Refugees from other social media platforms, talking about games and geekery.
Elza Awakens!

Kind of a big deal for me today in Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. Elza, the Goddess of Creation, has awakened to her final form. Why is this cool? Because she's the Goddess of Creation. That old joke that goes, "Be yourself. Unless you can be Batman, then be Batman"? Well, if you can be the Goddess of Creation, wouldn't you want to be?
She's special because she's a 5 star base unit. Quite a lot of mobile RPGs have a "gacha" (aka slot machine) mechanic, where the units necessary to take on end game content are locked behind some sort of random draw. In Star Trek Online, the best ships come, not from shipyards, but from lockboxes that cost real money to open for a very small chance at something worthwhile. Neverwinter Online locks high end companions and mounts the same way. DC Universe Online has top-tier abilities in lockboxes. Almost every MMO I have played in the last few years -- Final Fantasy XIV gratefully excepted -- has decided that targeting "whales" is not only desirable, but necessary.
FFBE is no different. You can draw common "friend point" units, one-two star base units, for free. Every day, you can spend the cash currency ("lapis") for a three-five star base unit. Naturally, you're way more likely to get a three star. You only have a half percent chance at a five star unit. Whales will spend thousands of dollars to pull a five star.
Just on the daily half price pull, with lapis earned in-game, though, I pulled Elza, a five star base. My first in months of playing. She's not even a Final Fantasy character; she's from Brave Frontier, a mobile RPG by the same company. (We get Brave Frontier characters; Brave Frontier is getting Brave Exvius characters).
Being a five star base means she gets a six star awakening; not all units do. But to get that six star awakening, I needed to gather a bunch of rare materials (which I did during the previous event, just in case I should need them), and level her up to the five star max level (80). That took quite some time. I was just able to do it this morning because of another event that opened today, the Cactuar Dunes, which drop leveling items.
So, got her to 80, awakened her, and now she's at six stars -- but level 1. She needs to now get all the way to level 100. She also needs to get a Dual Wield materia (which I am in the slow process of grinding for; it takes months unless you spend money), and there's other materia I need that I don't have the characters for. It takes a specific character to farm trust mastery for his or her or its trust mastery reward (like, Dual Wield).
I've been using Elza all along in various events for which she gets a bonus as a Brave Frontier character or just as dark magic user. Today, the Maxwell event opened. This is another Brave Frontier boss. Supposedly she has ten million health and revives herself when he is killed and substantially heals herself every three turns thereafter. Elza is designed to be incredible at this event.
Too bad she's level 1 again, though.
(edited: Maxwell is a she.)




Gratz! My daughter plays a mobile game called Ensemble Stars, and she's PISSED that she has no five-star cards, which apparently work along the same lines as the 5 five-star characters here as well. So I feel the pain, although only through a tangent.
Not kidding when I say this:
This is triggering an intense need for me to log into a game and BUY something. I want for my shift to end so I can log into Lotro and make an alt... or buy a new 3DS and Pokemon Sun. ARGH.
Well, I would suggest giving into your dark side and getting a 3DS and Pokemon Sun, because that's all anyone will be talking about for a few months. ;-)
I hope you didn't think I would want you to NOT dive into a new RPG!
To be fair, I do not enjoy neck pain from looking down at a small screen.
Maybe I'll pass on Pokemon again.
Congrats Tipa!!!
I need to give this another try. Sounds like one of those games you have to stick with for a while before you start getting to the complexity.
This also reminds me that I have to log into my mobile FF game, Mobius Final Fantasy, because you get extra special rewards for logging in on the 8th, 18th and I think 28th of each month. :)
I have FF Mobius, but I haven't played it much. Exvius takes a couple hours each night to play and it's really crowded out all other games at this point. Thankfully I can play it while watching one of the Arrowverse shows :)
Exvius starts off slow, but then you come to a difficult fight that requires you to form your random units with their random gear into a real group. That's when the fun starts.
The gacha mechanic has this benefit: your units will be different from someone else's units. I didn't draw a tank for months, and the only healer I had was Leah, a 1 star base healer. And she was awesome! Lots of new players don't have any healer.
As time passes, you get more and more units and figuring out which to level, which to include in which team and so on becomes more of a challenge.
Last night the Arena changed rules, and now the AE status change effects that ruled LAST week are illegal. I had to change out my whole Arena group to fit the current rules.
I'm going to have to work to put together a Maxwell group. Thankfully, I have most of the characters that work well with the meta for the encounter, with the exception of my Elza, who is underleveled and doesn't have the Dual Wield TM (and likely won't by the time the event is over, either). But I've been lucky recently, and am looking good with other characters. No encounter requires a five star base like Elza, anyway. They just make things easy.