The year of 2018 went by like a whirlwind – We’re almost at the end of December! To be honest I didn’t think the site would’ve survived long enough for this post!

Let’s take a look at the major things that happened in the PAD world this year, and ponder what GungHo will have for us next year! Long post ahead!

---

---

Major Events

It’s no secret that PAD had a really rough year – There were a couple of months where it was pretty dead, with nothing interesting going on. It wasn’t until last month or so that things are picking up again, as if we had a PAD renewal. Below are some highlights (not PAD events, but game-changing events) of the year, sorted by feels!

Shocking: Egg Machine renewal

The year really started with a bang – Rare Egg Machine renewal. That is removal of all the silver eggs from the Rare Egg machine (REM), plus dropping ★5 Godfest Exclusives from Godfests (poor Ronia still). Rates were disclosed for premium egg machines as well.

Who would’ve thought that’s how we started the year, with all servers doing the same? All this happened in January and many thought PAD would be dead by the end of year…

Exciting: The return of streams

Ever since the Heroine chaos that costed GungHo 50.2 million yen, basically all stream stopped in order to prevent error propagation. Everyone was starving for a stream for a year, and then this exciting PAD 6th anniversary stream came to us! From introduction of Monster Exchange, Plus Points, all the way to that Yog-Sothoth available for 1,000,000 Monster Points (Cotton for NA, which led to funny comments from JP players…).

And of course we can’t forget Persona collab and Yu Yu Hakusho collab announcement that brought us game-changing characters to PAD!

In comparison, GungHo Festival 2018 stream was basically… forgotten at this point. To be fair, the entire GungHo Festival this year was pretty underwhelming until the finale in Tokyo. Despite all this, the stream did bring us new evolutions of

Yog-Sothoth, animated Miru and Dark Athena!

Also worth a mention is that super exclusive

Coca-Cola Tamadra that is only available at the venue… I wish I were there for it!

Though really, that wasn’t even as good as YamaP’s Rank 777 stream! It was a lot of buffs for cards including those from GungHo Collab cards! The most exciting and hyped of all is arguably the new evolutions for

Amenominakanushi and Dark Metatron!

In fact, YamaP just hit Rank 888 yesterday, just before 2018 ends! Whether there’s any celebration this time… stay tuned I guess.

Out of nowhere we had a stream in October, counting down to 7th anniversary of PAD. Seriously, not many expected it, some didn’t even expect a 7th anniversary to happen. What came as surprise was a lot of updates, including 200 Magic Stones free, orb skins, interface overhaul from Version 16.0 update!

I personally call it the PAD revival stream. Many returned to PAD because of this, and it was amazing! This was probably the best stream of PAD this year!

And of course the last stream of the year, a year end special! This one was pre-recorded and was only 1.5 hours long, a bit disappointing for some, but the announcement for Fate/stay night: Heaven’s Feel collab and the stream rewards ( 20 Magic Stones + lots of goodies) were amazing!

YamaP though.

It’s quite unfortunate that the producer of PAD, Daike Yamamoto (YamaP), still can’t say a word on stream to this date, after the 50.2 million yen Heroine fiasco… Hopefully that changes in 2019. Ganbatte YamaP, don’t mess up again!

That’s 5 streams that was translated, and all of them were insane amount of contents. On the first stream of the year I was doing this alone, and by the end of year I have a team of 5 making the translations possible. Thank you everyone on team! 🙂

Evolving: New systems & QoL improvements

2018 is certainly a year of cleanup in the PAD interface and many systems, bringing us quality of life (QoL) changes throughout the game! The year started with Version 12.6, and we’re now at version 16.2!

Long list, I almost wonder how we played the game before all this happened…

Monster Exchange, a.k.a. the recycling

Remember the old days before March 2018, Monster Exchange (aka Trading Post) wasn’t a thing? Pepperidge farm remembers!

Instead of having gacha rolls as the only way to get a specific card, Monster Exchange let us exchange multiple ★6 Godfest Exclusive cards for another desired card (generally from collab). All whales with a ton of Godfest Exclusive dupes rejoiced. I honestly don’t remember that Monster Exchange only started this year!

Besides REM cards, now we have limited-time exchanges especially from collabs to keep us all busy, and maybe too busy!

Stacking up those Evo Material, and later Enhance Materials

Now let’s look at arguably the highlight of this year – Evo Material Stacking in April from Version 14.1 update. Also translates to most veteran players getting 200+ box space back (which are filled up again by now). Great times!

For people who has a large box with multiple dupes of a card, having the Evolution Search button on every card was game-changing too. Trying to search for a certain card can be hell, especially on NA server that somehow doesn’t have search function!!

It wasn’t until version 16.1 update in late November that stackable Enhance Materials was implemented. We all looked forward to this since stacking was introduced, and it’s exciting to see it before the year ends (Next year for NA)! 2018 really is all about the space!

Gems, what a gem.

Remember how tedious things it was to make an Awoken Evolution because you’re missing [insert descended monster]? Gems took care of most of that for us during May!

The concept was a bit confusing to understand initially, since it was quite an abrupt change. I’m really thankful that our author Kennori wrote an article explaining what everything is, which has helped a lot of people (including me)!

Plus Points

Plus Point system, along with the Monster Enhance option, were also game-changing – No more hoarding +’s on a random

Shynee or any farmables, or keeping track of your excessive +’s on RCV and crying about it!

Hearing voices

Voice awakening, for some on Japanese server, was certainly a QoL improvement! Many of the voices fit the characters in game! The awakening was introduced in version 15.2, but was not fully implemented until around version 15.3. It really doesn’t do anything in game but adds a lot to user experience… on Japanese and Korean servers anyways (Korean server uses JP voices too).

My top picks for voice?

Ideal and Cotton.

Voices on North American server, on the other hand… was disastrous. Let’s talk about that at another time, if ever.

100% Skillup Dungeons

As part of YamaP’s Rank 777 celebration, we first saw a solo-only, 100% Skill-Up Chance Dungeon for Super Godfest. Ever since then, the skill-up dungeons has become a norm in Super Godfests, selected collabs, and specials machines!

For many this is a great change, now we can save Tans and Pys for farmables or selected collab/special cards instead!

3 hour guerrilla dungeons

Since an update during an event in November, guerrilla dungeons have become 3 hours long instead of 1 hour! It’s great for casual players, but it certainly was a hectic week trying to fix the schedule on front page for all sources!

Along with that, groups (A-E) appears to be retired now, and we just stick with the starter dragon color for determining these limited-time dungeon schedule. Easier to explain to new players, I guess.

The whole game’s interface

I definitely can’t skip over the literally game-changing interface renewal, on the dungeon menu, game icon, and more! The game finally doesn’t look like it’s a 1990 2013 game!

The icon really rocks now too, even though it’s still the iconic Volcano Dragon.

Heartwarming: New series, a little at a time

Valentine’s special

For many years we’ve all joked about Valentines specials in PAD, it only took 6 years for us to see it happening! Though most of the cards themselves are a bit underwhelming (except

Valentines Ney), but the level of sweetness and art quality in this special event is probably one of the highest!

New Monster Point toys

During 6-Year Anniversary Stream we (well, whales) have new cards to spend our overflowing Monster Points on! Certainly many PAD players (especially farmers) went after Amen, and slowly there are more interest in Khonsu. Will popularity of Mut boom one day? We shall find out in 2019.

We also finally see the animated

Dark Meimei added to Monster Point store in November, who originally came as a Monster Memory toy in a magazine. I hope we get more animated Celestial gods next year!

Great Witches, turning PAD around

Of course I can’t skip the 5 Great Witches, who were introduced almost monthly since April! Veroah took the longest to come, presumably because of Halloween? Madoo, Reeche, Zela, Saline, and Veroah have made their presence in a lot of teams. Have they found their way to your box yet, or even to your heart? 🙂

P.S.: This series also was a killer for us translating their names!

Refreshing the classics: “New” Godfest Exclusives

You know how anime brings back old series once in a while and you’d still find them awesome? Yep, happened in PAD too. GungHo surprised us with the oldies returning stronger than ever! Although orb skins are only for looks, they certainly refreshes the game for many. The initial release of the colors were a bit bright, but was later adjusted to mute some colors, which is now easier for our eyes. Support for colorblind mode was added in a later update too.

Best part? Getting one of them for free using the

PAD Appreciation Medal, of course!

These Godfest Exclusives really mark the new heights of PAD, to be honest.

Forgotten new pantheons

Let’s not forget some of the new pantheons that were added: Celtic Gods in January and Mesopotamian Gods series back in March. Fun fact, I can’t spell Mesopotamian without a spell check still…

Celtics Gods

Mesopotamian Gods

Exciting new pantheon

It took almost 9 months before we saw Samurai Gods 3 series added! To Japanese this is the more exciting pantheon – And I agree! They are also the first 7* pantheon in PAD.

Samurai Gods 3

Surprising: Raining Magic Stones!

PAD’s way to thank all of us for sticking around for so many years is… throwing us more Magic Stones!! 200 total! Then if you look at January alone, it’s another 173 Magic Stones!

My stones disappeared pretty fast though, thanks to all the Super Godfests! Did you use all of yours yet?

Superb: Super Godfest(s)

GungHo: I heard you guys like Super Godfests, let’s bring you more Super Godfests! And also Super Player’s Choice Godfest!! That wasn’t enough? Let’s have over a month’s worth of Super Godfests!

*Server crashes, connection error* (It really happened)

…That’s how I feel is going on in GungHo staff’s minds anyways. As of this moment, we’re still having a Super Godfest! 10 Magic Stones per roll! It makes all the past Godfest look like a joke! We had 7 Super Godfests this year too!

I really don’t have that many stones to roll!!!

---

New dungeons, descends, & rewards

Spirit Numens

Introduced during GungHo Festival this year were Spirit Numens, used as evolution materials for the animated evolutions:

R/B/G starter dragons, Light Miru, and Dark Athena! It was certainly a great time seeing everyone helping each other out to pick up a Numen or two!

And more things descended.

Did you know that we had 11 descended dungeon additions this year?

GungHo really put us into spelling tests this year with all the mythical creatures and cute girls descending! Though honestly, besides

Eir for Dark Metatron, Manticore, and the newest Zahhak, how many do you use regularly, or even remember?

When	Descended Dungeon	When	Descended Dungeon
1/29	Kuroganemaru Descended	7/13	Sol & Mani Descended
3/20	Manticore Descended	8/10	Nidhogg Descended
4/23	Bigfoot Descended	10/11	Lindworm Descended
5/16	Moby Dick Descended	11/22	Quetzalcoatl Descended
5/27	Panera Descended	12/26	Zahhak Descended
6/21	Eir Descended

Even more Arenas.

Back then Ultimate Arena 1 (A1) was extremely hard – Now it’s the entry exam to PAD! This year we have 5 different Arenas added for the endgame players! How many have you cleared, and how many are at farming status for you?

When	Arena	Dungeon Type
3/14	Ultimate Arena 4 (Three Hands of Fate, A4)	Technical Dungeon
8/24	Multiplayer 3P Arena	Multiplayer Dungeon
10/30	Training Arena	Normal Dungeon
11/30	Ultimate Arena 5 (異形の存在, A5)	Technical Dungeon
12/27	Alt. Ultimate Arena 2 (Alt. Three Hands of Fate / 裏運命の三針)	Technical Dungeon

New rewards

Really, it’s old cards polished as new reward. Want those Monster Point store or collab cards that we always wanted to buy? Work hard and you can get them. Too bad GungHo stopped doing this since October – Instead you get to work hard and farm tokens for Monster Exchanges. (Meanwhile I’m farming Yo-kai Watch World Collab tokens on JP, and Heroine tickets on NA…)

The table below is based off Japanese version, and only contains Ranking Dungeons and Quest rewards. Click on the column header to sort by heading.

---

Collabs galore

2018 was a huge year for collabs – Surprisingly many have also made it to North American server! If not, let’s hope that eventually next year they’ll be in NA! Do you remember them all?

Click on a column header to sort by each heading!

---

Outside the game

This year certainly is the year that PAD trying to expand (and failing in some parts?). GungHo tries to attract the younger market with PAD Radar, but it’s quite questionable as most of the dedicated players aren’t in that age group.

PAD Radar & E-sports

It began with PAD promoting E-sports at the beginning of the year, where the E-sport is PAD Radar player vs. player mode. They pushed PADR in basically everything including stream, manga, to anime… I would say that it’s certainly not as successful as they intended.

Though GungHo pushed PAD Radar hard, the game itself is really limited to Japan (as Treasures are Japan-only), and it’s extremely pay-to-win style. For many in North America, it certainly is a dream to have PADR ported over for the exchangeable cards in PADR. To be honest though, the PvP side of it certainly won’t take off in NA… It might be best to stay as Japan-only anyways.

PAD anime

Last year we had PAD Cross (PADX, not to be confused with PDX), this year we have the new PAD anime about Taiga, who runs a takoyaki stand and plays PAD Radar with 2 styluses. What we got out of it was a bunch of PAD characters, animated!

Every week there’s a new episode uploaded to PAD Official YouTube channel, and each episode is available for 1 week before taken down.

The first big hit was

Haku!

SaladBadger‘s favorite,

Paimon! Clearly female in the anime.

And now we impatiently wait for more characters, animated. 😀

First pop-up store

Another new bit that GungHo adventured was the limited-time PAD Pop-up Store, selling new PAD merchandises! We all know PAD doesn’t have a lot of merchandises (most of which are old releases and hard to find), so a whole pop-up store dedicated to PAD was exciting! I was there and I spent a lot of money… not once but twice. No regrets though!

I love PAD goods, and honestly would love to see more of it (ideally with more varieties) in 2019!

(Though seriously many including me aren’t a fan of that PAD emblem, I’d rather see more Tamadras!)

---

The sad and questionable

Bye bye, EU server

It was expected, but it still hurts to see it gone. The server has stopped all updates since a maintenance on April 12, and later shut down on December 10.

Sad way to end the year with a server closure, and here’s the most iconic way to end – with a Sopdeath goodbye (screenshot by Patse of EU server):

Ranking Dungeon, stylized with bonuses

Style Bonus, introduced in the Version 15.3 update, was certainly questionable for those who enjoy Ranking Dungeons. Activating selected awakenings in ranking dungeon rewards points, where the point scales differently in every ranking. In recent rankings there are quite a few abuses of this new system, which ruins the fun for some.

I’m neutral to it since it makes me reexamine the teams I can make with my box, but at the same time it’s really frustrating for the ones who are extremely dedicated. Though I agree with most people that style points should be limited to fixed-team rankings, for it not to be abused as badly.

Speaking of rankings, did you know that 22 Ranking Dungeons happened in 2018 for JP? That’s a lot, considering there are only 45 Ranking Dungeons in total!

PAD Radar and food

Just like PAD, PAD Radar has Ranking Dungeons called Ranking Battles. In the recent few rankings they all featured food, many are 1-year’s worth of food! I guess that’s some incentive to play a ton of PAD Radar… only if you’re in Japan though.

We had these for the grand prizes:

• Umaibo Cup – 1,200 Umaibo snacks
• Meiji Almond Chocolate Cup – 40 packs of Meiji Almond Chocolate
• Kellogg’s Cup – 1 year worth of Kellogg’s Hershey’s ChocoBits

Not a joke, here’s a case of 40 Meiji Almond Chocolate won:

PAD Radar Monster Memories

Monster Memories has been kind of a hit or miss – Sometimes sales go well, more often they don’t. Last year we began with Armor Drops, which are a pack of 5 Monster Memories that you simply purchase in Japan (or eBay and Amazon), and you claim the monster through scanning the QR code (at the back of the Monster Memory toy) in PAD Radar. Some monsters can be claimed as gift dungeon in PAD, to be used in the main game. For Armor Drops, there were only three sets made ever, featuring these cards and were guaranteed:

Dark Athena was sold out in 2 days after an A3 video went viral, Light Heradra had some manufacturing issues and was discontinued, and Fire Miru did not sell well somehow (some were sold at 500 yen, stock overload!). GungHo discontinued this series not too long later, and put everything in Monster Point Store.

This year we have the scarier versions – Real life gacha, featuring these cards that you can use in PAD, if you’re lucky enough to get the Monster Memory of them. None of these has made it to Monster Point store either, so NA players please keep drooling:

Corresponding posts: Dark Radra, Blue Athena, Red Ragnarok Dragon, Light Bastet.

Was it a good change? For GungHo, heck yes everyone is whaling packs for that one card, instant cash grab! For most of us players though, it’s horrible. You can easily spend $40 for a box of these, with not guaranteed useful units for the main game (Personal experience here – I did buy a box trying to get Blue Athena and failed). I really wish they bring the guaranteed Armor Drops back, to be honest.

---

Fun facts of 2018

These are some interesting findings we have this year!

• 4000, then 5000+ cards! We hit 4000 with Coca-Cola Tamadra , and now we’re past 5000! #5000 was the very cute New Year Artemis . Time really flies.
• PAD Monster Design Contest. It’s been 3 years since there’s a 7-year anniversary monster design contest for JP server, and it’s back again! I wonder who’d win this time? (I’m also entering for fun!)
• Super delayed collab. We first heard about Yokai Watch World Collab in June, it took half a year for it to make it real! Wonder what happened eh?
• Changes with North American server. I play both servers, and until recent months it’s been always 2 months behind JP server, in terms of contents. Lately NA server has gone down to 1.5 month difference, which is great! Sometimes there are exclusive contents (like a NA-exclusive Great Witch gacha)! Maybe we’ll be down to 1 month gap for contents in 2019?
• Let it die, with GungHo collab! Totally a coincidence, but when GungHo Collab 1 and 2 hit NA server, two GungHo games announced their closure: Calcio Fantasista and Divine Gate Zero. Now that GungHo collab returns to JP server, the date coincides with the final day of PAD EU server and Divine Gate Zero… What a curse. (Yes I know Let It Die is also a GungHo game)
• Still 300 max friends. I’m sitting at maximum and have no one to delete, help. I hope that will be the first change in 2019.

---

Looking forward

2018 is coming to an end, but PAD certainly isn’t. With the new systems and changes, I feel quite positive for the game itself, and it certainly is in a better place than a year ago when the game felt dry. While the collab selections this year are great, our author Kennori and I do think that there are quite a few missed opportunities here and there (see our thoughts in Fullmetal Alchemist, Persona, Yu Yu Hakusho, and Magic: The Gathering).

For JP server

While PAD (Japanese server) already has a ton of improvements, there’s always room for more! Simple things like Stamina Notification (which is still NA-exclusive) should come to JP. Friend system should really be next on the to-fix list in terms of QoL changes. Open all mail option should exist, along with a better mailing system between players. We’re almost in 2019, why can’t we react more than a simple “Nice“, when even Facebook can have more reactions than a “like”?

Aside from my complaints, Voice can honestly be better implemented. It really shouldn’t take up an awakening slot, and enemies should have voices too. Speaking of voices, why doesn’t

Tamadra say “Tama Tama” anyways?

I also question why isn’t the PAD lore animated – it would attract more audience for sure! At least, make a manga of the lore! (I really just don’t want to translate the lore)

For NA server

Besides the obvious more collabs and shorter time gap for contents, I’d like the search function to be on NA! It helps me so much on JP server!

Another bit I see as a site owner is for the official PAD webpage to be used more. At the moment it’s even more laggy than my site, and some images are definitely too big. There’s a lot of potential, I’d hate to see the webpage gone to waste. Not to mention reading NA news on Facebook is really painful… The webpage plus Twitter should be the main source for news, not Facebook. And really, there needs to be more indication as to what each maintenance is for… It really isn’t a “secret” at times (especially when my blog exist)!

Super wishful thinking, but please give NA server an option to change to Japanese voices…

For the Blog

When I rage-started the site on January 15, 2018 (which I picked instead of going for Rank 1000), I certainly didn’t think I’d survive a year posting PAD Japanese news on my own. This is 50 posts per month on average, on top of my work. Lots of sacrifices were made for all this to happen. I was very fortunate to have amazing people joining me on this adventure (and suffer together):

In the translation department, Cate translated a ton of, if not most of the cards (especially collabs) and wrote 9 critical reviews, bringing up important points no one else dares to. We still find it hilarious that Cate’s most popular post is on King Frost Cloak, though the new Godfest Exclusive review is slowly taking over (finally).

Chu2 is the hero who made my dream come true – the front page’s guerrilla schedule in local timezone! Chu basically coded a lot of things behind the scene, and also wrote 18 (!!!???) detailed and often underappreciated guides. You can also see how the blog, and even chu’s writing evolved over the 18 guides! Without Chu I don’t know how many textbooks I’d have to read to code.

Kennori has focused on guides and posts that I never thought would be helpful – Like the Rainbow Medal overview post that he’s still keeping up to this date. He’s been a great support on the blog, and if I have to really compare all authors, his writing and formatting improved the most.

Once in a blue moon, tb_ax finds time and makes amazing specific guides (which are great reads). Although Blaze, Paulo, and Bean haven’t posted much, they have been really helpful behind the scenes and contributed great ideas on many posts.

To all authors: Thank you all for bearing with me and my stupid, site-crashing coding for the past year. You guys are the reason why the blog is how it is now – It’s much greater than I can ever do on my own. 🙂

To all readers: I know some of you have been reading since the start of the blog, and many of you have donated to me to keep me and the site alive. Thank you for dealing with my deteriorating English. If you like the blog, be sure to spread the words about it – It will make us feel that all our times spent was worth it! (Many of us sacrificed PAD time for this!)

Also if there’s anything you all want to see, be sure to let us know here or anywhere you can find us! We do have some crazy projects ongoing, and hopefully be up on the site soon.

That’s all I will say about the year of 2018. Hopefully 7th anniversary will bring us more craziness in 2019!

Afterthought: I realized how much of a PAD fan I am, by writing this post… Sigh.

Comments from our authors

[speech name=paulo]theres a lot of things that happened in JP, except i cant think of them because they decided to keep upping the ante as the year kept going that anything that happened in the beginning feels lame compared to now[/speech]

[speech name=kennori]I may have joined in on the PAD party late, but I feel like I started playing PAD at the right time! GungHo keeps throwing out all of these awesome changes and events that my interest has never been lost.[/speech]