Fourth Wall Break #4: Slight Games Hiatus to Fix the Blog Formatting and Goodbye Global Romancing Saga Re;universe

Pictured above: An example of one of the many glitches that have showed up.

Slight Games Hiatus to Fix Up the Blog's Formatting/Layout

As I was sitting down and working on the next episode of The Bleak + The Pearl, I once again realized that many of the older posts (which I still use to look up details and whatnot) had built up a non-deal-breaking-but-definitely-there number of glitches in the text and such. 

I've tweaked the fonts and colors and layout of this blog to be something that is easy on my eyes and a few times there were various fonts and such more hardcoded (on purpose or not) into the posts. Every once in a while (alas, on average about once an old post it seems) there would be portions of text that were impacted. 

Some paragraphs are "broken" and show up as a large blank spot or with some copy-pasted background color/font that glitches in comparison to the rest of the post. A lot of dividers were black or dark to contrast the original white + gray schema and now that does not work with the new dark schema. Several graphics are fine but as I mentioned in my previous Fourth Wall Break, sometimes re-using graphics ends up crashing out the back-end editor so I am going to reduce how many times I might go back and use more HTML itself. I'll likely delete out a few old graphics (especially some of the filler AI, since I've decided to not use any more for the foreseeable future) and have already started updating some things be more concise with my graphics usage. 

Blogger/Blogspot also has a kind of default back-end formatting where it converts a lot of the text into one huge paragraph and then smashes in a bunch of breaks and spans and such to handle the kind of formatting the paragraph tag was meant to do. I'll give a whack to actually converting over that to make the posts a bit more "future proof" for when I make back-ups. 

I also want to go in and add pages and such there were kind of meant there to be the whole time. A place for One-Shots. Pages that collector advice, playtests, and whatnot. A place for Fourth Wall Beaks. More an About. 

I will also go through and correct a few typos, text glitches, and the such. I might even make a few "post-commentary commentaries" if things show up that are worth pointing out for future glances.

It will likely take a week or two to finish that up entirely but I'll spend a few days working on it. For the next few days, I'll keep playing the games but I will probably not post anything new until next weekend or so, essentially taking a week off as other content pops up and I fix the old content. 

Goodbye Global Romancing Saga Re;universe

Tonight will be the final "reset" for the Global Version of Romancing Saga Re;universe, a gacha game that's been out (worldwide) since 2020. Like a lot of folks, I found it in the duldrums of COVID-19 and extended lockdown. Also, like quite a few people, I am a longtime fan of the SaGa franchise and the overall works of Akitoshi Kawazu. Titles like SaGa Frontier 1 and the OG pair of SaGa games on the Gameboy (called Final Fantasy Legend 1 and 2 in the United States) are by a long shot my most replayed games and the SaGa franchise eclipses every other game franchise except possibly Minecraft for total numbers I have spent playing it. Frankly, SaGa probably wins. 

I have put a 100+ hours into several of the titles across many, many playthroughs. 

Mechanics inherent in the SaGa system such as the generational mechanics of Romancing Saga 2 and the multiple protagonist viewpoints of most of the titles since Romancing Saga 1 are a huge influence on the tricks I like to play with solo RPGs (Barston Bakersfield exists because I liked the idea of looking at how multiple generations handled a world and it was pretty natural for me to want to jump around and play different groups of heroes in the same universe). Just the style of stories that Kawazu likes to tell (considering some choices in his SaGa series and his influence on the original Final Fantasy titles) impact how I play out things with the blend of weird ancient science and modern magic. The sorts of characters. 

Several character and place names in my current series are references to SaGa titles. Uuld Alloces (Bleak + Pearl) and Khalid City (Bloody Hands) are both references to some of my favorite characters. While I love playing Khalid in Romancing Saga 3 and Alloces is a fun villain (though the firelord Aunus might have been a better choice...though the name might be a bit more giggles), both of those names showed up here because of Re;universe: the gacha that was like the ultimate fan service for all the SaGa series where characters from all the different titles plus some new ones went on adventures in worlds directly related to old titles or inspired by it. You can play Alloces and Khalid on the same party, for instance.

Heck, the River Eos in Barston Bakersfield is because of a joke about the global version of Re;universe facing End-of-Service (EOS). 

Which it now is. 

The above picture shows my final account status. I maxed Adventure Rank and Player Rank. I have, I think, the highest possible stats in all the weapon types. Total Combat Power (why gachas prefer that particular abbreviation I will never know) is 58.4 million which has to be one of the highest in global. In fact, until someone shows up with 58.5 million I will assume I have the highest "score" in GL.

I ended up missing one character total out of all the possible characters to get. 

I spent "too much" money on the game - had I realized it was a gacha and what gachas were when I started I might not ever have really started - but also not really. Enough so I could always have fun and never sweat things but never so much that I felt a complete crunch from it. Still, enough money to have bought multiple copies of all the "real" SaGa games a few times over (which I also did). 

I will miss the fan-fiction fun. I could probably spend multiple posts writing about that in detail but it was a great little wrap-up of the whole series and playing at various memes. I think the game hit its peak of absolute fun maybe two or so years ago with something called World Tower (a series of increasingly difficult challenge battles) and the launch of Remembrance (a game mode where you fought hard enemies locked to a single weapon type at a time). Since then, bosses have had more HP and characters underwent constant waves of power creep. Things like a slight chance to stun got replaced more and more with "do millions of damage" and it was a different game. 

In that light, I am ok with letting the nostalgia go. I am ok with not spending a couple of hundred USD here or there to stock up on in-game jewels. I am ok with not having to do decently complicated daily/weekly logins to get all the rewards. I am ok with not grinding 24/7 to clear shops and keep characters up to date. 

And none of the complaints I could toss at the game will make up the fact that I will essentially mourn its passing (the Japanese version of the game continues, by the way, but since my playstyle was always about maximizing as many characters as possible I am not really in the mood to start from zero and feel like I have to spend even more to try and catch up). 

It was a great game. Possibly the greatest gacha game to hit the US/English market. There will likely be nothing like it. I met a lot of online friends while playing it. I shared a lot of memes. 

Tonight, around 2 hours after posting this, I will go back in one last time and play at a few random events in the game as the clock clicks down. Then, around 5 hours after I click post, it will shut down. 

Good night, funny little pixel people.