My thoughts about 1.1
This started as a reply to another thread asking about thoughts on the new story episode but it quickly ran away with me so I'm doing my own thread. Until I get the survey letter and can share all this with Hotta directly, I'm gonna dump my thoughts on 1.1 here.
I experienced some issues with missing audio, or abrupt scene transitions, or erroneous scene display during transitions in the new story episode. The drowning anomaly tale didn't work for me for an entire day and was very frustrating; the ghost at the bonfire refused to spawn until the next day as well.
Bagel has been hit or miss. I've seen some really beautiful images, but the endless onslaught of lowest common denominator upskirt and cleavage shots make me roll my eyes and wish there was more room for actual talent in the recommended page. Uploading images is still bugged and I haven't been able to post in two days.
The Mario Kart minigame can be extremely frustrating and, even once it's figured out, becomes grindy instead of enjoyable very quickly. I'm relieved a lot of people seem to be just afk farming, because it guarantees me a lot of free wins and I can get out of it faster. By queue synching with a friend we were able to cooperate in a single car and it removed all challenge completely.
The story was good, writing was good, I loved the focus on Nanally and hope other characters get their own backstory development as well. Sunni Island is pretty and I enjoyed exploring it, though once the bugs got out of the way, I had it 100% in just a couple hours.
I got crazy lucky with pulls and got three copies of Lacrimosa at once. She's been great fun and is quickly becoming the leader of my main team. I wish her outfits looked less like costumes, because I don't feel inspired to spend more annulith on outfits that don't belong on the streets of Hethereau on any day that isn't October 31st.
The Porsche was an interesting way to get players to spend fons and annulith, and it suggests that Hotta weren't kidding when they said their focus for making money is going to be cosmetics. I like that a lot.
Some areas of the patch really feel like they could've used another few weeks or a month in development and I wonder if maybe they rushed it to release because of contractual obligations to Porsche. Hopefully this doesn't become a pattern, and future patches will be more polished and carefully thought out.
Thanks for reading, I'm gonna give all this to Hotta themselves once I get the survey mail.