AFK Journey – A Look at Season 2: Waves of Intrigue
Posted on December 6, 2024 by Aywren
While I don’t often try gacha games, nor do I stick around long for the ones I do try, AFK Journey has been an exception. I’ve continued to play this since release, logging in every night to do my dailies and power up my team, and still haven’t spent a single dime in the game. Nor have I felt the need to.
While I do play some of the arena modes for rewards, I’m not a very competitive player. “Getting ahead” doesn’t bother me, and I’ve found that over time, sticking with things for the long run and taking care with the resources that the game provides a F2P player has been just fine for me.
It’s helped that after hopping guilds, I finally found a group of somewhat more casual folks who just want an active core of players to engage with. Somehow, I was promoted to an officer of this guild, though I think it’s mostly because I was grandfathered in as an active every-day player.
Still, it’s been fun to see our guild be in the top 10 repeatedly. It’s amazing what consistency can do for a small group of casual folks. The fact that this is possible at all in AFK Journey is one thing that keeps me playing – I never feel like I’ve wasted my time or energy on building my account. As someone who is usually a major alt-o-holic, I’ve also never felt the need to re-roll or start a second account, either.
There’s plenty of battle content to be had on a daily basis, and while I only usually drop 15-20 mins a day in the game, this has always felt like enough. In fact, I was a bit lazy in Season 2 and am only just starting to work on moving through the storyline. I’m glad that I have!
Season 2 Story – No Spoilers
I won’t say that AFK Journey has the BEST writing ever – but given that it’s a translated F2P gacha game and the story is almost fully voiced, I feel the quality of the story content is still very strong. In fact, now that I’m on the later half of this season, I’m sad to say that the character development and the story beats might have been more enjoyable than FFXIV Dawntrail was for me.
The beginning of Season 2 struggled to hook me (pun intended), despite going into a neat new pirate-themed area. I think this was on me, though. Once I just settled down with a chunk of time to focus on it, the characters started to grow on me.
I really admire that the story took its time this season to bring in just a couple of “main” characters and really focus on developing strong individual backstories, motivations, and struggles for them to overcome. I honestly didn’t expect to become as invested in a few of the characters as I did through their growth arcs.
While not everything is perfect pacing-wise – the shorter cutscenes are still a bit too abrupt and feel weirdly spaced – they are exploring using more large-screen cinematic cutscenes. The art style of this game remains a gorgeous inspiration, so to see them go all out like this is VERY much appreciated.
The writing can get a little over-verbose at times, especially when the game seems to feel the need to over-explain things. This, however, is a problem I saw with Dawntrail recently, too, so I guess the games are in good company.
Still, I’m looking forward to seeing how the story is going to end. I know that waiting this long to progress has put me behind in content I can access – though it makes it very easy to one-shot all the story fights since my team is so over leveled. This is fine, though, as I can hopefully hop into some of the side quests once I’m done and pick up some of the cosmetics I’m missing.
That goes on to another thought about this game…
Rewards System
Again, being a casual player who doesn’t care about being competitive one bit, AFK Journey has seen fit to offer plenty of cosmetics and fluff as in-game rewards outside of the cash shop. This season has introduced the Velvet Store, where you can purchase cosmetics – outfits, eyes, headwear, skintones, etc – for velvet vouchers.
While I guess you can buy these vouchers with cash-shop currency, I’ve found it easy enough to get the stuff I want out of the store without needing to do that. Am I able to get everything? No, and that’s fine. I’ve been able to pick up just the pieces I like most without much trouble.
Of course, I haven’t been gunning for anything big like a character skin (though we’ve gotten a few of those for free this season, too), so your mileage may vary.
Other Bits and Bobs
The devs have also been experimenting with different sorts of mini-games and battle content. Some of it I don’t pay much mind to as I’m not overly into battling. But some of the games have been quite fun. For example, we had a pretty neat Monopoly-inspired community board game for Halloween that I really enjoyed spending time with.
This season has also seen casual systems, such as the fishing system, developed out and expanded. I wrote a small guide for fishing back when it was first a thing, and it has come a long way since then. There’s now a leveling system for fishing that gives you all sorts of bonuses and perks, all while keeping the base concepts of the fishing game as it was originally introduced.
The devs are very communicative about the direction the game is going, and the newest blog post is already talking about changes they’re going to make in the next season. Not quite sure when that’s going to begin – part of the reason why I wanted to get through the Season 2 story now – but it sounds like it’s full speed ahead!