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ImpAtom posted:You can and should recruit every character. It looks like every character has an associated endgame dungeon. If I decide to switch out a character (found Yun. Yeah I know…), will I find the other character where I originally found them?
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Jul 27, 2022 03:28
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Unlucky7 posted:It looks like every character has an associated endgame dungeon. If I decide to switch out a character (found Yun. Yeah I know…), will I find the other character where I originally found them? Yes. In the case of Sundown, he'll be at one of random spots you saw him before.
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Jul 27, 2022 03:56
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Dr Pepper posted:It really is fun how not only is each chapter starring its own character but each one is a different genre. This has been such an undersold part of the game, IMO. Live A Live isn't just a game with a bunch of short vignette style chapters so much as 8 unique flavors of RPG and it's still kinda mindboggling that the original came out in 1994. Playing through the original a few months back for the first time was a hell of an experience to have, considering how much of this game's blood I suddenly recognized in so many other games I've played before without batting an eye. Unlucky7 posted:It looks like every character has an associated endgame dungeon. If I decide to switch out a character (found Yun. Yeah I know…), will I find the other character where I originally found them? With the exception of (I believe, and this is based off the SNES version) Sundown, all characters that you switch out will be found in the same location you recruited them.
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Jul 27, 2022 04:00
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JimmyBiskit posted:This has been such an undersold part of the game, IMO. Live A Live isn't just a game with a bunch of short vignette style chapters so much as 8 unique flavors of RPG and it's still kinda mindboggling that the original came out in 1994. Playing through the original a few months back for the first time was a hell of an experience to have, considering how much of this game's blood I suddenly recognized in so many other games I've played before without batting an eye. This is what makes Live A Live truly unique, compared to, for example, Romancing SaGa. I'm a huge SaGa fan, but at the end of the day, no matter which character you pick (even in Frontier, where the stories are really different), it's still the same game at its heart. Live A Live completely changes things up for each protagonist, even if the combat system stays basically the same (though, even there, the movesets for the different casts have significant differences that completely change your tactical considerations, like, Oboro handles completely differently from the Xin Shan Quan crew, who are totally different from Sundown, etc.).
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Jul 27, 2022 04:28
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So I'm playing the final chapter and I have an opinion question: Is Masaru kinda dogshit? Maybe I need to stat him up differently but even with really high natural physical attack he just seems incapable of doing any damage compared to the master, Oboro, or Pogo. I ended up dropping him after doing one of the trials with him because he really didn't seem to be bringing anything to the table.
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Jul 27, 2022 05:26
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Glagha posted:So I'm playing the final chapter and I have an opinion question: Is Masaru kinda dogshit? Maybe I need to stat him up differently but even with really high natural physical attack he just seems incapable of doing any damage compared to the master, Oboro, or Pogo. I ended up dropping him after doing one of the trials with him because he really didn't seem to be bringing anything to the table. Part of it is his extremely low starting level, but the other thing is that his initial weapon is really, really bad. He can equip any of the weapons from the kung fu chapter, IIRC (basically any spare Iron Fist you might have kept around), but what he really needs is his ultimate weapon, and then he wrecks face. That said, his stats tend to make him mostly the game's best damage sponge; he's not going to have the raw damage of most of the other characters. However, he has a wide variety of moves, much like the Xin Shan Quan master, and the key to using Masaru is knowing which ones to use at any given time, since he doesn't have a "use this all day every day" option like Lei's Kingfisher Tantrum.
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Jul 27, 2022 05:56
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Masaru gets really swole with his ultimate weapon. He can also use Taeko's Furious Fist from Akira's chapter if you still have one of those. I just like seeing him grow from level 2, he gets a lot of HP and quickly maxes out his important stats. The only unfortunate thing is if you did successfully learn all of his cool attacks he doesn't learn anything else as he levels, which makes it a little less exciting than seeing the ultimate moves for characters like Sundown or Akira or being able to get that free unlimited use Heavenly Peaks' Descent for your disciple. I had him in my final party in the original, but I'm probably gonna change it up this time.
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Jul 27, 2022 06:49
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Alxprit posted:Masaru gets really swole with his ultimate weapon. He can also use Taeko's Furious Fist from Akira's chapter if you still have one of those. That's what I was thinking of. I knew he could use fist-type weapons from other chapters, but forgot which one.
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Jul 27, 2022 07:43
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Okay, looks like I got the True ending down. That was one heck of a game... Only thing now is to play the Final Chapter as Oerstead 
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Jul 27, 2022 09:24
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Finished the game tonight. This remake slaps. Final chapter true end thing: the new ultimate final Final boss was insanely hype esp. when Oersted wrenches free and delivers the final hit while everyone else is down. I am at peace. What a good fuckin game.
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Jul 27, 2022 11:44
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I got this game and recently finished the Imperial China chapter (since I picked it first in the demo). It's fun! The grid-based combat is pretty unique when you compare other RPGs at the time, the English voice-acting is really good and the 2D-HD look is really beautiful. Anyway, I focused on training Lei Kugo since she's probably the most beginner-friendly out of all of the disciples considering Yun is a late-bloomer and Hong's stats generally don't mesh well with some techniques he can use. Though, I decided to make two extra save files in case I want to focus on the other two disciples. I also decided to name the school "Fist of Rhalgr" because I'm a huge FFXIV nerd. Since I've done one chapter, I've got 6 left. Any suggestions? I'm thinking on Present Day.
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Jul 27, 2022 15:16
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Pyro Jack posted:I got this game and recently finished the Imperial China chapter (since I picked it first in the demo). It's fun! The grid-based combat is pretty unique when you compare other RPGs at the time, the English voice-acting is really good and the 2D-HD look is really beautiful. Anyway, I focused on training Lei Kugo since she's probably the most beginner-friendly out of all of the disciples considering Yun is a late-bloomer and Hong's stats generally don't mesh well with some techniques he can use. Though, I decided to make two extra save files in case I want to focus on the other two disciples. I also decided to name the school "Fist of Rhalgr" because I'm a huge FFXIV nerd. Present day is probably the fastest chapter, other than that I would say either near future or old west next. It took me 20 years but I finally beat the king and got a cola bottle. Now I can finish the game. The updated battle system helped me see why it felt like he had infinite health.
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Jul 27, 2022 15:32
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Voice acting is great but I want to give special notice to the Imperial China ending where the English dub sounds like this, but in Japanese, they add some extra special flair to it.
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Jul 27, 2022 15:45
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Terper posted:Voice acting is great but I want to give special notice to the Imperial China ending where the English dub sounds like this, but in Japanese, they add some extra special flair to it. is that the other disciples’ voice actors in the Japanese version? Kind of a shame they didn’t do that in the dub if so since they all sound great in the trailer
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Jul 27, 2022 16:12
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Decided to go with Present Day. Now to name the character since I prefer naming people than using the default names and then I could go Street Fighter on peoples' asses. Edit: I've went and finished the Present Day chapter. Probably the shortest one that I've experienced so far since it's just several rounds of fighting and a few cutscenes. Probably even shorter if you've just want the abilities that you need to be copied (which is basically just Moribe Seishi's abilities) and then blitz through the chapter. Odie O'Bright is a disappointedly weak Final Boss for the chapter since I had more trouble with Namkiat and Jackie compared to him, even losing to the former once. Anyway, since I'm doing the short chapters, might as well do the last one. The Wild West! Mainly because I want to shoot people since I'm tired of punching dudes for the last two chapters. Pyro Jack fucked around with this message at 17:55 on Jul 27, 2022 |
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Jul 27, 2022 16:46
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(Endgame spoilers) I kind of love that this game, after 7 chapters of a nonstandard settings, then uses all the trappings of Dragon Quest to tell what is essentially an Anti-JRPG story. I was a bit disappointed to see that if you went back to the beginning of the Medieval chapter and throw the fight with Streighbogh in the intro you only get a standard Game Over. But then that is not that surprising. I wonder how much this game had silently influenced games ever since it was originally released. I had joked about Undertale before but I can see some of the ideas there being planted here.
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Jul 27, 2022 21:10
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Unlucky7 posted:I had joked about Undertale before but I can see some of the ideas there being planted here. Megalovania is literally inspired by Megalomania.
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Jul 27, 2022 21:32
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So yeah, this sure was a video game. Sure makes some of the SNES Golden Age JRPGs make more sense, like, drat, it's super apparent how ideas from Live A Live took hold. It's a little weird to get my head around how to credit design elements of a game that came out nearly three goddamn decades ago and has been through a modern remake filter (albeit a very faithful remake filter), but the conclusion I've reached is that this game was wildly ahead of its time, and in some respects feels a little bit dated today, but it only feels dated by like, five or ten years. There are a couple points where you can really feel the Old JRPG Bullshit piling up, and it just wasn't in the cards for whole swathes of the game to be ground-up redesigned, so they're in here more or less as articles of faith and exist as little spots where the quality-of-life papering-over couldn't quite reach. But god drat. This game feels original still in 2022, maybe less mind-blowingly so than it might have in 1994 and especially now that the idea of an anthology JRPG about thematically connected stories isn't really revolutionary anymore but, like, god drat. The HD-2D glow-up certainly doesn't hurt either, although it's a shame the Switch struggles to run it at times. I love how distinct each chapter feels. Seven completely different tones, seven completely different genres, seven completely different styles of love-letter to seven completely different eras of film, seven completely different characters, seven completely different styles of play. I once read, somewhere (my fading memory says it was an Action Button review, but hell if I can remember exactly where) that the JRPG genre is like a canvas - game genres being generally more akin to how we might think of a "medium" in art than what we think of as a "genre" in film - which you then find ways to use to convey narrative. The battle system, the progression, the exploration, and, yes, events and dialogue. Final Fantasy II/IV turned heads by giving you a "battle" sequence in which you progressed by a means other than depleting the opposing party's hit points. That kind of thing. Live A Live is fruit turgid with that kind of creative application of genre. The Shifu starting at max level but with stats that are middling in context, and his young students who are weak but brimming with potential if they could only gain the experience is a great example of this (Fire Emblem fans will instinctively think about Jeigan and Est here, because Fire Emblem is another early wellspring of narrative concepts crystallised as gameplay systems). Everywhere you look there's stuff telling you things; every item description is from the viewpoint of a character instead of that of the developer, mechanical differences between characters are framed as differing ways in which they see the world, and the protagonists all fight differently in ways that feel like true expressions of who they are and where (and when) they're from more than they feel like a designer ensuring a diverse allocation of unit classes. This stuff seems obvious to us now, in 2022, but in its original context it was the cutting loving edge. These guys figured out how to paint a masterpiece on the JRPG Canvas, and then opened a gallery. It is readily apparent that this game was made by people who love video games, and it is just as apparent that even though Japan (and, allegedly, the world) wasn't ready for it at the time, the people who made it understood the value in what they had made, and took much from it with which to find later success. It's right and just that it got such a high-profile second chance, because it was an injustice for it to go largely unknown despite being a key influence for literal decades. Now with all of that said I'm going to complain at length about the most integral part of the game and the spoilers. So we're all agreed I think that it's kind of a deliberate joke that after seven distinct original and novel short tales told in a JRPG style we are then given the secret that ties everything together in a Fantasy Medieval Europe sword and sorcery tale about a princess and a dark wizard. It's a good joke. I found it funny for about two hours, which, probably not coincidentally, is about how long the Middle Ages chapter stalls for before pulling its rug. It's earned. The problem I have is that as what I can only assume is part of the joke, they bought back the random battles. And I don't find that quite as funny. So, like, here's the thing. The game, the whole game, up until now, has made such a point about averting the use of random battles. It's like it's saying, we get it, we understand that this has only ever been something we all put up with before a better way was found, a mission it shares with its contemporary EarthBound. It was, to an extent, fitting for it to then abandon this undertaking as part of its effort to misdirect the player about what's about to happen in the Middle Ages chapter, because it's committed to using every single stroke on that canvas to paint a picture of JRPG Cliché. Like the rest of the joke, it remains funny for a couple of hours. But unlike the rest of the joke, it doesn't go away. The JRPG clichés are dramatically thrown away, but this mechanical part remains. And round about the same time, the game sends Oersted out on a wander around the game's largest environment, with no direction provided. I don't know exactly how long I spent before giving up and looking up a guide to reveal the completely unintuitive, untelegraphed action that triggers the next plot movement. It can't have been that long, maybe forty minutes. But it felt like hours, because, as we know without question in 2022 and surely must have at least suspected in 1994 having gone to the effort to make a game that avoids random battles, having to scour a large environment while being interrupted every few seconds feels godawful. So, this bit in the middle of the game's most impactful chapter was a bit of a misfire. But, hey, it's one bit, which does eventually end, and then it's right back onto the plot train. So what does the game do after this? Naturally, it repeats the same conceit again, for an entire final chapter that you'll need to scour in even more detail for an even longer time. I can't lie. The fatigue hit hard during the climactic final chapter. Somehow, for some reason, the game decides at this point that what it needs to do now is go in even harder on the JRPG tropes than it already has. The assembling of your team, this is good, and we see there a seed that would later blossom in FFVI in particular. But once again you are scouring Live A Live's largest environment, without any real guidance, and with the constant interruption of random battles, and to add to that, there are now seven dungeons - dungeons? Now? - that you have to complete if you want your Good Ending. All that, and tracking down Sundown. It's, just, it's too much. It takes too long. It ruins the pace. There was not an opening for five more hours of content at this point. Our seven protagonists are, we're to believe, flung together across time and space and proceed to spend a ton of time grinding in complete silence before anything interesting happens. And I mean, look, once you get there, the final boss sequence is incredible. In 1994 the idea of a fleshed out fallen-from-grace tragic figure pulling cosmic overlord duty must have been faintly astonishing. In 2022 it is merely a very cool sequence. But they carry it. Oersted sells it completely with his absurd trauma conga-line and his reams of soliloquies. "My hate is yours, and yours is mine. To share, a history, so long as men yet live!". Today it's kind of a cliché, but this right here is why it became a cliché. God, I was sold on Oersted as a villain the moment he started speaking. It couldn't have been more on the nose if they faded out the background and had a spotlight shine down on him. I am Here for this plot and how it's brought home. It's just! The five hours of filler! After everything in those other chapters! (Also as much as I love the constant Elizabethan-ness of everything in the Middle Ages, there's also kind of a weird quality to it that I can't quite pin down; it's like somewhere between the editing room and the recording booths there was a disconnect, or maybe multiple disconnects at different points, often the meter of the lines will falter slightly as though nobody had ever bothered to actually try reading them out and observe they failed to match that iambic cadence, and other times the voice actors didn't seem to realise they were supposed to be reading lines in that way, or other times the lines have the wrong meter but the voice actors clearly cotton on and manage to deliver the line in a way that works. There's, just, something really weird happened and I'd love to spend days badgering all the cast and crew to find out what exactly.) Someone upthread said the game is both hugely ahead of its time and utterly of its time, and, like, yeah, that, basically. But I think the remake had a daunting task which it carried out admirably; I am given to understand the whole undertaking is astonishingly faithful, beat for beat and pixel for pixel with only extremely minor changes for some variably justified censorship purposes, but there's clearly been a lot of thought put in to transparency and quality of life, with only a few sequences that still evoke that good ol' 1994 Game Bullshit Feeling. I'm glad it was made (both times) and I'm glad to have finally played it. I see what all the fuss was about.
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Jul 27, 2022 23:08
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Fedule posted:Live A Live thoughts You know, this whole post makes me think that someone at Square-Enix might be realizing that people are kind of bored of "normal" JRPGs, and games that previously did poorly due to being too avant-garde or high concept could sell much better today. Live A Live is clearly the centerpiece of this push, but they remastered SaGa Frontier just last year, Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song is due for its own remaster this fall, and they're even bringing back Frontmission (which is certainly a departure from SE's usual fantasy fare) and rereleased Chrono Cross (which remains controversial, though I contend that if you just ignore the somewhat forced connections to Chrono Trigger, it works a lot better). It could just be them throwing whatever older titles they can at the wall and seeing what sticks, but I'd like to at least pretend that someone appreciates that a lot of these weirder games have the potential to connect with modern audiences in ways they may have previously failed to. Also a lot of this stuff is being marketed most heavily on Switch which indicates a non-zero (though I'd imagine still pretty slim) chance of Super Mario RPG showing up at some point. Personally, I hope they do a ground-up overhaul/redesign of 7th Saga. Like, usually the only Enix property that gets tossed around a lot is Dragon Quest, but 7th Saga had the interesting premise of "what if a JRPG was also sort of an Amazing Race/Survivor deal" and I'd like to see what they do with it using modern tools. Regardless, as someone who has never been hugely enthusiastic about Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, I'm glad to see Square-Enix digging into their lesser-appreciated titles. Now if only Konami would take the hint and give us more Suikoden...
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Jul 27, 2022 23:51
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Fedule posted:spoiler thoughts I completely agree that the random encounters in the Medieval chapter, that one weird section where you are literally aimless, and both of those carrying over to the final chapter kind of sucks the air out of those sections, though they do not ruin them. It is a trapping of JRPGs and very deliberate, but it is still not that fun to play through. True Ending question: If you play as Cube, will you be able to give Ornsted a cup of coffee? For better or worse the guy kinda earned it. Unlucky7 fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Jul 28, 2022 |
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Jul 28, 2022 00:15
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Terper posted:Voice acting is great but I want to give special notice to the Imperial China ending where the English dub sounds like this, but in Japanese, they add some extra special flair to it. Holy poo poo the Japanese dub is so much better there, I should have gone for that.
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Jul 28, 2022 00:20
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I have to admit (Imperial China) I ended up with Yun as my disciple because I did not know about the mechanic and wanted to give the guy a bit of help in training. He did grow on me eventually but one of these days I should play through choosing Lei instead. Kind of weird that I am seeing a couple of people calling the dub bad. I mean, yeah, it is goofy in places, and I am sure the JP is better in those places and others besides (I mean, c'mon Tomokazu Sugita is 4 characters here), but I calling it bad is a stretch. Unlucky7 fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Jul 28, 2022 |
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Jul 28, 2022 00:30
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Unlucky7 posted:True Ending question: If you play as Cube, will you be able to give Ornsted a cup of coffee? For better or worse the guy kinda earned it. From what I've been told in lieu of a speech, Cube gives him a flower. Pogo, meanwhile, gives him a hug. 
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Jul 28, 2022 00:30
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I went with Sammo Hung in the fanslation, and Lei this time. I think both dub and original voice acting are great personally.
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Jul 28, 2022 00:39
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Yeah I like the dub a lot. I saw some people mad about the translation because they took some liberties with the dialogue, but the people getting mad about it were lovely gamer bros and I have learned to never take the opinions of lovely gamer bros all that seriously. As for late game complaints: Yeah, the random encounters get kind of exhausting. Hell, I didn't like needing to walk back through the long path leading up to the final boss in the prehistoric chapter and you can (technically) dodge those. They're a bit much but then again I'm not like some people I've seen who take random encounters as like, the greatest sin possibly committable by a game. Like I've seen folks write off Undertale angrily because it has random encounters. I'd prefer if they DIDN'T have random encounters, sure, but it's more a bit of old game friction rather than something that sours the game for me.
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Jul 28, 2022 00:48
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For what it's worth (endgame stuff) you don't have to do the optional dungeons to get the best ending, recruiting every character is enough. Four of them don't even have random encounters, and I kind of liked Masaru's gimmick of just being a straight path full of extra tough encounters, most of which could be avoided if you ignored the chests, but the other two that were straight dungeon dungeons managed to try my patience as well. Pacing across the overworld and having the final dungeon be one you'd traipsed through twice in the previous chapter were the bigger drags for me. I came in with the mentality that it was gonna be Live-A-Live's World of Ruin, figuring that if it somehow wasn't, that'd be a pleasant surprise, but having tempered expectations helped a lot. If this wasn't a remake of a 1994 game, I would have been heck of disappointed by everything but the actual finale, which would have still been amazing. Ørsted's voice actor absolutely nailed it. "Hate. Sweet hate. She springs eternal, all-tempting draught. We'll drink of her again."
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Jul 28, 2022 01:01
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Glagha posted:Yeah I like the dub a lot. I saw some people mad about the translation because they took some liberties with the dialogue, but the people getting mad about it were lovely gamer bros and I have learned to never take the opinions of lovely gamer bros all that seriously. I'll admit, there are a few lines I prefer the Aeon Genesis versions of ("You can't win against a gatling gun!" was a particular favorite of mine, and while I'm taking the game slowly so I can savor it, I imagine I'll still find myself partial to the Aeon Genesis version of Oersted's speeches in his final chapter), but I'm not gonna lose my mind over it. The Aeon Genesis version is still right there whenever I want it, and the second translation provides a fresh take on the stories. My main translation gripes are the chapter titles/end cards, because I think the former now have less impact, and the latter broke up a perfectly good aesthetic through-line, and of course what they did with Pogo's one line, which I guess was gonna be tough to translate no matter what, but I feel like their solution didn't really land.
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Jul 28, 2022 01:45
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I think part of the Pogo issue is that he doesn’t have a localized VA. In the dub they straight up just leave the original in. After all, why not? There isn’t anything there but grunts and noises. Nothing to localize. Of course, this creates a bind when the climax has him say mankind’s first word.
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Jul 28, 2022 01:56
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SettingSun posted:I think part of the Pogo issue is that he doesn’t have a localized VA. In the dub they straight up just leave the original in. After all, why not? There isn’t anything there but grunts and noises. Nothing to localize. The story with the line is that "Ai" is the Japanese word for "love" so the whole thing was a wordplay, basically, it sounds like Pogo's screaming and is him shouting out "love" and also implying that love is humanity's first word because of said word's similarity to just screaming. The double meaning is lost in translation, and Aeon Genesis just had him yell "love". I think the best solution would have been to do the literal translation, but with "Love" in parentheses, or some other variation of the "Translator's Note" meme.
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Jul 28, 2022 02:08
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EclecticTastes posted:I imagine I'll still find myself partial to the Aeon Genesis version of Oersted's speeches in his final chapter Please circle back to this once you've seen the remake version. I dunno what the original/Aeon Genesis version did, but I absolutely loved the remake's take.
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Jul 28, 2022 02:20
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Fedule posted:Now with all of that said I'm going to complain at length about the most integral part of the game and the spoilers. Calling the seven scenarios "distinct original" doesn't feel accurate when they're each giant love letters to the genre's that they're each based off.
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Jul 28, 2022 03:33
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Unlucky7 posted:Kind of weird that I am seeing a couple of people calling the dub bad. I mean, yeah, it is goofy in places, and I am sure the JP is better in those places and others besides (I mean, c'mon Tomokazu Sugita is 4 characters here), but I calling it bad is a stretch. I had favourites on either side. The real standouts for me are Mad Dog and Sundown in English, Lei and Akira in Japanese. Feels like people calling the whole dub bad are being a bit extreme.
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Jul 28, 2022 06:30
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Luceid posted:I had favourites on either side. The real standouts for me are Mad Dog and Sundown in English, Lei and Akira in Japanese. Feels like people calling the whole dub bad are being a bit extreme. Some people are always going to be purists about subs vs. dubs. The Japanese cast is insanely stacked, mind you; it's hard to top the likes of Norio Wakamoto and Tomokazu Seki. However, the English dub still manages to get the job done quite well, and is absolutely worth experiencing. I've certainly heard worse.
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Jul 28, 2022 06:44
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Huh, Present Day is pretty short, huh? I’m like halfway through and the premise of fighting Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out-rear end weirdos is pretty rad but I kinda wish it worked more like Mega Man (than it already does) and actually gave you a short level per boss to flex your new moves with. Also finished Edo Japan, no idea truthfully how you get swole enough to kill the fish but I guess that’s what the genocide route is for. It’s kinda crazy that they made a wholeass stealth chapter when there was only Metal Gear Vanilla as a big stealth game, and added two optional goals with different idiosyncratic attached with Pacifist/Genocide like killing that one hannya man before killing everyone or figuring out how the hell to not kill those last three guys before Ode. This game having so much potential replayability in general is one of the most impressive things, like the remake is well done, and I knew about the premise of different eras/styles long before the localization announcement, but having the foresight to design stuff in a way where, if you were a kid, could get dozens of hours out the campaigns, even the less conventional JRPG ones, was foresight I wasn’t expecting from an old SNES game.
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Jul 29, 2022 07:16
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The secret to the fish is that it's vulnerable to the instant kill move, which you can learn by giving six koban to the pot or by grinding an inordinate amount, but don't do that. This can be done in a pacifist run.
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Jul 29, 2022 07:27
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Bongo Bill posted:The secret to the fish is that it's vulnerable to the instant kill move, which you can learn by giving six koban to the pot or by grinding an inordinate amount, but don't do that. This can be done in a pacifist run. There is another way to deal with the fish. Shooting it with the prisoner will cause it to turn around and interrupt it, and its only moves either have a charge time, or require it to be at melee range. So just knock it back with your move of choice (even Waterspout is fine; the healing it gets is nothing compared to what Mammoth King gets from fire tiles, since water tiles have the lowest damage of all tiles), and then keep spinning it around to keep it wasting turns on flipping back towards you. It takes a little bit, but it's vastly easier than the Majin Ryonosuke fight. The biggest problem is the backtracking involved in killing both bosses in a zero-kill run, where you wanna take the mimic to Ryonosuke, then use him for his usual purpose (since he sinks in water much too quickly to be used against Lord Iwama, then come back to Lord Iwama after you get the prisoner. You may even want to get the medicine box before backtracking, just to make sure you win as quickly as possible, since it can take a while.
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Jul 29, 2022 07:51
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Bongo Bill posted:The secret to the fish is that it's vulnerable to the instant kill move, which you can learn by giving six koban to the pot or by grinding an inordinate amount, but don't do that. This can be done in a pacifist run. Awesome, thanks EclecticTastes posted:There is another way to deal with the fish. Shooting it with the prisoner will cause it to turn around and interrupt it, and its only moves either have a charge time, or require it to be at melee range. So just knock it back with your move of choice (even Waterspout is fine; the healing it gets is nothing compared to what Mammoth King gets from fire tiles, since water tiles have the lowest damage of all tiles), and then keep spinning it around to keep it wasting turns on flipping back towards you. It takes a little bit, but it's vastly easier than the Majin Ryonosuke fight. The biggest problem is the backtracking involved in killing both bosses in a zero-kill run, where you wanna take the mimic to Ryonosuke, then use him for his usual purpose (since he sinks in water much too quickly to be used against Lord Iwama, then come back to Lord Iwama after you get the prisoner. You may even want to get the medicine box before backtracking, just to make sure you win as quickly as possible, since it can take a while. I’m gonna be honest, I must have missed a LOT because I think I found Majin Ryonosuke if he’s the super boss in the koban jar hallway that kicked my teeth in, but everything else sounds like gibberish, unless Iwama is a mandatory boss I’m just forgetting the name of. I’m definitely sure I missed something because I was looking for the key to the cells and found three bucket head guys, beat them up just to see what they were guarding before intending to reload, and then poo poo got real, the Prisoner shot Ode, and then he turned into a hosed up frog and I saved when the end chapter prompt came up because for some dumb reason I figured it would boot me back to my last manual save spot with the Chapter Clear progress marker on my file. So umm, where do I get the key from? Or this mimic?
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Jul 29, 2022 09:12
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Just playing the demo, does the combat in this game ever get more interesting or challenging? I'm not really sure how to feel about how every character has like 8 attacks which aren't limited by MP or anything and things are easy enough that you don't have to think much about what to use. Though there were some inklings of things getting interesting in a puzzle-like way in some of the Captain Square levels and how if the Ninja is underleveled from avoiding combat you can get 2-shot and have to rely on laying down flame tiles and keeping out of enemy reach. I also did enjoy figuring out how to try to get through that chapter pacifist style the most of anything in the demo. I don't really expect a lot from mid 90s Square games but wondering if things ever get more or less challenging enough that you have to think things through a bit more. Kind of on the fence about buying this game in general. Always been a little bit curious about it since high school era SNES emulator days but never got around to playing it. The demo was decently entertaining but didn't really blow me away, though people in this thread and gamefaqs etc. are really hyping up the game as being great. I will say also that I know the overall late game story based on reading an LP of the SNES fan translation years ago so there wouldn't be any big surprises there. Item Getter fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Jul 29, 2022 |
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Jul 29, 2022 09:38
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Last Celebration posted:Awesome, thanks It's hardly a spoiler, come to think of it, since it's just a normal hazard of the castle layout, but the giant fish in the moat is named Lord Iwama. If you avoided it without noticing it, it's the giant shadow in the upper portion. As for Mimic Mammet, try killing the electrodes before finishing off Clockwork Gennai. Phantom Butterflies clears 'em out pretty quickly. From there, well, that pot in the hallway isn't the only place you can spend koban. You may have noticed a suspicious-looking slot behind Gennai's room. Be sure to bring four coins; three to get in, one to get back. And be sure to save, trust me, if you end up falling afoul of a particularly dirty trick, you'll be glad to get back. Anyway you need to do all that to get a zero-kill run.
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Jul 29, 2022 09:50
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EclecticTastes posted:It's hardly a spoiler, come to think of it, since it's just a normal hazard of the castle layout, but the giant fish in the moat is named Lord Iwama. If you avoided it without noticing it, it's the giant shadow in the upper portion. As for Mimic Mammet, try killing the electrodes before finishing off Clockwork Gennai. Phantom Butterflies clears 'em out pretty quickly. From there, well, that pot in the hallway isn't the only place you can spend koban. You may have noticed a suspicious-looking slot behind Gennai's room. Be sure to bring four coins; three to get in, one to get back. And be sure to save, trust me, if you end up falling afoul of a particularly dirty trick, you'll be glad to get back. Anyway you need to do all that to get a zero-kill run. Oh yeah, I met and was quickly obliterated by Lord Iwama. And thanks on Mimic Mammet, I definitely would have just not bothered killing the helpers otherwise.
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Jul 29, 2022 12:07
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