The first draft title was “The Races and Skills” and lemme tell you, that’s a wild difference in how it sounds.
So uh… the Goddesses don’t fuck around. The scenario is hard.
Unlike Aoharu and Grand Live, this one’s events happen at the end of their years, so you have three in-campaign races total. Not only that but if you get to the end you go to the “Grand Masters”, this scenario’s URA Finals, but unlike in URA there’s only one race, meaning you have 5 extra turns of training.
Even with all of this, you can’t really afford to make many mistakes. Not like your whole scenario will stop but if what you want is to win them all then things will get tricky.
A really neat detail that I noticed was that the other trainer’s girls started showing up in my own regular races in this scenario. Sights of Meek, Glacé, and Cocoon, are actually common after their own scenario in the URA Finals. You might see them in Grand Live as if they quietly went through their campaigns on the side, but I can’t think of any cases where they showed up in regular races, and I know I would’ve noticed.
It’s a really cool detail too, it really helps sell the idea that in this campaign they’re training nearer to you so you might cross paths more often.
But going back to the scenario races, in the Grand Masters race you will actually face against the Three Goddesses in a race and it will kick your ass.
Then you notice that unlike every other scenario, this is an actual race, and like any other race you can buy skills before it, and to be fair it IS the last turn so it’s not like you’re gonna get extra hints, though you might wanna save some skill points for the skill you get if you win the race.
Even THEN the race will kick your ass and might need to use your retries. The problem is that it’s not enough to have one powerful oponent, you have to deal with Meek, Glacé, and Cocoon being beefed up PLUS the Three Goddesses themselves.
But if you buy skills and then head to the results screen, you might get the same cut-in you see when a girl is about to use a skill and the choice to “Evolve” some of your skills.
Actually, let’s give a bit of context first.
When you enter a training campaign, your girls aren’t starting quite from scratch. Each girl actually has three upgrade types you can apply to them so that when you enter the training they have a stronger start. These are:
Stars
Related to their gacha rating, every girl can be a 5-star eventually. Their stars determine their starting statline (meaning some extra initial points to make initial training easier and to squeeze some extra points by the end) and their unique skill starts at a higher level (It starts at 1 by 3-star and can rise up to 4 in the scenario, then it starts at 3 by 5-star and can get to 6 in the scenario).
You rise stars by getting Star Fragments of that specific girl. These are gotten via Gacha dupes, exchanging Goddess Statues or in some events.
If you’ve played any gacha in the past, this specific type of “Ascension”-type upgrade should be familiar.
Awakening
Each girl starts with certain skills from scratch, but Awakening them can grant them extra skills to start with (they still need to be purchased, but they’re guaranteed to be there). Most notably at Lvls 3 and 5 the girl gets Gold-framed skills, which are basically an upgrade to an existing skill that needs you to buy the previous tier also.
For example: Super Creek comes by default with Corner Revovery◯ (Restore endurance in a tight turn) but via Awakening she can unlock Arc Line Maestro (Same effect but MORE). By default, without Hints, Arc Line Maestro costs 340 skill points, 170 from Corner Revovery◯ and 170 from itself. You will notice that if you only buy Corner Revovery◯ then Arc Line Maestro will cost 170.
This also means that any discount to one will also discount the other. So if you get up to Hint Lvl 5 with Corner Revovery◯ it goes from 170 to 102 (40% discount, so 68 less points), that means that getting Arc Line Maestro goes from 340 to 272.
Can you get Hint Lvl 5 on both? Why yes! It’s not easy but it IS possible. In which case Arc Line Maestro goes from 340 to 204 points.
Speaking of hints…
Hints
You can actually upgrade the baseline hints of every skill a girl can use through awakening. It’s a really costly process you do via “books” whose stock can’t really be farmed (unlike awakenings where the materials can be aimed for in training).
These upgrades can only take a skill up to Hint Lvl 3 but that’s still a lot, especially when a gold skill might have more than one source.
To use the earlier example, Rice Shower (Strength) and Super Creek’s support cards both can grant Arc Line Maestro. If you already have the Hint Lvl at max with any of the other 3 girls that can get the skill then you can max out its hints.
So with that context out of the way…
One cool thing I always liked about Awakened Skills is that they feel like a second layer of characterization for the girl. Like their inherent skills reflect something about themselves.
Rash girls have almost exclusively yellow booster skills, resilient girls tend to have at least one blue recovery skill, girls with something intimidating about them have at least one debuff while really imposing or pessimistic girls get all but one debuff.
For the longest time I thought this was just a case of me overthinking stuff until they added Evolved Skills.
Evolved Skills
So like I mentioned every girl has at least 2 golden skills. With the Annivesary Update they made it so that these skills can “evolve” if you’ve met specific conditions by the time you’re seeing the training’s results (so no evolved skills while training). These conditions can be a stat line, specific objectives met, specific events seen. Thankfully they minimize the randomness to things the player can do if they try so they don’t require a random event you might not see for example.
The game was already trying to give girls unique skills for a while now. Agnes Digital for example has skills like Uma Mania that were first seen as skills in her spread. But Evolved Skills are a means to make everyone unique since every girl gets two potential evolves with names exclusive to them.
Every. Single. One.
I honestly expected them to roll them around like Granblue Fantasy’s Extended Masteries, but no, from one day to the next we got 2 new skills for every girl.
And they’re really delightful too. For example Teio’s Lightning Step becomes Teio (帝王) Step (“Teio Step” refers to Toukai Teio’s unusual leg flexibility that let it do surprisingly complex legwork, but here they stylized it being written with the actual kanji for “Teio”).
The aforementioned Arc Line Maestro is shared by Creek, Mayano (Bridal), Opera O (New Year) and Dotou (Halloween); but it can evolved into Healing Maestro with Creek (Effortless cornering restores a lot of endurance), Barrel Roll with Mayano (Same effect as Healing Maestro but with more conditions to evolve), Waltz Maestro with Opera O (Recovers endurance in the corners rather than making the cornering effortless), and Soul Guide with Dotou (Restores endurance AND increases some speed while cornering).
You might notice that you CAN deny an evolution if you want… but why would you?
Well, because there’s cases where the evolution changes a skill completely.
For example, Cheerleader Nice Nature’s skill “Monopolizing Power” (a debuff that slows characters in front of her at the end of the race) can evolve into “I guess I’ll do my best” (Her speed increases for a while at the end of the race). This isn’t only a neat way to reflect Nature’s character evolution into a reluctantly less jaded girl by the end of her story, but it means that Nature can be a debuffer or a main runner depending on what you want.
Shout outs to Kawakami Princess whose two Evolved skills are “Non Stop Princess” and “RISING DRAGON”.
Honestly, I could probably go into each evolution and why they’re neat.
And I MIGHT.
But not today.