Recent reviews by Atara

First game was way more enjoyable. This is like an entirely different game.

I really wanted to avoid giving this game a negative review, but it's hard to recommend in it's current state.

- A lot of things just have no information whatsoever. So you don't understand what the point of many things are. This is not an issue with the game being complicated, but rather an issue of information transparency.

- It's very laggy for a 2D game, and heavy on system resources. I get around 20% CPU usage, and 2gb ram used with ALL the performance tweaks suggested by the developer and having the game minimized. So the "idle" function of the game is no better than having a bit miner running in the background. Dev says he is trying to fix this but said it's hard cause of the game engine he's using. I didn't get what he meant until I looked at the game files, it's a Gamemaker MZ game, which is basically an incredibly bloated and heavy game engine that runs in packaged browser. His hands actually are quite tied here.

- First game is just better. More coherent and cohesive UI and graphics. Systems made more sense and were more enjoyable. The gatcha was better (characters actually had rarity, and had a point to them outside of just how they look). Most importantly the combat was way more fun to watch in Auto (first game was real time top down action). The army system was actually quite good. The skill system was nice, etc.

- This game just takes the first game, has a slightly better translation, better tutorial, makes it more polished/modern looking, adds a story, and adds a bunch of effects but at the expense of the above issues. Which is really unfortunate. Depending on what things you value here, this game can be considered a sidegrade at most.

- The character art is way better in this one. So if the waifu collecting/dating sim mechanics were what you valued most you might like this game more.

I loved the first game so I was really looking forward to this one, but all this game did was want to go back and play the first one. There is workshop, but it isnt real mod support since you have to go into the game files copy and paste the workshop files over still. First game was also like this. I personally don't mind this, the bigger issue is the lack of an English community and mods. First game ahd the same issue. Dev talks a lot about the changes being due to moving to newer technologies, I think he should have just stuck to the old stuff in that case. The first game was really good, just needed some polish and extra content.

I launch the game. Making my first character. First thing I see, my Father's name is "Dying young girl", my mother, "Noble seeker". My character is 9 years old. I open the alias generator, and have been here rerolling for almost an hour. Interesting alias candidates so far.. Gay Ram, Huge Toy, The Gay, Reliable Father, Northern P*mp, Tight Companion, Virgin of Control, Tiny Spear, Emo Necromancy, More Than Virgin, and Moaning Combat. I've seen more interesting ones posted on discord. Perhaps I will make it past the character creation screen in a few more hours.. First Pet selection seems to be the same as Elona, which means Dog, Cat, Bear or.. Little Girl. I play this game and ask myself, am I perhaps on the spectrum? Now I realize, at the end of this journey, I will probably become the spectrum.

UPDATE: Chinese review bombing cause price was dropped there (I guess people who paid more for the game were unhappy) has brought the rating down from 95% to 74% in one night, rip, but it's bounced back up to 82% now at the time of writing. Just leaving this in, in case people are wondering what happened to the rating of the game.

So I did make it past character creation eventually. I died in my first half hour of playing.. from trying to cook 7 batches of roasted berries with 3 stamina left for my hungry character, and pet little girl. Brutally murdered (by myself) for trying to cook some dishes. This is the experience I craved. Also turns out you can ride your pet little girl. This makes me uncomfortable. What have you done Japan?

Anyhow, I got my friend into the game. He sent me a screenshot. I see his father is named, "Cuckold slave", and his mother, "White little girl". I'm not making this up. This was entirely randomly selected by the character generator, he has no mods installed. Needless to say, I think he is enjoying the game.

I guess I should be nice include helpful stuff here for new players, and potential buyers. Don't worry, I have a udemy style, complete Elin beginners in only 20 hours curriculum planed for you noobies. Soon you will be a certified half noobie like me. You can also read through all the guides I talk about here to get an idea of what the game is like before you get it (also just play Elona oomsestepnc mf for free to get an idea of how this game will feel, it's the closest and most complete version of the older game, now just imagine that game + stardew valley, and you have Elin).

1. Go on the Ylvapedia wiki, this is where you will spend your free time browsing when you cant be on the PC. Click on player guides. There's two you want to read here: start with "Beginner's Guide (Beta)" then read "New Player's Guide" afterwards. First one is shorter and like an introduction to the game, and how you can get through the beginning. Second one is much more indepth, detailed, and longer. You will want to read all the pages referenced and linked in that guide as you read through it as well. Now start going through the different pages in the wiki using the left panel, just looking at the pages or systems that interest you most.

2. Congrats now you know enough to think you're ready then die cooking some berries like me anyways.

3. Why did I put this into steps? Everything ended up in step 1.. Now I can clickbait people by telling them this is a "1 Step" crash course, which totally isn't just one step cause of my poor writing skill, and lack of effort.

it okay. inferior in a lot of ways to other mmos. but also has some additions that make it nice. yeh, it just ok. but at least this will be popular for a while.

Edit: the top most negative review for this game is about the privacy agreement. I suggest taking a read at the following post that I will copy and paste from @piratesoftware from x.

"For all the people currently freaking out about the Once Human Privacy Policy.

The policy states under "Personal Information we receive from you:" that they receive "Name & Contact Details" "Such as first and last name, title, prefix, email address, telephone number, (instant) messaging account, postal address, date of birth, age, gender, country/region, and government-issued ID, such as passport information, as required by applicable laws for age verification and correction of personal information."

The general internet has warped this into a demanded requirement and a privacy issue. It's not. These are only sent to the company when required by applicable local laws. This is why it says "Receive from you" and "as required by applicable laws".

In some countries government issued ID's are required for live service game access. If you are not in one of these countries you obviously are not asked or required to present those documents.

Fearmongering on social media is boring as ♥♥♥♥."

Personally, it feels like to me people are just looking for reasons to find issues with the game and trying to scare people into thinking it's Chinese malware because this is a Chinese game. I don't think people realize how public most of their data is, and how much of it is being collected by various software/games/etc on your computer. Your data is not as private as you think, and I guarantee this game is not collecting anywhere near as much a lot of your other games that you're probably playing. This game has valid issues, but we can't have a proper discussion about them with people making big issues of things that shouldn't be a huge deal.

Solid game. Unfortunately reviews are a little misleading because a lot of them are negative reviews about character creation being locked to only one character, which the devs have now fixed. They kinda deserved the backlash but at the same time, the current mixed rating isnt entire representative of the actual game. I bet this game would hover around 65-70% otherwise. My only issues so far have been occasional stutters, especially when I enter new areas. I wonder if those stutters are the game caching shaders on the fly? A bit strange since they cache shaders on first boot too.

As for the actual game it's an SCP-esque, the division type game with survivalcraft elements. There are pve and pvp servers with different seasonal events depending on which of the two kinds of server you pick. The pvp server is still mostly opt-in pvp only, as in, you can avoid most of the pvp content if you want, personally I like this, but the downside is it has a lot less content compared to the pve servers. Would have been nice to have had in between servers with both content.

This game is fairly casual for a survival craft, just a heads up. And yes there are seasonal resets, but it does seem like you get to keep most things, the main things being reset are your levels and exploration. Everything else you can keep in your eternalland, and some things like gear can even be transferred in with some currency.

Shop seems mostly p2w free but im not entirely sure. I dont mind the seasonal resets if they find a way to change things up and keep it interesting. Overall, I do think the fomo hype will die down, but I dont think its gonna be like how doomers are predicting the death of this game. It's a solid, decent game, I rate it a 7/10 so far.

So far game while not perfect, is promising. It gets regular updates, and there are a lot of interesting game mechanics and systems. I think with some improvements to the translation, and more information available for the game (guides, general info, a wiki, etc), that this game can be very good.

Disclaimer: I leave this game open a lot on my PC so the hours are not really a good indicator of how much I've played.

I've been playing for around 3 weeks now. I have not played yugioh since before pendulum was introduced. And those were just casual duels against friends, no meta or anything followed. We just hopped on ygopro percy made some random decks without looking anything up. I am now a Diamond 3 player, and have played around 15min to a few hours daily. Impressions below. I will also include a short new player guide at the bottom.

F2P friendliness. Super F2P friendly. I checked how many gems I've made and spent today, it was around 35k-40k gems and I haven't played a month yet even. The gems do slow down a lot after you get new player gems, but you still get around 7k gems monthly from dailies, etc. Once you have all your staples 7k is enough to make a cheapish to average cost deck, An expensive one will cost around a little over 11k, or more if you're missing staples. The staples are what make deck costs expensive at first, but once you have those its not so bad anymore. I have so far completed 3 full decks, one rogue tier budget deck (ninjas), one average cost meta tier 1 deck (purrely), and I am close to completing one expensive deck which is around tier 2/3 (Vanquish soul). I also have most of my staples already and bits and pieces of some other decks I want to run in the future. Surprisingly this game is very F2P friendly gems wise.

Review of the game as a way to play yugioh (so not a review of yugioh itself). Polished, good UI, last update had nice QoL improvements, fair amount of cosmetics and theyre pretty cheap too. The solo stuff is annoying to grind but they do give you an alright amount of free stuff. The events are fun, but I do wish there were more of them cause it's kinda boring in between events. There's nothing to do but play ranked and do dailies and grinding ranked gets boring once you hit a certain threshold which is dependant on your skill level. Climbing ranked is honestly quite fast and easy, but it is also super forgiving so you can also grind it out to higher ranks by abusing how forgiving this is. That's why you'll see people saying master rank is just a grind. Technically yeah, but if you're good at this game it wont actually be a grind. I'm sadly not that good so I was only able to get up to diamond from gold in a few days before needing to do any grinding. I'm doing this as a new player who has no idea what most of the decks Im playing against do.

The other issues. So not sure if this is a master duel specific issue, or just a yugioh issue but it can be a little unfun sometimes because to climb you are basically playing a coin flip mini game to see who goes first (this makes a huge difference in winrate, and is well documented already by several players) then a hand trap mini game to see who has more luck and automatically wins. Statistically speaking, if you play enough games it will average out to 50% of times where you have the advantage or not, and I know card games will inherently have some randomness but it's just annoying that so much advantage is decided by a coinflip then the luck of your initial hand draw. If you're lucky, both your opponent will get to play the game with an actual back and forth, where it will actually be fun, but this is sadly a rare occurrence, especially the higher rank you go. This is mostly an issue of this being a game designed around a best of 3 format, being played in a best of 1 format, and partially cause the MD ban list mostly targets consistency of decks rather than the actual power ceiling of those decks. So op decks will still be incredibly op, sometimes. Just not as often anymore. Makes it duels feel much more luck based than they should. On the other hand, as of writing, at least they are targeting all the right decks with their ban list. as the meta feels pretty diverse right now, with lots of decks being playable and strong. So kudos where due.

The new player guide I promised. Do the tutorial stuff in solo first. Buy the duel pass asap, it will take only around a few weeks to finish with daily play, and even less if you grind it, and this is easily the best item to buy from the shop because it gives you lots of valuable UR crafting points and some gems. you get around 1 UR card per 1000 gems, with average or a little below average luck, which can be considered the same as 30 UR crafting points if its a card you want, or 10 otherwise. Next, buy all the bundles for 750 gems each. Thats basically 10 packs for the cost 7.5 packs + a really good UR staple. It's incredible value. After that you can start investing in whatever deck you want to build. If you want a budget deck to have time to figure out what deck to make, I highly suggest either a mathmech or salamangreat deck or ninjas. The former will give you cards you can reuse in a lot of other popular decks, the latter is just seriously cheap to make a decent deck with. Black wings is also a decent option. Dragonmaids are alright too. Also dont make decks just to dismantle them later, its a waste of your resources. You are however, good to dismantle UR cards for decks you will never build in the first place. Better than having them sit around to never be used. Double check on the discord if you need help with what to dismantle, etc. Or just check the masterduelmeta website to see what decks use said card.

I have more hours than indicated here. May or may not have been playing this with a pirate hat on for a while to try this game out before buying.

This somehow mixes all my favorite elements from different genres, really well. Roguelike, auto battle, gacha without any inapp purchases (thank god for this), etc. The only thing I don't really enjoy are the some of the idle elements, but there are surprisingly very few of them and the ones that are there are pretty inconsequential. Ironic considering the game name. Some of the idle elements are fun, but the kind I don't like are the ones that time gate you out of content or resources you might want to get into right away. There are also a lot of fun and interesting systems that add depth to the game, between equipment, skills, collecting heroes, army units, etc. I like that there are other game modes too like arena, overworld exploration, and not just the roguelike exploration. I enjoy the difficulty curve, its challenging and feels rewarding without feeling impossible.

The translation is bad. The dev is very up front about this at the VERY TOP of the game description so I'm surprised people are giving negative reviews based off that. How did they miss that and end up buying the game anyways? Either way, here's my warning to review readers too. It really is bad. You will take some time trying to figure things out, but most things can be understood with a little guess work.

Goes on sale often. For how cheap it is on sale I think this game is definitely worth it, especially if you don't mind the poor translation. I do hope the translation improves. That's the only thing stopping me from going around telling people to get this game.

Even the matchmaking is gacha. You only have a 1% chance to get into an actual lobby.

I will give this a real review if we are ever allowed to play the game.

Game is literally unplayable in ultrawide (32:10), there was a screen I actually couldn't get past at all in the tutorial. I will change my review if they fix this.