The Plot

Shangri-La Frontier, while it looks odd from the images, is a VRMMORPG manga where the main character is known for one thing. He’s known for loving and beating the worst games out there. Then comes along a new game, Shangri-La Frontier. A game that is not horrible. But one that promises to be a great game, and Sunraku is created in that world.

As it turns out, being very good at bad games makes you much stronger or more adaptable in good games. And soon Sunraku is starting to explore mysteries of the game that weren’t meant to be found for a long time. Of course, there are some drawbacks as well when he gets cursed, but he’s used to having an uphill battle.

The World of Shangri-La Frontier

I think one thing that makes this manga stand out to me is the world that they are creating. It is fairly common for MMORPG’s in manga to be pretty generic. They all try and do something different, I won’t say that they don’t, but often times, it follows more of a predictable pattern.

Shangri-La Frontier does a good job of offering predictable patterns but also then unique things. One of the early unique things you’ll meet are the rabbits. This whole world within the world of Rabbituza and other creatures. It’s a twist done some for comedy but also it builds on the lore of the world.

And it is the depth of the world building as well. As you get further into the story, you see the progression of the world and story that it is trying to build. I think it’s interesting how, as part of the manga, this whole other world has been created as it’s own living entity in the game.

Sunraku

Now, Sunraku isn’t the most unique character out there. In fact, I think that there is a lot of overlap with him and Kirito from Sword Art Online. Both of them fall into a category of not playing too well with others but have a heart that is willing to help others.

That is a trope that I like. I am not a fan of when an anime or manga leans into edge lords, but on the other extreme, when the main character is overly emotional as well, Midoriya from My Hero Academia, that is annoying as well. So it’s a character who cares, but not to the point where it’s at a level that it holds back the character.

No An Isekai

Let’s also talk about that, this is going to feel a bit like an isekai to some because the characters spend almost all their time in the video game. We rarely see outside into the real world. But it’s like Bofuri and Sword Art Online that way. The real world and connection to the real world still exists.

I very much enjoy isekai, but right now there are a ton of them. I recently started one where someone was reincarnated as a vending machine. Or I’m reading one where someone came back as a sword. It’s definitely scraping towards the bottom of the barrel with them. Not to say that all of them are that rough, but I do think it’s worth noting that some of them are and the saturation point. By just making it an VRMMORPG it is different.

Who Is Shangri-La Frontier For?

I think that this is going to have a bit of a wider appeal than the normal fantasy manga storylines. The world building, like I talked about, is better, and I think the supporting cast is interesting. And I can’t speak for the anime, obviously, since that isn’t out yet, but the manga doesn’t lean into fan service. I’d say that it actually does a good job of just being normal, which I think will help with the audience as well.

My Final Thoughts on Shangri-La Frontier

I’m not sure I have a ton more to say about it. I very much enjoy it, and it’s one where I am going to keep on reading it. I will also be watching the anime when that comes out to see how it shows it off. I think the best comparisons are things like Sword Art Online and Bofuri which I really like both of them.

Honestly, some of why I like this genre as much as I do might be because I just enjoy the idea of playing in another world. It is probably why I like D&D and watch movies, or get invested into television shows. It’s fun to see a world, in the manga, where that exists. It’s the escapism element of it and imagining what a VRMMORPG will be like in real life when it happens.

But even without that, I think that the story is strong. I like the characters and I want to see what they get up to. And I think when you care about what the characters do next, that’s always a good sign for a story.

Have you read Shangri-La Frontier? Let me know your thoughts on it. Or is it one that now sounds interesting to you?

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Boss Battles

Building a Character

So, this really should have more of a graphical component to it than it will. I would love to show some art, but I don’t have that, to give a sense of the design, or a layout of how I think the board is going to work, but we are in the super early phases of this design. What’s really going to happen is that I’m going to move this over to a spreadsheet and create a number of different characters based off of that so that everything is formatted the same.

The Real World Character

Male – Age 26 – Office Drone

A recent graduate with high hopes and now nothing more than an office drone. Changing the world was the dream, and now it’s changing numbers in the spread sheet. Friends moved away and not enough energy after working overtime to make that many more. At least the people he works with are nice enough, and the coffee isn’t bad.

“I’ve been waiting for this game for months, I know some old friends have too, it’ll be just like old times.”

Keywords: Gamer, Business

In Game Character

Stats:

Strength: 5

Agility: 5

Vitality: 5

Allure: 5

Guile: 5

Currency: 100 Gold

Oddly enough, that’s about it for a character when you pull them out of the box. The real nuances to a character are going to come with how you allocate your 10 extra points for the stats.

The Other Stuff

I think it’s important to talk about what else you’ll have right away, even though it might not be pure character creation stuff. Such as what sort of weapons will you be able to find, and what sort of skills can you pick up. You will be dropped into the world without any gear, just normal commoners clothes, and no skills, just basic attacks that you can do, so that’s why you get 100 gold to start. You can save it up, because there is better stuff you can get on level 2, but you might not live that long.

For armor, and this could have really been it’s own section, you’re looking at two types of armor.

Leather – No movement penalty, +2 defense

Chainmail – Minus 1 movement, +4 defense

Something along those lines. the advantage with chainmail is that you are going to be taking considerably less damage. When an attack might only get through on leather armor at 2 to 4 damage, that means chain might mean that you take no damage. But it does mean that the enemy is going to be more apt to focus on you, because you are going to be the closest with that slower speed, so it’s a trade off. Numbers are not final at this point obviously, but for an example.

Weapons then, you’re going to have much more of a choice. You will have two handed swords, short swords, daggers, bow and arrow, axe, crossbow, and maul at least all available at the start of the game to buy.

As for skills, we’re looking at pretty simple ones that would be available. Something like sweeping attack, bash, counter attack, rush, disengage.

Plus there will be items as well, health potions probably being the biggest of those items that the players might want to buy.

Now, with getting items, I could be really nice, I could be really mean, or I could do something between that. What do I mean? If I was really nice, you’d have a catalog of items that you could pick from and purchase without it costing a turn. If I was really mean, I could make those places four separate shops and make players almost have to decide to shop at least 3 times in a row before doing anything else. I’m going to be less mean than that, I don’t want to hand out gear, and players can do other things on their first turn, but on the first level, there is just going to be a bazaar that’s the shopping area, so you can go and shop once and be done with it, unless you decide that you need more and then you can come back again. The first level is going to play a bit differently than others, I think, and I will delve into what I’m thinking when I start building a level, though I probably won’t build the first level.

Character creation, pretty simple, basically all a player would need to do is allocate those points and fill in the player name and the character name. The character boards, for the stats, might be more like a character sheet, and then a side board. Or I might go with dials that keep track of stats, that’s too be determined, with a save sheet so if the dials get bumped it isn’t the end of the world. Or with a save sheet, maybe I’d do a dry erase player board, that’d be pretty cool and useful.

What do you think of character creation, it should be extremely simple. Obviously, the keywords I handed out this time were pretty generic, but I want to create more unique real world people than just what I wrote for this one, someone might run a greenhouse so they’d know about plants, or maybe a chef, give people a ton of different backgrounds.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Shopping

The first of the in town activities is going to be shopping. Shopping is going to have three parts, the second part, however, is going to be optional. The first part is simply picking where you want to go. Levels might have information brokers, weapon and/or armor smiths, general stores, apothecaries, and more. There is not generally going to be a true one stop shop for everything. If there is a general store that would be the closest, but the armor, weapons, and medicine that you’d find there are going to be worse than you’d find at location that is specific to them. A general store will have more trinkets or interesting items that might be useful for PC quests, NPC quests, guilds or more.

The next part is the optional part and that is interacting with the shop keeper. They are going to have a limited dialog tree that you can go down, and while they might have a quest or information, not all of them will. So if you’ve been somewhere once and it just seems to be general conversation and nothing that’ll lead to a quest, you can certainly skip it. Most likely you won’t frequent the same person and shop too often, but who knows.

Finally, you shop, I mean, that’s what you came there for. Shopping is split into two parts, there is stuff that you can buy for the hero, and there is stuff that you can buy for the guild. You can spend your own money to buy stuff for your character, or you can use the guilds money. Same for buying stuff for the guild. If you spend too much of the guilds money on yourself, your morale will go down and you’ll lose more people dropping out of your guild. The flip is true, if you spend your own money on the guild, you are going to raise the morale, because you’re one of the elite players in the guild, so when you’re helping those who aren’t as good, that catches people’s attention.

Now, I’ll talk more about items and how they work coming up sometime soon.

Interact with NPC’s

I’ve kind of walked through some of this with how it’ll be work when I talked about quests. Now, NPC’s won’t only give you information about quests, they might let you know about floor events that could be coming up, they might let you know about secret locations to go on the level, they might give you a quest, knowledge on the floor boss, or just knowledge on the game. You’ll have a branching dialog path that you can go through, and while it might be like an MMORPG or video game RPG in general where you can go down one path of conversation and then it’ll go back to the previous list of questions, that might not always happen. Eventually either you’ll just be able to end the conversation, or you’ll reach a decision point that requires you to use a stat or a skill and that you can modify. When you hit one of those, you know that your conversation will be ending after that, or if it does continue, you’ll need to spend another round talking with that NPC.

Interacting with PC’s

Interacting with PC’s is going to give you more of the story that is going on outside of the game. Even though you won’t know what is happening in the real world, you’ll find out the stories of the other PC’s and you’ll have to see if you can help them, potentially. There’s going to be branching dialog, but most of the time, when talking with a PC you won’t be spending modifier cards or checking your skills. Maybe if it gets into a physical confrontation you’ll check your stats against the other PC’s stats, but fairly often the decision points won’t allow you to spend a modifier card or check a skill, you’ll just need to make a decision. Those will still end your turn and to continue further with that PC you’ll need to spend another action. Also, interacting with PC’s will be different than NPC’s because PC’s aren’t as likely to allow you to loop back and ask a question that you hadn’t asked before.

Recruit to the Guild

The final thing that I’m going to be talking about is recruiting to the guild. This one is pretty straight forward, you go there, you check your morale versus the relevant skill for recruiting that you choose to use, and see what you get, granted, you can modify it. So why wouldn’t you send over the guild members to recruit. Two main reasons, firstly, sending a generic guild member will mean that you cannot modify the check of the stat, and guilds general stats are generally worse than yours. And because they are generic guild members who are recruiting they don’t generally have as much sway period, so they are working off of their own side of a recruitment card which is going to have a lower top end, so even if you have the best guild possible, you wouldn’t get as much as if you had gone there yourself.

Thoughts on how all of these would work? All of them can be done by the guild, though, there would be a few differences. Mainly that you’d not be able to modify something if a guild member went there, and the guild doesn’t have access to the players funds for shopping, just to the guilds funds.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

Let’s talk about what a guild is, it isn’t a concept that shows up that often in a board game. But in an MMORPG, that’s generally the people who are partied together in a group and share loot, money, tips, and things like that. But as compared to a small group of friends you might play with, a guild is generally going to be larger so that you have more resources to share amongst each other.

The idea of this large group can be tricky to do in board games or even an RPG. The issue with it is that you have so many faceless characters that you don’t have that much of an investment in controlling nameless and faceless characters, they are a bit more cannon fodder than anything else. And in this case, that means in game that you’re killing people, generally not one of those things that you’d want to actually do, so having a guild is going to need to have some weight and some advantage to the group.

I want people to be worried about maintaining their guild for several reasons and we’ll get into some of those when we talk about the levels and what you do on the them. Your guild, based off of many people you have in it, is going to be able to help you on the levels. I’ve talked about it with the boss battles and how you’d need to balance between having too many people protecting you, tiring them out, stressing them out, and putting them in danger too much and having people leave the guild that way, as compared to having too few and having people die, plus then people leave the guild because people are dying.

I think that death is a key concept here and those leaving or joining the guild. If you have enough people die, you will be fighting an uphill battle getting people to your guild and keeping people in your guild. It might be worth it for the late push to risk more, but early game, you could be fighting a battle making sure that you are spending enough time recruiting guild members to offset those leaving because you’d demonstrated that you’re willing to risk people’s lives needlessly, when you go into a boss battle or go through a level battle or quest. So, if you have too many die, you will always be dealing with a steady stream of guild members leaving.

Another thing that I’m considering with guild members is how to use them on the levels between bosses. I think that they will be a communal resource that players will be able to decide on how to use them. Maybe a player is going on a difficult quest, they can take guild members along with them to help mitigate some of the challenges. Or the players could send out guild members to recruit on a level, do a quest on their own, shop for gear, anything that the players can do, but for the guild members instead. I’m thinking something along the lines of, every ten guild members you have, you can assign them one action per round on a level. So if you have thirty people, you got an extra three actions, if you have twenty-nine, you have an extra two.

To go with that, and to get into levels just a little bit, but mainly as it pertains to guilds. Some levels are just going to be nice, or look like a good spot to stop while others push on ahead. You are going to have a few people leave the guild on those levels. Or maybe the level looks very dangerous, and sending out guild members to do anything on that level without them being paired with someone else will cause you to lose a guild member. So it won’t just be a situation where you can always send off guild members to do jobs for you and expect to see the numbers grow and not shrink.

The guild is also going to be a timer on the levels as well. There will be a limit to how long you can stay on a level, let’s say in this example that you can stay on a level ten rounds doing actions each round. So you might shop, you might quest which will take four rounds, you might research the level boss for another round. Now you’ve spent six rounds. You can spend another four rounds, so a total of ten on that level if you want, or maybe as many rounds as you want, but after four more rounds you’ll run out of event cards for that level, more on that in levels, but every round you stay after five, you start to lose more and more guild members. Some get used to it and settle down, some might be discontent about not pushing ahead and trying to get back to the real world. So maybe there is an awesome quest that you really want to do because you know the reward is going to be a skill, and you need another skill to feel comfortable fighting the boss, but it’s going to cost you guild members, and you might then run into an issue with not having enough or using a large enough percentage to fight the boss that you’ll lose some more. So do you push into that quest, get that skill, have guild members leave, and then have to spend most of the next floor recruiting again, or do you push ahead and hope that you get a similar event on the next floor?

Obviously there is a bunch of the fine details to be worked out here. I do think there will be a cap on guild size, which feels like something that is fairly standard in games, because otherwise you could just recruit early on until you have a massive number and just kind of run with it. So I want the pressure of that to be part of what players have to think about through the game. This is something that I feel like good cooperative games do, I want players to have to think about which 5-8 things they really want to do and have a few that they won’t be able to get to even though they’d be good as well.

What do you think of Guilds? Do you think that it will be too much to handle in the game, do you think it’ll be a good type of pressure for the game?

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The Premise

The Characters

So let’s now talk about the level bosses. A quick recap on the concept for the level bosses, these are not levels of the characters, the character doesn’t have to be the level 4 boss to get to level 5 in character progression, in fact, I’ll be talking about some other ways to get XP in the future. But these are the bosses on the various levels of the MMORPG that the characters are stuck in. So to progress to the next level of the dungeon you need to defeat the dungeon boss for the level you are on.

What characters do on each level of the MMORPT will be leading up to the boss fight, and when you get to the boss fight, you better hope that you are prepared, there are four big things when it comes to the boss fight.

1. Evolving Boss Combat
2. Programmed Boss Combat
3. Vanguard Combat
4. Rearguard Combat

Let’s actually talk about them in reverse order of what I’ve put there. Rearguard combat is basically your guilds combat. These are the nameless people who you have in your guild and what they do in combat, is simply keep any minions or smaller bad guys off of you, the heroes, so you can fight the big bad. I want this to be pretty simple in how this works. You probably don’t send your whole guild after the minions or take your whole guild into battle with you, in fact, doing so will hurt morale and cause people to leave, so you need to try figure out the right amount. Too few and they’ll die and you might start taking minimal damage from the bosses minions, too many, you start to lose morale and members will start to leave the guild. But this is a one time thing that you set at the start of combat, basically a pre-combat thing so you can compare numbers with the minions and see what happens. You can also improve your odds, and your morale, by improving the equipment of your guild members, so you might need less to complete a battle if you do that.

Next we have the Hero Combat, this I don’t have nailed down, but I want to do some blend of die and card combat. I like chucking dice, but I don’t want it to be completely determine by what you roll and I want plenty of ways to mitigate the dice. No crit fail, you drop your sword and the boss cuts you in two, because there’s no respawning or restarting with that character. Instead, I want characters to have abilities to dodge, block, and survive, but at times attacks to be blocked of their own, or countered. I know that players will have some more powerful abilities that they can use as well. I want to go with a very MMORPG sort of feel, or video game RPG, where some things will take time to prepare or other things will have a cool down effect for an ability.

After that we have programmed combat for a boss. For video games there are a lot of videos showing exploits for a boss, because they are programmed, so they have patterns that they use. I want to emulate this in the boss battles, and I think this is how I can make boss battles seem very powerful with epic attacks and how do we beat them, all while giving the players a chance. When the boss attacks, that card goes to the bottom of the bosses attack deck, so for their first health bar, there might be only three cards, that means that you will know that is coming up and what attack to prepare against after a little bit, and after even less time if you’ve studied the boss. It takes it from being a more random style of combat to almost a puzzle that you need to figure out and beat. Now, just solving the puzzle could be really easy, but I want to combo that with the players abilities that might take time to cool down or prepare so that they can’t and won’t always have the ideal turn.

Finally, we have the evolving boss combat. Every boss is going to have two or more health bars. Most likely only the first level boss will have two, so it’ll always be “or more”. When a bar is emptied, like in a TV show where the villain gets knocked down and then comes back stronger, I always think of Power Rangers with this concept. I want to do something similar with the boss combat, the boss when their health bar hits 0, the first one or any but the final one, will add an additional one or two cards to their combat cycle and you might even remove a previous attack card from the combat cycle. So it’ll be something that the players can learn, but they’ll have to relearn the pattern and figure out the puzzle without knowing what might be coming up. Added to that, I want when the boss goes into red, so basically when it comes down to the final turn or two, I want some of those newly added cards to have additional abilities that will trigger as well, not a whole new attack, but something making the existing attack more powerful and harder for the players to deal with.

And then once defeated there will of course be loot and XP to be gained, wounds to be dealt with, and morale of your guild to be adjusted, but those are basically outside of the boss battle, and I’ll talk about them as time goes on.

What do you think of the combat idea? Is the idea of the puzzle and evolving boss combat style something that seems like it could work? Do you like chucking dice for combat (Sword and Sorcery), or do you prefer to have more card based combat (Gloomhaven)?

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With that said, I want who you play in the game to be highly customizable. If you like the look for a character, you can play them how you want if it’s a dual weapon fighting tank, a slow moving shielded character, or a rogue who uses fancy knife tricks, all of those could be the same character you visually like. But, I also want to give it an RPG feel. It would be easy to give you just a blank character sheet and let you go at it, but I’ve found that those don’t work as well for board games as they do for something like D&D, mainly because no one fully knows the world like they do in a RPG, so no one can help guide how things are going to be created. Plus, you aren’t just your in game character.

So how do I propose getting around this issue, I’m going to split your character into two parts, there is the out of game character, this is supposed to be an MMORPG that is a death game that people are stuck in, that means that you not only have your in game character and persona, but you have your out of game life as well. My thoughts are that in game you can be anyone you want to be, if you want to be a tank or a rogue or a ranged character, a night in shining armor or slink around in the shadows, you can do that, but in order to give you some direction or something to base it off of but it is still going to allow you to do what you want in game, because in game the name of the game is survival.

I think giving some player backstory will help push people in a direction if they are feeling overwhelmed with options as well. A quiet mousy player might pick something similar to themselves or completely different, but you can choose, they probably are less likely to pick something adjacent. And I can give them real life skills and things like that which might influence what a person picks. Or maybe they are a big streaming celebrity, that will probably influence what they pick as well, maybe they will go really flashy, or maybe they are going “undercover” to try and get the scoop on a new game. And if this was an RPG, I wouldn’t do anything like that, generally RPGer’s have about 400,000 different characters that they have an idea for, but for a board game, they generally have more constraints, so for a board gamer, they might want more direction, and it also makes the game more accessible.

To make it even more accessible, I’d probably give a quick build guide as well. Like, if you want to be a tank, start with this at level 1 and then this at level 2. Or a rogue, agility with a side of agility and charisma is probably what you’re going to want to have. I know if I pull this idea together there is going to be a lot for it, so I don’t want it to be too intimidating.

Before I kind of run down specifically what I’m thinking with this, there is one more reason for having the player character set-up already. I want to add in story elements or story cards, however, it works, that are things which can come up in game, or maybe it’s just a narrative branching path that relates to who the person was in the real world. Or give the players hidden objectives based off of their character in the game. It wouldn’t be something like tank the party and get everyone killed or get this other character killed or anything negative, but something that would be able to open up something fun and cool specifically for that character that would allow it to feel unique and special based off of the backstory that you picked.

So let’s talk about specifics, what does this mean.

First, it means that each person is going to have two character cards, you’re going to have your real world character and your MMORPG character. The real world character is probably going to have some key words on it, these are things that they’ll know, so if you find something with that keyword in the MMORPG world, they are going to know more about, solve it, whatever it might be, faster than everyone else or better odds.

The in game character will get keywords as time goes on, but this will come from getting skills or items. And it’ll be about focusing your character how you want to play it. You have your basic sets of skills, strength, agility, guile, toughness, intelligence, and allure. These skills you can level up however you want, and they are going to influence game created challenges, you’d use your strength when swinging a massive hammer or you could get a better deal at an NPC shop because you have better guile or allure. And while sure some of the real skills will come over like I said with keywords, the in game skills are going to be not that useful when dealing with a player in the game, so another person stuck in the MMORGP, that’s going to be some more about those keywords again, or at least not influenced by in game stats.

Finally, I talked about story elements for the characters. This part can be tricky, because you want them to be important, but you don’t want them to be locking someone into a choice. So if you are playing Lily the Tank and you have a personal quest that connects you to someone or something that then leads you to The Rapier of the Lilies that kind of sucks, because you wouldn’t be able to use it. But if you unlock a skill, again the same issue. And anything else could feel like it’s a little bit lacking as well if it doesn’t offer some in game reward. One thought I have, if there are enough of the elements in there, to give each character a real life drama that they are unfolding and finding out about in the game. The trick with that is that it’s not the main focus of the game itself, so there needs to be enough to keep the thread going. This is still a work in progress as to how this will play out or if it’ll even happen, but I like the idea of character specific quests/bonuses.

We’ll talk more about leveling up characters, starting stats and skills, and more of that coming up, but that is a bit more into the nitty-gritty, and I’m not to that part yet in my design, at least not with characters. So I’ll be back later, sometime soon probably, with more design talk as I look at creating a campaign style board game.

Let me know your thoughts below. Would you like a rare item for a character specific thing, would you like a rare skill, something you can sell, or something to do with your backstory? What would be the most engaging for you?

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Why am I making a board game around this idea though, and what is the idea?

We’ll start with a brief synopsis. In Sword Art Online, the first season, the main characters, Kirito, Asuna, and others spend most of the game trapped in a full dive MMORPG, Sword Art Online. In fact it was a couple of years that they were trapped in the game. The creator of the game had decided to create a death game, where the only way to escape was if someone beat the final boss and you had survived, if you died in the game, you died in real life. So the players both had to be careful to survive because of the stakes of the game, and also still forge forward to try and clear the game.

So, you can start to see how this could work potentially as a board game and in particular a campaign game. But let’s pull out the pieces that interest me out of this anime.

Firstly, we have the general idea of basically a level based dungeon crawl, this is fairly common in games so we have to ask how would we differentiate it. I think that leveling and all that is fairly normal. But I want to make it about advancing further and further in and less about specific battles and more about the different floors or levels.

Next I think the idea of no respawn, no retry is interesting. It definitely wouldn’t be the only game to do something like that. But that would suck for a player to have played through a game with their character and then lose everything and be out of the game. But this was an MMORPG, so in the show there are 10,000 users, most don’t climb up levels and try and clear everything because they aren’t experts at MMORPG’s. In this game I’d want to have somewhat if not nearly as leveled characters available for the players to take over, so it isn’t the end of the world if you lose your character, but it is a setback.

Sword Art Online is also less about the boss battles, though there are several that are shown in the first season, and more about how people are surviving and interacting in the world. This is something that I’d want to emulate in the game as well. I do think there should be a boss battle per level, but it would be the second part of each level. The first part, I would want to give players different things that they can do on a level. Questing, interacting with other players or NPC’s, shopping, fighting monsters, and researchign the boss with it eventually leading to facing off against the boss for the floor.

There also is an element of guilds and teams, though Kirito through most of it is a solo player. And I think emulating that is something that I’d want to try and do as well, make it so you have a nameless team behind you and you grow your guild or lose some of it, and you have to balance risks of how you use these guild members, how you balance trying to do the most that you can so you can level up and be ready for the boss battle, but also not pushing your guild members too hard that you lose some due to them dying or that you exhaust them too much and push them away. Plus, you might also want to recruit more.

There is also a concept of unique skills in the game, Kirito, as the main character, gets a dual wielding skill. That is a unique skill in the game, so I want to create a way to create unique skills and to handout skills. When leveling, except for maybe at a few specific levels, you shouldn’t be getting skills, just stat increases that you can spend. Skills I think should be unlocked or gotten as you complete quests or keeping track of actions kills, things like that. You can then unlock different skills, and some skills can be combined with other skills to create improved skills. I’m still trying to figure out how that might work.

Finally, with the boss battle, I want the bosses to feel like they did in Sword Art Online. Bosses had multiple health bars that players had to get through, and as they got more damaged, they could add attacks and change up their attack patterns. This is something that I want to emulate as well. Have it so you can plan and figure out the patterns of the boss if you want to, and you know what they are going to do, but as they knock out bars, new attacks will be added, maybe some will be removed and you have to be able to learn the new pattern of what is going on again, at least if you are going to do well.

So, what’s next for the Design Diaries? Well, I’m going to start taking each part and working out how I think they would work well or interesting as a board game mechanic, as well as talk about some things I didn’t cover too much, like combat and how that would work.

Also, finally, why am I doing this, for me, it’s a fun thought exercise even if it’s something that I never prototype or if it doesn’t work as an idea. It gives me something I really like, board games, and allows me to dig more into how games work, what works, and what I think would be interesting in a game, whether or not it’d work. Now, do I hope that it’s awesome, sure, but this is more trying out ideas and see what could be fun and what might work and just if game design is something I might have fun with in my spare time.

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10 – My Roommate is a Cat

This is just a really fun anime, slice of life story about a writer who has a cat adopt him. The writers life is hard, his parents have passed away and he’s living in the house he grew up in. But with the help of the cat, he’s able to start to reach back out into the world, though not always because he wanted to. The story does a great job with it being focused on what the human is doing, but then the second part of each episode gives you the cats perspective on everything that happened and what the cat is worried about with the human. It’s very adorable and just one of those anime that is relaxing to watch.

9 – Space Dandy

He’s a dandy guy in space. This anime is just a completely silly romp as you follow around crew of the Aloha Oe as they travel space looking for exotic and new monsters to bring back to the central processing agency in order to get a reward. Now, it would work better if he was even remotely competent at his job, but he’s not and his crew is even less competent than he is, possibly? All the while, well doing this, they are being chased by Dr. Gel who is out to get them. The whole thing is just absurd but such a good time.

8 – Dagashi Kashi

Another sillier and lighter anime, this one delves into the world of dagashi, cheap candy and snacks. The main character works at his families dagashi shop, Shikada Dagashi but doesn’t want to take it over. When someone from the Shidare corporation comes to try and get Shikada Dagashi to join them, the owner agrees but only if they can convince his son, the main character to take over the shop. The story is just little vignettes for the most part and stories about how certain dagashi came to be. It’s a lot of fun and has more energy than the previous two, but is still very relaxing to watch.

7 – The Devil is a Part-Timer

Another slice of life anime, I do like them quite well and they tend to run less into fan service, though, this one has it’s fair share, The Devil is a Part-Timer focuses on what happens to the devil when he ends up on Earth with no way to get back to his realm. That means that he has to take on a part time job and a lot of weird adventures ensue has he starts to figure out how to deal with the mortal world and maybe, it turns out, the Devil isn’t such a bad guy after all. Very much a slice of life, but has more of a full through storyline running along in the background than some others.

6 – The Disastrous Life of Saiki K

Saiki K has special powers. He can teleport objects, read minds, and do many amazing crazy things. But for the most part, he just wants to be left alone. Of course, he can’t be, and it’s even a bigger issue because he doesn’t notice the pretty girl who everyone notices, so she wants him to notice her, he can’t read the mind of an idiot so he can sneak up on him and wants to be Saiki’s friend, and of course, there are the evil forces of Dark Reunion, a completely made up organization. It’s completely absurd and just little vignettes into Saiki’s life but very much worth checking out.

5 – Sword Art Online

SAO, one of those classic anime that really isn’t that old but has gotten a huge following and even a spin off show, which I didn’t like. Sword Art Online is the story of what happens when full dive MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games) go wrong and everyone becomes stuck on it. The only way to get out of the game is to clear the game and if you die in the game you die in real life. This could have been a massive hack and slash adventure type of game, but instead we get an interesting look into the minds of those trapped in there, those who want to survive, and those who have something to fight for, and those who let them game twist them.

4 – Assassination Classroom

An alien has landed on earth after destroying half the moon, and what he really wants is to die. But he won’t go easily and he won’t let just anyone kill him, because most normal methods of death, he can avoid. Instead, he wants to teach a class, and those students, through training, will be the ones who will be creative enough how to kill them, plus, they just might learn something along the way. A completely absurd premise, but they do a really good job with the anime and with the students. It’s less about assassination and more about how he ends up helping all the students in some way. Also, he’s a human size yellow tentacle monster, so there’s that weirdness going on as well.

3 – Is It Wrong To Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon

It’s a long title and one that seems like it should just be a dumb fantasy anime, and in some ways it is, but it is really entertaining. There’s some fan service in it and falls into the trope known as a harem anime, but it feels different, probably because the main character never puts together that hes the person the harem is forming around, he is too innocent and pure. All he cares about is becoming strong enough to be worthy of the girl, Aiz Wallenstein who saved him from a Minotaur in the dungeon. It’s a lot of fun, and it takes something that you see a lot in anime, leveling up, and codifies it into the story so that while it is silly that it’s in the world, it makes a lot of sense. A light hearted fantasy anime that’s definitely worth checking out.

2 – Cowboy Bebop

Now if we’re talking revered anime, Cowboy Bebop has to be up there. This space opera follows a group of bounty hunters as they travel around to different planets, meet different people and tell their story. However, what really makes this anime work is the music. The music is just amazing and it’s a new for each episode. And each episode has it’s one distinct style and feel to it because of the music, the story was woven into the music, not the music put around the story. It’s just so well done and while it might not tell some massively epic tale throughout everything, it creates a mood that just works so well and you care about the characters.

1 – Steins;Gate

I don’t thin there will be many surprises with my #1, I’m pretty sure every time I do a top five, it’s my number one as well. But Steins;Gate is just so good. It’s a time travel story, which generally I’m a sucker for, and it tells it really well. The characters are so sympathetic and what seems like just a silly quirk early on ends up revealing way more about the character than you’d think later in the show. The time travel aspect is well done and while there are some completely implausible things, overall, I think it works really well. There’s just a sense of the conspiracy around it and the story just speaks so much into the characters and the world. Clearly I highly recommend this one, it can be intense and times, but so very good.

There are a few that just missed the list that I wanted to mention as well. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, I need to finish watching it, but I did enjoy it. Ghost Story, just a really enjoyable anime and something different in how it told it’s stories. After School Dice Club which is about board game. There’s so much out there that’s good that I probably could have done a top twenty, also a lot that is pretty crappy, so hopefully this’ll give you some new shows to checkout.

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To recap a little bit about what I said on Ordinal Scale, this anime as a whole seems more like a popcorn anime. It doesn’t have a ton of depth of the bad guys, the good guys develop some depth, but it’s not a very important focus. There seems like there should be because of the theme of getting trapped in a video game and having to beat the game in order to survive. They should have been able to really delve into the psyche of the players in the game, and while they do some of that, it doesn’t really build too much upon that. I do appreciate though that the show has never been about the boss fights, and while there are fights, it’s never drawn out that long.

Now, there are some weird things about this show as well, the first being the lack of motivation for the first bad guy. He seems to have created this world simply because he could and there doesn’t seem to be any more reason than t hat. The second being how it switches in the middle when the new bad guy takes over. Without getting into spoilers, it goes to a creepy dark sort of place and feel, all without really being all that creepy or dark still. It’s just kind of weird how it changes. It almost has a George RR Martin feel to it (not in terms of killing everyone) but where in book four he seemingly decided, I’m bored with these characters, let me write about new ones for no good reason and introduce magic. Sword Art Online kind of has a similar feel to that about half way through the first season. If it weren’t for the fact that you were invested into the story at that point, say this had happened in the first four episodes, I’m not sure I would have continued with the anime. But I think if you are forewarned about the change, it’ll be easier to watch and keep into the story.

With all of that out of the way, the basic premise for the show is that there is an awesome new MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) where you get into the game as a full dive. This full dive technology basically allows you to feel like you are 100% in the gaming world. So when 10,000 players who get the first copies log in, they are super excited to start killing monsters, hanging out, and killing boars because obviously you have to kill boars to level up faster. Things change drastically when everyone is teleported back to the city of beginnings (where you spawn to start the game) and they all find out that the creator of the game and the full dive system has locked everyone into the world so they can’t log out, the only way to escape the world is to make it to level 100 of the world defeating the bosses along the way and if you die in the game, you die in real life. We follow our main character, Kirito as he battles by himself through the world and finds out that while he can’t save everyone, he needs to try to save them.

It’s an interesting premise, like I said, and it doesn’t focus on the boss battles, in fact they maybe show a handful of snippets of them throughout the show. This show focuses in on the people who are in the world and how they react to being trapped in the world. It takes a fairly light approach to it as there seems to be less concern about being the game than one would expect, but as relationships develop, characters die, and it’s been a long time in the real world, it creates an interesting dynamic. If it had gone darker than it did, I think I’d have a fairly different view on this. Often when I’m watching anime I want something that is enjoyable, makes me think some, but I don’t generally want something that weighs on me too much.

Sword Art Online (Season 1) is one that I’d recommend to people. While it is light and doesn’t go to the depth that it could, and has that swerve in the middle to a different sort of story, it’s enjoyable, it doesn’t seem like a long show. It’s the light beer of anime (as I said in my review for Sword Art Online: Ordinal Scale ) I don’t think that is really a bad thing in this case. I’d say that I’ve seen better Anime shows, such as The Devil is a Part-Timer! (expect a review on that later), but Sword Art Online is worth the time watching it and most people will find it enjoyable.

P.S. I know that Sword Art Online is kind of fun to hate on for a lot of people because it’s lighter. If you go into it knowing it’s light and decide that you hate on it because it’s light, get a job.

P.S.S. (Forgot to put this in the first place) – This is also an anime that you can probably watch either dubbed or subbed without  missing all that much.

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