What Games Are You Playing: 2008

[Anthony Edward Stark]

I do really enjoy that the game makes you have to WANT to investigate characters. I think if I had to sit through everyone's backstory Final Fantasy-style I'd want to murder someone. Fortunately, unlike a Final Fantasy, I could murder that character.

I think I lost my Bronze Sphere, by the way.

[Sierra]

Grefter: Eh, I'd say go ahead and spoil me about anything I missed.

Also, fun note: I kept a prybar in my inventory the whole game in honor of Fenrir.

[Meeplelard]

Just to tell, you want 250 for your states when fighting Minerva. 240 still might get you overkilled.

I don't plan on fighting Minerva until my very last Mission, and after I've leveled up a lot of Materia so that I can fuse them like mad and get stats up to crack.

I know very well Minerva was a super boss geared to combat your broken set ups, and apparently succeeds.

[Twilkitri]

Finished Xenogears.

I was expecting disc 2's failure to be overblown, but no, it is pretty much a kick in the face. How depressing. Moreso since there's effectively no chance of it ever being corrected.

Story was decent enough. The pseudoreincarnation stuff kept reminding me of Traci Harding's Celestrial Triad, although they needed to do more with it (granting that they needed to do more with a lot of things). Ending somewhat failed though. Also some characters got nothing even approaching a chance for development ._.

Battle system was okay I suppose, although it didn't take all that long for it to get old.

I'm afraid I'm not really seeing why people don't tend to allow gears. They don't appear to have any sort of sentience or anything that would potentially void them being legal.

[Pyro]

Twil: They turn the cast into a bunch of Ryu 3's. Some people are Not Cool with this. Also, you can't use them in on-foot dungeons.

Disgaea 2: Finishing this sometime soon (?) at the behest (whipping) of others. Near the end of the second to last chapter. Bought a bunch of items so I don't get raped as badly as I would have without copious SP restoration. Not sure why I didn't have these before... game probably didn't require them. Endgame challenge pickup is a bit silly.

[Twilkitri]

I don't see how they do that, unless you balance them all to on-foot and then give them the gear or something.

[Sierra]

PST: Ditched Vhailor to dodge the problem altogether and then made another run through the Fortress of Regrets. Only took an hour or so; woulda been less if I'd just zipped through the dialogue, but it's just too awesome to skip. Anyway, good ending just jumps to the Baator sequence after the farewells, so yeah, nothing I hadn't seen in the other endings.

[Cmdr_King]

Twil: It's essentially two different battle systems.  The gear one makes them a cast of Lights (except maybe Elly), the other one makes them actually interesting, and allowing swapping between the two would just be asking for people to scale gears against the on-foot cast.  Also an RPGP throwback, I suppose.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

NxC - Suddenly, in the Tower of Druaga, Kagekiyo/Tarosuke get a hold of a plot-given 20% MP cost reduction skill. Apparently, having a PC with godly movement, a Zeal clone, MP draining, blistering offense, awesome stat-busting and solid MP just -wasn't enough-. Noooooooo, he needed his MP costs to become particularly affordable, because the MP draining wasn't good enough. For the love of what.

[Shale]

Tales of Symphonia: Started, playing Hard mode, got up to exactly where I got to the first time I played it a few years back, with Lloyd escaping his capture by the not-Desians. The sort-of-3D battle system really makes me miss Free Run, as getting gangbanged by three or four monsters from multiple angles when my only available movement is one-dimensional kinda blows. Also, the AI is even more retarded than usual. Yes, Genis. stop casting spells when you still have TP and go attack the enemies with your ball on a string instead. That's a winning strategy. (On a related note, Genis has yet to live through a boss battle.)

[Dark Holy Elf]

Given how horrible Genis' earlygame magic is, attacking with the ball and string may not be an especially bad option for him.

XF - Finished. Sexy/10. Rant coming when I don't have work in nine hours.

[Grefter]

Holy crap someone else has read Traci Harding stuff?  Less shocking I guess given it is Twil.  Sadly Traci Harding does far more far better with her reincarnation gig to boot... (Kathryn Kerr did it better than both of them, not that she is a stellar writer either).

WoW - So I am caving and going to level up another character, I am interested in how the new Recruit a Friend thing works out for the game dynamics (You essentially play with a friend and get triple the experience, so it should A) Make levelling a lot less painful and B) be an interesting test on stuff).

[Anthony Edward Stark]

If you have a lot of friends, Gref, you can level 1-60 in 42 minutes. Level gifting?

Aaaanyway, SC4. I made David Bowie and rampaged across Xbox Live with him. Kilik button mashers are always laggy somehow. Makes it hard to GI properly. I usually counter that with The Todd. Revenge five. Kilik is button mashy, but Maxi is button mashier.

[Grefter]

I don't have friends that dedicated and I just have familly that is fucking lazy and bitchy.

[Twilkitri]

The gear one makes them a cast of Lights (except maybe Elly)

Did I miss something? Elly didn't seem especially good in-gear as far as I saw.

[Grefter]

She requires obscure limited time to purchase expensive accessory.  Makes Aerods hit damage cap.  You can do the same thing with Billy anyway.

[Shale]

Given how horrible Genis' earlygame magic is, attacking with the ball and string may not be an especially bad option for him.

It's not so much the damage as the fact that he hasn't yet discovered the "block" command, and tends to get killed to death within seconds whenever he gets that close to enemies.

[superaielman]

SaGa Frontier- Redoing stat topic. I have to run.. four~ files I think? Should just be four. Doing Lute right now. Just nabbed TL, which is yay. The main team is Lute/Roufas/Fei-On/Mei-Ling/Captain Hamilton.

[Cmdr_King]

Nah, not even thinking of super-Elly.  It's just that Aerods will be a steady 4-5k damage when everyone else has to build up to anything more than 2500 or so.  And that's before accuracy issues, which are universal for the gear cast using their best turn 1 damage.  Doesn't hurt that she's also a bit of a speedster (for all Emmy is faster.)
I could be overestimating an end-game Aerods, though, it might only be comperable to everyone else (but still accurate at least.)

[Idun]

Or once you've raped Elly enough for Aerods until you get better Gears at the end of the game, you find your use for her dwindled as fast as the demi-human arc. For example, my final boss battling (I decided to chop down all four orbs and then Deus) wouldn't have been easier with Elly because she runs out of gas too fast uber-using Aerods. Simply put Emmy in there for wonderful Ether goodness with those ETH/MGK boosters, and all is well and smooth with the world~ Oddly, that's the first time I ever used Emmy in battle besides going to the tower.

Edit* Oh yeah, I am playing a game. I'm just going to copy-paste what I wrote around 3AM somewhere else:

Surprise! Not let down by another Final Fantasy iteration. This instant wondrous joy makes me happy, but I acknowledge that it wasn't great enough to renew my interest in Square-Enix. This entire summer has actually helped me get back into gamer mode - for example, in the passed two days I have added 23 hours onto my total Final Fantasy XII gameplay from which I restarted around 6 or 8.

I believe it's the design of the game that keeps me engaged. Surely the characters could have a bit more umph, since right now the story is surrounding a simple fetch-and-follow-and-be-sorta-kinda-left-in-the-dark pathway. Yeah, the story and characters need a bit more umpf. But the design? Rabanastre? Westerands/Estersands/Ogir/Nem sand seas? Wow. Extremely expansive, varied, and begging to be discovered. Hell I spent 3 hours just in the Ogir region stepping on every pathway even though I already retrieved the map. It helped me gain levels and LP while I was at it.

I talked to someone regarding the Gambit system, and I've yet to have massive manual'ing unless a teammate is currently initiating a certain attack/spell and I'm fighting a boss and am reluctant to let a character die. Matter'of'factly, I believe the last four boss battles I was in, I had to revive one person and opted to not choose the "be at high health at all times pathway," and killed the bosses in less than a minute. [Spoiler Boss] I was at 20? Gigas I was at 19? That avion bird thing, I was at 18? The enemies inside King Raithwall's tomb give c. 100 EXP per pop~. Yeah, no problems there really at all.

But I do have one frustration. There are times when I'm practically ambushed, and I noticed the enemies have a "beneficial" gang and conquer mentality - if 4 enemies attack, it's on one person. This can dwindle HP fast, especially if an enemy carries a sword and chains your ass into oblvion. I've died twice since I played this game, and that can become frustrating - especially if you're running away from a lvl 34 Salamandstron and haven't saved recently, but if you know your pathways from exploring, you can run away (not into victoly), but into respite, regain and reconquer. I've noticed it's easy to lure enemies to, so it's a double edged sword depending on your gaming style - patience versus rushing. I have figured out a spiffy way to prevent dying from ambushes like that - if I have Penelo in my group, I normally set all her gambits to magic (not wise, but hey) and a teammate with HP<80 gets Protect (before the onslaught of even more attacks) and Ally HP<40 gets Cure which keeps me alive.

So I do like the gambit system. So kill me.

-----
*Above excitement is a direct result of trudging through Disc 2 of Xenogears (super fail) and Suikoden Tactics (boring-fail). My happiness may be overexggerated and unintended.

[Twilkitri]

I don't know if Aerods ever managed four-digit damage whenever I tried using it, let alone that amount. It zeroed out at least twice. I wrote it off as a flagrant waste of fuel.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Aerods -is- a waste of fuel if you don't twink for it.

[Cmdr_King]

400 fuel isn't all that noteworthy by endgame, or even the point Elly leaves, really.  Though yes, if you're... getting... those sorts of results... how the hell do you get those results?  Maybe against some bosses?  I dunno.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

As Grefter said, you can do the same thing with Billy. But Billy's uses 20 fuel, so that's what I went with.

[Shale]

She requires obscure limited time to purchase expensive accessory.  Makes Aerods hit damage cap.  You can do the same thing with Billy anyway.

Specifically: EtherDoubler makes ether attacks twice as powerful for twice as much EP cost. Aerods and Billy's Ether guns get the power doubling, and two times zero is still zero.