Wish upon a star

Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy - thoughts and game design analysis

2026-07-14T22:14:24Z

So... I have a new gacha.

For the past couple of months, I've been playing Dissidia Duellum Final Fantasy. I have the tendency to go through periods where I play a single gacha game regularly on my phone, until I either ragequit it OR it gets cancelled, and then I will have a fallow period where I'm not playing any gacha games. I've been in that fallow period ever since Echoes of Mana got discontinued back in... May 2023. Wow, that's a long time ago. RIP.

Anyway, I picked up DDFF back in May and, because of my health issues, it's been nice having something I can play on my phone while lying in bed, and so I've sunk a LOT of hours into this game. But please don't take that to mean this game is good or engaging, because it's actually quite bad. Like, poorly designed to a baffling, this-has-no-long-term-viability degree, to the point where I wanted to do a rant/breakdown about everything that needs to be fixed to make this game not bleed users. So here we go: way too many words spent analyzing the design of a gacha (that is, a predatory, freemium, cashgrab) mobile game. I first give a basic overview of how gacha games generally work / how they are typically designed (introducing a bunch of specialized terminology used in gacha game communities), so that I can then compare it to how DDFF is designed and basically just go "Why???" I then add a couple of personal/fannish thoughts.

( Prologue: How I got into this game )
( Gacha game design explainer )
( The bizarre design of Dissidia Duellem Final Fantasy )
( Some final, more-positive thoughts )

Okay, so there you have it -- 10000 words and over 10 hours spent writing up thoughts on this not-particularly-good gacha game I might very well drop in a couple of months. orz

comments

Schrodinger Dead Characters

2024-08-19T12:27:13Z

Writing my Pinocchio canon promo and writing about Lampwick reminded me that I need to finish a mini fandom meta piece I've been meaning to write up for a really long time.

Basically, late in high school and during college, I got into three things: (1) I played Soulcalibur for the first time (Soulcalibur II), (2) I finished playing Sword of Mana, and (3) I watched Pinocchio for the first time (at least, at an age old enough that I actually watched/remembered the whole thing).

These three canons actually share something in common, which is that, well, I got unreasonably attached to a particular character who made it to the end of the story alive, but who I later found out died in a different version of canon!

Let me go through these one by one:

( Spoilers for Sword of Mana, Soulcalibur, and Pinocchio )

Anyway, I was wondering if you know of any characters like this, where it's possible to go through the whole story under the belief the character survived, only to find they died in another version of the story -- characters who live in one version of canon but die in another. And if you consumed the one where they lived *first* and then got blindsided by their fate in a different version. I wonder if the experience is very different when the order is swapped (you're expecting the character to die and are like "huh, interesting choice" when they survive); I feel like I must have experience with that too, but for some reason, these three examples always stick out in my mind when it comes to these "Schrodinger dead" characters, maybe because it's more memorable that way. Do you find you tend to latch onto these characters who have a habit of maybe-dying in canon, or that those kinds of characters don't really stand out to you?

EDIT: Oh man, I kept feeling there was another example of me knowing a character should die and being surprised when they didn't, but I couldn't think of it. But I finally remembered -- it's actually the opposite: Mild spoiler warning for Magic Knight Rayearth, but I read the manga first, and then I watched the anime. In the anime, Presea dies once she gives the main trio their new weapons/armor. Having read the full manga, though, I was like "Mm, well, that's an... interesting choice..." because I knew Presea would be plot-relevant later. And then I later read that the anime dealt with this problem by... introducing Presea's twin sister, Sierra! Lmao, amazing. Great save.

comments

Promptmepromptly: Star Trek tropes that resonate with me

2024-07-01T20:46:25Z

For promptmepromptly, I got the following prompt:

What tropes that came from Star Trek have resonated most with you as a viewer, possibly with examples of them in alternate medias? If that scope is too broad, feel free to pick a trope and talk my ear off about it.

It's hard for me to tell what tropes Star Trek originated, and what it just popularized. So instead, I just decided to brainstorm some elements that frequently feature in Star Trek, and which resonate with me, and talk about them. I chose two topics:

( Humanistic Renaissance men / random ship concerts )

( Characters caught between different cultures )

comments

Author/artist commentary on "That Pervert" (Quodo comic)

2023-12-12T22:12:38Z

A behind-the-scenes / commentary thing for my Quodo comic (n=5366).

( Conceptualization and prep work )
( Drawing the comic )
( Notes and various easter eggs )

comments

Comparing DeviantArt and Tumblr for their suitability for posting fanart

2023-04-24T12:30:04Z

So I've been using DeviantArt a lot recently for a personal project. This combined with my Snowflake Challenge musings (where I pondered what is now the best site for posting adult art in the wake of Twitter's struggles) inspired me to write up a long comparison of how DeviantArt and Tumblr compare as sites for posting fanart. n = 4546 words.

( Table of contents and preliminary notes )
( Pages vs. posts )
( Post creation )
( Site performance and loading times )
( Creating an art gallery )
( Userbase activity )
( Browsing experience )
( Summary diagram )

comments

Snowflake Challenge #7 & #8

2023-01-16T23:17:07Z

(Where's Challenge #6? I've decided to do it later when I have more time and am less panicked about work.)

Challenge #7 - In your own space, interact with a community or a fic.

Done. This one is always easy for me because commenting on fic tends to come quite easily to me. Also, I am really behind on the Quodo tag on AO3, so there's plenty of works for me to comment on at the moment. I am kind of rushing through my reading so I didn't leave as many comments as I liked, but I did leave comment on three different people's works, and I'm still in January in my backwards-moving fic backlog. I hope to leave a few more.

Challenge #8 - In your own space, create a quiz or a poll (or tell us your thoughts about answering quizzes/polls).

I was a bit inspired by hamsterwoman's general ramblings about personality quizzes to share some of my thoughts on what I think make good and bad "What X are you?"-type personality/sorting quizzes.

( Ranting about uQuiz ahead )

comments

Texture squick

2020-12-13T00:27:43Z

This is kind of random, but I have wanted for years to make a post about trypophobia, which is something I experience. I don't particularly like the name trypophobia ("fear of holes"), though, because it's not exactly a phobia, nor is it limited to holes. So instead I'm going to call it "texture squick," which I think more accurately captures the experience.

Just a heads up that the first part of this post features a lot of detailed description of creepy things that might make you uncomfortable (certainly made me uncomfortable writing them), and the second part of this post features a lot of images which will be highly unpleasant if you have texture squick (but probably look perfectly innocuous if you don't).

( What is texture squick? )
( Creepy texture examples )

comments