Verdant Skies and Love Nikki
Oct. 31st, 2019 04:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alias_sqbrTwo games I've been playing a lot lately: the space-based farming sim Verdant Skies, which runs on Mac and PC, and the phone-based doll-maker gacha game Love Nikki.
Verdant Skies
A shonkily made but more diverse Stardew Valley in Space. It took a while to grab me but I'm quite enjoying it now, a couple of hours in. The art is Very Patchy, and the writing is heavy-handed: The characters are like...a shopkeeper who literally says "I'm going to go relax by counting my money" and Space-Latina-Kaylee-from-Firefly using a gratuitous number of Spanish exclamations, etc. But the core farming sim mechanics are adequately implemented, and I am having a lot of fun wandering around an alien planet gathering samples for the multiple science nerd love interests. Including a non binary character! Also the pragmatically mercenary colony manager is way hotter than Lewis from Stardew Valley >.> The CAPITALISM IS BAD message is both heavy handed and shallow, and colonialist "hooray for discovering and settling a pristine alien planet" tropes are played pretty straight thus far. But the "HOORAY FOR SCIENCE AND BEING NICE TO PEOPLE" tropes go right to my id, and I get to play as non binary and bi, so. I'm having fun, but ymmv.
Love Nikki:
This is a somewhat problematic dollmaker gacha game with a very silly, shallow plot. But it's well made and fun to play. I strongly recommend not playing if you have any tendency towards gambling addiction/have issues resisting micro-transactions etc, I'm having fun playing for free but it is very good at making you think "Oooh, if I just spend $1 I could..."
It's a lot like Helix Waltz in basic structure, but better made as a game (for a start, it runs, and all the text is clear and readable) and much less interesting as a story.
I spent a long time thinking this was related to the idol anime Love Live, but it's an original Chinese game set in a fantasy world where people battle for The Best Style to decide everything from who pays for pizza to who wins a war. Luckily it has a Pokemon-esque cheerful self awareness of it's own ridiculousness, and it's a great setup for what is effectively an RPG but your stats are things like "Cool" or "Sexy". You have to spend a lot of time grinding the same style battles to gather materials to upgrade your wardrobe, and also waiting for your turns to build up, but thus far the balance of grinding, waiting, and new content has been about right for me as a time filler a few times a day.
The clothing/accessory art is well drawn, with fun options to play with, and there's a few ways to get creative and see what other users have come up with (all of which reward spending real money to get the coolest outfits)
The protagonist, Nikki, is a Generic Nice Girl with an incredibly annoying talking cat sidekick who insults you/her if you fail a challenge. She just wanders around getting better at Style, making friends and helping people. It's all aggressively heteronormative, and the approach to race is unfortunate. The countries are not!America, not!England, not!Fantasy Europe, not!Imperial China, not!Russia... and The Wasteland of Brown People and Elves. All the darker complexions I've seen are tagged "sexy", and the clothes and plots involve a lot of other exotifying stereotypes.
But since Helix Waltz stopped working for me, this is what I've got.
OH ALSO, there's lots of guides online, but one thing I wish I'd known going in: it costs FOURTEEN REAL WORLD DOLLARS to change your character's name, so choose carefully!
Verdant Skies
A shonkily made but more diverse Stardew Valley in Space. It took a while to grab me but I'm quite enjoying it now, a couple of hours in. The art is Very Patchy, and the writing is heavy-handed: The characters are like...a shopkeeper who literally says "I'm going to go relax by counting my money" and Space-Latina-Kaylee-from-Firefly using a gratuitous number of Spanish exclamations, etc. But the core farming sim mechanics are adequately implemented, and I am having a lot of fun wandering around an alien planet gathering samples for the multiple science nerd love interests. Including a non binary character! Also the pragmatically mercenary colony manager is way hotter than Lewis from Stardew Valley >.> The CAPITALISM IS BAD message is both heavy handed and shallow, and colonialist "hooray for discovering and settling a pristine alien planet" tropes are played pretty straight thus far. But the "HOORAY FOR SCIENCE AND BEING NICE TO PEOPLE" tropes go right to my id, and I get to play as non binary and bi, so. I'm having fun, but ymmv.
Love Nikki:
This is a somewhat problematic dollmaker gacha game with a very silly, shallow plot. But it's well made and fun to play. I strongly recommend not playing if you have any tendency towards gambling addiction/have issues resisting micro-transactions etc, I'm having fun playing for free but it is very good at making you think "Oooh, if I just spend $1 I could..."
It's a lot like Helix Waltz in basic structure, but better made as a game (for a start, it runs, and all the text is clear and readable) and much less interesting as a story.
I spent a long time thinking this was related to the idol anime Love Live, but it's an original Chinese game set in a fantasy world where people battle for The Best Style to decide everything from who pays for pizza to who wins a war. Luckily it has a Pokemon-esque cheerful self awareness of it's own ridiculousness, and it's a great setup for what is effectively an RPG but your stats are things like "Cool" or "Sexy". You have to spend a lot of time grinding the same style battles to gather materials to upgrade your wardrobe, and also waiting for your turns to build up, but thus far the balance of grinding, waiting, and new content has been about right for me as a time filler a few times a day.
The clothing/accessory art is well drawn, with fun options to play with, and there's a few ways to get creative and see what other users have come up with (all of which reward spending real money to get the coolest outfits)
The protagonist, Nikki, is a Generic Nice Girl with an incredibly annoying talking cat sidekick who insults you/her if you fail a challenge. She just wanders around getting better at Style, making friends and helping people. It's all aggressively heteronormative, and the approach to race is unfortunate. The countries are not!America, not!England, not!Fantasy Europe, not!Imperial China, not!Russia... and The Wasteland of Brown People and Elves. All the darker complexions I've seen are tagged "sexy", and the clothes and plots involve a lot of other exotifying stereotypes.
But since Helix Waltz stopped working for me, this is what I've got.
OH ALSO, there's lots of guides online, but one thing I wish I'd known going in: it costs FOURTEEN REAL WORLD DOLLARS to change your character's name, so choose carefully!
no subject
Date: 2019-11-01 07:03 am (UTC)I can tell you right now that all the darker complexions in the game are tagged as sexy. I keep hoping they'll come out with another complexion that's not but so far no dice. The stuff they've done together with Barbie is the least racist they've done.
GOD Momo is so infuriating. How far into the game are you? It gets ridiculously dramatic in a still completely incoherent way later on, but it also takes aaaaaages to get that far. I really ship Nikki/Bobo and certainly some of the official art super supports that ship, but some of the events are spoilery for things that happen later in the game and from what I understand Bobo has... left the group? So idk.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-02 11:40 am (UTC)I'm a bit over halfway through chapter 7. More Bobo/Nikki shippiness is something to look forward to! I've seen bits of the weirdly intense plots in Dreamweaver etc.
But yeah. A lot to sigh over, too :/