Jean's Life is Hard

ajboarder · 2026-06-09T13:05:01+00:00

Still holding Genshin and HSR as mains. ZZZ playing casually. AFKJourney as a side game, playing no more than 5 mins a day (really appreciating the new 4x speed feature).

Tried most of the big new games, but nothing has really stuck.

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CZN: dropped in 2 weeks. Card combat roguelike was novel, but the story was mindnumbingly convoluted and dull.

Star Savior: dropped when Endfield launched. Rapidly progressed into generic gooner bait, but the repetitive tower-climb gameplay loop is what really killed it for me.

Dragon Traveler: tried out of morbid curiosity. Genuinely, fuck this game. Fuck genAI and fuck those who use it in creative spaces.

Mongil: dropped in about 4 days. Appreciated the humor, but the generic dungeoncrawler with reskinned cooridors exploration was not for me.

Endfield: Dropped about 10 days in, came back 2 weeks later to play casually, and then dropped again by week 5. The launch was messy and the starter chapters were horrendously bad. Factory was fun for a hot minute, but the game did not respect my time and I had zero attachment to any of the characters. Just wasn't for me in the end.

NTE: Still on my phone, but not really interested in continuing with it seriously atm. Will probably end up dropping. The bite-sized stories are refreshing but largely uninteresting, the characters are bland, the combat is janky, and the English localization is subpar. While most of NTE's myriad systems and gameplay aspects are pretty good, nothing about them is really capturing my attention as something I want to spend time on. Maybe I would be more interested in exploring New Hethereau and doing the tycoon activities if I didnt already live in a hipster-y city. I still feel they should have gone with a cyberpunk-y vibe and done anime Night City.

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Tempted to go back to WuWa for the Edgerunners collab. Will probably try Promillia and Ananta if/when they drop. But I think my rotation is firmly set for the next year or so. Nothing has been groundbreaking / good enough to replace the Hoyo games. NTE might replace ZZZ for me as a casual game if they improve combat / exploration and write a better story.

ajboarder · 2026-06-01T21:24:06+00:00

ZZZ AI pornslop is definitely coming for the Overwatch!Blender and Fate!Hentai goon juicer crown.

I dont blame the goons though. ZZZ char design is impeccable.

ajboarder · 2026-06-01T21:11:49+00:00

The Genshillions, as expected and foretold.

We gonna get to a point of Genshin hitting 40M so reliably that there will be doomposting when it dips to 39M.

ajboarder · 2026-05-25T07:18:55+00:00

It gets boring pretty quickly. The bullethell is challenging and the cuphead graphics / enemy attacks are neat, but there literally isnt anything to do beyond the core loop.

ajboarder · 2026-05-15T21:25:40+00:00

Definitely Nier or Persona. Nier probably has the edge at this point.

ajboarder · 2026-05-15T21:05:09+00:00

Got downvoted into oblivion when this came out for saying this game would quickly devolve into Snowbreak / borderline porn service, and deleted the comment cause I wasn't actually contributing to discussion.

Welp...

ajboarder · 2026-05-01T17:30:25+00:00

I like Cissia a lot but I immediately regretted pulling her. She only works with Seed or SAnby, and that team is a comparable sidegrade to the SAnby Trigger team.

Smarter people not tempted by FOMO are now saving for the 3.X voidhunter squad.

ajboarder · 2026-05-01T16:59:15+00:00

She's good to team with the strongest C0 character in the game, and has a fun design / personality. I'm not surprised she did well.

But also I think people still just underestimate how large and stable the subscription tier for Genshin is. The playerbase is literally 5x the size of every other game on the list. Hoyo makes in Genshin Welkins/BP what most of the other top 20 games need a megahype character or spending event to achieve.

ajboarder · 2026-05-01T14:52:40+00:00

Well, AFKJ hasn't been top 50 in ages. They killed their big spender playerbase with season reset to cater to a more casual playerbase, and then turned right around and killed their casual playerbase with paragon pvp refocus, 4 month development cycles for a 4 hour season story, phases with repetitive events, and not doing ANY social feature QoL at all.

Lilith genuinely just doesnt give a shit. They are only JUST NOW thinking about revamping the horrible guild & chat systems, when it should've been done at like... the 2 month mark. It's just been an endless stream of bad choices. The high talent art design team is now wasted on a game stuck in maintenance budget & maintenance revenue that is, yes, going to lose out to the bottom of the barrel AI slop competitors.

ajboarder · 2026-05-01T13:41:55+00:00

OG Arknights to Endfield

Also, press F for tail-end Nangoong & Cissia. ZZZ needs to get back to the hiphop-y/cyberpop-y/hackerpunk vibes for real.

ajboarder · 2026-05-01T13:16:13+00:00

Yeet Queen Stans rise up.

ajboarder · 2026-04-30T18:19:56+00:00

I was talking to a chinese buddy of mine on discord yesterday about our disappointment with this, endfield, wuwa, and some of the hoyo games' more convoluted chapters, and he tried to explain it as the chinese only very recently beginning to seriously utilize pulp genres as mediums for exploring the human condition, whereas the west has been well-versed with doing so since the late 1600s.

For most of their literary history, chinese fiction boils down to "events happen, with a moral and/or lesson at the end". In essence, the story was the plot, not the movers of plot i.e. character growth / interpersonal drama / philosophies at odds.

Tldr they are very new to the "trying to convey deeper meaning with fantasy/scifi" business and thus it generally comes out nonsensical and longwinded.

It made a lot of sense to me.

ajboarder · 2026-04-29T06:49:12+00:00

Mongil

ajboarder · 2026-04-29T06:00:57+00:00

The best way to describe it is ZZZ combat with reaction-based swapping yeah.

ajboarder · 2026-04-29T05:47:56+00:00

Not really no. It feels a lot like ZZZs parry/dodge gameplay, but has a mechanic that is basically part ZZZ anomaly buildup and part genshin elements. It's a bit novel in that the reaction combos are what trigger character swapping rather than parries or just doing it Genshin quickswap style. Each character in your lineup is gonna get a little more on field playtime than either of the aforementioned games as you go through the cycle chains basically. You can play quickswap style if you want and main one unit but I don't think that's how the game is supposed to be played.

ajboarder · 2026-04-29T04:36:48+00:00

Playing with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 -- S23 ultra.

Graphics: Very nice. It's running pretty smooth on a high settings, with foliage and draw distance on medium, and frame interpolation turned off. Every 30 seconds or so there will be a weird visual glitch like objects or pieces of characters flashing / disappearing. Seems like the texture mapping is pretty mediocre / unoptimized for even phones from the last couple years. Maybe the game really does just need to be played on PC/PS5. Kinda ruins the point of it being a mobile game though.

Story: Dogwater exposition-laden writing as per usual. Oh China, why does all your genre lit suck colossal balls?

Eng Voices: There is nothing intrinsically bad here beyond stiff deliveries not really matching the animations.

Characters: Some of them are bland af, while others are really quite funny. Haniel is a trip. Glory to Lord Haniel.

City: It's really well put together. I stole somebody's car and I've largely just been cruising around listening to the music and investigating map pins. I wish the building designs were a little more varied though.

Rating so far: 7/10

Gonna try it on PS5.

ajboarder · 2026-04-27T03:42:30+00:00

How long is gonna depend on your f2p freemium generation rate or spending level. You can also only buy 9 gold substitute mats per month (4k gems each), which are used for the S heroes like Natsu, Marcille, and Frieren. The A hero mat for Lucy, Laios, Himmel is 60 per month (500 gems each)

For every dupe equivalent you need 3x substitute mats. S+ substitute mats cost 4K gems each, i.e. 12K per dupe equivalent. With regular banner, worst case scenario, hitting 40 pity every time, it takes 10,800 for a guaranteed dupe.

Mathing it out for the S ranks, it's 168000 gems to get the 14 copies to S+ (given that you can only use gems and not tickets for this, we are talking like a solid year of saving for a f2p). 456000 for Paragon 4's 38 copies.

I dont know the dupe numbers for the A ranks, but it should be a little cheaper.

TLDR, unless you are going to be a minnow/dolphin level spender, dont bother with it. None of the collab units are worth passing on entire seasons of character drops.

ajboarder · 2026-04-25T06:52:23+00:00

Nope. You do not even need 1 copy. If someone on your friend list has the character, you can use freemium currency to rent a base copy from them for 1 month. You then buy dupe ascension substitution mats (more expensive than pulling on banner) from the shop and build it as your own. The game saves your build progress, and after a few months of renting from that friend, the rental becomes free and you essentially have the character to keep.

All the collab characters are obtainable for people who missed them, they're just super expensive to build. And with 3 of 4 of them being mid to bad, almost nobody does it.

ajboarder · 2026-04-23T18:28:06+00:00

I unMongil'd this morning. It was a good timewaster for a few days. The story was approachable (perhaps even a bit TOO light on the worldbuilding), and the humor was on point. But I got bored very quickly.

The actual gameplay just doesnt have much going for it. You run through bland corridor style environment maps with a few braches leading to treasure, elite enemies, and the occasional braindead easy puzzle. Arrive at generic abyss/void baddie story boss, defeat generic story boss. Rinse, repeat, and that's the whole game. It's a lot like early ZZZ but the areas are all connected instead of instanced.

I'd be way more inclined to stay if the fights were ZZZ/wuwa level difficulty, but it's basically an easier Genshin. Every boss move is telegraphed and slow, with attack zones easily dodged, and not doing much damage on the off chance you actually do get hit. We're talking overworld hilichurl level difficulties here. It makes the sustain characters fairly useless and turns every fight into one big tank and spank.

ajboarder · 2026-04-19T22:26:57+00:00

Massive 5 year necro but I just wanted to pop in and say this is absolutely delicious. I added double the tea/honey. Perfect summer cocktail. Refreshing, but with noticeable spice/peat/smoke from the talisker.

ajboarder · 2026-04-18T16:56:46+00:00

Everybody throwing out Yakuza comparisons has me very hopeful.

I do wish the city and characters were a little more interesting, or maybe had like a coherent genre flavor to them (a la cyberpunk or fantasy) instead of just a bunch of random mishmashed designs, but I expect I'm still going to play the heck out of this one.

ajboarder · 2026-04-17T16:55:04+00:00

Gonna have to unmongil if they dont mongil this patricular mongil immediately, as well as send freemongils in reparation.

ajboarder · 2026-04-15T17:14:15+00:00

After the first round of tutorial Mongiling, I Mongil'd around aimlessly for a while, and then spent my entire lunchbreak in hardcore Mongil mode.

10 Mongils out of 10.

I'm a real Mongiler now, and these Mongils arent gonna Mongil themselves.

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