Finished Growlanser: Wayfarer of Time.
Djinn, did you actually play Growlanser 4? It IS a cesspit of hentai tropes, but it also has some genuinely decent stuff in there, surprised how fast you are to dig at it considering your reputation for sticking up for games that indulge the animu too hard. I've mostly been listing the worst parts because that's funnier, but the game's plot has some nice touches and well-done parts, too. I'll give an example: the whole fate-change system, which is really basically just being explicit about some branching paths. At times, you can (sometimes through obscure nonsense) be able to save and/or affect someone's fate, usually averting their death, but sometimes merely preventing them from going off on a fruitless lifelong quest for nonexistent revenge or the like. Furthermore, they have at least some different dialogue for the choices, so it can feel like it did matter, and they have several fallback fate changes if you've screwed up the first, essentially making it more like 3 options than 2. For example, if you let a "noble opponent" dude get killed (uh, by your own allies hand, so that was kind of the plan, but you're still not supposed to want this despite slaughtering hordes of other soldiers who don't have names, usual has-a-portrait bias) via not going shopping with his daughter earlier to get an accidentally life-saving gift, you can still change his daughter's fate by fessing up you helped kill daddy, for example. Or letting one brother get killed means you have to worry about changing the fate of the other brother now to avoid him getting killed as well (the aforementioned NPC playboy Gary Stu, who is apparently the 2nd deadliest person in the world other than the final boss, and can fight off an army of 300 hundred guys single-handedly but still needs his medicine. Right.). Interesting stuff. The political plot, while hamfisted (SUDDENLY WE MUST BACKSTAB OUR ALLY BECAUSE), is still passable largely because there's one character with a brain willing to make trenchant and realistic comments on it. Aside from the above-mentioned branches, there's two major ways to run the endgame, a whole bunch of endings, and other nice extra features I appreciate.
Anyway. I went for slight boringness and got the Frayne ending, as she's the most obvious love interest, and she isn't wearing hot pants / a miniminimini skirt like is so sadly common in the world of Growlanser 4. Sadly they sure didn't think of much to actually have in that ending, mostly sappy i-wuv-u stuff. Kind of odd in that one of the major bits of bonus content are unlocking portraits / art of this & previous Growlanser games, and Frayne ends up having an interest in art and wants to draw a picture of you on the docks with a sunset behind you or something, and.... then they don't show you the picture in the ending. I see.
Gameplay wise, the true final battle was the optional arena battle against the GL2 / GL3 squads. Actual final battles got utterly stomped. Brought Meline along so she could get the final blow against her sister, for all that it didn't appear to matter. Anyway, why are the final battles EZ? Because the game puts too much faith in enemy mages. In Growlanser 2, some of the final battles are potentially quite deadly - both you and the enemy have pure-MT spells in a game with very large cast sizes on both sides of the battle, so we're talking a quick draw to who can resolve their Quakes first. In Growlanser: WOT... okay, first off, you can GL3 style buff up before most battles, which includes Attack Up / Protect / Resist, which do as yuo might expect. But enemy mages get even further hosed. All the elements have resistance gagues from 1-7 starting at 2- 1 is double damage (weakness), 2 is normal damage, 3-5 are 25%-50%-75% resistance, 6 is nulling (100% resistance), 7 is absorption. By the endgame, most characters should be wearing armor with +1 to all resistances, possibly with a few resistances at +2. So we start at 3. There's another skill you can get pretty early in the game that's Magic Def Up, and there's no reason not to use it at the start of every set piece battle - it raises all resistances by 2. So your 3 resistance is now at 5 for 75% damage reduction from all elements. AND you have the spell Resist up. And to add icing on the cake, there's yet another spell you can cast before battle, Magic Shell. It does just that - all magic does 0 damage. Doesn't fall off after it's nulled spells or anything, either. The duration IS rather short on it, so it doesn't last forever, but it lasts long enough. End result: enemy magic suxxxxxxx. The final boss has a Seymour-esque "cast all 4 elemental spells at max level on one character", and each spell did like 25 damage, for 100 damage total. To ~700 HP. I'm shakin', especially in a game with fast-using items, and 9 Elixir Vitaes which restore the entire party's HP. Owned.
Speaking of spells, that's one oddity about the endgame it doens't make entirely clear - there was supposed to be a heroic sacrifice of Our Hero and use of a Spell Nullifier, but the final boss did something nasty, and then in the epilogue both Our Hero and his familiar are just fine, so I guess they decided not to use the Spell Nullifier after all, or it got broke in the final engagement. I see.
Anyway, despite the snark, GL:WOT is a good game, if too easy. It just has to have repellent crap attached to it as well which makes it a qualified recommendation of "if you can ignore / actually like the cruddy dating sim part." Sigh.
