I’ve always wondered why would games use the stamina limit at all. No, not really. The reason is obvious: let users play some, then make them pay if they want to play more. That makes perfect sense – it’s just that in a world where there are so many ways to waste your time for free, having to pay for it seems like a bit of a stretch to me. If I look at games I got hooked on to and then stopped playing for good, most of them had the stamina limit.

Still, it’s not something I can’t get over. The reason I stopped playing PAD is not (only) that player stamina recovers slow, but the immense frustration of the random orbs, no tolerance for error at higher levels (despite high stamina costs) and the simultaneous lack of challenge in any other fields. Simply put: it reached a point where it was either annoying or boring.

Why this occurred to me now though is that ShiroPro has re-launched as an almost complete rework with a whole different gameplay – one with a player “stamina”. Not as limited as PAD for example, but you can’t just rotate maps anymore like you could before for leveling or farming. Not that it’s very tempting to do that – they tried to reform the tower defense genre and… uh…

Let’s just say that with enemies popping up all over the place, then running around the map without any clear routes to defend, it’s not tower defense. The whole point would be to come up with a Perfect Defense for a certain layout of enemy troops headed for your base. Except now sometimes you have to defend multiple objectives with varying stress levels throughout waves, while you can’t relocate your defenders without letting them die first.

Trying out maps wasn’t such a risk when all you could lose was a few minutes to wait on repairs. Now that a daily quest map takes 30 stamina (out of my current low-level 70) that’s many hours’ wait to have each attempt “recover”.

In contrast I’ve been playing KanColle for years continuously, and maybe the biggest reason for that is that it’s flexible. It lets me play whenever I want however much I want. The limitations are all in-game. Sure, you can buy resources, buckets etc for cash, but it’s so ridiculously ineffective it’s simply not worth it. (This doesn’t hold for repair angels, but that’s not a necessity either.) Then again my current game style for KC isn’t the most active either. Just farm resources and then burn them on events. Loop. Can’t complain though.

I was wondering if LLSIF will eventually become like PAD for me, once I’ll have extremely solid, maxed teams and at least marginally sufficient skills to clear anything. It definitely doesn’t have the frustrating random factor of PAD, but that also means that after a point you’ll have nothing to do. At this point the stamina limit isn’t that disturbing, and it recovers reasonably fast too considering song costs. We shall see.