Super Mario 3d Land - beaten as much as I care to
Which means up through the second run through the W8 final, with 4 shiny savestars.
As it turns out, they do in fact expect you to do that thing I said I wasn't going to do for a fifth savestar and a bonus level, which I do not consider anything near worth it.
Nothing really to say about the few stages between when I reported in previously and now. I was concerned at the time that the way things had been heading could have made me irate enough with the game to slander the majority of it if I waited, but that didn't end up happening.
Dr. Lautrec And The Forbidden Knights - Currently stalled at the start of chapter 3
Interesting mishmash of styles in theory. It's not that good at pulling it off though.
I don't remember anyone talking about it before so let's start off with an overview of a typical quest.
First, you get a map to a hidden treasure with a brainteaser regarding where in the catacombs the labyrinth the treasure is in is. I've never figured any of them out myself but fortunately you don't need to, because Sophie and Lautrec will discuss it and come up with candidate places to go, so you go to those and talk to people and then they come up with other candidate places until they end up figuring out the actual location.
So you go to that location and play find-the-fleur-de-lis-which-marks-the-entrance. The first time this was on the ground and they had scenes of them opening it up and so on. But later on when they aren't showing this they seem to have no compunctions about putting them on the rooves of buildings and so on.
So you go into the catacombs and play stealth sections combined with block-pushing sections. Occassionally you will come across sealed entrances which require you to solve a puzzle. These aren't whimsical Laytonesque puzzles. These are find-the-difference puzzles, and sequence puzzles, and so-far-laughably-simple 'crossword' puzzles, and so on. There tends to be three per standard labyrinth so far.
Behind two of these sealed sections, you will find Treasure Animatus pedestals, one of which is the object of the quest. So you fight the Treasure Animatus by putting your own Treasure Animatus and crystals you've picked up throughout the labyrinth on plinths around the one you are fighting, and eventually tame it or kill it. Taming it lets you use it for the rest of the labyrinth, although it starts off with the same health it had left. Killing it - I'm not sure what that does as I haven't done it to any actual treasures, but I assume you still get it and just can't use it (unless you brought along a resurrection item).
I did not yet mention that you only get to take three treasures into a labyrinth. Yet there's no problem with carrying around and using treasures you get mid-labyrinth. You also only get to take three items in, although considering the battle style I'm not sure this is that much of a problem. I haven't actually taken any items in so far.
When you get the treasure which is the object of the quest, first all the treasure you have on hand get experience according to the crystals you've picked up throughout the labyrinth which you didn't get killed off (I think dead treasure still gets EXP, but a reduced amount), then you leave the labyrinth regardless of whether you're done there or not and then they give you a 'poor' grade for missing a single puzzle. Then when you go back later to do that puzzle, you get another 'poor' grade for only completing one puzzle (others are left completed, you can't re-do them - meanwhile leaving a labyrinth through the entrance rather than finishing it resets them all. Go figure).
Character sprites are nice. Sophie's eyes are horrifying. Gustav is great.
Inspector Godot with the magic police force is being made out to be a dick so far, but I'm assuming it's going to turn out that he has actual reasons for discouraging people from finding treasures revealed later.
Anyway I believe I said something about being stalled currently.
So, I've recently gotten to chapter 3. Chapter 1 was essentially a tutorial. Chapter 2 was quests 1-5 and a storyline quest (which has been given the number 21 after the fact, which may say something about the length of the game...). So far everything had been just ducky, aside from the chapter 2 boss which had over twice the attack power of most of the other treasures in Chapter 2 and was able to one-hit most of the treasure I had along. But the weight of numbers was enough even if some things ended up dying.
But now we get to the regular bosses in Chapter 3, and they're all more durable than the main boss of chapter 2. They all have more HP and more defense, and this is a subtractive defense system as far as I can see. The worst of them from these regards has 30 more HP and 15 more defence, but it also has even more attack power than the boss. I tried my hand against one which had 25 more HP and 40 more defence than the chapter 2 final, but 60 less attack, and I couldn't even get it down to the taming zone - meanwhile the chapter 2 final couldn't be tamed and had to be killed off, so you had to go right through the taming zone on it.
Meanwhile, crystals you get in the one I tried, quest 6, were all level 8. My highest levelled treasure is currently level 5, and that's after several hours of grinding (noting that I was grinding all my treasures up, of which I have 18, not concentrating on a single one, keeping in mind you can only take three at a time into a labyrinth). You can redo the quest 1-5 labyrinths for experience, and if you get all the crystals, you get 100 EXP from each run. Meanwhile, EXP requirements for each next level are 100x current level. So if they really expect me to be level 8 at this point, and I want to get my level 5 treasure there, and it currently has 160 exp to level, I'm going to need 1460 EXP for this one treasure, or 15 more runs - assuming I was running for all crystals, except I actually have recently started ignoring the secondary ghost treasure to save time, so I don't get a crystal for that and I get 90 EXP per run instead and it will actually take 17 runs (probably still takes less time all up). Keeping in mind that I finished Chapter 2 in only 7 runs, and could have done it in 6 if I had known to save the quest treasure for last.
You do get more crystals and consequently more exp for redoing the final quest of chapter 2, but then you need to fight a ghost of the chapter 2 boss and you end up with half your treasures dead and waste the EXP, plus it is a considerably longer dungeon. Not worth it.
I'm not really sure what the game is expecting of me here.
It's not like levels even really increase your treasures's stats that much.
I'm going to try bringing in a group tailor-made for attacking one of the bosses rather than running by lowest-level, and see if that can help out, but I'm not going to enjoy it.
[EDIT]
Success against the one I had tried previously. Now at the very least I have it and the secondary treasure from that labyrinth to use against others from this chapter. They turned out to be levels 12 and 14. What.
Is there some source of ludicrous EXP that I've missed?
On that topic, that quest gave off 300 EXP, but it's vastly less feasible to grind against than the chapter 2 final, so that isn't much help.
