PhoenixShi

From my experience, the standard thing with porn mobile/browser gacha games is that they are very stingy, pay to win, and purposely made inconvenient to play. Lust Goddess most certainly does not deviate from these norms. Next, this is a type of collectible card game, and standard aspects of such games, going back decades now, is that your playing deck will be of a fair size, as there's a cost system, where each card has a cost to play, with stronger cards having a higher cost, but at the start, you can only play low cost cards. Lust Goddess although does not follow this pattern, as your playing deck is only five, to eight cards, depending on your league, and there is no cost system, so if you got one of those absolutely broken cards in your starting hand, and you get to go first, you almost certainly won. As you play, and win matches you get points to go to higher leagues, with there being thirty leagues in total. They supposedly tried to balance some of those busted cards by having them only available based on your league, so those super busted cards would only be available at the highest leagues, when people would be more capable of dealing with them. Although they screwed that all up by offering those cards that should be available to very few, in events, and spending packages, so you can run into them as early as league twenty something.

Pros: -Very diverse cast of characters. -Beautiful art. -Good music. -Most everything is voice acted, in English, some being pretty good. -Good game play, if you like card based systems. -Reasonably generous with getting pulls for the gacha, relative to other gacha games, and relatively decent gacha rates. -No PvP, which tends to be nothing but whale wars in gacha games. -Has a PC client, which works pretty well. Cons: -Farming previously completed stages, which you need to do a lot, takes more time than it really should. -Levelling up a character takes far too much focused grinding, especially for a game that in time, would have a huge character pool. -Event stages need to be farmed, but consume the same stamina used in the rest of the game. -Events are the main on-going content, but they are over tuned towards you having both of the new 6* characters, and having your characters at a rather high level. -The big event is in the second stage, which revolves around getting various cards that come in four rarities, are obtained through RNG, the selection of cards increases with each update, and you need to farm the cards again from scratch in each update. -Like seemingly every Chinese developed game, the writing is intolerably wordy. -While the game is still relatively new in China (version 1.6 at this time), it already looks to have general power creep, with one of the two new 6* characters each update tending to be viewed as even more busted than the one from the prior update. -It started with only four chapters of the main story, and in version 1.3, that's still the case. -While most everything is voice acted, many of the characters sound like they were done using a text to speech program.

Short version: I started shortly after global launch, and played for almost four years, with my main issues being its utter lack of quality of life, how RNG just kept getting shoved into game play more, and more, and how intolerably verbose all the writing would be. --------------------------------------- Long version: It launched with very weak quality of life, and after four years, virtually nothing was changed on this front, making playing a real annoyance. In most games of this type, which are heavily built around farming the same stages over, and over, you can quickly skip clear previously completed stages, or at least could let it auto repeat clear stages. Here, no skip clearing, no auto repeat, the auto clear function wasn't particularly reliable, and you needed to start up each run manually. If I didn't play on an emulator, so I could simulate an auto repeat function, I would have quit in short order. Beyond that, you need to log in at least twice a day to fiddle with your base, as characters would get fatigued, and you had to move them around, something I've never seen in such a function of other games. Most things in general were more of a chore than you'd expect them to be. The auto complete of stages was unreliable due to how much RNG they kept putting into things, so even if the recorded play through was perfect, RNG in subsequent auto runs could fail if enough aspects differed. This resulted in the one major "quality of life" improvement people tend to point out, that being making the big weekly annihilation stage so we could skip clear it. Although in reality, it wasn't a quality of life change, it was as with the growing amount of RNG, the auto clears would fail far too often due to how long the stage was. Aside from that, its last two new game modes when I quit were all built around RNG. Not being able to use my characters, or not being able to use them properly, as I needed to jump through a number of RNG hoops first was not fun, so I would just ignore those game modes. For some reason Chinese developed games all seem to suffer from the issue of their writing being extraordinarily verbose/wordy. Like when explaining a new game mode, or introducing players to a new event, instead of just getting to the point, and letting the player play, they always had to have a bunch of characters chat, and chat, and chat about random nonsense. I normally will read everything, even manuals, but I couldn't stand the writing here so much, that I gave up on reading any story text within a year.

Lost Ark is a good game to play long term if you: 1. Enjoy **VERY** mechanics focused difficult multi player weekly content as your main content to work towards. 2. Can form a static group to do said content with each week. 3. Are addicted to making alts in the games you play. 4. Have lots of time to spend playing to grind for equipment enhancement/honing materials, or are willing to spend real money for them. If the first two of those four things in particular do not match up with you, or what you want from the games you play, it can impact your enjoyment so significantly, it would be best to not even bother downloading the game. Honestly, in many ways this kinda felt like an isometric version of Blade & Soul, as both are built around difficult mechanics heavy weekly group content, with dull daily grind content, and have a toxic elitist player base. In regards to number one, they have mechanics during fights where you stop fighting, to execute a mini-game, like a typing test, or leading a thing, to another thing, under certain conditions. These sort of "mechanics" mostly come up in the later weekly content, and to an increasing degree with each new piece of such content they add. . . Some added notes: A. The game could really use some form of solo training tool for its weekly raid/dungeon content, as it can do a poor job of relaying how you should handle mechanics. This is why there's so many detailed guides on how to do things, but really the game should be teaching people how to play, it's not the community's job to do that. This is also why you need a static group to do that content with, it just gets more demanding over time, complete with raid wipe mechanics if even one person made a mistake, so what should be a twenty minute piece of content, instead can take hours to complete with teams of random players. B. Because of how mechanics heavy things are, explaining things can take a lot of time, so people don't want to do that, and just expect others to know how to do everything. As a result, it's not long after new content is added before about all you see in the party finder is people looking to do fast runs with experienced players, or just selling the service of AFK carrying people through content, as many try doing that as their way of getting loot from them. C. If you think you can power up your character, then face roll everything, you're very wrong. There are plenty of mechanics that will kill you, and maybe even the whole raid if even one person screws up, no matter how geared people are. D. Most every active player at the time this was written has at least one character with a gear score of at least 1415. Due to this there's a fair amount of content below that which is basically dead now, particularly guardian raids, field/world bosses, chaos gates, and ghost ships. Except for guardian raids, they do not scale with the number of people there, so you just can't expect to do them solo, and can be wasting your time even trying. Some higher level people will do the lower weekly dungeons for a chance at card drops, which results in you just chasing them around as they insta kill everything, even bosses. Then a lot of the people queuing up for the sub 1415 guardian raids these days, honestly ****, and tend to be rather under geared. End result is your experience in multiplayer content below 1415 can be pretty poor, meaning you'll be playing mostly solo for a long time. E. The daily resource grind content, gets really boring/annoying, pretty quickly, and there's a fair number of things seemingly added solely to waste time. F. If you're more of a solo player, don't bother. While the daily grind content is a mostly solo experience, the weekly raid content can only be even attempted with a group. There is just no recurring solo content that will be able to keep your attention, or is worth working towards. G. The standard equipment upgrade system has a type of pity system, so if you fail enough times, it will just give you the upgrade. Basically if you stick with it, you can have your entire account stuffed full of characters with their equipment at a high, to max upgrade level. H. A good chunk of the player base is pretty toxic, and elitist, or just want to be carried through everything, and can't be bothered to look things up on their own before hand, as they expect people to explain mechanics to them, and so on.

Kritika is a decent enough game, that has had three global releases thus far, two of which were terrible, this is one of them. After the horrible En Masse release, the developer, ALLM, decided to self publish the global release, so it was finally the way it should be, it just never gained a big audience. Then along comes Com2Us, which absorbs ALLM, quickly shuts down the global version, then months later releases this abomination, complete with "play to earn" blockchain crap. If that wasn't bad enough, games like this are aimed at people that want to play multiple characters, so will have a fair number of character slots by default, except this version only provides one character slot, and it costs some $50 US to open each additional slot. Currently the only version of Kritika that's worth playing is the Korean release, as there the government has banned play to earn games. I'd suggest that no one bother with the global release of Kritika, and avoid anything Com2Us has anything to do with.

After wasting almost 1.5 years with this, hoping they'd finally fix the big issues with it, I eventually quit, as I had to conclude that their intention was never to make a good game, it was to make something profitable. Despite all it's many, many faults, they did manage to make something that proved to be more profitable than they likely ever even dreamed it could be, so as far as they are concerned, it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, so have zero desire to "fix" anything, hence my rating of zero. Genshin to me is not a game, it's a gacha with a thing that sort of looks like a game attached to it. If you're looking for a good game to play, don't waste your time even downloading this. If on the other hand you want to waste a lot of drive space on bloated digital trash, spend a lot of money getting digital waifus, that may be censored later, and want to be treated like trash, that is only valued for the money you are meant to spend, then that's strange, but Genshin is absolutely for you.

The art, and music are quite good, but the rest, not so much. Here's my main points against it: -The writing of the "story" so far is actually pretty good, especially for a foreign developed mobile game, but what is written amounts to trivial text related to the deranged personality traits given to each character. -The game play loop is as boring as can be. -The whole game is largely just a gear check. -You hardly get any of the pay currency used to roll stuff, and do other things in a recurring manner, and they're charging far too much to buy it with real money. -Just about everything you roll is trash, as the only thing considered worth investing in for the long run are top base rarity items, as only those can be evolved to the highest rarity, and the odds of getting those is very low. Then due to the power creep Japanese players admit exists (it's been out there for three years now) you'll need to keep rolling for new stuff as it comes out, and thereby spending to keep up. -Like with some other such games, you get a second currency when you roll for stuff, except here that currency is locked to the month the banner was released in, events also get their own pity currency, it expires not long after the related month/event ends, and you need a lot of it to get anything worth wild, so it will only be of much use to whales, because they don't have enough advantages as it is. -Even if you do collect enough of the pity currency to get a featured weapon that would unlock a class if you rolled it, getting the weapon that way does not unlock the class, and you need to spend just as much to also get the class (it takes fifteen 10+1 pulls to get enough pity currency to get a SR weapon, or class unlock). -Some classes are only obtained by purchasing cash shop currency packages, and you want to collect as many classes as you can, as levelling classes provides passive account wide stat bonuses. -Equipment, and classes obtained by spending money are objectively better than the stuff you get from playing the main game, with the stuff obtained from doing events sitting in the middle. -It's another mobile gacha game where after you "upgrade" your equipment, it actually becomes worse. Since it goes back to level one after you upgrade it, it doesn't actually become stronger until you levelled it back up to the level it was before you upgraded it, or to it's new higher level cap. -Getting four duplicates of your equipment is very important, as it significantly increases the level cap of an item. -Too many important rewarding dungeons, as well as PvP happen at set times of the day, for only 20-30 minutes at a time, and maybe only once a day, if you missed it, too bad. -Due to how slowly your stamina pool increases (called AP in SINoALICE), how quickly it regenerates, the function you can use to rapidly regenerate your stamina that becomes available every eight hours, and dungeons you're expected to continually farm, to be efficient, and effective in the use of your stamina, so that you can keep up with others, you need to invest a lot of time into the game, spread out over the course of each day. Some spend as much as thirteen hours a day playing to do so, and lose a lot of sleep. -The main focus of late game is supposedly PvP, which is guild based combat of 15 vs 15, guilds can only participate once a day, and guilds can only have at most 15 members. The result of this is guilds kicking people left, and right if those people missed a day, or such, resulting in added stress, drama, people rage quitting from the game, and guilds folding. If guilds could have some 30-45 members, the situation would be much better, but they don't, so if that really will be the main drive of the game, I don't see it working out well in the long run over here. -PvP is not balanced, so whales will dominate. Early on, like with other such games, a free player can more, or less keep up if they put in enough time, but the longer these games are out, the more important spending becomes, and the wider the gap between the whales, and free players becomes.

The game elsewhere is pretty decent, but not amazing, and about a 7. If you want to play it, just don't play the NA/EU version this review relates to, any other one would be better. Here's the problem, EME (the publisher), and/or ALLM (the devs) wanted to make this release unique when compared to all the others, and the "hardest" one of them all. Maybe they figured considering how long it took to bring it over, they needed to separate it from the rest, so people already playing other versions would play this one, but whatever their reasoning, all their tinkering just took a decent game, and **** the fun out of it. The key problems come from their changes to the "difficulty," and the player economy. What makes a PvE encounter difficult is how well mobs are able to deal with the abilities of the player, and how well those mechanics are balanced. Kritika is a rather mechanically simplistic game, that is clearly trying to push the power fantasy. Skills are very flashy, you're able to mow down hordes of enemies due to your high damage, and usually take minimal damage when hit. Although instead of adding more mechanics to increase the difficulty in a true sense, they just greatly boosted mob stats, and applied shields to bosses that were never designed to have them. Now mobs take longer to kill, and even trash mobs can kill you in as little as just a few hits since their damage was increased by some four, to five times. Now instead of feeling like some powerful force of nature, you can feel like a fragile delicate wimp. In content not yet released here bosses have breakable shields that prevent them from being staggered by player attacks. Here those shields were given to most bosses, even some of the lowest level bosses, all never being designed to have such shields. With those shields, and their boosted stats, bosses can just shrug off player attacks, then launch their big attacks you were suppose to interrupt, but couldn't because of the shield. Once those shields do break, they almost always immediately enter fury mode, where they often similarly can't be staggered, gain new attacks, and boosted damage, only for the shield to go back up once fury mode has ended. Not knowing what other versions were like, most players had no idea these changes were made. Although EME, and ALLM later applied the same changes to late game content that as of yet hadn't been given those changes, at least to the same degree. This content is what a new level 65 (current level cap) player was told to do once they reached that level, although due to the severity of the stats boost, they were much too weak to do that content. Add to that how this version didn't have content that was suppose to be between that, and the prior content, and you can see one example of how poorly thought out many changes were. Due to a player revolt, and mass exodus, EME, and ALLM did at least decrease the severity of the stats boost, and remove the boss shields, although only in that late game content, the rest still has it. Many players still didn't come back though. For the economy, they have been trying very hard to control it, supposedly as a means to thwart gold sellers. Although all such changes came at the expense of the players, more so than the gold sellers, who always find a way around any such obstacle. First direct player trading was disabled, and the auction house was made to use Kred (a secondary cash shop currency) for sales of almost all items, that short of the odd event awarding some, could only enter the economy through real money purchases. This made the auction house like a secondary cash shop run by players, but all such sales were also taxed in Kred at 20%, or 20 Kred ($0.20 US), whichever is higher. Later they even added absolutely insane min/max prices for all items, to give you an idea how bad they were, before that update I was having a hard time selling level 60 legendary (highest rarity) weapons for 50-60 Kred, after the update their min price was 600 Kred. Especially with no events awarding Kred, the auction house was filled with items, no one is buying. Gold (in-game currency you can gain by playing) prices of things, especially for levelling players, was much too high compared to how much you could get. Their solution to help players get more gold in their pockets was to make gold gains unaffected by your current RP/stamina level (as you play, you consume RP/stamina, the more you use, the lower your gains are for XP, loot, and before then, gold). Most players stop playing after consuming the first RP/stamina bar, since gains go from 100%, to 50% then, so if you think about it, the ones such a change would actually help the most are the gold seller bots they're supposedly at war with. Again, if you want to play, play another version, the NA/EU version released by EME has too many thoughtless changes, that just sap the fun out of the game.

I played the game, at least off, and on for a few years, and it used to be pretty good, but not any more. It has become increasingly clear since early 2016 that the devs don't care about the game, and certainly not about the players, just about how much money they can squeeze out of people. That shift in the development philosophy of the game can be clearly seen in the user reviews here which prior to early 2016 were very positive, but quickly became very negative instead. It used to be that the stuff you could buy were cosmetics, modest boosters for gains, and ships that were just alternate versions of what you could get from playing, but not necessarily better. Now they sell the materials to make stuff, and have at times increased the required volume of such materials multiple times over when putting them in the cash shop, without increasing the rate you could expect to get them from just playing. They've also buffed various pay ships, will release new things as timed exclusives to help push people into paying to get the new OP thing in time, only to later nerf it when a new thing to spend money on is added, at which point the process repeats itself. If you don't want to pay, you'd have to spend most of your waking hours to farm enough materials before the item disappears for who knows how long, or is nerfed into uselessness. Then they decided to put in restrictions on the volume of materials you can stockpile, which can be less than the amount needed to make some things, of course materials you bought with real money are apparently exempt from that restriction. A trading system has recently been added, but rather than a marketplace UI system like most games have, it works from a trading chat channel, and direct player trades. Such a system requires the player to both be able to communicate with others, in a given language, and actively advertise the things they want to buy, or sell, rather than play the game. With a marketplace UI language barriers can be removed by having the game translated in multiple languages (as this one is), and is far less cumbersome as you can for instance just post something for sale, then go back to playing while the UI handles the rest. Although, since they have this system in place, and as it uses the cash shop currency for trades, with even mandatory min values, they claim now everyone has access to the cash shop currency, without even having to spend money themselves, no matter how badly the system works out. Since everyone supposedly has access to the cash shop currency now, they can feel justified in putting in even more pay advantages. Finally there's their appointed player GMs/mods, which are all apparently white knights for the game on ego trips. If you speak out against the game, or devs, they hate you, and will likely at least threaten to ban you for supposedly breaking rules that may not exist, or just go ahead and ban you. If you try to report them for harassing you, your report just goes to other player GMs/mods, who may even identify themselves as good friends with the one/s you have a complaint against, so it should be easy to figure out how well that works out for you. _________________________ Note: Pay to win (P2W) is a purely subjective term regarding if a person feels the pay advantages provided by a game are too significant, or not. While most may have not considered the game P2W prior to early 2016, with that change in development philosophy, now most feel the pay advantages have become significant enough to call it P2W.

It's not completely terrible, but I find it's not all that good either. Worst part is it's easy to see it could have been great, but after so many bad changes to the game, poor management, and a the horrid community, it's just not at all what I was hoping for. Take note that a lot of the reviews here are from around the time of the NA/EU launch, in one year they've put out content that took about four years to be released in Korea, as they're trying to get caught up in a big hurry, which isn't doing the game too many favours. The game now, simply is not like it was at the time when most of those reviews were written, so they can be largely ignored. After that mass of updates, the grind has increased by many times over what it was. Things that made the game stand out a bit more like the upgrading equipment system, and to an extent, the skill system, have since been dumbed down, or partially removed, because having choices to make is too hard for people apparently. They keep reducing the cost of the upgrades that still exist, but the real problem is how dependent you are on doing content with others for character bound items, and how toxic much of the player base is, who will refuse to team with people that aren't at end-game like they are, or just really hostile towards them, so many just end up quitting. Then if people complain in the forums, or such, there's always a group of white knights ready to yell at you, mods apparently won't penalize the hostile white knights, but may ban/suspend others over nothing. A community this bad, in a game where playing is so dependant on the community, just isn't a fun combination at all. Unless you start the game already knowing a group of people you can play with, don't even bother downloading the game. ____________________________________________ Other things: The servers have always been kinda poor, and performance of the game client is weak. It uses a soft lock-on system, where when you aim at something, it's suppose to it lock-on automatically. If there's only one target, that works fine, but it can easily mess up in a group fight. Often enough I've been in cases where I'm aiming at a target in front of me, but my attacks will be flying off to my old target since I'm still locked on to it, even if it's now off screen. Making suggestions is largely a waste of time, as they're just pumping out the Korean content as quickly as possible. There isn't even a suggestions, or patch discussion forum section like most any other online game, even other NCSoft games have, which gives you an idea how little interest they have in suggestions, or what you think. Instead of improving the existing guild/clan system, they added Social Clans. A player must spend in-game money to start a Social Clan, but then has basically no control over it at all, as it's permanently open for anyone to join without being invited, you can only kick one person per day, but they can always hop right back in after you do so, which means you can't keep out disruptive players. If you don't like it when a game sells the materials you're suppose to be playing to get, then stay away, as they'll even do their best to remind you that those items are in the cash shop. Inventory/storage space gets to be a big problem due to all the *many* types of tokens/currency, materials, consumables, cosmetic items, and so forth taking up space. You can't customize your control scheme much at all, and it will use the same key, to do too many things, with no way to change what things are done on a key, or their priority, causing you to for instance pick an item up, rather than use an attack, since they use the same key. Also different classes will let you do the same sort of action, but each class may use a different key to do so, which makes playing multiple classes more difficult than it otherwise would be. Due to the amount of grind, number of character bound items, lack of control customization, and constant updates, if you like playing more than one character in a game, this isn't for you. Don't get too attached to your current skills, after the next update, you may find that some have been removed, heavily altered, or your option to select them blocked due to the further dumbing down of the game, forcing you to try to come up with a new skill rotation, again. Most events, even those supposedly aimed at helping players get to end-game, are aimed at end-game players due to being related to higher level dungeons, and the nature of the community. Getting the *character bound* upgrade equipment you need is very RNG based. Unless you're willing to keep buying special keys from the cash shop that guarantee you get the one you need, you could end up opening dozens of chests before you get the one you need. Then if it drops in a dungeon, some players will bid against you, even if they can't use it, since again, the community is often toxic.

Note, this is a review regarding the En Masse release, some releases of the game aren't regarded as well as this one is, which may explain some of the negative reviews. . VERY solid game with true action gameplay in an open world MMO. The action isn't as fast, and responsive as say a single player action game, or one of those town hub instanced dungeons online games, but for an open world game, it's much more of an action game than most any other MMO out there. They keep making adjustments, that actually prove to usually benefit the game, unlike some others where updates just seem to take what was a good game, and make it worse. This doesn't mean I think everything they do is great, but I agree with the changes far more often than I'm against them. The profit model is also very fair, with it mainly revolving around cosmetics, boosts to gains, and extra quality of life befits like easier fast travel. Many complain about the quests, but most can be completely ignored if you don't like them, just go bash mobs, and collect the rewards from the repeatable quests for doing so from the UI, rather than a NPC. As you level up mobs will drop shards that will give you some very nice weapons appropriate for your level. The repeatable quests you can get rewards for from the UI also give you tokens you can exchange for armour, and accessories, as well as provide you with crystals for your equipment. Result of this is that gearing up a levelling character is very easy, the equipment grind is just at end-game, and by the time you get there, which doesn't take too long, you'll know if that's a class you want to invest in. That's some examples of the kind of changes they've made to the game for the better.