Dress Sense Or Dress Sensibly?

There's not much I don't like about gacha games. I like the way they look, the way they read, the way they sound and the way they play. I would never have expected it but it turns out the genre fits me to a T.

The monetization that gets some people mad doesn't bother me. In fact, since the Free To Play revolution, which suppose must be well over a decade in the past by now, which did, genuinely and literally, make most games completely free as far as I was concerned, about the only kind of monetization that gives me pause is the good old monthly subscription model. 

If EverQuest Legends had launched as Buy To Play, with no sub needed to go on playing after the first month, you'd most likely be reading a post like Tipa's about that game right now (I'd definitely be playing a Kerran.) instead of looking at some screenshots of Flora in her new 1970s-style trouser-suit. That isn't to say I won't buy EQL eventually but it is the reason I haven't bought it yet and it will almost certainly be the reason I don't play it for more than a month.

There is one thing I don't like about Gacha games, though. I've mentioned it before. It's the way my  characters tend to look the same all the time. It varies from gacha game to gacha game but it may not be a coincidence that the ones that put the least friction in the way of changing your apperarance are the ones that fold soonest.

Neverness To Everness is fairly standard in that you can roll for outfits on the gacha board, buy them for in-game currency and win them as rewards for in-game activities but none of those options is both easy and cheap. I've been playing for three months now and only yesterday did I finally get Flora a change of clothes. And even then it was only by way of the alternate NTE universe that is Warrens Continent.

The 999 Nights update that added an entire medieval fantasy ARPG to the magitech modern world was bizarre in all kinds of ways but not least in how it blew a giant, smoking hole in the gacha dress code. In Warrens Continent, characters have a traditional RPG paper doll with gear slots and whatever you put in most of those slots shows up on the character. Mobs drop wearable gear and there are plenty of different looks. 

You can take a pretty good shot at getting your character to look how you want them to... for a while. Then, of course, you have to start paying attention to stats and the whole thing falls apart, just like in a  traditional MMORPG, which is how things like transmog and appearance tabs end up being added to every MMO that lasts more than a few years.

Luckily, whoever designed the gear for Warrens Continent had an infinitely better fashion sense than the average MMO dev, so most of the pieces look pretty good together. And there are sets that have bonuses that make you want to wear all the pieces and naturally sets fit together quite nicely so it all works out.

I very much appreciated all of that, while I was playing Warrens Continent as if it was the main game. I was a bit miffed when I had to upgrade Flora's excellent starting look, probably the most demure and modest outfit in the entire game, to something that looked like it wouldn't be out of place in a Slayyyter video but stats are stats.

The best thing about that original outfit was that you can wear it in Hethereau. I was looking forward to doing just that for a while but then, almost inevitably, I stayed so long in Warrens Continent and changed my gear so many times I forgot all about it. It didn't help that the outfit, appropriately called "Unassuming Warrior", is only available through the "Button Shop" and I had no clue where that was.

I did look for it. My immediate thought was that it would be the Mysterious Fuzzy trader but that was a dead end. I looked at every trader I could find and pored over the map but I couldn't see any sign of a "Button Shop". And then I just sort of forgot about it. Don't ask me why I didn't google it but I didn't.

And then on Wednesday I mentioned the Button Shop in a post and Mailvaltar dropped into the comments to explain where to find it: in the F4 Event Menu.

It is. And I never noticed. I will say in my defense that a) I very rarely look at the Events Menu and b) the Button Shop Button isn't actually part of the menu itself. It's on its own at the bottom of the page. Even so, there's no excuse for missing it.

The upside of having waited so long is that when I finally found the shop I had plenty of Buttons to spend. Over ten thousand, in fact. More than enough to buy me both the outfit and the dyes to change the color. So I bought them all, which may have been a mistake.

Oh, not the outfit itself. The outfit is excellent. Flora's wearing it now and it makes a very nice change from running around in Lycra bicycle shorts under a netball skirt. It's the dyes I'm not so sure about.

They come in a pack of three - red, green and blue. At least I think those are the colors. It's hard to tell. They're very muted, particularly the green. Or maybe I mean unassuming. None of them is bad in any way, it's more that I'm not convinced any of them is an improvement over the basic silver and black look, which has a timeless kind of elegance about it.

Still, it's nice to have some wardrobe choices at last. If only the outfits weren't character-specific. Then all my characters could be unassuming, which would come as a huge shock to several of them, I'm sure. Not to mention they'd all be able to wear the Archmage outfit I won on the gacha board a couple of days back. That won't see use until and unless I win Iroi, too.

All the poses in the post, except the one below, were taken on the roof of Mint's building, which turned out to be the perfect place for a fashion shoot. I was there because visiting the Button Shop reminded me I hadn't finished everything I wanted to do in Warrens Continent yet. 

It's funny how a couple of weeks ago we (That's just me, Nimgimli and Mailvaltar really, I guess.) were complaining, or at least observing, that it looked as though we'd be doing nothing but the 999 Nights content for weeks and now here I am, having almost forgotten it was there, back running around Hethereau every day as if the update had never happened.

But it did and I'm back with it now. Not only do I want to finish the event itself but now I've seen inside the Button Shop there are a few more things I want to buy there. Not least the money.

Yes, you can buy money with buttons. Fons, specifically. If I can get enough buttons I might even be able to buy enough Fons to cover my losses at the Catzebo. They are substantial.

Also, I just realized this minute, as I typed the word "Catzebo" for the umpteenth time, that it has to be a pun on "Casino"; not, as I've been thinking until now, on "Gazebo". I really did think it was a joke about the cats all standing around in little, wooden huts...

And with that, I think I'd better make my exit. Fast.