Been playing the game a lot in the last few days and I'm really liking it a lot more than I thought I would. I finished off the first planet a couple of days ago and while I think it was a bit longer than it needed to be, I still enjoyed it thoroughly. I'm the last person to get here so I'll just repeat what everyone already knows which is that the final boss fight was spectacular. It was so good I actually uploaded it to my defunct youtube channel so that I can go back and watch it in the future. I don't play that many jrpgs so this is probably the most epic jrpg boss fight I've ever played. Aside from that I'm really enjoying the writing in the game. Some of the side quests and I'd say all the companion quests are really well written. I like that you can go to talk to quest givers after a quest is over to get some more thoughts and context about the quest from them. In fact, talking to random NPCs every now and then is almost always interesting. It gives a sense of depth to the game world.
I wish there was a way to check how long I've played the game. I would estimate somewhere around 25-30 hours. I still have the second world to do. I've just landed there and done some of the preliminary stuff so all I can say about that is that it's visually gorgeous. Really beautiful artwork all around.
That all being said, now that I've played the game a decent amount of time, I'm starting to see behind the veil of the monetization and how the game systems are implemented and like everyone else I do wish it was better. For the first planet I used my standard crew of trailblazer/Dan/Natasha/March at level 39 almost throughout until I finally leveled up Bronya to match them. I can tell how powerful her buff can be when you have a high DPS character getting free double turns and damage boosts. Leveling these 5 characters pretty much drained my XP resources to the point where I calculated I probably cannot get a 6th character to 40. I wanted to level Serval to have another element for damage but it wasn't really possible. Also I needed to save up some XP materials to boost my core team once the level 40 threshold was passed. I do not think it is viable for free to play players to level more than 5-6 characters which is a shame cause I'd really like to be able to try out all the characters and their abilities. I had a look at the shop and of course they're selling a fairly expensive bundle which has a lot of XP items in it to let people boost up their characters.
I should mention at this point that I've played the game long enough that I'm willing to pay some money for it. I bought the $5 pass (which was more than $6 for me because Mihoyo uses the crappy iOS currency conversion). The battle pass seems okay for $10 ($12+ for me) but I'm just reluctant to pay for another battle pass when I'm already playing 3 other games with battle passes. I'm at level 17 in the battle pass right now so I'll probably pick it up if I'm actually able to complete it within the month. Other than that, man, the prices in the shop are absurd. It's no wonder they obfuscate your purchases into two different currencies to mask how much you're really spending on the game. In my currency it's about $3 per lootbox which is $30 for just 10 of them. I know people are happy to spend that and much more on the game and no judgement from my end but it really is too much for me. This pricing makes the $5 pass look attractive because you get about 18 lootboxes worth of currency from that which would translate to "over $50 value". 18 lootboxes per month (if you log in every single day, another thing I'm not a fan of) is pretty much nothing really. I hope the game is generous with free lootboxes but I assume that's only true at the start and your currency income crashes after you finish the content.
The other thing that bothered me is the artificial level and timegating of content. When I finished the main story on the first planet I was around level 27 or 28. I had a bunch of side quests and companion quests to get through so I thought I'll clear all of them out before moving on. Did everything I could including using up my energy on the repeatable content and stopped my session. The idea was I'll come back later at night and put in a good couple of hours on the new planet. Well, when I came back, it turned out that I needed to be level 29 to continue the quest. And I had absolutely no way to get there. A little bit of energy had recharged so I did a couple of those things and that was it. You really like a game and you sit down to explore a new planet and turns out you can't play at all. It was so annoying. I know this is very common in mobile games and they sell energy refills to let you bypass the restriction but man this game did not need to do that. They make tens of millions of dollars on their lootboxes. Why do they also need to frustrate their players? That was a real black mark on an amazing game. And the best part is when I finally got back to playing the next day and breached level 29, a new companion quest appeared on Jarilo-VI. So irritating.
Anyway I reached level 40 and did the equilibrium 2 test and then realized just how rare ascension materials are. The limited amount of daily energy doubled in importance when I realized how much I'll need to spend on them. I got all 5 of my party members to level 48 and have just been wrapping up other stuff. I'm hoping to dive into the new world finally tonight.
I know some of the frustrations I've mentioned are just part of the genre of gacha/mobile games and the answer is that you should know what you're getting into.
Anyway I've managed to accumulate enough currency so far to get to 87 special rail passes so I thought I'll try the Seele lootbox and see how it goes. This was what I got in my first 10 lootboxes;
Welt was literally the first one I got. I stopped there because now I have some questions about how the lootbox works. Does getting Welt mean that I have used up my chance of getting Seele at 90 pulls? Will I need to wait till 180 to get her now? If that's the case I'll not bother because there's no way I'm getting to 180 before this lootbox goes away. Or does it start counting the pity timer after your last 5 star? In which case, in theory, I'd be able to get Seele on the 91st lootbox I open? In short, is it worth continuing to open this lootbox or should I just save for the next character that's interesting? I've read that Seele is super powerful and will be a top tier character for some time to come.
Also, if you're on the EU server feel free to add me; UID - 701989178
I got a friend request earlier and absentmindedly declined it without thinking about it. If it was someone from here my apologies.
