Thoughts?

(This page is a WIP, so beware of massive changes to the text at a moment's notice ^^;)

Intro

So... when I was making the navigation links I realized I would have an extra space I couldn't get rid of without fucking up the formatting somehow and, well... gotta put something on this page :P

So I guess this is where I vomit out all of my thoughts and feelings over this obscure, janky Genshin clone! I do not expect this to have any sort of coherency to it at least at first because I'm literally editing this as I go so just roll with me.

How I first found out about it

So it's, like, late spring or early summer 2022, and I've been playing Archosaur's other MMO thingy, Dragon Raja, since October of '21. My time in that game is its own bag of worms, but TL;DR while I initially liked it, the combination of dogshit story choices (especially concerning One Specific Character) and the addition of a cross-server chat (the worst fucking update to be ever conceived of on God's green earth) had me desperate to find another game to spend my time on.

But there was basically no choice to be had. I picked up sooooo many mobile games during the pandemic and dropped almost all of them in short order (even abandoning some of my standbys) and mobile MMOs were (and probably still are) extremely slim pickings, either consisting of horrifically grindy "cultivation" games or factory-line bikini armor fantasy fare. I did find some MMOs that had decent character creators (the test I came up with is trying to make a dark-skinned, male healer. If I can't do that your character creator sucks and I'm not playing) but they were extemely few and and extremely far between, and also didn't scratch the itch as well as Raja did. So it looked like I was doomed to be stuck on this red-string-strangled, horrifically racist iceberg until I could find something that could blow it out of the water.

Around this time folks in chat started mentioning another MMO that Archosaur had in beta. At first it was just a statement of fact. "Oh, they're making another game? Cool." But the closer it came to release day, the more people started talking about it, with even some openly hoping to jump ship if it was any good. And you know what? Bitch me too!!! Even if the only thing that changed was not seeing the n-word at the top of the chat as soon as I log in it would be fucking worth it!!!!! So when pre-registration hit I immediately signed up to pre-download it through Google Play, and jumped in as soon as the servers opened.

Getting into the game

Character Creation

There was a two- or three-day period between when Noah's Heart was available to download and when the game was actually available to play where you could make your character beforehand (probably so it'll be a little easier on the servers??? idk) and I took full advantage of it.

Uhhhhh I don't know how to convey this concisely in paragraphs so here's a pros and cons list

Pros:

• There's no loli gender! This is something that seriously skeeved me out about Raja, and I was always on the lookout for fanservice fuckshit in that game, because, y'know, why else would "girl" be a separate gender from "female"? (Said fuckshit came in the form of the loli versions of outfits, which were significantly more revealing and skimpy than the female versions :/) But there's none of that bullshit here... technically.
• The male hair options are pretty decent. Long hair! Long hair for dudes! Granted it's only three of the base hairstyles that are long and they're all ponytails, but it's way better than the grizzled 20-year-old army vet aesthetic other mobile MMOs enforce on their dudes. (Like, do you want a buzz-cut, a slightly different buzz-cut, or an untamed mop of hair? Yawn.) The only "bad" hairstyles are the two undercuts, but I think all shaved hairstyles in games look borked, so YMMV.
• Dark skin options! Several dark skin options! A whole wheel of them! I don't know why other mobile developers refuse to give even a handful!

Cons:

• The female hair options are (were?) bad. Yeah, when the game first launched the lady hairstyles were straight shit. They looked stiff and crunchy and looked pretty not-done overall? I don't know if I just got used to the artstyle or if they tweaked how they looked, but I hated them on first sight.
• They loli-fied the female model as a whole. Remember when I said there was no separate loli gender in Noah's Heart? Yeah, this is what they did instead. The default female model has bigger eyes, a smaller nose and mouth, and chubbier cheeks; the face as a whole is situatated lower on the head (and I suspect the head is smaller, too, but don't quote me on that), it's much shorter than the male model (even when pushing the female model's height to its limits, it's only barely taller than the default male model, and that's only because the female model is wearing heels!), and the default standing pose and animations are overly cutesy. It's extremely hard to make a female character that wouldn't put you on a watchlist or haunt your nightmares for eternity, and is the one definite downgrade from Raja.
• The darker skin tones look weirdly gray... at least in the character creator. This is less of a con and more of a warning, but while you're in the character creator all the skin tones look fuckin' weird. I think this has something to do with the lighting????? They all look better once you're actually in the game so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Actual Game

...I'm gonna admit, I really don't pay attention to gameplay intricacies and high-level stategies. If it is easy to make the digital people move and hit, easy to get the things to make the digital people move faster and hit harder, and easy to obtain more digital people that can move and hit in different ways, then it is a good game. And Noah's gives you a pretty clear path to most of what you'll end up grinding for??? And also strategies mostly only really matter for challenge modes and PvP and I hate PvP and only play challenge modes when I have to :P So I'm not gonna be talking gameplay, like, at all not until later at least... you'll see. The gameplay isn't even what keeps me around anyway!

The Story

The story itself is dead simple: You are an amnesiac that wakes up in a temple with only a spirit hanging out in this cell phone-thing for company, and you eventually meet a normal girl that takes you back to her town to heal up. Then bullshit happens and you, normal girl, and another chick you meet along the way head to the city to because reasons, where you'll get drafted into a mercenary group, stumble upon a plot to resurrect an ancient evil, start on the path to recover your memories, and just generally do adventure-y things and see the world.

(...Look, I haven't seen the tutorial since the game opened, okay? Lemme start a new character and get back to you.)

The plot isn't anything special, but I was muddling through a particularly grating bit in Raja at the same time, and this was a much-needed breath of fresh air. I'm the main character! Like, for real this time! There's no bumbling dumbass that sucks all the oxygen out the plot! There's no convoluted, creepy, half-done romance that grinds the story to a halt for 15 levels! Just me, the characters I pulled, the world to explore, and dungeons full of enemies to beat to a pulp.

Oh, and speaking of the world...

The World

oops I ain't done yet :P