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Shangri-La Frontier: Crap-Game Hunter Challenges God Game (Kusoge Hunter, Kamige ni Idoman to su) is a webnovel started in 2017, with a manga adaptation published by Kodansha and available on k-manga or Bookwalker beginning in 2020, and an anime adaptation that just notched its third episode on Crunchyroll. New episodes are out early Sunday mornings in the states. At its core the story basically goes "what would happen if a guy who was good at video games played a good video game", and while the answer to that is "he'd have a good time and see some cool stuff", the specifics of that answer make this one worth coming back to. Shangri-La Frontier (SLF) is one of those VRMMOs full of AI-driven NPCs that all the kids are into these days, but it's not powered by a forsaken child or connected to an alternate dimension (that we know of), just helmed by a couple of rockstar programmers who really liked the Sleeper raid in Everquest and as such have populated their world with unique bosses that will advance the world story when killed. Now, the greater tech needs of the gaming industry's jump to VR have left a whole, whole lot of games deficient in the design department. Nonsensical plots, bugged hitboxes, getting autosaved in a bad state and having to wait hours for a cell reset... there are weirdos who find something to enjoy in the vast sea of crap games, but SLF is widely recognized for its quality. It's a god game, running for just a year but already having racked up thirty million players. None of them have defeated a unique monster yet. But let's meet some of them who might!  Front and center is our protagonist, Rakurou Hizutome, in-game name Front left is the triple-skull player-killer, in-game name Arthur Pencilgon. Real name Towa Amane, a hobbyist gamer with a penchant for ruling the social scene and making stationery puns. She has a history with Sunraku beginning from Unite Rounds, the going-too-far of Dark Souls whose absolutely abysmal "realistic" drop rates resulted in the players who were meant to unite and protect the kingdom dividing into factions to hunt down and loot the respawning friendly NPCs. SLF sees her as the second in command of the player-killer guild Asura Kai, but she's a little dissatisfied with her current position. Front right is the hard-hitting Spirit Monk, in-game name Oicazzo. Real name Kei Uomi, a pro gamer who loves up-close fighting, fish puns, and avatars of any gender though he's definitely a dude. He's also got a history with Sunraku, mostly through terrible fighting games like Berserk Online Passion, colloquially "BerP", a game which ran its rollback netcode a little too strongly resulting in its players being able to turn themselves into Doctor Octopus with the right inputs to duplicate and stretch their limbs. Sunraku gets him into SLF with talk of the whole unique monster hunt thing. Back right is the actual reason Sunraku's playing SLF, though he doesn't know it yet: Saiga Rei, in-game name Psyger-0. She's a veteran of the game and has been trying to connect with Sunraku for a while in real life, so her friendly local game store owner decided to play matchmaker a little. She's not as prominent a character as the other three, at least not this season, but has her moments. She's a member of one of the largest guilds in game, dedicated to hunting down unique monsters, and has sufficient experience and gear to set the current in-game damage record. Back left is the friendly vorpal bunny, Emul. She's one of those "interesting plot pathways", responding to Sunraku's "vorpal soul", the dodge-heavy, crit-heavy way he proved himself to Lycagon. The boss of the friendly vorpal bunnies took an interest in Sunraku's development and assigned Emul as an NPC companion to keep an eye on him, so even when his other gamer buddies are doing other things, as they do, he'll always have Emul to talk to. She's powered by the same AI that drives the rest of the world, and unlike all those player characters, if she dies in the game she The anime has paced itself a little slowly so far, but the manga's been pretty good at showing what there is for all sorts of people to enjoy in all sorts of games, and based on the season preview this double-wide run is at least going to end somewhere satisfying.
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Oct 16, 2023 00:27
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doomrider7 posted:If he inspired Let Me Solo Her(web novel predates Elden Ring), I should hope he is. To be clear, I wasn't saying he did, just noting down the obvious parallel - naked dude in funny headgear outplays the game's biggest challenges. If you found something that says so, feel free to share, but most of what I found links Let me solo her's aesthetic to a meme series of Dark Souls 3 videos with a similar vibe.
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Oct 16, 2023 17:54
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I've been watching youtube videos about abandoned games recently and it's interesting how many of them just become someone's weird little social space. Just some BerP-adjacent thoughts.
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Oct 22, 2023 18:25
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I would like to see more of Emul shooting the poo poo with random zone filler, not gonna lie.
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Oct 29, 2023 17:02
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I love how they give the throne room door to Pencil Knight a fog door effect. It's like, everybody knows what it's supposed to be. Also I appreciate the idea of somebody who cultivates disabling skills for the sole purpose of posing with hostile monsters. That's a dream to chase.
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Nov 6, 2023 03:20
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Doodles posted:PEATZ! I'm not gonna lie, the friendly vorpal bunnies (and others) are my favorite part of the story. Mostly because they play into roles that are neat for the story but which player characters might not be willing to take up (and if they were, interacting with them would compromise Sunraku's opsec.)
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Nov 20, 2023 01:35
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Infighting is something you don't see a whole lot in MMOs for, well, exactly this reason. People like Mr. Staring Vulture Mask over here can just swoop in and scoop up the spoils, because it's not like the fighters want them. Of course, if you try and code around it you can run into problems, like people training AoE attackers into a world boss fight to invalidate the rewards, or your own weapon's random poison chance not being recognized as your own damage. City of Heroes, for all that I'll talk it up, went this way too... kind of. There weren't really significant item drops to speak of, but you did lose out on a proportional-to-damage share of XP. Not a problem if there are a few rumbles mixed into the overworld spawns to add color - just keep going down the block, you'll get another one. But it really bit the low-damage crowd control archetypes, who could confuse a boss into destroying their own posse but wouldn't get much of a payoff from it, even if they jumped in immediately. ...oh, and there's this one occasional event where giant monsters show up and beat on each other, but because monsters have a tremendous regeneration rate it was tough for small teams to do a significant enough chunk of the total damage to be counted with defeat credit for the "I helped beat the giant monster" achievement. Fortunately that's one of the things the private server guys got on top of pretty quickly. But the Prismatic Forest Grotto is probably just the devs wanting to put on a show and not caring too much about the game balance in overworld area 4 out of plenty. I do wonder how many times Sunraku has played sportscaster while he was watching all the unskippable cutscenes in all those lovely games. Glazius fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Nov 27, 2023 |
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Nov 27, 2023 00:31
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Electric Phantasm posted:Kinda surprised she made her avatar look exactly like her. Unique monsters are valuable development resources, given that you get a chunk of encounter XP just for showing up to lose. Since they haven't even all been encountered yet, it's worth chasing after anything that seems new.
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Nov 28, 2023 04:10
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A cutscene viewer where your party can sit in on it even if they haven't unlocked the scene itself is a pretty interesting social tool in a game that seems to pride itself on player path diversity.
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Dec 10, 2023 13:23
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Sunraku Don't Skip The Tutorial Challenge (difficulty: impossible)
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Dec 18, 2023 02:15
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amigolupus posted:The dynamic between Sunraku, Pencilgon and Oicazzo is amazing. The casual level of trolling and poo poo-talking between friends is the most realistic part of this show. I figured it was just a dating sim of the Tokimeki Memorial model where you could be playing the field but getting a bad reputation with someone would get you badmouthed to everyone. Too low of an introduction threshhold and too high of a bomb impact means your only options are FOREVER ALONE and x2 GANTT CHART INTO HAREM COMBO.
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Dec 18, 2023 21:18
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amigolupus posted:Another detail I liked was how Cazzo used Repel Counter, a skill that Sunraku also has. It's a nice reminder that this is still an MMO and how players with different builds can still find themselves having a thing in common. The general idea of the skill gardener is a nice patch on top of the thing you sometimes get in VRMMO stories where you can just pick up a skill that changes your game forever by doing random stuff. The gardener can tell you about the skills in the game and what you have to do to learn, evolve, and level them - Sunraku's gotten a bunch of skills that support his build by choosing and playing the build, which is exactly the thing you'd expect from a well-designed game. He just has no idea he could have checked.
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Dec 19, 2023 01:01
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The thing you have to keep in mind is that Sunraku doesn't know how this game is played. He's just been doing the things that seem reasonable to him because like hell a kusoge's got a tutorial. Just a manga reader here, and we haven't seen anything definitively there, but based on the incidental conversations it seems like a lot of people are playing SLF as a conventional numbers collider. Probably one of the NPCs in Firstia is there to teach people about tab targeting and some kind of VATS-like system that auto-aims ranged and melee attacks based on some targeting parameters.
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Dec 26, 2023 02:57
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Grandito posted:That newbie is going to end up being some kind of pro who's hustling him, right? I can't see being a mentor in an old game as a plot arc that makes sense. That's what Pencilgon is doing for Sunraku and Oicazzo right now. Granted, they're on kind of an accelerated track, but y'know, it's like poetry, it rhymes.
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Jan 4, 2024 05:46
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Honestly I wish we'd get more behind-the-scenes stuff at the game company.
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Jan 7, 2024 22:14
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I do appreciate the running gag they've got going with Mia. And hey, they finally made it to the fireworks factory. I like how Pencilgon's big gambit also cut off the one place Asura Kai was expecting to run, didn't catch that detail on the first read.
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Jan 21, 2024 22:09
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Who among us has not pointed a boss the wrong way and felt like poo poo? The documentary at the end was maybe one of the best minis they've done, too.
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Jan 28, 2024 18:02
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cant cook creole bream posted:Why bother with 100% revival items, if all attacks one hit kill anyway? Because you're limited per type in how many revival items you can carry.
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Jan 30, 2024 01:15
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Do watch the ED to this one. When they changed it over for the season break it felt a bit weird to get a love song over a protag montage, but it's got the proper visuals to it now. Stand tall, my friend. May all of the dark lost inside you find light again. On a completely unrelated note, it must feel weird as gently caress for Sunraku to learn pertinent information about the game he's currently playing through a mass-market media publication, rather than in the proper way by webcrawling for xXx_fAIlIAslAYEr666_xXx's increasingly unhinged mechanical breakdown on some two-year old blog now populated only by adbots trying to establish a legitimate pattern of platform usage.
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Feb 11, 2024 13:44
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Yon posted:City of Heroes had Hamidon, which the devs were okay with players beating, but iirc (it's been nearly 20 years) they kept getting mad when they used the 'wrong' strategy and would patch the fight so it wouldn't work. The intended strategy ended up being dumb as hell. City of Heroes status effects work on a hybrid magnitude/duration system in PvE content. Every status power that lands on you, like being immobilized by a web grenade or stunned by a flashbang, has a magnitude like 2 or 3 and lasts for a certain amount of time. Resistance to status effects comes in forms that will either reduce its duration or resist a certain magnitude of the effect, and for most forms of protection it's a bit of both. Normal enemies have a small resist magnitude - minions usually have 1, lieutenants 2 and bosses 3 - and a hero power that's intended to apply a status will usually apply magnitude 3, meaning it won't work on a boss unless you hit twice and overlap the durations. Where does Hamidon come into this? Well, he's a giant cell whose organelles all blast the players individually, in addition to a big corker blast from the nucleus that you need to farm drops from the zone monsters to survive. He starts with 6 yellow blasters, 6 blue power drainers, and 6 green healers, and they have their own quirks for dealing with them. But as originally intended, when he hit his 25% health breakpoints he would spawn one blaster organelle on top of everyone currently inside the cell protoplasm, which in a full zone of 50 heroes means more concentrated pain than anybody can stand. You're allegedly supposed to either spread out when he gets low or have everybody but the most damagest pull out entirely until the yellow hit. I say allegedly, because Hamidon wasn't technically immune to status effects, he just had a very, very high resist magnitude. But surely the entire raid wouldn't show up with hold powers and all just focus them on the nucleus until they stacked up high enough, making him unable to use any power including the yellow summon. Of the two ways to herd cats that one proved a lot easier in practice. They did eventually change the fight, but not so that Hamidon couldn't be held. It's still a good idea to shut down that death beam of his. The summon will always happen now, regardless, though instead of a ruinous amount of blaster yellows it just puts him back to his original loadout of 6, 6, and 6 and scatters everybody out of the cell so they have to fight their way in again.
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Feb 14, 2024 15:34
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Everybody congratulate Sunraku on his excellent haul: a bunch of stuff from so far forward in the game nobody even knows how to turn it on yet.
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Feb 25, 2024 16:02
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The spider lily grove was only accessible during a particular time of day and a particular phase of the moon in an obscure corner of an early zone. It's entirely possible that hints to its location were supposed to appear as the world story advanced. Contrast that to the intended first in the order, who, well, maybe the devs are cultivating a player base that's a little too carebear for its own good (manga spoilers): there's an NPC pirate captain who's also hunting him down and you have to start bar fights in the at-launch final city to get his attention.Doodles posted:Something I just thought of: Well, Sunraku already knows there's a fetch quest between him and "learning the truth of this world". More questions would probably just bounce.
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Feb 26, 2024 23:56
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This is where I initially thought the double-wide would stop, on the escape scene. It seems like a good place for a dynamic season break, though there are definitely a few things to set up from here.
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Mar 3, 2024 15:44
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Vorpal Bunny Don't Blow Your Cover By Talking In Public Challenge (difficulty: impossible)
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Mar 10, 2024 16:03
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Must be weird to be an NPC trying to come to grips with your average MMO player's attitude to pain, death, and respawns.
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Mar 17, 2024 17:36
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I could see including Akane in like a season-ending montage. They don't show up in the story quite yet, though this is around when they start canonically playing the game. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 25, 2024 02:03
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claw game handjob posted:I love that Sunraku being such a huge dumbass resulted in an entire episode of hurling his corpse into a meat grinder and it was still good times to watch where a sloppier show would have only turned in "filler" for this. "No! NO! "I had sploits enough to get it! SPLOITS ENOUGH AT LAAAAST!"
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Mar 26, 2024 22:10
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Keep on posing into oblivion for love, error-miss. Not that you'd let anyone stop you.
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Mar 31, 2024 17:02
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Overcoming physical resistance by powerbombing one guardian into the other guardian's burning corpse sure is one approach to the problem. Collide those big numbers, Rei.
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Apr 5, 2024 19:48
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doomrider7 posted:Besides the...actually you know what, Inwas gonna say something about Rust being one of my favorite characters, but everyone in this series is my favorite character. Asking me to pick one over the other is like asking me to pick which is of my dinos in ARK I love the most when I love them all equally. We did literally just get through a whole arc about Rakuro getting Kei the fight he wanted with the arguable best gamer in the world. The chair's probably team swag from the event that everybody was going to get anyway, even though the actual invitational process was more like "This way, there are videogames to play!" "Where?" said Rakuro, following along.
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Apr 10, 2024 15:53
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