Ding 27 -- Smuggled Lollipops in Tower of Fantasy

I played some ToF last night and progressed a bit with my story quest. As it turns out, there's trouble afoot in the Banges Tech Headquarters! It's THUGS! Crazy thugs with cool stylings!

THUGS gonna die!

As the story goes, after being introduced around the island by Hilda and getting to know a few important characters, you head to bed for the evening. It's a nice scene and you even light off a few fireworks. Ahh, happy days. 

In the morning things are much different. Banges Tech headquarters' shields are up and there's trouble, so Hilda leads you through a back door. When you get there, you find a lot of people in a kind of restraining field and start freeing them and taking down the aforementioned THUGS.

You head into the headquarters itself to see what's going on . . . and promptly get caught while trying to be sneaky.

It was a good try

That's ok, they throw you in a prison cell with a guy named Koh. Koh lets you know that everybody has been captured and put in jail cells, including President Kolador and his son Theo. GASP! 

It's ok. Not only is Koh President Kolador's right hand man, but he's also a thinker! He has a great plan to get the cell door open and have you throw on a guard uniform as a disguise! "Plan Koh" goes off without a hitch and before you know it, you're walking around Banges Tech headquarters in an Heirs of Aida guard uniform freeing people left and right.

Just act natural

I haven't looked up any spoilers about the Heirs of Aida, but I'm thinking that things may not be so black and white with the bad guys of the story. I mean, they could have outright killed President Kolador and Theo, but instead they just locked 'em up, right? 

Here's where the story goes a little kooky. Theo is a pretty sickly kid and looks to only have a couple months left to live. That's driven President Kolador crazy, and he decided to give him some kind of monster making syrum in hopes of saving his life.  However, you only discover this after running a couple of strange black market delivery jobs for a shady character named Hopkins while looking for Astrum. Side note: Keeping things light, Tower of Fantasy makes one of those delivery jobs giving some random kid some lollipops? *scratches head*

The best black market jobs are the ones you pull off for bratty kids

You see, this Astrum stuff we're hunting for is pretty rare and valuable since it's an energy source used to power Omnium machinery.  Yeah, I don't know what that is either. Look! It's all very complicated! 

Anyway, while hunting for Astrum, you then encounter a super frustrating puzzle mechanic that basically wants you to throw a laser box (ala the game Portal) onto a moving platform. Honestly it took me about a good 10 minutes to figure out how to put that cube on the platform.

I hate that stupid cube

Inside the ruins where you're hunting for Astrum is President Kolador, and he's just about done turning his son into a soulless monster. It doesn't end well.  

Theo!  You monster!

In the end, the Heirs of Aida take care of Theo and leave you and Kolador behind. Kolador gives up the "now depleted" Astrum and bids you a final farewell by telling you that "Sean at 201" has what we need as he's left to wallow in the fact that he failed as both a husband and a father. (Dang, I could use some light-hearted lollipop smuggling right about now.)

Heading back to Franz and Hilda, they put 2 and 01 together for you and point you toward Shelter 201 on the east side of Banges Port.

. . . and that's where I decided to stop and do a few bounty missions and dailies and things. Whew. Intense, and I really liked the story there -- even the crazy part of delivering a mystery kid some smuggled lollipops. (especially the crazy part of delivering a mystery kid some smuggled lollipops!) It's all good times in Tower of Fantasy.

Happy Dueling!

Blaugust Journaling -- How about some Guild Wars 2 and Tower of Fantasy?

I got nothin this morning, so I'm just going to do a little quick journaling about a couple of games I played yesterday.

1- Guild Wars 2.

So Team Spode is playing Guild Wars 2 together . . . again . . . and I'm there for the ride! Except last night . . . I wasn't! Why? Because the mic on my headphone decided to not work and I spent way too long fighting it instead of just playing muted. After 40 minutes of troubleshooting and uninstalling Oculus thinking that there was a conflict between the Oculus headphone mic and my actual headphone mic, I organized my terribly messy desk and found the cable I needed to hook in my podcasting mic that I never use. At that point, I was like . . . I'm done, and didn't even log in.

I love going super necro in Guild Wars

That said, I got in a couple hours of play on Guild Wars 2 last night and this morning, so it's not like I feel like I'm "behind" or anything. Our buddies John and Clara have been playing tour guide to Team Spode in the Heart of Thorns expansion, and as it turns out, there's lots to do there . . . waypoints, points of interest, vistas, challenge points, etc.

Standing in a council of angels?

For me personally I've just been going through the story in Heart of Thorns and getting a bit road blocked by the need to grind enemies. Sounds like an MMO, doesn't it? It sure does!

2- Tower of Fantasy

I logged in a bit this morning and man . . . I don't want to like this game, but I'm really liking it. Every time I log in, something cool happens that's like, dang, this is really freaking good.  Case in point, there was a battle with this lady named Frigg and it was friggin' intense. She gave me an amazing butt kicking with a super cool cut scene.

About to get my butt kicked

My brain keeps telling me, please don't let me like a game with the name Tower of Fantasy, but there's this troll inside of me that's like . . . YES, YOU LIKE GAME! YOU PLAY GAME! TOWER! FANTASY! ALL THE THING YOU LIKE! PLAY GAME, DUMMY!

Me . . . it's me. I'm not a crybaby.

That's all I got time for this morning! Thanks for the quick read, and I'll catch you tomorrow.

Happy Dueling!

Too Old for Tower of Fantasy?

Ohhh man . . . so, listen, I played a lot of Tower of Fantasy yesterday and got to level 22. I noticed a couple things about myself as I was playing, and it was a little distressing for me.

How about we let your guide around the world get infected with evil!

First things first, I enjoyed myself. It felt a lot like a PC-based conversion of a mobile MMO take on Legend of Zelda's Skyward Sword, which, is exactly what I've heard about Genshin Impact. It's a fun formula for a game. It's got crafting food, going through shrines, climbing mountains, riding mounts, cool weapons, short solo dungeons, flying, jump puzzles, gacha stuffs, chibi robot chefs, neat scenery, and mildly entertaining anime story bits . . . what's not to like? And it's free!

. . . and they're giving away a free cube mount because they met their pre-registration goals!

About half-way through though, I had this sneaking suspicion that I was the oldest dude on the server, and it felt weird.  Reading the general chat kind of filled me with a ton of embarrassment. Probably not true, but I'm being honest about that feeling. I almost asked in chat if there were any older people playing that had a guild together, but I figured it would out me. AND LOOK, I typically don't care at all about any of it (I mean, I played Wizard101 and Pirate101 -- IT ISN'T JUST A KIDS GAME, IT'S A FAMILY GAME), but for some strange reason it struck me funny yesterday.

So edgy . . .

Anyway, because of all that, I didn't even try to find other people to play with. I just took it solo and explored the starter island, unlocking all the gates and visiting as many locations as I could. I did get a little lost once the story quests dried up. 

Off to quest with Mr. Schudy. He's a cutie crab-robot dude-y.

I'm still confused about possibly having to get to level 24 before chapter 2 really starts to play? Or possibly it's time gated? Anyway, the game did a great job of telling that there were things I could do other than play on the main story quest. Literally, there was a giant text box pointing to a button saying to click there to see all the other stuff I could do in game.

There really are more things to do!

So let's talk game systems a bit. First thing I have to talk about are the controls on PC. It very much feels like this was built to work on mobile first. Your mouse is not free moving in the game. Perhaps there's a way to set it like this, but it's not default.  Because of this you have to press Enter to free up your mouse to click buttons on the right hand side of the screen, and you have to press Escape to click on things on the left hand side of the screen. 

You may be thinking, what buttons on the left hand side of the screen? Ah ha! The most important button for a blogger is there, the camera button. That's right, there's no default screenshot button (at least that I could find), and that makes sense if the game was designed mobile first. When you do press the camera button, you get a few camera controls that center your character in the action. The resulting picture has your game name, server name, and a logo on it. Um . . . Print Screen and a paint program it is! 

I'm Stingite of the Lunalite Server on the game Tower of Fantasy -- nice view, right?

There's an interesting system in the game called Simulacra where you can win personas in lock boxes and use their skin while playing the game. You woo these simulacra with gifts, which then causes them to awaken, which leads to cool powers. You can also go through special quests that play some of the backstory of the Simulacra. I was pretty happy with the Zero Simulacra and his cool cube of death weapon.

Oo! That Zero SSR Hero pull!  

Oh yeah, by the way, I love Gacha games that have an amazing box opening sequence. The box opening sequence for Tower of Fantasy is absolutely amazing. Check it out.

So, end of the day, I had fun and will probably play this game a little bit more despite my resistance and feeling old. I may even get brave enough to out myself in general chat to find a nice guild of older folks . . . or not. Probably what I should do is go give Genshin Impact a go. Not that I expect it to be filled with an older faction of people, but at least I wouldn't be playing a game called Tower of Fantasy. Yikes the name of this game is so cheesy. 

Happy Dueling!