What Are The Chances?

It's going to be slim pickings here for the next few days because we have a lot going on, one way or another, but I'll try and get something together. Don't be surprised if there are gaps, though.

One thing I was going to do was record another success in the lottery that is adding a new character to the roster in Neverness To Everness. I have had a modicum of luck with gacha draws in the past. In Genshin Impact, back when it started, when the fist banner arrived I got Diluc, a highly desirable five-star character (Although not, according to the search I've just done, an S-Class.) almost on my first roll, which certainly gave me the impression it was going to be easier than it was.

I didn't stick with Genshin long enough to see my luck change and in Noah's Heart, the gacha I played the longest, they gave so many free rolls all the time I still had hundreds left when the closure of the game was announced. I think I had pretty much everybody by then. And even if I didn't, I certainly had far more characters than I needed.

 I can't remember who I rolled on in Wuthering Waves. Whatever was going on there, I don't seem to have made a big deal of it. There are 43 posts labeled "Wuthering Waves" here and the only one that seems to be about a successful roll is the one where I say "I only had to spend a fraction of the tokens I already had to get a couple of new Resonators, one of whom, Encore, was my first five-star pull."

At that point I was clearly still figuring out how it all worked, which is odd considering it was the third gacha game I'd played. You'd have thought I'd have known by then. 

Part of the problem, if it can be called a problem, is that I don't much like swapping teams around for combat. And in the open world I almost always want to play the character I started with. That's "my" character. None of that fits very well with a game design that assumes you'll constantly flip between characters, always looking to play the best one at any given time. Although it is interesting that, in cut scenes and quest dialog, the game usually shows the player-character as the Appraiser, regardless of who was being played before.

 It's a little bit different in Neverness To Everness in that some of the characters seem to have more obvious roles than I noticed in previous games, both in and out of combat. I was keen to get Iroi, for example, because I thought she'd make a good team healer. I wanted Hotori because her time-stop outside combat looked like it would be fun. I wanted Lacrimosa because she's fricken' vampire. And Nanally can run up skyscrapers...

Hotori, and Lacrimosa, I got extremely cheaply. Nanally, I haven't yet rolled for. Iroi, I tried to get and failed.

Then there was Linko. I wanted Linko because... I have no idea why I wanted her. Because she has a backpack? Because I found her conversations with her devil-doll funny? You tell me. I don't even know what she does. 

But I wanted her anyway, so I skipped rolling on Zankou, the first character in the current update, who I had no interest in and waited for Linko.

 I did not get Linko. Not on my first roll. Or my tenth. Or my twentieth. 

I wasn't keeping a close count but it probably took about thirty goes before i got her. I went in with a tally of about forty unsuccessful rolls behind me, following my unsuccessful attempt to snag Iroi. I used ten Fabricated Dice out of the thirty-five I had, then I bought another twenty-five or so with various currencies I had saved up.

Before I'd used all of those, I hit the threshold at seventy failures, where the chance of winning increases substantially. I won Linko on my first roll after that. 

It was very exciting but once the thrill wore off I realised I have no idea what I'm supposed to do with her, now I've got her. For now, I'm just working on building a bond of affection between us so she can come and live in my apartment, along with Lacrimosa and Chiz. Mint is still living in my old apartment.

The more I think about this, the less sense it makes. But I'm doing it anyway. 

Next time a character turns up that I want to roll on, I won't have a feather-bed of forty failures to fall back on. But if I don't get that one, I will for the one after that. It looks like every other character is an odds-on win. 

Seems like decent odds to me. 

Clearing The Fog From The Fogden Game

 

Yesterday I mentioned I'd played through the latest story episode in Neverness To Everness but I didn't say much about it, other than that I enjoyed it. Let's fix that.

The episode goes by the name "Fogden Game" and when I saw that I did wonder for a moment whether it was going to be a second game-within-a-game, like 999 Nights. That was a worrying moment. I think they got away with it once but...

Luckily, it's nothing of the kind. The story carries on from exactly where it left off, at the end of Dreamwalk Corridor, almost three months ago. Only, as we learn, in the game not much more than a week has passed. Nanally is still very much not herself, as anyone wouldn't be, if they only had half their soul. It's past time for us to do something about that, instead of playing 3DD&D with Mint!

A note left by Hotori tells us she's going to be away for a while and we should all look after the store while she's gone. Obviously she's up to something and equally obviously she's going to need our help. Otherwise why would it be in the story? 

Do you have trouble keeping your metadata straight in these situations? I know I do. What do I know? What does my character know? What have I read outside the game? It's a narrative minefield.

Luckily, somehow - I forget exactly how - the Appraiser knows just where to find Hotori, who for some equally unknowable reason, Flora (And everyone else.) has suddenly decided to refer to as "The Shopkeeper". This brought me up short the first time it happened. I wondered if I'd missed something but no, apparently it's new to this chapter. 

 

Whether it'll stick remains to be seen. I quite like it. I also like the idea that everyone at Eibon gets a job title. There's the Appraiser, the Shopkeeper, the Butler (Adler), Eibon's Handyman (Taygedo), the Bodyguard (Daffodil) and the Ichi Daimi (Nanally, although that one's very much a self-appointed title rather than something that describes her role in the shop.) 

Edgar could be the Researcher, which just leaves Sakiri. I have no idea what her official title would be. She fights and she sets her pet anomaly, Kiroumaru, on people. Apparently she also posts lists of rules on the fridge. I guess we could call her the Enforcer. 

As it transpires, Hotori is about to go rescue Daffodil from the Scarlet Letter along with a team from BAC, specifically from ETD6. This plays into the part of the game I find the most fascinating - the enmeshed, interlinked networks of professional and personal relationships that suffuse the world with both nuance and confusion. I purely love it when I don't know what's going on but I know it's something.

Hotori has some kind of history with the Director of BAC, Alphard. That's how come the Appraiser, the player character, ends up at Eibon in the first place. Alphard has a very heavy professional rep while Hotori is barely ever sober, so they seem like a total mismatch but they're both exceptionally heavy hitters when it comes to a fight and they go back a long way. Theirs is a history about which we know next to nothing. Catnip laced with cocaine to me.

 

The ETD6 team is Chaos, another character I find increasingly enigmatic and intriguing, Nitsa, who I can't remember much about except she's quite sweet and Linko, who we haven't met before. Linko is a pathfinder of some kind. She has a huge backpack and she gets hunches that the game signals by having a lock of hair on the top of her head wiggle about. She's cartoonish and cute and - surprise, surprise - she's one of the two banner characters in this episode, the other being Zankou, one of the villains.

I'm going to jump out of chronology here to question that last part. We can roll for Zankou right now and if we win her, we can add her to our team. How, exactly, is that supposed to work? I already have enough issues with the way the team-building mechanic allows characters who aren't present and have nothing to do with whatever it is you're doing to magically appear and fight with you, wherever you happen to be, but at least so far they've all been friends or colleagues.

Zankou is an enemy. Granted, she's conflicted in her loyalties but she's very much not any kind of friend or ally. But putting even that aside, at the debriefing at the end, Alphard tells the Appraiser Zankou's crimes are so heinous there's no deal to be cut and she's going away for a long, long time. 

If she's in prison, how does she get to pop up whenever she's called to fight alongside the player? Does she get day release? It's a step too far for any kind of hand-waving lore explanation to wish away. It's just Game Logic and we have to accept it and ignore the implications, the way you can swim in plate armor in every MMORPG ever made, I guess.

Getting back to the plot, the Appraiser invites herself along and because she's universally considered both a wild card no-one knows anything much about and a Good Egg, of course that's fine. I mean, who knows what she mightn't be able to do? Everyone goes into a disused industrial facility out in the woods somewhere and a lengthy puzzle sequence follows. 

I like the puzzles in NTE, for the most part. They're easy enough to understand, not too fiddly to execute and don't outstay their welcome. This one involves a lot of running along derelict corridors and up stairwells, looking for messages and being taunted by Inanna, the really nasty boss of the Scarlet Letter, who appears in television screens all over the place.

This was one of my favorite parts. I could write a whole post about the way every game goes straight to old, boxy cathode-ray television sets whenever they want some way to present a sinister, remote presence. Flat-screen TVs might as well never have existed. 

They all do it but NTE is the first I've ever seen dig into that trope and open it up. There's a whole conversation about how Inanna had to scour second-hand electronics stores all across Hethereau to source enough old but still-working TVs for her dramatics. I think she says she could only find a dozen in the entire city. (Six, in fact...) That's the kind of commitment to the bit that really sells it for me. 

Eventually, we find our way to the top of the building, deactivate the final, taunting TV, get in the elevator and go all the way back down to the lobby and go through the door in the tree. (Didn't I mention there was a tree with a locked door in it? Well, there was and now the door is open.). And on the other side of the door is the Fogden. Where the game happens.

So, what is the Fogden Game? Ah, that's the question. Here's how I remember it without looking it up. It might not be accurate but it'll be an accurate impression of what I got from it. Very much not the same thing. The more important thing.

The Fogden Game is a game that takes place in the Fogden, an anomalous realm under the control of a Rules Anomaly called the Fog Coffin. A Rules Anomaly is an entity that both sets and enforces rules within its sphere of control and is one of the most terrifying concepts I've happened on in the whole of my gaming career. Seriously, these things would give Harlan Ellison nightmares.

Every so often the game starts up. I don't know the cadence  but it's apparently been happening for at least two hundred years. This is telling. It's easy to think of anomalies as only having been in the world for a few decades but the Fifth High-Level Anomaly Outbreak that occurred forty years before the time the game is set was only the trigger for anomalies becoming widely known to the general public. Prior to that they were a government secret, controlled by the agencies. Inanni tells us she has a couple of hundred years history with the Fog Coffin so she's clearly an insider. 

The game itself involves a whole load of people entering the realm and hunting each other until only one is left alive. Whoever wins gets to ask the Fog Coffin for any one thing that's in the Fogden. It can be material or immaterial.  

 

As we learn later, Inanni has set the whole thing up to get Hotori into the game so she can win and ask the Fog Coffin to give her Hotori's esper ability to manipulate time. Inanni believes this will make her truly immortal instead of whatever bargain basement version of living forever she has now. I mean, she's the one who tells us the Fogden Game was happening two hundred years ago, which she knows because she was there, so her current immortality mod can't be that shoddy but arch-villains never will settle.

That's the plot in a nutshell. Obviously, we have to make sure it doesn't happen, especially because only one person can leave the Fogden alive once the game starts and even though we didn't sign up, we're in it now. 

We get introduced, visually at least, to the other competitors, a motley crew ranging from small children to an old guy in a wheelchair. In theory, we're going to have to kill all of them but of course that's never going to happen. They can sure kill each other, though, and they do, although mostly off-camera. 

Or maybe they don't. It gets very confusing from here on in. Up to the point where the actual game begins, I'd been able to stay on top of the plot quite comfortably but once it all starts, it's everyone for themselves and it's hard to know just where you are. 

Or who, because Fogden Game is one of those episodes where you spend a lot of time not playing your own character. I used to dread those in MMORPGs but they make a lot more sense in gacha games, where you play a gestalt a lot of the time anyway. And I'd have to say that, in the gacha games I've played, which is, like, three, so I'm no expert, the whole body-swap deal is much better-handled than in any MMORPG I ever played. 

 

In this episode you get to play as the Appraiser, as Daffodil and as Linko. I think that was all. There's not a huge amount of fighting although there are several boss and sub-boss fights. Mostly it's talking, running, collecting and puzzles.

Anyone can do all of those. Doesn't matter if you never saw the character before. You can run, talk, pick stuff up and figure out puzzles just as well as if you were on your main. Usually the problem with having to play unfamiliar characters is having no chance to figure out what their abilities are, something that matters a lot in most MMORPGs. In gacha games, though, there's a good chance you'll have the character on your team already so you'll know what they do and even if you don't, button mashing is going to get you through. At least, it will in NTE.

It got me through just fine, anyway. Daffodil felt overpowered and Linko and Nitsa did more running away than they did fighting. In their big, set-piece fight with a giant, flying, skeletal snake, I barely ever managed to target the damn thing, let alone hit it and we still won. 

In fact, I never died once in the whole thing. Didn't even come close. Some of the fights looked hard going in but turned out not to be. I don't think they're actually scripted so you can't lose but there seems to be a big margin for error and a lot of "sit back and watch and let the characters show you what they can do" moments. I found it all very well-paced. 

 

Daffodil's segment mostly involves her travelling through a seemingly endless series of bleak, wet caverns, taking Lumen Circles from the petrified corpses of failed competitors from previous games. I never did figure out what the Lumen Circles were or why Daffodil wanted them, except that they somehow figured in getting her to where she needed to be, namely facing down Inanni.

Along the way, Daffodil fights a pair of siblings or lovers or friends or business partners (Missed the relationship but they're a couple.) and the guy in the wheelchair. The couple are bittersweet. The old guy is obnoxious. Both were memorable. She also spends some time talking to a girl who, I think, is a contestant in the game who's given up to protect her injured sister. Then Daffodil meets her own "sister", Zankou.

Daffodil's history with the Scarlet Letter is fascinating. I don't believe she and her sisters are blood-related. Ananni adopted them, presumably without benefit of paperwork, and brought them up to be assassins, murderers and all-round villains. Daffodil escaped. Zankou and Poinsette stayed. 

Zankou is not happy about Daffodil's defection. Poinsette is conflicted. I found both their stories quite affecting. I was pulling hard for Poinsette to switch sides and eventually she kind of does. It was very satisfying.

While all that's going on, Chaos, his team and the Appraiser and Hotori are heading through a different part of the Fogden. Chaos, the Appraiser, Hotori and Thyme, the enemy-turned ally from the Dreamwalk Corridor episode, who's also turned up somewhere along the line, all get separated from Linko and Nitsa, who spend most of their time trying not to be squashed by falling boulders and edging along narrow ledges with their backs to the cliffs as the entire part of the Fogden they're in tries to kill them. It's intense!

Eventually, after a great deal of exploring, emoting and fighting, everyone ends up in the same place for the final battle. But I think that's enough for one post. 

Let's make it a two-parter.

Sometimes You Have To Make Your Own Luck

I'd love this to be a post about how I got another S-Class Banner Character on my first try and for almost no effort but sadly my luck didn't run to a third straight win. I thought briefly that it had because on my fifth roll this morning, a big S popped and up came the image above. 

Yes, it's Iroi and yes, for a second there, I thought I'd won her, but I realized almost immediately something else must have happened. When you win any character of whatever class you get a bespoke mini-movie, complete with posing and dialog. This was just a couple of static images.

I was confused enough to stop and fiddle around in the settings and options to see if I could work out what I'd won. It might surprise - or more likely shock - some players, to find out just how little I know about this game, even though I've been playing almost every day for weeks now. 

It surprises me a little, too, although not all that much. I somehow seem to be able to combine a keen sense of curiosity for what lies over the next hill with a bland indifference to how to get there. I'm like a sheep crossed with a cat. 

This is the way it generally goes: I start a new game, run through the opening tutorial then, if I like it, I carry on playing without thinking too much more about it. 

Usually what comes next is a hyper-extended quasi-tutorial that feels like the game's started but which is actually still supposed to be teaching you how to play. The problem with this approach, which I always used to recommend as probably the best way to introduce the various complexities of any game, is that I let it all wash over me and very little sticks. 

I'm sure, at some point, some tool tip or voice-over must have explained what the various buttons do on pretty much every screen but all I've done is click through them as fast as possible because I was already paying and I wanted to get on with the good bits.

It's not until I run into some problem that I stop and try to figure out for myself what all the buttons do or how the systems work. And to be fair to myself, it's not like I needed to know before, is it? Games are very easy and straightforward at the level I'm operating. It makes sense to leave it until I have a reason before digging into the details.

Absent a tutorial or a toll-tip, trial and error usually works. I tried all the buttons and one of them turned out to be a tally of every dice roll I'd made since the game began. It actually keeps the records for a rolling six months but until we get there it's everything. Looking at that, I could see I'd won an outfit.

My first! I was excited.

I needn't have been. Yes, I'd won an outfit. It was a low chance and once again I'd been very lucky to get it. Unfortunately it's an outfit for the character I was trying to win and I didn't win her. So now I have an outfit no-one can wear.

I did check. I wondered if maybe it would work for the whole team but no such luck. It's Iroi or nothing.

I carried on for a while, hoping I'd get lucky twice. I'd pre-set the number of rolls I was willing to use and I had about twenty rolls left before I hit my limit. No dice, so to speak, so I stopped. I'll almost certainly have another go before the Banner changes but for now I was done.

I was still in the mood for some gambling, though, so I thought I'd see what was on the other board, the one that uses the cheap, blue dice. I had loads of those. Last time I looked it was all characters I already had, although you always need multiples to Ascend. This time there seemed to be a couple I didn't remember getting so I thought I'd try a few rolls.

In the end I think I rolled about 25 times. There was the usual sale on where you get eight rolls for the price of ten so I did that a couple of times and then banged out a few singles on top. And I did pretty well. I got the usual couple of dupes but I also got an S-Class I didn't already have - Fadia.

I don't particularly want Fadia. If I'm honest I'm not entirely sure I can remember who she is but every character you acquire opens up some related content like Bonds and background stories so it's always good to get anyone new. 

And maybe I'll need her. After I finished rolling dice I blew a million Fons on scratch cards (I said I was in a gambling mood...) and that made me wonder where I was with my Tycoon levels. Not very far was the answer. I was on Level 19 but all the conditions had been met so I just had to press the button.

For Level 20, though, I was stuck on Exploration again. I had most of the boxes ticked but I still needed five Rabbit Holes (I'd only done one.), three characters at Level 40 (Again I only had one.) and an Anomaly Commission (I  was at 8/9 there). Rabbit Holes were easy. Or they were once I noticed you could adjust the difficulty level. Things didn't go so well before that.

Getting the character levels just meant spending some resources and I had plenty. I can't remember exactly what happened with the Anomaly Commission. I know picked a bad one. I had a look at the options available and I thought I'd try the boxing gloves. I remembered that being easy first time around.

Yes. Well. Maybe it was. The upgraded version, however, is a DPS test and I could not pass it. The gloves take a defensive stance and you have to defeat them in sixty seconds. I couldn't get them under 80%. 

At some point I fought the dog again and got the Arc but how that fits into the picture I can't quite figure out now. Maybe I needed two after all? 

I also did Dragon Gate Substitute, for which, confusingly, you fight some fish, not a dragon at all. They were easy enough, although I made it harder by falling off the roof of the building and having to start over.

The final box I needed to tick after all that was something called  Headless Rider, which is gated by an Anomaly Commission by the name of Ride Assault. I had no clue how or where to find it and it wasn't on the map so I looked it up.

Ride Assault has a complicated trigger sequence, where you have to be driving a car (A bike won't do.) down Foxwindow Avenue sometime between eight in the evening and dawn just to get it to pop. In the highly unlikely event you just happen to meet the conditions, a headless biker appears and if you chase him, he leads you into a tunnel, whereupon he summons a portal to take you to his Anomaly Realm. Then he tries to kill you.

That's not the fight you need for the Tycoon level. It's the fight you need to get that fight. But you have to start somewhere. Having read a couple of guides and fiddled with the clock to get the time of day right, I crashed about on Foxwindow until the biker appeared. I chased him, entered his realm, jumped out of my car to fight him and got slaughtered. It wasn't even remotely close.

I am now going to have to go away, read up on the strats, apply some upgrades and pick a team that has the right elemental qualities to exploit his weaknesses before I take another run at him. This means more research and finding out something about how a few systems work because I barely have a clue on most of them.

Of course, if I had any gaming skills I could probably just brute force it but I don't so it'll require some cheesing finesse. As it stand, not only can I not even begin to read any of the tells that let you know when you need to Counter or Parry. I wouldn't even know what to press if I did. I have never knowingly Countered or Parried anything since I started - nor ever felt like I needed to, either.

And it may be that I still don't. It might be that once I pick the right team and upgrade everyone, button-mashing will be good enough again. I hope so, anyway. I'm certainly not playing this game to git gud, or even for the fights, for that matter. But sometimes you have to make at least a token effort. Either that or give up, an option I always find rather attractive.

That's where I am with Neverness To Everness right now. Slowly learning how the game works so I can avoid playing as much of it as possible. 

Don't anyone try to tell me how to have fun!

Lacrimosa Moves In - Peace And Quiet Move Out

If there's one thing that might finally force me to keep a post short (Speaking of posts, if you want to skip right to the actual content, please click  ^[1] . Otherwise, please carry on!) it's having to type it on my laptop. No laptop keyboard is ever going to feel as natural and comfortable as my mechanical. 

Today, though, it's 35c out, which "feels like " 38 according to the ever-reliable Weather Underground. And it certainly feels all of that, at least upstairs where the heat rises, at the front of the house where the sun hits, which is where my study, if that's what we're calling it, is.

So here I am, downstairs at the back of the house, in the room we'll call the lounge for the sake of having something to call it, which is the coolest room in the house and likely to remain so until the sun comes round to shine directly through the windows around six in the evening. Typing on my lap may not be comfortable but at least I can see the keyboard without sweat dripping into my eyes. 

And because I'm down here, Beryl is too, which is good for her. You can tell it's hot. She stayed down here for a couple of hours on her own earlier on today, which is something she never likes to do. One more day of this, with tomorrow possibly being a degree or so hotter and then a gradual slip back to more normal summer temperatures over the weekend, at which point I will be at work anyway, where we have do have some sort of (Not very efficient.) air conditioning.

I like hot weather generally. I don't even mind it as hot and humid as this, these days. Humidity used to make my brain stop working but age seems to have tempered that. It's not good for Beryl, though, so I'll be glad when it drops a few degrees. I just hope we don't get any more thunderstorms in the transition. 

On Monday we had the biggest storm we've seen in thirty years, living here. It was like those news clips you see of tropical rainstorms or the tail-end of a hurricane. The drain at the back of the house was completely overwhelmed and we had three inches of water in the so-called conservatory, which is the first time that's ever happened. The conservatory roof leaked, too, although that's nothing new.

I had to stand ankle-deep in water, soaked to the skin from the torrential rain, constantly pulling the debris that was sweeping in out of the drain-grill to keep it clear for about fifteen minutes and then we spent an hour going through all the stuff that had gotten soaked to see what could be salvaged, which was most of it although some of that is never going to be the same again. 

 

Fortunately, water would need to rise more like six inches to get in the house itself. We got off lightly. Down the hill from us there was some more serious flash flooding with some damage to the streets that caused them to be closed to traffic next day. Never live at the bottom of a hill is my advice.

As well as the influx at the back, the storm brought down our giant rosebush at the front, blocking the path, so after I was done bailing out, I was out there, cutting it up and tying it back, still in the rain. And just to put the cap on the day, before any of that happened, while it was still hot and sunny and we had no idea what was coming (Absolutely no thunderstorms were forecast - they were supposed to miss us by twenty miles...), I managed to break the fridge, trying to force-defrost it. 

Never do that. It's the second time I've broken a fridge by removing ice build up too vigorously.

So that was Monday. But by Tuesday afternoon we had a new, improved fridge (This is why people still use Amazon despite complaining about them all the time.) and the conservatory was clean, dry and in better order than before. And of course, with it being so hot, everything that was wet is now dry and you might never know it happened. Although I bloody know, I can tell you!

Hmm. That's one long-ass intro to what I said was going to be a short post. I do like talking about weather. We just don't often get any weather worth talking about here, which I'm now seeing is a bit of a blessing. I suspect we might get more anecdote-worthy weather as climate change tightens its apocalyptic grip. Something to look forward to...

What I thought I was going to talk about was Neverness To Everness. I might have to go back to the top and put in a warning so people who might be interested in that sort of thing don't tab out before they even get there. Like this...

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[1] Readers with no interest in my home life but who would still like to read about the home life of my imaginary friends, please carry on from here! Everyone else who just clicked out of curiosity to see what would happen  ^ back to top

Last time I posted about NTE I was saying how Flora wanted to get a bigger apartment and maybe ask Lacrimosa to move in with her. Both of those things happened. Flora's delighted with her new flat. Her new flatmate, though...

I love Lacrimosa. She's sweet and funny and charming and honestly you couldn't ask for a more co-operative housemate. If you remember, though, two of the reasons Flora was finding life with Mint a little trying were all the little sighs and strange noises she makes and how she keeps sleeping in Flora's bed. Or, rather, on it.

Sometimes you just don't know when you're well-off, do you? Lacrimosa makes a lot of strange noises, too, and she also talks in her sleep, which means she's making some kind of noise pretty much 24/7. And even though Flora's new apartment at Skyview Halls is enormous, somehow you can hear Lacrimosa all-too-easily, no matter where she is. 

Guess where she mostly is, though? Yep. In Flora's bed. Lacrimosa's favorite thing in the world to do is sleep so she's there a lot. Talking to herself. OK, fair enough, it's a big bed. There's plenty of room for both of them. But it's a big apartment! There's plenty of space for them to have a room each. Plus, I thought she slept in a coffin. Maybe she forgot to bring it with her in the rush...

So, having Lacrimosa move in was a bit of a mixed bag. Also, have I now effectively sublet my old apartment to Mint? She's still living there as far as  know, even though I'm not. Should she be paying rent? 

The really weird part was the way inviting Lacrimosa exactly coincided with a bond quest Flora got at the same time. You need Bond Level 4 to invite someone to live with you, which is also when you get a little bonding quest so you can get to know each other better.

Lacrimosa's quest involves helping her choose a suitable gift for her "Grandpa", who's had to go into hospital. I could write a dissertation on the subtext of this short quest but I'm going to restrict myself to a third of a blog post because it's important to retain a sense of proportion. 

Lacrimosa's "Grandpa" is no blood relation although he is a kind of tomato relative, since he lets Lacrimosa grow the plants in his garden, which is probably the same thing as far as Lacrimosa's concerned. Skia arranged for Lacrimosa to move out of dorm accommodation at BAC and into an apartment he found for her, in a block managed by an elderly couple, who he also asked to keep an eye on her. 

Lacrimosa calls the couple Grandma and Grandpa but as it transpires from conversations with her, she doesn't know them well. Grandpa has gotten ill suddenly with some unspecified ailment and Grandma is mostly absent, visiting him in hospital. Lacrimosa wants to visit too and she knows it's expected that a visitor brings fruit to a patient's bedside but the only fruit she knows anything about is the tomato.

Which is where you, the Appraiser, come in. Lacrimosa, like everyone you meet, seems to value your advice so she asks you to come help her choose a fruit for grandpa. And yes, there is discussion of whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. Whichever it is, it's deemed inappropriate for the purpose.  

 

Flora ended up having to choose between I think it was apples, oranges and strawberries. She went for strawberries and Lacrimosa was happy with that although I got the impression she'd have been happy with a house-brick if that's what flora has suggested. Lacrimosa toddled off to catch Grandpa before visiting hours ended and that was the end of it.

Except, since I'd just asked Lacrimosa if she'd like to move into my new apartment, the timing seemed very much to suggest she was moving in with me because her current carers weren't able to give her the attention she needed and I was stepping in to help. That's absolutely how it went in my head canon but I can't help wondering if it isn't there in the writing as well.

It's quite firmly established that Lacrimosa isn't entirely capable of looking after herself and probably shouldn't be left on her own for too long. She's unworldly, to say the least. She knows very little about life outside the strict confines of her job and her extremely limited interests. 

She also talks about herself in the third person, always a sign of concern. And I just noticed that the Appraiser follows suit, always saying "Lacrimosa" where it would be more natural to say "you". I'm reading that as empathy or at least compassion on Floras' part. 

The Appraiser is of exemplary character, highly emotionally literate, or she is if you choose those responses. You could, if you were one yourself, play her as an insensitive jerk, but who'd do that? Not me. I'm pretty sure she has Lacrimosa living with her because that's what Lacrimosa needs right now.  

 

Whether there'll ever be a good moment for her to move back into her own place depends, I guess, on how Grandpa does. I suspect he might be in the hospital for a while. I imagine Flora's going to have to buy yet another bed.

And that, I think, is where I'm going to leave it for now. I've had about enough of typing on this laptop. I was going to do a whole thing about the Ghost Train Ticket quest but that's just going to have to wait. Good quest, though...

 

Notes about AI used in this post

I asked Gemini to do me some html code for the footnote. I've done footnotes before. I could have looked it up old school but why bother? Gemini did the basics, I did the rest. I'd have had to. If Gemini ever had a sense of humor, it seems to have lost it. I remember being mildly irritated by how chatty the AIs used to be. I kinda miss it now.

Idle Thoughts And Meaningless Musings : Neverness To Everness Edition

I spent most of the morning writing a lengthy post about AI and then I read it back and decided it was full of things I'd already said. More than once. There were a few ideas that hadn't been done to death mixed in, here and there, but those probably need a proper post of their own, a post I don't want to write just now, so the whole thing will have to stay in the draft folder for the time being.

I'm technically on holiday anyway (Although when you only work two days a week and you haven't gone anywhere, the expression doesn't really carry the weight.) so there wouldn't normally be a post here today, anyway. Also, it's a Saturday. No-one reads blogs on a Saturday. That's a proven fact. 

Of course, they do read posts that were posted on a Saturday later the following week, when they're at work and bored and the boss is out of the office, so it's not like you can put stuff up on the internet at the weekend and expect no-one's going to see it. More's the pity.

Given all of that, I think I'll just indulge myself with a hotch-potch of screenshots and observations about Neverness To Everness. No theme, no purpose. Take it as it comes.

I just really like those shots of Lacrimosa. She's very photogenic. I ought to remember to get her out when I take screenshots instead of always showing The Appraiser. It's very clear, looking at Lacrimosa, how much more effort went into what she's wearing than the utilitarian outfit Flora's stuck with, at least until she can build a strong enough bond with someone else to steal their look.

Speaking of bonding, Flora still has a house guest. She came home one day to this, which was when it occurred to me there was only one bed.  

I mean, there is a sofa...  I thought Mint must be sleeping on it but apparently not. So I bought another bed. 

Sidebar. Are there any games where characters actually sleep in a bed? As in under the covers? I can't think of any. Everyone always lies on top. At least in NTE they do wear nightclothes to sleep although only by the expedient of walking around the flat like that all the time. Still, better than going to sleep in your clothes. Which, come to think of it, is what Flora does...

There's hardly room on the mezzanine for two beds, though. I could do with moving to a bigger apartment but Flora doesn't seem to have made much progress in that direction. I probably need to look up how it works.

And anyway, now I come to think of it, Lacrimosa might make a better flatmate. At least she'd sleep in her own coffin. 

Flora went to the drive-in with Nanally the other night. We saw Sin City Chronicles because of course we did. I'm not sure Nanally knows there are any other movies. We also didn't take a car, even though Flora has one. For some reason we sat on top of someone else's car and it wasn't even anyone we knew.

There were fireworks at the end and a strange bit of dialog where it was made clear that didn't usually happen but not why it was. I'm not sure if it meant anything. 

I was a bit disappointed the cut scenes don't show any of the actual movie. I could hear some of the soundtrack in the background but that was all. When Flora went to the movies with Mint we got to see a few scenes although it turned out to be the same movie that's the only one that ever shows up on Flora's home wall-screen.  

Kuro's missing a trick here, I think. I bet they could quite easily arrange it so you could stream from your PC onto the screens in the game. I would happily sit in my chair at home, watching Flora and Mint watching actual TV shows or movies in their apartment, instead of watching those same shows on my laptop. I bet a lot of people would.

If you think that's weird, following our successful manga-reading party, Lacrimosa is planning an anime marathon. She wants to hold it at Eidon because she doesn't have a TV and she thinks it would be a great idea to watch anime on Taygedo's head. I don't know if this is a thing that's actually going to happen in the game but I'm praying it is!

It's perfectly feasible, too. It's already well-established that Taygedo can show broadcast images on the TV screen he usually uses for his face. The only problem seems to be whether he'd be willing to sit still for long enough, which knowing him seems unlikely. Then again, he's easy to intimidate. Or trick.

Harping on the theme of who are they writing this stuff for, I did another very good, long quest the other day that revolved entirely around helping an architect to come to terms with repressed feelings of grief, loss and guilt over her mother's death, when she was a child. There was some fighting near the end but it was pretty much a short, stand-alone point-and-click adventure. It would fit right in on Itch.io. 

That's a screenshot from the quest, above. It's from the part where Flora had to go into a florists and pick out a suitable flower for the architect to plant in the garden of the house she was having built for herself. Just the kind of thing every adolescent male dreams of doing in a video game, right? I mean, that's why Call of Duty's so successful - all the flower arranging.

Or maybe you'd rather spend an hour running messages between three talking dogs that aren't on speaking terms any more because they're all behaving like seven year-old girls who'have had a falling out over who's best friends with who? I did that one last week. Again, a theme guaranteed to grab the attention of any red-blooded, twenty-something male, I'd say.

It sounds like I'm cherry-picking but the whole game is like this.

Getting back to Lacrimosa for a moment, she's really pathetic. As in she oozes pathos. She's a Sad Goth Girl, which weirdly doesn't seem to be a TV Trope. It should be. 

The scene where you visit her home is quite disturbing. She has hardly anything in there, just some small pieces of furniture and a lot of tomatoes. She rents the place from an old couple, who we don't get to meet, but they seem to be as much her guardians as her landlords.

She didn't find the place herself. Skia, who Lacrimosa refers to as "Doggo" (She gives everyone nicknames, possibly because she can't actually remember their real ones.) found it for her. She certainly would never have managed it on her own. She barely seems capable of looking after herself. 

Lacrimosa may have some mental health issues but exactly what they could be is, as always, unclear. The sheer amount of subtext packed into this vignette is astonishing but I'm finding Neverness To Everness to be all about the subtext. What's often missing is any actual text. 

It's not just written subtext, either. Compare Lacrimosa's barely lived-in room with Nanally's. The effort that's gone into the detail in both. It tells you so much. Nanally evidently has a full and almost certainly happy home-life. The stuffed toys, the Anomaly Guide, the drawing materials, the family pictures on the wall. 

There's a basketball, a soccer ball, the bass guitar Nanally plays now she's in The Whoots!!!! There's the beanbag chair and the potted plant and the bookcase with all the knick-knacks cluttering up the shelves. And look how untidy it all is, while still looking clean and cared-for. That fedora on the rug is a masterful touch.

This is the room of a girl in her early-mid teens, for sure, although to return again to the vexed question of just how old these people are supposed to be, I can't forget something Nanally says in Dreamwalk Corridor, the quest where we learn what little we know about her and where she loses half her mind and half her soul.

She asks the Appraiser "Can I still be the boss of the family if I'm this weird kid, like for ever and ever and ever?" We know Espers frequently experience changes when they come into their powers - physical changes like horns and tails but also temporal ones, like shortened or extended lifespans. I'm wondering just how long Nanally might have been a teenager. The Anomalies began forty years ago. She could be in her fifties but like Peter Pan, she just never grew up.

As for Sakiri, abut whom I know nothing, not having done any character quests with her yet, she looks half Nanally's age but she talks like someone at least in their thirties. In a way it doesn't much matter but in another it's crucial information. It's odd enough sharing an apartment with Mint. I don't want to think about sharing one with Sakiri...

Let's All Go Get Ice Cream! Every Day A New Adventure In Neverness To Everness

Here's the question that keeps coming back to me over and over while I'm playing Neverness To Everness: who is this game for? It's a question I often find myself asking, when I read about new games in development or try them out in testing, but for most games, what I'm really thinking is "I can't imagine enough people wanting to play this to make it worth the time and money it took to build it". For NTE I'm thinking something very different.

Neverness To Everness hasn't had any difficulty finding an audience or making money. A staggering 30 million people pre-registered and at launch the Free To Play title generated $14m in revenue on its first day. By any measure, it's a hit.

But who are all those people? Why are they playing? As Toyah would say, it's a mystery.

Well, it's a mystery to me, anyway. The more I play, the more I can't help notice the disparities between what I thought the game was going to be and what it is.

Based on the vibrant, exciting promotional videos and the intriguing lore on the website, I imagined a fast-paced, action-packed cyberpunk experience, where I'd be part of a cool, confident, highly-skilled team of agents, employed by a quasi-governmental organization and tasked with keeping the world safe from bizarre incursions from another reality. I expected a lot of fighting, some car chases and a tense, complex plot.

What I got was an open-ended offer from a woman in an office to settle down in a new city, find a job, make some friends and spend most of my time hanging out with them. Maybe she'd call me if she needed me. Maybe not.

The big crisis I thought I'd be dealing with actually happened forty years ago and it turned out to be not that much of a problem anyway. Anyone under thirty almost certainly likes things better the way they are. No-one's talking about fixing any of it or pushing the incursion back. It's all about managing it safely and integrating the incoming oddities and anomalies into society. If I do get ever to work for these people, I'll basically be some kind of bureaucrat, making sure everyone follows the regulations to the letter and being sure to follow them myself.

Everything about the set up is a little bit vague and hand-wavy anyway, entirely intentionally as far as I can tell. There are government agencies like BAC handling the ongoing situation but there are also private organizations, contractors, corporations and individuals, all working together as part of something called The Circle. 

Where the player character fits into all of this is surprisingly difficult to determine and even harder to rationalize in context of the aforementioned pre-publicity even if, at the start of the game, it all feels like it's going to plan. The game begins with my character, Flora, escaping from some facility or other in a flurry of explosive action. In a rush of set piece fights and dramatic cut scenes she somehow finds herself inducted into one of those cryptic quasi-governmental departments just like I imagined and then...

...next thing I know, she's working in an antique shop owned by a drunk and run by children. How did that happen?

It's an antique shop that somehow also operates as an independent contractor in the handling of "Anomalies" so adventure seems like it could still happen but it's very low-level work for the most part. Instead of being sent to handle major incidents, we wait for clients to turn up and ask for help in sorting out their little problems. Things like a missing child or something stealing from the bins outside a shop. 

It's probably just as well it's nothing big. Most of our operatives are still too young to drive. When Flora goes on a commission it's usually with the instruction to keep an eye on them and make sure they don't get into trouble. The boss can't do it herself; she's too busy drinking.

Flora's official role isn't "babysitter". It's Appraiser, which means she can judge whether anomalies are present, "Anomalies" being the catch-all for extra-dimensional entities. It's not exactly the kind of front-line, car-chasing, gun-slinging, bounty-hunting career I was expecting. More of a support role. It's one step away from administration, let's be honest.

Flora does have a contact in the aforementioned government agency, where there are supposedly some plans to use her talents for something bigger, when she's had a chance to acclimate to her new situation but Mint, who I guess is Flora's handler, is hardly the sophisticated spy you might expect. She's an office worker who keeps fluffing her promotion opportunities because she gets flustered at the very thought of taking an exam.

So far, so peculiar. But it's just the backgrounding being laid down, surely? A solid base for the wild adventure to come. Hmm. I suppose it might be but if so that wild adventure is taking a long time coming. 

Which isn't to say there's nothing happening. That's the really strange part. There's so much happening I can't keep up with it all! It's just that very little of it is what you'd call "adventure". And there's hardly any fighting.

Almost every storyline I've been involved with so far, big or small, has focused heavily on either the social or the commercial. Taygedo and his date. The camera shop losing business. Professional rivalry between Eidon and Sterry. Finding a lost dog. Petty vandalism. Even when we finally get to hear about Daffodil's mysterious upbringing with the ominous "Mother" and her sinister "family", something that looks tlike it might be the actual main story thread, it's far more like a warped family saga than any kind of epic adventure.

Yesterday afternoon, I finished what did feel a lot like like an epic story arc, only it was all about starting a band, learning to play and performing in front of a big crowd for the fist time. Flora, Nanally, Haniel and Akane played Night of Moondog as The Whoots!!!! (Four exclamation marks mandatory.) 

This, for anyone who doesn't know, is the culmination of a long "Spinoff" quest-line, which starts when Haniel invites the Appraiser to go see a band at a cellar club. It's a fine example of the disconnect I was talking about at the start of the post. If this really is some kind of fantasy-adventure game, designed around fighting monsters and saving the world, how come I'm playing the drums in a band started by a couple of teenage girls and we're all acting like coming top in a battle of the bands is the most important thing in the world? And it's the most exciting thing that's happened in the whole game, too!

It's no isolated incident, either. I've done plenty of quests now and they're almost always like this: detailed, complex, layered, nuanced, almost wholly conversational and concerned with anything but fighting monsters or saving the world. Some do have a few fights sprinkled in like seasoning. Some even have a couple of set-piece boss battles. But some don't have any combat at all and a few don't even have any real conflict.

Questing is only one aspect of the game, of course. Arguably, it's not even the central feature. There are many ways to pass the time. You can run a business, play games, go fishing, collect and return lost items, deliver packages... and of course you can explore the huge, sprawling city and its hinterland. 

As you do, you'll meet many of its citizens, all going about their business. Some are happy to talk to you. Some have little problems they'll tell you about. They'd appreciate your help but don't expect much in the way of adventure. You might be making sure the cakes get baked or learning how to take better photographs.

The developers send out regular questionnaires, asking how players are finding the game and gathering information on what they think about it. No doubt they also have extensive metrics, telling them exactly how players are spending their time. Apparently those sources are telling them "players are spending more time exploring the urban world than engaging in combat." That's leading publishers Perfect World to consider "introducing paid city-themed content that includes character skins, clothing, houses, and cars".

The developers are reportedly also planning on "improving gameplay to enhance its appeal and increase player retention." which I guess might have something to do with putting some actual adventure into the game. I can't help wondering if that's in response to customer demand or in an attempt to redirect attention to what was probably intended to be the core of the game, which was surely the fighting since improving your team's combat ability would seem to be the main motivation to spend money.

And here's where I start to have trouble with the whole concept. Maybe this is old thinking but I still tend to envisage a largely male, mostly young audience for games like this.

It's not just the presence and apparent importance of combat in the game that suggests it. Or the illegal street racing and bank-robbing for that matter. There's also that aspect of the anime-flavored, open world gacha genre we tend to dance rather tentatively and uncomfortably around, here in the West: sexualization of the characters. Particularly, although not only, the female characters. It's ever-present in many of the games and it's something that has, in the past, needed to be toned down for a Western audience. 

In most of the gacha games I've played, it's an aspect that's played a fairly low-key role but it's undeniably present to some degree. In NTE, for example, it's noticeable that a disproportionate number of the key characters are female and the dress code in Hethereau is certainly what you might call.. relaxed. 

It's never been remotely unusual for video games, even in the straight-laced West, to use sexuality to grab and hold the attention of what was, for the longest time, deemed to be primarily, if not exclusively, a young, male audience but in more recent times the general audience for video games has expanded to include a much broader range of genders and ages and whole subgenres have grown up around the concept of socializing with imaginary friends or romantic partners. Interactions between players and NPCs are more numerous and varied than they were even a few years ago.

On that basis, it shouldn't surprise anyone that Hethereau is full of attractive, outgoing, friendly NPCs or even that some of the gameplay involves socializing with them rather than fighting monsters. What does surprise me is the nature of some, possibly most, of those interactions.

Yesterday, for example, I helped Mint cram for her exams then later I bumped into Lacrimosa in the street and she invited me over to her house, where we both ended up drinking tomato juice and reading manga with someone she met on Bagel. This was before my stint playing drums behind Nannally, Haniel and Akane. It was all quite odd but at least it made a change from all the child-minding, babysitting and teen drama that often seems to take up the majority of Flora's evenings. 

And it's not like these are isolated incidents. At times, living this kind of heightened version of a normal life seems like it's the main thrust of the game.

It works for me although some of that may be novelty value. I can't remember ever having spent this amount of time doing things so apparently unrelated to the main plot and utterly devoid of physical violence in any other supposedly adventure-oriented game. 

It's all so gosh-darned nice, too. Playing Flora, there's an engagingly innocent, endearing feel to it all. She's like an older sister figure or even a favorite aunt. She keeps an eye out for the kids, makes sure they're safe and having a good time and in doing so, she has a good time herself. She doesn't even mind chatting to Edward on Bagel although god knows he not the most stimulating of conversationalists. And when she does get a minute to herself, she's glad to spend some downtime with her friends, almost all of whom just happen to be women or girls.

I wonder if it mightn't feel a little different, if I was playing as the male version of the Appraiser? A lot of these activities are arguably stereotypically female scenarios. Would a male player character slip into the role as smoothly?

Actually, he probably would, assuming his dialog was the same. The Appraiser always comes across as sober-minded, sensible, responsible and selfless. Unlike many of her friends and colleagues, Flora also dresses demurely by local standards and always behaves impeccably. She's long-suffering, patient, ever-willing to help out, even when the crazy plans she gets drawn into are sure to go wrong. She's the calm voice of reason amid a frenzy of sugared-up hysteria and drunken self-indulgence. 

She's usually the adult in the room, even when there are clearly older people there. I imagine it would be the same with a male Appraiser. I don't think gender comes into it much, if at all. 

Is this what the modern player of a magitech adventure game wants now? To be the designated driver in every situation? The calm voice of reason? The Sensible One?

Maybe it is. Maybe everyone playing NTE really does want to live a vicarious, innocent, work- and family-oriented life, doing their job to the best of their ability, minding the kids who inexplicably work there too, before skipping off down the street with their friend, holding hands, heading off to eat ice-cream, see a movie or just hang out at each other's places after work, where they'll talk mostly about food they like and shows they watch on TV before heading home for a good night's sleep. 

If so, I guess there's hope for the world after all. I mean, it's got to be better than becoming a murder-hobo, hasn't it? 

Maybe it's close to what the target audience already does in real life. Maybe what they enjoy is seeing those lives, interests and concerns reflected in these characters. If so, that would be welcome news from a gaming perspective, if also slightly worrying from a real-life one, given the general level of scattiness, disregard for personal and public safety and the plethora of all-round performative, hyperactive behavior on display. 

Until and unless Hotta or PWG decide to release some hard numbers on the demographics, the way cinemas routinely report on who's going to see which movie, it's all just speculation. For all the critical analysis, I'm no wiser as to who the game is supposed to be for, let alone who's actually playing it. 

Although I do feel pretty safe in saying it wasn't made for pensioners like me. I am definitely not the target audience. I probably should stick to my lane and play Stars Reach or Pantheon with the rest of the geezers. 

Now, doesn't that sound like fun?

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?