Heyo friendos and welcome to another edition of the Weekly Gacha Rhythm Game Update, the weekly post where I talk about the gacha rhythm games I play!
For those who are new to these posts, the games I play are BanG Dream: Girls Band Party (Garupa) in the Japanese (JP) and Worldwide (WW or EN) server, Project Sekai: Colorful Stage feat. Hatsune Miku (PuroSeka), D4DJ Groovy Mix (GuruMiku), and Uma Musume: Pretty Derby. The latter three are Japanese only… for now.
A somewhat busy week (particularly in a certain horse girl simulator…), but nothing too crazy.
Y’all might be wondering what the title is about, and well… I’ll get to that eventually. Just keep reading.
For now, though, let’s get into it, starting with the classic:
Garupa (JP)
Event: An Analysis of Harmony & Change
(No new pulls)
Remember last week when I was talking about Morfonica? Well, looks like JP was listening, because the current event is a Morfonica-themed one. And to top it off, it’s an event centered around Rui (at least that’s what it looks like).
Hey, I’m all for it — character development for the most boring girl in the franchise? Heck yes! That is, if there even is character development. Based on the TL;DRs I’ve read about the stories (translated here), it looks like there’s some of it, so good signs!
Anyway, besides that, there’s not too much going on. There was a news broadcast recently that unveiled some cover songs, but I don’t know any of them other than the Guilty Crown opening (which I’m down for).
One thing I am glad the game is implementing is a Retry button, which has been a godsend in Project Sekai. Good to see that feature making its way here too.
That’s pretty much it. Moving on to the English counterpart…
Garupa (WW/EN)
Event: Blossoming Symphony / Play Act! Challenge Audition
(No new pulls)
…Where there’s nothing really going on.
NEXT.
Project Sekai
Event: Secret Distance / Resonate with You
Wondering why the title states I’m the RNG god? Wondering what RNG God even means? Well, RNG = random number generator. Basically, I’m just really lucky, and it started here.
The current event focuses on one of my favorite bands, Leo/need, but honestly the cards aren’t that amazing (still great overall though). Still, I decided to pull once just for the LOLs, and well… see the result above.
Literally the first card that came up was one of the 4* cards from this set. It also happens to be one of my favorite girls in the game, Saki. So that’s nice.
The funny thing is that my best team in the game is made up of literally all 4* Leo/need members (plus a random Kagamine Rin), which I’ve been able to get through sheer luck.
Three of them came during the first weeks of the game, one came just like this in a random “just for LOLs pull”, and the other one… I don’t remember. I think I got her early, though.
Looking back, it’s amazing how lucky I was getting all three 4* cards from the same set. I guess I’m making up for it now, because I’ve had terrible luck in the game since (see literally every WRGU post before this one).
Until now. Though this could just be a one-off and I could be 4*-less for the next few months. Hopefully I didn’t use up all of my luck.
Anyway, one thing I want to point out about this set is how the cards all connect together to make a story. Usually, the card art is connected by a visual theme, but they’re still separate entities from each other. Here, though, each card is a different perspective (both in space and time) of a certain storyline. Take a look:
You can see the time progression as well as the different camera angles (notice Honami in the third image?). Honestly, it’s super impressive. I love the extra work they did for the cards, and it doesn’t hurt that the art is hella good (as usual). Good stuff all around.
One final thing — the game recently announced an update to version 1.7.0:
You can read the tweet for the full details, but the one thing I wanted to point out was that they’re finally fixing the player disconnection issue from Multi Live.
Basically, if a player disconnects from a Multi Live, your whole group is kinda screwed because the game doesn’t adjust for the missing person. The score is calculated as if all five players were playing, and getting a Super Fever is impossible because it requires all five players to not miss during the time period (which is kinda hard when there’s only four or less players).
Well, with the new update, if somebody does disconnect, they adjust for that. That means the score and the Super Fever criteria are adjusted. A welcome change — I’m just wondering when they’re gonna add a harsher penalty for people who disconnect, because there really isn’t any penalty for disconnecting occasionally (key word: occasionally).
I guess the temporary ban is good enough for now, and honestly, the new adjustments for disconnection should fix most of those issues anyway. We’ll see.
D4DJ Groovy Mix (GuruMiku)
Event: Non S.T.O.P! Awe&Some
I forgot to mention something last week in the midst of the crazy Singapore collab — the game was giving away free pulls because it’s spring (or something like that). That meant five 10-pull tickets and four single-pull tickets (some of which I put in the album last week).
Well, that’s not all! The game’s half-anniversary is coming up, so in honor of that, the game gave away six more 10-pull tickets!
“Wow!”, you might be thinking, “how generous!”. And yeah, it’s generous, but like I mentioned in the past, it’s kinda pointless for someone who has more than half of the 4* cards in the pool (*cough). Plus, it doesn’t help that the pool gets new cards once every few months because of all the limited sets.
So because of that, you can see the results above: no new cards. Nothing. Not even a new 3* card.
Sure, there were some good pulls overall, but they were all dupes, so what’s the point? And before you ask, the dupes automatically get converted to shells, which you can use as currency to get items. Not rare items, either — decent items, but not amazingly decent like the Platinum EXP tickets.
Other than that, the game came out with a recent update that made a few needed changes. The first is that they finally updated the UI in the Multi Live screen so that the titles are bigger. That was something I’ve wanted for a while — you could barely read the titles in the old UI, so it’s nice they’ve changed it.
Honestly though, I think they’ve made the titles TOO big. Now the username is the smallest item in the screen (see the above tweet’s image), and it’s hard to read them in the chaos of huge titles and bigger card images. Funny how fixing a mistake leads to another mistake in the complete opposite direction.
The other big change I noticed was that they finally allow the use of multiple single-pull tickets at once. That’s nice because it was annoying having more than one of them and having to individually pull them one by one.
With the amount of single-pull tickets I get from completing daily missions, it’s basically a free 10-pull every ten days. I mean it already was, but now it REALLY feels like it. It’s the little things.
Uma Musume: Pretty Derby
Event: The Legend Race
Now you may be wondering how TF there are eight images in the pull album. Well… it’s a long story.
There I was, bored of training the same characters over and over again. Or at least training them in the default outfits.
For those of y’all that don’t know, the 1* and 2* characters don’t get their idol/racing outfits, donning a default outfit instead. Once you limit break them to the 3* rarity, they get their unique outfit.
Unfortunately, to limit break the trainable characters, you need their character shard/crystal things (not the official name but that’s what I call them). You need… 50 shards to raise a 1* character to 2* (I think), and 100 shards to raise a 2* character to 3*.
You get shards by pulling duplicate characters in the gacha or through Tazuna’s limited store (though it only shows up three times a day and they only sell one at a time). You can also get shards by exchanging statues that you get when pulling characters (see the pulls above for an example).
Basically, though, the best way to get shards is to continually pull in the character gacha. So… that’s what I did. Hey, I had a sizeable amount of jewels and barely any 3* characters. Gotta spice up the game somehow.
Anyway, the first pull I did I got… 3* Special Week. A character I already had, but hey I’ll take the 20 statues. I decided to do another pull for LOLs and… 3* Silence Suzuka?!?!
…Hell yeah.
In all honesty, when I was pulling, I was doing it for the character shards — I had no expectations to get any new 3* cards. So imagine my surprise when my first two pulls both had 3*s.
A few days later, I realized something — every tenth 10-pull, you get increased rates for 2* cards (97% 2*, 3% 3*). At this point, I was six 10-pulls away from reaching that, and I had the jewels to do so. So I thought, “why not?” and pulled a few more times. I didn’t need to save up for Seiun Sky — what are the chances she’s the next trainable character?
I want y’all to look at the first 10-pull I did from that day (image 3 in the slideshow), because it’s by far the best pull I’ve done in the game. Not only did I get the alternate Tokai Teio, but I also got Mejiro McQueen the very next time up. That… was an experience.
Now you see why I’m the RNG God? Just don’t look at the next few images.
Unfortunately, it turned out I made a horrible mistake: I didn’t get the guaranteed 2* cards in the tenth pull (which apparently I didn’t take a screenshot of, probably out of frustration). I’m still not 100% sure why, but I suspect that you need to do ten straight 10-pulls, with no single pulls in between. That sucks because that single pull was a ticket I got a while ago.
The unfortunate-ness doesn’t end there. My stupid self, seeing this, thought that maybe the guaranteed 2* cards happened AFTER the tenth pull, so I mustered up enough jewels to do an 11th pull.
Now this is where the M Night Shamalamadingdong plot twist comes. You may think that my RNG wore off after getting two 3* cards in the same 10-pull, but no, my friend, that was not the case. On that 11th and final pull, I got my final reward — Curren Chan, the current rate-up 3* card (on the final pull, too!).
In total, I got four new 3* cards in exchange for using up my entire jewel stock I was saving for a rainy day. I now have every initial 3* character except for Taiki Shuttle. Not a bad exchange by any means.
That doesn’t even count the characters I was able to limit break into 3* rarity, either. I gathered enough character shards to be able to get five characters their race outfits (including Haru Urara, the horse with a school athletic outfit because of her inability to win a race).
Suddenly, I had a whole bunch of characters to train. I’ve been able to get several characters to A rank (including the new Curren Chan) thanks to a new stratagem called “use fully limit broken support cards”.
I was originally using the support cards that matched the stratagem I was going for (like speed for escaper/sprinter), but I found out that the “worst” support card that was fully limit broken (using duplicate cards to raise the max level) is better than the “best” support card that wasn’t limit broken.
Because of that, I’ve been using my two fully limit broken Level 50 support cards that I got from past events, as well as the Level 40 support card I got from the friend point store. The results speak for themselves:
In other game news, the Legend Races are about to end soon, and it went pretty well for me. I was able to beat all four legends and gather enough shards (the main reward you get) to limit break the two trainable characters I had (King Halo and Sakura Bakushin O).
In addition, I got a lot of Taiki Shuttle’s character shards, which is great because you can actually exchange shards for a character you don’t have. Having said that, it’s pretty impossible to do so since the only way to get shards from a character you don’t have is through the limited store, which only stocks one at a time (and only has two character shards stocked). I need… 70 more. Might take a while, huh.
Anyway, it’s also nice that I beat everybody because you get a special trophy of the legend’s shoes if you beat them. It still annoys me that I wasn’t able to beat El Condor Pasa when she had her legend race because it means there’s one missing trophy in that section of the room.
Maybe someday…
To end things off, let me talk about the upcoming content revealed by the Pakatube livesteam. First, the next trainable character is none other than BNW’s Narita Taishin!
Turns out my predictions weren’t so far off, huh? Maybe Seiun Sky is coming soon… I hope not. Honestly, though, this is good solely because I have no gems. It gives me more time to save up, because if my predictions are right, I won’t have much time.
In addition to the new character, there are also new support cards featuring new characters Yaeno Muteki and Zenno Rob Roy.
I’ve talked a bit about Zenno Rob Roy before (Rice Shower’s roommate). Yaeno Muteki is one of the newest characters, though. It’s interesting to see her getting a card over somebody more established in the series like Narita Brian (though I guess she’s technically in the game as a supporting character in other characters’ stories).
Finally, the game’s main storyline is getting another chapter focused on BNW (probably why Narita Taishin is getting a trainable character, honestly). The reward for finishing the story is SSR support card Winning Ticket!
Apparently the support card has one of the best skills in the game, so I’m down for that! Otherwise, free gems for reading the story are good, too. I’m just wondering what the next event is going to be…
And that’s all for this week’s update! Thanks as always for reading! I’ve been busy the last week, so the Uma Musume Rando Ramblings post might have to be delayed for a bit until things calm down. Sorry about that! I’ll still be posting WRGUs, though, so look forward to next week’s post! Until then, stay safe out there!
Fractals and Recursion 