Is Etna herself that frightening... or is it more her boss support/stage obstacles in general?
What sort of nasty tricks do Etna and Prinny have? Or is it just 'good stats'?
Etna's pretty nasty, but a lot of it does come with the support. She has five Prinnies that have about half her HP and do decent damage. The thing is that XE has limits in the form of EX skills. You gain SP to use EX moves by attacking/being attaced/killing/being killed/basically doing anything. SP is a party resource, though. So with six actions and prinnies dying (and if you're not tanky enough, YOUR characters dying), their SP builds fast. The prinnies' EX skills aren't too great (2HKO damage or so, but that's AFTER I BOOSTED MY HP by like 60%-100%), but Etna's pretty much just overkills. With that HP twinking. Pretty soundly too.
So she's basically a limit fighter. Not too durable (probably gets 4-rounded or so), so it probably doesn't work out well. However, if she DOES get a limit, she overkills and it also removes one SP from the enemy (limit busting!). Granted, this is on Hard, but I imagine she overkills on Normal as well anyway, just by a smaller margin.
Fortunately they have PC forms, which may end up better due to more options. Etna totally wants that swimsuit costume that lowers her HP to 1 and her VIT by 20 (though it increases AGI by 25 for evade hax!!!) in the DL.
Cross Edge - Yeah, beat the Etna/Prinny fight. Wasn't too tough that time for some reason.
Fight after that was against Lazarus (new character I think). He's weak, but you need to kill him within five turns for the frue ending, which isn't trivial. Twinking for offense and knowing the limit is five turns helped out quite a bit.
I guess I should mention one of the battle mechanics of the game. Each turn every character gets a number of AP (action points) to use for their attacks. It's pretty much exactly like
Breath of Fire:Dragon Quarter in that regard. In addition, you can store up to twice your base, and this is generally what you want to do for two reasons: Combos and Overbreak.
Combos are basically a sequence of skills that form another skill, but the ingredient skills are not unique. Each skill has a "type", and the combos are sequences of "types". For example, the first one you get is just R-Skill I -> R-Skill I -> R-Skill I. There are about seven skills of type R-Skill I and all of them work, AND they can be used multiple times in the same combo. Obviously, if you have more AP, you can do more combos, and sometimes having 2x means the difference of doing one combo each turn or three combos on the second turn.
The other thing is that enemies (and PCs) have three bars: Break, Down, and Burst. All attacks inflict Break damage, while only some do Down and Burst. If you deplete the Break bar, the enemy goes into Overbreak, which has two advantages. First, the person who inflicted Overbreak gets AP back (I think equal to their base), so they can use more moves. If the attack that initiated Overbreak is a combo,
all characters in that combo get AP back, and it is NOT split. Second, the enemy is weaker during Overbreak (I think there's a defense drop or something) and combos seem to do much more damage to them (the combo I listed above does about 2.5x its normal damage for example). Depleting Down/Burst doesn't seem to give back AP and I'm not sure what all they do, but that's a lot less common than Overbreak.
Thus, the most efficient strategy is to store up AP, then combo the enemy until Overbreak, and then combo them even more while they're weakened, adding up to waaaaaaaay more than 2x the damage you would've done by just attacking on both turns. This is why the 5 turn limit on Lazarus's battle was important. I skipped the 5th turn refilling my AP but never got a chance to use it.
End tangent.
Anyways, after the Etna/Prinny fight I managed to get a bunch of costumes for people. These include batshit things like Misha getting +1000 HP and +15 VIT and Aurica getting +1500 HP and +20 VIT (though hers reduces AGI/LUC to compensate). Marie got one with +2000 HP as well. Keep in mind that these people's base HP is around 700 or so, so these are INSANE HP boosts. Other people got good boosts, but they tended to be in other stats. Later on, Miko got one with a good HP boost as well as boosting STR by 30 (her STR was like 15 or something before that). So yeah, costumes are pretty cracked out on stats. They also apply mults to characters' BASE stats (i.e. no equipment, including the costume itself), kind of like the reverse of Disgaea aptitudes. This means the stat changes will still mean something at endgame (though at that point, the mults will likely matter than the raw stat boosts).
Overall, I'm still loving this game. It may have more insane twinking options than even
Ar tonelico, and actually forces you to USE THEM. People generally complain about the game being too complex, but it's not that bad once you get used to all the systems you can horribly abuse. There are polish issues, but eh, not bad enough to be a big deal to me.
