Land of Livia

Soooo...I read a blog post about why this guy couldn't give up working on his indie game. From the blog post, I found out that the app was called "Land of Livia" and it was supposed to be an RPG type mobile game that had a good story and had a free Prelude. This sounded like a pretty sweet deal, so I downloaded it.

I quickly realized that the description was a little...boasty.

They claimed that it had a good story, but more words doesn't necessarily equate to a good story. You start on your farm, a red dot on a green map, and there's a storm happening out in the ocean, which logically is the cause of your problems, right? So you're told about this red dot further down the road. Go there, you say. Cool. Wait 5 minutes for the travel time. You get there. What's available? An MMO style quest. There's wolves and they're prowling. And for some reason you need to kill them. This will take you 10 minutes. Press button to wait 10 minutes.

Oh dear God...

So this is the way things are. You go places which takes time or you complete quests, which takes time, or you listen at an inn which takes a lot of time. I was super not into any of this almost immediately, but the perplexing thing to me was that there were leaderboards and active chats with people who were obviously super into this. They would talk about where each other were from, where/in what quest to find certain items, and what sections were bugged. By the time I had noticed the leaderboard stuff, I was like 12th on it in some of the categories. There are not a ton of people playing this game, but some of them are ridiculously into it. The highest quest completer has done new/repeat quests over 1800 times. And it was because of my confusion of their fervor that I persisted at least until I finished the Prelude.

This app is nothing but grinding with time. You can't complete different quests without good enough gear, so you grind until you get a decent random drop. But grinding is just waiting. When you give up on getting gear that will make it a sure thing. You wait grind, hoping you'll land on the right side of the percentage of chance to beat the quest.

I'm SO over this game and I won't be plopping down the $3.99 to continue. Good luck to those who found joy in the wait. I surely did not.

Pokemon: Omega Ruby

I have been the absolute worst at playing new things lately. Well...new old things. I borrowed "Pokemon: Omega Ruby" from a friend and was therefore in kind of a hurry to finish it. However, I was more in a hurry to finish it because I was bored to death of the sameness of it all. I've only played a handful of Pokemon games, and I'm fairly certain die-hards are expecting not much deviation from the formula, so I very well may be in the minority to be annoyed by it.

You're a kid heading off to become a Pokemon trainer. Everybody thinks that's normal. Bye, possibly forever, kid. You have a friend that's a half step behind you and will battle you every time you complete some milestone. There's a group of adults with stupid plans that you have to foil. This time it's Team Magma. They want to awaken an ancient Pokemon. It's a bad idea. Everybody knows it. They'll figure it out after being beaten by a kid 42 times. Beat all the gyms. Go to the Pokemon League. Beat 5 people. Win. Roll credits.

The new bits, from the games I've played, were the ability to pick berries and plant berries, and the existence of secret hideout locations that were everywhere. I wasn't into that, so it didn't add a ton. They also added Pokemon-style beauty pageants you could participate in. I was also not into this. Everything else seemed very much standard, and after a while, it started to feel like homework.

I probably won't be playing anymore Pokemon games in the future, but if you're into replaying the same base storyline over and over, Omega Ruby is probably still your jam.