The "What should I know before I play this game for the first time?" Q&A!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The "What should I know before I play this game for the first time?" Q&A!

Lunar Suite: Jun 5, 2011; If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.

food court bailiff posted:

Anything I should know about Operencia?

you will need to backtrack, which you can do later in the game, to get extra challenges, loot, et cetera

i don't think enemies respawn, like, ever, so once you've cleared a level, you've cleared it

you'll get a vendor a little bit into the story, like 2-3 levels in

this is an SMT style game where status effects are not useless

# ¿ Aug 14, 2020 15:30

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 03:45

Lunar Suite: Jun 5, 2011; If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.

Ciaphas posted:

Planning to pick up Atelier Ryza on PC tonight or tomorrow, if anyone has any suggestions

Haven't even tried to play one of the series in years

Item quality affects damage/healing/other. Get quality as high as possible.

The secret to getting quality as high as possible is to stack quality / quality + / quality++ traits and find a synthesis loop. I don�t recall the loops for the first game, but there should be a way to e.g. turn neutraliser into water, and use the water to make neutraliser. By going through this loop you should be able to stack Quality-increasing traits all the way to 999 if needed (or other traits).

Eventually you�ll be able to make seeds. Materials spawned from seeds have quality of up to 100% the quality of the seed, e.g. you can get 999 quality materials from growing them yourself and making max quality a lot easier to reach.

The series older system of merging traits has been abandoned in favour of trait levels, e.g. you no longer combine quality and quality + into well made, but you stack quality+ until the number goes high enough.

Every time you recipe morph, the number of items you can add to the cauldron resets. You can abuse this e.g. by making your weapon from the basic recipe and morphing multiple times. The + Gear Atk effect from each ingot stacks across morphs, and you can add many more ingots than you would by making the item directly.

Speaking of recipe morph, a lot of amazing synthesis helpers with high element values, or even values that spread to neighbouring nodes, are discovered through recipe morph. Things like Melting Oil, Amberlite, or later-game synthesis intermediaries like the Spirit Bottle are hidden in there - get them.

You can charge your gathering tools (hold the button) to get all resources from nodes that can take more than one hit (some trees and crystals) at once.

Item duplication comes quite late in this game, abuse Item Rework until then. You can rework items up to your alchemy level, so the more you synth, the more you can update your gear by dropping more materials in. Or replace traits with bigger ones.

You can hit select with your cursor over a node or a material to quickly open a reference menu. There, you can see e.g. where to gather materials you lack, or to check whether the trait you�re looking at can actually be used on weapons / armour / healing items.

Lunar Suite fucked around with this message at 13:50 on Feb 2, 2021

# ¿ Feb 2, 2021 13:46

Lunar Suite: Jun 5, 2011; If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.

Ciaphas posted:

Thanks for all this - inspired me to pick it back up after getting overwhelmed and putting it down.

How long will it be until I pick up on one of these loops? And while I'm synthing what's the difference between Synth Quality and Quality nodes?

I think some of the loops are available from the get go, but I'm not certain. It definitely gets easier in the mid-game, when traits like Quality+ and Quality++ start to appears.

Quality nodes affect the current item only. Synth Quality is an effect of several "middleman" items, like Neutralisers. When you use those items to make another item, the synthesis quality is increased by the listed amount. I'm not sure if that's before or after the "quality is average of quality of all added ingredients" Ryza 1 does, though. Having a few neutralisers with both high quality and high Synth Quality + X effects is a good way to pump up other items. Loop loop loop~

One Weird Trick to getting high-Quality items is to totally focus on using high-Quality ingredients, even if that doesn't unlock any effects you want. You can then (ab)use Item Rebuild to unlock those effects; since ingredient quality doesn't affect item quality in Item Rebuild (you can still use Quality nodes to increase it, though), you can go hog wild with high-Element Value stuff. You're still limited by your Alchemy Lvl and your party member's Dexterity, though.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 10:26

Lunar Suite: Jun 5, 2011; If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.

ahobday posted:

I've started playing Atelier Ryza 1 and I've just got to the point where I've met the big monster with the crystals on its back. The game hasn't grabbed me yet but it feels like I'm still in tutorial mode. If I don't particularly enjoy what I've done so far, is it worth it to carry on until more of the game opens up?

To me the attraction of Ryza isn�t battle, it�s gathering and crafting. If you aren�t looking forward to the next zone�s story, new ingredients, and the mad poo poo you get to make with it, it might not catch you the same way (and that�s ok!). I tend to do a couple intricate syntheses early to trivialise battle with high powered gear and bombs.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2021 10:48

Lunar Suite: Jun 5, 2011; If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.

Oh, for Ryza 2 - item rebuild gave me ridiculous amounts of SP.
And my current best farming spot for items to turn into gems is the third floor of the sunken city. Charge your staff and whack the three palm trees for coconuts, then use the scythe for blue leaves or the spirit whistle to fill the rest of your inventory. Return to atelier, repeat, then boil all the spare items down into gems. Gets you about 30k a run?

# ¿ Feb 14, 2021 11:28

Lunar Suite: Jun 5, 2011; If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.

Atelier Ryza 3:

General

You can pet cats and dogs in this game. Not the goats, though.
This game has recycled the maps from the first game, making them into a single seamless overworld. You will also go to other areas; it's there you'll make a lot of advances and find new materials.
You can fast-forward through the Item Duplication, Gem Reduction and Synthesis animations by holding the A button. Dialogue fast-forward is RB.

Item Synthesis
As usual, item Quality is king, affecting the power of the healing and damage items you create. Traits are also important, but try not to neglect quality.
Not all traits have an effect on all items! This is called their "Transfer Category". You can check the trait type mid-synthesis by pressing "Related" (Select on a controller) to open the Reference Menu and access the Guide from there. Some of these are obvious (Healing++ does nothing on damage items), some less so (Critical++ has no effect on Weapons or Armor), and some are trap options (Speed++ does nothing on Armor or Weapons, only Accessories).
The ability to Sort and Filter your items through the Submenu is still very useful. Watch out, however, as pressing the Sort key twice will sort items in ascending order, putting your lowest Quality/Value/powerful items first without telling you.
To snap the game's difficulty curve over your thighs, learn how to loop traits to level them up. For example, make a Red Neutraliser. Red Neutraliser is also a (Gunpowder) item and can be used to make... Red Neutraliser. Using four Red Neutralisers with Quality+ Lvl 1 to make Red Neutraliser makes the traits combine into Quality+ Lvl 4. Repeat for Quality+ Lvl 16, repeat to max Quality+ out at Lvl 50. This will also refine the quality (not the trait) of the items at the same time, even without Quality+/++ traits.
If you're gonna nerd out over traits, drawing a synthesis chart of what item can be used to make what other items (or itself) helps keep the synthesis loops clear. A good basic loop is Neutraliser -> Zettel -> Water Orb -> Neutraliser. Blue and Red Neutraliser also loop into themselves.
You increase the Elemental Value of the items you synthesize by increasing their quality and adding rarer traits (e.g. Quality++, Skill Charge++, Critical++). A Red Neutraliser can have their Elemental Value boosted from 3 to 5 by good traits.
Materials with Effect Spread (such as the Traveler's Water Orb or Taboo Drop) are very worthwhile, unlocking multiple neighbouring nodes with one ingredient.
Once you unlock Item Rebuild through the Skill Tree, you can use it to unlock extra effect nodes or slide in other traits. With Item Rebuild, you can focus on synthesizing high-quality but 'bland' items and spice 'em up later, as quality doesn't change from ingredients in rebuild, only through Quality nodes.
By marking an item as "Favourite", it gains a 🔒 symbol and will be ignored for Gem Reduction and the Auto-Add Material option in synthesis. This stops you accidentally destroying your last copy of a neutraliser containing a rare trait. You can still add Favourite items to a synthesis manually, however.

Skill Tree
The Skill Tree will allow you to unlock the ability to add more ingredients to a synthesis, which helps increase quality and unlock traits by putting more high-quality items in.
Skills on the Skill tree are not grouped - e.g. the tier 2 bombs are locked behind Core Crystal Modification, the tier 2 Ingots and Cloths are behind Max Quality 700.
Grinding CP for the Gather Lvl 2 / 3 skills didn't seem worth it - ingredients for higher-tier Items appear plot gated, rather than skill gated as they were in Ryza 2.

Getting Materials
You can add a material to your Exploration List, which causes nodes containing that material, and maps with such nodes, to be marked by a special icon (you'll have to zoom into the world map a bit).
Seeds allow you to grow your own materials, whose quality is up to 100% of the seeds' quality. A 999 Quality seed is the only way to get some materials to 999 quality, late in the game.
You can only grow seeds once you get the choice to create another Atelier, and only if you pick the Farm Atelier (you can remodel your Atelier for some minor cost in materials at any time). You can't grow seeds at your Hideout anymore, despite the big wide field there.
In the Basket, "Discard All" switches your cursor to a mode where you can select multiple items to discard. You'll still need to confirm. Items marked as Favourite should be skipped.
During Gem Reduction, you can press A and hold the D-Pad to the right to keep selecting items. Items marked as Favourite are automatically skipped. I tend to sort first by Quality, then by Quantity, then leave ~12 items (press down twice from the first item), then reduce the rest unless they have a good Super Trait.

New Mechanics
You can only transfer Super Traits from raw ingredients, not from items that have inherited them. For example, if you make a Yellow Neutraliser with Ultra Purity, you cannot transfer that Super Trait when you use the Neutraliser in Synthesis.
An item with the "Ultra Purity" Super Trait will give more gems in Gem Reduction than it costs to create with Gem Duplication, giving you infinite gems as soon as you can make a Neutraliser with this trait (you can duplicate up to 99 copies per round of duplication; push 'down' to roll over from 1 duplicate to 99). Make sure to mark one of your Ultra Purity items as favourite, so you don't melt it down when you go through pages upon pages of duplicates of it for Gem Reduction.
Keys are a, ahem, key mechanic in this game. You start out being able to create mediocre keys, up to 5 times before you need to recharge at any Atelier. After a story mission, you gain the ability to synthesize "Pristine Keys", which let you create much stronger keys whilst using up one Pristine Key.
Stronger keys can e.g. add additional Element Types to items you synthesize, such as adding Ice element to Red Neutraliser
You cannot duplicate keys or Pristine Keys, but you can melt unwanted keys down for gems.

Combat, Weapons and Equipment
Your starter equipment is fine for a while; unless you really want to grind traits to Level 99 for four hours like I did, you will do much more damage with items at first
If you do want to grind for lvl 99 traits: Good weapon traits are Skill Power +/++, ATK+DEF Charge+/++ and ATK/Speed Charge+/++. Get those onto Ingots
At the end of battle, any excess CC is put into your CC bottle and lets you use recovery items from your Basket.
ATK Boost alone goes only up to +50 ATK, ATK/DEF Charge++ gives 100 of each, and can be transferred to Weapons and Armor. Same for the Defense++ trait versus ATK/DEF Charge++.
Those traits adds much, more more to the ATK stat of weapons / DEF of items than I got from ingots/cloth, so pay attention to traits for your equipment.

Finishing Touches
Good general traits to loop and forget in a bottle of neutraliser somewhere are: Quality+/++, Critical+/++, Healing+/++, Enhance Finisher +/++, Damage+/++. Whilst there are more excitingly-named trait, like "Tremendous Healing", their effect is always a bit lower than the corresponding ++ trait if the ++ trait is at max level.
What happened to lent's nipples

Updated March 29, 13:42

Lunar Suite fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Mar 29, 2023

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 10:06

Lunar Suite: Jun 5, 2011; If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.

One more for Atelier Ryza 3 - every region of the game has a certain number of �secret� recipes hidden in resource caches (blue or orange crystals). This is where you get e.g. the recipe for all seeds other than Plant Seeds.
Recipes only appear if you open the cache with a Rare or Very Rare key - try making keys from tough bosses, or wait until near the end of the game when you can make Rarity + 1 or + 2 Pristine Keys, which guarantees a Very Rare key.

You can cook at campfires, which gives some bonuses.

# ¿ Apr 24, 2023 08:11

Lunar Suite: Jun 5, 2011; If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.

yook posted:

The new zelda could be called tiers of the kingdom and it would actually still work.

Here's some more stuff that's really more of a confessional for my own screwups:

Some areas of the depths aren't directly accessible from each other and many have high sheer cliff faces that may or may not actually have anything at the top. It's not great for blind exploring, so try to get an idea where things are located and whether the areas are connected before trotting off.

The depths and Hyrule essentially mirror each other - Mountains in Hyrule are canyons underneath, and deep chasms are mirrored as impassable cliff walls, as is ocean.
Most of the depths are a big continuous mess but there are several small isolated pockets. Not all chasms are visible from above, either. Looking at you, Rito Village .

The game only points this out once - each Shrine has a Lightroot beneath it (with the same name but reversed), and each Lightroot has a shrine above it. This helps you find some of the harder to locate shrines / roots.

Lunar Suite fucked around with this message at 09:44 on Jun 13, 2023

# ¿ Jun 1, 2023 12:44

Lunar Suite: Jun 5, 2011; If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.

Rockman Reserve posted:

Anything for Rune Factory 5? I�ve never played any of �em.

Rune Factory games are largely like Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games, with some dungeon crawling and more item crafting atop it to keep it fresh. The Request board outside your base gives you tons of requests that are actually tutorials for anything from monster taming to raising crop levels.

RP
Your RP recovers (slowly) when you're standing still, this also counts if you're talking to someone. You can open conversation with the NPC at the bottom of your base to slowly recover RP in the early game.

Most of your RP restoration is going to come from cooking. Some easy (one ingredient) dishes that restore a good amount of RP are:
Boiled Egg (Pot | Egg), Hot Milk (Pot | Milk S/M/L), Boiled Spinach (Pot | Spinach), Pickled Turnip (Cooking Table | Turnip), Boiled Daikon (Pot | Radish )

Crops
If you cut a fully-grown crop with a sickle, you have a chance of receiving a seed of a higher level. Ship higher-level seeds, and seeds in stores will all be of the higher level going forward. For levels about Lvl 7 or so, you need a higher-level sickle and/or use Greenifier (raises soil quality by 0.2) and Greenifier+ (raises quality by 0.5), and apply them until you get at least +1.0 Quality (check using a magnifying glass or item with a magnifying glass embedded in it).

There are three ranks of fertiliser: Formula A (raises growth speed by 1.0 fold), B (raises by 2.0 fold) and C (raises growth by 2.5). One bottle covers a 2x2 area, and each can be used once a day (i.e. you can use one bottle A, one B and one C on the same 2x2 plot to immediately max out the growth rate to the cap of 5.0x, but you can't use four bottles of A in one day).

Crafitng and Recipes
Crafting something whose recipe you do not know costs more RP than following a known recipe.
You can buy Recipe Bread (for cooking, accessories, weapons, pharmacy or farm tools) which will teach you one recipe of the appropriate level per bread (more for high-level bread). Recipes are largely identical to those of RF4, so you can look them up.
It's generally impossible to make something more than 15 levels above your skill since the RP cost increases so much.

To get skill levels quickly, do the following:
(Equip a star pendant if you have one, it raises the rate of Skill EXP gain. Star Pendants are a level 40 accessory, made from a silver pendant, one nugget of Gold [Meline Crystal Caverns - Depths and later dungeons], and a Love Crystal [dropped by Pixies, which can be farmed in Everlasting Darkness Level 2, but that level drains RP] )
Open your crafting station. Select the highest-level recipe you can actually make. Remove all items the game pre-populates the recipe with (i.e. if you're cooking boiled spinach, remove the spinach) and put in a "dummy item" such as a weed.
Craft. You will fail, creating a Failed Dish / Scrap Metal / Object X; however, you will fail at the level of the recipe you tried. You can recycle the Failed Dish / Scrap Metal / Object X again and again through the high-level recipe.
Much like in real life, you learn more from trying and failing outside your comfort zone than by repeating something you're already good at.

Rune Factory games secretly have a super deep crafting system. For example, the Magnifying Glass item lets you see the soil's level, growth speed, HP, etc., but you need to equip and unequip it... However, if you reinforce a farming tool or accessory with a magnifying glass, that effect can be transferred to the new item. Now you have a sickle that shows you soil and crop levels. Look a up a guide if you want to make really good equipment, it's far too deep to get into here, but it lets you make truly bonkers stuff like rings with multiple resistances, a scarf that shows soil level, cuts RP consumption and speeds up tool charge, or a short sword with the stats of Dual Blades.

Drop Farming
Your "Spell Seal" (gets tutorialised) has a chance of forcing the enemy to drop their item without needing to defeat them and without killing them. Enemies generally seem to only drop one item.
You can farm enemies by using the Spell Seal to claim a drop, moving away until they despawn, then moving back towards their gate to re-spawn them.

Upgrading tools
Upgrade your watering can first, it's the biggest time saver. Upgrading your hammer supposedly increases your success at getting mineral drops. Upgrading the sickle lets you get higher-level seeds from grown crops. Upgraded fishing rods allegedly attract fish from further away.
Upgrade the axe last, charged swings with the hammer and axe only cover a wider area, they do not do more damage. Upgrading the axe/hammer also doesn't increase swing speed as it did in RF4; sorry, logging is annoying again.

Lunar Suite fucked around with this message at 13:56 on Mar 19, 2024

# ¿ Mar 5, 2024 00:15

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# ¿ May 14, 2024 03:45

Lunar Suite: Jun 5, 2011; If you love a flower which happens to be on a star, it is sweet at night to gaze at the sky. All the stars are a riot of flowers.

Szarrukin posted:

Anything I should know before starting Pacific Drive?

Story missions always put you into a "perpetual stability" zone, where the storm doesn't advance until you either open a gateway or activate the last/only stabilisier in the map. Loot accordingly.

Maps come in different types, distinguished by the icon on the left side of the junction name. The map type determines which Tier 2 / 3 resources you can find, i.e. you can only find "Salamander Nests" in the mid zone, in a map of type "Marsh".

Repair kits (Mechanics', Sealing, Electrical, Light Replacement) stack to 3; if possible, don't leave without a stack of 3

Most items or consumables have an upgraded version, which tends to last longer and only takes up slightly more space but what they do isn't always signposted:
* Repairing car part durability (including tyres): Repair Putty -> Blowtorch -> Olympium Blowtorch
* Recharging battery: Battery charger -> Plasma Prod
* Light Source: Road Flare -> Reignitable Road Flare -> Crude Flashlight/Bioflare -> Biolantern
* Get resoures: Scrapper -> Plasma Scrapper, Hammer -> Magnet Hammer, Hand Vac -> Thermal Vac. Upgraded resource tools seem to also get better drops (i.e. the magnet hammer gets more plasma from generators)

If your Tier 1/2 item (scrapper, prybar, etc) is under 50% health, best to scrap it and make a new one before driving out. Your car can be upgraded to a level 2 crafting station (if upgraded) - you can't make some of the advanced resource collectors in the field.

You can use the hand vac / thermal vac to suck up any drops, not just the ones its used to harvest. Useful to sweep the area (but beware of sucking up smaller Abnormalities!)

Recommended garage upgrades:
Matter deconstructor (breaks down dumpster pearls, which tend to be very good, if random, resources). You can also scrap car parts that have an incurable status effect, which refudns at least some resources. You can also scrap excess paint cans for chemicals.
Matter Regenerator (Mk1 / Mk2) - create two sets of car parts, swap them in and out from the regenerator onto your car, save a fortune on repair putty. Regenerator restores parts' durability, but will not remove status effects!

I finished the game in 20 drives, without ever using (or getting) Junction Bypass, Junction Scrambler, or many of the higher-tier upgrades, really.

Recommended car upgrades:
Trunk in the Trunk (And its upgrade)
Resource detector - for 2.5 energy, it scans the area and highlights cars, resource nodes, and barrels in range with a HUD marker including distance. These markers stay for ~30 seconds before fading - enough to point yourself in the right direction
Offroad Tires
LIM shield - given to you during the story, replaces your bumper (Recommended: rear bumper). Whilst active, the Shield will consume battery for each instance of damage deflected, but will also detach any bunnies, Abductors, etc, and stop you from getting smashed to crap. High battery drain if uses carelessly, lifesaver is used carefully.

You get a total of four side racks, two seat racks, and two top racks. I recommend one fuel tank extension and one battery extension in the seats, a resource detector for the roof, an extra storage dedicated to repair kits on the side and generators (solar, lightning rod, water) on the last three. Those generators covered enough environment types that I could run lights and the occasional Resource Detector ping / LIM shield without having to worry about power.

Generally - don't take stupid risks, don't drive back into the storm unless you have to, most abnormalities you can just drive around. If in doubt, go slow and in a circle around the weird thing, and live another day.
Oh, and #GovernmentYellowGang.

Lunar Suite fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Mar 5, 2024

# ¿ Mar 5, 2024 00:27

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The "What should I know before I play this game for the first time?" Q&A!