#I immediately gave Epimetheus most of my Valentine's card items because he has all my uwus

[murasaki-murasame]

A whole buncha shit went down in Chapter 12 today and we got a new Chimera fight to begin shaking up the shadow meta in preparation for the new mana spiral batch and the new Agito fight, but like 90% of my brainpower is currently being spent thinking about how the new influx of wyrmite rewards let me do another tenfold on the Valentine’s banner, which finally got me Epimetheus.

But I still have some thoughts on the new chapter so I’m gonna put them under a cut because of spoilers

I’m feeling extremely vindicated in my choice to dream summon Laranoa, since chapter 12 ended up having flame enemies, and she even showed up in the story, which is like the last thing I saw coming.

Even though my water team is probably my weakest one overall, I didn’t actually have too much difficulty with anything up until the last couple of Very Hard battles, which I wasn’t able to do, and probably won’t be able to for a while.

I still think that the higher difficulty main campaign maps are really fun and well-balanced, though. It’s pretty rare to get challenging content based around dealing with waves of mob enemies. It really forces you to play differently, especially in Very Hard where every enemy hits super hard.

And on the note of the main bosses in the chapter, I’m still wondering if the whole deal with the cube bosses is actually gonna lead somewhere. Thus far they’re just this giant question-mark with no real in-universe explanation or acknowledgement, and their whole sci-fi vibe and the cryptic references to space probes just feels like the exact opposite of how the rest of the game is. It’s possible that they’re just there to be challenging boss fights with no real context behind them, but I kinda hope something happens with them. Maybe once we’ve gotten one for each element.

Story-wise this chapter was shorter and a bit less eventful than I expected, but it was still really fun. It really feels like things are heating up now. Especially with how it ended, it really feels like the first half of a two-chapter story arc, so that’s probably why it felt kinda brief. It definitely raised a lot of interesting questions that’ll probably get addressed in the next chapter.

First of all, the big elephant in the room is the reveal that apparently we’re going to see the fifth heir in the next chapter, which just kinda came out of nowhere, lol. I really thought they’d be a mystery for longer than this.

It’s not like there’s anything to go on one way or another, but I kinda hope that the fifth heir is that wyrmclan leader we saw that looks a whole lot like Euden. But who knows.

They’re still a huge mystery, but the stuff with Phares in this chapter makes me think that the fifth heir is somehow involved in the whole concept of black mana and how it corrupts dragons, if we’re meant to assume that Phares showing up with the void dragons at the end of the chapter was related to him getting help from the fifth heir. Which might explain why Chelle and Leonidas seemed genuinely freaked out at the idea of Phares working with their mystery sibling. I don’t think the idea of black mana has been introduced or explored at all outside of the descriptions of the void bosses, so it’ll be cool if it gets properly explored soon.

And on that note, I really wasn’t expecting this chapter to provide an actual in-universe explanation for stuff like the void dragons and the IO bosses. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s nice that the void dragons aren’t just in their own little weird pocket of ambiguous canon.

It’s kinda weird to see the main story basically introduce the concept of void battles when those have been in the game forever, but it’s nice to see them finally addressing it, lol.

The whole deal with Leonidas talking about ‘dracoshifting’ is also totally a hint at a future game mechanic, isn’t it? People have been wondering for a while now if there’s going to be some sort of revamp to dragons as a mechanic to basically rebalance them according to the current needs of the endgame meta, and I could totally see some variation of what Leonidas did to Mars being used to explain a new mechanic about buffing existing dragons. I imagine that if we get to do it, we’d do it in a more humane way than Leonidas, but still.

I’ve been thinking ever since they introduced mana spirals for adventurers that dragons should probably get something like that to make them better, and I could see this basically being how they do it. I dunno exactly how they’d do it, but maybe it’ll be like promoting dragons to make them stronger and giving them a new sci-fi design like Mars has. There’s definitely a lot of old dragons that need some sort of buff to make them more relevant. I’d want it to be slowly rolled out for specific dragons that need it, though, like with mana spirals.

Mainly I think that the 60% strength dragons probably need a buff since we’re starting to get conditional 80% strength dragons, but there’s also other relatively weak 5-star dragons like Prometheus, Takemikazuchi, Nidhogg, etc, that could use a buff.

This also might be a good way for them to make it worthwhile to actually be shapeshifted for a while, instead of just using the dragon to use a single skill or to tank a hit. At the moment they’re basically all weaker than if you weren’t shapeshifted, but maybe this sort of buff would also lead to their shapeshifted forms being way better. Which would at least be great for characters like Xainfried, Mym, Lathna, etc.

I’m also kinda wondering now if this chapter might be setting up for Leonidas joining us and being playable eventually. It kinda feels like that’s what they’re setting up, but honestly I kinda hate all of Euden’s siblings and I don’t really want to see any of them become our allies, lol. Also Leonidas would probably just be a flame sword, and we really don’t need more of them.

On a similar note I think it’s pretty safe to say that we’re probably getting Gala Alex next month. I dunno if I’ll go out of my way to save for her, but we’ll see. I’m curious to see what her gala alt would play like, though, especially if she’s still a shadow unit. There’s just a whole lot of competition in shadow at the moment. Either way, I think she’ll probably end up being a sword. Shadow doesn’t really have any noteworthy sword units at the moment, so that’d be nice.

Once we get into March I might start saving for her, but for now I’m probably gonna put some resources into the new dragon banner, since all of the featured ones really interest me [especially Apollo since I don’t have him yet], and I just got Epimetheus so now I’m done with the Valentine’s banner.

That also reminds me that at this point it’s basically confirmed that both Epimetheus and the three old Valentine’s adventurers are permanent now, which is really interesting. I guess this means that later this year they’ll make the old Halloween and Christmas units permanent, too. That’d be a nice way to keep introducing new holiday units without it getting bloated and hard to manage. And honestly most of the older holiday units aren’t particularly good anymore, so there’s no real harm in making them permanent. RIP in pieces to all the people who whaled for V-Hilde, though, lol. Maybe now that she’s permanent she has a chance of getting a mana spiral to make her better.

Anyway, I’ve felt a little let down by some of the recent story chapters, but I ended up really liking this one. Now I’m excited to see what reveals and developments the next chapter brings.

I’m also still extremely hyped about the upcoming shadow mana spiral batch, and the new Agito fight. I’m still clinging onto my pipe dream wish of them improving Norwin by making him more like V-Addis or Natalie. I’ve actually been thinking some more about the different ways that could go [even after I made a whole post about it lmao], and I think it’d be interesting if in addition to adding an enmity effect to his S1, they added an effect to his S2 where he takes non-lethal damage relative to the amount of damage he does to the enemy with the skill, as a way to manually get him down to low health. So I guess in that case he’d be more like a shadow version of Chelsea, which could be fun. I also think there’s a lot of interesting things they could do with him by, say, adding a team health regen effect to his Blind = Team Strength ability. But who knows. I just want him to get some special attention and become genuinely good because I really love him, lol. Though in general I like the idea of them using mana spiral upgrades to basically give certain characters a whole different play-style. Sorta like how Karl can now be used more or less as a buffer, but that has more to do with D-Rathalos than Karl’s mana spiral. It’s still an interesting way to give older units a niche in the meta.

#murasaki rambles #dragalia lost #I immediately gave Epimetheus most of my Valentine's card items because he has all my uwus