Now: is LB7 good? Instead of answering this, I'm going to post 3 sprites and let you infer the rest.
2024-03-22: The new story chapter released the other day, seems like it's some kind of school AU thing set inside the main character's head, featuring a bunch of the avengers as schoolmates and da Vinci as Guda's mom and younger sister. The banner characters are Marie Alter and a new Hassan. They seem mid gameplay-wise but they're cute and cool, so I tried rolling. Marie took until around pity before showing up. I ended up with 7 Hassans. Sucks, but at least the yen's doing bad so the total cost is about $100 less than what it would've been if I'd been spending on NA at current exchange and tax rates. It's great for me but I hope Japan can get itself back in shape soon. OC2 seems neat. I'll get around to reading it as soon as Neobenedict and his team get through more of it.
I also went and finally got around to doing the White Day event, but I skipped through it so I could clear out the shop. It seems like it's probably fine, the gang put on a play. The 90++ node drops gallstones and the purple mat from OC1 that Saberdusa needs, so I looked up a team someone posted in the wikia comments of Beni-enma, two Castrias, and Ibuki. Beni needs a 50% charge CE because her refund is bad but otherwise it works pretty well.
2024-03-02: I've been doing pretty well about not spending money on the gacha, but I cracked and spent five whale packs rolling for Saber Medusa after getting two copies in one roll and then a third at the end of the first pack, bringing her to NP4. At that point the brain spiders kicked in and I decided to chase NP5 since Medusa's a favorite of mine and I was one copy off. I got a few spooks along the way, with Europa, Anastasia, and Artemis showing up. I also made brief attempts at Andromeda and Medb when their banners came up, and got them without much trouble. I skipped over most of the valentine's event because I've been losing interest, but it seemed like it was less dire this year than last. Andromeda is a fun character and she has more personality to try and carry an event than Johanna did last year. I wonder if we're going to get Perseus for White Day or if they're going to break from the pattern because it's a redundant event that could go away without losing much.
I think they announced that next up on the schedule is OC2. I guess that checks out, it's been about six months since the last story chapter. I wonder what that's going to be about. I've been seeing some speculation that maybe this will address what went on with singularity X-F since it's set in Japan, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
2024-02-05: Finished the Samurai Remnant event on all three of the accounts I'm running right now. That was a mistake. I rolled Summer Musashi on all of them and she's been an MVP. She works fine with a 50% charge CE, Xu Fu, and a support Castria, but sometimes falls a little bit short on refund and might want a Waver plugged in for some extra charge.
2024-01-19: Went through pretty much all of the case files event on NA to use the teapots on barbatos. I farmed Barbatos with Gray, Summervinci, and support Oberon. The numbers were a bit close but it worked out pretty well. I've continued playing the alt, but I haven't updated the page going over it because I'm not sure how I should handle posts from other people in the thread I'm posting it in on Discord. On JP the Samurai Remnant event has started up, and it's decent enough so far. The reports I'm hearing say it's also written by the Demonbane guy. Iori seems pretty good as units go. He's like a better Bedivere, which is a pretty good spot to be in since Bedivere's pretty good. Ushi Gozen seems pretty bad, Yui Shousetsu seems like a maybe kind of okay Arts support. The banner's a pretty easy skip.
2024-01-07: continued playing the alt. I'm up to the middle of babylonia now. the lack of decent damage CEs has me looking at the 3* options and thinking things like "wow atlas academy looks pretty good". it's dire over here. i wish there were a permanent 5* CE ticket.
2024-01-04: I got bored while I was sitting around sick and decided to start another run on JP, see what it's like on a new account with all the new toys they've added in the last couple years since I last tried it. I'm doing a longer writeup of how that's going. The short version is: a lot of things have been improved, but class skill gems being as thin on the ground as they are outside of lotto events is still a pretty big stumbling block.
2023-12-28: Nothing else funny happened with the Tunguska raids on NA, unfortunately. On JP I've been farming the lotto, and stopped at about 100 boxes. The event story was mostly just lighthearted fluff, though the ending gave them an excuse to let us summon Solomon who should be ultra turbo dead after the ending of part 1.
2023-12-22: The Tunguska raids started on NA about four minutes ago but I missed them. died too fast. reports from the data journalists at atlas academy say they died four hours before the raids even unlocked. 30 minutes after the raids went live a scheduled tweet went up saying the raids were out. it's incredibly funny. watching this rules.
2023-12-13: I farmed the lotto on NA until I ran out of apples. I got about 35 boxes in. It sure is an event I did two years ago on JP. On JP I finished the main part of the event and unlocked the 90++ node. I might even go and grab the other four copies of the welfare but she seems pretty mediocre as an ST quick servant with a 20% battery, so I'm having some trouble imagining when I'd ever use her. The second banner servant is Usesugi Kenshin, upgraded from her 4* welfare status. She is an ST Arts Ruler. She is outclassed at NP1 by the genpool 4* alternative Astraea, also at NP1. She does more damage at higher NP levels but Astraea's pretty common to have by this point and Kenshin just isn't really doing enough to move the needle here. The devs have announced the Christmas event will be happening in about a week or so, and it looks like the event welfare will be a Nemo alt. Maybe that will be better. Truth be told I'm not feeling too hot on FGO right now. I've got more than enough tools to deal with anything I could possibly encounter and the events just aren't engaging in the way they used to be. The story's spinning its wheels and only makes anything resembling forward progress once or twice a year. The game is eight years old and it's starting to show its age.
2023-11-30: I reinstalled FGO a couple weeks ago when I saw they added Theseus to the FP gacha after the last event ended. but I've mostly just been logging in and doing dailies, and skipped the last event. The monthly shop reset today so I went and grabbed the monthly grails and finished grailing Gray to 120. The new GudaGuda event on JP seems alright. I'll probably get around to reading it before it ends. The new characters for the GudaGuda event seem okay. Banner servants are a couple of Shinsengumi guys with Buster NPs. they seem like they'll work fine with koyanskaya, probably. The welfare servant is a Quick ST Archer with a kit that looks pretty boring. I am whelmed by the options from a mechanics perspective. Welfare girl is cute, Shinpachi's 2A looks like a Bleach character. 5* banner servant isn't doing anything for me.
2023-10-29: Finished the Halloween event on NA, but didn't read too much of it since I read it a few years back. I rolled my FP on the GudaGuda5 rerun banner and then uninstalled the game since the actual event is bad to play from what I remember. JP's been pretty dead this month but a new grailfront event started with the traum 3* archer making an appearance and Ptolemy being the banner 5*. I also don't really want to play a grail front so I went and uninstalled FGO JP for the duration of the event. There was a limited 4* servant pick ticket earlier in the month, and I grabbed Summer Murasaki, since I could use a decent ST Arts Rider and already have pretty much everyone else I could want.
2023-09-22: new event on fgo jp features the NPC from the end of the summer event, which is pretty much the quickest a servant has ever escaped from NPC jail and become playable. wandjina is okay, but I'm not rolling especially hard on her. I did get baited by a couple of the banners and now have an NP5 kriemhild and an np5 saber ibuki. the event doesn't have a lot going on writing-wise, but not really in a bad way.
2023-09-10: FGO JP released a new kind of endgame challenge quest today. It's ten waves long and you select a different party for each wave at the start, and you can't reuse any CEs. It's mostly pretty straightforward, but you need to take out both of the sabers in wave 4 at the same time, the caster on wave 8 has a 3T unremovable evade, and the enemy on wave 10 has four break bars and can NP seal sabers, archers, lancers, casters, rulers, avengers, pretenders, and beasts. And because I can't find anything about the fight on the wikis besides Atlas Academy right now, the waves go as follows:
w1: 2 casters, 1 avenger. 174k, 212k, 177k.
w2: 2 assassins, 1 berserker (kijyo koyo). 163k, 239k, 160k
w3: 1 archer (asvatthaman). 563k.
w4: 2 sabers (gawain and fairy gawain). 258k, 305k. Both need to be defeated at the same time or they'll revive endlessly.
w5: 1 berserker (kriem), 450k. This one has a 5T 50% attack/defense up and a 50% max HP percentage up.
w6: 1 rider (quetz), 705k.
w7: 1 lancer (a dragon). 846k.
w8: 1 caster (caster cu). 645k. He has an unremovable 3T evade.
w9: 1 foreigner (yang guifei). 564k.
w10: 1 unknown class. 3 break bars. 177k, 213k, 264k, 329k. I listed out the ones she'll NP seal above but if you don't want to filter those out manually the main classes that have advantage against her are berserkers and assassins. There's a few more, but I just grabbed my ST arts zerker of choice (galatea. vlad probably works fine too.) and chucked the berserker black grail on her and stalled it out. The servant here can also apply ignore invuln so you'll probably want to take along castria with the amakusa CE to get some more overcharge.
All in all it's not too bad, but I figure I may as well write out what the fight entails on the off-chance anyone's actually reading this. It's a neat change of pace.
2023-09-08: JP summer event's over. It was fine, though the club stories dragged things out a bit. I've also gone and done the NA event, and just finished getting both grails, and I've set the bot to grind out the 90+ node to get more treasure chests. I came out of NA with NP3 Anastasia, NP2 Sei, and NP1 Okita Alter and Charlotte. My main targets were Anastasia and Sei so I came out of it without too much trouble. Ideally I'd like to get more copies of Sei but I'm not chancing that on a mixed rateup.
Summer aside, JP just finished a round of hunting quests that I didn't bother with and it looks like they've started a campaign for Ordeal Call 2, which is coming out at a frankly blistering speed by the standards of FGO. Usually we get one main story chapter every six months, and it's only been three for this one. Hopefully they keep this pace up and start killing off more of the bad seasonal events that they've been phoning in for years.
2023-08-15: The Summer 8 banners and welfare have all dropped and now we know what the deal with all the servants are. I rolled the fairy knights to NP5 and my rolls went poorly. The long and short of it goes like this:
Gambling aside, the event is pretty solid. Can't think of much to say about it, it's just a lot of solid character writing from Nasu.
2023-08-10: The rest of the JP summer servants were announced today. As expected, the fairy knights are on banner 2. Melusine is the SSR, and then Barghest and Baobhan Sith are SRs. Barghest seems to have joined a PMC, and Bao's name is being translated as Cait Cú Cerpriestess, since she seems to have adopted Cernunnos theming for all her moves. The welfare seems like it's going to be Cnoc na Riabh, which I've been speculating about on Discord for the last few days. On the gacha end of things, I think I might skip Summer Castria and just focus on rolling on the fairy knights, or at least wait to see how my rolls for banner 2 go before I try to roll her.
2023-07-30: JP anniversary hit, the anniversary servant is LB6's Aesc. Her kit's pretty weird, but it feels to me like a puzzle that's missing a few pieces. I wouldn't be too surprised if one of the summer servants (maybe either Castoria or Baobhan Sith) ends up with a support kit that pairs well with her. Mostly what Aesc wants is some way of getting to OC4 and some way of lowering her HP by a bunch. I could see Summer Castoria having overcharge built into her kit more directly and I could imagine Baobhan Sith playing into the vampire aspect a bit more and draining an ally's HP. Both of these would help to unlock Aesc's potential more fully. mechanics aside: summer morgan a cute. love her giant hat and big book. phenomenal witch design. a+. I rolled about two packs for her as well as the anni quartz, and got two copies of her.
2023-07-22: Finished reading through the rest of LB7. Part 1 was kind of a slog, but part 2 was solid. It feels like if I knew how to do a closer reading of it I could probably figure out what they're doing, though it seems like the plan is going to involve rayshifting into a bunch of elements of the plot that just seemed like background technobabble before this. All signs continue to point to U-Olga Marie being summonable, probably as the anniversary servant.
Now: is LB7 good? Instead of answering this, I'm going to post 3 sprites and let you infer the rest.
2023-07-21: Finished off the tower event today. The wiki's been pretty slow to update for this event for some reason. The CQ's a bit annoying, but the main thing that worked for me was swapping in my main DPS (Vritra, since she has an AOE skill seal on her NP. Ruler Moriarty would work too) from the backline on turn 1 so that I didn't have to eat the 200% attack down, and then using Castoria and Lady Avalon to run a stall comp with pretty regular skill seals from Vritra to neuter the really annoying parts of the CQ. Now I can get back around to waiting and farming the dailies until the anniversary servant (all signs point to it being U-Olga Marie, but maybe they'll surprise us) dropping on, I think the 28th or 29th? I think that's when the in-person event is, at least.
2023-07-19: Got through the end of chapter 14 in reading LB7 and got about halfway through the last tower in the current event over on JP.
2023-07-17: Made some progress on reading more of LB7 during a particularly long board meeting where we were asking them to recognize the union. My role there was mainly to be a body in a chair. I've gotten about halfway through LB7 now and think I'll probably keep plugging away at it over the next few days. Also the Morgan rerun banner went up on NA and I decided to spend the rest of my anniversary quartz on it. I came out of it with Morgan at NP3, Baobhan Sith at NP3, and Barghest at NP2, where all of them had previously been at NP1.
2023-07-12: Oberon banner's up on NA. Got him in one ticket. Guess my NA account gets to live again. I don't have the mats to max out most of his skills, but I got the bare minimum up and running. Time to set up a braindead Arjuna Alter farming team.
2023-07-05: tower event started up on JP today. the new medusa is cute. i rolled a bit on her and got her in two tenrolls. the tower's a bit more manageable this time since they've finally added an automatic team builder to the game, though it does seem a bit busted right now
2023-07-04: Picked up NA again since there's been a bunch of apologems and maintenance quartz. I went and rolled for Koyanskaya and got her in one. Off of GSSR I got Ibuki and a Baobhan Sith. I used some pure prisms to get Koyanskaya skilled up, but the only servant I had who was compatible with the double Koyan system who was skilled up was Ereshkigal.
2023-06-28: relapsed in a few days.
2023-06-25: rolled three packs for kali, got nothing. this isn't an abnormal or particularly unusual result, and $210 is far from the most money i've spent to strike out, but my superego has briefly managed to overcome my id and wrest control away from it. It recognizes, however dimly, that while the meditative act of watching the flashing lights and their associated good and bad signals may be fun, it is also the biggest drain on my finances and quite likely exacerbating my depression and making it harder to do my job effectively. so, i've gone and uninstalled the game and left the FGO discord server I've been hanging out in for the last few years. now here's hoping i can stay clean and not just relapse in a couple days
2023-06-22: rolled three packs for kama, got four copies of her. it's absolutely bait ahead of the medusa banner but I think kama's probably more useful than what I've seen of saber medusa's kit.
2023-06-07: ordeal call dropped today, and with it came something like 18 grails, 20 bond grails, 480 3* hp/attack fous, 180 4* HP/attack fous, 15,000 mana prisms, around 300 fou prints, and some other stuff. i went and used 10 grails to take summer ibuki and summer wu to 100, and 4 more to level summer erice and hephaestion to 90. i used the gold fous to max out da vinci rider and galatea and get to 1920/2000 on summer ibuki, and then used the paw prints to max out beni-enma, melusine, galatea, and three cards on da vinci rider. the sphere grid needs regular mats and upgrading card damage seems like it needs statues, which i don't have, so I wasn't able to do much upgrading on that yet. also i guess lb6 dropped on NA. i rolled what i had on the banners and got a barghest and a morgan.
2023-06-02: rolled the monthly tickets on spider girl's banner and got her
2023-05-31: turns out unlike the other lottos I had to go and do a handful of mini CQs before I could unlock the end of the event. the CQs were kind of annoying but weren't too bad for the most part. The worst one was the one where you had to match the card chain, since there's not really a lot of good ways to guarantee card draw in FGO. The pirate quest was neat, and the hot potato quest was an interesting use of the game's systems, even if it was annoying. I've farmed around 130 boxes so far. I used what meager quartz I had saved up to roll for danzo and got two copies in two rolls. it's a good result even though danzo is a weak (albeit cute) servant.
2023-05-24: looks like it's lotto season once again on jp fgo. the lotto itself seemed pretty good from the announcement stream. the new servant is a cute spidergirl but her kit looks like a strict downgrade compared to huyan zhuo. it's the current lasengle cruise control special of a quick aoe servant with a 30 percent charge and a couple of self buffs. should be a pretty easy skip.
on the lotto end of things, i set melusine on the 90++ node and have farmed about 45 boxes so far.
2023-05-17: it is over. the dragon has been slain. the event has ended. the game has returned to having nothing to do. The next time there will be new content has been announced for three weeks from now. And this time we actually know why the game is dead, since the president of the company announced on Twitter that they are all busy playing the new Zelda, and he will personally make sure everyone has their workloads reduced for a bit.
and since apparently I'm using this page to write news about the game now, might as well write up the announcement about Ordeal Call.
Ordeal Call has been announced for June 7, 2023. In it, you will be able to get up to 3 Storm Pods per day (up to a maximum of 9 held at a time) as a login bonus, which will allow you to do Ordeal Call Free Quests. To make it easier to do hard content they've introduced a sphere grid to let you upgrade the classes. The news announcement then spends a few paragraphs explaining how the FF10 sphere grid works. Unlocking nodes on the sphere grid takes regular materials and QP, as well as sand that you get from clearing quests on the Bleached Earth. At various points in the sphere grid there will be barriers that you need special items from Ordeal Call CQs to unlock. Those new items are called torches and they look like they follow the same hierarchy as the experience embers. please be excited for this riveting new gameplay mode where you wander the desert and look at rocks and sand.
2023-05-15: Finished the rest of the Grailfronts on NA, and promptly used the grail to take Beni-Enma to level 112. JP continues to make me wonder what's going on with their content pipeline since--
come to think of it I haven't talked about the issues with JP's content pipeline on here before.
Alright so usually FGO pushes out an event or event rerun roughly one, one and a half times a month. Sometime last year I think the production staff said that they wanted to stop doing reruns so that they could spend more time focusing on making more new, better content (source: some guy told me this is what the producer said during one of the livestreams. if this is wrong blame Greblin). Additionally, last year FGO spent the whole year hyping up the release of LB7, only to have LB7 get split into two parts at the last minute, with a lot of stuff that was very clearly not finished (cough Beni Alter cough). This year instead of having an event every three or four weeks or so, we've gotten three events to date, all of which are the seasonal events that are locked in on the schedule. Valentines, White Day, annual collaboration event with another Type-Moon property. The Arcade collab has been pretty good, but Valentine's and White Day felt about as phoned-in as the Christmas events. I had the game uninstalled for pretty much all of January and I didn't miss anything. So right now we're about halfway through the year and there's just been next to nothing going on in FGO, and the big special story drop they spent all of last year hyping up had to be broken up into multiple parts because it wasn't done when the year-end deadline hit so it had to have the second half moved to February. They said they'd get more content out and then their content pipeline got worse than ever. It's not like this is some fly-by-night indie production-- this is Sony. Sure, Type-Moon are the writers, but they have a team of writers for when Nasu's working on other things, and the other people in the partnership making the game are Lasengle (development staff formerly at Delightworks, bought out by Aniplex in a merger in 2022) and Aniplex (subsidiary of Sony Music Entertainment, subsidiary of Sony Group Corporation).
Now, what I want to believe is happening is that Sony (I say Sony even though it's Aniplex because I want to try and shame the parent company into investing more into their biggest live service game. Sony, you own Playstation, it is unacceptable that your biggest service games is this content dry) is gearing up to make new content and is just in a transitionary phase, and is contracting out the writing for new events to new people to get more people on board for the new content production cycle. I want to believe that's what is happening, and that the new writers they've contracted just aren't used to the writing schedule that FGO demands. However, without being able to know what's going on behind the scenes, and with FGO's penchant to only ever announce new content 12 hours before it releases, all I can see from my end is a production schedule that's in complete disarray, with half-assed seasonal events and a production team that is struggling to produce new content.
2023-05-13: There's not much to comment on. I did a couple of the grail fronts on NA yesterday. On JP I'm building my QP stocks back up to prepare for the sphere grid to drop.
2023-05-04: finished the event. The challenge quest had some gimmick where you needed to get 100 points from killing the same rotating group of three enemies over and over. I had da vinci drive over it, backed up by castoria and tamamo. pretty brainless, just have defenses of any kind and a good AOE DPS.
2023-05-03: played more of the FGO Arcade collab event and finished the main story. It stuck the landing pretty well, and it seems like pretty much everyone in the circles I hang around in likes the redesign on large draco a lot more than the design she had in the arcade event. The event is secretly a collaboration with fate/extra last encore. it's solid.
2023-05-01: did a bit more of the arcade collab event. it continues being on the better end of FGO events. they appear to have remembered some of the world mechanics from CCC. There's some decent movements in the plot, and Nero has a mirror match with beast Nero. I should really sit down and reread Dra†Koi, because this event's reminding me a fair bit of it.
2023-04-30: got my 600 day login quartz, and did not roll tiamat off of her banner with it. The event nodes today had some good interactions between Nero's poisoner and Nightingale. The writing for the event has interactions that make me feel like the writer, the guy who wrote Demonbane, has spent any amount of time considering which of the historical figures might have interesting interactions with each other, and the writing chops to execute on it halfway decently. this is probably the best writing for the historical fiction side of FGO since aeaean breeze, where the writers came up with a solid story about circe and odysseus talking it out like adults.
