Doctor Lautrec And The Forgotten Knights - finished?
Had 27 puzzles unseen in the list, played through the last dungeon I currently had access to, which was a seven-puzzle dungeon with 5 difficulty stars out of 6. Expected this to unlock two more dungeons with the full 6 difficulty stars at ten puzzles apiece. After that dungeon there was some storyline and the credits ran again, which was bemusing. Saved a new version of the clear save, and loaded it up, and checked the available quests, only to have found that there were no new quests. Checked the puzzle list, only to have found that all the remaining puzzles had been added to the list, in what seemed to be a ludicrously cheap (and undiscoverable) way of adding bonus puzzles. Did one of the sequence ones and confirmed that it was one that had not been seen midgame, and that no prize was given out for having done it. Remainder of bonus puzzles left untouched.
I'm mostly concerned about the lack of 6-star difficulty quests, here. I have a theory that maybe the regular final quest may be marked as 6-star difficulty, despite all the 5-star quests being aftergame. But for some bizarre reason, the quest selector takes a page from Super Robot Wars 1 and offers you three random quests at a time in a stunning display of user unfriendliness, and I really don't care to sit there refreshing it until the final storyline quest shows up. (Midgame it always offers you two random new quests and one random old quest (unless you don't have at least one old quest, or there aren't at least two new quests, of course), so it isn't as bad as it could have been (unless you want to do quests in numerical order (in which case they've stymied you anyway by not making them available in the same order))).
Man I sure am lucky that I don't need to revisit any particular quests for anything I missed.
Speaking of revisiting things, halfway through the game four treasures show up in the shop for ludicrous gemstone costs. I waited until I had enough diamonds for the most diamond-expensive one first, and helpfully it was horribly outclassed by that time. But I gotta say, at the point the first one which became available became available it was already outclassed. Meanwhile, I never ended up getting enough diamonds to be able to buy the next-most diamond-expensive one. So if I was into that sort of thing, I could spend time grinding gemstones to buy a handful of useless treasure! no
With regards to my earlier complaints about battle difficulty spiking, after having changed tack to using whatever I had that was most powerful rather than was lowest levelled... at that point, things were still a bit touch and go, but after acquiring a couple of the treasures in question, things never reached that point in difficulty again (except possibly for Sang v2, if there was a lot of treasure lost or still fatigued from Sang v1 - but I didn't have any real trouble, and I don't carry around restorative items).
I liked the final boss, but I expected it to have five stages and was disappointed when it only had three. There was essentially a fourth stage in one of the postgame quests, but never a fifth, which seems off. The 'fourth stage' was tameable, but was an Arboreal treasure and consequently worthless, so I never tried using it to see whether it actually showed up as a tame version of the final or if it was one of the standard tame arboreal treasures.
Let's talk about the battle system since I didn't really go into it last time. You have the treasure you're fighting on the central pedestal, and put your own treasures on plinths around it, as I said.
Every treasure has HP, Attack, Defence, and a type. Types are Terrestrial, Humanoid, Avian, Aquatic, and Arboreal. And Crystal.
Anyway, every time you put a treasure down, it attacks the central treasure, then the central treasure attacks it. Then it never does anything else for the rest of the battle (aside from having an elemental effect on connected plinths and potentially participating in synergy attacks).
So, Terrestrial are the strongest, but they're only super effective against humanoids and are weak against Avian and Aquatic. Avian are next-most strongest, but are only super effective against Terrestrial and are weak against Aquatic and Humanoid. Humanoids are the next-most strongest, and are super effective against Avian and Aquatic, but are weak against Terrestrial and Crystal (Crystal weakness never comes up for your own treasures). Aquatic are the next-most strongest, and are super effective against Terrestrial and Avian, and only weak against Humanoid.
Arboreal are the weakest (outside Crystal). They're not strong or weak against anything. They are the most defensive ones. In a battle system where each of your treasures can only be attacked once each battle. YESZZZZZZZZZZZZ
Crystals can do fair damage against Humanoids, but they're mostly useful for knocking treasure which is shortly outside of the taming HP zone into it rather than risk an actual treasure doing too much damage and extinguishing it, or for being sacrificed.
When you put a treasure on a plinth, it gets a 30% attack/defence? bonus if it's super effective against the central treasure, or negative 30% if it's weak to it (supposedly - I've seen central treasures do more damage than they have attack power while in this position, but there may be other factors involved. They also get 10% extra bonus for each plinth their plinth is connected to which you've put a treasure they're super effective against on, and a 10% loss for each treasure they're connected to which they're weak to. Crystals don't seem to get 10% bonuses from being put next to Humanoid treasure, though.
Some treasures also cause synergy effects from being placed next to each other. They're few and far between, though, and the effects generally aren't that great. Then you have effects like 'Attack power x3' which do sound great until you remember that the vast majority of the time you're trying to knock treasures into the taming zone. I think that this feature also suffers severely from the only being able to bring three treasures with you into dungeons rule, especially since some effects require three treasures in the first place.
All up, if they bring out a sequel which doesn't make any improvements to the variety of gameplay types in the game, I will probably still play it, but I will be sad because there is ludicrous room for improvement.
