so uhh nobody asked but i feel obligated to pay tribute to the (belated) birthday of my all time favorite character, hina! anybody who takes time to read this i will absolutely cherish, but i just want to express the enjoyment i've derived from this painful mobile game over the past 2 years and the happiness i've experienced from a teal-haired pixel 2d anime girl

before the game released to jp, i was keeping updated with it for about a month prior. i initially fell for arisa and aya just from introductions and the first week or so of the game. little did i know, some girl named hina hikawa would come in and TEAR APART the competition

i can't really pinpoint what first drew me to her, because it all sort of hit me at once. i started reading the pasupare story, and as soon as i heard her start talking and looked into her personality, i KNEW that the number one spot had been replaced.

i've always been drawn to energetic types of characters, however, hina is very VERY unique. she had so much more depth than i ever could have expected - she was a genius, and it left her unable to properly understand other people's struggles. i felt so inclined to finish the pasupare story to watch as hina grew to be so much more understanding of her bandmates and people overall.

i love her humor. something about her backhanded compliments always gets a laugh out of me and reading her interactions with other bandori girls makes me light up!

speaking of her relationships, let's talk about her and our other birthday girl (and my 5th best girl), sayo! i could talk on and on about my love for them. the tanabata festival event is one of my favorites EXACTLY for this reason. sayo's inferiority complex is something i can heavily relate to myself, as well as hina's desire to have the same relationship they had as kids. they both care for eachother so much and it makes me so happy to see the different ways they show appreciation for eachother (ex. hina bringing sayo fries in garupa pico, and sayo taking hina's guitar to play in season 2). although they're rather subtle, the hikawa sisters relationship as a whole makes me SO happy., and seeing how sayo has warmed up to hina so much more warms my heart. i just LOVE these girls so damn much and they are the perfect example of polar opposites done right.

now, onto the part where hina hikawa robs me of my money

i've been saving pulls on top of pulls for hina since her first 4* released on jp. to my luck, of course, i didn't get her first card despite pulling about 5 times. or her second card. or her third.

at this rate, i had given up on playing jp bandori as i had a pretty unappealing account with about 4 4 star cards at rank 110ish. this was when bandori en was announced. what is this? ANOTHER CHANCE TO GET MY FAVORITE GIRL?! to put it lightly, you could say i was ecstatic. the day en gbp came out, i started saving as many stars as i could.

a few months later, the day comes to pull for tanabata hina. i have 10 pulls ready and i'm feeling confident. well... that confidence was quickly beat into the ground when i got all 3 star pulls. until the final one. i saw those rainbow glowsticks and FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. i tabbed and at the very end, i was greeted with tanabata sayo.

while i would've happily taken her had i not spent 25k stars on a card that didn't show up, bitter wasn't even a strong enough word to describe how i felt. i continued playing bandori after, but i was beginning to lose motivation. i had been trying so hard for a long time to get even a single card of this girl.

i pretty much went on a hiatus until about august of last year, where i started searching around for starter accounts because i got so fed up with wasting money and pulls to get nothing, and i found my perfect account - all of hina's 4 star cards to date (which was 3 at the time), and birdcage yukina. a 4 4 star starter, which i was more than satisfied with.

i took the account for a pretty decent price, imo, for $30. and with that, i grew that account massively. in the 6 or so months i've had it, it's gone from a 4 4 star card starter to 37 fucking 4 star cards, which is absolutely unbelievable considering i nearly left a game i loved dearly because of having terrible luck.

i won't make this go on any longer than it already has, but i'll just go on to say that hina has been incredibly generous to me. out of 7 pulls for her halloween card, she managed to come out on the VERY. LAST. PULL. as for constellation hina, i went a bit nuts and spent 100 dollars for extra pulls thinking that i would need them, despite getting her on my second pull along with western tomoe and constellation sayo!

just to summarize, i just want to say i love you so much hina. happy birthday you sweet, pure angel. i hope it's just as boppin' as you are. thank you for blessing me so much, you will always be my #1. <3

and my massively unfinished ita bag <3