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tbh the funnier thing to me is arguments over how long jrpgs are in an era where regularly big aaa games are built to last like 200+ hours, something even a lot of jrpgs with lots of big 100% stuff to do don't hit in one playthrough
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Nov 18, 2021 02:28
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it's weird that dungeon encounters' final boss is on floor 90 out of 99, i assume there are superbosses down further. my party fell down a pitfall and 'fell for all eternity' and they're now scattered around... i don't really feel like finding them though. i mean i beat the game.... and the final boss was the first real boss of any kind anyway... so idk if it's even worth doing the last 9 floors
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Nov 18, 2021 02:30
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Sakurazuka posted:An hour of play time as soon as you have the pep powers that make metal slimes appear and increase your exp. As soon as you get that pep power the best you can summon are metal babbles since what shows up is gated by progress and your level iirc.
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Nov 18, 2021 02:34
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:It always seems so crazy to me, because people talk like it's only been recent that games changed. But like, the most mainline RPG is final fantasy and literally only final fantasy 1 on the NES really had the concept of grinding as central to the game, by FF2 on the snes, literally 30 years ago, the series had pretty much fully transitioned to the idea each boss had a specific strategy to fight you were supposed to puzzle out and very very few 'level check' bosses.
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Nov 18, 2021 05:26
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Some of the really old RPGs also kind of feel like they're balanced around the idea that you'll fully explore and map out every dungeon on your own, taking as many trips to do so as necessary, and so you'll gain the required levels in the process of doing that rather than running around fighting battles with the express intention of levelling up.
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Nov 18, 2021 10:31
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"grinding" is also still a thing in general because of live game services having power/level barriers and those are a lot of majority of popular gaming nowadays.
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Nov 18, 2021 11:15
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You will probably enjoy Dragon Quest XI more if you minimize the amount of fighting you do. It's impossible to "clear" areas anyway because they respawn. The Draconian Quest setting (increased difficulty options that can only be enabled at the start of the game) that prevents you from gaining EXP from weak enemies would be a good one.
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Nov 18, 2021 11:30
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There's no way to toggle those settings after starting, right?
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Nov 18, 2021 13:16
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Fixins posted:There's no way to toggle those settings after starting, right? You can turn them off at a church, but not on.
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Nov 18, 2021 13:30
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Barudak posted:Ruined King combat is real good but has the most inexplicable equipment screen I've ever seen. In the equipment screen if you want to see the stats new gear you picked up have, say to compare against what you're wearing, you have to click the "change gear" button and then hover over the other pieces. Except you can't back out of this screen if you don't want the new gear. You are now 100% committed to switching gear, so if you want your old gear back because its better, do the process again. There's definitely some UI hassles they need to work out the kinks for. They also really, really need to specify that "autosave" is, like, "save whenever we feel like it," and not "save whenever something important happens." I ended up dying on a fight in one of the midgame areas and finding out that my last save was about, oh, 7 encounters ago, and it took a full loving half hour to get back to where I was! Just make it save after every encounter!! drat!!!!
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Nov 18, 2021 15:49
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I couldnt tell you a drat thing about Dragon Quest XI two months after beating it except that the music sucked.
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Nov 18, 2021 16:01
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It's cute how Hinako's kit in Second Light has a bunch of nods to the mechanics of the first game. Being able to transform faster than other party members, Épée Lion getting stronger on successive actions to mimic the original Ether system, being able to boost Ether to replicate Ether charging.
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Nov 18, 2021 16:08
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Second Light is already a pretty easy game but Hinako's kit is super busted. I have her revved up with all E/S fragments and Rena as her ether battery. Instant Reflector form, then Averne Beaurmwhatever until dead, which for most enemies in the game is one hit. Bosses sometimes get a turn.
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Nov 18, 2021 16:13
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Crossposting from the Switch thread: SMT V update! I've finally made it to the first boss and beyond! More demons to collect! Gotta catch' em all!!! Ahem. Great fun so far. Though it's typically me that I spend so much time exploring, recruiting, fusing and sidequesting that I was strong enough to take down the first boss in one go, which apparently is not normal in a Shin Megami Tensei game? Due to a funny misunderstanding, I faced the boss with my planned strengths and weaknesses reversed from what I actually needed, but I also went into the battle with two healers, the two characters with the most glaring weakness also had strong magic attacks corresponding to the boss' weakness and by pure chance the boss was also weak against the status effect one of my demons could cause. Sleep. There's something deeply hilarious of watching a giant monster sitting there and taking a snooze mid-battle, while my party was using the suddenly free turns to heal up and re-fill their MP. My mermaid even managed to do the same thing again during the battle, gifting us another reprise from the endless barrage of AOE-attacks. A couple turns were chancy, but thanks to sleep allowing me to refill my healers mid-battle, we eventually won the damage race! Now next time I should probably listen better to an important NPC telling me boss weaknesses, instead of hoping I accidentally have the right skills on hand after blundering into the boss battle. 
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Nov 18, 2021 16:33
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Inspector Gesicht posted:I couldnt tell you a drat thing about Dragon Quest XI two months after beating it except that the music sucked. It’s been like three years and I still remember Ham Shamwitch and his brothers even without him being a mod’s avatar.
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Nov 18, 2021 16:37
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Libluini posted:Crossposting from the Switch thread: i dont think the game is really *that* hard (even from my experience playing on normal) it's just that especially back in the SMT3 days it was apparently just the JRPG expectation that you could overlevel and steamroll things when you get stuck instead of actually using the parts of the combat system that aren't magical attacks (one tip: RES for a status element just means its less likely to succumb to it, i think. you can absolutely still seal/sleep a boss resistant to a status element, which is good for the skills like "medium attack, chance to inflict Sleep". also WEAK to a status element gives you a press turn when you inflict it, which i didn't realize until embarrassingly late)
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Nov 18, 2021 16:39
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how do i break astria ascending? i have it via gamepass
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Nov 18, 2021 16:43
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The 7th Guest posted:it's weird that dungeon encounters' final boss is on floor 90 out of 99, i assume there are superbosses down further. my party fell down a pitfall and 'fell for all eternity' and they're now scattered around... i don't really feel like finding them though. i mean i beat the game.... and the final boss was the first real boss of any kind anyway... so idk if it's even worth doing the last 9 floors
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Nov 18, 2021 16:54
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Ruined King revised the ability system from Battlechasers to be less catastrophically broken, which, ok, fine, but at the same time I liked that aspect. Its also weird the single, solitary mechanic they didn't carry over was the permanent buffs for grinding out the bestiary. Inspector Gesicht posted:I couldnt tell you a drat thing about Dragon Quest XI two months after beating it except that the music sucked. The existence of third act made me actively dislike the game, the let the mute protagonist talk early on then never again so he stands like a lummox while his grandfather weeps for his parents death, theres a boss about 1/3rd into the game that felt like pure random chance to beat and them absolutely nothing else required any thought ever again. Relin posted:how do i break astria ascending? i have it via gamepass Turn the difficulty to very easy.
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Nov 18, 2021 16:56
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Barudak posted:Turn the difficulty to very easy.
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Nov 18, 2021 16:58
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dril candles tweet except instead of dollars it's EXP
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Nov 18, 2021 17:01
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Relin posted:how do i break astria ascending? i have it via gamepass It takes a bit to get going, but get your thief the passives for 100% steal success and higher rare rate, then go to the game's first dungeon, steal primarily from insectoids and rats. Those have the highest chance of letting you steal stat orbs. I did exactly one steal session and got 30+ stat orbs, which together with just playing the game normally gave me more stat orbs I could actually use. Also see those stat nodes in the skill trees with like +1 stat, +10 HP? At the very beginning? Avoid those, use your SP instead to go forward and collect important skills and passives, those cost no orbs to gain. You can also unlock stat nodes and then just not use stat orbs, if you just want to go somewhere important on the skill trees. Even a short way behind the first few nodes you can often get stat ups multiple times stronger than the very first ones. Pump up your characters with a couple of +100 HP/MP and +4/+8-type nodes and your future will be way easier. Then there is chronomancer, a class with some weird skills, some of which turn time back for the battle, or enemies, or all enemies. Make your thief a hunter for even more synergies with thieving-skills (like a skill making stealing an AOE-effect to steal from everyone, giving temporary weaknesses, etc.) and on and on. Those talent trees are basically Swiss cheese in terms of loop holes. Alchemist is a good class for a support-character like your bird lady, as it allows you to collect passives powering up item use in addition to skills allowing you to use damage items, that kind of thing. The only drawback to all of this is that SP-cost inflation turns truly breaking the game into a bit of a grind sooner or later. Note: You can make SP-grinding easier if you realize SP-gain is dependent not on enemy strength, but numbers. A battle against 8 weak baby enemies gives you ca. 8 SP, a battle against three strong motherfuckers gives you like 3. And eats up a lot more time. If you go through a dungeon and encounter large enemy groups, take a note: This dungeon is a prime grinding spot for skill points. Astria Ascending is still grindy and bullshit, but sooner or later you can just move equipment, passives and characters around like Lego pieces to assemble whatever tool you need to no-sell every annoying encounter. Basically, the devs made a lot of fights dumb trolly joke puzzles at your expense, and fully expect you to exploit every loophole you can to troll them right back. Have fun! Edit: On very easy and easy, this makes playing the game a very enjoyable experience. If you play at normal or higher, it becomes a necessity to survive
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Nov 18, 2021 17:25
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Ruined King's really fun. I kinda wish I wasn't halfway through the game before getting the whole team but that's minor. It almost feels like you can build Braum to go so hard into tanking it kind of trivializes things, at least on Normal.
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Nov 18, 2021 17:40
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Feels Villeneuve posted:i dont think the game is really *that* hard (even from my experience playing on normal) it's just that especially back in the SMT3 days it was apparently just the JRPG expectation that you could overlevel and steamroll things when you get stuck instead of actually using the parts of the combat system that aren't magical attacks
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Nov 18, 2021 17:43
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Dawgstar posted:Ruined King's really fun. I kinda wish I wasn't halfway through the game before getting the whole team but that's minor. It almost feels like you can build Braum to go so hard into tanking it kind of trivializes things, at least on Normal. Braum and Illaoi can both take an extreme amount of punishment if built properly and keep Taunt up more-or-less continuously, so attrition is definitely a viable option on lower difficulties. There's a lot of monster gimmicks that punish this kind of playstyle, though, and I'm starting to get a good amount of encounters past the midgame on Heroic that require far more use of turn order manipulation, cleanses, debuffs, and strong aggressive play to keep Braum from getting turned into mulch. I do kinda feel like they should've leaned more into Pyke's control aspects from the base game instead of making him another DPS, though. Ahri's the only real mage archetype in the game, and the result is that she has an incredible Swiss army knife of a toolkit that's indispensable on higher difficulties. Unless I missed something, Charm is the game's only unconditional Stun and Slow, something that automatically makes her incredibly valuable on difficulties where some enemies have big "gently caress you" skills if they get too many turns in early, as well as on bosses where being able to outspeed them repeatedly is key.
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Nov 18, 2021 17:52
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Libluini posted:It takes a bit to get going, but get your thief the passives for 100% steal success and higher rare rate, then go to the game's first dungeon, steal primarily from insectoids and rats. Those have the highest chance of letting you steal stat orbs.
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Nov 18, 2021 18:29
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Vermain posted:I do kinda feel like they should've leaned more into Pyke's control aspects from the base game instead of making him another DPS, though. Ahri's the only real mage archetype in the game, and the result is that she has an incredible Swiss army knife of a toolkit that's indispensable on higher difficulties. Unless I missed something, Charm is the game's only unconditional Stun and Slow, something that automatically makes her incredibly valuable on difficulties where some enemies have big "gently caress you" skills if they get too many turns in early, as well as on bosses where being able to outspeed them repeatedly is key. I just got Ahri and already she's a lot of fun. I was worried her, Illaoi and Yasuo would be a bit too squishy but they regularly finish battles with full health.
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Nov 18, 2021 18:55
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Zereth posted:... Are these nodes on side branches or something? You just said you had more stat orbs than you could use, why not unlock them? Eventually, I did go back and took some of the lovely nodes, yes. Though eventually you have four different skill trees to fill out, with point costs of even basic stat noes slowly rising into the triple digits. So you start thinking "should I really waste 30 SP on this +1 early game node or should I wait until I can take this 160 SP one giving me +14 instead?" and never use some of those nodes. And some classes, like Alchemist and Black Mage, have a ton of active and passive skills eating up your points, so there's rarely something left over except for the odd HP or MP node. Normally not a problem, but I was impatient and powered up my characters severely, abusing the fact that grinding for stat orbs and several annoying side quests netted me tons of SP, too! But then SMT V came out and I put Astria A. on hiatus for the time being. I'm basically at the point where you have to go visit half a dozen dungeons one after another without the story moving an inch. (Chapter 11) My characters all turned into monsters but with your average fight giving 5 SP and and your average skill node now costing 100, progress now stalled out. Ridiculously, the new unlocked dungeons are all a jump in difficulty high enough, my dumbasses are already slowly falling back down the difficulty curve to their normal place! This game is weird.
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Nov 18, 2021 19:35
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Oh it costs SP to unlock the node, and THEN an item to actually get the benefits of it? Okay then that makes sense.
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Nov 18, 2021 20:02
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on one hand atelier lilie is making me feel bad that after six months on wanikani i still have tons of kanji and vocabulary i need to learn. on the other hand it's really nice going back to salburg
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Nov 18, 2021 20:19
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The Colonel posted:on one hand atelier lilie is making me feel bad that after six months on wanikani i still have tons of kanji and vocabulary i need to learn. on the other hand it's really nice going back to salburg I was able to get kanjitomo to be able to read its font after messing with the configuration a bit. You need to tell it what color the text and background are (both have hotkeys), because the default assumptions aren't any good for Lillie
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Nov 18, 2021 20:28
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Tae posted:"grinding" is also still a thing in general because of live game services having power/level barriers and those are a lot of majority of popular gaming nowadays. I think action RPGs have also muddied the waters for people too. I don't really have any proof of that, I just want to blame Borderlands and Destiny as if they're the reason that grinding being the solution for everything is still chugging along.
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Nov 18, 2021 20:54
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RareAcumen posted:I think action RPGs have also muddied the waters for people too. I think it's a combination of people being uncomfortable with lateral thinking in general, as well as people having particular gameplay styles or aesthetic choices they want to stick with instead of switching off of them for a more favorable tactical advantage. I'm always constantly reminded of Doom Eternal: there were a lot of launch complaints about the combat system that encouraged you to (though crucially did not require you to, except on the hardest difficulties) cycle through your entire arsenal by making certain weapons better to use against certain demons, rather than just being able to sit on a single weapon throughout the entire game. Some people just want to find a specific weapon or a party setup that they like and then never let it go, and developers often include grinding as a means of ensuring that those sorts of stubborn players don't get stuck.
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Nov 18, 2021 21:15
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RareAcumen posted:I think action RPGs have also muddied the waters for people too.
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Nov 18, 2021 21:26
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those games also don't have the negative rep that jrpgs have, for several things that are now just regular in all big video games
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Nov 18, 2021 21:28
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Vermain posted:I think it's a combination of people being uncomfortable with lateral thinking in general, as well as people having particular gameplay styles or aesthetic choices they want to stick with instead of switching off of them for a more favorable tactical advantage. I'm always constantly reminded of Doom Eternal: there were a lot of launch complaints about the combat system that encouraged you to (though crucially did not require you to, except on the hardest difficulties) cycle through your entire arsenal by making certain weapons better to use against certain demons, rather than just being able to sit on a single weapon throughout the entire game. Some people just want to find a specific weapon or a party setup that they like and then never let it go, and developers often include grinding as a means of ensuring that those sorts of stubborn players don't get stuck. Game design is something I do not know anything about so I'm not even going to get into that conversation to begin with. Instead, I just bought Neo TWEWY, anything I should know as I get started? I'm just trying to move the story along since I only just got started on the next day past the demo when Fret and Rindo let Kanon have that rare pin. Mainly because stuff will unlock and I'd like to be out of the tutorial. It's very slow though, getting into battles takes a few seconds every time to load.
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Nov 18, 2021 22:41
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Zereth posted:Oh it costs SP to unlock the node, and THEN an item to actually get the benefits of it? Okay then that makes sense. wait a second, you're telling me I have to get enough experience to gain the sphere level, move around on the sphere grid, then I've got to have the item to use? okay then
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Nov 18, 2021 22:54
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Here's my one complaint about Ruined King so far: hazard zones are loving horseshit on higher difficulties. They'd be fine if there were a way to expand the scope of the combat timeline to see where using an ability might land you, but there isn't, so you're stuck taking a wild guess as to whether or not using a specific ability early on in a fight will get you clobbered for 2/3rds of your health. It's not great!
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Nov 18, 2021 23:23
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Vermain posted:Here's my one complaint about Ruined King so far: hazard zones are loving horseshit on higher difficulties. They'd be fine if there were a way to expand the scope of the combat timeline to see where using an ability might land you, but there isn't, so you're stuck taking a wild guess as to whether or not using a specific ability early on in a fight will get you clobbered for 2/3rds of your health. It's not great! Normally you can see your successive turns if you take a normal instant action, but yeah sometimes the hazard is too far and you can't scroll that bar
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Nov 19, 2021 01:46
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RareAcumen posted:Game design is something I do not know anything about so I'm not even going to get into that conversation to begin with. There’s a handful of pins with “???” in their evolution requirements, those evolve when a specific person equips them when they hit max level. The game tells you this when you unlock the social link-type feature that shows evolution methods…like 80% trough the campaign. You can look these up yourself but it’s not super advised if you’re trying to go spoiler-free. Besides that it’s a pretty guide-free experience.
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Nov 19, 2021 02:52
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