Blue Archive - The south Korean Gacha game that almost died, is now being released on Steam this summer.

[Gravemind]

Isn't there also time travel in the plot as well? I think they did the thing where the first main bad guy is evil version of the protagonist.

That's less a case of time travel and more a case of Phrenapates being Sensei from another timeline where everything ever went wrong.

There was, however, a very weird case of "time travel" (???) in the somewhat recent Volume 1 story updates in which Sensei got to meet, and speak briefly with, Yume – Hoshino's dead Senior that she's been obsessing over.

If everyone could see the halos then the people at the bank would've been able to tell who the students were during the heist.

the rest of the students apparently only perceive each other's halos as being generic-looking.

That's why the Foreclosure Task Force couldn't be identified. You know, aside from the fact that they had distinguishing characteristics otherwise, were wearing their normal clothing, and were all wearing their IDs during the heist.

 

[Kivotos strongest Sensei]

Isn't there also time travel in the plot as well? I think they did the thing where the first main bad guy is evil version of the prprotagonist.

Not technically time travel and not technically evil. The story is a masterpiece when it comes to writing and the rollercoaster of emotions it puts you on.

Spoiler: Final Chapter

It's an alternate version of you, the protagonist, where you didn't have the freedom to choose, and everything went to shit. Almost all the students are dead and the world has been taken over by the Color, a cosmic entity based off Lovecraft's story "The color from space". The goal of the enemy "you" is to destroy your world too, so you have to rally all the students you helped in the previous episodes to aid you. The true goal of the enemy "you" is to save his last students, so that they doesnt have to suffer anymore and are given a second chance.

 

[Kivotos strongest Sensei]

Story itself really wants to hint that some students may, in fact, be mythological deities/entities of some sort,

Here's also a few other interesting things:
-Kivotos means "Ark" in Greek
-Sensei gets his protection / issues his commands from a Tablet
-Aaron is Moses' older brother in the Old Testament
-Mika singing Kyrie Eleison and pleading for God's mercy is what allows Sensei to defeat Beatrice

 

[Fatsuit Shinji]

Aesthetic reasons, they look cool. Lorewise, only Sensei can see them,

This is a miss translation

According to implications from the director of Blue Archive in a 3rd Anniversary Q&A, the shape of a halo can generally be seen by others, but like small details seen on someone's face, they are generally given little, if any attention. Officially hired language interpreters misconstrued (from Korean to English) that Halos' shapes cannot be seen by others over the livestream or that they have no form, despite this being seen as false such as the Plum Blossom Garden background showing a toy shaped like Sunohara Shun's halo, or a Trinity Festival advertisement for Seraphim showing Mari's halo accurately recreated on a chalkboard, which was shown as an in game CG to promote an event alt announced a week after said Q&A in Japan

More detail information here and key point is halos are seen as the similar concept as irises, fingerprints and etc. Where everyone can see them but

a sort of physical manifestation of their soul.

More popular theory is the halos represent their divinity.

 

[Gravemind]

-Sensei gets his protection / issues his commands from a Tablet

The tablet itself is called the "Shittim Chest", which also has a whole slew of semantics tied to it, including locations of great Biblical significance, to, more pertinently, being the Hebrew word for wood of the acacia tree, which was used in the construction of the Ark of the Covenant, not to mention that the Shittim Chest has its own special passphrase for allowing access to it ("We thirst for the seven wailings, we bear the koan of Jericho").

There's a lot more references that allude to the deeper lore of the game both in relation to these subjects and beyond, but I don't currently care to deep dive into each and every single one at this moment though.

This is a miss translation


More detail information here and key point is halos are seen as the similar concept as irises, fingerprints and etc. Where everyone can see them but


More popular theory is the halos represent their divinity.

Thank you, I couldn't be bothered right this second to go pulling all of that up.

 

[Ayana Otonashi]

saori best girl btw

 

[Farm Hand]

I first heard of Blue Archive because of Karin at the time of that game-saving boom. Then I started to play it at global launch after seeing a few hololive vtubers do sponsored streams. I was particularly very impressed by the music and 3D-animated chibi characters compared to so many other gacha games with characters animated like paper dolls. Still doing all of the events and high-difficulty content short of Torment with a f2p account, but I only read like a dozen main story segments and a handful of events. From what I read, though, I did find it to be charming and witty (genuinely), but I heard about the lead localizer dying and a popular writer leaving, and I don't know how the quality has been since then.

As usual with most gacha games, I really wish that all of the spoken lines had subtitles. I think characters lose a lot of the appeal they're specifically designed to have when you don't know what they're saying half the time with all of the incidental dialogue.

 

[Gravemind]

but I heard about the lead localizer dying and a popular writer leaving, and I don't know how the quality has been since then.

Despite people doomering hardcore over the Project KV fallout, the game has stayed consistently well written IMO. In fact, from what I've heard, a lot of the original writing staff had long since fucked off before Volume F ever became a thing, so if you've enjoyed the story up through Volume 3, you've been enjoying the works of the new writers for a while now.

It's best to ignore what most of the playerbase says. Most of them don't even actually read the story, and you have a handful of elitist "fan translators" who like to whip the rest of the shitskin pedos into a tizzy any time any off-handed piece of dialog is altered or if there's small grammatical errors in a given event story.

 

[God's Strongest Retard]

Aside from being BA (and Arknights' Sankta) shtick, that's is the question yet still unanswered.

To be fair arknights actually answered it for their world a while ago.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Not technically time travel and not technically evil. The story is a masterpiece when it comes to writing and the rollercoaster of emotions it puts you on.

Spoiler: Final Chapter

It's an alternate version of you, the protagonist, where you didn't have the freedom to choose, and everything went to shit. Almost all the students are dead and the world has been taken over by the Color, a cosmic entity based off Lovecraft's story "The color from space". The goal of the enemy "you" is to destroy your world too, so you have to rally all the students you helped in the previous episodes to aid you. The true goal of the enemy "you" is to save his last students, so that they doesnt have to suffer anymore and are given a second chance.

It's all cool shit but it's buried in the gacha. I just want a single player game for the plot with actual good gameplay.

 

[Gravemind]

It's all cool shit but it's buried in the gacha.

Not really? A large majority of the gameplay content gives you premade comps to clear it with, save for a few spots like one of the latter sections of Volume 3 and some parts of Volume F.

 

[Glory To Arztotska]

BABBY

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

I pretty much wrote Blue Archive off after what I heard about it in another thread, I forgot exactly what I was told but it wasn't anything good... I honestly don't really know shit about it. Is there any reason to play it if you're not a coomer?

 

[Kivotos strongest Sensei]

I pretty much wrote Blue Archive off after what I heard about it in another thread, I forgot exactly what I was told but it wasn't anything good... I honestly don't really know shit about it. Is there any reason to play it if you're not a coomer?

Anyone who calls BA a gooner/coomer game has never played it. The gameplay is split in 2d sprites for story and 3d chibis for combat, and while there are some "risque" characters like Hanako, you won't interact much with them outside of their respective chapters. This is the upcoming chapter:

https://youtu.be/JwWVgGE5b0Q?si=8wyJf2daNg4M5IbJ

Also in case you've noticed, nearly every game that has appealing/attractive female character is being called coomer/gooner slop by retards online.

 

[Gravemind]

Anyone who calls BA a gooner/coomer game has never played it.

Homedog, BA leans heavily on its fanservice and the devs are in full acknowledgement of this, so much so that they meticulously plan out their own fanservice. You don't have to be in denial over this.

As it turns out, other coomslop games like Nikke actually have decent stories too. Arguing about this is just propping up strawmen to fight against other strawmen.

You can still enjoy BA while being aware of what its main draw is.

 

[1994 Honda Civic]

Okay but that's kind of the thing here. Fandoms of all stripes is complete GRIDS no matter the medium it inhabits; they'll always make a show, game, or any art form lame and gay simply on the virtue of being vocal enough to annoy as many normies as possible. Especially when their creators play into their fans' minds, it is a recipe for securing future paypiggies. And knowing how crazy they can get, it is a valid reason to not like something due to how obnoxious one's fans can be. How do you think people felt when Undertale was all the rage in its first two years after release? I find it to be a decently-good game but engaging with the fanbase was and still is not a requirement for participation.

Why I'm clarifying the fandom point is to correlate to this phenomenon. What I think those kids mean by "gooner games" doesn't have to only mean by what the game consists of. Some of the times, a few games may look completely "innocent" like in the case of Blue Archive and still be classified as such because of the visible pattern seen for most gacha games. The patterns being the blatantly open fanservice, monetization through virtual currencies and most importantly, the people those games tend to attract. So by association, they'll think BA is exactly like Nikke and the fact that its respective fanbase is protective to a spergy degree of their high school gungirl game leaves them thinking it's a den of antisociality.

I can't fully blame them for believing it since that's a common enough occurrence in which can't be ignored. Although as Gravemind stated, these games can have good stories to tell despite these fanservice-y aspects muddying the final product a little. I would know a bit about this and I feel for you at the end because Touhou has a good catalogs worth of those fan-made pieces doing exactly that! We don't have to pretend we're better than those TikTok kids due to culture war shit and we certainly don't have to associate with the general collective we know as fandoms. If the last several years didn't teach you anything about this, I don't know what will get you to not chase phantoms over nothing. A game is just that, y'know?

 

[Kivotos strongest Sensei]

Homedog, BA leans heavily on its fanservice and the devs are in full acknowledgement of this, so much so that they meticulously plan out their own fanservice. You don't have to be in denial over this.

I never denied BA has fanservice, I denied that fanservice is its main pull. A 7 minute video with parts cut from 4 different Dev interviews given in the span of 2-3 years hardly qualifies this as a "coomer game", claiming otherwise is being intellectually dishonest.

Still, the advice I've given everyone so far has been to play the game themselves and judge for themselves instead of taking something someone else said about the game at face value. I'm not here telling others they're wrong and retarded for questioning me, i'm calling them retarded for letting themselves be swayed so easily without trying it for themselves.

 

[Gravemind]

I never denied BA has fanservice, I denied that fanservice is its main pull. A 7 minute video with parts cut from 4 different Dev interviews given in the span of 2-3 years hardly qualifies this as a "coomer game", claiming otherwise is being intellectually dishonest.

Again, you don't have to be this hard in denial just because you like the game. I also love Blue Archive, but I definitely don't love EVERY single part of it. I don't care for when it gets suggestive over the more definitively underaged-designed characters, and I don't like when the L2D Memorial Lobby events swerve into fetishes I really don't want to see (sweat, feet, the "stuck" thing that they do with Tsukuyo, etc.).

You are twisting the argument around. The video is meant to prove that the game DOES have fanservice as a main draw and the devs fully know what they're doing when they include it. You can still make the case that a lot of the characters are endearing and the story is quite good despite what they do to appeal to the gooners with deep wallets without denying that there are, in fact, some more questionable aspects to the presentation.

 

[Kivotos strongest Sensei]

The video is meant to prove that the game DOES have fanservice as a main draw and the devs fully know what they're doing when they include it.

If that were really the case, if fanservice truly were the main draw, then you would see that in promotional mateial everywhere the same way you see it with Nikke or any Hoyoverse game. There are, i agree, questionable L2D's such as Karin's, but at the same time, there are regular ones such a Hoshino and Akane. The existence of fanservice itself doesn't mean that fanservice is the cornerstone on which everything else is built on.

 

[LongForgotten]

I pretty much wrote Blue Archive off after what I heard about it in another thread, I forgot exactly what I was told but it wasn't anything good... I honestly don't really know shit about it. Is there any reason to play it if you're not a coomer?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDG743T14M4 I'm mostly into it for the cute 3D models, but some people seem to like the mostly uneventful and relaxed story with funny character interactions. There's also an overarching plot with room for speculative fiction fans to enjoy, and some "epic" moments too. The fanbase is filled with the sort of people who's first reaction to any media is screaming "Where's the porn?", and the developers seem to be fully supportive of them. So I understand why someone with a higher impulse control would immediately write it off completely