Hello hello 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.
Pretty calm week overall, all things considered. Ya boi’s officially got both vaccine doses, so that’s nice. Still gotta wait two weeks before I’m fully vaccinated, but I’ve been holed up for more than a year in quarantine anyway, so two weeks isn’t that bad in comparison.
Anyway, enough about that. Let’s get into it starting with the classic:
Garupa (JP)
Event: Confused, Lost, Yet Held Tightly
(No new pulls)
We’re still fully in the Roselia event, and… yeah. Nothing else too crazy going on in the JP Garupa world. Next!
Garupa (WW/EN)
Event: VIVA LA LIVE!
(No new pulls)
Similarly, in EN, we’re still in the multi-band event featuring every vocalist.
The nice thing about this event is that since the event cards are both 3*s, the threshold to get them is different. Instead of the standard 75,000 points for a 2* and 150,000 points for a 3*, it’s 100,000 and 120,000 points for both 3* cards. Less points overall = less need to play, which is nice for someone like me who only plays for the event cards.
I’ll admit that I almost forgot to get the second one — after getting the event cards, I usually just open the app to get the login rewards and immediately close out. I checked to make sure I was good one day and found that I was actually 5,000 points short. I guess my mind morphed “close enough” to “enough”.
Funnily enough, the exact same thing happened last event, except worse. I was making my event team in the Bestdori team builder (highly recommended by the way, bestdori.com) when I noticed I had one more card listed in the site than I did in the game. After some deep searching, I realized I inputted the 3* event card in the site, but I actually didn’t get enough event points to earn it. Now you may think I was devastated by this, missing an event card for the first time after 3+ years of playing the game. But honestly… I didn’t really care.
The truth is that the non-limited event cards eventually come back in the Sticker exchange store. That means that in a few months, that card will be available to purchase. So in the big picture, I don’t actually miss too much.
Real talk, that’s not good, because I feel like this is gonna be the start of a bad habit where I stop playing events because I can just get the event cards later. Y’all know how much I’ve been meh about Garupa lately, so it’s a bad sign when the sole reason I play is nullified.
I’ve been thinking this for a while, but maybe it’s time to move on from Garupa. I might still play the JP version, but once I start getting busy with real life, I won’t have time to play all of these rhythm/gacha games. That leaves Garupa in an awkward spot.
For now, though, I’m still living the NEET life, so I have time to spend. Still, it’s something to think about, and I’ve been really thinking…
Project Sekai
Event: STRAY BAD DOGS
(No new pulls)
Well, the Vivid Bad Squad event just ended, and the winning team for the event was unfortunately Team Pancakes (AKA not my team). I found it funny how the winning team won all three “checkpoints” during the event again (the two midpoints and the end). Honestly though, since the difference between the winning and losing team is 50 gems, I don’t really care too much. At least everybody gets something.
Now that the event is over and we’re at a weird point where there’s no event (as of the time of writing), there’s nothing too crazy going on in Project Sekai. I guess the only thing to mention is the fact that I’ve been saving up gems like crazy: I’m now over 10,000 gems for the first time, and it feels… weird.
I’m not normally the type of person to save gems like this — I like doing impulse pulls, so I don’t usually have a good number of gems saved up for the future. That’s probably not a good trait for someone playing a gacha game, but at least I don’t spend money. Well, not recently…
D4DJ Groovy Mix (GuruMiku)
Event: D4FES -Of Brilliance and Glory- / Fledgling Bonds, Linking Magic★
(No new pulls)
Aight, turns out I could not get the Tsubaki 4* card, but no biggie because the set is permanent.
The new event, as y’all might expect, is a limited set. Why? Hell if I know: it’s not a collab or special holiday. I’m not gonna ramble on this because I’ve done that way too many times in previous WRGU posts, but… just bleh. When 75% of your gacha sets are limited, it’s… not good. Let’s just put it that way.
Anyway, I’m a bit surprised they didn’t do a collab event with Godzilla vs. Kong, especially since they’ve been showing the progression of the Godzilla in one of the overworld areas for the past week. I’m honestly getting a bit tired of opening the app and hearing a monster shriek followed by sirens, but at least that’s been the extent of the collab (along with a song and optional hit sounds).
That’s all I got from GuruMiku land.
Uma Musume: Pretty Derby
Event: Golshi Week
So… we’re still in Golshi Week, which means no event. That hasn’t stopped the new character hype train, though, because we just got a new trainable character — Smart Falcon!
Along with the new character, existing support SSR cards Super Creek and Suragawa Tazuna are rate up! These are arguably two of the best support cards in the game, so I was definitely ready to spend gems on the support gacha. After all, good support cards = good trained characters.
Unfortunately, my RNG God luck ended this week, as I only was able to get two SSRs from the pulls I did. Sure, one of them was Tazuna, but I was hoping for Super Creek since her gold skill is one of the best recovery skills in the game.
I guess I should be thankful that I got the SSR cards I did, because Teio is one of the better SSRs in the game, while that Tazuna is the 3rd copy I pulled overall, which means she’s 2LB (limit broken twice, a term I learned recently).
Maybe someday I’ll be able to get a MLB (max limit broken) SSR support card that isn’t an event card. Maybe someday…
Anyway, new character! Smart Falcon’s an interesting choice, but it makes sense. She’s a dirt racer, which is badly needed since only Haru Urara is a dedicated dirt racer, while Oguri Cap, Taiki Shuttle, and El Condor Pasa have dirt traits (and two of those are 3* characters).
I’ve noticed that the recent additions to the trainable roster have been characters that fill gaps — Curren Chan is a sprinter, which was badly needed because there wasn’t a character that was sprint only. Yes, there are sprinters like Sakura Bakushin O, King Halo, Taiki Shuttle, and Maruzensky, but they all have abilities in other distances (also Haru Urara, though she’s useless on turf, so she doesn’t count). Narita Taishin is a mid/long distance runner (which is heavily represented), but she’s also a chaser, which doesn’t have much representation other than Gold Ship.
I guess in that way, there has been a pattern in which characters end up trainable. The bad news is that we’ve pretty much filled the urgent deficits in all distances and strategies unless the game wants to double down on sprinters and chasers, so we’re back to square one in predicting who’s next.
If I had to guess, I would think that Seiun Sky has a decent shot since she’s a mid-distance runner with the “runner” strat, which basically means she starts in the lead and tries to keep that lead. At least, that’s what I’ve noticed when she ran in races as a CPU. There’s not that many characters right now that are both mid-distance and runner strat other than Mihono Bourbon and Silence Suzuka (along with Maruzensky and Daiwa Scarlet, but they’re more milers IMO), so it might work.
In that same vein, Ines Fujin could work given she’s also a runner strat, though I’m not sure what distances she specializes in.
I’m still gonna throw out Narita Brian and Tamamo Cross as two names that could be added very soon as well. The former especially since she’s actually in the opening for the game:
That makes me more surprised that she wasn’t an initial character, honestly, though there are other characters in that opening that weren’t initially added like Narita Taishin and Biwa Hayahide (though they were eventually added).
Actually, huh… Air Groove isn’t in that opening. Maybe she replaced Brian?
Wait, El Condor Pasa isn’t in that opening either. And King Halo. And Maruzensky. And Mejiro Ryan. And…
You know what? I retract everything I said. They probably made the opening before confirming the playable roster.
Anyway, the conclusion is that nobody knows anything and that we’re all privy to CyGames’ whims. All hail the CyGames.
Before I finish this week’s post, let me talk a little about what I’ve been doing in game (though it’s honestly not that interesting). I mentioned previously that I’ve been able to get characters to A rank — well, my PvP (multiplayer mode) team now has a decent amount of A rank characters:
There’s been a few goals I’ve been striving towards:
- Fill out PvP team with A rank characters (which conversely gets my overall rank to A)
- Get to Class 6 in PvP
- Get all of my characters to at least 3* status (AKA get their racing outfits)
The first and second kinda tie together, though I’ll admit I got super lucky and will most likely be going to Class 6 this week.
You may be wondering what I’m talking about, and well… it’s complicated. Basically, the PvP (multiplayer) system in the game is pitting your horse girls against other players’ horse girls in five races. The TL;DR is that more wins = more points, but it’s a bit more nuanced than that (explained very well here).
You start off in Class 1, and every week the players’ classes update according to the highest score they achieved during the week. For example, if your max score for the week was 300,000 points (AKA a certain rank, say 100,000th), and the cutoff score for promotion was 250,000 points, then you move on to Class 2. The max class is 6, which is pretty much full of whales and dedicated players.
As you can see by the image above, my max score for the week was 452,754 points, or 157,267th in rank, which is higher than the cutoff for promotion (the other numbers in the image).
The bad news is that I’m pretty likely to be relegated back to class 5 next week unless I get lucky again (which is unlikely given my current RNG status), but I’m just happy to get the rewards for getting to class 6 for the first time: 1500 jewels and 5000 friendship points. That’s a lotta jewels — literally a 10-pull’s worth. Very good.
As for the first goal, I’m kinda struggling with getting characters to consistently get to A rank, but I’ve been slowly getting there. Right now, though, I’m spamming training runs with Gold Ship for one purpose — Golshi Week missions.
I didn’t really talk about this last week, but there are special missions in honor of Golshi Week that give out hella rewards. There are standard missions like “win Arima Kinen” or “get 1 million fans overall”, but there are also some unique missions. Namely, the mission involving Gold Ship — get X total number of fans for Gold Ship.
You see, every time you do a training run with a horse girl, the total number of fans earned from that run gets added to the overall total. Basically, I needed to spam Gold Ship training runs to get hella fans to finish the missions. How many? Well, the biggest Gold Ship related goal is to get 5,640,000 total fans. I had… 4,000,000 total fans. Each training run usually gets around 200,000 to 300,000 fans.
You do the math.
Luckily, I still have about a week to achieve this, so I’m not too rushed on time. If anything, I think the hardest mission to accomplish is to win 564 races in training modes, which I’m about halfway through.
You may be wondering what the point of all of this is. Well, there is a special reward for finishing all of the Golshi Week missions. That reward is… 150 jewels.
…
Yeah, it’s underwhelming, but it’s not about the ends here — it’s the means. The later missions give thousands of support tickets, items used to level up support cards. Sure, I already have like 300,000 of them, but hey a surplus is better than a deficit.
Now, the third goal… that’s a work in progress. A long, long, long work in progress. Basically, I need to wait until a good character shows up so that I can spend all of my jewels on the gacha. Getting duplicate characters = character shards = limit break characters with said shards.
I only have five more characters to limit break (Vodka, Mayano Top Gun, Agnes Tachyon, Winning Ticket, Nice Nature), and some of them are only 10 or so shards away. But until somebody like Seiun Sky or Ines Fujin shows up as the next trainable character, this goal’s on hold. Gotta save up those jewels.
And that’s all for this week’s update! Thanks as always for reading, and I’ll see y’all next week for another edition of WRGU! Until then, stay safe out there!
Fractals and Recursion 