The RPG Duelling League
Social Forums => General Chat => Topic started by: DragonKnight Zero on January 22, 2024, 06:57:16 AM
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Might as well get things started with finishing up writeups from FFT Fiesta.
Was being indecisive about what I needed for the final series. For accessories, picked up 2 Rubber Shoes (just in case though I don't plan to use them) and a 2nd Defense Armlet. Grabbed a 2nd Red Shoes. (should have picked up a 3rd as well) Most of my remaining funds went to extra katanas for Draw Out. Kikus and Murasames mostly with a few more Kotetsus and Heaven's Clouds.
UBS4
Priest with Draw Out, Dancer with Punch Art and Martial Arts, Samurai also goes Punch Art + Martial Arts. Blade Grasp on all. The only really meaningful threat on the field is the lower leveled monk. He dies to a Bolt3 from the mediator's Blast Gun and an Earth Slash from the dancer. After that, it's just taking out everyone else. Other monk, then archer, knights last. I checked the knights' secondaries for anything that would threaten a full team of 80 Brave Blade Grasp, danger level nil. Elemental boosted Blast Gun, Earth Slash, and Draw Out > enemy evasion.
Did stall for a bit at the end. Could have dropped the last knight with Holy but the first monk would crystalize first so I opted to wait a round to go for all the marbles. Crystal which Felicia picks up. Learn Counter and Move-HP up off it. She now can master the class. Only damage I take all fight is one arrow and random Throw Stone.
UBS5
Everyone but the dancer is set up with a spell gun and a Black Robe if they can. Arrange PBF to draw Rofel forward with a Petrify. Firing squad executes him in three shots.
Morund Death City
Priest and mediator go in squad 2, everyone else in squad 1. Mediator, monk, and samurai have Hamedo and keep Blade Grasp on the rest. I give the dancer a Bracer and a Power Sleeve to go with her Thief Hat. Punch Art and Martial Arts on her and the samurai. Move Ramza exactly 3 panels from his default location. Kletian comes forward to charge Holy on the dancer. Ninja on squad 2 side goes for Throw on the Mediator, Hamedo. Other enemies advance doing nothing. Dancer advances with a Spin Fist on Kletian, a ninja, and a time mage hitting all three. (this is the only time I've used Spin Fist all game) Mediator shoots ninja dead. Priest does nothing of importance: using Kiku on a samurai just for the action. Monk Ramza punches Kletian for 210. Wave Fist from the samurai does enough to drop him.
Death City Presincts
My female Gemini's turn to be the priest. I give her Blast Gun, Thief Hat, Black Robe, and Red Shoes and set Hamedo. Samurai Artemis gets a Blaze Gun, Black Robe, and Hamedo. Everyone else sticks with Blade Grasp. Defense Armlets on the members unable to wear Thief Hats.
I messed up PBF placement putting the female Gemini in squad 2. So Balk ends up shooting at Artemis on his first turn instead. Gun Hamedo. Priest moves up and Kiku on Balk for 160. (and the hyudra) Enemy Chemist tosses a Hi-Potion on the hyudra, not that it matters. Monk Earth Slash on two, 40 to Balk. Samurai and mediator shoot the hydra dead. Dancer starts Nameless. Balk gets his second turn and shoots at the female Gemini. Just as planned. Gun Hamedo procs a Bolt2 leaving him at 124 HP. She does 153 with the Blast Gun allowing me to end it right there. Easiest Balk 2 fight I've ever had. And hey, that 40 damage Earth Slash mattered. Dancer doesn't get any actions this battle.
Hashulam
Black Costumes for all but priest and samurai to ward of Spell. Hamedo on monk and samurai with the rest sticking with Blade Grasp. MagicDefend Up on all.
Turned out to be very straightforward bashing. Hash mostly stuck to hitting 3-5 units at a time with magic but MagicDefend Up (and Move-HP up on the two who had it learned) along with Chakra, Murasame, and the occasional Cure were sufficient to keep up. If someone got low enough to die to a physical, well that's why I have Hamedo on the two units with decent physicals. Priest supports and uses Draw Out. Monk and samurai go between offense and support as needed. Mediator shoots, Dancer uses Kiku or Slow Dance if not able to get a good fining line/offense would require too much bunching up. Hash couldn't really get damage to stick and went down like a chump. No Slow procs from Heaven's Cloud but didn't really need it anyways.
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Pokémon Scarlet - Hidden Treasure Of Area Zero Epilogue (Switch)
Accessing this is actually locked behind a mystery gift. ...that means that they can arbitrarily remove access at any time by just stopping distributing it, like they'd been regularly doing in older games but not so much recently. Not great! (Unless they put out an update that changes how it works later.)
Counterbalancing that situation is that this is pretty terrible, and appears to primarily serve just as a way to give you access to Pecharunt. So it might not be a huge loss if it was shuttered at some point.
If you want any actual lore about Pecharunt you're better served by the video put up on the Pokémon Youtube account rather than the DLC itself.
With regards to the Indigo Disk postgame, I did a little of it but it's really not doing much to entice me back to do any more.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Switch)
To my knowledge, I did everything except for beating the badge gauntlet level in the special world. (Unclear if there's anything else locked after that.) I was never able to get the timing down for consecutive parachute hat deployments and that level starts off with a lengthy section of them - not dealing with that on every reattempt.
Very enjoyable, possibly a bit on the easy side overall although that's hardly something I'd complain about. Also feels sparse for some reason that I think is mainly due to there being comparatively little postgame content? It has been a long time since the last 2D-centric platformer (...at least the ones I consider to be part of that category) so I may be internally comparing it against the wrong titles.
Escape Goat (Steam)
Escaped the Prison of Agnus (all rooms completed) with 1308 deaths.
I assume the majority of the deaths were in Final Path 9, but the game doesn't give you a breakdown unfortunately. Terrible room. Second highest probably a different room in Final Path, where there's concentric moving-block pathways where all the inner moving blocks have buzzsaws. Could not control the goat's jumps anywhere near finely enough for the sort of movements needed for these rooms.
I'm not going to try the alternate (harder) set of levels, although it might be interesting to look up someone else's playthrough of them.
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PALworld: It's a survival game (think Ark Survival) with Pokemon and Soulslike elements. You can capture Pals and have them work in your sweatshop or fight alongside you in battle. I like it because it's not very demanding - although you can certainly find trouble if you look for it. Currently level 15, dicking around the first island.
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Atelier Sophie- Welp, a few weeks slower than I'd have liked but we finished! Huzzah!
So... Sophie is a strange game because somehow by removing the calendar system they made it feel more bottlenecked? I'm not sure if that's genuinely the case or just vibes but I frequently felt like I was just kinda grinding out the next Important Event points because there wasn't really any new alchemy or quests available and it was just doing one thing repeatedly. There wasn't the sense of picking a focus and that still helping you do other things along the way. I also felt like getting friendship progress was weirdly stalled, but maybe that was just the schedules being wonky so you didn't really auto-progress stuff very much? I dunno.
There's this really great stretch in the midgame though, once you realize that Plachta needs some sorta body, that really has the good Atelier vibes, which is repeated later when it's time to unlock the reveal of the final boss. Like yeah, you have a few different errands to achieve this one overarching goal, and each one has different facets that it needs done, and they have different timers so you can do stuff while waiting for stuff. But the midgame stands out more because we suddenly go from "Sophie is a kind person who wants to help her friend the talking book" to "oh she's gay she is going to kiss Plachta now." I gather the further entries of the Mysterious series only double down on this.
They did do the thing again where the final boss just drops a regen along the lines of 20% of his HP when on his last legs, so lol lmao hope your finishers and best items weren't spent getting to this point because you're just gonna lose ground every turn now. Just extremely feelsbad game design and it's weird to me they used it so many times in this era of the series. It's extra annoying because honestly the game is just not like that at all prior to the finale, but they hold back lots of stuff throughout the game so nothing truly mean would even make sense prior to the ending bits. I mean we're talking about a game where after level 20 you stop gaining levels and instead get skill points. Dunno if this carries over to the other Mysterious games but given the less than stellar reputation of Firis I can only assume they fucked it up if so.
Still, nice to have one of these off the stack again, even if I didn't make progress on the year overall.
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Super Metroid
Played this randomly for the first time in a few years. I'm rusty but 52% in 1:24 is still pretty good. Just a really fun game to play around with even if the controls feel a bit clunky these days.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
New run idea: everyone trains exactly one skill. No variety! Well mostly. More of an interesting science experiment than an actual challenge run. It was harder than normal, but not dramatically.
1. Each character can only train one skill. "Train" covers faculty training (Byleth), setting as a goal, active instruction, and group tasks. It does not cover any automatic training before recuirtment (obviously) or actions in battle. However...
2. Characters whose chosen skill is a weapon or magic type (i.e. swords, lances, axes, bows, brawling, reason, faith) can ONLY use that weapon or magic type in battle. Characters who have a movement or authority skill are not restricted in this way.
3. Seminars are banned.
4. For battles where the deployment limit is 11 or less, each deployed character must be specializing in a different skill. For battles where the deploy limit is 12, there may be exactly one pair of characters sharing a specialization, since there are only 11 trainable skills. Adjutants may have any specialization, though rule (2) still applies to them.
5. Characters' advanced/master class(es) must in some way correspond to their specialization. i.e. I can't get Jeritza, train him in armour, and then keep him in non-armour advanced classes.
Results of the above rules:
1. Recruitment of many students (especially Ferdinand and Caspar) becomes significantly more difficult.
2. Most characters will likely need to certify in a one-prerequisite Advanced class. However, some caveats:
a. Lance specialists will likely need to go through Cavalier to gain enough skill exp to reach Paladin. Lance specialists basically need to start with at least E+ riding to have a shot at this path.
b. Riding specialists will need to use lances in battle in order to reach Cavalier / Paladin.
c. Flying specialists will need to use axes in battle to reach Wyvern, optional lances for Pegasus.
d. Armour specialists will need to use axes in battle to reach Fortress Knight.
e. Authority specialists will likely have serious trouble reaching any high-end classes. Dancer, however, is a legal choice for them.
Anyway, the hardcore mono-focus has interesting effects, particularly on the characters I focused on manual training for. Because authority/armour doesn't really need much training beyond B, riding/flying beyond A+, this means that the weapon specialists got a lot of attention. Anyway, for them:
-Characters reached A in their primary specialization around Chapter 7. Great for Sylvain (Swift Strikes) and Dorothea (Meteor).
-Characters reached A+ around Chapter 9.
-Characters reached S around Chapter 11(!)
-Characters reached S+ around Chapter 15. Crazy.
Coversely, authority obviously caused problems. Edelgard and Byleth hit B in late part 1, others (not Felix) hit C around then or slightly earlier, and never hit B... except Petra who used a Knowledge Gem for much of part 2. Felix hit D authority in early part 2 and then I wondered why I bothered.
Unit notes include battles/kills in parentheses, in ascending kill order.
Linhardt (faith, 30/13): Priest->Bishop. Seiros Holy Monks. I mean aside from losing armour- and flying-killing this isn't too different from vanilla Linhardt, Physic all day with occasional Warp or Stride. His damage was wretched but White Range+ (yes!) lategame actually mattered for expanded threat.
Jeritza (flying, 28/14): Wyvern Rider. Training him in flying gives him Darting Blow, so he was pretty generically cool, though since he didn't get Alert Stance+ or even to Wyvern Lord (due to failing five ~70% certifications in a row) he was definitely the backup one.
Mercedes (riding, 78/46): Mage->Valkyrie. Empire Magic Users. Asked to join around chapter... 10 I think? And I realized that I kinda wanted a second Physic user, so I set her to riding since she already had C+ reason and faith and thus made a capable Valkyrie. She certified in Chapter 14 and I added her to the team then. Didn't get Fortify or Ragnarok but wielding Thyrsus and sniping things from range 5 while also having Healing Staff Physic is still real good as it turns out.
Hubert (authority, 109/50): Mage->Dancer. Unlike normal Hubert he can't use any faith magic at all, and he was slower to get his key spells, so definitely subpar until dancer made this not matter. Authority is important but super authority focus not so much, apparently, though it'd be an interesting thought for Dimitri if I tried this run on AM.
Balthus (armour, 160/63): Brigand->Fortress Knight. Impregnable Wall battalion. Fortress Knight just ruins units, even ones designed for it. I got him in Chapter 3; at that point he was one of my best units with Curved Shot and Smash and good str/def. Falls off with time as he always tends to but when Advanced hits he really fell off a cliff, couldn't kill anything and all he could do is struggle to reach better units and protect them with Wall. Ended up like Level 27 when everone else was in the mid 30's.
Bernadetta (riding, 157/65): Cavalier->Paladin. Lances were her weapon of focus, but since I couldn't train her in them she didn't get Vengeance until like... Chapter 10? By which point other people were getting better killing power anyway, so she never really excelled. At least having both Tempest Lance and Curved Shot early was useful. Was replaced by Mercedes after Chapter 13.
Felix (brawling, 187/93): Brawler->Grappler. Jeralt's Mercenaries. From here on we hit the combat mainstays. Easy to recruit thanks to Byleth being a swordy. Anyway no 2 range sucks. Pretty good at killing things if he reached melee but definitely not perfect? Sylvain was better even at that. Really wish Brawl Avoid didn't require faith for this, I kinda used him as a semi-dodgetank with Jeralt+Ingrid adjutant and he'd be so much better if I could go all the way. As is, kinda meh, and particularly bad in Intermediate despite Nimble Combo.
Sylvain (lances, 234/110): Brigand/Cavalier->Paladin. Supreme Armoured Co. Did you know Chapter 2 Sylvain starts with D+ axes, letting him reach Brigand? Wild. Anyway Swift Strikes in 7, with Death Blow soon after, is silly. Kills all but the bulkiest enemies with high move and canter, yes please. Lategame CF isn't too cavalry-friendly as always which hurts him a bit but still very solid overall. Turns out pure lance is very much a valid Sylvain build!
Shamir (bows, 205/127): Sniper. Empire Snipers. Sylvain and Linhardt don't lose much from mono-focus, sure. Shamir, though? Basically loses nothing, besides B rank battalions. Get Hunter's Volley, kill things with Hunter's Volley. What more can be said?
Byleth (swords, 301/131): Thief->Enlightened One. Gloucester Knights. Swords would not be a fun specialization for a lot of people due to the lack of 2 range, as usual Creator Sword goes a long way toward making this more palatable. So, for that matter, is Enlightened One; even with magic banned, having +1 move on Swordmaster is a big deal. Windsweep is fun. Otherwise, generically solid stats.
Edelgard (axes, 305/151): Brigand->Warrior. Empire Heavy Soldiers. Emperor vs. Warrior is a reasonable debate (power/speed vs. defence), Armored Lord is trash though. Anyway, I gave her Fetters of Dromi to make Raging Storm better and generally to get my strongest statistically unit to better places faster. A pale shadow of Wyvern Edelgard but still one of the better units throughout the game.
Petra (flying, 313/145): Pegasus/Brigand->Wyvern Rider->Wyvern Lord. Galatea Pegasus (eventually). Alert Stance+ in Chapter 9 is a fun time! That said lack of other sources of evasion midgame (namely B authority for Galatea or Secret Transport, and a flying adjutant, and lower prowess skills) do hold the build back a bit. Had to really muscle it out in lance and then axe training to reach pegasus and wyvern. So a bit awkward, but with Death/Darting Blow and AS+ she was never going to be anything less than outstanding.
Dorothea (reason, 273/164): Mage->Warlock. Vestra Sorcery Engineers. Blast away with range 5-6 Thoron, great times. Black Tomefaire is wonderful, she one-shots axes/swords/bows and one-rounds armours all the way to the very end of the game. Not having healing was bad but early Meteor/Agnea/Range+/Tomefaire go a long way for making up for it, really good for a 4 move unit.
I dunno who the overall MVP was. Probably one of the Eagles women or Sylvain.
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Tried out the first bit of Granblue Fantasy: Relink
I keep trying to get into this IP since it's just *everywhere* in Japan, and it has strong "old-school FF" vibes. But it just keeps falling short of being engaging. The gacha game of course has all the gacha problems, so I dropped that quickly. I tried watching the anime, and I definitely sat through all 26 episodes, but nothing deeper than the character names stuck with me. I tried the fighting game, which is gorgeous and created by favorite fighting game developer, but the story was so far removed from everything I'd gleaned from the gacha and anime that I couldn't get into the story or characters there either (despite Ladiva being the absolute best).
And so here I am, trying again with the console RPG. The story just skips over the intro bits, which is a little jarring if you haven't played the gacha or watched the anime I guess. The characters feel pretty flat as a result, but I'm hoping the goal is that they're jumping further along into the story to get to the 'good parts'. Since the intro of GBF is very boilerplate 'boy adventurer meets girl who fell from the sky' JRPG fluff.
The battle system is a little too ARPG for what I was looking for at the moment, so I'll have to come back to it after I finish SO6 and need a new ARPG.
tl;dr - GBF is popular and Djinn still hasn't figured out why...
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Rakuen (Steam)
RPGMaker-based adventure game. (No combat.) Decent, although unfortunately I didn't care for half the musical sequences.
Prose & Codes (Steam)
Essentially a decent amount of substitution ciphers of text taken from copyright-free books. So I found it pretty entertaining.
I was playing on progressive difficulty, where for each genre the puzzles start off having 6 letters pre-solved and that number goes down the further you go, with the last ten or so puzzles in each genre having nothing pre-solved. You can also play the entire game with nothing pre-solved, or with fixed amounts of letters pre-solved. (I don't know if the pre-solved letters are curated for each puzzle or if they're randomly selected.)
There's a followup which uses text from poems rather than prose but as a person who isn't really into poetry I don't intend to play it.
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Wasteland 3 - I'm almost done. Just presumably the final battle, about 100 hours total.
So this is my second CRPG that I've played and we're batting 2 for 2 in terms of how much I like these games. WL3 is weaker than DoS2 though. There are some general polish issues and weak character writing which kind of sink it from being in the same tier as DoS2. On the whole however, it's good. Looks like earlier versions of the game had a lot more bugs and freezes which they patched out because my 7 year laptop was able to run this baby pretty smoothly.
In general, the overall strengths of this game come from the setting and decent enough gameplay to carry it through despite some unfortunate polish issues. The setting really does a lot of the work because not only are the environments cool to explore, but they mark a pretty important aspect regarding the characters, their motivations as well as the underlying plot of the game. It takes place post nuclear fallout where as the name of the game suggests, is a wasteland. To my understanding, this game also takes place after WL2 which had the organization your characters represent be in dire straits. In short, law and order are in short supply, violence is rampant and supplies are scarce. The game then asks you to make a lot of decisions with these factors in mind. For example, do you keep the crazy Ronald Reagan worshipping cult alive, knowing that if you gank them, you'll lose access to your only power source in the short term? Do you save those refugees knowing that doing so makes everyone else in the city's lives harder?
The game also likes to put a lot of excellent gameplay rewards BEHIND dubious moral decisions. For example, around 1/3 into the game, you'll encounter this slave trader who offers you a deal: Find one of her slaves and she will give you access to the bunker area in your base, which contains end game armors and weapons. The obvious decision is to tell her to take a hike. However, the power spike at that point in the game is so ridiculous that not only is it extremely tempting but telling her off doesn't even give you any consolation prize or punishment. You are basically strictly rewarded for making an awful choice. And as I noted, the game does this A LOT. Side with the Reagan worshippers and you lose access to the Robot Communities wares, which has one of the best vehicle parts in the game.
Where the game I think starts to lose steam is around the last 1/3 of the game. The game can be roughly summarized into 5 chunks: Setting up your base, Relations with the Bazaar, Denver, Aspen and Yuma County. Pretty much around Aspen, the game is either extremely difficult...or extremely cheesy. Enemies get a spike in HP and a lot of the fights late game are basically all rocket tag: whoever goes first wins. Lucky for you, you can pretty much enter all fights with initiative if you choose to attack first. However, this comes with a drawback where it is often better to shoot first and ask questions later - which ruins the immersion and makes dialogue options weaker. If you accidentally trigger a fight through talking, the game has an initiative stat that determines how many characters will be able to act immediately...but why bother with that if you can just shoot everything dead ASAP with no risk? Part of this rocket tag aspect comes from your weaponry but also because you get better skills and abilities. But if you've made a bad build or mistake, resetting your character sheet isn't free. And since this is post apocalyptic, money isn't exactly freely available. Sure, I had leftover cash at this point in the game but it's not like it grows on trees and you can just respec whenever you want. This is what I meant earlier by the game having some polish issues. Another one of these little problems has to do with crafting. Crafting Weapon and Armor parts is one of the strongest things you can do in the game. However, what the game doesn't tell you is that a lot of these parts and mod are limited and attaching one to a weapon is permanent. If you then sell the weapon or scrap it, you don't get your invested parts back. This means it is very incentivized to not use any of your good mods until you get those end-game weapons and encourages an unreasonable amount of hoarding. Sure, you might pick up on this in the whole "resources is scarce" theme. But really, you're telling me I can't detach a scope from my rifle? What?
It goes the other way too. If you've invested in the good stuff, all of a sudden, the combat becomes less strategic and more about "how much stuff can I blow up in one turn". Mainly because it is the most effective and efficient way to handle encounters, but also because tanking isn't very feasible late game. My dedicated tank healer has like 400 HP, 40% evade and like 50% elemental resistances across the board but he will still go down if like the 7 enemies all attack him. As a result, a lot of characters have kind of same-y roles - just different weapons so you're ammo stock doesn't go down like candy. For example, right now one of my companions, Kwon, is a mid-range attacker with an extremely busted SMG. On his turn he's often killing 3+ enemies due to a combination of his specs, weapon and abilities. My other companion, Lucia, is a shorter range pistoleer/shotgunner. This role is great at tackling close range threats with a little distance, but their role should be more support oriented from getting more access to unique Strike attacks and destroying enemy cover. Instead, I have found her to be more effective if I just make her a more efficient attacker. This is true of basically every role because defense is just not a thing that really works in this game. So yeah, the game actually loses strategic value the farther along you are into it.
Early on, you don't notice these issues because the strengths and weaknesses are more pronounced and enemies are still relatively balanced compared to your gear. But once you leave reach the halfway point, around a little ways into Denver, the game is very open in terms of letting you explore. So if you go into end-game areas, you can quickly loot them for the insane gear. The morally dubious choices with great rewards as I mentioned earlier also exist. The result is that you don't snowball but rather just end up dumping a bag of bricks all over the enemies at that point...or vice versa.
As for the plot, I'll go into it more when I have time (I want to see the ending first). But long story short, my current feelings are that I think Angela is written pretty poorly and despite the game having lots of moral conundrums it wants you to look at, the ultimate choice it wants you to make really falls flat to me. Maybe because I'm not an idealistic teen or my outlooks have changed since I've been married but the choice the game wants to give you is not really a choice. And while I agree with Cid's sentiments that tyranny isn't a thing that is ever okay, Angela's "solution" is so poorly thought out, it's borderline insulting. BUT maybe the ending changes things, so we'll see.
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Momodora 5 - Finished. It's pretty good. A nice, short indie Metroidvania. It's very similar to Reverie Under the Moonlight, but has some more impressive sprite work due to a slightly larger team (from 1 guy to... 1 guy + an animator + some support? That's still a significant effort increase!). It's also a little longer than RUtM, although.. still not quite long enough? I had ~8 hours on the clock, which is probably closer to 7 hours without some idling. The game will nicely mark areas with secrets with a question mark, and there aren't really weird Shinespark puzzles like modern Metroids, so it's pretty easy to be a completionist. I got 109%/111% completion. Maybe will get to 111% after doing the postgame boss rush? We'll see.
In general, if played on Normal mode, it's of the style of high enemy damage but also enemy attacks being fairly dodgeable and telegraphed. There'll be nice red warning marks even for off-screen attacks coming to give you a chance to get out of the way. The game also has some aggro-encouraging mechanics where enemies are fairly easy to stunlock, so a strategy of just "immediately run toward enemy and unload your combo before it can get going" often works. Although there's the By Law Obligatory enemy designs in 2D platforms with a dodge, like enemies armored from one side that you're supposed to let them attack you, then roll through the attack and hit them from the other side. Archery is fairly busted for range games if you want - one of the very first Sigils you get (Think Hollow Knight Charms) increases the damage dealt by your first arrow hugely at Stamina cost, so getting that in as a first strike will blast a lot of regular enemies good. And a decent number of bosses can be handled by just cowardly staying to the side and unleashing a hail of arrows with a bunch of arrow-enhancing Sigils.
Anyway, this style of combat is my jam, and the play control is real smooth. Once you get to late game, you get a Sigil that makes perfect dodges more lenient to get which is a little centralizing, but whatever. The lategame bosses are also a tad on the easy side? Maybe they'll have more teeth on modes harder than Normal, but you get enough broken stuff that I was beating them on the first or second try, compared to having to take a few deaths to learn patterns earlier in the game. The randoms can still be scary, though. (Although the VERY final area is a bit of a letdown on challenge... kinda wish they'd made the final final dungeon like 2x bigger just to let you style somemore with your endgame superpower builds.)
Speaking of lategame, one odd balance bit is that they sorta forgot to have a money sink? There's several mechanics that reward money (Explorer companions, a Sigil that increases money drops, fishing) but nothing to use it on past the early game.
And yes, there is a topless demon whose weak spot is her breasts, again. Ain't my jam but it's back.
Okay, back to the main event: nitpicking Metroidvania plot written by a non-native English speaker! I think he muffed it up here, which, well, it's Metroidvania plot, so this hardly counts against the game. But I like to write about such things anyway, and after Reverie under the Moonlight's success this had a real localization team (Jeremy Blaustein!), so what the hell. Minor spoilers, followed by more major ones? RUtM kept the plot pretty simple, there is an insane evil queen doing evil magic and shit and you gotta stop her to stop the curse, so just Dark Souls moodiness of a ruined town was enough. Moonlit Farewell is more of a standard heroic quest but has some... puzzling... choices.
** (Minor spoilers begin here)
First, the game is called "Moonlit Farewell", so we're expecting to wave goodbye to someone. Is someone going to die or heroically sacrifice themselves? Something change forever?
The problem isn't where we end up, but rather that there's a setup that seems like it's setting up one plot, and then it does a different plot, and the switch is done less in a "cool plot twist" way but more a "wait what" way. There's demons loose, and also two warring sibling gods who hate each other. There's also an expedition of an archaeologist from Karst (aka where RUtM took place) and her knight guard poking around ancient monuments with curious inscriptions, along with some sealed old temple areas. Your mission is to get back the Big Magic Artifact summoning demons, but you also need to intervene in this divine quarrel. Here are the two most basic ways to take this plot:
* Shonen option: Probably after getting your ass kicked, Our Heroine realizes she needs some Power-up. She uses the archaeologist's research to collect the Four Doohickeys and do some ritual and beats some sense into the two gods, and maybe even kills 'em both (the "Farewell" part?).
* Making Friends option: Same as the above, but it involves doing sidequesty doohickeys to "fix" the problem and resolve the quarrel's source.
What actually happens:
First, the archaeologist and her escort are a total plot dead end. You find them cowering in bandit town and send them back to safety. They never help out in getting the needed vague power-up, despite the fact that said power-up involved poking around in ancient temples, which should have been the main reason for their existence!
Second, our heroines just take the side of the goddess in the feud. Despite that the goddess is the one who attacks us for no reason other than it's boss fight time, twice! We never actually see the brother god take any direct hostile action against us. He's just sitting in his moon pillow fort doing nothing until we charge in to murder him. Okay, okay, I guess the demons that are bad are sorta related to him, and we get TOLD that he's up to an evil plan to reset the world... but by his sister, whom we meet by her attacking us and being told that she's part of a petty quarrel. In almost any normal bit of writing, this would add a bit of tension - are we being lied to? Are we just being told to go gank a mostly harmless rival by the Real Villain? But I'm pretty sure that no, that was not the intent. Now, there's no problem with the brother god indeed being bad news and the Final Villain. Just... why set up the plot to act like both sides were equally at fault earlier? Or at least set it up as a direct plot twist that the goddess you've been fighting is actually good and she was fighting you because (insert excuse here)? It comes across as just confused rather than a plot twist the way it's written.
And there is no Farewell to anything in this game. The title is a lie!
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Okay, back to no spoilers. There's a carryover character from the earlier Momodoras that the game clearly thinks is very cool, but the only thing they let her do in this game is mostly get her ass kicked and let Our Heroine do the boss fight afterward, so... meh.
Anyway, still recommended. Short Metroidvanias are around my attention span for video games these days it seems.
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Since kicking the year off with Super Metroid and Three Houses, I've followed that up by played various other sidescrollers. And also Fire Emblem.
Super Mario Bros. 1 - I didn't take a hit until world 3 and didn't lose a life until world 5 (blame the surprise water stage in a pipe). Felt pretty good. Still game overed a couple times in world 8 though; still remains rude after all these years.
Super Mario Bros. 2 - Played through entirely as Mario, who is generally pleasant enough even though not being able to hit some of the bigger horizontal jumps is unfortunate. That said I decided not to take any of the major shortcuts through levels anyway. Built up loads of lives so never had to fear the game over screen, final level is still mean though.
Metroid: Samus Returns - This game is definitely proto-Dread, so it's interesting to revisit. Dread really is quite a lot better though; this game doesn't have nearly as good boss design (the second type of Metroid isn't really much fun to fight and you fight way too many of them) and the controls don't feel nearly as good, it's a more boring exploration experience too. That said it's still checks all those good Metroid boxes and was fun to revisit for sure; a very good game, just not outstanding like Dread or Super or...
Metroid Fusion - I feel I just appreciate this game more and more with time. So many brilliant atmospheric moments which really elevate the story. Good boss fights, good exploration, the feelings of slowly breaking free of constraints really resonates with me more than "here is a big open environment, go do whatever", good use of horror elements. I basically like everything about this game. Gonna have to play Dread again to decide which one is my favourite Metroid, I think. Or just leave it as a tie. Anyway, so far I've done a playthrough where I got 100% and a playthrough which I finished in 1:08. I realized there's an ending for 100% in under two hours and I don't think I've ever gotten that, so that's next.
Fire Emblem Engage - Doing a women-only playthrough. No Vander makes Chapter 3 hard, man. That said past the earlygame it's normal enough; Seadall is certainly the main unit I miss, not having him keeps some of the worst nonsense Corrin and Byleth would normally enable under control. This is the first time I kept both Lucina and Lyn on their starting users and the combination is completely cracked.
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Super Mario RPG (2023)- It's astonishing how this is both a stunningly faithful remake and also just has a really distinct gamefeel. Just a bunch of teeny changes that really speed the whole game up (my final play clock didn't even crack 10 hours). It's also wild just how badly bosses EXPLODE, like in the back of my head I knew they weren't much but I think I like 3HKOed a bunch of them, it's absurd.
But yeah there's not a whole lot to say, game holds up with so few actual changes it's really funny. Heck, they didn't even add voices like Live a Live did! Mid-90s Square was something else y'all.
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The Hex (Steam)
Pretty good. The gameplay is more in service of the narrative and/or comedy than Inscryption's, at least for most of the characters. A couple of them could be expanded on. A little disappointing that you don't get much opportunity to do anything fancy in the programming sections (although that of course essentially also ties into the narrative).
Didn't touch any of the ARG stuff (or even discover pretty much any of it to begin with) and missed a bunch of secrets, but I ended up watching a video some days afterwards which went over it all.
Cat Quest (Steam)
Quite enjoyable. That said:
* It ends up being really checklisty which is a style that's kind of falling out of favour with me.
* For a significant portion of the game you end up walking back and forth between distant parts of the world map which gets to be a pain. You get some quicker ways to move about later on but some sort of fast travel would have been vastly appreciated.
* In relation to both the above, you can't tell if a location has anything level-appropriate available for you without visiting it. (The map does at least distinguish incomplete dungeons/quest boards from complete ones as I recall.) So unless you're keeping separate notes, every time you've gone up five or so levels you need to traipse around everywhere to recheck.
* Main story tasks which are on-map, meanwhile, don't have any sort of level recommendation attached at all, so the majority of the time I ended up being vastly overlevelled for them.
* The drops from chests give the impression of being primarily randomised, which isn't great. (If you get a second instance of a drop you already had it improves the one you already had.) You also see fancy chests a bunch of places from the beginning which you can't open until completing a lightly secret quest halfway through the game, but then once you can do so they thoroughly outclass everything in the regular chests. Then you get semisecret ultimate equipment later in the game which thoroughly outclass everything in the fancy chests. Still have to open them all though to flag each dungeon as completed!
All that said I still wishlisted the sequel afterwards.
Return Of The Obra Dinn (Steam)
Great.
Unfortunately I didn't end up getting everything correct in the intended fashion. For one example, at one point I thought I remembered something which indicated which of the brothers was which, but after having entered that information it eventually became clear that it wasn't correct when none of it locked in later, so that essentially ended up giving away what the correct values were. In most of these situations I did end up finding evidence I'd missed later on. (And, of course, there's no real way for the game to guard against this situation, and it's reasonable enough to conclude that there shouldn't be.)
Did identify the Chinese crew members via evidence at least.
Rock Of Ages (Steam)
Beat the story mode, missed around 4 keys. As far as I can see getting them all doesn't do anything important, so not worrying about the rest.
Not really a fan of the gameplay, likely because I'm not really a fan of tower defence.
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Against the Storm –
I’m not normally into Rogue-likes. Against the Storm was advertised to me as a City Builder first and I like City Builders…especially when I can just chill and take it at my own pace. This game is interesting though in that it kind of combines multiple different genres of game into the end product. What you get is a sort of City Buidler Roguelike with a touch of RTS (not quite there, but close). And surprisingly, it’s real fun – even though I was just looking for something to chill with.
So the premise is simple. You’re basically building settlements in a storm riddled world. Your goal for every settlement is to reach the required Reputation score (usually 14) before the Queen runs of patience. You gain reputation by increasing your settlers’ resolve through fulfilling their needs such as preferred food, housing and services. You can never lose reputation but your settlers can get afraid and lose resolve from different events, during the harsh storm season and from hostility. The queen also gives you a set of orders, which when fulfilled gives you Reputation, lowers impatience and opens a new building you can build for that map from a pool of unlocked buildings.
You lose if a) all your settlers leave or die b) The queen runs out of patience. Since impatience can only go down when reputation is gained, you’re on a strict timer on every settlement. Essentially, the goal is to get in, maximize your settlers’ happiness as quickly as you can, then get out. There are lots of different ways to go about doing this The complexity is trying to find the quickest way out while managing an effective city layout for logistical and production reasons. You’re often juggling between multiple different resources and despite having about 30 hours in the game now, the supply chains are still tough for me to remember.
It is surprisingly real fun and even on these easier difficulties right now, I’m feeling the tension despite not being a serious danger. I think this is because ATS kind of turns the City Builder design on its head a little bit. For one, you never really know which set of Blueprints you will get. Some buildings are really powerful. Any farm for example is amazing because it will instantly solve food problems by giving you an ever renewable resource. However, you may never get these and if that is the case, you have to try to find ways to get food elsewhere. Second, the game forces you to expand because your starting resources are very limited. To meet your settlers’ demands, you are forced to open new forest glades which then generates new loot, resources and events. That’s the roguelike aspect of this game coming in.
You can still keep playing once a settlement reaches its max reputation, but you don’t get anything out of it. But hey, if you enjoy slow rolling to a win you can. On the other hand, getting a bunch of tools and then going a mass exploration, crate delivering adventure ala Eph can let you speed through a settlement since shipping crates back to the Queen improves Reputation by a notable margin.
I highly recommend this game if you can spare 30-40 dollars. It’s lots of fun and every settlement feels different. Will be moving to Veteran once I win through Pioneer a few more times.
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Blazblue: Entropy Effect (Steam)
Not a fighting game, but an action Roguelite (more of a Dead Cells/Hades-like). Pick a Blazblue character and kill enemies in a sidescroller.
You get different powerups based on your character and based on different elements. I beat the game, although there's more endings. Typical Blazblue nonsensical story. Took a while to get into, but it grew on me after a while. Takes a lot of design elements from Hades, so if you're looking for something that's kind of like that check it out.
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Metroid Fusion - I got 100% items. And then I realized that there's an ending for getting 100% in 2 hours and I'd never gotten it, so my task was clear. 2 hours is definitely not too far from speedrun territory (the world record is a bit over an hour as I recall) so it's a bit tight, but I had fun plotting out a route (no clue if it's the best) to snag everything and then executing it. Took a few save loads on some of the more difficult items, but less than I feared. Ended up at 1:38 which is hardly great (included several major errors which I decided to shrug off) but good enough for me.
Fire Emblem Engage - This is the ninth mainline FE game I've completed three times. The women only run is done. Some notes:
-Chapter 1 is in theory trickier without Vander but is still largely scripted.
-Chapter 2 is... tricky without Vander for sure, but manageable.
-Chapter 3 is the hardest map of the run without question. Enemies come at you in waves of several, and I only had three units (Alear, Framme, Etie). Took several tries to execute a plan to survive the opening round, and the boss is just hellish since she basically can't be damaged except by Alear's personal boosting one of her allies and even then only barely, and she's carrying a vulnerary to heal and drag things out further! Ack. Eventually I manage it. I don't want to imagine what this map would be like if the pegasus knights had even 1 more HP so Etie would miss one-shots on them, y'know like how FE normally treats its earlygame archers.
-Chapter 4 and 5 are tougher than normal, and I'm unable to keep Louis from dying, the only casualty of the run. Still, our lord and saviour Chloe joins and that helps a lot. Celine's nice too.
-From Chapter 7 on the game plays fairly normally, with lack of Seadall being the only major noteworthy thing.
Alear (180/90): Griffin Knight with Lucina. So I'd read about Bonded Shield (engage command which protects adjacent allies of same movement type from first hits, doubles/braves/chain attacks go through) but never used it as much as it probably deserves. This playthrough... yeah I decided to leverage it more. I didn't always rely on it but typically used it on one or two turns in most fights, and it's really good at protecting a fast mounted mage. Alear is a good user because of the support list and personal.
Framme (13/13): Staffbot. Was basically only used when deployment was very high, but hey, she was one of the top fourteen, so that's something. Chain Guard has some nifty uses early but way too much worse than Bonded Shield later.
Etie (183/116): Warrior, used Marth earlygame. Her high kill count says more about her high availability and lack of staff access or utility than anything else, she was actually #13 and definitely benched in a bunch of maps. Good at killing fliers with Radiant Bow midgame but eventually even that falls off. Perhaps I should have forged her a brave or something for the lategame but I was worried I'd be too underlevelled for even that to work.
Celine (179/99): Sage with Byleth. Thyrsus good, Byleth's boost to magic and speed very good, Goddess Dance busted as always. Generally competent magical unit at most points.
Chloe (312/232): Wyvern with Sigurd. Just ridiculous. Post-well I think Chloe has a case to be the best physical unit in Engage, just dominates from the moment she joins and never lets up, has Canter when her competition doesn't in part 2 and then Lance Power plus her innate speed on Wyvern (which she reaches without a Second Seal) is just kinda amazing forever. Sigurd's a very good emblem, canter is extremely good and having it without a skill slot rules, and move is always the best stat.
Lapis (22/15): Filler in Chapter 7-11 (held Leif) and again in 14. You can make her work but I didn't really bother.
Citrinne (176/105): Mage Knight with Micaiah. Micaiah giving staves to someone with high magic is always nice. Kinda rocks right out of the gate due to promotion giving her speed but it does fall off eventually. Still the Micaiah user always has uses and her Levin Sword does wonderful things to enemy armours.
Jade (7/2): Filler in Chapter 10-11, not much to say.
Ivy (224/171): Lindwurm with Lyn. Here we are, default "canon" Ivy. Her naturally high magic combined with Lyn's high speed leads to someone who can easily reach ORKO thresholds with Elfire/Bolganone, Speedtaker to really get rolling and then Bonded Shield lets her clear out enemy formations like a champ. Would have been even better if I'd thought to put Celica engraving on a Fire (and upgrade it to Elfire) but still was probably the MVP of the run.
Hortensia (156/35): Sleipnir with Corrin. Flying 3 range Corrin user OP, it is known. Hortensia can't do the damage with it Ivy does, and the battle/kill numbers speak for themselves, she was always chipping enemies to freeze them and debuff them. She uses staves sometimes too of course, since she is good at that, but not nearly as much as she did evil debuffy combat. Corrin also lets her take hits with her beefy +15 HP, how novel.
Goldmary (143/78): Wyvern with Roy. Roy lets her easily get Sword Power so that was her build. It'd be nice if she were a bit faster but the offence is adequate (high atk) and the bulk is ridiculous, we're talking something like 45 def/30 res with Binding Blade by the end. And Hold Out for the extra hit at the end. Not quite as durable as the Ike-user and also no free Reposition, but significantly better offence.
Timerra (139/88): Picket with Eirika. Despite favouring her (I gave her the C14 boots, they're from her castle!) she was one of the less useful PCs overall. I gave her Lance Power (though it took longer to get than Chloe because of needing Sigurd levels via bond fragments) but the offensive stats just aren't great and proc skills aren't as useful as just building up reliable kill numbers, and don't stack with crits as nicely as you might like. No Eirika user is ever BAD lategame, mind, Sieglinde rocks (though kinda highlights a flaw of the build, Eirika wants Sword Power, not Lance).
Merrin (125/71): Wolf Knight. The opposite of Timerra, I did not favour her at all, never even giving her an emblem until the end when Marth rejoins. But she's so good midgame anyway, those bases. With no favouritism dagger offence does fall off a hell of a lot, major damage issues toward the end and there's no Knife Power to fix this, and Marth doesn't really do enough the way Eirika or Roy can.
Panette (170/110): Warrior with Leif. Standard Wrath/Vantage Panette build. Pretty good! You obviously have to watch numbers but nobody else has her power/crit combo (and good hit too!) so she pulls the build off well, impressively so considering it uses such a low-demand emblem.
Anna (11/4): I'm impressed I somehow got her 4 kills, though I did use her until Chapter 11 I suppose. Anna used as filler is very bad. Hey guys do you want Boucheron's bases four chapters later? Yeah me neither.
Yunaka (48/25): Filler for Chapter 6-11 and 14. To her credit, is better at it than my other filler units, Thief is a good earlygame class.
Saphir (99/42): Warrior with Ike. So Panette used Ike until she got Wrath and Leif. Conveniently Saphir joins shortly after, so Ike's gotta go somewhere! Her build also lends itself to Wrath since she gets a hit boost at low HP, but the power's no Panette so I didn't try to pull of Vantage/Wrath with her. Okay filler, durable and longbow chain attacks and all that.
Veyle (52/22): Dragon with Celica. So Celica's Echo gets range+1 on dragons, that's actually pretty sexy for Caduceus-esque counter ignoring. Too bad about her HP, and also the lack of staff access (outside Celica's Recover, which is nice to be fair) but she pulled her weight decently as magical might late without needing much investment or taking an in-demand emblem.
Was fun.
Since then the two things I've played are Troubleshooter and Unicorn Overlord since y'know I like SRPGs. Troubleshooter looks kinda interesting but is a bit of a slow starter, definitely seems like a game with too many systems for its own good so far.
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Baldur's Gate 3
So I decided against my better instincts to try Baldur's Gate 3, since a lot of people from various directions have been recommending it to me.
First of all, whew! My file ended up being 78 hours, which is longer than it usually takes me to play games. I am generally not much of a completionist for sidequests, but I did the character quests which added a significant chunk of game clock.
Lae'zal is probably my overall favorite character (and I even skipped some of her plot on accident in the earlygame, so I'll need to fix that), but I found all of their plotlines quite compelling. Wyll and Karlach are both really good people but have just enough edge to be fun. Some highlights from the NPC cast include Raphael, Dame Aylin, Isobel, Gortash, Orin, and Rolan. They did a good job of making the villains reasonably fun while also making you hate them. I feel like Astarion and Shadowheart get the best character quests (with the caveat that I missed a lot of Laz'ael's), Wyll's and Gale's are both decent, and Karlach's definitely feels a little less fleshed out than the others. Not getting to meet Zariel is definitely a bummer.
The voice acting is really good too. I thought all of the main characters have great voice acting. I think voice acting can really make a cast shine brighter and this cast definitely does!
Setting-wise, the game does a great job. I really like how the different locations feel lived in, especially Baldur's Gate itself. I think the plot is only 'decent' but the game really thrives on his character interactions and confrontations.
Gameplay is kind of SRPG layered with random die rolls and 5e DnD elements. It would be quite a daunting system to get used to if you weren't familiar with 5e already, but thankfully I am. Even still, there are so many options! Jump command being so important is odd to me. I really enjoyed a lot of the boss fights; Dror Ragzlin, Phase Spider Matriarch, Marcus, the Chosen Three, Viconia, Lorroakan, Cazador... the MVP fight has to be Raphael though. Fantastic music, gripping and difficult fight, lots of moving parts. His taunting and sneering at me…. hot.
Party balance is good, although I have to admit that LVP Rogue is pretty apt to my DnD experience. I adored playing as an Oath of the Ancients Paladin. Would really like to try Bard next, since for some reason there is no Bard PC at all! I was really surprised.
My biggest complaints would be that the game is glitchy, a little finnicky/too much information thrown at you, and that it has a protagonist that doesn't speak except for your dialogue. And the DnD DNA means that chance plays a large factor in combat at times.
I'm definitely interested to play it again pretty soon. I'd like to play as Dark Urge and get Minthara because I want to see what she's all about. Sad to lose some of my PCs but I'd like to get her authentically and play the game that way. My ending was me turning into an illithid and roaming Avernus with Wyll and Karlach. (presumably in a polycule, but wyll won't admit it) At the reunion, I tried to eat Gale's brain but I managed to stop myself. Hooray!
Gameplay notes:
I played as Oath of the Ancients Paladin which is overall solid. Their 'Turn the Faithless' really only came in handy a couple times, but the Healing Radiance was frequently incredibly useful. Really like the mixed fighter and mage role, and Divine Smite is great.
Battlemaster fighter + great weapon fighting feat + level 11 + potion of cloud giant strength for the final battle = ridiculous damage output. Fighter is overall good in this game but especially late after they get a third swing. I think the final form of the final boss took like ~120 a turn just from Lae'zel, which was pretty silly.
Wyll was the overall MVP -- Warlock is dumb as fuck. The armor that adds Cha modifier to cantrips... please. He did like 1d10 + double cha mod with each shot which is ridiculous from range. Cloud of Daggers saved my ass so many times against bosses, and fireball is fireball.
I gave Gale the boring-but-effective Evocation Wizard build, which was definitely really good! His Cantrip game was definitely weaker than Wyll's which makes me inclined to say he's a worse unit but still can't really go wrong with the Wizard arsenal.
Shadowheart... respecced to Light cleric, as I joked about. Fireball/Warding Flare/Radiance of the Dawn/Spirit Guardians/Guardian of Faith are all great, And having a healing battery to extend time between rests is always very useful! Lategame didn't get as much use from her.
Karlach is decent, definitely hits her stride in midgame, but felt like she ended up a little overshadowed by Lae'zel ultimately. Lots of HP and tanking power vs. physical enemies though.
Astarion was probably the worst of the origin characters because Rogue isn't great. I did Assassin for him. I've heard that Thief might have more interesting options. Cunning Action is good utility, but his bulk and damage isn't wonderful.
I didn't really use Halsin or Jaheira much. I was more excited about the origin units and usually ran out of steam with my main character before needing to use them.
I really loved this game. Definitely a big competitor for game of the year, and it's only March 1!!!
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FFX HD Remaster
Picked up my postgame file again and finished up a bunch of captures for Nemesis. Down to about 7 more species to go; one of the unfortunately being Tonberry so that's going to suck. Beat up Earth Eater a few times for more Fortune Spheres during the process. Somewhere, decided to give Dark Shiva a try. Pulled off a victory with an underleveled party, to my pleasant surprise. Well, underleveled relative to what the guides suggest for it. The stat benchmarks:
Strength: 149 for Wakka, 255 for Anima. Immaterial for everyone else. Tidus and Auron both with over 160 weren't cracking 100k damage with Slice and Dice and Tornado anyways. (doesn't help that I flubbed the Tornado input)
Defense: Doesn't matter as everything Dark Shiva did killed the target.
Magic: 100 or so for Kimahri for reliable 99999 Nova. Ended up unused on anyone else. Dark Shiva has extreme magic defense so spell weren't going to be doing a whole lot anyways.
Magic Defense: Doesn't matter, no attacks are subject to magic defense here.
Agility: 160ish for Rikku, 110-130 for Tidus, Yuna, Wakka. Kimahri was on the right side of 98 with Auron and Lulu trailing around 90. (those familiar with the game mechanics will know there's no really functional difference between 110 and 160 for a character not starting the fight)
Accuracy and Evasion don't matter as I never used a standard physical and every incoming attack ignores evasion.
Luck doesn't matter either but I have done a bit of Luck boosting and everyone has values in the 20s.
HP was at 9999 for all but Lulu but the only value that matters is anything above zero.
MP is whatever as I didn't use a single MP dependent skill in the winning attempt.
I've knocked off enough Greater Spheres to have Auto-Phoenix armor for everyone besides Yuna. Yuna sticks with her Auto-Haste + Auto-Protect setup.
Overdrive mode is Comrade for all. Auron, Yuna, Rikku is the starting lineup.
Auron goes first thanks to First Strike. Swap in Wakka and Attack Reels.
Yuna gets a turn thanks to auto-haste. Swap in Tidus and Slice and Dice; the delay on Blitz Ace is too monsterous here.
Rikku may or may not get a turn depending on starting RNG. Use it on an overdrive from Kimahri or Auron.
Attack Reels was doing around 200k damage, which was my best offense by far. After that opening, it's let auto-phoenix handle revival and pray I get a turn. Dark Shiva is constantly double-acting and may get a triple or quad action depending on how it spreads out who its murdering. Hopefully, I get a turn right before its Overdrive to swap in Rikku for Hyper Mighty G. Otherwise, splat.
Things actually came together in only two tries. On the first go, got into a situation where one more attack would fill up Dark Shiva's Overdrive but I only had one turn. So I went for Jinx and prayed that someone could sneak in an action after the next attack. Oops, it turns out even the non-damaging Jinx charges the boss' Overdrive meter. Total annihilation follows.
So basically, my turns are spent attacking with Overdrives: Entrusing Overdrive to Wakka if his was empty, the user's full, and his turn was coming up before the boss' (this situation never came up): or Hyper Mighty G to live through Diamond Dust. Lulu stole once to meet the action quota and did nothing else of note. Yuna's only role is to summon Anima to drop Oblivion as a finisher for the Overkill. 4 Attack Reels and some other overdrives from the dudes and Dark Shiva is worn down enough for Anima to deliver the killshot.
Auto-Phoenix MVP; it was the decisive factor in being able to manage (read: flub) my way past this fight. Had a good run where Dark Shiva tended to avoid bullying Wakka long enough for him to get turns to fire off Attack Reels and only needed to endure one Diamond Dust. 12 Phoenix Downs spent, a good return on item investment. Equipment drop was a trashy weapon with only Icestrike but no way am I redoing this battle to try for something better. This marks my 4th dark aeon kill. 4 left though I don't know if I'll ever go after them for real. I thought I'd peace out before Dark Shiva but it turns out I had the tools to win it without an enormous resource drain.
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Unicorn Overlord: Liked the demo so I bought the game. Nice to see a tactics game that goes back to Ogre Battle rather than being another FFT clone. The variety of conditions you can put on your skills is quite nice. Also a lot of freedom in terms of which stages you can tackle when you wish.
Just got enormous boob girl back, cleaning up a bit on the first area before I head to a second.
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Apocalipsis (Steam)
Played through both the main story & the side story.
I think it mostly tries to ride on its graphical style, which doesn't always look especially good in action. Outside that it plays pretty similarly to a worse version of Machinarium (which I already have a low opinion of).
The game is split into discrete levels where once you've solved whatever puzzle is blocking you from leaving you can't diegetically return to. You can return via a level select feature although this puts you back at the start of that level leaving you to solve the same puzzles over again. (For clarity, you can still return to the level you were up to via level select.)
Getting the non-bad (?) ending turns out to require you to have collected a bunch of non-puzzle-related items throughout the game. A little surprisingly, once you've actually beaten the game (and presumably got the bad (?) ending), you can actually just skip back to the levels containing these items (presuming you look them up, I guess it's not as simple if you don't) and pick them up, then return to the final level and re-complete the game with the other ending, rather than having to replay the entire thing.
anyway i thought that was surprisingly merciful
The main story has Harry taking an Orpheus-like role to rescue his beloved who was executed for being a witch. Then per the side story she literally is one, and not exactly a benevolent one. I don't have the capacity to understand exactly where you're trying to go here, Apocalipsis.
Dragon Audit (Steam)
Fairly short & simple 3D point/click-style adventure game which I enjoyed a decent amount. Contained more ribald jokes than I was expecting. Unfortunately had barely any unique responses for using the wrong items on things.
The graphics are fairly primitive but this is only really a problem in a couple of instances, the prime example probably being that the camera can start acting up when in confined spaces.
The story has been left open for a followup so hopefully one is made.
DUSK (Steam)
Horror-FPS which to some extent I enjoyed inversely to how heavy it was going on the horror. Somewhat correspondingly, my least favourite of the episodes was Episode 2 and my favourite was Episode 3 (which also had other things going on in addition to being comparatively less horrorful).
If they make a followup I'd likely play it.
The full version of Logiart Grimoire is out now, and they have added 115 extra puzzles to the game above the Early Access version - but unfortunately they're not included as puzzles in the core tech-tree-like gameplay mode, they're all siloed off in a separate area where you just access them through a list. This is quite disappointing.
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Unicorn Overlord: Damn I can't say enough good about this game. Fixed stat growth instead of random FE nonsense? Yes please. Also there's no stat penalty for promoting units early, although it takes resources so you can't do it to everyone.
I ended up restarting and using all hired units. That way I can color coordinate my entire army and execute all the story characters like the merciless bastard I am.
My only complaint is that the time limit on some stages seems too short. I'm playing on Tactical if that makes a difference. Not too terrible, feels like they just need a little tweaking. Like 10 more seconds in some cases. Anyway, Hallowed Corne Ash are reasonably plentiful so it's not a big deal.
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Unicorn Overlord
What if Vanillaware wrote a giant love letter to Fire Emblem but borrowed Ogre Battle's gameplay concept? Having a blast with this. I'm not the biggest fan of Ogre Battle or Soul Nomad's gameplay so I was a bit leery about this too but the game is such an evolution of their formula. The game really wants you to get into building squads, considering how they imteract with enemy squads, and even adjust your tactics (AI settings basically) to get the results you want. It ends up being a lot of fun.
The game has a damage projection system which tells you how the battle will go, even accounting for the RNG. It's a bit of an odd choice since if you don't like how a battle is projected to go, often a good strategy is to mess with the RNG in various ways (toggling on/off assist actions, for instance, or doing a different combat first). But it ends up working pretty well anyway? The game might be even better with a detailed battle projection that included the percentage chance of each individual unit in the battle to fall, but it could have been much worse with no projection at all since combats are too complicated to hand-predict, so I'm not gonna complain too much.
The story's a bit disappointing. There are glimmers there, but yeah, this is definitely more in the style of Archanaea or Elibe Fire Emblem. Really feel the game could have stood to be more ambitious here; the two main villains are both particularly dreadful so far.
On the other hand the graphics and animations rule. Octopath Traveler had me thinking I just don't vibe with sprites these days but clearly that's a lie, since the spritework in this game is beautiful. I spend more time than I should watching the battle animations because they're so great (fortunately the game lets you choose whether to watch a battle play out or whether to skip it each time, good QoL there).
Playing on Expert, currently in Elheim.
Other things:
Phantasy Star 4
Replayed this for the heck of it. Enjoyed it a lot, but I know the game too well at this point and I was craving something more difficult. So I'm now replaying this again with a challenge run of "don't use helmets or armour". This has the effect of making everything tougher, but randoms moreso than bosses; enemies can do loads of damage so it's important to find ways to kill random formations as fast as possible. Hahn and Gryz are even worse than usual because they're so slow. Up to the Air Castle. The hardest dungeon was Tonoe Basement (a flashback to my first playthrough where I missed the Tonoe shops), with Nurvus being a notable second. Bosses aren't as buffed relatively but Dark Force 1 having a multitarget physical made him nasty (which is funny, I'd consider him one of the easiest bosses normally) and Xe-A-Thouls having three of them is also scary, for all that I've beaten every boss on the first try so far. Lashiec having another multitarget physical will likely test that.
Metroid Dread - Beat the game in hard mode in under 4 hours, which is the "best" ending. Also beat it on normal mode in under 3.
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Baldur's Gate 3 - Finished a second playthrough of BG3 with the Dark Urge. It was mostly an evil playthrough, but I did a lot of talking my way out of problems/lying to people rather than fighting everything I encountered.
I was a Lore Bard, Expertised all the Cha skills and used them extensively to slither out of fights or just to be a pain in the ass. Also Insight and Perception.
Spoilers ahead!
Some highlights:
-I chose the “fantasize about cutting off Gale’s hand” option, which ended up with me actually doing it. RIP Gale I guess.
-Sided with Minthara/goblins over the grove. Feels bad, and the plot is less rich after that due to not having tiefling NPCs, Karlach, Wyll, or Halsin. I only had Shadowheart/Astarion/Lae’zel for a lot of the run, until Minthy joined in Act 2.
-One advantage of that, though, is that you get a lot of those characters’ unique dialogue with each other!
-Did Lae’zel’s sidequest which i managed to skip first playthrough. Good stuff! I really enjoyed the plot there. One thing I didn’t like though — Lae’zel still says “for Vlakaaith!” even though I betrayed her. Feels kinda silly.
-Act 2 again is a bit depressing because I had the dark urge to kill Isobel and did it. Bye Jaheira and Isobel and Isobel’s gay wife. I feel like this part of the game is the part that feels much emptier than it did first playthrough. No saving the rot. feelsbadman
-Did the Shar path for Shadowheart this time. My culty little pal. Again, objectively the worse route but I figured I’d pack it all into the one playthrough.
-Minthara is fun; very pragmatic and driven, and has basically no moral qualms about anything. I wish she had a little bit more, especially since her camp dialogue is glitched to talk about Gale all the time, even though I didn’t even meet anyone called Gale. LOL. She could be a GOAT character but she ends up falling short thanks to the decreased dialogue and lack of a character quest. I was surprised that she didn’t have more dialogue during the Orin fight. I needed my fix of toxic yuri. Her voice acting is super super super good.
-Also, did her romance. it is very brief and doesn’t really reveal that much about her. Very disappointing. :( she’s still my hot, evil wife though.
-Did Vampire Ascendent Astarion. Again, objectively bad choice, but it’s very fun to watch him chew scenery in the lategame.
-I accepted Bhaal into my heart.
-I gave Raphael the Crown of Karsus in exchange for the Hammer. Nothing could go wrong
-I sided with Gortash. I think it would have been cool if he was a PC, instead of him just dying. I really liked the Dark Urge’s tie with both Gorty and with Orin. It really adds an extra dimension to their stories, especially Orin who didn’t seem to have much in a ‘regular’ playthrough.
-One random highlight is when I lied to the projection that Lorrakon set up and told him I was a tax collector and he gave me his tax money. LOL
-It felt pretty good to tell the Emperor to fuck himself. Stupid slimy bastard.
-Speaking of which, I used my one shot of Power Word Kill from being Bhaal’s Chosen on him in the final boss fight after chipping him a bit.
-Ending was ‘make everyone thralls, except Minthy who will help me usher in a reign of darkness’. Definitely not a great ending or very fleshed out compared to the regular ending, but it was honestly what I deserved. Sadly, Raphael didn’t come and try to take my crown. I could have taken that bitch.
Gameplay notes:
-Still did the base difficulty. I think I’d want to have a full party to play Hard.
-Bard is a fun class. Cutting Words is quite cool and made a lot of things that were hitting miss. I mostly used the Inspiration on that. Having to determine that you will use Inspo at the beginning of the turn makes its offensive capability less useful than normal.
-For my extra spells, I took Fireball and Counterspell the first time (because I was missing Gale and Wyll, and Counterspell rules), and Misty Step and Shield the second time. Teleporting is good, as it turns out!
-Went with a Rogue/Ranger multiclass for Astarion, which is way better than just Rogue. The extra attack on turn 1 at level 3 + extra attack at level 5 really adds the DPS element that Rogue desperately needed. I did Thief/Gloomstalker. Two bonus actions a turn is pretty swell for stabbing and hiding and dashing. He could really shoot down enemies a lot better than the first time.
-Did Tempest Cleric with Shadowheart. Much like first playthrough, she peaks midgame with max damage Shatter and Spirit Guardian, but she’s always pretty good. GOAT against Ketheric.
-I did Champion Lae’zel. Generally worse than the Battlemaster because of lack of options to increase accuracy, but once she gets rolling with Great Weapon she’s still solid. Action Surge is also sexy, especially with the ease of Short Rest in BG3 vs. 5e DnD
-Minthy is generally very solid; high AC, divine smite, Vow of Enmity. All around very good.
-Using a smaller party makes long rests more common. Didn’t really push my resources, but might have on the higher difficulty!
Final thoughts:
Gameplay is engaging and compelling; combines turn-based/grid-based tabletop gameplay into a game format quite well. The luck aspect is a bit of a damper on otherwise excellent combat. I liked how they took some of the weaker spells and abilities in 5e proper and buffed them. Definitely not an easy game, even on base difficulty, and has a lot of tricky bosses that you have to adjust your strategies to beat. Raphael was probably my favorite fight (and not just because of the music, although it helps), but I also really liked Cazador, Orin, Gortash, the goblin leader, and a lot of other random encounters which ended up being quite challenging and fun to beat. I want to revisit the game on Hard at some point.
I also like how customizable your party is and how you can play around with different builds if you want. I used Bard and Paladin and they felt like they played very different roles in the party while both being incredibly useful. The combinations of characters and classes you could play seems like it could lend a lot of replay value and tinkering around with the multiclass system is something I am interested in.
Plot is a mix of standard DnD flair with mindflayers, which adds an extra supernatural/horror element that I really liked. I wouldn’t say the plot is amazing and I think there’s definitely some parts that could have been done better, but overall I was satisfied with the progression. It starts a little slow, and Act 2 does feel a little fillery at times, but I thought Act 3 does a great job of tying together the threads.
Characters are the highlight of the game. All of your party members have fleshed out motives, backstories, and opinions on the journey. I like how the game gives you a built-in excuse to have party members of varying philosophies and alignments, which allows you to have Astarion and Wyll, two people whose life philosophies and moral codes are diametrically opposing, together in the same party without it feeling stupid or out of character for either. My faves are Lae’zel, Astarion, Karlach, Wyll, and of course Gortash, who revels in being the slimiest tyrant. All of them have compelling backstories and fun interplay with the other PCs. Gortash is a weird mix of power-hungry tyrant and actually a bit optimistic compared to your average character of his archetype?
I think all of the PCs are pretty good, though; I ended up with a positive opinion of all of them, even Gale who is the whitest white man to ever exist.. Halsin and Jaheira are a little less compelling but still likeable. Raphael and Mizora are two of the other highlights from the NPC cast, but a lot of them are quite good. Isobel and Dame Aylin are a great couple <3. Really enjoy their defying fate energy and Dame Aylin is suuuper fucking hot. Really missed them on this most recent run.
The voice acting really lends a lot to this! The game’s voice acting is almost universally very good (aside from Cazador, who sounds like my trying to impersonate a generic villain); Astarion and Lae’zel and Minthara are all great, and Gortash and Orin and Raphael have the right amount of villain pizzazz to make them compelling. I also really like the character designs and the outfit choices, and I really like that you can use not to wear a goofy helmet if you get it. :)
Some less good things would be
1. the load times and crashing on the steam deck is definitely a problem. I had a few cutscenes also fail to run properly, especially in the Astral Plane/Shadowfell. there are some times when things glitched out, and sometimes spells would take a minute to kick in.
2. the music. way too much of the game has barely noticeable music which is a shame. raphael’s song being a big exception.
3. some weird glitches, especially involving minthara’s dialogue. she repeated this line to me about gale like four times and he wasn’t even in my party. very odd and immersion breaking. really should be fixed.
Overall, though, I had a great experience! Really enjoyed this game and its characters!
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Unicorn Overlord
Still having fun, nearing the end of Bastorias.
UO difficulty is a bit odd. Playing on Expert, and since the earlygame my only deaths are due to third-party loss conditions (which Hallowed Corne Ash can't even save you from, lol) which are often kinda hard to see coming. Which isn't really great. That said battles are engaging anyway. Short maps can't really challenge you too much because items let you stomp things, but in long maps the 10 item limit is definitely a consideration.
Phantasy Star 4
Completed with no helmets or items. The hardest boss indeed proved to Lashiec, since with no armour even Thunder Halberd 2HKOs everyone, as does Another Gate, so I'm healing all the time, and only have four Star Dews. Profound Darkness had me worried about losing at a couple points (Megid after Cancelling one-shots some people so every time the latter is used, a bit of luck is needed to have Wren outpace the boss) but I pulled through, Raja was clearly the best choice since his Blessing buff let me Chaz and Rika survive the physicals, even without shields.
Air Castle and Garuberk Tower were both tough dungeons. Frost Sabers (an enemy) are very dangerous in particular because if they get a turn at 50% health or below they will use Air Slash which as a MT physical does crazy damage. Best solution against more than one ended up being to have Rika cast Saner so that I'd then reliably outpace them next turn and blitz them down. Tonoe Basement was probably still the toughest ultimately; Chaz and Rune getting to hang out in the back and cast Rever if necessary after the fight ends is certainly a big help.
The shield decision is always the biggest one for equips in this game. Kyra always had two shields which tended to make her the tankiest PC (although I usually put Wren in front for randoms), Hahn/Seth/Rune/Raja too though that's unsurprising. I only bothered with shield Chaz for the brief sections lategame where he's alone (more on that below). Rika was the one who varied the most; in the first half of the game I often had her with one shield just to have someone who could take hits near the front. After getting the Silver Tusk and Thunder Claw her offence is just too good to curtail in randoms, so I always used two claws for them, but usually switched to a shield for bosses (notable exception being PD, as above).
I actually lost the Chaz duel with Alys's ghost/illusion which feels like it shouldn't happen. 2HKOed by someone faster! Even with two shields! Yikes. The loss of endgame armour is a huge hit. Anyway I solved that by using the Swift Helm itemcast to outspeed her, then heal and wait for a dodge with my boosted speed, RPGDL strats here.
Was fun! Never really had too much trouble at any one point of the game but it made for a pretty neat hard mode experience.
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Unicorn Overlord: Beaten. Had an amusing game over on the last battle when I had all my units deployed and no Alain so when the mass takeover occurred I had no way to swap Alain into battle and cure the mind control. I should knock that for the game pulling a "Gotcha!", but they couldn't reasonably expect someone not using Alain on their first playthrough.
Anyway, outstanding game. Huge replay value. There's a lot of ways to break the game, but that's because there's a lot of ways to play the game. So many neat interactions between skills, so many types of equipment, etc. I can see this game taking off in the speedrunning community because you can basically go straight to the last boss.
I might delay my next playthrough because they dropped a random huge update for Star Ocean 2 R. Chaos difficulty, more gear, more raid bosses, and other stuff.
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Believe I've reached a point in FFX postgame where I'm not progressing without some serious stat grinding (or Zamato, which I'm not going to use).
Dark Bahamut looks impossible with my 25-30ish Luck and 100-150 Defense. Physicals barely land due to the Luck differential and it has stiff defenses so my only form of offense to get around that are Nova, items, and story Aeon Overdrives for one shot of 99,999 each. Then there's Impulse, which is death at my defenses and total status havoc even with maxed Defense.
Dark Anima has the same issue of getting damage past its defenses as dark Bahamut: stiff defense and magic defense and inflated Luck to evade my Celestial weapon physicals. Mega Graviton also causes status hell to all but my one Ribbon user. (Doom taking someone out as a bad time can very well spell defeat) No counters to deal with at least but double the HP. At least max Defense doesn't appear to be a requirement to handle this fight.
Dark Yojimbo also has high Luck but notably lower magic defense. So I can damage him without stat grinding Luck. Instead, it has sheer offensive brutality in Wakazashi to delete the party whenever it feels like it. I don't think I'm getting past this one without max Defense. (as well as preparing to handle the status crap)
Yeah, could grind out the necessary stats and materials to craft the needed armors. But nah, I'm good with peacing out of this one and calling it as done as I'll ever get it.
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Unicorn Overlord
Beaten. Around 75 hours, Level 40-43 or so.
Had a lot of fun with this one. I think from a purely tactical perspective the game could definitely be better, but I get it; this is an incredibly difficult sub-genre to do well-balanced combat for and all things considered they still manage okay. But really, there's just such a joy in tuning squads in so many ways to respond to threats the game presents. I can't say enough good things about how the game is very public with how everything works and wants you to interact with it. Definitely just an unexpected joy of a gameplay game. I averaged over 2 hours per day until I beat it which is pretty unusual for me.
Lovely art/sprites. I do wish the story were better; that is certainly gonna keep the game out of the 10/10 range. But very fun. In a weird way, despite the obvious genre difference, it reminds me of a Warriors game... not quite as mechanically tight as some of its competition, but extremely playable. (The mix of different sizes of maps also calls the mind this comparison.) Will definitely play again at some point, and it's a good sign when I'm saying that so quickly about a 70+ hour game.
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Final Fantasy VII Rebirth- Fin
Okay so. There's some parts of this game that smack of lacking confidence in itself and in the player to be willing to roll with what flows naturally in the game. This is most pronounced in the beginning and parts of the endgame, where it feels like the game is afraid to just not have a driving force moving the plot along beyond "hey Sephiroth is out there, we should figure out what to do about that" and insert action sequences that just don't really jive with the overall mood meant to be set in this portion of the story. Like yeah, Shinra is a problem and they do rule the planet, but there's a big gap between their city and the rest of the world in how they exert control. And there are some changes to the big plot modules that don't always work, like I'd say Cosmo Canyon is just overall weaker as a sequence, despite Nanaki's arc being drawn a lot more sharply.
On the flip side the game's propensity for bombast sells the hell out of other sequences in a way that's amazing. FFVIIR-2 basically pauses every hour or so to rip your heart out, and at least one time does it so much harder than the original game I was floored by it. Just a fantastically well-composed scene.
As a game unto itself it feels a lot more able to stand alone than Remake. Like, when Remake was being a remake it was good, and when it inserted gameplay to fluff out Midgar to a complete game it was kinda the weakest parts of the game. Now, the stuff with Avalanche being real characters, that was good, but making Hojo's lab an entire Resident Evil Mansion of new dungeon is... a lot. Making the Shiny Golden Wire of Hope a whole dungeon? A lot. Remake has its share of "this did not need to take 2 hours" dungeons but it a lot better about adding gameplay to sequences that were really short in the original, and as you might expect when it has 'permission' to make a dungeon of doom it does it with gusto. I think I spent more time in chapter 13, which is "Literally just Temple of the Ancients", than any other chapter but it always felt properly paced and appropriate.
So yeah no like. Go ahead and play this game (once you can, since I'm 100% several of you are just waiting for a PC version). Even if you felt like Remake kinda fell apart at the end, Rebirth is a lot more thoughtful about its new stuff and is a lot more satisfying about going off the rails for being more reserved with it.
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Logiart Grimoire (Steam)
Regarding the additional puzzles which were added in the post-early-access release, while it's still a bit annoying that they're not integrated into the main game structure, it turns out that they are still at least somewhat thematically linked.
Each of the puzzles is tagged with two or three keywords, often a subject along with an action and/or location, so this is similar to how the majority of the puzzles in the main game need to be unlocked by combining two or three of the other puzzles. For example one might have 'Cat' and 'To Cook' and the puzzle resolves to a cat in a chef hat using a cutting board.
And this actually leads to a lot of these puzzles ending up much more novel than I'm used to seeing in a while, so it was ultimately a good experience despite my previous complaint.
Anuchard (Steam)
Shortish action-rpg where you go into various dungeons to restore various people/entities and parts of the world.
It's trying for some amount of depth re cycles of history etc but ultimately I think it's a bit too short to really reach what it's aiming at. (And it's implied that all the characters in the game are literally the only people in that location, given a few of the events, which makes some of the later events not really make sense.) I did like some of what it was doing.
Never got especially good at the combat but happily it never got especially difficult. (The combat itself isn't particularly deep, either, so that could be a turnoff for some people.)
Dráscula: The Vampire Strikes Back (Steam)
Fairly bad old spanish-developed point & click game.
Crashed on me numerous times, had some issues with the english voice work. Some unfortunate 'jokes'. The interface is also fairly clunky.
The most annoying problem is that often exits which weren't otherwise interactable weren't indicated by anything - you would only know there was an exit if you clicked to walk somewhere and you changed location as a result. The prime examples being a tree, and a non-visible secret passage happening to be in a cupboard which is in the same room as a second, visible secret passage and where when you initially opened the cupboard you got an item out of it. (It also doesn't appear to really work with the geometry of the location, given the cupboard is against a wall with a visible corridor on the other side.)
If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers (Steam)
Started playing this much more recent point & click only taking into account that it was well-thought-of and short, unhappily completely missed that it was a horror game which I am really not in the right state of mind for currently. Ended up being a much more discomforting experience than I was hoping for as a result.
That said, it's very polished and has some good sequences. There is one sequence in the third chapter that overstays its welcome a fair amount though.
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Unicorn Overlord (complete)
8/10 game, I'm honestly extremely satisfied with this one and am willing to play it again at some point, but overall have some issues with the pacing in places. I can accept a ho-hum writing job in a gameplay game, which this very much is, but there's just enough little problems I have that add up to some gripes overall. I like the hell out of this game, I just think it could be better.
Probably the biggest is that it tries to have its cake and eat it too regarding the order in which you can deal with neighboring countries; giving you the illusion of freedom on that front while it's very much implying that you are supposed to go in a specified order. This frankly could have been done better if they had gone further in either direction. Either go for a fixed scenario order where you can have more in-depth storytelling or embrace the more open world approach they were teasing at. Either could have worked, frankly.
I'm going to also take this time to vent a bit about how some of the localized chapters' stories played out. Drakenhold's was probably the best fleshed out one. The others didn't have enough time to cook - Bastorias could have gone from good to great if everything regarding Elgor and the Rat Bestrals wasn't constrained to a couple of encyclopedia entries and a last-chapter reveal. Albion could have been decent had it expounded upon the small bit of local plot it got. Elheim...good god Elheim was honestly the lowest part of the game, I don't know what the hell that needed. I think ironically, Elheim and Albion suffered more from tying too much into the rather bare "collect the macguffins to do the big plot" aspect and not having enough of their own internal plot. It also feels like the game needed one more chapter, so to speak where you could deal with the enemy using combined arms setups, but that may just be me.
Also Agrias Oaks syndrome is in full force here, don't act surprised. Outside of a core few (mostly Scarlett, Lex, and Yahna), characters will disappear from the plot after the chapter they were introduced in is over, no surprises here.
I feel obligated to take a bit here to expound on just how much of a miracle it is that this game made it out in this level of quality. Unicorn Overlord had a ten-year dev cycle, having originated as a PSVita title and going through not one but two large-scale refactors. It basically limped across the finish line only because Kamitani funded the end of it himself. I suppose to that end I can't blame its faults too much because there was barely enough money to make the game with by the end, so it had to be shipped out soon.
You know what games usually come out of those cycles? Duke Nukem Forever. Anthem. Suicide Squad:Kill The Justice League. Games that are just fucking terrible and out of touch with everything. Shambling monstrosities that should have been put down years ago. It's amazing that Unicorn Overlord basically beat the odds here and came out in the state that it did.
It's flawed, but I love it all the same.
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Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Replayed this. Eirika HM. Decided to actually do early promotions. Core team was Eirika (promoted at 20), Ephraim (20), Seth, Tana (11, Wyvern Knight), Colm (16, Rogue), Vanessa (17, Wyvern Knight), Gerik (10, Hero), Duessel, Saleh, Lute (10, Mage Knight), Kyle (11, Paladin), and Tethys. Colm got pretty RNG blessed early, almost immediately turning into an excellent fighter. And then Tana possibly got even more RNG-blessed, even despite promoting early she was 23 str / 29 spd by the end, crazy.
Metroid
Amy wanted to see this. This is the first time I've played it since 2001, when I played it once before. It's... clunky. The DNA of later Metroid games is visible but it's just not very fun to play. Starting at 30 HP every time you die (which is as little as like ~5% later) is awful, the way the game emphasizes very slow grinding to heal is bad, lack of map is a bad combination with how same-y the areas are.
Kid Icarus
See above, another NES game which I consider much worse than at least one later game in the series. Made by some of the same people right after Metroid 1, so it's neat to play it as a pseudo-sequel. This one I haven't played since ~1996! Anyway while also obviously aged, I do think it's notably more fun than Metroid 1; enemies NOT dropping health is actually a huge addition by subtraction so I'm never tempted to grind, and you start off at reasonable HP anyway (100% early, as little as 40% later). Game's an odd hodgepodge of stages, the three castles have a bit of a Metroid feel but the rest of the game is either sidescrolling or upscrolling, with the latter being particularly dangerous because you can't go back, so if you fall you die, have fun.
Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line
Currently playing this. There's very little to say about it, it sure is more Theatrhythm. Which, naturally, means I'm having a good time.
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Princess Peach Showtime!- Finished this. It's not a very substantial game, and the A+ costume design is sadly the only truly excellent part of it, but it's... Fine, y'know? Good enough game. Probably wouldn't recommend dropping $60 on it for most people? I don't think it really lends itself to replays or challenges in particular; as far as I can tell, there's 30 stages plus 5 bosses and you have to do all of them to finish. There might be some extras but it's not many. So it's not really like a proper Mario game in that way.
Now aesthetically it does pretty well at staying engaging across the entire run. There's 3 stages for each costume, the stage play aesthetic is strong, it helps bind the whole thing together. But I'm going to forget everything about this game by next week, and honestly only three or so of the stage types are actually engaging in their own right. At the same time though, as you might expect from having 10 distinct stage types determined by your current job class in a platformer, none of the gameplay really has the depth to sustain many more stages than that. The game just really never rises above the issues generated by its premise even if it's pleasant enough within that.
So yeah, not a bad game, but not one I can strongly recommend given the many other games out there and nintendo's pricing tendencies.
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Mega Man 11 (Steam)
Decently enjoyable. Played through on the default difficulty, which may have been a mistake - was harder than preferable, but fortunately I was able to be carried by E Tanks. I can't say I did a good job of using the gearing system or alternate weapons outside of boss fights so I guess I wasn't really meeting the game halfway here though.
The game feels weirdly uneven, location-wise - the robot master levels all feel like they're around 50% longer than they need to be, then the fortress is comparatively short. (And there's just the one.)
Didn't bother with any of the challenges.
Xenosaga Episode III: Also Sprach Zarathustra (PS2)
Mostly enjoyable. Probably the best of the three systems-wise, although not at all perfect. For one thing the game brought up the concept of managing character resistance to Gnosis early but then you barely ever fight any Gnosis on foot until late in the game. (Which is also a bit of a problem for chaos, who wants to kill Gnosis with one of his moves to boost another of them, although I have no idea how effective that mechanic actually is.) Mech combat is also more interesting early on when your energy is more limited and devolves somewhat later into primarily just continually repeating the same sequences of moves, bosses with shifting elemental defences aside.
Also saddening that Shion only gets one type of throw, which only works on humans, and even then doesn't work on some humans (or on humans facing the wrong way). Still v. amusing to spend most of a few boss fights having her continually send them to the ground.
The Miltia sequence in general is the highlight of the game as far as I'm concerned. The lowlight possibly Merkabah, which almost feels like a joke. Abel's Ark isn't great either but at least it doesn't have you retracing your steps so much. (Although it then does of course ask you to do that after you've left in order to get some goodies. But then Merkabah did that as well.)
I played through the first set of levels in HaKoX when I first ran across it and came to the conclusion that it was terrible. When the story decided that I needed to go look at a HaKoX machine to continue I played through half the second set and reconfirmed that it was terrible. Didn't touch it again.
Also didn't beat Ω Id or Erde Kaiser Sigma. I looked into the Id fight (after giving it a try and being slaughtered - this was directly after getting the key, not at endgame, although it sounds like that doesn't really matter) and it sounds fairly terrible, so not bothering with it - and my understanding is you essentially need to beat it to get what you need for the Sigma fight (which I also tried and didn't do very well at).
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Trails of Cold Steel III- beat this.
It's weird because like. 80% of the game is a very strong 8/10, just very good RPGing to be found here and while there's some pandering they mostly do a good job of keeping it on the right side of the line. It does however have a kinda rough start with a lot of choices in the story that were at odds, and more weirdly an ending which I just don't see how they thought it was a good idea. The Curse of Erebonia is a bad idea to start with, but you could make something like that sorta palatable by suggesting that there's a miasma which makes people more aggressive that resulted from some ancient collective sin. Like, the seeds of that idea are there, but they assign so much agency to it and take it so far beyond people making bad decisions in the heat of a moment that instead it's just this case of mass demonic possession which arises from... nothing, just some ancient conflict in the past whose present manifestation has no real thematic link to how it arose in the first place. It also kinda completely dumpsters every major antagonist of this arc along the way, and the whole thing arises from them desperately wanting to somehow make Osborne redeemable later rather than just letting this dude be beyond the pale from his own traumas and letting Rean have conflicted feelings about him or even hate him in the end. Just a very dumb writing decision arising from Falcom not being willing to let go of their darlings.
Despite all that basically everything from late chapter 1 to the final dungeon is really good, and the final dungeon's issues are mostly related to "you all signed up for child sacrifices and at least half of you should have fucked off and stayed home after that" outside the actual ending being bad. It's just so weird that this series which made a point of integrating massive leaps of technology and artifacts of god into the political elements of the story falling back to "devils made them do it" in order to get its world war.
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Hades II: Beat the two routes to the extent that they're currently available in early access.
I think where this game falls flat compared to the first one is the characters. Melinoe is very Mary Sue compared to charming rebel Zagreus. The hub area characters are just bland in general. There are some good characters scattered in the dungeons, particularly Arachne and Circe.
Gameplay is fine though.
I am gonna claw out your eyes, and drown you to death
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NEO The World Ends with You- Finished this. Might tool around a bit with Another Day but we'll see, seems a lot more combat-focused than TWEWY's version.
So in several ways this is really a better game than TWEWY. Like, the way it handles fashion is smoother and easier to work with, the game feels more forthcoming with how food works, and the larger stable main cast is nice. It has a bit of a VP vibe in terms of controls and combat flow, although that can make the handful of fights that really demand you employ the movement afforded by this being an action RPG kinda awkward. So like, if you had any affection at all for the original, I do definitely recommend it.
But it should also be said that yeah, this game extremely assumes you played TWEWY, and honestly some late-game aspects seem to be entirely pulled from the Final Remix version that was released on Switch, although you can get the gist with just the original. And more than that while it improves on the original in several key ways, it just doesn't have quite the same focus, uniqueness, and spark of the original. And like, let's be real, you never could, but... think about the relationship between Undertale and Deltarune. It's a bit like that.
Sometime I should probably like. Actually talk about this game, but these post are really more about summaries and reminders for myself and I think the overall meat of the plot will stick with me a while longer. Mostly you will be unsurprised to learn I love Shoka.
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Trails of Cold Steel IV- Donezo.
The sins of CSIII's ending really means that a lot of this lands with a thud. There's plenty of good scenes throughout but it peaks in the early chapters where Rean is absent and the emotional stakes are clear. Once he's back a lot of the best stuff, including his best stuff, is buried among plot beats of former friends and allies who are either "doing their duty" to engage in Anime WWII or are 'cursed' with unquenchable bloodlust. While some of the problem IS just the fact that all of the character beats that don't feature Rean himself all involve those terrible plotlines, which makes the contrasts rarer, the larger problem is that too many story beats need me to be invested in bringing people back from the brink when I think they're pieces of shit for being on the brink (eliciting a "okay, cool, glad Rean is happy i guess" reaction more than anything else) or that the thing that pushed them to the brink is the worst plot concept Falcom has ever written.
I'm glad the proper final boss is handled the way he is mechanically though. Like they really gave Osborne a lot of variety for a boss with like 4 or 5 skills, you need a lot of stuff to go toe to toe with him, and it makes the earlier phases of the fight really hard because you don't really have a good way of knowing some of it before you go in. But fortunately even if you take the "ugh just get me past this" options, it last for that phase and he's back to full strength for the next.
But no, there's still a lot of good game here. Just, it's mostly stuff that was already good in CSIII, and the parts that should be unique due to this being the climax of the story arc instead is hampered by how badly they balanced "we want WWII" and "Osborne should be redeemed" as writing goals.
And we really should have tossed Rufus off Orchis tower when we had a chance in the last game. We'll see if Reverie does anything worthwhile with him but I'm not holding my breath.
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Tales of Hearts R- Finished this.
It's. An odd experience to play this now and actually be able to read it? I mean, it's a fairly different game even without that, they changed how a bunch of stuff works, but it's recognizably the same basic game but also it's kinda specifically the same basic game which is a choice when they ramped up the dungeons so much. Not that they're too bad, especially by Tales standards, but it's certainly a choice.
Funnily they end up really making Lithia the central character for the bulk of the story, despite her being strictly an NPC and staying that way, but it's very much her story once the second half actually gets going. It's a shame in some ways because Kohaku's great, but eh, I also get it. She was sorta the one that had to reach the furthest to bond with the rest of the cast and that IS just kinda what the game is doing.
Neat to have this done at least. Nothing special, pretty average Tales game, but glad to have finally gotten to it.
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Elden Ring DLC. First I had to remember how to play Elden Ring since it's been 2? years since I last touched it. Having fun. I'm a bash-my-face-into-the-wall-until-I-win guy so I'm dying a lot. Boy I sure love loading screens. Spoilers ahead.
Gaol guy in mausoleum. ~25 deaths. Fun fight. This was before I had any of the Scad powerups.
Giant Fire Basket. Noped on out of here. I want none of that.
Lion Dancers. ~55 deaths. It's actually not bad except for its grab move that did 95% of my full life. And you can't see it coming when the lightning is on the screen. Ended up soloing it with Nepheli Loux ash because you need to burst this thing down and summoning players increases its HP too much.
Sir Erdredd. Not only no deaths, but no damage at all. This guy does not know how to deal with a greatshield.
Ghostflame dragon. 2 deaths before I decided to do something else.
Yet Another Ulcerated Tree Spirit. Sigh.
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Half-Life 2 Episode 2 (Steam)
Personally really didn't need the Antlion caves section.
In general was quite entertaining, didn't have any especially terrible defence sections (although the Magnusson-Device-focused one was getting close to it), didn't require too much use of the terrible rocket launcher.
Picross S Namco Legendary Edition (Switch)
Cleared all puzzles.
On the one hand, excellent (https://www.rpgdl.com/forums/index.php?topic=7153.msg201994#msg201994), new developer-themed Picross S game. On the other hand it's primarily focused on Namco's games from the NES & earlier which I have very little familiarity with.
Nothing mechanically new to me in this edition to comment on.
Some of the translation did seem a bit off at points, but it could be that they were keeping in line with historic translation choices.
Runaway: A Road Adventure (Steam)
Point & click adventure game. It was fine.
Had an overreliance on pixel hunting and no way to highlight hotspots that I could find. The majority of the time I got held up it turned out that I had missed some item somewhere. (Plus a few situations where there were hotspots referring to collections of items/containers, where the character would not actually take an item from the collection/container until a need for it had come up. This would be fine if applied consistently but the character has no problems with taking a heap of individual items they don't currently have a need for, and it means there's at least one situation where a hotspot which will be relevant for taking from later isn't easily distinguishable from a hotspot that only exists for flavour.)
Puzzle solutions mostly weren't too out there but there were a few weird ones.
The character is quite bad on the 'Adventure game protagonists are jerks' scale.
Thirty Flights Of Loving also the included Gravity Bone (Steam)
Short first-person experiences.
They're both pretty unusual and I don't think I'm really the target audience.
Had resolution problems when playing Thirty Flights which meant around half the rendered image wasn't actually displayed but I don't think this caused any actual problems. (First person game so generally could just look around to see everything, although there were a couple points where camera movement is restricted so it's possible I missed something during those.)
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Have you played Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection on mobile, Twil? It's not deep mechanically, but it's very long and completely free. After you beat it 100% you get to do it again without the ability to mark squares.
More Elden Ring bosses. Spoilers ahead.
EDIT: Just going to keep updating this post.
Rellana. 23 deaths. Reddit is way overhyping the difficulty of this one.
Rhinoporcupotamus. 8 deaths. When this thing glows, run the fuck away.
Death Knight. No deaths Knight.
Clone Wars Yoda. No deaths.
Messmer. Tried it about 10 times and decided I'd rather go exploring. First half is easy but hoo boy there is not enough fire defense in the world. EDIT: Only took about 6 more tries.
Skibidi Toiletry. 15 deaths to kill its second form. Then I found out it has a third form. Fuck this I'm going somewhere else. EDIT: 4 more deaths to finish it.
Centaur Crucible Knight. ~5 deaths.
Hornsent. 4 deaths.
Romina 420blazeit. 10 deaths. This is probably the fairest fight in the game. Lots of telegraphing, No hour-long attack strings.
Yep It's Another Ulcerated Tree Spirit. No deaths.
Pustulant Knight. 3 deaths.
WAAGGHH BOAR RIDAZ! 0 deaths.
Dragon Knight. 0 deaths.
Jagged Peak Drake 1. 1 death.
Jagged Peak Drake 2. 1 death.
Seannax. 8 deaths and I stopped because I didn't see any real progress.
Charo's Mariner. 0 deaths.
Charo's Death Rite Bird. 7 deaths. Coochie coochie.
Yosh 2.0. 1 death.
Marigga. 1 death.
Cerulean Ghost Dragon. 4 deaths.
Moorth Ghost Dragon. no additional deaths.
Plains Fire Toilet. No deaths.
Moorth Fire Toilet. 4 deaths.
Shadow Keep Fire Toilet. 1 death.
Unte Fire Toilet. 1 death.
Rakshasha. 2 deaths.
Jori. No deaths.
Madding. 5 deaths. Shut up, I suck.
Midra. 3 deaths.
Leda's Prison Jump. 30 deaths. Surprisingly the trick is to kill them slower, not quicker. If you blitz Freya, Dune and Leda spawn in much faster.
Radahn, Seanassax, Bayle. These fights are not fun. They're sucking the enjoyment out of the game.
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Unicorn Overlord- Did a playthrough with someone. I did not like this as much as the other people here did. The gameplay has a lot of depth and options, sure. All that complexity boils down to 'Alain and Cav murder squad handles things' or 'send fliers to snipe'. Everything from the equipment system to the AI setting system to the number of classes felt overly complex for the sake of complexity. Ogre Battle (which this feels like a spiritual successor to) had the same issues, but it saddens me that they couldn't improve on that.
Writing, as noted by others, adds nothing to the game.
Probably a 6 or 7. It's fun on the surface but I was hoping for more.
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Trails into Reverie- Properly finished this, clearing up the Corridor.
I think this helps nail home something that was always true in the Cold Steel games but became a bigger problem as they went, the writing team isn't really great at making more than a small core cast of characters all feel equal and interesting. So instead, the format of Reverie lets them do parts of the story much more closely to their strengths, with one of the routes having a core fixed cast of 4 characters that only katamaris up an additional three, all of whom understand they're supporting characters there to set the others up for success, while the daydreams, most especially the ones you unlock in the Coda, are able to zoom in on just one or two characters are a time. The after-after game set, while not really doing THAT (well, the third one does but) do a wonderful job of communicating how excited the writers are for what's coming.
I have to admit I'm a little disappointed that the game makes a point of having you tell it who Rean's love interest was then only has her obliquely mentioned in a few scenes where they can just splash an image, rather than like. Having even ONE scene for each of them when they reunite throughout the story. Doubly so because like... if you picked Towa like I did (or Alisa, they're in the same boat storywise), she was trapped behind enemy lines when shit went down! Rean should have things to say there!
Probably an unintended bone for the Rean/Crow shippers all told.
I honestly really liked the Coda and the questions it decides to tackle. The Black Records became something of a plot tumor thanks to being tied into the fucking Curse and the resignation several characters develop around that, but revealing this as the source of them makes it all feel more natural and the misunderstanding of what they were have a bit of a tragic air.
So this game axes Divine Song as an order, which makes the mid-game a lot harder than CS3 or 4, BUT instead the True <x> Bell items are so completely cracked that you get the same effect at the rough endgame as zero casting time WHILE ALSO being free to do more generic delay-reduction Orders that let your physical characters be useful for more than item tossing (S-Break machine being the easiest setup). It's delightfully broken. For the record my core team eventually became Rean, Rixia, Nadia, and Musse, and boy howdy Nadia is good with minimal investment and off the charts if you actually build her like a CSIV mage.
Hooooonestly if we consider this as a CS game, it's probably my favorite. It's middle of the pack overall, a bit behind Sky 3rd, but it really feels like they were able to cut away some of the fat from Cold Steel and refocus themselves on their best strengths as writers.
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FF2 Pixel Remater - Well it's FF2 but FF2 is a game that's grown on me. Finding out they patched in being able to turn off the automatic hp gains they added to the GBA version is nice since now there's at least a happy medium between that version and the previous nonsense. Overall it's a perfectly acceptable (if still very breakable) SaGa experience.
FF3 Pixel Remaster - Well it's 2024 and I finally got around to finishing a version of FF3? Yay? Anyways while it's a more civilized iteration than the other two (this says NOTHING) it has the problem of bosses that do basically nothing spam MT 2HKO damage in a game that doesn't believe in having civilized turn order mechanics or means to compensate. Would've finished at what would have seemed like a perfectly reasonable Lv47 except the game thought it'd be funny to pull that nonsense with Cloud of Darkness too many times and just 2HKO everyone with bad turn order/damage variance and fuck that shit so I settled for a nice round 50 to make that less likely. Also the game decided that not only would it be funny to inflate the HP count of every endgame boss but they should also resist every element on top (including katanas EXCUSE ME DARK BLADES because fuck that weapon group and fuck you the player specifically for not using the special boy super endgame physical class I guess) which had basically destroyed what goodwill it had built up earlier. That the job system is a weird halfway point between FF1's promotion stuff and a proper class change system is also, in all honestly, weird and bad and not helped by the fact that around two thirds of the ones that aren't directly obsoleted (ignoring the existence of super special boy ninja for a moment, god, fuck that choice if I haven't been clear on that point) feel like fake classes for idiots designed to be used at exactly one point and never again.
2/10? At least the arranged soundtrack slaps but reflecting on things I just have no respect for the game whatsoever.
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Played two puzzle games with abbeys...
Lucifer Within Us
Detective game with a really great plot setup. Life has presumably been very boring because there's been basically no crime for 100 years, but suddenly there's a suspicious death at the abbey in a kind of future medieval-ish world. Rather than write it off as a weird fluke (which, tbh, I probably would have done!), an exorcist is called for (Ada, Our Heroine), because OBVIOUSLY if anyone is committing crimes it must be because they're possessed by a demon. That's the only reason why people would defy the will of Ain Soph of course! But if people are getting infected, then that means someone or something is spreading it, so there's going to be more murders at the abbey before the day closes. If you think that monks arguing about the power settings for tiaras or generators suspending giant swords in a cathedral or inquistors with detachable cyborg hands sounds interesting, this setting is for you.
Anyway, it's fun, but it's also short. Really short. Some of the reviews mention the "tech demo" aspect, but despite being an indie title, the credits list is long enough that I guess it goes to show just how much stuff there is to pack into even small detective games to ensure it coheres well. You'll have ~3 suspects, 1 of whom is guilty and the other 2 who are innocent but have randomly decided that lying a lot is fun to provide some contradictions for you to hunt down in the witness statements. The game shows a neat timeline of each suspect's claimed versions of events, and you can use this to point out contradictions between one witness's statement and another's, along with the usual pixel hunting for evidence. To end the case, you need to pick out the suspect's motive, opportunity, and means, as well as identify the demon possesssing them.
There's also one kinda odd criticism: I wish the game had many more digital demons to pick from during your accusation, like 12 or 13, say. Why? Spoilers, but
so there are only 4 demons. One of them is Lucifer, whom any degree of game sense can suspect will be the last demon confronted given the game's title. This means that there's a rather substantial clue in the right direction for case 2 based on the remaining demons, and case 3 is basically spoiled from the start since there's only 1 non-Lucifer demon left and he fits one of the 3 witnesses like a glove. The game really needed some decoy Not Appearing In This Game demons that could plausibly go with the various red herring motivations & dead ends.
Recommended, but it is just 2-3 hours of gameplay at most.
Chants of Sennaar
You get to climb the !Tower of Babel! But with less jumping robots.
Don't read any summaries or spoilers, it's best gone into blind on plot. The opening area is the Abbey, where devotees seeking God want to climb the tower, but are blocked by warriors. What's really going on? Our Hero decides they really, really want to climb, and is ready to go do some Myst-style puzzle solving that is greatly eased by understanding WTF people are saying. Conveniently, many regions of the tower have stories of people who also tried to ascend and left behind useful info before probably being devoured or something. The local equivalent of why people in town know what's in the treasure chest at the bottom of the monster cave in a fantasy RPG, I suppose.
Our hero possesses the "subtitles" superpower that when others talk to them, they conveniently have the glyphs of what they're saying drawn on screen, because the game was not going to torture you enough to learn how to actually pronounce their fake languages too. Which is fair. You have a notebook where you can jot down your current guesses at glyphs, and the game eventually prompts you to make your choices. Get a set correct and it'll be verified, Return of the Obra Dinn style (and often "Verified" in the sense of you were right, but there was a different sense of the word than your guess in the official answer). There's some occasional annoyances where I understood the word fine but misinterpreted the picture I was trying to match it too, but oh well, just check a walkthrough. Also, you might think that learning a bunch of new languages would be repetitive, but the game is savvy on that - it'll just give you common words early, and then go to new topics for what the people using a new language use it for, so it keeps things fresh.
The puzzles are mostly fine, but there are two that I didn't gel with at all, and unfortunately they're both close to the start of the game. One of them barely qualifies as a puzzle at all, and is just doing some actions that are sure whatever. So yeah, if you have a Lens, just walkthrough that sucker up IMO, because there's lots you could take from what it shows you that isn't what the game really wants you to use it for. And if you have a lamp and a floor with slots for the lamp, then yes, you can solve the "puzzle" without further clues... (my hint) Pretend that if you closely examine the rotatable-thing in the center, you'd see some tiny holes. Was the game supposed to show this but just forgot? I'd have figured it out fine if I'd seen what it looked like close up.
I won't spoil the plot, but I will say that the final area went somewhere entirely different than I was expecting. Wild Arms meets WALL-E? Okay sure game. I think maybe they ran out of time there? It's fine, but I wasn't a huge fan, but it did provide a fair excuse for the final challenges I suppose.
I do recommend clearing out the game once you sit down to play it, because you will want to keep the various languages in the back of your mind for the final tasks. Most of the early part of the game is merely in understanding the individual words, where just wild-ass guessing is fine (swap the word order if you got the verb / noun order wrong, whatever, you're not punished for incorrect guesses). But you will be expected to write some simple sentences by the end, and remembering "oh yeah this is the language where verbs always go at the end like Japanese", "this language plural goes before the word", "this language plural goes after", etc. is easier if it's fresh in your head.
Fun stuff.
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Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line
Probably the best of the Theatrhythm games. They're all pretty similar at their core idea of being a rhythm game with FF music, not much to say there, obviously this one has the most tracks so far including numerous Square Enix games in addition to the expected Final Fantasy (Chrono, Xenogears, Saga, Mana, Nier, etc.).
But it's also the best one in terms of the RPG elements. The first game made me care about RPG elements, but only in the context of grinding as efficiently as possible to get all the characters. The second game made a lateral move to not tie characters this way, but also left me feeling like the RPG elements didn't matter. This one throws in a game mode, Endless World, which apart from being a fun series of random-with-choice track selection, constantly challenges you with completing quests to keep advancing further. Some of those quests involve just the rhythm aspects (e.g. get at least "good" timing on 95% of the notes in a song) but some also require the RPG elements, and messing with teams to pull those off is actually quite fun. Kept me entertained.
Monster Hunter Rise
Pretty fun action game. I kinda like exploring the environments and learning them better for the inevitable boss fights which take up most of the game. The boss fights themselves are reasonably fun, a bit on the long side but that does reward learning the tells of the monsters and getting good at them.
I'm currently 23 hours in or so, having completed up to 6-star in the village quests and 4-star in the hub quests.
Eiyuden Chronicles
I finished this. About 44 hours or so. Got 89 stars of destiny, or whatever this game calls them. Getting all of them was never gonna happen once I realized that several are gated behind some minigames I very much did noy enjoy.
This sure is a Suikoden game. Unfortunately Suikoden games live and die by how good their story is, and this one is only so-so. Without too many spoilers, here are the things I liked about it:
-The protagonist talks!
-The game manages to make a decent chunk of the cast feel reasonably important.
-Perielle's good. She's not the tactician (that role very clearly is held by another) but does remind me of Shu a bit in the sense that she's the ideological driver of the player side, and she tends to steal most scenes she's in.
-The main villain has pretty good stage presence.
But ultimately the story isn't really that interesting, and it manages to often undercut the things which would make its characters really good. Into spoiler territory:
Aldric's plans are reliant on literal human sacrifice which both remove any possible moral nuance from the conflict and kinda undercut him as a character; he gets skewered for hypocrisy nicely even without this angle. With Perielle I kinda felt like the writing wasn't really committed to her in her role; the game enjoys hinting that her manipulation might lead to troubles but it never does. Let her come into conflict with Nowa or Melridge or ANYONE more! Seign, similarly, is initially presented as been in confict with Nowa, complete with a duel that wants to feel super epic, but then he just kinda joins up with you as 100% ally and that's that.
Gameplaywise it's definitely above the Suikoden average, at least, if not massively. I think earlygame randoms are dull because early magic kinda sucks tbh (like Suikoden it's very limited, but unlike Suikoden it's also very weak, so feels barely relevant) so you're basically just auto-battling through everything instead of at least having the "hmm is this fight hard enough to spend my spell charges on" question. But they do get a bit better as your options open up, and boss fights are decent. I played on Hard and while I never lost a boss fight a bunch of them certainly had me nervous, and nothing just rolls over and dies like several Suikoden human opponents (especially S5) did. War battles are super boring and waste time, but they can sometimes tell decent story moments. Duels are more confusing than Suikoden's despite having two choices instead of three. There's one I lost a bunch of times until I basically got good enough to perfect it. They are reasonably stylish though; I thought the last one felt like a good way to end the game.
6/10 territory or so.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Did another randomized run, with a different ruleset this time.
Rules:
-A twelve-person team is randomly generated using non-Anna members of the roster. Byleth is one of the twelve.
-Other characters may be used extra party spots are available (i.e. before recruiting everyone), but their goals may not be touched and they are treated as having no "interests" (see below), which in particular means they can never certify for advanced (and beyond) classes.
-Each unit is randomly assigned three "interests" and three "disinterests", chosen from the pool of 11 skills. The other five skills are neutral. The list of interests must include at least one weapon/magic skill and will be rerolled if it does not. Broadly speaking, characters should focus primarily on their interests but may use neutral skills to round out their build. Specific rules follow:
Disinterests are subject to the following rules:
-Characters may not equip a weapon or use a spell associated with their disinterests.
-Characters may not set an ability (dex+4, weight-3, rally, etc.) learned via their disinterest.
-Characters may not certify, nor spend a battle in, a class which has their disinterest as a prerequisite.
-If authority is a disinterest, B rank and A rank battalions can not be used, even if the character reaches the required authority rank.
-Disinterests may not be set as a goal nor targeted for instruction
(Exception: Byleth may use faculty training in order to reach the minimum threshold to have a 100% chance to recruit a character who is a member of the twelve-person team, i.e. D+ rank for Ferdinand/Caspar/Leonie and D for everyone else.)
Neutral skills are subject to the following rules:
-Once a neutral skill reaches C+, the skill must not be set as a goal nor targeted for active instruction.
-Any ability, combat art, or spell learned at B rank or above in a neutral skill may not be used.
-If authority is neutral, A rank battalions can not be used.
Finally, the choice of interests will dictate legal advanced/abyssal/master classes. Characters may only certify for or spend a battle in an advanced (or beyond) classes if every prerequisite for that class is one of their interests. For master classes with C rank prerequisites, the C rank prerequisite is allowed to be neutral (but not a disinterest). For War Monk/Cleric, the Faith prerequisite is allowed to be neutral (otherwise female characters with brawling as their sole weapon would potentially have no legal classes).
e.g. A character with interests of swords/riding/reason and disinterests of axe/faith/brawling would be allowed to certify for Swordmaster, Mortal Savant, Valkyrie (if available), and Dark Knight (but not Assassin, Trickster, Paladin, etc.). Before advanced, they would be allowed to use most classes, but not Brigand, Armour Knight, Priest, or Brawler.
There is exactly one legal set of interests (out of 161) that will result in a male character having no legal Level 20+ class: lance + armour + authority. If someone gets that, they're either gonna be the dancer, or just be bad, I guess! Female characters also have to worry about brawling + two other non-weapon skills with a faith disinterest.
Anyway, here's my team. The numbers are battles/kills.
BYLETH: Brigand/Pegasus -> War Cleric (414/210)
+Brawling, Axe, Faith; -Bow, Sword, Reason
Punches things hard, durable, can toss out the odd healing spell. The disinterest list having both swords and bows is unfortunate but still pretty good.
DIMITRI: Archer -> Sniper (483/266)
+Bow, Sword, Authority; -Faith, Brawling, Axe
BVantage + BWrath Sniper! Aside from being training-greedy this is certainly good, since he can kill anything on player phase then set up to kill more things on enemy phase, and in many maps he doesn't even need Retribution to counter at 1-3 which is nice. Only downside is the -50 hit at range 4+ against siege tomes and Bow Knights, but this could remedied by switching to a Cursed Ashiya Sword. MVP. Dimitri would rather have more move overall, but still an interesting choice.
DEDUE: Brigand/Archer -> Sniper (270/146)
+Faith, Bow, Armour; -Riding, Authority, Sword
Sniper who misses some good maps for being a Sniper. Was weirdly defence-screwed so couldn't take hits from much of anything, i.e. one of the worst snipers I've used but there's only so bad they get.
YURI: Brigand -> Wyvern Lord (322/174)
+Faith, Axe, Flying; -Authority, Riding, Armour
Is a Wyvern Lord, is automatically very good. Had Alert Stance+ and Windsweep and excellent speed. Lowish power meant there were some things he couldn't kill, but great anyway.
BALTHUS: Brigand/Archer -> Wyvern Rider (250/129)
+Axe, Armour, Flying; -Sword, Lance, Authority
Struggled a lot midgame until he got to Wyvern, and was a little iffy even after reaching it. Really came into his own when I got him a Brave Axe; with that he could kill a decent number of enemies while having canto. The lance disinterest meant no Wyvern Lord, but Wyvern Rider is FINE as an endgame class...
HAPI: Mage -> Bishop -> Gremory (219/100)
+Reason, Faith, Axe; -Armour, Bow, Sword
Pretty bog standard Gremory Hapi build. Not much to say, did big magic damage from big range with Warp and Physic, obviously good. Only downside is the authority bane + neutral meant she never really got past C for authority, but School of Sorcery Soldiers isn't too bad.
DOROTHEA: Mage -> Warlock (245/149)
+Axe, Reason, Authority; -Armour, Bow, Lance
Aside from being stuck in a 4 move class, this is just vanilla Dorothea i.e. very good, she still gets Physic by the rules, and of course Meteor/Thoron great as always, as one-shotting snipers with Meteor right up until the end.
PETRA: Brigand -> War Cleric (289/158)
+Armour, Axe, Brawling; -Sword, Flying, Riding
The other punchy character, she didn't have as much power (though typically still enough) or charm as Byleth, or her Recover, but what she did have was crazy speed and thus evasion via Brawl Avoid. Was my primary dodgetank.
RAPHAEL: Brigand -> Dancer (37/7)
+Sword, Lance, Authority; -Riding, Armour, Brawling
Dancer Raphael is pretty bad as far as dancers go, aside from having good HP. Evade never got anywhere near reliable even with the sword interest. Still, is a dancer.
FERDINAND: Brigand -> Warrior (118/62)
+Axe, Armour, Reason; -Faith, Brawling, Sword
Warriors are mediocre. Only good thing I can say is he had accurate gambits, usually used Kingdom Snipers for Fusillade. Armour also gave him Smite, which was nice since he joined late.
HILDA: Brigand/Archer -> Warrior (252/134)
+Sword, Axe, Brawling; -Faith, Armour, Flying
Compared to Ferdinand she didn't have Smite, but did have a higher axe rank (and hence, earlier Axe Crit / actually reached Axefaire2) and much more power, so if she actually reached things she could do some good things with Killer/Brave/Freikugel at least. Still one of the weaker units.
GILBERT: Swordmaster (54/20)
+Sword, Armour, Flying; -Riding, Faith, Authority
Bottom-tier combat (though could take the odd hit Ferdinand or Dedue couldn't). Used Smite, and Retribution on maps where that was helpful and he wasn't on the bench.
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Replayed FF8 due to a temporary obsession with it. I don't feel there's anything interesting about the playthrough itself, rather I'm inclined to gab about what has changed since the last time I played.
- Seed rank mechanics fully cracked and documented. This lets me time Seed tests for maximum gain/minimal lost points
- Triple Triad trade rule mechanics exposed, letting me have greater control over spreading ones I want. Or what to do to get rid of Direct. I spent around 70% of my Triple Triad matches with All in effect which really boosted my deck to an insane quantity.
- RNG methods for rule manipulation Took advantage of this a few times to cherry pick which rules I want to abolish from each region.
- Magic effects on GF compatibility documented. While not really worth paying attention to most of the time, it did let me make informed decisions about which spells I wanted to use. Related, I was much more willing to use my Magic stocks for things other than Cures, Esuna, and Dispel.
- The Battle Mechanics Guide wasn't even published the last time I played through FF8. Nice to know what is going on under the hood and I welcomed the detailed explanation of Draw difficulty and the Limit system, among others.
Alongside all the new info that's come available since 2005, I also imposed some voluntary restrictions. Drawing and stocking magic I limited myself to 11-15 times max per fight, per character. (to prevent situations of spending 30 minutes drawing and 3 minutes battling) I also limited how often I went Limit fishing, generally only if there was a timer in play, and just had characters take their damned turns if one didn't pop. Also I was more willing to refine spells to cut down on Drawing time rather than hoard everything for potential cash. Those 75 Gil sellables aren't really going to be missed. Variety helped make things interesting, more shutting down enemies with status application, less crushing everything with Limit spam.
I wish I hadn't bothered fishing for The End to log it on the status screen. Took about an hour under ideal fishing conditions. (low-level fodder that's blinded and only uses weak physicals) Truly a skill where if one can set up a situation to fish for it, sure not going to need it to win) Which is still less time than the Shockwave Pulsar grind, which I'm not disclosing whether I bothered or not.
Some parts of the game are genuinely enjoyable. Mostly my opinion hasn't changed in 20 years though; there's a lot of tedium in between the fun bits. It's a very customizable experience but that entails learning a bunch of concealed underlying rules. With all the hidden game mechanics, sometimes I get the impression of a SaGa wannabe and wonder how the game would have turned out if it leaned all the way into SaGa's intentionally inscrutable game mechanics.
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It's summer, so time to do a job system fiesta. But I've already done FF5 so many times, so...
Bravely Default 2 - Five Job Fiesta
I did a similar run of this for BD1. The rules are similar to FF5 fiestas, but like BD1, the jobs come in five distinct groups instead of four. Those groups are:
Prologue / Halcyonia: Freelancer, Black Mage, White Mage, Vanguard, Monk
Chapter 1 / Savalon: Bard, Beastmaster, Gambler, Thief, Berserker
Chapter 2 / Wiswald: Ranger, Red Mage, Shieldmaster, Pictomancer
Chapter 3 / Rimedhal: Salve-Maker, Dragoon, Swordmaster, Spiritmaster, Oracle
Chapter 4 / Holograd: Bastion, Phantom, Arcanist, Hellblade
This excludes Bravebearer which is gained way, way later than any other job, so I'm somewhat inclined to class it similarly to the GBA jobs of FF5 and exclude it entirely. I suppose I could also include it in the Chapter 4 group and maybe it I ever do another one of these I will, but as is I'd rather get a job which I can use for more than one dungeon, thanks.
Anyway the rules are as follows:
-Roll one job from each group, as soon as the first job is available.
-Before getting access to my first job, I treat the game as a Freelancer SCC, i.e. I can't use abilities from other classes besides Freelancer.
-From the point of getting the first job on, only use jobs, sub-jobs, and abilities from my list of rolled jobs.
-During the point where I have two to four of my jobs, at least one character must use each job as a main job.
-During the point where I have five jobs, no two characters may have the same main job, and whichever main job is not being used must be used as a sub-job.
-Hard Mode, no sleep mode nonsense.
Simple enough I think!
Anyway, notes:
I roll and get my first job, Vanguard! But first, it's Freelancer time..
Outlaw's Hideout: Sloan makes this completely trivial even with all Freelancers. Only notable fight is the boss.
BOSS Selene and Dag: Dag's brave quad actually threatens to overwhelm Sloan's healing. I could see losing this. I don't. Unfortunately, my offence is quite poor, so I have trouble overwhelming Selene's healing... especially since the game makes you waste Seth's first special as a tutorial. So I spend time turtling, building everyone up to 3 BP, trying and failing to blitz one of them down, building up again, and eventually deciding I should build up Seth's special again and use THAT in my blitz... and then Selene runs out of MP, rendering the battle trivial. I go into this fight at Level 2 (Seth) to 5 (Adelle).
Vanguard get!
Hydrangea Hills: Optional area, but sure why not, let's get some treasure (I badly need money) and a bit of JP to get rolling in my new job. I quickly realize that Vanguard's beefy defence trivializes physical randoms, which is most of them right now, and I blitz down the rest with basic physicals. Easy.
Fenrir: Optional quest boss. He buffs his attack like crazy (which leaves Defang mostly a waste of time), then counters physicals for 2HKO damage, not bad at all. He can't really deal with Sloan, but he slow my offence down a lot. Until I realize I can toss items that hit his weakness (Darts) and wow that does a lot more than my physicals while not triggering counters, okay, cool. I win.
Vale of Sighs: Enemies here are a step up. Well, mostly Aqua Elements, because they have magic, both the traditional type and Gravity, which does 50% MHP on a hit. They die with extreme prejudice. Other randoms mostly aren't too bad. Sloan still hard carrying. Cross Cut can be pulled out if I need more offence - it does over 3x as much as physicals, nice.
BOSS Horten: Is pathetic. He hates my good PDef. He hates Defang. He does counter physicals but those counters, and everything else he does, does 2-digit damage to my 1000+ HP. He's even weak to swords... which only really pull even with axes thanks Vanguard having a better axe rank, but it does mean Sloan hits him extra hard. I'm Level 8.
BOSS Adam: Yes yes, your damage numbers are very big.
At this point I lose Sloan. Guess I'll actually have to start worrying about healing.
Sandswept Ruins: Randoms keep improving. Terra Elements can do big damage, so they die first. Restless Souls are notable for having physicals, and can sometimes throw out magic damage, but also waste turns on much weaker stuff a lot. Sandworms have MT blind, screw them.
BOSS Orpheus: I was kinda worried about the start with his various allies but honestly they're pretty offensively inept. The scariest thing is when Orpheus starts attacking, he can use Stone which apparently counts as physical for the purpose of his own buffs (so if he uses Hurts So Bad it gets +20% damage) but otherwise is fixed 300 MT, reduced by default to 180, not reduced by earth resistance despite the animation. Weird. Anyway my healing is only potions which do 250 so I do kinda struggle to keep up with that, but then I realize I can actually blitz him reasonably so I do that. He doesn't counter physicals or much of anything that I saw.
At this point I roll my second job and it is indeed Bard! So I can start using that right away. I put one PC in that and keep the other three in Vanguard for better damage. Bard can use a bow but it's notably less damage than Vanguard axes.
Underground Reservoir: Dagons are annoying since they counter physicals with MT daamge which isn't a total joke (I mean, it's still less than 10HKO, but everything adds up), so they often merit Cross Cuts. Gelaflans have magic damage or can MT lower my defence so everyone else does more. Formations with 5 or 6 enemies can be a bit tricky but I can still generally manage them just by choosing how many Cross Cuts to mix in with my attacks in braveblitzes. I do need to start using potions frequently between fights now, though.
BOSS Anihal: By far the hardest boss so far, no real surprise. She fights with a Gelaflan, an Undine who is a tanky healer, and a Peiste which has a poison physical (including as a counter to sing, sob) and a MT fire physical, all with around 2000 HP instead of their normal figures (the Undine has less, but also has high PDef). Anihal herself can throw out okayish damage of both types (ST) and MT silence. Stacking Don't Let 'em Get You can really take the bite out of most things in this fight (though as mentioned, both the Gelaflan and Anihal herself have some magic to get around it), and if I'd lost the fight I'd have given my bard silence immunity to get it out more reliably. A lot of the fight is just trying to keep up with healing as best I can with just Phoenix Downs and Hi-Potions. Undine dies first, then Gelaflan, then the Peist. Once we're down to Anihal herself I use a special and just set up a big blitz: since she (as well as the gelaflan and peist) is weak to earth, Sword of Stone does extra big damage (similar damage to Crosscut before the weakness multiplier, but costs about 50% more MP, so it's normally not great) so I can take her down quickly. And good thing I do because as her HP drops she starts countering with Sandstorm which is awful, MT blind and also starts killing people. I just try to keep the folks with remaining turns alive, unblinded, and use Mini Ethers for MT, and successfully complete my blitz with one PC standing (the one with the Gaia Shield, which nulls Sandstorm).
Bernard's Mansion: Every dungeon has been tougher than the list, the trend continues here. Not much magic to worry about, but Axemaidens are scary anyway, their Outflank can do upwards of 1000 damage. So fights against lots of enemies are quite dangerous. But generally, it just means I'm using more and more Cross Cut relatively, and using more and more potions between fights. I buy up to 99.
BOSS Bernard: Oh no, there's an Axemaiden! I use a turn 1 Gloria special to nuke it off the face of the battlefield. There's also a swordsman who gets dispatched. My bard uses Don't Let 'Em Get To You four times immediately and I stay at 64% or better physical reduction the rest of the way, whic makes Bernard damage not very good (also slows the draining). Only error I make is doing some defaulting early, which he counters with stealing BP. No problem, I just switch to always using actions of some sort instead, Cross Cut or Potions or buffs. Bernard is weak to axes so he's an easy brave-blitz using a Bard special when the time comes, I do it at under 11k but I realise I could have done it way earlier. Pretty easy.
BOSS Berserker (3 resets): Another boss against whom Default is not very effective (all his damage ignores it), and in fact attacking is a better damage reduction due to Vanguard's Defensive Offence (-30% damage received on turns after using a physical attack or tech). He can use Vent Fury which sends himself berserk (this is great honestly, because berserk causes him to take more damage). On turns when he's not doing that he can use Water Damage (Manarobe is the armour of choice, to half this), Shell Split, and rarely, the incredibly dangerous Crescent Moon, which is MT. His ST moves all hover around OHKO damage if I'm not reducing damage (yes, even against my boosted HP), and pierces default. Ouch.
I employ the same strategy as last time but Berserker hits way harder and is way more durable than Bernard was, so even with all my damage reductions he still wears down my potion supply; I can't really heal enough to offset everything he does unless I stop my offence entirely. I can survive for a while even as my HP gets low but eventually he uses Crescent Moon which can wipe out people at low health easily. I make two changes to win: one is to level up just a bit more so that my Bard gets Hurts So Bad, allowing me to blitz from about half his health instead of well under. The other is just to buy a bit more HP boosting (Iron Bangles) to buy myself a bit more time. So ultimately the strategy is to maintain 4x Don't Let 'Em Get Ya (brave-blitzing to do this.), sometimes throwing in a fifth with another PC to reach the cap of -80% damage received, my highest-offence characters primarily attack with Cross Cut, and otherwise I throw in Potions, (Mini) Ethers, and other periodic Defangs with my lowest-offence Vanguard. I do use a Vanguard special at one point which helps with damage received. Then, when the boss is at around half HP, I use my Bard special to boost damage, begin attacking, use 4x Hurts So Bad on the Bard's next turn, and then 4x Cross Cut with the other three, buying myself time with Phoenix Downs. Sadly one PC is dead when I strike the killing blow and I do not have the action to use the Phoenix Down, it takes my very last Cross Cut to finish the battle with everyone at negative BP.
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Unicorn Overlord
Realizing I didn't make a post on this earlier. Not really much to say. I got halfway through Bastorias and kinda gave the game a long break as it was getting a bit too easy, even on Hard mode. I'll eventually return some day.
UO is a game that could have gone a lot of ways, but an interesting (IMO) what-if is if rather than a classic RPG style quest to gather allies and such, the game was closer to the Heroes of Might & Magic or Brigandine II series. As is, it is rather tough for the game to get you to care too much about generics or about late-joining classes because you can already have created a bunch of doom squads. A game that just flat reset your team every chapter, maybe having one or two carryover characters, might have been interesting - i.e. maybe there's 4 separate campaigns and we only throw everyone in a blender for the final showdown. Or even make the game an outright strategy game where everyone's trying to unify everyone else by force. Both of these would mean you're basically stuck with your starting area's team-squad, at least for a bit, so as to appreciate their strengths & weaknesses without having to compete against the entire rest of the cast.
Also I know people have brought it up before, and it's not strictly the most important thing to nitpick, but the plot tone remains... weird in how the plot treats Alain & co. as if they're a tiny RPG party when the rest of the game very clearly treats them as actually liberating areas, rebuilding towns, and holding territory. Yet bosses literally say lines about "Who are you" and treating the player army as if they're upjumped rats, despite the fact that we objectively control huge swathes of territory with fireworks & shit in our honor, and also just killed all the bosses' minions. It's weird!
Shovel Knight: King of Cards
For whatever reason, I never got to this - maybe because I played the rest of the SK series on Vita and had mostly stopped Vita'ing by then? Who knows. Well, played it now. 100% items, 100% map exits, 100% merit medals, and bought all the fancy decorative upgrades from Mr. Hat. It's pretty great! Reasonably short & compact playthrough, too. You also finally get to face the Troupple King as a boss, something I didn't realize we needed until now.
Similar to Specter Knight's campaign, they came up with new stages specially designed for King Knight. There's also more stages that are individually shorter, which is fine, and will sometimes have a secret exit to find in addition to the regular exit. For the most part, it's good times. Only complaint is the usual problems when you expect to grab a ladder but King Knight inexplicably doesn't and you fall to your doom instead. Also, as an interesting quirk, I found the Propeller Blitzsteed, a Castlevania Dagger equivalent and the first Heirloom you're likely to get, insanely useful. King Knight is normally about very upfront, bashy combat, but throwing cheap flying daggers everywhere gives him a range game for free. It's great against bosses, too.
The difficulty is for the most part on the easy side - harder than Spectre of Torment, but easier than Plague of Shadows. All the trickiness is in the platforming. Assuming you're buying the health upgrades, you shouldn't really ever be dying to damage; bosses emit restoration hearts on being damaged, and the stages are short and have health refills in them. It's too bad because the boss fights are really cool; I'd love to have, like, doubled most boss HP to force you to learn their patterns better. As is, the challenging bosses are ones like Tinker Knight who have insta-death pits in their fight to be aware of. The main exception is the superboss; she happily can kill you via damage while not having BS instant death pits, so her fight was probably the most enjoyable in figuring out. (And a random FF4 Zeromus flashback too!) Certainly a better fight than the final boss.
There are two minorly bad things that aren't a huge deal, but can mess up the vibe a bit. The "on death, lose money, get back to where you died to collect it" idea from older Shovel Knight returns. Now, to be super clear, money is not that big a deal in game. I bought everything without grinding. It's mostly a decorative penalty. And... I still hate it. It's just the worst, most frustrating feeling to watch your funds dwindle because you can't figure out the jump they want you to do. And sometimes the death money bags spawn in totally unrecoverable locations, too. I didn't even die THAT often, but it makes the deaths that do happen far, far more stressful than they have any right to be. This is supposed to be a silly fun game, not a "get angry and in tears" game. Whyyyyyyyyyyy rub this penalty in the player's face. (But maybe I'm just a wimp for this? SMT5 made me quit playing it after just ONE bullshit death.)
The second minorly bad aspect is tied to a largely good aspect which I now realize I didn't mention. SK writing is in general good when it's being goofy and silly (Plague of Shadows) and bad when it's trying to be serious (Spectre of Torment). For the most part, King of Cards is goofy, which is perfect. Our Hero wants to be a king, and winning the title of King of Cards at the card game craze sweeping the nation sounds like basically becoming a king right?! Unfortunately the plot swerves towards dumb, well-trodden, and played serious roads in the very last act. THE ENCHANTRESS AGAIN?! Come on, switch it up. Maybe make the superboss the regular final boss, it'd be more fitting. And if we're taking the plot seriously, didn't Spectre Knight recruit King Knight anyway rather than what ends up happening? And they decided they needed an explicit insane plot point to explain why people aren't talking about Joustus in later games?! Whatever. Like just let me beat up Shovel Knight & Shield Knight in a fun non-canonical prequel, it's not much to ask. Not a huge deal though.
There is a NG+ mode that is tougher, but as usual, Yacht Club has made the game tougher in exactly the wrong way that SnowFire would prefer. SnowFire would want to remove the penalty for dying but make everything way harder with more spikes, longer gaps, more enemies, etc. The NG+ just reduces your health, and doubles down on resource tension where taking damage loses treasure and using Heirlooms (!!!!) costs Treasure, because how dare you have fun or something. So you're either boringly perfecting everything or you're stuck in a downward spiral of losing your cash and then losing your ability to use subweapons. Or you can grind cash safely for an hour and then spam abilities like crazy!!1! Wow that is not for me, I want to take on a tougher challenge not show I can perfect the existing one (which is something that if I wanted to really do, I'd just speedrun the base game).
EDIT: Oh yes, Joustus was pretty fun overall, the Triple Triad esque card game. The only asterisk is that I kinda liked the game strategically more in Worlds 1 & 2. World 3 introduces a new mechanic, Cascade, which kind of overwhelms a lot of the other strategy in the game? It lets you flip the allegiance of cards you push around, which is an insanely dominant ability - like imagine if moving your Queen in for a possible checkmate in chess could result in your opponent casually turning it into their Queen. Or if someone could play a card in Poker where the lowest hand wins. Totally puts the area control aspects on their head, as what was once exerting influence can now just casually be flipped into the other side's card.
Also, in important news, the Fairy of Research is now the King (Queen?) of the Fairies.
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Xenoblade Chronicles- it is done.
This is a game that must speak so much to the 14 year old who was just there for it in its day. It's got a lot going on, you can play it practically forever, there's enough there for the cast to extrapolate on, that's all good stuff. But coming into it as a Xeno veteran I can only miss many things and find disappointment in some of the stuff that replaced it. The game is scaled back so much in terms of the craft, depth, and texture of the plot and scenes, it has the unmistakable air of "okay we can't do what *we* want, so what'll sell".
It kinda reminds me of Don Bluth's Anastasia in that way when I say it out loud.
Which isn't to say the game is shallow or lacking in good aspects or anything like that. It's just. So often I'd feel like I was making progress and then thought "hey I should look up how to <x>" and then get stuck in a quagmire of quests filled with generic dialog to even access <x>. And you can see what they wanted to do with how all those systems interact and for the right person of the right age, I'm sure it's magical but. Man I'd rather have some other way to see how Melia feels about Fiora or how Dunban feels about anything than either fighting a million things for proccing affinity points in battle or doing every major sidequest in a region hoping the generic quest barks go to the character I'm more interested in at the time.
On the plus side this version of the game has Casual Mode, which undoes some of the mechanical rough edges of the game like the insanely harsh level checks. I played about half of it legit, I'd say up until Sword Valley, but at that point I kinda forgot to swap from casual for mobs to normal for bosses. It's a shame in some ways because bosses crumple that way while mobs remain potentially tricky if they're even in your ballpark level wise.
It IS really fun to get a bit overlevelled and just walk straight into monsters that're terrified to attack you though.
But yeah, this does feel nice to just have done and dusted after so many years, even if it's a different version and couldn't possibly live up to my original hype for it back in 2011 or whatever it was.
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Eiyuden Chronicles Rising- went on through this on a whim, it's pretty alright.
So, this game ended up being clearly a retro PSP game? Like, it just has that structure of main and side quests that are deliberately designed to be digestible in chunks one could play during a commute, y'know?
In terms of introducing the larger conflict that I assume is going on in the proper Eiyuden it's kinda so-so, but as a Suikoden veteran it *does* do a good job of establishing how Eiyuden as a setting will be compatible but slightly different from that series. Like, okay, yeah, Runes are pretty comparable in terms of how you use them and their appearance, but by breaking them up into the raw runes and the lenses you create a good way to differentiate between characters and explain how Runes can be "common enough for an army" but shy of "magitek singularity" (although unlike Suikoden there IS a suggestion, at least in this game, that things are on the cusp of such a thing). It does make the sometimes too-modern dialog feel just a teensy bit less out of place at any rate.
So yeah this was a bit better than it'd been described to me, but I do get why it underwhelmed people a bit on release.
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Have you played Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection on mobile, Twil? It's not deep mechanically, but it's very long and completely free. After you beat it 100% you get to do it again without the ability to mark squares.
I have! At the time I thought Expert Mode was terrible but that didn't stop me from replaying puzzles in it aways after hitting 200% completion. Unhappily my save didn't transfer when I got a new phone but your having brought it up has gotten to start going back through it.
Glass Masquerade 3: Honeylines - Folks & Spirits (Steam)
It's more Glass Masquerade 3.
Since the previous expansion they've added the option for piece cuts more in line with the first two games, so it was good to see those again.
Retro City Rampage DX (Steam)
I was afraid that this would be structured like the classic GTA games (e.g. beat score X in location 1 to unlock location 2 etc.) but happily it has a more linear, story-based one.
Has a lot of amusing scenes/callbacks if you're into the gameplay at all. The final mission was terrible, though, a format switch to a racing game style view where you have to get through extended sections of obstacles to get a brief chance at damaging the final boss, with no checkpoints. Might be less of an issue if you have a controller with a turbo option but I don't.
In keeping with GTA and the like, the game has a bunch of checklisty side tasks. I beat all the spree-style ones (albeit not with gold medals for a significant amount) but didn't bother trying to collect all the loot items I'd missed etc.
Superhero League Of Hoboken (GOG)
Somewhat amusing point&click adventure/RPG hybrid which doesn't really work on a gameplay level.
Much too heavy on the RPG side, and a bit too light on the adventure side.
The superheroes in question each have unusual powers, but most of the powers are either used once to solve a puzzle or are essentially just offensive magic for RPG battles. A couple have utility/traversal uses. One of the later heroes has a power used to solve multiple puzzles!
One of your initial superheroes has the power 'put animals to sleep' (actual sleep, for clarity). One of the initial missions you get is to deal with a bunch of rabid sheep. You may connect these two concepts. No! Putting animals to sleep only works in combat. The mission actually needs to be handled by an item you get in a different location. Not good! There should have been much more emphasis on solving problems via powers. (Or at least in getting the equipment you need to solve problems via powers, which does happen at least once at least.) The combat-only powers should not have been, or most characters with them should have also had non-combat powers.
Battles are also often just a chore and there should have been less of them.
Gaining access to additional areas of the overworld is decently set up for the most part except for the locations which aren't actually on it, which are all accessed via train. The problem is that the train system was set up by someone who hates public transport and wants everyone else to hate it. Every train only runs between two specific locations, and each train is only usable if you have a keycard specific to it. Stations are somewhat evenly split between having one line or having two lines. It shouldn't be required to have to go looking for the relevant station after you get a new keycard! Any train should just be able to go to any station that you currently have a keycard for. This isn't really a puzzle.
Also it might just be me but I think it's weird that there are so many locations which are essentially in pocket dimensions that you can only access via train. I don't know offhand if the locations in question are supposed to actually be distant from the overworld but our group of superheroes isn't supposed to be dealing with problems outside the area around Hoboken anyway?
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More Bravely Default 2 fiesta (Vanguard/Bard/staytuned):
Abandoned Mansion: At this point I do a quest which leads here. Halfway through I open a chest with 3 Hi-Potions, and kick myself because those would have been really useful against Berserker, and honestly the randoms in this dungeon are a step down from Bernard's anyway. There's a boss here, it's easy.
Onto Chapter 2! Since there's a choice of which boss you fight first in this chapter, I roll for my job immediately and get Pictomancer. So after getting the first job in Chapter 1, I get the last in Chapter 2, which means I'll have a truly large section of the game with just Vanguard + Bard. Also at this point my first characters master Vanguard. Vanguard's second job special provides a free attack boost based on the ChanceOfBeingTargeted stat, which is welcome. They also get Neo Cross Slash now, which has a big MP cost (54) but does over twice as much damage as the already powerful Cross Cut, so it's neat for big brave-blitzes.
Academy/sewers: No real problems here. Probably the most noteworthy enemy is the Mantrap which very, very rarely counters physicals with confusion, which is dangerous. Gigantos also counter physcials much more frequently, dealing a significant but predictable amount of physical damage. They're weak to earth so Sword of Stone puts in work against them.
BOSS Roddy: Roddy's not much of a problem. I largely resist his damage with my Wind Talismans (best accessory) and Academy Robes, and at only 17000 HP he's an easy braveblitz. Plus I have Hi-Potions now, so I can keep up with boss offence. Yet this fight still manages to give me a good scare. Why? The Picto-Beleth who accompanies him is immune to all physical damage types. This leaves me with remarkably little in the way of good options for killing it! Fortunately the Vanguard special attack is earth, not weapon-typed, so it does around half its health, and I can take out the rest with a bunch of attack items, but I could have been in real trouble if I'd had less of those.
Wiswald Woods: Largely easy. The most notable enemy is the Petunia which does big light-elemental damage on their own turns, making light resistance tempting.
BOSS Lily: Lily has two things which make her scary. One is huge physical damage with Human Slayer and Quickfire Flurry. Bardstrats lock that down. The other is paralysis, including as a counter to physicals. The Laurel Crown (on everyone) blocks that. With those protections in place this fight is pretty routine. She comes with a Picto-Amrita which can inflict dread and that's certainly annoying, but it's easy for me to kill unlike Beleth (its resists are magical).
Treetop Tower: In this dungeon I get multiple Earthbreaker axes, which are an upgrade over storebought, but are earth-elemental, which is a mixed bag. Some enemies resist earth, but others are weak to it. Hellhounds have a physical counter but it's not too scary.
BOSS Galahad: Galahad comes with THREE annoying picto-demons, including a Beleth and an Amrita from the previous fights, and a new one, Picto-Mona. Who MT heals the team for 10k. Screw that, she dies first. I make some misplays in this fight, dumping a braveblitz into the Amrita only to discover that Amrita is immune to earth, and dumping a brave-blitz into Mona only to discover she immunes axes. WHY ARE IMMUNITIES NOT LISTED BY SCAN IN THIS GAME GRRR. Anyway the fight still isn't too hard because it can't really break through Bardstrats. Once I get my act together, I unleash three Direct Sunlights on the enemy (obtained from a quest) which hit weakness on all four enemies present and does 1950 x3 to them all, nice. I then blitz Mona with a sword to get rid of the healing, then blitz Amrita with a non-earth axe, removing the threat of dread. Beleth goes next; I use a Vanguard special and then a few storebought lightning attack items to finish it off. Galahad has a physical refelction buff is annoying, but he can't kill me and Lily sometimes paralyzes him which is funny. Eventually the reflection wears off and I smash him with Neo Cross Slash.
Secret Studio: A short little dungeon. Most of the enemies are weak to axes or earth and I have zero difficulty here.
BOSS Folie: Folie fights with a Rock Tortoise and Golem; the latter absorbs earth so ruins one of my early plans. They aren't too scary overall (tortoise will set up reflect, I don't care). She also fights with an untargetable wall (the game's data says it's called Study in Crimson) which throws out Darkra for big magical damage (first turn it does 2000 to one, ouch), usually ST at first and usually MT for reduced damage later. The wall sometimes uses a MT status move which adds poison and dread (not very accurate, maybe each at 25% chance), and everyone is blocking one or the other with their hat. Folie herself uses some pretty weak debuffs, unimpressive physicals, and Daub (+30% damage received?). As her HP drops she starts using Scuro and Chiaro which are significant ST magic damage. She will rarely counter Default by gaining BP, but since most of her actions aren't too scary I'm not overly bothered.
All of this adds up to "use Don't Let 'em Trick You x4 on turn 1" to control the magic damage, since that's very dangerous and nothing else about the fight is. I take out the two supports first, then set up for a Bard special + Hurts So Bad + Neo Cross Slash blitz. Honestly after I see my final damage I realize I could have done this at the very start of the fight possibly, or at least as soon as the support were dead.
Pictomancer get!
I'm not sure what to do with this job right now. Honestly it seems kinda bad, outside Sub-Job BP Saver letting someone with Vanguard sub-job being able to donate BP for free (which is obviously gonna be cool). It's got more Atk than Bard but still way behind mastered Vanguard, and terrible HP. We'll see. For now, still running two Vanguards of course. Anyway Chapter 2 is done, except for one last little dungeon and-
Wayward Woods (2 resets): Wow this is the hardest dungeon in the game so far? Devil's Snares absorb earth, and counter physicals with Don't Touch which can inflict a plethora of nasty statuses, like the Mantrap only way more frequent; they can also do randotarget physical damage which really adds up. Buffs and Cross Cut can mostly deal with them safely, with higher HP ones I just use Neo Cross Slash, which marks the first time that sees work in randoms. Toxic Worms can throw out both MT poison and MT blind both attached to significant MT damage and have pretty good HP, and half earth. Adamantite Golems null earth, have big HP, and usually counter physicals for big (defence-ignoring?) physical damage. Yikes! Not friendly for my team. I get through it, though, and Chapter 2 is complete!
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Visions of Mana Demo: Played it. Honestly it feels...comfortable? Like, I'm not expecting anything grand from it but it is a comfy ARPG, and the class options are definitely there. I probably will get it when it comes out, since I don't have much else to wait for.
Characters get nine classes overall, one base and one for each element, and as they're tied to elemental relics, you can't (for now) run duplicate elements in the party. From what I can gather, classes determine your CS (limit break, which is this time shared by the whole party in exchange for basically being a smart bomb) and base weapon type. Probably stats as well. Which, interestingly, each character has at least three base weapon categories shared among their jobs, but unique to them so far. Demo let us play with Wind and Moon classes (tying to two of the three characters, at that)
Worth noting is that all learned spells and passives are shared between jobs. Weaponskills are shared between jobs that share the weapon in question. Point system unlocks later class abilities, so while I imagine you will get to unlock everything eventually, you have to decide what to get now. I'll be interested in seeing how it plays out in the full game. I say, as I have way too much of a backlog already.
Crystal Project: Speaking of backlog, taking my second dive into this game. About the same impression I had before: gameplay is good, even if classes feel a bit more restrictive, music is good, but the writing feels a bit painful to me. Too many blatant references, and the framing makes me keep on wondering if this is supposed to be its own world or just a MMORPG world and it's never honest about either.
But this isn't a game that I play for the writing. It's a game I play because I want to have my Reaper/Monk do a chargeup before chunkifying some dude with a wind punch for 1600+ damage, and then follow up the next turn with what would be a life-sacrificing attack but his setup turns his hands into life-draining orochi claws that give a return on investment. And the fact that I can get excited about builds is a pretty good indicator that something has definitely gone right here. ...I will avoid going into the classes here but more because I'd end up turning this into an In-Game Use post and that thread is elsewhere.
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BD2 Chapter 3: I roll for a new job and I get... Spiritmaster. Well, it's an oddball, we'll see how it fits in.
Also on the Rimedhal world map I pick up Alastor, a new axe which is not earth elemental, so I can stop worrying about running into random earth resistance all the time. I get another storebought in Rimedhal itself. It's the only thing I pick up; armour upgrades basically aren't worth much with the weight system.
Some notes about random strategies in this chapter: enemies are getting increasingly evasive so Won't Be Missing You is getting better and better, Close Those Tired Eyes is another I use a fair bit. While its sleep isn't too accurate, it has a low MP cost, and it has a large variety of uses: it cancels an enemy's defaulting state, it prevents the counter they would use upon waking up, and of course it deprives them of turns until they are hit physically. Pictomancer moves are mostly worthless in randoms; the one I use the most is Freehand, which does ~900 average damage split among random targets. This is a pale shadow of what Cross Cut can do (which has a lower MP cost), but for non-Vanguard offence it's fine. Freehand does trigger magic instead of physical counters. Pictomancer physicals, incidentally, are very disappointing; Bard if anything is still better just because the current best bow inflicts paralysis. Obviously Vanguard is still the heavy lifter in randoms; Crosscut is huge, and Neo Cross Slash, though rarely needed, is obviously even better in a pinch. Speaking of good Vanguard skills: eventually I pick up Sub-Job BP Saver which allows free use of Gift of Courage, i.e. BP Transfer. This lets non-Vanguards transfer BP to Vanguards. It gets especially useful once I drop to one Vanguard.
Anyway, the chapter itself:
Serpent's Grotto: Randoms here are okay but not as tough as Wayward Woods. Lux Elements continue the element enemy tradition of having strong magic damage and gravity, so they're always good targets to kill. Turans have White Wind so they die first. Cask Paraponeras have a draining counter to physicals so they merit Cross Cut.
BOSS Martha: All physical boss means bardstrats are go. I wonder how this challenge would go in a version of the game which nerfed Bardstrats? I don't have to think about it. She uses Jump as a counter to defaulting sometimes; she'll head off the screen and descend a few clockticks later (fraction of a turn) to deal damage; this is fine but means I shouldn't default right before I'm planning to attack her with someone else. Martha has huge HP (nearly 60k, best before this was just over 30k) but buffed Neo Cross Slash tears into it remarkably fast anyway. This does not bode well for the durability of the rest of the bosses in this chapter.
Jaws of Judgement: White Fangs counter physicals for big damage, put them to sleep or Neo Cross Slash, or let my dragon helper Gwilym chip them down for Cross Cut which definitely happens sometimes. Merciless Souls counter physicals with Battle Thirst, stealing BP, but they can't steal from someone at -3 BP so braveblitzing is just more effective than usual. Azazels are the scary enemy of the dungeon, dealing significant magic damage with Meteorite and also countering magic with that, I nearly wipe when I do Freehand x4 and learn this. But I don't!
BOSS Gladys and Helio: Gladys is the main damage-dealer so antiphysical bard strats come out to play. Helio then uses some big magic damage, so sure, he gets to die first. Gladys makes things a bit interesting by adopting her counterstance which counters me for every attack I make on Helio but that's still physical and thus reduced by bard nonsense. Neither of them have great HP. Routine win.
Spiritmaster get! Let's talk about it.
Healthbringer, first of all, is a neat healing move. Sure it only does ~450 MT (though it focuses if allies are dead) but even that is often better than a Hi-Potion, for a low MP cost, and here's the thing: it resolves three times. So it's great healing action economy. AND while it's active, the user is immune to control-denying status and can't be killed if their HP is above 20%. This is great, I even use it in randoms if I anticipate my victory is at least a round away. Besides that, another neat move is Devotion, which costs 1 BP to restore MP equal to 20% of the user's to any target (self included), which is a bit weaker than an ether but hey it's free, literally so at the end of a random. This frees me up to use Neo Cross Slash more. They also have respectable enough magic damage of one element (light).
At this point I go to the Hall of High Holies but I wipe to a random there so I figure the game is telling me I should do other things first. I head over to Enderno and figure I could get the Salve-Maker asterisk now but hey there's another quest sure I'll do that first and it sends me to this other dungeon and-
Frosty Forest (1 reset): Okay clearly I did something wrong with sequencing because this dungeon enemies are extremely strong for this point. My solution is to mostly not fight them, and use Neo Cross Slash when I do. Special mention to Arachnes whose brave combos include hugely damaging MT physicals (the cause of my reset), and a fight against six skeleton assassins hiding in a treasure box who have something like 40000 HP between them, ick. Phoenix Downs have a reasonable chance of instant death (40%? idk) so I resort to using those and praying, fortunately the last one dies as I send my final PC into negative BP. Anyway I finish the quest here. Should I have done this at all now? No. But I make bad choices sometimes.
Crystalcap Mountain: A bit of a breather, but still not trivial. Plagues are annoying because they attack MP (they also sometimes use Doom) and also counter magic with that, but that's more annoying than dangerous. Triffids are plants so y'know sometimes counter with some annoying status but not too often, they're also weak to axes. Algaions hit so hard as to one-shot my frailer PCs but they die quickly themselves.
BOSS Glenn (1 reset): I delayed doing this fight a bit because he uses a 1500 MT attack item which isn't reduced by bardstrats. Or at least I assumed it wouldn't be reduced, I realize I didn't test. That said he has bad HP by this point, so I use a bard special to buff and then one-round him with Neo Cross Slash x4.
... oh yeah, and he counters physical attacks sometimes with Philtre, which inflicts Charm. So my one reset involves my Vanguard getting countered after her first attack then brutally overkilling her three party-members and dropping to negative BP. Oops. Yeah we refight him with her blocking charm.
Hall of High Holies (1 reset): As mentioned, I have one reset when I come here the first time, but now that I have a levelled-up Spiritmaster and am using Neo Cross Slash ever more, it's not too bad. Most of the enemies are humans; the swordswomen counter for a big drain + MP drain which does lots of damage, so that merits big damage of my own to avoid the counter. Lancemen are bulky and make themselves bulkier, while mace- and wand-users have big magic damage, the time I lose involves a MT Banishra/ga spell (I forget which) laying waste to my party. There are also Gaganas, who have wind-animation attacks which are not, in fact, wind, and are evasive, but not very damaging, and Abadons, who fairly reliably use MT dark damage. Nothing too bad.
BOSS Domenic: Only thing about Domenic has that puts a wrench in my plans is Stop as a counter to physicals. Nothing I have seems to get rid of Stop (Purify and Basunabringer both miss it). If my Vanguard had blocked that this fight would be a joke. He also counters magic with Slow (annoying, but not as bad) and Artistry (WHY) with Triplera which is his main damage option. Still, he has no wait to overpower anti-magic bardstrats that I saw, so the usual buffing followed by smashing works. Of note, Banishga actually kinda does okay damage, certainly less than Neo Cross Slash but not laughably less like everything else I have.
To end the chapter there's a chain of three fights, each against 2-4 Holograd soldiers who have ~15k HP each (this is far more than most randoms), and being a chain fight, I can't just go into major negatives BP-wise since I'll keep that for the next fight. There are two enemy types, swordswomen who aren't too notable and mages who deal big earth damage (over 2000 with Stonega ST, though often use weaker stuff too) and have magic counters. Neo Cross Slash blitz, with other PCs using attack/accuracy buffs, Healthbringer, and Gift of Courage. Straightforward enough, I'm never really worried about losing.
Chapter 3 is done! At this point I roll for my next job and get Bastion, but more on that in the next update.
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Trails Through Daybreak: well ok falcom i accept your apology for the cold steel games
Seriously though I enjoyed it a great deal, not quite to the same extent as Zero or Azure, but still pretty high up there. A few assorted misses with the overall cast and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about field combat being a thing compared to the previous games but overall it felt smoother to play than the Cold Steel games and it's nice that it's not just a repeat of the Rean Show feat. Rean.
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Xenoblade 2- So, because I bought Torna as part of the expansion pass, I got a ton of goodies in XB2 that made it super duper easy. So I kiiiiinda beat the main game in a bit less than 40 hours.
On the one hand this does mean I beat the danged game and don't *really* understand half the systems in it, but on the other hand the game only mildly improved on the deadliness of enemy mobs so I think I was certainly less frustrated. I will say though that the handful of quests and such I did end up doing were definitely a move in the right direction relative to my complaints about XB1.
So honestly, on the whole, I think Xenoblade 2 is a better game than 1, even if I understand that it tends to undercut itself a times. But honestly setting aside anything else, Xenoblade 2 just has a much better villain cast. Like yeah Egil is fine as a foil to Shulk but as a character? Eh. And sure “Deus with dialog” is interesting to me as a Xenogears veteran but again, not an amazing villain. Meanwhile there’s real pathos to Jin and Malos and I get why Rex wants to redeem them much more. Like, Shulk developing an aversion to killing makes sense as a reaction to events through the game , it’s a good part of his character, but Rex clearly understands his enemies as people and relates to them as such.
More substantively… both of these games are honestly smaller in story scope than Xenogears, but where XB1 is trying to execute some of its ideas without really embellishing them (or I guess, not doing ENOUGH to embellish them), XB2 is more an outwardly Very 2010s RPG that then eases the player into the more philosphical side of Takahashi's writing, and where it borrows directly from Xenogears it takes those ideas in a different direction. Like, the fact that Pyra and Mythra are basically a variation on Fei (with a plot role slightly closer to Elly) is well documented, but the fact the two games were released nearly 20 years apart is very present, one feels like someone taking the clinical understanding of DID in the late 90s and building a story around them, while the other feels like a depiction of a plural person derived from knowing some plural people, so this very similar idea feels a lot fresher and influences the story in interesting and new ways.
But yeah the game's flaws are really really well documented and honestly playing the Definitive Edition of XB1 spoiled me somewhat becuase between those two games they got better at quest markers and properly pathing out your minimaps, but still I overall enjoyed this one more. It just had more under the hood whereas XB1 just felt like a thinner game than other Xeno stuff.
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XB2 Torna The Golden Country- Wahoo.
For the most part this is the best parts of XB2 concentrated into a smaller space. Along the way they also did a good deal to smooth over some of the most frustrating parts of XB2 proper, although that might also have been in part a function of being a DLC campaign. In particular the areas here are smaller and use vertical space a LOT less, but that could also just be so they could design it faster? I dunno.
I do think the ending feels a little at odds with itself. The trouble they have is they couldn't really TOP the showdown with Malos, and that was the only logical place to put the culling of the party that happens. And within the context of XB2's battle system I'm not sure how you do a good Price of Freedom sequence. But simultaneously the ending sequence is doing a lot to show in montage a finalization of the state of play that leads into XB2 proper and not having a real 'chapter' about Amalthus' campaign and Lora's last stand does kinda diminish what this game was doing with its unique plot. It hits the most important bits and does a good job of showing Torna as a real place (albeit I think they might have forgotten some stuff) but I'm surprised how much of Jin's transition between who he was in Torna and who he became in XB2 is left to inference.
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Chapter 4 opens with a split-path, and I've already rolled Bastion, so I head to get that in Halcyonia.
There are only three fights before the boss here, and they're similar to the ones at the end of Chapter 3: squads of Holograd soldiers with ~15k HP. The sword and magic users return, joined by lance- and club-users. They play similarly enough to the fights in Chapter 3, mages die first but otherwise straightforward enough.
BOSS Lonsdale: Lonsdale is a rude welcome to chapter 4, where bosses get serious about their counters. Lonsdale can counter anything except items, pretty much. Specifically:
-He counters physical and buffs with Corporal Punishment, a physical attack powerful enough to one-shot my lower-HP characters, sadly including my Bard who I forget to put an HP booster on.
-He counters magic attacks with Vallation which nullifies the next magic attack.
-He counters debuffs with Wall which raises his defences. It's tempting to dispel this but dispels get rid of debuffs as well, clever boy.
-He counters Default with BP+1.
Healthbringer and Items both don't earn counters, and he's all ST (though fast) so I can't really lose but the fight does take a long time. I can't buffcheese to stop his damage without dying myself, and I can't just blitz him since his physical counter 2HKOs. So mostly this ends up a slow fight of single Neo Cross Slashes, healing actions, etc.
Bastion is my reward, a new job, yay! I throw one PC into it. At this point I decide to go play some boring card games and then beat up Shirley, since I'll need to do it at some point and it gives a decent amount of JP for my new job, immediately getting me to JL 4 for Bastion so I have Rampart.
I do this in part because while Lonsdale had three fights before him, that's three more than the next boss.
BOSS Marla: Like Lonsdale, Marla counters almost everything that isn't Item (or Healthbringer, in my case). However, she's even faster and can chain together Recurring Nightmare (physical attack which gives the user a free turn on a KO, she'll use it often if she sees someone near death) so the threat of party wipe is certainly higher. She also has super high evasion so it's a good thing her buff counter isn't quite as scary (also this time I make sure my buffer can take hits). Anyway, her counters:
-Physical attacks, buffs, and debuffs with Shadowstepper, which is a decently strong physical.
-Magic attacks with BP+1
-Default with Become the Lightning, which raises her Atk (and MAtk, not that she uses that for anything afaik) by 25%.
Her speed is crazy and she's almost always in the "about to get a turn" state.
Rampart, fortunately, comes to my rescue in this fight in a big way. I'm able to chain it into other buffs and hopefully my buffer doesn't die. The "other buffs" I use are typically to accuracy just so I can hit. I also use Holy from my ex-Spiritmaster and that hits a weakness but it still doesn't do that much. In addition to Rampart, two of my characters now have Spiritmaster's Spirited Defence (one Spiritmaster and one former Spiritmaster using Sub-Job Specialty 1), which lets them survive otherwise fatal attacks at 1 HP, preventing Recurring Nightmare and just generally keeping them alive. I keep Healthbringer up at all times, often recasting it once it's ticked twice.
This is another pretty slow fight (thanks to the evasion) and a bit of a dangerous one but I do prevail first try.
Wrecked Institute: Not too much to say here. At this point my strategy in randoms largely involves the Vanguard doing most of the killing and the other PCs running interference with MP/BP/turn donation. I still use sleep but I use it less and less. Buffs sometimes if I need an accuracy push. Nothing too challenging here.
BOSS Vigintio: He's kind of a joke. I have a bunch of elemental resistance via shields, armour, and Wind Talismans, but nothing I've set particularly. Like the other two Holograd generals he counters physicals, magic, buffs, and debuffs, but most of them get countered by him gaining BP so he can't stop he from setting up anti-magic nonsense. His own turns involve a weirdly high amount of Electon (full-screen lightning/light) which he's weak to so he ends up damage himself more than me. He counters physicals with Comet which only tickles after Bardstrats are set up. Easy.
Holograd Army HQ / Flying Fortress: See previous dungeon, not too much to say. Fights are fun but not particularly challenging any more.
BOSS Adam: Adam counters buffs with Ruby Blades, which damages himself a bunch. So I set up Rampart and anti-physical bard nonsense, forgetting that I dispel myself now that I have a mastered Spiritmaster. Oops. Let the Spiritmaster reach 2 BP then do it again. On his own turns he uses various different elemental blades which strike multiple times in recurring fashion. Between Rampart, elemental defence (Icefire Shield, etc.) and buffs he's not great at killing me and does thousands of damage to himself. Later in the fight his own turns favour Minus Strike more, which certainly kills, but again runs into Rampart, so I keep using that. I don't even start attacking him until he's lowered himself to ~40k out of his starting ~120k, haha. Then I do and it turns out he's weak to axes, well then.
Chapter 4 done!
Current team:
Seth: Bastion with Vanguard secondary (with Sub-Job BP Saver for free BP donation)
Gloria: Vanguard with Bard secondary (my might knows no bounds)
Elvis: Pictomancer with Bard secondary (Sub-Job Specialty 1 means he extends buff duration by 2 turns due to Bard's specialty 1 stacking with Pictomancer specialty 2)
Adelle: Spiritmaster with Vanguard secondary (SJBPS for free BP donation, again)
Working well!
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Rhapsody 3: after poking the 6th story for a bit, I decided to take the game at its word and treat said scenario as a proper after game. By which I mean I have declined to play more if it.
I was liking the game well enough through the first three stories but the fourth is such a pure dungeon crawl with nothing much going for it, a prequel to a silly but not THAT interesting chapter plot in the second game. Worth plowing through to get to Cherie’s chapter, but I also completely stalled on it twice and played a whole fucking Xenoblade both times.
This gets at the larger problem though: Rhapsody was never ANY good at dungeon design, but the first game was piss easy and the second, while mean at times, has a decent means of buffing up your party to eventually win just about anything, so with a little grit you can just force your way through. This game you spend so much time in dungeons, and enemies are actually fairly lethal, and the inane party system gives you tons of party slots but doesn’t let you control most of them so it’s just a constant slog. Shit, in most of the chapters you don’t even level up fast, then by the time you DO the game says “lol enemies just level scale to you”. Thanks game. Thanks.
In conclusion your honor, it’s good that after this N1 gave up on dungeon design forevermore and just made srpgs. Best decision they ever made. Real shame they gave up on musicals in exchange.
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hitting you with walls of text. they're almost done I promise
until my next challenge run
BD2 Chapter 5: Starts with a whole bunch of sidequests. I think by this point in my first playthrough I was done with the game and skipped a lot of them, but this time I try to do most. Few are actually worth the time, though getting more money is always good since I can buy elixirs now!
One sidequest of note: the one about Roddy working too hard, in Wiswald. For some reason this quest has you spend 37k gold to complete it. It's not even clear why! You see some people helping out in town and Seth is just that inspired to give them money. There is no reward for giving up such a massive amount of gold beyond a single (storebought, inexpensive) accessory, not even a cutscene about how Wiswald is doing so much better now thanks to your investment or something. I am confused.
Dungeons at this point aren't too notable, buff accuracy is needed, smite with Vanguard, transfer turns/BP as needed if enemies remain, or sometimes finish with holy magic. Some enemies do pretty big damage if given a chance, particularly with dark magic (so reducing this is good). Let's talk about bosses. There are five of them in the Crystals' Resting Place, the big dungeon of this chapter.
BOSS Asura: He has huge evade, and deals lots of multihit physicals (the multhit property means Rampart isn't too useful). Spiritmaster hovers at 2-3 BP in this fight to turn off autobuffs. Set up anti-physical Bard nonsense and Healthbringer. My Bard gets transferred lots of BP to keep both the defence and accuracy buffs up. Asura counters physical attacks but not buffs, so isn't too big a problem since I came prepared.
BOSS Catoblepas (1 reset): My first reset since Chapter 3, and first reset on a story boss since Chapter 1! This guy is a jerk. He doesn't counter buffs either, mercifully (though he does rarely counter any damage with a physical), nor does he have multihits. He just has huge speed and huge damage. I shouldn't have lost, but I got a little greedy letting my defensive buffs lapse when he's at ~3% HP left and guess what he decides to do a brave chain which involves multiple uses of an attack which does 2500 MT damage, I'm so dead. Aside from that, though, bard nonsense + Rampart + accuracy buffs let me do my thing again, same as against Asura.
BOSS Genbu: Counters buffs by hitting hard, but Rampart gives me time to set them up, which is great. That said, this guy is, while not super hard, a big pain, because he reflects a third of all physical damage he takes back at your face. A single reflected Neo Cross Slash comes close to killing my Vanguard, especially if a crit is involved (eventually I hit on the brainwave of giving her a Giant's Shield to get her more max HP, making it less likely). So I learn the hard way that I can't really use that in brave chains, and this fight takes forever. ("Just use magic!" you say? Yeah Holy does about 1500 to him, compared to Neo Cross Slash's ~10k, no thanks. Also he uses Reflect a lot.) That said he's not as fast or offensively adept as the previous two bosses, especially once he gets below half HP and starts wasting turns using Reflect on me (which stops nothing I do), so I'm not too worried. The fight takes over half an hour. x_x
BOSS Immortal: And finally an easy one. No evade, no super speed, no physical reflection. He's another boss who is all physical so I shut down with usual anti-bard nonsense, but honestly he seems kinda weak anyway, and wastes turns on spittle attacks which can inflict contagion (mildly annoying MP poison, Spiritbringer more than makes up for it) and poison (which my party immunes because everyone is still using the lightest statusblocking hat in the game). Also he's weak to axes. The first boss I manage to see 20k Neo Cross Slash against.
BOSS Edna (1 reset): Edna is quite tricky so probably deserves a greater breakdown of what she does. At full HP she mostly does three things.
Physical attacks: ~2500 to one
Vortices: Some large number (8?) hits of wind magic to random targets. If not facing any resistance they probably do like 800 or so, but wind is an easy element to resist.
Soaring Flourish: Dispels and inflicts slow on one foe, inflicts haste on self. Slow is a very frustrating status in this game, it can neither be status-healed nor dispelled (at least with anything I have). Outside brave-chains I only see this against buffed targets.
Default: obvious
If she reaches 3 BP, she will use a combo of Soaring Flourish (may target anyone) -> Attack -> Vortices -> Silent Storm
Silent Storm: ~2500 physical to everyone, inflicts silence. It looks like wind but it's not. Hate this.
Once she falls below a certain HP threshold (it's higher than 50%, maybe when below 100k of her 180k HP) she gains some new stuff:
Apoplexy: Inflicts Wind Resistance Down on everyone. And other Element Resistances Down but for my team, this doesn't matter. Not 100%, sometimes someone gets lucky and isn't hit by some of the statuses. I *think* this dispels but now that I think about it I'm not 100% sure, I might be just remembering that Airy and Anne's similar moves did, and there were a lot of other sources of dispel flying around by this point. One way it is definitely weaker than the moves it's obviously inspired by is it doesn't make you WEAK to elements, just reduces resistance. If someone nulled wind before, they still half it after being hit by this.
Ultraflare: MT damage. A bit weaker than Silent Storm I think? I think it's non-elemental magic but I'm not sure.
At this point her big brave chain changes to Soaring Flourish -> Vortices -> Silent Storm -> Ultraflare. If she uses this when I have no damage mitigation in place it's gonna wipe most of my team, probably only anyone defaulting will live.
-Counters physical attacks by gaining BP (50% or so).
-I know she countered magic too but I forget with what, Holy was doing less than 2000 so I didn't bother.
-Once below ~60% HP, counters buffs with Soaring Flourish. Fortunately the dispel is ST, so I can still buff allies.
-Once below ~60% HP, will rarely counter healing actions (Items, but not Healthbringer) with Apoplexy.
Anyway Edna is a pain. She's super fast (~50 more speed than the previous fastest bosses who I already noted as speedsters) even before she uses Haste. I lose once because I come in not blocking wind and she just does too much damage of mixed damage types and I have no way to shut her down enough to keep up. So I come back with wind nulling on literally everyone: Typhoon Shield on my Vanguard, two Wind Talismans (or similar) on everyone else.
I have a choice: I can stay at 2-3 BP and stack anti-physical buffs (at 1 BP or below, I'll dispel my own) and accuracy buffs. However, she still dispels me a lot, is able to do magic damage, etc., so my protections aren't perfect and need to be reapplied way too much. I also need to waste lots of turns healing my bard and spiritmaster of silence. I decide this is not worth it.
I instead decide to keep my Spiritmaster at 1 BP or less, so the four spirit moves (Health, MP, Dispel to clear Apoplexy, and status healing to clean silence). This limits my buffing potential, but these spriits just save me so many actions otherwise. This does mean I need to stay very on top of what she can do, especially those brave chains. I use over 20 X-Potions to keep up with healing (in addition to the constant Healthbringer, and many Phoenix Downs), far more than any previous fight. For offence, I need to use accuracy buffing three times to reach 100% hit against her (she's very evasive), though two gets close. Of course, either she or my own spirits will dispel me shortly after, so I only do this right before my Vaugard is about to get a turn, either naturally or by having my sing-user use Shut Up and Dance. After unleashing a brave chain on her, Edna will almost surely have enough BP to brave-chain me right back, so it's only something I should do if my party is in good shape. Rampart can help with Silent Storm, but I have to watch the timing so my own dispel doesn't mess me up (and even then, it's not nearly as effective as against some previous bosses because of Soaring Flourish being used as a buff counter and in the brave-chain.
I spent a lot of nervous actions with Edna at around ~45k HP, just outside my kill range and facing the full wrath of her limit mode, but eventually I safely squeak in a couple attacks to lower her to 25k and then I just need to find an opportunity to set up one more brave-chain and I win.
Chapter 5 complete~
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Unicorn Overlord
Finished. Then finished again after I did the bonus mission. I think the strengths & weaknesses of UO are pretty well known... it was good, but could have been a little better. That said, it is genuinely way more playable than original Ogre Battle, and I do hope they take the bones of the engine they made and do some sort of fast-follow DLC or the like.
One of the reasons I slowed down some was that the game had gotten a bit curb-stompy. Bizarrely enough, despite this, the Bastorias arc ended up maybe being the most challenging one in the game? I remember seeing in Discord some "lol beasts" commentary, but... well the first mission was challenging but for dumb reasons, albeit still fairly easily cheesed with Hastened Call / boss rush strats (which I avoided almost every other map). But the last two missions were no jokes, either. At night, werewolf units traveled at infinity speed and could instantly shred lonely wounded units that weren't up to snuff, leading to one of the very rare "um I'm gonna reload a save rather than accept a squad !death + Valor loss" moments. Normally huffing an Empowering and/or Defensive Draught is enough to get past any surprisingly badass enemies, but Over on the PC side, my mostly-Beast unit put in work, and other beasts were solid role-players elsewhere - I was pretty happy with 'em. (Well not Ramona of course, she never got used, but the other beasts.)
Gameplay-wise, everything after kinda crumbled, as you start getting the busted power-artifacts like the ones that give more than +1 AP or PP (which I tried to nicely split between squads to not power-focus TOO much). Well, the final-ish boss was actually pretty tricky - I guess some emergency party-shuffling to include more multi-hit attacks would suffice worst comes to worst.
Plot-wise, hmm. First off let me say that I genuinely liked the addition of the fairly extensive epilogue scenes for all the character groups. A problem the game has is characters generally stopping getting any plot scenes outside their own arcs, and letting all the recruits get another detailed scene + post-coronation dialogue is cool. As for the arcs themselves... I think it's interesting to separate them by quality of villains and quality of supporting cast.
* Cornia: Okay PCs, meh villains.
* Drakenhold: Good PCs, meh villains.
* Elheim: Okay PCs, bad villains.
* Bastorias: Bad PCs, good villains.
* Albion: Bad PCs, bad villains.
Not a strong way to end as can be seen! To go into some more detail.. usual warning that spoilers ahoy below.
* Cornia's cast is generic but likeable with all the FE1 callbacks. Villains are all mind-controlled but get hit with anti-mind control juice. The early showdown with Galerius is cool but makes 0 sense in light of the plot twist toward the end of Unicorn Overlord (shouldn't the big plot twist there have been outed early..? Actually just go ahead and out that one early and don't give it a happy ending, we already knew that the game had starkly refused to show Ilenia's fate, just have Alain go ice mom unknowingly early to drive the dagger in.). After the main Act 1 set, the plotline with Tatiana was fairly good, an example of as solid vignette style mini-story. Melisandre is JP fanservice but actually has some surprisingly good supports after I ground them up much later.
* Drakenhold has by far the best cast. I felt like I got to know Aramis, Gilbert, Virginia, Leah, and co. pretty well, they all made sense, they combined being interesting with not being dumb. Even the side characters were good - Primm, Hilda, Amalia, etc. were all memorable and cool. The desert gang was fine I guess. (Berengaria is hard to judge as ridiculous fanservice, but I guess she succeeds in being that, so there's something there.) Villains are all mind-controlled again though.
* Elheim: I can't say that Rosalinde & Eltolinde were the deepest characters ever, but they were fun enough, and their various servants & allies had their moments too. The fact that the regular elves & dark elves apparently get along perfectly well in this universe was interesting. Ridiel was a simple and well-trod plotline but the game made it work and it's a plot line that SHOULD be done (for all the forgiveness for criminals, this kind of "beaten down by society and lost their idealism and sells people out" is certainly resonant and a more interesting target for recruitment). Galadramir was awful but that's just one ignorable character, maybe my least favorite character in the game. Meanwhile the villain-side was mega-terrible this time. Some of the characters are mind-controlled, but others.. I have no idea WTF they were trying to do with Gailey. He apparently wasn't mind-controlled, but we barely are given a motive for his heel turn, and to the extent we are it makes zero sense. Letting Baltro suddenly become a mass necromancer, a power he never really displays again, was definitely a kludge for "we have no idea how to justify fighting more elven units." Not a big deal, but gonna assume this was a one-time thing since it never comes up anywhere else and seems like a real handy power for Baltro to have. Alcina makes zero sense and sucks.
* Bastorias: The villainy in this arc is unironically the best ones? There are two big bads are not mind-controlled and both have valid evil schemes. Mind control is still used, but for the mooks rather than the showcase villains, and it seems to have limitations. There's even a plot point about how bestrals aren't great targets for the Rite of Control. And while the game loves to show bad guys backstabbing each other for Reasons, this arc was by-far the best-explained one I bought the most. Reimann is a huge psychopath who the game doesn't try to nonsensically explain away his villainy (a la Alcina) and is both threatening and also very betrayable. Eigor is a valid chip-on-his-shoulder threat. Okay, the scene where the Bastorias Blue gets stolen isn't sold well, but oh well, cutscenes not making clear the geometry of a scene isn't a new complaint for me for villains from nowhere stealing the MacGuffin. Okay, despite all that praise, Yunifi is pretty boring as a character. She's a generic do-gooder whom everyone loves and trusts on sight (I guess MILDLY explained by her pendant, but honestly the narrative seems to be leaning into divine right of blood arguments). Morad doesn't really get to do anything cool, and Ramona is just a backstory dump. I also don't really like the way they handled the final PC plot twist - it should have been "Yunifi and Morad were 100% lying about their amnesia the whole time" a la FFX Tidus. (Also, shouldn't Yunifi have been an elf, given later revelations...? Maybe she is, I suppose, we don't really see her ears.)
* Albion: The plot here really doesn't add up, neither logically nor thematically. It's very odd because Scarlett was clearly one of the core characters designed and the most designated, canon-y pair with Alain.. but.. she really doesn't get to do much here.
Let me switch to the villain side. Much as mind control is a bit of a safe-for-kids excuse for people to be fighting you, it does make a certain degree of sense in-setting. Why is Zenoira strong? Because they possessed a bunch of people, especially people in charge of military units. Sure, fair enough. And yet, there are 0 mind controlled enemies in Albion. Fine, that means we need some local villains, but almost all of the opposition is portrayed as pressured into it by Zenoira. But.. where are the Zenoirans, then?! The only one who shows up is Baltro. This is a game that marks the affiliation of the units you're fighting, and Alain even confirms it: it's very clearly the Church you're fighting against. (Okay, and a random Paladin from Cornia in Bradley, who isn't mind-controlled either but has decided to become evil because reasons.) That's fine! Zenoira won and installed their own cronies, perhaps. But, alas, no. Based on the reactions Alain and Scarlett have later, it seems that it's still the Church people in power who are loyal to the old Pope etc., and this was all some huge misunderstanding/ mix-up where everyone else trusted Sanatio, and the word of the Pontifex was just unquestionable law. And Sanatio's plot doesn't make tons of sense, but the general mood is that he's been tricked by Baltro, although I don't really understand how. He does make clear later that if he'd known Scarlett lived, things could have been different. None of this makes tons of sense - if Albion was intimidated, there needed to be a Zenoiran army here. If Sanatio was tricked, then he needed to perceive corpse-Pope as alive and talking, not know he's dead but consider this such a terrible secret that would ruin everything that he needs to (???) work with Baltro. Like seriously, did you read Lord of the Rings? Just means Gondor needs a Steward!
Okay back to Albion PCs. I can forgive a logically messy plot that works thematically. But it kinda doesn't here. The leaders you meet elsewhere are deeply committed to the liberation of their homelands and the defeat of Zenoira. Scarlett does not get any scenes on that topic. What she does get are scenes of her family's servants when she was a kid being extremely obsequious and deferential to her, despite the fact that she must have been, what, like 7 or 8 years old at most when she left? Perhaps 9 or 10 at the margin? You might recall such a child with affection, sure, but you are unlikely to be "best friends" unless you were a fellow kid, which I don't get the impression was the case. Okay whatever, minor plot hole, let's move on. The game cooks up a plot element where the Pontifex is hereditary in this world. I'd like to point out that this is fairly rare with real-life religions, but it does happen sometimes, so sure. And the narrative remembers this for Sanatio, making finding the new Pontifex one of his goals (since I guess if he had Scarlett, then he wouldn't need to keep a cover-up with Arrant, which is somehow linked to also complying with Zenoira?). But it bizarrely doesn't for Scarlett. If she's supposed to be the ruler of Albion by blood right, nobody on our team freaking talks about it! You can't just introduce a plot point like this and then forget about it. Josef or Travis or someone else pragmatic should have been saying "hey we need you to go lead our force to show we're the rightful rulers and they're the heretics", and Scarlett needed to reply and give her own thoughts on the matter. If she wants to rise to the challenge of being a leader like Gilbert, great! If she wants to refuse, great! Maybe she thinks the Orthodoxy can get by just fine without a weird bloodline descent thing (although, factually in setting, I guess her bloodline DOES have special shrine unsealing powers for reasons), maybe she wants a quiet life for herself, who knows. The point is, this is a huge weapon that the Liberation has been given - the rightful heir is part of their team! - and it needed to be discussed! Just what are Scarlett's feelings here? Given that what we ARE given involves Raenys / Umerus being incredibly loyal and nice to Scarlett, it sure seems like she would have an easy time if she stepped up and said the Pope's daughter was here!
And yet we're still not done. Okay, fine, Scarlett didn't want to do that. But making it so Sanatio was mislead means that it's in some sense Scarlett's "fault" for not just un-misleading him. But the game doesn't own that plot point, either, which would have involved a trade-off for Scarlett's non-existent non-decision. Ugh. It's annoying to me because I find that "justifying" why the mooks in the army are fighting is just good world-building. I admire how Claude dresses up his clause in Byleth's banner as a matter of restoration in FE3H Verdant Wind, say. They didn't have to make this plot point - they could have said that kids of the holy line are no big deal and Scarlett wouldn't necessarily have an easy time convincing others to join. They could have made Sanatio just a power-grasping jerk who didn't actually want to find his "replacement". But you combine both, and you end up with them trying to make both sympathetic, yet by all rights one of them really shouldn't be.
Okay that was way too much on Albion plot.
* Final cleanup: Despite not having, um, names, the Great Sages are actually some of the best plot & characters the game has? I actually really respect them explaining the backstory behind what really happened in the plot, as well as the game caring enough about its setting to at least include this. I also appreciate that there's a solid excuse for what they are and why they exist, and aren't just mysterious benevolent helpers for no reason. Dunno why they locked these behind the Ring of the Maiden quest though - the game sorta wants you to wait a bit on that, which means these revelations all come extremely late (and don't reward the player for finding the sanctuaries "early"). I was amused that Amalia's backstory involves the super-hidden town in Drakenhold, amusing they worked that in.
This one I'll absolutely forgive as no big deal and "hey look, it's a final showdown, it needs to be epic and involve all the mechanics you learned", but the game does indicate that Baltro can't just mass possess EVERYBODY, hence restricting the Rite of Control to movers & shakers & badasses. Yet, if so, where are these armies coming from? (Especially the Bestral armies!) These clearly aren't just normal paid mooks anymore, once they get insane orders like "kill everyone." (Which I'm not sure actually happens despite the cutscene? If it had, the postgame coronation should have been way more dour.)
In nitpicks, the game is occasionally good at letting Alain do something clever. I'd rather if he'd have denounced Baltro's hypocrisy unprompted and realized he obviously wasn't acting in the best interests of the stranded Zenoiran souls. Instead Baltro just kinda busts out with that himself. It shouldn't have been that hard to figure out after he just betrayed Galerius!
There's also a bit of protagonist-centered morality in the ending. I was kinda hoping to learn more about Valmore, but he's not even an afterthought, just an excuse for a happy ending for a character personally closer to Alain. The fact that Valmore's family won't get a cleaned, sane Valmore back is just not discussed. Oh well.
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Unicorn OverlordBizarrely enough, despite this, the Bastorias arc ended up maybe being the most challenging one in the game? I remember seeing in Discord some "lol beasts" commentary, but... well the first mission was challenging but for dumb reasons, albeit still fairly easily cheesed with Hastened Call / boss rush strats (which I avoided almost every other map). But the last two missions were no jokes, either. At night, werewolf units traveled at infinity speed and could instantly shred lonely wounded units that weren't up to snuff, leading to one of the very rare "um I'm gonna reload a save rather than accept a squad !death + Valor loss" moments.
The AI is top-notch in Bastorias. They'll actually do feints like "hey attack my exposed unit" and then when you move after them there's suddenly a fox in your base.
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Final Bravely Default 2 update, after which you may now return to your regularly scheduled posts which are not walls of text, I promise.
Chapter 6-7: Once again, new quests. The most notable ones take me to a new optional dungeon, and one actually worth talking about:
Magma Mountain: The most notable enemy here is the Sizzlemoth, which has a MT physical which inflicts charm. Worse, it can use this as a counter to buffs and debuffs! Thanks, I hate it. There's also lots of big fire damage here, unshockingly. Equipping for fire defence and charm protection is a must, but I have very little of the latter, so I settle for just putting it on my Vanguard (Spiritmaster immunes it innately, fortunately). It suffices.
BOSS D-Vergr (3 resets): He starts with four minions out. The minions have around 9000 HP, which can be killed by one Neo Cross Slash (once I switch from an axe to a sword, at least) but loads of evade, needing at least three accuracy buffs to hit reliably. The main boss has the following skillset:
Terminus Est: summons a minion
Attack: The usual, 2k damage or so
Shadow Nova: MT dark magic, does over 2k if not resisted.
The End: Also MT dark. I see it only rarely, I dunno how it differs from Shadow Nova.
Bafflepuff: Confuse. Also used as a counter to buffs and rarely to physical damage.
Cackle: Only used as a counter to magic, MT debuff to Magic and MDef.
Seek and Destroy: Sacrifices a minion to hit one person for 5-digit damage. Yes, the devs gave the boss the Surpassing Power skill just for this.
His brave-chains are mixes of physicals and Shadow Nova.
The minions, on their own turns, can use Entice (inflicts charm) or a physical attack called Irritant. More on that later.
As mentioned, on my first attempt I only have two PCs immune to charm, and that's obviously bad. I need to buff to control the minions, who otherwise will charm me to death sooner or later, and buffing gets me countered by confuse. This is not tenable. One reset.
I come back with confuse immunity on Elvis, and shuffling out fire resistance for dark in a couple other places. Things go better this time, since I can now safely buff accuracy, but the minions keep returning and sooner or later they charm a key person at a bad time. They seem to get loads of turns sometimes for some reason. Regardless, that's two resets.
I head out and buy Mortarboards (confuse + charm immunity, 4 weight hat from Wiswald, it kinda rules tbh) for everyone except my Spiritmaster, so I'm finally free from status nonsense. I come back, look all those G-oetias in the eye and say "I don't care about you". I ignore them, setting up a damage blitz on the boss himself, whose HP isn't too high, and...
... and I lose more decisively than my previous attempts. And I realize why, too late: Irritant, the physical used by the minions, has a significant turn delay attached. With a full field of them, I get fewer turns than I should. Once I drop to two PCs, though, I'm just plain dead, they slowly lock me to death until the boss puts my Bastion out of my misery with Seek and Destroy. Wow, okay.
So the strategy is as follows: buff accuracy, use Vallation to protect from Shadow Nova on vulnerable PCs, and mercilessly kill the minions. Healthbringer can assist with keeping me alive (and repairing Vallation damage), as usual. It works.
Anyway. I also beat another optional boss (Hephaestos) who is notable for having 200k HP, which is quite a bit, but he's pure physical with no real tricks so gets owned by Rampart + my other usual nonsense.
The quests done, I advance the plot.
Fount of Knowledge: The randoms here are pretty badass, actually. I didn't notice on my first playthrough because my randomsmashing was cracked out by then, but yeah, they good. They hover in an HP range where even axe-weaks typically need Neo Cross Slash to kill, so I go through MP fast, and they hit hard. Some details:
Magiponera: They have very hard-hitting ice magic (over 3k) and can do significant damage to MP (2HKO typically), or inflict sleep. Can't stand these guys.
Angra Mainyu: Also do significant MP damage, with Mind Crush. Sometimes waste turns on Doom (5-turn countdown). Very evasive (I equip for accuracy but they still need three accuracy buffs).
Siamese Cait: Dodgy little bastards (also need three accuracy buffs). They also hard with light magic, or can inflict freeze (stop + poison status, can't be cured by any items). May use Curaga to fully heal themselves if low on HP. They absorb holy which is my backup damage. There's a fairy in Mag Mell who hates them enough to give me a quest to kill them; don't worry, I hate 'em too.
Rafflesia: If not killed in one hit they may counter with paralyse. Not too bad otherwise.
Fallen Frond: They hit hard with wind magic, and are moderately evasive. May use Curaga to fully heal themselves if low on HP.
I go through potions and even ethers reasonably fast. One thing that helps a bit is doing in-battle HP/MP healing: Spiritmaster's Devotion works well for the latter, while my Bastion equipping a Blessed Shield and using its Cura itemcast to heal is actually shockingly decent healing, like 1200 MT or 3000 ST? Better than X-Potions; I'd assumed it would be worse.
BOSS Night's Nexus (1 reset): She has three forms, good speed (not as fast as Edna, but comparable to other "fast" bosses, i.e. a bit shy of 2x), and a hint of evasion (one accuracy buff is usually enough, two is safer). Here's the skillset:
Attack: ~1600 or so
Calamity Calls: MT dark damage, ~50% contagion
Inflame: MT damage, ~50% berserk
Ruin: MT damage, always does fixed 200 MP damage
Salvation: MT damage, heals user for around half the total damage dealt
World-Ender: MT damage
Default: throws this in periodically as per usual
If it looks like there are a lot of similar skills there, it's because there are. I'm fairly sure they're all physical (it's possible World-Ender isn't, that one's rare), it's possible some others have elements (Inflame might be fire? I'm not blocking that). Her attacks are remarkably undamaging, they might push to around 1000 against no buffs at, but almost always I see 3 digits. They are all multitarget, though, aside from the basic physical.
Contagion and Berserk are both annoying; Contagion does significant MP damage at the start of my turn, and berserk's turn denial is an obvious problem. Other than the ailments, Ruin is easily my most despised attack: 200 MP damage is a lot (ethers only restore 180) and can leave me dipping into my BP supply in order to use turns restoring it. It's worth noting that Rampart is not as good a solution to these moves as you might expect: it blocks the HP damage, but the other effects go through. Not cool!
She has three forms. When you beat the first, everyone celebrates: you won! Yeah yeah I totally buy the main villain had less HP than all the Chapter 5 bosses, guys, good one. The second form is the same as the first with slightly higher stats. The third form, though, is the problem.
The first thing to note is that while the first and second form are completely different fights, the second and third are technically a chain (even though there's a cutscene in the middle): status and BP carries over between them. So one key is to go into form 3 in good shape; I don't on my first attempt, and that's part of why I lose.
The bigger problem, though, is that form 3 now has three parts: the main body, and two hands. And they ALL have the full skillset as listed above, or most of it (in particular, I confirm that they all have Ruin, two have Calamity Call, two have Salvation, and two have physical attacks... only the body seems to have World-Ender but who cares about that). The Night's Nexus herself is just as fast as ever, and the hands, while a bit slower, are still pretty fast (and actually have slightly higher damage). So that means the boss's offence just went up by a factor of nearly three; if one of them does a brave-chain I can be barraged by an absolutely crazy number of MT attacks. (The main body will store up to 3 BP and do four-part chains, while the hands will store up to 1 and do two-parters.)
Oh yeah, and she counters physicals with a physical of her own (a lot), and counters either buffs by gaining BP (~50%), and counters healing by gaining BP (sometimes. Either she stops doing it in form 3 or I got very lucky).
After losing once I go out and buy some more statusblockers. My vanguard gets a Carbon Cap to prevent contagion; my Spiritmaster and Pictobard get accessories (my Bastion doesn't really use MP). I also equip Peace Rings on my Pictobard and Bastion (my Spiritmaster is already immune, and my Vanguard getting berserked isn't a big enough deal to sacrifice significant amounts of attack/damage over).
From there the strategy is clear enough: Spiritmaster stays at 2-3 BP, do lots of Don't Let Em Get You to reduce the physical pain, Spiritbringer to restore MP (really important to save turns with Ruin flying around), Bastion uses the Blessing Shield to provide healing if needed, occasional Rampart, lots of turn shifting around via Gift of Courage, buff accuracy to Neo Cross Slash reliable (it does around 12k, with a decent crit rate).
Form 3 is more demanding. I use Spiritmaster's special (MT full healing + regen) to help turn the tide but otherwise play carefully. Each hand can be killed in about three uses of Neo Cross Slash. Once I kill the second, I know from past experience that they'll both come back after a few turns, and that's annoying, but fortunately the main body doesn't have too much HP in this form so I'm able to do one more brave-blitz and win.
Night's Nexus uses physicals, Calamity Call, Ruin, World-Ender
Grasping Hand uses Calamity Call, Ruin, Salvation
Cradling Hand uses physicals, Ruin, Salvation
At this point I decide I'm high-levelled enough (48) to try some of the Hall of Tribulation fights. Spiritmaster has by far the biggest upgrade from JL 13+, so my first target is to get that.
BOSS Helio, Domenic, and Martha (2 resets): The opening to this fight is great. The camera pans over the enemy line showing you Helio and Domenic. Huh, wasn't there supposed to be a third boss?
And then Martha drops on someone dealing 9999.
Anyway this fight is nasty, let's talk about it.
All three bosses have a a "Counter Any Ability" which gives them 1 BP. I'd guess it's around 50%. This will counter anything a PC does EXCEPT the default command and item command. Maybe the basic attack command, I never used one. The fact that items are safe is a key detail of all the tribulation fights, and this includes itemcasts.
Helio the Spiritmaster can cast Holy for huge singletarget damage, or set a version of Healthbringer which restores around 3k MT (he basically always does this when it expires), or rarely cast Reraise on someone. When he reaches 3 BP he will do a brave-chain of Holy castings.
Domenic the Oracle uses both Triplera and Triplega which each do 1-3 hits (randomly) of a random mix of fire/ice/lightning. Each hit is significant, probably high 2HKO for the -ga version and low 2HKO for the -ra version. Fortunately he doesn't do this often, outside brave-chains. He uses the majority of his turns casting Reflect, both on his own team and mine. Extremely rarely he will cast Stop, and both times he does it bounces off a reflected PC. Unfortunately he's immune. His brave-chains involve Triplera and Triplega and thus have lots of damage potential.
Martha is The Problem. She counters the Default command by using Super Jump; on her next turn, she lands for around 5000-6000 MT physical damage. Oh and it delays everyone's turn. She will sometimes use Super Jump on her own turns, or Sonic Thrust (weaker MT physical, good for shredding Rampart). She can also use various ST physicals (Bolt Blast is lightning, Mind Crush does lots of MP damage, Angon pierces default). Her brave-chain, mercifully, is all ST physicals.
That's a lot of damage! On my first attempt I die horribly. I come back with Iceflame Shields (fire/ice immunity), Valkyrie Coats (light/lightning resistance), and Light Talismans (stacks with the former to light immunity) on everyone. This leaves Helio unable to damage me, and Domenic *mostly* unable to damage me, though sometimes he rolls a lot of lightning damage and that can cause problems. Martha can still just carve through the team, though. So... bardstrats it is!
General strategy:
-keep Don't Let Em Get To You x4 active at *all* times. Anyone without this is going to explode sooner or later.
-Since buffs are needed, keep Spiritmaster at 2-3 BP. I use Healthbringer to keep up with healing. I would love to use the Blessing Shield but unfortunately the Iceflame Shield is too important.
-Rampart is pretty cool, even though Sonic Thrust sometimes just shreds it.
-Only default if my current HP situation is good. Preferably if Rampart is up.
-Regen is a good buff to get up to help with healing, since there's no dispel to worry about. Either the Spiritmaster special or casting it manually. It's reflectable so I have to watch that (the one time I forget is annoying, thank goodness Pictomancer has dispel because Regen is fixed 10% MHP and you don't want a boss with that).
-Mind Crush is so freaking annoying. I need to use lots and lots of ethers to keep up.
-Mild accuracy buffing is needed the two mages. (Martha needs a lot, she's very evasive.)
I end up Domenic first, just because he's so much easier to kill than Martha (I just don't have the turns for more significant accuracy buffing) and I figure that once he falls, the battle will be mostly won. I'm kinda right but I still almost lose at one point after which is embarrasing. Funnily enough, Helio runs out of MP around the time I finally kill Domenic, but he's a non-entity anyway at that point. Martha dies second once I'm able to scrounge up time to buff accuracy (I can also use the Blessing Shield at this point, which helps).
Anyway both my resets come pretty quickly, so fight #3 involves me figuring out a lot of details of the fight and generally takes forever. I get so few turns for anything besides staying alive, and it's so difficult to make headway for a long time especially since only attacking very rarely gives Helio's healing more time to be effective. I use all my Ethers and X-Potions and Elixirs, and the fight takes about an hour and a half, but I do win. The one last scary point shortly after killing Domenic is terrifying because I would lose about an hour's work there.
Woo! Spiritmaster Level 15 reached. Spiritmaster gains two more spirit effects: Lifebringer (revives) and Bravebringer (+1 BP). Both are automatically summoned at 1 BP or less. This is silly. Let's go try it out.
BOSS Orpheus, Anihal, Bernard, and Shirley: Looking at enemy levels this is probably intended to be the first Hall of Tribulations fight.
Orpheus uses MT magic damage. Nothing too scary, a bit under 2k, but it's non-elemental and hits everyone and that's definitely really bad when added to other things in this fight. If he has buffs I didn't give him time to use them.
Anihal's pets haven't scaled up very well, they mostly do 3-digit MT damage. She can still use Muzzle for MT silence.
Shirley, being the gambler, is random as hell. She can pull out lots of hits (up to 10?) of ST magic damage (high 3HKO or so), but usually whiffs around doing not much.
Bernard is the star of the show in the same way Martha was: he does by far the most damage, has the highest HP/evasion, has a brave-chain of four powerful singletarget physicals, and has counters besides the generic "gain 1 BP". In his case, he can counter Default with Steal Breath (steals a BP) and buffs with Buff Burglar, which does exactly what it says on the tin. One mercy is that if he's not brave-chaining, he won't do much damage, just relatively weak physicals which may steal a little HP/MP/BP. When he brave-chains, though, it's time for four attacks which do around 4000 damage each, potentially OHKOing some team members (though Spiritmaster can never be OHKOed, which is super valuable as it means he'll never wipe my full team). Since he steals BP and gains it on counters he gets these chains pretty often.
UNFORTUNATELY for this fight, cap-broken Spiritmaster is overpowered. Every round I regain HP, MP, get revived, get status-healed (sorry Muzzle), and most importantly gain 1 BP. And Bravebringer can be cast manually on top of this, so make that 2 BP. This breaks the game's action economy and I'm free to essentially get triple my normal compliment of actions. (A little less because manually casting Bravebringer itself costs 2 BP, but this is easily worth it and also helps keep Spiritmaster's BP below 2, which I now like).
With all these extra actions there's plenty of time to use Blessing Shields to heal (my Bastion and Spiritmaster both do this) or transfer BP around. Or use Phoenix Downs, because as Bernard's brave chains above illustrate, people definitely die! (It's not worth waiting for the spirit to revive them, but that's still a nice bonus if it happens.) My pictobard uses accuracy buffs -> Shut Up and Dance so that my Vanguard can reliably hit.
Kill order is Orpheus (he's fragile, but his MT damage scares me) -> Shirley (she's randomly scary) -> Anihal (mostly because she takes some incidentally retargeted Neo Cross Slashes and is thus easy to kill next) -> Bernard.
Level 14 Bard provides Epic Group-Cast, so I can now use the Blessing Shield for 3000 MT Healing, and Spiritmaster's Healthbringer now restores around 1600 MT. Awesome.
BOSS Sir Sloan (1 reset): I decide to go advance the plot now, figuring my new powers make me unstoppable. Well, not quite. Sloan does multiple Microgravities in a brave chain and I die.
So the cool thing about this fight is that Super Spiritmaster isn't the answer. The spirits don't prevent me from all dying at once, and debuffing Sloan is useless - his damage isn't based on his attack stat, but his HP. So one last time, back to Bard strats, since their percent damage reduction does work. This also leaves me free to buff accuracy as much as I want, which is good because Sloan's evasion is crazy. Anyway, with bardstrats and my now shockingly good healing, this is a routine win.
I decide to try out another hall fights. One more in particular, since Vanguard is my next most valuable job to cap-break.
BOSS Selene, Dag, Roddy, Lily (3 resets): This one is quite a bit tougher.
Selena will sometimes cast Protect or Shell which aren't too notable, or will use Full Cure for around 5000 MT healing. Her only brave-chain, which she uses quite often, is Benediction (+30% healing power for 3 turns) -> Full Cure. Depending on how much she has used this recently she can heal for up to 9000. If an ally drops she will use Raise All for 99999 revival on them. This is brutal and one reset is partially due to finding this out. So she's obviously target #1.
Dag can use Enrage (provoke) to make sure he is the one targeted; he is smart and always prioritizes my top damage-dealer (I assume he looks for Atk/MAtk, since if he targets a second person he'll hit my Spiritmaster). He'll also use Shield Bash for around 2000 and turn delay. Initially his brave-chain is a bunch of Shield Bash, which seems to mainly target my spiritmaster and bard but I'm not sure why he focuses on them. Once his HP drops he'll mix in Neo Cross Slash into his brave chains which does over 8000, i.e. just kills most people. Or Quake Blade, which is kinda similar but earth. More on that later.
Roddy has Chainspell, so everything he does is cast twice. He can use Stonera (ST or MT earth damage with a chain of slow/stop) or Aerora (ST or MT wind damage with a chain of sleep/silence) or Healaga (3000 ST healing x2, targets the lowest-HP ally). His brave-chain is to use Healaga twice, Stonera, and Quake, which is a stronger than Stonera but always ST. Once an ally drops he starts using Tornado (stronger ST wind magic) and his brave-chains will involve Disaster (stronger ST wind/earth magic, but is nulled by anyone who nulls either element).
And finally, for the third of these fights in a row, there is an incredibly dangerous physical attacker with way too much evasion. Lily can use Shadowbind (paralysis, no damage), Quickfire Flurry (bunch of hits), Human Slayer (about 3000 ST), and Grand Barrage (5-8 hits of ~300 each). Her brave chain is to use Human Slayer twice, then Quickfire Flurry, then Grand Barrage. Once an ally drops she may use two Grand Barrages. Once she's below half HP she uses Grand Barrage x4. Do the math on that one, it's horrifying. She's the only one of the four who has a counter to something besides "gain 1 BP from anything"; in her case, she can counter physical attacks with Shadowbind.
It takes three resets to figure out everything about the winning strategy here, but here's what I end up doing:
-Earth immunity and at least wind resistance on everyone except my Vanguard. This can be accomplished by Gaia Shield, Academy Outfits, Earth Talismans, and Wind Talismans.
-Reflect Ring on my Vanguard; the Relect Ring has a huge boost to Targeting Chance so also ups her attack a lot. Reflect stops everything Roddy does. As a bonus, he'll sometimes inflict sleep, slow, or stop on himself! I imagine his healing can also be shut down with reflect but I can't actually cast it.
-My bard and spiritmaster use hats which provide cost reduction / MT, while the other two get hats which block paralysis. In the case of my Vanguard this is absolutely crucial, or Shadowbind counters will wreck me.
-Keep Super Spiritmaster up. This provides the BP, healing, extra MP, and status healing (for silence/sleep). Unfortunately the dispel means I can't buff defence which leaves Lily a huge threat.
-Use Pictomancer's Disarming Scarlet to keep Lily at Atk-35%, especially later in the fight this becomes crucial, so that I can actually survive Grand Barrage x4.
-In a change, I put Sing secondary on my Spiritmaster, so I have another source of Shut Up and Dance.
-Spiritmaster and Vanguard can still use the Blessing Shield for MT healing, though it bounces off my reflected Vanguard, so X-Potions can be used to heal her.
-Otherwise it's the usual buff accuracy -> Shut Up and Dance to pull chains of Neo Cross Slash as offence.
-Pictomancer's Purify can remove Provoke, I discover. Hooray!
-Kill order is Selene -> Dag -> Lily -> Roddy. Selene must die first, Dag I end up killing before Lily because he's just much easier to kill (less evasive), and I learn the hard way that Lily being below half health when she has any offensive help is a bad time.
Breaking the cap on Vanguard mostly gives me Ultimatum, which is finally, finally, a MT physical! It costs 1 BP but has a higher base power than even Neo Cross Slash (though doesn't break the damage cap). To give you an idea, Berserker also has a MT physical which costs 1 BP, and this one is 3x stronger. It's fun! Sadly I don't have too much left to use it on.
Neither of my remaining jobs gets much from breaking their job cap, but I make a try at Pictomancer anyway. Unfortunately the Pictomancer / Berserker / Arcanist tribulation fight features Castor hitting me for MT 12000 damage (not a typo) without even needing a full brave-chain, and Folie can use Purify to heal attempts to debuff him (and also has horrible multiturning status hell). I can probably find a way to win this (which will also involve some elemental shutdown of Vigintio whose damage is actually legit now) I figure but it seems like a large step up from even the previous fights and y'know what, nah I'm good.
I tangle with two other kinda superbossy fights, Cyclops and Jormungandr. They're both pretty similar, featuring a swarm of incredibly evasive helpers (as in I need around 5 accuracy buffs to reliably hit) and a very hard-hitting physical primary boss. Strategy: Disarming Scarlet on the boss, Rampart, accuracy-buffed Ultimatum to kill the minions with all my usual Spiritmaster, +BP, BP- and turn-transferring nonsense.
Isle of Nothingness: The final dungeon is still capable of putting up a bit of a fight. Most notable are Amons, who appear in huge groups and have a ST physical which hits for around 4500. That's a lot! It's fire so I do have to adapt my equipment. Accuracy-buffed Ultimatum is the way to go, but does need BP sadly.
BOSS Night's Nexus: The first form is the same as the third form from the Fount of Knowledge, except she has one new move (Exclusion, one turn ST banish). Unfortunately for her I'm way stronger now. I do equip berserk and contagion-blockers again but with those in place, this form poses zero threat, its damage is too poor for what I can do now.
Some plotty nonsense follows, and then the real final boss! Here's what we're dealing with:
A World Forsaken: ~2500 MT
A Life Cut Short: Death, also used as a counter to buffs
Courage Squandered: -1 BP MT. Works even if the target(s) have negative BP. Also used as a counter to items
A Wellspring Depleted: ~500 MT MP damage
Tragic Denouement: Inflicts all debuffs, MT
Counters any damage by gaining BP
The counters all seem to be under 50% except maybe the item one. The item counter definitely throws a wrench in my plans since the tribulation fights had trained me that items are safe! Also after that huge MP damage I do need to use ethers a lot.
That said she just doesn't use enough turns on damage, and Spiritmaster nonsense undoes a lot of what she does. The instant death is annoying for my singing pictomancer, but my singing spiritmaster is immune because Spirited Defence is silly. So while it takes more time than you might expect for me to kill a boss with only 150k HP and modest evasion (two accuracy buffs suffice), I never feel in any remote danger. This kinda cements on my mind that the halls of tribulations are kinda superbossy!
Final quick thoughts on the classes:
Vanguard: 8/10. Debuffs have some use but not much. Really, though, this class is about three things: high attack via the second specialty, shocking MP-efficient damage moves (both Cross Cut and Neo Cross Slash are best in class for their MP costs), and BP donation. Being durable is just gravy. Definitely one of the best classes in the game.
Bard: 7/10. Great skillset. Stacking damage reduction is one of the easiest ways to mitigate any boss who doesn't rely heavily on dispel (read: everyone except Edna, this is not a Dragon Quest game). Having a rare way to boost accuracy is also welcome. The sleep and damage-boosting songs have uses too, and then lategame Shut Up and Dance is wonderful.
Pictomancer: 4/10? It has a few niches, but overall debuffs just aren't that great in this game. -10% Atk might result in as much as -15% damage if you're lucky (usually less), but the Bard version is better at that for a number of reasons (Bard buffs are MT, bosses get turns faster so status wears off on them faster). And it's not a great carrier because no S ranks and low weight tolerance. It does have Sub-Job BP Saver though, and that's surely in the conversation for best support ability in the game. And it did have good synergy with the rest of my team, particularly Spiritmaster.
Spiritmaster: 7/10. Good but weird. The various spirits themselves are only okay, but getting all four of them going at once for free? That's neat. Except the part where it dispels you, that's not neat. Its L1 passive which prevents OHKOs rules and makes me forgive the class for its ugly weight tolerance, Sub-Job Speciality 1 is also cool. It has a great special if its own damn L2 passive isn't interfering with it, MT fullheal that also casts reraise and regen on everyone? Nice. Breaks the postgame as well, so there's that.
Bastion: 4/10. Self-only defensive buffs are truly terrible, so this class doesn't have too much except Rampart (and Vallation, but waaay more bosses use physicals in this game). Nulling one physical hit on everyone is great, and while the HP cost isn't fun to pay it's probably nicer than paying with extra BP like in BD1. As a carrier it's decent enough, you can do worse than tanky and high weight tolerance, and the free BP while absorbing damage while defaulting is cool.
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Laggy Fantasy Tactics: A Run
That basically sums it up. I'm doing a LFT run because why not, and also i never was able to complete one all the way through (most of them kind of peter out in early to mid C4)
The party so far:
Ramza: is Ramza. Has generally been running Ninja and its prereqs, with a bit of Knight. Will be stopping in Knight to learn Speed Break at some point for later purposes.
Daison: Oracle/White Mage, sometimes dips into Mediator for monster recruitment. Pretty much the go-to for support effects, and has been carried by Move-MP Up himself. Also frequently hits people with sticks. Also grabbed a shitton of geomancer skills from a crystal lately, I may want to invest in Counter Flood.
Charene: Samurai/Monk with Equip Spear. I'm probably not committing enough in either direction but it's fun to have both PA and MA to run off of. Not being restricted to Katanas means that she hits harder than her stats say.
Susan: Wizard/Time Mage/War Criminal. MAU boosted elemental spells are bullshit. Also Frog is a good control option if you need someone just plain removed from battle.
With that out of the way, battle highlights:
Gariland: it's Gariland. You're up against squires and one chemist. A chemist who, in this case, rarely even used potions until he was cornered and being beaten down. lol.
Mandalia Plains: Had one reset because I tried to save Algus' ass and it led to him walking back into the horde of enemies, just to get mulched, on his second turn. Even died to a crit, IIRC. jfc. Second go went cleanly at least, though Ramza ended up doing much of nothing the whole time. Really should have gone for Accumulate rather than Equip Axe, even knowing what I was planning for down the line. Oh and Susan got her triple-kill canceled by the red panther being a cute kitty.
Sweegy Woods: Another rather uneventful fight. Charene'd upgraded to Monk at this point. It showed. She pretty much broke everything's face after a single Accumulate. Algus basically tanked the left two monsters while I had to keep the black mage from nuking everything again. Ramza managed to do something as archer though. He'd rolled low enough on starting JP he'd have to go for another fight as it though.
Dorter 1: you know, I don't think I ever used archer as much as this playthrough. Ignore Height is hilarious here. Also Monk still an unholy force of face-breaking. Daison's gone Oracle which means i now start abusing its Move/MP-Up for more healing. Even if it's pathetically bad right now.
I think it was about this point that I'd set my mind on Ramza going Ninja, while Charene would go Samurai.
Sand Rat Cellar: Three resets. It was really my fault, too, since rather than refactoring my team i instead, uh...kept approaching different approach tactics. There were some easy ones too. This was a fight I largely lost on the prep screen though. Biggest one was assuming with Delita that, since Rat Cellar was in the desert, it would have Sand tiles rather than the mix of Hell Ivy/Pitfall/Carve Model it did have. Also trying to get fancy with the monks instead of just fucking killing them was a mistake, and assuming Guts on Delita would be enough supplemental revival to my Oracle was a mistake. Managed to work it out by leaving Algus (as Knight at that point) to die to the other three knights and archer while I relocated the team from his side to Ramza's and took out the monks. Thief!Ramza with Power Break did generally neuter the knights though. Half the time this fight is a fucker for me. The other half it's...
Thieves' Fort: Thankfully, this one wasn't, and almost as if compensation for the difficulty I had with Cellar of Sand Mouse, this one was almost too easy. Thief!Ramza now had Quick Attack, leading to payoff with my acquisition of Equip Axe all the way back in Mandalia. One of the priests ran out to try and Bolt2 the team, only to get instaganked for 120 with an Axe Quick Attack. Two of the three thieves had also gotten the clever idea to line up right where Susan could just cast her own lightning magic, with Algus actually being useful and shooting the one that wasn't going to die instantly from good zodiac. The map was basically over at that point and the other priest I think had the humiliation of even missing a coinflip Raise.
Lenalia Plateau: ...Poor Miluda could not catch a break here honestly. I swapped Charene to Archer for this, and she took advantage of the ridge on the left. Killed the mages in short order, crippled the knights, it wasn't much of a fight from there.
Archer Is Useful count: 2
Windmill Shed: This fight...holy crap I had no right winning this one on the first try. I'd gone in with a half-cocked strategy that, were I actually thinking, I would have at least gone to fix some JP issues for execution. No, I had to test out my shiny new Ninja Ramza. Against Wiegraf.
I attempted to cripple him with Power Break, only to lose both coinflips and get countered, and Ramza went down to critical. I tried to do a clever bit and time a revive before the attack which I'd *figured* would kill him (a Life Drain from the oracle)...only to then be met with Ramza dodging the spell off of narrow margins and my thoughtfully-timed Raise hitting a living Ramza. I am a tactical genius.
(Ramza got killed right after that, even)
To add more panic to the pile, Delita set up Wish on Ramza. Wish then also proceeded to miss. Thankfully, I'd learned my lesson from Sand Rodents and Charene had Revive. I managed to land Raise on Ramza this time now that he was actually dead, pop Revive on Delita...and then I decided to have Ramza, his turn accelerated by Quick, go for another Power Break on Wiegraf. He landed one of the two hits before dying to another counter, but at least Wiegraf was sitting at something like 4 PA rather than 7.
Mercifully, Susan had obliterated most of the opfor, with both monks and the chocobo down. Unmercifully, Crush Punch procced on Daison. Out of sheer spite, the monks dropped chests when I really needed crystals, and for a good while the fight turned into a horrible loop where Wiegraf was killing Daison immediately after he'd been revived, so there was a whole thing of just...me going back and forth reviving him and hoping to hell I didn't miss the 75% hit rate on that. It broke once Daison managed to get a turn, I got them away, the oracle crystallized which Susan immediately picked up, and I was able to close the fight out from there.
Most of my damage on Wiegraf had, hilariously, been from unleveled jumps from Charene. Also I had MFI'd the Wizard Robe, which means that Susan is set to become even more of an unholy terror.
I could have solved a lot of the early problems from the start, honestly. Had I, last map, decided to instead level Ramza enough to get Concentrate rather than dive right for unlocking Ninja, I could have gone in on Thief and just obliterated Wiegraf's PA from the get-go.
Still, Wiegraf 1 just seems to give me the best fights and this is no exception.
Interlude: I got a dragon. Two resets to remember that the dragon spawns on coming in from the south of Lenalia.
End interlude.
Fort Zeakden: Understanding my mistakes from Fovoham, I'd swapped Ramza in to Archer for this. One of the Black Mages had tried to instagib Ramza with a spell. Ramza had an Ice Bow that was MFI'd from a previous map, and could charge faster than the black mage. Another triple-digit counter-kill for Ramza.
He'd then made his way up to the rooftops. Susan nuked the other mage from her spot, while Ramza took potshots at Algus. This fight was honestly rather uneventful, all things considered, and none of the other knights were killed, just Algus and the two mages.
You know what? I'll take a clean Zeakden run even if I didn't get the chance to MFI anything.
Chapter 1 ended there. Four resets, one due to horrible RNG and the other three due to poor planning. Chapter 2 update will come when I clear that.
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Replayed Triangle strategy and did the new hard mode maps. Love that they added the story missions as mock battles.
Triangle is the best pure SRPG I have played since the PS2. (I adore Brig but it’s writing is not strong)Brilliant gameplay and story; endless replay value and holds up very well coming back to it a few years after release. It even does a good job on cast balance which is a feat in a 30 person cast. Definitely a 10/10 title.
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Laggy Fantasy Tactics: Act 2
Act 2 went...surprisingly smoothly all in all. I managed to not have to do any propositions, even though the temptation continues to run strong every single time I look at my JP scores. Some highlights.
Dorter 2: This is about where I started going crazy with MFI bullshit. Charene petrified Andy with a lucky Carve Model, and Susan did the usual murders. Archer Ramza was there to grab the higher-up MFI locations, though I still had to stall Agrias and Gafgarion out to keep them from closing things out too quickly. Last archer was an asshole who had Item, and specifically Soft, to break Andy out of petrification, so he had to die the normal way after all. Sorry Andy.
Araguay Woods: You know what's fun? Having a free mount for your spear-wielding samurai who's normally got Move 3. Pokes of doom abound. Not much else to say, didn't MFI much even though I probably could have.
Zirekile Falls: I played this one dirty, stripped Gafgarion of his gear beforehand. Still had some hilarious troubles as I didn't check, assumed one of the knights wouldn't have Equip Bow and a corresponding crossbow to kill Daison, and it took several turns for Charene to get in position for Revive to get off due to the chokepoint at the start. Also Gafgarion hasted someone before he escaped. MFI gave me another prize though: an Ancient Sword, something that you normally don't get until Chapter 3. (also a Platina Dagger but that's purchasable right after this fight) Watch as I neglect to leverage this properly for the next few fights.
Zaland Fort City: Knowing the huge wall is there, I grab Spike Shoes for everyone who isn't able to jump 4. And then waste my advantage by deploying Daison and Susan too far to reach the black mages. This, however, was the point where I'd say I needed to quit for the night: I'd forgotten to put White Magic as Daison's sub and didn't give Agrias the Ancient Sword. X-Potion Knight was left to sandbag so I could do MFI shenanigans.
Bariaus Hill: I Need To Stop, Part 2. Swapped Agrias to Knight but didn't sub Holy Sword on her. Think I forgot to put Time Magic on Susan as well. Honestly still didn't matter. Sleep and Frog shut down the Lancers in hilarious fashion. More importantly, though, MFI'd a Twist Headband. Of all the things I could have found...god damn.
Zigolis Swamp: I Need To Stop, Part 3. Forgot to swap Mustadio back to Engineer for gun use and Snipe, neglected to put Daison in Mediator to try and recruit the one non-undead monster there. Didn't matter, Susan just nuked them anyway. Also guest starring a red dragon! Red dragons are tanky and do decent damage, who would have thought? Not that he got to show that off much, due to being Stopped for half the fight. No MFI here.
Goug Slums: Literally the one fight in which I had a reset this chapter, would have been multiple if I didn't get lucky. First one was lost in deployment; forgot to give Punch Art to Charene and Time Magic to Susan, and spread the deployment too thin. I still forgot to give Time Magic to Susan the second time around. I was about to lose due to neglecting to check AoEs until I got incredibly lucky with an Asura Knife Draw Out. Two kills, and I think two Death procs? The enemies had grouped up together for me to kill all four in one move, and it turned everything around. Oh and then I turned the surviving archer into a frog. lol.
Bariaus Valley: This one's generally been on the easier side, nothing really of note here in this fight if you ask me. Well, outside of the one knight rolling MFI and swiping the node in the corner. When does Monk get a dickpunch ability, because that knight needs one.
Golgorand Execution Site: Normally I do a single random run of Bariaus Valley to get Split Punch for Agrias. I decided to forego it this time since she rolled with enough free JP to in fact do so. This fight usually is one of the big stumbling points for me, and will fuck me the hell up. Which is by design; Golgorand does not fuck around.
It was absolutely ridiculous. Agrias and Charene basically cut across the arena with Agrias even oneshotting an archer who was lining up a big charge on Ramza. Ramza himself hit Gafgarion hard enough to force a retreat, and the whole fight was over within a remarkably short time. MFI gave me a bag to sell for ludicrous amounts of money, even.
It got the last laugh on me though, since I was hoping for crystals to get Agrias built up, especially off of the Geomancy Knight. I did not get that. Every single enemy dropped a treasure chest. Assholes. Oh, and concerning was how, early on, one of the archers landed Zombie on Ramza.
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which-
Lionel Gate: This fight was over in a very short amount of time. Which is good because god fucking damnit Secret Fist fucked my entire party up. Serves me right for not investing in Death Sentence protection for everyone. Oh and Gafgarion wasn't an issue. No secondaries, matched speed which means I just move-waited to make sure he couldn't hit Ramza at full strength more than once. No MFI due to the time pressure of course.
Queklain: So, I'd planned to invite a Flotiball from Zigolis for this fight. Turns out I didn't really need it. Agrias and Ramza were doing about 150 each a turn to him, Split Punch landed Don't Move, Mustadio petrified the knights, and the only casualty was Charene getting petrified off the bat. Ended on a Melt proc even, which was funny. I was half afraid he'd have Counter Magic'ed it but it doesn't really apply when the attack kills you.
...and now I face the temptation of the Fur Shop and the sweet dragon-based loot I can get from it. Defenders and Dragon Whiskers both available for my perusal if I only pay the one-time fee of 20,000 or 24,000 gil respectively.
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super: I guess I realize I didn't do a post on it, but I did return to Triangle Strategy a few months ago, beat it, and then played ~5 maps in to a NG+. Should do a detailed writeup sometime. I do agree it's good that they added the story missions as grindable in a patch - it's particularly important in that the story missions drop healing items. You could potentially hard lock yourself out of healing items in the OG patch, which was dumb, so there is at least a very slow way to get more in the event of disaster now.
In other news...
Touhou Luna Nights
Beaten. I played Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth which was made by the same Team Ladybug indie group and enjoyed it, and saw the 9/9 silly Cirno sprites, so sure, what the hell.
Anyway, it's a pretty good Metroidvania. The platforming & combat are really fun, most importantly. I'm not a fan of top-down shooters, but the Graze mechanic makes for high-stakes and rewarding gameplay in a platformer where you want to just barely dodge enemy shots. Since our heroine can stop time, there are some pretty tricksy patterns that come at you fast, but if you dodge them in real time, you get rewarded. (And you get minorly rewarded for "dodging" them while time is stopped.) It makes things nice and exciting. The boss fights are all great. I basically did a daggers-only using the subweapons very little, which I found out later was not optimal from checking speedruns, but hell, it's optimal on fun because it makes you learn the enemy patterns, which are all very rude but just barely fair when time isn't stopped. Unusually, it's also a game that gets the difficulty curve exactly right - the game is very gentle and training wheels early, and it gets tougher and tougher linearly. Lots of games have inverted difficulty curves because they're feeding you so many goodies & power-ups that they're not sure if you have late game, but no, beating up the final bosses feels much more challenging and rewarding than the earlier ones.
Similar to Deedlit, it's not very much on the exploration aspects - the gradual unlocking mechanic is incredibly basic-ass, along the lines of "beat boss to get the green key, there is a green door in exactly one spot that opens the way to the next area." So don't go expecting much special there. Similarly, the level design is on the cramped side - there aren't really any big rooms, it's all narrow corridor maneuvering. Oh well.
Also, the music is great? ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL62MUJgPtF56ufLQ26qVIrRNumtoDpJc1 ) I listened to some Touhou stuff way back when and acknowledged it as pretty good (if famously, er, synthy in instrumentation). The remixes are all great, better than the originals IMO. Like, take "The Maid and the Pocket Watch of Blood" - honestly not that impressive in its original form, but dang if the Luna Nights version isn't fantastic. Pretty much wasn't a single track I disliked.
Okay, that leaves TOUHOU PLOT, or more specifically fangame plot. This one wasn't so strong, although I suppose it works better than Deedlit. Deedlit's nothingburger of a setup didn't work well, but Touhou at least adapts better to "cozy" plots of not much happening. Something odd is that the writer seems to think Sakuya is both A) Extremely powerful (there's a number of lines about "oh no my power has been sealed here" and others having lines from bosses like "haha I'll stand a chance because your powers are sealed" - Translator's note, they're sealed for like literally a minute of gameplay time, the very first thing that happens is unlocking the ability to stop time again, WTF), yet also B) Kinda naive / dumb. (I'm sure it's in character, but the main antagonist mocks Sakuya as being naive for not noticing her, which given that the player has already been given ample clues as to who the antagonist is... she has a point.) Weird combo; I'm used to slightly "underpowered" but clever main characters. Anyway, getting back to the plot, the Received Wisdom in writing is that you're supposed to have some sort of "inciting incident" in a story where something interesting happens that drives events forward. It doesn't have to be at the VERY start, but it should be early-ish - Gandalf coming to the Shire and recruiting hobbits, say. Or for other Touhou games, EoSD involves the sun being blotted out by mist, and PCB involves "someone stole spring." But the initial plot of Luna Nights is just the Touhou girls horsing around for fun, with put-upon Sakuya dealing with her boss's silly whims. Very cozy, but sure I guess, given that most of these people seem to get along well. The plot actually starts at the end of Stage 4... of a 5 stage game. I dunno, I'd liked there to have been some sort of stakes earlier? Also, in ANTAGONIST SPOILERS (??), is this just going to be a fan sendup of Embodiment of Scarlet Devil with all the bosses from that game back exactly, or go anywhere new? Well asking the question answers it, of course it's going to just mimic EoSD exactly rather than be creative. Boo hiss, I'd have actually been more down for Nitori having some sort of evil plan than for it to be Flandre, Again as the final boss.
While I said "beaten", what I mean is the main game was beaten. I did the extra stage, cleared the first extra boss, and hahaha nope'd out of final extra boss. Well I did just praise the game above for having a rewardingly constantly increasing difficulty level, but yeah that boss is for people better at the game than me. I got to her second phase and will call it a draw.
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I've been playing a mobile tactics game called Sword of Convallaria for the last month. It's a gacha game, with all that that entails. But what makes it stand out is the "Spiral of Destinies" mode. It's a branching path story where your actions change how the story unfolds. There's also some sim management as you control the kinds of skills your characters get. Pretty cool, and I recommend checking it out.
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LFT fast (not speedrun) playthrough writeup. No nonsense and few limitations, I want to see how hard the game feels trying to be as straightforward as possible with my knowledge of it. I do impose some rules.
* No superfluous grinding (notably no randoms, though I fatfinger a couple, once in Ch1 and Ch2 and just end them ASAP. They're uneventful.) I don't ever crystal farm, though once a fight is under control I'm not above having PCs that are out of range of finishing the last enemy unit(s) bonk themselves for JP while the ones who actually can reasonably end the fight do so. At some points I delay ending a few encounters to get a specific JP count for my sanity but it's always only a handful of turns.
* No propositions or poaching that isn't in a story fight, no going out of my way to MFI overpowered picks, etc.
* Technically I can use special chars, and objectively it's correct to use Orlandu once you get him, but that's boring. I settle for just using Agrias instead of having to worry about a 4th generic; also to see how she feels since I haven't used her in a while.
* No Calculator (it's dubious if the time spent unlocking and leveling it is even worth it for maingame LFT, though it's a lot more tolerable with props) but also the "best" way to use Calc is still degenerate full battlefield strats so eh, I'm not into that.
* I use my starter generics and spend no time in the soldier office and get 3 female Capricorns with Ramza Capricorn. Which means they all have worst compatibility with Agrias. OH WELL
Unfortunately with the emulator I'm using there seems to be some sort of bug that's affecting some damage formulas to be way lower than they should be, notably Spark from Bombs, some Elementals, and (most relevantly) spellguns all doing single digit damage. So far this hasn't really mattered in a meaningful way (Balk 1 ended within a single round of actions for me and he wouldn't have OHKOed regardless) but may as well disclaimer it.
The long-term team composition goal I had in mind was:
- 2 female generics beelining for Bolt/MAU into Ramuh/Moogle, then using Summon to carry Ch1-2 (and part of Ch3) while they branch into Yin-Yang and Time respectively
- 1 male generic going for Ninja with Item secondary
- Ramza going for Draw Out because female MA while going through the physical tree is less painful
- Agrias (Geomancer or Knight, grinding Holy Sword in easy fights)
It's a fairly straightforward composition that balances between strong aoe damage/healing, one dedicated speedy Item user and a "let them approach me" gameplan for the most part. DO and Holy Sword fill in the gaps where appropriate as instant, unevadable damage with splash. It is notably very revival light: just one Item user. I never end up using Raise for pretty much the whole game on either caster, valuing their offensive/utility magic more; Guts for Wish does come up as a backup plan for Ch1-3, as Ramza just spends a lot of time unlocking Samurai and never can stop to pick up a decent secondary skillset. He also started with Yell which is a decent JP filler move.
Is this ideal? Probably I should've just caved and had another dedicated Item secondary (Ramza or one of the casters.) But honestly, I find FFT a lot more brain-engaging when you run low revival sources, so I just rolled with it.
I recorded the whole thing (including fight downtime, shopping, etc.) as a reference so if you are interested you can check it out. Still got the endgame stretch to finish but I doubt it will put up much of a fight.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2255127851 - start to Ch2 Zirekile
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2255436567 - Ch2 Zaland to Ch3 Yuguo
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2256671378 - Ch3 Riovanes to Ch4 Bervenia (uncleared)
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2256671649 - Bervenia to Bethla
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2258755690 - Germinas to UBS5
Writeups for Ch1 and 2 for now, I'll do the rest at a later point.
Chapter 1
In Ch1 this means Wizard/Summoner, Thief/Archer, and Monk for these units respectively.
Everything up to Dorter doesn't really deserve comment, although Mandalia Plains did open with a Wizard killing Algus immediately with 41 collateral Bolt damage.
Sand Rat: Complete slaughter, the two Wizards sweep with Bolt and Poison and my Archer finishes off the enemy Archer by claiming the high ground first. None of the units ever get out of their deathtrap save the Monk who starts outside.
Miluda 1: Also one-sided, only one Thief gets an attack off and all the other enemy units are dead before they can do anything.
Miluda 2: Requires a bit more careful zoning to deny the enemy Knights any meaningful hits. Miluda's tanky enough that my slow hang back and pick off approach means everything else dies before her, but I'm never in any danger.
Wiegraf 1: Harder than it needed to be mainly because I'm being stingy with JP and not picking up Bolt 2 or getting Ramuh early, opting to save for MAU. This means my offense is quite limited for a blitz approach, so I end up killing all the support instead. Lucked out a bit with some evades and Ramza never eating a Crush Punch ID proc. Probably still would've done ok even if it'd gone south but likely I should've just picked up better damage beforehand.
Ziekden: MAU is done, so the girls go Time Mage to unlock Summoner for Ch2. Archer is great for obvious reasons in this fight. Kill opening Wizard (who almost always charges an OHKO on Ramza so you don't really have a choice), then go after Algus, usual deal. He gets some good Auto Potion RNG but it's not enough. Poison gets extra value here.
Overall, chapter 1 is predictable, Black Magic just rips it in half handily - nothing can really compete with the raw damage output+splash and Poison's range is great for Knights and bosses. Archer feels very good in some fights too and since Ramza needs a lot of time in Monk to unlock Samurai, Repeating Fist's early OPness gets to shine. Battle Boots for basically the whole chapter as well, the +1 PA/MA accessories are honestly kinda traps for the most part.
Chapter 2
My male generic wants to head to Ninja eventually but since it's ultimately just a carrier destination there's no real rush. I dedicate this chapter to getting more of Item finished and spending a lot of time in Thief, for Move+2.
Ramza similarly needs to unlock Samurai, although unlike the male generic he would rather start accruing JP there ASAP. However since actually playing and leveling on Samurai is pretty painful I also decide that he goes Thief where he can to pick up Move+2 as well. Both of them grab HP Restore as a generic reaction (I have a very high opinion of it for 300 JP.) Otherwise he just bounces between jobs for unlocks and runs Guts secondary and spends an awful lot of time Yelling. The idea is that...
...the two female generics will carry this chapter by blowing shit up with Ramuh. Moogle gets picked up too, those two summons alone make for an incredible skillset for a long stretch of the game IMO. I decide against bothering with more in Summon for now. They'll go Oracle and TM once that's done.
Agrias will round out the roster at the end. For Zigolis/Goug I'll just throw in a chocobo as filler.
Dorter 2: Possibly the most one-sided fight I've ever had here; the enemies decide to bunch up in a nice cross formation and uh that's that. Basically no meaningful enemy actions occur, and as the last surviving Thief and Archer retreat back to their inevitable slow deaths I bonk the guests some taking my time to go up and finish them off. Summoner gets unlocked after this.
Araguay (1 wipe): I opt to be greedy and not mount Boco, he gets his eyes gouged out and panic runs into the welcoming arms of a Goblin Punch. FIRST WIPE I'VE EVER HAD ON THIS MAP IN ANY FFT VERSION, oops.
Zirekile: A slow ass fight where I maximize my JP-gaining actions while playing it safe with my limited revival. We finally do have Ramuh here although it's genuinely less efficient than Poison against all the enemy Knights.
Zaland: Oh hey a very nice box formation with the two Wizards and two Knights, oh look they're all dead to double Ramuh. Again the fastest clear I've ever had in this encounter. Moogle is picked up so we're done with playing Summoner for now.
Bariaus Hill: Musty solos one Summoner, I spread out to avoid Elemental splash and carefully bait the Lancers forward to pick them off without letting them land fatal hits. I do eat a death or two but not my Item user, and clutch a Haste out to dodge the enemy Summoner's Shiva. Another zoning-heavy fight. Also my planned Oracle doesn't have Priest JLV2 yet so she has to make a detour here for that.
Zigolis: A pig spawns and promptly gets poached (running dual Thieves right now!) Actually this fight drags out longer than I'd like - Skeleton Souls 2HKO, the opening Ghost gets a Shadow Stitch off and the pig annoyingly evades easy death early on and keeps Musty sleep locked. So I spend a lot of MP using Moogle to avoid getting killed and two of the early undead units actually reach 0 on their timer near the end of the fight. Fortunately neither revive, though it wouldn't have been that big a deal, just annoying.
Goland: I mess up a lot of my plays here so it's worse than it has to be. However ultimately it's a fight that largely centers around baiting the Summoners to their death and not getting too messed up by the Archers in your turn order killing your casters. I'm careful not to lose my Chemist so it never spirals out of control. (RIP Boco though)
Bariaus Valley: Musty gets a one time cameo here, and with a Chemist on the other side this fight just sort of crumples over (guns are really good here against the casters and the Knights just aren't in a great position to threaten you.)
Now is probably a good time to take stock of my exact setup/how much I've grinded thus far...
* Ramza - LV11, unlocking Samurai still. In Knight to get it to JLV4 and also because Golgorand is pain. Normally Guts secondary (Yell & Wish), has Item here with Phoenix Down from spillover JP. RSM HP Restore / Move+2. I had Equip Spear from a Lancer dip and was planning to use it, but stupidly sold my Javelin and did not buy a Mythril Spear before I was locked out of castles. I may deeply regret this soon.
* Draper (male generic) - LV11, finishing Ninja unlocks still. In Geomancer to pick up Attack UP. Item secondary (Hi-Potion, Phoenix Down.) RSM HP Restore / Move+2 like Ramza.
* Stephanie (female generic) - LV10, Time Mage (Haste, Slow, Don't Move), saving for Teleport. Summon (Ramuh/Moogle), MAU.
* Annette (female generic) - LV11, Oracle (Silence Song, Paralyze). Summon (Ramuh/Moogle), MAU.
* Agrias - LV13. Freshly joined (with only Stasis Sword.) Immediately in Geo to actually do damage and work on Attack UP.
And so we get to...
Golgorand (1 wipe): Conventional FFT wisdom says you want your casters to match enemy Speeds (or be 1 below) so you can immediately cast on them freely. For Chapter 1 this is generally 5 Speed, for Chapter 2 this is 6, and for Chapter 3 this is 7. LFT Knights throw a ripple in this since they are slower than vanilla (90 mult instead of 100) but this works mostly still.
The two enemy Knights on the ground in Golgorand in vanilla are usually not a big deal - they're 3 move and don't have secondaries. So you can just kite them, forever. In LFT they have 5 move (Move+1 preset) and one of them has Elemental as a secondary. This is kind of a big deal. So big that both of my casters, who are 6 Speed and on Ramza's PBF side, end up eating shit and dying before they get a single action.
I try my best to recover (still killing Gafgarion before his second turn) and do get some good luck so it looks like it's not totally hopeless for a bit but ultimately 9 units vs 3 is just way too much action economy disadvantage to fight uphill on.
On the second attempt the casters are now 7 speed and actually get to move, although things are still grim early on as they usually are - a struggle to simply stay alive and not get buried into being forced to revive while still taking out Gafgarion ASAP. At some point the Yin-Yang Archer also confuses Ramza and my male generic, and they're just left floundering on the wrong side of the map for a good portion. And then finally the last insult to injury: in forgetting to get a spear for Ramza he and Agrias are both on Coral Swords... and I forget one of the enemy Knights has fixed Rubber Shoes. AND both my casters only have Ramuh as their damage spell (and the Oracle is on a rod.) Which means only the Time Mage with the Rainbow Staff, and the Geomancer with the Mythril Sword, are capable of damaging him. And said Geo was Zombie'd while he was confused midway through, so if he goes down, I can't revive him either. (Spoilers: he does go down eventually from lack of healing)
Long story short, the fight does end up boiling down to just the two floor enemy Knights, and eventually they both get a turn to 2HKO my Time Mage (who I have tried desperately to keep alive the whole time). FORTUNATELY I win the 50/50 on undead revival on the Geo, and he lands the last fatal blow to Mr. Rubber Shoes.
I felt very tested at all points throughout this fight that I'll plug a direct timeline link to it: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2255436567?t=2h7m53s By far the hardest fight in Ch2 and up to this point in general, nothing else comes close, but that's Golgorand for you.
Lionel Gate: I don't even bother with Rubber Shoes here, Ramza COULD win the duel handily (he's finally in Samurai! And 2handing a spear for 120 damage pokes to Gaffy, plus Gaffy knocks him into HP Restore range) but I just go for the lever to be safe. The Summoner charges Shiva which is the one scary move that happens in this fight and is instantly shut down by Silence Song, so that's that.
Queklain: Quek lands double DS and no sleep. Pdown one of the Knights because they're bodyblocking me. Oops, I forget to set Holy Sword on Geo Agrias. Doesn't matter, I slap him with a Slow 2 on my Time Mage's first turn and have too much damage; he kills one more person but that's not enough.
As predicted, Ramuh dominated Chapter 2, although at 7 CT and with far more dangerous enemy setups it's not quite as overpowering the way Black Magic is in Chapter 1. Silence Song was the other clear winner; even if you don't pull out blitz wins at Zaland or Goug, it shuts the most dangerous units down there real fast, and the only one at Lionel to boot. My male units kinda sucked at damage but they did their job at keeping enemies distracted or pulled into position for my casters to blast away, and they spent most of the chapter investing in unlocks/RSM to be relevant in the future as Ramuh becomes less of a powerful button.
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Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate (Steam)
Set of short point&click adventures. Generally fairly entertaining/amusing.
I think that progress at finding the bonus objectives should be retained across replays of each roomisode rather than you having to achieve them all in a single play to get the best score. This isn't a Quest game where you're finding better or worse solutions, these are primarily just finding specific additional jokes - and having to repeat that every time isn't particularly entertaining. The second & third roomisodes particularly have points where the world state changes and access to some of these is lost.
The bonus roomisode has you lose access to verbs and I don't care much for that either.
(Also RigRug is bad.)
Dragon Age II (Steam+EA)
Entertaining but not as good as Dragon Age Origins.
Made the MC a rogue again. As the Origins MC is still extant (for all that they don't appear in II) I left the II MC with the preset name & look rather than customising them (although I elected to use the preset which removed the nose scar (?) rather than going with the strict default).
As with Origins I let the game decide how attribute/ability points should be distributed for the non-MC characters as they levelled up. The MC I primarily put ability points into the two-weapon, assassin, and duelist lines (although I never had them use the duel-centric duelist abilities).
Ultimately sided with the mages, lost Isabela, Fenris, and Sebastian across the course of the game. Did not put the MC into a relationship with anyone.
I like the idea of the game structure. But, it feels like anything in the city which isn't plot-relevant barely actually exists, and as a result I don't think the game does a good job at conveying any sort of progression of time. I don't remember any incidental characters who change across the years or so on.
Inventory is annoying. They give all items a star rating which reduces as you get further into the game and better equipment becomes available, which sounds like a good idea in isolation. But, I have seen the game give separate instances of accessories which it lists as having the same effects different star ratings - so what am I supposed to take away from this? Do items have hidden stats which it doesn't list?
Also, you can't see what rating currently-equipped equipment has. Thanks, game, practically defeat the entire point why don't you.
Also! General storage is in a location where you can't take a party, and you can only adjust equipment for people who are in the party. So if you pick up a fancy sword for instance, once you're free to check if anyone wants it you first need to reform your party to include all applicable characters, then if no-one does want it you can separately go to storage to drop it off. On the off-chance that you pick up a weapon that someone does want but they don't have the stats for yet, if want to check this in future you need to get it out of storage, then leave and reform the party to include them to check. That said outside the fairly early game I don't think I ever saw any character not have the stats for anything I picked up.
Switching topic to reuse of dungeon layouts, in my view essentially the only problem here is that all of the unused doors in each dungeon are still visible. (I guess also parts of the map.) All they had to do cover (or replace) the unused doors with walls. Or even just pile stuff in front of them like they do with some of the caves in the outdoor areas.
I hate the city gangs system. Not to suggest that the city shouldn't have gangs. But it really put me in mind of Superhero League Of Hoboken in how you get attacked a bunch and then you've (essentially) killed everyone (after an eventual hideout quest for each). There must have been a better option.
I intend to go on to Inquisition at some point but not immediately.
(Got a 403 page several times while trying to preview this message, posting without previewing seems to have worked fine? Is previewing broken for anyone else?)
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Might as well get things started with finishing up writeups from FFT Fiesta.
Was being indecisive about what I needed for the final series. For accessories, picked up 2 Rubber Shoes (just in case though I don't plan to use them) and a 2nd Defense Armlet. Grabbed a 2nd Red Shoes. (should have picked up a 3rd as well) Most of my remaining funds went to extra katanas for Draw Out. Kikus and Murasames mostly with a few more Kotetsus and Heaven's Clouds.
UBS4
Priest with Draw Out, Dancer with Punch Art and Martial Arts, Samurai also goes Punch Art + Martial Arts. Blade Grasp on all. The only really meaningful threat on the field is the lower leveled monk. He dies to a Bolt3 from the mediator's Blast Gun and an Earth Slash from the dancer. After that, it's just taking out everyone else. Other monk, then archer, knights last. I checked the knights' secondaries for anything that would threaten a full team of 80 Brave Blade Grasp, danger level nil. Elemental boosted Blast Gun, Earth Slash, and Draw Out > enemy evasion.
Did stall for a bit at the end. Could have dropped the last knight with Holy but the first monk would crystalize first so I opted to wait a round to go for all the marbles. Crystal which Felicia picks up. Learn Counter and Move-HP up off it. She now can master the class. Only damage I take all fight is one arrow and random Throw Stone.
UBS5
Everyone but the dancer is set up with a spell gun and a Black Robe if they can. Arrange PBF to draw Rofel forward with a Petrify. Firing squad executes him in three shots.
Morund Death City
Priest and mediator go in squad 2, everyone else in squad 1. Mediator, monk, and samurai have Hamedo and keep Blade Grasp on the rest. I give the dancer a Bracer and a Power Sleeve to go with her Thief Hat. Punch Art and Martial Arts on her and the samurai. Move Ramza exactly 3 panels from his default location. Kletian comes forward to charge Holy on the dancer. Ninja on squad 2 side goes for Throw on the Mediator, Hamedo. Other enemies advance doing nothing. Dancer advances with a Spin Fist on Kletian, a ninja, and a time mage hitting all three. (this is the only time I've used Spin Fist all game) Mediator shoots ninja dead. Priest does nothing of importance: using Kiku on a samurai just for the action. Monk Ramza punches Kletian for 210. Wave Fist from the samurai does enough to drop him.
Death City Presincts
My female Gemini's turn to be the priest. I give her Blast Gun, Thief Hat, Black Robe, and Red Shoes and set Hamedo. Samurai Artemis gets a Blaze Gun, Black Robe, and Hamedo. Everyone else sticks with Blade Grasp. Defense Armlets on the members unable to wear Thief Hats.
I messed up PBF placement putting the female Gemini in squad 2. So Balk ends up shooting at Artemis on his first turn instead. Gun Hamedo. Priest moves up and Kiku on Balk for 160. (and the hyudra) Enemy Chemist tosses a Hi-Potion on the hyudra, not that it matters. Monk Earth Slash on two, 40 to Balk. Samurai and mediator shoot the hydra dead. Dancer starts Nameless. Balk gets his second turn and shoots at the female Gemini. Just as planned. Gun Hamedo procs a Bolt2 leaving him at 124 HP. She does 153 with the Blast Gun allowing me to end it [https://menuland.ph/mang-inasal-menu-prices-in-philippines/]right there[/https://menuland.ph/mang-inasal-menu-prices-in-philippines/]. Easiest Balk 2 fight I've ever had. And hey, that 40 damage Earth Slash mattered. Dancer doesn't get any actions this battle.
Hashulam
Black Costumes for all but priest and samurai to ward of Spell. Hamedo on monk and samurai with the rest sticking with Blade Grasp. MagicDefend Up on all.
Turned out to be very straightforward bashing. Hash mostly stuck to hitting 3-5 units at a time with magic but MagicDefend Up (and Move-HP up on the two who had it learned) along with Chakra, Murasame, and the occasional Cure were sufficient to keep up. If someone got low enough to die to a physical, well that's why I have Hamedo on the two units with decent physicals. Priest supports and uses Draw Out. Monk and samurai go between offense and support as needed. Mediator shoots, Dancer uses Kiku or Slow Dance if not able to get a good fining line/offense would require too much bunching up. Hash couldn't really get damage to stick and went down like a chump. No Slow procs from Heaven's Cloud but didn't really need it anyways.
Sounds like you're making solid progress in your FFT Fiesta! Good call on the accessories and setting up your team with Blade Grasp and Punch Art. The battles seem to be going smoothly, especially with smart use of Hamedo and spell guns. Nice job managing Balk and Hashulam with minimal damage taken! Keep up the great work!
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Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn - Replayed this for the line count project, but it's also the first time I've played it in nine years which is crazy for a game I like so much? I did a "lowest level only" run similar to what I've previously done for FE9/FE6/3H where I had to use the lowest level person all the time, along with recruiting everyone and keeping them alive. Interestingly this doesn't make some of the already hardest maps (e.g. Dawn Brigade part 3) any harder, since you can use everyone on those. The hardest maps were 1-Endgame (everyone still in tier 1), 4-1 (night map with Ike's team), and 4-Endgame-1 (everyone still tier 2), followed by maps like 3-11, 4-3, 4-4, 4-E-2, 4-E-4, and 4-E-5, so mostly maps where I'm a tier lower than normal plus the very end where being a few key stat points short really does add up.
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia - eyyy they released this for the Switch. New file so I have to play normal mode. Well surely this will be really easy for me - *dies a bunch to Blackmore, Eligor, and Dracula anyway* never mind. Not much to say past that; there was nothing notable about this run, but I had a good time. I approve of OoE having the prominent placement on the art of the Switch DSvania collection, good taste.
Chrono Trigger - Another random replay (Steam version in this case). I beat the game, then did a NG+ run to get all the endings. It's interesting that I used to think fighting Lavos with two people in NG+ was evil but now, even with levels still in the 40's, I was able to do it. Don't neglect your MDef, kids. (It's funny reading guides which say things like "this is super hard even at Level 55, what you need to do is use a Haste Helm + Nova Armour on Crono". WRONG.) Otherwise, this was my first time playing the game with the "new" (DS) translation, which while a bit less punchy at points does clarify some lines well. Also makes the slide show ending hornier than I recall it being. Otherwise, it's CT, still great. I want to force every game dev to play this and understand how a game can be this good even without exceptional writing or battle system; everything about the game's pacing and polish is so good.
Hyrule Warriors - Also got a Switch version, so sure, I'll play this again. Kinda fell down a rabbit-hole and spent over 100 hours on it, I'd forgotten how much I enjoy this game. Gameplaywise it's pretty clearly the best of the four Warriors games I've sunk notable time into, I think - both the action and the map aspects are engaging in a way that I'm not sure any other game in the series has matched simultaneously, and I love the huge variety of fighting styles available. I beat the maingame, essentially completed the first three adventure maps, and stuck me toes into a few more to get some of the multi-elemental weapons.
Baldur's Gate 3 - Started this, still in act 1. Really fun game when it's not tripping over itself with how clunky it is. I hate harzardous terrain on the ground which is both hard to see AND your NPC allies will randomly walk over it in a limited-healing system like this. I also hate how party switching, which the game encourages through both its writing and gameplay, is such a pain compared to how Chrono Trigger did it. On a positive note, though, the writing is very enjoyable, good characters and feels like a well-done D&D campaign (except the part where the game seems to expect me to constantly want to extort NPCs, which I guess is some people's idea of a fun anti-social character. I'm not even blaming the writers for the option, really, but it's weird because it wouldn't be socially acceptable in any D&D campaign I've actually played).
Fire Emblem Fates - Also started a replay of this. Lunatic Conquest, we'll see if I stick with it or something pushes me back to Hard.
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Other people can post here too, really, it's fine.
Fire Emblem Fates - Beat Mr. Fuga's Wild Ride. Still on Lunatic. Still a wonderfully-designed game mode. It's not that much harder than Hard but the little changes do add up a lot.
Ace Attorney Investigations - In honour of the second game being localized for the Switch, I played this for the first time in a decade. It's been a while since I've really felt a compelling urge to replay an Ace Attorney game and in some ways I feel like I've fallen out of love with the series but then I ended up enjoying this a lot anyway! Honestly I was kinda pleasantly surprised. This is still one of my favourite AA games, case 1/2/4 are all solid then case 5 is real good, simultaneously a good mystery to unravel and one of the funniest cases in the series. Edgeworth best protagonist.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - Replaying this as well (third Normal Miriam playthrough because I'm too rusty to try Hard, fifth playthrough overall), just got the ability to turn into a laser beam.
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Astro Bot Went and cleared the maingame. I'll just have to say that overall, amazing platformer and an unironic love letter to all of Sony's gaming history. It's 4:45 AM so I'll not go into detail here but...yeah.
I'll say, pity this didn't come out *before* the instant Sony started showing its ass. And, you know, all the Concord shenanigans.
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My PS4 died so I traded in a bunch of my old games and got a PS5 for free. Well not actually free it cost me my soul since I hate getting rid of old games. But hey, faster load times so I can now die even more in Elden Ring.
Metaphor Re Fantasia: It's Persona. If you like Persona, you will like this. I'm in the end arc now. So far I'd say it's better than P5 but not as good as 3 and 4. The job system is fun until you realize it's not as freeform as it appears because the later jobs require you to have spent time in other random jobs that you had no way of knowing beforehand.
Baldur's Gate 3: Not too far into this. I started out trying to roleplay as kind of a Lawful Evil fighter. The game wasn't too crazy for this despite giving you options to be an asshole. Except Lae'zel. She loved my tough guy act and came to have sex with me very quickly. She tried to be the power top but I rolled to intimidate her and got a nat 20 with an 18 needed. Probably the only time anyone's ever shut her up.
Then I restarted as a half orc wizard that only casts Magic Missile because it is the coolest spell. The game forces you to memorize other spells but at least you can use all your spell slots to upcast Magic Missile. This run is going smoother because the game likes it when you are a nice guy.
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Guess I might as well put up writeups for my next FFT fiesta before the memories fade. Even though I don't think I ever posted a writeup for the final battle of first one I completed. Well whatever, though I'll put that conclusion in a separate post. For reference, classes are rolled on the following schedule.
Start: Knight, Archer, Priest or Wizard
After Windmill Shed; Monk, Thief, Oracle, or Time mage
Meeting at Lionel: Geomancer, Lancer, Mediator, or Summoner
Chapter 3 start: Samurai, Ninja, Calculator, Bard, or Dancer
Chapter 4 start: Any of the above not already selected plus Chemist, Mustadio, Agrias, Rafa, or Malak
Playing on console so Mime is a "hell no."
Like FF5 fiesta, at least one party member must be in a primary job once it is unlocked and the party can only use skills from one of the five rolled classes. Other than universal skills. Much like how FF5 allows the Item command, I designated certain squire and chemist skills as always available.
For Squire, it's everything besides Accumulate.
For Chemist, it's Potion, Phoenix Down, Antidote, Eye Drop, Echo Grass, and Equip Change
The fiesta restrictions only apply to story battles from Dorter onwards. Randoms and grind fights are anything goes with the exception of Move-Find Item, equipment theft, Invitation and Train, and Brave/Faith altering. Those are forbidden unless the associated class has been unlocked.
RNG rolled Knight, Thief, Summoner, Calculator, Mustadio. Ouch. One good skillset, two middling units, and two scrubs. Piss awful skillset synergy with every non-summoner having trash for MA, among other issues I expect to encounter. Special characters I've decided they remain in their base class for story fights and rely on randoms and spillover JP to access skills in the other 4.
Optional rule 1: So you rolled a calculator but no other mage classes. Under strict interpretations, that would mean they have nothing to use Math Skill with. But that's no fun. So the alternative is going crystal calculator and allowing any spells they can scrape up from crystals. They are allowed Bolt for unlocking calculator but cannot Math Skill it unless they have obtained a crystal that would have it. (basically any enemy unit on the mage side of the job tree) If going crystal calculator, setting Math Skill as a secondary is banned; only calculators get this. I'm using this one for my party as it feels right for calculator to have access to its gimmick.
Optional rule 2: Hi-Potion, Madien's Kiss, and Soft are allowed in Chapter 4. I'm not intending to use this but if it's more fun for you, by all means. Could even include Ether is so inclined though I feel it takes away from MP management. But if you want to roll that way, hey it's your game. FFT fiesta is more about fun than enforcing a challenge.
OK, what a long preliminary text wall. The theme I'm going for with character names this time is special attack names. Starting with Ramza who has been renamed Dark Matter (Belvoue) Not really sure what's his best Zodiac with this class config so went with my Virgo standby.
Prologue and Gariland are very standard. Well, the Broad Sword squire rushing forward to lob a rock at my party instead of swinging at Delita isn't standard but that makes my opening moves easier. Get my crystal at gariland to teach Potion and Equip Change to Dark Matter. I drag things out a bit for Delita to pick up enough JP for him to learn Throw Stone.
Right away, it's time for the Soldier Office grind. One of my starting female generics has 66/74 which I decide is good enough to keep her. Will make for some mouth-watering Summon damage. So I seek two more units and after scrolling through far too many I settle upon these two.
Cross Blaze; Male Taurus
Meteor Storm: Female Sagitarius
Not that I care about internal Zodiac with the skillsets I got assigned. My requirements were 68 Brave or better and 64 Faith at the lowest. Teach them and Dark Matter Throw Stone and Phoenix Down.
For Mandalia, I make Dark Matter a chemist for scraping a few extra Chemist JP for the guests and the generics stay squires.
Mandalia - 3 resets
Even though I choose Destroy the Death Corps for the Brave boost, I still want Algus to survive long enough to gain the JP for Throw Stone, if nothing else. He keeps suicidally charging into the greatest concentration of enemies though, hence the resets. Finally, get an opening where he's still standing at 4 HP when my squad gets its second round of turns. After which the enemies tend to favor targeting my units and I proceed with the normal beatdown. Did have a stupid AI moment. Thought I was being clever in leaving the thief at low enough HP for Delita to kill but Delita goes to whack the full health panther instead. You idiot. This leads to Meteor Storm getting beaten into the dirt. Battle ends before the death countdown expires but I was not happy.
After this, there's a long wait before there will be any story progress. Knights are the most expensive starting class to gear up. I need 3000 Gil to fully outfit someone with knight gear and Battle Boots and the goal is 4 sets. Starting from 2300, it's a long way to go. So even though I have 4 characters all with Knight unlocked already, not everyone is going to be in the class right off the bat. I do sell the starting Holy Water which is enough to pick up a second Long Sword along with shields and helms for two knights. Also, a third pair of Battle Boots for a chemist because 3 Move humans feel so helpless.
What follows are several grind fights where I have 2, later 3, Knights with helmets and no armor with the remaining filling in as squires and chemists. Starting generics rotate in and out to fill the 5th deployment slot. I didn't intentionally drag out fight for crystals/chests though maybe I should have with the dire cash situation. Oh yeah, I want gear for Delita and Algus too. It's close but I do manage to meet my goal of getting everyone geared up with no one higher than Lv 4 for Sweegy. All 4 of my fieasta units also have Job Lv 2 in Chemist for convenience. Grab a few extra Potions at Gariland before moving on to the next story fight. Teach Power Break to Meteor Swarm.
Sweegy Woods - 0 resets
I make one of my units a Chemist for this one while Delta gets a Knight setup to scrape up some extra Knight JP. Straightforward exercise in minimizing the numbers of enemies that can reach me while beating down the others. And keeping Delita and Algus productive. Went well, only used one Potion.
Dorter 1 - 0 resets
Delita and Algus are in their base classes with Item. I choose to live dangerously and have all my knights with Basic Skill. Forgot that with 4 knights and two guest Squires, they'd all like Long Swords but I forgot to pick up the 6th. Oh well, one of my lady knights will have to make do with a Broad Sword. Longbow archer shoots Algus, which I've never seen before as normally, one of my units has lower HP and is therefore a more attractive target. Male Knights advance along the ground; their role is to bait the wizards into leaving themselves exposed to midcharge swings. I even remember to check Zodiacs to ensure it will be a one shot kill. Lady knights go after the longbow archer with the guests.
I messed up my positioning with the wizards and was only able to finish off one midcharge so Dark Matter got fried once. Knight durability comes through so while Dark Matter got brought down low, no deaths on my side. I do hold off on killing the knight and unarmed archer for some crystal farming. Both wizards leave crystals which I have the males grab, giving them a small headstart on their magic collections. Meteor Storm got the longbow archer's crystal for the basic Potion, which I'd not bothered to spend the 30 JP to teach earlier. A satisfying battle result overall. The Iron Sword war trophy was a welcome addition.
Finally stable enough funds-wise to hire the 5th unit. I had intended to use a different name but whimsy struck before then so instead or Raging Edge, welcome Tiro Finale' to the team. Female Capricorn. So I've got a Virgo/Taurus/Capricorn triangle, meaningless as it is (what am I going to use it for? Carbuncle? Steal EXP) to go along with a Sagitarious and Aquarius. Can finally kick out the other starting generics to reduce the clutter on my formation screen. Pick up more Potions and off to Sand Rats.
Sand Rats - 1 reset
I leave Tiro Fianle' on the bench seeing has she hasn't unlocked Knight yet and I felt no need to wait. Each squad gets one male and one female knight. As it happens, each one also has one member with Dash and one without. Thanks to the last fight, I have enough swords for everyone. As in Dorter, I slap Basic Skill on my knights leaving the sole source of recovery as Potions from Algus and Delita. As they're the lowest HP targets on my side, the enemies will favor going after them. It's going to be an interesting map. Shrugged and bought and set Weapon Guard on Algus; maybe that extra 10% W. Ev will help.
All about positioning and using my units as body shields to keep the enemies from landing deathblows on the guests. First attempt saw enemies dodging fatal shots and Algus dying around round 3. Delita going down was the dealbreaker for me along with being right about to lose one of mine to an angry Monk. Maybe could have finished it from there (only 2 enemies remained) but I opted to reset and try again. Next go I was more successful about spreading out enemy attacks to keep anyone from dying and Algus and Delita chose to be smart about when and who they dispense Potions to. Got a monk crystal but only got Spin Fist out of it. (I was hoping for a free Weapon Guard)
Stop by the Dorter shop for gear upgrades, picking up two sets of light armor. And 4 Bucklers though going for all 4 right there was probably not the right call. Got no randoms on the way back to Igros. Look at what I want to buy and realize I'm around 15000 Gil short of what I'm looking to purchase. I want 4 sets of swords, shields, and armor for my knight squad. And a Long Bow as I plan on running Algus as an archer for Thieves Fort. Of that, I only have one Iron Sword and some shields. Not too upset since there's a new member who needs some training time. Teach Power Break to everyone but the newbie.
During this grind session, not everyone stays in Knight the whole time. Various units spend time in squire and Dark Matter gets some mage time in, unlocking Time Mage. Partly to be able to obtain time magic off crystals and partly because I'm going to be unlocking calculator eventually so might as well knock some of that load now. Also because I'm going for only 4 sets of knight gear. By the time I finish up the grind fights, everyone but Tiro Finale' has Move +1 and some have Counter Tackle done, the last squire skill I'll ever care about.
Thieves' Fort - 2 resets
Delita as a squire with Item as before, Algus as an archer with Item. These two are my sole sources of HP recovery since all my knights are running Basic Skill. Highest level female sits out, in this case it's my starter generic. I'm one Iron Sword short but I'd consciously chosen to skimp so Tiro Finale' makes do with a Long Sword. Same general strategy as Sand Rats where I try to control the fight so that the guests don't die.
Algus gets dropped in the first attempt having only succeeded with one action, no thanks to the Black Magic priest going after him while staying out of sword range. I had no need to care since it's his last battle as an ally and half the enemies were down by this point. But dammit, I wanted that spillover Archer JP and he's my only Phoenix Down user. So I reset.
Next try, Miluda ganks Algus with a critical. Again, with him having only landed one action. Not good enough, reset.
Next attempt, I screw up the PBF which results in a lady knight getting Charmed on round one. Upshot is that the Black Magic priest has best compat with one of my dudes and comes close to target him. Smack down the priest midcharge; bonk the Charmed knight out of it with Basic Skill. From there, I proceed with my plan of taking out enemies as they present themselves and not letting the guests take fatal hits. Land a Power Break on Miluda too, which removes the threat of freak KOs. I opt to stall a bit for the Black Magic priest to crystalize, which she does. Have Meteor Storm pick it up; now I have three units with a starter set of spells.
The downside of Power Breaking Miluda is that she's much more eager to break my stuff. End up losing two shields and one helmet to her, which will need to be replaced. Though the Bronze Shield war trophy can fill one of those slots and the Iron Sword trophy is why I opted to choose to skimp on buying a 5th.
Got into a random on the way back to Igros. Fielded an Equip Armor archer, which is funny because I'd never use such a build in normal play but here, the unit had loads of Knight JP and I was short on light armor so that's how things played out. i have enough funds to outfit a 5th unit with up-to-date knight gear so do so and off to Lenalia with no further fanfare. Grab some more Potions while at it.
Lenalia - 0 resets
Delita is an archer with Item and the sole source of HP recovery. He climbs the cliff and shoots a wizard. Enemies go with the weak wizard going after Delita and the strong one going after my team. Time Mage casts Haste on herself and Miluda. Other enemies just shuffle around. My first set of actions goes decently with the strong wizard killed midcharge and I land a Power Break on Miluda from the fornt, which is neat. Not so cool was the Hasted time mage Don't Moving three of my units with the one able to smack it midcharge not quite doing enough to kill. My mistake for clumping up but does put a damper on my offense. It's the time mage's last action as some rocks from the Don't moved group is enough to remove the last of her HP. Enemy knights hit people but they're spread out and Miluda can only swing for 14. Not very threatening to my 110+ HP squad. Delita Potions self and retreats. Wizard drops a spell on all three Don't Moved units for about 30 to each. Get some damage in on him though not enough to kill. My two mobile units are able to chase him down and kill him midcharge before he can land a second spell on the three still stuck. Once the Don't Move wears off and I see no one is in critical danger, battle is good as won. Help finish off the knights while waiting for mage crystals. Delita keeps himself alive and gives a few Potions to allies who are running low on HP. Also landed another Power Break on Miluda for additional hilarity. Got one mage crystal which Dark matter takes, being the only one with Time Mage unlocked. I would have been OK with finishing the fight before the knights' countdowns ran out but I opted to take the slow way of using Dash and Throw Stone to pummel Miluda even though I don't really need to fear 7 damage Counters. Taking it slow does have a handy upshot; Delita finally hits the 500 Knight JP for Equip Armor.
Oh, one Knight broke an Iron Helmet. Not again (sigh), more replacement costs.
With the fight complete, off to Igros for gear upgrades. It has Mythril Swords, Bronze Shields and Chain Mail. I want 4 each of swords and shields and 5 Chain Mail as Delita would like one too. Yep, short on cash again. Though this time, it doesn't take that many fights given how high Dark Matter's level has been climbing. I also decide to nab two Silver Bows now for future Thief unlocking rather than return later. During the grind fights, a few spend a fight in mage classes such that both Dark Matter and Meteor Storm have Summoner unlocked. In the spirit of the fiesta, I won' use summons until it become opened up through story progression. Same deal with thief; between spillover JP from guests and a brief stint or two in archer 3 of my 5 have thief unlocked but I won't start using it until its designated time.
Hit a random in Mandalia and with the funds from that fight, I bring my Chain Vest supply to three, pick up a Small Mantle, and raise my Potion stack to 30 and Phoenix Down to 8. Game throws another random at Lenalia but I reload until I can skip it as Dark Matter's level is getting worryingly high at 10. Teach Weapon Break to Tiro Finale' and Cross Blaze before challenging the next fight.
Windmill Shed - 4 resets
Delita is a monk with Guts and Equip Armor. That means I don't have any recovery. So I do something that's rare for me and give one of my knights Item. Meteor Swarm is the designated item monkey. As a Sagatarius, she's less attractive of a target to Wiegraf. other two are the Capricorn and Taurus for good compat Weapon Break attempts. The start of the fight will always open with Delita walking forward and chucking a rock at Boco. Wiegraf will step back and Stasis Sword Delita. Boco and the two monks will pound on him but with his high HP, he can weather the assault. I gave him Counter Tackle for some extra damage too. Rock plus Counter Tackle should bring Boco low enough to kill; if it doesn't I'm going to have issues controlling the fight. Ideal opening is Ramza taking out Boco with an attack and the other male and one female putting the hurt on the close monk. Delita is generally in critical after the enemies' first set of turns so he'll attack anyone within reach and retreat. It's not necessary to Potion him before he retreats as moving the item knight behind him and acting would leave two targets open for a Stasis Sword, which I'd rather avoid doing. On his second turn, Wiegraf will come forward and Crush Punch Ramza and he's now within reach for a Weapon Break attempt from the side.
First go - Crush Punch instakills Dark Matter. Uh oh. And the first Weapon Break misses. Not surprising at 38% but still not good controlling the battle. I goof up with the Item knight's timing too While I play it out for another round and do break Wiegraf's sword next round, Delita got himself killed. With I'm willing to expend one Phoenix Down, two is more than I'm willing to absorb and I give up.
Attempt #2: Stasis Sword Stops Delita. This is bad because Boco will attack from his front rather than the side, which prevents me from landing a round one kill. I misplay and though a Potion would save him but it's not enough. Wiegraf Split Punches him and retreats and the generics finish him off. More significantly, Wiegraf is out of swinging range. Reset.
Attempt #3: Delita dies to the opening assault no thanks to a high damage critical. This won't do; I want him alive long enough for more than one action. Reset.
Attempt #4: Stasis Sword lands Stop. Can see where this is going. Rest.
Next attempt, no Stop, Delita lives through the opening moves, and Boco dies as planned. Delita finishes off a weakened monk and retreats. Just as I planned. Crush Punch on Dark Matter, no instakill. Connect with the very first Weapon Break which is fantastic. I do much better about keeping Delita alive after giving him his first Potion and he helps out finishing off the support. Tossed Delita a second Potion to incline him to Wish a weakened Dark Matter. A third Potion and he's pretty much set for the rest of the fight without further intervention. Stack a Power Break on Wiegraf as well; now he can only punch for 6. Or Potion himself since I forgot to check his secondary. This makes taking him down a slow process, especially when I mess up positioning such that he retreats along the back where only one member of this melee focused party could reach him at once. Thankfully for me, he is able to jump out of the corner he retreated to onto more open ground where ganging up on him is possible. Delita turns up around 70 JP short for Move-Hp up. Not that I was expecting him to reach it starting from 115 at 11 or 13 JP a pop but he sure put in a valiant effort. Dark Matter learns Head Break off the knight crystal. I wasn't intending to farm but it dragged out so long the generics passed on anyways.
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FFT fiesta: (knight, thief, summoner, calculator, Mustadio)
Thief is not opened up for my party to use freely. Gear up the remaining two units who haven't unlocked it and knock it off in one battle. I do play out an additional random to get some thief JP going though I don't drag out the fight to do so. My units are dabbling in non-fiesta classes too so after these fights, Tiro Finale' has enough squire JP for Move +1 and Cross Blaze spent one fight as a weaponless priest (his fists do the same damage as 3 WP staff) and has Oracle unlocked. Dark Matter's level is also disturbingly high at 12.
Fort Zekaden - 0 resets
I'm not counting the reset where I forgot to give Delita a sword. Or the one where I forgot to set Move +1 on Tiro Finale'. Or the various attempts at manipulating things to prevent the Brave loss on Ramza. Or the stupidity that wouldn't have happened if I'd just played it out the first time.
Delita is a Squire with Item and Equip Armor and the Small Mantle. The males are Knights with Basic Skill and start in squad 1. Females are Thieves in squad 2. The higher HP one gets Item. Both have Steal Heart learned.
I could not manipulate Algus to go where I wanted; he always went to lower ground where Delita would walk forward and attack from the front on his first turn. I advance the thieves as far forward as I can without leaving them in wizard range. One wizard will always target Dark Matter with a spell except for the rare occasion she goes after Delita. Dark Matter goes to whack her midcharge, hopefully taking her out. Or at least low enough to where a rock from the other knight will finish the job.
After the first round of shuffling, the thieves go and are close enough to start attempting Charms on the knights. I'd predicted they'd be irrelevant to the fight but turns out that as bad as I'm inclined to think Steal Heart is, it's not so awful when they're being stacked. Charming various knights actually proves quite helpful in keeping them off my back. (and Delita's) My knights mostly want to target Algus though the other wizard is a higher priority to eliminate.
To my disappointment, Algus tends to live to his third turn and Dark Matter loses his Brave bonus from Mandalia. No thanks to Auto-Potion working just when he needs it though even without it, my knights don't get very many chances to swing at him. Eventually, I give up on Brave retention and just play things out. I'm landing enough Charms to keep Algus' knights from doing much to me. Delita is generally staying alive through the fight. Head Break on Dark Matter is relevant if Auto-Potion is going too crazy. Though the attempt I kept, Auto-Potion only worked once on three hits so after two swings from Delita and one from Cross Blaze, Algus has low enough HP that another 56 damage swing from Cross Blaze ends things before any enemy unit crystalizes.
I forgot to try piling Speed Break on Algus to delay his third turn. Though since I get my first attempt after his second, somehow doubt it would be enough.
Chapter end random stats
HiLevel: Still 12 somehow.
Job Levels: Everyone has job level 8 in knight except Trio Finale' who is lagging at 5. Thief job levels are mostly 2 though one or two do tick over to 3 during Zekaden.
Skills report: All units have Power Break, the Taurus and Capricorn have Weapon Break. Those were the only breaks used all chapter though Head Break had relevance. Yeah, got all the Knight JP I'll ever need and can probably stop using JP up on knights after this. Haven't picked up Weapon Guard for anyone yet even though they can easily afford it now though sub 10% W. Evade isn't going to count for much. Only Thief skill learned is Steal Heart on the two females at Zekaden.
Welcome the wonder trio. If nothing else, for free gear though I do plan on having them field random if my main team is out on propositions. Set up the guests with Battle Boots and Item. Agrias does start with Hi-Potion, could be useful at some point. Only other change is shifting to 3 knights and 1 thief for the upcoming fight. Maybe I gave Item to someone for Phoenix Down, already forgot.
Dorter 2 - 0 resets
Favoring knights here to fish for juicy midcharge damage. I move the thief to bait the archers while staying out of wizard range. Enemies do oblige with one archer coming forth and dying midcharge. Thieves do show up with Steal Heart but all that does is divert a turn from my squad to bonk someone out of it with a rock when it hits. Wizards don't live long enough to get a second spell off and with them gone, what remaining enemies there are don't have enough damage output to threaten my life. Fight off Charm and finish them off.
Pick up some light armor in Dorter; the Headgears are quite welcome for thieves. I get three. Then it's off to Igros for knight armor upgrades. Two of each will do. Shields last of which I settle with two. I actually have enough cash to afford all this without extra grinding. Did get two randoms on the way to Igros but didn't have to go out of the way to raise money.
Araguay - 1 reset
Astounding, a failure. Black Goblin corners Boco and kills him in two attacks and a counter, not helped by Boco missing his attack which would have done enough for my team to finish it off. This is in spite of landing a Charm on the black goblin before it can act, a counter knocked it off.
Anyways, my team is three thieves and one knight as I'm hungry for thief JP. Knight has Secret Hunt just because and more knight JP isn't going to be productive. Boco doesn't die so guests can dominate.
Strip Gafgarion's weapon, shield, and accessory. Agrias is around 30 JP short of Move +1, too bad.
Zirekile Falls - 0 resets
Joke fight. Went with the three thieves and Dark Matter as the knight. Between guests, landing random Charms, and the non-standard AI settings of the enemies, barely saw any attacks directed at my team. The knight using Water Ball on my team could have caused some mischief but no frog procs occurred before Agrias helped my party take him down. Could have made it even more of a joke if I'd stripped Gafgarion naked and no secondary to spam Hi-Potions but whatever, more JP.
Tiro Finale finally has the squire JP for Counter Tackle.
Backtrack for the shops. Triangle Hats do matter on thieves that will be focusing on Steal Heart. Platina Daggers make thieves suck slightly less; I settle for three. Coral Swords are handy for better knight damage and Agrias likes the damage increase too. I make a judgment call to pick up 4. Also update my heavy armor stock. I did do the proposition in Dorter on the way over so that at least one member would have enough Summoner JP for Ramuh right away. Good thing as the cash from the prop made the difference in being able to afford everything I wanted to purchase. I also pick up 10 more Hi-Potions just as a precaution though I don't expect Agrias to use the all up.
Why yes, I do have three units with summoner unlocked already. Gonna be doing it at some point anyways so got it done early on the three who have spells from crystals already during the various randoms I run into. I let the wonder trio of Rad, Alicia, Lavian handle one random with two chocobos. As I expected, they struggle. With a team that struggles with damage output, chocobos might as well be hellspawn. Whatever, did this to myself. Make my way back to Zeland.
Zeland - 1 reset
I go with three thieves and knight Dark Matter again, having decided that the 4 Jump thieves are better suited to this map. One thief is set up with Equip Armor and Item for emergency restoration while the others keep JP up. Choose to save Mustadio. He goes right and shoots a wizard. Thieves open with a bunch of Steal Hearts, charming the close knight and a wizard. Funny moment where the charmed knight dodges two attacks intended to uncharm him. Knight whacks the uncharmed wizard. That wizard locks a spell on two thieves; other wizard targets a spell to hit himself and the other wizard. Both die when it goes off. Even with the wizards out of play, Musty still manages to be stupid and put himself in range of both knights. They and an archer gang up on him. Even if he could have lived if the critical hadn't occurred, he'd still be doomed as the knights had him cornered. Game Over.
Next go-around, I get a best compat Steal Heart on a Wizard. Mwahaha. Land a charm on the close knight too. Last thief beans the uncharmed wizard with a rock as that lets my thieves spread out better. Charmed wizard goes for spell on both, like last time but the uncharmed wizard dodges the fatal attack. Too bad. This prompts Mustadio to put a bullet in his skull, leaving him low enough for my thieves to finish off. Recharm one wizard while the other two make sure the other is all the way down.
Next round, other knight beans the charmed wizard with a rock. Uh oh. He blasts the best compat thief with a Bolt 2. Hurt like hell but thankfully no kill. Potion time since Mustadio goes to shoot wizard and I don't trust Agrias to heal in time. One more knife stab takes the second wizard down.
Most of my offense in taking down the remaining four enemies is Charming knights and Mustadio gunshots. At least until Agrias and Dark Matter can finally get to work. Three thieves was definitely the right call since knight takes 3-4 turns before being able to reach anyone to strike. Things get slowed down even more when Agrias gets her sword broken, first time I've ever seen that succeed on her. She mostly spends the rest of the fight giving out Hi-Potions to low HP thieves. Might as well since 8 damage punches aren't doing much. One archer was down by this point and by keeping Charm on one knight at a time, enemy damage is kept in check until I can finally wear them all down. Got a Wizard Robe drop, which definitely appeals to me even if the current party has no use for it.
In a normal game, I'd be ecstatic to hike all the way back to Igros to replace the broken sword and get some training time in for my party. In this case, I'm less enthused about the idea as the highest leveled unit (14) feels worryingly high and I don't want the enemy levels getting more bloated just yet. Thankfully, my earlier choice to buy a 4th sword paid off and backtracking to ensure a fully equipped team is fully optional. Also arrived in time for the Zeland fight proposition but I don't feel I have enough second stringers to handle randoms while I have party members on a job. So I pass on doing it for the time being.
Baraius Hill - 1 reset
Only one? Well that's because I can lean on Item. Without it, like say under stricter rules, this would be much more of a nightmare.
First try, I use three thieves (they're better as setting midcharge hits on summoners). Open up with a Charm offensive, getting a knight and archer. The other knight and archer knock them out of it, resulting in my units taking hits. Summoner on Mustadio's side blasts him, other summoner has Time Magic and Hastes a knight and archer. Hasted archer picks off Mustadio before he can get a second turn. Uh oh, this looks bad. While I do manage to off one summoner before it finishes casting a second summon, the other generics manage to down a thief in the meantime. The other JP up thief bites it later on and me only inflicting one additional casualty. Not helping that my future Steal Heart attempts all miss. With three corpses on my side and a Phoenix Down already used (with the revived trying to land a turnaround Charm before an archer puts her back down), I decide the situation is unsalvageable even if I was willing to spend the items and hang up that attempt.
Next try, I run two knights and two thieves. Plan on the first round is to bait an archer into coming forward and chopping him up with the knights midcharge. Land a Charm on the closer knight again. Though the other knights whacks him out of it first and he goes and break the helmet of my Equip Armor thief. Yuck. One archer goes after Mustadio; other takes my bait and comes forward to charge something on my other thief. Knights take him out as planned.
Downside is that a summoner blasts three people with a summon. And she has best compat with Dark Matter resulting in nearly 150 HP of pain on him. Mustadio shoots summoner again: Equip Armor thief Move/Waits to set up a midcharge kill on that summoner. Other thief does land a charm on a knight. Enemies do their thing with the Archer charging something on Mustadio. I decide to have a knight send him over the cliff but it takes both of them to do it. Which leads to the other summoner landing a double kill. Ouch. And my armor thief is low since she was needed to kill a summoner. Desperation rock from the other thief sends the summoner off the cliff, though she survives in critical. Armor thief uses Potions to get out of oneshot range or Phoenix Down on an ally knight, depending on which I feel is more important. Living summoner Moogles herself out of critical. I really wanted Agrias to go after her but Agrias goes after the weakened archer first, (forgot he was still alive down there) and then goes for a killshot on a weakened knight, leaving me to scramble about desperately attempting to neutralize the summoner. A rezzed knight and a thief can't quite get enough damage in and my knight is sent back into the dirt before the thief can finally bait her into a summon and landing a killshot midcharge. Meanwhile, Mustadio goes down to a knight critical. I've rezzed my other knight at this point and between that one and Agrias (thieves diverted grabbing chests from archers) end the battle before my other knight crystalizes. Yeah I won but it was ugly with two Phoenix Down needed to make it and someone on the ground when it ended. maybe I could have done better if I'd gone for Equip Shield instead of trying to squeeze out more JP with JP up on non-armor thief and set Weapon Guard on the thieves. Ironically, this winning attempt had the low HP thief as my only unit at full health at the end, having never taken a hit. So maybe not; I don't know.
With two guests departing, my team has access to summons. And their levels are at the point where summoner has equal Speed with average Speed classes. Score. I have three units with summoner ready to go so it's just getting the last two through wizard and time mage. Buy a bit of knight gear in Lionel before backtracking to Zeland. Which is mildly annoying as I have only two Wizard Robes for casters but I just had to make do for one fight. The magic-less units I teach Bolt which suffices to get them through the class unlock grind without the hassle of having skill-less casters. Grab a third Wizard Robe at Zeland as well as bringing my Rainbow Staff count up to 3. Go for three sets of light armor as well. One more fight for the last straggler to finish up Time Mage and everyone has summoner unlocked.
I suppose a sane player would do some summoner grinding to at least have an attack summon on all 5 units. I am not sane and choose to move on without further training.
Zigolas - 0 resets
Mustadio has Seal Evil, was the outcome ever really in doubt? I went with one knight, two thieves, two summoners. My male summoner only has Moogle learned, the one female summoner had just enough for only Ramuh. Knight, a thief, and the female Summoner also have Secret Hunt. Mustadio made statues, I pull out a few Steal Hearts now and then and poach a few undead. No pig, I got a Floatiball instead and chose not to reroll. Moogle summoner is on heal duty. Ramuh didn't come into play with enemies so spread out and Mustadio making statues.
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LFT Fiesta (Wizard, Time Mage, Mediator, Samurai, Thief):
At the beginning of November I started a Fiesta run of LFT. I haven't been spending as much time with it as I intended and so blew past the one month deadline, but I'll see it through eventually. At any point, all party members must be in one of the five jobs or on the way to them, and each job must have someone in it once that's possible - so, no bringing over abilities from prerequisite classes. It's like the Double Dare challenge in fives.
Chapter 1 and early Chapter 2 were not much trouble. The windmill and Dorter 2 were the only maps to take more than one reset out of me; otherwise, it was smooth sailing and light record-keeping until I reached Zaland and, intimidated my my memories of Bolt 3 Wizards, put it off for a couple of weeks.
Zaland Fort City - 1 reset
First mistake was not putting Spike Shoes on my Time Mage Kambei. I had hoped the Rainbow Staff's +1 Jump would be enough, but no, he couldn't scale the cliff and had to haste Agrias and Ramza but not himself. Mustadio ran to the roof and shot a Wizard for about 55% health, and Agrias saved us bigtime by proccing Stop on a Stasis Sword on a Wizard who was charging a nasty Fire 4 on the main squad.
Still had a Ramuh and a Cure 4 to contend with though, this map's enemies are as scary as ever. Ramza ran up and charmed the Stopped Wizard, only for Mustadio and Agrias to down her anyway. Soon afterward Ramza and my Thief (taking advantage of Best affinity) landed Steal Heart on both the Oracles (one of whom had been charging Raise 2 on the dead Wizard!) so things were looking up, but one of the Knights had Throw Item and X-Potions and stalled us long enough for the Two Hands Oracle to recover from Charm and start OHKOing people. Our Thief crystallized shortly before we could kill the last enemy left.
Round 2, we had enough Spike Shoes to go around and things immediately went off to a better start. Gorobei the Thief ate a Shiva up on the wall but was able to kill a Wizard and charm the Two Hands Oracle into killing the other one. Time Mage Kambei Bolt 2'd the Knights only for X-Potion man to heal the other...whose Distribute healed him to full as well! This brazen display of Distribute value could not go unanswered, and so Shino the Monk Insulted the potioneer Knight to put a stop to any funny business. Gorobei stole the deadly Oracle's Bamboo Pole which led to her spamming Confusion Song on the Knight, us and herself thanks to a redirect courtesy of Agrias, so the fight was trivial from then on. Shino Invited the Berserked, Confused Knight to finish the battle.
Bariaus Hill - 1 reset
First attempt, Elemental and a Lancer killed my Monk before we even got a turn. Second attempt with better PBF positioning went incomparably better: Ramza now in Samurai oneshot a Summoner midcharge, the Geomancers charged forward and got cleaned up quickly, and Agrias got a Crush Punch death proc too, making this the shortest battle of the run so far, and that's counting randoms.
Zigolis Swamp - none
Fire 3, even in the rain, is more than enough to oneshot things. Mustadio nails a Seal Evil on his first turn which helps too.
Goug Machine City - 1 reset
First attempt, Arm Aim-less Mustadio did chip damage before dying instantly, Ramza got hit with a nasty Ifrit, and the enemy Archers cleaned us up. I then went back to my alternate save to teach Mustadio Arm Aim. This time, one of the Archers moved aggressively along the bottom and fell prey to a Fire 3, and with better positioning on our part the Summoners couldn't charge up troublesome spells immediately. With the help of Mimic Daravon I was able to clump up them and the Thieves in the center, where all four were killed by a marvelous Asura Draw Out (I think one was due to a Death proc but still). The rest was easy, and I was able to stall for crystals, leading to my Wizard learning a grab-bag of lower level Black and Time magic.
Bariaus Valley - 1 reset
Agrias got ganged up on by the Knights and died to a critical sword hit, but my PBF had a lot to improve too and I was able to get the second squad in play much sooner on the second go. Ramza got hit with Death Sentence and died, but that was my only casualty; Asura Draw Out from my Mediator did a lot of work on this map as well. After the map I realized my Time Mage had gone into the battle with nothing equipped on both attempts. Oops!
Golgorand Execution Site - like 10 resets
This one needed me to try several approaches to see which one worked, and a little luck in the first couple turns. I eventually learned that it was critical to A) take out the Time Mages early or they'd cause headaches and B) avoid any of my people dying early on, as with so many enemies to kill they'd surely crystallize before I could close out the map. The strat I eventually hit on was to put my own Time Mage with my Wizard in the second group and, between the two of them, Fire3/Fire4 the Time Mages and nearby Archer to death. Meanwhile the main group disabled the near two Knights with Mimic Daravon while Ramza runs forward and steals Gaff's Blood Sword, catching a Haste2 meant for him in the process. That limits him to Charged punches which are manageable, although on the successful attempt he ended up running into Ramza's Meatbone Slash shortly thereafter and exiting early.
The Yin Yang Archer goes pretty crazy with Confusion Song and tags my Mediator with it, but nothing too disastrous happens as a result and we're able to get across the finish line with only the Wizard hitting the dirt. It sure took a lot of failures to reach this point, though. Notable was Attempt #4: Time Mages charged Slow and Stop on Kambei from opposite sides, so he put Reflect on himself. Result - the Time Mages Slowed and Stopped each other! I really wanted that run to be the one, but things didn't work out with my old setup. I had the Knight with him then, and that just lead to the enemy focusing down Kambei before I could make much headway.
Gate of Lionel Castle - 1 reset
Went in without Rubber Boots, Steal Heart luck was not with me, RIP. Next time went well - Ramza was able to duel Gafgarion thanks to Reraise from Koutetsu, and boosted Fire 3/4 still rocks. Got a Steal Heart on the Summoner before he could Silf us.
Inside of Lionel Castle - 0 resets
Got a bit lucky here. PBF, put everyone in the corners. Queklain opened with Bio 2 and Petrified my Time Mage, but my Thief had good compat with a Knight and Charmed him, so I kept going. Not sure what Draclau's bodyguards are in universe, but at least they're susceptible to the stirrings of love. Ramza had unlocked Murasame and mostly kept people topped up with that while my Wizard and Thief beat down Queklain. Mediator got a clutch Persuade in, might have lost otherwise. His only other move was a Bio 3 that didn't kill anyone.
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Baldur's Gate 3 - At the end of Act 1 now. I wanna be Level 5! Truly this game captures the all-important D&D feel of obsessing over how cool the next level will be and wondering why the cruel DM hasn't let me level up to reach it yet. Floor-based damage is still bad.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - Hard Mode. I guess this is for people who spam items or are really good; I'm certainly not the former and am still working on the latter. The first boss was crazy hard and the second wasn't much better, but since then it's settled into a more reasonable feel for the game, i.e. harder than Normal but in general by greater skill with the game can close the gap. Plenty of resets on Bloodless, Alfred (who got a substantial buff), and the sorcery lab -> fire cave sequence. Stuff I've gained appreciation for: Welcome Company, some directional shards (True Arrow early, Bolide Blast more recently), MP regen food, guns (mostly they just wrecked Craftwork after I thought he'd be a third consecutive hellish earlygame boss). Just got Invert.
Fire Emblem Fates - Beat Lunatic Conquest. This is the second time I've done this, and the first I've done it without losing a lot of people on the final map.
So the thing to understand is that the final map is silly. Probably overtuned, certainly overtuned when considering you have to do another (admittedly relatively short/easy) map before it without saving between. So using the knowledge of "Rescue and Pass lets you set up a quick kill" and "Samurai talent lets Corrin stack Life and Death with Swordfaire on the Yato which ignores half the final boss's damage reduction" I came up with a plan to one-round the final boss. (You need 78 attack and to double. 4 from Rally Strength, 15 from the aforementioned skills, 7 from Wyvern Gunter pairup, 2 from tonics, 19 from Yato and A swords yields a reasonable 31 str, and I additionally had Outdoor Fighter. There are other details like needing enough bulk to survive a Vengeance proc and reaching 29 speed before rally+tonic). Further to this strategy I captured both the rally dude in Takumi's map and a Falconknight with Pass in Hinoka's to use Rescue.
Final map aside (which tbh is a bit silly, if satisfying), the rest of the game is just generally super fun. Every map is recognizable from Hard with the same enemy stats, but a couple key improvements (extra reinforcements or new enemy skills) increase the amount of attention you need to pay. I was constantly sitting there planning out turns.
Notable units:
-Corrin was +Str/-Skl. Default class until 20/5, then Swordmaster until 15, then Master of Arms and finally Paladin. Kinda all about the final boss kill. Overall not too notable a unit before then, solid offence but a bit squishy.
-Effie was definitely the MVP of the (pre-Camilla) earlygame and remained real good thereafter. I went General for Wary Fighter but she did well on speed so perhaps I shouldn't have bothered (I forgot to set it on maps where it'd be useful again late i.e. Ryoma's map, oops). Then Great Knight. Outstanding str and def.
-Niles was vanilla Bow Knight. Was usually paired with Camilla since she gives him str and he gives her speed, relationship goals there. Niles could one-round frailer enemies (notably including ninjas, eventually getting Shruikenbreaker), was mobile and evasive. Lots to like.
-Camilla was a staple as always, I did Malig until 11 when I went over to Berserker, back to Malig for Trample at 16 then back to Berserker again. Could kill everything forever, and her defence was, though not as good as Effie/Xander, still good enough to frontline.
-Soleil (Laslow+Peri) went Master Ninja and had great 1-2 offence one-rounding all but the physically bulkiest enemies basically, particularly good against mages due to res and ninjas. Permanent +2 str/def/res from lesbian powers is certainly welcome.
-Xander was his usual tanky self. Charlotte supported him but could also do some decent fighting of her own, like Camilla with roughly 15 less def/res. Nina (Camilla+Niles) provided lategame utility and decent offence with the Shining Bow (had Trample from her mom). Percy (Arthur+Effie) was mostly a rallybot and anticrit aura, but he did some key tanking in Iago's map because he had really high def and wasn't weak to beastslayer or armourslayer. Jakob, Elise, and Dwyer did usual staff-and-aura stuff. Peri was a generically competent combat unit, if not as good as her daughter. Azura danced and made Ryoma's map bearable.
-Only deaths were Odin and Silas who both fell on the last turns of Chapter 10. That map is evil.
-The freeze staff rules. Rescue too but they limit that for good reason.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Started yet another goofy random run.
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FFT fiesta (knight, thief, summoner, calculator, Mustadio)
Teach the designated knight for the next fight Speed Break. As well as pick up at least one summon for summoners: Ramuh if enough JP, Moogle if not enough for Ramuh.
Goug - 0 resets
End up running one knight, one thief, three summoners. One summoner only has Moogle, one only has Ramuh, the third has both. Item on the summoner with both.
My thief gets the first turn. Runs up and chucks a rock at the slower enemy summoner. Mustadio Leg Aims a thief. Enemy thieves go after Mustadio: one stabs, the other lines up a Charge +2. One summoner goes, just moves. Archers calculate that Mustadio is doomed and go after my team. Complicating matters is that one has Steal Heart and charms my thief. My team's turns. Dark Matter moves forth and locks a Ramuh on the slow summoner. Thankfully, Zodiacs and Faith work out to ensure a kill; contrary to popular belief, lightning magic is not boosted on this map. Knight knocks the thief out of charm. One summoner is able to get close enough to Ramuh the two enemy thieves. Other tosses a Moogle on Mustadio for comedy. Ramuh goes off, failing to break 100 on either thief.
In an unusual twist, Mustadio is still alive at the end of round one. My thief goes for a killing stab on a thief, guarded by Small Mantle. Mustadio Leg Aims the other thief and retreats towards my party. Enemy thieves attempt a Steal Armor (misses) and a knife stab on mine. Living summoner blasts Mustadio and three of my team with a Shiva. Dammit, hoped he only had Moogle as he has only job Lv 2 in summoner. Why he didn't attempt it on my thief earlier who can say, maybe MP. I was kind of hoping Musty would still be around to draw the archers after him. Dark Matter gets charmed and locks a Ramuh on my thief. Yikes. Knight bops him back to his senses with a rock. One summoner goes after a thief with her staff, can't quite kill. (this proves unnecessary) Other Moogles the team. Ramuh goes off, enemy thieves die.
Next round starts of with my thief stabbing the summoner. He goes for another Shiva but this time, I bash his face in with midcharge whacks. Next objective is to remove the Steal Heart summoner. Then I stall for crystals from the summoners and thieves. Knight applies Speed Breaks to the last archer while waiting Dark Matter goes for Steal Heart to further keep her neutralized (the other male hasn't learned it yet). Both thieves drop boxes but one summoner does leave a crystal which goes to Tiro Finale'. Free Moogle, yay. And some starter magic for the calculator unlock grind later. Finish off the last archer and claim.
Blooper moment, I Ramuhed the wrong archer when it was just the two of them. Lost track of which was which and forgot to check skillsets.
Not much to do except switch jobs around for the next fight.
Baraius Valley - 1 reset
Two thieves, two summoners, one knight. Thief, knight, summoner for squad one. Summoner and thief on squad 2.
Having thief Dark Matter run up an toss a rock at the wizard was not the play. Knocking him back means Agrias can no longer open with Stasis Sword on two. Bolt from the wizard and a Bolt 2 proc from the Lightning Bow archer drop him. And my only Phoenix Down unit is in squad 2. They have a smoother opening oneshotting the wizard with Ramuh and putting the archer in critical but aren't able to make it over before Dark Matter crystalizes. And all my Steal Heart attempts fail, for added insult. Game Over.
Finally make the decision to stop being so frugal and set up Dark Matter with Equip Shield and also giving the summoner in squad 1 Weapon Guard to hopefully ward off early deaths. This time, I position Dark Matter further back on his first turn to draw the wizard forward. Stop from Stasis Sword is also a good opening though. Squad 1 summoner also gets a 90% Steal Heart on one of the knights, which she merrily abuses. Other knight does whack him out of it but it does divert his turn and my knight was body blocking the other knight from reaching the summoner so she's safe from retaliatory sword swing. In the meantime, Dark Matter stabbed the wizard dead.
On the other side, it was slower. Ramuh doesn't kill either generic but a move/wait from the thief on her second turn for CT manipulation let her deliver a midcharge stab for a kill on the wizard. The archer also had worst compat with the summoner so it took longer to beat her down. Charming the archer was a big help in staying in control of the situation on squad 1's side. I also have the knight try to break her bow once the enemy knights have been dealt with while waiting for wizard crystals. Game obliges and my 5th unit gets a mage crystal, ensuring she'll have something to calculate way down the line.
Back to Warjias for some shopping. Thieves get slightly better body armor but it's the Wizard Staff that makes the detour a worthy one. Also up my Gold shield count to 4 in preparation for Golgrond. Get into a random on the way back, which I take for the welcome chance at extra summoner and thief JP. Ramuh > Mindflares and while I'm chasing down a few stragglers to Secret Hunt, get an archer crystal that gives up Charge +10. Which is amusing despite that this group will never be using it along with a Jump +1. After this, Dark Matter has enough knight JP to master the class.
Golgarond - 0 resets
Was dreading this battle prior to playing it as it presents a number of issues for my job limited squad.
Issue #1: I want that Blood Sword. Which rules out nuking Gaf out of the gate. This also means I want someone with Steal Weapon. It's for this that I still haven't taught anyone Move +2 and been hoarding thief JP. Tiro Finale' gets to do the honors of swiping that sword.
Issue #2: Gaf sticking around means my team will be eating a lot of Night Swords. And he'll get frequent doubleturns on my 6 Speed knights and summoners. This is hazardous when combined with the other enemies. So Cross Blaze, also having good compat with Gaf, is the designated Knight. I make sure he has Power Break and Speed Break learned. And because knight JP is so plentiful, I go ahead and teach Shield Break. Landing a Power Break early will greatly reduce Gaf's ability to kill someone.
Issue #3: I'm outnumbered 8 to 5. So it's very unlikely I can solve my problems by throwing Ramuh at them until they stop moving as my casters will likely run out of gas first. And with all the enemies around dishing out damage, going to need to reserve some of that MP for healing. So gotta be selective about when to drop those attack summons.
Issue #4: Time mages. They can ruin things by creating a highly unfavorable turn split at a key time. My whole team has high Faith too so those Slows will hit quite often.
Issue #5: Thieves suck at dealing direct damage.
To give myself the best chance I believe I could get, I set up my team as follows.
Dark Matter is an Equip Armor thief with Item for emergency revival and Potions if I feel they'll save someone from death as well as being the team member who can charm the female enemies. I even take the speed hit for the extra HP of a helmet for AI manipulation. Thus, raising my chances that the emergency reviver will be upright if the need arises.
Tiro Fianle' is the designated weapon thief with Basic Skill secondary. Much as I want to scrape up more JP, I choose survivability and give her Equip Shield and a Gold Shield for better evasiion.
Cross Blaze is a knight, for reasons already mentioned. Sticks with Basic Skill. Has Equip Change since i don't need knight JP.
Other two are summoners and I give them Steal so they can charm knights if I feel that's the play. With their caster MA, they have better success percentages. Both have Ramuh and Moogle learned. Set them up with Weapon Guard and Equip Shield with Gold Shields to increase their survivability.
Knight and Michelle, the generic Aquarius summoner go to squad one leaving other thief and Sagatarius summoner for team 2.
Gaf goes after Michelle and gets a critical for 72. Crossbow archer goes after other summoner, guarded. My thieves are next. I do not go for the Blood Sword straight away; have other matters I deem more important. Attempt to charm the knight on the gate, fail. Move her towards squad 1. Dark Matter goes for a charm on the nearby time mage, success. Enemies turn. Knights on ground can't reach anyone to hit and shuffle around. Knight on gate whacks the charmed time mage. That time mage goes for a Fire 2 on Tiro Finale' Ice bow archer shoots at someone. Other time mage locks a slow on to Meteor Storm. I redirect to the crossbow archer. One summoner locks a Ramuh onto the knight and injured time mage on the gate; other summoner Moogles the one hurt by Night Sword. My knight goes to Gafgarion's back and attempts 70% Power Break. Success; things are turning my way. Does leave him within range of two knights but he's got enough durability to live through one round with them. Slow resolves, hitting both my summoner and crossbow archer. Ramuh goes off before Fire 2, offing the time mage and sending the knight into critical.
Next round sees Gaf Night Swording for a more manageable 24 and the crossbow archer shoots at a summoner but is blocked by shield. My thieves go for some Steal Heart; one misses but I land one on a knight. Uncharmed knight ignores his buddy to break my knight's Cross Helm. Well damn, guess I'm hiking back to Igros then. Charmed knight whacks his ally and Counter Tackle returns him to his senses. Time Mage Hastes the Slowed archer. Ice Bow archer shoots at someone to inconsequential effect. I risk a Ramuh with my non-slowed summoner on the knights. My knight runs away and tosses a rock to little effect as he can't reach anyone to swing. Ramuh puts down both knights and the threat of sustaining heavy damage on the ground is removed.
Only on my team's third round of turns do I feel it's prime time to attempt to steal the Blood Sword. First 47% attempt succeeds and once Tiro Finale' scales the gate and stabs the knight in the corner dead, it's onto the home stretch. I do make a goof with Dark Matter; should have charmed the Hasted, best compat archer rather than the other two generics. I still go on to win but better target prioritization would have made things more decisive. Steal Heart does lots of work; nearly every generic ends up charmed at some point in the fight. Equip Shield was absolutely worth losing out on JP up given how many physical attacks got sent my way.
Other highlights:
Equip Changing the Blood Sword on and later whacking Gaf with it is so gratifying.
Gaf pulling out a Magic Break on a summoner. Never seen that happen before. Wasn't a midcharge shot either; it's the most proactive I've seen the AI get about attacking MP. I was a bit scared for the summoners' MP but he never made another attempt, sticking to 3 PA fists. It was enough to shut out Ramuh on the unlucky victim, which did mean I had to resort to physical violence on the remaining enemies.
Charming the Ice Bow archer and she helps shoots down Gaf. I momentarily thought the battle was over then the game reminds me, oh yeah got to kill her too. Every other enemy crystalized before I could finish so that archer is the sole witness to pass on the account of what happened.
Hike to Igros dealing with randoms along the way. Sometimes I have the main party tear through them with Ramuh while some I let the second stringer squad consisting of Rad, Alicia, Lavian, Mustadio, Agrias, and the chocobos handle them. Helps get Mustadio more JP for his eventual addition. I'd prepared a unit to swipe a Judo Outfit if I ran into the overleveled archer entering Araguay from Zirekile but didn't get that formation. Buy three Cross Helm then stop and save in Dorter and see I have sufficient quantities of Potions and Phoenix Downs. Going to make a short stop in Araguay to do some hunting. Set Secret Hunt on most of the squad (even summoners) and set out.
I'm looking for the enemy composition that include both a Trent and a Gust. Goal is to Secret Hunt both; other monsters don't matter. Dark Matter reaches Lv 18, which is desirable for my intended Lionel strategy. Game also throws another random as Baraius Hill, which I welcome for some extra summoner and thief JP.
Lionel gate - 0 resets
Dark Matter is a knight with Item. Relevant Breaks are Power, Shield, and Speed in that order of priority. Also taught and set Move +2, the first time I've bothered to use it so far. Though the Blood Sword is the main source of recovery; Potions are a backup plan. The Lv 18 Speed point is a big help for keeping up with Gaf.
For the others go with one female thief and three summoners. Thief has item; others stay with Steal. All use Equip Sheild.
I'd placed my thief for turn order priority in the PBF This happens to start her within Steal Heart range of an archer. Attempt a Steal Heart - success. She scoots over to the one corner that the summoner or any knights can reach on turn 1. Archer shoots a summoner and procs a Bolt 2. Knight hits archer out of Charm; other knights advance unable to reach anyone. Archer goes for a killing shot - guarded. I may have been able to recover even with a summoner down but this is far preferable. Enemy summoner cannot target anyone due to how I set up the PBF so just advances. My summoners' turn. One tosses a Moogle for the injured summoner the others attack. Two Ramuhs and summoner, archer, and a knight are down. Next round, two more Ramuhs and the other archer and a second knight are done. Opt to bash in the last one with physicals as my summoners are running dry on MP and Moogle can deal with any hits that get through my evasion. I notice I forgot to give some of my summoners shields. After all the trouble to give them Equip Shield, really? Play it out rather than start over.
On the other side of the gate, Move +2 and Battle Boots let Dark Matter reach Gaf on the very first turn. 40% Power Break lands first try which will be a big help in surviving. Future turns are either using regular attacks to recover from the constant Night Swords or attempting to break the shield. Gaf's shield does stop a number of my swings but not enough for him to wear Dark Matter down as 27 a shot isn't really able to make damage stick on someone who can parasitic heal for 64, even with a speed advantage. I do eventually open the gate to let the rest of the party in. They grab crystals and boxes before joining in the gamgbeating; oh hey free Magic Break. Also break the shield after about five tries. I do attempt to steal the sword for added humiliation but those all miss. Ganging up on Gaf is a bit tricky since I don't want to corner him and all my attacks are range 1. Got to watch the turn order to get the most swings. I do wear him down in the end though.
Inside Lionel - 0 resets
One knight with Speed Break, one thief. Both have Basic Skill to wake up sleepyheads. Others are summoners with Ramuh. Use the PBF that only lets Queklain hit two with Nightmare. Two Death Sentences, perfect. Thief chucks rock. Should have set Move +2 on knight as she'd be able to reach Queklain for melee/Speed Break. So has to resort to rock. Doesn't matter as three Ramuhs do enough damage to end the fight in a single round.
Chapter end statistics:
Hi Lv: 20
Job Lvs: 8 in Knight with one fully mastered. Except for Tiro Finale' who lags at 7. Thief job levels range from 5-7 depending on unit. Summoner job levels have most at 3-4 though I have one at 5 close to 6.
Skills report: Speed Break, Shield Break, Weapon Guard, Equip Armor, and Equip Shield see use this chapter for the first time. Steal Weapon gets used and one unit has learned Move +2. Male generic finally spends the 150 on Steal Heart. All units have Ramuh with only one trying to skimp on purchasing Moogle.
Not much to buy at the start of Chapter 3. A couple of Twist Headbands, Flame Shields, and higher WP swords are all my fiesta team will make use for. Check the fur shop, of all the times to get the rare Fairy Harp poach when I was aiming for an early Gold Staff. Didn't get the Main Gauche but that was the rare so to be expected. I do pick up two Musk Rods for the upcoming grind to unlock Calculator.
It's possible to get Air Knives now. It is a rare poach from a monster that only sometimes appears in one specific fight when entering Zigolas from Goug. Opted to not bother to try for it even once.
So story progress gets put on hold for a long while. I have 4 units with Oracle unlocked as I did spent a bit of time dipping in Priest in the previous two chapters. No one has trained in it though and wizard hasn't gotten attention other than what was necessary to unlock summoner. With Ramuh ending fights in so few actions, it takes a lot of battling to open up Calculator for the 5 fiesta units. Not helped by that I refused to buy additional Wizard Robe so was only training up three at a time with the other two mucking around in knight and thief. I do some propositions for some of the mage JP. Took around 15-20 fights to open up calculator on all five though if I add the battles the B team tackled during active propositions, the battle count comes closer to 30. Had a funny moment where I got two crystals from Oracles at Zirekile and they both granted the exact same ability list: Cure 2, Blind, Silence Song, and Invitation.
Stole two Judo Outfits during the process since my levels were high enough for them to appear in randoms. One from an archer: easy pickings once isolated and surrounded as he had no Basic Skill or Steal Heart. Other from a female monk, who hit pretty hard but could only go after one target at a time. And she was more determined to try for Secret Fist but the RNG kept saying "nope." My units didn't unlock calculator at the same time so I did get a little calc training in while working on the last ones. Not much though, not enough for Damage Split on anyone.
Goland - 0 resets
Two enemies have better knives than what shops carry and I am interested in stealing them. I'll settle for one though. I don't need more Judo Outfits or guns and don't care about early Germinas Boots enough. Tiro Finale' gets placed on thief duty having already learned Steal Weapon. I roll with two summoners here. Not counting the reset where I didn't obtain either of the knives; the Main Gauche thief had worst compat with mine so I gave up on trying and the mediator died before she could reach him due to a combo of Olan going after him and charmed Chemist. I was clearly winning when they dropped crystals with only a single disarmed chemist still alive on the enemy side.
Next try I steal the Main Gauche on the first attempt. As a bonus, didn't have someone get charmed right out, the thief instead Dashing Dark Matter. Olan is also cooperative going for Galaxy Stop most of the time. Knight help kill people I don't need alive or goes for breaks on those I do. Thief charms people when out of range for theft. Summoners support with Moogle, Ramuh, Steal Heart, or staff whacks depending on the situation. Calculator, heh. Looks for allies to feed Potions though if it's lucky, there will be an enemy around to poke. I got about three Steal Weapon attempts on the mediator, all failing. Then Olan kills him and I don't care enough to revive him to attempt again. One summoner gets silenced by mediator's Silence Song partway through. Oof, the one time Echo Grass would have mattered and my Item users don't have it. Same summoner got her Triangle Hat stolen 87 HP is precarious but most enemies were down or Galaxy Stopped so I didn't have any disasters because of it. Cross Blaze got a thief crystal gaining Steal Weapon and Steal Exp, the latter of which I'll probably forget I have. Mediator crystal gives Tiro Finale' (the only one on my team who could reach it) Silence Song, making three free Silence Songs on my team. Calc Dark Matter does scrape up enough actions to have the JP for Damage Split. It will be very rare that I bother to use any other reaction now that he has it.
With the Main Gauche in my possession, opens up a fun Thief combo. With Weapon Guard, Equip Shield, and a mantle, a thief becomes a dodgy little gnat. Cross Blaze got selected to be the thief in the next fight and he has the JP reserve to learn Steal Armor and Move +2. He would do more damage with fists but he's likely to be in the midst of heavy hitting knights so I valued the evasion more. I have plenty of spare Triangle Hats so don't need to replace the lost one.
Lenalia - 0 resets
I want that White Robe. Both because it's not buyable for another shop checkpoint and therefore a shiny and also because swiping it lets Ramuh do full damage on Zalmo and I can skimp on spending JP for Titan. I do hope that Zalmo doesn't have Raise 2 (or that it misses a few times) because I only have 3 casts of Ramuh on my summoners, which is my main killing tool. And Zalmo has more casts of Raise 2 on him than I have summons. Going with two summoners again on this map.
Not counting the reset where I end the fight with a crystal on the field because I misjudge distance. Was very clearly going to win, which was the issue as I wanted to pick up the crystal. Zalmo did have Raise 2 but several enemies crystalize anyway due to him being too far from them and therefore not a consideration to FFT AI. Also saw a few misses on Raise 2 attempts.
Next attempt, he doesn't have Raise 2 but does have Phoenix Down. This is far less of an issue for me as it has less range and it's less resource intensive to put the newly revived back into the dirt. Anyways, battle plan is fairly simple. Nuke groups with Ramuh and use a mix of physicals and Steal Heart to deal with single enemies. Steal that robe when I get a good shot and breaking that stick would be ideal. Had a cool moment where a knight weakened by Ramuh draws close. My Knight chops off 63 of his 64 remaining HP, leaving him at 1. Summoner could try to kill him but the calc's turn is coming up and I don't want to body block her. So instead I Steal Heart a 1 HP knight. Which in turn allows the calculator to walk through him and slug him in the back. For extra irony, this is the only action the knight connects; she would miss every other physical swing or break attempt for the rest of the fight. Monk in critical? Guarded by mantle. In part due to my knight's inability to hit anything, both monks were still alive (and charmed) when I had nicked the White Robe and was ready to go for the kill. They went down a time or two but Zalmo would pick them up with a Phoenix Down, then my units would miss their killshot, and he'd Cure them up on his next turn. Saw a couple of Secret Fist attempts from a monk but they all missed. Calculator gets to feel useful feeding a Potion to a summoner at a key moment and the next attack leaves summoner at 3 HP. Weapon Guard comes in at a clutch moment right after as Zalmo tries to poke her dead and guarded.
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The Picross block
Logiart Grimoire - Emil's Magic Training Parts 1 - 3 (Steam)
Extra puzzles for Logiart Grimoire. The gimmick is that Emil isn't great at designing picross puzzles (in artistic terms, not in coherency terms), so there's some novelty in that.
Similarly to the free additional puzzles which were added after the early access release, these don't directly play into the tech tree setup of the main puzzles. They are however set up in groups which simulate it in a basic sense. (e.g. one group has a puzzle depicting wool, another depicting a hand, and the final one depicting a glove.)
Since playing through the initially-released packs, two more packs (Parts 4 & 5) have been released, which I have not gotten to yet.
Pixel Puzzle Collection - replay (Android)
Got back up to 200%.
I had forgotten that once you've completed all of the regular puzzles in the run-ups to 100% & 200%, you're locked into having to complete any remaining boss puzzles and can't play random regular puzzles. (More of a problem for the first of these because before hitting 100%, every time you complete a boss puzzle you then have to wait a few hours before you can do another.) After hitting 100% I made an effort to include a lot more boss puzzles in the rotation but still ended up with only boss puzzles remaining somewhere around 190 - 195%.
Charm Studies (Android)
Short free VN with included picross puzzles that I picked up because it was by the BAD END THEATER developer. For quantification's sake, it includes 15 puzzles (and five of those are post-game).
Pleasant enough but there's not really a whole lot to it. Also the mechanics are set up to automatically flag errors which I'm not a fan of.
The non-Picross block
Ace Attorney Investigations Collection (Steam)
Replayed the first game before starting on the second as it'd been a long time since I originally played it. I've been rolling my eyes at complaints about the final sequence being too long for years - but on replay, it turns out it really is much longer than I was remembering. (More specifically there is much more remaining after Alba's diplomatic immunity is revoked than I remembered.)
I never got around to playing the fan translation of the second game so it was pretty great to get a chance to play through it. It does a very good job of tying everything together. On the negative side, I didn't care for Mind Chess.
Final Fantasy XIII (Steam)
I was expecting Dragon Age Inquisition to go on sale when Veilguard was released close to the end of my playthrough of the AAI games. Then it didn't. So I started playing FF13 instead because it's been eating up a comparatively ludicrous amount of drive space for too long. (Inquisition didn't go on sale during the recent major sale either, weirdly.)
Found the main game generally enjoyable, no doubt helped by the generic gameplay advice I've seen brought up over the years (e.g. switching paradigms after two ATB sequences giving you a full ATB bar). Had some trouble with the first Barthandelus fight because I mistakenly assumed that his big attack was something you were supposed to switch to defensive paradigms for rather than something you were supposed to punish (no doubt forgetting how the fight worked in RK), and with a few Eidolon fights where I was concentrating too much on the side activities they liked and not enough on just generally building chain against them.
I think the game doesn't really do a good job of selling Sentinel, especially given the Barthandelus issue. It feels like you rarely ever see any enemies telegraphing big attacks. They also feel very weird to control directly. ('Okay, I guess now I just sit here while all these guard blocks slowly tick down'.) Also they mess up your targetting for your offensive roles when controlled directly (a problem saboteurs also have), which is annoying.
Ultimately I did get five stars for the sequence of final bosses so I thought I had a decent handle on things. Then there was the postgame.
I'd completed a bit over 40 missions before leaving Gran Pulse initially, and when I went back in the postgame I found that most of the missions I hadn't done previously I still couldn't do. Had around 1.5 million in funds available, so spent some time grinding Adamanchelids for gold dust & also to start working on the level 10 crystarium nodes, and eventually was able to give Lightning an Omega Weapon. Didn't help as much as I was hoping for. Kept grinding Adamanchelids for money to improve that weapon, every now and then trying my hand at an Adamantortoise and failing to make any headway.
As things stand currently, everyone has had all the nodes for their primary roles for a while. Primary team is Lightning/Sazh/Vanille, it had become clear that I needed a Sentinel to survive Adamantortoises & Attacus so I started Lightning on that, and also started Vanille on Commando so I could switch out my COM/COM/RAV slot for COM/COM/COM. (Didn't want to change any of Sazh's current setup, part of why I didn't make him the Sentinel, so started him on Saboteur arbitrarily without adding it to anything.) Tried Attacus again with Lightning having L2 Sentinel, and while Lightning & Sazh can now survive Merciless Blade, Vanille still can't (and Provoke doesn't appear to have any impact on who is targetted). This ultimately led to me losing chain on him at one point while resurrecting Vanille, which further ultimately led to me running into a doom timer situation (or at least exacerbated it).
So while there's scope available there for me to spend more time grinding to get Lightning to a higher Sentinel level (getting more levels for Omega Weapon & more HP for Vanille on the way), I've come to the conclusion that there isn't much point. Not helped by having now seen that Attacus also reduces the lead-in on Merciless Blade as the fight goes on, which is all adding up to making the fight painful to attempt. Final missions completed count is 58. (Several of the later ones, involving Zirnitras & Neochus, were also only completed because Instant Chain happened to trigger.)
Best I ever legitimately managed against an Adamantortoise was to kill one of its legs. Tried the summon thing once and I only got it down to half health before it got back up. I assume that it also gets back up if you actually kill its legs (unclear on why the mere act of summoning knocks it down, as far as I'm aware that doesn't do any damage) so also in a situation where I have no longer have any desire to continue attempts on those.
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Baldur's Gate 3: I killed a fortress full of goblins but only because their priest drugged me and threw me in a prison cell. I was perfectly amenable to them beforehand.
Marvel Rivals: This is surprisingly competent for a game at launch. I've mostly been playing Captain America and have also dabbled in Peni Parker, Luna Snow, and Wolverine.
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FFT fiesta - knight, thief, summoner, calculator, Mustadio
Shopping time. Bog standard armor upgrades for knights. Holy Miters are very welcomed upgrades for summoners; they can finally ditch those tired old Triangle Hats. Chameleon Robes will come in useful in a few key situations, one of them coming up so I grab three. I pass on the Sleep Swords out of habit though maybe grabbing one would have helped. I have enough Judo Outfits for my purposes so don't buy more.
Get into a random in Zeklaus which is welcome as I have two units sitting at 290ish Calc JP. The calculator in the fight is able to take enough actions so that spillover JP pushes them over the 300 benchmark to learn Damage Split. Glorious, glorious, Damage Split, probably the only perk of a calculator in a fiesta context. Does it make up for having to drag a lump of deadweight? Guess I'll see.
Pick up three Aegis Shields at Dorter and four Germinas Boots and after some pondering, bring my Flame Shield stock up to five. Preparation for the next fight involves all my non-knights setting Equip Shield. I'd prefer to stay with Gained JP up on the JP hungry summoners and calcs but those lancers in the next fight scare me and I feel the shields offer the best shot at survival. Meteor Storm also has saved up enough summoner JP for a big summon and since she's on deck to be a summoner for the next fight, pick up Leviathan. A bit shaky since she only has enough MP for one Leviathan but I want those big summons before the enemies get too fast. My designated thief picks up Steal Helmet for the next fight as I want to swipe a Platina Helm. She's rocking the Main Gauche + Weapon Guard duo, which along with Equip Shield and a Small Mantle because I'm being too cheap to pick out something better. With this, those scary spear pokes will have only a 37% chance to hit from the side and even less from the front. Preparations complete, onwards.
UBS2 - 0 resets
Running two summoners here. My thief goes first and charms the frontmost Lancer. He goes and rams that spear into another for 121. The other lancers seem to take offense at this and both go for Jumps on him. Time Mage also targets the charmed lancer with Fire. Other time mage goes for a Haste that ends up missing. My knight does nothing of significance. One summoner just moves for lack of targets but the other charges a Leviathan that will catch the jumping lancers. Fire and Jumps land, charmed lancer dies. Leviathan goes off; chemist and hurt lancer are on the floor with the last in critical. Crap, I wanted to steal a Platina Helm but both the wielders are dead. Next round sees the Lancer retreating and the Time Mage on that side tossing out a Moogle. Lancer is introduced to the dangers of bringing an Ice Shield against a Ramuh and the time mage is also dropped to critical. Other time mage gets charmed. Summoner time mage doesn't get to do more than another Moogle before my knight and theif catch up and lay into him with sharp objects.
I stall for chests hoping for a Platina Helm drop keeping the other time mage charmed while he wastes his MP on Hasting my team. Calculator is desperately looking for not-full HP allies to feed Potions to for JP. No dice, I get other drops instead. Guess I could have revived one of them myself but I opted to roll the dice and lost. Reset but I'm not counting it as I was in no danger of losing. And wow, for all my fears about this map, thanks to charming enemies, I didn't see a single attack thrown my way.
Next try, charm the frontmost lancer again. He goes after the Chemist this time and lands a solid hit. This time around, the other lancers try a Throw Stone and a regular poke to try to break the charm but both are evaded. A Moogle and a Cure come out towards the injured chemist. Not that it ends up helping as I drop Ramuh and Leviathan which leave both uncharmed lancers and the chemist on the floor.
So that leaves the time mages and a charmed lancer I intend to steal from. The time mage with summons has no attack summons because all his JP are in time mage. And the other has no offensive skills to threaten my life with. So all I'm doing is keeping the lancer charmed; not complicated when all three of my girls have Steal Heart within reach, and chasing down the time mages. Which takes longer than planned because the lady knight has gone back to being unable to land hits through mantles. Time mages do get a couple of Slows on my units and one attempts a 36 damage staff whack which get blocked by shield but that's it before my lancer buddy helps kill them, landing the killing shot on both actually.
Which just leave item theft on the lancer. My knight fails an 85% Power Break. Soon after, Charm falls off and he gets a turn to stab the knight for 143. Damage Split reduces that to 71 net. This is the only time the enemies manage to land a hit all battle. While trying and failing to grab that helmet, lady summoner grabs a crystal and learns Steal Shield off it. And I think, sure let's get an early Diamond Shield. This gets slightly complicated as charmed lancer keeps moving to spots where height differences only let me attempt thefts from the front. Knight also keeps failing to land Power Break. Sometime during this, one of my units snags a crystal from summoner time mage. Yay, free Shiva. It takes a while but I do snag both helm and shield and finish him off with physicals. Astoundingly, the calculator's hit made the difference in being able to kill him without him getting a turn. All calc had done up to that point was feeding Potions to the knight.
I now have a 4th unit with Damage Split. Oh yes.
UBS3 - 0 resets
Running two summoners here. Meteor Storm and Michelle the starter generic as they have good and best compat with Izlude. I also do the unprecedented and set the knight up with summon magic. Set them up as follows:
Summoners - Knight -
Wizard Staff Any sword (doesn't matter)
Aegis Shield Aegis Shield
Holy Miter Platina Helm
Wizard Robe Wizard Robe
Germinas Boots Germinas Boots
Going for the assassination here. Tiro Finale' the Thief goes for a Steal Heart on enemy summoner. Calculator ... gets jumped on turn 1 because he's so slow and I goofed on the PBF. Knight and summoners go for Ramuh on Izlude and a knight close enough to catch in the effect area. All of them resolve after Izlude lands from Jump so all it accomplished was denying me a Flawless Victory.
Archers take shots at the thief at 49% because I forgot Weapon Guard, both miss. Summoner drops Shiva on both archers. Turns out a 7 MA Ramuh, and 14 MA good compat Ramuh, and a 13 MA best compat Ramuh are enough damage to send Izlude packing.
Hmm, there's some weird Jump math going on here I don't understand. Izlude Jumps on clocktick 13 and going by solely by the numbers, he would land on clocktick 20. 7 speed knight goes on tick 15 which would have Ramuh going off on tick 19. Yet for some reason, Izlude landed on tick 19. Curious.
UBS1 - 0 resets
This shocked me as I expected to end up with a few. Well OK, it would be simple but I wanted that Crystal Helmet. Which meant I'd actually be dealing with the support rather than baiting Wiegraf into a 4 unit Damage Split and assassinate. For the first time since Baraius Hill, I run two knights, specifically the Capricorn and Taurus for good compat Weapon Breaks. Dark Matter is the Thief and I teach him Steal Helmet. Tempted by Weapon Guard to go with the Main Gauche but opted to stick with Damage Split. Calculator and Summoner get Chameleon Robes. I set the PBF trying to bait Wiegraf into a swordskill on Dark Matter and either knight. Equip Shield on any non-knights. I stick with the Flame Shield as if I'm lucky, the wizard will have only fire spells and be useless.
Wiegraf goes for the male knight and calculator instead and lands a Stop on the knight. Oh no. Dark Matter charms the closer archer through the wall, though the other archer breaks it with a Throw Stone. Archer takes a shot at the calculaotr, guarded. My female knight tries for a Weapon Break. Fails but mercifully blocks the Counter. I have the summoner toss a Moogle on calc and stopped knight. Wiegraf clobbers the stopped knight dead with a 220 swing. I goof up here and have Dark Matter drop a Phoenix Down on the male knight. Instead, I should have had him try to charm another enemy and use the calculator's turn for the revival. Male knight gets a turn to attempt Weapon Break, fail. Counter doesn't trigger, I move him 6 panels away from Wiegraf. Enemies shuffle around, archer eats shield. Female knight tries Weapon Break again, success. Had it failed, I would have reset as I'm not willing to take another 2 unit Stasis Sword. Now I just got to deal with the other enemies before attempting to obtain that Crystal Helmet.
So it turns out the Wizard has Bolt magic instead and a Bolt 2 is incoming. Male knight gets a turn while it's charging but isn't going to do enough to kill. Attempts a 54% Steal Heart, success. Spell interrupted. My female knight lands a Don't Move proc on the far archer with her first swing and busies herself whacking her to death. Summoner is generally kept busy with healing though I'm happy to blast multiple enemies with Ramuh if they're polite enough to clump up and no one is in immediate danger of dying. I mostly lean on Charming enemies to soften them up to a point I can go for kills. My shield evasion is working well enough to fend off death from arrows or Wiegraf's 54 damage punches (66 on the knights). The other archer is the first to fall thanks to a charmed knight landing a solid whack and the Wizard is the next to go after Bolting herself (for a paltry 39), two of my units gang up and finish her off. I do get too aggressive at one point and the calculator gets put to sleep for my hubris.
With my female knight done bullying the archer and rejoining the team, I decide the situation is stable enough to let the calc snooze. Kill off one knight and charm the other (again). Calc is healthy enough that Wiegraf ignores her. I pull out a Head Break on the still full HP charmed knight to soften her up and finally feel like I can give more attention to Wiegraf. Ideally, I'd prefer to land a Power Break before attempting theft. But they keep missing. I'm also getting constantly diverted by picking up crystals/chests and making sure the enemies don't get them. Another free Shiva from the wizard crystal. I actually snag the helmet off a random steal from the front and retreat before I connect any Power Breaks. And seeing Wiegraf weakened enough where my knights and thief can finish him off and they're all in range, I abandon the Power Break idea and go for the kill. All three get through the evade and end it before the last enemy knight crystalizes.
Last unit has enough calc JP for Damage Split now. This is earlier than I expected. Very nice.
Shopping time. I grab two more White Robes and 2 Power Sleeves. Stick upgrade for the calc. Pick up a Wizard Rod and Gold Staff though I don't expect to use them often. Then off to Lesalia for Diamond Swords and Diamond Shields which I bring my count of up to 4. Pick up an Orichaculm for slightly better knife stabs. That's it for equipment. Proceed directly to Grog Hill after setting up my units.
Grog Hill - 0 resets
This battle does scare me a bit so I go for the safety of Equip Shield on non-knights. Damage Split on everyone. Knight gets Summon Magic along with a Wizard Robe and Red Shoes. With that Crystal Helmet, she still has the highest HP total in the squad so the sacrifice in evasion is less likely to come into play. I opt to run two thieves for a change. Male has Basic Skill and is stacking PA and fists. Female has knife and Item for those emergency revives.
Battle starts. Enemy thief walks forward and waits. My thieves go. Male thief throws rock. Female thief attempts to charm a chemist, fail. Chemists shoot different targets, Damage Split. Archer charges something on a thief. Close squire take a swing, blocked. Far squire Accumulates and advances. There's a nice big cluster of 4 enemies that my summoner and knight drops Ramuhs on. The Rubber Shoes chemist is already outside that effect area so no loss from Ramuh here. A 12 MA Ramuh and a 9 MA Ramuh are enough to drop the archer and chemist and thief and squire are in critical. Thief retreats doing nothing. Calculator gets a turn, walks up, and slugs the squire in the face for a kill.
My thieves go. Male tosses a rock through the C. Evade for a kill on the enemy thief. Female Charms the chemist. Yeah, I've got this won. Chemist uses Fire on himself for 22 rather than shoot the squire. Squire hit's someone in the back with his axe for 84, Damage Split. I'm saving squire for last so knight has no one to hit. So she Equip Changes into Diamond Armor and Diamond Shield for lack of anything to do. Summoner's main job is done and she's just tossing heals, Steal Heart, or staff whacks depending on my whims at the moment. Recharm the chemist who Fires himself for another 22. This time, I have enough units close enough to beat the remaining HP out of him before he gets another turn. Lone squire just can't make any meaningful headway against evasion and Damage Split and a summoner ready with Moogle and is just target practice.
It's a bit easier to hunt for the Air Knife poach as Ahrimans show up more commonly at Grog Hill. I feel it would be easier with Ice Brands and a Blaze Gun on Mustadio so opt to put off the question for later. Do my usual shuffling of jobs before Yardow. There's a Gemini ninja in the next fight so I make Meteor Storm into one of the summoners. She also gets a Green Beret. Cross Blaze is on summoner duty too and teach him Golem. Summoners and calculator get White Robes. Knight would have one but I was stingy and has to make do with armor. Aegis shields for summoners, Diamond shields for everyone else. Yes I am using Equip Shield again, expecting ninjas to get a few attacks off.
Yardow - 0 resets
This was a pleasant surprise. Knights and thieves are really ill-suited to facing the opposition here with ninjas that can throw things from positions melee characters can't reach to the ever-present risk of getting outsped. Thieves have Steal Heart but it's a coinflip if it will work and/or slow down the enemy enough. And the summoners will have their picks of victims for a couple of turns since they go after most other units I could field. I am pretty much depending on the summoners to swing things in my favor.
Catch would be relevant here and I even have someone who got it for free. But it's a tough sell since it does nothing against summons which I do expect to face a few of and I have access to full team Damage Split. So I stick to Damage Split. Fight opens with Gemini ninja throwing Magic Shuriken at Rafa for 49 and another ninja climbing on the wall and tossing something at one of my summoners, blocked by shield. Malak advances and starts up a Dia Sword Back in Rafa's direction. Thief Dark Matter can do nothing better than toss rock at ninja for 11. Knight Tiro Finale' whacks Malak for 100. Female Summoner plants a Ramuh on two ninjas and Malak. Enemy summoners advance with a pair of Shivas. Male summoner shuffles away from the clump and puts up Golem.
Dia Sword Back resolves, one hit on Rafa for 30-ish. My Ramuh goes off, sending Malak and the Gemini ninja into critical. Malak leaves. Shivas go off, one hitting only the knight for 50, the other able to reach summoner and knight. Damage Splits keep the net damage under 100 to knight and about 25 to summoner. Calculator has nothing better to do than Potion the summoner.
Ninja attacks knight with physical, double guarded. Ninja on wall throws something at male summoner, blocked by that 10% shield evade again. Critical health ninja Potions self and retreats. My turn. Dark Matter can once again do nothing better than throw a rock at a ninja, misses due to C. Ev. Knight swings at ninja in front of her, miss again. 7 speed summoner has a Ramuh for the Gemini ninja and a summoner. Ninja dies; summoner only takes about 50-60 thanks to White Robe. Enemy summoners blast 3-4 units at a time with Shivas. Male summoner can't really do much other than Moogle Rafa and any nearby allies.
I'll mention how much of a letdown it is when 3-4 units are getting hit and only 1 Damage Split goes off. At least there were no deaths on my squad. Enemy Summoners are running low on HP though with Wizard Mantle one in critical at 19. Though I do have incredible evasion luck to compensate. Another swing at the knight, another double guarded. Other ninja throws something at calculator, eat shield. With the doorway no longer clogged by enemies. Dark Matter can get inside. He can't guarantee a kill on any summoners so instead, Charms the 19 HP one as he has better compat with her. Spike Shoes ninja gets another turn and hops the wall and goes for a physical from behind the calculator. Finally, a 100% hit chance, no way to dodge... denied by Golem instead. Suck it. Look at the AT list and have the knight whack that ninja. My female summoner opts to Charm the other ninja instead of heal. Risky but it pays off. He goes and kills the uncharmed summoner. Charmed summoner goes for Cure on self. And while I was tempted to make use of it, I opt to have Dark Matter punch her out with a 133 midcharge. (from a thief, mind you). Calculator finished off the ninja who attacked her.
Calculator kill count; 3 What sorcery is this?
All that's left is a charmed ninja at 54 HP. I was aiming to chase him down with multiple units to gangbang him without letting him get a turn uncharmed but Rafa takes him out first with a miracle 5 panel Heaven Thunder. Sure, I'll take that.
My evasion luck was perfect this map. Don't think I've seen that ever until now. Well, not outside speedy assassinations where there's only one attack made against one of my units.
Black Robes are for sale, a welcome upgrade for summoners to get more oomph out of Ramuhs and better HP than Wizard Robes. Gold Hairpins may be relevant on Velius so I grab two. Platinum Swords at Lesalia are a welcome sight for knights whose damage have been mostly stagnant. I also pick up a Circlet and elect for a 5th Diamond shield. There's nothing I need in Dorter so I can just return to Yardow. Thinking it over, I do splurge on a Bracer just in case I find myself wanting a male punch thief. (punch damage goes from 77 to 126 with 70 Brave) Decide to go with Chemist Rafa since I already have the gun so buy a third Power Sleeve for her. Last thing is to replenish the Potions my calculators have been using and to have enough for 4 fights. High level is 27 going into Yuguo.
Yuguo Woods - 0 resets
Felt easy enough to forgo Equip Shield for Secret Hunt and Gained JP up. I'm running two thieves this fight. White Robes on knight, summoner, and calculator. Rafa shoots a ghost. Undead Time Mages go for a Demi on Dark Matter the knight and a Haste 2 ghosts. My thieves each go after a time mage to stab/punch as Steal Heart doesn't work on them. This recklessness does put them in Wizard range and there a Fire 2 and Bolt 3 incoming. Ghosts Throw Spirit at thieves, Damage Split. While I generally don't like walking into spells, I have the knight walk into the incoming Bolt 3 to down the Demi casting time mage. Summoner is able to line up a Leviathan to hit all three ghosts and a wizard. Haste 2 hits a ghost but it's still not going to be fast enough to escape Leviathan. Black magic goes off. Fire 2 dodged by Elf Mantle. Bolt 3 gets Damage Split.
Recall that I said Move-Find is banned unless Chemist is selected and active? That restriction doesn't apply to guests. Rafa started with Move-Find and uncovers a Mythril Spear. An amusing surprise. Rafa shoots time mage. Time mage goes to bonk the male thief, Damage Split. He punches her dead. Other thief Secret Hunts the ghost that Rafa shot earlier. Calculator finally gets a turn a feed a Potion to the knight. Leviathan finally goes off for a triple kill on other ghosts and one wizard. With only a lone Wizard left, easy mop up. He gets one last Fire 2 but doesn't live long enough for another.
No I did not stick Item on everyone and oneshot everything with Phoenix Downs. That would be boring and I feel it would go against the spirit of a fiesta run. Also i completely forgot that was a thing and this map is easy enough to win without them.
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Ace Attorney Investigations 2- f i n a l l y beat this.
I don't know why I had quite so many gaps as I really did playing this, because it's good. It's better than I remember the first being. It is very frustrating seeing how they portray some characters early on relative to where they end up (Gavelle's antagonism most strongly) but I think that's honestly common throughout the series. It's just that AAI2 keeps a very stable cast so it stands out more.
In the end I'm not sure what to make of Kay. I suppose it's not uncommon for assistant characters to feel a bit undercooked in the series, but for Kay I don't quite get a sense of what her skillset is going to grow into if that makes sense? Her story doesn't end on as strong a note as Maya's.
But obviously this is an exercise in spending time with Miles and within that it's very good. The first game is mostly about thrusting him in a scenario where he's out of his depth, but this game feels much, much stronger thematically because they started from the premise of what they wanted to do with Edgeworth (challenge his decision to stay on the path his adoptive father put him on) and built the rest of the story around that.
This does have some drawbacks in the overall game because it kinda means every other case is gonna suffer compared to 3, because that extended flashback is, somewhat by design, going to drown out anything the game does on its own merits. That's just the price you pay for having that choice in the game structure. But that's not to take away from some of the absolute highs later on, which still have a lot to do with Edgeworth. I think this game more than any other set aside time for him and Franziska to just be siblings, the teasing, snarky cooperation they engage in is so emblematic of their relationship as brother and sister, and I love it. And as I had to comment in chat, the bit where he has to defeat Eustace's self doubt using logic? Perfect, no notes.
But yeah this is some good stuff, it's annoying I made so little time for it and spent so long on it, it deserved better. But glad to have it knocked out.
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FFT Fiesta: knight, thief, summoner, calculator, Mustadio
Before heading into Riovanes, I finish teaching Move +2 to the entire party which will be the only movement ability I use for the rest of the game. Not that there's a whole lot of options anyways since of the 4 generic classes on the docket, only two have movement abilities to speak of. And given how slow calculator gains JP, I don't expect Move -JP up to pay back what it costs to buy it.
Riovanes gate - 0 resets
I expect to have arrows raining down on me so I scramble to hide behind Diamond Shields with the help of Equip Shield. Combined with the nighttime accuracy penalty on bows, the archers are going to struggle to land their shots on my party. For an added buffer, I have enough spare Summoner JP on the knight to teach Golem and set summon as the secondary. Knights mostly suck with magic but Golem is one of the few summons their scrubby MA can still handle. Other preparation include having at least one member of each gender able to Steal Heart and making sure the team has access to Steal Helmet and Steal Armor. Thief is running Main Gauche with Weapon Guard to go with her shield and mantle. I decide to run two summoners. Summoner Dark Matter goes with the knight, leaving the thief, calculator, and other summoner on team 2. Keep Rafa in chemist.
I want a 2nd Crystal Helmet in the off chance I find myself reaching for Equip Armor. I also want the Earth Clothes on the high level archer as I have a plan for it at Velius. General plan is to murder or charm anyone I don't need and charm the targets before attempting to rob them. Battle starts with Rafa shooting Malak and Malak advancing doing nothing. Check enemy skillsets; the Feather Boots knight has Elemental. Having someone get frogged by Water Ball would be very bad given I have no means of curing it so fingers crossed. Thief moves towards team 1. Enemy generics go. I expect them to go after Rafa and one does but the other two have bad and worst compat with her and they decide they'd rather go after my party. Hilarious when an archer decides she really wants to take that 10% from the front shot at the thief. Knights just advance; Elemental knight has no valid targets yet.
I choose to risk the knight on team 1's side to rush the archers to introduce them to Ramuh. Knight casts Golem as a safety net. I do have shields though and between the knight's one cast of Golem and my evasion, I'm counting on those to prevent deaths to my party. Summoner on team 2 Ramuhs the Feather Boots knight even though he's the only target in the effect area because that Elemental scares me. Archer Charges go off, connecting on Rafa and guarded by my party and I groan. Damn, cast Golem too early and now I worry it's going to get worn down by enemies picking on Rafa. Who does not have evasion. Ramuh goes off sending one archer to critical. 12 MA, Black Robe Ramuh is pretty good after all. Malak gives a Potion to the critical HP archer and it's enough to take her out of it. Thief lands a Steal Heart on the knight on team 1's side. Rafa shoots the guy I just charmed. Dammit Rafa, stop being a dumbass. Calculator finally gets first turn but has nothing to do with it so just move closer to the team while not getting close to too many knights.
Knight takes swing at Dark Matter, blocked by shield. Elemental knight seemingly does not have Water Ball instead going for a Quicksand on the female summoner. Death Sentence I think I could recover from though still glad it didn't proc. Archers take shots at thief and calc, all blocked. One is close enough for my knight to reach and murder. I decide that rather than blow 24 MP on a single target, Dark Matter is better off going for a 93% Charm on the Earth Clothes archer. Another Ramuh for Elemental knight over there and he's low enough for Rafa to finish off. Malak poke denied by shield. Thief charms knight. Thankfully, Rafa doesn't repeat her previous stupidity and goes shoot the near dead knight taking him to full dead. Charmed archer shoots Malak, which combined with earlier damage, is enough to get him to retreat. And Rafa too, which is probably to my advantage.
5 on 4 now with my team healthy and the Golem safety net still up. Still takes a while as enemies resist clumping up for Ramuh, not helped by knight landing Magic Break on one summoner. AI being pre-emptive with the MP damage again, what is this? Had concerns that my other summoner was in danger of getting MP busted but the knight never tried Magic Break again. Having my knight trying to bash the worst compat archer was also a misplay on my part; would have done better to have her take down a second knight. Relying on a mix of Charmed enemies attacking their allies and physicals to wear down the remaining foes. Eventually get a second knight to critical, who takes himself out chucking rocks into the calculator's back and getting Damage Split. Gemini archer goes down too being fixated on my Aquarius thief and never landing any of those 10% and 17% shots. Earth Clothes archer does get low after a hit from a charmed knight. I do steal the armor on the next attempt though so I don't need to worry about manipulating enemies to keep a theft target alive. With all the charming my thief and summoners are doing, there aren't many attacks coming my way though the few physicals they do slip in are all blocked by evasion. Knights only have a 22% chance of hitting the thief with physicals from the front so thief is the body blocker of choice when it comes up.
Which just leaves stealing that helmet, which is the only reason I haven't murdered the last knight so far. It takes several rounds between Charming him, him being in positions where I have to try to get past evasion, my knight constantly failing to land 62% Shield Break from the back (which would make the theft simpler), and picking up crystals and chests from the other enemies. And when I do land that steal, there's still the matter of finishing him off. My summoners don't have the MP to spare for Ramuh (the Magic Broken on being reduced to 2) so physicals it is. His evasion ends up being on a roll much like my party's.
Yeah, my party's evasion was on a hot streakl. Think I had over 20 physicals to fend off throughout and only ONE managed to break through to be stopped by Golem. This includes multiple 66% hits from knights and an arrow to the thief's back which the Elf Mantle stopped. It takes around 3-4 rounds for my party to land enough hits on the knight (56% from side and 85% from behind) to finish the fight. Shield Break would have greatly helped but the lady knight had gone back to missing over and over.
Velius - 0 resets
This was surprising as I was prepared for a few fails during the Ramza/Wiegraf duel. Velius worried me when I was first starting due to no MagicDefend Up to hide behind and he is capable of oneshotting 3 out of my 5 party members with Cyclops. But I do have 3 party members with enough hoarded Summoner JP to attempt a Lich assassination strategy so that's what I bank on. First, got to get Ramza through his duel. I opt for a happy fun times with the Blood Sword approach. Set him in knight as follows:
Blood Sword Battle Skill
Diamond Shield Summon Magic
Crystal Helmet Damage Split
Chameleon Robe Equip Change
Red Shoes Move +2
I'm relying on landing a Power Break early; if I can't I probably lose. With Move +2, Ramza is able to reliably reach Wiegraf's back for a 59% chance. I expect a few losses though on my first attempt at the fight, the second Power Break lands. which is enough. Sure, a Counter will reduce my net gain from a Blood Sword hit down to 2 but it has to trigger and connect through the evade. Between Damage Split and Blood Sword whacks that don't get undone by Counters, I'm able to keep Ramza's HP in good enough shape to not get around to a second Power Break attempt before the battle moves on to phase 2.
The rest of the squad has specific roles to play. I have two units with good compat with Velius. Since Cross Blaze doesn't have enough JP for Lich while Tiro Finale' does, he plays the role of bait. He's the calculator with Earth Clothes and a Holy Miter. Earth Clothes are there to stuff Titan so Velius will be forced to use something else, ideally Cyclops. Tiro Finale' is a Knight with summon secondary for the extra bulk since Lich is another summon that low MA units can use just fine. Being on the same Zodiac triangle as Velius, her Lich is 100% accuracy even without any MA boosting.
Michelle the starter generic is the summoner. Gets a Green Beret so that she can get Lich off before Velius gets a second turn. Which leave the Sagitarius to be the thief. Her job is running interference on demons with Steal Heart since her offense on Velius would be neutered.
Ramza gets the first turn. And since the last action in the first phase was a Damage Split attack from Wiegraf, Ramza gets an immediate turn with everyone else's CT at 0. I have him run up and drop an instant Lich on 4. Connects on all 4 doing 481 to Velius. Velius' turn. I hold my breath and just as I'd hoped, he takes the bait and goes for a Cyclops on the calculator. He's clever enough to hide behind a torch to stuff a "surround and beat during charging" strat though if things work out, it's not going to matter. Thief marches up and Charms the 6 Speed demon as that's all she can reach. Ramza gets another turn here and with the demons out of kill range, shrugs and swings for a parasitic 104 on Velius. Demons go for a Dark Holy and a Lifebreak on the thief. Knight and summoner take up positions with Lich on Velius.
Lifebreak goes off, Damage Split. Charmed demon GigaFlares the other two so no Dark Holy. Cyclops overkills the calculator for nearly 350. I'm relieved as that would be enough for a kill on Tiro Finale' the knight but instead he went for who I wanted him to. Liches go off. I merely needed 2 out of 3 for a win; the first two do the trick. Lich for 496 and sheep monster is gone. (496 because he leveled up on killing the calculator, which meant his HP max is higher)
Riovanes Roof - 4 resets
There goes my streak. First map with resets all chapter. I do have a specific plan for this map though Rafa being suicidal can still send that plan to hell. Only 4 units. And one has to be a calculator so functionally a 3 person deployment. Can still make this work. The plan.
Tiro Finale' is the calculator. As one of the units with good compat with Celia, her role is to be the bait. Gets a Holy Miter and no armor. Celia will see that she can bring her to critical with Ultima and be drawn to Ultima the calc. And because she'll survive the first Ultima by 3 HP, Lede will be drawn to Ultima her as well.
Cross Blaze is the thief. His role is to steal the Cachusha off Celia.
Dark Matter is the knight. His role is whacking Celia while Ultima is charging for 156. Gets a Chameleon Robe to deter instakill. That Bracer looks tempting but I'm holding off unless the extra power is necessary.
Starter generic is the summoner. Wizard Staff, Holy Miter, Black Robe, Red Shoes. 12 MA with lightning boost. Her role is to cast Ramuh on Celia. And anyone else that's close enough to the blast zone.
Catastrophe follows.
1. Rafa gets confused. Nukes herself with Diamond Sword before the enemies get to her.
2. Rafa gets confused. Celia goes for Ultima on the bait. Lede murders Rafa.
3. Rafa runs away with a Diamond Sword on Elmdor. Both assassins go for Ultima on the bait. At last, I get to move. Due to a positioning error, thief can't reach Celia but can reach Lede. Barrette is probably the more useful hairpiece anyways so attempt a steal at 52%. Miss. Might have taken this attempt if it worked but it failed so I reset after confirming that sword whack and Ramuh do indeed do enough to send an assassin into critical.
4. Rafa goes after Lede. Celia goes for Ultima on the bait. Lede murders Rafa.
OK, I need Rafa to retreat on her first turn. Fight still looks winnable. I'm not counting the reset I forgot to teach the thief Steal Accessory. Next try, things work out. Rafa retreats with a Diamond Sword in Elmdor's direction. Both assassins go for Ultimas on the bait. Thief is in range to steal from Celia. Land the 65% steal, physical from knight, Ramuh, done. Didn't need the Damage Split off Celia's Ultima but welcomed anyways.
Chapter end statistics nonsense:
HiLevel: 29
Job levels
Mastered Knight on all but one who is somehow about 150 JP short.
7-8 in Thief on everyone
5-6 in summoner
3-4 in calculator No one has enough calc JP after Damage Split to get any Math Skills going.
Skill report
Kinght: Weapon Break is super useful in two fights but otherwise didn't feel worth a turn to try for. Head Break sees use for the first time. Power Break sees use; shame that it missed every time. Weapon Guard sees serious use this chapter with one of the few standout W. EV options becoming available. Equip Shield showed itself as a breakout star of this chapter, something I did not anticipate when starting this. It's particularly good at nighttime fights against archers and it proved invaluable in those fight heavy on evadable physicals. Equip Armor gets put back in the closet.
Thief: Steal Heart continues to be useful in disrupting the enemy rhythm and getting them to help out with killing given how shaky my party's damage dealing is. The other equipment stealing abilities see use to snag some handy things earlier than they show in stores. (and early Earth Clothes was key to a smooth Velius fight) Steal Weapon goes unused this chapter. Everyone has Move +2 now.
Summoner: Moogle and Ramuh continue to do their thing. Titan is relevant when White Robes are about even if I never got around to using it. Golem, Lich, and Leviathan all make appearances though no one can spare the JP for all three so hoarded and had to pick and choose which would be most valuable.
Calculator: Damage Split on all and it is awesome. Softening enemies up before I've gotten around to spending actions to deal with them is a useful benefit when my non-summoner damage mostly sucks. Haven't learned anything else yet.
I've never bothered with knights with summon before until now. Turns out they're totally fine with Golem and Lich and Golem from their HP is a safety net that gives my party space to turn the tide of a battle. Generally get only one cast of either but it's OK when one cast is all I need. And if I'm desperate for another summon caster, (which did come up a couple of times) they have decent options for salvaging their MA. I never did try Diamond Armlet (preferred) or Magic Gauntlet but that would require giving up 6 Move and I never got desperate enough to resort to those.
Thief got, well good may be giving them too much credit but they did obtain a respectable evade setup in this chapter. Damage sucks so they do depend on allies and Steal Heart for offense. But the ability to straight up deny most physicals sometimes feels worth the lower offense and losing Damage Split. The PA boosting gear also open up the option of punch thief for males which is a noticeable boost to their attacks. So they have more to contribute than Steal Heart and Move +2.
Summoners' speed deficit didn't cause me as many problems as I feared. Throwing summons at key groups of enemies does solve lots of problems in this chapter. It's those fights that aren't essentially won in a barrage of summons where I actually have to work for my wins.
Calculators suck. They contribute Damage Split and are prime bait for assassinations and very little else. Pretty much require a Green Beret if I want calculator JP which puts them at a bigger HP deficit. Though it is still pleasing when the calc gets a kill or a meaningful assist.
Chapter 4 begins and Mustadio officially joins the fiesta squad. In story fights, he must stay in Engineer but can use secondaries from fiesta jobs or Item. Along with the standard RSM, specials may also use support abilities from any fiesta job. I considered allowing Hi-Potions, Maiden's Kiss, and Soft in Chapter 4 and maybe I'll suggest it as an optional rule but I'm sticking to the original plan.
Before running off anywhere, pick up two Icebrands (the 2nd if I feel inclined to try Equip Sword thief; so far that hasn't happened) and two Platina Shields for now. I can also spare funds for two Carabini Mail so do so to have an Equip Armor option, never mind that I never used it last chapter. Only other item on my shopping list is some extra sets of Earth Clothes And a Papyrus Plate surprisingly. I did math and found that if a calculator is wearing a Green Beret (and there's little reason to use anything else if I want them to participate in combat), the male generic with a Power Sleeve does more with the book than the stick. Not as much as Wizard Robe but I'd rather not take the HP hit when calculator HP is already so low. Fought a random in Zeklaus which is significant because I poached a Dragon and game decides to award the rare poach. Early H Bag, score. Very tempting for a female calculator.
The randoms on the way to Goug and back to Goland give Mustadio training time to knock out some of the prereqs for calculator. He's already got knight and thief unlocked from some fights with the second stringers and summoner is opened up on the way so calculator is the only one he doesn't have. I don't actually finish before challenging Colliery but progress is made. Before talking to Beowulf, I buy a third Black Robe.
Beowulf joins at Lv 28, which is a guaranteed Crystal Helmet. Round it out with purchasing another Ice Brand and Platina Shield, some more Potions and Phoenix Downs, and one last check that I have 5 Ice Shields and it's time to rock.
Colliery 1 - 0 resets
Knight with Golem would have made this a joke. I tough it out with Damage Split, Moogle, and Potions and it wasn't much harder. Did some Chemist charming while at it. Another instance of Beowulf being stupid and not going for the killshot on a chemist within reach instead chasing after the guy on the upper level who is closer by panel count only but otherwise farther. I must remember this and stop trying to be clever on round 2.
Colliery 2 - 0 resets
I want that Blaze Gun; it's the whole reason for being here. Ice Shields on all but Mustadio and Beowulf who settle with White Robes (and Mustadio and the knight set Secret Hunt) Battle starts with close thief going for a physical on Beowulf. Mustadio shoots thief. My thief goes marching towards the chemist. Beowulf takes a swing at an enemy thief. Chemist shoots Mustadio but only can do about 50. Knight whacks thief. Summoner Ramuh on thief and behemoth; thief goes down. Mustadio Leg Aims the King Behemoth. First steal attempt at Blaze Gun, miss. Calculator has nothing within reach to hit so Potion on Mustadio. Beowulf is reckless and goes for a physical on the immobolized behemoth and puts it into critical. Behemoth fails to kill before Mustadio poaches it. Meanwhile the rest of the team is in pursuit of that chemist. I didn't look close enough and get caught off guard by other thief with Move +2. Who had run over and swung at the thief. I feared that I'd be seeing charm attempts but he opts to run away instead.
Stealing the gun takes longer than I'd like because I'm also trying to stay out of behemoth range. Get the gun after about 4-5 tries and then it's a matter of killing the remaining foes. Between my team being somewhat spread out, low non-Summon damage, and Charming the thief to help kill the chemist, it's a bit slow. Get them both down and before I can bring the team to focus fire on the remaining behemoth, (who has been milling around on its own the whole time) Beowulf finds his way over to it and kills it in two swings.
Mustadio can learn Arm Aim after this battle. Also, I totally forgot I could heal with Ice Brand swings.
Colliery 3 - 0 resets
Bringing out the Ice Shields again for this one. Except Mustadio because he has gun and I rely on staying outside dragon range with him. Knight and Mustadio have Secret Hunt. Knight goes with Platinum Sword for this map. Ifrit would be would be good for the summoner but I'm stingy with JP and want to see how it goes first without. Mustadio and summoner go on team 2 leaving the rest for team 1.
When it comes down to it, barely any trouble at all. Even though I was insisting on poaching the monsters. Or forgetting about using ice healing with Musty's Blaze Gun. Or the chemist on team 2's side having worst compat with Mustadio and thus couldn't really take him down until team 1 joined them on that side. I still kludged my way through relying on Beowulf's Don't Act and Arm Aim to not take too many dragon hits. Arm Aim comes in relevant here crippling a dragon while knight and thief pursue and beat it down. With one dragon gone, the threat of them healing each other is gone and the second is simple after that.
Colliery 4 - 0/1 resets
I do reset this once but only because the fight ended having poached only one Plague and I wanted more. It was literally at the victory screen when I reset.
Since I can only deploy 4 units, the fifth job isn't represented. Too bad as I really could have used Mustadio and his spell gun here. Germinas Boots on all but thief to have 4 jump. Beowulf gets a Platinum Sword so he isn't oneshotting eyeballs. Knight and thief set Secret Hunt.
Straightforward despite all three Plagues getting a chance to spread status effects before I can poach them. Though if the thief lands a Steal Heart, that's one less chance to get randomly screwed by status. Knight oneshots with Ice Brand. Thief is mainly depending on Beowulf softening one up with a physical to get a poach. Summoner mostly heals whoever the demon is targeting. Calculator isn't really relevant and only gets one turn before Reis (and maybe Beowulf or Damage Split) finish off the demon. I see Death Sentence attempts from the Plagues but even if it hits, fight will end before it counts down.
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In the end I'm not sure what to make of Kay. I suppose it's not uncommon for assistant characters to feel a bit undercooked in the series, but for Kay I don't quite get a sense of what her skillset is going to grow into if that makes sense? Her story doesn't end on as strong a note as Maya's.
Lingering good vibes from AAI1 meant I liked Kay and think that in concept, she's one of the most interesting assistants possible! Having a "thief" of sorts pair up with a prosecutor is an interesting match. But... the writers just had no idea what to do with Kay in AAI2. Really needed to stop and give her something cool to do that wasn't just "person who operates fancy tech tech device for flashbacks." And much as Maya was damsel'd in distress at times in the OG Ace Attorney games, at least she was still Maya (well when not channeling). Giving Kay Hollywood amnesia for a length of time was just gratuitous. It's not like it made much sense or much interesting happened thanks to it. Ah well.
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Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster- so for a while now I've been thinking "gosh, I played the worst version of FFV like 20-odd years ago and never again. I almost feel like I didn't even play the same game as everyone else. Maybe I should check this out." So I did.
Anyways, so final builds! Mages ended in Mime, and fighters in Freelancer, because I'm actually bad at video games and also wanted to do the DBZ "throws off weighted training clothes and enemies stand agape at the intimidating battle aura before them" maneuver.
Bartz (Blue, Summoner, Black, and White mastered in order)
Used !Summon, !Blue, and !White
Blue magic is weirdly streaky. In the end you're really only here for White Wind, and that's a bit marginal, unless you got Mighty Guard of course but that's still pretty niche. Early on the MP costs are prohibitive, but there is a stretch when you get the Air Knife where they rule.
Lenna (Monk*, Thief, Ranger, Dancer, Berserker, in order)
!RapidShot and HP+30%
*I actually nabbed Barehanded, went to thief, then finished out Monk once the AP flowed like wine
Monk is fucking *nuts* at the start of the game, I wasn't ready for it. Then it just slowly falls further and further behind. And honestly because of the way I planned the build, Lenna didn't fully come online again until the Kaiser Knuckles came along, which has the minor problem of making her less potent in endgame battles due to sacrificing the Hermes shoes, but it's worth it. It's funny. yatatatatatatatata ta!
Krile (Red, Time, Black, Mime)
!Dualcast, !Time, and !Black
You know what this build is.
So Galuf obviously struggle bused for the last couple dungeons before Krile joined, but honestly it's kinda impressive how long Red Mage avoids being truly dead weight. There's definitely a time in mid-late World 2 they are absolutely just here as an MP battery and to chuck elemental rods if you saved some for the purpose, but it takes a *while*. Early world 2 has some pretty handy utility weapons, and boosted -aras are actually viable for longer than they intuitively should be. Mind, I did get enough levels of Black Mage to use the L4 spells before I could train in RM, which had some edge uses thanks to Bio.
I'm floored that she got enough accidental MP in Mime to actually master it, but I did do all the magic pots so. I shouldn't be.
Faris (Knight, Samurai, Mystic Knight, Berserker)
!Spellblade, Two-Handed
Faris only did the one thing for most of the game. Honestly the reason I even did samurai was so she could keep the same core concept but not waste AP. I definitely used Zeninage a bit though so it's not the worst decision I could have made. Honestly though the biggest problem with all of this is that accuracy is a real struggle at several points in the game, and I'm not sure there's much you can do about it with this set? I also spent most of the time I was training MK unable to use Spellblade, because I just kept using the Masamune until I got an Enhancer. The Initiative is pretty juicy and if you don't know a weakness then Spellblade isn't much until Flare.
But yeah, that was fun. It's neat how much dumb bullshit is in this game waiting for you to walk face-first into it.
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The Case of the Golden Idol
Finished the main story (i.e. not the side stories added later). Was pretty fun! Note that the game got completely remade in a new engine and was re-released a few months ago, so it looks and plays MUCH prettier than some old screenshots you might have seen from before. (It's also added a hint system, which is appreciated although the puzzles were well-designed enough I never needed it.)
This is a very much a "Return of the Obra Dinn"-alike. You aren't actually solving these cases in-setting. You are just piecing together what happened based off what information you have with zero attempt to explain why you have access to this specific evidence set. It does not matter if you "catch" the criminal, it's very likely they'll still be hanging around in the next chapters, their plans proceeding! "You" are just the player, making these mysteries interactive rather than passive.
...but there are some advantages to this approach, too. Sometimes there just isn't a good answer for why you have access to a specific evidence set and this game just entirely skips the part about justifying why your investigator showed up at the perfect time and strip-searched everyone and tossed everyone's room without causing a ruckus. And it's nice to be able to confirm directly what happened as a "reward" without constantly having to recycle characters - in a normal detective setup, either you wouldn't be sure about the identity of some killers or those characters stop participating in the plot without shenanigans (i.e. they can't just show their faces openly if they escaped). Here you get to know who did it but also get to recognize the same ol' cast of characters showing up again.
Anyway, pretty fun. Do recommend smashing it out in a single day though - similar to Chants of Senaar, there is a "final boss" puzzle that expects you to have understood the overarching story to that point. I didn't really have any trouble with it, but not a great fit for a long break in the middle. Still, not bad for some Christmas Eve gamin'.
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Disgaea 7- Finished this.
There's a couple points in the game they just kinda change the rules on you without actually giving you many tools to deal with it. The first one makes sense to me, it's introducing a new mechanic and all, that's not uncommon in Disgaea even if they rarely get the balance right. And also it's in like... chapter 2. It's rude because it's so early but also you're still just kinda getting set up, you haven't made many decisions on how you're gonna play.
The other one is over in chapter 12 which can fuck off. Honestly the core mechanic behind the final boss (which is what this is, you fight the final boss a bunch before you get fully to the end) is bullshit to start with, but this specific fight disables every mechanic you would have learned to use before this point to combat it except one that's locked to the main characters... but not even all of them! Ask how I know.
Now that said the entire rest of the game is some top shelf Disgaea and I don't hold it against the game *that* much. It's hard to really dissect what makes Disgaea good honestly because it's not just comedy but kinda juvenile comedy, so like... talking too much about it would diminish its goodness in a way? But yeah I'm looking at my rankings and I think it's firmly behind 2 and 4, and a smidge ahead of 6. It feels good there.
Also: rejoice, for we have the first clear instances of Disgaea Yuri! Now it has its toxic elements, but it's not, y'know, Etna/Flonne either. Just nerds being nerds, after being set up by their boss. who obviously is Flonne but they never actually name drop her
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Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night - Beat Hard Mode. Competent fights towards the end but I'm so much better at the game now.
Baldur's Gate 3 - Finally in honest-to-god Act 2. The boss fight in the Githyanki Creche was pretty nasty.
Fire Emblem: Three Houses - Doing a goofy random run, near the end!
Mega Man 1,2,3,4,5,8 - Played through all of these with Amy. Went through stages in a random order and have tried to use energy tanks as little as possible. Lots of fun!
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Logiart Grimoire - Emil's Magic Training Parts 4 & 5 (Steam)
Completed. More of the same except that these packs include larger puzzles than the previous ones. Good fun.
Fitness Boxing 3: Your Personal Trainer (Switch)
Done daily sessions for a bit over two weeks. Current thoughts:
* Fairly certain my form is terrible and that the game has no real way of judging me on it. The game doesn't even seem capable of distinguishing one type of punch from another as long as it's thrown with the correct hand e.g. it might ask for an uppercut or hook and you do a straight and the game still marks the punch as perfect. I've only worked with a fraction of the moves currently so possibly it does a better job with the later ones or possibly it's being lenient since it's early on. (There's an option specifically for extra leniency but it's not enabled.) The scoring feels very opaque so it's also possible it's docking points in those situations but not being at all obvious about it.
* That said because I'm working with shoes on carpet I can't properly do anything which involves twisting your feet in the first place, so mixed blessings on the form judging front.
* It's unfortunately a lot more sequence-memorisation-based than I'd prefer, although I guess I don't know how else you'd do it. It remains to be seen just how obtuse it can get. As long as it doesn't start expecting me to remember sequences between sessions?
* The instructors like to fill dead air between sequences with advice and it's unclear if any of it is meant to be targeted or if it's all just generic.
The Case Of The Golden Idol (Steam)
Also played through this recently - completed including the DLC. Very entertaining, although it feels a bit bleak at points.
Dragon Age Inquisition (Steam)
Started on this. Just got to the point of the game dropping a ludicrous amount of new possibilities on me all at once, so it's going to take a while to sift through everything and figure out what I should be focusing on first. (Have access to storage now at least.)
Much more clambering about than I was expecting from a Dragon Age game.
The equipment crafting system feels like it has many more options available than it really needs.