Don't Lose to a Grasshopper
"Alright, let's start the game now. I've been really looking forward to this one."
"No. We're playing a game today — I'm going to pull for a red panda. I'll make the cam a bit bigger, though."
I hurried into the game.
A lot of people mistook Animal Kingdom for a cozy healing game just because the characters were animals instead of humans, but it was a hunting and PVP combat game through and through. If it had actually mirrored the real world, the big herbivores and apex predators would have been the strongest and the little grazers would have been cannon fodder — but this game didn't care about real-world power at all. Follow that logic and a T-Rex would be the strongest thing in the game if you included prehistoric animals, and an elephant would be the strongest among living ones, and then everyone would just chase the same handful of creatures. What would be the fun in a game where everybody played an elephant?
On top of that, tapping the profile button in a character's info screen brought up their real-world size and a rundown of the species, so it was a pretty decent way to pick up animal trivia. In-game, amphibians and reptiles had the advantage over birds, birds had the advantage over mammals, and mammals had the advantage over amphibians and reptiles — a rock-paper-scissors type triangle. That said, it was no exaggeration to claim that anything below SSR was basically unusable. SR pulled in the animals that never showed up at SSR, things like fish and whales that could only live in water, while R and N were where the bugs and insects lived. From SR up, type disadvantage still applied as a penalty, but you got no bonus at all for having the advantage. Insects were the worst of the lot: a 30% penalty against every single animal in the game.
Animal Kingdom guaranteed an SSR on your first ten-pull, so you had no choice but to start with one. The animals themselves were all drawn at roughly the same size in-game. If they'd implemented real-world scale, the difference between a mouse and an elephant would have been so absurd it wouldn't have worked, so they'd standardized everything to more or less the same proportions. An equipment gacha was supposed to come later, but for now I had to pull animals first. And the one I was aiming for was the recently added red panda.
Mammals and birds were the popular types; amphibians in particular had almost no fans. If they'd put dinosaurs in, reptiles would have been the most popular type, no contest. The T-Rex: every guy's ultimate fantasy. But I was a girl. Then again, the T-Rex was every girl's fantasy too.
"Time to pull. What's it gonna be?"
I hit the ten-pull button. The guaranteed first SSR popped.
There were a staggering number of animal characters in the game, but that first ten-pull was a locked SSR, and after that you got a random SSR every hundred pulls. Most people were hunting mammals. Plenty of animals that hadn't even been in the beta had shown up too — which made sense, given how many animals there were in the world.
"Guaranteed... please be a red panda."
Lee Ji-Zero obtained a Red Panda!
"Ohhh, it dropped! A red panda, yes! Hehe. First try."
"Sorry, LatestTV."
The second I looked dejected, LatestTV apologized on the spot. I'd just gotten lucky; there was no reason for them to say sorry. Still, pulling a red panda on the first try had me in a ridiculously good mood.
"It's fine. You don't have to apologize."
The mobs in the early story mode were all insects, so type advantage didn't come into play. In hunts, having the type advantage boosted your attack by 30% and cut incoming damage by 30% — a 130-to-70 swing that made a huge difference. Early story was all bugs, so it didn't really matter what you pulled, but you still wanted a mammal if you could get one. The stages supposedly went insects, then amphibians and reptiles, then mammals, then birds, and I'd heard you had to push a long way through the maps before birds even showed up. The game hadn't been out long, and rumor was nobody had even cleared as far as the amphibian and reptile maps yet. It was still nothing but an insect field out there.
Once you'd pushed story mode a decent way and geared up, you could start running raids, apparently. The unusual thing about this game was that the animals themselves weren't locked into tank, DPS, or healer — your role changed depending on what equipment you put on them. Raids were still a distant, hazy future for me, though.
"I got the animal I wanted right away, so I should save the rest of my tickets. I'll stockpile a hundred pulls and drop them all at once. Maybe when there's a rate-up for a bird I actually want."
You leveled animal characters in story mode and could enhance their stats up to that level. Every ten-pull guaranteed one stat enhancement ticket, and if a duplicate SSR dropped you got five. Even if I pulled a gorilla now and poured enhancements into it, I could transfer the level and enhancement values over later when I got the animal I actually wanted. The first transfer moved stats at 100%; from the second onward, the amount you kept dropped each time, so you had to be careful about when you used it. Either way, if you wanted to raise a character you had to keep pulling, so the move was to grow whatever you'd gotten now and transfer later when the one you wanted finally dropped.
Enhancements bought with gacha currency mattered a lot in raids and the Colosseum. Each enhancement randomly raised one of four stats — Strength, Knowledge, Wisdom, or Vitality — and you needed to roll the one that matched the role you wanted to play in raids. Levels were easy to raise. Stats only went up with enhancement materials from the gacha, which was exactly why you had to keep pulling even after you got the animal you wanted. Strength for physical DPS, Knowledge for magic DPS, Wisdom for healers, Vitality for tanks. You'd enhance, save if the option you wanted came up, and keep rerolling if it didn't. One in four to hit the stat you actually needed. After level 100, two stats went up at once, and the odds of getting only the ones you wanted dropped to one in ten — or so people said. The level cap was still only 40. How anyone knew what happened at 100 was beyond me.
The Colosseum was auto PVP: three of your animal characters attacking another player's defense deck. You got ten tickets a day by default, and a win was a flat plus fifteen to twenty points while a loss cost you five to ten, so you had to pick your fights. Specs mattered enormously there; if you wanted to be a ranker, you had to sink currency into enhancements. Real-time, control-based PVP — the Arena — didn't need any of that investment, and if you only cared about raids you could just raise one animal per type. But to rank in the Colosseum you had to beat other rankers' defense decks, which meant an absurd amount of spending. Were there people out there raising a tank, a DPS, and a healer for every type — nine animals total — just for raids? As far as I was concerned, the Arena, the one mode that didn't care about your specs, was the best content in Animal Kingdom.
"Jiyoung, want to party up with me?"
"Yeah."
Story mode parties usually ran two or three players. You could go solo if you wanted, or party up if you wanted three. You could only control one of your own characters, though, so the rest of the party slots had to be filled by other players.
Mina has invited you to a party. Join?
I hit Yes and headed straight out to the hunting grounds.
Mina had a male lion. Between lions, the males were more popular thanks to the mane. Animals whose males and females looked very different had two separate versions, though of course there was no difference in performance.
You'll pull it eventually. If it wasn't a limited character, a standard-pool one would drop someday. The game had promised there were no limited banners and that they wouldn't make any, so if you just kept playing, you'd get it eventually. But new animals kept being added, which meant the rates kept getting thinner, so it was only going to get harder.
Enemies I needed three hits to take down, Mina flattened in a single blow. The level gap between us was so wide I was basically getting carried. Leveling up didn't raise your stats if you didn't enhance, but your base abilities still went up, so a difference like this was inevitable.
"There's nothing for me to do."
"Sorry. There was a level gap."
"Boss fight. I want to try this one myself."
"Okay. The first boss should be easy."
I walked up to a grasshopper boss of considerable size. It looked plenty creepy, and I wanted to beat it down as fast as possible. Grasshoppers chewed through rice plants and caused farmers no end of grief, or so I'd heard. Well. I was going to teach this wicked grasshopper a lesson right here.
"Prepare yourself, you rice-chomping menace of a grasshopper."
"Hah!"
I dodged the grasshopper's jump attack and snapped straight into a counter. In my imagination, that is. In reality, the giant grasshopper landed the jump on me and chained it into a back kick for a full combo.
"What the—? Why is a grasshopper this agile?"
Whether it was because my hands were small or because I was just bad at games, I kept missing the buttons, failed to dodge anything the grasshopper threw at me, and found myself on the verge of dying. I had 20% HP left. The grasshopper had 50%. At this rate I was obviously going to lose.
"Mina, help me."
"I'll get revenge for you."
Mina put the grasshopper down like it was nothing, and all I could do was sit there and watch. Her level was higher, sure, but a one-shot? Then again, it was stage 1-1. Of course it was a one-shot.
"I didn't die, okay?"
"That's not it, okay? I just wasn't feeling well today, okay?"
Me, almost dying to the first boss? Absolutely not. If I tried again I'd definitely do it right. There was no need to rerun the 1-1 map, though, so we moved on to 1-2.
We cleared the trash mobs, arrived at the boss, and I tried the fight one more time.
"I am not losing this time. It's a katydid now."
I failed to dodge the katydid's attacks too, came within a hair of dying again, and finally got so mad I just shut the game off.
"I'm done. This is so freaking boring."
"Jiyoung, you're not going to play?"
"Should I just quit? Maybe I'm more of an auto-battler person."
"That's no fun, though."
"Yeah, true."
"I'll teach you."
In the end I let Mina walk me through the controls properly and changed my keybinds. Dying from the very first maps really hadn't made any sense.
"It'll be over soon. Just wait a bit."
Listening to Mina's lecture, it sounded like a pretty simple game. See the enemy attack, dodge, hit, dodge again. Once her lesson was over, Mina and I went back into the 1-2 map. I'd force-quit, so we had to run 1-2 from the top.
We cleared the trash again, and then it was a one-on-one with the boss. I was doing better than before, but it still came down to a razor-thin loss. Mina rushed in and finished the boss off in a flash. I was so mad at a character that just would not move the way I wanted it to.