Keeping Warm in a Cold World

That’s the theme for this week’s Noah’s Barks blog post. As civilization and prosperity decline in sync with temperatures, we must turn our focus towards the things still giving us joy. For me, it’s my beloved partner, this website, and the subjects I write about. What about you? I expect “this site” to be a part of your answer, too. Comment below!

This week flew by, evident in my lack of things to discuss. I’m just about done indexing the entire site, which is a huge deal. Google Search Console (GSC) is organized terribly, so I might have missed a few pages, but they’ll be addressed as GSC updates at its glacial pace. I’ve been spending 8-10 hours a day on SEO crap, but my backlog is about done. Now you know where my time went.

Social Media Share Buttons

What’s next for the site? I’ll probably be improving visuals, mostly. I wasn’t exactly in the best mood to mess with plugins, given the long load times I previously discussed. Regardless, I know it’s better to have my social media share buttons up sooner than later.

I’m trying out a new one called Sassy Social Share. I can’t endorse it yet, but I liked their emphasis on being lightweight on resources, nonaggressive with premium functions, and not needing to communicate with their own servers. Also, I’m very sassy.

First impressions are good. I prioritize function over form every time! It has an issue I’ve run into before where you can’t be too precise with its placement. It’s set to appear after my content block, but that awkwardly puts it above my author signature. For the last plugin I used, I tried to manually move the buttons in the code editor UI, but it had no effect. I haven’t messed with this plugin yet. It’s low priority compared to just having the buttons.

Header and Footer Stuff

I began messing with the header and footer again. I thought putting them in a different color from my background could make the site more parsable to new viewers, but I’m not a big fan of how it looks. Maybe I need to mess with gradients so it blends into the background. I’m pretty unfamiliar with that, so it could take a while to figure out.

I added a Ko-Fi link to the header. It’s primitive right now, I know. I worked on my Linktree quite a bit, too. I’d like to plant my feet into as many platforms as possible for increased exposure, and I’ll incorporate them into my Linktree and header/footer as I do. I think that’s all I have to say right now. Most of my work this week was on stuff that’s invisible to readers.

Super Robot Wars X

I finished it! Expert mode, true ending route, all secrets, yadda yadda. I took the G-Reco routes because they had all of the secrets. My opinions on the game remain unchanged. I have a drafted review, but reviewing any of these games is a massive, time-consuming project. Or at least it is if I’m to meet my own high standards. My general opinions are the same as I discussed last week.

Tempting though it is to see different units, I don’t want to lose all story context whenever I would have gotten around to playing the other routes. I’ve forced myself to do a NG+, and I’m nearly done with the second route split. I’m obviously demolishing all of the maps, but whatever. I did that the first run, too.

I don’t want X to be yet another SRW left hanging in completionist limbo. If I were to return just for that, and lacked context to get anything out of the additional story, what would be the point? Then it really would just be a checklist.

Speaking of checklists, I guess for a true 100%, I still need to:

Finish Amari’s second route
Finish both routes with Iori (fast-forwarding everything other than his dialogue/unique Scenarios)
Unlock all Intermission cutscenes
Play the default late-game Masaki recruitment Scenario
Upgrade everything to max
Die.

The Next SRW(s)?

What, you thought this was over? You fool! I’m still staring down a very long barrel of SRW releases. For both our sakes, I’ll list everything I still have an interest in doing. Lists are so epic!

Super Robot Wars 3 [SNES] (First time finishing)
Super Robot Wars EX [SNES] (First time finishing)
Super Robot Wars Gaiden: The Lord of Elemental [SNES] (First time finishing)
Super Robot Wars: Alpha Gaiden [PSX] (Continuing my replay of Normal + Easy routes and working on my guides)
Super Robot Wars GC [GameCube] (First time finishing)
Super Robot Wars J [GBA] (Finishing second route with Calvina)
Super Robot Wars A Portable [PSP] (Playing Lamia’s story for the first time)
Super Robot Wars: Original Generations [PS2] (Finishing EX Hard + Special modes)
Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier (Finishing first playthrough)
Super Robot Wars OG Saga: Endless Frontier EXCEED (First time finishing)
Super Robot Wars V [Switch] (Finishing second route with Chitose)
Super Robot Wars T [ Switch] (Playing Saizo’s story for the first time)
Super Robot Wars: The Moon Dwellers [PS4] (Finishing EX Hard + Special modes)
Super Robot Wars 30 [Switch] (First time finishing)

Wow! When you look at that list, it almost seems like I’m never going to fucking be free! And that’s just the games with full, in-game, English translations. If I became willing to use script translations or auto-translation overlays, my backlog would increase exponentially. Am I willing to do that? Uh, I’d really prefer not to. However unlikely, another English patch might drop by the time I finish the above list. So, I’m doing that first.

I have beaten the original Super Robot Wars and Super Robot Wars 2, so I’m spared those. I own Super Robot Wars 30, but not the DLC, which provides extra units to use in the main game. I’ve no interest in starting until I have it. What’d be the point of getting the ability to use units from Votoms only to have already finished the game?

I’ve no money to buy the DLC, though. If you’re in the holiday giving spirit, you can consider donating, or subscribing to my Patreon. There’s other ways to give if you check out my Linktree. Just leave a message about what you’re donating for, if you mind what it goes to. Anything helps!

Likewise, Super Robot Wars Y came out this year, and it sounds like the best entry in years. However, I won’t play it until the second DLC season ends in Q3 2026. Quite a wait, but as you can see, I have things to keep me busy…

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel

I’m still addicted to playing Super Quant, crap though they may be. With how fundamentally broken MD is, playing a “tower” deck works pretty well. You just need to go first, which is already borderline mandatory. At least with a towers deck, you’re more likely for your win condition to be a definitive victory. I’m shocked to say that I’ve yet to see Magnus get Kaiju’d. MD players run the most random generics, and I’d fully expect some to still be on Gameciel. Modern boss monsters tend to “float” when sent to the GY by an opponent’s card, “effect” be damned.

More Cosmetic Calamities, Oops It’s Depravity

I’ve won enough to get 3k Gems for the Labrynth bundle. I pulled a Royal Arianne! That was awesome. It seems like MD’s new fiscal strategy is to bombard players with so many limited-time cosmetics at once, that they’ll potentially have to buy Gems in order to get them all.

As always, Konami’s decisions are baffling. Not the economic logic; the other way around. This is such a logical, obvious, time-proven business strategy that it defies explanation as to why they weren’t doing it already. If you have more possible things to buy, players are more likely to find something they want to buy. Konami handed out hideous goblin cosmetics like they would someday run out of desirable things to convert into cosmetics, despite the fact there’s new, great character designs launching every week in the OCG.

Maybe they were just trying to avoid having to crop more images to make into cosmetics. I think that’s the Occam’s razor explanation. Konami employees probably dislike working as much as any of us do; even easy work. But they have to scrounge up higher quarterly earnings somehow, and they did the obvious solution: release content. It’s a pain, but literally, somebody’s gotta do it.

The Faster Card Release Schedule

Adding further economic pressure is the increased pace of importing cards. I’m not sure where this came from. I don’t even know if it accompanied an announcement. But yes, Master Duel is finally outpacing the real-life card game’s new releases. When the game came out with only a fraction of the card pool, people coped that the rest was going to come any day. From the start, my high IQ (jaded) brain said they were deliberately not keeping pace with IRL formats, and I’ve since been vindicated.

Now, that might be changing. It’s entirely possible that this pace suddenly halts, and new releases slow in order to create another buffer of cards to import. As much as I hate to say it, this would make sense. The logic would be to funnel pack releases into shorter windows where players wouldn’t have enough time to acquire gems and buy everything they’re interested in without swiping their debit card.

The counterargument to this approach would be players saving Gems throughout the staggered release schedule. This would counteract the purchasing pressure from sped-up releases. However, in practice, I don’t think many people would be willing to save. The ones who would be frugal enough to do so are likely to be F2P players or small-time spenders limiting their expenses. The entire gacha business model is leans on people’s natural inability to be patient, after all.

I expect and would like to believe this release pacing continues, at least until it’s at parity with the TCG. I can’t imagine it being a regular thing for MD to get cards in English before the physical format does. That’d be insane. I would welcome it, though. MD already gets the shitty part of the OCG like Maxx C, but none of the positives like playing with new cards ASAP.

I think the expedited release schedule is a natural component of the oversaturation model seen in the excessive bundle releases. There’s just too much shit for any free player to buy all of. Want to buy new cards? Well, you might miss out on that limited-time Eldlich bundle.

Don’t care about Eldlich? What about the fact it has the only legal copy of Pot of Extravagance in its associated set? That move is fucking insane, by the way. At least it’s on the Limited list. Technically, this is the first example of true P2W product we’ve seen in Master Duel, and there’s every reason to think it will get worse. Stay vigilant!

Well-Earned Suspicions of a Positive Direction

We’ve heard that, internally, Master Duel‘s developers initially wanted its player base to convert into physical format players. For dozens of reasons I won’t get into right now, this is a completely insane expectation that betrays a shockingly low level of demographic awareness.

It was and is never going to work like that, and one of the explanations is that Master Duel is a unique format. Anyone going from Master Duel to physical would have to contend with an entirely different card pool; especially TCG players. Players discovering this beforehand would be discouraged from playing physical, and anyone blindsided by it would have a negative game experience. It’s incredibly myopic.

Maybe Konami has finally thrown in the towel when it comes to making every MD player a double-dipper on formats? It’d certainly be the correct move, for once. While this, and any business strategy, is not motivated by benefitting the player base, I still think it’s a better outcome.

It just so happens that what makes Konami the most money this time also gives us more content. We aren’t going to have as easy of a time getting all of that content, but it’s more likely we’ll find content especially relevant to us from the increased market choice. I much prefer the latter. If you’re gonna kill me, at least kill me with content.

I’m very interested in seeing where the buck stops with card releases. I’m desperately praying this isn’t just a phase as described. Maybe the powers that be will get their heads out of their asses and find a way to get the Takahashi-illustrated cards in the game. I don’t care what has to happen for it; do it.

On the horizon, I’m obviously looking forward to Solfachord support. But the OCG recently revealed Fairy Tail support, and it’s enough to make it work as a dedicated deck. I’ve had extremely unpleasant encounters with Snow and Luna, so you’d think I’d be opposed to this. But the new cards look so fuckin’ cute that I’m absolutely going to be building Fairy Tail the second it’s put into MD. And at its current pace, it might even happen before I have grandchildren!

Peacin’ Out

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and stickin’ around. After clearing up so much of my technical workload, I’m hoping to get back to writing. I aim to publish a review this week. Keep a look out for that!

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