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MMM - Technicolour Tele-Tuber Transcribes Tales of Travel, Trimming Times of Terrible Technicalities (Valentines 2020 Gacha)

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The Modern Magus Magazine

Hey everyone, I’m late. Did you wait?

It’s the most wonderful time of the year for all, where both normies and closeted nerds like myself enjoy personal time with either their significant others or waifus / husbandos, and the latter gets to spend an eternity melting in a pleasure dimension instead of having expensive dates and expectations to fufill.

I don’t envy Guda for having to deal with Kiara, BB, and Kama for every valentines. But I do envy the Guda who gets caught in their Bad Ends. The chocolate’s pretty tasty, too.

Valentine's 2020 JP
NA Release Date: 02/01/2022
Introduction

So it turns out, I got into watching VRtuber videos pretty much around the time that FGO decided to make one of my favourite upcoming Seiyuus a new servant. And they’re a Japanese JK type. I can only get so “excited”, to keep things PG-13. One thing I can say for sure is that I don’t envy the NA localisation team when she’s in NA. Managing old fashioned Japanese for translation is a pain. JK / Gyaru talk is also a pain. The two of them together? Brrrrrrr.

Servant Data
Archer
Magic Resistance C

Increase your Debuff Resist by 15%.

Independent Action (Self-Centered) A

Increase Critical Star Gather Rate of own Quick Cards by 10%.

Snow on Xiang Lu Feng A

Increase own Quick Card Critical Strength by 10%.

Teachings that Drive to Enlightenment B

Increase own Charm Resist by 100%.

Overview

More to the point, let’s get to gameplay. Sei is a new SSR Archer with a statline truly fitting for a Japanese servant - passably high attack in exchange for awful HP. It’s practically the Japanese national identity in FGO at this point. Having the worst HP of any SSR Archer in exchange for the 5th highest attack of your class is...well, it’s pretty bad. But to be fair, the Archer class really is made up of Archers high stat-total monsters like Ishtar and Orion, so even having a slightly subpar stat spread like Sei’s looks far worse.

She compensates for it slightly with her multitude of...abnormal passives, thankfully. At a first glance, you may think it’s a bunch of great passives - MR is a given, Independent Action, ANOTHER critical damage buff, and even more passive debuff resistance, but in reality, three of those are more or less nerfs from standard Archer passives.

Her Independent Action is simply extra star weight for Quick cards (which is nice, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not flat critical damage), the “other” critical damage buff is just critical damage on Quick cards (in other words, a downgrade from normal Archers), and lastly, the debuff resistance passive is solely for Charms, essentially granting immunity, like King Hassan or Kama. In the end, it’s slightly better critical damage dealing, though only for her two Quicks. Not exactly something worth having 1000 less HP than Ishtar for.

NP Generation
Servant Skills
Noble Phantasm
Conclusion

So Sei’s got every colour under the rainbow under her skirt, but does she have the same coverage in gameplay? On one hand, she’s got a vivid palette:

Lady’s got a pretty solid supportive skill. While giving servants credit for one solid team buff feels like Deja Vu for me, a mini-Garden of Avalon is solid for an 8 turn cooldown Charisma skill, and is equally benefits her greatly. I guess she can also provide her star bomb for others if need be, but the 30% gauge she can provide to a whole team is the real meat and potatoes of the deal.

As much as I would prefer better, her critical damage output is still...solid. She has a decent critical damage skill and stargen, as well as her abnormal affixation to critting with her Quick cards, so Sei can bring to bear a respectable offense from her her star generation.

She has an evade skill, and a consistent one at that. Which is...surprisingly rare for an AOE Archer. Gil lacks one, Napoleon lacks one, Tesla has his Guts but it’s, well, Guts, and Ishtar’s is chance based. Add in her Charisma’s regen effect and she isn’t too bad on the durability front.

However, she’s also a little on the dull side:

While it’s definitely not on the bad side, Sei’s damage output is a little lacking compared to her competition, and won’t really match the better existing AOE Archers, then again looping Archers like Jeanne Archer or Atalanta, who will simply pull out more NP’s during a given timeframe with easier setups while not lagging too far behind in damage output per NP. While she can push the letter pretty hard in the rare circumstance she gets to face off a Neutral and Man attribute servant, that’s ultimately a niche of a niche for an AOE servant.

Her number of gauge chargers can conceal it pretty well, but Sei’s NP gain is still pretty average. If she isn’t using the aforementioned Skadi / Waver setup, including the Kaleidoscope, she can have issues getting her NP ready at a reasonable pace, then again after all the cooldowns from her supports have been exhausted. It makes me skeptical of her ability in challenge quests, at least.

So on the whole, Sei is a servant not exactly lacking in any particular aspect, but simply mediocre. I understand that recently I was pretty harsh on Europa for a similar issue, but thing with Sei are slightly different - she has applications outside of farming and baseline 3-enemy quest due to her reasonably good critical damage and effective damage buffs from her NP. Also Charm immunity is sometimes quite handy for Challenge quests. She’s not really standing out from the crowd (not visually, anyways), she isn’t the new revolutionary Skadi farmer, but she’s a robust servant with serviceable applications and some niche uses when needed. Also cute as heck. Rath™ Seal of Approval.

Final Conclusion

In the aftermath of writing this MMM, I realize I have to put up with flooding my present box with chocolates once again this year as my CE capacity continues to burst at the seams, as it has for the past year. For this one writer fighting against misconception and blind waifuism in an age of disinformation and conceit, I concede that I am terrible at inventory management. And hypocritical since I’ve definitely been biased toward waifus in my own writing in the past.

What do you mean, “Second Archive”? Is that a type of chocolate?

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