Month: January 2022

24: I Only Have Room for One Gacha Game

For the first game I’m reviewing this semester, I’m going back a little bit into the Pokémon franchise with mobile game Pokémon Masters EX. I don’t typically enjoy gacha games, just because I know I’ll get a little too into the pulling mechanic, but I’m having a lot of fun with this one. I think the key is to only spend a little bit of time playing it every day. For people who are new to my blog, I rate the fun I had playing, the difficulty level, and whether or not I consider it replayable out of five in each of these categories. Typically a three is average, and I adjust for things that are good or bad, rather than either “meh” or a mix of both. Obviously what I rate something may not be what you consider it to be, and I encourage anyone who played the games I’m reviewing to chime in with your own experiences in the comments! You can also read tags for my more casual commentary on the game.

Battle Screen
Battle Screen

FUN RATING: 3/5. This game has a bunch of things to do, but you might not be able to finish all of the battles available to you if you aren’t a little over the recommended level. I felt a little confined to the main story, and like I had to finish it before I could go through the other events. The scout system where you pull for different sync pairs (sets of trainers and pokémon of different levels of power) is really exciting, but once you get past the first few sets of achievements, it gets a little hard to get enough gems for the 11x scout. However, this game is definitely addictive and I spent a solid couple of hours playing it the first weekend I had it. Making up different strategies for teams is super enjoyable, and it’s not too hard to get strong team members if you don’t mind waiting a few days to get the gems required for the larger scout.

Gems are expensive. For reference, for an eleven times scout, you have to pay 3000 gems.

EASE RATING: Depends on if you buy gems. 4/5 if you do, 2.5/5 (wow! Decimals! I didn’t want to give it a three) if you don’t. Some areas of the game, like the Battle Villa, where you battle for as long as you can in one streak (which I believe ends when all of your three pokémon sync teams have fainted), are super difficult even for higher level players. The Legendary Arena, where you can fight legendary pokémon for rewards and medals, is another series of long, hard fights. However, the main story is pretty easy if you use the manuals you have to level up your sync team to their level caps- you can finish battles in a few minutes, even if you don’t have the recommended typing. In higher level / difficulty situations, you really do need the correct strategy and proper strength/weakness pairings to take out the opposing team without suffering losses yourself. However, spending money on gems means you get more incubators for reward eggs (you can sync with the pokémon that hatch from these eggs) and more exclusive scouts (these work like Genshin Impact pulls, where the things you get are left up to chance), some with guaranteed five star scouts (these are the highest level of scouts you can get, and their percentage of being pulled is often very low, happening once or twice at best per eleven scouts). These overpowered units you can get make gameplay a lot easier, as they tend to be incredibly powerful in early game scenarios. You can just turn on auto and let your phone sit if you’re so inclined, and you’ll probably still win (I watched a friend do exactly this). However, gems are pretty expensive, so you should probably avoid purchasing them as a rule.

Skip tickets

REPLAYABILITY RATING: 2/5. You get the option to replay the main story in hard mode after beating it in normal mode, but other than that, you don’t have a whole lot of options for playing things again aside from just deleting the whole app and not linking any accounts to it when you redownload. Aside from the extra difficulty, this game actually works for you to not have to replay the game at all- with skip tickets, you can bypass training entirely. You get skip tickets for completing medals (which act as achievements) and for completing certain areas. You also have the option to do co-op after getting to the first main story interlude, but I haven’t done enough of this to form a real opinion on it (most of my friends are far more powerful than I am, and I wouldn’t want to drag them down in co-op). Overall, this isn’t very replayer-friendly.

OVERALL: Sure, this game is pretty basic. It’s a gacha time-suck for sure, but I really enjoy it.  I think what I get most out of it is playing it with other people and the sense of community I get from a small group of friends that also enjoy it. Getting the scout you’ve been trying for for a week is super exciting, and I love sharing this kind of excitement with other people. I’ve leveled up my sync pairs as much as I possibly can, but I’m still having fun with it- it doesn’t automatically guarantee a win, I’ve still lost a couple, and I just have to come back with a better strategy and typings than before. It’s a little bit to get used to, because pokémon only have one main weakness in this game, and it differs between the pokémon. Trying to use a fire move on a grass-type and having it not be super-effective sure was disorienting, but it’ll tell you at the preparation screen before the battle what weaknesses to aim for, so you get the hang of it pretty quickly. If you already play a gacha game, I would not recommend it. If you already spend money on one, I guarantee your wallet cannot handle a second- honestly, I would not buy any of the paid gems on offer just because they’re crazy expensive. However, this game is friendly to players who don’t want to spend any money, and you can go really far with just what the game gives you. I think the main thing that gets people to spend money is probably frustration, because you keep spending thousands of gems trying to pull this one character before their banner ends, and then you don’t get them. I tried for ages to get one character, Sygna Suit Red (because his EX form is super cool),  and I was just lucky that his banner came back in a couple days (it shows up when you first get the game for a couple days, and it was pure chance that it came back up again for a week or two shortly after the end of the first one). It genuinely almost got me to spend money on gems for him, but one look at the gem prices and I was immediately reversing that decision. Primarily, I just enjoy collecting all the cool-looking character designs. I’m not really here to win, I just like getting trainers with drip.

23: Rough Draft of “This I Believe” Speech

In my opinion, most people have this perception that the people who stay in your life are the only ones that matter. They’re the most loyal, and they’re the “right” people to have by your side. However, I think that things that don’t last are just as important as the things that do. I believe that not everything is going to work out, but those experiences are just as valuable.

During quarantine in 2020 and 2021, there was a resurgence in playing video games that were typically older or came from a place of nostalgia. One of these games was Minecraft, which I had played in elementary and middle school. With its rising popularity because of streamers like Dream and Technoblade, that gave it a larger player base. All of this combined with my freshman year of college being one of relative isolation, with only a few local friends to my name, hooked me right back in.

And you know what? For a little while, it worked. I had a small close-knit group of friends on the main server I played on (it was only for people my age, which was another bonus), and we called almost every day. My best friend had started playing with me, which brought it more into “real life”. We started to branch out to other games, and then just video and audio calls for hours.

Then the server went down. The owner didn’t want to keep it up any more, even though there was a sudden influx of players from a YouTube video spotlight. We had a realm, but slowly players started to drop off without their main source of entertainment. It makes sense! Without the main thing people wanted to do, there was less interest in the game in general. In a month or two, there was only a couple of people left. And then we all started to drift apart.

As most friend groups are, there was some drama. One guy liked another girl, and she didn’t feel the same way. Things went somewhat back to normal, but it wasn’t ever the same as it used to be. We beat the final bosses on our Minecraft realm, and then we all kind of stopped talking to each other. People got jobs and were far less active. The realm subscription expired, and most of us, myself included, stopped playing Minecraft regularly a little after that. We don’t really talk to each other often anymore. I’m still close with the previously mentioned best friend, and we live together now, but we were friends before all of this happened.

Despite this, I don’t think I regret the experiences that I shared with these people even though I’ll probably never talk to them more than once every few months again. I got to experience closeness with other people during quarantine, when I didn’t really have many people there for me, being an out-of-state student who originally knew nobody coming here. I’ll always appreciate the late-night calls with people and the friendships that formed out of it. Was our group doomed to fail because many of these people are online friendships? That probably played a part, but it doesn’t mean that getting to know these people was worthless. Not everything is supposed to work out, and the most important thing you can take away from these “failed” relationships, in my opinion, is your memories and new knowledge. As long as you were, at some point, truly happy, then I don’t see how that can be counted as a loss.

(Obviously this is a very rough draft, and I’ll probably have to do a couple of drafts after this! I have a couple other options I can use if this experience isn’t impactful enough, or I can go into more detail. See tags for me talking a little bit more about some specific things I was unsure about.)

21: New Semester, New Ideas

In terms of my passion blog, I’ll probably end up using the same passion topic I did last semester: video game reviewing! I honestly had such a blast writing all of the reviews and evaluating different games I was playing, and I couldn’t wait to do it again this semester. That I got to play video games for school was also definitely something that made me less guilty about spending my break time playing them.

If I did do any other passion blog, here’s some ideas:

-Going around to different art exhibits around campus and downtown and writing a little bit about them and what I thought about the pieces! One of my Art History classes gave examples of a bunch of different places I could find exhibits, so I wouldn’t have to go back to the Hub every week for something. I probably will be taking a look around exhibits even if I don’t do this- apparently there’s a place downtown that has regular art (visual and performing) exhibits that change often! You can just go in and see something new every time, which is really exciting.

-This one is a little out there, but I enjoy music and curating different playlists for the week. I could make different playlists for occasions or just for the week, link them here, and explain why I put on there what I did. I think this would be super fun, and if I’m talking about every song on a 10-20 song playlist I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to hit the word count even though it’s a little out there. However, if we’re doing the same commenting on other people’s blogs as last time, this could get a little tiring for the people reviewing and I wouldn’t want to make something if nobody was going to listen to it.

Some ideas for my civic issues blog:

-How schools are dealing with COVID-19. A lot of people seem to want students to go back to school, even through Omicron. Some schools are closing, some aren’t. Some schools are making young students pay for tests if they’re unvaccinated, and it can become an easy way to contract the disease. However, some argue that it’s good for students’ mental health to not have classes online again.

-Pressure in high schools for students to participate extracurriculars, multiple AP classes, and participate in sports at the same time all while juggling personal life and potentially jobs. Because of college applications, students often have to take on a heavy courseload and have extra things to “recommend” them in order to have a better chance at getting into the schools they want. Could also look at higher tuition costs in comparison to what it used to cost students.

-Lack of support for (and demonization of) houseless people, to the point of architecture deliberately designed to keep people from sleeping on the ground or on benches. Could look at the lack of support systems here as well, as it’s hard for people to get back on their feet. It can be harder to get a job as a houseless person, and you need a job to get money for food and housing.

Finally, my This I Believe podcast ideas:

–Not everything is going to work out. Sometimes things are supposed to end, and all you can do is enjoy them while you have them. Not every relationship lasts forever. Sometimes you fall out of contact with friends. You lose interest in hobbies. That doesn’t mean that these experiences aren’t worth living. Even if things aren’t eternal, you can still get valuable knowledge and experience during them. Things can make you happy and not last, and that’s okay.

–Try not to assume things about people. You might see someone and not like them at first glance- think they’re uncool or self-centered. However, everybody has their own things that make them interesting, and you might have more in common with someone than you think. You just need to be open to possibilities (and a little conversation).