Knot! Let me choose to get married!
It's finally time for the public beta of Echoes of Fate: Sigh on a String, and it's been more than two years since I first learned about the project, and I've been involved in every round of testing of the game.
The most widely spread about this game in the past two days is, of course, the news of "limited to foreign servers, white gifts for national services": in order to match the progress of the global version within one month, the national server will send out new characters launched by overseas servers in these three months, which can be regarded as rolling the "open server compensation" to a new height.
The picture is passed on to the pulp
From an industry point of view, the project "Echoes of Fate" itself also has many reasons to pay attention - "Sakura Wars" producer Prince Hiroi has been in charge of the original work for many years, popular Internet artist LAM, and shortly after its release, he broadcast a full season of anime produced by a first-line studio to warm up, in short, it is a high-level project that can be seen at a glance.
The game presented in front of everyone today basically meets this expectation: the investment in art resources that can be called the top in the two-dimensional mobile game, the bilingual dubbing in Chinese and Japanese covering the entire main plot, coupled with the theme of "classical music anthropomorphism", at least in terms of style atmosphere, it can be discussed at the "ceiling" level at the moment.
But as the title says, whether it was participating in the open beta before, playing the overseas server that was launched in advance for two months, and now returning to the national server, it is not because I appreciate classical music or have much affection for the anime broadcast two years ago.
It was because of love at first sight with the player in the game who has the "heavy girl" attribute, "Aria on the G string".
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"Heavy girl" is a cute attribute that has become more popular in ACG circles recently, referring to those characters who "attach too much importance to the relationship with a specific object, have low self-esteem and self-centeredness, and therefore often cause pressure in communication".
Moe Niang Encyclopedia's entry on "heavy girl" explained
The heavy female character in the real world is inevitably troublesome, but the heavy female characters in the virtual work tend to express a "feeling of imminent brokenness", as if the slender branches and leaves kept in a glass bottle, without careful irrigation, will wither, which is very lovable.
As a player in "Echoes of Fate", "aria on the G string" (hereinafter referred to as "aria") can be said to fully interpret the cute point of this attribute.
Just by appearance, you can show ten or even nine points of femininity
In the setting of "Echoes of Fate", in order to fight against the monsters that fell from the sky, some girls let the scores of the remaining great operas and songs in human history lodge on their bodies, thus having great power.
These girls were called "players" and were named after the music they were staying with.
Among the players, aria does not occupy a major place: she only makes a few cameo appearances in the anime, does not appear as a supporting character until chapter five in the game's plot, and is the most common one-star player in terms of card pool rarity.
But with the second meeting of the aria and the male protagonist replaced by the player, he said that he was going to get married, which was enough to impress me.
You see how good she is
Although the different players in "Echo of Fate" have rarity and different roles in the main story, each character is equal in terms of design and production resources - at least three high-precision dynamic standing drawings, rich expression differences, 3D doubles in exploration mode and finger-drawn villains in battle, and the expressiveness of combat special effects is also at the same level.
In the "tea break" plot exclusive to each character, the players and the protagonists also have a more straightforward and intimate interaction, and players can also make a "contract" with them when the favorability reaches a certain level.
With the cooperation of these side content, each player has been shaped in a more three-dimensional way, and aria is naturally no exception: she can be said to be "strange words" in the tea break plot, which is easy to impress.
Prior to the game's launch, Echoes of Fate released a series of audiobooks featuring monologues by various characters, in which arias introduced their background: "Arias on G Strings", composed by Bach, was originally part of "Suite No. 3", but is best known for being adapted to be played using only the G strings on the violin.
This can also be seen as the core of the design of the character of aria - the inner yearning to build an emotional connection with others, but being alienated by others, so noticing her protagonist is a particularly important spiritual sustenance.
The same goes for including the positioning of aria in battle, where all of her skills are pure output and hardly work with others.
Recently, the characters of the "heavy girl" attribute are becoming more and more popular, but there are still a few works that can have rich interaction with the "heavy girl" characters like this; On the other hand, "Aria on the G String" is one of my favorite pieces in itself, and when I draw the aria and the background music plays a familiar and unfamiliar version of the variation, I probably do have empathy.
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To be honest, it's not easy to maintain "single-mindedness" to arias in the game.
As mentioned above, the player characters in "Echoes of Fate" are treated equally at the design level, including the card drawing interface: the highest rarest three-star card will not have exaggerated special effects emphasis, and everyone will sound music representing themselves when they appear.
The popular player "Giant" in the anime has also been added to the game through linkage activities
Even if you draw characters who have not yet encountered in the main story, you can quickly build an impression of this character with the help of the tea break plot, action mods, and intuitive impressions of the music they represent.
Design elements such as Swan Lake are quite characteristic
For example, the player "The Girl of the City of Alley" is one of the new characters who only appeared this year, and unlike aria, canon or Swan Lake, I was not familiar with the piece itself, at first I just thought that the character image of the player and the first impression of the piece were appropriate to me.
What really got me out of mind about this character was when I first sent her on in battle – each player had their own animated appearance, Alai City's appearance was "accidentally overdone, and forced to calm and walk back into place", and even tactical tea.
In the tea break plot, Alai City is a player who very much wants to play a mature big sister, but from time to time shows a childish side.
It was also an opportunity for me to learn more about the background of the piece and to get to know her better—this way of connecting the details together to shape the character was at least quite useful for me.
The main plot of "Echoes of Fate" takes a simple and easy-to-understand royal plot, and instead expresses the character's character directly through these small details. This is probably a kind of "back to basics", players do not need to go to the community to see what "character interpretation" and "deep plot digging" to intuitively feel the cuteness of these characters. Of course, doing this well is inseparable from the art resources that the game is stacked everywhere.
This expression is also in line with the background of "Echoes of Fate" with Prince Hiroi as the original work, such as the story framework and progression rhythm of each chapter, and the base based on the concert hall, including some performance styles, can feel a lot of the shadow of "Sakura Wars".
In addition to the battles, each chapter is a leisurely daily story
Similarly, just like "every character can become a heroine" in "Sakura Wars" back then, each character in "Echoes of Fate" has an emotional line that can be advanced as long as the player has a heart, and can express his or her tendencies through completely different dialogue options.
There is also the "improper person" option that is customary in "Sakura Wars"
So in terms of experience, "Fate Echo" actually plays a lot like the "beautiful girl game" of the past, and the packaging is more beautiful.
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As a high-cost second game that has attracted a lot of attention in China in recent years, during the internal beta last year, "Fate Echo" actually received a lot of criticism in terms of gameplay, the reason is that everyone feels that turn-based gameplay is monotonous and outdated, and it is still not difficult to see the evaluation similar to "everything is good, but not fun" left by players at that time.
But a year later, when the game is officially in beta, it is not difficult to find that such a sound is much smaller.
In the past half a year, after the fierce struggle of a number of products, the "version environment" of the second-game industry has actually undergone obvious changes, and one phenomenon is that although everyone previously said "turn-based no play" and "some interesting new gameplay", the actual response is still those works with traditional gameplay and good in character operation and community building.
It's as if everyone has finally figured out one thing - "Is it wrong to pursue gameplay in the second game".
At present, the biggest advantage of "Fate Echo" is that it can be called excellent production capacity - compared to last year's beta version, the number of players before the official launch of the game has doubled from the original, and in the three months since the launch of overseas servers, new characters have been launched almost non-stop, and these characters have of course maintained the high production specifications mentioned earlier.
And now everyone knows that these character national uniforms that were launched after the public beta will be given away for free in this month.
At the same time, Echoes of Fate's changes to the gameplay system are also neat, and the direction is to make the game itself "lighter".
For example, the combat system of "Fate Echo" itself is turn-based with "position" as the core, and it is more focused on team matching between characters than real-time strategy.
Each player carries two skills, and each skill comes with its own color attribute, which can accumulate the energy of the corresponding color with each release, which can be used as a resource for performing the character's special move "Peak Solo Performance".
The solo performance of the player "Giant" recreates her highlights in the anime
In the previous version, all characters shared the same energy pool during battle, which was emptied once released, but now all players have independent energy pools, and they can frequently release big moves when they cooperate with each other, which has the feeling of "resonance" between characters, and it is much more enjoyable to play.
At the end of a round, there are usually multiple characters that can be magnified
This "faster pace" change is also the overall positioning presented by the open beta version of "Echo of Fate" - "the plot can be skipped", "acceleration and automatic combat" and "cultivation simplification", the main thing is a "never press the head, each takes what he needs", does not force the player to occupy the player's time in the game, players can completely treat it as a "character favor cultivation game".
On the other hand, "Echo of Fate" is still playing the advantage of "multimedia planning", and it is comfortable in the fields of comics, fan creation, peripheral production, etc., and has launched two drama comics in succession, and plans to launch a vinyl record player co-branded with Audio-Technica to enrich the content of the player community outside the game.
In the first few months of overseas operations, this approach has received a good response, and the production of fanart and COS works is quite large, especially the latest "Don Giovanni" The quality of fan works is even more pleasing due to the preference of female players.
Don Giovanni fanart on Twitter (send!) Yes, the national service is also sent)
In the public beta live broadcast two days ago, the silhouette of the upcoming "Chinese Style Player" was further announced, and speculation about its identity has become a hot topic among players at present.
epilogue
"Cross-media projects" such as "Echoes of Fate" have been popular in the industry for a while, that is, from the beginning of the project, "three-dimensional" publicity offensives have been launched simultaneously in various fields such as anime, games, audio novels, and IP derivatives to maximize the popularity of the project.
However, after several years of practice, this set of practices has been verified to be not as good as imagined, first, the upfront cost is too large and the risk is too high; Moreover, the release rhythm of different projects is not so easy to cooperate with, and may even drag each other down. In recent years, few manufacturers have adopted this practice.
Coupled with the changes in the general environment, it is foreseeable that there will be few such large-scale projects in the industry that try to flatten high-rise buildings in the future.
In fact, "Echoes of Fate" has encountered many ups and downs along the way, and the anime "Echoes of Fate: Beat of Fate" broadcast in 2021 is well-known, but the response is not as expected, adding a lot of pressure to the mobile game project that was originally planned to be launched immediately after, and finally postponed to two years later.
As a long-term follower of this project, I also know that the project can persist so far and produce results, which is inseparable from the efforts of many domestic developers and operation personnel after the opening.
No. 1 on the first day of the free list is also a reward for hard work
Players who often visit comic exhibitions may have discovered another thing, in the past two years, even if the game has not been launched, "Fate Echo" is still a frequent visitor to domestic comic conventions and fan exhibitions, from last year's Firefly Comic Con to the first half of the year in Shanghai CP29 to the recent Guangzhou CICF, there are "Fate Echo" booths.
Obviously, the current direction of operation of "Echo of Fate" is not only the game, but also the further construction of a fan community and the creative power of players - this is the direction that many domestic two-dimensional game companies are working together, and each round of irrigation is still precious.