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I'm almost done it and I'm still not sure what I think about the postgame stuff. It seems genuinely much better done than most (looking at you Crono Trigger) but it also seems a bit unnecessary. It'll be interesting to hear your take, anyway
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Jun 18, 2020 04:41
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I didn't find the Archdemon that tough in the original game despite people generally saying he was the strongest of the three potential final bosses (I struggled more with Jagan and the Dark Lich, but then again even the dreaded Heath came off as a wuss to me so perspective), but whoo, this guy is a pushover. And while the new Collection translation as well as this one made it clear that Elliott was bodyjacked by the Dark Prince for the final battle, that wasn't at all made clear in the original translation. There I always felt the Dark Prince was keeping the little guy around as a hostage.
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Jun 18, 2020 06:11
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Catching up after hibernating for like a week. My main comment on #38 is... When are these idiots going to learn not to provoke the guys who're prophesied to annihilate them? That just gives them an excuse, and thus never ends well. Also, a comment on Faerie's dialogue in general: She's cheesier than a place that mass-produces the stuff. You'd think they'd shorten His Dark Majesty to something like "Dark King" instead of using the full title every time he's mentioned. You don't just get a bonus for playing the Duran/Angela route, you get an entirely different ending scene (since what you saw here plays when you finish Dragonsmaw instead on their route). Additional criticism regarding the game's difficulty: When the player has more trouble fighting a door than the last boss, there's something wrong. Surprise, they added a postgame quest! Now load up that save file and get working on it.
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Jun 18, 2020 08:23
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MonsterEnvy posted:The hell you just said Faerie's Ability was not good. That is absurdly good. Recovering your MP every 10 seconds for the whole party is great. On this, my thoughts are that we have unlimited money so effectively we have unlimited mana out of combat because I can buy 99 walnuts. In combat we go in with basic mana pools and effectively 450 extra mana from Walnuts. On Angela this amounts to around 600 mana or so, which is ancient curse 20 times or so. I just don't anticipate a fight running long enough that Angela casts ancient curse 20 times without the fight ending. 2% regen every 10 seconds on Angela amounts to around 3 mana every 10 seconds, so you refund a walnut over the course of around 90 seconds. That's fine but contrasted against more damage improving your mana pool by making fights shorter, I just don't think it's worth my time.
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Jun 18, 2020 19:44
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I felt like a lot of care went into the game but at the same time a lot more could have gone into the characterization, storytelling and dialogue. The voice acting was really hit or miss. Some characters were really good, like Sara Miller-Crews' Angela, who immediately became my favorite character in this version. A lot of dialogue limited what other actors could do, though, like the Priest of Light in Wendell's canned responses to whatever your party says to him (and even Faerie's, and so many other NPCs) kind of sound flat or over-emotional depending on what character spoke before they did (usually Riesz is to blame for them sounding over emotional by contrast). Special mention to the Dark Prince for being described by Belladonna as having "closed off his heart to the whole world, even his own people who raised him up, and to her," and then to REALLY be a dick to her, rather than being cold, literally cackles with glee between every sentence he speaks. He's a cartoon villain within a minute of that backstory and retroactively makes Belladonna worse than (love is) blind, because he is truly evil. Some of the spirits were also great. I laughed so hard at Wisp (er, Lumina. We're using Secret of Mana's OG translations a lot, and I guess what was settled on in games after Legend of Mana, with spells like Lucent Beam, though Nevarl still sounds way funkier to me than Navarre, and yes, Hawkeye would definitely insist that everyone call him Hawk) and was really looking forward to some of their interplay like on the ship where Lumina says something like "Uhh, I actually really don't like this guy at all!" when you meet Shade, who was also incredible. Gnome owns bones, but the rest weren't really as interesting. I think having Faerie do less in the remake would have been a good choice to give them more of a chance to shine, and the story naturally could let it happen at the first Sanctuary visit (the original scene pulling the sword from the tree there WAS much better, even syncing up with the unique piece composed just for that moment), and heck you could even let the villains kill her off at this point or after you try to rescue her in their city so they can still get the Mana Sword from you and release the God Beasts. This would also force the characters to have to find their own way without a guide, supporting each other more and having your hero come into their role as a leader. As you said, the villains definitely could have been improved with more backstory during the Benevodons and culminating in Pedan and their final dungeon, especially because this is all after two of the threats have been wiped out on your first visit to the Sanctuary so they could really focus on their backstory at this point. This would also serve to break up the prestissimo the game hits of dungeon bossfight dungeon bossfight dungeon bossfight when compared to the pace prior to the Sanctuary visit, where there was at least some exploration and meeting characters involved. Given so much of the game is traipsing through dungeons and even repeats of dungeons for the Benevodons, it's a shame they didn't include more plot-relevant dialogue among your characters there, or at least just banter. Heck, they even sort of do this in the final dungeons, like the dialogue that was happening between Belladonna and Riesz during the fight (not that it was paced well, the ring menus interrupt the flow a bit; maybe boss charge-up attacks at key moments would make the conversations fit better) The characters interactions were always part of the joy of replaying the game, and it would have been a lot of fun to have a party of Duran and Kevin in which Hawkeye complains every time they have to leave the towns and girls and go back on the lonely road, or one in which Charlotte and Angela tag-team clown on enemies or tease Riesz for acting so weird. Lise was one of my favorite characters and seemed sensible and competent. Riesz felt like an buffoon, which, given some of the choices the game railroads you into is apt I guess, and it's my canon explanation as to why she keeps referring to the Dark Prince as the Dark Majesty when that's a title a Belladonna was using because he's their royalty. Then again, I can see Riesz just being like "well, hating him and what he's done to my family and my kingdom is no reason to be rude," which would be pretty funny and I wish they leaned into more. As it is her voice just seemed wooden like she's trying to behave as she imagines a princess should and at other times she yells "JUSTICE!" or "THIS IS HOW IT IS DONE" or "IT IS OVER!" but I feel like I'm having to dig into her motivations a lot more than I have to for Angela or Kevin, who I feel they comfortably nailed the personalities of. I get that there's always things that can be improved, time and money are limited resources and a lot of what I'm going to take away is going to be colored by nostalgia, but even what they did recreate could probably have used some trimming. Like, I never understood why the game always forced you to see Charlotte's backstory in the Cascade Cavern and again at Dior even if she wasn't in your party or Ludgar's backstory when you don't have Kevin. Cutting this sort of thing would keep the game's plot more focused on your team's goals at these points and add some variety to having those characters at those story beats. But at it's heart I guess the game's plot and story was never really the point. I'm just attached to the characters because of nostalgia, but it's really just an early action RPG and by and large that aspect has been tremendously improved. I'm generally leery of remakes and not exactly confident of Square Enix's track record (FFVII2 is NOT the norm, and it also took them a decade) and was terrified they were going to make class strikes and spells interrupt everything like they did in the original (because of hardware limitations in the original), but to their credit they let you skip the cutscenes and they'll even whiff if you use them carelessly. The verticality of the exploration and the combat (not only to attack flyers but also to avoid attacks) was a surprise and were great. The Forest of Wonder's sidescrolling perspective was refreshing and neat (sorta reminded me of NeiR) and I wish they made more of these types of choices throughout the game. Each character has a lot more choices with how you can build and it seemed like no stats were useless because they had different functions depending on the character (Hawkeye's Ninja Master tech was absolutely devastating despite him not having very much strength probably because intelligence affected it), though it would have been nice to have them actually document what each stat was meant to do in the menu. But goddamn was Angela powerful. I bet if you just saved enough points to have her get Ancient Curse immediately after changing to Magus, all of the Benevodons would have been as easy as the last boss. Something that might mitigate the usefulness between melee and spells would just be having more deadly enemy melee attacks (especially on hard mode) like in that Sin of Mana romhack. You needed at least one character to keep enemies off of your back line or Angela or Carly would just get pasted. Maybe as an incentive they could give the more unique functional melee combos like the knockback and stun to Duran / Riesz / Kevin and limit those similar tools on characters like Angela. Rather than as a reward for melee centered builds, I think the class strikes were meant to be equally strong for all characters and used more in unison whenever you'd break a boss' bubble, because typically you'd have the time and the gauge saved up at those points to have all three characters get them out, though Whirlwind Spear did a lot of work gathering enemies up to be blasted by Dark Force for a long time in your game. I dunno, in the end that romhack (that Natural 20 introduced me to, by the way, thanks again for that) spoiled me for gameplay and choice. The only way that could have been improved upon in my eyes was just limiting the interruptions by animation cutscenes and Praetarius even went back and added a "hold X when the spell name appears in text in battle" option that would skip most animations to speed up a lot of the fights at my suggestion. I'd be crazy if I didn't say I'm glad they made this game as well as they did, though, and hope that the series keeps getting titles if they can keep improving the formula, because it was fun to play. Maybe they can remake Legend of Mana next, but of the earlier games this one would definitely lose the most going from sprites to polygon models. Its combat and environments could certainly stand the improvements though. And they wouldn't even lose much by not touching characterization, since you're basically a mute protagonist in that one and all the whimsy comes from all the other characters that don't do anything! Or, just make a new game. Gonna need a composer on the level of Hiroki Kikuta or Yoko Shimomura for that, though. As always Nat, thank you. I'm pretty much lurking all of your LPs, I've been a fan since the first one you did. Edit: Woah, typed a lot of words there. TL;DR I put a lot of thought into lesser aspects of the game I might not have otherwise because it committed the cardinal sin of not being multiplayer and I couldn't just finally share a game I loved from my childhood with my good friends now. Heck, the original game was multiplayer and only wasn't three player because they dummied out that option due to a bug caused on the ghost ship corrupting your save file. Again, that romhack disabled this and allowed you to play three player. All you had to do to avoid the bug is not save when you're a character down for that part. Jabbering Idiot fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 22:22
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Jun 18, 2020 23:11
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Jabbering Idiot posted:As it is her voice just seemed wooden like she's trying to behave as she imagines a princess should and at other times she yells "JUSTICE!" or "THIS IS HOW IT IS DONE" or "IT IS OVER!" but I feel like I'm having to dig into her motivations a lot more than I have to for Angela or Kevin, who I feel they comfortably nailed the personalities of. The lack of contractions ("it is" instead of "it's") is a hallmark of translating japanese formal speech patterns. Which yes, sounds weird in English. The 'wooden' veneer of Riesz's voice fades when she gets emotional, so I imagine that was the intent behind the VA's rendition of it. The limited voice direction shows a lot in the multiple dialog choices though, like it's obvious that some dialog was pieced together from different snippets rather than done in a natural conversation. Charlotte is required at Dior to get the Elves to break their taboo, so both her scenes at Cascade Cavern and Dior are necessary from a 'introduce this character' and 'hey this character is important here' standpoint. Everything else is mostly worldbuilding, from Duran showing up to give you directions in the Molebear Moors, to Kevin and Ludgar's deal. It was a deliberate choice the original devs made because it helps bring across the 'there's three separate but also connected conflicts/plots going on here' aspect of the game. And there's not a whole lot that could be done to fix the problems with the execution of that choice since they're working with a whole cloth. I mean there's only a couple opportunities to deal with Altena in the game when you're not on Duran/Angela's route. Even then, they're out of the way enough that Angela just doesn't have any worldbuilding she can accomplish. I mean, the easiest thing to do would be to have her give directions to the Ice Labyrinth to other party members, but that would require her to be in Alrant with a price on her head 
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Jun 19, 2020 00:27
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I dunno, just having the Faerie seems to make most people go "oh snap" and do stuff differently than they would otherwise, look at the mini village. And they could just have easily have had some random npc dialogue in town suggesting where the ice mana stone was. I'm basically suggesting they didn't have to force the worldbuilding in like the original game did, there's plenty of opportunities to explore or just play with other characters to make those other places more important when you have the relevant team. And I don't mean to say Reisz being an overly formal wooden character is a bad thing, it's just that especially in her case either the dialogue or the direction or the acting doesn't feel like she's the same person between her situation-to-situation reactions and canned voice lines. She feels stilted in a way that isn't the character herself forcing the formality, if that makes sense.
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Jun 19, 2020 02:36
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The class 4 thing doesn't bother me anymore than class change actually being referenced in this game period. Calling it the Grand Class or whatever would make sense here, but if they ever do another remake or some kind of expansion, they'd probably do a thing where the so-called Grand Class would become surpassed by something else, and then calling it the Grand Class would be silly. DBZ literally had Goku reach a state called Super Saiyan God so he could simply survive against an actual God of Destruction and that quickly became outclassed a while later by...*drumroll*...Super Saiyan Blue, where even then most of his enemies from then on weren't gods. And I'm still not sure if that one is stronger than the actual Super Saiyan 4.
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Jun 19, 2020 06:03
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To be fair on how they implemented the postgame content: It's not like they could place it after the Tree was destroyed, because then you wouldn't have Faerie (who does your class changes for you), you wouldn't be able to use magic (both because the elementals cast them for you and because magic flat-out doesn't exist anymore), and... well, generally, you wouldn't have any options at all. It kinda irritates me that landing Flammie in Valsena starts you off facing exactly the opposite direction from what you'd expect. I've gotten sidetracked more than once by that. The way they pronounce Grand Croix bothers me. I mean, what language is it that pronounces that sequence of letters as "kwah?" And why would they pair it with a Grand that's actually pronounced the way it looks to an English-speaker? In my Riesz run, I'm pretty sure I did her Class 4 quest last just to spite her. Frankly, I'm bothered by the name Class 4 (which I can accept because... well, that's exactly what it is, isn't it?) less than I am by the names of the class items. "Loyal Sphere" for a guy whose most defining moment in this game is arguably when he betrays everyone he's ever known because he doesn't agree with what they're doing? "Kind Sphere" as a source of combat power at all? "Instinct Sphere" for a guy who tries to suppress his more violent instincts? At least Duran and Angela have perfectly logical class items (Valor Sphere for the guy who goes around swording everything, Sage Sphere for the girl who goes around magic'ing everything), and the Hope Sphere makes sense as a source of power even if I'm not quite clear on how it relates to Charlotte. Why do they say "crowning ceremony" instead of "coronation?" Coronation sounds more natural and means the same thing. (Not to mention how, going by Heroes, Riesz's parents founded Laurent and thus there was no time to start a tradition of any description...) Anyone remotely used to Trials should've expected the boss's existence, though the nature of the boss seems pretty drat phoned in; I mean, its model is literally just a giant version of a generic enemy- what's so impressive about that? At least put us up against the ghost of her mother testing her worthiness or something. The Cactus prize you just got displays closed chests on the map and also tells you how many times you've found Li'l Cactus in the area out of how many times it appears there. Spoilered just in case you want to figure it out yourself.
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Jun 19, 2020 06:41
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CptWedgie posted:The way they pronounce Grand Croix bothers me. I mean, what language is it that pronounces that sequence of letters as "kwah?" And why would they pair it with a Grand that's actually pronounced the way it looks to an English-speaker? French. Grand Croix is "great cross". You were expecting croy, like the sex-in-a-canoe seltzer?
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Jun 19, 2020 07:26
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This remake is good, but not great. A lot of outdated things have been improved, yet some relict from the past game still held this game back. I also question some decisions made. They added more bather between the characters, yet not really. It doesn't fell like the characters are actually talking to each other. Usually they are either not at all talking to each other and just monologues or one character talks and then another character responds which then is never acknowledged. For example, Riesz says something in line of "I must retake Laurent" and then each character has a response line they can use if they're in the party. The dialog then stops. Had Riesz responded in turn and said something different depending on the second character, it would have felt more like they were talking to each other. As it is, most of the banter doesn't sell the illusion that they talk to each other or even see each other. There are exceptions and when they occur it's great. The story was good enough for it's time, but did not really give the writers much opportunity to update it without drastically changing it. We have mana running low and in a real life situation, depletion of resources often leads to war. However, each nation was so good and benevolent that a convenient mind controlling villain was needed to make the war happen despite the game already having the setup for war. This is not a good writing by modern standard and drastically limits the story telling potential. Then we have the exception, the beastmen who seemed neither mind controlled nor too bothered by the depleting mana, but still attacked, presumable because they are jerks. Now, if you play Kevin's prologue, the game mentions humans oppressing the beastmen. This looks like a panic response by the writers who realized they needed to do more than "beastmen are complete jerks" and had to pull something from their asses. Considering how strong the beastmen are and that all major nations are so benevolent they needed a mind controlling villain to go to war despite a resource depletion scenario, there is nobody who both could and would oppress them. The part of the game where you fight seven Benevodons is a very long pause in the story that a modern RPG should just avoid. I liked the skills you could equip, but there should not be any "congratulations, now you just flat out do 30% more damage" skills. The developers should also make up their mind wether or not MP is an actual limit. Angela is severely limited by her MP supply early on, but can more or less spam freely once she hits class 3. Other characters has the problem that they can't really afford to use their skills for anything else than bosses until roughly they hit class 3, provided they even want to do so. If the characters use stat ups, stat downs or sabers on vanilla enemies, not only will they run out of MP very quickly, but there's no point in doing so in the first place until you get multi-target versions of said skills. Traps and Charlotte's summons are also not strong enough to be much worth until class 3. That said, battles are fun to fight and I could play this game a few times before getting tired of it. It does work as simple fun. It's just that I can see how much better still this game could have been if it was an original mid budget game rather than a remake shackled by the original game.
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Jun 19, 2020 09:50
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Thanks so much for all of this and for watching through all the silliness. CptWedgie posted:The way they pronounce Grand Croix bothers me. I mean, what language is it that pronounces that sequence of letters as "kwah?" And why would they pair it with a Grand that's actually pronounced the way it looks to an English-speaker? Yeah this is definitely French and definitely correct! I'm pretty sure there's a dialect of French that pronounces Grand the way that it comes out in English as well.
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Jun 19, 2020 13:46
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Natural 20 posted:Yeah this is definitely French and definitely correct! I'm pretty sure there's a dialect of French that pronounces Grand the way that it comes out in English as well. There's also the fudging of a blended language. For example I've noticed that when some folks say Spanish/Mexican-origin words (particularly if they don't do it often) their whole intonation will shift almost like they're badly dubbed: "I'm going to make faa-HEE-taas for dinner tonight". There there's the stereotypical Texan/American-in-general approach to just pronounce it as if it were English so the Rio Grande becomes grand. In-between those is something I mostly see from some parts of the Southwest (New Mexico, some bits of southern California from personal experience) where the words keep their pronunciation but folks are used to them so there's no reshaping of the rest of the sentence or accent.
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Jun 19, 2020 19:18
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Jun 19, 2020 23:01
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Is that any of the standard classes that doppelganger's model is using?
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Jun 21, 2020 04:30
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I'm fairly sure it's her Darkside Class 4 model.
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Jun 21, 2020 10:48
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I wonder if Class 4 is them literally translating something that was meant to be interpreted in Japan as Death Class or something.
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Jun 21, 2020 13:59
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With Japanese VA, the characters say "class four" in English.
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Jun 21, 2020 14:20
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The characters talk about Class 4 like it's a DBZ transformation and it makes me incredibly nostalgic.
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Jun 21, 2020 18:44
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Hawkeye's Class 4 boss is thematically appropriate considering how you find it, but still incredibly lazy design-wise. I mean, it's a giant version of a preexisting enemy again. Not all that impressive or interesting. It's an interesting detail how Eagle keeps pausing during the message, almost like he's fighting the urge to spill the beans on how, exactly, they're really related. Given the context of the quest, it's not surprising that there's a scene if you go back to Nevarl; in fact it'd raise more questions if there wasn't. At least Angela gets an interesting boss fight for her Class 4 quest. It even makes thematic sense: You have to fight yourself in Class 4 in order to unlock Class 4... in other words, "prove you can handle this power and you get to use it." For the record, on the assumption that Nat won't be showing us any future playthroughs, I'll go through the other characters' Class 4 bosses right now: Duran fights a 1v1 rematch against Loki's ghost, after a brief pause to re-humiliate Bruiser (his tutorial enemy). Kevin fights the Beast King, one-on-one- interestingly enough, his Light Class 4 is also called Beast King. And Charlotte fights a giant zombie, with help from the whole party. I put them in spoilers in case Nat (or another reader) wants to go into those fights blind when he gets around to using those characters.
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Jun 22, 2020 07:15
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Jun 23, 2020 00:14
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Not sure if you want me to spell this one out Nat since you might want to figure it out yourself, but regarding the different versions of Class 4. Everyone has only two class 4's, one light and one dark. So you can either be
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Jun 23, 2020 08:10
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Rune Seer's Class Strike is Ton Shatter, which is basically a smaller version of Ton Annihilation that doesn't bother with the opening glacier. Yeah, in my experience Angela's Class 4 boss is the hardest by a significant margin, just because there's no room to breathe in that fight. And as I kinda alluded to in the spoilers in my last post, the Class 4 bosses are exactly a 50/50 split between "thematically appropriate to the character" and "random boss fight out of nowhere," with the thematic ones- coincidentally or not- aligning perfectly with the ones you fight solo (spoilered to prevent spoiling previous spoilers). I love how the Flammie-summoning scene actually changes depending on when and where you do it. Summon her in the day in Molebear Moors? It's a bright, sunny, clear day. Summon her at night in Fiery Gorge? It's a dark night, lit from below by an active volcano, with a notable heat haze and actual sparks flickering upward. Great touch. The Special Effect line is great on a Dark - Light Angela since she learns spells that inflict status ailments (and said spells are even pretty strong in their own right). It also works well in combination with the various "inflict status on power attack" abilities too, and I'm pretty sure Hawkeye learns one of those before even class changing.
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Jun 23, 2020 11:11
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Jun 23, 2020 23:01
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Anise the witch is a villain from one of the Mana games that came out after Sword, don't know which one. I think she's supposed to be some kind of major lore character, on par with the various iterations of the Dark Lich or Vandole. I'm guessing the events of whatever game it was happened before this one, since yeah, it would be weird for our protags to give this much of a poo poo about some random fuckhead looking to cause problems when there's way bigger fish to fry.
Shitenshi fucked around with this message at 04:25 on Jun 24, 2020 |
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Jun 24, 2020 04:18
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Shitenshi posted:Anise the witch is a villain from one of the Mana games that came out after Sword, don't know which one. I think she's supposed to be some kind of major lore character, on par with the various iterations of the Dark Lich or Vandole. I'm guessing the events of whatever game it was happened before this one, since yeah, it would be weird for our protags to give this much of a poo poo about some random fuckhead looking to cause problems when there's way bigger fish to fry. Anise, or a version of her, was the villain in Dawn of Mana and I think also Heroes of Mana. This is going off memory, but I think she's basically the dark counterpart to the Goddess. As Mana power wanes, her power increases, and she (or copies of her) are periodically reborn. Unfortunately the Mana series does not have the most consistent lore.
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Jun 24, 2020 04:44
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Welcome to the longest dungeon in the game! Strap yourself in; this is gonna take a while. You run into this place's gimmick pretty quick: It's primarily composed of versions of the playable characters' hometowns that have been destroyed by various elements, though some are more easily identified than others. For example, it starts off with a version of Valsena that's been buried in crystals, so it's not hard to associate it with Earth. A nice touch is that each of your characters comments when you reach the section based on their own home (Duran, in particular, is LIVID when you start the Valsena section).
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Jun 24, 2020 08:53
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Jun 24, 2020 23:09
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What's going on? To address the elephant in the room. I presume anyone reading already knows what's going on, but in case you don't, there have been allegations of Domestic Abuse by Lowtax, the person who owns these here forums. Read more here. What is your stance? I don't want to support Lowtax at all if I can avoid it. Practically that means no more buying things from the forums, but also encouraging anyone supporting him on Patreon to stop and anyone else to also not buy anything. I'm fine posting here, it doesn't make me uncomfortable but I know that it does for some and I can absolutely accept that stance. What's the plan now? I will finish posting the Trials of Mana LP here and hopefully get it archived. If the forums collapse in that timeline I'll be posting as normal to YouTube and to any alternate LP sites that show up. There is something in the works on the LP discord which can be found in the stickies of this forum. Going forward, my next LP will hopefully be with Yorkshire Tea once again. I will endeavour to post this to as many available sites as possible so that if anyone never wants to see the forums again, then they have the option to do so. The last thing I'd want to say is that I value every single person that watches along and comments on my work to an incredible degree. LPing is some of the most fun and rewarding work I've ever taken up. I love all of you and I hope given how trying this year has been that you're making it through okay.
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Jun 24, 2020 23:32
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Natural 20 posted:
Here is hoping Lowtax is booted like the Modmins want.
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Jun 25, 2020 05:34
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Re: Current events: I've never bought anything here except this account, and have never had any intentions of buying more than this in the first place, so that's kind of a non-issue. Anyway, as to the video... Second up in the longest dungeon in the game: Nevarl. It's harder to identify what element this is, since it combines "buried in sand" and "poison gas;" I'm tentatively attributing it to Wood, though. Too bad about not wanting to go somewhere in Anise's Stockade; in case you didn't notice in Valsena (especially the castle, where you have to go upstairs, loop around the balcony, and then go back down the other side to get through), Nevarl drives home that it's going out of its way to force you to use the longest, most circuitous route possible in every location. Wendel's third, and that one's another fairly easy-to-identify one, albeit solely due to the enemies that appear there: Darkness, in the form of a zombie apocalypse. Thankfully, the longest dungeon in the game comes with checkpoints. Otherwise it'd probably be unbearable for anyone who isn't overlevelled.
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Jun 25, 2020 09:42
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Jun 25, 2020 23:12
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Well, some good news on current events at least: A mod has confirmed that Lowtax has agreed to hand over the site, though no contract establishing such exists yet. Anyway, after the checkpoint in the excessively long dungeon, we've got Altena. Which is Water, because the whole place is frozen over and the Mana series associates ice with water (perfectly understandable, in my opinion, since ice is water at extremely low temperatures). Obviously, Angela is not happy with Anise right now. It wouldn't matter even if you could jump that far in the room with the broken bridge/wall/gate thing, there's an invisible wall in the way anyway. No shortcuts for you. Riesz sure likes casting Freya, doesn't she? And finally we get a glimpse of Laurent, which is Wind because of apparently every opening to the exterior acting like the wind statues back in Gusthall. This, in turn, leaves Ferolia as the last section of the dungeon; I'll hold off on that until the LP actually gets there, but it's another incredibly obvious one.
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Jun 26, 2020 09:09
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I love "Prime Slime" and "Beetman" as enemy names, by the way. Good to see they're not afraid to unleash Dragon Quest Enemy Name Guy on other series as well.
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Jun 26, 2020 12:15
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One could also see the areas in Anise's dungeon as what will happen to them if the heroes fail. Valsena doesn't fit with anything we've heard in game but Nevarl is abandoned and reclaimed by the sands because the oasis dried up, Wendel is overrun with undead because the Priest died and his protection faded, Altena dies in frost without the True Queen's magic to keep the place habitable, and Laurent stays lost and decaying, ravaged by the winds that once shielded it.
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Jun 26, 2020 13:07
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Yeah, as a setpiece and a narrative idea it's great. It could've used a mini boss or two to jazz the place up though, and let you really flex your Class 4 muscles.
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Jun 26, 2020 13:34
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Kyrosiris posted:Yeah, as a setpiece and a narrative idea it's great. It could've used a mini boss or two to jazz the place up though, and let you really flex your Class 4 muscles. And maybe make it like half as long; it's kind of a slog as is.
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Jun 26, 2020 14:55
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CptWedgie posted:And maybe make it like half as long; it's kind of a slog as is. I feel like the slog factor is partially based on that it's just a minion grinder. If you took out the jumping puzzle and teleport maze and just made it "these are the world's kingdoms bereft of Mana's gift and suffering the fate of the heroes' fall", with mini-bosses for the zones that represent your characters to break it up, it'd be a lot better IMO.
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Jun 26, 2020 15:02
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Kyrosiris posted:I feel like the slog factor is partially based on that it's just a minion grinder. If you took out the jumping puzzle and teleport maze and just made it "these are the world's kingdoms bereft of Mana's gift and suffering the fate of the heroes' fall", with mini-bosses for the zones that represent your characters to break it up, it'd be a lot better IMO. I can kinda see your point, but I feel that most of the "slog factor" (as you put it) comes from the fact that it's legitimately an incredibly long dungeon, and not only are there no shortcuts but you're usually forced to take the longest path possible through every single area.
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Jun 26, 2020 16:21
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