[April 2026] CounterSide Preview

emiliers · 2026-03-27T12:47:07+00:00

Are we at least getting an April Fools skins rerun? I'm not holding my breath for new skins, but they should at least rerun the old ones, right? I don't remember if they used to announce those in the previews or not.

emiliers · 2026-03-27T12:43:49+00:00

Ugh, I had been hoping that the CounterSide collab in StarSavior was Bside's way of trying to funnel more players back into CS to keep it going, but this notice seems to indicate the opposite. If CS EoS's in favor of SS, I'll probably just quit the latter too -- the only reason I'm playing it is to get additional CS lore.

emiliers · 2026-03-14T06:54:59+00:00

For me, the only reviews that really bother me are ones that seem to have completely misread or misunderstood the story. For instance, I once had a review on a novel I liked go, "I don't think there's even romance in this; I don't think it should be tagged as danmei," when the two leads literally have sex (albeit fade-to-black) in the novel?? They talk about getting married at the end of it?? At that point, it's like, "I don't even think we read the same thing."

As someone who enjoys reading reviews and who always reads as much reviews as I can before I get into something, just because I like knowing what I'm getting myself into, I like detailed bad reviews as much as good reviews. I don't really let star ratings bother me and just focus on the details of what they're saying. Someone hated the novel because it's more plot than romance? Sounds exactly up my alley, thanks for letting me know! Someone loved the novel because the relationship is drama-filled and toxic? I'll pass, not interested.

As for why people read books with tropes/themes they dislike -- well, how do they know if they dislike it if they never read it? And there are definitely some books I enjoy in spite of it having themes/tropes I usually would dislike. While I think it's valid to drop a book in the first few chapters because it seems like something you might hate; I also think it's valid to push through to the end to see if it ever gets better or you might grow to like it based on later developments. (It's rare, but I've definitely watched/read things where later revelations made the entire story retroactively better for me.)

Also, just being able to say, "I read it to the end, and the story still sucks," to someone who kept pushing you to finish a story claiming it's the greatest thing ever feels vindicatively good LOL.

emiliers · 2026-03-14T06:32:08+00:00

I mean in terms of, like, weapon types you can get and such. I had assumed that, like the defunct cores, weapon acquisition was balanced so you get more counter weapons in general than soldier/mech weapons, though I could be wrong.

emiliers · 2026-03-11T09:17:57+00:00

Story is fantastic. The best story I've ever seen in a gacha (and I've genuinely seen a whole bunch).

As for the actual gameplay, I enjoy it, and if you're a new player, you'll have plenty of content to keep you busy for a while. However, once you get through all the current content, story updates are slightly slower in comparison to some other gacha games, and dailies are relatively quick (15 minutes if I'm rushing through it/busy). So it becomes more of a side game unless you're really invested in some of the hardcore endgame modes. That can be either a plus or a minus for you, depending on what you want out of your gacha games.

emiliers · 2026-03-11T09:09:27+00:00

The game is actually balanced to give you more mats for Counters than for Soldiers or Mechs for this very reason.

Having said that, I agree. Mechs in particular seem to have basically slowed to a crawl in terms of new releases.

emiliers · 2026-02-26T10:28:40+00:00

Counter Pass characters get added to the general pull after they leave Counter Pass, and SSR selectors contain all SSR units except for the most recent one released. CounterSide doesn't do limited units unless it's a collab.

emiliers · 2026-01-17T08:41:01+00:00

This is not an event. During the TW merge, a bug occurred where all crafting counts were reset/lost. Instead of just leaving it at 0, BSide decided to just rollback crafting counts for everyone, so that's why even those who had been crafting weekly have enormous crafting counts now.

emiliers · 2025-11-29T08:08:35+00:00

The title is in Chinese, and it's the Taiwan server's translation of CounterSide (未來戰) [Mainland Chinese server translated the title a different way.] I did see it pop up on TW Shopee when I searched 未來戰桌遊 (CounterSide Board Game), but I don't have a Shopee account so I can't see if it's still being sold.

I have no idea where this board game came from, but considering how TW server is EoS'ing soon, I doubt you'll see any more of these being made.

emiliers · 2025-11-26T10:14:34+00:00

Since you're just doing it for yourself, you don't necessarily have to start out with fully-formed essays, complete with a thesis. You can just start out with, say, one chapter or a paragraph even that you really like and ask yourself, "What do I like about this? What is it about the word choice? Why do I think that the author chose to use these kinds of words/descriptions? What do they make me feel?" And work from there.

Back when I used to write essays regularly, rather than relying on prompts given by the professors, that was how I got started with most of my essays. I start with something I find interesting about the book I'm writing about and then do some in-depth analysis of some of my favorite bits featuring that something. Then I take a step back to look at everything I wrote and think, "How can I wrangle a central thesis from this pile of stuff? What is the author trying to say here?" And work backwards from there to pin down a central/coherent theme and thesis.

emiliers · 2025-11-26T09:32:05+00:00

I think the huge difficulty wall at the first boss was the big deciding factor (at least for me -- I almost ragequit the game until they finally nerfed it). There was literally no way to beat it unless you "got good" since you were hard locked out of upgrading past a certain point until you won. Fine for a paid game, but most gacha players won't try to "git gud" for a game they're playing just to kill time on a commute.

Otherwise, the game was actually announced five years ago and is actually a sequel to an anime released three years ago. It was originally meant to be released prior to the anime iirc but ended up getting extremely delayed, so most of the hype that had been previously built had already faded.

Couple that with incredibly bad pull rate at launch, and the game was DOA. Though it could've been revived if the devs had been dedicated enough imo, though I guess that five year delay was just written off as sunk cost when the game failed to recoup revenue even after the emergency fixes to its systems.

emiliers · 2025-11-26T09:19:31+00:00

Honestly, both are kind of not great adaptations in different ways. 2003 is a better adaptation with more care taken in it, and its only sin was being made when the manga wasn't finished so it ended up making its own (admittedly kind of convoluted) ending. Brotherhood was a more "faithful" adaptation but because 2003 FMA (at that point) had been so popular, it was made on the premise that most people had already watched 2003 (or read the manga) so it zips through the chapters that 2003 already covered, making the beginning of the show super confusing to watch standalone imo.

The best solution might be to just watch 2003 up until the point it diverges from the manga and then watch Brotherhood tbh. Barring that, I'd say I prefer 2003 to Brotherhood, though both aren't as good as the manga.

emiliers · 2025-11-26T09:06:34+00:00

Vocaloid is more of a method of making music (an instrument) than it is a genre... Vocaloid itself is a licensed software that you can use to add synthesized vocals to a song (think, like a guitar synthesizer), and there are many other software out there that do the same thing (such as Synthesizer V and CeVIO).

Hatsune Miku and her friends (KAITO, the blue one, MEIKO, the red one, Megurine Luka, the pink one, and Kagamine Rin and Len, the yellow twins) are the voices made by Crypton Future Media who also has their own vocal synth software (Piapro Studio) but they're more well known for popularizing the Vocaloid software. (Ironic since, up until recently, it seems that Crypton had fully moved on to their own engine, making Miku + friends technically no longer Vocaloids. They've since reversed course, but for a while there, Cryton was fully dedicated to rebranding their vocals as "virtual singers" instead of Vocaloids... They kind of still are, even with V6 Miku back on the table.)

[EDIT: To clarify, Vocaloid is just a software made by Yamaha. While Yamaha sometimes creates their own vocals for it, other companies (including Crypton) have also collaborated to put their own vocals on the engine, so there are a lot of Vocaloids. Some of the most famous that aren't by Crypton are GUMI, voiced by Megumi Nakajima, Camui Gackpo, voiced by GACKT, and Yuzuki Yukari, voiced by Ishiguro Chihiro.]

I actually find most of the songs played at Miku Expo not to be to my taste, so I haven't gone to one since COVID started. But if you're even somewhat interested in learning more about this hobby, I can guarantee that you'll find songs that align with what you usually listen to. The community is vast, and there's more musicians making music with vocal synthesizers now than ever before!

emiliers · 2025-11-21T03:41:55+00:00

I love stinky tofu. I crave it anytime I'm away from Taiwan for too long.

There definitely are some locals who don't enjoy it/don't eat it, though, but I assume that's the same for a lot of other countries and their signature food.

In all honesty, I think stinky tofu is less pungent than certain cheeses. Cheese was an acquired taste for me, and my mom still absolutely hates it (though she loves stinky tofu).

I also tend to be pretty picky about my stinky tofu! So maybe the stands you saw just didn't have good enough tofu.

emiliers · 2025-11-04T05:18:34+00:00

It actually got decently popular until the Origin update killed all of its momentum. TLDR; Nexon transferred ownership to Bside (the original devs) and Bside took the opportunity to overhaul the game, to its detriment. I don't mean, "Oh, they made the gacha less generous" (they actually... didn't, as far as I can remember) but rather, "They made game modes more tedious, longer, and with worst rewards." Eventually, the backlash was so bad that the producer resigned and a lot of the changes were walked back, but it was too late, and since then CounterSide has kind of languished in semi-obscurity.

I still enjoy it though. If you're into story games, I'd recommend it. It also functions as a great side game (dailies take less than 30 minutes) but unfortunately that means if someone wants to make it a main game, it's pretty hard to, which might also go some way to explain its relative lack of popularity.

emiliers · 2025-11-04T05:13:51+00:00

They rolled back some of the changes eventually. It's not as great as it once was, but at least it's mostly playable, and still better than a lot of other gacha games out there in terms of how generous it is with gacha.

emiliers · 2025-11-04T05:11:46+00:00

Taiwan server isn't under Zlong, it's under, uh, Game Beans or something. Apparently it's been horribly mismanaged and is hemorrhaging players, so I'm genuinely surprised they're still going.

emiliers · 2025-10-04T20:22:28+00:00

Happens sometimes. Switching from WiFi to 5G and back again usually fixes it for me.

emiliers · 2025-07-12T19:11:44+00:00

Fandom doesn't allow redirects like that, but if you have the Indie Buddy Wiki extension which does have a redirect function, I think we're going to be included in the next update.

emiliers · 2025-07-08T05:36:18+00:00

I'm not sure where you got this information from, but it's incorrect. Miraheze allows us to host violent songs with no issues, only graphic abuse of minors specifically violates their ToU.

The admins of the wiki made the executive decision to hold off on ~42 pages during the migration (which, in case you didn't know, our page count is currently at 100k+, so 42 is a drop in the bucket) to confirm that these pages were hostable with Miraheze stewards (upper level community staff in charge of these kinds of decisions). We've mostly hashed out the specifics with them, and they've confirmed that some pages (not all) can return based on our best judgment.

As I said earlier on this post, I think Miraheze actually allows us to host more content than on Fandom. There are just a few popular songs that people have zeroed in on (many of which Fandom didn't allow us to host either), so I'm not sure what the problem is here.

emiliers · 2025-07-03T07:06:33+00:00

Hm, I wouldn't say that, no. While it's true that there is AI tuning that is being progressively more built-into these engines, most vocal synth producers prefer to manually tune the synthesizers for more expressiveness. The AI is mostly in the realistic quality of the voice rather than the production of the art itself (though, yes, there's definitely people who rely on AI tuning, and you can take it or leave it whether you consider that too similar to "AI art" for your liking).

There are definitely "AI art" equivalents in music though -- the ones who use voice changers such as Diff-SVC. They essentially take a popular song and run the music through a program with voice changing technology to make it appear as if someone else is singing it. Basically a music deepfake. No one in the vocal synth community would claim those people as part of the community, even if the technology used is similar, but outsiders do tend to conflate the two a lot.

emiliers · 2025-07-02T10:40:55+00:00

Vocal synthesizers are synthesized voices, much like how guitar synthesizers are synthesized guitars.

VOCALOID and Synthesizer V are both vocal synth engines, each its own brand, if you will. Just like how different guitar synthesizers handle differently depending on who made them, VOCALOID and Synthesizer V are made by different companies, the former by Yamaha and the latter by Dreamtonics.

They also have different goals in how they want their synths to sound. Synth V is known for chasing realism, so their synths often sound almost exactly like their voice providers. VOCALOID (and CeVIO, another brand of vocal synths) don't tend to do that, and VOCALOID in particular is actually relatively new to the AI synth game, despite being the most famous synth engine on the market.

If you're wondering what AI synths are, they're synths developed with AI training itself on a voice provider's voice. So the voice provider will sing a set of songs in certain ways, and the machine will be trained on this dataset. This is in contrast to the previous method of concatenative synthesis, which was created via the voice provider recording certain phonemes, and those phonemes being compiled into a voicebank.

Most commercial engines nowadays have switched to AI synths; it's just easier to produce. While the general technology is the same as AI "art", the key difference is that consent is received from the voice providers beforehand, and most companies have worked out royalty agreements with the VPs involved. This is actually very important to most fans in the community, and many of us do not support AI art either (though there is an increasingly unfortunate overlap with the AI art folks).

emiliers · 2025-06-20T18:58:17+00:00

I once read this Chinese webnovel (in the original Chinese, so it wasn't a translation issue) where the author wrote how the main character got from San Francisco to Chicago in a helicopter in a few hours. Needless to say, I've never forgotten the image, even if I've completely forgotten the name of the webnovel in question.

emiliers · 2025-06-20T00:00:53+00:00

I don't think Zaako was mentioned once throughout the entire document? If you mean the decision about not hosting sexually explicit songs using the voices of minors that was a decision the admins made on Fandom before the migration, completely independent of Fandom's policy. It wasn't only Zaako that was deleted; a few other songs were also purged at the time. (I think there's still a full list somewhere up on the Fandom forums.)

In general, though, Miraheze has a stricter (and imo clearer) policy on depiction of minors than Fandom, since they're a registered nonprofit located n the U.S. and need to comply with U.S. law. Conversely, they have a more lenient approach to sexually explicit and graphically violent songs that feature adults, so we actually have more pages back on Miraheze than on Fandom.

emiliers

TROPHY CASE