow my depleted stamina to recover (Apparently cooking really takes it out of you.), last night I finally gave Jennie enough curry to convince her we should be BFFs and she sealed our lifelong pact of friendship with the deeds to the ranch pattern I'd been waiting for.

 

By a remarkable stroke of luck - I certainly hadn't had the foresight to prepare for it - I happened to have all of the necessary ingredients in my packs so I was able to run the outfit up immediately. I then spent a frankly embarassing amount of time posing and taking selfies, ostensibly so I could use them in this post but really just because I was so thrilled with how great my character looked in her new outfit.

Beyond anything else, I think this is the primary reason I've enjoyed Noah's Heart so much and spent so much time there. I love the character designs and costumes of many of the Phantoms so the prospect of being able to cosplay as my favorites is highly motivational, as is the means by which that happy state can be achieved.

I'm very impressed by the way all the costumes can be crafted using only resources gathered in-game. It would be so much easier for players and so much more profitable for Archosaur if you could just buy the outfits in the store but somehow having to play the game instead is, weirdly, more compelling. Who knew?

According to this guide to fashion in the game, the insight was hard-won: "Apparently, the developers of Noah's Heart learned their lesson from Dragon Raja, welcoming the community's feedback over the exaggerated number of outfits for sale in the cash shop." Interesting use of "welcoming" there, I'm thinking...

However it came about, when it comes to looking good in Noah's Heart, the current state of affairs suits me very well indeed. It might be possible to spend a lot of real money on speeding things up, although I can't say there's much I can see in the cash shop to that end, but if you're  not in a tearing hurry, you certainly don't need to spend anything at all.  

The pacing feels about right to me. I got my last outfit almost two months ago and I hardly put myself out racing for the next. It took just long enough to give me a genuine sense of achievement but not so long that I began to lose interest. Ideally, I think I might prefer a cadence of around one outfit a month but one every six weeks is perfectly acceptable.

There are plenty to work towards, too. As far as I can tell, every Phantom's signature look is available as a reward at the final tier of Affection, which comes at Level 11, 12 or 13, depending on quality. With new Phantoms being added almost weekly, there's not much chance of running out of aspirational affectations.

Once I'd acquired the pattern, crafted the clothes and put them on, I was amused to find the transformation even includes the bandages and bandaids on Jennie's knees. The only thing missing seems to be the massive pair of protective goggles Jennie wears pushed back on top of her head, but my feathered headband makes a fine substitute.

More than any mmorpg since The Secret World, I find Noah's Heart intrinsically appealing for what my character looks like as much as how she plays. It's that, more than anything, that's likely to keep me playing well into the coming year. 

Now I just have to decide which look to work on next. I have a couple of ideas...