Playin' any games today, Flying Nun? (WGAYP - 2011 Edition)

[Hunter Sopko]

Sounds like they took a page from the Japanese Anime storytelling method. If they say it enough times in the show, that makes it true, no matter how much evidence to the contrary.

[Grefter]

It isn't that the character isn't doing heroic things (if you choose the Good options, I don't even want to think about how terrible this plot is if you are a douchebag).  It is that there is other characters doing far more heroic things that have an established history of doing heroic things.  Bonus point for them being labelled as hangers on in the established history of heroics.

So very depressing.

Edit - And this is also noting that the game has established that you need to get followers otherwise the revolution cannot succeed.  Presumably so everyone else can do all the work while you act as a figurehead, working entirely unrelated jobs for riduculous wages (preferably in towns that you are supposed to be working on saving from starvation), buying up all the local property and industry while doing sidequests to garner the support for middle class citizens who contribute to nothing other than the bourgeois economy one at a time.  Standing on the necks of giants to become king.

I really need to stop thinking about this before I shoot myself.

[Shale]

Sounds like they took a page from the Japanese Anime storytelling method. If they say it enough times in the show, that makes it true, no matter how much evidence to the contrary.

It's also how politics and sportscasting work.

[Fenrir]

To be fair, the game establishes that the leader of the revolution can't be some random dude, so everyone kind of wants the main character (brother/sister of the actual king) to be a hero.
Evil path makes absolutely no sense though.

Last Remnant: Disc 2.  This is the most SaGatastic game, even more than every SaGa game. The mechanics are seriously messed up - I can kind of understand the rationale behind them, but I don't see how Square-enix can think that there can be mass appeal to them.

You control a whole lot of characters in battle, each with their own equipment, skills etc. They're grouped in unions, groups of 3-4-5 that all share HPs. at the start of every turn you have access to a few different options (use physical skills, use magical skills, heal, heal other teammates, etc) but you're never really sure that the options you want will show up. Your unions can interrupt enemy unions and vice-versa, but this is very hard to plan. The most difficult battles have reinforcements out of nowhere and uber status of doom.
Ultimately, strategy can only get you so far in this game. What you really need is Bigger Numbers, from equipment, stats, skills.

You can only equip the main character, every other character will upgrade naturally by asking you stuff after battle "Give me that gold ore please". There are about one million enemies, one billion item drops. Even forging your own stuff is difficult, you have access to about one thousand weapon/armor recipes which all ask for specific items. There is no in game bestiary so you pretty much have no idea where to search.
You can harvest a ton of items in a ton of different places too.

So yeah. This is overly complicated. But just fight a ton of stuff, harvest tons of items, take some notes of everything you're doing, and you should have no problem right? WRONG! THIS IS SAGA!!
When you fight enemies, your battle rank increases. Battle rank is the enemy's level basically, this has just about no influence on your team.
In a SaGa fashion, you only get good skills and stats if you fight strong enemies, and get next to nothing for fighting grunts.
So basically, if you fight too many grunts, your battle rank will increase a lot and your team will be a lot weaker than the enemies in the long run. So yeah, avoid every random enemy, fight only bosses and uber randoms, or you'll sacrifice the long term for the short term. What is the point of having such an elaborate loot system then? And guild quests that ask you to kill X amount of enemies? I don't know.

Fortunately, there's a lot of leeway. You can pretty much play regularly and still finish the game, but you'll have a really difficult time for seemingly arbitrary reasons, you will feel like you'll completely miss the point of the game, and you can pretty much forget about beating the uber version of the final boss. (not that you could even have access to it anyway, it's worse than VP's A ending or Suikostuff) OR: Play with a faq, and feel like you completely miss the point of the game too! OR: Play the game 20 times and learn stuff on your own. It's the way it should be, but it's no fun. And you still won't unlock the uber final boss without a faq, really.

And battles take way too long.
Somehow, I still enjoy playing it, but every game over is even worse than losing a character in Hardcore Torchlight.

[Glen Veil]

Disgaea 2: Beaten, game was a blast, generally enjoyed every bit of it minus Tardo being plain and generic next to the rest of the cast.  Only gripe with the game was the expected quip about how Adell's parents are the two demons BECAUSE LOOK AT THOSE TIES did not happen.

[Sierra]

The fact that they didn't feel it necessary to point this out to the player was the best part.

[Tonfa]

Last Remnant: Disc 2.

Got suckered into getting the 360 version? It is basically a beta for the PC one which has a number of important fixes like redoing the BR calculation in a way that actually gives you benefits for fighting scrubs, autosaves/save anywhere in general, selective disabling of unit commands and removing the leader cap. I enjoyed the game and its ridiculosity enough to beat every superboss, The Seven and The Lost are even more nightmarish than the frue final. and I still need to do NG+ on Hard, sell off all carryovers/spend all the money, and then use the trainer to bump the party size cap to 25 from the very start

[Captain K.]

360 has save anywhere, unless you mean during battle.

While you can hamper yourself with BR, it's by no means an impediment to beating the game.  It just makes the sidequests/optional bosses harder.  I linked multiple enemies through the whole game and am still doing fine.

While Bigger Numbers certainly do help, I find that strategy gets you pretty damn far in this game.  It is FAQbait, but the FAQs for the game suck, and the wiki is hard to use as well.  This is the kind of game I'd love to spend 6 months writing a guide for, if I had that kind of time to spend.  Still, I didn't start looking at FAQs until I was halfway through the game, and I managed to get all the missable triggers without one.  The luckiest one was where you have to agree with the female knight in Melphina three times to get a quest.

[Tonfa]

The luckiest one was where you have to agree with the female knight in Melphina three times to get a quest.

Actually that is the one quest you do not need to do to unlock the real final boss. (wiki check - oh, only applies to PC version). Therefore it is best to agree with Roberto (unless you're on 360).

I know people have mentioned not being able to save between the army battle and the boss in base battles on the 360 version, I thought the game did not have save anywhere based on that. My bad.

[Cmdr_King]

Ar tonelico- So, the game ends when you've shut down the tower and finished the two cosmospheres, right?  They do for me.

Yeah, not bothering with Phase 3 (beyond a token amount to finish up cosmospheres).  Game just doesn't inspire me to go completionist on it.

Anyway, so I actually played half this game back in uh... 2003?  Way back when it came out.  And played the rest in the past week.  So I don't remember things like how the game started or the like.  That said, the final climb through Platinum Garden and Catwalk, like so many Gust efforts, was considerably harder than the rest of the game, largely because gimmickier enemies started showing up.  The final boss sequence was similarly more impressive than the rest, although this was partly because I'd managed to make Jack really frail and he sorta exploded to the Satellite Beam. 

Is naive idiocy how harem mains are normally written?  I assume so, and writing Lyner that way really holds back the game because he actually evens out as downright cruel because of it.  It's mostly a pity because if they'd stepped back from the cliche for five minutes and had him evolve through the game, it would have been pretty awesome.  As is, call it a 6?  It's interesting enough but the flaws really can't be ignored.

[Fenrir]

Yes, 360 version. PC certainly sounded nicer, especially the leader cap removal. Can you believe I can only use 6 leaders? I don't know why they don't just patch the 360 version. Must be japanese culture not being used to this. Sounds like they added a save between the base battles, which is also a really good idea. I just lost against the racist albino crazy cat, and I don't want to do the whole thing again.

Strategy and trial / error only got me through one particular battle. Otherwise I either won or got completely crushed every battle. You do have to not act like an idiot in battle, but otherwise there's just too much randomness involved, I feel.

[Niu]

Last Remnant: Disc 2.

Got suckered into getting the 360 version? It is basically a beta for the PC one which has a number of important fixes like redoing the BR calculation in a way that actually gives you benefits for fighting scrubs, autosaves/save anywhere in general, selective disabling of unit commands and removing the leader cap. I enjoyed the game and its ridiculosity enough to beat every superboss, The Seven and The Lost are even more nightmarish than the frue final. and I still need to do NG+ on Hard, sell off all carryovers/spend all the money, and then use the trainer to bump the party size cap to 25 from the very start

Have you tried White Conquer yet?
That said, I wonder why didn't they include Blue Rush as an optional too...

[Fenrir]

The 6 bases are cool. One big boss with 5 unions to defeat.
Too bad you have to endure those pointless battles before each of the bosses. Especially since you can't save between battles. Actually during those filler battles I just input my commands and then go away 10 minutes, failing every QTE, not that it matters.


Albino cat was bad enough, since he could OHKO one union every three turns or so. This is bad. Really bad. I split up my unions (instead of using 4 unions with 5-5-4-4 characters, I used 5 with 4-4-4-3-3 characters) and ended up beating him after careful use of the revival spell (interruption is a pretty big deal here) and strategy (basically, go after the mages first) At that point I did every sidequest available because fighting 5 other similar battles sounded like too much for me. Turns out those bosses get even more h4x.

Fish was easy. I don't know what the hell was wrong with him.

Toad thing wasn't too hard either, but all his grunts were annoying and he had that crazy insane Galaxy spell that does huge damage to everyone (fortunately, he had the decency to only use that once)

The twin sisters basically used Galaxy every three turns, and could waste the turns of 2 unions (by engaging them) every turn. This makes killing the grunts much harder to do. Fortunately, by having all my characters focus on those annoying mages I could kill all of them on the first turn. The battle would have been a nightmare otherwise.

Young was ridiculous. OHKO one union per round + some splash damage to other unions most of the time? WHAT? I wasted an unbelievable amount of herbs reviving everybody everytime. This battle is a good example of how you can feel like you don't have control over battles (It's hard to tell who's going to be interrupted by the boss, and harder to tell who will be damaged by Brawl's splash damage) but still can win by playing carefully anyway. Nice.

Old was pure support for this better than average grunts. I just sent Jager to tank the damage from the warriors while everybody else handled those FREAKING MAGES! Smooth sailing from there on. Near the end of the battle he starts getting crazy and murdering anyone who dares attempt to touch him, but he's really already over at this point. (not that this would have been too difficult to handle)

Cyclops? Bitch move. I'm ashamed of you, SaGa guys.


My unions are:
Jager + 3 grunts: Unions of Big HPs. They can all use item arts (including revival), but they're mostly good at tanking and doing big physical damage. 
Emmy + Caedmon + 2 grunts: Union of Big Damage. I send it wherever I want things to die.
Irina + 3 grunts: Union of Healing. It's Irina. I have her on standby, ready to heal anything, most of the time.
Glenys + 2 grunts: Union of Filler. Tries to stay away from difficult enemies, can sometimes heal.
Rush + Two grunts: Union of Awesome. Rush is GOD. He can do anything.
I don't even have any attack magic user anymore at that point.

[Meeplelard]

Parasite Eve 3rd Birthday: Up to Chapter 4.  Nice that it opens up with signs that Aya may be back to her old self again, though still early.  Also, yay for a random toss in from a PE1 character out of nowhere!?!?

Marvel Ultimate Alliance: in the middle of the Atlantis stuff.  I tried Captain America and Wolverine's missions, but it doesn't seem feasible at my levels once I get to the boss due to time reasons, so I'll probably go back at higher levels and such.

[Tide]

Front Mission 4 Replay: Done. Used a dual Minotaur arm set up for Darril's squad, which lead to massive amounts of pain for the AI. Nothing like eating an 8000 damage counter attack. In general, this replay kind of reinforced how bad Luis is. His default computer set has a grand total of +2 AP upgrades.

Super Mario RPG: Attempt Marathon replay. Got to Bowser's Keep on day 1 and finished it the next. Laggy and Eph were all like, "use Mallow and Bowser!" So I did, and made the last dungeon around 2x longer just for the final boss segment. Came back with Mario/Mallow/Geno default to win. This type of playthrough is fun since it suddenly makes the game hard. Axem Rangers were very damaging and Black's 550 HP felt like it took ages to wear down. Knife Guy and Grate Guy were near impossible unless you use Bowser. Bundt required an extremely lucky miss to win. Probably won't do it again for a bit, but yeah. If you want to make you SMRPG run more fun, try it.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I still can't believe there's a challenge that makes Knife Guy and Grate Guy top tier.


I haven't been playing too much recently since the defeat of Tactics Ogre. I finished VP, think I mentioned this already though? I replayed Metroid Fusion, 1:02 since I'm a bit rusty. Why haven't you played this game yet? Fix this. Also dug up Mega Man Powered Up and went from 80% challenges completed to 96%. All I have left is the Wily boss rushes, which don't appeal to me because having to redo the Yellow Devil each time (who I can perfect but he takes ~3 minutes) = no. I also tried to pick up Oilman and beat his HM quest but argh. Oilman is such a puny.

Not sure what's next.

[Tide]

Don't forget Bowyer also has MT 2HKO to the whole party. I also wiped once to Exor. If you had even lower levels than me, as Sage said, Corona is a MT wipe if you're not boosted at all (it is otherwise, just a very high MT 2HKO). If you want to watch it and missed a part of it, most of it is recorded on my ustream channel page. No sound though!


Also Chrono Trigger: Played more of this. Stream with Meeple, NEB and Ciato on Skype. Got to the part where there's a bunch of optional stuff to finish, so nearing the final stretch as I understand.

And of course, a stream shot to commemorate:

[Fenrir]

L.A. Noire: Surprise gift from my girlfriend. Made it to the golden butterfly case. I think I screwed it up.
What I really like about the game is the way the game allows you to fail. Read Gref's rant basically. Since I love the idea, I've removed every external clue the game could give me. (Like the music stopping if you have found every piece of evidence on the crime scene. Let me miss stuff) Not really to make the game more difficult but more immersive.

The game's really that good and revolutionary, honestly. It's a hell of a lot harder to tell what the game wants you to say however (unlike in Phoenix Wright), and it's not as immersive as it should be though. The worst example, unfortunately, is the first interrogation in the game. (Clovis Galletta) I was supposed to tell her she lied by showing something that.. didn't quite prove she lied at all. So yeah, instead I trusted her and asked her a nice question. She went into a violent rage and said the interview was over. Huh.
It gets better.


Last Remnant: Completely, utterly crushed by the Fallen. I guess I need to grind. I removed Irina and added Duke of Ghor into the team. BR 62.

Mario Galaxy 2: 52 stars already. Easy and fun enough except everytime I have to waggle.

[Pyro]

Okamiden: So I'm going to a cave to kill a big snake. Twice. Okami did this plot point first and better... Which is a refrain I can use for the entire game, sans maybe chibi-partner interaction at a few points. This is a rather lackluster sequel that hasn't added much of anything. Fans of the original are better off replaying it, I think.

[Captain K.]

Last Remnant:  At the end.  Unlocked Absolute Conqueror, but he is rather hard.  So back to grinding.

[Random Consonant]

Shining Force 3 Part 2 - superDonhort left the party.  Good riddance.

[Twilkitri]

Persona 4 - finished.

Initially got Bad Ending (ver. no-deaths). Subsequently looked up the requirements for True Ending. Have to say that some of them are kind of unintuitive.

Despite knowing who the killer was from here across the entire playthrough, I cannot say that I ever saw anything that would point towards them? Seems almost like you aren't supposed to know and just have to guess based off the conditions set up previous to the question, which do strike off most options to be fair. Wonder if I would have gotten it initially or not if I had played up to there without knowing.

Ending to the final happened somewhat strangely. After two characters had been removed, Yukiko revived one of them with no apparent effect, but then on the next lot of removals Yukiko was removed... and so was the character that had been revived, which made for a somewhat strange scene since they were not on the field. Next turn the main was removed anyway, but I find it hard to believe that that was supposed to happen that way.

Managed to at least start all slinks this time. Aside from plotslinks, maxed Chariot, Empress, Magician, Hermit, and Priestess. Cannot say I think much of slink-based evolution as opposed to plot-based evolution.

Expected to max more that that because I was not expecting things to go into autopilot after Magatsu. Annoyingly I redid the previous dungeon for fetch quests before running through Magatsu in the one p-day, so I effectively failed those quests as well due to this.

Things which are annoying:

Being restricted to two-handed swords. I am still bad at timing swings right with them. It doesn't help that I fail to comprehend the requirements for Player Advantage as I have hit enemies from behind without getting it and hit enemies from the front with getting it (without Emperor active). Was also hit with Enemy Advantage a fair amount after missing and being hit from the front, which assuming is a penalty for failing to connect, is all the more reason to not be happy about the situation. Plus I assume that being stuck with one weapon type is what caused the physical elements to be combined, which I am not really a fan of, mostly because it resulted in there being multiple physical skills which previously were differentiated by being different elements but now have no obvious difference from each other.

The partner AI is kind of dumb at times. I observed it using multitarget skills which were effective against particular enemies but repelled/drained by other enemies on the field numerous times. Chie also insists on using Mabufu/Bufula on enemies which aren't ice-weak despite her physical skills being more damaging. No-one with buffing skills ever seemed to use them either, although I am fine with that from a gameplay perspective. Not the biggest fan of P-buffs.

On the plus side, unless my memory is failing me, I seem to recall the P3F:A partner AI suffering from a crippling fear of using healing skills when below half SP. That doesn't happen here, so that's either an improvement or nothing at all depending on how my memory is. On the flipside of that, the P4 AI appears to have nowhere near the critical predictiveness of the P3F:A AI. Or possibly just critical rates were reduced. Seems like there is still some amount of psychicness built into it though.

Continuing on regarding the AI, what happened to the AI tactics? In P3 we've got Act Freely, Knock Down, Attack Fallen, Full Assault, Heal/Support, Conserve SP, Assign Target, Same Target, and Stand By, whereas here we just have Act Freely, Full Assault, Conserve SP, and Heal/Support. Also Direct Control if you're insane I guess. To be fair, some of the P3 tactics were useless, but these included Full Assault, which is still available, and Conserve SP is only useful for stopping Chie from wasting her time with ice. Actually, Full Assault is less useful in P4 than in P3 because most people don't have anything to do apart from assaulting, whereas in P3 they could all use items. Anyway. My main problem is that, assuming that Stand By causes people to go into guard mode and not just stand around as I don't remember, there are a number of times when I would have liked to have used it in P4.

I don't like that the people following you around in dungeons are just decorations, despite never using the split up functionality in P3 when I wasn't forced to. I don't like that in certain dungeons I can turn around and find that no-one is there as they have all got stuck on dungeon architecture aways back. I don't like the numerous times I rotated the camera to see down a passageway and then it snapped back into a position unusable for that after releasing the button.

I don't think the Goho-M/highest floor system makes any sense compared to the terminal system.

I don't think being forced to use ID skills on enemies to see whether they repel it or not is a good idea, for all that a good deal of ID skillusers are resistant to the type of ID they use.

Things which are not so annoying:

Slinks having optional romance late >>> Slinks having mandatory romance midway.

Slink reversal system was seemingly removed as well? I never had any slinks go into reversal, and some of them were left for some time.

In summation, P3 is better.



SRWL - Up to episode 9.

Started replaying this for some reason. I guess due to having watched Macross Frontier?

[Yakumo]

You're complaining about the AI but you say you would need to be insane to use direct control?  I do not comprehend.  Why would you not want to control your characters if you don't like the way their AI is set up?

[Twilkitri]

In general, the partner AI operates the characters better than I could. I only really take issue with regressions and inconsistencies.

Direct control would ruin what I have come to consider the Persona Experience. Do P1/2 have partner AI?

[Shale]

P1/2 are traditional turn-based RPGs with full control over everybody.