News Ticker

Menu

The demise of Aria ~ Aqua Ritmo ~

If you are aware, I have posted about the smartphone game for Aria (known as Aria ~Aqua Ritmo~) a long time ago here and this is the link to the introductory post. After the first 3 events, I slowly started playing the game less and less and now that the game is reaching the end of its lifespan, it's time to sit down and think back on the good old days.
Before that however, let's take a moment to consider I stopped playing the game. Ever since the second event onward, the game has been gaining slightly more recognition, especially among Aria fans. The anime was initially popular partly due to the relaxing music as well, which made it better that the game featured the opening and ending themes as well as insert songs and BGMs. However the increasing player base also brought with it problems as I quickly noticed the more frequent lags in game and the astounding number of no-sensing when I tapped, resulting in a miss and hence making the songs very difficult to full combo. Some event types, which I would elaborate on below, came with a lot of problems, or were too grindy. All these added up to a rather tiring game experience which made me drop the game eventually.

Let's look at the event types. Until I stopped playing, there were essentially 3 different event types.

First, the usual token event. This is quite similar to Deresute's where completing a song with a certain score will give you a fixed number of tokens. However, they have the case where scouted cards can give you a multiplier. During the initial events with tokens, they essentially made the multiplier too huge that caused a lot of complains in the player base and had to eventually tune it down to a more acceptable level.

The second event type is where you play a fixed number of times on either hard or expert to get a reward. For instance, 100 plays on hard/expert will give you the event SR. As Aria's duplicate cards stack and make the primary card stronger in a decreasing amount, a duplicate SR or UR is generally welcomed and this is the point they make use of in the game as approximately every 20 plays after that will give you a duplicate. For instance 120 plays, 140 plays, etc.
The third event type is like a battle between companies. The main girls in the cast come from 3 different companies and the player base choose the company which they will like to play for. If your company has less people, your points gained per song will be less compared to a company with more people and thus have more points gained per song. The problem with this is that the player base is heavily biased to Aria (the main company) hence making the least popular company having a multiplier of 6. So, a song played by an Aria player essentially gives 6 times less event points than expected. This created a problem when the players are not granted access to view exactly how many players are in each company and this resulted in them thinking it is an unfair event.

Aria ~ Aqua Ritmo ~ event types are quite unique and though all 3 still need a lot of tuning, they are essentially quite interesting and might be a joy to see something similar in other games too.

Many players stopped around the same time as I did and this brought the player base back to a tolerable level (for the lags) and events became slightly less competitive. However that also meant that the maker (HarvesT) reduced their efforts in the game. In the last few months, only gacha and several events have been rolled out at a slow pace and now, it is finally closing down.

The game is ending.
And for the ending, they have changed the rates to 70% UR 29% SR 1% R, which is great if you missed out any URs you like previously... now is the time to try. Also, they have been quite generous with giving out gems and refunding them. However, the gem shop itself is now closed so you cannot buy any gems anymore (but who needs gems if the game will be gone soon?).

In any case, I loved Aria's anime and that was why I gave the game a try. Though it came with its own set of issues and problems, I'm glad to see that it lasted more than a year and it will continue to live in my memories as one of the games I've played.

Thank you HarvesT.

~ Reina-rin

Share This:

Post Tags:

No Comment to " The demise of Aria ~ Aqua Ritmo ~ "