West Shibuyaaa…

When development ended on The Secret World, I had barely started to play my two Dragon alts, Freydis and Kamala (not to be confused with Nick, my Dragon main). At the time, I thought the game was not long for this world, so I said goodbye to my characters. I remember being especially sad that Kamala would never make it to Tokyo, as I’d been quite keen on her as a character.

But of course, TSW turned out to only be mostly dead, and before long I started playing again, albeit very sporadically. While I’ve occasionally dug out other characters, mostly during the fan-run anniversary events, usually when I’ve gone back to play these days it’s been to slowly inch Kamala through the story.

(Freydis still hasn’t left Kingsmouth despite occasional play, but I recreated her in SWL and used her to play through the story with a friend some years back, so in a way she’s had her day in the sun.)

This paradigm of dusting Kamala off for a few missions every few months has stretched on for almost a decade now. Lately I’ve had the idea to just skip most of the side missions in Transylvania in a final sprint to Tokyo, and the recent anniversary event and my hype over Miracle was the push to do it.

As of today*, after so many years, Kamala has set foot into Tokyo.

*(Today being when I wrote this, which will probably be about two weeks before you’re reading it.)

Encountered an interesting bug on arrival. The lighting had bugged out, throwing Kaidan into near total darkness. The sun was visible — and in fact seemingly brighter than it usually is in Tokyo — but shed no light on anything around it. This felt very thematic, but was virtually unplayable as I couldn’t really see anything. Thankfully, relogging fixed it.

Arriving in Tokyo is always a bit of a baptism by fire, but aside from some unpleasantness involving some Orochi drones, I got through Kurt’s missions fine and got my full set of AEGIS controllers.

Despite my predilection for tinkering, I’ve stayed remarkably consistent with my build on her. I’ve stuck with my plan from the start, a fist and elemental build focused on massive resource generation, allowing me to fire off consumers like a machine gun. It’s a little lacking in AoE, but the flamethrower is helping with that now I have one, and it can shred single targets with shocking efficiency. I also have two impairs, so sometimes stuff dies without even getting a hit in. It also really captures the rage and aggression that defines Kamala’s character in my mind.

I have created a few other builds here and there. Some assault rifle stuff, a chaos/fist build for variety, another elemental and fist build focused on elemental AoEs for when I need that, and a few other odds and ends, but the vast majority of the time has been on that original fist build. It’s strong and it’s fun, so why use anything else?

I’ve always been a defender of TSW’s combat, and I still feel it has something special, even compared to more modern games. I feel like TSW and GW2 kind of represent a dead end in the evolution of MMO combat. MMOs started out with very immobile tab target combat, but around 2012 there was this big move towards more mobility and casting on the move, with GW2 and arguably even more so TSW leading that charge.

Then WoW regressed and doubled down on immobility, and the action combat games that came after have increasingly used animation locks to limit mobility. That feels a lot more natural than the tab target models of yesteryear, and I love that style of combat, but I wish the mobile style of TSW had also survived in some form. There’s a fluidity to it that you don’t really see elsewhere.

Anyway, I’m just glad Kamala’s finally reached her long held goal. This won’t be the end of her journey. I’m probably going to move on to other games now, but I’ll maintain my habit of checking in with her every now and again, but this time when I revisit her, she’ll be exploring the haunted streets of Kaidan.

That’s a bit more exciting than what she’s been doing so far. I’ve spent less time in Tokyo than the other regions. I think there might be a few missions I’ve only done once, as opposed to the four or five times (or more) I’ve done most missions elsewhere in the game.

Plus I just know her and Ricky Pagan are going to get along famously.

I’ll leave you with a song. In a funny coincidence, the song Tokyo Summer by the Mounties came on the radio earlier today. This song came out the same summer Tokyo originally arrived in TSW, so they’ve always been linked in my mind.