I think my least favorite take, opinion, whatever you want to call it, is “why did Arknights not say the Inquisition was bad?”. It applies to any event, really, replace Inquisition with whatever the Authority Figure Organization is involved, and hell, I even agree with the sentiment sometimes, Arknights’ not flawless, but for the most part: You need to read better. You are playing the Game That Doesn’t Say Things Explicitly. It tends not to say things explicitly, turns out.

It kind of bugs me opening my inbox and seeing something to the effect of “I’m uncomfortable about Irene because she’s technically a cop, why is she not Condemned for it?” First of all, shame on your for wanting all of the art you peruse instantly moralized, to the point it needs to somehow involved a shovelful of The Opinion, served explicitly, at the drop of a hat. That aside, the Inquisition is not put on a good light to say the least, so even then the point is moot. Irene’s journey is very much seeing with her own eyes that “the Inquisition raised me, I respect and love the people I’ve met in it, as they do me, and the dogma surrounding the Inquisition is an important brick in the temple that is my life” necessarily is something that exists alongside “the Inquisition does in fact leave the imperiled to be doomed, and sees human life more as numbers and resources than human lives, the dogma is built, necessarily, on oppression of others as a means of fostering order and morale, and I’ve benefited directly from this privilege”, and that she has to make a decision. High Inquisitor Dario, her mentor and foster father, tells her as much: “Once you see things with your eyes, you have to make a decision”. Irene does in fact make her decision, leaving the Inquisition and the mentorship of The Highest Of Inquisitors, Saint Carmen himself, who was going to take her in and basically assure her a seat as a High Inquisitor in the future, because she found the latter realization to weight more than the former. In her own words, Irene decided to step away from this, because if she remained in the Inquisition, she’d only forever perpetuate the oppression on the Aegir, among other things.

Now, there’s definitely more to say about the Inquisition of Iberia, but I’m focusing on Irene here: Do you think it’d make sense for her to just suddenly have a moment of clarity, in the middle of all that fighting and struggling to stay alive, say “I’m antifa now, actually” and discard everything that has been her life until that moment just like that? If you do think so, I hope you don’t write anything soon. Your desire for catharsis is not unimportant, but the narrative shouldn’t have to accommodate for it in the most neckbreak way possible, and if you do need it to do that, then read something else, there are reads and games like that elsewhere (for example, Tales of the Abyss has the main character do an absolute 180 from one moment to another after a specific event in its story), but also do show some respect for the fact that Irene, in a way that resembles what anyone who just had her entire world view challenged not once, but twice (Under Tides and Stultifera Navis) would act, allows herself some time apart from the tension of the Big Happenings of the event, actually digest the paradigm shift, the loss of someone important to her, what to do with all the new information she has and what the experiences have taught her, and grow out from there organically. 

What I’m trying to say is that I’d rather have less “conclusive” overdone neckbreak moments of “you know what? Fuck this! Fuck you!” and maybe let the characters in any given narrative seep and stew into what happened and what happens from there on. Take, for example, Full Metal Alchemist, in which certain important characters have a real moment of “Hey... Are we... The bad guys?” that shapes the events of an entire, important part of the story long term, slowly, with the gravitas it deserves.

fgo criticisms have been flaring up in the wake of dw’s sakura wars mobile game quitting after only half a year but I have a disease that makes me get defensive when people try to rip fgo apart as this uniquely terrible game with uniquely terrible devs so i’m going to complain about people who are complaining for a bit.

i hadn’t heard of the sakura wars game before it shut down but from what i’ve been able to find it suffered from a lot of the same problems as (launch) fgo, terrible gacha rates with no pity, slow ap recovery rates, barebones repetitive gameplay. so i guess seeing how fast sakura wars was shut down people feel like it’s only the fate name holding up fgo and in the early launch days of barely playable fgo that was definitely the case but I don’t think it’s fair to fgo to act like people only continue to play it because it’s fate, and “being like fgo” wasn’t the only problem with sakura wars either. sakura wars is a vn/dating sim series that attempted to revive the series with a mobile game that featured none of the original cast that fans cared about while fate was already a series with new characters and a new setting every instalment and the thing that stood out in this new game was actually that it DID have characters from previous fates available. hell, it’s not fair to sakura wars to claim that its series name is simply weaker than fate’s when there were other factors involved in its failure beyond “being a delightworks game”

fgo DOES improve, launch fgo is unrecognisable compared to current fgo in a good way. events have become more streamlined (events have mid- to lategame enemy hp scaling but feature damage ce’s to let newer players keep up, mission events are set up so that they basically clear themselves just by farming the most recently unlocked node), they experiment with new game modes and gameplay mechanics on the regular, they’re taking more care to make viable permanent servants and buff the older ones, and the past few months there’s also been a noticeable effort to throw out random banners for minor things as an excuse to rerun old limited servants more often. I’ll admit the bar is on the low side (strengthening quests are a ridiculous model, there shouldn’t be this many limiteds to need reruns in the first place, etc) and progress is slower than many people are willing to put up with, and I’m not saying anyone Has to put up with it or they’re a fake fan or whatever, but like, granblue fantasy is seven years old and still doesn’t have the ability to uncap a weapon multiple stages at a time when its entire gameplay loop centers around farming and uncapping weapons and they’ve buffed heles like 7 times but she’s still shit, none of fgo’s problems are exclusive to fgo.

i LIKE playing fgo. i like tapping the cards and watching my little guys go and coming up with different teams to make them go harder or just look good together or even lean into the Themes. and this is going a little bit on a tangent but i have this post window open anyway i was talking with friends earlier that one problem that a lot of mobile games seem to have is that they use “making the game play itself” as substitute for “making the game fun to play”. the only game with autobattle functionality (out of the ones I play, i don’t know everything that’s out there of course) that I feel DOESN’T do this is arknights, where you solve the puzzle that the stage presents in order to earn the right to not have to solve the puzzle every single time you play the stage and coming up with different efficient or perhaps ridiculous ways to solve the puzzle is part of playing the game. the worst case I know is dragalia lost which upon realizing that playing it sucks implemented an item to just let you skip playing stages altogether. “this game is good because you don’t have to play it” is not the selling point some people (and devs) think it is, and fgo refuses to fall into that trap - something I believe is an intentional decision because of their explicit refusal to implement NP skip.

one big advantage that fgo has over the other mobile games i’ve played is that it’s entirely turn based with no real time elements beyond start and end times of events. fgo doesn’t NEED to continue playing itself when you look away because looking away has no bearing whatsoever on your ability to clear the quest, fgo doesn’t give a shit if you look away for six hours and then close the game and only reopen it another ten hours later, you can continue right where you left off. the problem is not that you have to manually play the quest, because as far as the system is concerned you can take as much time as you like to clear that quest, it’s that the greater structure of the game wants you to repeatedly manually clear the same low-stakes quest for disproportionately small rewards. this one’s easy enough to solve by just increasing material droprates across the board. repeat clearing a low level quest is much less frustrating if you actually get drops every other clear.

but that’s a bandaid solution, because related to the issue of having to manually farm low-stakes quests is the lack of high-stakes quests to do when you want to do something a little more engaging than routine farming. outside of event challenge quests with their time limited availability, certain main story chapters that you can’t replay, and recently on JP the permanently available kiara challenge quest in the main interlude, there simply isn’t any difficult content to play. you could argue about fgo’s merit as strategy rpg in the first place i suppose but if you ask me it does have that merit and there is a clear effort from dw’s part to improve the depth of fgo’s strategy elements, the issue is that there is simply not that much content available to unleash those strategies on. of course you’re gonna get bored if all there is to do is either brainlessly repeat the same quest for minimal rewards or play the specific challenge quest that the game hands you right this moment regardless of whether that’s the kind of challenge you feel like facing right now. the solution to this one, although it’s likely going to take some significant effort on dw’s side to implement, is to make main story quests replayable.

you want to flex your brain muscles but there’s no challenge event right now? you stomped on a boss by using overpowered servants the first time but want to challenge yourself with some 3* this time? or the other way around, you beat a boss by the skin of your teeth the first time but want to stomp all over them now that you rolled some bitching 5*? you rolled a servant that’s not that suitable for day to day farming but would really shine in more difficult content and you want to try them out? you have a silly strategy in mind that would only work against certain story enemies? you’re like me and just really crave the shimosa duels? all of this involves content that already exists and is available in the game, dw would just have to figure out a way to let you access it again after clearing the chapter. and of course ideally this extends to event story quests once they’re added to the main interlude

i guess another way to put it is that i think the reason a lot of people say fgo has bad gameplay is not that its gameplay system is actually bad, in fact it has the potential to be very engaging, but rather that it’s a system that is set up to respect your time through the ability to put down the game absolutely whenever you want without being penalised, only for the game around it to go and penalise you for putting it down anyway. if you don’t diligently spend all your ap farming this quest you won’t get single damn material drop, and if you don’t play the event while it‘s happening you’re going to miss out because you can’t be sure when if ever it’ll return. so the number one way to solve the problem of fgo’s “bad gameplay” is not to make the game play itself whenever it tells you to play, but rather to make content more easily available so you don’t have to play if you don’t want to and CAN play if you do want to. thank you for coming to my ted talk i suppose