Here She Comes Now (Feat. Lacrimosa)

I'm almost embarrassed to post this after last time but if I'm going to be straight about it, I'm more embarrassed about how much I wanted to post about it yesterday evening, right after it happened. It's how they get you, isn't it? Hah! Well, Hotta! You may have got me but you didn't get my money! 

Not sure why I'm crowing about not having paid the company that's given me so much great entertainment this last month. It's not exactly putting it to the man, is it? More like stiffing the waitress on her tip. 

Sidebar: Do we still say "waitress" any more or is it like "actor" now, where the old, male-gendered version becomes the new, non-gendered preference? Although I have noticed "actress" coming back a little of late and doesn't universalizing the masculine to replace the feminine bring problems of its own, anyway? Then again, there's the way officers of all genders are addressed as "Sir" in the military and how Nanally calls Daffodil "Master" in the game... This stuff is just weird, sometimes. I can see why people try to use completely ungendered terms like "Chair", awkward though they sound.  I have seen "wait staff" used instead of waiter and waitress but that's clunky and awkward and anyway "staff" itself was superseded by "colleague" a good while back, at least where I work, although that never really stuck either. This is what you come here for, isn't it? This sort of acute social insight. Admit it!

Also

Sidebar: I really like these sidebars I've invented. I think there might be a lot more of them coming, at least until I get bored and lose interest.

Can we please get on with the post now?  

Ok, getting back to the point, yes, I rolled on Lacrimosa as soon as the opportunity arrived and yes, I won her with the handful of Solid Dice I had left. I was unfeasibly pleased with myself, too, considering I had no control over anything that happened. Still, they do say you make your own luck. Whoever "they" are.

Lacrimosa is the featured character in the new banner that came with the big update yesterday. It has a version number - 1.1 - but also a nice, catchy name: Dreamwalk Corridor. 

The full details are here but the highlights are a new playable character (Lacrimosa, of course.) plus associated glider skins and outfit ("Sold seperately", as it would say in tiny print at the end of the commercial if Lacrimosa was a Barbie, which, come on, let's face it, she is.) and a new chapter in the MSQ, which takes place in a new location, Sunward Island. And a ton of other stuff, which you can read for yourself at that link above.

The new storyline and location I'll get to in another post but I will say I just started it and it's very good so far. This post isn't about that, though. It's just me, gloating explaining how I came to add Lacrimosa to my team, what she brings to it and what the implications are.

First of all, the mechanics involved in rolling for a new character. I explained some of it last time but I'm learning as I go and they're peculiarly over-complicated compared to other gacha games I've played. What I've been used to until now is a fairly simple system, where you accumulate a specific currency then spend it on "pulls" that play a flashy animation and then reveal what you've won. You can suppress the animation when you're bored of seeing it and just spend the currency for an instant result if you prefer.

For some reason, Hotta decided to gamify that a little by replacing the animation with a full 3D representation of a board game and showing an actual six-sided die rolling for each pull. The currency itself is literally dice - Solid for the board where you win the good stuff in the Limited Banners (That's "Limited" as in "time-limited", meaning they come and go.) and Fabricated for the permanent banner, where the regular characters are. 

 When you roll a dice, your little figure moves along the board that number of spaces, exactly as if you were playing any traditional board game. Every space has something on it so you always get a reward. Most of them are just upgrade materials but there are some decent odds and ends there as well as the Big Ticket Prize you're after. There are no squares where anything bad happens so you can't actually lose. You just win a lot of things you probably don't really want. 

The huge difference between this system and all the ones I've seen in other gacha games is that you can see the S-Class character you're after, right there on the board. As far as I can tell, there's absolutely nothing you can do to influence the route you take towards them. There's no skill involved, purely the luck of the dice, but as in any board game, merely being able to see the layout adds a huge amount of interest to every roll, something that doesn't figure at all in the lucky dip pulls of other games.

The whole "it's a game" aspect is enhanced by things that happen on certain squares, like bridges that pop up and let you change direction or skip whole sections of the board. Again, there's no way you can control any of this. There's no tactic you can use to improve your chances, but neither is there in Snakes and Ladders and people still play it like there is. That's psychology for you.

Every roll costs, naturally. That's how Hotta makes its money. Well, one of the ways. But you can have a few rolls for nothing because it wouldn't be much of a Free To Play game if you couldn't.

You can get a small number of Solid Dice and large number of Fabricated Dice for free by playing the game. I noted in my post about winning Hotori that I had a dozen Solid Dice back then. It took me just five pulls to win her and I haven't used any since, so when I came to roll on Lacrimosa I had seven Solid Dice left. It took me around twenty pulls to win Lacrimosa and now I have one Solid Dice left.

Wait? What? That's not right! Does mathematics work differently in Hethereau or something? Nope. Let me explain because I had no idea about any of this until I did it, either. This is how it went:

I decided I'd roll five of my seven Solid Dice because five is my favorite number and I don't like to go down to zero. I threw my five dice with no luck so... no, wait, actually that's not entirely true. I got an S-Class... something. I took a screenshot:

That looks like I won a car, doesn't it? After everything else was over, I remembered I'd seen this come up so I searched my bags for whatever it was but I couldn't find anything. Vehicles are an actual token that sits in your inventory and there wasn't a new one. I went through every tab, item by item. Nothing. I have no clue what I'm supposed to have won, if anything. It also has nothing to do with the Porsche collab that's happening in the game right now as far as I can tell. If I hadn't taken the screenshot, I'd have assumed I imagined it.

That aside, I hadn't won anything and I had just two Solid Dice left. I was going to stop but then I noticed an option to buy ten rolls for just one Solid Dice and about 1400 of some other currency. Hmm. There are quite a few currencies in the game already (I'm sure there will be more soon, too. There always are.) and I haven't paid much attention to any of them. 

I didn't recognize this one but I had a look and I had about 10,000 of them. It's called "Analith", which Gemini tells me is "The game's free premium currency, which can be farmed through open-world gameplay, achievements, and City Tycoon modes, and can be converted into limited Solid Dice." I probably should have known that.

Ten rolls for not much more then 10% of my stash seemed like a good deal so I took it. I didn't win anything good. That left me with one Solid Die. Well, what can you do with just one? So I took another ten. The Analith charge went up a little but it left me with about 7k of the stuff so that seemed okay. 

And on the fourth or fifth roll I got her. Winning was unreasonably satisfying but the run-up to winning was even more unreasonably exciting. Thanks to the board game conceit, I could see my little character token getting closer and closer to the square where Lacrimosa was waiting. When I got within a single dice-roll of her it was exactly like rolling in an actual board game. You know how many you need and you're willing the dice to land right-side up. 

And it did. I forget what I needed to roll. I think it might have been four. Whatever it was, I got it and with it, Lacrimosa. I still had five or six rolls left from the ten I'd bought so I used them as well. I don't think there's a way to save them for later. 

How much it cost me to win Lacrimosa depends how you're counting. I had seven Solid Dice and I used all of them so she cost me seven Solid Dice. That's clear. She also cost me something like three thousand Analith on top of that. And it took about twenty rolls to land on her. I didn't keep an exact count. As for real money, it cost me none at all.

I also won another Adler, which is useful because duplicates let you do some upgrading of the original, and Edward, who I wanted. I like Edward as a character and he's a healer, which I didn't have on my team yet (And haven't figured out how to use, either.) 

All in all, a very successful Limited Banner for me. I'm now two-for-two. Can't beat that. And since there's always a few weeks between banners, I ought to have enough Solid Dice for a few more rolls next time. If I'm sensible, I'll save them all for when Akane arrives, which everyone assumes she will at some point. Everyone wants Akane. I don't think there's anyone I want more, now I have Hotori and Lacrimosa and I have the unopened box that would let me choose Sakiri.

All of which brings me to the issue of what to do with Lacrimosa now I have her. You can only have four characters in a team but you can set up multiple teams and swap between them out of combat whenever you like. I immediately made a team featuring my character, Flora The Appraiser, Lacrimosa, Edward and Aurelia, who I have but had never used.  Then I got into a fight with an anomaly my regular team could handle in their sleep and although we beat it we all ended up half health except for Aurelia, who was dead.

This is the problem. If you get new characters and want to use them, you have to level them up and Ascend them and get them the right weapons and all that nonsense. That's how you end up having no upgrade mats or money instead of having far more of both than you know what to do with. And then you might consider spending some real money to get out of that hole and once again, that's how they get you!

 

Except that in Neverness to Everness there are plenty of good reasons to have lots of characters even if they're all still Level 1. I might do a whole post about this because it certainly deserves one but the short version is that every character has at least one special ability that can be used out of combat. Hotori, as I mentioned in the previous post, can literally stop time. Nanally can run up walls. And Lacrimosa can fly.

Okay, she can't fly very well. She turns into a cute but rather pathetic bat and kind of bobbles about. It's not hugely practical. If she moves in bat form it uses stamina, too, so it's of limited value as a means of transport. If she doesn't move, though, she can hang in the air indefinitely, which is interesting and possibly useful. She can also shoot out the tires of vehicles with her other out-of-combat ability but I'll save any more details for that other post, if I ever get round to it. If anyone wants to get ahead on that, here's where I found out about it all..

After the disastrous fight, I took time out to get Lacrimosa up to the level of the rest of my regular team. I'm thinking about whether to level up Edward but until I know how to get his healing into play I'll hold back on that. As for Aurelia, I think she's going to stay on the bench, for now anyway.

Another question is whether I want to start schmoozing Lacrimosa so she can come live in my apartment. I haven't really done much with the Affection system yet but I'm mildly interested in it. There are some attractive perks to be had there. 

Before any of that, though, there's a mystery to investigate on Sunward Island. And let me just say right now, I did not trust that teddy bear from the moment I saw him. I literally said so, out loud. But all that's for another time and another post.

You have to pace yourself, don't you?