So you've decided to roll on the Valentines Banner

Hello and welcome back to another edition of The Premium 10 Pull, what makes this occasions all the more special? Well funny you should ask that, this last week almost, if not all of them, every gacha game tends to celebrate Valentines Day. Some more than others, but none the less this is one of the many seasons of Limited events, giveaways, and above all else, giving players the excuse to "spend time" (translates into see two panels of dialog worth of voice acting from their favorite characters), with their favorite characters. We will be focusing on the Valentines shenanigans first, then onto the "other" stuff and by other stuff the things that kept me from writing the next piece of the 10 pull. So without further adeu, I edited the first image I made with the first blog:

ONTO THE GAMES, Starting with...

DRAGALIA LOST - VALENTINE'S CONFECTIONS 02/14/2019 - 02/22/2019

... NOPE

Okay so, for a good couple months the favorite theory was this was the event that would introduce Mym (Better known as the human version of Brunhilda, the fire dragon Euden befriends into one of his many dragon pacts) as a playable character. I mean its clearly her time, shes constantly fawning over your character like the romantic she is and fits into a valentines banner like nobody else. Yet here we are, Cygames deemed it so because what better way to introduce a new healing unit into fire than just coloring Light's best healer in a coat of flame and changing her skills around a bit to match the valentine's motif.

Meanwhile, the event that follows the actual summoning banner is... rather Lackluster. So the way Confections works is there are at least three sets of valentines related stories. The opening two revolves around the main story cast trying to find ways to thank Euden for bringing them all together. The next two feature the other two valentines characters on the banner Orion and Ezelith, both sporting a whole one star downgrade from their previous versions but both using different weapons. Then the last two feature the Banner leads themselves Hildegard and the dragon Prometheus. So to actually access these stories to see them, you have to... play the game. By play the game I mean, no theres no special valentines quests or bosses to fight (atleast not all the time), I mean play the base game. Imperial Onslaughts, Dragon Trials, any story quests, all of that. After completing quests you get roses that you can trade into the Valentines currency shop for a TON of useful upgrade materials.

In the grand scheme of things this event is extremely lackluster, Its essentially a Facility Event (The events that give you a free element aspected building to boost certain element types) but with all of that cut out of it. Yet, this event is offering some of the most rare materials you can get in the game with just a measly little time investment, such as a WHOLE Damascus Bar, a gold key, key fragments, and SILVER BARS AND KEYS. None of these items are this easy to get outside of uncapping characters fully, raid and facility events, or... MONEY. So if you're playing and didn't know these items were available, what are you waiting for?!

As for the characters available on the Banner itself, V.Hildegard is a fantastic healing unit, yet if you didn't already have another healing unit by the name of Verica, you aren't missing too much. Hildegard boasts higher SP costs on all of her spells and currently her second skill, which is her shield, isn't that useful in high tier content YET. Verica is currently still the go to unit for High Midgardsormr due to her lower spell costs, yet its not like Hilde CAN'T do High Midgard, you're really just missing a way to clear stuns, and an emergency burst heal which can be remedied through weapon options.

Valentine's Ezelith is probably the most useful utility wise out of this banner, at the 4* rank she gives you a ranged archer unit with two damage skills, and a full 100% stun resist making her a safe pick to dps High Midgard with. With Break Punisher being her main passive to boot she can pump out damage bow users most normally can't, with her only real downside is that she is a ranged unit so her HP requirements for high end content scale up higher than your melee classes.

Valentine's Orion was a clear meme character boasting his Strength Doublebuff passive and Curse Resistance. Yet for a small amount of time during launch he actually was THE character to pull at 3*s. Cygames unfortunately did not properly code his burn damage and he was actually dpsing High Midgard down faster than Mikoto. This was shortly fixed and we got 300 wyrmrite because of it. He is back to being a meme and almost unusable.

That pretty much covers all you need to know about Valentine's Confections, What's next for Dragalia Lost? VOID BATTLES, these will be available on February 22nd, and will be the missing link between Imperial Onslaught grind and High Dragons, offering new weapon choices for all elements (if you can best the new bosses) and hopefully bringing that content closer to a lot more Dragalia Lost Players.

GRANBLUE FANTASY 02/14/2019 - 02/25/2019

Okay so the only real reason why we're covering Granblue ahead of everything else that doesn't actually have anything Valentine's related is because Granblue has two new characters in its newly minted "Valentines" roster. Last year they added the originally only obtainable character via... HAVING A JAPANESE CELLPHONE CONTRACT to the roster as an obtainable, yet limited valentines character. After the addition of Valentines Medusa, it would only be suspect that they would continue to build up a valentines roster akin to their Halloween and Summer offerings... even if they are all kinda "meh" in utility.

This year we got TWO whole new characters, Valentines Clarisse and Valentines Melissabelle. They will join the limited Valentines Medusa during the Valentines season, and will of course only be available to pick up during this time (Outside of extreme circumstances). Also making a return, you can (depending on if you either play the game as Gran or Djeeta) give chocolates to your favorite characters, and get a couple scenes worth of dialog from them that can only be accessed in-game during this period.

Outside of all of this, the event that ran besides the Valentines stuff this year WAS a Light Advantage Guild Wars, and with the last blog we basically covered what Guild Wars was, but before when Guild Wars would land on a holiday the event bosses would take after something that was inspired by the holiday. Case in point, last year THIS thing was the boss.

A... Giant chocolate horse. Guild Wars used to be fun...

WHAT IS NEXT FOR GRANBLUE FANTASY:

I can hardly believe it's been 5 years, almost 3 since I myself started playing the game myself. The 5th Anniversary will boast maybe one of the biggest in-game currency give-a-ways of any gacha game (outside of a full game shutdown), a plethora of in-game bonuses and resource cost reductions, and of course the biggest event story update of the year with the continuing What Makes the Sky Blue part 3. This is the time of the year to tell everyone "Its never been a better time to get into Granblue Fantasy" all the while reminding them "It's never a better time to avoid starting Granblue Fantasy).

FATE GRAND/ORDER 02/06/2019 - 02/20/2019

Okay to be fair I started writing this blog a couple of days ago when this event was actually running... sorry I'm late, so I will atleast recap what happened during the Valentine's period. This event was a rerun of last year's Valentines event, but since there was a good chunk of servants added to the game SINCE last year, there have been a bunch of new additions to this event by virtue. Every servant added before this event (and during of course) all got a 4* CE you could receive from them as a sort of valentines gift, in exchange for chocolate coins. In addition to that the event also gave out a currency you could trade in for a whole bunch of useful materials to help uncap servants, including the elusive Crystalized Lore, which is used to fully max out a skill on a servant to level 10.

I wish I could honestly say more about the event but I really didn't touch it, it seemed like alot of work for a game that... constantly continues to fuck me over in the RNG department so, maybe when the next thing happens (AKA, an actual important feeling thing) I will go a bit more into detail rather than... farm materials in other games that actually give me SSRs.

The bias is strong with this game, sorry.

The 5* Servant introduced with Valentines was a popular one though, none other than the Sith Lord herself, Mysterious Heroine X Alter. She... as of her incarnation into NA is... billed as one of the worst Berserker 5* characters you can get. Most Berserkers usually want a deck revolving around doing massive damage via a triple Buster deck... and like Vlad (But also unlike Vlad), she doesn't and as of the moment her Quick deck as a Berserker limits her functionality to do insane damage... that is until Skadi gets added into the game, OR if you somehow have Scathach to pair up with her. Again though, her time is not now, its in the future along with the recent rate up with Edmond Dantes, you are purely rolling for a extreme down the road future investment... All I did was throw tickets at her but as usual nothing, I'm saving for Summer.

WHATS NEXT FOR FATE:

AN ACTUAL STORY SINGULARITY!

Yes, leading up to the eventual Part 2 of the FGO story we are getting the singularities that take place before then starting with the introduction of Shinjuku. We will be getting the anticipated Archer of Shinjuku as a 5* Archer servant along with a new 4* assassin and avenger (whose names are also a mystery... if you don't look them up on a wiki) I of course already know who... exactly the old man in the banner is but if you want to keep that a mystery until Shinjuku drops I will abstain from mentioning it here. Also I GET TO PLAY THE GAME AGAIN.

AZUR LANE 2/14/2019-2/20/2019

Azur Lane did not really... have a valentines event, all they really had was if you had your favorite ship selected as your secretary on valentines day you would get a special thing to take up inventory space from them. During Valentines they ran a special week long event for the IJN Ryuujou, where you grinded the event maps long enough and eventually got enough of the currency to unlock her... I misread the time the event was going to run for officially and this is the first boat I have not collected... I am sad now.

WHATS GOING ON NOW FOR AZUR LANE:

The Winter's Crown event is another lottery event where you do the event maps to get the currency to empty out boxes for sweet materials, upgrades and even ships! The Duke of York will be available out of the third box, and one of the more anticipated HMS vessels, the HMS Victorious finally makes her debut in the Limited Time build banner for the event. With this event coming to the US, we will also be getting a new addition with the HMS Sirius, who is completely new and wasn't available during the original run of the event on the Chinese or Japanese servers. There are 5 ships in total to build, two to grab from the Lottery Boxes, and of course a certain number of these ships will be available by just clearing out the event maps and getting lucky. this event will be running into the next month until the 13th, there will be plenty of time... unlike the last one, to actually do what you need to do. Good luck with your builds... I need more Quick Finishers.

KINGDOM HEARTS III

THIS IS NOT A GACHA GAME.

So the REAL reason why I haven't been updating you on great gacha games such as Another Eden and... Langrissr... is that I spent alot of time playing KH3 instead. I finished it a little bit ago and... boy, BOY, do I have some news for you guys... Do you know what game ALSO has a gacha game about it?

KINGDOM HEARTS UNION CROSS: (NEWLY ADDED)

So... without... maybe spoiling Kingdom Hearts 3... All I can really tell you is that Union Cross ties into the main series in such a way now that... Union Cross is now the most important game in the timeline and also maybe the entire franchise. Because at one point Kingdom Hearts 3 literally becomes the biggest advertisement for a mobile game I have EVER seen. So upon this realization and massive want to go back INTO Kingdom Hearts after being thoroughly disappointed by the overall package of the third game... Picking up Union Cross seemed to be the way to go as I play through the old games for either the first time... or if you're KH 2, the second time.

A little backstory for the game, Union Cross used to go by a different name, you might (or might not) have remembered a game called Kingdom Hearts Unchained... well that game turned into this game. I'm not really up to date on the reason why Square Enix rebranded the game in regions, all I know is that when the game came out I couldn't play it due to my phone being too ancient to run it. I forgot about it for about 3 years... that is until the inevitable release of KH3. After witnessing... the INSANITY of what they decided to do in terms of how the story should go from that ending, I really didn't have a choice and I was already hooked on the idea of... downloading a Kingdom Hearts mobile game.

The game has seen quite a bit of life since people have also come to the same conclusion I have had, yet I can't really tell you if it has sustained itself over the growth of people finishing KH3, all I know is the game has newly updated guides to help accommodate players like myself. Even going as far as to tell me "You need to be about 300 chapters in to get to the actual tie-in content". So that's what I have been trying to do while also juggling the other 4 games that I have, adding a 5th one seems insane... but in the end so is Kingdom Hearts.

So far from my time with the game I have done enough to unlock the actual events that run from time to time, which actually included a Valentines themed Heartless raid boss that you can take on and as you beat him his next incarnations only get stronger. Unfortunately this is about as far as I have climbed into the Union Cross train so far, this game is actually pretty different from the games I have been playing, most of your power comes from Medals that you equip to your keyblade and little familiar pet, then depending on which keyblade you are using you want to order those medals accordingly. Alot of medals have Buff and Debuffing properties so properly chaining Buff medals into damage medals seems to be the key to doing well, but so far my keyblade medal capacity is low so I have to make due with what I have in terms of space. Look forward to more Khux within the coming Premium 10 Pulls.

Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space

Another Eden also fell victim to the lust of Kingdom Hearts 3... I think it actually released at the same time so I did the opening of the game, went back to bed alot in-game to piss off my main characters sister enough to where I didn't get breakfast, and got to the future. To be honest I'm actually rather impressed with the presentation of this game and also the fact that this is the first mobile game that I'm playing that doesn't have a stamina system? It doesn't gate you from playing the game outside of just being underleveled for content, and all the stuff I have been hearing about it is that the game isn't super difficult at all as long as you remember to power up the units you have. This is definitely a game I think that's worth checking out... I just have to spend the time to check it out myself... so I guess make that 6 mobile games at the same time, oh boy.

The Rs of your Ten Pull

• SMT Dx2 is running a crossover event with Bayonetta, a free 4* demon I think is what I heard correctly? Still not enough to get me to go back and check it out
• I still have Langrissr downloaded, but man, that stuff on the release was whack and I kinda just put the game down to see if they would atleast fix the global chat issues. Seems like a competent FEH clone with... some depth.
• Speaking of Single Player games, I hear they're finally gearing up Yoko Taro's SINoALICE for an english release sometime within Q1, might be interesting to check out
• FEH is currently running its Second Anniversary... thats about as much as I can tell you about it. It's cool though that what was originally supposed to be an advertisement for Fire Emblem has kind of eclipsed the series in its own way. I might just open it up to check it out at this point.

And that's the end of your spark fund.

So I think a biweekly or monthly format would work best for this. Mostly due to the repetitiveness of mobile events, it would be better to spread out these updates as it gives more room to actually say nonsense about whats happening in games like Granblue, and proper time for literally any new mobile game to come out to shake up the market... even if it doesn't. Next time I hope to get a bit more into Khux, and Another Eden, all the while seeing if... I can atleast give Langrisser a fair shake... Who knows maybe that Epic Seven game is also still worth peoples time, it seems like people are enjoying it.

Save up for next month's banner, see you all later!