The RPG Duelling League
Social Forums => General Chat => Topic started by: DragonKnight Zero on January 05, 2022, 02:14:05 AM
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New year already? Didn't really register for me. Oh well.
Lufia 2 stomp continues. From the time of having a full party, gameplay gets more interesting with enemies with more varied weaknesses and resistances to pay attention to if one doesn't want to be stuck dealing scratch damage. Given how I was somewhat underleveled, the next couple of boss fights outsped Tia which complicated my survival. The clown bosses went down in 3-4 rounds since I paid attention to setting up my characters to hit their weaknesses. The one after that inflicted a casualty due to their speed advantage. And I was still without revival. Gades 1 reduced the team to a smear; no surprise since I got there at Lv 18-19.
Gades 2 gave less trouble. I gave Maxim the Mind Ring and Guy the Undead Ring to go with his Thunder Ax. Got buffs up on round one after which Maxim goes on heal duty. With Guy and Dekar slugging away for about 350-400 a round, didn't take long and nothing terrible happened.
There's more but I'm cutting it off here to get the topic up.
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Deltarune Chapter 2- I must admit that, for now, I find the overarching plot far less interesting than the moment to moment plot. Chapter 2 does use it more to purpose where it seemed a bit 'shock value' in the first, but it treads a little bit into "Lore for Lore's sake" territory. I doubt it'll pan out that way, but because the game's coming out piecemeal it is a bit just... kinda there for now.
Everything else is great. Susie is great, Ralsei feels like a more distinct character now, Noelle is great, everyone else... is serving the role they're meant to. Is good, nobody surprised.
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Bravely Default 2 - I can't believe the final boss was just Lucia from Octopath Traveller again.
Low 7 or so? I wanted to like it better but less QoL and more balance by annoyance outweigh the better pacing and more likeable cast. Granted the better pacing does make me more inclined to give it a replay later but eh.
Oh well, at least we'll always have Elvis.
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Cthulhu Saves Christmas- Fin!
I feel like this game hits its brand of humor more consistently than CStW did, which is nice to see since CSH felt a bit off. I think it's because this game feels a bit more specific and targeted in its jokes? Like, this goes a lot more into your Persona type games where the first seemed like it was trying to hit like.. the entire jRPG genre from 1986-2009. The music in particular is extremely on-point, I keep forgetting it's NOT the SLink and similar around-town music from P5.
But yeah I get the sense that some of this is kinda things they wanted in the original, but I'm glad to see them here in their own thing giving the game a more distinct and refined vibe from the original.
I uh may have unthinkingly set the game to easy so I almost don't feel qualified to assess the gameplay? It's identifiably the basic system from CSH, but it feels overall a bit streamlined just from being a fixed party. I admit I don't feel like I got the full swing of Baba or Belsnickel's personal mechanics. Some of the charm of the first game is lost by downplaying insanity as a mechanic, but with so much else going on the simplified form here work with the overall game more.
But yeah this is pretty good.
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Get in the Car, Loser- finished, including the first round of DLC (granted I played it in like Act 2).
Occasionally brilliant, extremely on the nose, always fairly relatable. I almost want to just shout out memes rather than digging in more just because with the game's length and on-the-nose-ness, getting into anything seems like it might just discourage rather than encourage people to play it.
For myself I am really glad I did the DLC though. It takes a lot of the micromanagement out of the equipment/ability system which is interesting on paper but feels like it kills the flow a bit to me, honestly. I didn't realize the entire last boss chain was in fact a chain so I kinda went in equipped wrong (the DLC sword is very useful overall but the default sword of fate is probably better for bosses) but on the other hand I was 'overlevelled' so it didn't mean much in the end.
On the whole probably the best of this "clear out my entire PC backlog" trip, but probably a game I'll be more interested in having played as other people play it.
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Lufia 2 battle report continues:
So it turns out I forgot about whole towns and dungeons since I last played. The game does have some nice scenes though the overall progression still has that strong fetch quest feel I remember from before.
Idura 2 puts up a fight due to his weakness being ice. The only characters that can really exploit this are the ones most likely to be using their turns for healing. (Ice Balls exist but are fixed power and I don't have lots of extra cash) He's also faster than everyone. Went down without anything bad happening but took some time.
Idura 3 almost wins. He confused Dekar, who in turn walloped Guy which left him weak enough for the opposition to pick him off. (Idura is still faster than everyone) A sleeping Maxim fell next as Guy was set to wake him up with an item but got killed before acting. Maxim is my only character with revival. With only Dekar and a low HP Selan, defeat looked immanent. Only because the enemies did the only set of actions that let Selan live (physicals on Dekar) did I get to carry on. I won that battle from that position and chose to keep the result rather than resetting but it was sure a close one.
I will mention that I'm not using any Ancient Cave equipment to more closely experience the intended gear curve. It won't help the enemies that much for the most part.
Devil Flower (Rogue Flower in retail) put up a fight to my surprise. It does quite heavy damage to my Lv 25-26 party when they're not saturated in blue chest armor. Also likes its status which I forgot to account for. No one had sleep protection and the boss is quite capable of sending people to dreamland. Had Selan been put to sleep early, might have lost. Had Maxim been put to sleep early, the fight would have dragged even longer than it did. (He has the Burn Sword and does the bulk of the damage) So I got lucky in spite of my careless casual approach.
Couple of Ancient Cave firsts (from the Gift file): Flash used the ST status cure on someone with a status, which has never happened before in all my past time with the game. And during the same run, I found a Safety Hat (Safety First in the patch). This is significant only because it's impossible to find in the retail game. Not "impossible unless fulfilling an obscure set of conditions". Not "rare on the level of the Pink Tail" low odds. It's truly impossible because of how the cave has no chance of headgear appearing in red chests after B9 normally. So it felt good seeing it.
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Pokemon Brilliant Diamond- fin. I remember DIamond being longer. Actually it probably was.
There's just actually nothing to say about it honestly. It feels a lot less... like there's new stuff in it than any earlier remakes? They definitely updated some of the actual pokemon lineups for trainers but like... what's available to the player and how you play the game feels so similar I can't really peg anything that's different about it at all. What was funny was some of the weird bullshit bonuses you get with mystery gift and save files from other games, turning Jirachi into my lead was fun. Otherwise just kinda... exists.
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Fire Emblem: Souen no Kiseki (aka Path of the Blue Flames, aka the one with Ike before he started pumping iron)
Despite having a giant backlog, I somehow got ensnared by this. Decided to give Maniac Mode a go. Patching a JP ROM wasn't that bad (definitely don't get it pre-patched, that's asking for trouble), too.
Now, if you search up Maniac Mode, you'll find it has a.. let's say.. mixed reputation from the first Google hits. It's more about overwhelming you with extra numbers, which can actually work for say FE7 Eliwood Hard Mode if you care about your XP rank and are training lowbies constantly, but won't really challenge immortal juggernauts that much. Also, Zapp Brannigan style "overwhelm your kill limit with waves of attacks" is actually not totally crazy in a game with expensive forging - those extra enemies will dull Titania's axes in all the blood. Really. As usual, the earlygame is the worst on this - by the time Muston / Jorge / Daniel / Aimee showed up with their shop, I'd broken Titania's Iron Axe and Steel Axe, Ike's Iron Sword & Steel Sword, Soren's Wind tome, Oscar's Iron Lance, Rhys's Heal staff (only 30 charges under JP rules!), and Boyd's Iron Axe. At least Boyd still had a decent number of uses left on his Steel Axe, Poleax, & Hammer, but… yeah, the extra enemies are notable.
The other notable change is to the XP rules. You get slightly less XP for kills. But! The enemies are a bit higher level which gives a bit more XP to offset this, chipping XP isn't affected, and there's the aforementioned waves of enemies, so you get plenty of battle XP. Bonus XP really is noticeably cut, though - you get enough to rig level-ups at the base if you want, but not enough for easy major catch-up. This has the unfortunate effect of making objectives and efficient play matter less, and going on massive killing sprees matter more - trying to rush through the river escape map (C6, "A Brief Diversion"), aside from being suicide, just doesn't pay off. You're going to have to take it slow and steady and murder everyone and eat a bonus XP penalty for not speeding through, but who cares, because the bonus XP wasn't that much. The even starker example is Feral Frontier, where slaughtering all of Muarim & Tormod's rebels for battle XP is 100% the play now rather than attempting to spare any. (This was always true, I guess, but it's MORE true on Maniac.)
This isn't all bad (and arguably bonus XP needed a nerf anyway). The extra toughness on some enemies does reward things like Soren's Adept as more relevant. Plus, at least based on Elf's old writeup, I think enemy AI changes a bit, with fewer stationary enemies - it's been far too long since I played FE9 North America, but the feral Tigers in C14 definitely move, the mages on Norris's ship in C13 (Astrid map) definitely move and can be quite annoying, and so on, which Elf's writeup seems to indicate that they don't. That said, Maniac Mode's boosts certainly aren't enough to deal with the most famous FE9 exploit, that of Earth / Earth supports, so you can still make a nigh-unkillable Ike & Oscar cooking duo if you want.
Other thoughts.. Shinon is worse in JP rules which, unironically, makes him better. I'm serious. JP Sniper doesn't have the +15% crit bonus so he's actually very good for chipping to set up kills for others, and during the very dangerous early turns of C4 ("Roadside Battle", Soren's map) he can still facetank and build walls to protect Soren & Rhys, which really helps with the extra enemies swarming you. Titania is just as amazing as usual, act shocked. The main pleasant surprise has been Mordecai - having a pre-promo tank who can hold chokepoints with no training necessary is shockingly relevant on a decent number of high-deploy count maps (C11, C13, C15), especially if you're benching some early joinees and planning to use later recruits. Do you want to keep using him in the second half of the game? Hell no, but he's an authentically good unit on some tough missions.
I'm up to C16 currently, "The Atonement." Enjoyable enough, although I am reminded that FE9 can take awhile to play itself in the backline by modern impatient standards, even when combat animations are turned off.
And oh yes, I still really like the plot & writing so far. The only nitpick I'll offer, and it's not a big one, is that Ike does a "voice of the player" moment around C8-C9 where he basically acts like he doesn't know anything at all about Gallia or the beast tribes, either in favor of tolerance or in terms of imbibed prejudices. Now, yes, you-the-human-player doesn't know anything about this fantasy world and needs to have it explained, and it's also an explicit plot point that Ike is considered lucky in Benignon to have the privilege of growing up in a tolerant community that didn't ingrain certain strong class beliefs in him. So being a little naive and shocked at prejudice is fine. Not knowing *anything*, though? That's a little too far. Wish the writers could have cooked up a conversation where the parties cover all the relevant points for the player to learn but in a way that indicates Ike is sheltered but not ignorant.
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Atelier Escha & Logy: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky- fin, Threia ending.
So it seems clear to me this game had a major rewrite shortly into production. The overall structure and framing of the game with the office comedy elements feels grafted on after a lot of the basic setting details and areas were designed. Now, a lot of that stuff is fine, and the end of the game does eventually bring back the elements that flow naturally from the setting and Ayesha, but it's intensely backloaded in a way that makes it pretty clear a lot of this was a reaction to the reception of Ayesha and the two parts just kinda exist side by side rather than building on one another in any meaningful way.
Once the original plot arrives it's decent enough, apart from just feeling like Clone and Nio had been kinda wasted to that point. Does make me curious to get to Shallie and see if they manage to bring any of that stuff forward, but honestly I get the impression... no.
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Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance- fin.
I am catastrophically bad at these games, but that's what easy mode is for. Anyways, in some ways this game does feel a bit... half, like just kinda doesn't give you much time with it's mechanics and seems like at some point in concept it meant to have a bit more stuff in various parts to kinda build out the state of things. But I don't know that I mean that as a complaint because I think being compact is a net positive for the sort of game it is. Ultimately aside from the memes it is certainly intended as a way for the series timeline to move forward if people who weren't Kojima wanted to do so, but it also functions as a sort of coda for just... acknowledging the level of effort required to really fix what's been done to the world. As well as just giving Raiden a personal story that fits his *real* history, not just the things he claimed to have believed. So that's neat.
Also, y'know, memes.
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Pokemon Legends Arceus- So the game has three clear checkpoints for the 'end'. when the credits roll, when you've unlocked all the legendaries, and the final challenge for completing the pokedex. I've reached the second, having cleared out all the 'story' content except the one you need completion for, so I'm calling the game here. I might tool around and fill out the dex for a while yet, but I think I'm ready to move on to another game overall.
Overall this is a game I'm very glad exists, although I'm not sure I'd want a second one. Although there's also places it could be improved so I'd probably play one if they went for it. In much the same way that Pokemon Go is kinda 1/3rd of the ideal pokemon game, this feels like it's counterpart, the one that's somewhere between half and 2/3rds of the ideal pokemon game. Go captures the primal desire for the ability to just go out into the world, meet other people, and catch pokemon in your own back yard. Arceus captures the primal desire to inhabit pokemon, to see them as animals and how their world might work, and also sells the idea of how pokemon would help you navigate the world and influence the development of human technology far harder than any of the traditional gym journey games.
The main fumble point... okay so it's not a bad thing in most gameplay, But they completely revamped the damage and HP formulas such the the game is far more rocket tag-y. Now, out in the wild and doing captures and battles with wild pokemon, that's all fine. It's a way of making the stealth and capture mechanics more relevant. Similarly, the shift to cool-down based turns adds more tools to your kit in 1v1 (or team vs 1) fights. But between those two things, the (rare) fight against other trainers devolves into repeatedly revenge killing one another and hoping that you didn't turn-screw yourself in the process.
But as noted, this is only a small portion of the game's actual content, and there's stuff you can do to mitigate it. Simultaneously it does stand out as a weak point in the game's overall feel and presentation just because everything else makes sense together while this one element feels undercooked.
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Atelier Shallie- we have taken the path of the eternal understudy. Fortunately Wilbell is great.
So I will freely admit I cranked down the difficulty for the penultimate and final bosses. Most of the game had a very nice balance after a very easy early game, but honestly if I have the best attack item and properly upgraded equipment I probably shouldn’t end up getting locked down by the boss’ last 20% of HP like that, y’know? At least not in a game where powering up is actually relatively arcane at times.
Everything else is mostly good, the core cast feels more like a unit and has a more distinct drive and vibe than the previous game. That said as a finale for the Dusk games it’s a mixed bag. Some characters and plot lines more or less come together (retconing Dusk as a desertification phenomenon and the overall plot of this game that rises from it is a smart move, and some series staples like Harry and Wilbell are handled nicely) but gosh it feels weird to wrap Linca’s plot but not have ‘our’ Linca take part, to say nothing of the conspicuously last minute reference to Ayesha.
Ultimately it’s solid but I was very ready to wrap it up at the end. Albeit the fact I’ve been stuck without internet for two days and played like 60% of the game in a rush contributed I imagine.
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I haven't written a post here in nearly 3 months, oh dear. Lots of stuff, most of it short, but here goes:
Cthulhu Saves Christmas - I beat it. Best Zeboyd game probably. I already said my piece in the 2021 year-end thread. Still the most recent new game I've played, it's all replays from here on...
Pathways Into Darkness - Amy was away for a week, and said I should play something she didn't give a shit about watching, like a FPS or something. So here we go. Ancient little game, Wolfenstein-era FPS meets eldritch horror-inspired text adventure. Bit of a nostalgia trip.
Kid Icarus: Uprising - Played a bunch more of this randomly. Too out of practice to particularly improve on any old benchmarks, so I just played through the game once, mostly around intensity 7 or so.
Zelda 2 - Zelda 2's actually pretty cool y'know. I did a run with 1 Life. Most things endgame kill you in 2-3 hits, certainly novel for this sort of game. Dark Link took... a lot of tries. Then I beat it with 1 Magic. Definitely easier than 1 Life, the only really notable thing is you have to wait until you've gotten every MP booster in the game in order to beat the fourth palace, since the boss there needs Reflect (costs 120 of 128 MP at Level 1 Magic) to kill. Otherwise you can still cast Best Spell (Shield) easily enough, and Life once, so hey. Hardest fight is actually Thunderbird since casting Thunder again takes all your MP, so no Shield/Jump/Reflect, makes him quite nasty. Finally, I beat the game with 4 Atk (capped at 1, initially, and I could raise it +1 every time I cleared two palaces). I'd tried 1 Atk back in the day but never beaten it, 4 is more reasonable. It's still much harder... 1 Life means you take about 4.5x damage (it varies) compared to max, but 1 Atk means you deal 1/12 as much damage... yikes! Even 4 atk is still 1/4 as much damage, so it's pretty comparable to 1 Life... harder honestly, aside from the final boss. It's a huge mercy that your Atk stat actually has no effect on Dark Link, he dies in 8 hits regardless. Thunderbird is 32 though, so that was nasty.
The lesson from this is almost surely "never pass up an Atk level to get something else, never pass up a Life level to get a Magic level" since the stats are pretty clearly ranked in that order for usefulness. Magic could have been worth more but again Shield is definitely the best spell and it only varies from 32 MP to 16, Life is the next most important and only varies from 80 to 50.
Mega Man 9 - Did one of my "must use up all weapons in a certain order". Tornado was the focus this time, so you use that up fast, it's cool though! Otherwise it's Jewel -> Magma -> Plug -> Laser Trident I think? I forget, should have written the last four down. Magma's a bit better than I realized, I didn't realize the "extra damage if you successfully shotgun an enemy with all three flames" applies to all bosses, not just Hornet Man. Endgame was brutal and I had to resort to E-tanks, the boss rush followed by arguably the hardest Wily in the series in a single run of weapons leaves no margin for error.
Mega Man 1 / 2 / 10 - More random Mega Man replays. I tried to replay 10 on Hard but got completely destroyed, I forgot how nasty that is. Normal was enough, considering I'm rusty at the game... haven't played it since it was new (when I apparently played it at least 8 times?! And I don't even think of it as one of my favourites...).
Mega Man X8 / X4 - And still more. For MMX8 I did a run of Hard Mode, no X. This... yeah gets really horrifying towards the end. Normally I lean on how powerful all of X's upgrades make him... in particular the invincible dash and damage halving. Having none of that made Sigma and Lumine in particular rather hellish, but it was very satisfying to get good enough to prevail! MMX4 was a standard run using X. I apparently hadn't played the game since 2009 which is crazy considering I like it quite a lot! Mostly clean sailing until the final boss. Good lord both of these games have crazy hard final bosses. It's funny how classic Mega Man doesn't really go in for that too much, the toughest MMX finals are really on another level especially if you haven't got all the game-breaking powerups.
Fire Emblem 7 - Did a Hector Hard Mode file. Fliers good, Raven good, cavaliers good (well Kent at least, Sain decided to gain neither str nor spd and Lowen didn't do much better). Used Marcus until around Chapter 26 or so, he's great. Nerd shit:
Raven 158. Florina 157. Fiora 148. Kent 133, died at Cog of Destiny. Heath 127. Hector 91. Marcus 78. Priscilla 64. Harken 53. Hawkeye 50, died at Sands of Time. Pent 44. Lucius 38. Matthew 38. Vaida 32. Lowen 30. Eliwood 29. Erk 29, died at Dragon's Gate. Guy 29. Lyn 26. Jaffar 24. Louise 24. Bartre 17. Isadora 13. Rebecca 13. Oswin 12. Nino 8. Rath 5. Dart 4. Athos 3. Canas 3. Dorcas 3, died at Peddler Merlinus. Legault 3. Sain 2. Renault 1. Wil 0.
Currently working on another Three Houses file (of course).
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Fire Emblem 3H:
Beat Claude's route, playing Edelgard's.
Hard mode isn't very hard thanks to Divine Pulse but I'm unwilling to try Maddening due to seeing things that gave me nightmares. The plot and characters are great and the class system is very good. Not sure it can keep my interest for 3 playthroughs but definitely glad I played it.
The endgame seemed to drag in Verdant Wind. Kind of ran out of actions to take with all the time that we were given. By contrast, I find the time pressure to recruit people in White Clouds very stressful.
I want to like everyone but the idea of having to kill the characters is so dang sad. I can see why people might want someone to blame the sadness of it on, but it's not that simple and I guess that's the entire point.
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Stomping Lufia 2 - the writeup continues
I've already finished, it's getting everything I want to express out in text that's dragging along slowly.
4 person party again. And the first big dungeon with Lexis can troll in a way that is probably unintended. About half the enemies there are resistant to Neutral. The strongest buyable weapons at the time are all Neutral element. Given how the last dungeon has a Burn Sword and a Fly Ax to find for free, this is a mean trick to pull on a player who goes to the trouble to grind money to upgrade weapons only to have them do less damage than a lower attack elemental weapon.
The dungeon also has the nasty Assassins. They outspeed the party, are one of those that resist Neutral, are a hassle to avoid due to their movement, and can instakill if the RNG feels like it. I do have three sources of ID protection by this point which does mitigate the danger somewhat (even if the Undead Ring is the only one I had in play when I went through).
The seas of the world are open after the events of that dungeon. Very little else reaches their level of danger in my time with Lexis. Other than trying to raid the Tower of Truth early. Haha, turns out those monsters are a threat to a Lv 30 party with sub-optimal gear. I actually leveled up my party to 35 before the Mountain of No Return. Not because I felt I needed the levels, but so that Artea doesn't start 5-6 levels ahead of everyone.
The monster data for the retail game seems to indicate the Gargoyle bosses are Hard as well as Flying but I think the patch removes the Hard attribute. Maxim's Pumpkin Jewel did less damage that I expected. Guy's Fly Ax did perform up to expectations. He started with enough IP to open with a Flying Smash that took one from full HP to nearly nothing.
My favorite part of the sub upgrade is no random battles while underwater. Of course I go everywhere other than the next plot point for treasure as well as visiting a town early. Got the key from Dragon Mountain but didn't go farther in.
More to come in a later post, including some actual boss fights.
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Hard mode isn't very hard thanks to Divine Pulse but I'm unwilling to try Maddening due to seeing things that gave me nightmares. The plot and characters are great and the class system is very good. Not sure it can keep my interest for 3 playthroughs but definitely glad I played it.
The endgame seemed to drag in Verdant Wind. Kind of ran out of actions to take with all the time that we were given. By contrast, I find the time pressure to recruit people in White Clouds very stressful.
Yeah, the game's time-management activity system kinda collapses late in the second phase of the game. There's a bit of a tense rush to get professor XP during White Clouds so you can have more actions which lets you do all the Paralogues and get needed skill training, but then you have a big empty desert of what to do with your time in the second half. I guess it's okay in that it lets you "catch up" if you've changed your mind on a skill training path or realize you've invested in the wrong spot, but meh. If I had to guess, it's that the devs realized that cross-house Paralogues are less likely to fire in part 2 (Ferdinand / Lysithea, Leonie / Linhardt, and Mercie / Caspar are all super missable) and were hesitant about making too many of them... and too many single-character paralogues (e.g. Marianne, Hubert) would make it so that there's Too Many Paralogues and dilute focus... but yeah, the result is that there's too much stuff in White Clouds and not enough after it. (The DLC, of course, makes this problem worse by adding two more White Clouds paralogues to The List.)
For Maddening: If you're unsure about Maddening, I'd recommend doing a New Game+ Maddening. You can essentially adjust your own difficulty by how much you abuse or don't abuse the NG+ features (i.e. do you equip the imported super-battalions from your previous playthrough or not, do you use it to unlock super good skills on Byleth early or boost their professor rank, etc.). It's also worth mentioning that the hardest parts of Maddening tend to be the early-game and the final maps, and if you only have Blue Lions left to do, the Blue Lions pretty cleanly have the best team for smashing the early game. Dedue, Dimitri, and Felix are all very solid even with practically no skill training. That definitely helps some IMO.
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Tales of Xillia 2- sweet jebus even in the annals of Tales final dungeons that's bad.
Everything else is good! Game is good. I have never seen a Tales game really pull off the depiction of grief quite so well as Chapter 12 of ToX2 does it. The cast benefits so much from already existing and getting to do "well shit what should my life be now" instead of having to be established and have a Defined Character Arc to go through it's not funny. Leia and Alvin are great in this and they are... not, originally. Elize's personal character chapters are kinda eh, but as a contributor to the entire party she works so much better with just a year of maturity to her. Milla and Jude are still very, very good. Rowan is mostly the same, except actually gets to have character moments and spotlight in this game!
Also like, all the actual plot native to this game is good. Much better expression of underlying political/racial relations in the wake of sudden change than some other games I could name.
Now, the game actually does have problems. It is fucking MEAN, like "I just turned it down to easy because I wanted to finish the game in a reasonable time frame and not have to grind" mean. The entire thing is broken up into a fairly rigid chapter structure, and one thing it's doing with that is trying to enforce the player going through every single sidequest in order to keep up with the overall power curve. It's an attempt at padding in a game that's honestly plenty strong enough and lengthy enough without it, and I know exactly why they did it and also wish they hadn't. Like, this game is built from the bones of Tales of Xillia with some unused/probably completed but unimplemented content from that original game, and because of that it doesn't have that 'explore' edge that one might expect from a certain kind of jRPG. So, they fleshed it out so to speak to make up for the player knowing all the dungeons in theory. But... why though, it's fine to just let the game stand alone based on what you developed unique to it, y'know?
Might have to shuffle around some rankings for the series, we'll see.
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Tales of Xillia 2- Stuff
Glad I'm not the only person who liked ToX2. Like yeah, the game's not perfect but I really enjoy the premise of all the different scenarios. It's a neat way of looking at a set of established characters and exploring more about their characters as well as getting into interesting scenarios that ToX1 couldn't get into. I think the DL as a whole isn't very receptive to it (something about Ludger being an awful main) but the entire set up of it is something I really liked. The fact that the more flawed characters have some of the more interesting "what ifs" (hi Alvin) is cool too.
Anyway, right, games. People still play these right?
SD Gundam Generation Cross Rays:
I've touched upon this in Discord briefly. Long story short, it plays very similarly to the PSX generation title (G-Gen F) but it's updated in terms of some of the polish, graphically better and includes the newer Gundam series titles. On the whole, the main weakness of the gameplay lies in the change in the mech design philosophy. G-Gen F did this right by making each every suit have some sort of built in weakness, which gives you an incentive to keep building up your armory and creating more suits an ACE data. Here though, a lot of the suits are similar and don't really have this design philosophy. You don't have things such as eating weaker counters, forcing low accuracy shots with terrain, avoiding counters altogether, kiting, etc. because a lot of the mechs have similar weapon ranges, accuracy and such. Pilot stats matter more and there's a completely revamped skill system. However, it would've done the game a whole lot of favors if the skill system was also more utilized by enemies. Hard mode in this game just inflates character stats but not skill set ups. So at the end of the game, playing on the bonus difficulty is still kinda of joke. Even if you're at -150 stat disadvantage, not much an enemy can do if you're shooting it repeatedly from 11 tiles away. I sunk a lot of hours into it - it's a good grind game too since building levels, upgrading mechs and such takes a while and the entire game is about 150 hours. Think I'm done for now. Overall, still a solid 7/10 but a disappoint 7 since I was expecting more.
X-Com Enemy Within:
I had previously played X-Com back in like early 2020 or something but never finished it. I finally sat down and finished a standard campaign but on PC. It's about what I remembered. PC has better loading, better map visibility etc. But the gameplay is basically the same. My biggest issue with X-Com is that there is very little character related work so its hard to relate to it on a writing/plot level. The premise is good, but there's no driving force here since Bradford is barely a character, you play as a mute CO and Valhalen/Shen are basically NPCs. Your soldiers obviously can't do much since they can die but it wouldn't been nice to get something that you can be attached or related to. Game time was about 36 hours and I did pretty much everything including the DLC missions. I think I had it at a 7 at the time. It's probably the same still. I can see myself going back to it, but considering I like Chimera Squad better and X-Com 2 is supposedly a big upgrade, its kind of hard to see how it will hold up over time.
X-Com Chimera Squad:
Yeah, I like this game. It's still X-Com but battles are now in smaller spaces, characters have personalities and there's no perma-death. What?! Blasphemy. Chimera Squad does a whole bunch of interesting things for the series, and this change from soldiers permanently dying to a 3 turn countdown is one of those things I think hardcore fans severely dislike (see also: Fire Emblem) but myself and I presume the DL as a whole probably sees as a net benefit. There's some interesting dynamics but what it ultimately reminds me of is FFT. You can definitely get into some tense situations where someone is bleeding out and you need to prioritize between stabilizing that person, repositioning or doing something else. I think I appreciate that a lot more than just "Oh that guy is dead and there isn't anything I can do about it". Of course, FFT did have actual permadeath so after 3 turns, the person does crystallizes, but you could theoretically keep playing. However, the time spent training a new unit is almost never worth the cost of just restarting so I think the comparison is very fair. Also, if someone is stabilized, they can't rejoin the mission if it has multiple phases and you have to deploy a back up android instead, which are significantly weaker - so getting KO'd is still always bad.
What else? The character balance is pretty much spot-on. There are 11 PCs and you can only choose 8. However, I've found that all the agents have pretty much their own selling points. I was never really severely disappointed with any of them, although I didn't recruit the supposed weak-link of the cast. There were moments where someone feels a little underwhelming but I found that was also often based on the scenario. There are different mission types and some PCs are just way better than others depending on the mission. For example, Claymore is frequently cited as one of the strongest chars due to his ability to pump out a lot of AoE damage. However, the fact that he only has 9 Move and can hit friendlies with his grenades means that he's more of liability than the others on escort levels. Flip side, someone like Cherub doesn't pull out a lot of damage, but can become cover as well as shield allies from any damage for a single hit is great on those since the shield works on the VIPs. The difficulty is pretty random. I've seen it described as a wave and I think that's correct. Some levels are notably harder such as the boss missions, but then immediately after, the next story mission is focused on getting intel on the new enemy faction so then all the enemies there are grunts. Game keeps an edge even late, which is very nice.
Ultimately, I just like all the systems here. Between the time management (choosing between research, training or getting supplementary resources) and combat, it's a good title. Shorter than regular X-Com, but I think WA4 proves to us that you don't need to be a long game to be a great game. It's probably a solid 8-9 right now. We'll see how it ends up, but yeah. Like Grefter said, just punchy and solid. I'd recommend this to other DLers if you like X-Com and are looking for a shorter title.
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NieR Automata- my first platinum! Thanks Yoko Taro!
But no so. One interesting thing is comparing my reaction to this to how I experienced NieR, which I had a similar arc with (well, I finished the A route in Automata near release but), because knowing NieR’s story before playing it the game felt a bit rushed, like it was so eager to get to the tragic beats it didn’t always lay proper groundwork so some of them landed but many did not. Automata was not that at all, they were so thoroughly invested in the mental states of the cast that knowing exactly how this all ends made many of the big tragic beats hit harder.
Although it’s also possible this is more that Automata also has big uplifting beats too. Like, few things land as well as those first chiptune notes of Weight of the World in ending E.
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Mega Man Zero- So I will freely admit, this collection does the thing where I can turn on 'story mode' and just have all the various upgrades and y'know what, the game's... okay, that way.
I played the first stage legit and then got up to the boss in one of the first mission sets and y'know what, decided to just start over. Good thing honestly, the game just kinda does dumb bullshit a lot? But also it kinda recycles stages in a way that sucks and also wow, just fucking wow that bomb mission.
Bosses... I despite Anubis actually, otherwise I do feel like if I wasn't able to just faceroll them because all upgrades most of them would have been pretty reasonable, in a real "hey yeah just roll this four of five times and you'll probably manage". Granted, this woulda also made the boss rush hell.
Not sure what else to say about it because I feel a bit unqualified. Like, I have not actually played any MMX games! Well. Command Mission but. I do appreciate that the game is actually understated in what it's doing, they're really trying to sell the overall scenario with just a mission briefing from Ciel each stage and it kinda works? That's cool. You can sorta tell I think that Copy X was meant to be the real deal in concept and they changed it because, oops, they kept the MMX series going alongside this one, but I think that works overall actually. X himself falling to that point would feel more contrived than "people wanted their heroes back so much they tried to clone them and it went sideways". Not that this is some wildly story driven thing but, y'know.
I do think the game kinda assumes you've played yourself some MMX, just in terms of understanding how core controls work, but maybe MMX is designed that way too I dunno.
But yeah so MMZ1 isn't very good. I think everyone knew that? But it's true.
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Triangle Strategy - Is good! Definitely a worthy successor to the TO/FFT style of game. Except for not having a class system.
So let's talk about non-gameplay first. The game spins a pretty interesting story about three once-warring powers now at peace (spoilers, the peace doesn't last). There's pretty good setting work into how the three nations vary and why they clash. Competent enough political plot stuff. One thing I will definitely hype about the game is the conflict is intensely human and political; nobody's trying to summon Satan, and there isn't a creepy cult of ugly old men sacrificing babies. Game delivers on that promise better than almost any other Japanese RPG I can think of.
Front and centre in the game's storytelling is its choices. The game features a bunch of story branches based on the choices you make... or rather, convince your friends to vote for. A lot of the choices are really quite interesting. The big endgame choice in particular works really well.
For gameplay, the combat is certainly quite enjoyable. It's definitely more TO than FFT in that it can get kinda slow and bogged down at times, but if you enjoy studying the turn order and thinking about who will act when and how to keep your folks safe, it's certainly a good time. Highly adjustable difficulty is nice; I played on Hard until one very difficult fight around 2/3 through, then switched to Normal. Hard was certainly tough, Normal I never lost after switching to but I'd also had to get pretty good at the game by that point.
You get to deploy 10 characters, they're all pretty neat and varied with reasonably interesting skillsets and playstyles. My only complaints are that (a) there's not much customization, this is closer to a WA4 situation, and (b) what customization there is is... quite bad. There's a crafting system (which is really a skill system) but it's clunky and the choices you make are poorly documented. Rabbids this ain't.
But honestly that's my only major complaint? Very solid game all around. Rather clearly the best game the Square Enix Bad Title JRPG Studio has made, because it has the best writing and at least arguably the best gameplay (you could make a case for a lot of their games, but y'know this one's a strategy RPG). 9/10 area.
Other stuff I've played recently:
FE3H Cavalry Only
Rules are simple, once hitting Level 10, everyone must be a (non-flying) cavalry class. That's Cavalier in Intermediate, either Paladin or Valkyrie in Advanced, then finally expanding to include Bow Knight, Great Knight, Dark Knight, and Holy Knight.
Perhaps the most challenging thing about the run is that you don't get the good intermediate masteries so damage is lower than I was used to. The other challenging thing is having no magic in Intermediate tier.
Everyone with a riding boon got Move+1, which was most of my team. Not everyone, as you'll see.
Byleth (130): Paladin. Hit things with a Brave Lance, had good stats. Not a standout unit but not bad.
Edelgard (129): Great Knight. Mostly because I wanted Axefaire. Great Knight isn't a great class (har har), but she had her usual good points of stupid high Atk, high bulk (useful with no great dodgetanks), and Raging Storm.
Hubert (101): Frozen Lance Paladin -> Dark Knight. A pretty classic build. Cavalier Hubert is a bit limited and Paladin isn't as effective as normal due to no Fiendish Blow, but still generally competent.
Ferdinand (90): Paladin. Used Swift Strikes once he got that. He was kinda generic, not as good as Sylvain.
Bernadetta (124): Bow Knight. Did Vengeance things, not having Death Blow makes it more useful relatively, but she was still kinda struggling late in Paladin. Bow Knight was a huge improvement to gain the utility of Encloser and huge range in general.
Dorothea (63): So uh fun fact, I benched Dorothea after Level 10. Started wondering if that was a mistake, so kept her along on adjutant duty. When she did hit 20 I pulled her out again, reclassed to Valkyrie, and never looked back. Obviously good from that point on, Hexblade/Thoron/Meteor/Physic you've seen this before. LMAO me thinking Riding bane would actually matter.
Petra (98): Bow Knight. Definitely nerfed by this challenge, the lower speed of cavalry classes + no Darting Blow seriously cut into her doubling, albeit she was still way faster than anyone else, with one exception (~30 speed, next best was around ~20). Was fairly cool as a Bow Knight, but definitely suffered as a Paladin.
Sylvain (96): Paladin -> Dark Knight. Swift Strikes bot like Ferdinand, though his higher power did help a little... what helped more is getting to Dark Knight, and suddenly he had Physic and armour-killing as well, nicely versatile at the end.
Ingrid (33): Paladin. Got her midgame when her stats were good, but the build is unkind to her the same way it was to Petra and she had no promise of Bow Knight in the future, so eventually got benched.
Marianne (83): Like Hubert she could use a magic CA in Intermediate tier. Unlike him she got to go Valk in Advanced and could use spells and Physic. Very solid.
Leonie (133): Bow Knight. So uh somehow she got the most kills? And it's understandable because she's very good on this run. Better speed than the Swift Strike boys, promoted soon after the timeskip into Bow Knight and just rocks then, very versatile in her offence with Point Blank Volley. Earlier she just has generically good stats.
Hapi (54): Used her because riding boon but honestly this might have been a mistake, due to no magic CA she was so bad in Intermediate. Once she did hit Valkyrie, see Marianne pretty much (i.e. she was good), but was a bit behind on levels. Oh well. Impregnable Wall + her personal put in good work when appropriate as usual.
Jeritza (36): MVP while he was around. With Darting Blow he was even faster than Petra. Great strength, good bulk. Smashed things. Windsweep. His usual downside of missing Death Blow isn't a downside any more.
Super Mario Kart - Beat 150cc all cups auto-mini again. Then did it as Bowser, at Amy's request. Fun fun~
Metroid Dread - Replayed, got 100% this time. No guides, no videos, very satisfying. Still extremely happy with this game, there was the perfect mix of challenge for the puzzles/execution needed to get 100%. A couple of the shinespark ones were definitely very tricky!
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Radical Dreamers- did the primary path, not sure if I'll go hunting for anything else since sounds like they actually expect you do flail.
Gets a shocking amount of mileage out of implication. There's several scenes that just have characters reacting to something without entirely knowing why, and trusting that the player will know, or figure, that they should know two of these characters from Chrono Trigger and infer why particular things effect them the way they do. It's surprising how well it works. And several things, especially the intro, make a lot of Chrono Cross make way more sense because when CC remade this, they carried those elements over while changing their context in a somewhat nonsensical way. But yeah, this is neat.
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and there isn't a creepy cult of ugly old men sacrificing babies.
Me, the person who took Frederica's route: well, that is technically correct. of course, the truth is worse hyzante delenda est
Anyways, Triangle Strategy good apart from the things that are less good, at Ch18, haven't really gotten back to it due to a mixture of deciding if this is the part where I give up on trying to go through all the story maps on Hard and also juggling like three other things poorly.
Super Robot Wars T: help im being attacked by an even bigger military-industrial complex and late-stage capitalism
Dark Deity: help im being attacked by a probably bad switch port of a probably buggy mess of a fire emblem clone
Crystal Project: help im being attacked by open exploration ff5
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Mega Man Zero 2- huh. mega man plot.
Ended up playing this on cheat mode too, I feel like I just don't quite brain correctly for some of the bosses. That said, what's here is a lot better and it felt less like just slamming my face into a wall and more "y'know what, I'm kinda just playing these for funsies, not for mastery, so fuck it cheat mode". Nothing is anywhere near the tier of the bomb mission, and the bosses are generally pretty sensible. Without having played the MMX games, I feel like this game *actually* made it's boss cast the sort of noble types that MMX sometimes tried to paint mavericks as? Like, the conflict between reploids and humans feels real here in a way I don't think it ever would in that series. But y'know, just guessing on that.
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Mega Man Zero 3-
D’ya know Suikoden? And if you play them in order Suikoden II feels like “oh this was the game they were making the whole time and the first game was like an alpha build they shoved out the door while they kept working on the real game”?
That’s what playing Mega Man Zero 3 is like. This is the actual completed version of Mega Man Zero and the first two games were alpha builds with partially-complete mechanics they released to fund the finished game.
So I ended up playing this way all the way through legit, and it's just very good at being this kinda game. Well, legit, I still used the checkpoints because life systems are for suckers, and my ranking started high then dipped well into the C range by the end because I am bad at video games and still used enough elves to just start facerolling bosses in the last stretch, but y'know. Anyway it has far fewer "why are you LIKE this" bosses than the previous games (especially zero 1 obviously but Zero 1 isn't... good, this is known), and the final stretch is really something. It's not a flaw exactly, but I do feel like it's a bit of a shame the third form of the final boss isn't its own stage with its own checkpoint, because dang, that is a complex fight I just spammed elf healing to get through because I just did two other bosses. Felt like I didn't get a chance to actually feel out this fight that was clearly the most complex boss design in the series!
But yeah I'm probably gonna cheat-mode through Z4 just because I've reached the point I'm ready to move on but this series begs to be played in sequence, but nice that I actually, factually played at least one for realsies.
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Mega Man Zero 4- yeah I did the thing and just straight facerolled this in cheat mode because I'm a bit ready to move on. But gosh, game's good. Not quite as brutal (mostly) Zero 3, so I probably could have done fine legit, but yeah, just feeling finished here.
It's weird to not have that edge of goofy half-sarcasm when talking about Mega Man Plot!! so... probably gonna just leave that for later. It's shockingly effective between the four games.
Um. Yeah this doesn't have quite the same punch as Z3 and I don't think the boss slate is quite as good, but I do like that it feels like a proper sequel and plays around with new ways of doing things, even if it's a bit of a mixed bag overall. The weather system is a neat idea, and let them do some more wild stage design, but I have a feeling I was probably happier playing in cheat mode and not having to engage with item farming to get The Good Stuff.
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Mega Man X- my quest to clear out backlog nonsense continues.
Wow so I'm told that dash became default after this and I can't imagine having played the whole game not knowing Chill Penguin was the stage you did first if you knew what was good and fun. That first stage was... a lot, having come off all the Zero games.
Anyway so this legacy collection doesn't have the checkpoint system which... I do get it, MMX just isn't as hard as any given zero game, but gosh I missed it. Otherwise yeah, this is a good game what holds up decently well, and it's fun to kinda get a sense of what these games would be like if you played it no upgrades because... it'd be classic mega man, the design sensibilities are all classic mega man, but X himself is so much stronger as you go. It's a neat bit of symmetry between the conceit and the actual game feel.
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Mega Man X4- I think this shall be the cap of this Mega Man journey.
Played Zero because, after the previous game, I missed a lot of Zero's tools and yeah. It is a bit of a shame to lose the armor hunting game I guess, but on the other hand I didn't even get a subtank in this game because they are both bad to get. Yeesh.
Anyway I set it to easy mode, which seems to just like quarter incoming damage or so. So well bye all the things meant to balance Zero >.> yeah.
It's funny because as best as I can tell, the consensus rankings on the series is something like 1>4>2>5>3>6>7, with 8 too divisive to reliably place, but also as best I can tell the series didn't really form it's distinct identity until this game. So basically it peaked exactly when it became more distinct from Classic mega man, which probably is also why they've made 3 classic games and no X games in the past 15 years.
Anyway, since I was playing Zero the emphasis is on just knowing your business anyways, but yeah being on easy I was super able to just faceroll all the bosses and get away with it, but I do think the overall stages were friendlier than X1. Well, except for the damn jetski level. However they're also less interactive and not quite as fleshed out for exploration as in X1, so I can definitely see where that's considered stronger overall.
But yeah it's... interesting where with Zero I was pretty keyed up to get to the next one once Zero 3 was also a good video game, but in X... yeah, I'm good I think. Good games, not gonna go nuts trying to play all of them. I dunno why Zero makes all the MEGA MAN PLOT work but... it kinda does. It's still weird.
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Triangle Strategy: Beat the Golden path on NG+.
8/10. Outstanding gameplay and writing; by far the best title this team has done. I dock it a little for the polish/transparency issues, but it's hard to complain about a tightly balanced SRPG with completely customizable challenge.
My final team was the core eight+Julio and Decimal. Decimal is nuts.
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The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe
(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FRtD7R9VUAA9wAr?format=jpg&name=small)
Finished it up. Well mostly (there's some super-obscura stuff that's skippable as usual), but got the "Test Achievement Please Ignore" achievement, which I figure is close enough. Recommended! 25 dollars might be a little pricy but if you own the original you get a discount, and eh, it's still worthwhile. The writers haven't lost their touch, and now they can have some fun with sequels / nostalgia / etc.
Unfortunately, per reputation, it's truly a game best experienced, so not gonna talk a lot! I guess given that we're RPG fans here, there's one surprisingly effective part of the game that's rather Shin Megami Tensei-esque? But SMT is a big series so that could mean anything from "Mara penis chariot" to "Stanley visits a Japanese high school". You'll know it when you're there.
Triangle Strategy:
Took a hack at this. I'm enjoying it; there's definitely some cheeky tactical stuff you can do that's a good once-in-a-while option that makes you feel like a badass, most notably anything involving roofs and Hughette / Anna. Up to C13 or so on Hard.
Gameplay wise, my one comment is that this is a rare game where item use is truly balanced by budget. Healing items are extremely good - vital even, given that resurrection isn't a thing and enemy damage is high. One character running a distraction and chugging potions while entertaining multiple other characters is a very solid strategy to give the rest of the team time to finish off their foes, and this is gonna put a strain on item reserves. Meanwhile, the amount of items you can buy is limited, and doesn't refill after every mission (it's every 2 missions or so instead?), meaning you could theoretically get a bit stuck if you too-aggressively used your healing items and there aren't more for sale. Anyway, the result is that buying out the merchant's stock is pretty important, and all the Other Stuff to spend money on lies unbought. (Attack items are useful too of course, but see above for budget problems - definitely a once-in-awhile thing, although good on Frederica after she gets her Fire damage up passive, since that works with Firestones and she needs to take turns off spellcasting sometimes.) It works out, I guess (makes the choice of when to use items important!), but it's definitely a bit unusual - most games would have weaker but more plentiful items.
Writing wise, I think this is definitely shows the effect of Game of Thrones, specifically the TV version. This might be a little unfair (the War of the Roses and the like certainly existed for FFT to be based on), but the terminology borrowings ("ser"), untrustworthy nobles (more so than the books), teleporting armies, a banquet that is actually a betrayal, a public execution of a leader by beheading... seems kinda direct. I do respect that similar to Suikoden V, the narrative takes some time to introduce the political situation before upsetting the apple cart, for all that I kinda wish it better established / explained one key part of the plot. Specifically, how the heck did Aesfrost invade so easily to set things off? I guess if the country really is tiny per later thoughts, or at least sparely populated, they could just float down the river with 100 guys and win, but I wish that Our Heroes would either establish that this sudden victory was shocking and weird and implied far more traitors than just the nobles in the castle allied with Patriette. It's very bizarre with everyone acting like Aesfrost is the huge unstoppable favorite vs. Glenbrook in C5-C10 or so, but nobody seemed to think that was the case in C1-C4. France had their king captured and could fight on just fine in the 100 years war! And how big is the land (including all 3 in-game nations)? The differing landscapes suggest some size, but everything else makes it seem more like the size of one country - and not even a particularly big one (England at most, probably more like the Netherlands / Israel), it's less than a day from the Wolforts home to the capital and less than a day to the mines as well. Also, the backstory of the earlier war still doesn't make tons of sense, but maybe that will change later. Anyway, will maybe write more once I actually finish a route.
I'm running the core 8 + Rudolph + currently Archibald usually (although for the mission where you're trapped in a ravine, I took LadderMan instead whose name I forget). Rudolph is pretty funny - the "Sideshow Bob stepping on rakes" strategy works pretty well for the last part of the fight as traps are extremely good vs. single powerful enemies who waste their turn stepping on a trap, and he's weirdly tanky for an archer. One aspect of the system is that for some gimmick characters, they basically just want to spam their one good move over and over - LadderMan couldn't fight, but he could use a high-accuracy delay move, so I guess after dropping your ladder then removing it after everyone's escaped up it, you just spam that the rest of the battle. But I guess this isn't new, certainly plenty of FFT characters / classes that basically just spam their one money move.
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Transformers Devastation- Sure was a Platinum B Team game. Well, that's slightly unfair, it has flashes of their good stuff but yeah, you can tell this was a budget title made because it was income. Still has some good stuff, but honestly the first mission is a drag and it's like... a third of the actual total game for some reason? It's weird.
Pretty alright.
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Lufia 2 boss crush:
So after a long stretch without substantial boss battles, Lufia 2 dishes out several in quick succession. This is where paying attention to its battle mechanics sees payoff. Fights were done in the 40-45 range; I didn't intentionally seek out levels.
Venge Ghost was always a breather boss as it wastes half its turns doing nothing. This time I had 3 party members outfitted to hit its light weakness and the only reason I didn't have a 4th was because I didn't want to spend the cash. Wasting half your turns doing nothing will not end well when the fight is over in 4 rounds. Preying on the light weakness took the fight from "easy win" to "obliteration."
White Dragons: OK, this is a regular encounter but tied to plot and has boss music. The only difficulty was setting up my party to one-round it. Unless all 3 use Cold Stream, I think my team will be fine. Spent the 20000 to give Selan Firebird for this only for it to turn out unnecessary as Artea with Fire Ring does enough to enable my one-round win.
Fire Dragon: That humble Pearl Brace from way earlier in the game is Selan's best shield for this fight thanks to its unlisted fire resistance. This boss pretty much only uses fire damage (yes the physical is fire element). Other preparation include giving Selan the Ice Ring along with teaching her Ice Valk, Artea sleep immunity, Maxim the Dragonslayer, and Guy the Fly Ax. Artea is on heal duty, everyone else is hitting a weakness.
I kind of goofed with my preparation where the boss was faster than everyone and I had no Agility buffing on my team. But the fight ended before anything bad happened due to the Agility woes. Selan is doing 600 a cast and the muscle men were do over 1500 with their weapons IP or around 500 with regular physicals. So that 7500 HP went down in about 4 rounds.
Ghost Ship: Hahaha, undead boss. Selan and Guy used healing IP that did 3964 damage to its 10,000 HP. Valor from Artea hits for 934. It was down in two rounds. Only reason I didn't one-round kill is because I was too cheap to pick up a Tough Hide for Maxim as its healing IP is good for maybe 2000 (didn't check this game).
Tank: OK don't really have much to say about this one. I didn't have that many options on hand for exploiting the armored trait and even then they weren't that powerful. Maybe the patch removed that attribute. Just made sure Artea was silence protected. I remembered to teach Artea Fake before coming but I don't think he needs the Agility for this one. It will be relevant on the next fight.
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Team Punchboy punches their way through Ivalice:
Turns out coming up with silly theme names for the team was enough to get to start a Monk SCC. Hopefully I don't put myself into a corner later in the game while rushing through. Ramza gets named Kenshiro who is known for punching things hard enough to make them explode. I guess I could have used his actual birthday but was too lazy to look it up. Anyways made him a Scorpio. I know I didn't want Capricorn or Taurus as that makes Lionel Gate more difficult than it needs to be but didn't want bad compat with Gemini and Sagitauras which show up often in assassination missions. So my usual Virgo Ramza is no go. Plus Scorpio gets good compat with Zombag who's going to be baited into Hamedo.
Gariland: Yep, this gets a writeup. I stalled it out so that Delita could gain enough JP for Throw Stone for future use. Got a crystal for Ramza and two boxes before ending the fight.
Time to hit up the Soldier Office. I'm looking for male units with 67 or more Brave and anything 50 Faith or below. Zodiac I'll settle for anything. This goes faster than I had anticipated which is welcome. Recruit Axel (Capricorn), Captain Falcon (Capricorn), and Jin (Taurus) I settle for 66 Brave on Axel planning to use story fights to make up the difference. Other two I rolled lucky with 70 Brave on both with Jin having the perfect 70/40 for a melee class SCC. This bankrupts my War Funds. Last recruit will wait a bit until I'm less broke, plus I can only bring 3 into Mandalia. Teach all 3 recruits and Ramza Throw Stone and nothing else. Yes I am living dangerously. I give Delita Item secondary.
Mandalia Plains: Even though I don't need Algus alive, I want him around at least long enough to pick up Throw Stone. This can be troublesome as Algus seems to be suicidal charging into the biggest concentration of enemies. I didn't stall for crystals/chests though looking back it may have been better to do so given how broke I was. Anyways, all 4 of my units reach job level 2 to unlock Knight. Ramza also has enough extra Squire JP for Gained JP up so I teach him that too.
The money situation is felt hard here since I don't want to wander into a random with 4 naked Knights. I sell some of the starting consumable items that aren't likely to see use and some extra weapons and scrape up enough to get two sets or armor and a second Long Sword. The first random I only bring in Ramza and Jin as shieldless Knights with 3 of the starting generics. They get enough actions to unlock Monk during that first battle. Turn them into Monks, Axel and Captain Falcon's turn to go through Knight. Pick up what gear upgrades I can after each fight. 2-3 more randoms later, I feel I can finally spare the cash to hire the last punchboy. Balrog (Libra) is the last member of the SCC team. 3 more battles before he unlocks Monk and at this point, I remove all non-Monk skills I had been leaving on the others. This process netted enough JP for everyone but Balrog to pick up Wave Fist. I also have just enough cash to get up to 6 sets of Battle Boots though I am short a Leather Outfit. Feel I can get away with cutting corners and move on.
Sweegy Woods: Jin sits out having the highest EXP out of the SCC group besides forced Kenshiro. Delita and Algus are both Squires with Throw Stone and Item secondary. Between here and Dortor, I plan to have Delita scrape up enough Squire JP for Gained JP up so I do stall a bit after 2-3 enemies have died to let them get more actions. Finish with Delita about 20 JP away from Gained JP up which is close enough.
Could go back and buy more armor now that I have cash but choose to cut corners and press on. Surely that 5 HP won't matter?
Dortor (0 resets): The first map of the challenge. Same group as the last battle and same setups. Kenshiro and Balrog advance on the ground while Axel and Captain Falcon go up towards longbow Archer. The longbow archer gets one turn and a pair of Wave Fists down it before it can get a second. Knight has Defend, nearby Wizard does not. So Wizard is lured into casting a spells and gets oneshotted midcharge by Balrog's fist.
Now I goofed because the second Wizard had Defend and I failed to stay in sync with its CT. So it moved after Kneshiro had punched someone and fried him. Wasn't able to get him to safety and he fell. Monk offense, Delita, and Algus were able to finish thins before the countdown expired. Balrog has enough JP for Wave Fist now so no more suffering with skillless Monks.
Sand Rats (0 resets): Lots of Wave Fisting enemies through walls. Delita is in Knight with Guts secondary and Gained JP up with the hope I can get him enough Knight JP for Equip Armor before the end of the chapter. Despite Algus being the only source of restoration, wasn't really difficult.
Got into some randoms between here and Thieves Fort which is welcome for the JP. No one with Chakra yet.
Thieves Fort (0 resets): This time it's Captain Falcon who sits out. I had considered giving Algus Move +1 for this but forgot and just played it out. Black magic Priest stayed close enough to Wave Fist it midcharge and dropped a Thief as well in the first round. Other than needing to keep Balrog away from Miluda after she hit him once for 36 of his 72 HP, didn't have any trouble. The other Priest tried to Raise someone but it missed and she didn't do anything else before falling to punchboy fists. Kenshiro picks up Chakra after this. He's also the only one at Lv 5 for the next PA point.
Lenalia Plateau (0 resets): First round is about taking out the mages. An ill-timed critical pushed one Wizard out of reach from the second Wave Fist that would have finished him off. This is made up for by a second critical which oneshots the Time Mage when normal damage wouldn't have been enough. After that, it's just careful positioning so that no one gets ganged up on. The terrain makes it difficult to get people to flat ground for Kenshiro to heal. Anyways, with three people having good compatibility with Virgo, only takes a few Wave Fists to finish off Miluda.
Delita has over 300 Monk JP from spillover so I teach him Move-HP up for giggles and general survivablilty. Hike back to Gariland for new armor and Igros to upgrade Delita. Got another random which is welcome as I'm still hungry for JP to learn more abilities.
Windmill Shed (1 reset): First attempt, Delita gets Stopped. I try to save his hide with Chakra. That was a bad idea because Kenshiro gets gangbeaten. I'm not able to reach Wiegraf with enough Wave Fists before crystalization. Next attempt, I'm wiser and willing to leave Delita to his fate if it comes to hit. No Stop proc this time and I don't bother trying to heal him yet knowing he'll get a turn to retreat to safety. Boco needs to go down first and I also end up taking out the Monks before really bringing my attention to Wiegraf. Kenshiro is on heal duty first and attacking second. Although Axel gets one-shotted by Crush Punch ID, this time momentum was enough in my favor to land the 3 Wave Fists I need to send Wiegraf running.
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Monk SCC punches on
Delita turned up about 100 JP short for Equip Armor. Darn. So I leave him in Knight with Guts secondary. Axel still hasn't gotten his next PA point like the rest of the team. Jin has the JP to learn Chakra so I teach it to him.
Fort Zekaden (0 resets):
Balrog sits out and I take all the Capricorn/Taurus punchboys. Axel starts on Kenshiro's side. The close Wizard locks a Fire 2 on Kenshiro and a midcharge punch would only take off 75 out of 80 HP. And Axel is too far away to help. I could walk up and attack and have the redirect finish her off but then Kenshiro would be within reach of a Knight who would likely finish him off. So opt for a midcharge Wave Fist instead which keeps him out of Knight melee range. Algus is smart and shoots Delita from a position that Delita cannot hit him with a physical. This is what I want since that means Algus is more likely to come close chasing Delita. Delita climbs on the fort and chucks a rock. Auto-Poiton. Oh well, it's only 5 damage erased. Jin and Captain Falcon come from behind the fort to help out.
Things get dicey when Knights gang up on Axel and KO him. Uh-oh, the race is on. Algus is so dead set on Delita he leaves himself in reach of two good compatibility Monks. Captain Falcon punches his back. 60 damage, no Auto-Potion. Jin reaches him with a Wave Fist. 48 damage, no Auto-Potion. The other Wizard has caught up and fries Jin and Delita as well as the Knight that smacked Jin and now Jin is down. But Captain Falcon can get close enough to Algus to Falcon Punch past the evade for the kill.
At the end of the chapter, Axel is still at Lv 4 and 6 PA; everyone else hit their 7 PA point. Kenshiro is the high level member at 6 and the others mill around at 5.
Dortor 2 (0 resets):
Gafgarion, Agrias, and punching anything within reach. And lots of Chakra. Since my punchboys are still at 6 Speed, that gives them chances to midcharge Wizards if they can get close enough. Individual enemies don't do lots of damage so as long as I take care not to have both Wizards get spells off on the same guy, I feel safe.
Buy armor and with no reason to shop at Igros, head straight for Araguay.
Araguay Woods (0 resets):
Wave Fist > goblins I don't think I took any damage here. One goblin was dueling Gafgarion but kept getting denied by shield before dying. And Boco was smart and didn't let the Black Goblin corner him. Only bit or strategy used was having a target available for Agrias each time her turn came up to let her rack up as much JP as I sanely could.
Take off Gaf's sword and accessory before the next map. Looking back, I wish I'd removed his shield too just so Ovelia could club him better if he ever catches up with her. Agrias becomes a Knight with Holy Sword secondary. I actually downgrade her to a Long Sword in the hope she'll get more actions to unlock Monk. (this is also why I let Gaf keep his armor)
Zirekile Falls (0 resets):
Joke fight, of course with most enemies more interest in attack Delita or Ovelia than chasing my low HP Monks. I killed maybe 2 Knights myself and leave the rest for Agrias and Delita. I wanted to Chakra Ovelia so she could contribute MBarriers but between my lack or mobility and her often staying off level ground, didn't get much chance. Agrias came up a bit short on Knight JP finishing with 198. On the plus side, she did get enough spillover base class JP to pick up Move +1, a welcome aid for Zeland.
But before I go there, it's back to Dortor for armor upgrades and then a hike to Igros to get a stronger sword for Agrias. I run into the overlevelled Archer at Araguay and after a tense fight of trying to keep anyone from dying, kill it off. Got very lucky and it dropped its Wizard Outfit. Yay, extra 6 HP for someone over the best buyable armor. I got into several more randoms going to and from Igros, which are welcome for JP and EXP. Kenshiro has saved up enough to pick up Earth Slash and I do so even if it's not that powerful at 7 PA. Everyone has Wave Fist and Chakra by now.
Zeland (2 resets):
Choose to save Mustadio since I have Chakra and want the extra Brave. Balrog, Captain Falcon, and Jin are the recepiants: Axel is already at 70 Brave and going from 70-72 makes less difference than going from 68-70 (Balrog) or 72-74 (Captain Falcon and Jin) Kenshiro and Jin have their Lv 8 Speed point whereas the other two do not. This suits me fine as it provides the possibility of punching Wizards midcharge.
Attempt 1: Mustado goes left. Kenshiro Earth Slashes a Wizard through the wall. Jin Wave Fists the other Wizard as I do not want them bunching up. Both Wizards lock spells on Kenshiro and run. I'm not able to kill off either of them and Kenshiro dies. And I haven't taught anyone Revive. Well, crap. Was able to reach one with a midcharge Wave Fist but it wasn't enough. My 7 PA punchboys... don't punch all that hard with 7 PA and Kenshiro crystalizes.
Attempt 2: Mustado goes right. Geomancer Knight nicks him with Hell Ivy. Wizard takes off the rest of his HP with a good compatibility, high Faith, Ice Rod boosted Ice2. Ouch.
At this point, I think maybe it's time to stop hoarding JP and teach someone Revive. Forgot to do so before making the next attempt. Mustadio goes right and this time the Wizards go after different targets. Hooray, I can play the map now. From here on out, main focus is keeping everyone alive with offense as a secondary priority. Kite the hell out of the Knights, Wave Fist through the wall a lot. don't try to hit Archers if it puts someone within reach of one or both Knights. Got a few crystals/boxes since 40 damage Wave Fists don't finish things that fast.
Despite how drawn out this became, Axel still don't reach Lv 8 for the Speed point. Heh. My units have enough JP for Earth Slash or Revive but not both. After some thought, teach Axel and Jin Revive and Balrog and Captain Falcon Earth Slash. Agrias class changes into Knight for the extra PA, buy Mustado better equipment for HP and off to the next map.
Baraius Hill (1 reset):
Kenshiro and Captain Falcon have 7 Speed so they go before the generics. Kenshiro lobs an Earth Slash at the left Summoner while Captain Falcon takes an Earth Slash potshot at one of the Archers. Enemies go. Knights can't reach anyone; one Archer shoots Captain Falcon, the other starts charging on Mustadio. My other two Monks get their turns now; they land two midcharge hits on the charging Archer and drop him. Summoner launches Ramuh at Kenshiro and Mustdio, no kills. Lots of scrambling for survival in the next set of moves. The second Summoner snipe Balrog down. I almost forget to get Axel over to him while dealing with the Summoner and when I do remember, Revive misses and Balrog crystalizes before I get another chance. Reset.
On the next attempt, I move Kenshiro's companions a bit to far out on the hill and the left Summoner tags all three. It looks like I'm headed for another reset when a Knight takes a swing at a weakened Axel. He dodges the fatal deathblow at 80% and lives on. This time, the second Summoner eats Stop from Stasis Sword and my punchboys are able to finish her off without any Summons being sent my way. Got a few crystals/chests while slowly wearing down the last of the enemies.
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Monk SCC punches on:
Drop off Agrias and Ovelia and then it's a quick detour to Zeland for gear upgrades. Got into a random during the trip there and back which is still welcome as I'm hoarding JP for Hamedo. Changed Mustadio into a Chemist with Snipe secondary.
Zigolas Swamp (0 resets):
Mustadio has Seal Evil so this was always going to be a joke fight. He's a Chemist for spillover JP just because I can. Ended up with only one statue since I kept leaving low HP enemies around when Mustadio turns comes around so he opted for direct gunshots.
Goug (0 resets): Took a while to kill anyone due to my 7 PA and those Summoners. It got off to a good start with Mustadio disabling a thief and the other thief having worst compatibility with Mustadio so he only ate one 15 damage stab. This draws both Archers to him instead of my team as the 5 Speed Summoner blasts 3 of my monks with Ifrit. Still hadn't killed any enemies after round 2. But the slow Summoner only had enough MP for one attack Summon and the other only knew Moogle. So with the enemy damage so low, it's just a matter of careful positioning and liberal Chakra use to keep anyone from dying. Eventually wore them down. Got 3 crystals/chests even though I wasn't stalling since 40 damage Wave Fists and 30 damage Earth Slash is low offense at this point.
Shrugged and taught Kenshiro HP Restore and Move HP-up since I plan to use them both at Lionel. It does delay Hamedo learning but this felt more urgent.
Baraius Valley (1 reset):
Jin and Balrog go with Kenshiro in the first squad while the two Capricorns go in the second squad. (This is dumb as the only unit with Revive in the first squad has worst with Kenshiro) Lost the first time as the Lightning Bow Archer had best compat with Kenshiro procced a Bolt 2 which took him from full HP to zero. There was no level ground by him and he crystalized.
Even the winning attempt was messy. It took a while for squad 2 to off the Wizard as the Archer kept feeding it Potions to undo my damage plus he dodged a few attacks while gleefully pelting them with 36 damage Bolt 2s. Even though I wasn't screwed over by wacky random zodiac comptat, Kenshiro's squad still need to be careful with positioning as both Knights attacking the same guy is a kill. (I hadn't picked up Hamedo yet). Agrias did more damage per attack than my 7 PA punchboys. Balrog got to close to Knight sword stabs and dropped at one point but succeeded in keeping Jin safe enough and got him back into action eventually. It was a slow win with Jin cornering the Archer on the elevation and slowing punching her out at 50 a shot while Kenshiro and Balrog spent more turns using Chakra than attacking.
Axel had the 1200 JP for Hamedo after the battle and is the only unit with it going into Golgorand
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More Monk SCC wrietups:
Golgarand Execution Site (0 resets):
I put the two Capricorn punchboys with Kenshiro and Jin and Balrog go in squad 2. This will become my standard distribution when the game asks me to split teams. With only 7 PA, I don't really count on being able to take out Gafgarion fast. So I don't bother and focus on thinning out the support. Gaf comes over towards the first squad and Night Swords Axel. Kenshiro Chakras Axel and I move him towards the gate keeping him 9 panels away from the Time Mage. Axel lobs a Wave Fist at the closest Knight while leaving a clear lane for Captain Falcon to Earth Slash both Knights on the ground. He does so and moves just far enough away so the Knight can't reach him. Balrog snipes a Knight with Earth Slash while Jin advances without attacking anyone as that would put him where a Knight could smack him. Knight comes so whack Axel... "Oh no you Hamedon't." Close Time Mage Hastes herself. This turns out good for me since she ends up with a turn before my Monks get their next turn. Goes for a status spell on Kenshiro. Since he has best compat with that Time Mage, he goes Hokuto Shinken on her and takes out all her HP with one midcharge punch. It a long drawn out slow wearing down of the enemies. At least none of my monks died. Kenshiro stays up on the gate to attack the other Time Mage and the Archer who had climbed up there. Other than the Time Mage harassing him with Slow, they ignore him, the Archer preferring to rain arrows on the punchboys on the ground. Lots of Chakra usage and kiting the hell out of Knights; they never got close enough to attack other than one worst compatibility hit. I collected a bunch of crystals and chests before swarming Gaf. Jin picked up Spin Fist from a crystal; underwhelming as it is, it's still free. It took more than one volley from the team due to Gaf evading. The dragged out fight at least has the benefit of EXP and JP. Jin and Captain Falcon both have enough for Hamedo. Kenshiro finally reaches the 8 PA benchmark.
Lionel Castle gate (1 reset): Hamedo on 3 monks comes just in time for this map, where I'm crazy (and cheap) enough to try to do this with Battle Boots instead of Rubber Shoes. The rough plan is to knock off the Summoner and Archers first while letting Hamedo protect from Knights. Due to the group's low damage output, executing this plan turns out difficult. Kenshiro has Move-HP up and HP Restore set. Chakra heals him for 60 which is slightly more than what Gafgarion does so he heals only when he's missing 60 or more HP to use less CT. Summoner lives long enough to launch two Titans at my team. While this doesn't result in defeat, it means more turns spent on Revive and Chakra and not many free to attack. Meanwhile, thanks to Move-HP up, Kenshiro occasionally has a turn where he can attack so he flings the occasional Earth Slash from his side. I lost because I left Kenshiro too close to where generics went after him. Archer and Knight cut me off from getting Axel over to him and he crystalizes.
Next attempt, Summoner only gets off one summon before being brought down. However, Geo Knight has Elemental. Carve Model is what worries me but she didn't roll that. Did Quicksand two Monks though and lands a Death Sentence on Jin. Troubling but actually recoverable. This is because my turn order is Axel, Jin, Balrog, Captain Falcon. So when Jin does succumb, Axel can Revive him and he has a turn to do something productive. However, more trouble strikes when Gafgarion double-turns Kenshiro when I thought he was safe. Kenshiro had 107 HP before the double-turn. Night Sword hurts for 54. Do the math. When I do get Axel over to Kenshiro, Revive misses. Then Gaf kills him. It was a close one getting Jin over to Revive Axel, then making sure Axel was healthy enough so that he could Revive Kenshiro. Succeeded with Kenshiro's death counter at 0 and 83 CT. Taking out Gaf is still a slow process as my team's damage isn't any better than the last fight. But afterwards, everyone has reached 8 PA. I spare 200 JP on Jin to teach him Stigma Magic in preparation for the next fight. Everyone learns Hamedo after this and set it for the next battle.
Queklain (0 resets):
PBF used X_MX
X___
R
R is Ramza's starting position. Jin must not be in the spot marked M. With this PBF, Queklain will start off by tagging Ramza and the unit in spot M with Nightmare. One Sleep, one Death Sentence. Jin uses Stigma Magic to wake up the sleeping punchboy. Only Kenshiro is able to get in range to Wave Fist Queklain without bunching up too much for more Nightmare. Next comes a Bio 3 hitting 3 people and turning Captain Falcon undead. Kenshiro gets a Chakra and attack with everyone else I can get in range without bunching up too much. Next comes a physical on Captain Falcon, no Hamedo. Ended up not reviving him and lobbing more Wave Fists to win.
Chapter 2 finished at Lv 13-14 for the team.
Nothing on the shopping list at the start of Chapter 3 so went directly to Goland.
Goland (0 resets):
Olan is smart and uses Galaxy Stop on his first turn. Thief steals his hat, which is annoying. Mediator uses Persuade on him which is hilarious because Olan had just gotten his turn so his CT was low and because it's not like Persuade will delay the incoming Galaxy Stop. Judo Outfit Thief lands a 81% Charm on Jin. Yuck. For once, the worst compatibility between Kenshiro and Jin works to my favor as Kenshiro snaps him out with a 24 damage Earth Slash.
The rest of the battle is mostly tossing out Grand Uppers, Dash Punches, Falcon Punches, Blodia Punches, and ATATATATATATA at immobile enemies. I do stall hoping for a Judo Outfit drop (at one point Chakra-ing the Mediator) but get two crystals and a Twist Headband instead. Should have gone with HP Restore rather than Hamedo here as knife stabs are less of a threat than gunshots.
Lesalia (0 resets):
One downside of making a Scorpio Ramza is that MBarrier from Alma is no longer 100%. It drops to 95%, oh no. Part of my plan is to keep a Monk (not Kenshiro or Jin) around Alma to feed her Chakra for MP so that I can take advantage of MBarrier goodness all fight. Low Faith makes this somewhat less effective though. I also went with HP Restore on most of the team with only Kenshiro and Jin getting Hamedo. Idea was to not Hamedo Alma if she tried to help with Healing Staff. This was a completely unneeded precaution given a party of Monks with Chakra. Rest of the battle plan is routine: stay out of enemies' attack range unless I can gang up on them and avoid getting ganged up on. Balrog snipes Knights with Earth Slash. I end up taking out both Monks before Zalmo is close enough to take a few swings at. He goes to heal himself considerately staying in range of two of my team to nail him midcharge.
Finally, Judo Outfits. The bump from 8 to 9 PA isn't that big of a jump in damage output but I'll still take it. At Lv 14-15 for the group, the next PA point is still quite a ways off. I teach everyone who doesn't already know them Earth Slash, Revive, HP Restore, and Move-Hp up.
UBS2 (0 resets):
Move Ramza from his starting position and place my units so that no Lancers can poke someone on their first turn. Those Time Mages toss out some Haste spells. I'm not able to kill the closest Lancer even with all 5 of my units attacking it due its 270 HP, Lancer evasion, and my lowish damage. Well that's not good with all three Lancers in attack range and one or two Hasted. They go and one Monk is dead after the next set of enemy turns. And that Chemist undid some of my damage with a Hi-Potion, argh.
But I have 5 Monks with Revive, Chakra, and Hamedo. So they can sandbag like hell. Which I do, taking shots when I can afford to do so. I did get sloppy and Jin got too close to a Time Mage who tags him with Don't Move. One Lancer goes for a fatal Jump on his immobile self. Now my team will get turns before that Jump resolves so apparently the AI didn't see him as doomed and the other two Lancers went after him to make sure Jin was extra dead. One goes to his right. "Oh no you Hamedon't." Other Lancer tries for a spear poke on his left. "Oh no you Hamedon't." The combined efforts of my team send both those Lancers into the ground without them getting any more turns.
For added insult, one Time Mage had attack Summons and was sniping Kenshiro with Ramuh. He had bad compatibility though and after 2 57 damage Ramuhs, didn't have enough MP for a third. Kenshiro was hurting though since I had used his turn for Earth Slashing the Lancer on Jin's right rather than heal. Still alive Lancer kills Jin then goes for a fatal strike on Kenshiro. "Oh no you Hamedon't." With two Lancers down and the Summoning Time Mage under 24 MP, the opposition no longer has the means to pressure 5 Monks with Chakra, Revive, and Move HP-up. Hasted Chemist and his Hi-Potions hangs in for quite a while before I can successfully gang up on him. Last Lancer tries for another attack on Kenshiro. "Oh no you Hamedon't." Only 42 damage from the counterpunch due to worst compatibiliy but still free damage. Just a simple chase down the remaining enemies and grab any chests/crystals which appear during the process.
UBS3 (0 resets):
I've been sticking with Battle Boots the whole time and was too cheap to pick up Germinas Boots. Would have mattered here though since I would have been able to make the Summoner dead instead of allowing him to blast 4 of my units. I felt smart here with my positioning otherwise getting in as many shots of Earth Slash to Izlude as I could without hitting any of my own guys in the process. A Knight had Spike Shoes and was tossing rocks at me from turn 1 but he never got a chance for a sword whack. Ramuh only did about 40-50 so I don't feel the need for Chakra. Kenshiro and Axel finish off the Summoner. The others lob more Earth Slash at Izlude. I feel clever remembering to place someone within Izlude's move range so that he's baited into Hamedo on his third turn instead of jumping.
Or I could hit him with enough Earth Slash that he runs before his third turn. That works too.
UBS1 (0 resets):
After looking at my monks' max HP, give Axel HP Restore and the others Hamedo. Because Axel's max HP is such that he will be put into critical from full by Stasis Sword. I also teach him Repeating Fist since he has spare JP.
One thing I do appreciate about Monk compared to other SCCs is that something can go wrong and the situation is often recoverable. I have enough damage to one-round Wiegraf if all 5 monks land Wave Fists through the evade but I don't expect the game to let me gang up on him with all 5 right off the bat. Set up the PBF so no more than two units can be hit by anything Wiegraf tries. He opens with a Stasis on Balrog an Captain Falcon landing Stop on Balrog. Archer picks off Captain Falcon. Wizard has Summon and plants a Shiva that will be fatal to the stopped Balrog. So I'm down one unit with another on the way before I get a turn. Sigh. Kenshiro Revives Captain Falcon who gets a turn to Chakra himself and spreads out. For the other two, I have Axel move behind Wiegraf and Repeating Fist. 105 damage, better than Wave. Jin goes to Wiegraf's left and after a bit of thought, I have him Earth Slash for a guaranteed 64. Shiva goes off and nukes Balrog. Enemies go. Wiegraf uses Stasis on Axel and Jin. HP Restore from Axel; Jin gets Stopped. Wizard goes for fatal Fire on Jin. Knights do nothing but move. Archers take shots at people, no deaths. Axel oneshots the Wizard with a high rolling Repeating Fist midcharge. Punchboys on the ground busy themselves healing up with Chakra not really able to get into good attacking positions without bunching up for swordskills. And I want them spread out because when he can only hit one unit, Wiegraf will opt for his Two Hands physical which does enough damage to oneshot everyone on my team. He goes after Kenshiro.
"Oh no you Hamedon't." Kenshiro lands a critical through the evade for 114 and Wiegraf is down to about 40 HP, low enough for one Earth Slash to finish him. The generics kill off Jin and Axel and I don't bother trying to save them instead completing the Wiegraf kill.
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I uh may not have started the twitter poll game.
Disco Elysium- Played this. Sam Vimes Simulator 2019 is pretty good? You can certainly tell eastern european socialists wrote which leads to a few odd elements but mostly pretty good. The internet was right, it's just *nice* when you can get the little options that get Kim to smile.
I was not particularly thorough for various reasons but still got some fun quests. I also managed to get through with a fairly minimal body count which I appreciate I think. Weird as it is for all the cops to be so pissed about Klaasje. Well, not weird, but weird you can't really push back against it harder.
I dunno, maybe I'll have more thoughts later, but yeah mostly it's pretty good.
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Monk SCC delivering beatings.
Finally, Power Sleeves. This is one of the most gratifying points in the game to be a Monk.
Grog Hill (0 resets):
The batch of deserters is the first to feel the increased power of Team Punchboy. Took a few rounds to catch up to them to score kills though. Balrog gets sniped down by the Chemists and Archer so it takes turns to Revive and heal him. And one Chemist had X-Potion and used it a lot because I wasn't able to focus enough damage on any one unit for a kill in the first 3-4 rounds. After the Thief and a Squire went down though, momentum was very much in my favor and it was just a matter of chasing the Chemists down and introducing them to multiple punchboy fists.
Yardow (0 resets):
This is the easiest battle at Yardow I've ever had in any playthrough. For the opening, one Ninja throws something at Rafa, miss. One Ninja throws something at my team, miss. The goddess of evasion was definitely blessing my side. Rafa charges a Heaven Thunder on the two Ninjas on the ground and runs away and Malak goes for Un-Truth in her direction. My turn. The closer Summoner has best compat with Kenshiro so his Earth Slash takes off 110. Axel follows it up with another 90 damage Earth Slash for a kill. Balrog Wave Fists Malak and takes him out. The last two units are free to lob Earth Slash at the Ninjas Rafa targetted, taking them both to critical. Heaven Thunder goes off and in a rare display of Rafa competence, finishes them both. Other Summoner Hastes herself.
Surviving Ninja gets the next turn and throws something at one of my team for 99 damage. Summoner gets next turn before my team and locks a summon on someone. Too bad for her I can take her out in two midcharge hits. Chakra on the Monk who was hurt, two more attacks on the Ninja. Ninja goes and attacks but fails to kill. Not that it would have mattered since one more attack finishes it off. If I hadn't bothered to heal, the battle already would have been over but it's OK. Velius is coming up and extra EXP is favorable to me.
Kenshiro has enough JP to master Monk so I do so. Get Rafa outfitted as a Chemist. After some deliberation, I splurge on 3 Bracers in anticipation of the Velius fight. This pretty much bankrupts my War Funds.
Yuguo Woods (0 resets):
HP Restore on everyone. Earth Slash is useless here. Still, I've got Power Sleeve Monks with low Faith so even Hasted ghosts are at most an annoyance before they go down in two attacks. Or even one with good compatibility. Simple matter of ganging up on anything that draws close enough. At one point, both undead Wizards locked magic onto Kenshiro then positioned themselves where he hit them both with a Spin Fist midcharge, the first time I've used Spin Fist all game. Didn't kill either but weakened them enough that the first spell finished off the Wizard charging the second magic. It was over before any of the undead enemies' death counters expired.
Riovanes Gate (0 resets):
HP Restore on everyone as Archers are going to be a factor a lot longer than Knights. Leaving Rafa a Chemist had the Archers taking her out on round 1. Oops or smart? Because it does get Malak out of the way as well. Team 2 starts off by sending the far left Knight into critical with 3 Earth Slashes. Kenshiro's team could only safely land one Earth Slash on the Knight there so they were less productive. Earth Slash is useless on Feather Boots Knight but I land enough damage through the evasion to send it running and it only lands one 70 damage sword whack when I tried to Secret Fist him. Lots of getting shot by Archers, Chakra usage and the occasional revival, and sniping the other Knight with Earth Slash when it came over. Several HP Restores went off which eased the healing load. Getting up on the parapets was a risky affair since I'm trying to keep people with level ground next to them. And there's only one path up for my 4 Move Monks that keeps them adjacent to level ground.
Of course, once I do get someone up there things shift. It becomes easier to send someone else up after the first one since the first punchboy is inflicting damage. After dropping Earth Clothes Archer, I send two of the punchboys after Feather Boots Knight who has been left alone to run into a corner all this time. I do stall some hoping for Earth Clothes but it drops 108 Gems instead, which is at least useful later. After the battle, Captain Falcon is at Lv 21 and has crossed the next PA point threshhold.
Velius (3 resets):
Kenshiro must have HP Restore or Wiegraf is impossible. I also set HP Restore on Balrog and Hamedo on the other three. The Capricorn and Taurus punchboys get the 3 Bracers while the other 2 stick to boot for the movement increase.
Kenshiro has 188 max HP with the Power Sleeve. Lightning Stab does 140. One won't put him in critical but after Chakra and moving a second one will. I go with this since I'd rather not give up the Power Sleeve's PA boost.
Attempt #1 - HP Restore fails. Wiegraf uses Lightning Stab. Ramza dies.
Attempt #2 - HP Restore fails. Wiegraf uses Lightning Stab. Ramza dies.
Attempt #3 - Wiegraf criticals with the second Lightning Stab blowing past the critical range to trigger HP Restore. Ramza dies.
Attempt #4 - By now I've worked out how to position Kenshiro so that Wiegraf will Stab and retreat on his second turn. So in case HP Restore fails, I can Chakra and retreat and live to get another turn to Chakra again about 140 HP. This time HP Restore is perfect so I get turns to attack. Still had to be cautious and watch the AT list so I don't get bowled over by a Wiegraf doubleturn. The 4th Earth Slash puts Wiegraf into critical.
Velius time. Kenshiro gets the first turn and I have him retreat. Velius goes and locks a fatal Cyclops on Axel. Axel gets off a 315 damage punch but no one else can get close enough without walking into Cyclops' kill zone. Demons do nothing. I shuffle the other punchboys around and wait. Kenshiro goes next and Wave Fists from the side for 90. Velius moves down and clobbers Jin with a physical. Demon locks a fatal Dark Holy on Kenshiro. My turn. Balrog Revives Jin. I misplay here with Jin and have him attack the demon charging Dark Holy. Should have either hit Velius or Revive on Axel. Demon survives with 11 HP and nukes Kenshiro. Captain Falcon punches Velius for 260. Demons finish off Jin and drop a Giga Flare on the two still living punchboys. Velius pounds Captain Falcon next. "Oh no you Hamedon't." 260 damage and battle is won. It's a relief to get past this even after my mistake as this was a fight I was worried about not having the oomph to win. When Cyclops could oneshot 4 out of 5 of the punchboys at max HP, having a drawn out fight is not good odds for my team.
Riovanes Roof (1 reset):
Haven't touched FFT in over a year or two so forgot how damaging Lede is. I had set HP Restore on everyone and she proceeded to take Kenshiro from full to zero HP with a physical. Celia Shadow Stitches Balrog. Elmdor had landed Confusion on Rafa and she went for Heaven Thunder next to Balrog (before he was Stopped). Try playing it out with the other two flinging Wave Fist at Celia for 108 each. Lede kills another punchboy; Celia Stop Bracelets Balrog. I only have one more turn, can't reach Celia, and then Elmdor finishes off Rafa.
Lesson learned, this time it's Hamedo on all. Kenshiro gets a Bracer. Elmdor Muramasa on Rafa, no confusion. Rafa uses Truth in front of Elmdor and retreats. Lede goes to kill Kenshiro like before. "Oh no you Hamedon't." Kenshiro punches her face for 210. Celia goes for a Charge +1 on Rafa. Well sure. I suppose if I hadn't already taken off over half of Lede's HP already, the other three punchboys would be more than capable of taking Celia down midcharge. Kenshiro goes before them and ATATATATA on Lede taking her down to zero HP. Battle won.
End of chapter sees my team at about Lv 20-21 range. Kenshiro and Captain Falcon have picked up their next PA points.
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Monk SCC punching through Chapter 4:
On my way to Dogoula, I pick up 5 Earth Clothes and 3 Germinas Boots at Yardow. Stuck to the Power Sleeves for the PA boost though. Also got into a routine random at Yuguo. More EXP means closer to next PA and Speed points.
Dogoula Pass (0 resets):
Routine fight. Hamedo on everyone. Because I'm still at 7 Speed on everyone, close Wizard goes for a high level spell and dies to two midcharge attacks. Priorities are other Wizard, then Lancers, then everyone else. Chakra as needed, Revive anyone who falls. Mostly used Earth Slash to get around evasion. Hamedo mostly failed but worked enough to prevent a loss.
Turns out there's one spot on the PBF the Knight can reach if it starts with Germinas Boots. As long as Hamedo goes off though, he's merely an inconvenience. Jin reaches Lv 21 for a PA point right in time for the next fight.
Bervania (1 reset):
So I have a plan to assassinate Meliadoul without her breaking anything. PBF is as follows for team 2; the first group is immaterial.
____
__
_C
T___
T is my Taurus punchboy. C is the Capricorn with the highest PA. With this setup, the Ninja will go first and Throw something at the Taurus. Meliadoul will move onto the box. Taurus goes and punches from the side for 160. Capricorn will punch from Melly's front. As long as both attacks hit, it's enough to get her to run.
First attempt, Ninja moves onto the box and throws something at Captain Falcon. Um, oops. Ninja was an Aquarius and thus went after the unit she could do more damage too. Reset. Next attempt enemies move as predicted. I was prepared to reset until Meliadoul's evasion fails and it happens on this very attempt. The first group might as well use Chakra if any arrows hit them; they can't get close enough to help.
Finath River (0 resets):
HP Restore or Counter?... went with HP Restore as I felt it more relevant for the most dangerous enemies. 4 yellows, 1 red, 1 Uribo. My high level is 22 so not very dangerous. The red's HP is low enough that ganging up on it with 3 punchboys takes it out and Chakra > yellow Chocobos.
Zeltenia (0 resets):
Maybe would have made sense to use some Earth Clothes here as there were times I couldn't line up an Earth Slash without hitting my own teams. Help Delita batter the two close Knights. Delita puts some hurt on Zalmo at one point and when Zalmo goes for a Raise 2 on one of the downed Knights, he leaves himself in range for two of my punchboys to remove the rest of his HP.
Kenshiro and Captain Falcon have reached Lv 23 here and its Speed point.
Bed Desert (0 resets):
Power Sleeves and mobility boots as usual. Kenshiro and Jin get HP Restore, others set Hamedo. Yeah, I misremembered and it's Axel who has 40 Faith. Jin is second highest of the five at 49. PBF setup -
__M__
SM_MR
R is where the game initially places Ramza, S is my other 8 Speed Monk with Stigma Magic learned. Balk will start by shooting Ramza. Gee I wonder why. Kenshiro Chakra's himself and moves one space in front of the empty space in the first row (bottom row on the diagram). 8 Speed Monk gets the next turn, moves behind Kenshiro, and uses Stigma Magic to remove poison from the whole group. Generics go with the Wizard coming forth to nuke Kenshiro with something. This is intended as two of my punchboys get close enough to Wave Fist him midcharge. The last punchboy isn't able to get close enough to attack anyone so shrugs and Chakra on Kenshiro.
From here on out, the strategy is to keep Kenshiro alive, take out the Archers, and only deal with Knights if they start to get in the way. As long as Kenshiro is alive, Balk will always go after him. One or two punchboys stay within 4 panels of Kenshiro at all times to attend to him. He still dies a lot no thanks to Ice3 shots doing more than his max HP, Balk doubleturns, Archers picking on him, and HP Restore either failing or being blown past. As for the Archers, Jin gets close enough Secret Fist one and takes out the other through direct damage eventually. They mostly busied themselves with picking on Kenshiro or the other punchboys before succumbing to repeated Blodia Punches. The Knights caught up and Hamedo didn't always work so I spent even more turns on revival and recovery. Eventually killed one and sent the other into critical. Got chests and crystals from the Archers and Wizard before I was able to land enough 50 damage Earth Slashes to send Balk down. Last Knight in critical survives the fight to bear witness to what happened. Being a 3 Move melee unit, he was nowhere near enough to endanger any of the punchboys when Balk was down to critical.
Before this fight, Kenshiro was leading the group in EXP. Since he spent the whole fight soaking up gunshots and using Chakra on himself when he did get turns, Jin passed him as the EXP leader.
Maybe it would have been better to give Kenshiro Earth Clothes instead. I wasn't using him for offense and the extra HP would have enabled him to survive an Ice3 at full HP.
South Wall Bethla (0 resets):
Routine fight for the punchboys. Set Hamedo on all. Take the Ninja out first then the Archers though the Thief gets punched out before them. Landed a Secret Fist on one Archer so left him doomed and went after Knights. Got a few boxes even though I wasn't intending to draw out the fight (ninjas crystalize fast yo). Everyone has their Lv 23 Speed point after this battle is complete, right in time for the sluice.
Bethla Sluice (1+ resets):
Hamedo on the Ramza side punchboys to fend off Knights. Other side goes with HP Restore. Wizard locks a Fire 4 on team 2's side. Only one of the punchboys can get into Wave Fist range and it isn't enough to take him out. I reset out of gamer rage. Spend several more resets fiddling with the positions of team 2 on the PBF so that both can get into Wave Fist range as the AI is very good about positioning Wizardboy in the most out of reach spot it can manage. Finally get a positioning where both punchboys are able to midcharge the close Wizard on their side and I can play the map.
On Kneshiro's side, it generally takes more than 3 Earth Slashes to critical a Knight unless one of the punchboys gets a good critical and/or Hamedo activates and gets through the evasion. So got to be careful about positioning when battling down there since arrows are also raining down from above so there's a real risk of people dying from enemies ganging up on them. Sometimes opted for Secret Fist on Knights if I didn't have many attacking turns available. Though the winning attempt, I played a bit risky and ran someone up both sides to catch the Flash Hat Wizard in an Earth Slash crossfire. Conveniently both switch Knights can be hit by one Earth Slash though I still ended up killing everyone on the map. Axel learns Spin Fist from a crystal, pointless as it is. He's the last of Kenshiro's companions to do so. (actually everyone but Kenshiro picked up Spin Fist from crystals)
TG Cid joins. For this challenge, his only relevance is the Bracer he comes with. Also amusing to note that the next armor upgrade is here and I not once used the 5 Earth Clothes I bought.
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Monk SCC takes out a Sephiroth lookalike.
Pick up 5 Black Costumes which I intend to use in Limberry. Also grab 4 more Angel Rings, bringing my total to 5, and 3 more 108 Gems.
Germinas Peak (0 resets):
Opted for HP Restore on everyone planning to take out Ninja and Thieves first. The Ninja was smart and stayed far enough away that I couldn't take him out on the first round. And when I finally do land enough attacks to send him to critical, he's still tossing Kikuichimonjis at me for 165. This complicates my survival and slows down beating down all the enemies. Quite a lot of Revive and Chakra to deal with the enemies' offense. Some timely HP Restores helped out. The extra EXP is probably for the better overall as it gets my team closer to their next PA point.
Poeskas Lake (0 resets):
The undead units were annoying but I wasn't really in danger of losing. HP Restore on all. Take down the ghosts first, then bait some of the other enemies closer before going after them. The undead Oracle whiffs a 39% Paralyze and does nothing else before dropping. Summoner leaves itself open for midcharge Wave Fists. The Archers prove to be obnoxious being smart enough to retreat while my 4 Move punchboys try to catch up to them. One drops and I've got the other under half HP when one of the ghosts leaves a box. I make the crazy choice to grab it which of course lets the other enemies death countdowns expire. Second ghost crystalizes. Oracle and Summoner both revive but get beat down with midcharge fists when they go for magic.
None of my team actually died. Fairly liberal Chakra use and timely HP Restores kept them going. Finished right around Lv 26 for everyone.
Gates of Limberry (2 resets):
Kenshiro gets a Black Costume. Two other punchboys get them as well. Stick to boots for everyone the first time. I set up the PBF intending to draw Lede for an Ultima so that I can pile on a bunch of midcharge hits. Celia locks an Ultima on Kenshiro. Lede goes after Kenshiro with another Ulitma. I can't reach either of them with my team. Well damn. I try to get someone to Revive Kenshiro taking shots at any Apandas that wander within reach. Disaster strikes soon after my second turn with one punchboy eating a Stop Bracelet, two more getting petrified by Bio 2, and the last getting charmed. Letting things play out, I saw to my horror just how much trouble a charmed monk can cause. It Revived the one Apanda I'd taken out and also Chakra'ed another who had depleted its MP. Lede has Time Magic and Haste for added insult. Another Bio 2 ended the last one before Kenshiro crystalized, meaningless as it is.
Next try, only Kenshiro has a Black Costume. Everyone else sticks to Power Sleeves. I come up with a strategy where if one Monk Earth Slashes Kenshiro, his HP will be in critical after the first Ultima goes off. At which point HP Restore can save him from death. I'm also more mindful of my positioning to not allow Stop Bracelet to sneak up on me. Kenshiro's HP Restore fails and he dies. Apandas get really lucky with the Bio 2 and make 3 of my punchboys into statues. Last punchboy is out of positon to help any of them and succumbs to Shadow Stitch. Reset.
This time, 3 of the punchboys get Angel Rings to ward of Stop Bracelet. I also set Hamedo on them with the intent of baiting physicals from Lede. One sticks to Germinas Boots to reach an Apanda with Wave Fist right away. Try the same plan as before and this time Kenshiro's HP Restore activates so he lives on. The only status that lands is a Slow on Kenshiro and one Undead from Bio 3. Celia comes down to ground level to Ultima Kenshiro again helpfully leaving herself open for Earth Slashes. Lede Shadow Stitches someone. The other four units get turns before Ultima resolves and pile on enough damage to Celia to get her to retreat.
Elmdor (0 resets):
This one I was worried about in planning trying to do it with only 9 PA. Earth Clothes on all. Balrog and one other get Bracers and the other 3 equip 108 Gems. Opt not to go with HP Restore to raise my chances of drawing Ultima. I want to pile on enough damage in one round as I'm not liking my odds of living through two rounds of enemy attacks. I think I have enough damage if all 5 punchboys get turns but it's certainly not a guarantee since I'm wide open for Shadow Stitch. Elmdor will Muramasa 3 units on his opening turn and Balrog will always be one of them. Lucky for me, the Assassins see weakened units they can pick off with Ultima and use that rather than Throw. With some crafty positioning, I'm able to line up Earth Slashes to heal those injured by the opening Muramasa and move those targeted by Ultima next to Elmdor. Due to a lucky critical from one of the punchboys, I can do enough damage to take Elmdor to zero HP. Have the last punchboy hurt an Assassin because I can. Lede's Ultima goes off. 207 damage to Elmdor finishes him. No deaths on my side, hooray.
Zarela (0 resets):
Black Costumes are a must otherwise Zarela will unload Spell on my team. The fight might be doable with Germinas Boots because of access to revival. I opt to make this as hassle free as possible and go with Angel Rings on all. Hamedo on everyone.
This fight takes ages because of only 9 PA on the punchboys. 65 damage Wave Fists aren't taking Zarela out very fast. Not helped by Zarela grabbing a crystal off a crystalized undead Knight and recovering the 350-ish damage I'd done to him up to that point. It's not safe to leave sleeping Monks alone either as Zarela's physical oneshots a sleeping Balrog and comes close to murdering anyone else (225 out of about 250 max HP). So failure to Stigma Magic a sleeping punchboy usually results in a dead one. Another reason to wake up the sleeping is that they're bait for the undead knights and Armor Break hitting is horrendous. Zarela mostly flits around dropping Nightmares though if he spots a weakened unit, he will swoop in for a kill with a physical or Flare 2. Saw Confuse 2 once but only Balrog got hit and Meliadoul decided that snapping him back to sanity before he lost any turns with a 72 damage sword whack was worthwhile.
Meliadoul came with Phoenix Down so that helped take out the support faster than planned. Played very defensively prioritizing keeping HP up (otherwise Flare 2 takes out the weakened) and staying spread out to avoid bunching up for Nightmare. Kind of tricky with only 3 Move. Neutralizing the support was more important to me. Only one Armor Break got past Hamedo and it thankfully missed. Bone Snatch was obnoxious and kept coming back to life, costing me turns to put it down again. I forgot that Stigma Magic can miss and had at least one instance where Jin or Kenshiro failed to wake the other from slumber. Meliadoul died once from Flare 2 and I opted to bring her back into action just to have an additional unit pursuing Zarela. (trivia: her 90 damage swing actually outdamages my team's damage output) By the time I finally ground down the last of Zarela's HP, Balrog and Kenshiro had lost their Reraise and everyone had eaten dirt at least once.
Most of the group reached their next PA point and on the way to Igros, got into a random and got enough EXP from it for the last holdouts reached the 10 PA benchmark.
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Laggy Fantasy Tactics: Wherein I blunder and bumble my way through the game with only a general recall of my last time through 4/5 of the game, half that much of an idea of what I am doing, and showing the game off to a different friendgroup.
Orbonne (0 Resets): Nothing of note here. It's the demonstration fight, and you get to see swordskillers do cool shit. Ramza embarrassingly got his helmet broken and nobody had any special abilities at the time.
Magic City Gariland (0 Resets): Mostly uneventful. With one point of...notable irritation. Enemy Chemist rolled Hi-Potion. He eventually went down but good god he was an asshole. It's Gariland, though, what do you expect?
Here, I grabbed Navarro(M Chemist), Sara(F Squire), and Eltiana (F Chemist) as my main generics for Chapter 1. Navarre promoted to Priest, Sara to Knight (alongside Ramza and Delita; the defense up mods make up for the lack of armor at this point I figured) and Eltiana to Wizard.
Mandalia Plains (1 Reset?): I picked Save Algus the first time, trying to get that Brave bonus. Algus died before anybody on my team could get a turn. Which was hilarious. On reset, I decided to leave the prick to his likely well-deserved fate. Eltiana notably vaporized the Red Panther in a single hit, and other enemies did not fare much better against the black mage here. The rest was just a beatdown.
Store updated at Igros: Algus was given a bowgun, Ramza swapped to Archer, everyone else stayed roughly the same.
Sweegy Woods (0 Resets): ...what didn't go wrong here? I guess my positioning could have used work here. The cat used Steal Heart, and hearts were indeed stolen. At one point Navarro, under the effects of charm, revived the black goblin. Who was immediately re-killed. Sara got confused. Hilarity continued.
Ramza switched over to Thief, and Navarro changed classes to Oracle (Priest sub) and learned Paralyze. Why do I have a generic dude as a spellcaster? Dunno, maybe I'll get him to Bard at some point. Not optimal, but sure. I got relevant offensive accessories for my generics.
Dorter Trade City (0 Resets): Incredibly stupid mistakes were made, largely in overextending Ramza to a position where he was so far from Navarro that he almost didn't make it. 70/70 Faith or good compatibility probably account for Ramza's 100% raise rate and continued survival. Also Move-MP Up is stupidly good. Enemy mages were unimpressive as usual, though then the knight decided to roll Item with Hi-Potion.
Eat my entire ass, Hi-Potion Knight.
Following this, Ramza learned Quick Attack, was reclassed to Squire (Thief sub) and was given a flail. I also gave him Move-Find Item. Eltiana learned Frog. Algus, now with enough Squire JP to grab a break or two, swapped to Archer. Delita learned Equip Armor and reclassed to Monk. This was a mistake. Sara also reclassed to Monk, without Equip Armor. This was also a mistake.
Cellar of Sand Mouse (0 Resets): There wasn't much in the way of sand or mice. What there was, was murder and amphibians. Tactical mistakes were made again as I did not attempt to immediately converge the two squads into one like I should have. Delita and Sara both proceeded to get killed in record time. Algus only lasted longer because he sat in the corner. For further embarrassment, Navarro missed two 80% revives.
On the other hand, Ramza with Quick Attack did 56 damage a hit, and could not miss or be countered. Two of the knights (Grefter included) got taken out of the battle by Eltiana landing Frog on them (78% on the one, but she also landed a 37% chance on Grefter), essentially rendering them pointless. The third knight and the archer, however, kept Ramza and Navarro in a constant cycle of reviving party members until I managed to get an opening to murder the archer, and then eventually cripple the geomancy knight. MFI came in to hilarious effect here, though, with Bronze Armor and a Red Hood showing up for free. Also another Bronze Helmet.
This played hell on level sync, though, since now Ramza was two levels ahead of everyone else and basically got everything active from C1 Ubersquire aside from Yell. Navarro also has about 450 Oracle JP that I'm considering my choices on. Eltiana learned Bolt 2. Delita is now a Geomancer who is wearing heavy armor...and has Regenerator slotted on reaction because why not. Algus grabbed Equip Bow from Archer and immediately moved to Knight, essentially running 80% of his boss set as far as I'm convinced. I'll figure out what to do with Sara, but I have an idea of what to do with Ramza.
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More punching their way across Ivalice aka Monk SCC
Igros (0 resets):
Another long fight like Zarela. Earth Clothes and Germinas Boots on everyone. Jin gets HP Restore and I give the others Hamedo. I feel the power loss over Power Sleeve is worth it here as Earth Slash allows me to heal off swordskill damage without bunching up. And I absolutely do not want more than one person at a time getting hit by swordskills. Dyce goes after my team with Stasis Sword which is preferable. Zalbag gets two attacks in before the knights beat him up. Counters from Zalbag send one Knight into critical, taking him out of the fight. The rest I'm going to have to eventually deal with as my team slowly makes their way under the arch. It's the best I could do while keeping them spread out. Many, many Earth Slashes were used (along with the occasional Chakra) both to heal up from whoever last got hit with Stasis and to pound any Knights that got close. Sometimes both. Dyce procced one or two Stops which slowed down the advance but didn't endanger my team. Knights thankfully didn't have anything in the way of secondaries that threatened my chances. Ninja Knight had Throw but with only 3 range, simple to bait physicals which Hamedo would deny.
Seeing Shellbust would have been a reset but Dycedarg never had any targets in the HP range where he could kill someone with it so it never appeared. I did end up killing/criticalizing nearly all the Knights before Dycedarg got into a position I could finish him. A punchboy did fall but it was from a Knight whack and not Shellbust so carried on. Opted to zero out Dycedarg's HP and planned to revive the fallen monk when it was Adramelk.
Goat king is up. He's capable of status hell but as long as I don't bunch up for Loss, it's manageable. Stigma Magic can undo his status anyways so I don't fear Seal. Since I'm prioritizing bringing back the fallen punchboy, get off only one attack before his first turn. He puts up a fight even though it's 5 on 1 pummeling groups with Bahamut and sometimes opting to oneshot Kenshiro with Holy. I was constantly on the defensive with revival and recovery only getting the occasional chance to attack. That 11/12% C. Evade kicked in quite a bit so I saw a number of misses too. And even then I was constantly watching the AT list to make sure Greater Goat could never drop Loss on multiple units so I sometimes gave up attacking for safety. After 5 Bahamuts and 2 Holies, he went for a physical on a 150ish HP Kenshiro.
"Oh no you Hamedon't"
Hmm, interesting. Got in what further hits I could while intentionally not healing Kenshiro. (I think his MP was depleted but didn't consider that in the moment) Adramelk obliges my manipulation and goes for another physical on Kenshiro.
"Oh no you Hamedon't"
The counterpunch does the remaining damage to win the fight. Everyone gained about 2 levels from this and I'm entering Morund at about Lv 30-31 on everyone.
Outside Morund (0 resets):
Still going with Earth Clothes and Germinas Boots. HP Restore for all as nearly all the offense on the enemy side ignores Hamedo. Gusty Wind lands Slow on Kenshiro. Summoner locks Ramuh on Kneshiro for 92. Ninja Geomancer was the only melee threat on the field with a Rune Blade and didn't get to do anything. Couldn't do anything on turn 1 and I opted to take him out first with 4 Earth Slashes. Jin went after a Mediator who had wandered within attack range to shoot him. My team is synched up CT wise with the Summoner so it wasn't long before he got close enough to bury him with fists midcharge. Tried for a Secret Fist on Geomancer, miss. I didn't get any kills on round 2 but on round 3 things were clearly swinging my way. Summoner went down to a fatal fisting. (not that kind, head out of gutter) Kenshiro hadn't died to summons + geomancy so wasn't losing turns to dead punchboys. Jin was holding his own on the Mediators even with the Priest trying to help them out with recovery. One Mediator soon fell once I got punchboys on the roof to help out with damage. Meanwhile, the Mediators were just unlucky. Because trying to take down a punchboy with 260 max HP and Move HP-up takes too long with gunshots, they tried Talk Skills. Death Sentence, miss. Death Sentence, miss. Mimic Daravon, miss. Ya know, when a giant mech is smashing you with oversized fists, maybe trying to talk it to death isn't the best strategy. 3rd or 4th Death Sentence attempt actually hits but it was too late to matter. Only the Priest and one Mediator were still standing and both were downed before the death counter expired. Not that would have been an issue with 5 people with revival.
I think the Priest didn't have Raise. All that would have done would delay the inevitable though.
Halls of Morund (0 resets):
Swap to Power Sleeves except for Kenshiro who removes his armor. Hamedo on Kenshiro, others don't matter. I set the PBF so that the opposition cannot Mighty Sword anyone on their first turn. Vormav walks forward to 3 panels away from Kenshiro and does nothing. Rofel goes to carve up Kenshiro; "Oh no you Hamedon't." Kletian moves behind Vormav and locks Dark Holy on Kenshiro. Only two punchboys can get in range to Wave Fist Kletian but it's enough. Kenshiro Earth Slashes all three Shrine Knights just because he can. Axel and Balrog get their punch power on and drop Kletian with midcharge Wave Fists. Enemies retreat.
Zombag (0 resets):
Kenshiro goes with Earth Clothes and 108 Gems.
Capricorns get Earth Clothes and Germinas Boots.
Last two punchboys go Power Sleeve and 108 Gems.
Capricorns set HP Restore while the others set Hamedo. Though if all goes well, only Kenshiro's will be relevant.
So how does trying to take out an opponent with Defense Up and Move HP-up with physicals sound? With two people with worst compatibility with the boss and one with bad? Yeah, my group has issues with damage output. Move HP-up I neutralized by AI manipulation and surrounding Zombag but there's still the low damage output. Kind of lucky I only saw Speed Save go off once.
Open up with taking out both Archaic Demons with two Earth Slashes each. Hurt the Ultima Demon with Kenshiro. Ultima Demon Almagests three people including Kenshiro. Zombag goes for a fatal physical on Kenshiro. "Oh no you Hamedon't." With the danger of death averted, it's a routine matter to take out the last demon and heal the wounded; generally with Earth Slash doing both. This just leaves Zombag.
Zalbag's AI is fixated on Ramza if he is alive and within reach. I exploit this to draw him to a place where Kenshiro and the two Capricorns surround him and to draw physicals which are usually blocked by Hamedo. From the beginning, I had planned Ramza's Zodiac so that those Hamedo punches would do more damage. Zombag's evasion was on a roll though. Out of the first 10 Hamedos I triggered, I think one actually got through. So I opted to attack and hope that I didn't trigger lots of Speed Save. If Kenshiro's Hamedo fails (which it did occasionally), I have Balrog and the Capricorn on Zombag's opposite side toss Earth Slash at Zombag and Kenshiro. With damage ranging from 30 to 84 a hit depending on who's attacking and what they used, it took a lot of hits to wear down Zombag. Was fortunate that the RNG didn't screw me over in some way. Like Kenshiro dying and Zombag escaping the trap. A Blood Suck strategy might have been more reliable and faster but eh, I won.
Levels are at about 32-33 for the team with Orbonne open for the final descent. Leveling a bit is probably the safest thing to do at this juncture. Life will be much easier with the Lv 38 Speed point and there's also a PA point coming up, though not as impactful on its own. 10 to 11 is not a big jump in Earth Slash damage. Which will be my main go-to for all the mantle wearing enemies in the final set of fights. Doesn't mean I will stop to level though, gotten this far without intentional leveling and tempted to go the distance.
I buy 3 sets of Rubber Shoes and 5 extra Earth Clothes in preparation for the fights to come. Every other key piece of gear I might want I already have. A 5th Bracer would have been a decent investment and I had the funds but I forgot.
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Super Robot Wars X- fin. Did the IF route and managed every SR point, which either means this had an easier early game than T or that I’ve played too much SRW, one of those.
Honestly I sorta regret that the way I purchase the games locks me out of stuff like early adopter DLC, because god damn is this game kind to Masaki. He’s a practically necessary on Original-heavy stages.
Well until the last map. I uh maaaaaaay have stuck the Platinum Emblem on the Dai-Gurren and the Hyper Generator on the Gurren Lagann. Golems ain’t got shit when Simon decides to punch 20 of them to death in a turn.
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Laggy Fantasy Tactics Death Corps Did Nothing Wrong edition:
Leaving off at Ramza getting chewed out by Dycedarg's Elder Brother, I've decided to do some extra prep and some playing around. Ramza is now a Thief and using a Battle Axe. If you recall before, he had obtained Quick Attack right before Zeklaus. Now he has a PA 11 axe rather than a PA 8 flail. Sara learns Secret Fist, Navarro learns Confusion Song and Foxbird, and Eltiana learns Bolt 2.
And so I go to faff around on Mandalia with Move-Find Item. I don't really get *much* out of it, but a White Staff is something, as is enough JP for Navarro to learn Weapon Guard. Sara also becomes a Geomancer, learning Carve Model. Detour out of the way, I head to the real objective, the next plot map.
Thieves' Fort (0 resets): Allow me to preface this with the fact that the additional JP given out means primary Guest Characters (most notably Delita and Algus) can be made to be quite competent, as evidenced by the fact that Algus has 3/4 equipment breaks while being a Knight with Equip Bow and Delita is a Geomancer. They have been genuinely useful and will continue to be useful throughout the chapter. However, this does not change the fact that Guest AI is a callous, unforgiving prick. You will see why.
The actual fight was not that bad; The white mage out front trying to cast an offensive spell got ganked for 99 HP by Ramza and, predictably, did not survive. The thieves likewise went down to a combination of magic, geomancy, and Quick Attack. The problems began when one white mage demonstrably cast Cure 4, died, and left a crystal.
...only for Algus to steal the crystal, like the absolute prick he is. Looking forward to Zeakden.
Surprises from MFI included a Thunder Rod and an Asura Knife. I am in equal parts approval and surprise. If I was building Ramza towards Samurai I'd have probably grinned like a moron. ...Keeping this in mind for potential future replays though.
Navarro learns Silence Song, Ramza learns Steal Weapon, Sara and Delita learn Hell Ivy. Eltiana equips the Thunder Rod to go with how she has learned Bolt 2.
Lenalia Plateau (0 resets):
Miluda's rematch started quick and brutal, and then ended about the same. The two Black Mages and one Time Mage start out prepping Fire spells...only for one of the Black Mages and the Time Mage to eat an interrupt courtesy of Silence Song. 20 MP cost be damned, that already feels like one of the best Oracle spells. Following that, it was a vicious skirmish that eventually ended with me once again checking MFI hotspots while Miluda got beaten down. Most notably, found a Triangle Hat and some Chain Mail. The former, of course, found its way to Eltiana.
Delita was taken out before he could steal any crystals on that note.
Ramza gained two breaks (Head/Armor or Head/Shield, IIRC) from a crystal, and set up for the next fight with Battle Skill and two knives instead of an axe. Navarro swapped to Priest, Sara learned Blizzard but moved back to Monk, and Delita learned...Pitfall, I believe. Equipment upgrades were shared around, as I went into the first true bossfight of the game.
Fovoham Plains (Windmill) (0 resets):
Hi Wiegraf. This fight was frankly a quick and brutal one. Wiegraf starts out moving forward, Ramza advances in kind and cuts his PA by 3 with one of the two hits from Power Break hitting, ultimately crippling his swordskill damage. The enemy Oracle attempts to Confuse Ramza, only to get stuffed once again by Silence Song. Delita, in a fit of avian bloodlust, desire for chicken, or perhaps reminded too much of Algus by those feather colors, focuses down Boco, aided by high compatibility. Sara gets in a slapfight with one of the other monks.
...and Eltiana does like 90% of the actual damage to Wiegraf. This fight was madness, only made moreso by the fact that Ramza found a Wizard Robe.
Chaos aside, this ends up being the cleanest run of this fight I've had. Wiegraf only gets off one Crush Punch, which does 24 damage to Navarro and doesn't proc Death.
Where does this leave everyone going into Zeakden? Delita and Sara both learn Blizzard, Eltiana is sitting on enough JP to learn Death if so desired, Navarro's still sitting on 280 Oracle JP (enough for Petrify, Blind, or Zombie). Ramza...uh. He's got options that I'll have to decide on. Lancer lets him have a 64-damage attack with spears, I could work towards Ninja(albeit...slowly), or get him started on mage classes for some MA growth.
Next time I play: Algus is getting got, hats likely get thrown, and gafgarogs gafgarog.
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Triangle Strategy - Did a replay, all the way through on Hard this time, and did one of the other route's. Frederica's. Game remains good and recommended.
Fire Emblem Three Houses - Currently doing yet another challenge run, which is basically "pretend I'm playing old FE". No gambits, no combat arts, no abilities beyond a few exceptions (Prowess/Breakers), and only using weapons your class is "proficient" at, so no bow wyverns. Azure Moon, up to Chaper 18. Will provide details when I'm done.
Laggy Fantasy Tactics - Doing a four-unit run with Amy (each of us using two). Final dungeon is open, we're doing the Kolliery. Lotta fun as always. Did you know LFT has now existed for longer than FFT existed without LFT? We're old.
Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest - Did a no-reset run, i.e. what is often referred to as ironman. Hard Classic. Definitely a very tense experience, but fun. One thing I enjoy greatly about Conquest compared to other challenging Fire Emblems is how much it feels like you, the player, own what is going on. There are no same-turn reinforcements or weird triggers or fog of war. So this results in an all-playthrough feel of "my decisions matter" and it's pretty great.
Deaths:
-Niles died in Chapter 10, Camilla's join chapter. Frankly losing only one unit here is a win as far as I'm concerned, for all that it did mean I missed the treasure chests in the next chapter.
-Odin (Nosferatu tank) and Jakob (who had just learned Inspiration) both died in Chapter 13 (Cheve) as I misplayed Takumi + his armour knight friends + those accursed wyvern + armour pairups who fly across the river.
-Effie died in Chapter 16 (the boat), which is okay because she was almost on the bench anyway. Less okay was Peri dying in the same map, to Shura when I had a brainfart and forgot he had Counter, go me killing myself on the player phase.
-Chapter 20... oh god. After messing some stuff up with the wind and getting Kaze + Mozu isolated near Shura, I was certain I would lose both. Kaze did indeed die, but somehow Mozu barely managed to survive, once going down to 1 HP and once dodging a fatal attack. Also dying on this map is Felicia, who had recently learned Inspiration, because that move is a curse apparently.
-Silas died in Siegbert's paralogue, which is fine because he was turning out terribly and I'm honestly a bit surprised he made it this far.
-So the roster expands in Chapter 22 (Sakura's map) and I brought in Laslow for possible Pairup stat boosts and his 1-stat rally. No I had not used him since his joining chapter. So it wasn't much loss when I failed to notice he was in range of a bow-puppet.
-Shura died in Chapter 24 (Hinoka) as someone had to bite it to 12-move pegasi in one scary turn where I couldn't stifle their move with a dragon vein. Yes, that is 3/3 for losing the natural Locktouch users in Conquest, go me. Fortunately I was using Ninja Corrin.
-Corrin's son Siegbert died in Chapter 26 to the Wyrmslayer assault troop. Did you know even Corrin's non-Kana child counts as a dragon regardless of class? If I did, I'd forgotten. Oops.
Survived but benched: Arthur, Nyx, Selena, Charlotte. A far smaller list than usual!
Unit notes on the main team:
Corrin: Female, magic, ninja. Main weapon was the Levin Sword. Stayed in the base class long enough to get Draconic Hex, then switched to Master Ninja. Fast and magic'd things to death quite well.
Elise: Strategist. Made of glass but survived 'til the end! The best of the Inspiration-bot staff users, thanks to Lily's Poise and capping magic/speed/luck so she actually had good offence when I was able to use it.
Mozu: Archer -> Sniper -> Merchant. Quick Draw + Bowfaire + Spendthrift + Rally Strength + Strength Tonic + Keaton pairup one-rounds the final boss, and Rescue enables this on turn 3. Otherwise she was accurate and had decent overall stats later as you would expect.
Azura: Danced. So glad she didn't die, god. The things she enables, particularly in Ryoma's ninja hell map, are so irreplaceable. Giving her an HP Tonic in Chapter 15 (the Valla map with just her / Corrin / Gunter) was the best decision I made all run.
Beruka: Wyvern, eventually switching to Berserker to get Rally Strength+Defence on one unit (and Axefaire, near the end). She was always competent enough but rarely stood out.
Camilla: Usual Maligknight -> Berserker -> back to Maligknight -> back to Berserker for Trample/Axefaire damage nonsense. Huge strength/speed, murdered everything, obvious MVP in her first few maps, she's great of course.
Benny: Armour until Wary Fighter, then Wyvern. In his element on this run, he is reliable. Amazing HP/Def, good res and accuracy (and a personal which makes everyone's hit better). His damage sucks but who cares. Not nearly as impressive pre-Wary Fighter, but good enough.
Leo: He existed and was solid enough. Didn't do anything exciting with him despite thinking about it. Mobile and decent magic damage, and adequate bulk. He capped speed but goodness is his speed cap as a Dark Knight bad (25?!?).
Keaton: Existed, married Camilla. Like Benny he is relatively reliable what with his class having a crit-evade boost and decent enough bulk.
Xander: Did his usual reliable tanking with 1-2 range and 8 move, along with Benny was probably one of the two "safest" people to bait out enemies late.
Kana: Corrin Jr., also used a Levin Sword, wasn't as good at it but worked okay, Draconic Hex is a neat baiting tool.
Velouria: Waited until Camilla got Trample so she could get it too. Kinda like her dad but with better offence, 6 move + 1 range lock is a bit limiting but quite solid past that.
Izana, Forrest, Flora, Gunter: Predictable filler roles. The middle two got Inspiration which is cool.
Fun times.
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Ys: The Oath in Felghana- fin
Well this was a video game. I dunno about the original or the other complete remakes of the Ys series did, but this one definitely feels like someone took what was originally an extremely Zelda-like game and reformatted it into an action RPG. And within that this is... y'know, alright, worth playing. It does have a particular vibe, extremely aggro, that's pretty satisfying... annnd kinda completely at odds with the much more Zelda-like "you must master the new tool you have to best this battle" bosses. It's not bad at that exactly, but it's such a difference in focus and you don't have quite the same tools a regular Zelda game would give you to accomplish that, so it does feel needlessly mean at times, but still a unique experience.
Not sure I'd really play any more Ys, it hits that some sorta spot MMX did where it's nice to peak into a slice of gaming I normally don't but not so compelling I need to seek all of them out. But hey, did a thing.
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Laggy Fantasy Tactics
Did a four-unit run with Amy.
Marcus (Ramza): Generally centred around Monk. Early on he ran Poison as his secondary (surprisingly good utility to add) and Equip Armour, then later he went to Thief/Ninja for dualpunching and poaching (and occasional steal, notably Balk's Blaze Gun), eventually when he returned to Monk he used Guts for Scream and Heal.
Hubert: Spent most of the game as Black/Yin Yang. Pray Faith is a very inappropriate spell but he eventually learned it, mostly he was about magical boom for much of the game transitioning increasingly into Short Charge status later. In the aftergame he dropped Black Magic and became a Chemist once we had two elemental guns.
Benedict: Mediator/Time Mage mostly. After Blaze Gun he even had good damage too. Typically ran Short Charge and Teleport. Haste 2 is a great spell, Quick has surprisingly neat utility, and otherwise there's lots of statusy goodness here between Slow / Negotiate / Mimic Daravon / etc.
Daisy: White Magic specialist, the skillset is good largely from beginning to end. Aside from when she was learning White Magic (and a bit of Time for Teleport; learned Haste 2 for free from Benedict which is cool), she spent time in various sword classes, Knight/Geomancer and finally (after Excalibur) Squire.
I believe the only maingame fights which caused multiple resets were Golgorand Execution Site and Izlude/Saika/Taishyr. Germinas Peak too? Definitely needed to re-tool our setups for more offence on that one. A scattered other set of fights caused one each.
We beat the Kolliery (again never more than one reset) and did the Deep Dungeon, but weren't able to beat Elidibs. Just too many enemies getting too many turns. Even got Chantage/Ribbon and lost. Probably would have wanted Math Skill to control more targets at once (Dispel, Slow, Don't Move, etc...).
Enjoyable as always.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses - I did a bit of a "pretend this is old Fire Emblem" run. Broadly, mechanics which were introduced in Awakening onwards are banned, including:
-Combat Arts
-Gambits
-Equippable abilities (exception: Prowess skills and Weapon Crit+10 skills, since they mimic the weapon rank bonuses of old games)
-Using weapons or magic your class isn't "proficient" with. So for instance, Wyvern Riders can only use axes/lances.
-Commoners/Nobles can choose ONE weapon and use only that, until they change class.
-Adjutants
-Punching
These rules did not apply to out-of-combat stuff. I also allowed battalions, which could be debatable, again because they're not equipped in combat and kinda like equipment, but also because without them I feared my stats would be too awful; I was already suffering due to no Death Blow/Combat Arts/etc.
Fun because I was basically forced to fight "fair"; cheesy evasion strategies and gambits were out. Poor offence meant I had to think about how to approach enemies, too; in the later maps, one-rounding enemies was relatively uncommon, though my strongest characters could do it to certain enemy types and/or with certain weapons. Range shenanigans were still go; Bow Knight is an incredible class and I still have equipment for long-range magic.
Class notes:
Beginner tier: Monk is still good. Fighter is now the clear best physical job here, since having axes and (especially) bows is much better than just swords or just lances.
Intermediate tier: Pegasus Knight is great (swords/lances), Cavalier is kinda similar but doesn't fly, Mage/Priest are still good for usual reasons, Archer has Bow Range+, Thief has swords+bows. Other classes not very useful.
Advanced tier: Wyvern Rider still very good, Sniper/Paladin/Assassin/Warlock/Bishop all serve basically their old roles as well (though no Hunter's Volley). I also used Valkyrie on one character, although its lack of Faith is a major downside it doesn't normally have (the infantry mages are proficient in both magic types). Unlike in normal games, there's little reason to stay here past Level 30, only one character actually did (as an Assassin).
Master tier: Bow Knight and fliers are busted, not much news here. All mages went Gremory. Bow Knight I'll particularly note as even more useful than usual since its big downside compared to Sniper is gone.
Without combat arts, magic is still great (mages lose their own magical combat arts, though) and bows emerge as the clear best weapon type (even without Close Counter); Mini Bow in particular is just such a good weapon under these rules, since it's super-light and provides innate Close Counter (kinda; you can't double with it then).
Units used:
Byleth (swords -> Myrmidon -> Thief/Pegasus -> Wyvern Rider -> Falcon Knight): Mostly stuck in sword classes to have Creator Sword access, but flier for Chapter 13 was too important, so she took a break then. Anyway she got really good stats and was generally very useful.
Dimitri (lances -> Fighter -> Cavalier -> Paladin -> Bow Knight): Kinda struggled a bit at points during the Fighter/Cavalier stages because he was quite slow, but he had lots of Def so I built him for that. Thanks to his angry phase he didn't get to Bow Knight until quite late (Chapter 19?) but was good once he did; couldn't double like the others but Brave Bow hit very hard.
Felix (bows -> Fighter -> Archer -> Sniper -> Bow Knight): Nice offensive stats. One of the overall best characters; he didn't have quite as much raw damage as Dimitri, but not too far (and his Crest is always relevant in this run), and being able to double a lot of things + not being doubled was big. Also the might supports with Sylvain/Ingrid were great.
Sylvain (lances -> Soldier -> Cavalier -> Dancer): Not really planned but hey it worked. Used the Levin Sword+ as a Dancer to hand out support bonuses. Bulk let him take stray hits right up until the end, even though the dodgetank build was out.
Mercedes (faith -> Monk -> Priest -> Warlock -> Gremory): Live to Serve is good, Physic is great, Fortify is great. Spells do enough damage to be notable, wish she had 3 range though. Had great speed which was nice for both offence and defence, Res too. Possibly the least useful overall of my main three mages but all were very good.
Ingrid (lances -> Soldier -> Pegasus -> Wyvern Rider -> Wyvern Lord): Can't do the dodgetanking thing as well (though still tapped for it on occasion, most notably against the Bolting Gremories in Endgame), otherwise pretty standard Ingrid stuff here. The speed was certainly nice.
Hapi (C3 recruit as Monk -> Mage -> Valkyrie -> Gremory): Essential monster-hunter: Banshee to control them, various spells to break them at range, and late even had to use desperation Shield of Seiros strats for her to bait them. With gambits banned these roles became very useful. Also had Physic and Warp of course, at least when she wasn't a Valkyrie, though her stats were the worst of the mages (didn't generally kill armours).
Dorothea (C4 recruit as Monk -> Mage -> Warlock -> Gremory): Good for all the usual reasons, Meteor was great for both accuracy and offence, Physic/Thoron good as always. Generally had solid stats and was extremely useful.
Catherine (C5 recruit as Swordmaster -> Assassin): Well hey there's no reason to consider backtracks with her any more! Has that jagen feel, but fortunately Assassin and her screaming speed (only person to not get doubled by Jeritza) meant she always had a niche, even if it's overall a weaker niche than that of my other characters.
Leonie (C7 recruit as Cavalier -> Pegasus -> Sniper -> Bow Knight): Kinda hopped between one good class and another. She was a bit speed-screwed but still had solid overall stats; not one of my better characters though there were times when Bow Knight was just so useful that I would have to rethink that statement.
Seteth (C12 recruit as Wyvern Rider -> Wyvern Lord): Pretty underwhelming. Sometimes a third flier was nice to have, but his speed was just so bad, really limited him both offensively and defensively. Biggest mistake in hindsight was trying to use him as my 11th, I should have focused more on...
Maneula (C8 recruit as Priest -> Bishop): Didn't use her much until the timeskip, and even then she was often my 12th, but then I realized she had more upwards potential than Seteth. Didn't course correct in time to get her to Gremory, which was a shame since that'd have been useful. Anyway, she had poor offence, but her faith utility was nice in lategame maps: Silence was shockingly good for controlling certain mages, Ward for surviving certain things in Endgame, and Warp. She also had Bolting for the last two maps, which was beautiful even though unlike Dorothea I never used it for direct offence. Still not great, but more useful than usual for sure.
Ashe: Benched in Chapter 3 due to general mediocrity
Annette: Benched in Chapter 3 due to her good traits being banned
Dedue: Benched in Chapter 4 due to low speed
Constance: Recruited in Chapter 3, benched in Chapter 5 due to other mages having Physic.
Yuri: Recruited in Chapter 3, went Archer, benched in Chapter 8 due to just not being as good as the others.
Shamir: Recruited in Chapter 6, benched in late Part 1. Good prepromo but without combat arts there's no reason to continue using her late; the other archers all have clearly better stats.
The hardest maps were certainly Hunting by Daybreak (flying Byleth had to carry, basically, and I had to be careful which enemies I baited), and then the last three. Merceus because Jeritza was a difficult foe for my team and because the siege tome + falconknight formations were something nobody on my team could tank directly; Enbarr because husbando drops reinforcements on your head and both NotDorothea/Petra/siege weapons are all huge pains (ended up using Ward to get Mercedes in vs. NotDorothea safely, and Hapi + Shield of Seiros to tank a ninja reinforcement demonic beast); Enbarr 2 because uh yeah, obvious. Ingrid was the key tank for the siege tome reinforcements, I ran the Dark Knights out of Death using Mercedes, and Dimitri/Felix killed infinite War Masters with bows while Catherine (Goddess Ring) and Byleth (Evasion Ring) killed the final boss.
16th playthrough done, and just in time for the sequel!
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Elf: I am impressed that in an ironman run, you did Siegbert's paralogue. I only did that one on Revelation where I could deploy a busted team of 10 royals if I wanted. That Revelation run, I was doing my "Casual for battle saves but not accepting deaths" deal stolen from Eph, but I broke that rule for Siegert & Percy's paralogues and just accepted some (fake) casualties. I've seen people online whine about how unforgiving that map is, too. Combined with horrible rewards other than Siegbert himself, no less!
Brigandine Legend of Runersia
Did a run as Norzaleo on Hard a bit ago after getting frustrated by a loss in Triangle Strategy. Yeah, despite starting with the fewest units, it's definitely easy modo - the fewest borders, and both Rubino and Elena are extremely good. The one minor downside is the low-starting level, but… whatever, wait a few turns with them at the training grounds before they go on their romantic killing spree. Maybe an issue if you're trying for minimum conquest times but I still won in less than half the allotted time (1 year and 4-6 seasons or so?), so. Pick was my 3rd; he's interesting and different, although prooooobably not worth the risk considering he's extremely frail. Got a decent amount of use out of Maximilian, Schlizer, Jiu, and a few neutrals too. Sadly, the one unit I didn't end up getting to use much was Leonora, although I know Elf praised her. Her being good was relevant, she was just left on "scare enemy lord into not attacking while battles happened elsewhere" duty with a neutral and a retired Grados I think.
The one funny thing was Stella pulling an Ashnard and wandering off way far away while her country burned in the background. She made it all the way to the northern end of the map on her insane raiding mission that I kept falling back from and taking the spot "behind" her as I didn't want to engage her without better units, but it didn't really help! (Also had a brief "international conference" moment when Rubino, Stella, and Superaielman were all in the center of the map bordering each other.)
I did the other final boss in the name of variety, and yeah, despite the game trying to tell you it'd be easier, it's actually probably harder than the other option? Not that it's Actually Hard, but I could see something going terribly wrong if you misposition and get area-nuked hard enough. While the other final boss basically is guaranteed to get wrecked. Not that it's a big deal, but the post-credits plot scene clearly assumes you did the route that the game wants you to pick and fought RG, so it was a little weird seeing it after an ending where Rubino succumbed to the temptation / mind-control of the rune. Ah well.
Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright
I had a Lunatic Casual CQ run up to Takumi's map I stopped on and should technically finish some day (was using a different set of units!), but kinda lost my enthusiasm for it. Decided to go back and play Birthright but on Classic, so no cheaty battle saves that make gambling less costly. The challenge, given that this was BR, was rolling up randomly a team of exactly six characters (well, Corrin + 5 characters). I actually got a pretty good team! Jakob, Azura, Rinkah, Hinoka, and Scarlet. Guess I'm playing as F-Corrin for that early Jakob access. But yeah, Jakob offers heals and can make early Corrin a death tank, and Azura is always good (I swear I did not rig the randomization to get her). The one off-beat thing I'm doing is that I elected to make Rinkah the ninja rather than Corrin… ninja-Corrin is boring, I'll do Spear-Master Bolt Naginata Corrin eventually instead after the Dragonstone OP phase ends.
Anyway. A brief interlude to complain about Conquest's plot - it's relevant, I swear. One of the parts of CQ plot that actually works okay is Takumi's descent to madness and his rivalry with Corrin. Unfortunately, CQ, as usual, shoots itself in the foot and doesn't make it quite as good as it could have been. The game wants to insist that CQ Corrin is Right because, unironically, a magic sword chose Corrin, so whatever they do just has to be right (Azura says as much, and it appears to be played deadly straight). This also means that Takumi's rivalry with Corrin is because he was possessed / influenced by Anankos. The problem is that human Takumi has extremely valid reasons to hate and despise Corrin the traitor who is leading an army that is causing quite a bit of destruction, yet spirit-Takumi says that actually he's totally cool with CQ Corrin before the final battle, all that emo phase was just his possessed side. I'm not complaining about him *eventually* getting purple goopy powers, but SnowFire the writer would have delayed that to the last second, and run with human Takumi genuinely disliking Corrin for the destruction they cause. Make Corrin feel the consequences of their actions.
Okay, why did I bring that up? Because through the magic of organic gameplay, I accidentally gave BR Takumi a fantastic reason to hate Corrin, despite this being the route where he gets magically cleansed by Azura! On the Izumo map with Zola, due to the low deploy count, I have to take it really slow - that means largely staying in the starting room and blockading the entrance. Sure, paired-up Corrin could probably survive a stroll outside, but then everyone else could get in trouble. Takumi's crew wanders over to help as green units, but since I am way, way slower at cleaning them out than the map "expects" (the map has a stream of reinforcements headed over for the first ~14 turns or so, too!), Oboro & Hinata find plenty of angry Nohrians waiting for them, and die. Hey, I wasn't gonna use 'em anyway, and in-character, they were too far away for Corrin to shout at or something. I like to imagine Hinoka recognizing the bodies amongst the Nohrian dead before joining Izana's pajamas feast. In the next map (Mohshukujin ninjas in the forest), crazed Takumi shows up, but after being cured, he doesn't seem to ask about where his retainers are. Maybe everybody "in the know" has signed some terrible pact of silence of just pretending not to know, maybe they're still out there searching for you at the Bottomless Canyon! They definitely aren't dead due to our own laxity! Really! And if Detective Takumi ever found out the horrible truth… ah. Then we'd truly have an excuse for an epic showdown. Ah, organic plot.
After that map is the ship map, which is actually one of the most dangerous maps in BR. On this map, a decent number of enemies have the cheaty 1-2 range weapons seen on many CQ bosses - why do they largely stop appearing later?! Anyway I died here twice, the second time at the very end. Still stuck here. The problem is that if you wait too long, the entire map aggros and wants to kill you. With the small deploy count, I can't really defend Azura or un-paired up Ninja Rinkah with meatshields, although the tornadoes help of course. Sure, Corrin / Jakob are very tanky, as are Guard Naginata Hinoka / Somebody Else, but they're not completely immortal, and that leaves a 5th slot vulnerable (although I guess I could mildly cheat and pair them up with Reina). It wouldn't be so bad if I could efficiently kill my way through the map, but the low deploy count bites me again here, making it hard to ensure I don't get overwhelmed in the final wave. For example, there's a Kinshi Knight packing an Illusionary Yumi (+10 Res) that Dragonstone Corrin utterly fails at damaging; switching to Yato would help, but it's still only a 3HKO, and it would ruin Corrin's defenses for all the crap everywhere else. If everyone was spread out in offense formation and I applied a shuriken debuff first, I could probably take her out quickly, but that would just get me killed by everyone else on enemy phase. But yeah, units like that pile-up who can actually deal damage to my tanks, and then I eventually suffer a casualty and reset (although it was actually due to un-paired Rinkah dying after I couldn't meat-shield her entirely anymore). We'll see on attempt #3, I guess!
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Re Siegbert: Interesting. It's not an easy map, of course (very little Conquest-specific is) but I don't really consider it that tough myself? Though I know you tend to play maps a bit more slowly than me, which has advantages sometimes but I imagine would make Siegbert's map harder. The one paralogue I did avoid for the reasons you cited was Ignatius's; that one I consider quite tricky without burning the four-per-file uses of Rescue.
Good luck with the ship map! There's definitely a few tricky midgame maps before the game has a bit of an easy run in the late midgame. And then... I'll definitely be interested in how you deal with the Windmire maps against Camilla, Hans, and Iago, if you stay on Lunatic.
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Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta
I did 375 since hey that sounds like a cool way to give me a balanced party.
<GILGABOT> And by "balanced", you mean "get the consistently worst job from every crystal". :)
Okay, that's not quite true, as Monk is not the worst probably, but still, check it out:
Monk, Berserker, Geomancer, Dancer
Earlygame was not a problem, Monk punches the Tule-Walse section of the game to death effortlessly (except Garula who mostly gets counterpunched instead). But from then on most every boss was a pain:
-Liquid Flame more like Liquid Pain, can't exploit the tornado form and the other two wear me down badly.
-Sandworm is ugh, I let the Berserker die and try to turtle with Charka and counters. Either I have bad luck or something is up with counter vs. Sandworm because it kicked in 0 times out of 9. Fight took over half an hour off the clock though I used emulator speedup to make it more palatable, mostly just me spamming Chakra until I gained enough HP I felt I could safely take a swing.
-Soul Cannon was a terrifying damage race, luckily on the winning run only the Berserker got hit with Old, I still used both Hi-Potions I'd acquired so far and four Elixirs.
-Titan and Manticore are just slug and prey. I beat Titan first time but not Manticore.
-Purobolos were awful. Only boss I had two resets on. Really did not have the ability to slug them down fast enough for Self-Destruct chains to not screw me over. And god forbid I miscount and trigger MT Arise, which I certainly do at least once.
-Bridge Gilgamesh was also pretty awful.
Not awful were Byblos and Adamantoise, both of whom Geomancer bailed me out against.
After that I got storebought Hi-Potions, and I could actually do something besides hope to outslug things with my not-very-good damage. The last three required bosses of W2 were still difficult; Atomos was a photo finish, Seal Guardians a lot of annoying HP counting which Berserker naturally makes even harder (one reset, on the second run I finally saw Death Sickle actually work against a boss for once), and Exdeath is definitely trickier when you only have three people to respond to his various moves with the appropriate mix of Hi-Potions and Phoenix Downs. This is the type of team that almost makes me understand why someone might farm Reflect Rings (four is still a big waste of time, just protecting one PC would have trivialized the second stage; I decided not to bother at all).
And then World 3, while not easy (both Gargoyles and Melusine were a pain in the ass to get things started), I'm actually rather proud of.
So this is where, after suffering for over half of its existence, Dancer suddenly becomes worthwhile. Storebought Lamia's Tiara and common-steal Rainbow Dresses from Phoenix Tower mean Sword Dance is now 50% in the hands of a Dancer (or in my case, Geomancer as well). At first I do Barehanded Dance which leads to ~5000 damage Sword Dances or so. Okay, cool cool. But at a certain point I think bigger: Rune Axe. While it's not a particularly special weapon in Berserker's hands, Dancer has a real magic stat. Sword Dance with this does anywhere from 4000 to 9999, depending on my level and the target.
Geomancer does the same thing with Assassin Dagger + Lamia's Tiara. In the final dungeon I'm lucky enough to get a Rune Chime (1/16 drop, from admittedly a very common enemy) and suddenly wow, they've got a high 4-digit Sword Dance of their own. Equip Ribbon Monk becomes mostly the item-user at this point, Berserker is still Berserker.
Anyway for bosses, the most notable ones are past the start are Omniscient (I do the Reflect Ring Mage Masher thing), Apanda (physicals still not really the way to go against Byblos mark 2, but I prevail), Catastrophe (Earthquake one-shots the Dancer and leaves me scrambling, fortunately he decides to be nice the rest of the way), and Twintania (not hard, but notable because I need to kill the Berserker off so she doesn't trigger Tsunami counters... and because FLIRT shuts down the Gigaflare form. YES). Neo Exdeath is a big of a slog (I switch my Geomancer to back row Equip Ribbon, this might have been a mistake) with only the Dancer doing really big damage and only randomly, but Grand Cross is mostly a joke with three Ribbon users and I can survive Almagest with two PCs at least. (Possibly should have made it three with HP+30 on Geo? I was expecting to kill the Almagest part faster than I did, some bad Sword Dance luck there.)
No resets in World 3! Final level was 37. No grinding, but not much running, and the only significant source of exp I skipped was the Great Trench.
Class notes:
Monk has a good World 1, a decent enough World 2, and becomes basically useless besides an HP sponge in World 3 as weapons suddenly spike up in power. Not that HP sponging is nothing, ensured I survived Almagest for instance. For their abilities, Focus is okay (33% DPS increase compared to physicals, also triggers fewer counters), Chakra is rarely marginally useful in W1 due to being better than Potion, and HP+30% is a nice little durability push but a very expensive investment.
Berserker is the worst, and I drew no classes which can really support it (e.g. Knight for Two Hands, mages for W3 Gaia Hammer / Rune Axe). Bosses like Sandworm, Soul Cannon, and Exdeath are made challenging by their incompetence. They have bulk at least. Their speed is wretched; not only is it bad on paper, but something about the way berserk is handled makes it even worse on turn 1. The entire rest of my team instantly doubled Berserker after all got Hermes Sandals. Equip Axe is nice on someone with a magic stat.
Geomancer is a slave to what Gaia is doing at a given time. Useful against Byblos, Adamantoise, and in a few dungeons such as Ronka and Drakenvale. Vaguely acceptable in some other dungeons due to providing magic damage which my party otherwise lacked. And sometimes just a near-useless knife fighter. For skills, Gaia's the only useful one, and struggled on my team because unlike real magic skillsets it doesn't improve Magic Power when set, and the rest of my team had average to terrible magic.
Dancer is mostly just bad in World 1-2, you Dance because why not it's better than physicals on average (especially against the evasive). The W3 equips really change them, suddenly they're a damage cannon, albeit one with awful HP which does hold them back, especially because they usually want to be in the front row (though Thor's Hammer gave a nice backrow option). Equip Ribbon is nice for stat boosts and stat immunity, Dance was useful on Geomancer after Lamia's Tiara, Flirt is useful against Twintania.
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Tried the Live A Live demo, and found out I can fight both Shintyu and Omega. This must be the only demo that allows you to fight the super bosses.
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Did end up doing a bit of leveling for Monk SCC. Not a lot but enough. An extra level or two was enough. Still might split up the last set of writeups depending on my attention span.
UBS4 (1 reset):
Earth Clothes and Germinas Boots with Hamedo as reaction. Enemy priorities are the lower leveled Monk and the Archer. The other Monk is a Ninja and will almost always favor regular physicals for Hamedo to block. Earth Slash to get around evasion with a dash of Secret Fist if it ever comes up to only having one punchboy free to attack a full HP enemy. Secret Fist didn't really come up in practice as the enemies tended to line up when advancing so I was Earth Slashing multiple foes often and thus anyone close enough for Secret Fist was already hurting.
Had a loss due to something silly. Could have healed an ally with Chakra or Earth Slash. Went with Earth Slash because it recovered more HP. What could go wrong? How about it criticaling and knocking a monk off a high drop. He survived the fall damage but was stuck on a panel with no level ground next to it. Generics KO him and I'm not able to win in time to prevent crystalization. Reset.
Actually played this multiple times trying various approaches on Balk 2. The attempt I kept, I got the Yoichi Bow from the Archer. Not usable within the confines of the challenge but still an entertaining trophy.
Rofel again (1 reset):
Rofel's AI is such that if there are no valid targets within his range on his turn, he will retreat. My strategy is to bait him to retreat, take out the support, and deal with him after they're gone. One reset because I didn't set up the PBF correctly to have Rofel retreat. So he came forward to charge Petrify and I was not in position to maximize my damage. Didn't feel like punch past Defense Up and auto-protect with the mage support battering me and gave up instead of playing it out.
Next attempt, I set the PBF properly and he retreats as intended. Time Mage Hastes him, which would be scary were it not for his AI setting and he wastes the status retreating for the back faster. Meanwhile, I pound down the support, careful to stay 10 panels away from Rofel no matter what and recovery as needed. Even with Hasted mages and me forgetting to set HP Restore, I still overcome them.
With the support down, next comes Rofel. Being a physical class trying to get past Defense Up and auto-protect, it takes a lot of pounding. When everyone is in position, bait Petrify and nail him with 4 Earth Slashes and Repeating Fist from the one punchboy who can get close enough. Then it's just hit with everything I can and endure all the broken armor.
Like the previous map, I played this out multiple times. The first winning battle, I had an oopsie using Kenshiro as Petrify bait. Petrify hits and while I can fix that with Stigma Magic easy enough, it does slow down my offense and Rofel Shellbusts 3 people before reducing his HP to zero. The winning attempt that I kept, I remembered HP Restore for the reaction. Also did a bit of positioning trickery that when I baited Petrify from him (this time remembering to use a low Faith punchboy), sneaked in two Earth Slashes yet he couldn't get into Mighty Sword range. Another Petrify from him. Couldn't stay out of Mighty Sword reach this time so swarmed him. Got a good roll on Repeating Fist and by the time Rofel got a Shellbust off, he was at 63 HP. So finished him off with only one broken armor. Maybe it would have been possible to lure him around to win with no broken gear but I wasn't clever enough to find such a way with 10 PA Monks.
Kletian fails again (0 resets):
Still with Earth Clothes and Germinas Boots. Set Hamedo. Kletian is smart enough to retreat if there's someone with spell range on his turn. So I didn't get to punch him out on round 1, not getting enough punchboys able to reach him. Plus I'm spending turns keeping Kenshiro alive and dealing with annoying Samurai sniping people with Kikuichimonji. Rely on Hamedo to keep me safe from Ninjas. My poor PBF placement isn't enough to save Kletian and I do eventually reach him with enough units to punch him out.
Played this fight a few times as well in the process of trying to find a winning strategy for the fight after this. Moving Ramza 3 panels away from where the game initially places him on the PBF will draw Kletian forward, leaving him bait for midcharge Punch Art beatings. This makes for the fastest victory and I would have done this more if I already had the Lv 38 Speed point. For more EXP though, murdering the support also works. Ninjas are the first target's to prioritize. Once they're out of the picture (dead or critical and out of their threat range) there's very little risk of losing. Lancer Time Mages are laughable and tend to offer themselves up to Hamedo. Samurai can be annoying but don't have the offense to endanger a party of Earth Clothes Earth Slashing Monks who also pack revival.
Kletian using Flare is very comical. 2 casts and he's out of gas. His AI is more defensive and isn't inclined to approach with his staff unless someone's within his movement range. Either snipe from afar with Earth Slash or come closer and bait him into Hamedo, either way he's a joke on his own.
Balk 2 (4 resets):
This battle I was worried about being able to clear coming in, especially without the Lv 38 Speed point. With Earth Clothes and Germinas Boots, my punchboys only do 60 damage to Balk with Earth Slash so trying to rush him isn't likely to work. Will probably need to take out some of the support before I can focus on Balk. I am relieved it took this few attempts; was mentally prepared for a much higher number of attempts. HP Restore as reaction since Hamedo is useless here.
Attempt #1: Balk shoots Kenshiro for 133. Chemist has good compatibility with him and high enough Faith to kill him off. Kenshiro never gets to act as he's highest on the unit list so he doesn't get a turn after being revived, just getting shot down again before his turn comes around. The monsters are closing in and I haven't really made a significant dent in the enemy forces when I give up.
Attempt #2: Balk gets a Bolt 2 for 171 on Kenshiro. Chemist finishes him off. Plays out like the previous attempt with Kenshiro never getting to act.
Attempt #3: Axel and Captain Falcon put on Rubber Shoes and go with Kenshiro in the first group. Bolt 2 from Blast Gun again and Kenshiro is face down again. Whatever, if the trap strat works, it will be over before the countdown expires. I have someone in team 2 move to exactly 8 panels away from where to trap Balk to bait him. On his second turn, Balk does not move to the trap panel instead opting to Arm Aim one of the trappers. Oops, forgot he could do that. Reset. Punchboys can't guard both lightning and Snipe so I don't have a reliable means of setting up a trap strat.
Attempt #4: I have 3 units with the 11 PA point so I give the Bracers. Maybe can get something going with the extra damage. With 14 PA and Earth Clothes, Earth Slash damage goes up from 95 to 175. 112 to Balk means that rushing Balk down looks more viable if (and it's a big if) I can line up enough units. With sluggish 3 Move Monks. (cough)
This time, Balk opens with an Arm Aim on Kenshiro. Miss. Chemist shoots Kenshiro. Manageable. Just got to see that he's in the path of an ally's Earth Slash. My opening wave of attacks puts the Hyudra into critical as well as inflicting hurt on various other enemies (and Balk though that damage isn't going to stick). I was careless with my initial positioning though and the Hydra fries two units. Balk and the Chemist finish them off. Crap. Being down 2 punchboys proves to be too much to recover from. The Dark Behemoth makes it to my team and starts murdering people. I was down to one punchboy under Arm Aim when I conceded defeat.
For the winning attempt, everyone but Axel reach their Lv 36 PA point. Those 4 get Bracers. Axel sticks with Germinas Boots and I primarily focus him in a medic role with offense as a secondary priority.
Battle starts with Arm Aim missing again which is welcome and Chemist shooting Kenshiro. I'm more defensive with my teams positioning now. Got off one free 175 damage Earth Slash on the Tiamat due to starting PBF. Enemies go. Arm Aim misses again. Hydra attempts a Triple Flame, whiff. Hyudra attacks the punchboy Hydra tried to fry. Balk shoots someone and triggers an HP Restore.
All three flying monsters are lined up for Earth Slash when my team gets their second set of turns. I might have a chance now. Thanks to the increased damage from Bracers, I get in enough damage to KO all three fliers. Too early for victory laps. Chemist has Phoenix Down, there's still frequent Balk doubleturns which can easily result in a dead punchboy, and also Arm Aim to fight off. Stigma Magic can deal with Snipe status though it still takes away turns from offense. And the Dark Behemoth is still in play.
So the Chemist was fixated on reviving the Hydra. Because chemist move-acted on round 1 but the Hydra only moved, it always came back at 20 CT. One of my units would smack it down again before it got a turn. Chemist would re-rez it and the cycle went on for the remainder of its existence. Meanwhile, the Dark Behemoth was closing in and it was decision time. One option was going all-in on trying to blow through Balk's HP. But if that failed, I would lose all my progress up to that point. And the three remaining enemies are quite capable of wrecking a member or two of my team. The other path was to focus on getting the behemoth out of play. The Bracers provide enough offense for that to be doable. Decided my chance were better with removing the Dark Behemoth even if it take focus away from the other enemies. And I came dangerously close to losing it. I had carelessly left Jin on a panel inaccessible to Revive when ganging up on the behemoth. Had it opted to kill him, it would have been a sure loss as my chances of breaking through Move HP-up and Defense Up down a unit were grim. Lucky me, it went after units that I could reach to revive, killing two before it was brought down to critical.
It was a tense situation: down two units. Was a scramble to get them back up while still keeping that Hydra neutralized and dealing with Balk. Also got to watch my positioning so I don't lose anyone to the behemoth when it runs for a corner. The Chemist does get a doubleturn wiht his 10 Speed to my team's 8. But he revives the Tiamat on the doubleturn, it's too far away to harm my team, and it retreats for a corner. Seemingly ages later though maybe just 3-4 rounds, everyone is back up and I start moving them across the gap to where Balk and the Chemist are hanging out. Behemoth is too far for the Chemist to support so it's a non-factor. All the while still dealing with smacking down the Hydra every time it's revived and dealing with the constant Balk doubleturns (and his over 60% chance of murdering Kenshiro on those doubleturns) And not letting the enemies pick up any crystals. Felt so relieved when I could get my sluggish 3 Move punchboys into position to bring down the Chemist. Also opted to kill off the Tiamat and the Dark Behemoth. Did not want to get Balk down to critical only to have the Tiamat decimate a unit or two right at the end. Even with all the other enemies down, it still took a while to chase down Balk and batter him with enough Earth Slash to bury him. I got the Chemist's crystal before that happened, the Mime crystal a mostly wasted gesture in an SCC. Balk did wander towards the gap and I suspected he intend to cross but I landed the killblow right about then, sparing an even longer goose chase.
One upshot of this drawn out fight was that everyone but Axel reached their Lv 38 Speed point. Even if I don't think I need it for Hashulam, it's still welcome given the large speed gap.
Graveyard of Airships (0 resets):
After that last long, drawn-out sandbag-fest this was a very straightforward battle. Black Costumes and Germinas Boots because Hash has Spell. HP Restore on Kneshiro and Jin; Hamedo on the others. Battle begins with my entire team rocked by Quake. From here on out, it's focus on survival and getting in what attacks I can. Oftentimes found myself using Chakra more often than attacking. Try to stay spread out yet close enough for support actions. Routine Monk stuff by now. Hash mostly pummeled 3-4 units at a time with magic. Couldn't really make damage stick to a team of low Faith SCC Monks. And the highest Faith units have bad compat with him. Saw some HP Restores go off which reduces the pressure. He did try for a few physicals on weakened neutral compat units but that's what I set Hamedo for. Hamedo went 2 for 4; the last one getting the kill and denying me a kill bonus. It's alright though. Axel got enough actions to reach the Lv 38 Speed point. Going into the final battle, the team is in the Lv 38-40 range all with 11 PA.
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Fire Emblem Birthright - I decided to rip off Snowfire and do my own run of Lunatic Birthright with a random team. I dislike small teams, though, so we're doing 12 instead. I got Corrin, Kaze, Orochi, Kaden, Scarlet, Kana, Dwyer, Mitama, Kiragi, Selkie, Midori, Shiro. Rolled Corrin up randomly too and got Troubadour (pretty worthless), +Str -Spd. Speed bane sucks but it's probably workable on Birthright because enemy speed isn't great on average.
Some other rules:
-Challenge doesn't start until Chapter 7; I can use anyone before then.
-For getting kid PCs, I obviously had to fill out a bit of a roster to get them, using the minimum number of additions possible. I did Corrin/Kaze (which also keeps Kaze from dying), Orochi/Jakob, Kaden/Mozu, Hinoka/Azama, Takumi/Oboro, and Ryoma/Kagero.
-From the above list, Jakob and Mozu had to be permanently the backup unit in their pairup with their partner and never actively used.
-The three couples for whom neither parent was on my list of rolled PCs, I allowed myself to use both PCs in the couple, but they must be permanently paired up and they can not use any weapons their child could not. Why yes this is a specifically targetted rule to keep Ryoma from being overpowered (he was still very good).
I'm up to Chapter 18. Notable trouble fights were Chapter 9 (both just surviving the initial assault and making sure I recruited Oboro) and Chapter 12 (this one is wild; it's normally trivial, but I had no flier and had no way to outrace Xander reaching me and cutting someone down. Ended up promoting Takumi to Kinshi Knight). Also Kana's paralogue of all things; the Snipers in particular were very scary and I couldn't win fast so the reinforcements piled up. Had some trouble with 10, 13, and Mitama's paralogue as well. Everyone's promoted now and I have a solid, consistent team, so I don't anticipate too much trouble before the endgame maps.
Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes
Scarlet Blaze, up to Chapter 10. I'll save more detailed comments for later but I'm really enjoying this game. It's not as thematically impactful as Three Houses was bit it's a lot of fun, and definitely in the conversation for best Warriors game in terms of gameplay (while obviously having better writing than all the others I've played.
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Laggy Fantasy Tactics: Gafgarog Edition
It...had very much been a while for sure. That while had clouded my judgment as you will see for a very silly outcome.
Fort Zeakden (1 Reset):
...yeah. I had my first reset. to Algus. I had, out of greed for certain advancements by Chapter 2, moved Ramza over to Archer. This...proved to be a mistake. The entire thing turned into a clusterfuck with one of the enemy Knights rolling Steal Heart and charming Sara (setting her up to let herself be killed), Item Knight struck back by un-silencing the black mages, Ramza couldn't put out much damage in total, and between Ramza Positioning and locations, I wasted two of Ramza's turns trying to get an item that ultimately turned out to be a javelin, and one of Navarro's on trying to use Zombie on Algus only to discover that my brilliant meme plan to get him to Auto-Potion himself to death would not work.
And then when I was one hit away from clutching it out courtesy of Eltiana pumping out absurd damage, the stuffed-shirt bastard had the nerve to run away halfway across the map, ultimately timerscamming me.
Frankly, I would not be surprised if this was grounds for me to be forced to uninstall LFT.
I probably could have salvaged it, but not without a crystallization or two. So I went back and made an adjustment, swapping Ramza over to Lancer and giving him a storebought Javelin, letting him do more damage than Quick Attack did with an axe. He responded to the black mage trying to cast spells on him by stabbing her in the face for 90 damage. The fact that nobody had Steal Heart helped, though Sara was a general non-factor (as to be expected from placing a melee unit on the secondary team). Eltiana sniped Algus twice for massive damage each time, Navarro kept him and Super locked down with Confuse, and Ramza committed murder in general. I did grab a Mythril Armor here, so I got something from this aside from the usual.
From here, Chapter 2 began.
Dorter Trade City: Hat Throwing Edition (0 Resets)
Preparations for this one were...slim, due to the lack of store access here, and no real new options. Agrias got White Magic sub, Gafgarion got Time Magic sub. Furthermore, I forgot to swap Eltiana back to a thunder rod. It doesn't really matter here, she still did about 90-100 damage with her L2s. I can't think of much else for this fight outside of admiring the custom spritework they had for making a thief throw his hat on the ground and stomp it. Seriously, that is an enviable amount of spritework. Silence shut down mages again long enough for them to die largely harmlessly.
Perhaps more notable was what happened after this fight. Eltiana learned Magic Attack Up, as if she needed to be even more of a walking warcrime.
Araguay Woods (0 resets)
hahahahahahahaha 250-damage ice 1 hahahahahahahahahaha
Also I forgot to change Ramza over to Archer for this map. I did so for the next one.
Zirekile Falls (0 resets)
So, I chose not to go the degenerate route of turning Gafgarog into a naked mage here and to do this fight legitimately. He still got all of one turn, which he used to hit Ovelia with Night Sword before, in quick sequence, getting Stopped by Stasis Sword, shot, and then thunderstruck, immediately forced to retreat. If I had better stealing I'd probably consider grabbing his gear to get dupes but it is what it is. A knight did roll Geomancy and got an early Confuse on Delita...only for Delita to not give a crap since he was over away from my party and basically attack the enemies. Good job confuse knight, you did nothing.
Aside from that, the fight was a bit of a slog due to having to chew through six high-durability targets, but I wasn't threatened. Also got a clean sweep on items this time. Most notable was a Platina Dagger and a Leather Mantle.
After this fight, Ramza learned Concentrate, and with enough Archer levels, classed straight into Ninja, jumping up to Eltiana's capacity for murder, even with just two daggers. Sara...kind of sits there and exists for the time being. Eltiana learns Ice 2 and reclasses to Time Mage, with me feeling confident in her having L2s+MAU from Black Mage to start working on other classes for the time being. Agrias gets enough JP to learn Crush Punch. This will sadly not last. As she's the only heavy armor user in my party currently, Agrias also gets Gafgarion's old Cross Helm. I believe here is where Navarro learned Move-MP Up. Perhaps one of *the* most vital caster skills.
Zaland Fort City (0 resets)
I don't choose the Save Mustadio option because I fear for a repeat of Mandalia Plains. My fears are wholly unjustified, though. Navarro silences both Black Mages in a single go when they try to go for a Fire 3 salvo, and also confuses one of the Knights, while Eltiana instakills one of them with a L2. She gets razzed because one of the Oracles has White Magic subbed, but this is ultimately to no consequence. Sara and Navarro get zombied by the other Oracle. Again to no real consequence. Also in utter hilarity, the confused knight, an Item Knight apparently, just *hands* Ramza an X-Potion. Thanks, dude.
And a dickhead knight breaks Agrias' helmet. Shows me for trying to give her nice things.
Agrias killed the last knight before I could get a shot at crystal-learning Fire 3, but I did manage to find a Wizard Staff. Which immediately goes to Eltiana for further war crime commission. Ramza learns the art of throwing balls, and then will cease forevermore to learn new throwing arts. Agrias gets an old Barbuta as punishment for losing the Cross Helm. I prepare for suffering because I have bad memories of the next map from my first time playing, at that.
Bariaus Hill (0 resets)
Thankfully, I didn't actually have resets here. It felt like it could've come close, though. Off the bat, one of the geomancers Stopped Eltiana, taking that nuke off the board. In retrospect, I *think* I could've used Heal to patch that up, but hindsight. Confuse kept putting in work here, turning one of the Lancers against a summoner and making a geomancer do ineffective things, but the summoners...hoo boy. This fight is rude with introducing them, and that's with the LFT nerfs. Wide-area 90+ damage always hurts. Had to do a bit of round-robin revival here to pick back up from the opening salvo, but once I did and took out the summoners, it was more of a matter of closing out the fight. Found an early Green Beret, which you bet went straight to Ramza.
I did some mucking around in a random after having used a proposition to give Navarro a little bit of Mediator AP to learn Invite. Blame for not doing MFI as soon as possible in Fovoham is on me, but I got a Squidrockin out of the deal. Not sure if I'll keep him long term but it's funny. Agrias leaves the party, giving me her gear and forgetting how to use Crush Punch. I am more disappointed in the latter.
Zigolis Swamp (0 resets)
First off, the MFI guide didn't help here one bit. Second off, I brought Mediator!Navarro here in hopes a pig would show up. No pig was seen, only a morbol. A morbol who got invited to join my party. So I now have several chocobos, a squidman, and a morbol.
Mustadio's AI, as is usual, was questionable here. He went for killshots when Seal Evil is better against undead. I did have a bit of feeling proud of myself, setting up a killshot on a ghost, then using Elemental to eat its MP Switch before the spell went off. All in all, though...not a remarkable fight if you ask me, as monster fights tend to be. I also brought a Red Chocobo along for this fight and the next, considering I actually needed a five-man and a monster will substitute in a pinch.
Navarro swapped back to Oracle.
Slums of Goug (0 Resets)
And then we have this one, which played out...amusingly. Mustadio's first and only (as is usual) action of this fight was to punch one of the thieves in the dick, rendering him unable to move for the next few turns. They responded by cutting him down. Luckily, only one of the summoners felt like summoning. Unfortunately, Sara ate 115 damage from a Sylph summon for that, and the archers were particularly dickish today. I used the one Magic Shuriken in my inventory to give that mid-charge Summoner a real painful time for it. Charge mods are funny.
Item-hunting took a bit, got me (amusingly) a free Poison Bow, but the real stand-out part was that from one of the summoner crystals, Eltiana learned Ifrit and Shiva. I would've let her have the other one, but her turn wasn't up and the sole surviving archer was threatening to grab it next turn anyway, so Ramza was up to get it. He learned...a bunch of Chemist stuff.
Post-battle, Sara learned Attack Up. I neglected to take her out of Geomancer, though. Eltiana learns Stop.
Bariaus Valley (0 resets)
Oh look agrias spent her knight JP in a break. Damnit.
Auto-JP salt aside, this was another largely straightforward battle, as battles with Knights tend to go. Confuse and stabbing as usual, with Eltiana throwing out several 100+ damage Bolt 2s. Navarro runs into the frustration inherent in trying to status a Worst Compatibility knight, while Sara sits on the other side with a Confused Mustadio beating up some nerds.
As for Agrias? A Talk Skill Knight was slinging Insults at her until she decided to say screw it and throw down. No real threat considering the Oracles kept getting stuffed before they could cast spells, and the White Mages kept healing my guys by needlessly casting Cure 4.
MFI payouts were...not great to my recall, but that is how it goes sometimes. I tried to get Navarro the white mage's crystal, but no Cure 4. He *does* learn a wealth of other spells from the one he did grab, though, including Protect 2 and Reraise, so I'm hardly going to call it a wash when that's still a *lot* of JP's worth of free skills.
And with that battle concluded, ends this session, with the unlocking of the mixed awesomeness of Power Sleeves and Short Edges. Ramza is going to murder, while I debate reclassing Eltiana back to Black Mage to learn Lv3 spells and maybe Death, or moving her onto Summoner. Navarro, despite the W-EV I have been thoroughly enjoying from sticks, is...okay, I don't know what I'm going to do with him just yet. I think the next target skill I'd want for him would be Short Charge, which would necessitate a stay in Time Mage.
As for Sara, I am sorely tempted to throw her into some propositions to get JP available for other jobs (while using Alicia and Lavian to get some bleedover JP for Agrias and Mustadio). She feels like she's really falling behind compared to the rest and Geomancer as a class can only do so much.
Next time: The Rise and Fall of Gafgarog, and oh god zodiac demon fights in LFT I recall this nightmare too well.
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Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes- finished Crimson Blaze
There's plenty to like here but... gosh it ends on just the most "okay we're done here" notes. It honestly makes me suspicious there's some sort of conjoined ending DLC or something, y'know?
I don't feel super qualified to judge it as a musou type game, although it seems functional enough in terms of giving you some tools to give it more of an FE vibe so that's nice. You can certainly distribute orders and explode things good by correctly routing weapon advantages and stuff.
What's here in terms of supports is alright, and Shez is an alright lead. There is a certain sense of needing to dig around to find good stuff that's not just rehashes, but there's plenty of them available so it'll work out probably. The lack of real endings is a major letdown though.
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge- did story mode. Gosh this game is very satisfying. Honestly way more than the classic games, you can switch from ground to air to ground really easy and it’s great. The super moves are nicely balanced too. Also like… I played as April, that’s great.
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Fire Emblem: Three Hopes - Scarlet Blaze down.
In some ways a better game than I dared hope for. It is an odd game, in that I don't think it stands alone at all. You really need to have played Part 1 of Three Houses to understand how the Central Church operates, why certain characters oppose it, and how the characters in each house grow close to one another. To say nothing of specific character details. But as an expansion on Three Houses it really does an excellent job. Many subtle points of the original are made more explicit in this game, and in some cases (like the concessions Petra has extracted, or various discussions on class) it's really to the game's benefit to have these. There are more supports (including some that were always needed in the original game, why yes Edelgard/Jeritza I am talking about you), and they're largely very good. Shez works well (providing another extremely valuable commoner perspective), and I really hope this is the direction they go with avatar characters in the future if those continue to exist (as I think they will).
Perhaps my biggest complaint about the story is that it doesn't have as much emotional resonance as the original. Like it's great from a fanservice perspective that Edelgard is doing better emotionally this time around (Hubert's line about her being more liberated as of late and how much that means to him lives rent-free in my head) but it doesn't make for as compelling a tale. And a certain two characters being allies this time around (contingent on a particular recruitment / story path, but it's the one I got) is fun but does make your victory feel very assured. It's also perhaps an issue that watching the same characters unfold in a fifth(!) timeline now was destined not to be emotionally effective.
Elly's complaints about the ending are fair. Like... it's certainly an ending, I definitely wouldn't have wanted another fight after it, but yeah not having the character endcards sucks and it could have benefited from one more scene probably (then again, I feel similarly about Houses endings where you don't get the lord's S support). Although I will say that the decision to have the very last fight in the game be a battle against both Rhea and Thales, where the name of the game is to try to use them against each other by catching them in the same critical rush is an extremely thematically approrpriate end to the route and quite satisfying, and a pretty clever use of Warriors gameplay to boot.
Oh yeah, gameplay. Has the problem FEW does where I don't think individual commanders are that interesting to fight, and actually in general feels like I'm just bullying the enemies; combat arts and especially spells are just things enemies are incapable of dealing with. Still enjoyable enough to play out both the action side and the strategy side, and abusing weapon triangle advantage feels rewarding. The paralogue maps probably offer the most challenge and are generally quite well-designed. The skill/class system is cool. So overall I enjoyed it, though I suspect it wouldn't have made much impact on me if I disliked the characters/writing.
Good game would play again. Already am in fact, just started Golden Wildfire yesterday.
Fire Emblem: Birthright - Lunatic Classic with my pre-rolled team of twelve continues. 8 resets on the Camilla fireball map. God that map is rude. Beat Hans on the first try (albeit slowly), so that was satisfying. Iago's the only map left I'm really worried about.
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Live A Live remake finished.
Very good, Square is really doing the game justice.
SD3 and this, Square can be good as long as they try.
Near Future especially so, Tokida is such a man of culture to cone up with everything in there.
SF chapter also became scarier and reminded the fandom that it is the forbear of all the RPG maker horror rpgs.
On the other hand, the rebalancing had made the game significantly easier. Modern and Bakumatsu certainly wasn't this easy. Though, not to the point of triggering a complaint from me.
Oh and that newly added content in the end, it caught me in surprise in a very nice way.
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Laggy Fantasy Tactics: Golgorand ga Taosenai
You should be able to judge from the name that what was planned to be the end of Chapter 2...ended up literally *just* beating my head on Golgorand. Something like twelve times or so.
Ramza, for the immediate time being, learned Martial Arts and swapped his Green Beret out for a Headgear. The results were to speak for themselves. Navarro also spent time as a Mediator, and Sara was an Archer at this point. Eltiana the Walking War Crime sat this one out.
Prior to this, in order to counteract the bad RNG on Agrias' and Mustadio's ability rolls (Agrias, in her infinite wisdom, decided to invest in Counter Tackle rather than Split Punch), I did take them to a run of Bariaus Valley randoms. Got the Mindrave/Mindflayer formation, probably the most dangerous one in this point of C2. Courtesy of Mustadio having extremely good luck on Arm Aim, Agrias' Coral Sword, and Ramza's new kung-fu, it...wasn't that bad. Comedy was had as Ramza literally pummeled a squid-man for 200 HP a turn. And one of them was even Invited. For perfectly legitimate reasons that do not involve treason and illicit hunting, I assure you.
Navarro got switched back to Oracle, Sara got promoted to Lancer. Then the fun ended.
Golgorand Execution Site. (11 resets)
Yeah. This one gave me some hell. Between formation woes, zodiac woes, and all other kinds of RNG-induced hell, I had a lot of resets. I'm not going to go over them all because that would take absolutely forever, and my memory is not that good to remember all the bullshit.
However, I will cover a few of the more notable ones.
Run 2: This one almost ended up being viable. Until one of the archers literally dodged both 60% hits (that would have oneshot her) from Ramza, and then landed a 40% killshot on Navarro.
Run 5: This is where I went on full tilt, and started resetting due to Ramza having bad compat with the center archer.
Run 7: About when I went off of tilt. I think I switched Navarro to Priest here since the speed lineup was more favorable.
Run 8: Failure here led to way too much shit, and convinced me I needed to level some of my party members.
This...is where I shamefully admit I had to go and grind another fight in Bariaus Valley. Ramza was left out, party was Agrias/Mustadio/Eltiana/Navarro/Sara, with Sara in Monk, Navarro in Summoner, Mustadio in Knight, Agrias in Holy Knight. Thankfully it just took one fight, which was...something of an annoyance considering it was a Squidrockin letting loose with Nameless Dance constantly. Bastards are...not nice. It wasn't threatening, more...annoying.
This got the levels largely synced out. Eltiana learned Ice 3 and used bleedover Summoner JP to learn Moogle. Navarro swapped back to Priest. Most importantly, Sara learned Revive, which went on her with Punch Art in place of Battle Skill as she swapped back to Lancer. (honestly in retrospect she did better as an Archer, though in part due to the fact that the +PA gear being optimal here. She needs time in Dragoon, though). Agrias relearned Crush Punch finally to make up for the utter travesty that was her swapping it out for Counter Tackle of all skills. Agrias swapped to Geomancer to take advantage of PA-boosting gear on swordskills, to boot. I think I swapped Ramza to Flame Whips here just out of a sense of "what could possibly go wrong?"
Run 9: ...and then I had made mistakes. Most notably, then forgetting to put Holy Sword on Agrias, so she only had basic attacks, and forgetting to sub Yin-Yang Magic on Navarro. Ironically, this *almost* turned out a victory...until Gafgarian started getting multiple Night Sword crits and using Secret Fist to, in a most inspirationally spiteful move, keep people from reviving one of my characters. I considered it a loss because I refuse to accept permadeaths of non-monsters.
Run 10: Agrias got Holy Sword back. I still forgot to put yin-yang on Navarro. I knew it wasn't going to work out when the Lightning Bow archer decided to crit-into-proc on Eltiana, instakilling her from full. I swear the AI reads for those things.
Run 11: Finally put Yin-Yang back on Navarro. I think I also swapped Ramza back to Ninja Swords here. Tried confusing Gafgarog and a knight. It didn't work out beyond wasting the geomancy knight's turn.
Run 12: bloody finally. I still don't feel like I actually won this one, since it felt like I was iterating until I got a RNG setup that didn't screw me to an extent. Thankfully, Garfunkel had Charge rather than Punch Art for his secondary, which particularly bit him in the ass as he charged...right as Ramza got a turn. This ended with me getting some revenge by leaving only one of the Time Mages alive, turning her into a chicken, and having Agrias collect all the crystals. Conveniently, this got her Equip Sword among other things, which will probably help with her intended leveling path. Got a Twist Headband and Ice Shield for my troubles.
This managed to make me relive my childhood nightmares. I'll just leave it at that.
Next time: The End of Girafarig. For real this time.
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Altima: the final punchout (0 resets)
Before going into the writeup of the final fight, a summary of the loot from treasure boxes dropped from defeated enemies in Orbonne. 3 Light Robe, 3 Feather Mantles, another Black Costume, a Gold Staff, and a Wizard Rod. All meaningless to a team that speaks with their fists but an amusing statistic.
Back to Earth Clothes on all. Jin, Axel, and Captain Falcon also trade their Germinas Boots for Bracers. The intent is that they speed things up and those three have good compat with Virgo so might as well prioritize buffing their damage. I figure the drop from 4 to 3 Move isn't that important when Altima uses Teleport 2 to get around. Lastly, the increased damage from my team lets them take down two Ultima Demons before they move instead of one. Balrog and Kenshiro stick with Germinas Boots. They're meant to focus more on supportive roles. Balrog is designated for attending to Alma. Hamedo on all.
At the beginning, Alma charges MBarrier on herself and Altima clobbers her midcharge. I send Balrog to Revive Alma while the others batter the high level Ultima Demons with two Earth Slashes apiece taking them out. Stay about 3 to 4 panels away from each other to discourage Grand Cross, of course. Demons go. Hurricane on Alma and Balrog, smacking Alma down again. Other Nanoflares two punchboys. Altima goes for a physical on one of the Nanoflared. "Oh no you Hamedon't." From here on it's routine. My 9 Speed monks get two turns before the living demons get their next turn, more than ample chance to reduce them to not-living. After a few times of Alma getting smacked down and Revived, her Speed advantage finally lets her resolve MBarrier. Punch Altima when I get the chance; use Earth Slash if I feel I need to heal someone other than Alma. Use Chakra to keep Alma's MP up and those MBarriers coming. Altima 1 stands no chance. I was lazy and didn't keep my CT synced with Altima so Grand Cross did show once. Kenshiro gets hit by Berserk, Confusion, and Sleep; the other punchboy I moved out of the effect area. Stigma Magic removes all three ailments. I did notice the first two demons getting close to crystalizing but got that last 208 damage Wave Fist in before Altima could snag any crystals and undo the damage I'd done.
Not that I would have been in danger of losing. I'd just be annoyed on principle.
The first several turns from form 2 were a mix of Despair 2 (to dispel MBarrier buffs) and physicals (could oneshot the good compatibility punchboys if they didn't have Protect status). Hamedo stops most of the physicals, even one where the counterpunch whiffed from height difference and Altima floating. And Chakra makes Alma's MP a non-issue so she keeps on tossing out MBarriers. At some point, Altima fixated on Kenshiro trying to take him out with All-Ultima. It would have done enough to oneshot him but MBarrier (oh no, only 95% success rate) landed first and brought it down to survivable. Earth Slash from across the deck undoes most of the damage. Altima goes for All-Ultima again on Kenshiro. This time, Kenshiro gets a turn while it's charging and redirects. Redirected All-Ultima finishes off Altima 2. A bit anticlimatic the final hit wasn't a punch given the theme of the playthrough but a victory is a victory.
I'll write up some concluding thoughts later.
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Fire Emblem Birthright - Lunatic Classic with random team down. After Camilla's map, the rest wasn't too bad. Hans and Iago's maps were tough for sure, but I beat them first try (although I really should have lost on turn 2 of Iago's map... needed a couple lucky dodges and some luck with enemy AI. Somehow I picked up the pieces and won convincingly after that).
Unit notes (battles/kills in brackets)
Dwyer (46/24): Strategist. Primarily a healer, didn't actually level enough to get Inspiration. Had some combat with Horse Spirit, but wasn't fast or strong enough to kill many things.
Mitama (43/35): Onmyoji. Another healer, less mobile than Dwyer but far faster (due to Darting Blow from Hinoka). Still didn't one-round too often.
Selkie (70/41): Honestly on reflection I'm not a big fan of the foxes. They have good res but no 2 range with which to counter mages, and some evasion but can't use weapon triangle control to really make it reliable. They give lots of speed to their pairup partners, at least? Of the two foxes, Selkie had lower power so was the less useful one.
Kiragi (84/65): Sniper. God, he's just terrible? Takumi without the power; doesn't double much besides armours, isn't strong enough to one-shot or double Wyverns without support. And like all Birthright pure archers, no 1 range which sucks. I considered going Kinshi instead but then his offensive stats would have been truly wretched. LVP by far.
Shiro (98/76): Spear Master. Generically solid but unexceptional, with decent stats in most areas but short of being one of my top PCs for use. There's only one Javelin on this route, so he got it.
Kana (123/80): It's kinda remarkable how much worse he was than Corrin, had something like 8 less def and 15 less str. Faster but not really by enough. That said he still had respectable enough mixed bulk and staff use.
Kaden (115/83): The better fox, at least on this run. Using both is kinda silly because they compete over weapons.
Scarlet (143/102): Wyvern Lord. Now we're into the core combat PCs who made the run possible. Scarlet had outstanding def, good power, and shockingly good speed for her, so that's nice. Just had to watch out for both bows and magic; if neither was present, chances are she was putting in amazing work. Rally Defence and flight were nice utility too.
Midori (133/106): Mechanist. Mediocre upon join, but when she promotes she gets shuriken. Shuriken are good! Her offensive stats weren't exceptional but she has great overall bulk so she was often there at the frontlines doing serious damage to anything, if not always enough to kill.
Kaze (265/170): Master Ninja. Lategame MVP. Kaze's drawbacks are iffy str and bad def, but his speed and res are through the roof and shuriken are great. Later, he gets incredible weapon triangle control thanks to his S rank in shuriken, reducing both berserkers and mages to 0 hit/damage respectively. Doesn't like mixed physical groups but that's about it. Shurikenfaire also helps his str, he actually one-rounds lots of enemies late.
Corrin (303/192): Probably the overall MVP. +Str -Spd, the bane is bad but the Practice Katana goes a long way as an option, and the str is ridiculous, as in "kills Sorcerers and Bow Knights in one hit" ridiculous. Speed pairups are plentiful too. Nice defence too, only real flaw is not being able to one-round at 2 range ever.
Orochi (275/197): Strategist. Definitely a character I gained respect for on this run. Her magic is insane, and while her low speed limits her as a troubleshooter for slow enemies, that's still highly valuable, as Birthright has lots of slow enemies for her to feast on (who are often bulky enough that other units struggle with them). Physical bulk usually lets her take one hit, at least, magic tanking is good. So she was able to rack up lots of kills and actually got Inspiration, which is nice.
Saga Frontier
First time playing this in quite a few years, good times. Played Blue's route. Party was Blue (guns/magic), T260G (HyperBlaster mec, got PluralSlash late), Thunder (Shrieker), Liza (DSC with SoulRune/Solar Blade), and Mesarthim (light/rune as well). I didn't do anything overtly cheesy like time magic or 99-defence but otherwise I was not playing nice.
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Live a Live- This game can be hella frustrating in that way SNES games manage so easily but... most of the time it's fucking brilliant and the remake really sells some stuff that might have easily gone unnoticed playing the original. Like, god, the end of Cube's scenario just sings now. And the voice acting in Sundown's chapter? *chef's kiss*
Yeah this is great, probably not the best game I played this year but like... I finished NieR Automata this year, y'know?
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Fuga: Melodies of Steel- fin.
I do think the game loses some steam in the middle, but still strong overall. Rides primarily on vibe and tone, which really is why the middle chapters where you're beefing up the roster and doing a whole chapter about one character before they fade into the background drag a bit, the tone loses some of the edge that gives the game it's feel. On the plus side you kick the shit out of Cat Mengele, so that's nice. Granted, probably would have helped if I played all 15 hours contiguously rather than spread out over an 8 month period but anyways.
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Bravely Default 2- Played this a while back. Very uneven game and I don't even just mean in the normal class based game of very uneven classes (although that felt worse than normal here). I don't mind the change from TB to ATB speed, but the game was plagued was serious transparency issues. Both speed and damage mults were way too opaque in a way that just feels like it should have been left far in the past. The counter gimmick was annoying when it was on randoms (bosses depended on the individual boss, but other than 1 particular one it was fine).
Challenge kind of dissapates once you have enough MP regen methods going because you can just have a healer revive everyone if needed. There was definitely a long stretch were bosses were just too much of jokes because of this (Adam was finally the one to break this at least a little).
I did enjoy a lot of classes being remixed.
Sad they got rid of the great chained random mechanic from Bravely Second, since otherwise there was too much random slog at times without anything to spice it up (yes, I know this game had a chaining mechanic, but I didn't like it at all).
Very uneven plot. The Chapter 2 story just needed to be totally flushed, but then the Chapter 3 arc was fantastic. Also, how did they have two tree towns in a game where the only time the graphics are ever interesting is in towns and both of them were total letdowns?! Rimedhal and the Russian city at least made up for that. I certainly wish they were able to pull more of that graphical style into dungeons instead of having many rooms of interchangable boredom.
Giant middle finger to the game though for having class passives with negative features that unlock after a certain point. Why would any designer think that hampering a class with a bad second passive would be a good design decision? I was running a Thief with a Monk secondary and the Artist passive to make the Monk BP costing move free, just to get Thief's second passive that also made the move free but also prevented my ability to gain BP through defaulting? Yikes
Final score was a 4/10. The optional multi boss endgame battles brought it back up from a 3. I loved those in BD, so I'm very glad to have seen those brought back. The ending story structure was also cute enough.
Triangle Strategy- On the other hand, this is the first time the team finally fully knocked a game out of the park. Everything was solid. The branching storylines were handled fairly well within the context of often not changing the general contour of the game until the end, there are a ton of fun battles (especially those in the Salt map or the mines), the system is generally fairly well balanced (I do enjoy the hyper focus on just a few skills for every PC) and the BP system was very elegant. 8/10
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Mentioning here incase people overlooked.
Kaneko and Machida are back in person to fundraise for their Wild Arms and Shadow Hearts spiritual seqeluel.
The Kaneko game is 100% spiritual sequel. It won't take place in any of the 9 parallel worlds of Fargaia. So don't expect Kaneko to finish any untold story.
But as of Machida's game, it seems there is tiny possibility of relating to Shadow Hearts 1's good end.
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Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes - beaten all three routes. game good but I don't really have a frame of reference for these kinds of games. Game obviously couldn't strike the same kind of emotional resonance that Houses did so I'm kinda glad the game stuck to beating people over the head with the sort of qualities more observant people noticed about Edelgard/Dimitri/Claude even if the writing could have dared more elsewhere, especially with the new faces (whyyyyyyyyyy do you keep falling the siscon hole videogame writers.) Lack of real endings is a problem but at the same time I'm not really sure what they could've done that wouldn't have resulted in things being really uneven considering how some of them end. Shez is a pretty good main all things considered, supportive without being a sounding board and the strong commoner perspective is something Houses oddly lacked.
Of course Azure Gleam Part II exists because the writers backed themselves into a corner and decided fuck it darkest timeline in probably the dumbest way possible and I am very unhappy about that and Golden Wildfire just feels kind of weak in general (although there are parts about it I like quite a bit) but so it goes.
Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE Encore - Got up somewhere to the final dungeon. The existence of this game continues to feel like an elaborate joke even now and I'm here for it. Too bad the joke kinda loses steam towards the end but eh that's what you get when you bring back a B-movie villain who somehow continues to not die when killed.
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Been playing Brigandine LOR on the PC. Creative mode is fun- just wish it would be ported to the switch, as it's easier for me to play on that rather than on a PC.
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Planescape Torment- finished this. I mucked about in the final tree for a while, but I *think* I settled on threatening Transcendent One with TNO’s true name to get him to merge.
The degree to which this is a different (and better) game played as a Wizened Sage as opposed to other builds makes me glad I played it now, rather than in 2006 or whatever. Like aside from Trias (who is still a bit too beefy probably but is pretty surmountable if you’re patient and well stocked) all of the combat feels like an exercise in efficient kiting in order to trick you into dying and relying on immortality a bunch. So it’s kinda weird the mechanics treat them as equally valid builds with no particular signposting. But of course that’s a limitation of the Infinity Engine, there’s not really the mechanics present to just tell the player “you *want* to say this but you lack the Common Sense” when that would help the game along a good deal.
That said once the game turns into the game people remember it as (roughly at the Brothel), gosh you sure can tell why people remember it as they game. Just much tighter while simultaneously feeling richer and better realized, where the game is just bullshitting with people until you realize hey wait, they can solve this seemingly unrelated problem of a different person entirely!
And of course the confrontation with the Incarnations is just brilliant stuff. I also appreciate that the memory of what was done to Deionarra elicits the exact same reaction from TNO no matter what his alignment is or what you’ve had him doing. Like nothing he can possibly do in the course of the game is as evil as that moment (I mean except in the like, cosmic way).
Anyway yeah that was a whole thing.
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Lufia 2: True Gades
So the version of Gades that's in the monster data but not actually used in the retail game is... kind of dangerous actually. He does enough damage to put up a real fight. Against my Lv 45-ish party, Destructo Wave does enough damage to threaten a 2HKO to the party before defense buffing. Well, everyone except Guy who has the Neutral resisting shield from the World's Most Difficult Trick. Compared to the 150-200 everyone else takes, Destructo Wave does double-digit damage to Guy which is reduced to 0-20 after defense buff. Fake and Courage in the first round were key to staying in control. And Devastation just does lots of ST damage, enough to send anyone into the ground. It's definitely not Neutral element either (maybe dark) as Guy went from near full HP to 1 from it.
Still, all Gades has is damage and no status and my team has the tools to keep up. And with 3 people packing light element offense, they can give as good as they're getting. Guy with Undead Ring and Hydra Rock and one Tweak does 2400 with Triple Attack IP so that's about a quarter of his HP in one attack.
Very little to comment on the rest of the game. Amon is a chump with confusion resistance. Likewise, Erim poses little threat to a team that remembers instant death protection. The only KO on Doom Island came from the Gades rematch where he KOed Maxim on round 2 so I didn't get to use Wave Motion.
As it turns out, the only status vulnerability a Maxim with a full set of Divine armor has is sleep. Which Daos' Terror Wave landed on its second use. One more Holy Energy from Selan won the fight in the next round so it's an amusing footnote.
Ending is still emotional even after so long since I last played the story.
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Return to Monkey Island
Very good! Highly recommended. I recommend setting the difficulty on "Hard" and setting the dialogue option to "more dialogue, less pacing" because hearing the voice actors go at it is great, and the script is witty & amusing. If you're worried about abstruse graphic adventure game moon logic, the puzzles (even on "Hard") generally make a lot of sense. If anything, too much sense, it keeps the playtime low despite there being a decent amount of content. The game has a built-in hint book this time which is pretty good in that it'll give slowly escalating hints before just revealing the answer, so it's a good sanity check to see if you're on the right track. I only needed it a few times, but it certainly reduced the frustration.
Also, the writers (Ron Gilbert & co., so the people who did Monkey Island 1 & 2) managed to both vaguely make Monkey Island 2's infamous ending sort of make sense, as well as honor the other games in the series. They didn't just go "ick that's all non-canon we're ignoring it," so that's cool. (But don't be scared off if you didn't play the earlier games; there's a Scrapbook feature that brings you up to speed pretty well instantly, and it doesn't really matter THAT much.)
I will say that the game makes an interesting philosophical choice which can make for a stronger single game, but might have implications on the series as a whole. You know how some characters stay young forever and will have adventures forever (comics characters, etc.), while others actually seem to have time pass? The original Monkey Island was made by devs in their 20s for kids in their teens, everybody is in their 30s/40s/50s now, and this game definitely bites into a somewhat older Guybrush who admits he's not at his prime. He's re-doing his quest from Monkey Island 1, and everyone thinks he & LeChuck are crazy for still caring. The friendly and harmless old guard has been shoved out (I think Terry Pratchett did this theme a decent amount, the new efficient bad guys replacing the harmless old bad guys) and we have some young new rivals who take pirating somewhat more seriously than Guybrush. He can only hold his breath for 8 minutes under water rather than 10! It mostly works in-game, but I do hope that Guybrush keeps having adventures forever, etc. But acknowledging the passing of time does open up some interesting possibilities at least (LeChuck ruing not finishing Guybrush off the first 60 times he had the opportunity feels kind of like if Mario games acknowledge that Bowser clearly wasn't really that set on defeating Mario.)
My one complaint (bit of a spoiler, but a vague one?):Ron Gilbert still loves his faffing about nonsense endings. Don't go in expecting much here.
The more detailed spoilery version: So the Monkey Island 2 ending, while weird, did come AFTER a climactic confrontation with LeChuck while running around a maze. You still got to achieve something, even if what exactly you achieved was rendered questionable. Return to Monkey Island jumps to its weirdness ending a little too quickly, without letting Guybrush settle up with the main antagonists. Come on! Plus, some of the interesting plot threads - like what the deal was with the dark magic earthquake and any long term implications from Guybrush eating an enchanted tentacle - seem to just be dropped. It's annoying because the game does a great job with LeChuck & the new antagonists, a 'boss fight' of sorts to settle up with them would have been highly satisfying even if it was only done via insult swordfighting or something.
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One of these days when the mood strikes I really need to play one of those games. I did enjoy what I watched of one way back in the day.
I will say that, at least for me, if you're going to have a writing-heavy game, I'm really, really happy that the characters age. Eternally unaging characters can work for pure comedy (The Simpsons) and obviously things basically devoid of non-insane plot (Mario), but I would find it pretty undesirable in something like Ace Attorney (still partly comic, but is telling a serious story as well), and my impression is that Monkey Island is broadly in the same category. They don't have to age as fast as real chronological time in our world is going by, but it's still nice, putting the main cast in at least some flux and helping make it less likely that things will go stale. As a bonus, it's one of the easiest ways to force game devs to have characters (and particularly women!) over the age of ~30 besides being the token old one.
Anyway I am replaying Valkyrie Profile, at the A ending now. The gameplay remains quite fun even to this day as long as I ban the most egregious things (a listed headed by reaction abilities and breakable accessories, but I expand it a little to include a few other things like statusblockers, and weapons over a certain power threshold and/or capable of instant death). It's a more relaxed version of a challenge run I did back in 2004 (and posted about on the DL forums of the day. Wow, we've been doing this a long time). I have resets to Dragon Zombies, Mandragoras, Wrath, and Fenrir.
Also doing line counts, so I'll post that at some point!
Trials of Mana - Replaying this again. Riesz/Hawkeye/Angela this time, doing the Reisz/Hawkeye path which is the only one I've never done before. Like my last playthrough, I treat the item limit as 3 per battle instead of 9 which definitely gives boss fights some teeth. No actual resets yet though, at Beuca Island. Game remains a joy.
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Valkyrie Profile - Beat this and the Seraphic Gate. I started relaxing rules a little in order to beat later SG bosses, especially since I missed the Sylphan Robe (dark-90, the only way to survive the angel bosses' great magic outside invincibility cheese). Relaxed all the weapon rules immediately, let myself one Angel Curio once I reached Gabriel, eventually two to deal with Carnage Beasts. Didn't beat the Hamsters; I could have, but it involved timing things better than I was capable of doing. It's okay, seeing them again is always funny.
Anyway it's a neat enough game and I was definitely worried I was overrating the core narrative but then the A ending shows up and yep it still hits incredibly hard. Lenneth realizing she has been a cog in a machine which erased her ability to love, the reframing of "unforgivable", her skewering of the gods' hypcrisy, I am here for it. Meanwhile Lezard and Loki sure do love chewing scenery.
Valkyrie Profile 2 - I'm not sure I ever thought I'd replay this. It's... god. What a roller coaster of a game this was. Anyway I'm midway through Chapter 3. The gameplay is... interesting? Odd balance but it kinda works. The plot... has a mix of interesting scenes in there but I'm definitely kinda frustrated that the game just has way too many people holding onto Big Secrets and it makes a lot of their interactions feel very artifical. We'll see how I feel about later developments now that I know they're coming.
Trials of Mana - Beaten with Angela (Grand Diviner), Riesz (Starlancer), and Hawkeye (Nightblade). Well Nightblade is certainly no Ninja Master, that's for sure. Didn't really find its unique tools very useful, it has a good L3 but eh, that's not that important in this game, not compared to how Ninja Master can generate SP so fast against multiple targets. Starlancer is generically solid the way it always has been, MT buffs good, Angela is Angela and takes over as crazy good as time goes on. No healer makes the 3 item limit sound tough but not really? It's just not that kind of game. I still died twice but it was due to outright death, not being out of resources, once to not evading Dolan's swipe after letting him get off Spiral Moon and once to Xan Bie who is just generally one of the most evil bosses in the game now.
DioField Chronicle - About three hours in. The characters aren't grabbing me and the gameplay is... interesting? Like a more real-timeish SRPG? I don't think it'll be as good as actual SRPGs but it's intriguing enough to keeo playing.
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DioField Chronicle - About three hours in. The characters aren't grabbing me and the gameplay is... interesting? Like a more real-timeish SRPG? I don't think it'll be as good as actual SRPGs but it's intriguing enough to keeo playing.
I'd say the closest qualifier would be Suikoden V's war battles.
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The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero- oh damn finished this a few days ago.
Daaaamn okay y'all. Y'all. I'm not sure the last time I played a game that felt this complete? Like yup, there's a few things that crop up that aren't answered and there's a second part to this adventure coming, but... there's just a nice complete arc and the level of escalation feels consistent and appropriate and this is very similar to the overall vibe of KH1. Except damn y'all, fuckin' Gnosis children. Game can just punch ya.
Anyway mostly wanted to tag this in here for later so I remember it.
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Tokyo Mirage Sessions - Progressing very slowly. This game is *weird*. It's basically Persona, but instead of gods, demons and folklore, we have FE chars. Okay? The story is about Idols. Okay? I'm not sure where they are going with this so the plot has just been largely flying under the radar here. The gameplay is okay. I think it would have been *much* better if the game was 4 PCs instead of 3. That might cause some balance issues, but 3s feel very limiting especially since Itsuki can't be removed. Also, the FE chars are all restricted to FE1-3 and Awakening. Way to make good use of a licensed property when there's like...8 other games there.
The main thing I enjoy about this game is the dungeon design so far. Very cool environments so far. Battles are very rocket tag - enemies routinely 3HKO on neutral and some will have sessions (basically like FE doubles or follow up hits) which will hit 2-3x, meaning PCs can drop in a single turn. OTOH, it's also very easy for you to OHKO enemies due to sessions. I find the 3 PCs limit make it such that it is way more punishing for the player versus the opponent. Will see how this game develops.
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Pokémon Ultra Sun- fin
Mm. I remember Moon being a bit easier? But also I remember moon very badly overall, I'm not 100% on what even is new. Also I might have just... not had a very suitable team.
Decidueye- Love this guy, but definitely kinda flawed for standard play.
Dugtrio- Really useful, but gosh just useless before evolving and persistent problems with dying easily.
Persian- Faded out pretty bad over time, but I ran fakeout the whole game which has plenty of edge cases.
Noivern- Utterly useless before evolution, then suddenly becomes a pretty reliable Air Slash spammer.
Araquanid- Kinda filler, the offenses just aren't good and while the defense is okay bug is gonna bug as a defensive type.
Zygard- this was the level 100 promotional I got when those were handed out like... whenever this game was new, which is cool except its treated as a trade pokemon and you don't get to control up to level 100 until you beat the elite 4. So...
Necrozma- we just subbed this guy in. About as good as the box legendary always is honestly.
Anyways, it's alright. Just kinda alright. I'm not sure this really changes my memory of Gen 7 overall, it's cool they tried some stuff but I'm not sure totems really worked as a concept overall. The ultra wormhole stuff added for Ultra is... there? I feel like this game goes a little harder on trying to redeem/justify Lusamine than the base games did which... isn't great. But eh that's such a small part of the game it doesn't matter that much.
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This Way Madness Lies- fin! The underlying story is a bit nothing but I do think there's a bit of fun just in the way it's written. Dunno why it works but it does.
Game is kinda weird with part choice surprisingly, you actually have fixed parties for most of the dungeons. Which is slightly a problem because they love sticking you with the gambling-based character but eh, you make it work. And it's otherwise a good excuse to teach you how each character works.
Not sure I'd say it's my favorite Zeboyd game but it's worth playing. Recommended.
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Mario Rabbids 2- Finished world 4. It's really excellent in spite of laggy menus and a not great interface. Glad it got patched and fixed the glitch that prevented you from getting 100% on the final world.
My core team has been Rabbid Peach, Luigi and a rotating third. Been using Mario and Peach a lot. Peach is great on survival missions due to barrier; Mario is just a good all arounder and overwatch is always good. Rabbid Peach/Luigi feel like slam dunk for using all the time. RP not only is the only one with healing, but she has really damn good offense with triple dashing. Luigi has stupid range and offense. Steely Stare and the range is useful on every single map.
Rabbid Luigi is hilariously bad. His draining is gone, his damage isn't especially great and his secondary skill is useless. Whoof.
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Finished Mario Rabbids. I’d rate it as the same 8-9ish as the first game. It’s definitely an easier game but a lot of the hardest missions in rabbids one were from protect toad missions. I don’t miss those. Sparks and items are an improvement over the system in one; game also does a better job with character balance and availability.
Luigi is the mvp; no one else has his damage and range. Steely stare is stupid strong too and is the best way to deal with ninja reinforcements. Rabbid peach is right on his heels. Healing plus crazy dash offense is nice. Mario/Rabbid Rosalina/Peach all had maps where they were useful. Rabbid Mario was okay; really bad support skill holds him back. Edge/Rabbid Luigi/Bowser I’d definitely call bottom tier; just not any reason to really use them. That’s still a balance improvement over the first where you basically always want to use Rabbid Luigi and one of Rabbid Peach/Luigi.
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I need to post here more.
Valkyrie Profile 2 - Beat this, as well as a single full run of the Seraphic Gate.
The lategame plot is definitely still very stupid even knowing that it's coming. Stupid highlights include a SUPER DRAMATIC scene where the game reveals Lezard stealing Silmeria's soul (whoever wrote the game badly wants us to think Lezard's plan is So Smart), and us learning midway through Chapter 6 "oh yeah Odin is gone now, lol so much for that plot point". Brahma's death still hilariously bad (though I do enjoy the dogs repeatedly mocking it in Valkyrie Dogfile).
Gameplay is weird. Most of the maingame is way too in the thrall of "did you get certain skills/sealstones" and too easy if you do / probably annoying if you don't? It's an interesting system past that and a bit finnicky. It comes into its own more in the Seraphic Gate, where the game starts just assuming "okay you DO have all the good stuff" and feels balanced appropriately; Wodan and Dirna in particular are both pretty fun fights that feel correctly balanced for the power you have at their respective points.
Game's rating remains about where I had it. There's really not much to like about the writing in 2022, and the gameplay is flawed, but it's certainly interesting.
Mario + Rabbids 2 - Currently in world 4. Fun game. I agree that the character balance is better (although I'll note that Rabbid Mario + Peach were sometimes both really useful in MR1, really it was just Rabbid Luigi who was too good and the Yoshis who kinda sucked, for different reasons). Rabbid Rosalina is pretty busted in this one but everyone has a use. Even more busted: items. Not sure how you can lose if you let yourself spam Cooldown Clocks on key things like Ennui, Unseen, Turbocharge, etc.
I think the game is slightly weaker than the first (reinforcements are handled in a worse way, fight design is not as good; many fights are actually random) but still a fun spin and I'm glad that it's appreciably different. The skill system is more polished and more team flexbility is very appreciated.
Tactics Ogre Reborn - In Chapter 4. Did Neutral route since I'd never done it before. On the whole this version's changes are positive ones. RNG auto skills is a design choice I'm not totally sure about, but they do shake things up in a game which can sometimes feel a bit samey, so that's nice at least. There animation time also gets a bit stupid (especially if a unit procs 3+ in one turn) and this game would probably be unplayable without animation speedup, but good things that exists and makes the game feel about right.
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Xenoblade Chronicles 3:
A nice upgrade from the previous two titles mechanically. One of the most interesting parts of the game for me was how dedicated it was to its meta-narrative. The main plot and themes work solidly on a surface level, but there's this wonderful undercurrent of the game gleefully denouncing the status quo in every way. From the game's main villains attempting to hold the world in a depressing stasis out of fear to the way the narrative seems to shun repeating the plot and themes of the previous Xeno titles. There's something uplifting about seeing two of the major characters from the previous two titles in the series telling the main characters that it's okay to destroy the world and do their own thing.
The Xeno games as a whole have been recycling and remixing the concepts from Perfect Works for well over two decades and it's clear that Takahashi feels he's finally expressed those ideas in a satisfactory way after XB1+2 concluded. Seeing XB3 tackle a new theme that's decided opposed to some of the long-running Xeno themes, such as the cyclical nature of history (and all the predestination baggage that comes along with that) is a refreshing change for the franchise and I honestly can't wait to see what's in store next.
Really solid character-writing and voicework. I appreciate just how robust the Hero system is in this game compared to the previous titles. In XB1, there was a standard set of 7 PCs. In XB2, there were 5 playable PCs and a gacha game's worth of 'weapon characters' that could be recruited and equipped to those PCs. XB3 splits the difference with 6 main PCs who come with default job classes and can gain access to roughly 15 more, and a 7th party member slot that can be filled by any of the 15-ish Hero PCs that can be recruited through sidequests. Most of these Heroes are integrated into the main plot, and all of them have extensive recruitment quests and follow-up Upgrade quests to give them some time in the spotlight. Due to how the setting of the game works, some of these PCs even interact with each other across questlines, making 90% of the sidequests feel more like mainline quests (most of them are largely voice-acted, too.)
It's just a really impressive package and probably the only AAA game I've played all year that felt like something that really utilized its high budget to create something special that couldn't be done better by really dedicated indie devs.
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Metroid Dread: My game-playing rate continues to slow and slow. Anyway, finally finished this up. It's good! I have a few minor qualms - load times on teleporters / transitioning between zones, some occasional erratic difficulty - but for the most part very solid. It does have the issue that it can be easy to "forget" old mechanics or not realize they're applicable at times... it's tricky because the a-ha moment of "I am a genius, I figured out this boss's weakness / what to do" only happens if you don't stick a big flashing sign telling you what to do, but that can mean that some bosses feel impenetrable if you don't "get" them. I definitely had this on a few. I was utterly baffled for the underwater evil clam where I knew I could lower the water to ride back and forth on the ceiling, but so what?? I definitely did not realize the extent of the unwise design of this room for its guardian. Also, the green-zone three part miniboss isn't obvious it's using a gimmick from the very start of the game, the slide, and just seemed to have BS unavoidable attacks if you weren't very diligent about jumping over it before you get cornered. Once I succumbed to curiosity and checked the Internet to see the slide trick, it completely upends the entire fight and makes it doable and go way faster. Also, while I'm sure there are sneaky faster ways, the first form of the final boss really walled me thanks to BS invincibility for days. I'm sure there are ways to break it faster but I only found one reliable one to wait for, so yeah.
The plot was for the most part fine. It's a little tricky trying to make Samus the hunted not the hunter given how canonically insanely powerful Samus "should" be by the end of Fusion, but the game has the good sense to let Samus be the hunter again in spurts and eventually just say fine she's gonna wreck some shit. I will say that I would still be down for some future Metroid where "Samus" has amnesia and no powers at the start and the plot-twist is that you're some surviving SA-X somehow, along with some BS for why you can't do the whole X-parasite infecting everything thing. I will say one plot point was too bad... I really liked the initial plot setup where Samus is deployed there's some claim of an X infection because she's immune to the X, but surprise, the enemy that shows up has nothing to do with the X and it was just a ruse. You didn't think we were gonna reuse the same enemy two games in a row, did you? Plus, it fits with Samus & the X seeming to come to a bit of an understanding by the end of Fusion. That was cool... except... uh... they show up again anyway kind of randomly. I guess it helps explain how local wildlife can possibly stand up to a heavily armed superweapon like Samus and keep respawning, but meh, I'm fine with hand-waving that kind of stuff. I do hope that future Metroid games consider having the Federation be the antagonist - the way Fusion went, it feels like Samus should be on bad terms with the Federation, and it's not the NES-era of games having to be 10-year old approved of no killing nice humans.
To reply to a comment Elf made last year, though, I will say I disagree that Samus being silent was a problem in this game. Her being silent was very good and definitely what writer SnowFire would have done as well. In any game with a big plot twist that either the character already knows, or already *should* know, just have them play it close to the vest and not talking out loud. Otherwise you end up with either the character telling the player too much before the player can figure it out for themselves, or else the character coming across as a bit of an idiot. I think I complained about this a bit when playing Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth where Deedlit comes across as either brainwashed or an idiot for not noticing an obvious plot point. Granted, a player who really remembers Metroid Fusion's script probably isn't that common for the biggest tell that something might be up - and that's easily explainable by a new scriptwriter just deciding to drop Adam being a white knight in calling her "Lady" - but there were other oddities too like how much Adam hypes up Raven Beak as the ultimate badass, and by all rights, Samus herself should have caught on very very quickly. Having her be silent lets us assume that she was in on the joke much earlier but didn't have much choice but to play along.
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On using old mechanics in boss fights:
The big one I didn't catch onto was power bombs against the third form of the final boss, which makes the big sun attack extremely evil. For the most part I think the game does a decent enough job of making bosses beatable even if you don't figure out certain gimmicks, but it's still a fair concern. Agreed about the slide; I definitely felt I was majorly missing something for that boss, and yep, turned out I was right. I did catch on after he bodied me once, though.
On Samus being mostly silent:
I see your point but I still disagree. Like yeah, sure, making Samus silent makes it easy to hide her feelings about Adam/Raven Beak, but if anything I think that's lazy and devalues the plot twist a bit! Just imagine how good it would be if Samus herself was being cagey about how much she knows, playing along with Raven Beak. A deft writer could drop in some neat hints about what her actual thoughts are which would hit differently on a replay once we know the twist. Oh well. Also as a note, they do have Adam use "Lady" in the opening sequence of Dread just to let you know it's not a writing change that he no longer uses it otherwise, which I agree would be a valid thing to think otherwise.
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Pokemon Scarlet- fin
It's extremely annoying to me that I feel *irresponsible* talking about this game without leading with it, but I do: this game was not ready to release, and even only having played after the first patch dropped some of the technicals are just not up to snuff for a full price release of this nature.
The reason for all that being that in most other relevant ways this is just an extremely good pokemon game. It lacks some of the more meditative, observe nature and plan accordingly elements Arceus brought to the table, and I can think of some refinements a followup could add, but structurally this is nearly ideal. The 8 gyms return, but rather than randomly hijacking the plot from time to time the resident team are their own events with subtly different mechanics from gyms, and an evolution of the Totem battles from gen 7 round out the game meaning that there's something for all 18 types. It also means there's 3 major NPCs, one for each questline, which gives them room to do different stuff, and then the actual endplot is... very pokemon while still having stakes. It's good. Everything actually in this game is good, nearly all of their decisions are good ones.
Except the one not to push the game back another 5 or 6 months.