My long feedback for the event…
Music:
Not sure if it’s new music or just variations on existing music (different tempo/rhythm). The shift once you reach the 5th chapter to using new (Evertale?) music is brilliant. The battle music is a bit ridiculously intense, but it’s funny for a change.
Story:
Everyone is going to have their own taste. I personally didn’t like the random flirting with them all, nudity stuff at the beginning, etc. I really enjoyed the walk through the history of the PvP meta. It’s nostalgic for someone like me but I hope newer players find it interesting. The meta things pointed out are exactly the ones I’d expect the Devs to mention. I think there’s a lot missing and otherwise some oddities like mentioning Searguard in one then Chromera in the next even though in reality I think they were super closely released. However, of course you’ve got limited space to talk about it. 2018 I think has some of the most interesting stories to tell, I was a little disappointed to see so much more time spent talking about waifu in the next era compared to 2017-2018.
What really drew me into the story was the 5th chapter. Going to the goddess world and a lot of very different style visuals was a great change of pace. The initial people shown there being an Evertale reference was a nice touch. It shows you really went all out with this story and I think it paid off!
That said, I didn’t like the final part of the story. Cinder felt like a lacklustre villain. She was trying to create a huge dominion for herself and that was framed as if it wasn’t evil but also she was being a heartless/evil baddie too. Maybe it was just me, but I felt like I wasn’t sure how I was meant to feel about her. The whole Tenguko storyline just took a weird turn where you find out she’s basically been your stalker for decades(?) and everything you do is playing out her fantasy love for you but at no point is it called what it is. I mean we spend months with her and get no idea how the relationship changes with her over that time, in stark contrast to us with Ayna where we get told multiple times how we appreciate what she’s like. So are we creeped out with Tenguko, are we falling for her or are we building a strong bond with her where she’s our monster?
The final ending to the story is genuinely odd. There’s a final battle, but then we get left stuck in another dimension with Tenguko. So we’re now just gone forever? It feels unfinished or like in the epilogue it should’ve at least hinted at us finding a way to get back.
So overall I think it was brilliant and almost of the same caliber as the other main storylines. I love how it starts as a nostalgic history lesson then shifts into the real story later on. It was just the ending that left me unsatisfied and the silly flirting/creepiness with Tenguko and at a couple of other points. I looked at what people were saying on Discord and the response about the story seemed very positive, so my guess is the younger audience loved it while the hard-to-please, older, veterans cared less for a storyline like this.
Team building:
It’s like Island Challenge but using release years rather than elements. That’s a brilliant concept and I think done super well with us getting a “friend monster” for the first few battles of each era. Since the monster pool doesn’t change it means people can share strategies for each era to help everyone.
Here are the teams I used for each of the years…
^ (2015-2016) I thought I’d try out what doom is like, plus figured that OoO would be super strong against old monsters. Turns out we face modern monsters so there was a bunch of insomnia but it was still very effective. With crescendo, Aurodragon and all that old PvE stuff it’s very easy to do this one I think.
^ (2017-2018) The nymphs with Dracorosa are exceptionally strong, then the buffed shiny monsters and Tenebris made this easy. I think next time I’ll avoid using this setup to challenge myself a bit more.
^ (2019-2020) I tried out the newly buffed Aethereon here and abused the fact the AI does terribly against Scyberithe. I new I had to try and fit Fiona in here too, luckily Christine, Ankara and Huskegon all exist in the same era!
^ (2021-2022) When looking for something powerful here, Jurlungur seemed like my best option. The SS sadly almost never lined up, but I was able to navigate myself to a win with the various sweepers. My options weren’t so great here and the start could end up a little passive depending on the enemy lineup.
^ (2023-2024) I was too tempted to go with Vixenblade here and turns out I could easily make a fully functional PvE team not far off what I normally build.
^ (2025-2026) I had by far the fewest options for this so the end of the team had a Moji setup haha. I basically built my UC front, which easily clears PvE. As usual, Celestiarchion and Cyberoach carried this as the rest supported nicely. Melusine felt brilliant.
Difficulty:
I would guess that the difficulty was pretty high for people. The restrictions are tough unless you’re someone like me who has played all these years and got a big collection, while the enemy teams are not restricted at all. I lost two battles (if I remember correctly) and a bunch of others were tricky.
That said, I think it was done well with the battles necessary for the story and progression being far easier and you had the mythic to help. So overall the design was great and it reminds me of Island Challenge where it was tricky on first release but over time you build your collection and find it easier. I think it gives people a great reason to collect/evolve some older monsters.
The puzzle battle was great. I lost it a few times, partly because I took the hint of “remove all RNG”. I’m not sure what the exact solution should have been, but when I did what seemed like the best option to me (which included some RNG) I completed it. It was especially satisfying how we found the same battle and lost then later got to fight and win.
Rewards
I saw a lot of people immediately giving feedback on this. Personally I think the rewards were appropriate for the number of tickets you spend, especially because it’s likely people will have some losses. I particularly liked that the monster rewards were at the end of the story section, before the battles got much harder, so everyone could get them.
That said, if people struggle to complete the later battles in some of the eras then they may be unsatisfied with the overall rewards they got. I expect most of the feedback was people having too high expectations, but the data will show whether people got stuck.
Something I really noticed was how few battles there were in each era. As a veteran, I basically had 6 warmup battles then only 6 real battles with each team. I find the number in Island Challenge to be much more satisfying.
So my preference would be something like:
- Reducing the tickets from 15-19 to 10(?) for each battle.
- Increase the number of battles in each era from 12 to 20.
- The first 6 battles keep as they are now, the next 12 come from the PvP team pool but more gradually increase the difficulty so it starts easier and ends harder than it is right now (or perhaps end at similar difficulty?).
- The final 2 battles are marked as “hell mode” and have monsters only from that era, randomly formed into a team, but with greatly boosted stats. I think this would make a unique and suitable challenge for the event.
- Current battles 7-12 rewards are spread over battles 7-18, perhaps with some extra nectar thrown in.
- Battle 20 would need some kind of reward. Doing all battle 20s giving an icon would be great.
- The “clock” layout of the UI could be altered to transition between 6 → 12 → 2 for the three stages.
Other rewards comments:
- I’d love to see egg tickets given out in event rewards somewhere. I feel like they’re perfect as basically “less valuable” 4 gems because they force their use in the gold eggs. This event isn’t the best suited to it because you have 30 gem rewards split as 1 for each.
- It would be nice to have achievements for completing this event X times.
