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I know what most of you are thinking, and the answer is no, I’m not just hopping on the bandwagon. My decision to add EA as a Maker into the game happened way before you-know-what. In fact, when you think about it, that whole controversy gave EA even bigger of a reason to be added in.

Moving on, the third on the list is Ele-Ar. Her main purpose in the story was to add contrast to this group of Makers. While Blizza and VAL make you wonder whether their circumstances in the story were unjust and mistaken, Ele-Ar is here to sow the seeds of doubt. “Are the CPUs making a poor decision?”

As a real life company, I don’t think there’s anything to say about EA that hasn’t already been said. Out of all the companies, they have the most objective cold-hard facts about them. I took some creative liberties when using Blizzard and Valve’s history to come up with backstories for Blizza and VAL, whereas with Ele-Ar, it was all laid out already. You may find that this Devlog is on the shorter side. That’s because I don’t really have to do much explaining. EA’s business practices didn’t sit well for real life people, and the people of this in-game universe weren’t just going to stand by and let it happen either.

EA is known for a great variety of franchises rather than just one or a few with the same genres or themes. This is reflected in her design, which contains three references to EA-related games (four if you count her clothes’ color scheme). Obviously, I wasn’t going to find a way to give a nod to every single franchise they’re involved in since that would maker her appearance incoherent and out of control. As for her actual clothing, I chose an existing character wearing a business attire (if you can even call it that) as the template, in order to match her personality. It’s all there in her profile.

On the subject of her weapons and skills, I’ve really tried my best here to not just go “haha, EA sucks, everybody point and laugh” so far, but I wasn’t going to pass up this chance when coming up with her moves. Her weapon of choice, like her background, should be self-explanatory. As for her skills, Ele-Ar is similar to Nepgear in the sense that she can fill any position your team may be lacking. She can adjust her damage type based on whichever of the enemy’s VIT or WIS stat is lower, but her main gimmick lies in what happens after she uses a skill. You may remember seeing ghostly flames in the Chapter 5 cutscene that breifly showcased each of the Maker’s fighting capabilities.. I don’t want to give everything away here so you’ll have to try her out to learn what they’re for.

v1.9 will still take some time before it’s completed. This is going to sound somewhat strange, but a majority of content I’ve been adding to the game so far ended up not being really relevant until the eventual v1.10 version. As for the things that do concern v1.9, I’ve been working, or should I say reworking Status Effects as well as establishing a consistent formula as to how skill descriptions should look like. Looking back at how I designed my skills around the combat system, my reliance on Status Effects made it so that balancing and refining these features had to be top priority. I’m glad to finally be finished with them, and now I can focus on other aspects of the game like maps and events.