October 27th, 2024

I have spent most of the day playing through Episode 12 in Arknights while my computer downloaded some stuff. I'm basically halfway through the Episode, cleared up through 12-9 (one of the nodes is all story and there's some tutorials so I'm calling that about halfway). I'm honestly finding the part 2 plot a lot more engaging than the part 1 plot. I don't think the plot in part 1 is bad or unengaging it just kind of suffers from part 0 (the launch content) being kind of rough and not really being great at making you care about the characters and having to like, fix that. While with part 2 you just care about everyone. I also really love the mechanic in Episode 12, which most people actually hate but which I think is really interesting. It's a little too complex to go into fully, but basically you have a much lower DP cap than usual (for most stages it's reduced from 99 to 20), and you raise it by ID'ing civilians, some of whom are enemies in disguise. The exact specifics of how it works are more complicated but I find just the starting point to be just really great. Having such a low DP cap means that you actually have to care about the DP cost of operators, and it means that Vanguards are actually more important, as not only are Pioneer Vanguards cheap 2 block laneholders, but deploying an operator will cost most if not all of your DP, meaning you want to regain DP ASAP. Just really love how just one change recontextualizes so much.