These are strange times. March is usually one of my busiest months of the year – it’s usually when my work has our big annual conference. If you recall, it was a crappy affair last year. This year we watched the coronavirus sweep across the U.S. with growing concern, forcing us to postpone our event two weeks before it was supposed to start.
Along with the decision to move our show came the opportunity to work from home full time. As Minnesotans were ordered to shelter in place, our intrepid heroes at OiO would be in nerd nirvana right?
Initially I thought working from home would be super sweet. Wear whatever you want, showers become optional and no one stops by to bother you with idle chitchat. By the end of the week I actually missed human contact. Throw in some multi-hour meetings where you stare into the webcam to look engaged and days start to feel real long.
And then daycare closed. My wife works for a small business with almost no flexibility with her schedule. Last week, I was online from 6-10 a.m. Monday, Wednesday and Friday and pulling long days on Tuesday and Thursday. I managed to get my 40 hours in for the week, but it was challenging.
The isolation feels very strange. On the one hand, it’s nice to have all the things that keep us busy on the weekend removed from the schedule. I’m getting a lot of time with my little girl and I love it. It just feels weird being cut off from other people. According to my fitbit, I am about one third as active when I’m working from home. What’s one third of sedentary – comatose?
I didn’t realize how serious my peers were taking the stay at home order until I tried to get a group together to run through a board game I am reviewing. I reached out to a handful of friends who never miss an opportunity to game. I found one taker. I applaud my friends for taking precautions to stay safe.
As tough as last week was, I am very thankful for my situation. I am grateful that my work is very flexible right now. I am grateful that I am still employed and my job remains largely the same. Most of all, I am blessed that my family has remained healthy.
From all of us at OiO, we wish you good health and good fortune. Thanks for spending some free moments with us.
What’s New at OiO?
Episode 22 of Outside is Overrated – Gateway to Anime
In the latest episode of the podcast, Tom, Joey and Scott discuss Tom’s first encounters with anime. The trio discuss Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Princess Mononoke and Cowboy Bebop.
Going Crazy Over Hearthstone’s Battleground Mode
I had heard of the auto chess before but I never had much interest in the genre. In between some matches of Hearthstone I was poking around the menus to see what other options were available.
I had no idea what the mode was. I was told to pick a hero. I didn’t even realize that each one had a special ability you could see before choosing. There was a tutorial, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was overwhelmed as rounds swapped between buying cards and duking it out with an opponent. I got smoked that round, but I was intrigued. I played again, found a hero with a power I really liked and I was hooked.
I don’t know how similar games work, but I can give you a rundown on Hearthstone’s version. You start by choosing a hero. Starting out, you choose from two options. If you buy card packs from the game’s current season, you can unlock a third choice. Powers vary greatly, from “give demons +1/+1 (an extra damage and an extra health)”, to “add a dragon to the tavern each turn” (where you buy cards) to “gain a free copy of the first card you kill in the next combat.” I believe there are 32 to choose from. You can read more about them in this article, althought I strongly disagree with some of the rankings.
You start in the tavern. You have three random 1-star cards to purchase and three coins in your first turn. There are six tiers of cards, as you pay to unlock higher tiers they appear as options to purchase. Each turn you get an extra coin to spend and the cost for unlocking the next tier goes down one gold. On your second turn, you have four gold and it costs four to unlock the second tier. You can either unlock the better cards, or add another card to your army and/or spend gold to trigger your hero power.
Once you buy cards, you have to move them into your active play area. Cards have a variety of special abilities: battle cries come into play as soon as you activate the card, deathrattles trigger when the card is defeated. Some cards taunt, forcing an enemy to attack them before they can target any of your other cards. Some cards buff the cards on either side of them. The cards you choose and where you play them while you are in the tavern are important.
After time runs out in the tavern, you battle one of your seven opponents. Each side takes turns attacking from left to right. Once one side or the other is wiped out the winner deals damage to their foe. The higher the tier you’ve unlocked and the higher the tier of your surviving cards, the more damage you do.
After you fight, it’s back to the tavern to repeat the process again. There are different classes of cards: dragons, demons, murlocks, beasts, mechs and unclassified cards. Generally, each class has cards that boost their own kind. A Dragon Whelp will start off combat doing one damage for every dragon you have active. A certain murlock will give another murlock +1/+1. Some mechs are magnetic, which allows them to merge with other mechs to make a more powerful unit. There are a lot of synergies and it’s a very common strategy to load up on one type of class. However, as more people purchase copies of a certain card, they become less likely to appear for everyone. If everyone tries to load up on Dragon Whelps, there are going to be some sad pandas in the playground.
If you get three copies of a card, they merge together and become a gold version with more health and attack than to the base card (plus the upgrades you’ve painstakingly added) and a more powerful special ability. The Dragon Whelp will fire damage equal to the number of active dragons twice. As an added bonus, you get to choose one of three random card from the tier above wherever you currently are. If you have unlocked three-star cards and get a gold, you get a free four-star card. Triples are super satisfying.
My favorite strategy features a menagerie. Some cards will boost multiple different types of cards at the same time, giving dragons, murlocks, mechs and demons +2/+1. It takes a bit of luck to get the right cards in the tavern but it is sooooooo satisfying when the right one turns up. I often have slow starts to matches because I am racing to tier up as soon as I can to unleash the best cards before my opponents get them. When it works it’s great, but when luck is against you it leads to a quick defeat.
It would be fair to say I’ve gone down a rabbit hole with this game. In addition to logging in to Hearthstone every day to complete daily quests, I have logged 36 hours in the Battleground mode. I think I started playing last month. To date, I have finished first 12 times and in the top four 56 times. My biggest minion was 142/35. I can’t remember specifically who that was, but he was a juggernaut.
The biggest downfall to this mode is playing enough to get familiar with all the cards and synergies. The time in the tavern is limited, so if you have to read every card it can get really frantic, especially as the cards get better and their abilities get more complex. It took me several hours to become reliably competitive.
I currently have a rating of 4,161, meaning I am just a touch shy of being better than 77 percent of players. If you are interested in checking out an Auto Chess game, it is included with your free download of Hearthstone. There are a number of other offerings out there, here is an article talking about some of the best and worst options on the market.
War of the Visions Final Fantasy Brave Exvius
Listeners of the OiO podcast know that I revere Final Fantasy Tactics. While I generally hate old games, I maintain that Tactics remains phenomenal to this day. When Hobby Box Burns sent me a message that there was a new phone game rooted in a similar style, I started deleting old text conversations like crazy to free up space for the download.
War of the Visions Final Fantasy Brave Exvius is a complicated mess of a mobile game. It’s got jobs from Final Fantasy, battles play out on a grid system and characters earn job points to spend on a big board. Let’s drop the comparisons to Tactics right there. If you are looking for something similar to the classic tactical RPG, check out the Disgea series.
The new Final Fantasy game is more akin to Marvel Strike Force and Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes, except you have virtually no control over what characters you get. You spend in-game currency to summon your first characters. I have no idea what the rankings are, I think they are all takes on rare? If not for the traditional loot colors on the borders, I would have no idea who to focus on. For all I know, I’m investing my resources in the worst characters.
You summon some dudes and you embark on a story about royal houses betraying each other. Each mission costs energy. There are a buttload of daily quests you can do and they cost more energy. There are world and hard quests you can do, and they cost energy too. But it’s ok, if you run out of energy you can watch a video ad to refill it. Barf.
I will say this, as you progress through the main story for the first time you constantly increase your rank and that will raise and refill your energy. I don’t know if your characters would be strong enough to beeline straight through the story, but at least it gives you an option to keep playing. The story did nothing for me, but I did like the voice acting. The music was good too. It has a very Final Fantasy flourish as the battles end, so you know when to look up and tap to collect your rewards.
If you couldn’t tell, I’m not crazy about this game. While I log into a couple other mobile games daily to do my thing and advance my teams, both the Marvel and the Star Wars games are streamlined experiences. It may take forever to accomplish something (I’m looking at you, crappy Kree grind to unlock Fury), but at least you can figure out what’s going on. This game feels like they are trying to make an epic next-gen RPG and put it into our phones with all the horrible trappings of a free-to-play mobile game.
I guess I have an affinity for lancers and and time mages, so I will keep dinking around with it for a bit. If you are looking for a true Final Fantasy experience on your phone, or a tactical RPG, I don’t think this is the answer.
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Thank you so much for reading my column this month. Until next time, stay inside kids!