murasaki-murasame

[murasaki-murasame]

In more depressing news, Dragalia is shutting down soon, and now that free summons have ended I guess I’ll finally talk about it, lol.

Firstly, I’ll just go over how my summons on these last couple of gala banners went. It feels kinda weird because of the impending end-of-service, but still.

Thankfully I managed to get both Nedrick and Primal Brunhilda from my free summons, so I didn’t have to spend anything there. I was missing some of the gala dragons on the spark list for that banner, but I cared more about saving for Euden and Zethia. Even if I’d just gotten Nedrick, I wouldn’t have chased after P-Brunhilda, but she’s nice to have. 

I actually got Nedrick from the second slot of my first free tenfold, which was kinda funny, and immediately made me more relieved about how things were gonna go.

Then I got a dupe Xander from the second day, a dupe G-Ranzal from the third day, and ANOTHER dupe G-Ranzal from the fourth day, so that was kinda bizarre, lol. It would have been genuinely agonizing if I got all those 5-star sword dupes before I got Nedrick, but at least I got him first.

Since the new Euden and Zethia alts aren’t technically gala characters, I guess this is where I managed to complete my collection of gala adventurers. I’m still missing some gala dragons, but I don’t care as much about them. It feels much cooler that I have every gala adventurer in the game now, even if it’s kinda depressing to think that this is the end.

Anyway, I was ready to drain all my emergency resources if I needed to double spark for Euden and Zethia, what with them being the final new characters and all, but thankfully I got Zethia at around 100 summons, and then Euden at 190 summons. It always feels awkward to stop more than halfway into a spark, but I have all the gala adventurers, and all the gala dragons that are available to spark on this banner, so there’s no reason for me to keep going.

[EDIT: I also got a Civilian Leif dupe from the scratcher summon. Which reminds me that I still should have one or two of the new 5-star summon vouchers from the shop, but I don’t think they’re worth getting]

Also they just announced that we’ll get a banner after this where we can spark any non-limited unit we want [presumably], so I’m gonna just save my resources for that, lol. I think I have like 260 summons worth of wyrmite and tickets left, along with my entire stash of unread stories, and a fair bit of diamantium, so I should be able to spark on it.

There’s a fair amount of permanent units I want, but I’ll probably go for Sandalphon. My water team really feels like it needs as many buffs as it can get, whereas all the other options just feel like luxury picks to fill out my roster, like Sheila, the apostles, or Summer Leonidas. Also, now that I have both Origa and Regina it makes me want to get Sandalphon even more. Hopefully I can also get Pinon in the future to complete the team.

Since they also announced some platinum showcases, I guess there’s still a chance we might get stuff like dream summons and platinum deluxe showcases, so I’ll try and hold onto my diamantium instead of using it to spark on a regular banner. It feels kinda weird that we’re still getting paid banners like this, but mostly it’s just weird that they haven’t even announced when they’ll shut off in-game payments, lol. I feel like they announced end of service way in advance, and the game won’t actually shut down until at least the 4th anniversary, but it feels customary to turn off in-game payments soon after formally announcing end of service, one way or another.

Also, while I remembered, I decided to import the artbook, both as a way to show my support for the game, and because it might go out of print soon. That should get here in the next few days, so that’s exciting.

But yeah, end of service is kinda the elephant in the room, lol. Even after like two weeks I still don’t know if I can articulate all of my thoughts about it properly.

I guess the main thing I wanna say is that I really appreciate how much effort they’ve put over the last year or so into wrapping up the main story as conclusively as possible, and releasing as many fan-favourite characters as they could. There’s a lot of stuff left hanging, but realistically things could have been left way more incomplete and unsatisfying. I wasn’t sure about it at first because certain things weren’t announced by that point, but the Origa event, the Euden and Zethia alts, and the confirmation that they’ll complete the PDT fights and release Legend Surtr makes me feel a lot more satisfied about where the game’s going to end up.

The main issue is just that it might all go to waste if the game gets shut down with no official sort of archival put in place, but that’s more of a wide-spread problem with live service games in general.

I really hope they can make the game run entirely offline even if it means removing co-op, but I can see why that might be too much of a hassle to set up. At least the fandom will archive as much stuff as they can, but it’d be nice to actually be able to play the game even if they stop supporting it. There’s still a lot left for me to accomplish in the game, so it’d be sad to get blocked off from it forever.

Compared to all that stuff, my issues with the incomplete parts of the story are a lot more minor, even though some of it still bugs me. Like how we only got glimpses of the last five wyrmclan leaders, or how they never went anywhere with Heinwald’s whole story. At the very least I think some of this stuff can be addressed through stuff like the new lore segments in Kaleidoscape they announced, and if they ever do a second artbook that includes unreleased material and concept work in it.

In terms of stuff that I actually care about, it’s basically just those two hanging threads, plus maybe the whole deal with the androids, although that was so vague that I wasn’t really invested in the bigger mystery being set up. Other than that, it’s just a handful of plot arcs I don’t care about much like the Syndicate. So I think they did a good job of resolving as much as possible.

It does kinda feel like they just needed a couple more events to truly wrap all this stuff up, though, which is kinda frustrating. Like, each of those things could have been resolved in a single event each, even a short mid-month one. But there’s not much we can do about that now.

Also, considering that it’s been like two years since they last did anything with Heinwald, I feel like they didn’t even have anything concretely planned out for him, lol. I think that was one of those things that was just floating in the air as a vague idea they could work with if they had room in the event schedule for it.

I’d be genuinely unsatisfied if we don’t get the names and full designs for the rest of the zodiacs, though, but that’s not a super big deal in the long run. At least the actual Hinomoto story arc got wrapped up in a satisfying way. It just feels weird to only get glimpses of those remaining characters.

It’d be great if we get some kind of reboot or sequel, like what happened with PriConne, but it’s probably more likely that at most we’d get a spiritual successor like the progression from Knights of Glory to Dragalia itself. An actual sequel/reboot would probably only happen at this point if Cygames takes full control of it, since Nintendo seems completely uninterested in original mobile IPs, and I doubt they’d bother with making an actual console game out of it. But it’s more likely that the IP will linger in a weird limbo due to being owned by both companies, which would really suck.

On the other hand, part of me still feels like the main story’s abrupt shift into a climax built around the characters literally planning to create a new world using magical McGuffin powers that just showed up feels like it could easily set up for a sequel or reboot. I know it’s typical for JRPGs to end with fighting God and whatnot, but this specific angle feels kinda suspicious, especially since this stuff was only just introduced.

I also kinda got this vibe from the new event focusing so much on the cosmic horror of Bahamut trying to wipe everything out of existence and make everyone forget that the cast ever existed. Like, I get what they’re going for, but it feels a little too on the nose after they just announced that the game’s gonna shut down, and might effectively get erased from the face of the earth like it never existed. So it feels a little cruel to focus so much on that type of subject matter if that’s how things are gonna end up, lol.

I did still really like this event, though. It’s probably kinda polarizing, but I really like how aggressively sentimental it is, and I think it’s a really satisfying resolution to Euden and Zethia’s story together. The part where Euden turns around and finds Zethia in spite of the risks genuinely made me emotional.

I’m actually kinda curious now to see how they fill up the last two chapters of the story, since this event already covered a lot of material that I would have expected to be in the main story instead. I mean, it’s basically a main story chapter in all but name, since it directly bridges the newest chapter with the upcoming one.

Anyway, aside from all that, I haven’t had time to use Euden and Zethia yet, but they look really neat, and I think they were the most fitting units to release for the game’s final new banner. It’s a shame that certain characters like the rest of the Agito and the zodiacs won’t ever be playable, and that certain characters didn’t get alts, but it’s nice to end things off with this sort of book-end.

It’s also really nice to finally get Origa. I was afraid that they wouldn’t have time to release her before the game ended. It kinda bugs me that she overlaps in weapon type with Gala Emile, but oh well. At least she’s a really good unit.

It was also a huge relief that they released Gala Nedrick at the last minute, since I really wanted to get him. It feels kinda weird to release such a unique and interesting character right at the end of the game, but I like how he plays. He’s extremely strong in Kaleidoscape, at the very least, but I also like how he synergizes with Gala Zethia.

For some reason we’re also getting a Valerio spiral, which is kinda bizarre, since they didn’t even announce it until after the end of service reveal. I know they were probably already working on it, but still. At the very least, it looks like a really good spiral, and we really needed something like this to flesh out the options for water units. It’s at least nice that he can get some sort of place in the meta, since he was basically dead on arrival and never had any sort of niche.

I guess there’s not really that much more to say, other than that I still really love this game, and I don’t regret the time or money I spent on it. I do kinda regret the fact that I stalled for so long on getting into stuff like the Sindom fights, but I think that also says a lot about why the game’s ended up in this position, lol.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost

[murasaki-murasame]

It took me longer to get around to this than I wanted, but anyway, here’s how things have gone with me in Granblue from around Valentine’s up to now.

TL;DR: I got a whole bunch of extremely cool new stuff, but I keep circling back to ‘Elmott’s really good [and cute] and I want to gush about him like an annoying door to door salesman’ :)

I’m not gonna bother listing out most of the random gold moons and summons and stuff I got, aside from the important ones, and I can’t remember exactly which banner I got certain things from, but anyway, here’s what I remember.

Firstly, I might have mentioned it in my last GBF post here, but I got Miranda from the max skill level weapon scamcha. I can’t even remember the details of that, but I think I did it because it had Valentine’s Vira’s weapon on the list, or maybe it was just because I’m an Agni player and there were some gacha weapons on there that would have benefited me a lot.

Either way, I don’t think Miranda was my main target, but I’ve been extremely pleased with her since then. I’ve had a lot of fun doing an Ultima Staff team with Neko/Warlock MC, Elmott, Miranda, and C-Altair. It’s actually a surprisingly solid team comp that doesn’t even feel overly gimmicky.

Anyway, I ended up skipping the Valentine’s banner [aside from the free pulls] since by that point I had decided to commit to sparking Lich and maybe also Fediel for the anniversary. Which was a shame, since all of the new Valentine’s units looked neat, and V-Vira seemed like she would have been really nice to have since I’m basically a fire main at this point.

Then I proceeded to get her from one of the daily single pulls on the random 3% banner after she came out, where she wasn’t even on rate-up, lmao. I vividly remember that I was still half-asleep in the morning while logging in to do my daily pull, and I spent a while genuinely wondering if I was still asleep when that happened.

So yeah, I somehow ended up getting her, so now she’s another tool I have for when I start breaking into actual high-end content with my flame team. I haven’t actually used her much since then, but she seems very fun. It’s always nice to get more defense-oriented fire characters who aren’t super gimped in one way or another. I hope her Grand version’s upcoming 5-star uncap takes some notes from how her Valentine’s version works, since it feels like the best version of the Aegis Merge archetype that we’ve gotten thus far.

I also got Benjamin from a suptix in early February, but I may have mentioned that before. Anyway, even if he’s maybe not the super optimal character for this set-up, he lets me do a full chain every turn with my earth team of Rising Force, Benjamin, Satyr, and Monika. Which is really strong and mostly self-sufficient, although it can be a little boring, lol.

Then we get into the anniversary stuff. To start with, I got a dupe Y-Ingwie from the first anniversary scamcha, along with SSR Farrah and Juri.

Around the middle of the month I decided to use my annitix on H-Vane, after a lot of deliberation. I might have been better off getting someone like S-Shalem or Y-Izmir, but for one thing I think Halloween units are probably more annoying to get in the long run, but I also just like Vane more, lol. Even if he’s probably better off staying in the back-line.

I got a whole bunch of random gold moons and stuff along the way in my free rolls and stuff, but in terms of new stuff, I got Azusa, Abby, and L-Arulumaya from the first flash gala we had. I was tempted to use my spark here since I really wanted S-Medusa, for similar reasons to V-Vira, and Yuni would have been nice as well, but I decided to save since I would have ended up with more of a discount on the second flash gala.

So then on that second flash gala, I ended up getting [including my roulette pulls] Grand Lancelot [!], LanVane, and then I sparked Lich. Oh, and also like with V-Vira, I somehow ended up getting S-Medusa on this banner even though she wasn’t on rate-up anymore, lmao.

I also haven’t had much time to use S-Medusa yet since I want to wait until I can uncap my fire Opus weapon to go all in on skill cap, but I’m quite excited for when I get around to setting up a dedicated skill damage team and grid. I have more or less all the tools for it now, and all the characters. I haven’t spent bars on my two S-Kumbhira spears, but I’m not in a hurry to.

Lancelot was a surprise, but at least it helps lessen the sting from when I sparked on his banner and didn’t get either him or earth Satyr. At least now I have both of them, one way or another, lol. It’s good to get more good water units, though. I know he has some annoying restrictions, but I have the right sort of characters to help enable him, so he feels really nice to have. It was a little awkward, though, since I had just switched over to using a water staff team because I made an Ultima Staff for my fire team, lol.

I started using Skyleap for the anniversary to get the extra crystals from the log-in bonus [though I’m gonna keep using it since it’s a good source of class points and stuff], and I ended up getting Dark Sarunan with the special Skyleap SSR ticket thing.

Between then and the premium gala where I planned on sparking for Fediel, I randomly got Ewiyar [the character] and Light Silva.

I think this probably happened pretty early in the roulette, but anyway, the grand ticket from the anniversary event thing got me a Rein dupe. Which kinda stung, but honestly it was probably the most helpful grand dupe weapon I could have gotten, lol. I ended up barring it and my existing copy, which at least means now I’m not dependent on C-Altair to get a good crit rate. It’s not 100% even with double Agni, but when I have the resources for it I plan on barring Gangsta Knife, which will round out the crit rate, along with giving enmity and garrison. The Rein fists also give a fair amount of DATA, which is very nice for stuff like my staff team which doesn’t have much innate DATA.

Then the first premium gala rolled around, along with the second scamcha. I got it partly to fund my Fediel spark and partly to try and lucksack her on it, but I just got a G-Narmaya dupe, lol.

As for the banner itself, I ended up sparking on it, and it ended up being pretty crazy, lol. Along the way, I got:

-Nezha

-Water Sturm

-Azazel

-Grand Wilnas [!!!]

-Summer Tabina [!]

-SSR Cucuroux

-SR Jasmine [how did I not have her by now, lmao]

-Cain

-Belial [!!!!!!!!]

-Fire Anthuria

-Summer Meg [!]

And then I sparked Fediel.

It would have been nice to lucksack Kumbhira, but Fediel was my main target, mostly since I finally want to just get the Lich/Fediel combo over and done with.

That’s a lot of new characters to get from a single spark, on top of the random gold moons and stuff I got, but I’m still surprised at how high value some of the stuff I got from it was.

For one thing, Wilnas ended up being the third fire unit this year who I had to skip, only to then luck my way into later on, which feels like the game’s way of convincing me to keep committing to being an Agni lord no matter how much the fanbase shits on it, lmao. It’s also worth noting that I also got my first copies of Michael and the Shiva summon recently, so things have lined up really well for me when it comes to my fire team. Which does make me sorta regret not annitixing Y-Izmir, but honestly I think I have enough options at this point that I can get by without her. It does also make me want to get Anila at some point, though.

Over the course of the roulette, the other somewhat noteworthy summons I got were Bonito, a dupe S-Mandrake, Titan, Grand Order, and enough Rose Queen dupes that I can probably fully uncap her. But mostly I’m still just surprised that I managed to randomly get Belial, lol. I was honestly planning to have to sierotix him like I did with Bubs. At least now I feel retroactively justified in using my free T3 ticket from last summer on G-Narmaya instead of him. I haven’t used any stones on him yet, though, since I’m waiting until I have the materials for his 4-star uncap. But I’ve already got him on all my grids.

Anyway, I’m not done sliming them yet since it’s kinda agonizing to do it outside of magfest, but I’ve used Lich and Fediel a fair bit [along with S-Tabina], and they’re definitely strong, but I feel like they rely pretty heavily on you also having a developed dark grid. It’s at least a real stark contrast to my fire team, where arguably the characters aren’t as strong, but I have a lot more power in the grid due to the grand weapons and stuff I’ve barred, so my fire team feels way stronger. Like, even with one of Lich’s weapons in my dark grid, and one Avatar staff, I can only hit like 1.5-2 million on my charge attacks even when Fediel’s buff is up, unless I have something else like Freyr buffs going on. Lich’s end of turn nuke also only hits for around 2-3 million or so.

Which, compared to my fire team hitting 3 million charge attacks [with Elmott being my only real source of CA buffs], and Elmott’s double nuke hitting for over 2 million without any skill cap buffs in my grid, feels almost disappointing, lmao.

They definitely provide an insane amount of defense and utility, though, which I appreciate. One of the main reasons I caved in and got them is because I didn’t like feeling obligated to play enmity, so having a super tanky team that doesn’t feel like it’s constantly on the verge of death is nice, even if I have a lot of work to do with my grid before it can reach it’s damage potential.

I think for most content I probably won’t actually use S-Tabina as a character, but she does help Lich and Fediel do more skill damage, and if I ever go Hades then her weapon would be nice to have.

I haven’t tried S-Meg yet since I haven’t bothered doing her fate episodes, but she’s also really nice to have. I’ve always felt that I had the least amount of dark characters compared to other elements, so in general it’s just nice to get some good limited dark units in addition to my spark targets.

Also, while I remember, I don’t care about most of the random gold moons I got, but I now have enough copies of fire Illnott’s gun to fully uncap it [one or two came from event SSR tickets, I think], as well as earth Nemone’s axe, which seems nice to have if I ever go Titan. Which I guess I have most of the resources for aside from the bars, since I have one copy of Titan itself, along with the weapons from Eugen, Golden Knight, Cain, and Leona. I also got a dupe of F-Siegfried’s sword, which will be nice to have if I ever have enough bars to justify building an actual Agni enmity grid. Which I’m not very motivated to do since I don’t like enmity and my fire grid already feels very strong, but still.

Then after that I threw like 40 rolls on the second premium gala to try and lucksack Y-Silva, but I just got the Lu Woh summon, lol. I kinda regret it, but I should still be able to spark for summer anyway.

I guess Y-Silva is probably gonna be my main spark target for summer, unless a new summer or grand character comes out that I want, but it’d take a fair bit to make me prioritize someone else over her. I finally have Wilnas, and she’s basically designed to enable him, which is why I threw some summons to try and get her in the first place.

With that being said, I do think that Elmott is actually a very good substitute for her. He’s not quite as good at specifically boosting Wilnas’ DPS like she is, but he provides similar CA buffs and a weaker uplift, along with dispel/skill damage spam. In a funny way, it feels like S-Medusa and Y-Silva are like if you took the dispel/skill damage and CA buffs/uplift parts of Elmott’s kit and split them off into two separate characters. They’re stronger at those specific niches than he is, but he packages those different things into one character. He’s also better than S-Medusa for dispel spam in most cases because he can double-activate it and doesn’t require as much ramp-up, and Elmott’s access to CA reactivation can be quite useful in it’s own right, especially since it gives Wilnas a bit more meter.

Basically I just want to preach about how much I like Elmott, and why I used the free perpetuity ring they gave out on him, aside from the fact that he’s cute, lmao. I honestly think he deserves his current place on the tierlist, even though I’ve seen people object to him being on the same tier as Athena and S-Kumbhira. I could see him getting knocked down a tier, but it’s also worth noting that he’s an extremely good Guild Wars character, on top of his value in other content. His reactive dispel spam is like tailor made for GW [just look at how Dark Cassius was the MVP of dark GW solely because he has a worse verseion of Elmott’s dispel spam, and that’s basically all he provides, lol], and if you don’t have a full team of unworldly charge attack characters to OTK with, then his teamwide CA buff passive is really good to help boost your damage, especially with the Freyr key, and he also provides some attack and CA buffs when he charge attacks. He also gets CA reactivation [which doubles the buffs from his charge attack] if you need to press an extra button.

He also seems genuinely good for certain HL raids due to his dispel spam, CA reactivation, and CA buffs. Viking also makes the uptime on his buffs more manageable.

I need to do more experimenting with it, but with my team of Viking, Elmott, Miranda, and Wilnas, I’m able to get Wilnas to charge attack roughly once every three turns. Maybe four turns in longer fights, but we’ll see. I’m pretty sure that with Y-Silva you can get it down to a charge attack with him every two turns, but I think that also requires an extra source of charge bar gain or something, and at that point you might be investing too much into enabling Wilnas and missing out on other utility you need. Which loops back into why I think Elmott being a jack of all trades is useful, lol. Same with Miranda, actually.

Whenever we get our next suptix, I’m probably gonna get Sylph. Which I was planning to do anyway, but now that I have both S-Medusa and Wilnas, she seems even more useful to have.

So yeah, even though I put so many resources into sparking Lich and Fediel, I ended up being more interested in how my fire team’s turned out, lmao.

I even managed to get Anthuria, so I might end up sparking Aoidos from the classic gacha when we get enough free summons for that, so I can set up a meme fire hype team. Which wouldn’t be very optimal compared to my other options, but it sounds fun.

Hopefully now I can just commit to saving for a summer spark, but we’ll see how that goes, lol.

#murasaki rambles #granblue fantasy #you are not immune to elmott propaganda #anyway lich and fediel are neat I guess :V

[murasaki-murasame]

I completely forgot to make a post about it when it happened, but I pulled for Phares and Valyx when their banner came out, lol. So here’s how that went, from what I remember of it.

To start with, I got Phares in my first batch of single tickets, so maybe I should have just stopped there, but Valyx was my main goal, so I kept going. Thankfully I wasn’t interested in sparking Michael, so being left with one spark target was a relief.

But then it took up to like 230 summons to actually get Valyx, and along the way I got like two or three Phares dupes and no copies of Michael, lol. I guess I didn’t have to spark him, but it kinda stung. It was enough summons to still feel like most of a spark, but not enough for me to justify finishing it to get Michael, so that was awkward.

I also got a Ramona dupe halfway through just to make things worse, lol.

I haven’t had much time to use them in endgame content yet, since even though I’m trying to break into the Sindom fights I’ve been more busy with GBF lately, but they both seem really good at what they do. I’m honestly kinda surprised that they’re permanent units, and that they were all released on the same banner.

I’ve done several Kaleidoscape runs with them, though, and at least in that mode, Phares is good, but Valyx feels like he’s in the highest tier on the list, along with the likes of Yukimura and Basileus. He’s very tanky and you never lose time from being knocked back, but he also does a whole lot of damage. In particular, his unique force strike is enough to stunlock most enemies while also doing lots of damage, so I typically just spend the whole run spamming that and mowing my way through everything. Hit-count enemies are annoying to deal with, but at least his force-strike does more hits than most axe units can achieve, so it’s not that bad.

I think Phares actually kinda suffers in this mode a bit since there’s so much time spent running around that it’s hard to keep up his dragondrive, which is way less of an issue in boss fights. But mostly I think his rotations are kinda clunky to do manually, so he doesn’t feel that fun to play. But for actual endgame content he’s pretty much designed to be exactly what you need for those fights, lol.

Anyway, I think at the moment I have like 150 summons, or maybe a bit more, but I haven’t gotten this round of Trials of the Mighty wyrmite yet, and I haven’t done the two new compendium events yet, so hopefully by the time the 3.5-year anniversary gala comes around I’ll be able to spark on it without dipping into my emergency reserves. At the very least there should be free tenfolds during it.

My main spark target there would probably be Sheila [if she’s the next gala unit], so I can continue my streak of having all the gala units, but if I get her along the way, I might spark Ciella, if they let us spark any gala unit/dragon we want.

And if we get a dream summon around then like I’m hoping we do, I’m still planning on using it on Sandalphon. If we also get a free dream summon I guess I might use that on F-Joachim, but I dunno if they’ll do that again soon.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost #I haven't really been on tumblr lately so I guess I just completely forgot to do this lmao

[murasaki-murasame]

After what’s felt like a billion events dedicated to Emile’s redemption arc, he’s now finally available, in pog gala form! [Along with another event involving his redemption arc, lmao]

So anyway I went ahead and summoned for him, and here’s how that went :)

The TL;DR is that I had to spark for him [which tbh I deserved after how good my luck’s been over this holiday season], but I had more than enough for that so it wasn’t a big deal, and it was actually a really good spark, all things considered.

I think at this point I only have a little over 20 permanent adventurers and a handful of dragons that I’m missing, but along the way to sparking Emile I managed to get Summer Chelle, Humanoid Jupiter, Sharpshooter Sarisse, and High Chthonius, who were all new, so that’s exciting. Especially since Summer Chelle would have been in the running for my next dream summon. The rest are whatever, but the novelty of getting multiple new off-banner 5-stars at this stage in the game is really cool.

I think I started off with a little over 400 summons, since after doing the spark [and doing some of the new event], I’m at around 110 summons. So I’m probably gonna be skipping Valentines unless I want to deplete my entire emergency stash, but I can probably live with skipping it.

I haven’t had the time to play around with Emile yet, so I can only speculate about how good he is, but on paper he seems extremely good, and the showcase video they posted on twitter helped confirm some of my hopes about how his kit works.

Like, I wasn’t entirely sure how his ego gauge mechanic would work in practice, but it looks like it’s literally just the skill reservoir mechanic that Alex and Audric have, and he can indeed spam his skills three times in a row if he has max gauge. So as long as he has people on the team to enable team level 3 amps, and assuming his gauges charge as fast as other skill reservoir characters, he should easily be able to reach and maintain high amp levels.

It’s making me a lot more tempted to dream summon Sandalphon, since I think she’s the only source of team level 3 defense amp in water, and she’s probably be better than DY-Lily for endgame content. But we’ll see how that goes. Now that I have S-Chelle, the list of units I’d be interested in dream summoning is pretty small.

His amp skills also seem to work based on a large semicircular AoE in front or behind him, so you probably don’t need to be very precise to get them to work properly, which is nice.

Going by what I’ve seen of datamines, his ‘dragondrive’ is in practice a nuke with 10,000% skill damage mods, which sounds extremely good on paper. The animation is kinda long, but I don’t think it’s any longer than something like Catherine’s S2, so it’s still probably worth using. Either way, it basically seems like it’s an extra damaging skill on top of everything else in his kit, at the expense of not being able to shapeshift, which sounds like a good trade-off.

And then there’s the fact that he’s heavily built around shared skills, since he has enough shared skill points to equip any pair of them that he wants, all damaging shared skills inflict frostbite [which also seems to last 42 seconds, going by datamines, which seems really good], and they all have a 150% damage multiplier applied to them, which when you factor in the damage reduction for shared skills probably ends up being a 75% increase over the original damage mods of the skills, which seems extremely good, especially since he can get 46% skill haste from just his own kit, which should mostly balance out the high SP costs of most shared skills.

It’s hard to tell what’ll be ‘optimal’ for him in terms of shared skills, but in a broad sense I think the best part of this is how flexible it makes him. You can go for the highest damaging skills you can find, or you can give him skills that inflict multiple afflictions to set up a multi-punisher comp, or you can give him two healing skills, or you can give him doublebuff-enabling skills, or cheap dispel skills, or so on. He seems like he can fill basically any role that needs to be filled in your water team.

That flexibility also makes him feel very future-proof, since he’ll always be able to fill some kind of role, even if certain things become less or more important over time, and if we get entirely new mechanics introduced in the future [like overdamage or amps] that you can use via shared skills, that can let him find a place in future meta comps as well.

At worst, we might somehow reach a point where amps become useless, but even if you ignore his two main skills, you still have his shared skills, and his dragondrive nuke, so it’s hard to imagine him ever being totally invalidated. Unless we get other water units in the future with this exact same mechanic, lol.

All in all, I really love how his entire kit is themed around his personality. It’s very gimmicky, but in a way that works out to be very strong, and it makes him extremely unique.

Also, in other recent news, Sarisse’s spiral looks extremely good, but I don’t have as much to say about it, since it’s not quite as weird or new as Emile’s. I do have the whole Exodia comp so I might not have any real reason to invest in her, but I’m really curious about the idea of replacing Laxi with her, and replacing K-Elly with Y-Cleo, so I can see if I can get both team level 3 strength and defense amps going at the same time. It’d at least make endgame flame fights a lot more lenient if I can make that work, even if it might lower my damage.

I’m slightly bitter that they seem to be holding back Phares and Valyx to release them in a prize showcase or something after this, but oh well. I cared a lot more about getting Emile, so I’m content with how things turned out.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost #my little scrunkly scrimbo (shakes him violently)

[murasaki-murasame]

Compared to the massive wall of text going over my recent gacha process over in GBF, there’s a lot less to talk about with Dragalia Lost, and yet on the other hand I feel much more positive about it, lmao. And aside from my gacha pulls I’ve also got stuff to say about recent updates and stuff.

Anyway I’ll just put it under a cut.

I think the only real summoning that’s happened since the last post I made was the zodiac banner where we got some free summons. I definitely don’t remember everything I got from that, but from what I remember, I got Cecile and Shingen from the free summons, which was cool. I dunno if I’ll ever complete the zodiac bingo since Nobunaga and Yoshitsune are going to be a massive pain to get in the future, but it’s nice to get new ones.

Then I decided to at least chase after Yukimura, since I’d rather not miss out on another zodiac, and she looked really fun. Thankfully I got her at around the 120 summons mark, and along the way I also got both Fudo Myo-o and my first copy of Gabriel in the same tenfold, which was a really funny coincidence. At that point I decided to just quit while I was ahead. I had enough to spark for Ciella without dipping into my reserves, but there’ll be opportunities to get her later. And I don’t really think she’ll be necessary to letting me break into endgame water content or anything, even though she does seem really strong.

Both Shingen and Yukimura seem really good in general, but they’re especially fun to play in Kaleidoscape. Especially Yukimura, who seems like by far one of the easiest and fastest units to use there.

And on that note, I’ve spent a lot of time with Kaleidoscape since it came out, and even though it’s not perfect, I’m really enjoying it. It’s a really fun way to test out different characters, and to give certain characters room to shine, although I’ve been avoiding anyone who I know wouldn’t work well in this mode.

There’s certain units who everyone says are good in this mode [because they are], like Yukimura and Basileus, but I want to shout out DY-Nevin as a surprisingly powerful unit in this mode. I dunno if it’s intentional or not, but the automatic skill charge in Kaleidoscape on each floor ignores his passive that reduces the effect of skill prep on his S1, which means that you can immediately press it and unlock his sigil. I think you can even do it if you die and have to retry a floor. So unlike even Basileus, he has absolutely zero ramp-time, and gets to immediately be a super strong unit with no real drawbacks.

I actually found him to be both easier and faster to use than Notte, who I also tried out. Maybe I just got unlucky with her, but I found her to be kinda slow, and surprisingly fragile. I think part of it is that normal mobs in that mode do so much damage that even Big Notte’s damage reduction doesn’t help much, whereas DY-Nevin [like with Yukimura or Gala Zethia] can still do damage while dodging a lot, so he feels a lot more durable than she is, despite not having any actual defense buffs.

I also found both Leif and Gatov to be major slogs to play, and they also both felt kinda frail. I think that was mostly just an issue of me not enjoying the process of switching stances for more than an hour.

I’ve used all of the rapid-fire manacasters [now that I have them all, after getting Cecile], and most of them were perfectly fine to use and felt very strong, but I must have gotten severely unlucky with my Gala Leonidas run, because that was the only time I’ve ever ended up not having the DPS to kill the floor 50 boss. It wasn’t even an issue of not having dispels, or not being tanky enough, I just couldn’t kill the Twins fast enough no matter how many times I retried and used different strategies, lol. But every time I’ve had a run with them as the boss since then, I’ve ended it with like a minute and a half or more on the clock, even with weaker characters.

Anyway, it’s a really fun mode, but some stuff needs to be ironed out. Like how much of a hassle it is to sort through your portrait prints, or to figure out at a glance what each one does.

Aside from that, I decided to skip Kimono Notte’s banner. At the moment I have a little over 300 summons [on top of my emergency reserves], but she’s not limited, and I already have both Luca and Thor, so it wasn’t a tempting banner. I might end up dream summoning her in the future, but she doesn’t really seem to be on the same tier as AO or even Sandalphon. I’m honestly surprised she doesn’t at least have overdamage, since light doesn’t have anyone with that yet. If she did, that’d make her way more tempting to me. But as it is, especially with the change to how she and Sandalphon work on AI, she doesn’t seem like a huge step up from Vixel and Hildegarde.

I’m probably gonna summon for Gala Emile if he comes out this month, though. I’m honestly really excited for him, lol. This has been a long time coming, after like three whole events and part of one adventurer story being centered on his redemption arc.

Water definitely feels like it needs some more good adventurers, so I’m curious to see what type of unit he ends up being. His new outfit makes him look like a wand or staff unit, but I’d lean toward wanting him to be a wand. We got Sandalphon really recently, and water just has a lot of healers in general, but Lily is basically the only water wand that anyone uses, so that’s a bigger niche that needs to be filled. Realistically he’ll probably have a unique attack combo so he could be literally anything, but I’m just focusing on what we can make guesses about, lol.

I feel like one way or another he’s probably going to overlap a bit with some of water’s top meta units, since they already cover a lot of bases, even if most of them aren’t super powerful. I think the most rare type of utility he could provide would be freeze affliction, frostbite resistance reduction, or maybe even freeze resistance reduction. Other than that, as much as I’d like him to get overdamage since I don’t have Sandalphon [though I do have DY-Lily], he probably won’t. Hopefully he has high hit counts, though, since we need more options for that niche in water.

Usually gala units just enable high levels of team amps without giving them very quickly on their own, but it’d be nice if he ended up being a strength amp buffer on the level of someone like Isaac. It might not be necessary when S-Marishiten exists, but it’d be nice. He might use defense amps, especially to set him apart from Gala Elly, but that’d also kinda overlap with Sandalphon and Regina.

At the very least it’s probably safe to assume that he’ll be extremely good, and designed specifically for endgame content, since that’s what they’ve been doing for a fair while now. So he should be worth chasing after.

It’d be nice if I get him early and can save a full spark for Valentines, but I’m willing to spark him if I need to. I just hope Valentines doesn’t end up tempting me and I have to skip it, since those units are really annoying to get in the long run, lol.

I’m also curious to see if the event at the end of the month focusing on the royal family will lead to use getting a non-limited alt of one of them, or someone like Phares or Valyx. We also might get a welfare alt of one of them from the event itself, but it might just be a facility event, so we might not. I guess we might only get Gala Emile, since we seem to be entering the stage they mentioned of less new units each month, but it seems like a good opportunity for a new sibling alt.

Anyway, assuming we get a dream summon around the 3.5-year anniversary, I think my choice would be between K-Notte, S-Chelle, S-Leonidas, and Sandalphon. It really depends on who I think will benefit me more, so we’ll see how it goes. And if we get another free one, then my options would be a lot more limited since most of the units I want came out in the last year so they probably wouldn’t be on it, but I think I’d end up choosing either Faris or Formal Joachim. At this point I have so many ‘old’ units that the most meta pick would probably just be F-Joachim for his shared skill, lol.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost

[murasaki-murasame]

This is super late, but anyway here’s what happened over the course of the GBF new years roulette, and some of the more recent stuff as well.

[This is going to be very long since there’s a whole bunch to catch up on because of how long I’ve procrastinated on this]

I genuinely can’t remember how far back I got some of these characters, so I might be repeating myself a bit, but anyway my last three suptixes went to Light Percy, Elmott, and Tikoh. At this point I’ve just embraced that I’m becoming a fire/light main, so I’m pretty happy with those choices, lol. Percy isn’t very optimal for anything, but he works nicely with Aglovale, especially on the backline. Elmott isn’t as flashy as I wish he was, but he seems like a great dispel-bot for raids where I need it. And Tikoh just seems like a really good healer for light, especially since I don’t have Fif and honestly she’s not a high priority for me.

A while ago I also got Cerberus, who I think was from an event ticket or something. My dark roster kinda sucks so I decided to uncap and eventually level her up. I’m not entirely sure how much use I’ll get out of her even with my small dark roster, but still.

Around the middle of December I decided to do the Christmas scamcha, which got me a C-Nemone dupe, along with Catherine. At least her weapon apparently has some niche uses, lol.

Then I got Wind Metera from another event ticket. I don’t really remember what she does, but I don’t think I’ll ever use her. I also got my billionth dupe of Danua from another event ticket around the same time, which is just kinda hilarious at this point. I’m pretty sure I have more than enough to fully uncap one of her weapons already.

Then we got into the roulette, starting with Christmas. I decided to finish off the spark, which wasn’t a huge deal since I had over 300 summons at the time and they gave us nearly two thirds of a spark for free on that banner, but instead of making the smart choice and going for C-Naru, I instead went for C-Altair, lol. I’d be the first to admit that he’s basically a strictly worse version of Summer Cagliostro and doesn’t in any way measure up to C-Naru, but I like him more, and despite his kit being sub-optimal, I think he’s more interesting in what he provides. I’d like to make a meme fire staff crest team with him, Elmott, S-Teena, and Warlock MC work out, but I think that’d just be a meme. I don’t really think C-Altair is going to actually be worth using unless flame gets a crest unit on the level of Aglovale, or something like that. Hopefully it ends up being an investment that pays off.

Along the way in that spark, though, I got C-Mahira, C-Clarisse, and C-Meteon, along with dupes of C-Magisa, C-Nemone [again], Lamretta, Ferry, *another fucking Danua*, and Light Percy. Just a few months after I suptixed him :’)

Anyway, even though I didn’t have C-Naru after that, and I got stung by getting a C-Magisa dupe after I’d previously chosen to spark her instead of C-Naru, without ever actually using her since then, I still chose to get Altair. At the very least I’m really happy to get C-Mahira. She’s not quite as amazing as I first thought she was when I looked at her kit, but I was probably gonna end up wanting to get her anyway, so at least this means I don’t have to worry about using an annitix or anything on her. At the moment I think I probably have a good enough roster to take on high end content with my light team [ignoring my grid], but I’d still like to get Cagliostro eventually.

Then we get to the Grand Lancelot banner on it, which contained some of the most insulting rolls I’ve ever experienced, lol. It wasn’t that I didn’t get lots of SSRs. It wasn’t even just that I got my first copy of the Lich summon when I could have gotten the actual character Lich herself. No, the game also decided that instead of Grand Lancelot or Earth Satyr, I deserved to get dupes of OG Lancelot and Fire Satyr instead. Thankfully I didn’t really care that much about either of them, but it was just hilariously dumb. Anyway, partly inspired by spite, I decided to finish off the spark and get Grand Jeanne.

Yes I know I should have gotten Lich instead since now we’re in the middle of dark GW, and Fediel also exists now, and so on and so forth, but I like playing light way more than dark, so I was gonna have to spark Jeanne sooner or later. I also feel like light GW will probably be in a few months, and I’m a lot more likely to be able to go hard on that, so I think it’s worth it. I’m still probably going to try and spark both Lich and Fediel some time this year, though.

Along the way I also got water Societte, dark Zeta, light Sarunan, and dupes of Shitori, flame Percy, Freezie, Altair, Grand Sandalphon, and like three dupes of Orchid.

Then immediately into the next banner I got an Elmott dupe, just a few weeks after I suptixed him as well :’)))

I think the only other characters I got on that banner were a dupe Grand Ferry, and then I lucksacked Cidala on the final day of the banner. I didn’t get Fediel, but I don’t think I had enough to finish off that spark after sparking on two banners right before that.

I definitely feel like I’m in a hell of my own making with how I don’t like playing dark, but I’m consciously choosing not to save sparks for the good dark units who would make the element way better to play. But I still just prefer elements like fire and light, so here we are.

Getting Cidala at least makes me feel better about not sparking C-Naru, since they ended up filling really similar roles. I know it’d still be worth it to get C-Naru in the future, but only if I really care about doing endgame burst with my earth team, and I think I’d rather use light for that, or even wind. At least I have Summer Illnott to make their ramp-up better.

That was when we got the Beelzebub summon, though, who was a real game-changer. Enough so that I actually ended up getting a sierotix and using it on him and then uncapping him with stones, lol. It might have been a waste, since I don’t have Belial yet, but honestly I feel like he provides more than enough quality of life to be worth it. I still don’t have Threo, so he makes farming stuff like Angel Halo and Arcarum WAY easier, and I’m actually able to do EX+ OTK within a small amount of button presses because of him. Since both my grid and roster for dark still suck [partly since I was kinda planning to not do much this GW anyway], it’s far from optimal, but I’m using Seox, Veight, and S-Zooey, which can do EX+ in two buttons in strike time, and four buttons outside of that.

Getting Beelzebub also inspired me to actually bother with sliming, which also motivated me to finally finish the process of uncapping Seox, which was also a pretty integral part of me being able to do this.

Just don’t talk to me about the fact that I forgot that recruiting Seox from the 6th anniversary event meant I already had 50 revenant weapon fragments, and I wasted a gold brick to fully enhance one of his weapons ;_; I think I started working on that weapon before I recruited him, and then I must have forgotten that I had no reason to finish it, since I ended up 40-boxing another ten of his weapons that I could use to finish uncapping him without wasting a gold brick. Which is exactly what I ended up doing.

Sometimes I wish the recruitment/uncapping process for Eternals wasn’t so bizarrely complicated and built around extremely valuable and rare items, lol.

Anyway, Beelzebub has also made other low-level grinding stuff notably faster as well, so I might finally be motivated to actually work on some of my grids.

Oh yeah, and then we got the last roulette banner, which I decided to also spark on, lmao. I’m nothing if not consistent with how badly I prioritize these things. I ended up sparking Earth Satyr, partly out of spite for not getting her on her actual debut banner, but also because I really like her kit, and even though I don’t plan on using earth for high-end burst, it’s nice to have more options for long, difficult fights with my earth team.

In the same banner I also got wind Lennah, wind Lancelot, Medusa, and dupes of Sen, Therese, fire Percy [again], and earth Beatrix [twice, lol]. I dunno if I’ll ever use Medusa since I have at least three good earth crest units already, and wind Lancelot seems really bad, but I think he’s getting rebalanced eventually, so maybe that’ll make him good. Wind Lennah is really interesting, though. She’s a very old-fashioned sort of healer unit, but it’s nice to have one if I need it, and honestly I’ve always loved her design, and her earth version made me like her a lot as a character, so I’ve wanted her for ages, but never enough to suptix her. I definitely wish she was more like her earth version, gameplay-wise, but oh well. She makes up for it by having a big hat and a big poofy dress, which I think balances it out :V

Then we got the newest suptix, which is where I got Tikoh, like I said before. I was kinda tempted by Aoidos and Benjamin, but I think Tikoh is gonna provide way more utility for me in the long run. The Marionette Stars event also made me really like her as a character, so there’s that. I guess this also means I can run her with SSR Feather, so that’s fun.

Sometime after that we got the dark summon scamcha which I fell for because it had Belial on it, only for me to get a dupe Beelzebub, lmao. I can’t deny that really stung, but by that point I’d gotten lots of sliming done because of my original Beelzebub copy, so it didn’t feel as bad as it could have. And hey, this means that I’m safe if he gets an uncap that requires a dupe of him or something. Which is probably unlikely, but I guess it’s good to be safe. I think that’s the only potential use for a dupe of him since I already have an uncapped one, though, since you can’t put two in a grid at the same time.

But that arguably pales in comparison to how bad of a choice I made by throwing 80 rolls at the current gala with Cupitan and Wind Yggy, pretty much entirely out of a FOMO-fueled desire to lucksack a copy of Lich. Which, as you can guess, didn’t happen, lol. It honestly stings a lot, since I chose not to spark her during the roulette, but oh well. At least this didn’t involve me spending any real money, but now I’m stuck at like 10 summons left, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to spark during the anniversary, even with the usual free 100 summons on the last day of roulette. If I somehow can, I’ll probably get Fediel, unless Kumbhira’s uncap is really strong. Cagliostro is also tempting, but the desire to flesh out my dark roster is finally getting to me, as you can tell. 

Along the way I got Morrigna [the character], Wind Yggy, and dupes of Water Societte and Razia. Which definitely wasn’t worth the summons at all, lmao. Morrigna seems like a vastly inferior version of S-Korwa, and honestly Wind Yggy doesn’t interest me much now that I have Lennah. She seems much better for FA, but that’s not a huge priority for me to begin with, and even then she seems fairly mediocre as an FA healer. Her crest support also seems super weak, and her charge bar battery stuff doesn’t seem that potent either, but it might at least help Narmaya charge attack more often. I guess it would have been nice to get Cupitan, but the only reason I was summoning here at all was to try and lucksack Lich.

Either way, I wasn’t going to be able to spark on Valentines unless I chose not to spend any summons during roulette, and I have all but one of the Valentines units anyway so that’s not a huge priority for me. I could just annitix one of the new ones next year or something if they’re really insane.

And on the note of the annitix, I’m still kinda torn on who to get. Y-Zahl or S-Halmal would be optimal for light burst, which is something I actually care about right now, butI could always use Percy as a budget option. Which would at least make me feel better about suptixing him.

Other than that, I could finally get C-Naru, who’d probably really help out my earth roster, but I still feel like I just don’t care about her much, especially now that I have Cidala. But we’ll see.

Then there’s also Halloween Vane, who’s tempting both for husbando reasons, and because his passive defense buff seems extremely useful. And tbh he doesn’t seem that bad as a frontline unit, even though he obviously can’t compete with Narmaya’s damage, and for some reason they decided to gimp his tanking abilities outside of his defense passive, so if we’re talking about stuff like endgame raids, I might be better off leaving him on the backline and using Lennah instead to as a defensive support unit, lol.

I also got a lot of random summons over the last few months, the notable ones out of them being Thor, Metatron, Ewiyar, Galleon, a Wilnas dupe, and an Uriel dupe from another scamcha. Which is actually a pretty good set of summons to get, even if they’re not as exciting as new characters.

I can’t exactly complain about how any of this went, since most of my issues were caused by my own bad choices that I made knowing exactly what the consequences were. I’ve already spent a lot of hours sliming for some of my new characters, but I still have more to level up.

Some of my elements are still in a bad place, but even with my water roster, getting water Societte makes me a bit more motivated to do more difficult raids with them.

Part of it is to do with the class mastery update, and specifically the buffs that Glorybringer got, but my light team feels even stronger than it did back when I got Aglovale and Nehan. The dark Xeno event gave me a taste of what I can achieve with what I have now, and it’s pretty exciting. Four or so turns of burst was enough to almost solo the Xeno raid, which I don’t think is very noteworthy for most people, but it was really exciting for me.

Along the same lines, I’m also going to use Glorybringer in fire [unless I go full Ultima/Hollowsky Spear strats and switch to Apsaras], which seems really promising, and I’m also happy to see that Nekomancer has found a niche as a high-end OTK class for stuff like GW, even though I’m not gonna be strong enough to make use of that for a while.

On that note, I’m actually pretty excited for light GW, which should hopefully be next. I should at least be able to achieve a ‘normal’ EX+ OTK by exploiting Beelzebub, but I do have a lot of options for OTK based on what I can achieve with my grid. I’ve got S-Shiva who seems good for both CA/nuke-based OTK and auto-based OTK, and for the former I also have V-Melissabelle and Light Sara, and for the latter I have SSR Feather, New Generations, and Levin Sisters. Plus characters like Lucio or Light Gawain, if I’m willing to press extra buttons, though at that point I’d be better off going for a normal CA/nuke-based OTK.

But even aside from that, I think my light roster and grid are good enough now for me to actually tackle NM95 and maybe NM150. I haven’t actually attempted either of those yet in any GW [at the moment I don’t feel strong enough for dark NM95 since I rely on enmity for damage but don’t have the defense options to stay alive], but I think I have a good balance of defense and offense with light at the moment.

Other than that, I guess my short-term goal is to try and hopefully save up for a discounted spark in anniversary, but I’m also hoping that at some point we get Wilnas as a grand unit. Really I just think fire is in desperate need of some powercreep, if only to make me feel justified in the 12-ish bars I’ve sunk into my Agni grid already, lmao.

#murasaki rambles #granblue fantasy #I dunno why it took me so long to get around to doing this lmao

[murasaki-murasame]

I probably shouldn’t have, but I decided to summon for Ayaha and Otoha because they look really fun and I already have other dream summon targets to worry about.

So here’s how that went.

I got them after 20 summons, lol.

I still don’t have Gala Agni, but I have Gala Leonidas and all the other good flame dragons already, so I’m just gonna quit while I’m ahead.

This was definitely very risky and stupid since I would have needed to go through most of my unread stories if I needed to actually spark them, but thankfully it all worked out in the end.

I’d accepted that this would mean skipping New Years, but I guess now I can probably still spark then if I really want to. I’d still have to go through a lot of my unread stories, but we’re getting like four events added to the compendium this month, along with the Kaleidoscape mode, and the New Years event itself, so that should help build up my stash. I think right now I have like 140-ish summons since I already got everything from the new event rerun, so the upcoming events should hopefully get me to around 200 summons. We also might get some random Christmas/New Years rewards, and maybe a free summon event, but we’ll see.

The annoying thing is that if it’s anything like last year, we’re probably getting two separate zodiac banners again with the new units spread across them, so i’d probably have to skip one of them anyway. But at the moment we don’t have any info on what to expect from that, so who knows how that’ll go. Going by the teaser epilogue we got from Mitsuhide’s event, which we now know was teasing at Izumo’s design, we’re probably gonna see the big dude as the tiger zodiac, and the person with the eyepatch as the off-schedule zodiac that’ll probably be on a separate banner.

Anyway, I haven’t had the time to mess around with them yet, but from all the videos and stuff I’ve seen showcasing them, I think AO are extremely good, and I’m kinda shocked that they’re permanent, since they have the level of power and utility that you’d expect from a gala unit.

Even though they’re [on paper] a staff unit, it seems like the best way to use them is to build them as a shapeshift spamming DPS unit, but even then, their healing actually seems good enough for most endgame content. H-Lowen might still be more consistent, but one upside to using a shapeshift build on them [especially with Mars] is that you get to also spam their healing skills a lot, which helps make up for them being relatively weak heals.

I’m not sure about all the exact numbers, but their dragon form seems extremely powerful. Maybe not as much as something like Nyx, but the combination of burn/scorchrend res down, stun/scorchrend affliction, a map-wide AoE skill, and a large AoE dragon strike seems extremely useful for most endgame flame content. They also have a dragon damage co-ability, which is really nice in general, and their combo = buff time chain co-ability also seems useful. 

Funnily enough I think Laxi is one of their best partners, since her high hit count can ramp up Leonidas’ dragon battery chain co-ability, and her team 3 strength amp can enable AO to fairly easily reach that on their own, since on top of everything else they do, they also have fast ramping team strength amps.

In general they do basically everything you could possibly want from a flame unit nowadays except for dispel, but you can have other characters cover that, or you can just give them a dispel shared skill or something, so that’s not a huge deal.

H-Lowen and Y-Cassandra will probably still have their niches [especially H-Lowen], but for the most part I think AO is going to be the dominant flame healer because of the sheer amount of buffs and utility she brings in addition to her heals.

Now I’m curious to see if we’ll get the other Agito bosses as adventurers, and how they’ll work, since AO’s entire kit is really heavily themed around the mechanics of their boss fight, which I think is really neat. I at least hope Volk doesn’t just get relegated to being a dragon, since I like his design a lot, and we already have his lance skin. Though on the other hand I also wonder if we’ll get Beast AO as a gala dragon in the future.

Also, I was wondering how they’d handle it if they ever made AO into adventurers, but I like the way that you swap between them in combat. I wish their win animation used both of them, but it’s kinda neat that it changes based on which one you’re using at the end of the fight. They also have a unique animation for when you summon them, which has both of them dropping down at the same time.

So yeah, I really don’t think I deserved to get this lucky considering how bad I’ve been at resisting the urge to summon recently, but here we are, lol. At least now I don’t have to worry about using a dream summon on them later. I think my next one will probably go to either Sandalphon, S-Leonidas, or S-Chelle, but we’ll see.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost #haha murder nuggets go brr

[murasaki-murasame]

I wasn’t sure at first if I was gonna summon on the Christmas banner since that’d make me risk skipping New Years, but both Nevin and Gatov ended up looking really good [in spite of the Nevin shared skill debacle], so I ended up going for them, lol.

Here’s what happened.

It’s been a few days since I summoned so I probably can’t remember everything that happened, but I’m pretty sure I got DY-Nevin after 40 summons, to start things off.

At that point I wasn’t entirely sure if Gatov was worth chasing after, since I already have Leonidas, but I like his whole play-style, and I can always just run them on the same team together, so I ended up going after him. Which took an extra 160 summons, which kinda stung a bit, but at least I didn’t have to spark, lol.

Though honestly the part that REALLY hurt was that, in addition to a Cassandra dupe and a Vayu dupe, I got TWO copies of Julietta before I got Gatov. That sorta situation is just uniquely cruel, lol. I also got like two or three DY-Nevin dupes along the way, which hurt a bit, but not as much as getting faked out by Julietta two times in the same summon session.

But on the other hand, that pain got mostly balanced out by the fact that I also got my first copy of Gala Beast Volk along the way. I was actually considering sparking for him if I got Gatov near the end of the spark, but thankfully I just got him off focus, lol. I ended up skipping the summon animation where he showed up, which made it a bit anti-climactic, but it’s nice to have him. I still don’t have Gala Agni, but I don’t think he was worth doing 100 extra summons for to spark, since I already have all the other good flame dragons.

I haven’t really had the time to experiment with either of them since I’ve been busy with travel recently, and I’ve been focusing a lot of my free time on Exos Heroes now that the big update for that game is out, but soon enough I want to try them out.

I still don’t really like the whole sigil mechanic, but DY-Nevin seems to have a really strong kit, and enough unique utility to make him stand out when Gala Notte also exists as a wind dagger. I also just enjoy running him with Basileus for aesthetic reasons since they’re both apostles and DY-Nevin’s outfit feels like it matches with Basileus, lol.

Thankfully Gatov seems to be roughly as strong as Leonidas, but he also has a more fun play-style, so that’s nice. He sounds kinda clunky as an AI unit, though, so that kinda sucks.

Anyway, I think I have a little over 90 summons left over [not counting my diamantium], and I still haven’t touched my stash of unread stories, so I should be able to spark on New Years if I end up needing to. And even after that I might be able to spark for Valentines without any big issues, but we’ll see.

The annoying thing is that we might get another split banner for New Years, so I might have to skip one of the new zodiac units in that case. They also might do a separate rerun of the old ones, which I’d probably skip even though I’m missing Nobunaga and Yoshitsune.

I’m also going to be skipping DY-Ilia, which I was a little concerned about at first, but then I saw her kit and immediately lost all interest in her, lol. I think she’s gonna end up being perfectly fine, but she just doesn’t have a lot going for her that I can’t at least do with characters I already own.

Her best use case seems to be as a defense amp bot, but that requires you to use Mars for skill prep and probably also Gala Leonidas for his dragon battery CCA. I feel like team 3 defense amps are also kinda overkill at this point since nothing is balanced around it, so it doesn’t seem as useful as something more offense-based.

There’s also the fact that we already have Undercover Grace who’s also focused on doing lots of personal damage and providing team defense amps, but she doesn’t require something like Mars in order to charge her amp fast enough to maintain it’s uptime. I’m not sure how easy it is to keep her from dying on auto, though, or how efficiently she uses her kit, but endgame flame content seems to have lots of mobs, so it doesn’t seem hard for her to get her stacks up enough to pump out team defense amps.

Grace only has access to level 2 team defense amps, but the difference between that and level 3 ones seems pretty irrelevant in most cases, and you can also just pair her with Gatov to get access to level 3 if you want to, lol.

So yeah, I’m pretty happy with how this went, and now I can just wait for New Years.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost

[murasaki-murasame]

Now that we’re all done with the free summons in Dragalia, here’s how the last few banners went for me.

For the wind focus banner, I got a dupe Tobias on the first day, then nothing until like a week later when I got a dupe Grimnir, but then the day after that I got Nino, so that was cool.

I think that was around when I did the platinum deluxe summons. The first one gave me Civilian Leif, along with a surprise Summer Patia [and maybe a dupe Summer Celliera if I remember right], and then the second one gave me Yukata Cleo. They weren’t my main picks for who I would have wanted, but at least they weren’t in the bottom rung.

I also got my scratcher summon around there, which got me a dupe Azazel. I think I already had a spare one sitting in my inventory, but maybe I’ll eventually grind for a second MUB copy through essences.

Then for the Halloween gala banner, I got Chronos from one of my early free summons, and then Halloween Laxi on my final free tenfold, and I did about 120 more summons to get Halloween Sylas. Along the way I got Summer Cait Sith, and dupes of Mid-0, Eugene, Curran, Ryszarda, Kimono Luca, and probably a couple of dragons I can’t remember.

And then for the hundredfold banner all I got was two H-Maritimus dupes and a Zhu Bajie dupe, lol. And I think I already have all the extra non-limited units they put in the spark pool so I’m not gonna summon any more on this banner.

Finally I cashed in my free dream summon to get Summer Verica, and my paid one to get Formal Noelle.

So all in all I think things went pretty well for me here, aside from the hundredfold banner which was kinda disappointing considering that I was missing most of the 5-stars on it. But getting eight new adventurers and two new dragons from all of this is really good. Not to mention the characters I got from the other recent banners like Regina and Basileus.

Mostly I’m just glad I didn’t have to do an entire spark on the Halloween banner to clear it out. I had exactly enough to spark without needing to dip into my unread stories, but I’m still glad I could stop partway through. I wasn’t entirely sure if that banner would be worth summoning on, but all three units in it ended up being really good. I dunno how much I’ll get out of Laxi since I already have Gala Audric, but Chronos is incredibly powerful [and helps make me feel better about still not having Gala Jeanne, lol], and Sylas looks extremely good as well. I still think his design is kinda bland, but at the very least he goes well with Curran, Lathna, and Heinwald on my shadow team. Both on an aesthetic level, and also on a gameplay level since he provides poison and shadowblight, and lots of defensive utility.

Funnily enough I feel like getting Halloween Sylas might have kinda invalidated the Summer Patia that I just got, but it’s still nice to fill out my roster, lol.

Realistically I don’t think I’ll ever use C-Leif, and his force-strike makes him feel really awkward to play so I’d rather just bench him, but there’s definitely units who I would have been more disappointed to get. Y-Cleo is also in a kinda weird spot, mainly because I have basically every good flame unit in the game already, but I really like her design, and i have a bias towards wand units.

I think i also won’t use Nino much, but at least I got something new from the wind focus banner, lol.

It’s nice to finally get Summer Verica and Formal Noelle, though. I haven’t actually touched the SinDom fights yet, but they should make them a lot easier to break into. I think I still need Summer Verica’s spiral materials to come around again before I can upgrade her S1, which is kinda annoying, but even without that she should still be worth using. Formal Noelle might be a little unnecessary, especially with all the times I see people use Summer Verica in off-element fights, but I still have a bit of a soft spot for Noelle, since I used to main her in the eHMC days, lol.

There also just weren’t many other units I was interested in dream summoning. Whenever we get our next one, my current target would probably be Sandalphon, and she wasn’t available on this one.

Since I didn’t have to go all the way to a spark, I now have around 130 summons left [plus the 1.5k wyrmite from the Trials of the Mighty that I haven’t picked up yet], and I still have all of my unread stories, so in theory I might be able to spark on both Christmas and New Years, but realistically I think I’m still planning on skipping Christmas unless it’s as strong of a banner as Halloween ended up being.

There’s also the ongoing gala dragon platinum summon to consider, but I don’t think that’s worth going for. I’m missing three out of ten of them, including Jeanne, but especially now that I have Chronos I don’t think it’d be worth the gamble. I’d rather just start slowly stockpiling diamantium for future dream summons, more interesting platinum summons, or to finish out a spark if I get desperate.

Also, while I remember, even though I won’t spend anything more on the current banner, it’s really neat that they’re lowering the spark count to 200 for it. I’m curious to see if this ends up being a sort of trial run for them permanently lowering the spark count for all banners. I think PriConne did something like that recently, so it wouldn’t be unprecedented. It’d feel a bit pointless if they do that but do another summon income reduction, but having a lower spark count would at least limit how much you’d have to whale in order to spark.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost

[murasaki-murasame]

Now that Regina and Basileus’ banners are done, here’s my part two on how my free summons have been going.

TL;DR: problematic anime boys got me acting unwise u_u

Firstly, for the Regina banner, I managed to get her on around the fourth free multi, and over the course of the banner I also got dupes of Hawk and Louise. I also got a platinum prize that gave me a sunlight stone, so that was nice.

Then on Basileus’ banner I got sent into a bit of a spiral because I quickly realized that I really wanted to get him [since I have a weakness for male wand units, and he just seems really good in general], but I only had like half a spark left after the whole Zethia/Bahamut banner, so I was wondering if I might end up having to whale if I couldn’t make myself skip this banner. Which lead me to double-checking my unread stories, and apparently I have over 150 adventurer stories, 70 dragon stories, and 30 castle stories that I haven’t read yet, so if I really wanted to, I could go through a lot of that and spark without whaling. Including the 40 sigils worth of diamantium I already had in my account.

I decided to just do a daily deal then and again on the final day of the banner so I could at least save myself some single tickets, and I immediately got Basileus on the daily deal I did on the second day, so here we are I guess, lmao.

I ended up not getting Sandalphon from the free summons, but even though she looks really good I can’t be bothered chasing after her specifically after getting so lucky with Basileus, especially since I also already have Gala Elly so it’d kinda sting to get dupes of her. At the very least I can dream summon Sandalphon later if I really need to.

And even though I was ready and willing to spark on this banner if I needed to, at this point I want to just quit while I’m ahead and make sure I have a safety net for the upcoming limited banner hell season, lol.

I have a feeling I might skip Halloween, but I might be really tempted by the November gala [+ Christmas], and I’d like to have a spark saved for New Years as well.

Anyway, I haven’t had much time to actually test him out yet, but Basileus does seem really strong. He seems to have good personal damage, but even though it’s not as high as other wind units like Gala Ranzal, it’s made up with by the fact that he has a huge amount of utility in his kit which matches up really nicely with endgame content. He has stormlash, high hit count [his ranged and sigil unleashed modes do like 35 hits per full combo, lol], spammable defense amp, both strength and defense debuffs, and dispel. He also has personal overdamage, but I think that probably doesn’t matter if you have any other source of overdamage in your team.

But in general he just has an extremely loaded kit, which also seems pretty much entirely immune to nihility, so he just seems like an extremely good unit who will probably stand the test of time.

His dual combat modes mechanic is probably his only weakness, since it divides up his utility, but that gets solved when he goes into sigil unleashed mode and he just switches into one mode that does everything. And with how his kit works, he only spends like two minutes in sigil locked mode anyway, and he gets it automatically unlocked in phase 2 Dominion fights. Either way I think it’s mostly just an issue in auto fights since in manual you can just move in and out of your two modes as you need, but it’s not a huge deal. I think his ranged mode is more valuable than his melee one, and it sounds like his AI defaults to that, so you’d still get a lot out of him.

He also kinda feels like he overlaps with Gala Notte a lot, since she also has stormlash, dispel, and high hit counts, but I don’t think it’d be that hard to just run them together. I think Notte could also be nice as a backline option for Basileus, since he has a really high hit count to make use of her shapeshift prep co-ability. Sorta like how people use Saiga as a dragon battery.

Since his defense amp is on his S1 and doesn’t have a cooldown, I think that you could probably maintain team defense amp levels with just him, but I’m curious to try him out with Yukata Lathna and see how easily they can build up defense amps. It’d at least be nice to make it easier to get the full effect of Lathna’s S2.

And on the note of amps, it’s kinda sad in a funny way to compare Basileus to Myriam. It feels like an unfair comparison to make, but they’re both 5* wind wands with spammable amps, and Myriam only came out like six months ago. But when you compare them to each other, you can really tell how Cygames was way too cautious and conservative with how they made the early amp users, because they didn’t want them to be overpowered, but they ended up just making them extremely weak and bare-bones, so now newer amp users like Basileus just have it as one aspect of a much more detailed kit. It’s also pretty telling that both of Myriam’s abilities only trigger if she has a team strength amp, but nothing in Basileus’ kit is locked behind achieving a team defense amp.

I don’t really have a lot to say about Sandalphon since I didn’t get her and I don’t plan on chasing her, but she does seem like she’s probably going to be the best water healer from now on. Hopefully since I have all of the other ones I can go without her for now.

I also don’t really have many thoughts on Regina, even though I got her and have used her a bit in the event raid. I don’t exactly plan on using her much in the long run, but that’s mostly just because I like Gala Mascula too much to kick him out, and it’d be a pain to try and run them together, lol. She might end up being really good in the Surtr fight, but right now her kit just feels kinda weird, and she’s lacking in utility that actually matters in current content. I’m glad we finally have a permanent 5-star water blade who’s better than Valerio though, lol.

So yeah, I’m glad I was able to get Basileus so early and quit while I’m ahead with this banner. Now I’m in a much better position going into the holiday season than I would have been otherwise. I dunno how much I care about Halloween Sylas and Dragonyule Nevin, but they might end up being strong enough that i’d want them anyway, and I’ll probably at least want the new zodiac units for my collection. We also might get Gala Nedrick in the next few months, not to mention the heavily implied Gala Archangels, so there’s that to prepare for as well.

Also, today we found out that we’re gonna get a wind focus banner between now and Halloween, along with a new type of platinum showcase that specifically gives you adventurers you don’t have yet, so that’s cool. Element focus banners are kinda meh, but at least it’s something that I won’t be tempted to spend resources on, and there’s still like five different wind 5-stars I don’t have yet that I’d like to get from it.

The platinum showcase is a lot more interesting, though. I hope we’re still going to also get a paid dream summon soon, but this is at least a way better deal than regular platinum showcases. I’ll probably end up going for this since I have enough diamantium to do it twice. I think I have like 28 non-limited 5-stars that I’m missing, so I’d have a relatively low chance of getting any specific ones, but there’s a fair few that I’d be happy to get.

Realistically I should wait until the last moment to do it in case I get any new 5-stars from the wind focus banner, but I’m going on a trip for a few days to get dental work around when this ends, so I might at least do it before that happens just to make sure I don’t miss out. But I might just end up doing it immediately tomorrow because I’m impatient, lol.

On a related note, I’m going to save my free dream summon from this event until all the free summons are over, but for now I’m planning to get Summer Verica from it. I’m not entirely sure who I’d get instead if I manage to get her from my free summons or the platinum showcase, though. Probably either Pinon or Nevin.

I guess there’s also the scratcher 5-star summon that I’ll get eventually, but that’ll probably just be a random dupe, lol.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost

[murasaki-murasame]

The free summons are gonna go on for the next month or so, but while I can remember it, here’s how the last two banners have gone, including my summons for Zethia and Bahamut.

From the first gala banner with the reborn dragons, I didn’t get any of the reborn dragons I was missing, but I did get Gala Chelle, who was the only gala adventurer I was missing by that point, so that was really nice. Then I did an extra 20 summons to see if I could get a copy of Gala Jeanne as a pity break, but I just got a dupe Gala Nidhogg instead, so I just decided to quit.

Then in the Zethia/Bahamut banner, I think the only 5-star I got from the free summons was Gala Cat, who I already had, so I decided to just keep going until I at least got Zethia.

Then at a little over 100 summons in I got Zethia, as well as Undercover Grace. I honestly should have just stopped there, but I didn’t have Bahamut yet, and I skipped Volk’s banner, so I decided to keep going until I got at least one of them.

About a billion dragon dupes later I had to spark for Bahamut and I didn’t even get Volk along the way, so here we are, lol.

I didn’t really keep track of exactly which dragons I got along the way, but they were all dupes, and at the end of it all I was able to make a second MUB Cat Sith, and I’m one dupe away from a second MUB Thor, so that’s kinda frustrating. I also got one or two OG Zephyrs that let me finish a second MUB copy of him just from dupes.

At this point I’m probably gonna have to skip Halloween since I only have like 50 summons saved and I probably won’t have a full spark until the end of November, but oh well. We’ll still get free summons for the Halloween banner, so maybe I can at least get Sylas from them. There’s also the free hundredfold which will probably be it’s own banner like the last one we got, but I doubt I’d have enough to finish a spark there, and I have no idea what type of banner we might even get for that.

From what they said in the digest, it sounds like the big Christmas event and banner will be at the end of November, so that might be a good time to spark, but I’d also have to worry about the New Years stuff happening a month later, so we’ll see how that goes.

So yeah I kinda regret doing a full spark on this banner, mainly since I already had enough good shadow dragons that Bahamut might not help me that much, but oh well, lol.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep15 [FINALE]

For better or worse I think Ryukishi achieved exactly what he set out to do with this series, and I guess everyone’s just gonna be forced to reckon with how they feel about his own perspective on this franchise versus how they feel about it, lol.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut, plus Umineko spoilers.

I’m not entirely sure where to even start with this, but I guess the TL;DR is that I honestly think Gou/Sotsu was ultimately just fine despite it’s issues, and part me of can’t help but be like ‘I told you so, lol’ about how this really did end with this episode, and also committed pretty hard to the Umineko prequel elements.

It’s not like all of my theories were correct in the end, but I at least think I was pretty spot on in my prediction last week that this would end with the miracle of them side-stepping the sword issue entirely and choosing the third option of forgiveness and reconciliation. And also them ending it with an epilogue where we go back to the Matsuribayashi timeline and get a happy ending for Rika and Satoko that provides a ‘non-magical interpretation’ for the story while also giving us an idea of how Bern and Lambda formally split off into their own entities and start the relationship we see in Umineko.

I didn’t quite expect them to go down the route of having them agree to just spend a few years apart and accept that they don’t need to literally always be together, but I think that was a really good way to wrap things up between them. It’s pretty much the healthiest compromise to their conflict that doesn’t come across like it completely invalidates one of their dreams. I get why it feels too anti-climactic and convenient for people, but when you pull at that thread you get into wider topics of what the entire story is about, since this was always going to end with Satoko being redeemed and forgiven. People might not have taken him seriously, but Ryukishi was 100% genuine about his regrets about Matsuribayashi’s ending, and how part of why he came up with this new story was to create a better ending, while also doing more with Satoko as a character.

Basically I think a lot of the fandom negativity towards this boils down to people fundamentally disagreeing with the idea that Matsuribayashi was even ‘flawed’ in this sort of way to begin with, or that Satoko was badly written. It’s valid to disagree on this stuff, but at the very least we all have to grapple with how Ryukishi has his own specific relationship with this series.

People like to focus on how he’s a troll who likes to mess with people, but I feel like this is a bit of a wake-up call for people about how he’s actually extremely sincere, almost to a fault, and he likes to use his stories as a vehicle for expressing his personal philosophies and ideals. 

This whole story is also a good example of how he just sees this as ultimately being a fictional story about fictional characters, and not literally a matter of real people who need to be sentenced for their crimes or whatever. As early as the original VN he was almost being outright preachy about the message that nobody is irredeemable, and that philosophy carries through to this. But to be more specific, nobody *in this story* is irredeemable. He’s pretty open about the fact that in practice you can’t apply this sort of ideal to real life, but fictional stories are their own separate matter.

I think this whole issue of how he views this as a story first and foremost is also the central reason why this ended in a way that comes across as Satoko being let off too easy for her crimes. One way or another, Ryukishi’s made it clear that he sees this as being no different to how other characters had arcs where they committed crimes but still got forgiven, or how Takano is basically a straight up war criminal who also got forgiven for her crimes.

Anyway, this episode at least committed to the Umineko stuff, so that was satisfying. Sure there’s people that still want to deny it, but at this point I think a lot of people are just being stubborn, so it’s not like anything would have really convinced them, lol. I’m also genuinely not sure what people even would have expected them to do beyond what we saw her, aside from having the two of them literally put on their gothic lolita outfits and turn to the camera and go ‘we are literally Bernkastel and Lambdadelta from the video game series Umineko When They Cry’. I almost feel like there’s some kind of misunderstanding from people who aren’t familiar with Umineko when it comes to the idea of what it even means for this to be ‘an Umineko prequel’, or ‘a Bern/Lambda origin story’. I mean, this is quite literally exactly what I expected and hoped for in that regard. It’s not like I was expecting them to incorporate anything related to, like, Beatrice or the Ushiromiya family.

I think this is also one of those things where you just have to decide for yourself whether or not you want to earnestly engage with the story that’s being told, or if you want to assume that there’s some level of malice or trickery going on.

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting them to literally have Rika and Satoko recite part of Bern and Lambda’s final conversation with each other word for word, lmao. Combined with the scene at the end where ‘Witch Satoko’ talks to herself about how she’s going to give her body back to Satoko while she goes chasing after Rika, it was literally just the exact origin story of their relationship as it’s depicted in Umineko.

I still feel like this would all only really be ‘worth it’ if we actually get something like a full on anime remake for Umineko, but at this point I can’t help but feel satisfied with this part of it all.

It’s not like I think Gou/Sotsu as a whole is perfect or anything, though. I don’t hate it as much as basically everyone else does, but I think Ryukishi’s the sort of VN writer who really struggles with the shift to writing for an anime. I think a big part of the frustration people have is just from how this is formatted as a weekly anime series spread across basically an entire year, instead of being something like a stand-alone VN chapter that you can read at whatever pace you want, even if it ultimately takes the same amount of time to read as it would to watch all of Gou/Sotsu.

There’s also the whole issue of this being a sort-of-remake, which snowballed into a whole list of structural problems. They absolutely tried too hard to have their cake and eat it too, and they should have just committed to it being made for old fans only, instead of trying to sincerely incorporate elements from the VN that old fans don’t care about anymore because they’ve gone over it already.

And as I’ve said several times before, it was a major issue for them to decide to put Nekodamashi in the middle of Gou and then spend like 20 episodes on flashback answer arcs until finally getting back to that cliffhanger. I’ve been waiting until this all ended to decide exactly how I feel about that, and now that it’s all over I still think it was a really bad idea. I don’t think it was an issue for them to reveal that Satoko’s the culprit that early, but having the gun cliffhanger specifically happen that early just gave people misguided expectations and tainted the answer arcs because people were just impatient to get back to the cliffhanger. And then the cliffhanger itself ended up being somewhat anti-climactic, which is what I’d been fearing would happen. It would have worked fine if they shuffled it around so that the cliffhanger happened right before Kagurashi and was followed up in the very next episode, or if this was a VN where you could binge your way through the flashback stuff, but spending like half of an entire real-life year to get back to that point only to have the resolution be ‘Satoko just shoots Rika and the death loops keep going’ just didn’t really work properly.

I’m a lot more generous towards the Akashi arcs than most people are, since I think they really over-estimate how much re-used content there is there, but they still suffer from the central issue of the show trying to be accessible for new fans. It could have been heavily condensed otherwise, without losing anything in terms of Satoko’s whole character arc.

On the other hand I think the first half of Kagurashi was awful specifically because it highlighted how bad of an idea it was to put Nekodamashi so early in the story. They still ended up having to go back to that arc and repeat it anyway, in the most 1:1 recap-y way in the whole show, but that wouldn’t have even been an issue in the first place if that was instead the first time that arc happened in the show.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I would rearrange the story to make it flow better while still following Ryukishi’s intentions, and I think they could have condensed it into a 2-cour season with this sort of structure if they did something like this:

-First arc where Rika gets thrown back into the loop and quickly figures out that somebody intentionally caused this to happen, and it’s not Takano because at least in this idea of mine she’d try and investigate her only to find out that this version of Takano regrets everything and is planning to flee the village with Tomitake.

Basically I think this could tie into the idea of Satoko initially wanting to just concoct an idea world for Rika so that she won’t want to leave this time, but sort of like what I think happens in Saikoroshi, Rika would still reject it, and this time around there’d be the additional layer of her knowing that somebody did this to her for an unknown reason. Maybe they could even initially market it as a new adaptation or a remake of Saikoroshi, and then reveal that it’s a sequel, to keep that whole element to the series. Either way I think this would end with everything going to shit when Rika rejects that fragment and wants to go back to St. Lucia’s, and Satoko basically snaps and kills her, and that way the audience can find out about her being the culprit without Rika finding out about it yet.

Maybe there could even be some dramatic irony where Rika’s attempts to meddle with certain ‘trigger events’, and her displaying her looper side, inadvertently triggers people around her to get paranoid, and the whole fragment would start to spiral into tragedy from there. I think they could at least use the whole conflict in Tatariakashi about Teppei actually being good this time as a starting point for that sorta thing.

-Second arc, rounding out the first cour, which is basically just Satokowashi. I don’t think there’s much that you’d need to change here, but like I said above I like the idea of her initially trying to just invent a perfect world for Rika and her to live in, instead of jumping straight to murder. But maybe instead of her literally just watching Rika’s loops, she could instead just be stuck using her looping powers to try and figure out how to create that ‘perfect world’ in the first place, by personally investigating all of the different tragedies and how to prevent them.

-Staring the second cour, a third arc where we basically just get to see those loops Satoko goes through, and her whole process of solving the tragedies and ‘purifying’ characters like Teppei and Takano, until we eventually see her perspective on the first arc, and how she reacts to Rika ultimately rejecting the world she tried to make for her.

-A fourth and final arc which is basically just Nekodamashi + Kagurashi, where she just totally snaps and tries to just torture Rika into never wanting to leave the village again, and eventually Satoko gets exposed and they have their direct confrontation with each other.

With that sorta story structure, you’d keep all the relevant bits of Gou/Sotsu as it is now, while being more focused on Rika and Satoko instead of doing kinda half-assed reruns of the Rena and Shion arcs. It’d also push the big cliffhanger between them until near the end of the show, while still revealing to the audience relatively early on that Satoko’s the culprit.

I’d also like them to do more with Satoshi and Shion, so maybe like with how Teppei gets redeemed and Satoko almost gets to have a happy life with him in Tatariakashi, the central question arc of this hypothetical story could also involve Satoko making sure that Satoshi wakes up from his coma, and Shion also gets to have a good relationship with all of them. You could probably do something interesting with the idea of Satoshi and Shion being in the camp of not trusting Teppei and his whole redemption arc.

Honestly I could spend a long time talking about how I would have done things differently, lol. For one thing, I think the Akashi arcs would have been much better if they just changed it so that Satoko used psychological tactics to make people paranoid, and we completely cut out the whole syringe plot device. I get how it fits with Satoko’s whole certainty gimmick, but it made those arcs way too predictable. Even if we knew the outcome, it’d at least be entertaining to see exactly how Satoko might go out of her way to set up the different tragedies. We kinda got glimpses of that sorta plot point in Wataakashi when things seemed to go outside of her control, but they didn’t really do much with it.

Anyway, this is a whole lot of words to say that I think that in spite of the serious structural issues going on, I think Gou/Sotsu as a whole is fine, and was at least working with a lot of perfectly good ideas that could have been executed much better.

Also, on a side note, that one scene during their fist-fight at the start where the art-style changes a bit was kinda weird, but I really liked how it looked, and part of me almost wishes the whole show looked like that, lol. I like Akio Watanabe’s character designs, but I feel like that sort of stylized, almost TWEWY-ish art style would have been really fitting for this series, especially in the horror/action parts.

Oh, and the new rendition of You was so good it almost felt emotionally manipulative, lol.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi sotsu #this got kinda long but I still feel like there's so much more I could say about this if I wanted to

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep14

Do you ever wanna just watch two little girls who are actually 100+ year old witches beat the absolute SHIT out of each other for 20 minutes straight? :)

Anyway, thoughts under the cut. Plus Umineko spoilers.

Part of this might just be because I’ve been high on painkillers for a few weeks now [long story short, I’ve got a lot of dental work that needs done], but this is perhaps the most entertaining episode of anime I’ve seen all year, lol. Not even in a jokey ironic ‘so bad it’s good’ way.

I feel like this is going to be the most polarizing episode of this whole show, because for better or worse it really crosses the line between Higurashi and Umineko, so whether or not you’re a fan of that whole trajectory the story’s been taking will really change how you feel about this.

Though to be honest I think on one level people are ignoring how Higurashi has always had a lot of these things in it. For one thing, the concept of the fragment space and ‘game boards’ has been a thing since Minagoroshi, and we’ve always had stuff like Hanyuu being a literal god who can manifest in the real world, and the existence of the mythical sword was hinted at in Matsuribayashi and then expanded upon in Kotohogushi. This episode also directly referenced the over the top rooftop fight scene from Tsumihoroboshi, which was just the start of Higurashi having lots of fun and silly fight scenes, like the fights between the club members and the military in Matsuribayashi, or the whole fighting game spin-off arc thing. Even in the VN there was an intentional shift from horror and mystery to high-octane fight scenes fueled by the power of friendship and miracles.

Obviously on the other hand there’s definite Umineko stuff going on here, but in general this feels like a pretty natural progression for this series to take.

Anyway, this was absolutely worth the wait, and it goes a long way toward making up for how bad the pacing in Sotsu has been thus far, lol. I still think they could have cut this down by at least two or three episodes, but still. As a climax to this whole conflict between Rika and Satoko, it was really cool.

Sort of like how Nekodamashi had it’s rollercoaster death montage, I really loved how this whole episode transitioned between fragments in increasingly seamless and surreal ways. The use of transition cuts between scenes was honestly really cool, and made it way more dynamic and engaging than it otherwise would have been to basically have an entire episode spent on one fight scene.

I think a lot of people are hung up on the exact logistics of how the fragment-hopping worked in this episode, but I don’t really think you should read into it too much. It basically operated on dream logic and heightened emotions. In the first few fragments Satoko might have waited a bit before attacking Rika, but it very quickly became one continuous sequence of events for all intents and purposes, with how their back and forth dialogue and their exact movements transitioned from one fragment to the next.

Basically it ended up becoming a fight between voyager witches who have become totally divorced from reality and just hop from one fragment to the next whenever they please.

I was wondering how they’d follow up on the gun scene, since it created this stalemate where they both know what’s going on and thus have no reason to surrender, but I really like how they decided to take this. I know a lot of people have been wanting more of a drawn out battle of wits between them, but the whole concept of them just getting into an endless fight with each other now that everything’s out in the open is extremely entertaining to watch.

It does make me even more convinced that it was a bad idea to have Nekodamashi happen in Gou, though. The immediate resolution to the cliffhanger was more anti-climactic than most people would have wanted after so much time spent leading back up to it, and the whole tone and pacing of Nekodamashi would have flowed very seamlessly into this. It also would have fixed the issue of the last two episodes being almost entirely recaps if this was instead the first time that we saw the Nekodamashi loops.

Anyway, there’s been a lot of debate about whether or not we might get a third season or some other kind of continuation to this, and I think this episode makes me way more convinced that it’s actually just going to end here, whether people like it or not. I think I’ve already said that there’s literally nothing the story needs to do anymore except have Rika and Satoko hash things out with each other, and that’s exactly what they’re focusing on now. Maybe they could spend time recapping Satokowashi, but that’d be extremely pointless. And at this point it’s pretty clear that one way or another the other club members just aren’t going to be very important to this story. There’s a bit of a loose end with their teenage selves showing up in the OP with new outfits, but that might be as simple as an epilogue scene set back in the Matsuribayashi fragment or something, and them looking ominous might be a red herring.

Also, in a more meta sense, there’s certain stuff the staff are doing and saying that make this seem like the finale of the whole series, like how in a couple months they’re going to release a congratulatory book compiling all the official artwork and interviews for Gou/Sotsu, or how they recently released a compilation CD of all of Ayane’s Higurashi-related songs, or how [I think] the artist for the Gou manga said on Twitter that the new chapter that just came out will be the last one to come out while the anime’s airing. We’re also getting two new Higurashi manga arcs starting soon, along with the reveal that the Gou manga will diverge from the anime and go into a new answer arc called Higurashi Jun.

So in general it just comes across like everything’s being wrapped up with Sotsu. I can see why people would be disappointed if we don’t get more, but with how the story’s been going, there’s just not really much material left to work with. Also, we know from TV listings that there at least won’t be a direct continuation in the next season, so if we get anything more it wouldn’t happen until January at earliest, and at this point I’d rather things just wrap up here instead of having to wait even longer to get the actual ending, lol.

I guess we won’t know how things will end until next week, but we really seem to be barrelling headfirst into this being Bern and Lambda’s origin story. Which has been pretty obvious for ages now, but this episode in particular really cements it. This whole fight is really similar to the one they have in Episode 8, and you can see throughout the episode how they’re embracing their looper/witch personas and becoming divorced from reality. You can even see the foundation for how Bern and Lambda have a twisted love for each other based on the fact that they’re basically the only people who can actually understand each other, and they’re so detached from reality that the violence between them is more like a sign of affection.

I feel like this is also going to end up tying into the miracle that Hanyuu is waiting for. At the moment we’re in a situation where it seems like they’re stuck in an infinite stalemate because they’re in a fight where neither of them wants to lose, but neither of them wants to win if it means permanently killing the other. So it seems like there might not really be any way out of this, but if they’re able to truly forgive each other and embrace their identities as witches, then they can basically step away from this entire conflict and just enjoy being with each other. It seems impossible for this to end with either of them ‘winning’ and things going back to how they used to be, so it could certainly be called a miracle if they both decide that they’re OK with that, and they take a third option where they can both be happy in a way that neither of them would have predicted at first.

This could also lead to a situation where Rika is able to ascend to a higher level by letting go of her human side once and for all, which could give her the ability to appear in the part of the fragment space where Eua and Hanyuu are, so she can save Hanyuu from getting killed by Eua’s spear.

And on that note, the whole bit with Hanyuu at the end actually reminds me a lot of the idea of logic errors in Umineko. I think people kinda over-use that term when it comes to stuff in this series where it doesn’t really fit, but that scene was actually extremely similar to the whole set-up where Battler got stuck in a locked room that he couldn’t come up with an answer to get out of, and he had to wait for the ‘miracle’ of Beatrice awakening so that Kanon could arrive and save him. Hanyuu is in a position where she’s already committed to flying straight at Eua, but the spear is right in front of her face and about to kill her once time starts again, and she has to wait for a ‘miracle’ to happen to change her fate. Which is also a lot like how in Matsuribayashi she almost got shot by Takano, but a miracle happened and Rika was able to divert the bullet. So it’d make a lot of sense in general if in the next episode we see Rika show up there and save Hanyuu.

And considering how Featherine acts in Umineko, I could honestly see Eua sticking to her word and rewarding Hanyuu if a miracle like that actually happens and saves her. So even if it’s anti-climactic, this might end with Eua accepting her loss and backing off, and maybe not even doing anything to punish Satoko for losing in her fight against Rika. Which is part of why I think the whole lingering threat of the ‘world without Rika’ might not even lead to anything and might just be a vague threat towards Satoko that never materializes.

Other than that, I think the last episode will probably also involve us going back to Matsuribayashi and seeing what sort of ending Rika and Satoko’s ‘human selves’ get once their ‘witch selves’ leave them behind once and for all. Which will probably just be along the lines of Rika going to the Saiguden to check up on Satoko, and them heading over to the cafe where the other club members [and probably Satoshi as well] are waiting for them, and it’ll just end on the note of them presumably working things out between each other peacefully.

Along those same lines, I think that the whole story of Gou/Sotsu will also get somewhat recontextualized as being a sort of deranged power fantasy that Satoko came up with in her head while visiting the Saiguden. I don’t think that’d be intended to devalue anything that happened here, but it’d be like how Umineko presents enough narrative framework for a non-magical interpretation of everything, while at the same time still acknowledging the value of the magical interpretation.

While I remember, I’m curious to see how the manga version turns out, since it’s clearly diverging a fair bit from the anime. It might just be an alternate take on the story concept, but at this point I think it might be presented as an ‘earlier loop’ of Gou/Sotsu, with how it’s been implied that Eua and Satoko have met before without Satoko remembering it. So maybe this whole series of events has repeated over and over again, presumably with Satoko ‘losing’ each time so things get reset, and Gou/Sotsu is the final iteration of that loop where they’re finally able to achieve a miracle.

I feel like the manga version is probably gonna end up being closer to what people wanted out of Sotsu, since it seems to be going in the direction of Rika knowing everything without Satoko knowing that, so they can have more of a drawn out conflict between each other as Rika tries to figure out how to win. Which is one way to take the story, but I still like how the anime ended up doing it, even if it could have been paced a lot better. I also think that the manga isn’t exactly a straight improvement over the anime anyway. There’s stuff it does well, but there’s stuff it doesn’t do well, like how the whole Nekodamashi arc feels extremely weird in the context of Rika not remembering her deaths [or at least not being given a clear reason for why she can suddenly remember them], her not deciding to go for five more loops before killing herself, and Satoko apparently not having any idea about Rika remembering her deaths, which seems to defeat the point of Nekodamashi’s rapid-fire death loops.

Either way I’m curious to see how Jun goes. I assume that we’ll still get some version of Satokowashi out of it, but I think that unlike with Sotsu they’ll spend much less time on answering the damashi arcs, and I also think at this point that the answers to them won’t be exactly the same as they were in the anime either.

Also, we recently found out that two entirely new Higurashi manga arcs will start in November, called Oniokoshi and Hoshiwatashi, which seem to be collectively referred to as Higurashi Rei, using the kanji from ‘the Reiwa era’, since it seems like the idea of these new arcs is that they take place in the Reiwa era. Oniokoshi seems to be about Keiichi’s son and a new mysterious character, while Hoshiwatashi seems to be about two entirely new characters, so I’m really curious to see how their stories pan out. I’m particularly excited about Oniokoshi since it’s being drawn by Natsumi Kei, who’s basically the primary artist for the Umineko manga, so that kinda makes me biased towards it, lol. And even though there’s basically nothing to go off of except for one preview image, it looks like it might go in a bit of a gay direction, which would be really neat. But we’ll see how it goes.

So yeah, I guess at this point with where things are going I’m gonna be really disappointed if we don’t get something like an Umineko remake after this, lol. It wouldn’t be very satisfying if it just ends on the note of ‘go and read the Umineko VN’ or something.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi sotsu

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep13

The true mystery of this show is trying to figure out how to even talk about each episode without just repeating myself or talking about other parts of the franchise, lmao.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut. Plus probably spoilers for both Umineko and Ciconia.

I’m not even sure where to begin talking about the fundamental issues this show has at this point, lol. It’s easy to just say that Sotsu on it’s own is bad, but I feel like it’s highlighting the fact that right from day one there were problems with the show’s structure and it’s intentions that have just become more and more of an issue as time’s gone on.

At the very least, I think that it was a huge mistake for them to have the gun cliffhanger happen midway through Gou, and to then spend so much time on backstory stuff and answer arcs. That just cast a negative shadow over all of those arcs because everyone was just impatient to get back to the cliffhanger. At this point I think they shouldn’t have even had Nekodamashi be in Gou to begin with. If they transitioned straight from Tataridamashi to Satokowashi then you could keep the general cliffhanger of revealing that Satoko’s the culprit without making people so impatient to go back to it and see what happens afterward.

But there’s also the issues like how Satokowashi revealed everything we needed to know about the howdunnit of the mystery, or how the whole gimmick of reusing the same scenarios as the VN in order to play both sides and make it technically accessible to new fans really wrote them into a corner and forced them to spend more time on the answer arcs than they needed to.

If we at least assume that the whole story ends in this arc, I think you easily could have condensed it all into one 2-cour season if they’d just committed to aiming this at old fans.

I guess there’s still a chance we’ll get some sort of continuation, but at this point I feel like the only way to get that much more content is if it ends up mostly retreading Satokowashi from a different perspective, which might actually drive me insane, lol.

In general it just feels like we’re already at the climax of the story one way or another, and there’s not many ways to keep it going for much longer without it seeming super forced. Like, Eua and Hanyuu are having their big confrontation with each other, and now Rika and Satoko are both on the same page, so they’re going to basically be stuck in a stalemate until one of them gives up. There isn’t really any mystery left to answer aside from giving more info about what’s going on between Eua and Hanyuu, so I’d rather they just cut to the chase and not drag this out.

We also know from TV listings that a different show is going to taking over Sotsu’s time slot next season, so unless it changes time slot for some reason, we’d probably have to wait until at least January to get a continuation, and I just dunno if that’d even be worth it.

I’ve already gone over my general ideas for how I think this will end, but I still think it’s entirely possible to wrap things up in just two more episodes. At the very least, if we get another full cour out of this then that’d probably just end up only having a few more episodes of actually new content, so my point still stands, lol.

I don’t think this episode did much to change my mind about where this is going, but it did at least clarify a couple of things. Like how Eua explicitly calls Hanyuu a ‘part of her’, which means that I’m probably right about my interpretation of them being two halves of the same being. There’s still a lot of different ways they could explain it, but at this point it’d basically still just boil down to the same idea of them being two parts of the same person.

It’s also more clear now that Rika more or less didn’t really know about Satoko being the culprit until the last minute, and was starting to get flashbacks to the end of Tataridamashi. I’m not entirely sure how to feel about that. It’s kinda hard to believe that Rika wasn’t at least suspecting Satoko by that point, but I do like the implication that Rika wasn’t fully dead when Satoko arrived, since that at least feels like pay-off for Satoko being so cocky and openly monologuing about how evil she is when she thinks Rika’s dead and can’t hear her.

I guess this episode also shows that there wasn’t anything particularly special going on with how Takano decided to confess to Rika in this one specific loop, which is also kinda underwhelming. Basically it seems like it just boils down to her feeling guilty about all of the stuff she remembers doing, but it’s still kinda weird that she didn’t confess to her in any previous loops. One of the weird issues with Gou/Sotsu’s storytelling is that Rika seemingly put no real effort into trying to investigate Takano even though she remembered her being the culprit, and I think that could have been really easily resolved if there was a scene like this in Onidamashi where Takano confesses her sins to Rika and leaves the village, since that would at least give a reason for her to not try and investigate them, and to assume that somebody else is behind these new loops. They could have even just had that happen off-screen and only be shown in Oniakashi if they didn’t want to spoil new fans. It just seems like a really easy change to make that would have made Rika’s passivity and hopelessness in this series way more understandable.

I think we’re also meant to assume that Satoko reacting to the box in this episode was just her faking it, since there’s no real indication that her conscience has returned or anything. But I’m not really sure why Satoko would go out of her way to fake that, when the trap box hadn’t even come up in that timeline. Maybe it would have made more sense if we saw her inner thoughts in that scene, but it kinda feels like they had to come up with some sort of scenario where Satoko would accidentally display knowledge that only a looper would know. Compared to how she’s been almost overpowered and hyper-competent in this series compared to Rika, it has a weird vibe of her being stupid because the plot demands it, lol. Either way it just seems kinda weird and contrived.

We also ended this episode on the gun cliffhanger again, which I saw coming, but it still kinda stings, lol. Hopefully the payoff is worth it. Realistically I think Satoko will just immediately shoot Rika, and we’ll cut to them having a proper confrontation in the meta world. With how they compared it to the ‘miracle’ scene with Takano in Matsuribayashi, it’s possible that they’ll somehow stop Satoko from shooting her, but I dunno. The stuff Hanyuu said about how this ‘isn’t the world that Rika fought for’ makes me think we’re probably not gonna stick with this loop for very long anyway, so I’d rather they just cut to the chase and get to the part where the two of them fight it out in the fragment world once and for all. Which at least seems to be what that one part of the OP is teasing at.

On that note, the only other mysterious part of the OP [and the key visual] left is the older club members in new outfits, which still feels like a bit of a loose thread, but it’s entirely possible that it doesn’t really mean much. For one thing, it could be as simple as it being related to an epilogue scene back in the Matsuribayashi timeline where they’re in different outfits to the ones we saw them wear last time we saw them. Either way I don’t really think the other club members are going to be super relevant to how this all ends, so one way or another whatever that stuff is related to could still just come up in the next two episodes.

Basically the question is just how exactly the big conflicts are gonna get resolved, and what note we’ll end things on. Which also ties into the larger question of whether or not this is genuinely meant to tie into Umineko [and maybe Ciconia] like they’re indicating, or if that’s some kind of elaborate troll.

I know i’m biased, but I think all the Umineko and Ciconia stuff is totally sincere, and Ryukishi really is using this as a way to start tying the wider WTC-verse together in a more concrete way, so that’s what I’m basing my theories off of.

With that in mind, I still think this will end with Rika and Satoko officially abandoning their humanity and becoming witches together, with the sword maybe being an in-universe plot device to depict that process. And with the reveal that Eua and Hanyuu are for all intents and purposes two parts of the same person, I feel like their side of things will probably end with them merging together in a way that creates Featherine, which would at least explain why Featherine’s personality is more mild than Eua’s, and also why Bernkastel is her miko, and why Featherine’s whole name is a giant pun about Hanyuu. It’d also fit with the whole religious motif that Hanyuu has going on if she basically ‘sacrifices’ herself to neutralize Eua. It’s at least the closest I think we’ll get to seeing Eua be ‘defeated’.

And on that note, I don’t really think this will end with anyone like Eua or Satoko being used as a villain who everyone else defeats so they can go back to their happy ending, since that’s the exact sort of thing that Ryuukishi regrets doing originally, and is why we’ve gotten so many redemption arcs for people in Gou/Sotsu. So I think at most we’ll see Eua get turned into Featherine so she’s less actively hostile towards everyone else, but I think this will ultimately end with Rika and Satoko reconciling and mending their relationship.

Over on the Matsuribayashi timeline side of things, I feel like this is gonna end up paralleling Nekodamashi a bit, and we’ll find out that Satoko ended up planning to kill herself in the Saiguden, but Rika and the club will show up at the last minute and she’ll choose not to. Then we’ll probably see her and Rika talk things out properly, and maybe Satoko will find out that Satoshi woke up from his coma or whatever, and that way they’ll all still get their happy ending, while also simultaneously we can still have Rika and Satoko split off their witch selves into separate entities that become the Bern and Lambda we know in Umineko.

It’s possible they’ll do something with the idea of Satoko losing her game and being sent to a world without Rika, but that also might just not happen at all. So who knows.

If they really lean into the idea of this directly setting up for Umineko, then it’d be neat if we also see Satoko and Rika meet Ikuko in the future of the Matsuribayashi timeline.

There’s also the Ciconia teases to think about, but they seem to be going in the direction of Ciconia taking place before all this even happened, so I think that’ll be kept kinda nebulous and unexplored until Ciconia itself finishes. Ryukishi might announce a release date for phase 2 after Sotsu ends, but I think it’s way too early for anything like an anime adaptation of it. I’d rather they wait until at least after it’s finished before they do something like that.

On the other hand, Umineko’s been over for like ten years, so it’d be much easier to do something like a remake for it after this. I have a lot of thoughts about how that might go if they do that, but I’m gonna wait until Sotsu ends and then make a separate post about it.

Anyway I guess now I just have to wait and see what happens next week, lol.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi sotsu

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep12

This show really doesn’t want to give me much to work with, huh? lol

Anyway, thoughts under the cut. Plus more Umineko stuff.

On the one hand only like 10% of this episode is even substantial enough to talk about on it’s own merits, but on the other hand I actually think it handled the recap stuff better than most of Sotsu has thus far. I guess the fundamental issue is that they shouldn’t have structured this whole series this way to begin with, but if they were gonna do recap stuff anyway, this approach is better than just dragging out these loops for no reason.

After how the last arc went, it was pretty obvious to me that there wouldn’t be anything particularly interesting about these loops, which ended up being totally right, so I’m glad they didn’t dwell on them much.

It could have been interesting if they sped their way through the first couple of arcs in one or two episodes and spent more time on these loops instead, but I don’t think that’d change the bigger issue of how this is still just recap material we have to get through on the way toward returning to the Nekodamashi cliffhanger, so in that sense the ideal option would have been to gloss over ALL these loops.

Either way, this actually covered more than I thought it would, since the preview images only showed up to the Akasaka loop, so I think I ended up being less negative on this than most people are, since it came across as mercifully brief, despite still being really boring since this is the most blatant recapping that we’ve gotten in Sotsu thus far.

We still have the last two episodes of Nekodamashi to get through, but since this episode went over the first two Nekodamashi episodes in addition to separate scenes with Eua and Hanyuu, it seems fairly likely that we can get back to the gun cliffhanger by the end of the next episode, which would leave us with at least two episodes to show what happens afterward.

Part of me does agree that it’s hard to imagine this not leading to some kind of direct continuation, but I still feel like there’s ways they could end this that would only require a couple of episodes once we get back to the cliffhanger, so it’s entirely possible that it’ll just end here.

All I can do is speculate, but at this point it feels like they ran into an issue where they didn’t have enough material to justify having Sotsu be even one cour long, but they couldn’t figure out how to condense the entire story into one two-cour season, so they had to use recaps to stretch Sotsu out into it’s full length. 

Having this episode end with Eua and Hanyuu finally confronting each other also makes it feel like this is genuinely gearing up for the climax of the whole story. At the very least it’s kinda hard to imagine how we could get a full season or more of content after this arc, with how everything’s out in the open and everyone more or less understands what’s going on. It feels like all that’s left is to bring the story to it’s close, and the question is just how that’ll work in practice.

There’s still the lingering thread of the promo material showing the other club members as teenagers in different outfits to the ones they had in Satokowashi, but I dunno how much I should read into that. And the fact that it’s part of Sotsu’s key visual and OP seems to imply that whatever it’s related to will happen within Sotsu itself anyway.

Like I’ve said before, the only real way this series can justify it’s own existence at this point is to be an Umineko prequel and end with the formal creation of Bern and Lambda, and even if it might annoy people, that could easily lead to a somewhat abrupt ending where Rika decides to embrace her own witch side so that she and Satoko can be together forever, even just as separate entities to whatever they leave behind in the real world. I at least think that’s more likely than this ending in basically the same way as the original series except Takano gets replaced by Satoko and/or Eua.

At the very least, the recap of the scene where Rika has a mental breakdown about her trauma and her crippling fear of being left alone reminded me that that would be a pretty understandable basis for her accepting the idea of becoming a witch so that she and Satoko can be together forever while traveling the sea of fragments. Obviously it’s pretty clear at this point what Satoko would get out of that kind of relationship, but I think Rika would also have her own reasons for wanting that, especially if this ends with Hanyuu permanently leaving her one way or another.

And on that note, it looks like we’re finally going to get some content between Eua and Hanyuu that actually explains what their deal is, so that’s exciting. I think I said last week that I’ve been thinking of Gou-Hanyuu as being a piece that Eua created, but after this episode I think it’s more likely that this is basically the same Hanyuu we’ve always dealt with, and that Eua is like the separate witch version of her. Which isn’t really that different to my original idea, but instead of Hanyuu straight up turning into Eua, she split into two entities. Which would at least fit with how this whole process has been depicted several times. It’s also clear that both of them know about each other, which is especially surprising for Hanyuu, so that seems to heavily suggest that they have some sort of direct, personal connection.

Eua does seem to talk about Hanyuu like she has some kind of ownership or authority over her, but it’s entirely possible that it’s just the same sort of thing as how witch Satoko saw her ‘human self’ as an outdated fragment who couldn’t keep up with the times. So if we interpret Eua as being like the cynical, malevolent part of Hanyuu spawned from her thousand years of isolation and observation until Rika’s birth revived her spirit, then I can see why she might see Hanyuu as being a ‘failure’ for being emotionally attached to Rika and basically sacrificing herself for her sake.

It also makes me wonder if maybe instead of her being ‘defeated’, Eua basically gets merged with Hanyuu to become one entity again, and that’s how we get Featherine. But who knows at this point. I at least think that’s the closest we’d get to having Eua be ‘defeated’ as a way to resolve things.

That’s basically all I have to say about this episode, but on a separate note while I remember, I’ve started reading the translation for the Answer of the Golden Witch interview that Ryukishi did after Umineko ended, and he mentions at one point that if he’s still writing in ten years, he’d like to go back and rewrite Umineko. This interview was done in 2011, I think, so we’re now at around the ten year anniversary of him saying that, which might just be a coincidence, but Gou/Sotsu definitely feels like it’s specifically designed to set up for Umineko’s story, lol.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi sotsu

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep11

Studio Passione: “We paid good money to animate Rika’s festival dance, and by god you’re gonna ENJOY IT!”

Anyway, thoughts under the cut, plus Umineko spoilers.

I know I talked about my theories for how this episode would be paced out last week, but I’m genuinely amazed that they managed to stretch the rest of this loop out into the entire episode, lol. It’s almost impressive how they managed to pad out half an episode or less worth of content into a full episode.

It kinda doesn’t even give me that much to talk about, yet again, which is kinda awkward, but either way this basically proves that I was totally right about my interpretation of the whole Keiichi scene, so I feel kinda pleased about that.

Long story short, the scene we saw in Gou was just an illusion depicting the story that Satoko told Ooishi about what happened, after she set the crime scene up to make it fit her version of events. I guess there’s still a non-zero chance that there’s some extra layer of mystery going on there, but at this point I really doubt it. I think that’s basically all that was going on.

I think this is going to be one of the more polarizing parts of Sotsu for people, depending on how they feel about the way that this is tying itself in to Umineko. This is the sort of storytelling device that’s basically never been used before in Higurashi, but is integral to how Umineko is set up, so it’s one of those times where it becomes undeniable that this is meant to bridge the two series, and is drawing inspiration and ideas from both of them, instead of this just staying within the boundaries of Higurashi alone.

With how this arc feels like a point of no return in the transition between the two stories, I really like how the first thing Satoko does when she accepts that she’s a witch is to start bringing Umineko-style narrative trickery into Higurashi for the first time. I think it’s a neat way to show how she’s starting to ascend beyond the game-board itself and is operating with a different set of rules. Obviously people aren’t gonna like that if they don’t like the idea of this being tied to Umineko, but I think that ship has long since sailed at this point, lol.

And honestly, even without relying on knowledge from Umineko, I think they did a fine job of having that scene in Gou seem weird and suspicious right from the get-go. For one thing, we were also told in Gou that Keiichi had no memory of what happened, and everyone else in that scene was dead, so it’s not that hard to start guessing that we were shown a false version of events.

I think I said this last week, but the confirmation that this is literally just Umineko Logic 101 really makes me wonder if Ryukishi is doing it this way in part to ‘prepare’ people for what to expect from Umineko. There’s still the possibility that we’ll get a full on remake after this, but even if it’s as simple as this basically ending on the note of ‘go back and read the Umineko VN’, he might still be trying to give people an idea of what to expect from it so they don’t get turned off by ep2.

This is getting more into theory territory, but if we keep going down this rabbit hole of transitioning into Umineko logic and narrative structure, I wonder if the entirety of Gou/Sotsu is going to end up being contextualized as a set of forgeries, in the same way as it worked in Umineko. Something along the lines of Satoko ‘seeing Rika’s loops’ being a metaphor for her being given manuscripts to read by Featherine based on Rika’s account of events, and then the Gou/Sotsu loops being forgeries made in collaboration between Featherine and Satoko, and presented to Rika as a new mystery to read and solve. At the very least, this could arguably justify stuff like how everything seems to go in the way Satoko wants, regardless of how reckless she gets.

I’m not 100% confident in that, but it’d definitely continue the trend of this being a blend of Higurashi and Umineko’s writing styles. I think it’d also provide a more comprehensive non-magical interpretation for what’s going on than just ‘Satoko fell asleep in the shrine and just dreamed all of this’, or whatever.

I also don’t really think that’d contradict the whole idea of Satoko being Lambda, though. Looking at it through this whole lens, it’d be sorta like how Ange goes through her own whole character arc in the process of reading Featherine’s forgeries, and basically ends up becoming a witch by the end of it. So the whole narrative arc of Satoko venting out her anger at Rika by trapping her in a new set of loops and slowly becoming a witch would still be intact, and still for all intents and purposes lead to her becoming Lambda.

There’s also various ways this could be tied into the whole deal with Lambda being Takano’s benefactor in Higurashi. Considering how Lambda never actually plays a part in Higurashi itself and is never mentioned by Takano, it could be as simple as ‘Satoko reads Featherine’s manuscript version of Higurashi and ends up relating a lot to Takano and wants her to succeed’, which gets morphed into her granting Takano her blessing of certainty. Either way I think that the whole timeline of events is weird and nebulous and isn’t really intended to make logical sense.

Anyway, probably the most surprising part of the episode was the reveal at the very end that the next arc won’t be called something like Nekoakashi, but instead it’ll be Kagurashi. I’m not really sure how much to read into that, though. It could just be as simple as them speeding through the Nekodamashi stuff, and most of Kagurashi will be the aftermath of that, so they gave it a unique name. Or it could be a completely new arc that does something totally different. Lots of people have suggested the idea of it being an arc all about Eua and Hanyuu and their backstory, which would be one way of doing something entirely different to a Nekodamashi answer arc, but who knows. I don’t think the final scene of this episode necessarily proves that the next arc will be about those two, though.

But on the topic of those two, at this point I think it’s probably safe to say that Hanyuu is effectively meant to be Eua’s piece in this game, and that they probably have a similar relationship to Bern and Erika, going by how much Eua seems to look down on Hanyuu. Although it’s not exactly clear if this Hanyuu is the same person as the Hanyuu from the VN, or if she’s like a clone of her that Eua created after Hanyuu disappeared or whatever after Matsuribayashi. 

Either way, I’m not entirely sure how they’d even approach an arc focused on those two. It’s not like Umineko really explained Featherine’s backstory, unless Sotsu is going to straight up introduce Ikuko/Tohya, which I guess could tie into my above theory about this being a forgery. On the other hand, I guess they could maybe do something like the Hanyuu backstory arc from the Higurashi console ports, but that wouldn’t really feel relevant to Sotsu’s story at this point.

Really the big question is just if the entire story will wrap up in four more episodes, or if there’ll be some sort of third season or whatever to wrap things up. Considering that this entire episode was just about wrapping up this loop, and we haven’t even gotten into anything from Nekodamashi, it at least feels like we’re running out of ways they could pull off an ending with just the next arc. But it’s not impossible. The simplest way to handle it would be to spend one episode at most on skimming through the next set of loops so we can get back to the cliffhanger from Gou, and then continuing from there, but if my theory about the overarching structure of the story is correct, then there might not even be that much to show after the cliffhanger, and the continuation of it might just happen in the meta world [or the ‘real world’], not the world of that loop itself. It’s also possible that, if this does lead into some kind of Umineko remake, the ending won’t even be particularly conclusive, and will just be continued in that series instead.

Even with how the pacing has gone thus far, I’m not really sure how confident I am in the idea that we might get another entire season out of this. Maybe we might get another nine episodes to fill Sotsu out to 24 episodes total, but I don’t know if we really need another full cour or two after the next arc. At the very least it’d feel kinda agonizing to have to wait even longer for ANOTHER full season to see how things actually end, lol.

There’s still the whole question mark of how the OP and the key visual for Sotsu depict Rika and Satoko as teenagers, and the other club members in different outfits to the ones from Satokowashi, but who even knows how that all might play into the story at this point. I still think we might get a Saikoroshi-style arc where Satoko loses her game and is banished to a world where Rika doesn’t exist and her relationship with the club members is totally different, but I’m not even sure what the whole point of that kinda development might be, or how long it’d take to get through.

At this point I think the best thing to do would be to just go all in with the Umineko stuff and have this end with the birth of Bern and Lambda and their whole love-hate relationship of mutual torture, even if it means leaving things kind of inconclusive, and without Satoko getting much punishment for her crimes. I think it’d be much worse if they just drag this out for even longer only to end it on the note of this whole conflict being neatly resolved and everything looping back to square one like nothing ever happened.

I guess we’ll just have to see how the next few episodes go, lol.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi sotsu #petition to replace the OP and ED with Rika's festival dance

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Sotsu Ep10

I’m kinda out of it due to a mix of toothache and painkillers, so bare with me on this one, lmao.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut. Also lots of Umineko spoilers, probably.

I’m genuinely kinda shocked that this arc STILL isn’t over, but at least it makes a lot more sense now why it ended up being longer than I expected, lol. I still think it probably could have been condensed by an episode or two, but still. It turns out that way more was going on with Satoko behind the scenes in this arc than I thought.

There’s also the whole possibility that Ryukishi might have intentionally laid out the script of Gou/Sotsu so that this whole sequence of Satoko definitively accepting that she’s a witch and killing her humanity happened on the cumulative 34th episode [24 from Gou and now 10 from Sotsu]. I’ve been wondering if anything could actually justify the extremely slow pacing this has had up to this point, but this might actually be dumb enough to make me think it was all worth it, lol.

Also, I’ve been trying to avoid saying it, but I looked at the whole batch of leaks from this arc when they got posted about a month ago, and it looks like we’ve officially covered everything that was in those leaks. I kinda regret looking at them, since it spoiled that Satoko would have an internal conflict that gets expressed literally in usual WTC fashion, but in a funny way I guess I ended up getting a misguided idea of what was going to happen just from looking at the leaks.

For one thing, I completely forgot about the leak of Satoko shooting Teppei until I double checked it a few days ago, so I was mostly just focused on the stuff about her two sides fighting against each other, and I guess I thought it would have made her seem a lot more redeemable than how it ended up actually working out, lol. I thought that it would basically go in the opposite direction and this would signal the start of her spiraling into regret and despair over the course of Nekodamashi, but basically the opposite happened.

I guess this probably answers the question I’ve had of what could stop Satoko from just immediately shooting Rika after the cliffhanger from Nekodamashi, since this raises the possibility of her ‘human side’ literally stopping her from doing it.

Though at this point I’m starting to seriously wonder if there’ll be some big meta twist about how Sotsu has actually been a separate set of loops to what we saw in Gou, and maybe Nekodamashi really did just end in tragedy and then everything got reset. I’ve been toying with that idea in my head for a while, mainly just as a way to try and make Sotsu feel like more than just a literal retread of Gou, but this is giving it a bit more validity as a theory.

For one thing, Eua already implied during Satokowashi that she had a history with Satoko, and going by something Ryukishi said in an interview, there’s already been a time where Satoko called her Eua, so it’s possible that Satokowashi onward is an entirely new loop where both Satoko and Rika have had their memories reset, but Eua still remembers it. Presumably the ‘Gou loop’ would have just ended with failure some way or another, and Eua decided to do it again. She’s given Satoko a pretty definitive failure state in Sotsu, but it’s possible that wasn’t always the case, and up until now she’s been willing to just do it over and over again until she gets the right outcome.

There’s also the theory some people have suggested that maybe the conflict between Satoko’s two halves represented a literal split in the timeline of some kind, with Tataridamashi maybe being a version of events where her human side won out, if only temporarily, and Teppei stayed alive to attack Keiichi at the end of the arc. That’d at least be one way to explain the weirdness of Satoko killing Teppei in this episode after we saw him attack Keiichi at the end of this arc in Gou. I’m not entirely sure I support this exact interpretation, though, even if I like the idea of these maybe being different arcs.

I think that for now my theory about the Teppei situation is that either 1: it was some kind of hallucination from Keiichi, 2: it was a fictionalized account of events that she fed to Ooishi to help trigger his L5 state, or 3: it’s the same sort of thing as the ‘Illusion of Witches’ in Umineko, and we as the audience were directly being shown a fantasy version of events by Satoko. Which is basically the same thing as the second option, but still. Considering how this seems to be barreling it’s way towards being some kind of Umineko prequel, I’ve been wondering if maybe they’d go that far with introducing narrative concepts here that get expanded upon more in Umineko. This would at least be a pretty straightforward example to use to illustrate the idea of how fantasy is used as a device in Umineko. And since there were infamously major issues with people not understanding what Ryukishi was trying to do with those scenes in Umineko ep2 which lead to him having to rewrite ep3 to explain it more clearly, I can see why he might go as far as to include an introduction to this idea in this series.

It’s possible that it’s just a hallucination, but I kinda doubt it at this point. For one thing, it’d feel kinda weird if THIS was a hallucination but not the whole fight scene between Keiichi and Rena, but it’d also just feel kinda weird since Keiichi didn’t really seem to be going L5 in this arc, so it’s kinda hard to imagine him jumping straight to that level of insanity on such short notice.

At least if we assume that this leads into the ending we saw in Tataridamashi, and not something entirely different, I think the real version of events is probably that after leading Keiichi to her house, Satoko attacks him with the bat [or she rigged some kind of trap to knock him out], and then when he wakes up he sees the aftermath of Satoko killing Teppei and he assumes he did it. Though tbh even at the end of Tataridamashi I’m not even sure if Keiichi acknowledged any memory of what happened with Teppei, so I’m not even sure if we need to explain how he’d end up convinced that that version of events happen. For all we know it might just be something that the audience alone was being shown, and from Keiichi’s POV he just gets knocked out and then wakes up in the hospital.

It’s possible that Ooishi ends up attacking him, but I kinda doubt it, at least after how this episode went. Even in the midst of HS, he seemed aware of the fact that Keiichi was at worst just being unwittingly manipulated by the villagers, and that he genuinely thought he was helping her, so I doubt that Satoko would be able to convince him to attack him. And at this point it just seems more likely that Satoko would attack Keiichi herself instead of pointlessly relying on someone else to do it for her.

We do know that he shows up at the festival with the bloody bat, but he could have just entered the house after hearing the commotion of Keiichi getting attacked, and then Satoko told her version of events to him, and he just picked up the bat from the crime scene and took it to the festival.

It’s also worth noting that apparently in the manga version of Tataridamashi, Satoko never even leads Keiichi to her house in the first place, and he just gets shot by Ooishi at the festival, which makes it seem more likely that Keiichi himself isn’t super relevant to how this arc ends. At least in the manga version of the arc, it seems like Ooishi probably just walked in on Teppei’s dead body and then picked up the bat and went on to do his killing spree.

Now I’m also wondering what’ll happen in the next episode, since it seems like they literally only have the festival left to cover before this arc ends. I guess there might just be a lot of content related to what happens with Satoko in the fragment space between this arc and Nekodamashi, but either way it feels like it shouldn’t take long at all to reach the big climax of this arc, especially since Satoko has already steeled her resolve. I mean, I doubt that human-Satoko is gone for good, but the rest of this arc is probably just gonna be witch-Satoko putting her final plans into motion, so there shouldn’t be much to cover there.

There’s a possibility that they’ll also speedrun through all of Nekodamashi from her POV in the next episode, but I kinda doubt it’d go by that fast. In spite of it mostly being a montage from Rika’s POV, and there presumably not being much worth showing about the mechanics and reasoning behind how Satoko set up the different mini-loops there, I think there’s still a fair bit to be shown from her perspective in that arc. For one thing, we’ll probably get a reveal of what was really going on behind the scenes with how Hanyuu suddenly gave Rika a new set of powers, and the whole deal with the sword. And even after the loop montage, I think that stuff will go on behind the scenes with Satoko and Takano to lead into the scene where Takano apologizes to Rika.

At this point my main question is how long it might take to get through all of that, since we only have five episodes left. At least as far as we know. There might be some kind of continuation yet to be announced, but I don’t want to bet on it.

It just feels like there’s a whole lot of stuff left to do before we end this. Like the stuff I’ve mentioned before with the OP having scenes of the club members as teenagers wearing outfits different to their ones from Satokowashi, and the scene of teenage Rika and Satoko fighting in the fragment space.

I’m also wondering at this point if we’ll get some Bernkastel origin story stuff to go with the apparent Lambda origin story. At the very least, they never really explained why she ended up being Featherine’s miko in Umineko, aside from the vague ‘Featherine is probably some version of Hanyuu’ thing. Which has been especially weird since Eua has been using Satoko as her pawn against Rika in this series. But this episode also makes it seem even more likely that Eua doesn’t even like Satoko, and is just using her as a pawn towards a greater goal of entertainment, while probably also playing both sides, so I could see this leading to a situation where she ends up working with Bernkastel instead.

There’s still the question about if this is even a Lambda origin story in the first place, but at this point I think that it’d just be a straight up waste of time if it’s not. That basically feels like the entire purpose of Gou/Sotsu’s existence right now, so if it’s all some sort of elaborate troll, then that just feels like it’d make EVERYONE pissed off. It’d obviously annoy the Umineko fans who like the idea of this being a genuine prequel or tie-in of some kind, but for the people on the opposite end who hate that idea, I don’t think they’d appreciate being told ‘I was just spending nearly 50 episodes tricking you into thinking this was something you’d hate, lol’. It just seems like the worst of both worlds.

Also, I’m pretty open to different variants of how they could pull off the specifics of this being a ‘Lambda origin story’. Like, I still think it’d count if this ends up being set after Umineko and is some kind of elaborate reenactment of how Lambda came to be, or whatever. There’s a lot of specific ways it could be executed, but it’d basically just be the same thing at the end of the day.

I know that witch Satoko right now doesn’t have the same sort of personality that Lambda had, but like with how Beatrice went through multiple design iterations that changed her personality, Satoko might just end up going through more development that makes her closer to the Lambda we know in Umineko. There’s also the fact that the end of Umineko already implied that Bernkastel was just ‘playing the villain’ for fun, so Lambda’s whole personality there might have been somewhat manufactured.

I guess at this point I just have to wonder if we’ll see Satoko come up with the name Lambdadelta for herself, lol. Even back in Higurashi we saw how Rika came up with the name Bernkastel, so if they’re really going in this direction, it’d make sense. I know Satoko is still calling herself Satoko by this point, but just a few episodes ago she denied that she was becoming a witch, and now she’s calling herself one, so these things can change, lol.

Anyway, this whole episode ended up being more Umineko-y than I expected. Even aside from the obvious stuff with them using the term witch, the whole fight between the two Satokos in the fragment space was exactly the sort of thing you’d see in Umineko, down to the fact that it was a gun fight like the love trial was. The imagery of the red cracks on the black background, and the entire screen shattering like glass, also felt like it was lifted straight out of Umineko.

Even if it might be kinda cheesy and forced, the monkey brain part of me really likes this stuff, lol.

Come to think of it, I guess this also makes it a lot more likely in hindsight that her classroom panic attack in this arc really was [at least in part] a representation of her two sides clashing. I think she always planned to do it as a recreation of that scene from Tatarigoroshi, but when it actually started her human side bled through and her genuine regret came through as well. I also assume that all the shots in this arc of her looking uncomfortable or depressed, especially around Teppei, were probably also setting up for this. Which I think is fine, but they probably should have been a little more clear about it, since it came across as her just faking everything, and this ended up feeling more sudden than it should have. I get why people would still see it as being sudden and unearned, but I don’t really think so. They probably should have included more stuff like that during the first two arcs of Sotsu, though.

I’m curious to see if I’ll end up being right about my theory that the sword will end up being used as a plot device to completely separate Satoko’s witch self, and maybe Rika’s as well, into their own beings separate from Rika and Satoko in the ‘real world’. It still feels like the only way to have this actually set up for Umineko without having things end in total tragedy for Rika and Satoko in general.

There’s probably a lot more I could say about this episode, but I think this has gone on long enough as it is, lol.

#murasaki rambles #higurashi #higurashi sotsu