Games you're playing: The 2009 edition.

[Tide]

On that we agree. I didn't find a whole lot of use for her, though Ragnar still takes last place.

Really? I was thinking Felius took last place. Ragnar has Hyper Attack and Orbital Ring. Felius has what, exactly? I've been playing him with axes and Upper Hand but this isn't really impressive as far as physical games go (and suffers horribly once Drop Kick becomes available since that has a way better multiplier to make up for the fact that it can miss).... Shockwave is pathetic compared to the other special characters' MT physicals. He's not terrible or anything, but everyone else offers something unique and powerful (Ragnar - Hyper, Alexia - Leader's Duty, Labyrinthia - Warp and Replica, Levin - Execrate and Blast, Clarissa - Encourage and Sacrifice) and he really doesn't.

Inclined to agree with NEB here. Having used all the PCs on my first playthrough, I felt Felius to be the worst of the human PCs. Exact pecking order for me was Levin > Clarissa > Ragnar > Alexia > Labby > Felius.

Problem was that other PCs aside from having a unique powerful ability, also had a better stat distribution in that it makes them easier to twink or specialize. (Clarissa had range and MAG/RFX, Levin had MAG, RFX and movement, Labby had MAG, Ragnar has a long range weapon and decent ATK, Alexia has lots of ATK). Felius specializes in...DEF. Which is not a really usable twink stat compared to the others. I had to give him the duty of generic boss smasher for him to be useful (Six Shooter man basically). Upper hand has uses, but his base abilities are garbage.

*Hypes the status absorb move here*

[Fudozukushi]

Oh, so you probably need another max S.Link to get her.

I'm guessing it's an accessory, too?

No, just two specific Personas that when fused together form her.  I know she's not a Maxed S.Link Persona.

Yes.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Alice and Odin off the top of my head do, a few more should have that as well. Odin is generally a wonderful persona to have, by the way.

Although, now that we're mentioning this stuff. Did you grab that Chakra Ring in Heaven?

Sadly, Odin requires a maxed S.Link, which I didn't grab. I also never once encountered Alice. Though I do have Sarasvati with Invigorate 2.

No, I didn't grab the Chakra Ring. What's it do?

Alice is a special fusion, FAQ her out (doesn't require special S. Links). The Chakra Ring is basically what Fudo said. Go fight the loser optional boss in Heaven for it, it's in the room you fought Kunino-Sagiri. Search for it after mangling the boss - it was unthreatening to my L66 party, so yours should positively slaughter it.

TWEWY - So, I was doing some Mingle PP abuse for Murasame evolution shenanigans. In the meanwhile, oh, look, I evolved Onikiri into Kanesada, lemme look at its stats after getting a few levels from Mingling...

* Jo'ou Ranbu spits drink.

81 ATTACK AT L4? The game can't like this at freaking week 1.

[OblivionKnight]

What S.Links did you work on, by chance? 

As everyone's suggest, go get that Chakra ring.  And if you have invigorate, go back to the Castle, fight pathetic randoms, regen SP with that.  It's a little tedious, but works.  And if you want to level some more, that dungeon (Magatsu) has the best experience in the game, even better than the frue final dungeon.  Hitting 77 will get you Rise's SP healing, although you might find the bosses a bit pathetic at that point >_>

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

At L77, the boss after Evil Kenji (who is sorta pathetic no matter what <_<) could still put up a solid fight, hard to argue with constant MT high 2HKO at base. He'd only be pathetic if Magetastic had HASSOU TOBI for him, but that's just animal cruelty by that point.

[OblivionKnight]

Granted, at level 77, you're 2 levels above him.  His damage ends up tanking a bit (at 70, NO is 270 MT...it's about 220 or so at 77, IIRC, which is a 3-shot to 480 HP...and 480 HP is the level 70 average HP!)

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

HP averages just sorta don't rise up that much. At L81, the HP average is 522? Yeah. 220 to 510 (erring on a high side kneejerk here) is still an okay 3HKO, and he double-acts (440 to 510 = Mediarahan that shit right -now-, and that can strain your resources pretty badly on the long run). In practice, it's still a strong 2HKO! This probably says something about how insane he can get at levels below 70, because MT OHKO is just stupid (hell, Nebula Oculus x2 is MT OHKO at L70. Thank god buffs/debuffs exist).

Of course, maybe I just saw Nebula Oculus a wee bit more often than normal.

[Idun]

Onto Dragon Quest VIII. First thing I can say about this is that I love Yang's VA.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

DQ8 VA is a shining jewel in general. I'm sure you'll like many more.

[Meeplelard]

Yeah, if there's one thing DQ8 did undeniably well, its the Voice Acting.

[Grefter]

Pretty spot on with skills again El Cid.  Hoooooorrriiiiiblly off on Perk choice again >_> Stats, you really should run around with higher Luck.  It gets you better perks as well.

NPCs are serviceable yeah but they just tend to get in the way in so many ways.  Just being in the way, blocking your line of fire of getting you in trouble because you forgot to tell them to put their guns away (not an issue if you don't spend much time in NCR....)\

Deathclaw ending cinematic is just bugged yeah, known bug, think there is fan stuff to fix that.

President can also be taken down with a luck (see save/load abuse).   Punch him in the head and crit and hope it knocks him out.  That will take him down so you can take the card without alerting guards.  From there you can probably kick his eyes out and not alert anyone or something.

[Dark Holy Elf]

On that we agree. I didn't find a whole lot of use for her, though Ragnar still takes last place.

Really? I was thinking Felius took last place. Ragnar has Hyper Attack and Orbital Ring. Felius has what, exactly? I've been playing him with axes and Upper Hand but this isn't really impressive as far as physical games go (and suffers horribly once Drop Kick becomes available since that has a way better multiplier to make up for the fact that it can miss).... Shockwave is pathetic compared to the other special characters' MT physicals. He's not terrible or anything, but everyone else offers something unique and powerful (Ragnar - Hyper, Alexia - Leader's Duty, Labyrinthia - Warp and Replica, Levin - Execrate and Blast, Clarissa - Encourage and Sacrifice) and he really doesn't.

Inclined to agree with NEB here. Having used all the PCs on my first playthrough, I felt Felius to be the worst of the human PCs. Exact pecking order for me was Levin > Clarissa > Ragnar > Alexia > Labby > Felius.

Problem was that other PCs aside from having a unique powerful ability, also had a better stat distribution in that it makes them easier to twink or specialize. (Clarissa had range and MAG/RFX, Levin had MAG, RFX and movement, Labby had MAG, Ragnar has a long range weapon and decent ATK, Alexia has lots of ATK). Felius specializes in...DEF. Which is not a really usable twink stat compared to the others. I had to give him the duty of generic boss smasher for him to be useful (Six Shooter man basically). Upper hand has uses, but his base abilities are garbage.

*Hypes the status absorb move here*

Oh yes, Status Absorb is cool and really handy for 2-3 and 3-1b among others (though in all except 2-3, Labby's Replica is often even better as an anti-status move). Of course Felius is force-deployed for 2-3 anyway.

(Clarissa > Levin > Labby > Ragnar > Alexia > Felius since we're handing out inequalities!)

[Sierra]

Felius isn't exactly good, no, but I did at least have pretty good success with weapon-breaking early in the game. I never did find a niche for Ragnar. Orbital Ring is nice in theory, but too situational--most of the time I had a good cluster of enemies to use it on, there was a PC in the way that I wouldn't be able to avoid hitting as well. I'll grant you Hyper, but I usually defaulted to stat-downing enemies rather than buffing my PCs. Also, maybe it was just bad luck, but my Ragnar always had trouble actually hitting people.

Rest of the lineup looks pretty much the same as my experience.

~

Pretty spot on with skills again El Cid.  Hoooooorrriiiiiblly off on Perk choice again >_> Stats, you really should run around with higher Luck.  It gets you better perks as well.

NPCs are serviceable yeah but they just tend to get in the way in so many ways.  Just being in the way, blocking your line of fire of getting you in trouble because you forgot to tell them to put their guns away (not an issue if you don't spend much time in NCR....)\

I was never clear on what purpose Luck served, so it wound up being the dump stat by default.

I always had to kick the allies out of the party before entering NCR (which I did a fair bit since I was trying to clear every quest I could find) because they wouldn't listen when I told them to put away their guns (or the guards/game didn't notice or care), and yes, this was very annoying. Them getting in the way on a regular basis was also still a nuisance; I mean, it's nice that we have a "get the hell out of the way" command this time, but it would've been better if they just didn't do stupid shit like that in the first place. If a game gives me the option to recruit allies, I'm generally going to use it, so it is a bummer that it's implemented with these flaws.

I always had good accuracy, though, so I rarely ever shot them by mistake. They shot each other much more often.

[Dhyerwolf]

Felius isn't exactly good, no, but I did at least have pretty good success with weapon-breaking early in the game. I never did find a niche for Ragnar. Orbital Ring is nice in theory, but too situational--most of the time I had a good cluster of enemies to use it on, there was a PC in the way that I wouldn't be able to avoid hitting as well. I'll grant you Hyper, but I usually defaulted to stat-downing enemies rather than buffing my PCs. Also, maybe it was just bad luck, but my Ragnar always had trouble actually hitting people.

This is where IFF hype comes in. Even before IFF though, you can use move Ragnar around/move around Orbital Ring to avoid a PC.

[Cmdr_King]

Ragnar's got good stats on paper, but his accuracy always felt like it was kicking his ass a bit in terms of his offensive capabilities.  That said, Hyper really is pretty awesome.  It's like they looked at Ragnar, realized he was defaultly the least useful of the PCs, and gave him a top-tier spell to compensate.

[Sierra]

IFF takes a while to learn, though, and requires spending time in a mage class. Which didn't sound like something Ragnar would be any good at.

[Dark Holy Elf]

To be fair, as long as you carry in the equipment of a fighter class you can crossclass in XF better than you'd expect. Enigmancer also has pretty high base Atk by mage standards (equal to Strider or Gadgeteer, better than Excavator) which says... okay, not that much. More importantly it has high MP, something Ragnar sorely needs to get any mileage out of Hyper (I had Ragnar spending much of his time as freaking Geomancer just because it is the only physical class in the game with a non-fail MP stat besides Royal Fencer and Sentinel, and the latter lacks something called speed).

[Talaysen]

And how do you find a universal agreement on how those states is going to get assigned? For example, knowing how the hp mechanics work, Vit is always my top priority no matter how bad the growth rate is, and I'd rather sacrifice some offense for that due to the gain of hp in late gain is much better reward.

Points go into the cheapest stats.  Seems simple enough.  I know a lot of people take PCs with choosable stat growth to be "balanced" in everything, so this isn't that much of a stretch.

It's not like we ever come with universal agreements on anything around here, and we've had stat topics for games that have to go through even more hoops.

[Niu]

Fair point. Counting after game or not? Since every character's ultimate equipment are only available in after game.

* Jo'ou Ranbu spits drink.

81 ATTACK AT L4? The game can't like this at freaking week 1.

99 ATK when maxed out, I told you that thing is broken.

[TranceHime]

Fire Emblem 8 Girls:



Can somebody please help me. @_@;; This hack is Nintendo Hard on GBA, seriously!!! It appears that the four forts there generate reinforcements every turn unless you sit 4 of your own guys on them, and even then, sitting your units on them one at a time is asking for them to DIE, since they all spawn right tehre >_>

EDIT: No wonder this map looked so familiar... It's based off of FE1's Ch 16! Goddamnit Japan!!

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Ouendan - KAIZOUENDAN 1 VANQUISHED BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA SCREW YOU KAIZO STEADY DIE

EBA - Currently going on Hard Rock. S Rank FC'd both September and Material Girl~

[Hunter Sopko]

P3- Up to 7/6, right before the next full moon. The S-Links feel a lot more natural than P4's for some reason. I guess it's because most of them aren't structured like after-school specials and feel like actual kids hanging out. Granted, you lose that extra something P4 gave them on occasion. Doing a lot better in keeping to the Max guide than I did P4's, just two are off by 1 level. One is Chihiro at 9, and honestly she can stay there for all I care. I'll leave her there and move on to where the guide tells me and come back to her late. I keep making the points where I'm supposed to have stats maxed by the skin of my teeth too since I was to broke to work on them as I should have in the beginning. Oh well. I'll be fine.

Otherwise, the cast does feel pretty good overall, except Minato... who just feels like he does less overall than Souji and everyone attributes it to him anyway. Still, again I like the dynamic between the team better than P4's despite it not being as hilarious. Fuuka was a pleasant surprise too.

[Twilkitri]

Etrian Odyssey - Down to floor 18.

The boss of Strata 3 was as scrubby as the Strata 2 boss. Bad trend. He also gave off the ingredients for a ludicrously powerful bow for the current time. Now I have barely any funding left, but my survivalist is doing more damage in one Multihit hit than my landsy is doing with Crush. Fair enough trade.

Went back to Strata 2 and killed the Wyvern. It didn't give off any experience or items. It was a saddening time.

Strata 4 has been pretty interesting so far. I wonder what gimmicks will show up in the remaining floors.



Breath Of Fire V - Up to the Cemetery. 47% D-Counter.

So long as it doesn't transition into the BOF3 Wyndian Royal Cemetery things should continue fine and dandily.

Dragonated Deamoned and Vexacion. Didn't dragonate Hortensia, although I was on the verge of doing so a number of times. Horten fight became significantly easier when I remembered that I had 50% magic blocking equipment, then moreso once I realised that her profile was lying. All that said Nina was the only one that could break her shielding, and I had also run dry on revivification items and half of my regenerative items by then.

Meanwhile the cemetery is taunting me with goods I couldn't afford even if I didn't have to restock. Tsk.

[superaielman]

L4D- Finally got around to clearing Dam it (single player). It's a fun one shot map, but has problems. Listing problems from least serious to most serious.

-You can get an unavoidable witch before you get second level weapons or any sort of explosive. This means you have to sacrifice a PC to get the job done.
-I've seen a pipe bomb spawn in a spot where you can't grab it. Probably just a minor error, not a big deal.
-The map is partly a maze. Come on, at least mark general directions.
-You can get a horde spawning on you as some of the slower players are still loading into the game.
-Finale is kind of a trainwreck. It only spawns hunting rifles and not auto shotguns/assault rifles. What the fuck?

Good map, but kind of unforgiving considering the lack of safe rooms.

[Talaysen]

Fair point. Counting after game or not? Since every character's ultimate equipment are only available in after game.

Right now, no, since most people don't allow aftergame equips (including myself, at the moment, though been thinking about changing my stance there).  If I ever do get around to doing aftergame (I plan to, at least), I might grab stats for that as well.  We'll see.

Etrian Odyssey - Down to floor 18.

The boss of Strata 3 was as scrubby as the Strata 2 boss. Bad trend. He also gave off the ingredients for a ludicrously powerful bow for the current time. Now I have barely any funding left, but my survivalist is doing more damage in one Multihit hit than my landsy is doing with Crush. Fair enough trade.

Haha, I see you managed to get the broken bow of broked.  Survivalist is already stupid on damage, so getting it the bow just makes it nuts.  IIRC, that's the best bow at endgame, even.

---

Devil Survivor - Day 2!  Not much to say other than fusion search is like the best thing ever.