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Guilty pleasure: mobile games

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    #16
    Originally posted by fishbowlhead View Post
    Otherwise all dross.
    What an idiotic opinion in the year 2018.

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      #17
      Monument Valley is great. I have the sequel ready to go too. It has to be designed with touch in mind. Couldn't play regular button games on a phone.

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        #18
        I play the recent Senran Kagura New Link multiple times a day. It's a gacha game with a light turn based combat system. I don't know if it's good (it probably isn't) but at this point I'm too far down the Senran Kagura hole to not play it.

        Also installed but not played yet are Girls Frontline, Love Nikki and that new Shin Megami Tensei game. I like anime girls more than giant green penises in wheelchairs so I'll probably try Girls Frontline before Dx2.

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          #19
          Originally posted by toythatkills View Post
          What an idiotic opinion in the year 2018.
          And thanks for your opinion Tony.

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            #20
            Originally posted by chopemon View Post
            I don't know if it's good (it probably isn't) but at this point I'm too far down the Senran Kagura hole to not play it.
            I'm down in that hole with you, probably for longer than you, and I still fail to see why I should play the SK mobile game ;P

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              #21
              What's this about the Senran Kagura and holes?

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                #22
                You'd expect SK to be more about hills, but instead it's all about a giant hole, the hole that the director is digging deeper and deeper with each game.

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                  #23
                  There are some mobile games I love. And then on the other hand, there is any game that sells bags of gems/coins/whatever as DLC. Some games I love:

                  80 Days - this is a steampunk retelling of 80 Days Around the World with you playing Passepartout. It works kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure where you pick your routes and make choices, aiming to make your way around the world. Replays can come out massively different due to the massive amount of routes available. You can even make your way around the other direction. There are lots of story threads and it's an incredibly impressive example of this type of game. I can't count how many times I have played through it.

                  Sword & Sworcery - This started as a mobile game but I think it's also on Steam and is coming to Switch soon. Gorgeous pixelart and music in a lovely adventure. It's incredibly atmospheric and a beautiful experience overall.

                  The Room (and sequels) - Started off like a creepy puzzle box game. You are in a room, there is a puzzle box in the centre and you have to figure out how to get it open by sliding things and pressing things and so on. The scope of the game widens and the sequels widened it much further with puzzles across many rooms and locations. They are all eerie and lovely all in one. Slow paced and yet rewarding.

                  Florence - there isn't much too this but I'm going to recommend it anyway. It's a very short game about a relationship told in lovely illustrative style. It's just a nice experience.

                  Organ Trail
                  - This might be a port from PC actually... not sure. Anyway, it's Oregan Trail with zombies and it's quite brilliant. Old school pixel graphics as you journey across the US trying to survive the zombie horde. Play it.

                  As other have mentioned, Monument Valley is great too as are the Kairosoft games.

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                    #24
                    I wanted to update this post for a while, so here I go.

                    Shinobi Masters Senran Kagura New Link
                    I've played this for about a week for the Senran Kagura retrospective videos I'll be publishing later this month; this game is not available in English and must be played through QooApp or similar services.
                    In contrast with all other mobile games I've played this is full 3D, using scaled down assets from the console releases; it looks and sounds good, though loading times are quite long, and I've used an emulator running from an NVME SSD. The game is also quite large, clocking in at more than 9GB, which you can download when needed or all at once. If you choose the latter, there's no progression bar and as long as the game is downloading the intro animation is in a constant loop...so for your sanity choose to download stuff when needed.

                    The gacha element focuses on the cast from all of the Senran Kagura games (though the cast of the previous mobile SK game, New Wave, is not fully represented) and their custome variations. If you roll the same character with a different outfit, the most rare version of that character will be kept and you'll be able to swap clothes in the dressing room. Clothes destruction is kept to a minimum, but some of the outfits available here are absolutely fantastic, starting from the new uniforms the four main schools received, to the rarest of outfits.

                    You create groups of five characters and tackle missions in which you face a certain number of enemy waves, culminating into a boos fight. Rather than single characters scoring long combos, you need to set up your team so that the five characters can link (hence the game's name) their single attacks together, build up meter, and unleash a special attack against difficult enemies. The system works, and right from the start you can activate autobattle and have to game do its things while you do something else; if you are not familiar with mobile games you might think "why do I have to watch a game play itself?", but this is a very common solution that alleviates the tedium associated with grinding in these game. Anyway, I did get bored durign the single week I've played, because this is not an action game, but rather a turn-based RPG battle. This is not to say that the game isn't done well, in fact I'd say it's done way better and with more care than any of the main Senran Kagura games from Estival Versus onwards, it's just that it's a bit too different from what Senran Kagura was/is (depending if you consider the franchise dead or not) and is not quite as fleshed out as other turn-based strategy games.

                    Worth a try if you like Senran Kagura, though.

                    Girls' Frontline
                    Of all the mobile games I've mentioned in the first post, GFL is the one I like the most and the one with the longest legs as a game. Story chapters are added sparingly, but each map has three medals to unlock and some of the later maps (according to the current progression of the English server) require some thinkering with formations and strategies, and don't simply rely on maxed-out characters and equipment. All special events add at least one new mechanic, like user-controlled gates to funnel enemies, mines to destroy bridges or rubble, spawn points for support units, and of course enemies that you have to tackle with specific formations. For strategy lovers there's a lot to like, and during the last major story event, map design wasn't based on incredibly strong enemies, but rather maneuvering and puzzle solving; some of those went a bit too far and were hard to figure out without a guide, but it's nice to see that GFL didn't force itself into the "you don't have the numbers to defeat this enemy" corner.

                    Recently the game added the ability to capture units from the first opposing faction, Sangvis Ferris, and they play very differently from standard units, with a clear distinction between ranged and physical units, varied special abilities, and different factors when defining formations. The introduction of this element came with a large injection of free resources, so getting most of the units was painless and didn't require any extra expense, whether those were real money or in-game stuff.

                    GFL had some impressive collaborations. It started with some random events with Arc System Works (Noel from BlazBlue and Elphelt from Guilty Gear) and DJ Max (which is currently re-running), then continued with the more appropriate VA-11 Hall-A (which delivered the best buffer in the whole game, so far as being forbidden in community speedrun events), Ubisoft's The Division (appropriate collaboration, but based on too much grinding of grenades to defeat bosses), and even Gunslinger Girl. Yup, the manga. And it was the best collaboration by far, both mechanically a thematically, and it basically posed GFL as a far-future sequel to the series (well, at least in GFL fans' minds).
                    Chances of these collaborations running again are slim, but DJ Max gave a ray of hope what they will re-happen in the future. The Korean server is having a collaboration with Jashin-chan Dropkick for some reason, and the collaboration with Hitoribocchi never got outside Japan.
                    GLF always have seasonal and April's Fool events where enemies and characters dress up as something (for example enemis might become watermelons during the summer event, or ghosts for halloween).

                    GLF is also one of the few mobile games you can play entirely for free if you plan your gems correctly. The game gives 300 free gems every month, and those are enough to keep you storage spaces large enough for the influx of new units, and maybe slowly expand your maximum resources like number of formations, dormitories, and so on. Developers recently started to gift tokens to roll for outfits, so while slow, you can also get some visual eyecandy without spending real money.

                    If you want to try out a mobile game, Girls' Frontline is the one I'd recommend.

                    Azur Lane
                    If there's a game I constantly think about dropping, it's this.
                    Azur Lane concluded its story with chapter 13, and forced itself into a corner where developers would have to increase level and damage caps to defeat stronger enemies due to insufficient DPS and/or health. For a good while Azur Lane survived only thanks to special events of collaborations, introducind new characters at a rather fast pace to keep interest high.

                    Then came research ships, characters you have to collect experience with other characters to unlock. Currently the fourth series has just been introduced, featuring ships that where never built or even laid down during WWII and existed only in blueprints or proposals.
                    To reinvogorate interest in the game developers introduced Operation Siren, a sort-of endgame mode where only the most difficult enemies will grant experience but with plenty of high-end equipment drops to fight these difficult enemies with ease. For most players this has become the de-facto standard mode, and every month the map is reset and you have to uncover the various areas all over again.

                    Azur Lane is an incredibly grindy game, and even with all the automatation introduced by the developers, it can and will become tedious, especially when you have nothing concrete (new characters or equipment) to work for. It is, however, the most successful of all the mobile games I play by far, mostly due to the character design. Its grindy nature and the lack of new meaningful mechanics (the last one were submarines...one or more year ago?) is what makes me constantly consider dropping it. But then I never do, probably because I would feel the need to fill the void with something else, and I don't want to start any new mobile game. Plus Z23 is cute.

                    Of special mentions are the various collaboration events held: it started with Neptunia (meh...which led to Idea Factory to develop Azur Lane Crosswave for consoles), then we've got Kizuna Ai and Hololive (had to search what those are), Dead Or Alive, and now a collaboration with Idolm@star just concluded...well, the fourth group of research ships is also kind-of linked to World Of Warships. Several collaborations stayed within Japan (like NicoNico and Utawarerumono) and China (a national retailer, I think).

                    Can you play for free? Up to a point. Story missions and some milestones give gems, but the large number of characters and items require to constantly increase storage space, and after you are done with story and milestones you'll have to rely on the incredibly rare commissions that might reward gems or "apologems" from the developers. What are apologems? Well, the game is offline for a few hours every Thursday for server maintenance, more if a major event is supposed to start; maintenance requires to download an update, then a patch, then an hotfix, then another update, and finally players can access the game, which still shows untranslated lines and the random bug here and there. Apology gems (apologems) are sent to all players for all these downloads and downtimes. One time the game was down for more than 48 hours just before a major event, breaking Fate Grand Order's previous record of being unavailable (24 hours).

                    Just download illustrations and photos of cosplayers. And no, don't play Azur Lane Crosswave.

                    Fire Emblem Heroes
                    Situation hasn't changed since the last post, I just log in to collect daily bonuses. FEH is not a bad game, is a good adaptation to Fire Emblem for mobiles, and resetting difficulty at every story chapter doesn't force players into an endless grind towards a few uber-powerful characters, but, I don't know, I've lost interest in it.
                    The game will soon run out of characters to introduce...I think...so it's relying on variations of characters. Today I've rolled for a Camilla (FE Fates) cosplaying as a pirate.
                    FEH is, by far, the game you can play without spending a dime: you start with plenty of space in your castle for characters, and you can expand it by using orbs, the same items used for summoning characters, which is gifted at every daily log-in, special event, and first completion of story maps. Just to give you an idea, I had to increase character space for the first time today, and I played ever since the game's launch.
                    You can buy stuff with real money (orbs, stamina for extra daily fights, items for upgrades), but the game is extremely generous (at least for a mobile game) when it comes to any kind of extra resource, so you can go completely free with this one.

                    Granblue Fantasy
                    Long abandoned, already described why in the previous post.

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                      #25
                      I play Senran Kagura daily. It looks nice and uses character models that look like the illustrations rather than chibi versions like Azur Lane. For me it's a good loading screen game. When a level in EDF/Let It Die/etc is loading, I tap through a couple of screens to set my team auto battling. The gacha pulls recently had a 5 chance increase and after a few years of playing I've never put any money into it. Don't even know if I can outside of Japan.

                      The one thing that has annoyed me recently is the latest LR card for Jasmine. The LR cards are the top tier cards that got introduced a few months back. This new one isn't obtained through gacha, you have to be one of the top 1000 damage dealers in a new limited time event. To get to that point you need to have a very strong team, presumably with some of the previous LR cards in. I don't have any of the previous LR cards as either the gacha gods were bad to me or I'd run of of crystals to do the pull. So now I can't get Jasmine. I suppose it's good in a way because it means people that have probably spent money to get the best pulls now get to obtain a new LR card outside of the gacha system.

                      Anyway, it's a gacha game for degenerates that I think is actually pretty good so long as it is something you occasionally tap at.

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                        #26
                        I managed to quit FEH and Dragalia Lost over a year ago. I had never spent money on them, but kept going back anyway.
                        Deleted to never be reinstalled.

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                          #27
                          Originally posted by briareos_kerensky View Post
                          Girls' Frontline
                          I'm confused; I googled this and it looked just like Arknights.

                          Are they related? Or is this just the mobile game thing again where many of them look the same?

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                            #28
                            I'm still playing Marvel Puzzle Quest since I posted, so we're looking at over 6 years now.

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                              #29
                              Pirates Outlaws is fantastic - basically Slay the Spire except with pirates in it. Free with DLC and the coin/reputation drops are decent, but pay a few quid for the upgrade booster (I paid £3.50) and the unlocks tick up really nicely with no further purchases required. Lots of unique scenarios/'seas' to conquer.

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                                #30
                                Originally posted by Asura View Post
                                I'm confused; I googled this and it looked just like Arknights.

                                Are they related? Or is this just the mobile game thing again where many of them look the same?
                                I think it's that they all look the same. Girls Frontline is Kancolle but instead of ships, the girls are named after/embodiments of guns and in Arknights the girls have bunny ears.

                                I quite liked both of them when I tried them but I was already invested in SK so didn't stick with them.

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