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 The original XBox didn't have much of a JRPG offering, if it had anything at all, and there was a desire to rectify that for the XBox 360. The intent was for Enchanted Arms to be a 360 launch title, but it was delayed a few months and released in early 2006 by FromSoftware, who made the Armored Core series and more recently Dark Souls. This game is much more the first than the second, in that it's a nearly bog-standard JRPG. Ultimately, that's what they were shooting for, and they produced a perfectly reasonable offering. It still spends a lot of time being stupid though, which is going to make this a fun ride. Golems: Golems are the big unique thing this game presents. They are extra party members that you can collect or buy all throughout the game. Most of the time they're just backup party members or a way to bring more of a certain role with you, but some of them completely upend the normal way battles work. They can also all be renamed. In order to keep things changing, at the end of every set of episodes we'll include a list of all the new golems we can get. It'll be up to all of you to show off your hilarious wit, and if we like a name I will be adding that golem to the party for as long as is feasible, either until they become obsolete or get pushed out for a better golem. EPISODES 1: Student Who Loves Festivals 2: Man Who Failed Long Ago (These two episodes have a couple of audio problems, but they should be resolved after that) 3: Crazy Pizza 4: Cota 5: Queen of Ice 6: Heavily Drinking Guard 7: The Nameless Dead 8: Man Always Stuck At "Just Friends" 9: Fire Temple 10: ¡Down In Front! 11: Man Who Saw Yokohama 12: Aqua Jelly 13: 2hot 2handle 14: Tumor 15: Spooky Boo 16: Destroy 17: Mystery Man 18: London Calling 19: Piano Man 20: Unreasonably Happy Man 21: Arsenal Leader 22: Ooka 23: Giggling Man 24: Strongest Guard in the Castle 25: Old Royal Guard 26: 2-D Or Not 2-D? 27: Emperor of Fire 28: Efficient London Carpenter 29: Man Who Travels a Lot 30: Phoenicia, NOT Phoenix 31: Why Did It Have To Be Yuki 32: Girl With A Cunning Look 33: Woman Given to Thievery 34: Junk(yard Boy) 35: Sphinx 36: Anubis 37: Swordswoman With Black Hair 38: Samurai Who Eats A Lot 39: Kind-Looking Old Man 40: Owner Who Knows The Difference 41: Oboro 42: Tokimune Istvun fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Oct 14, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 12:42
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Our Heroes! (As presented by the manual) Golems: Istvun fucked around with this message at 03:15 on Jun 23, 2015 |
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Mar 25, 2015 12:46
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Well, this is shaping up to become an.. experience. The golems as part of gameplay could be interesting but it seems the devs had two huge lists of jrpg and anime clichés within arms reach at all times. And seems like they actively ticked off stuff they've used: Retarded, but talented protagonist? Check. Anime schoolgirl making lunch for her crush? Yeah, but get this! This time it's a camp dude! One guy who is stupidly popular for no real reason? Yep. loving school setting? Check and double-loving-check! I'm totally not a villain outfit for the first NPC? Check with prejudice! Thankfully the mysterious sequence in the beginning was very short. Unfortunately, the rest of the video has been one forced tutorial after the other. But I do like how tactical the battles are with the very predictable damage dealing. Eh, let's see where this ride goes. The worst it can do is being painfully mediocre.
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Mar 26, 2015 20:01
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The PS3 version of this game was so much better. I'm not going to spoil why, just in case it's included in the 360 version in some way, but if we reach the tutorial area where it should be introduced and I don't see it, is it okay if I mention it?
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Mar 26, 2015 20:33
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Oh no. Oh no.
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Mar 26, 2015 21:07
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HerpicleOmnicron5 posted:The PS3 version of this game was so much better. I'm not going to spoil why, just in case it's included in the 360 version in some way, but if we reach the tutorial area where it should be introduced and I don't see it, is it okay if I mention it? I didn't know there was a PS3 version until after I recorded these first few videos, so if it comes up and you don't see what you're looking for, feel absolutely free.
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Mar 26, 2015 22:07
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Hooray. it's time for an UPDATE where we learn that festivals are just extended fetch quests. 2: Man Who Failed Long Ago At the end of this episode, we picked up our first golem! It's not the most exciting one we'll find, but it's still an excuse to explain stats and skills.  This is our new golem, Taigalion. That's a really bad name, incidentally, so we'll want to swap that out with a decent one pretty quick. But we can still go through its stats and figure out more about how this crazy game works. Starting from the top you'll see that it has 38 HP and 54 EP. I'm sure you all know what HP is, but EP is spent to use just about any skill. It is also Earth element. That means it takes half damage from Earth attacks, but double damage from Wind attacks (Thanks Counselor Coach!). Going down we'll see that our lion buddy is level 1 and needs 32 EXP to level up. It has no SP, which are used to improve stats and will be the focus of a later post, and no FP. I have no clue what FP do. It's maxed out on VPs, which means it's fully rested. Every turn beyond the first that a battle takes, and every time a character takes damage (no matter how much), that character will lose 1 VP. And they lose somewhere between 5 and 10 for being knocked out. As long as you have VP, you're fine - you'll start out the battle with max stats. But once you run out, you're basically useless in fights. 30 VP, incidentally, is a small amount.  Taigalion has three skills. The first one is the same punch Atsuma has, only weaker. It costs 8 EP and deals 40 damage to the two spaces in front. The second skill is a powerful close range punch. It'll deal 100 damage to the space directly in front, but on the status page you'll notice that it costs more EP than our golem has. So that means the skill's totally useless and I never should have listened to Some Numbers. It also has the skill Negate Rage as a support skill. Support skills are always active and have some sort of effect. In this case, it's a rather apparent one, but the damage, ranges and effects of skills can all be checked deeper in this menu. Golems cannot get new skills. Only our main characters can. So that means that as the skills on Taigalion get outdated, we'll probably need to let this guy go.
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Mar 27, 2015 21:10
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You chose the lovely white lion thing. So to honour some other lovely thing with a lion motif, let's name it Whatever. Can you at least get the other starting mons later?
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Mar 31, 2015 13:20
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Last Transmission posted:You chose the lovely white lion thing. So to honour some other lovely thing with a lion motif, let's name it Whatever. Yeah, you can. In fact we picked one of them up in our recording session today. ...unfortunately I wasn't recording my audio during that. I have one program that records my mic and the game, and the box was unchecked and I didn't notice. So it is going to take longer for the next set of episodes than I'd planned.
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Mar 31, 2015 22:48
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Hey this looks interesting, and I love JRPG stupidness. We need to rename that thing to Tony in honor of Tony the Tiger
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Apr 1, 2015 00:04
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I have a hard time figuring out how Makoto could be more of an offensive stereotype...
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Apr 1, 2015 06:20
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Well maybe if he... Nope, I got nothin'. Makoto is the worst.
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Apr 1, 2015 15:32
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When you said this is closer to Armored Core than dark souls I was expecting bitchin magic giant robots with lightning cannons and poo poo. words cannot express my disappointment
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Apr 1, 2015 15:54
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OmanyteJackson posted:Makoto is the worst. Everyone take note of this, the rightest of opinions.
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Apr 1, 2015 16:16
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On the other hand, a magical golem that is a sentient pizza.
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Apr 1, 2015 17:39
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After way longer than it should have taken, it's time for an Update! Mokoto continues to be the worst. 3: Crazy Pizza Over this recording session we got two new golems, and I might as well talk about both of them so there's more time for people to come up with names.  This is our chainguin-wielding maid. It's not very good at dealing large amounts of damage (those numbers in the status screen are an overestimation since the maid has weeny damage stats), but it can blanket tons of the field.  Later on we'll be getting this crusader-looking skeleton golem. He hits hard and has tons of HP, but can't keep up in a long battle. Istvun fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Apr 8, 2015 |
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Apr 8, 2015 03:20
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Some Numbers posted:Everyone take note of this, the rightest of opinions. Should he just be told to makogo away?
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Apr 8, 2015 04:40
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Why does this use the battle system from Koudelka?
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Apr 8, 2015 08:38
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SelenicMartian posted:Why does this use the battle system from Koudelka? My first thought was mega-man battle network
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Apr 8, 2015 08:39
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Do the models keep reloading in the dialogue? Is that what causes their clothes to constantly flap?
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Apr 8, 2015 08:55
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...Yuki is going to join our party isn't she? 
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Apr 8, 2015 10:13
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SSNeoman posted:Do the models keep reloading in the dialogue? Is that what causes their clothes to constantly flap? I don't know the technical details behind anything they did here, but I don't think so. Since when a character model first loads to give dialog they don't flap all over the place. I think it's that they made physics for the characters' clothing and such when they're running around but didn't disable it when they use the models as character portraits. And shifting poses is done by moving the model incredibly quickly, which leaves everything behind to flap wildly.
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Apr 8, 2015 11:50
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Yuki sounds too much like Amy Rose for my comfort.
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Apr 8, 2015 12:05
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Again we have an Update! We go help a dog, and Toya is a hard man to surpr- This is a sentence. Press A to advance dialog. 4: Cota Anyways, if people watching have any suggestions on how to improve our videos, please let us know. I'm doing a minimal amount of editing right now and we're all pretty new at this recording commentary thing.
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Apr 10, 2015 05:12
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I feel this sudden urge to press A... For videos you could try cutting out repeating random encounters unless something new and exciting happens in them.
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Apr 10, 2015 08:14
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SelenicMartian posted:I feel this sudden urge to press A... That's probably a good call, if we keep doing post commentary. I think the plan is to do live commentary more often than not.
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Apr 10, 2015 08:30
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I got 1000 cheevo points in this game but never beat the optional dungeon/tower thing. I believe you can break the balance of the game by buying golems early from some vendor that outclass everything for a while.
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Apr 10, 2015 09:26
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Relin posted:I got 1000 cheevo points in this game but never beat the optional dungeon/tower thing. I believe you can break the balance of the game by buying golems early from some vendor that outclass everything for a while. Yeah, the shop has golems from pretty far ahead in the game already. If I wanted I could have made no golems in this dungeon and spent the gems later on something from the shop, but battles aren't really hard so I can pretty easily get away with making as many golems as possible. The dungeons also have enough healing crystals that the VP system doesn't ever get the chance to pressure me to change up my lineup. Because of that, I'll be skipping them pretty often also.
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Apr 10, 2015 12:12
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We have another Update! This should be the last of the post-commentary videos, and we'll be out of this dungeon for next week. 5: Queen of Ice Also we still have some golems that could use naming. Personally, I've got nothing.
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Apr 13, 2015 13:11
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Istvun posted:We have another Update! This should be the last of the post-commentary videos, and we'll be out of this dungeon for next week. For the maid and the knight? Mrs. Coverfire for the first, Sir Rusty for the other. I don't know the length limitations. Really weird update, but I really hope that at some point they explain what happened to the dog??? It's very important!
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Apr 13, 2015 14:06
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Mehuyael posted:For the maid and the knight? I'm pretty sure it's like Silent Hill. Dog's gonna be running the whole rest of the game.
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Apr 13, 2015 15:13
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From Software games are really loving weird at times. Obviously it's not the Souls guys doing this, but like I wanna believe that they sorta had a hand (arm) in this game.
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Apr 13, 2015 17:53
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Mehuyael posted:Really weird update, but I really hope that at some point they explain what happened to the dog??? It's very important! Yeah, I'm really worried about Cota too. I'll pester Istvun to go find him. Edit: Oh right, this is the episode with both the thread title and my awful awful joke. Awesome. Some Numbers fucked around with this message at 18:05 on Apr 13, 2015 |
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Apr 13, 2015 17:56
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Some Numbers posted:Yeah, I'm really worried about Cota too. I'll pester Istvun to go find him. Ok, so my quest log is now: Get a jacket to stay warm Go to Yokohama City Find Cota Get out of the Sealed Ward Rescue the students Maybe do something about Brave Child Get back to afternoon classes Punch golems for extra credit. I forget what your awful joke was. But I'm glad that we finally established this game isn't ffx. I'd been worried I had the wrong disk.
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Apr 13, 2015 19:04
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I think you'll find that it should be Coverfire-chan. It's like you guys never saw anime  As for the knight...uh...Bors? He was a knight, right? Shame Toya is gone. He was a pretty huge bro, especially compared to Makoto.
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Apr 13, 2015 20:41
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Istvun posted:But I'm glad that we finally established this game isn't ffx. I'd been worried I had the wrong disk. The characters have said Atsuma's name way too many times for this to be FFX. I'm undecided as to which protagonist I hate more though.
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Apr 13, 2015 20:51
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Actually I got a better idea than coverfire - Mrs. Crossfire.
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Apr 13, 2015 20:53
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Poor Cota 
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Apr 13, 2015 22:56
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We tried to record today, but the internet at their house in Seattle was horrible and kept dropping the Skype call, so we played through the first part of the next bit three times and couldn't get much past it. They're going to be trying some things to fix their problems and we should be able to put up the next episode around Monday.
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Apr 16, 2015 22:08
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We're back (finally (again)) with an Update! 6: Heavily Drinking Guard We got one new golem today, but since we're going to have access to a ton and our gems will be very limited, I'll post them all so some proper shopping can be done. That or whichever ones have great names I'll definitely just use.
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Apr 22, 2015 23:36
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