Not Exactly AFK Journey

One of the things that has largely been absent from this blog for the last few years is mobile gaming. It is not necessarily that I lacked the desire to have stupid fun sleepytime nonsense gaming, but more that my hardware could no longer really support it. In 2018 I bought the Razer Phone 2, in large part because it had a ton of features and was being discounted significantly. That phone has been a trooper for me all through the peak pandemic years and finally started to show its significant age starting around 2022. I hate the entire process of upgrading devices and should have taken things like the fingerprint sensor failing on me as a sign that I should go ahead and do it. Instead, I suffered through all of 2023 and most of 2024 with a phone that would crash any time I attempted to launch a game. Recently I upgraded to a OnePlus 12R seen above, and I am pretty happy with that decision.

More importantly though it meant that I could actually indulge in various games that I had heard about for awhile, but did not have the hardware to really enjoy. AFK Journey is one of those “it” games that burned through the AggroChat crew starting in April and continuing on a bit into the summer months. Various Fedifriends have also been into the game so it was enough to make me want to download it as one of my first forays into another round of modern mobile gaming. Generally speaking, these games have a steady burn rate for me where I enjoy the first few weeks of playing… up until the point where I need to spend money to progress. At that point, I uninstalled it and moved on to the next one. What I am mostly looking for is some dumb fun busywork before sleep claims me and so far AFK Journey has excelled at that notion.

I’ve mostly been playing this on my mobile device, where I largely record fancy pulls when I think to press the awkward screenshot key combination of power and volume down. However recently I have installed the desktop client where it is so much more enjoyable to just roam around the world. Essentially the game is a combination of the usual busywork of a gacha game where you have various vents that you are expected to participate in every day in order to move the needle forward. You are rationed enough cash shop equivalent and hero pull currency in order to keep you hanging on to see if the next ten pulls get you something truly interesting.

Then there is this weirdly sprawling open world filled with optional content that you will absolutely miss if you are just clicking the auto movement button to progress you to the next quest item. This is the point where I always think what I think in these situations… that a game like this would be really freaking fun on a proper gaming device like the Nintendo Switch. I am sure I could probably figure out how to shoehorn this onto the Steam Deck… were it not for the fact that it does not appear to have controller support. Sure I could probably install something like ReWASD and map WASD and the assorted keyboard shortcuts to a controller… but that is an awful lot of work for a game that I probably won’t be playing two months from now.

I am running a full party of Graveborn, in part because those were some of the coolest champions that I pulled early on. My inner metalhead edge lord loves the trappings of darkness and death, and these all vibed with that heavily. I mean I am after all a dedicated Golgari player in Magic the Gathering, so this all seems like the right call. There was no team of Dwarves, so it was an easy pick over the assorted cute woodland furries and elves. Unfortunately, I have reached the point in the story where I find out that the Graveborn are kind of the dicks of the story… but MINE aren’t like that. They are mobile and misunderstood anti-heroes dammit!

For a game called “AFK Journey” it is shockingly interactive. Sure there is an autobattle system, and I have autobattled my way through several hundred levels of it because this ultimately gates how much you can progress your characters. This is in large part why I installed it on the PC, so that I could have it autobattling in the background without draining my phone battery. This feels like more of an upkeep chore than anything else, and I had neglected it for far too long allowing my cast of heroes to languish a bit. The actual combat is all non-interactive so I guess maybe that is where the bulk of the AFK nature comes from. You gear and choose your team comp, but after that, it just sort of plays out on its own. I am fine with this because quite honestly controlling anything on a phone is a bit fiddly for my giant sausage fingers.

I did spend $7 on the game, to unlock a cosmetic battlepass track. I figured I needed a costume with an overabundance of belts to match the edge lord nature of my undead team. I am not sure what I think about the whole open-chested nature of the outfit, but sometimes you just sort of have to accept that these things are built for folks who lust after such things. It was an improvement over the general fancy nature of the wizard outfits I had been given up to this point. Since I am effectively playing Merlin… I don’t think the game is ever going to give me proper armor to wear and I just have to accept that.

So far I am having quite a bit of fun with the game and actually enjoy roaming around the world looking for secrets to loot. I’ve yet to hit the upper ceiling where progression is ridiculously slow. I basically get to progress one character each day and they have this whole system where every 10th level up costs way more than the preceding 9 levels. So basically I zoom everyone up to a multiple of 10s, then that next level up I can do one of those each day for a week until I can zoom them again up 9 more levels. I’ve been given a shocking amount of pull currency and have had enough banked to comfortably do a ten-pull every single day on the normal banner since I started playing. The premium pulls also seem to add up and I have a 10 pull banked against the rate-up banner, but given that I have already pulled Nara I am going to hold onto that until the next banner rolls around.

It is a gacha game, and you sort of have to go into it expecting a specific set of trappings for that experience. That said… it seems to be one of the more enjoyable mobile gacha games that I have played in a while. I will forever mourn the loss of Dragalia, but for the moment this seems to be taking its place as my stable focus for the time being as I wait for sleep to claim me.