Understanding Parlay, Teaser and Pleaser Bets - Tips for ...

I've been playing this game for a few months now (since towards the end of February), making this the second gacha game that has managed to hold my attention for more than a couple of days. I think I've reached a point where I'm comfortable writing down my thoughts on E7, and so I'll be writing this as a sort of informal, subjective review. FGO having been my first gacha game, and the one I have the most experience with, a lot of this is going to involve directly comparing the two, hence the title. If you hate that game you're perfectly free to, but if you're only going to be replying to this to say "FGO is trash" and/or some variation thereof...well let's face it, if that's all you have to say me telling you to save your energy ain't gonna stop you, so just consider yourselves preemptively fed and ignored past this point. Moving on then, this is gonna be a long one.
Edit: I'll be adding little edits to each section as people point out stuff I missed.
The Story
Let's start with the least clear cut of my thoughts. I enjoyed the story; the characters were likable, Ras, Arky, and Meru have decent chemistry, the plot flows well enough without pointlessly piddling about, leaving that to the optional sidequests.
Unfortunately, it's also, for the most part, rather uninteresting and unimaginative. The setting consists of a bunch of tropes that have been done a thousand times (classic kingdom, merchant desert town, elf forest, etc) without any unique twists to them. World building is practically non-existent. The sidequests, which could've been used to keep expand on the setting without interrupting Ras' journey, are instead wasted on a bunch of pointless little character plots that tell us almost nothing. A lot of them feel like a bunch of teasers for future content, which is all well and good except I don't think those are quite as important as telling us more about the world we're actually in.
And the main story itself is pretty basic. Ras' fairly unique origin is hardly brought up, aside from constantly pointing out how he's not really human, which really just kinda justifies him having all the personality of a baked potato and about half the flavor. He's one doomed hometown away from changing his title from 'Heir of the Covenant' to 'The Chosen One', and really, would anything about the story change? The other unique aspect to the story is the world getting reset every time he fails and Diche’s power weakening as it goes on. All this ends up being used for is to explain why a couple of characters turned traitor and artificially raise the stakes. Other than that, it’s just a straightforward ‘chosen one saves the world with his pet and waifu while collecting allies along the way’. We get pretty much no exploration of most of the characters we meet either. The heirs, plus Mercedes, are the only ones that get their little character arcs, and they were exactly stellar. All in all, as I said, I did enjoy it. It was fun and entertaining and had it’s epic moments, and I did at least grow attached to Meru, which let me sympathize with Ras’ later quest to restore her. But it’s not really something I’ll be thinking about for a long time after I finished it, and I think that’s a shame.
Another problem is that a lot of the characters are just complete unknowns. Many of them are only known from the little sidequests, and those can be pretty hit-or-miss in terms of introducing anyone. I mean, could anyone tell me who Ken is? That’s not a rhetorical question, I still have no idea who this guy is. I pulled him when rolling for Charles and barely use him, cause I have no real interest in using someone if I know nothing about their character.
All that said, comparing it to this point in its lifetime, the writing of FGO’s early chapters ranged from just decent to absolute dumptser fire, and the only reason I stuck with it was the promise of significant improvements in the future. Not that another game having the same flaw is much of a justification, but gacha games have ongoing stories, so we can always hope for better. I feel like perhaps E7’s biggest failing was on focusing on too grand a scale for its release story. Something a bit more personal, with less, more developed characters, would’ve served it better. And I know the writers can do that, as they’ve managed it in a couple of the side stories. As a personal point, I also wish there was some sort of in story reason as to why the characters are joining us, and some more personal interactions with them. Stuff like FGO’s bond lines and interludes, or GBF’s Fate Episodes. Right now, once you pull a unit it feels like there’s no real reward for using them a lot. It would also help alleviate the ‘I have no idea who this person is’ problem I mentioned before.
TL;DR Decently enjoyable, could be a lot better. Needs to do a better job of characterization. Early enough that there’s plenty of hope for improvement.
The Sidestories/Events
One hell of a mixed bag here. I started playing during the ‘So the Roses May Bloom’ event and it left a fantastic first impression. I felt like this game took a lot less time to learn something FGO took ages to; not ever story node needs some random battle. It was interesting, well written, and above all exactly what I feel a story in a gacha event should be; something that makes me love and want the characters regardless of how good or bad they are gameplay wise. To date I still want Bellona really badly thanks to that event. After that we had Charles’ side story, which I also really liked. It too expanded on the political goings-on of Ezara, while doing a great job at properly expanding on Charles and making me want to roll him. Sure, it was significantly smaller, but I figured it was just on account of being a relatively minor event meant to introduce one character. Unfortunately, that’s where the good impressions stopped. Cermia, Krau, and Haste’s (Haste’s was a little better than the former too, but not much) side stories where just little adventures that only gave us some surface level characterization about those characters. And they all followed the same general progression. Nevermind having story nodes without battles, apparently the standard is having plenty of random combat nodes without any story or purpose whatsoever. They’re not even meant for farming, because the farming node is always the final one anyways. I had hope the GG collab, being a relatively major event, would have more effort put into it. But ultimately it was just an excuse plot to have a few GG characters dropped into Orbis to save the day and maybe set up some future plot with Kayron.
On a more hopeful note, the lousy side stories don’t change the fact that the good ones exist. As I mentioned, it’s still relatively (and hopefully) early in the game’s lifespan. The character side stories feel like they’re longer versions of the trial quests FGO uses when it introduces a new character without a proper event or story chapter, but the Roses event felt miles beyond any of the early events, and still above most of the later ones until the recent CCC collab. Maybe in the future the great ones can outnumber the lousy ones, and can have some more interesting mechanics than just reaching and farming the hell out of the final node.
TL;DR There’s been one amazing one, some great ones, and some shit ones. Same gimmick on all of them is boring. Jury’s out on whether they’ll keep getting better or worse.
Gameplay
This is the shining star of this game. The units have unique and varied kits, and building different teams is really fun. I’m of the opinion that people often underestimate the strategic depth you can get in some of the harder fights in FGO, but at the end of the day it’s still mostly a matter of pairing a DPS with the best supports you can and adjusting for whatever gimmicks the fight involves. On the other hand, taking into account the potential builds, speed and CR manipulation, a variety of buffs and debuffs, it all makes combat super fun. That aside, the idea of hunting specific boss monsters is great in theory, and I’d kill for FGO to have a series of always-available, increasingly difficult challenge battles like the abyss. The labyrinths could be better, they’re ultimately just a series of corridors where you fight the same enemies over and over again until the bosses. But I do like the concept, and the morale system makes it so you have an added layer to consider when building your team. Personally, I think they should at least take advantage of how simplistic the labyrinth designs are to introduce new ones in fairly short periods. With different combinations of enemies and bosses to make you really have to constantly consider your teams each time. Unfortunately, talking about using a variety of teams does bring me to the downside.
The problematic issue comes when you start getting a good variety of units. How many of you have nat 5s that you haven’t touched due to lacking gear? It seems to be pretty common advice for new players to focus on just a core team for most of the early and mid game, until you can auto Wyvern 10/11 and possible Golem hunts so as to more easily get gear for new units. I was fully prepared to follow that advice...until I rolled Lidica and realized I didn’t want to not use her or give up on Silk. And then I rolled Charles but didn’t want to stop using Ceci. You see where this is going? And so I ended up spreading my gear too thinly, and while I might have progressed faster if I had just focused, I can’t help the feeling that I would’ve gotten frustrated and bored if I did. The best part about this game is, in my opinion, all the potential team combinations you can make. Which you can’t really play around with for most of the game. Even in endgame, you end up potentially sacrificing many ‘just decent’ pieces of gear because your stat rolls might all end up on the one flat stat it had. Or worse, you have to get rid of it because you maxed it and most of your rolls did, in fact, turn out shit.
The endgame grind, getting the absolute best gear for arena or the higher abyss levels or whatever, isn’t that big of a problem. But I think there needs to be more mid-game content, and more ways to quickly get new characters to a decently usable state. Thinking back to the event we just had in FGO, I was lucky to summon the featured servant pretty early on. She’s by no means maxed, I certainly won’t be using her in any challenge quests any time soon. But I was able to get her into a useful state pretty much as soon as I got her and really enjoyed using her during the event. And it made me really look forward to when I do max her out, even if it’ll probably take months to get all the materials. On the other hand, I got lucky with Baiken, went all the way to 121 for Dizzy, and got all copies of Sol, and they’ll all be collecting dust for ages while most of the event was spent just setting my strongest team on auto-battle.
Expanding on my idea of introducing new labyrinths, I think that could be a way to fix the problem. Introduce a new, limited time labyrinth every one or two weeks, with a reward of at least one decent piece of gear with guaranteed stats. That way people can feel like they’ve made some genuine, if small, bit of progress every week no matter how badly RNGesus shits on them that week. And the surplus of gear would encourage people to try out more units, and by extension make rolling the gacha more attractive.
TL;DR Fantastic gameplay with some great ideas, held back by how hard it is to try out a variety of characters.
The Gacha
Ok so, aside from the aforementioned problem of new units collecting dust for a while, this one is going to be a lot more personal. I like gambling, I’m not ashamed of that. I was the kid on the playground who’d bet pocket change and toys on UNO games, who learned several varieties of poker before high school, and the only time I’ve ever enjoyed watching a sport besides baseball is when I’ve got some money on one of the teams. Naturally, whaling in a gacha game isn’t exactly a big jump for me.
Except that rolling in E7 isn’t any fun. You know the likely results too soon. If the game let’s you skip the whole animation, it’s a nat 3 unit or artifact. If the book turns gold, it’s a nat 4. When one of the twins appears (and so far as I can tell, they always appear, even when the book doesn’t start out as gold), it’s a nat 5. And you can always tell if it’s a unit or artifact depending on the twin. And with limited units, you know exactly what the unit is going to be, too. I know a lot of people like the fact that limiteds are guaranteed, I did say this one would be a lot more personal, but I don’t see the point when we already have a decent pity system in place for them. Would a little more uncertainty really be that bad? Make the twins only rarely show up, don’t immediately reveal which unit you roll when you do, make me wait and suck my breath in when I see a gold book. Let me skip all the animations if I keep tapping so that I have a reason not to do so. I know this isn’t as important to all, or even most of you. But I know there must be at least a couple of people that would enjoy a little more excitement with each roll of the dice.
P.S. Edit: Don't you hate it when you carefully write out a long reddit post on a separate document, and end up forgetting something anyways? There's a slight issue with the imprints as well. While it's all well and good that the game doesn't make you feel too underpowered for not rolling dupes, it also makes rolling dupes more painful. Having just 1 or 2 dupes of a unit is practically useless, which makes pulling dupes extra painful. In FGO, a single dupe can give you a pretty major bump in power for that unit's noble phantasm (basically their ultimate skill), so even when you a servant you already had, you generally think 'well, at least X will be stronger now.'
TL;DR This game’s gacha doesn’t scratch my gambling itch
Monetization
Here’s the part I find the most disturbing about this game. Gacha monetization is all well and good. It’s, at its heart, gambling. And while some people can’t handle that, I believe I’ve made it clear that I enjoy it. But this game seem to try and muddy the waters around the value of what you’re spending vs what you’re getting. There’s no direct way to buy only regular bookmarks. The regular price, that is to say the price available no matter how much you spend, is $100 for the skystone equivalent of 40 summons. That makes the monthly summon packs seem more valuable, even though you only get 4 more summons. Then there’s moonlight summons, which take 120 regular summons to get. Going by the rates, this is more than you’d need on average per nat 5 covenant unit, and there’s plenty of trash you can roll there to make it definitely not worth it. But it does make it seem more generous when a pack includes a few galaxy bookmarks, it artificially raises the value of a pack. Going further, there’s the Mystic summons. Conveniently, these require ten times the bookmarks of each of the previous summons, for a featured unit with lower odds than your standard rate up. Oh, but doesn’t a pack with 700 bookmarks seem like so much? And for a much higher chance to roll a specific ML unit than you’d get with the regular ML summon. Nevermind that, at 50 bookmarks per summon, if you buy all the packs that $570 for only 72 pulls. For $500 you could get 220 regular summons, are mystic summons really that much more valuable? Sure, the packs include skystones, but that’s just there to make them seem fairer. They know damn well nobody is buying mystic packs for the skystones. FGO gets you 55 summons for $80, with no ridiculous separate seperate category of servants that you need a special currency for and no bullshit limited packs to look nice compared to the even more ridiculous regular prices. And that’s not getting into leif packs, and mola packs, and the awful gear packs and blatant mystic power creep. Every part of this game’s cash shop is designed to devalue your money by making horrible options seem less horrible by comparison. Other gachas use standard casino practices; colorful lights, excitement, etc; to make the gacha more pleasing and encourage you to spend money that way. This game is basically going full scam artist.
Edit: This game does give a fair amount more premium resources than FGO, which I did forget to mention. Back when I started playing, I even considered this to more than even out the terrible pack prices and make the game more generous than FGO. However, my opinion slowly changed as I saw the problems inherent in the whole ML and Mystic summon system. All in all, it definitely gives you more free rolls if you're F2P, but the manipulative nature of the shop is still a major problem for those of us who would be willing to spend more money.
TL:DR The game’s a giant psychological trap that makes you devalue your own cash.
Looking just at the game, I have a lot of hope for the future. But looking at the business practices, I can’t help but dread it, and a little side of me hopes it fails for them.