Mighty No. 9Beaten all the Mighty Number stages. It's... decent? A bit frustrating in that it should obviously be better than it is. Boss designs are a lot of fun, stage design is uneven but overall I'm happy. Lots of checkpoints, but lives are still a thing which makes you care; turns out I still enjoy this way of doing things. The dash which gives you limitless horizontal movement but no ability to move up makes for an interesting platforming paradigm, and stat absorptions are pretty interesting.
The load times are facepalm-worthy (though apparently they're particularly bad on the Wii U version, which I am playing), and there's sometimes lag which also sucks. Game isn't much aesthetically either, and changing between weapons once you have a lot of them is incredibly clunky (like I'd straight-up take MM1's implementation over this, which is bad because this is a place where MM has made a lot of progress!). I do appreciate that the robot masters all definitely have their own (sometimes rather memorable) personalities, similar to MMPU. The robot who thinks he is an entire TV news team is my favourite. "Breaking news: boss attacks Beck!"
Cryo > Pyro > Avi > Dyna > Mic > Bat > Brand > Shade for how much difficulty each boss posed; I didn't bother with weakness hits. I will save that for the boss rush if it has one.
Also the most unbelievable thing about this robot sci-fi game: the two Japanese dudes are obese and all the Americans are really skinny.
Tonfa Fantasy 7Just posting to note I am playing this, through Kalm now. I'll post actual updates in the TF7 thread though.
Final Fantasy 13As mentioned earlier, secondary role challenge is done, took somewhere over 80 hours because yeah I ended up with way more CP (= getting into way more fights) than on a normal playthrough and then fights of course do tend to take longer on average. Anyway, final thoughts on the PCs:
Lightning: She's certainly the best Sentinel in this, and in fact has definite merits as a sentinel even compared to primaries (biggest weakness is Fringeward coming way too late; I didn't get it). As long as the attacks she is drawing can be dodged she often ends up taking very, very little, and a surprisingly high number of attacks are evadable; PCish magic attacks are the biggest exception (but enemy-only magical damage such as LASERZ usually can be dodged). She's a good Synergist too, since she's the only one who gets En- spells (double your COM damage against a weakness), and also gets Brave/Faith/Protect/Shell (the latter two take a while), and a good Saboteur, getting the Vanille set. I have mostly positive things to say about her but later on she wasn't in the party as much because there are other sources of buffs, and Sazh eclipses her and has the same Saboteur build. But she was a mainstay for much of the middle parts of the challenge.
Snow: Is a similar Synergist to Lightning (though he gets Brave/Faith late instead) but lacks the En- spells. He gets Haste but it's really late. As a medic his fast casting speed is nice, but his Curasa is really backended and since I wanted other things. His unique thing is his Saboteur line, which has the Fang set of spells (Slow, Daze, Pain, Fog). Pain/Fog are occasionally really, really useful against key enemies who are vulnerable, Slow/Daze are generically terrific against things vulnerable. Snow has a lot of cool stuff, just a lot of it takes a while to get to. His main issue is that very little of his set helps offence (nothing at all until he gets Brave/Faith late) and FF13 often rewards more offence, but if I wanted to dig in, chances are Snow would have a spot on the team.
Sazh: Sazh is light Lightning; their Saboteur progression is near identical (Sazh improves late with Dispel and then Pain/Fog instead of Deprotega/Deshellga, though I don't get Pain/Fog in time). He also has Sentinel, though he's worse at it. Honestly, there's little reason to use Sazh over Lightning for much of the challenge, since her SEN (once she gets it) is often more useful than his MED. But... this changes late, because Sazh gets Curasa, which is extremely powerful at healing, especially late when your HP is over 4000. It just makes a ridiculous difference for keeping up with enemy offence. After getting that, Sazh went from my least-used PC to possibly my most-used, certainly in any fights that couldn't be ended quickly.
Fang: Okay Fang may well be the most-used still, I dunno. Her Synergist is extremely good, but different: she gets a very powerful set of buffs (Veil, the -ra spells for offence and defence, Haste) but they mostly have short durations, so the more you want to use the more you have to spend a LOT of time reapplying them. Sometimes it's worth it, though. Always interesting decisions about which to use for sure. Aside from that she's the only Ravager which often means amazing things for long-term offence, and is a shitty Medic, though early on the differences between the Medics aren't as potent. Still, Haste/-ra buffs/Ravager gave her a spot on the team most of the time.
Vanille: The last two PCs were ultimately similar. Commando! Commandos mean way more damage and you often don't want to go without one (though there were times when I did). But neither PC's other secondary roles are that great. Vanille's are the better, for sure. She gets the Bar- spells on Synergist, which are sitationally great, as well as Veil, and late there's Protectra but I didn't get too much out of this. She also has a kinda tolerable Sentinel since Mediguard exists without too much investment. But usually she spent most of her time in Commando. She has less magic than Hope so for a while she felt like th eweaker choice for this, but then she gets Adrenaline which tilts things her way at high HP.
Hope: See Vanille. Hope's non-Commando secondary roles are mostly useless... but in his defence a lot of value can be found in the gap between mostly useless and entirely useless. Hope's Sentinel is rather trashy; it's similar to Lightning but his base HP is lower and it takes five tiers of the crystarium to actually get Elude, which is essential (Lightning gets it in three). I didn't make this investment. His Saboteur includes the MT spells which are trash... and Dispel. Dispel is only rarely useful but when it is (Dahaka is the biggest) it is great. So that's something. Hope/Vanille basically play the same role and which I choose is often based on which one's non-damage actually can find some use. I never use both, even though two Commandos would sometimes be tempting for damage, because the skillset is just too narrow; more offence can always be achieved with Commando/Fang/(Sazh or Lightning).
Teams I definitely got use out of at some point:
Fang/Lightning/Hope
Fang/Lightning/Vanille
Fang/Snow/Hope
Fang/Snow/Vanille
Snow/Lightning/Vanille
Fang/Sazh/Vanille
Fang/Sazh/Hope
Snow/Sazh/Vanille
Lightning/Sazh/Vanille
Fang/Lightning/Snow
Probably more. That is definitely one of the cool things about this challenge, the team variety. I really do wish you could save paradigm sets between teams, though; it's a significant oversight and would not have cost much memory space. It seems like the type of thing 13-2 might have fixed, except that 13-2 got rid of the idea of different teams.
Well, that was a lot of fun! Although next time I play this game I will definitely do something less stressful. <_<
