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 Crystal Project is a game that superficially looks like a cheap asset flip. Practically nothing about it except for the game world is original, relying almost purely on open source sprites and music for everything else, but it's a deceptively good game even so. It bills itself as a love letter to old jRPG's, the early Final Fantasies and the like, and once again, that might convince someone that it's just copypasted retro content, but Crystal Project does what I feel so few actual jRPG developers do and updates the formula with more than graphics.  The world is 3D, rather than a flat 2D plane, which is also part of the gameplay. Jumping and platforming is part of the game, both in the sense of completely normal navigation, but also in terms of finding shortcuts and secrets.  Aside from exploring and collecting loot, of course, what is an RPG without some enemies to fight?  And fought they will be. This LP will be mostly concerned with the mechanics of Crystal Project because, well, there isn't an awful lot of story there. There is a story, there are some characters, but its a game that clearly focuses on the gameplay, taking a few cues from FF5 in that a core element is swapping classes, combining class abilities and finding crystals to get access to more things to mix and match. Of course, for any jRPG, we're going to need a party, and we're entirely making our own. Each character will consist simply of a class(a starting class, they can be changed during the game), a gender and a name. Gender has a very minor affect on sprites, and there's a tiny stat difference, too, but nothing to be concerned about unless you're playing a very specific build setup on an extra high difficulty level. The party's made up of four and will not be changing during the course of the game. Classes Updated as new classes are unlocked Warrior   Warriors are your first tank class. They're built to do damage and attract enemy attention through the threat mechanics, while also being hard to kill. They also have some skills that open up enemy vulnerabilities or weaken their offense.   Probably the most core Warrior ability, it what makes them a proper tank, being able to draw and keep threat/aggro.   Objectively Defender Stance would go best with Warriors as tanks, but I tend to find myself using Berserker Stance more, since most RPG's have taught me that playing defense is a mug's game and the superior option is to kill the other guy first.   Pretty obvious, open up more gear options passively for other classes.   One advantage of Warriors' attack abilities is that they work with all weapons, making them very good for mixing with other classes, since there's never any clash preventing them from using their skills or the other class from using theirs.     Their Crush attacks are all hefty attacks that come with some form of drawback or are situational. Paragon Crush is probably the one I use the least, since it makes your next attack worse.   For passives, Grudge is EXTREMELY good for more or less all physical attackers since it puts them a turn ahead in terms of AP generation for the purpose of getting their big attacks out fast and early. Monks   Like in most RPG's(when did the trope even start? was it in a Basic D&D supplement?) Crystal Project monks are good at punching people, which means that their attacks scale with level even if you don't get your hands on gear upgrades. They also gain access to some self-healing abilities and a few quite powerful attack skills that rely on traditional caster stats rather than melee stats, which make them potentially interesting for some hybrid builds.   The basic Monk ability is self-cleansing, which is situationally useful, but I feel like most cases where you really want to cure conditions rather than wait them out, they're full-party.   There are, of course, some attack abilities, including probably the fastest accessible multi-target ability and a rare Earth-elemental attack.  Makes them useful if your other healer is busy or you didn't bring a Cleric.  Brawler is odd, because most other classes will want to be armed so they can get bonuses from their weapons, especially casters.  A nice almost-full-self-heal and a counter to damage-over-time stuff.  Having an always-hits ability is nice, but not as useful as you'd think, since if something guarantees a miss/dodge, then that takes precedence over a guaranteed hit.  First time I played, I liked having this on my physical attackers in the early game. The disadvantage to it is that you have to take hits for it to take effect, and getting hit is generally a bad move.  I rarely used this, but it could combo well with a Rogue.  Or Wind Punch. Some enemy types have relatively common wind elemental weaknesses.  Useful for practically anyone who can spare the passive ability points, which are always ten for everyone.  Also always useful, speaks for itself.  Since it runs off Spirit rather than Strength, and AP rather than MP, it's a great secondary for Clerics and other Spirit-using casters. It's a sometimes food, but I've used it to great benefit since it always hits and is untyped damage. Rogue   Rogues were a starter class I found useful all through the game, they are inverse Warriors. Instead of attracting threat, they want to avoid it, since many of their abilities only work when they're the least-attractive enemy target. They can do immense damage, cause conditions and have a unique ability to interrupt enemy attacks while they're charging.   Steal is only somewhat important since an NPC later in the game will allow you to simply buy steals you missed from bosses, which tend to be the important steals.  One of our first weapon type limited abilities, Backstab works on both Rapiers and Daggers, making them viable for a Rogue/Warlock build or similar, and does great damage otherwise.   Eye Gouge is another carry ability, locking down a physical attack boss for even just one round is great.  Likewise, Sleep Bomb is mostly useful for bosses to deny them a turn and give yourself extra time to buff, heal, revive, etc.  Shadow Cut is a good Rogue attack while you wait for the AP to gather for your other attacks.  Once again, I generally find that anything that "critically damages" you tend to just kill you. I do not trust such abilities.  Likewise, this ability is very situational, I consider it to really only be important for hardcore/ironman runs.  Some bosses rely almost purely on multi-target physical attacks, so this can let your rogue no-sell them hard.  Just a heavier version of Shadow Stab.  And this... I have no idea how you beat some of the game's tougher bosses without this. It's so good.   Probably the strongest single-target physical damage ability in the game, it absolutely rules. It has some combos with other classes and gear that are just incredible. Warlock   If the appearance didn't give it away, Warlocks are Final Fantasy red mages, though they use their own selection of spells rather than just borrowing low-level Wizard and Cleric spells.   Scan is primarily useful against bosses, because some of them have abilities that kick in at certain thresholds or at death, and sometimes you want to know when you can blitz for the finish and when you need to play it slow and safe.   For putting on your tank so they can tank more tankily.  The DoT effect makes me prefer this to the basic Fire spell that Wizards get. Bosses have a DoT resistance that prevents it from being completely OP, sadly.         Generally Warlocks have a lot of abilities that combo nicely with others, even if they're somewhat unimpressive as a primary class.  Refresher is also great, it gives you a lot more staying power between Home Points since you can only carry so many MP recovery items and they're also quite expensive.   The great limitation to this is that it only lets you cast Warlock spells, but something like casting Douse and Frost could be a nice buff/debuff kickoff to the battle, but at a 24MP surcharge, that's half a Wizard's Flare or Cleric's Star Flare! I can genuinely say I never used this in a 100% run of the game. Warlocks' built-in passive makes Doublecast cheaper, but that requires giving up whatever other nice primary passive another class has. Wizard   Black Mages, essentially. They blow poo poo up and they blow it up good.           One of those stances I never use, I always needed my MP more for offense than defense.  Has the downside of A) requiring you to get hit and B) still requiring mana to trigger the counter ability. You should just blast enemies instead before they hit you.   It's worth noting that Flare ignores resistance, but not weakness, so it combos well with the Cleric's Spotlight for a really big nuke. Cleric   And, for comparison, White Mages. Neither they, Wizards or Warlocks are 1:1 copies, but close enough to get the point across.        There isn't a lot to say about most Cleric abilities, but they do have a few unusual ones in there.     Blackout in particular can just negate some encounters and no-sell everything going on.  And having a huge non-typed attack spell also means Clerics can really contribute to fights sometimes.  Shaman   Ahhhh... shamans... shamen... whatever the plural is, I love them. In my playthroughs I almost always have one permanently as a primary or subclass unless dealing with something requiring an unusual setup. They have an excellent selection of skills and their passive ability is a blessing for any spellcaster.    Acid and Bio are what I'd call the bread and butter spells, consistently doing damage while weakening enemy offense is always worth your time. Being non-elemental, like all Shaman spells, also means they'll do consistent damage and be useful in any party.  Drain is occasionally useful if your caster is weakened but needs to deal damage and also heal, or has no direct self-heal options.  Instability suffers from the issue that most conditions inflicted are 1 or 2-turn conditions, so it's not THAT huge of a step up. Though I suppose it depends a lot on whether it rounds "half" turns of conditions up or down, increasing all 1-turns to 2-turns would be a big deal.   These two darlings, though... they're what really make Shamans so invaluable for boss fights. Less AP gain means getting hit by less heavy physical attacks(I believe enemies obey tall the rules of AP generation, but I'm not sure if they also gain AP from being attacked), and increased CT means a greater gap between their "starting" and "completing" a spell, meaning more openings for your Rogue to Trick Slash them or some other condition to interrupt them.  Safeguard is a theoretically good ability suffering from the fact that those 2 PP could be used to open up more offensive power instead.  While Sleep has limited applications per battle, it's always excellent as an emergency interrupt of an enemy's big attack letting you heal up, buff up and then start laying down murder on the other side.  A pretty ordinary multi-target spell, great for big enemy formations since it'll melt them down to about half health by itself and as far as I know, Damage Over Time effects do not produce aggro.   Another thing that makes Shamans interesting is that they actually also make a quite useful secondary for tanks and characters that aren't normally casters. Mist and Stone core are obviously more useful on someone who just drew the entire battle's aggro, but most of their damage is actually done from DoT effects that don't care about the caster's Mind stat, so even if they put on Defender stance, which lowers their physical damage output, they can still do some damage with those spells. Of course, they'd have small MP pools, but that could be patched up with a Book for a weapon... there are possibilities and opportunities. Great class all around, 5 out of 5. Scholar     I love Scholars, and all Blue Mages, but their passives are somewhat unimpressive. Books, as I've mentioned earlier, always struck me as one of the weaker if not weakest caster equipment options, and with a 25-point cost, learning the monster skill passive is going to take about as long as actually just encountering and learning all the monster skills.  The self-heal side effect on Infusion means that it's a quick and MP-efficient way to heal both your Scholar and another target at once, good spell.  Cheap and effective multi-target heal, one of the few in the game, also very good, great especially for enemies that use multi-target low-damage attacks where the big Cleric multi-target heals would be wasted MP.  Situationally useful, if not for the very slow Charge Time and high cost it would be a hard counter against any big enemy focusing on single-target attacks.  If you've got a tank, and you should have a tank, this makes them more tankish. Once again a good spell.  Situationally useful on physical attackers and a few other classes. Relying on Mind, which largely only offensive casters will have a lot of makes it a bit niche, but still useful as a way to turn MP into AP.  I've yet to really find a use for this, as most magic-using bosses have huge MP pools, but it always makes me wonder if there's a strat for four Scholars to just spam Magic Sickle on a boss to neuter them utterly.  One of the few untyped damage attacks available to players as well as I think probably the only player skill that runs off of Luck rather than another stat for determining its damage. It has some potential funny uses, though you kind of have to spec into it as your primary offense to really leverage it. Fencer     Fencers have very few skills I don't ever use, for instance, they start off with two out of the three damage-over-time options you have, all you now need is a caster to drop Burn on an enemy and they're melting off 45% of their max health(barring resistances) per turn.  Having a multi-attack ability is also very handy for encounters with mooks out in the field. Worth noting is that the base damage and AP cost for all Fencer abilities is the same, so you can sling them all out from the get go and there are no fundamentally superior options, they're all situationally advantageous.   Hawk Stance I find is mostly a good combo if you want to spam the Fencer attack that always hits, while Eagle Stance is the one I tend to use since it tends to permit for some freakish alpha strikes.   Piercethrough I use rarely, but Feathercut goes well with Hawk Stance, as mentioned.   The passives are unexciting but Eagle Eye has its use against some enemies that, despite being appropriately levelled, are very good at dodging.  Snowfang gives Fencers some inherent healing, of a sorts, which is also practical, making them more able to keep fighting without a healer's help.  Later we'll unlock a class that has a "first attack is a guaranteed crit"-passive, combined with Eagle Stance, Nighthawk and Rapiers having an inherent crit damage boost, it can lead to one-shotting a lot of things. You can also combo it with Swallowtail to wipe out entire field formations in one swing.  Checkmate tends to be kind of a desperation move for me, there's no real way to exploit any odd combos to nail the 5x damage hit consistently, so it's just something to sling out if you need a sudden burst of damage to have any chance of winning. Aegis    Cover is theoretically useful, but very situationally. Generally I'd say you could just have your Aegis pop Taunt or a similar Threat-generating ability so single-target attacks will go for them anyway. The primary use would be if you want your secondary to be something poor at generating Threat, or if you have a caster that can do way more damage than you can do threat in a single turn(like a Wizard's Flare or a Cleric's Star Flare) and they'll draw fire otherwise.  Theoretically good! But the problem is it takes a turn, and you almost always have something better to do with your turn.   Once you have the Threat or a good Cover target, popping one of these means you've got about one of the best tanking options up. For a Threat-based tanking setup, you'd need to spend turns generating Threat, but if you're doing Cover-based tanking, you can focus your turns on self-buffing, pop these, pop Entrench, etc. but a second weakness there is if you're not generating any threat, then you're a risk to a Rogue trying to stay minimum Threat so they can do your things... and Rogues are very, very good! So I still posit that Threat-based tanking is better.   Some people like this, but in my experience it's genuinely a small amount, to the point where anyone else launching some attacks on turn 1 will soon be top threat instead. I feel like the main use is if you want to use the first turn to buff rather than attack, so no one else is generating any Threat..  If combined with a Reraise status(which brings you back once after being killed) that would let you soak two killing blows in a fight, so that's a chunky amount of extra tanking.  Normally you don't really change stances a lot in fights, you pick the one that goes well with your setup and stick to that(at most, as a Fencer I might start in Eagle for a Nighthawk alpha strike, then swap to Hawk for Feathercut swings for the rest of it), so it's less that this is for getting boosts out of the stance changes you'd otherwise be using, more that you can now change your stances as a self-heal.   Magic Break is handy for getting everyone killed less, Resist Break is for boosting your casters. Not much to say about them, but they're really the only enemy-targeted abilities that an Aegis has.   Combined with the defense boosters earlier, this can make an Aegis genuinely hard to hurt. Since conditions tick down at the end of your turn, I think the idea is that you pop one of these, then on your next turn you whack Entrench to make them last longer.  This one I don't really get, you're trying to make everyone hit you, why would you make the entire party benefit from being hit? Also all your own Aegis abilities are MP-powered, so extra AP won't benefit you much unless you want to also be doing some attacking, but Aegises seem like they'd need you to just focus on their abilities almost purely to get the most out of them. Cover, Wall, Entrench, etc. and keep one big damage-doer from eating any counter hits.  Crystal Form is one of those abilities I can think of a bunch of cool uses for and then... I never really do. I think its really big weakness is that a lot of the very dangerous endgame enemies it'd be tempting to use it against tend to have at least a couple of big multi-target attacks where one character not getting killed isn't a big deal. Reaper   Reapers are one of my favourite physical combat classes, scythe users whose innate ability means any damage they do increases their max HP for the duration of the battle.  Rather than running off of AP or MP, all Reaper skills either take off a percentage of their health as payment for working or have a turn-based cooldown.   Their cooldown-using skills tend to have very high lifesteal percentages, giving them the potential to be very difficult for enemies to actually kill.  They also get a few conditions to inflict.   And a couple of buffs I rarely used because I generally found it more important to start hitting the enemy first for the purpose of winning whatever damage race was ongoing at the time, but both of them are useful when aimed at the right targets. Frenzy, in particular, is handy for Rogues who have trouble building AP without sacrificing their low Threat.    A number of their skills require scythes, generally the ones with Cooldown, while the ones that take health to "cast" have no weapon requirement, helping them be a decent secondary. Bloodspiller is also a really good secondary for any physical attacker, since it saves you having to waste time using skills that actually cause bleeding.    Initial Oomph is potentially useful, but largely only when mashing overworld mobs, since it's only one turn of extra murderousness. I consider it to be wildly overpriced considering what else 4PP can buy a character.  MP absorbing is... I don't think I'd give a Reaper a secondary caster class in most situations, so generally you'd use it to run an enemy out of MP rather than to gain yourself more MP. There are a few situations where this is a useful solution rather than just mashing the enemy down quick. Hunter   As mentioned, I want to like Hunters, but can't rate them very highly. Their inherent ability is generating less Threat.  Quickshot is a great skill, getting another chunk of free damage every couple of turns is excellent and also leaves the Hunter free to finish off badly wounded enemies rather than wasting a major attack or action on them.    Hide could have a synergy with a Rogue/Hunter, but you'd end up unable to use most of the Hunter's skills that way.  Hunter's Mark negates a lot of the Hunter's poor Accuracy, but I'm inherently opposed to the idea of wasting turns on things that aren't doing damage or debuffing enemies.       If there's one issue I do have with Crystal Project's mechanics it's that the PP costs for passives feel a bit overtuned in some cases. For instance, Covert would be excellent on a Rogue, but there are so many more important things I could use those 5PP for.   But, yeah, the Hunter just does damage. I feel like I'd rate them a lot higher if they also had access to some conditions of various kinds. Chemist   Chemists, a class I've never once used a skill from. Their inherent is that all ability Cooldowns are set to 1, which for a Chemist/Hunter would, I guess, mean you could Quickshot and Barrage every turn or something similar.   MP recovery during fights is usually limited to one weapon and one class' inherent ability, so for very long fights with very important casters, Chemists could be useful, I guess.         But outside of that they kind of suffer from just being a Cleric who only has half of their utility, none of their offensive options, and also you're spending money to use their abilities. You could just stock up on Ethers and refill your Cleric between fights.     There are so many buffs that would be useless in a given situation that I can't really see the point of this.  The same issue with debuffs.  Now this ability... will have a very great use once we get the Samurai class. But I'd still call it incredibly niche.   And this one would let a Rogue kick a bit more rear end without ruining their cover. But by and large... you can do better and cooler things without any of these abilities. Let the chemist throw a few pipe bombs and you might have my attention. Ninja   I feel like Crystal Project is the first game to get me a ninja class I didn't love or at least like, mostly down to the Scrolls mechanic and their... somewhat sub-par abilities, even if they do have a potentially very powerful passive: they can dual-wield weapons at a cost of removing 35% of the attack power from both of them. Great if you have two two-handers where you don't care about the attack power(like wands) or if the secondary is powerful enough for it to still be an upgrade.  An okay combo with any tank, but the problem is that you never really know what an enemy's hit percentage is. The max any percentage on your side will display as is 100%, but since when Kuromanto uses this, Vanessa still had 40~% hit chance, it's clearly possible for it to be greater. So if an enemy has a 200% hit chance, this won't do jack poo poo.  Also an interesting threat skill, since it doesn't rely on threat numbers but just says "top threat" full stop, it'll give you a lot of leeway to have other party members outputting pain.   Smokescreen has some potential, but Perfect Dodge suffers from enemies generally being pretty accurate. Anything with a less than 30% chance to hit is something you wildly outlevel anyway.       The Seals are all similar: single-target, use scrolls, elemental damage. It means you can more or less always exploit an elemental weakness, since these cover all the available elements, but it also means you don't get any multi-target attacks or condition-causing attacks. Crystal Project also tends to have more meaningful elemental immunities than weaknesses, some of them are good, but most of them are something like +15% damage, which generally means you can just go whole hog on non-typed or normally resisted attacks and still do fine. The Seal status could theoretically do some numbers if you've got someone ready to follow up by hitting, say, a Fire Seal with a Flare, but since it only lasts one turn, your timing would have to be relatively ideal. I'm just not very sold on them.  This interests me a lot more, since it's a guaranteed dodge.  This, on the other hand, feels like a leftover from a version of the game with harsher penalties for death. Dervish   The Dervish passive is that they recover 1MP for every AP they gain or recover, making them a very useful primary class in drawn-out boss battles or long dungeons/overworld exploration journeys.       Earth and Wind damage are the Dervish's stock in trade. All their attack spells are solid, and having a pair of debuff options is great as well. I still hate Wind spells for having a chance to miss, though, and a lot of enemies are immune to Earth spells.    I think I can recall all of one enemy that can Silence you, so Magic Prayer has limited utility, but at least the 10% less magic damage will stack with other sources of damage reduction. If you had limited ability slots, Soul Prayer wouldn't make it in, but as it is, having an emergency self heal/condition purge is good. Vigor Drain, meanwhile, is sneakily superior to what it looks like. By default it just looks like a way to defuse enemy AP users, but all AP drained also gains the Dervish MP back and there's no MP cost for using it. So it's essentially a way to ensure that a Dervish in battle can never be permanently tapped out of MP.  Focus Shield is potentially useful but good threat management from your tank should make it largely irrelevant.  As usual my opinion is that a better solution is just to avoid being critically damaged.  For when you don't want to Explode just one party member, but all of them! There are ways to make this a viable spell to cast, but I can think of very few situations where it would offer an improvement on what's going on. It does exactly enough damage to ensure all party members WILL die while not enough damage to ensure all ENEMIES will die. Beatsmith   Beatsmiths get +20% effect on any action they do more than once, stacking up to three times. Since everything they do repeats three times... that's handy.      You bonk someone or everyone three times. Rhythm Break is notable for the fact that I've never noticed an enemy using the same skill twice in a row unless it was a reaction/counter, so it's pretty bad.   These two combined with Beat Roll SHOULD be good, but repeated actions charge their cost with every action, and by default you'd only be getting 3 AP a turn with the stance on... so it would only give you one or two hits if used early, which is where you'd probably first want to use it.  It is, however, worth levelling Beatsmith a bit just for this passive, THIS can really give you an edge on fights.  Potentially really powerful for longer boss fights, but if you brought a class that could do more damage faster, the fight would be less long...  Simply do not get critically damaged. The end.   Long story short: Almost anything the Beatsmith can do, another class can do better and more flexibly. Valkyrie   Valkyries have inherent Reraise, the first time they die in any fight, they respawn with 25% of max health. Pretty good for a tank, even if dying does wipe their Threat clean.  Warcry, my beloved. Threat management made easy. This ability is just plain loving GOOD.   Multi-target healing and buffing? Absolutely! Give me more of that!     The attack skills are nothing exceptional, just trading AP for more damage, but the double threat effects helps play to the Valkyrie's main trait, since otherwise mages would usually outstrip them in threat generation(ignoring Taunt and Warcry).       The Valkyrie also plays nice with other AP-using and cooldown-reliant classes, making sure they can do their murdering as often as possible. I generally find I have something better to do with a Valk's turn, but occasionally a drop more AP for an Assassin/Rogue or a Cooldown reset for a Hunter/Reaper is what you need to save the day. A Valkyrie/Scholar could theoretically use Adrenaline to keep generating AP and then firing it off to someone else for the spike damage, though I could probably think of more useful things to do, it would be an interesting gimmick. Anyway, Valkyries rule. I love them. Always have a spot in my parties. Samurai   Samurai have two inherent passives, one gives them an attack boost if they hold a one-handed weapon and have an empty off-hand, the other ups their max AP from the default 30 to 60. Their skills are simple.      All of their Fierce and Swift attacks build up Combo Tokens on targets without ending the turn.    And their other attack skills end their turn but burn any existing Combo Tokens for extra damage. Combo Tokens do not persist beyond the turn they're applied.    Even if you don't plan on using them, though, it's worth levelling them some to get Unreactable on your physical attackers since some areas have almost purely Counter-capable enemies. Updates The LP will primarily be screenshots with some .webp's and youtube links for the music. The shortage of plot means that it's hard to really spoil stuff, but I would prefer conversations about not-yet-encountered classes and areas to be kept limited. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Feb 15, 2024 |
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Oct 4, 2023 02:41
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LJN92 posted:Will there be like an end goal of some kind given to us? Or will this be a "gently caress around till we get bored" kind of game? There is absolutely a final encounter that we're aiming towards beating AND optional extra-hard encounters to unlock a super-final, ultrahard encounter if we like. Black Robe posted:I remain unconvinced that this is a good game, because, well, you're the one LPing it. I'm choosing not to make myself suffer this time. There is only one, one part of Crystal Project that is bad, a part which is both optional and skippable(sort of). TooMuchAbstraction posted:I've heard good things about this game. I gather from the description that the audience won't really be able to manipulate your loadout (since you'll need to be able to change it to deal with fights?), but that's OK. Looking forward to seeing where it goes! The game does have some amount of flexibility with how to handle fights, though I obviously have some favourites. If someone wants me to try a specific loadout or a specific strategy/party composition for a boss, my thinking was that the primary sort of reader interaction(aside from the occasional "what direction now, folks?") would be that. The game generally has very low consequences for "losing" so it encourages experimentation. Tulip posted:What I do find interesting is how rare it is for even western RPGs to have "monk" be a type of cleric class. Closest I can recall is Wizardry 8 having Monks which also have psionic abilities, which had some overlap with cleric powers in that game.
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Oct 4, 2023 11:08
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JustJeff88 posted:Is this game procedurally generated, or is it the same every run? It's the same pregenerated world every time, you can randomize a lot of things, but not the world shape. Leraika posted:Also one of them (dealer's choice) should be female and named Leraika because why not Mega64 posted:Oh snap, I loved this game and am glad someone is giving this a good LP. The rare game I 100%ed. It really does feel like FF5 stapled upon an open-world platformer, and fortunately I love both of those things. I already made a party for the first section of the game, but we'll hit a renamer eventually and swapping one of them over to Warlock for the second update is supremely simple.
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Oct 6, 2023 21:34
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Update 01: Crystals? Crystals!  Welcome to Crystal Project, absolutely one of my favourite RPG's and definitely my favourite jRPG.  The game comes with a collection of pre-made names to randomize through, so please welcome Hamza, Vanessa, Tau and Charity to the action. They might occasionally have commentary, but since they don't have consistent sprites, I can't really give them little faces. They don't get italics for their dialogue, though. Hamza: Can you believe Ramza was already picked? Vanessa: Wait, we could pick our names? I just used my own.  Once we have a party, we can also choose to add in some CHALLENGE OPTIONS to make the game harder. In my opinion, it doesn't really need them unless you're on a second playthrough of some sort, the basic difficulty is really well-adjusted and does a good ramping up over the course of the game. There are also the Randomizer options, that let us mix up the classes, the encounters, the items, etc. it might take a few tries to make a fun seed, but some of them are very fun. Randomizing the crystals and starting classes is absolutely choice for a different take on the game.  And as said, I think Normal is a very nice difficulty, but it does also face you with some challenges you'll need to take some time before you can handle or will need to try out different approaches for. If you want to just do everything first try, Easy might be more your speed. With that over, let's get into it.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyyEOohiIcY The music track for the Spawning Meadows   Hamza: Oh, great, dialogue. Tau: A bit of scene setting won't hurt you. I like dialogue.     The Nans provide what little bit of early-game tutorial we get. Crystal Project is pretty big on giving you a few early pointers and then largely letting you figure out the details and interactions for yourself.  For instance, the nearest Nan walks off, but doesn't drag us along. We're free to explore this lovely meadow on our own.    Hamza: ...huh, we can jump. Tau: C'mon, we should follow the tutorial. Hamza: Later, I want to do more jumping.     Quietly, the first little meadow teaches you to do your exploring by hiding a couple of treasures in non-obvious places that you'll find if you poke around even in the most cursory way.    Tonics are just the game's most basic healing items, but still, they can be handy.  The game also likes to make sure you catch glimpses of hidden treasures to get your brain creaking on how to get to them. It'll be a little before we can get to this chest.     On foot we can jump three spaces horizontally and two vertically, which means that we can actually reach this ledge up here...     Tau: Why are we going this way? Hamza: Jumping's fun. Vanessa: They wouldn't just put this stuff here for no reason.     With a bit of height you can get farther than you think. Hamza: So what's the reason for this place, genius?  Vanessa: Free squirrel?    There are a few more chests with tonics and spare change, but they're not very important so they're also not on screen.        Tau: I trust her, a Nan wouldn't lie to us. Crystal Project doesn't have random encounters, instead it has wandering enemy Flames, with bigger Boss Flames as well. Blue flames are appropriately levelled, Green flames are notably weaker, Grey flames are very much weaker than you and won't chase you, Orange flames are somewhat stronger than you and Red flames are usually a guaranteed party wipe. Most of them have pre-set patrol patterns(or stand still) and beeline the party when they spot it, but with momentum so they can overshoot you if you dodge out of the way. Flames respawn when you leave an area for a bit and come back, but each area has multiple different enemy groups and a flame's enemy group setup may be different each time it spawns.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zD8XHAps5vk Spawning Meadows combat theme, not every area has its own, but there are a good couple of different ones and five or six different boss battle themes Tau: My world is shattered, you can't even trust a Nan. Hamza: Hell yeah, jumping AND fighting! This rules. The combat UI is pretty simple. In addition to the standard jRPG options, we also have, at the bottom, a graphical representation of the turn order. The AP that Tau just gained is a resource for non-magic abilities(and a few magic abilities) that accumulate each turn, when the user is hurt and when the user uses a physical attack.    Enemy info reveals, well, enemy info. All enemies have unknown HP until you've killed one or you hit them with the Scan spell. At the start of combat, all characters have zero threat to all enemies but...    After a bonk from Vanessa, she's now Top Threat, indicated graphically by a dotted white line pointing from the enemy to her, showing that the Slime will attack her next if it's able to. Except for a few rare enemies or situations, Threat is 100% deterministic and an enemy will always attack its Top Threat target.    Hamza's starting Warrior ability is Taunt, which does a ton of Threat Damage. In general terms, you can assume each point of actual damage to generate one point of Threat, so this means someone else would have to do 400 damage while Hamza just sits there to become Top Threat for this slime, but Taunt only affects one enemy at once, so you have to pick who you want your tank to piss off. But we don't want to spend the rest of this update on one slime, so let's finish it off.  Vanessa: I completely forgot Charity was here. Say something, why don't you? Charity: ...   Enemies, as per genre conventions, produce XP, LP(class XP, essentially, for learning skills and abilities) and drop stuff, in this case a bit of money.   Each class has its own skill tree but, it's worth noting that Hamza didn't just get LP for Warrior. Each character generates a lot of LP for themselves for their main class, and a little for the same class for everyone else, which makes it easy for others to dip into classes and means you aren't constantly levelling everyone from 0 just to experiment. I updated the OP to list the class skill trees, what the skills do and a bit of commentary on them for the classes we know so far.          Fenix Juice is our legally distinct Phoenix Down.      Something the game doesn't tell you, by the way, is that non-blocks are also something you can stand on. Except for "decorations" like the tall grass in the Spawning Meadows, all 3D objects are tangible and can be stood on, including this lamp post!         This leads to my most hated kind of jump in this game or any other platformer.     Characters are just under one block tall, which means that standing in here, it's possible to jump and, if perfectly positioned and moving quickly, jump out, cling to the outside of the block above while moving upwards, and slip on to the block above. It's something I really suck at, but I manage to do it after like ten tries.    Tau: Why are we collecting squirrels? Vanessa: Because they're there, duh.     There's no falling damage, though any liquid deeper than "half" a sprite's height is instant death, albeit only the kind that resets you to the last solid block you were on.   Twinkling stars like this indicate pick-ups you get just by walking over them, usually quest items rather than equipment or use items. In this case, a crafting material.     ...and something we won't get to interact with for quite a while.  Tau: Are you done? Hamza: My lust for jumping is sated, for now.        See? We can see slimes' max and current HP now. The Spawning Meadows don't really have any threatening encounters unless you're really loving around or running challenge/randomizer options, but they're a nice, slowly increasing scale of tutorial for new players.          Another new enemy is the Wisp. The blue globe icon indicates that it's readying a heal/buff/support spell of some sort.    We can flip up the details and also the more detailed turn order. Note that the spell has a small delay between the Wisp's turn and it activating, most spells have this, allowing for some abilities to interrupt it(like being silenced, slept or paralyzed, or a literal interrupt-causing ability), something that's a big part of the tougher battles in the game. Bigger spells usually have bigger delays while physical attacks go off instantly.     All encountered enemies also leave an Archive entry, tracking their drops, steals(if any) and abilities, which is primarily useful for a few rare/valuable drops and once we get the Blue Mage expy class, because of course there is one, and we need to find its learnable abilities in the wild.         Hamza: Oh, but I have!     Hamza: An appetite for jumps! Tau: ...we're never getting anywhere, are we? Vanessa: Well, we're going up! That's somewhere!      Chests are colour coded: Brown chests contain consumables, red chests contain equipment(and are thus very important) and purple chests contain miscellaneous items, often keys and quest objectives.  The Spawning Meadows have a number of these chests around, containing equipment for each of the starter classes, all of which are considerable power upgrades and will make the next area very easy.        And of course, because the Crystal Project dev(Yes, singular, ONE guy made all of this, except for the open source assets) is a smart cookie, a lot of "secret" areas are layered, with another bit of acrobatic exploration available beyond them.         The Cleaver, for Hamza, is our first introduction to the Variance trait that all axes have. It means that on any given swing, the damage done my vary by, well, the Variance either upwards or downwards. Aside from Variance attacks and critical hits, damage is another wholly deterministic aspect of the game.    Vanessa: What's that over there? Tau: ...we already went past there, did we miss a way up? Hamza: I'm sure we'll find it later, onwards!         If I have one critique of the basic exploration and platforming of Crystal Project, it's when there's solid ground underneath jumps, because it means that a flubbed jump has you walking all the way back to reset it, while water just pops you back immediately. There are a few, optional, jumps where this can get frustrating.      Hamza: Finally someone who isn't a Nan. What's up, buddy?   The squirrels are for this guy. Get him three and he moves aside and lets you access his treasure.  Also worth noting, NPC's count as objects you can stand on to reach/jump higher.         I think there are four or five squirrels around. As far as I'm aware there's no reason to grab the "spares" except completionism, but they're there in case there's one you can't find or can't grok the jump to reach.     The stout shield would be for a Hamza without the Cleaver, and the Stabbers are a dagger upgrade for Vanessa. Daggers all(or almost all? I think it's all) have a bonus to crit damage, meaning they synergize well with things that increase or guarantee crits.         Third black squirrel get. This one can look like an impossible jump if you're new to the game, but hey, no falling damage means infinite retries.      Vanessa: I told you, they wouldn't just have something here for no reason. Tau: Does that count as a quest? I think that was our first quest!    That may seem like a crude joke reward, but the Squirrel Dung is actually a stat-boosting accessory! It goes to poor Vanessa since she wants those crits. Luck is kind of an all-round booster, providing a subtle bonus to stuff if you've had repeated fails(like several misses in a row) and also helps attacks with Variance land right-side up.          Down the path is one more tutorial encounter before we reach the Nans' lodge.      Which has our first Home Point. Home Points are save points and also warp points, but by default we can only have one saved to warp to.        It's also where we can change classes and apply subclasses. Subclasses do not apply their equipment options or their class passive bonus, but all their skills can be used. You may as well throw some White Magic passives on people if you have nothing else to have more healing options and some MP use for non-mage classes. I also apply one of the two Assist options I'll be using for this LP, and they are ones I would suggest everyone use.     They are, by the way, hidden inside the More Options section of the Options menu. I would never recommend playing without Enhanced Home Point on unless you really like travelling. There are a couple of places that are ABSOLUTE pains in the rear end to get back to for a while. But between the Assists, the difficulty level and the challenge options, Crystal Project has a very modular difficulty. If just ONE thing is ruining the experience for you, you can moderate it, the only real exception being the platforming.   Tau: I like the Nans. Why does no one else seem to like the Nans?        The Lodge has a few Nans, some of which dispense advice, some of which are low-level merchants selling starter gear and one of which gives us our first map. Mapping happens for areas even without the map, but you need the map for the zone to actually SEE the map. If you're in a zone you have a map for, your minimap in the lower right automatically pops up.    Some items are bought with ingredients and money, or just ingredients, instead of purely money, as a sort of crafting system.     There's also a full heal inn. Despite the implication, no matter how many stays you have, they remain free. There's an option for Home Points to heal you in the Assists, but I feel like that makes things a bit TOO easy.          The Lodge's roof is climable, there are very few "true" diagonals in the game(which work as slides), instead most are just stepped stairs that you can easily walk up, down or stand on.      One of the limiters on your adventuring is how many consumables you can carry at once, but most main types of consumables have collectible Pouches that each increase your storage capacity by one.    There's also an upgrade for Charity here.  But we still haven't reached that one plateau.     The trick is using NPC's as stepladders.     Provides +15% to Steal attempts. I rarely made great use of Stealing in previous runs, but it can definitely have some potential at points.        And there's another Tonic pouch if you're willing to push on. Considering their ubiquity as free healing between fights, Tonic pouches are surprisingly handy.     In any case, that about finishes off the Spawning Meadows. Tau: Finally, are you two done? Hamza: I've done all the jumps and fights this place had. Vanessa: And I think we picked up every potential quest item. I knew those squirrels were going to be important!         The way out has a few inspirational Nan quotes and then...   ...we're in autumnal Delende. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDokgvuuS7E I really like the Delende theme. It's got some energy that makes me want to go exploring and a light-hearted feel to it, like there's no pressure at all. Charity: Hey, can anyone hear me? Vanessa: You can talk?! Charity: Yeah, I had mute on by accident. Nice jumps, by the way. Hamza: Don't need to tell me twice. Tau: Can we just follow the road for once? Hamza: Not a chance.         From this point on, the tutorial reins are more or less completely off, at least in the sense of overt tutorials. Areas will still teach you things, but in a pretty natural way where they just slowly introduce stuff and then by the end of it, you'd better have it figured out or you get your rear end kicked.   With a new area comes new enemies. They're still just basic physical attackers but...   We can steal their nuts and they hit a lot harder than Slimes and Wisps.  They also take a good bit more killing to put down, getting in a good few more whacks on Charity before the fight's over.            For a lot of easier chests, you can just sort of back-track a path to them. Start at the chest, a place that reaches the chest, a place that reaches that place, etc. until you get to one you can actually get to.  Earrings provide a small mana boost, and if a character wears two, there are two misc. slots, they get double the bonus from each.       On the west side of the first chunk of Delender is this ledge with a hidden upgrade for sword-and-board Warriors, as well as an NPC we can't reach up above, and one we can reach down below...              Charity: He seemed nice! Tau: Really, Crystals? That's what you're here for? Hamza: You gotta jump to reach them, and fight to get them. Vanessa: Nice to know there are some people to chat with here. Maybe we'll bump into him again. The Home Point stone is a pretty nice item and, unless you're really into some wild speedrunning poo poo, thankfully not an item you can miss. If you try to walk past Astley, he'll sidle over and enforce a conversation.    Delende's a pretty vertical area, there's a lot of looping around and reaching higher parts of it.        Speaking of: gently caress them roads, we're going treeclimbing.         The reward is just a +Strength item for Hamza, but it's the principle of the matter.             You can catch glimpses of this location from below, but it's plausible you might not find it until a good bit later unless you really like poking into all sorts of corners and crevices, which describes, I'd say, the ideal Crystal Project enjoyer.          Hamza: This Astley guy must like jumping, too, to have gotten up here. Maybe we have something in common?          Tau: Hey, this isn't fresh at all! Charity: Did that guy just scam us? He zooms off so fast he's practically invisible in motion.          Just over the river is this ring which just flatly ups the chances of loot dropping from dead enemies. Always worth a slot in the early game.     This guy actually does sell Fresh Salmon. It's a quest item, too! I grab one.     And the Fishgutter for Vanessa since it's an upgrade and Hamza already has a Cleaver. The book is an odd item. Most caster classes will use Wands(boost Mind, for damaging spells) or Staves(boost Spirit, mostly for healing spells and also some Monk shenanigans). Books will generally boost neither, but instead provide a max mana bonus and occasionally misc. advantages, giving you more casts in exchange for their being weaker casts. I generally find alpha striking more important, but possibly they have their place in some strategies. I was never a huge fan of them.   There are three fishers in the world, and if you get a Lure and a Fishing Rod, we can buy the worst of the latter here, you can pay them a pittance to have them fish up random items for you, with each combo of Lure and Rod unlocking a table of drops. Incredibly I don't think anyone's catalogued all the possible combos and their rewards, so it's still sort-of a mystery what you can get, but obviously a better fisher gets you better stuff with better gear.     Downstairs is just an inn and a small storage closet to loot for a free mana recovery item.      Charity: Well, this seems fun and we made a lot of progress. Same time tomorrow? Hamza: Hell yeah, we can find our first crystal! Tau: And advance the plot! I bet there's a cool plot. Vanessa: Maybe find out what that Astley guy's about... he seems fishy. Tau: He seems nice. END SESSION VOTE A: Collect the next crystal immediately, so we can get new classes that I can talk about. B: Head off-road to do some more jumping and finding of items. Maybe there will even be dogs to pet.
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Oct 9, 2023 11:10
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Cattail Prophet posted:Pretty sure this bit is incorrect, though I'd agree that storm stance is pretty meh overall. Maybe if you could have multiple stances active at once so you could stack it and mind stance together... Well, I wouldn't say it if I wasn't sure I was right, but I'll see if I can't get learn this one and then get Charity punched in the face a couple of times to set it off, for testing purposes. serefin99 posted:I vote for B. Any gamer knows you exhaust all the side stuff before proceeding with the main story. It's read correctly. I think it's to avoid weird edge cases with regards to stuff like suddenly removing some of your saved home points, though I believe that any of the ones that have a scaling effect(like boosted LP earning) can be turned up and down still, and stuff like "Skip Minigames" just opens up the option to skip minigames, rather than forcibly skipping them every time.
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Oct 9, 2023 19:38
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JustJeff88 posted:I would probably enable Max on Level up. It's always been a grumble of mine with RPGs where stats are random on level up, which is just begging people to reload. BG is known for this, and also the wizardry games. Oh no no, it's not "Max On Level Up" it's just "Max Level Up," i.e. the highest possible level is increased. I believe the default is 80. As far as I know all stat increases on level up are deterministic and decided by your primary class at level up, and there's an option later in the game to "reroll" them to match alternate classes if you want to make someone who did all their levelling as Punchmaster work as a Spellman instead.
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Oct 10, 2023 14:50
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Update 02: Dog Project Hamza: Are you all ready? I want to do more fighting! Tau: I guess, I still think we should go to that crystal... Vanessa: You know that's never how it works: You do everything but the objective first. Charity: And... there.   Charity's now a Warlock with a Wizard for her sub-class. Tau: Tired of being a Wizard? Charity: This outfit was just too cool, you know? Also as someone pointed out, I had not shown off the classes' inherent passives. Good point!  Warlocks' passive actually makes their apex skill usable without being too much of an MP hog. My only issue is that I think there are much better passives available.  Fighters' passive makes them a decent starting point for any other AP-using class. It means that by their second action, they can have 22 AP already(6 per turn start, 6 for an attack on the first round, +2 each turn from their passive) and no ability costs more than 30.  Enemy crits are relatively rare, so I find this ability to be a boondoggle.  An insanely good ability, even starting out Vanessa is landing crits on about a third of her attacks. That's a lot of extra damage.  I would personally prefer to prevent my HP from ever hitting "critical," but there's worse.  And this is why I largely think Wizard is better than Warlock, because overall this means you're going to get more murder per MP and I tend to find that for a lot of the bigger boss battles, by the end of them I'm running low on MP. So I want to wring as much murder out of them as I can before they're spent!     Hamza: Jumps jumps jumps love my jumps.      Vanessa: Everything's here for a reason, so even if we go off road, it'll help us when we go on road. Charity: And the more places we go, the more cool things we get to see.      Charity: Like this! I love caves.    Everyone starts with empty head slots, and it's not really worth your money to buy low-grade hats since you start finding them reasonably quickly. At this point I also remembered that Warlocks could use shields. In addition to staves and wands for wizarding, they can equip daggers and rapiers for weapons, and they can equip both light(generally wizard) and medium headgear and armor, and shields. I guess a niche for them could be a more defensive and survivable offensive magic caster, wand in one hand, shield in the other, wearing actual armor rather than T-shirts, but I always find that the best way to be survivable is to blast the other guy before he can blast you.     Tau: So much for going off-track, huh, I think I see Astley up there. Also for whoever said it, you were right: Astley IS in fact, female. The main tell with female vs male characters of Astley's class is the hair colour and hair style. The torso clothes are also different but Astley seems to have it coloured differently which threw me off.    Tau: We should at least see where they're going.           Tau: ...well she was off quickly. Hamza: Nice jumps on her. I respect that.    The two rogues are chasing each other in a circle around the crates, but as we learned with the Nans, NPC's are physical objects, thus...    We can just block them if we want to talk to them. The Fervor Charm gives +1 AP when making basic attacks which is kinda useful early on but as time goes on you'll be mostly using skills. The chaser does not react to us taking the charm or blocking the chase, sadly. Charity: Some folks just don't know how to behave or get along.    The local merchants have a few upgrades but nothing we really crave, mostly for our body armor which has not yet seen any upgrades.      Technically you could just warp back and get all your free healing at Nan's Lodge, especially with the triple home point assist on, but I have way more important things to leash my home points to.  Tau: Come oooooooon. Vanessa: No, we agreed. Charity: Yeah, we're gonna go see more cool stuff before we go grab our first crystal.       Tau: How did anyone even get up there?! Hamza: Forbidden jumping techniques...    This area has blue flames full of wasps that drop off the trees and attack you. The wasps are just generic physical attackers with no real tricks or gimmicks aside from being flying(and thus immune to Earth attacks).   Charity: Oh my God. Hamza! Hamza: On it! Tau: Puppies! Vanessa: Gotta pet the puppies!    Charity: Never before has anything in my life been this fulfilling.  Charity: Folks? We gotta do it. Tau: You know, I'm just glad we're doing some kind of quest, I'm in.      Tau: This cave looks kinda spooky... we'll only go in there if we exhaust all other options.     See? Extremely normal.   Also the dogs' bones are sparkles like the secret herbs back in the Spawning Meadows. So we gotta find three of those.     Charity: ...the bone was that other way. Hamza: But jumps are this way!      In hindsight I think it's possible to jump from that corner ledge to that tree, I'll have to test it out later.    And I totally forgot about this chest. I'll grab it off-screen.   You can use a corner of the stump for more height.        Getting the Delende map is pretty handy, the area is a lot bigger than it looks at first.   The Storm Hood is also a pretty great hat, I think my mages in my first run ended up using it for a pretty long time, there are some pretty nasty Wind-using enemies in the game.    Hamza: New fights!  Hamza: Hey! Get back here and fight me! The flames in here actually run from you rather than seeking you out.  Tau: First bone! Vanessa: Even if we have to give them away later, I love collecting things.   Flames will move laterally first, then attempt to jump if they hit a barrier. In this case, it means that when they get pressed into a corner running from you, you can move under them and abuse their lack of air control to ensure they land on your head. Flames vary a bit in just how much vertical jump they have, these can get about three blocks' worth of air time, there are others with a lot more jumping power.   Charity: ...is that Bigfoot? Vanessa: I don't think so, he's not travelling through the astral plane and seducing us. Hamza: ... Charity: ... Tau: ... Vanessa: Hey, that's what the internet says he does!      Dwellers are slightly annoying but not very scary. Also note the new skill icons. Gears are non-magic abilities, often buffs, which means they cannot be silenced away and tend to run on AP. "Rainbow" orbs are "Blue Mage" skills which makes it very easy to see who you can learn from and to browse the archive and see which enemies, in what locations, can teach you stuff.   Charity: Giant wasps and Bigfoot. Gross and weird. Cool cave, though.      Here I caught the transition between indoors and outdoors, it's a neat effect.        Tau: Ugh, no bones here. I guess that cave is the only option.        Crystal Project is generally very good about leaving quest items in the same areas where you need them, rather than forcing you to go around the gameworld for them and forcing you to remember that John Project back in the Tutorial Zone wants half of a Goblin Scrotum to reward you with a rare item.    Vanessa: Cheer up, we might find some cool stuff in here.    Charity: This is unreasonably dark, we can't even see if this place looks cool or not.    The Soiled Den has no music, just generic cave ambience of dripping water and distant rumbling rock.   One small reward.       There aren't a lot of enemies in the Soiled Den, only two flames and they mostly seem to generate pretty easy fights.  Zoo Bats(drat, I wonder where the dev got that name) are once again just default physical attackers, but they introduce is to a new and cool battle theme. https://soundcloud.com/schematist/division-blade-rpgjrpg-battle-theme        Tau: Oh thank God, there's the bone. Let's just grab it and get out. Charity: And just when there was finally some light to see by, I love underground rivers, they're so cool. Hamza: Not even any good fights in here, just those stupid bats, bleh.   And then as you approach the last bone, a Boss Flame, larger and with a black core but otherwise obeying the same rules as other flames, rushes at you from the shadows. It is in fact possible to juke it, send it flying into the river, grab the bone and then either Home Point Stone back, run away or get killed by it and just ignore that it's down here. But we don't play like that, we don't leave any bosses behind!  https://soundcloud.com/aaron-anderson-11/289-heated-battle-loop-ogg Meet the Bone Thief, which is a cool as gently caress boss name, very sinister.  All bosses have the trait of being immune to instant kills, though there are very few player-based instant kills in the game, and taking less damage from DoT effects. Considering that most DoT effects do 15% of Max HP damage per turn, that's kind of a requirement to avoid trivializing them utterly.    The Bone Thief also packs a selection of pretty nasty skills. It does high damage, it drains MP(though it has nothing to use them on, that can still hoover your casters dry) and it can do high damage + paralyze, taking away turns.  And it always tends to lead with Marrow Slurp, the MP drain, so you want to make sure its first turn attack isn't hitting a caster.    The first turn is mostly prep: Hamza takes aggro, Charity preps herself with a buff, Tau hits the Bone Thief with a debuff that makes it vulnerable to Fire damage.       The second round sees Vanessa with enough AP to deploy Eye Gouge, which blinds the Bone Thief for one turn. Since all its attacks are physical attacks, this means...   ...that Hamza gets some breathing room. The AP charge requirements prevent Vanessa from busting it out every turn, but even if it just halves the damage that Hamza takes, that's important since he's only ever two hits from death.   If I had been extra smart, I would've fired up his Defender stance, but I wanted him to be contributing more damage.  As an interesting fact: casting healing spells also draws aggro, which is why Tau is targeted by the Bone Thief's last attack before it goes down. Hamza spent enough turns paralyzed by Bone Crunch that he fell behind on drawing aggro, and Tau spent a lot of his time keeping Hamza healed up.  Vanessa then misses a 90+% chance to hit... and the Bone Thief melts from the damage-over-time effect that Charity had applied with the Warlock's Blaze spell. All DoT effects hit at the start of a character or enemy's turn.   Hamza: drat, that was a rush. We need to be fighting more bosses. Tau: Only if you promise to be better at keeping aggro, it almost got me... Vanessa: Mediocre drops, but maybe the next one will drop something better.   It was also guarding the last Dog Bone, so let's head up to hand the Dog Trainer the quest items.           Our reward is the BONE SMASHER, which is, perhaps surprisingly, not a Warrior weapon, but instead a Staff.  It provides none of the usual spellcaster bonuses, like Spirit, that most staves do, and instead is just a sheer combat buff. Probably the ideal recipient of this would be a Monk, who can do all of their stuff while wielding a staff as well as while unarmed. However, I still give it to Tau since he gets only moderate bonuses from his current staff and it gives him something to do that doesn't drain MP.  Additionally the dogs also run in circles of joy from now on. Charity: That's the sort of thing that really makes adventuring worth it. Vanessa: Sick loot? Charity: No. Cool places and cute animals.    If we continue further south, we reach the Seaside Cliffs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOWbOnDkZIs          Tau: Feels like everywhere we go, Astley's been there before us. Charity: I think it's nice of them to make sure they talk to all the new people, you know? Vanessa: Just as long as they don't loot all the chests before we get to them, too.       Here we come across our first purple chest, which usually hold quest items, map pieces, keys, that sort of thing. In this case, a clamshell! Vanessa: Useless? If it was useless it wouldn't have a spot in our inventory.    The Seaside Cliffs have a lot of areas we can't reach quite yet. Some of them require unlocking some new traversal options and others simply involve taking the long way around.         New areas also mean new enemies! There are also a few rare enemies that I don't get to see on this turn around.     Jellyfish have a damage over time attack, which can be nasty but is thankfully never their first turn attack, and a self-heal skill which our local off-brand Blue Mages can learn. Infusion's neat because it heals both the target and caster, meaning you've never in the tough situation of a caster saving themselves or another party member as long as you've got it.    This is also our first introduction to "half height" water which is traversible without immediate melting. Being in half height water also slows your movement and shortens your jumps a bit.   There's also this odd... structure... which we can't reach quite yet. How strange. Charity: Is that an amphitheater out in the water? Hamza: ...looks kind of like it's for a sporting event. Vanessa: Sports? In the water? You're going crazy, let's find you something to fight. Tau: I think he might be on to something...   On the east side of the beach, this cliff ridge looks impassable at first glance, but...     ...like so many things, if you just look around a bit, there's a way past.     Hamza: Why are we even picking these up? They're not weapons or armor. Vanessa: Because they're there. Now keep looking for more purple chests.     Venus Mantraps were probably the first enemy that really clowned on me a bit in my first run, because I didn't bother to read their stats in any kind of detail.  Firstly, they've got a reasonably punchy counter to any physical damage.    Secondly, they've got a multi-target attack that can flatten the entire party in two shots. They're no great deal for me since Vanessa has attacks that don't provoke counters, and she can blind the Mantrap even though it doesn't appear to have any eyes, but my first time around I was rolling without a Rogue(I think I did Warrior, Cleric, Monk, Warlock until I got more classes) and that made a lot of the early game harder than it needs to be.      Past this beach there's yet another apparently-unreachable item, but as we've learned by now, apparently unreachable only either means "for now" or "until you look around a bit" in Crystal Project.    First you use the chest you just opened to get a bit more height.       And then you just jump from rock pillar to rock pillar to get the rest of the way. The pillars can be a bit tricky until you get the hang of it, but the big trick when jumping to 1x1 platforms is that your characters' shadow is always directly beneath them, so you can always use it to gauge when you're on target. Hamza: Yeah! Jumping! Hell yeah!     The Storm Cap is a Medium Armor version of the Storm Hood, trading a bit of Resistance, anti-magic armor, for more Defense, which is anti-physical armor.        The last beach enemy we see for now is the giant snail, which has the jellyfish's poison sting and nothing else that really makes it unique. Once again, starter enemies.     Cliff Wolves are not by themselves scary, but they're an early version of other enemies that WILL be scary.     They hit hard and they can generate extra AP to get a bound ahead in using their big attack which has the potential to be really nasty if the Variance rolls well. Enemy attacks with Variance on them are very rare.           Tau: Where is this even leading? Hamza: Up. Charity: I like the look of this place, it's up-y and canyon-y at the same time.    This is one of the enemy formations in the Seaside Cliffs that can give you trouble. Together these two have a lot of health, you can't blind them both at once, physical attacks against the Mantrap are dangerous and if you let the Cliffwolf collect enough AP for Fury Swipes it can be dangerous, same goes for the Mantrap getting enough AP for Thorn Barrage.    This is one of the cases where I do switch on Hamza's Defender stance and just have him Taunt everyone prior to anything else.       But ultimately what saves me from getting pretty badly messed up is Vanessa managing to Eye Gouge the Mantrap. That skill really is so loving good for smaller formations or formations dominated by one tough physical attacker.  I come out on top, but not without a few dents.        Charity: Ooooh, a mountain meadow! Tau: ...huh, you could totally miss this.    Vanessa: I think this sheep's broken.      If you're fighting appropriately levelled enemies, most of your physical attacks will be 90+% chance to hit, but a few attacks default to a weaker chance to hit and some enemies are very dodge-y, at which point the Scope Bit becomes handy.      Vanessa: I knew it! I bet they've got some really cool stuff for us. We MUST find more clamshells!    We can bump into Reid again here, at which point he unceremoniously hurls himself into the depths.    Charity: Feels like there are crystals no matter where we go. Tau: Finally, we can get on with the plot. Vanessa: Tomorrow, maybe? I need to head off and do some chores. Hamza: We fought a boss today, I'm pretty happy with that. Tomorrow's good. END SESSION VOTE A: Northern Crystal Cave(Fencer) B: Seaside Crystal Adventure(Shaman) Both, of course, with a side order of screwing around first. There's still some jumps at the Seaside Cliffs.
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Oct 12, 2023 19:14
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Looks like a win for the beach!
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Oct 13, 2023 23:16
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Update 03: I Hate Sand So, the vote was for the Seaside Cliffs crystal, but before we go there, I wanted to go grab that thing I said I'd go grab.    And I'm glad I did! Earrings rapidly fall off in value as MP pools increase, but this early on it's roughly a 20% boost for Charity to be wearing a pair.  Hamza: Our first crystal, I wonder what that's gonna be like. Tau: It's going to come with the wonderful feeling of getting closer to the dramatic climax of our story. Vanessa: There's probably going to be some cool loot near it, too. Charity: I just hope it looks neat, that it's not just some little geode we can hold in our hands.        Before you get your hands on a map, the Seaside Cliffs are subtly deceptive, cut into several sections that don't quite connect in the ways you'd expect them to. For illustrative purposes, I'm going to take the "wrong" paths first, just like I did when I first played the game.         Charity: Whee! Tau: You seem very confident about going this way, Hamza. Hamza: Yeah, because it's the highest place we can go. Easier to start from the top and go down: basic jumping logic.    The cliffside also has a number of ominous cave entrances, not all of which we can access just yet, like this one, it requires a bit more height.    More Clamshells, we need 13 and this is about the halfway mark. Vanessa: I wonder what that guy will give us for them.              This might seem like a long underground passage just for an MP recovery item, but it restores 60MP, which is a full recharge for any member of the gang so far and a very meaningful amount for a long time yet.        Hamza: Hm, back on grass... Charity: I think this loops back into Delende.    Hamza: Works for me, I wanted to fight something new.     Rastens are big bunnies that come in medium-sized groups and whose main trick is that they can do chunky defense-ignoring attacks if you let them collect enough AP for it.   Charity: WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT. GROSS! Tau: I... I just wanted to see what Steal would do! Charity: Get rid of that! Tau: I can't! There's no drop item option! Vanessa: lmao, here, lemme keep them.   Vanessa: This is why you leave theft to the professionals. Tau: ...what do you do for a living again?  Charity: Can we please turn around? Weird stuff like this doesn't happen back at the Seaside Cliffs.         These pillars are a little jumping puzzle, not a very complex one, mind you. The game does have tricky puzzles, but it goes easy on us in the early game.      Despite appearances, we can't reach the loot chest from this angle, we need to take the longer way around.     A low-tier +Strength item. If you really wanted to max damage output, you could toss both of thes ones you have accessible at this point on a Monk or Warrior for maximum punching power.        Charity: ...spooky, eerie, creepy. Hamza: Crystals are rocks, rocks are in the ground, caves are in the ground, might be a crystal in here. Tau: Unusually sound logic.         Without dropping down that hole, the cave just provides a shortcut to another part of the cliffs and the underside of that little waterfall back at the camp.        As far as I'm aware this particular monster only spawns in ONE part of the Seaside Cliffs and I haven't found my way there yet as of the end of this update. I remember finding it quickly on my first playthrough but I need to knock my neurons around a bit to remember the path over to the westernmost side. Vanessa: This goes in the logbook, possibly a good trading opportunity.     Without an Earth Bangle, all that's down here is two Clamshells and a look at a red equipment chest I thought we couldn't reach from this side. Turns out that you can just barely make a diagonal jump off that little rock sprite over to the other side, and it contains an accessory that gives +10 Evasion. Evasion lowers your chance of getting hit, but I couldn't tell you exactly how much a +10 Evasion translates to percentage-wise, since that'll also vary per enemy based on their own base Accuracy.      A lot of the Seaside Cliffs is really a hidden jumping tutorial, teaching you how to read the terrain and the limits of your basic jump.       There are 19 Clamshells in the area including these three from The Rocker, so you don't need to be obsessive about collecting them. I like that bit of leeway in design. Charity: Hey... do you want some rabbit claws in return? Please? Vanessa: No giving away my quest items!          Continuing the tutorializing, it might seem impossible to reach that chest further to the left unless...       ...you remember that chests themselves are objects you can stand on.         Hamza: Back at beach level... still no crystal. Charity: What's that red thing over there?      Tau: A crab. Charity: GOTY! Vanessa: Great, now she's going to spam us with crab memes for the next 24 hours.  The cliff wall further down the beach looks impassable, but once again...         ...as far as I'm aware there is no flat surface anywhere in Crystal Project that you cannot, somehow, get to.       Actually a good tip, it's very easy to just learn them and then forget to equip them.       Most magic damage in the game is Fire, Thunder or Ice, with Water, Wind and Earth as much rarer. However, some of the most butt-wrecking bosses, in my game, use Water attacks, so I'm always happy for something that helps no-sell them even if the Swimmer's Top is otherwise barely on par with the starter robes.          Hamza: Wait... Charity: You know, I thought this would just lead to the same place, being downhill and all. Tau: This map design is going to drive me mad. Why can't it just be orderly and linear?       Hamza: Ooooh, yeah, I think that's a new enemy! Vanessa: New enemy means new drops!  Vanessa: Now stand back and watch a master of the thieving arts. Maybe we'll get her club as a new weapon for Hamza.   Vanessa: ... Charity: I thought you said it wasn't going to be creepy this time. YOU SAID IT WASN'T GOING TO BE CREEPY THIS TIME. Vanessa: Look just... don't overthink it, alright? It's probably from her lunch pail.    Mountainesses have one trick which is to have bucketloads of HP and to hit you real hard with a big piece of wood. As tricks go, it's pretty reliable, but not sufficient to stop us.  Charity: What finest ingredients?! Milk should only have one ingredient: milk! Hamza: Maybe they mixed milk and more milk. Since it's an MP recovery item and those tend to be pretty expensive, and has its own stack separate from tinctures, ethers, etc. it's actually not a bad idea to stock up on Milk if you're in the Seaside Cliffs anyway.         Charity: At least the view is nice... at least the view is nice...          The only thing down this way is this ominous entrance. Hamza: Getting a real crystal vibe from this. Tau: What. What even is a "crystal vibe"? Hamza: ...it just feels like a place I'd hide if I was a crystal. Tau: What does that even mean. Vanessa: Don't worry, Hamza, I'd still love you even if you were a crystal.     From memory, I can only recall one crystal that I'd consider to be in the "overworld," the remainder ensconced in some form or size of dungeon. Welcome to our first one of those: The Draft Shaft Conduit. It isn't large, but it's there. https://on.soundcloud.com/nAZsk   Hamza: Enemies already, hell yeah!     Canal Rats have one formation of six of them, and a single basic attack. With a bit of grinding, they'd be no real issue, but for now they remain one.  For the simple reason that we have no way of killing all of them or drawing their aggro to a single tanky member. Enemies that haven't been aggro'ed in some way tend to pick their targets at random, which means that rather than denting Hamza's armor, they instead dent Tau's face. Tau: Not my face! It gets worse because healing party members creates an amount of aggro with all enemies, so Tau will only cement that hostility by trying to render aid to the others.     It's a formation that I can take down, but not without getting hurt.   Good thing we've picked up a number of Fenix Juices on the way, otherwise that would've been a reset on the expedition.    The Torch is a modest upgrade for Charity, mainly noteworthy for giving her the option to swat enemies with it when she's out of MP.             The second group of rats dunks on Tau again. This is rude.     Tau: Oh my stars please not a third time. Vanessa: Hmmm... okay, watch this.    Most flames are water soluble and will, if immersed in the sort of liquid that would "kill"/reset the party, be deleted. My experience is that flames removed this way will reset faster than other flames, but it can be useful if you just want to get to the goddamn crystal and don't need any more bullshit.        It's not even hard to pull it off as long as there's any water around. Some Flames are immune to this, though.       Hamza: Boss flame! Charity: Oh gosh, another one already? Tau: ...alright, if there's a boss in here, there's probably also a crystal. Good job, Hamza.    Meet the Canal Beast. He's potentially a step up in difficulty from the Bone Thief.    In addition to its basic attack it has Pressure Squirt, which is a big single-target murder spell-  -Wrap, which is a boosted version of the Bone Thief's Bone Crunch, taking the target out of the fight for TWO rounds, but doing less damage-  -Floodgate, which could wipe out the entire party in two casts-  -and Ink Blast, which is a physical attack that attempts to blind the ENTIRE party. Very rude and also very bad if it pulls that off.      The first round is pretty simple. While the Canal Beast is weak to Thunder, Spotlight gives it a bigger weakness to Fire which lets Charity do more damage for less MP since Bolt costs more to cast than Fire or Blaze.   For the next round it intends to Ink Blast us, which means it gets the Eye Gouge.  This puts Vanessa at not bottom threat, though, so I have Tau Spark Shine the Canal Beast to draw some aggro.      With Wrap up next, I save Vanessa's AP so she has other options available for the coming couple of rounds.  Because I can just Remedy away Hamza's Paralyze in a single turn, after that, though...  Flood Gate is up next, and I don't really have a good response to it, due to bad timing primarily.  If you look at the init order at the bottom of the screen, the Canal Beast has a "gray" turn, where it starts charging the cast, and a "red" turn where it casts it. If Vanessa had a turn in between those two, she could interrupt it with a Trick Slash. Higher character speed, slower attacks and some abilities we don't have yet makes interrupts like that more likely, but in this case luck wasn't on the gang's side.     Floodgate fucks us UP.  Two casts of that would dumpster the entire fight, extremely rude spell.      Hamza: We made it? We made it! Tau: ...that was easier than the rats. Vanessa: Maybe for you, I got my rear end beat. Charity: No arguing, crystals! Hamza: CRYSTALS!         Tau: What a rush! Vanessa: What'd we get... aw, another caster job?  I pretty much always had a primary or secondary Shaman on the team when I played. The primary advantage gives them a lot more durability for those fights where the tank can't aggro everything, and their spells rock. They're all debuffs, either weakening or causing damage over time, except for one spell that just has extra lifedrain, and with none of their spells being elemental, they can always bring something fun to the party. I'll paste the full details in the OP after this update.       Charity: That was fun... but we can go farther tonight, can't we?  Charity: Look how much stuff we haven't seen yet! Tau: Well... we could always take that awful rabbit path up to Delende...              The path up from the Seaside Cliffs is one of two ways past the broken bridge, meaning that if you really want to, you could just swooze past everything, ignoring all the crystals and stuff, in favour of just getting on with things. But we're not like that, this is Crystal Project so we're going to PROJECT some CRYSTALS.            Charity: What even was that interaction? Vanessa: Dunno, but it gave me a chance to get rid of some of those rabbit claws, they're starting to smell.    Before hopping on to that tree, as intended, I continue along the cliff. It can get us to a few places, but for now I just want to clear up something I bypassed earlier.     The Hive Guards are now green flames because of the levels we've collected. Progress! They'll still attack us, mind you.            They can't all be winners. It's a decent boost but nothing huge. Anyway, keep in mind that we've unlocked some new heights in the Seaside Cliffs.        Anyway, back on track...          This actually puts us above where we ran into the Indecent Dwellers earlier. Still not at the top of this particular hill, but notably higher up.       Then crossing this bridge we walked under while entering Delende.           Charity: At least she was more normal. Hamza: A girl that helps you jump... that's someone after my own heart.  People around here are still super weirdos, though.      And as always there are hidden places to jump to.      Hamza: I'll never get tired of the jumping. Vanessa: I'll never get tired of the jumping leading to new loot.        Hamza: ...think we can make that jump? Vanessa: It doesn't look like a place we're meant to go, but eh, there's no fall damage! We can smack our faces into invisible walls all day. Tau: Can't we just... oh, never mind. I have to admit I'm a bit curious, too.      Charity: I wonder how far we can go this way. Tau: ...it wasn't that hard get up here, maybe this is really the way we're meant to go.   Welcome to the Overpass, there's no music here, just the desolate sound of wind sighing through the air.    The Overpass is generally a border between other regions, but it always gives a vibe of being a place you broke into, even the times you're meant to be there, and has a number of hidden things sprinkled around, as well as being almost completely empty of enemies.      Charity: Gives me the chills. Tau: But... in a cool way, kind of? It's like exploring an abandoned haunted house. Vanessa: Oh hey, looks like someone's finally kicking loose a little. Tau: I still think we should get back on track but... haunted stuff is cool.    Vanessa: Oh gently caress I think that's a red flame.         Yeah we are SUPER not meant to be here for a good long time yet.     Another one of these weirdos. Thankfully the red flames in this area have pretty small aggro radiuses and don't patrol in any sort of super weird or fast ways, just sort of ambling around instead. Also Lake Delende, though not very lakelike, also has the Overpass wind, no music.       And a couple of loot items.         But for now it's a dead end, we lack the mobility options to get out of here without warping to a Home Point.  Charity: That was eerie, let's stick to cool exploration from now on. Tau: I wanna know what was up with that place! We should look for more of the... what was it? The Overpass?      Vanessa: This weekend, right? I'm about to pass out. I'm so sleepy. Tau: It's those energy drinks, you just go to zero when they wear off. Vanessa: We can't all have a "healthy lifestyle" with "balanced diets." Charity: Um. Hamza: The weekend sounds fine. The jumps aren't going anywhere... nor are the fights.    Hamza: And look, Vanessa's got something to look forward to, too.  END SESSION VOTE A: North to collect a CAVE CRYSTAL(Fencer) B: West to collect a MOUNTAIN CRYSTAL(Scholar, the legally distinct Blue Mage) PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Oct 19, 2023 |
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Oct 18, 2023 23:17
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LJN92 posted:Yo, what the gently caress? Weird as that bit it, I think I can safely say that it's the only slightly greasy thing I've noticed in the entire game.
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Oct 18, 2023 23:59
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Also let me know if you want to see someone as a shaman, unless requested I'm going to shuffle around the party a bit for general variety's sake and what I consider useful, but I'm willing to roll with any assigned gimmick.
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Oct 19, 2023 00:41
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SIGSEGV posted:The Mist Mischief track link seems to 404. https://on.soundcloud.com/nAZsk Does this link work better?
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Oct 19, 2023 18:15
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MechaCrash posted:Also, a thing that I think is worth bringing up is that one of the bullet points is "nothing is permanently missable." So while bringing along someone to scan and someone to steal when fighting bosses helps, because you get that information quickly and can use that item right away, actually buying the things you missed is pretty expensive. Stealing is also useful for dealing with various trash enemies, because keeping stocked on consumables can be a bit of a strain on your wallet. I was gonna bring this up later when we got to the relevant NPC for it, but yeah. There is actually a mechanic for forgetting or failing to get the SUPER BIG ULTRA IMPORTANT BOSS STEAL or whatever it migth be. MechaCrash posted:But the talk of "here's debuffs you need" does bring up my one big complaint about this game: there is no generic "item" command available to everybody, so you can't use that as an emergency source of whatever you need. If you want healing, or scanning, or stealing, you must bring someone who has that in their skill sets, and you can bring a maximum of eight (four primary, four secondary). I actually kind of like the absence of an Item mechanic, because it's one of the things that keeps a healer relevant, you can't just carry a stack of 99 Elixirs and have Bob Blastymage or Fiona Fightmancer toss them at people's heads or chug them. If you want healing, you actually need to bring someone who can heal, or lifesteal, or something of the sort. In any case, next update is on the way and will come with an exciting challenge for everyone to participate in.
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Oct 21, 2023 01:21
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Update 04: The Mountain Blues Charity: We're climbing that mountain today, right? Vanessa: After searching Gran's cabin. Tau: I don't know... it gives me a bad vibe. Hamza: I thought you liked spooky stuff. Tau: Stuff can get too spooky.     Vanessa: Oooooh, look out, haunted stairs! Tau: Very funny.   Hamza: Look out, haunted chests, ha ha!    Vanessa: AAAAAAAAAAAH, EMPTY CHESTS, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH Tau: Okay, changed my mind, going in here was a great idea.         Charity: Oh my God it's happening again. It's the goddamn rabbits again. Vanessa: ...it's... it's loot. We have to take it. Charity: You are not picking that up. Vanessa: Too late. Charity: I'm so glad I'm not next to you in the formation.    There's no music in the rest of the cabin, but down here it's just a single ominous echo. Hamza: I don't like this red light. Tau: I don't like the spooky ambience. Vanessa: I don't like that the chests were empty. Charity: I don't like that you picked up that rotting melted head.    Tau: You're not gonna start picking up these bones, too, are you? Vanessa: Well-  Hamza: Looting later, that's a boss! And no, it's not just the lighting, that flame is dark red.      So, Gran is completely unbeatable at the moment. She(it?) can obliterate any character with a single attack and if she's not reduced to half health or less, Regenerate puts her back at max.          There is absolutely no way we can knock off over half her health in three actions, or survive long enough to take more actions than that.     Well, that sucks.  So, being killed by a boss has no consequences except booting you back to your last visited Home Point. If you get killed by a non-boss, it's the same except you also lose some money. Hamza: That's not happening... I guess we weren't meant to go in there yet. Vanessa: Hmmm. I don't know, seems suspicious, we're still in a newbie area. Charity: I'd be good not seeing any more bones for a bit.      The mountain is off to the west, as we approach, a rogue-ish looking fellow bolts along the cliff ridge. Vanessa: Who was that masked man? Tau: Someone who doesn't want to hang out with us, I guess. Charity: I wouldn't want to hang out with people who keep picking up body parts, either.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWtFntVa15k I really like this track, it's light-hearted and really makes me feel like doing jumps and going forwards. The exploration tracks by Vindsvept are some of my favourites in the game.     They don't quite come along as well in screenshots, but there's a falling leaves effect scrolling across the screen which contributes to things feeling autumny, which is one of my favourite seasons.       Hamza: There's that guy again. Tau: Is he following us or are we following him?        Hamza: Hell yeah, new monsters! And we can beat these!      Itachis... does that mean anything interesting? Anyway, they have a decently punchy attack combined with the Barrier that they usually pull on the first turn if they're alone and one of them if there are multiple, making them harder to hurt. At the moment we can't really do enough damage to take them out before at least one of them can attack.   But it's not a tough formation.       I also switch Hamza over to the Broadsword. Theoretically the Cleaver can do more damage if Variance is with us, but rolling low has screwed me over enough times that I don't trust it unless I have a couple of good Luck boosters to go with it.   Vanessa: Maybe he actually likes people who collect body parts, you know, since he keeps showing up. Charity: God, if he does, I vote we push him down the mountain when we catch up.           It's not quite a treasure behind the waterfall, but almost. Since the Broadsword is still a two-hander, it's a shield upgrade for Charity.      Itachitoris... once again, not sure if that means anything, are offensively... inoffensive. But with a multi-target heal ability, they are priority targets any time they show up.  Hamza: Easy peasy so far. We could've done this right when we started!             This bit always makes me worry I'm going to gently caress up my depth perception and walk off the ledge and hit something else on the way down before I hit the water so I don't get reset.    Farther up, the formations start mixing up the locals a bit.            Kamaitachis are the heavy hitters on this mountain. Division Cut seems to have something going on with the math that means it can actually hit harder than 50% in some situations, I'm not sure whether that's because it can crit or because sufficiently low defenses can somehow skew whatever math is used by damage.   Still not a threat when on their own, though.        One of the pinchier formations, but the gang's still not had anyone flattened on the way up so far.         Hidden Tonic Pouch on the right side, it's a bit tricky because the object you pass behind to get to it is below it rather than level with it.     Hamza: Hey, get back here! Tau: Why are you so concerned with catching him? Hamza: I just wanna ask him how he got so much farther than us so fast.    This one's the toughest encounter of the mountain. You've got a healer, a buffer and a bonker, the holy trinity.  Healer's first priority, but that prevents us from drawing properly aggro from the others or smashing them down early.  See? Here Tau eats what's definitely more than half their health in damage, unless I flunked grade school maths. The exclamation mark on the damage number tells us it's a crit, though, so I guess that's the explanation.  Kamaitachi goes down next because I don't want anyone else getting their HP hacked in half.   And of course I don't play it safe enough and the Itachi gets in a lucky hit before I finish it off and flattens Tau. Oh well, he's used to it.Tau: That doesn't make it better!    We're almost at the top now, but... quick detour first.     The Torpid Cuffs are an odd item, they provide a bonus until level 27 at which point they penalize you, but of course well before that point there will be other, superior strength boosters. I'd presume there's some wacky speedrunning strat that focuses on getting these real fast and then using the outsize strength bonus to smack enemies around super hard until you level up a bit.    I love that the spring at the top of the mountain is a tree with the river flowing out of its crown, that's a really cool idea. Just seeing that alone feels like a reward for getting all the way up here.     Hamza: ? I don't get it. Charity: He's a tsundere, just like in one of Tau's Japanese animes. Tau: If you start that again I will log off. Charity: Sorry, sorry. Hamza: No getting upset, there's a dungeon.      It's hard to capture in screenshots or .gif form, but stepping into the entrance, we simply drop down through a vertical shaft through darkness before landing in this ominous dark chamber.   And a couple of steps south, a boss rushes out of the darkness at us!  Charity: Blech, a giant spider. Tau: A giant spider in a dark dungeon is the right kind of spooky.        Sepulchra doesn't really introduce any new mechanics, but like the Canal Beast is a boss that doesn't just have a single solution. There are heavy-hitting physical attacks you can blind but not interrupt, and nasty magical attacks you can interrupt but not blind.     It starts out with one of the nasty spells, blasting over half of Hamza to ash with a single cast.     Not sure how long the fight was going to last, I wanted to hit him with Cures rather than Curenas to save on Tau's MP, but I miscalculated and that meant Hamza didn't have enough health when Sepulchra did the same again. Hamza: Bury me... with my sword... Vanessa: Calm down you big ham.   If an attack's target dies before they go off, a random target on the same side is picked instead. In the case of defensive and healing spells this usually means nothing meaningful happens.     Also note the difference in damage done to Hamza and Charity, a result of mages usually having more anti-magic armor(Resistance) than physical combatants.         After this, Sepulchra lays off the big attacks for some reason. Enemy AI seems partially deterministic and partially random. They seem to start with the same skill 9 times out of 10, and AP-requiring skills they tend to use as often as they have the AP for it, but beyond that you can't always rely on them doing the exact same thing in the same order, which can both be satisfying because it keeps you on your toes or, in cases like this, cuts me a break because Impale and Thunderbolt are scarier than anything else in the big monster's arsenal.    I was briefly scared of Thunderstorm, but as a compromise for it being a multi-target attack, it does far less damage than Thunderbolt.    That was about it, though, bleed and burn stacks melted the last of the HP off quick.  Also note that when the party leader dies, the second in formation order is up front. So Vanessa gets to be in the lead for a bit now.      In the shadows at the south of the Sepulchra chamber, there's another shaft that drops you down to the crystal, but let's see what these nice... people? Have to say, first.    Vanessa: Tutorial ducks? Cute.    Every class has a "master" somewhere in the world, if you bring a character there who has the class maxed, i.e. all skills learned, you get a class seal which is an accessory that massively boosts LP earned for that class, making it easier for someone else to master it. The seals also have another use we won't learn about for a long time yet. But more importantly, crystal!      Welcome to the Scholar! The local Blue Mage. They're a pretty decent primary class for other casters due to their -20% MP cost, which makes it easy to have them hoofing it around learning skills you pass by.  I flip Tau over to a Scholar/Cleric and make Charity a Shaman/Warlock.   Also worth noting that you know NOTHING about any Scholar skills until you learn them. With 20 active skills, they have more than any other class. Their 25-point, 0-PP Learning ability is really the only meaningful thing they have to spend LP's on. Additionally, one of my few issues with Crystal Project is that do the thing I hate where all Scholar skills are learned individually. Tau: Oh, this is cooooooool. Hamza: Hey, I think we saw a bunch of those "rainbow" skills on the way up here. How about we go back and grab them? Vanessa: You had me at grabbing things.   And now a quick montage.       The Scholar skills so far are primarily buffs and heals. Some pretty good buffs and heals, Sun Bath, for instance, is a nice multi-target heal, costing about half as much as the Cleric's multi-target heal even if it also heals a bit less per character. With that sorted, though, it's time to go poke around at a few things we missed earlier(or rather, that I forgot how to get to because it's been a while since I did a playthrough that wasn't randomized to hell and back).       The first one is above the Seaside Cliffs camp, on east side of the bridge. If we don't drop down early and just keep looping around the hill...    We eventually reach a cave! Charity: These caves are starting to get a bit same-y.         Tau: There's nothing in here... this is just going to be for some "cool" view from the top, isn't it?        Even if nothing else, you might want to set this Home Point just to have a tall local location to warp back to, generally the higher you start, the easier it is to directly navigate to what you want. But that's not all!          That's right! This peak has a horrible boss that utterly outlevels us and will destroy us effortlessly! Hamza: I bet we could take him. Vanessa: Like we could take Gran? Hamza: Oh, don't worry, I have plans for Gran.       So the Troll and its two "Meats" outlevel us enough that they're way faster and act before we do, dumpstering 3/4ths of the party instantly.         Now the Troll IS vulnerable to rogues, being blindable and interruptible(note that his big attacks have a CT or "Charge Time" stat), but it's just not doable at this point without some sort of insane cheese strat that I'm nowhere near clever enough to figure out.  Vanessa: Not again. Charity: We need a break from all the fighting, let's go to the beach!       Down by the Seaside Cliffs, the way over to the westernmost part of them was one that I missed in a very embarrassing way, due to forgetting just how powerful the basic jump is.         The area branches slightly, and the way down the first branch mostly isn't too exciting.          Charity: It does look nice, though. Tau: You know what would look nicer? Not messing around off-road and getting back on track.           We also get a closer look at the weird sea stadium, its purpose is still mysterious and inscrutable, but I can reveal that it's absolutely part of one of the most cheesy gamebreaking moves available to Crystal Project players.    There's also the game's last clamshell. Hooray! They have no real use but we collected them all. Vanessa: That gives me a deep sense of satisfaction. Now, back to the other and more interesting branch.          It starts the same, but this time we make a jump to stay high rather than dropping down.     There's a chest below, and we'll get it, but not just yet. Vanessa: This is violence.     Tau: Oh... I'm getting those spooky Overpass vibes again... Charity: See? Going off-road and seeing cool stuff is good!      There are a number of shrines in the game and, except for two, which are somewhat special, they're more or less all at or near the highest points in their region. Now, what good are they?   Bar one, they all sell a [Shrine Name] stone which teleports you to them. Especially if playing with just the one Home Point, having these pre-set points you can warp to is vital for being able to zoop around efficiently. Even with three home points, it's great, now we can always return to Delende for free, and it's a tiny jaunt downhill to the west to Nan's if we want a heal. The 10 silver price is deceptively high at this stage, though, I had to sell basically all the party's spare gear, including the starter gear, and a few consumables to afford it. Plus, the stones tend to have a surprise...  ...they usually bring you to the roof of the shrine which, in at least a few cases, has or gives access to a chest. Let's see what we got here.   Hamza: I'm equipping this. Vanessa: It's going to turn you into tissue paper! You're our tank! Hamza: Don't care, it's rad and cool and owns.  Vanessa: Guys, say something! Tau: ...I think the edgy dark blood knight thing is cool. Charity: I support Hamza in being who he wants to be. Vanessa: I'm playing with morons.     Also, a miracle happens.       I get an Earth Spirit and it drops and Earth Bangle first try! I don't know what the drop % is because the game doesn't say, but I swear that on previous playthroughs I've had to murder like a dozen of these for a single one. The Bangle itself is only exciting for that trade we can do with it... for now. If you wanted to hyper-optimize you'd probably want to grind out sixteen of these so you could keep eight, for when you really wanted that Earth resistance, and had eight to trade, since the trade is repeatable and optimal play would also be to have another eight of the trade result.    The chest is just a mediocre piece of Medium head armor. So let's go do our trade.           So with the optimal setup, you could give everyone 50% Water resistance or 30% Earth resistance, and I can think of at least a couple of fights that would make a lot easier to the point of beating out just about any other accessories. Cue a scene transition as we finish our off-path chores and there's not enough update left to go for the Fencer crystal.   Tau: Wait, why are we back here? Hamza: Because we can take her. Vanessa: Gran completely wiped us out last time, there's no way we can take her. Charity: Yeah... you just want us to waste our time until she rolls all misses and we crit every hit? Hamza: No. I've got a plan. Haven't you guys figured it out yet? Vanessa: ...gimme a moment, no way you can think of a plan I can't. Actually, give me until tomorrow, it's getting late. Hamza: Deal. But tomorrow we go. END SESSION READER CHALLENGE What is Hamza's plan? We do genuinely have every single thing needed to destroy Gran without gaining even a single extra level or finding a single extra crystal. For anyone who's done it before, please don't spoil it for anyone who might actually be trying to figure it out for themselves.
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Oct 24, 2023 20:27
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Leraika posted:Itachi is japanese for "weasel", as in the yokai "kamaitachi" (sickle weasel) which is maybe what they were going for???? Is that a weasel with knives for paws? Goddamn that's a scary thought.
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Oct 24, 2023 20:48
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Einander posted:The spider blocking the way to Scholar is a boss you can dodge, if you use the pillars on the sides and you're willing to reload a few times. There's only one actual mandatory boss in the game, I think there's one boss that locks off a mobility option that you gain on killing it, without which the game would become somewhat more challenging, but in every other case I believe it should be viable(albeit somewhat circuitous, in cases) to get every class, mobility option, etc. without fighting them. Einander posted:Gran and the Troll are a fun artifact of how the game handles the demo--there's still a few hours to go before it ends, so you can easily play it for ten hours depending on how much you wander. So it's designed kind of like a full game, with Gran and the Troll as its superbosses. It was a cool thing for the dev to do. The developer is a supremely nice person who seems to genuinely care about the players, their opinions and their feedback, and seems to try to make the best game he can.
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Oct 24, 2023 22:45
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MechaCrash posted:At least gathering Monster Magic isn't too bad, because if "give everyone the Learn Monster Magic skill" isn't in the cards (and at 25 points, it may not be!), you can flip everyone to Scholar for long enough to get the spells. And much like the Blue Mages that inspired them, it's a very versatile set that's probably got something useful in it. I always make sure my entire team has all the Scholar Stuff, if only so I only have to make one run at gathering things. The predictability and visibility of spawns also makes it a lot easier, combined with the in-game archive. You know where whatever has the skill you want is, you can see where it's spawned, and you might hit a couple of "wrong" flames, but you'll usually hit the right one pretty fast(and a lot of dungeon flames are hard-coded in terms of what group they contain, anyway). You're not stuck walking back and forth in a vague area for half an hour grinding through random goblins until you get the Skill Knowing Goblin.
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Oct 24, 2023 23:48
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Update 05: Secret Strategy Before we start, I want to blame Crystal Project for the delay in this update, because while playing to record for the LP I remembered how fun the game is and started doing yet another randomized run which has consumed a worryingly large amount of my free time and continues to do so.    Vanessa: There's no way this is going to work.    Hamza: You know about looting, Tau knows stories, Charity knows... uhhh... Charity: I appreciate nice things. Hamza: Right, Charity is a pro appreciator, and I'm a pro fighter. I know this is gonna work.   Vanessa: At least the save point is just up there when this inevitably fails.     So Gran starts like usual by eating Hamza and Vanessa, the taunt is mostly to make sure that Gran's targeting doesn't get any funny ideas and eat Tau instead.   Reverse Polarity is tricky to use since it has a Charge Time of 60, but thankfully we have exactly 69 Arbitrary Time Units to pull it off before Gran does her AI-mandated self-heal.     And perfectly, it does exactly as much damage as she has HP. Vanessa: This is stupid, you're stupid. Hamza: Just admit it worked because I'm a genius. Vanessa: Never in a million years.  Charity: Just... can we find something that isn't gross for once?      Past Gran's lair is an entry into the Underpass, which is like the Overpass, but under things instead of over them.       It's primarily a number of waterways that connect various underground sections of the map. If you had some way to swim without being water soluble, you could take a lot of shortcuts between dungeons and other underground spaces.   For the sake of a sense of mystery, the Overpass and Underpass and a few other areas don't have maps you just grab, instead you collect scraps of them until you have six, and then one NPC we'll find soon-ish can be paid to assemble them into full maps you can actually use.   There's also the Plate of Wolf down here, which goes well with Hamza's Contract and with his being an AP-user in general.   Tau: Now, this is enough of these silly excursions, we're getting back on track, we're getting back to crystals.    Welcome to the Pale Grotto. https://soundcloud.com/schematist/original-rpg-music-cyan-river The theme is calm and faintly melancholic, I like it. Combined with the dark spaces and muted lighting, it's very calm.   Charity: Oh this place is lovely, finally a place where there isn't going to be anything gross or weird.    Vanessa: ...what else can you even fish for? Charity: Crabs? Lobsters? Clams? Tau: Maybe it's metaphorical fishing, like fishing for compliments. Vanessa: Maybe she's just a crazy person and we should move on.        Adding to the calmness is the fact that this is clearly intended to be the FIRST dungeon you go to, rather than starting with the Scholar Mountain or the Canal Beast Cave.     So the enemies here are pretty easy. Hamza: It's not as satisfying to kill them when it's easy.        Charity: Ooooooo, ancient ruins! Vanessa: Ooooooo, ancient loot!       You can actually just skip right past and continue along without going into the ruins, but if we want to continue into the game without doing some Speedrunner Shenanigans, we need to collect three crystals, and the ruins have the third of them.          Tau: They really don't let us get a word in edgewise... Hamza: Trials sound fun, though. It's the sort of place you'd find some really tough enemies.        Tau: ...she didn't mean fishing for birds, did she? Vanessa: I told you, crazy person. Everyone else here is crazy people, and only some of us are sane.            In addition to the Zoobats, there are a bunch of grubs and worms around in the Pale Grotto, too. Once again, due to coming here "late," they're easily killed and they don't have a lot of tricks.       Really just a test of whether you understand the very basicmost mechanics.        It also introduces us to the idea that enemies detect us via line of sight, so we can avoid fights we don't like by being a bit sneaky. It's not often important on normal difficulty, but there are a few cases where it's downright vital and on harder difficulties, especially if playing on hardcore mode, it starts being even more important.    Charity: NO, DON'T YOU DO IT. Hamza: Mmmmm... amphibiany.   Hamza: Hey, why's everything... getting dark... feeling woozy... Licking the frog is actually a full heal, not a joke death. I don't think any other dungeons in the game have this sort of mid-dungeon heal, so it's another example of how this is a super-merciful starter dungeon.          This also has our first Rapier pickup. Rapiers are primarily the weapons for Warlocks and Fencers, some Rogue skills can also work with Rapiers, but a primary-classed Rogue can't use them and they lose access to some important skills when wielding a Rapier so you'll primarily want to use a Dagger with a Rogue anyway.         And our boss for the dungeon is the Guardian, a giant caterpillar.     Its Wind weakness is puzzling since outside of a class-randomized start, or a start with random start locations, there's no way to have any kind of Wind-elemental attack at this point that I can think of      The only interesting thing about the fight is a discovery I make during it. Blitz Crush, one of the Warrior abilities is meant to hit you back with 20% of the damage you do... but with the Contract, it doesn't. I'm not sure whether it's A) because the Lifesteal from the Contract balances it out in one calculation or B) because the 100% Lifesteal affects the "Recoil" damage, too. I can't really think of any way to test, but it's pretty handy.   It drops a nice armor for Vanessa but that's about it, now about that crystal...            Tau: It's nice of Astley to help us stay on task and know where we're going. Vanessa: "Nice." They're probably doing it for their own benefit, somehow. Tau: Are you always this cynical? Don't you ever trust people? Vanessa: I mean, I trust you guys because I know how damaged you are, you can't surprise me.      The reason I was originally confused by Astley's gender is that they have female Fencer hairstyle, but not female Fencer exposed midriff. Anyway, Fencers are pretty useful, there are some combos you can use to make them do some truly broken amounts of damage. Their main weakness is that all their skills require a Rapier, which not a lot of other combat classes can work with, and which tend not to have any fun attributes, but they have nice spread of being able to do high single target damage, multi-target attacks and some conditions.    But for now, let's head towards the Trials.         The exit is mostly just a nice walk along a moody underground lake.      Charity: I'm going to be sad to leave this place, I love the mood. Tau: Hmmm... do you think all these waterways actually connect? Charity: Maybe? Tau: I hope we can find a boat, I'd love to find out, it would be so cool if these rivers didn't just spring out of nowhere and end nowhere.     And with that, we're back into fresh air.       Back into fresh air and back to chests that draw our attention but have unclear ways to read them. This one is actually a little bit mean.  Because the ledge you have to hop on to reach it(at least without coming back notably later) is partially hidden behind the waterfall.           At least a Tonic Pouch is a decent reward for our time and effort.          Tau: That's a good question, are we her friends? Charity: Why not, it can't hurt. Vanessa: Unless she lures us into a trap and backstabs us. Hamza: If she does that we just win the ambush, simple.    Anything further west is just where we came from, heading east, on the other hand, prompts a quick shift to a much more... blue, tone of existence, and the theme switches to the calm one from the Spawning Meadows.      You can just jump straight down, but if you instead run along the treetops on the north side of the Proving Meadows, you can collect some extra loot on the various ledges.        It's mostly minor stuff, but I can't imagine any Crystal Project player who didn't hoover it all up. Tau: Enough looting, let's get back on track.      There are some merchants down here, but for now all I care about is buying the maps I don't have, since I like being able to actually navigate to places.   A sneakily hidden chest behind the tent also contains another Burglar's Glove.      I think I mentioned this earlier already, but if I didn't, here's another mechanic! Making death to a boss not penalized encourages some degree of experimentation, but makign death to mook enemies penalized encourages you to be more careful if you're exploring somewhere out of your level range.       And the goon squad is also here. Tau: Aw, that's cute, they've made their own little party. Vanessa: Psh, they're using DLC skins, you can tell they're tryhards. Most other "classed" NPC's use the default skins we do, but like Astley, each of the other members of their gang have small changes, like Reid having dark armor unlike a Warrior's normal red armor.      There's a weapon, armor and accessory merchant over here, too.       Tau: Whoo, deep breaths, this is exciting! Hamza: Yeah, I get you, there's gonna be like, new things to kill! Tau: I meant more that we're finally making real progress, not just wandering around looking for shiny things or cool views.     The Knight! The special mechanic here is tied to the action bar at the bottom, he starts the battle with SIX actions, rather than just one! Charity: Oh no, he's going to mince us!      Charity: ...really?   And a single attack of any kind puts him down. Whomp whomp.    Hamza: Let's just pretend that didn't happen.    It's tempting to just head straight down the stairs, but...       The rows of lamps are placed so you can jump on the first ones and then bounce your way down the staircase. The ones on the left don't lead to anything, but the ones on the right lead to an equipment chest.   Nothing special but an upgrade over our current shield options. Now, how about that other chest?    Tau: For the love of God, just poke the crystal! Vanessa: Not until we get our hands on that chest.        If you get on the ledge that the... mushroom things, are zooming past on occasionally, you can wiggle your way up these ledges on the right, then on to the big ledge up top, and then it's smooth sailing.      It leads to the first of a sub-selection of swords that sacrifice attack power for defense power, making them tanking swords. 20 Defense is actually a pretty big improvement, especially at this stage, but I'm unclear on whether Defense and Resistance are linear in their effects or whether they taper off, but I think they're linear, so if you're really struggling for some ubertank build in the later game, it might be worth returning to this class of weapons to milk every last bit of Defense you can.      This crystal grants us the Aegis class which is a more defensively oriented Warrior. Almost all their abilities are about buffing their own defense, and they only have two (non-weapon specific) attacks which weaken the target's magic resistance and magic attack respectively, filling out a gap in the Warrior's abilities which weaken physical resistance and attack. I never found myself using Aegis much in the later game, but for now it's an obvious fit to go with Hamza, while Vanessa gets to be a Fencer.  Hamza: This is the dorkiest-looking skin in the game. I hate this.     Tau: What is this? Vanessa: It's progress, I thought you wanted that. Tau: This is someone dropping acid and then scribbling stuff on the walls.      The mushrooms don't push you or initiate fights, they just stop if you block their path and are impermeable, forcing you to "go with the flow" and making going the wrong way remarkably difficult, so eventually...     Tau: I don't think I'm drunk enough to handle this tonight. END SESSION Next time, we handle "Skumparadise" which is probably one of the weirder area names and all round weirder-feeling areas in the game.
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Nov 5, 2023 02:04
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How Rude posted:The randomizer is VERY thorough and has many options to customize what gets randomly swapped. My only issue with the randomizer is that it's a bit too random, when it comes to mangling classes, you often end up with classes that are borderline unplayable and only a few which are actually viable to use, so I wish it had a "middle" setting where it tried to "theme" classes or somewhat stick to their original ratio of offensive/defensive/utility abilities. Randomized item pickups including quest items really strains your memory for where things are and how to navigate places without tools you might be used to, on the other hand, and is very good, and randomized crystals+starting classes+bosses+enemies means you can get some wild surprises. Ultiville posted:It’s probably because I suck, but Skumparadise is a low point imo. I started a replay because this LP reminded me that I really like the game overall, but the last bit of this area is sucking for me. Looking forward to see how you handle it, though part of the problem is I randomed crystals this run and I’m not sure I have great tools for it from this set. Part of the thing about Skumparadise is that really only has one fight you're expected to fight, the remainder you're all expected to avoid and resultingly have low to no actual rewards for fighting them(aside from a bit of XP, I don't even think they give money). But we'll have a look at that when we get there.
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Nov 7, 2023 16:22
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Update 06: Skumparadise Welcome to Skumparadise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxqHublI5n8   Hamza: Stay on your toes, everyone, no telling what the Trial might test us with. Tau: Very ominous atmosphere... oppressive but not creepy...    Skumparadise's gimmick is that, more than any other dungeon, avoiding fights is relatively trivial. Without being a tutorial, it's a tutorial in how to dodge fights you don't want, amplified by all enemies in here except the end boss having no drops or rewards except XP and learning points.          Also if you land on any of the mushrooms, most of them will move, carrying you past danger or forming platforms. Once again, it's only necessary in, I believe, one spot, but trains you to regard NPC's as platforms in future situations. Charity: Ugh, if this game has mounts I hope we get to ride something normal, and not like, a mushroom or... Vanessa: A giant slug? Hamza: A skeleton? Charity: Uuuuuugh.  The Awake ring is situationally useful for its immunity and an early Mind boost, but otherwise not really super noteworthy.  Hamza: ...what if we didn't avoid all the fights, though, and instead fought all the fights? Good question!    Skumparadise enemies are all creepy-looking mushrooms.    Unique to them is that they all have an untyped free action attack that does a decent chunk of damage for this stage of the game. Sword icon attacks are physical, orb icon attacks are magical, gear icon attacks are untyped and, unless they have an elemental type that can be resisted or negated, will always do full damage.  The three-shroom formations can actually be slightly scary if you don't swing their targeting right since two of them ganging up on your tank before they can get an action or a heal can be bad news.             Vanessa: No sense fighting these if they don't drop anything, Hamza. Hamza: ...but they're there. Skumparadise also has a decent number of secret things, so let's rewind slightly...  From the chest with the Awake ring, we can jump to the lanterns in the background.           And get a second Awake Ring by continuing across the OTHER lanterns, then jumping into the background.      Charity: Stupid mushroom, it's broken, it won't go any farther. The other mushrooms block the first one, but that just means we can use it as a platform to go up...      ...and collect another background goodie. Crystal Project dungeons also like to play around with the perspective a bit. It's usually subtle, but while usually at something like a 45-degree angle when viewing the party, here we're almost watching the gang from side on, more like a 10-degree angle.    Tau: Hey, the other mushrooms move when we jump on them, where are these ones going to go?  Charity: I had to go get a drink for one minute and you managed to drown us all in lava. Tau: In my defense there might have been something cool down there! Charity: Sure if you think horrible fiery death is cool.    Get the other three to run into the lava, then your forward-moving shroom can proceed.    You don't need the mushroom to make the jump, but the flames here can't jump, so any amount of height keeps them from nibbling on your ankles.   Once again the flames can be dodged, but this one has a new kind of mushroom to show off.     Fungers are like chunkier Shroomers that pick up the Spore skill. It's one of the rare times a debuff effect isn't 100%, but it still sticks often enough that it can easily leave you with only one or two characters able to act, and one of those getting their rear end beat. So you want to splatter them fast.        The trick here is really just patience. The mushrooms make a zigzaggy route that will always get you to the end. Here, though, it gets you to a ledge with a flame, but if you jump early, you can hop over the flame and on to the little "backrest."      And for the next one you don't even need to jump on the mushroom, you can literally just outrun the flame. Vanessa: Okay, this is kind of fun, I like outwitting these flames. Tau: It's nice to be using our brains instead of our swords and legs for once.      These two have the trick that you can't just stay on the mushroom but have to jump over or run around an obstacle to keep the high ground. Once again, a neat little trick, not too hard.    Once again I just run.     This jump is usually my bane of Skumparadise, I've inexplicably flubbed the jump to the leftmost mushroom so many times.   Once again, though, a twist. If you stay on the mushroom, the enemies in the niches will rush out and attack you, but if you jump to the front row of shrooms, you'll be out of aggro range.      Tau: Outsmarted! Hah! Vanessa: Whoah be careful, Tau, you're in danger of enjoying yourself.           From here on out we can almost turn off our brains. There's just one last trick.       Tau: We could fight those- Hamza: We could?! Hell yes! Tau: -or we could let them beat themselves up.    The flames can't jump or fly, but their aggro range is long enough that they try to straight path to you anyway and go right over the edge.    The reason we care about bypassing them at all is because there's a little gap in between two of the pillars farther right.        Which leads to the Mana Ring, an accessory that provides as much +Mana by itself as both of Charity's Earrings do together, freeing up one of the slots for something else, like an Awake Ring.           And of course the secret also continues further right to ANOTHER secret with a decent one-handed weapon. Hamza's still doing more damage with the Contract, but if we didn't have that, this would be a great upgrade at this point.  Anyway, the intended route.          Tau: ...I hate these narrow corridors, I be there's going to be a jump scare. Charity: ...well that would suck, thanks for making me expect it now, too. Vanessa: So far we've been scarier than anything in here. Hamza: Ha ha, yeah, if an evil clown or something jumps out at us we'll just whoosh, pow, smack! Tau: ... Hamza: You know, like sound effects, of us fighting, and winning.      This area can be a bit confusing since you can't see the holes to jump up through until you're right under them.     Charity: Finally, no more mushrooms.   Hamza: Finally! A proper fight!   Unless you count the optional bosses, like Gran and the Troll, I would say that the Parasite is probably the first boss that has a chance of being a temporary roadstop for new players who're trying to pay a bit of attention.    Like the other mushrooms, he has a Shroomy Gaze attack, giving him a default relatively nasty punchiness since that's about half the health of any character in the party.  If he chose to Absorb and Shoomy Gaze one character in the same turn, he'd be more or less guaranteed to one-shot them.   Funks are, well, small mushrooms, that have Attack and Shroomy Gaze. He'll pop it every so often if there are no living Funks. By itself not too bad, except...  ...Atmoshear means that it's hard to focus individual targets and I didn't bring any multi-target offensive spells. This is not the rudest use of Atmoshear in the game, but it makes the Funks defensive as well as offensive, but also makes it hard to blitz them down when they're summoned to cut the enemy offense.  And Dream Eater is often used by enemies that can put you to sleep from here on out. Once again an untyped skill, so it'll really shred the target even if it's your chonky tank type character.      After the first round of combat, the Parasite of course sets up the Funks and lines up an Atmoshear.    I immediately gently caress up and get Hamza killed when I aggro one of the Funks on him, but forgot to aggro the other one and it randomly chose him as target for murder. Hamza: Sometimes being a tank sucks.     Another effect of the Parasite using untyped skills is that Daze and Stun effects don't slow it down, because they don't use AP and don't have CT charge times, instead at most having hard cooldowns, this makes it a lot harder to lock down. There are SOME untyped skills that break this stereotype, but they're the rarer ones.     With the Funks down I start wearing the Parasite itself down... but just before I do, it manages to summon another pair of Funks.    Interestingly, even though I kill the Parasite, the Funks remain. There are some summons in the game that have scripted Escape abilities they'll use if their "owner" gets killed, but most will in fact hang around, so you can't rely entirely on just blitzing down a single enemy.  They're not greatly challenging, in any case. But if the fight had left everyone almost dead, it could've gone poorly.      Vanessa: Great, these dorks again. Tau: As long as they don't want to attack us, no reason to be hostile... The party will run into Astley & Co. over the course of the game, but since they're on their own quest, if you start sequence breaking, they'll be in the next place relevant to where you sequence break to, and not in the previous locations, so you can miss some meetups depending on your order of play                  Charity: That was an odd interaction. Tau: Yeah I... didn't even know what to say. Hamza: Well if I hadn't been dead I know what I would've said when that Talon joker came up to us: 1v1 me bro. Tau: Sooner or later someone's going to take you up on that, you know. Hamza: Oh yeah, I can't wait! It's going to rule. Vanessa: Five bucks says you eat dirt. Hamza: You're on!  And we get another quote like the one at the start of the game. It gives me a sense of the dev as being a big fan of unstructured play and people making their own fun, with the creator's intent of a piece being less important than the fun people make with it.        Charity: Fresh air, at last!          The Capital Courtyard is a relatively small space that mostly exists to give you a quick breath of fresh air between the Trial Caves/Skumparadise and the next section.      Charity: Some nice, normal birds.   There are two locked doors in the walls, but we won't be able to access them for a bit yet, nor is there a reason to rush to it... because we can get where they lead in other, creative ways anyway.    Charity: Hey, there's Chloe. Tau: What's she doing up there? Charity: Probably staring at the birds, she seems to like them. Tau: Hmmmmm.   Aaaand that's where I choose to leave everyone in suspense for what's at the top of the stairs. Primarily because the next area took WAY more screenshots than I expected and I'm trying to not make the updates unreadably long, since that was a complaint on some previous LP's.
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Nov 14, 2023 21:22
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Tylana posted:Unreadably long can be a drag for sure. The targeting isn't random, it's subject to the same Threat mechanic as everything else, and the basic shrooms' only other ability is a normal attack, plus there's a cooldown on the Shroomy Gaze that prevents them from spamming it repeatedly.
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Nov 14, 2023 23:52
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Ultiville posted:I like a lot of the platforming in this game but yeah, some assist options for it would be great, and there are definitely platforming sequences that wear out their welcome. Particularly, as Purple pointed out in an early post, some of the ones where failed jumps don't end you up in lava so you can end up having to repeat a lot of easy jumps to get to the one you're struggling with. I think I can name a total of three jumping sections in the game that make me swear and curse. I'll be sure to point them out when we get there. So far everything's pretty easy. All of the really bad platforming sections are also, I will note, optional ones. They lead to some very good stuff, but nothing you need to complete the game.
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Nov 15, 2023 12:34
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Update 07: Capital Sequoia Welcome to the first real town location in the game.  https://soundcloud.com/schematist/mythril-steps      The music is upbeat and active, and there are a good number of NPC's that aren't just standing still but walking around on various cycles, giving an impression of a place with activity. Tau: An actual city! With shops! And people! Hamza: Ugh, there's not going to be anything to fight here. Tau: But there's going to be lore and dialogue.    A couple of kids are running circles around the central fountain, let's stop them and see if they have anything to say.   Tau: Okay, that was pretty predictable, I guess. Vanessa: No no, this is important lore.    The Capital has new merchants for every category we've seen so far. Better weapons, better armor, better accessories, better consumables and a few unique things.    Hamza: What does this guy sell? Charity: Oh my god, a penguin! Cute! Vanessa: There's no rules that says a penguin can't engage in capitalism.   Vanessa: ...what the hell did you just put in our inventory? Charity: Penguin. Vanessa: Well put it back! The inventory is an extradimensional space for valuable objects, not a petting zoo! Charity: Make me.    Some of the merchants here hint at the existence of classes we haven't seen yet... and some of their issues. But I'll complain about ninjas when we get access to ninjas.      Tau: Well, we're clearly not meant to go this way yet, we should go another way. Vanessa: I can already think of five ways to sequence break this. Tau: For once, please don't. I don't want to end up at a final boss at level 2 again. Vanessa: Not my fault they left that emote bug in the game, I was just using what they gave me.      There's about a dozen "lost penguins" scattered around the capital, which encourages experimenting with getting places, exploring, etc. a very diegetic way to get people to experiment without a tutorial popup.      Hamza: What's with these weird back alleys? Tau: Don't worry about it, probably somewhere we'll go for a quest later. Charity: I'll be happy to avoid back alleys and sewers for as long as possible.      We won't have much use for Exotic weapons for a while yet, until we acquire some relevant classes.    Spears have lower attack but defensive bonuses, scythes tend to be two-handers that ignore some amount of enemy defense and bows hit hard but have an accuracy penalty, which makes them somewhat riskier to use, a bit like battle axes with their Variance.      The Plug Lure is our first fishing lure, we could head back to the fishing camp in Delende, buy the fishing pole and have the Warlock there do some fishing for us. I don't recall there being anything interesting from it, though, but I might pop back later to double check. As mentioned, bizarrely, no one seems to have logged all the fishing rewards, so it's a bit unclear what's available there.        The Know-It-All Ducks are about the closest thing you come to an explicit tutorial, since they tell you about how a lot of mechanics work in detail. Not often stuff you need, but tidbits like how Always Dodge abilities trump Always Hit abilities or exactly what a given stat affects. It's a place you can completely ignore, but it's nice to have it there for the people who really want to understand how every mechanic works in detail or the people who want to play ultra giga hardcore mega punishment mode and need to be able to leverage every last percentage point of power.       Charity: God, now I feel old. Hamza: You're in your 20's. Charity: Oof ouch my brittle bones, bring me my cane.    The Sour Pop Candies are pretty great MP recovery items, being percentage-based means that especially in the late game they provide a lot of MP recovery.   Charity: The only ingredient in milk should be milk. There shouldn't be any plural! Hamza: What if it's a mix of milk and milk? That's two ingredients.    Tau: ...well it was nice while it lasted. Hamza: What? I just felt like standing on this sign.  Hamza: And this lamp.  Hamza. Aaaand this roof.     Charity: How'd the little fella get up here? Penguins are flightless.      Almost every rooftop has something hidden somewhere, and with the way the game handles the existence or non-existence of roofs, you usually can't tell until you poke your head in or are very close, so you're forced to actually do a bit of investigating, you can't always see them from afar.      Vanessa: Still want to hang around? Tau: ...not in this creepy house, no. Sam the Sadist has one or two niche uses in the game, but not many.     Above the Know It All Ducks, we also find our first Craftwork items. Most of the Craftwork items are pretty dire in terms of stats, but they're also all upgradeable if we find the right resources. First to Silver, then Gold and finally Diamond. They have absolutely no weird quirks(except for those inherent to their type of item, like Axes having Variance) but usually very good stats, and there's only one of each. All of the Craftwork basic items are located in Capital Sequoia, so it's another reason to explore around besides penguins and it ensures that for every class you will always have a weapon that's roughly appropriate for the current game tier... unless of course you have multiple classes that want to use the same thing, so I guess don't have that.          There are also a number of additional Class Masters in town, usually hanging out next to a chest with a Craftwork item in it. All of them are hidden in various isolated second story apartments.        A lot of the "hidden" areas also chain into each other. You get a bit of height, that connects to another place, which lets you get to a place, and a place, and a place. There are still some bits of the Capital we won't be able to reach for a while, but for now we can still reach most of it.  It might also seem like there's no way out, but the chest we just opened provides a leg up needed to cross this fence and we can get back to checking out the main parts of town.      The last location in the lower Capital is a standard inn for recuperating everyone, I bring Hamza back to life while I'm here.       Vanessa: What the hell is a Quintar? Tau: Based on the name... I guess it has five legs? Vanessa: Or five eyes. Hamza: Or we could need to hit it five times. Charity: No, it's going to be nice, and friendly, and cute, and we're going to ride one.   Hamza: Thanks for bringing me back to life. After like two hours. Assholes.       More rooftops to explore before we head up to the next level, though.      More Craftwork stuff, also this might look like a dead end, but...          Using the game's excellent air control when jumping allows us to get around a corner and up on to the walls.    Charity: Oooooh, look at those rolling grasslands. Tau: City first, nature later.       In the middle city, the first building we come to is the library.         There's a very vital item here which might free Tau from having to be a Scholar for another 20 LP.       There are few important steals, but this guy will help you out if you've either got some OCD completionism going on or if you just want to make sure you didn't miss anything. He's a lot more important in randomized games, where quest items or crafting materials like diamond ingots or gold dust might end up being rare steals or drops, or good equipment.    I also buy every single map I can afford since it's vital for not getting lost in certain areas, even after multiple playthroughs.       Next door is the shop that'll let us turn Craftwork items into Silver items. We have some Craftwork items, but so far no Silver. Each crafting material is split into Dust, Ingots and Ore, which also sometimes forces making some choices since it takes a bit of effort and time to find enough for ALL the upgrades. In my original playthrough I never actually found enough Gold to complete all the upgrades, but it's possible.      Tau: ...wow, I can't believe we're not cool enough.        Charity: Astley really seems very concerned about everything, must be stressful. Tau: They're so concerned they're making me concerned.    The bulletin board is another reason to revisit the capital from time to time, as it will in fact see updates. At this point we now also have multiple reasons to hunt down more crystals: To get into the Luxury Store, to get a Quintar Pass and to get out of the western gate. Even if we didn't just like exploring, there are pressures pushing us out and about.            I'm not entirely sure why the town has two inns, the only difference is that this one doesn't have anyone staying there and we can collect a penguin in the room up top.       Growth Change is related to levelling. When you level as a class, it affects your base stats based on that class. Mages get better at magering, warriors get better at warrioring, and some classes are hybrid. If we later decided to take out all of Hamza's muscles and put them in his brain, we could go here, and go: "Hey, we wish he'd levelled up his PHD instead of his sword arm" and pay for it. That's it. Rarely necessary except when ultra min/maxing, but nice that it's an option.       Up top we can swap genders, it costs money, but after one gender swap, a given character can swap again for free. Gender has an extremely minor stat difference, nothing to worry about, but we can do it if we want to piss off nerds on the internet or just prefer one gendered set of sprites over the other. Hamza: Wait, you mean they'll want to do PvP if I become a girl? Vanessa: Only if they know you weren't always one. Hamza: Sheesh, some folks need to get a life.   More penguins.         The practice dummies... we'll come back to. They'll be more interesting later.   I considered this for a moment and then never really bothered with min/maxing my growth, I 100%'ed the game without it, I can do it again. Now, for more jumping.  So we can get to this chest up there.         These pole jumps used to be tough for me, but I aced it this time.        Some day someone will be a Monk for a while, probably Tau.              Hamza: All that jumping, just for a penguin? Charity: No bird left behind!   We can also slide down through the chimneys, a couple of which actually lead to otherwise-inaccessible locations.    Another Craftwork item, then off-screen I go back to the rooftops again for an alternate path.        Boom, more penguin. Now for the upper Capital.      All the shops are downstairs, but there are still some important things up here, firstly...     We will now never need to waste a home point to return here thanks to the Gaea Shrine.  All the chests behind her contain is Gaea Shards, i.e. one-use Stones, so let's try out the Stone.     No chests up here, but it's worth noting it lets us get on the wall to the west. Now we can access every part of the city walls except for the two southernmost sections of the west wall. This is more important than it sounds.    And there's another Deity for when we get a Summoner, that's the Deity of Fire, the Deity of Wind and the Deity of Earth(in Lake Delende) found.  Charity: Oh my God! A hedge maze! I love hedge mazes! Hamza: If you think about it a maze is like fighting your own sense of direction. Vanessa: You're really hungry for some combat, huh, buddy? Hamza: Sob, I need to kill something.         Hamza: Please, we have to, PLEASE. Tau: Only because it's a quest. Hamza: YES! KILL!    The flames in here run away from us, often revealing hidden gaps in the hedges we can use to slip deeper into the maze.   https://soundcloud.com/schematist/jrpg-battle-theme-concept-azure-wings Improper Imps are not a danger in any sense of the word.     They only ever show up solo and we're not affected by Threat mechanics like enemies are, so they're mostly just a way for Tau to learn a new Monster Magic skill. Sucks for them that murdering them all is a quest objective, all the flames in the hedge maze are Improper Imps.  They ARE somewhat hard to hit for their level, though. Rude.          There's another craftwork item and an accessory, andthen... there's not really anywhere else to go from this entrance into the maze. This requires a new approach, clearly.         Vanessa: Hmmm, no secret entrance from the gardener's shed.    Hamza: Oh poo poo. Charity: Hey, what's this? Vanessa: Uhhhhh... hey Charity how do you feel about crystal caves? Charity: Oooooh, well crystal caves are one of my favourite fantasy biomes, but it has a lot to do with the execution and the colour, now pinkish- Tau: Nice save, guys. Hamza: Yeah, we didn't want a repeat of the Stardew Valley Incident. The Gardener will plant seeds we can find, sometimes as drops, sometimes as chest objects. Each seed will take ??? ingame time to grow into a plant which, when harvested, will give us a battle with an enemy we can't find anywhere else. Some of these enemies have special drops that likewise are hard to find elsewhere.   Anyway, the secret to progressing in the maze is this little hidden "doorway" behind the suspicious outcropping.          The Craftwork Crown is notable for being the first Craftwork item that's an upgrade on our current gear without being upgraded to Silver.  This place is also a rude little place, because right next to the place where we came in, is another way out... which splits into two paths.        One leading to the central fountain and a ring.        And one leading through an annoyingly twisty path to the last 20% or so of the maze.      Charity: A spooky castle... Tau: I don't think we can jump that gap, though, maybe there's another way in. Hamza: Or we need some longjump boots or something.       And with that, the maze is tapped out.         Hamza: Boomer... like explosions? I'm in. Now we just need to find out where it is.       The Gardener's Key is also immediately useful, we may as well get those seeds planted right away.     I always felt like the gardener was kind of ominous.       The penguin pen is the last location in the upper capital we've yet to check out.        These two onlookers will change their commentary depending on how many penguins are in the pen, but, I must confess: I was too lazy to collect the penguins one by one to get all of their changed dialogues. So there you go, there's your reason to buy the game yourself after reading this LP, to get all those lines commenting on the density of penguins within the penguin pen.                 Charity: Nooooo, my penguins... Tau: They'll be happier in their natural habitat: a temperate grasslands pen where people gawk at them.    I believe there are 12 or 13 penguins in total, so we're almost there.         Charity: Oh no, I knew this was coming. Tau: Maybe it won't be as bad as you expect, relax.   The Lost & Found sells all boss steals we miss and occasionally a few other items I'm not entirely sure how are defined, but anything that would otherwise be permanently missable will be in here. I feel like it's a nice feature. Many of the missed steals will be quite expensive, so stealing them is still preferable, but you cannot lock yourself out.        The sewers are come up under the city in three locations, and have two layers, the latter of which can be a bit confusing at first, since not all of the routes down connect to the same layer. The sewers have no music, only drippy cave ambience.        The waterways being four tiles wide also prevent us from just jumping across them, meaning we're somewhat locked in, in our options.       There are also these large spillage pipes in four different locations below the walls. They also serve as entrance points! The first time I got here, in my first playthrough, before I found the stairs down inside the city, I found the walls, dropped off the walls on to these, and curved my jump in through the pipes.     There are also a few NPC's down here. This guy's one to keep in mind.      These stairs lead to one of the lower city entrances.         On the way across the rooftops to the second, I collect our 11th penguin. I think that means just one more to go.        From here we can drop down to the last one.      Hamza: ... Vanessa: ... Tau: ... Charity: I think it's actually sweet to know that love can bloom anywhere. Vanessa: Oh I don't think that's love blooming out of his trousers.      Let's just leave them alone and get back into the sewers...     And face our first sewer enemy! Hobos are not particulaly threatening, but they do have an interesting skill selection!     By which I mean they have one really interesting skill. Lucky Dice can do anything from 0 damage to twice the listed damage, and they completely ignore armor. If you stack Luck boosters(which increase both the base damage and help Variance land higher) and some of the boosters that improve Variance, it can be one of the most damaging skills in the game, especially since nothing reduces it. I never used it much but I'm sure there's some sort of wild speedrun strat that abuses it right to hell.       Hamza: You know, this city's really big, I don't even know where to go next. Vanessa: Well I have some ideas- Tau: No! We're staying on the path like we're supposed to! Charity: ...honestly this sewer wasn't as gross as I expected, I wonder what's down here... Hamza: What I know is it's late and I have class tomorrow. Let's figure it out next time. END SESSION VOTE Once again we have multiple options! A: Listen to Vanessa and break out of the city to the West. Probably brutally overlevelled for us. B: Listen to Tau and follow the plot which seems to want us to head East into the Rolling Quintar Fields. C: Listen to Charity and see what sort of things we can find in the Jojo Sewers undearneath Capital Sequoia.
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Nov 15, 2023 20:34
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Tylana posted:If you drop down from that final shot, does it go anywhere cool? Well, depednding on the drop, just into the moat and a respawn... or you could end up with a fun encounter that will, at this stage, also result in a respawn after getting our asses beat. We'll be back.
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Nov 18, 2023 20:49
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Update 08: The Sewer Level Tau: Let's get this over with. Hamza: Sewer levels aren't all bad, just... Tau: Most of them? Hamza: I mean, sure, but there's, uh. Um. Tau: No no go on, what's the legendary good sewer level? Hamza: Yeah I got nothin'. But maybe this'll be the first!       So the sewers have... nine entrances, six of which we have access to currently, and which are mostly paired so each entrance also connects to one other one.       The first one is a bust, which just leads back to one of the others and has no other benefits.  Charity: Okay, so the first one didn't work, but we're not done yet!        We've also got a few new enemies to run into down here. I loving hate these rats.    The reason I hate them isn't because they're powerful, but because of that goddamn Reckless Assault skill. One of them will always start with it, and it means you can't guide them anywhere with Threat, so all you can do is kill them fast before they get lucky and blow up a caster.      Charity: There! That's something interesting! The Quintar Nest we're... not heading into quite yet. There are a couple of ways in, and this is clearly the unintended but optional way.           There are even two connections into the Quintar Nest. It's actually an interesting thing because the Jojo Sewers -> Quintar Nest entrance is less demanding of pathfinding and platforming, so this is one place where the game kind of lets you choose for yourself. There's very little to miss by doing it this way, in terms of power and equipment, and you can go back and refind what little you miss later when it's a bit easier to do.    In terms of sewer exploration, though, this is another dead end... except for this door. Which is a different kind of dead end.     Because this guy is going to kill us. Hamza: Well, could be worse, at least it's a blob of blood. Vanessa: How could it be worse than fighting a giant angry blood clot? Hamza: At least it's not like a pile of garbage or poop. Vanessa: Ah, thanks, yes. Thank you for that mental image.      The Blood Slop is a tough fight because, once again, it's a boss with all untyped skills, meaning that we can't improve our own defense or worsen its attack power. Between that, and it often hitting us with Weep and Bleed status effects, it can be hard to keep up with its damage output.  It beats my rear end, though I do get close to winning, so this seems like a good reason to come back later. Now, for the third entrance. This time we're coming down from the town above.        As usual there are a lot of dead ends.         Vanessa: ...it isn't aggro yet. Be very quiet, maybe we can snatch the loot without getting attacked...    Vanessa: Okay, I didn't expect that to work.  Hamza: ...Is this a bug?   Hamza: I'm gonna poke it, ready up!      Narco Beasts are always avoidable because, well, they're asleep. You also get some turns to buff up and ready to bonk them if you wanna smack them without getting injured, letting your AP charge up, for instance. Of course, you can also just start swinging like a maniac, wake it up and bonk away and eat the hits, but it's kinda fun. Hamza: Aw, he just wanted to nap. I feel bad about this now. Oh well, at least we're getting XP.      Another Narco Beast, we can literally jump across it.    Tau: The what. Vanessa: Oh boy, I can't wait for them to yell at me over avocado toast.      The questions are all answered by stuff that the kids in town tell us. You can just brute force it because there aren't TOO many options, but it's a little reward for paying attention and chatting with everyone!     Vanessa: This is about the last club I wanted to be a member of. Ugh, let's get this over with.      This flame is another Narco Beast. You can actually sneak around it if you're super careful.         Tau: Wading around in sewer water, what a joy. Charity: Unless you've got some mods on that I don't, I don't think this setting has bathrooms, so it's not that gross. Tau: It's the principle of it.         The climb up to the Boomer Society has no enemies except that one Narco Beast, nor any really tough jumps. It's a quiet and peaceful little climb.                Hamza: I love a good bit of jumping. It's been a while since we did any nice climbing. There is, of course, something hidden here.        In the foreground is this very questionable piece of gear. I can see the usecase for more or less all other equipment in the game, but this one I've never figured out.         Vanessa: This is a ridiculously tall climb, I'm pretty sure we're higher than street level in the Upper Capital. Where the hell are we going?       Welcome to the Boomer Society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmKm6j5maME  It's a small, completely safe zone where everyone's nice to us.   It also has the renaming NPC. Like with gender change, once it's been done once, the character is malleable for free afterwards.   There's also our first lore duck. Tau: Lore?! Where?! GIMME!   The reason I picked a group of gamer buddies as the framing device for the characters is related to this.     If you don't go to the Boomer Society, you don't really get it seriously hinted at for a while, but...    ...the world of Crystal Project is very obviously intended to be an MMO, with the GM as the reigning admin and "banishes" being bannings. Imagine if killing Lord British in UO made you the new owner of the game world. That would've been a trip. Tau: Tasty, crunchy lore... Vanessa: C'mon, Hannibal Lecter, stop trying to gnaw on the duck. There are more people to chat with here.    New book in the corner, I hand it off to Tau because they finally learned Lucky Dice and now have a handful of offensive spells, so keeping them on bonky stick duty felt like a waste.     A bit of free money that I think is occasionally accessible again? I'm not sure if it's level scaled or progress scaled or anything, because after this early bit where the Boomer Society home point is a nice base to have bookmarked, I don't think I ever came back here later.  Vanessa: Okay, now to find out where the hell we are.    We're on the lower slopes of the peaks to the northwest of Capital Sequioa. This means that we can easily hop past the western gate if we wanted to enter the foggy grasslands out there, or on to the walls if we wanted a slightly less acrobatic way up there, or just drop right into town if that was the plan.     Charity: Awww, some nice cute sheeps.      Charity: ...it's weird when they talk.   Another good reason to Home Point the Boomer Society is that they have a free rest point. Not that the ones in the Capital are super expensive, but it's nice.       There's also the "Boomer Treasury" guy who will lend you either their big two-hander or their special shield, but only one of them at a time, so you have to trade in the one you currently have to pick the other up. If you come here as early as you can, it's more or less a guaranteed upgrade in terms of pure stats, but more interestingly, the "Rend" status effect is NOT the same as the armor break status effect from the Warrior's skills, so you can stack them both to make a target extra vulnerable to physical damage.  Time for the fourth entrance, another one that's "outside" the capital.      Start by dropping on to the northwest wall and heading south, this is also possible to do after using the Gaea Stone to get on top of the shrine.      Another sewer outlet and... a creature.   Charity: This is a quintar. Vanessa: Observant of you. Charity: A gaudily coloured velociraptor- Tau: Wasn't that actually Deinonychus and Velociraptors just look like that in Jurassic Park because someone got their research wrong? Charity: A gaudily coloured dinosaur with a single cyclopic eye in the middle of its forehead, that says "kwei." Hamza: I can't argue with your analysis. Charity: Well, at least it doesn't have five legs. I'll take my victories where I can get them.       This leads to the last sewer section. There's also an entrance to this part in the southwest wall, but we can't access that one yet.       This room always makes me expect an ambush.     But it's just a couple of hidden passages leading to a piece of heavy armor.      There are also a few formations here that mix Hobos and Sewer Rats, Reckless Assault is bad enough on the rats, but on the Hobos its even more dangerous. I do not like this.  To the east there's a jump you can only make one-way, leading over to the blood slime boss, and behind this door...    Tau: Oh this is the good kind of spooky.    Vanessa: drat, how deep does this go? You think we're gonna come out on the other side of the gameworld?     Charity: Honestly all the deep places so far have been kind of busts. Just mushrooms and spiders and stuff. Where are my drat crystals and other cool cave poo poo?    Welcome to the Capital Jail. https://soundcloud.com/schematist/guilt Tau: Oh yes, yes, this place rules. Hamza: There better be something to fight here.   The main gimmick is that there are four "wings," we start out with access to the South one and need to access the other three, with the eventual conclusion being behind the northern one. Which means key hunting.     Tau: A deep underground prison... Hamza: Imagine being locked up down here, barely any place to move...       Vanessa: I think you two are being overly dramatic, I've lived in smaller apartments. Hamza: By choice? Vanessa: Sure. I don't need a lot of space.       Charity: Right, but your neighbours probably weren't the ravenous undead. Vanessa: I'm pretty sure a zombie wouldn't have been keeping me up till 4am with loud music, so I'm still rating this as an improvement.    Zombies are a bit odd. Their special trait is that they poison themselves at battle start, so they slowly melt, and aside from that they're just a chunk of HP that does decent damage, and they'll poison you if they hit you. Not exceptionally scary.   We also start getting some Silver down here. It'll be three of any given kind to get an upgrade, so we'll have to harvest a few to get anything, but it's worth keeping an eye out for.     There are also ghosts, not just zombies.     If Spit Fire hits a target already Burning from Sear, it can ABSOLUTELY gently caress them up. Individually you can probably blitz them down easy, but if they're part of bigger formations, they're trouble.    This break in the corridor can't be crossed since it's too deep to jump up the other end, but thankfully we can loop around.        You can also barely see that the door on the right has a "lock" in the middle of its texture. Doors with that on them need expendable Cell Keys to open which are... a slightly odd mechanic here. I'll explain why once we get our hands on one.          Get the East and West Wing keys, fight a slightly larger ghost formation... and remember the locked door.  Vanessa: Stupid chest, out of reach... Hamza: Maybe if I stomped you flat we could shove you under the rocks so you could reach it. Vanessa: Shush, I'm coming back for that chest.          The East Wing starts off with a couple of locked doors, so you're sure to remember them once you get your hands on a Cell Key.       The enemies down here are very slow moving blue flames that don't pursue you, giving you a chance to try to dodge them.      Of course I always manage to bungle into one anyway, and I gotta show off the enemies for y'all.     They're unremarkable, just being bigger versions of the jellies we fought way back at the Seaside Cliffs. The main thing of note about them is that they drop Ethers, which are still pretty expensive to actually buy, so grinding up a stock of them here isn't a completely unreasonable thing to do, though also not a very necessary thing to do.           Vanessa: Finally! Time to see what's in those locked cells!     So the reason cell keys are weird is that you have a limited amount... but never really have to choose. You don't need to choose a way onwards, you don't need to chose any rewards or access, every cell you open has a cell key in it, except I think for one, but you also start with two so... there's no real thought required. They could've just given you ONE Cell Key. It may have been an engine issue, because I believe keys are exhausted when used(with one exception), so I think that rather than programming a way around that, the dev just made sure you constantly got refills. But then again, I know the game also supports doors unlocking when you activate triggers, so there could've just've been a "get key, all cell doors unlock"-trigger... I digress.           The East and West wings don't have a lot to talk about.               Though they do both have their own flavour, one flooded, the other overgrown.                  Formations like this are where the Capital Jail starts getting a bit tricky. I don't take any losses to it, but coming here a bit lower level you could get dunked on.   And now we have the key for the Dark Wing, the northern part of the Jail.          Vanessa: Okay now these cells are worse than my old apartment. At least I had a bed.         Jail Breakers are probably one of the first overworld enemies that can potentially trounce you. Between having an attack that can probably one-shot any party member and having innate lifesteal, you need a certain rate of damage output to take them down before they take you down.  And yes, like the giants back in the Seaside Cliffs, their steal is still Milk.              Welcome to a jump it took me like ten minutes to do. The doorway is very low which means that any time you start your jump just a split-second too late, you bump your head off the lintel and plop into the lava.     All for a mediocre piece of light armor. Bah.        With the corridor collapsed into magma, we have to take a detour, but it's more scenery than challenge.      Hamza: My boss fight sense is tingling.       Welcome to the Warden, he will ruin your day if you don't bring a rogue.       Five different multi-attacks, MP-damage, three different damage-over-time conditions. My first run against him does not go very well.      I get him into the deep reds, but I just can't heal fast enough to keep up with his damage output, he strips the MP I need for healing and I can't use Hamza to tank.  So for take two, I get Vanessa to save the day.    It's just a matter of having her avoid anything that draws aggro and making sure he's constantly Eye Gouged so he can't do any of his bullshit successfully.   The panic button when AP recharge doesn't hit fast enough is Sleep Bomb. You can only Sleep a given enemy once per battle, but it's a wonderful panic button from either your Rogue or your Shaman if you need a quick breather.     Even so, it's about as close as it can possibly get.   Reward is a nice scythe, which is handy because...     We also unlock the Reaper class! Reapers are scythe wielders whose main gimmick is damage they do temporarily raises their max HP, and they have a bunch of lifedrains besides. Now... before we forget...  Tau: I need to know what spooky stuff is behind this door.      Decent bonker for this stage, maybe a monk weapon.     Hamza: Sweet, new duds! Tau: I guess that's alright but, hey... in the corner...    Vanessa: Okay I think we may actually end up on the other side of the world if we go deeper.            Charity: I officially have no idea where we are, but I'm intrigued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HyFUFuTJ_A   Hamza: No way through here. Blocked.     Hamza: ...this is a long tunnel.    Vanessa: This had better lead to a treasure vault or something.    Charity: Better yet! It leads to COOL. VIEWS. OMG.    Charity: WE'RE UNDER THE SEA. SO RAD.     Charity: ...I wish to no longer be under the sea. Why is the floor meat.    The tunnel has a single, slow-moving, deep red flame.    It has a long patrol pattern, so I can hide here, wait for it to go away, and loot everything.       Hamza: drat, the jump's too high and it looks like the other side is all meaty, too... wanna go die gloriously? Vanessa: Beats walking back.     https://soundcloud.com/aaron-anderson-11/91-peaches-8-bit This is the theme that accompanies the party getting blasted so hard and fast they don't even get a turn before they hit the ground. It's trimmed a bit for Crystal Project, starting at about the 12-second point. We're clearly not meant to be here yet. This just about taps out the sewers... except for a rematch.    After respawning, I went back to the capital and turned the Craftwork Rapier into the Silver Rapier for Vanessa. Fencer has better damage output in this case, which I may as well pick since I can't blind my way out of damage from the Blood Slop. In addition to that extra damage, clearing out the Capital Jail resulted in some extra levels, and with the Boomer Sword for Hamza, plus the Gospel for Tau, there's more damage output and more healing potential.    Since the Blood Slop's damage is untyped, I can also swap on Berserker Stance for Hamza without actually suffering the disadvantage.  Of course it's annoyingly dodge-y, and Hamza has a bunch of whiffs on 85+% attacks, which make me seethe.  This may also be the playthrough where Lucky Dice wins me over. Get rolled on, nerds.  Vanessa and Charity's primary jobs are keeping the Blood Slop constantly burning and poisoned, which adds up to about 200-ish damage per turn it takes. Over a fight that easily ends up as several thousand additional damage.  I've also gotten to the point where both Charity and Tau can revive their teammates, and since Charity is still wielding the Torch, she can cause Burn even when she's out of MP, so I can afford to let her run dry.   The main danger is when the Blood Slop decides to bust out Hemoplague near the end. Oddly enough it only casts it once, I swear I could remember it spamming it more, I'm unsure whether there's a hidden "only cast at low HP"-script or whether it's a random roll I got lucky on.   I always forget the Aegis has inherent Cover until Hamza suddenly decides to save the day by tanking some spell or ability with his face.  I manage to scrape up a win just as the MP pools start running dry. First time I played the Blood Slop stopped me for a bit longer than that.   It's an optional boss that drops a suuuuuuuuuuuper useful accessory. On any tank this lets them do a lot more work without needing to be backed up by a healer.   Charity: Why is this place meaty, too? Like the tunnel? Tau: Maybe it's a secret side plot! Vanessa: Maybe someone just thought meat was spooky. Horror for vegans. Charity: Let's just get out of here.      Vanessa: Well, that wasn't half bad, we got some sweet loot and got a new class. Hamza: Two boss fights! Two! Tau: And we found out what a quintar is. Charity: Still not happy about that one. END SESSION VOTE A: Going to the Rolling Quintar Fields. B: Entering the Quintar Nest without going through the Rolling Quintar Fields. C: Getting ourselves mangled a bit to the West and other unintended adventures.
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Nov 22, 2023 18:04
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Cattail Prophet posted:It's funny how Crystal Project usually puts at least a little bit of effort into not ripping off any one specific game too blatantly... and then the Boomer Society is just super obviously a Majora's Mask reference. Having not played Majora's Mask, I never even knew. Black Robe posted:also a missed opportunity to put a duck in the Dark Wing. I wish I could five-star your post for this.
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Nov 22, 2023 23:07
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Update 09: Rolling Quintar Fields This update was delayed by a head cold that absolutely kicked my rear end up and down the street. Bleh.  Vanessa: New skin, Hamza? Hamza: Please... call me Bloody Darkedge 666.     Tau: You know, it'd be nice to get somewhere those other guys haven't already been for once. Vanessa: If that's a subtle hint to stop loving around and exploring every other side path, I don't think it's gonna happen.    Charity: Quintar fans exist? I hate this.       Vanessa: Come on, Charity, let people enjoy things. Charity: But they're enjoying the wrong things! They're enjoying things that are gross!     Charity: That lone eye is boring into my soul.  Tau: Well, no Quintar until we've found more crystals... so I guess we're finding more crystals.     Scavengers are completely un-noteworthy enemies. They have a physical attack and that's it.      Charity: Well, at least there's a nice view out here. You can hop on a section of the walls from here, but since they're walls we can get on to easily enough otherwise, it's just an alternate path.    Charity: Wow, look at these cute little guys! Hamza: One of my aunts has dolls that look like these, always used to scare me as a kid.    Reginalds have no special attributes and pure Reginald formations are unremarkable.    Vanessa: What the hell are these things? Is this anime? Tau? Tau: Not everything with a giant head is anime.     Charmions are another "are you paying attention?"-check. You can easily get your rear end kicked if your physical attackers just wade in blindly. Magic and Rogue skills that don't provoke counters are your friends here. Between Skewer and Poison Kiss, this formation can also make characters lose 30% of their max health every action they take.      Hamza: Get back here and let me fight you! There's a looping dirt road around this area, and a couple of flames will constantly run along it, they'll only aggro if you get EXTREMELY close.   Hamza: I'll stop you with my face if I have to!        Aero is our first Wind type spell and... I hate the Wind spells. I dislike that they have a chance to miss, though if you're already going for a Luck/Variance build to leverage Lucky Dice, the Variance and crit chance(which I don't think any other spells have) gives them a chance to punch above their weight.  Charity: ...do we have to? Vanessa: Look, it just... popped out, at least I didn't steal it this time. Charity: ... Vanessa: If I left it lying around, that would be littering! I'm doing the right thing!         Hamza: If only we could cross gaps of exactly 4 blocks. Vanessa: If only... Charity: Shame, really. Tau: Yes, it'd be a shame if a bunch of lazybones got their move on and unlocked our Quintar pass.        Also of interest are these little hollows.   Charity: Wait... are those... two eyes? And that's a Quintar egg? What????? Vanessa: Maybe they're like plaice. Charity: The fish? Vanessa: Yeah, their eyes migrate as they age. Maybe adult Quintar just have their second eye somewhere else. Charity: There's no answer to the where that would make me happy.    Unremarkable except for another Scholar skill. Roost is a nice enough self-heal, since it removes conditions AND provides healing over time.      There's a well-hidden item down here guarded by an adult Quintar.       Also a couple of familiar faces hanging around.          Delivered comically, but serpentining is actually pretty effective at avoiding fights since most flames rush at you with a good bit of inertia. More effective is if you can get them to fling themselves off ledges, but it's not always an option.     There's a nicely hidden chest up here, which gives me a chance to show off a mechanic I never use, which is that you can...  ...lean the camera a little. It occasionally makes a thing a bit more visible, but generally I never make any kind of use of it.   Hamza: Hey, how'd he get up there? Tau: Probably with a Quintar, like the one we could have by now.   Tau: ...this is an ambush, isn't it? Hamza: It had better be, it's enough that there's one party running around ahead of us and acting like they're smarter than we are.   https://soundcloud.com/aaron-anderson-11/a-5-character-theme   Time for our first PvP battle! There are a few of these in the game and they don't work entirely like other battles.  https://soundcloud.com/aaron-anderson-11/295-b-insidia-action-loop-ogg         With one very notable exception I'll talk about when we get there, PvP enemies always use player skills, so they theoretically have access to every skill we have, though there are certain classes we won't meet. We also can't see what they're about to do, which makes countering them more tricky.   Vanessa: Hey, these guys are chumps!   Hamza: Hah! Who're the noobs now, huh? HUH?!    I leave Kuroi Darkness alone rather than geeking the caster first just so she can do her little speech.     Vanessa: ...alright, I feel slightly bad now. The Lunch Money is a useless item that exists purely to keep score of how many times you beat up this pack of dorks. Also if you can get up to them without triggering the ambush, which I don't THINK is possible without either a randomized run or going west out of the capital and acquiring some new mobility options earlier than intended through an exploit, they do in fact have some dialogue if you come up to them from behind and talk to them outside of their "aggro" zone.    Anyway, another Quintar nest pit.    The entrance here is super hidden.       And the reward is a weapon for the Hunter class which we don't have yet, the same as Doist from the party that just ambushed us.     Tau: Lots of Quintars around here, at least these aren't trying to claw our eyes out.       Charity: Anyone willingly living in the middle of a bunch of Quintars has to be a grade-A weirdo. Tau: You never know, maybe the Quintars are attracted to them, and not vice versa. Charity: If that was my fate, the front yard would be full of Quintar heads on pikes.  Charity: I told you, grade-A weirdo.       I haven't actually been able to find this theme anywhere, but just imagine it as slightly chill and quirky.                   Tau: Okay, you were right. Vanessa: This is like someone calling themselves a fan of horses and collecting severed horse heads. What the hell.       Charity: We're not actually going to bring him more rare eyeballs, are we? Tau: Well... it seems to be the intended route of progression... Vanessa: And it's the only way we're getting them out of the inventory, just think of that.         Green Legs are unscary as long as you convince them to just attack your tank with a Taunt and have him put on the Defender stance first. But if you don't manage aggro properly and don't output enough damage, their managing to paralyze multiple people and get in hits on casters can be bad news.         The jumps here are all pretty trivial, though you can fat-finger yourself down to the ground below, but looping back to the Quintar Enthusiast's House isn't a big time loss and you probably cleared out most of the enemies on the way when you were arriving.            Hamza: Dead end except for the giant obvious pit. Charity: This better lead to a cool cave.   https://soundcloud.com/aaron-anderson-11/304-insecurity Charity: It IS a cool cave! I love cave lakes!      Charity: They're always so mysterious, you never know what's down there... could be treasure, or krakens, or treasure krakens...      If allowed to metamorphose, these guys turn into somewhat tougher insectoid enemies that have a paralyzing attack. They're scarier when they show up already transformed, since then you might face up to THREE enemies that can paralyze. Once again, good aggro management is key.      There's another pond down here, isolated from the rest of the lake, with a couple of flames racing around it. Those flames are Brutish Quintar.     They lose the self-heal of Sun Bath and the strong single-target Pecking Flurry attack in exchange for Whirlwind, which is a target-all Aero. It has the same weaknesses as Aero, but hits harder if it lands.  It is NOT to be hosed with, but now we have it, too!   Charity: I... I think I'm hardened to it by now. I think I just don't care. At least it can't get any grosser than eyeballs and partially digested skulls.       Hamza: Hey, check it out, there's a tunnel down here. Tau: But the crystal is in the other direction! Hamza: Yeah but... mysterious tunnel. Vanessa: I wanna check out the mysterious tunnel, too. Charity: Me three!        Hamza: Odd place, just a ledge... with the sea down below.     Hamza: ...and we're not getting back up, so we may as well look around.    Hamza: Oooh, there's something to fight here! Vanessa: ...isn't that the "very dangerous"-colour?   Yes, the Crag Demon is not an enemy we're meant to fight at this stage. And we're also a bit early in actually getting to this area, but even when we're meant to go here, we're not meant to fight the Crag Demon. It attacked so quickly that I didn't even have a chance to look at its skills. Vanessa: Well. Guess we might as well hand him that eyeball while we're here.                 And with that, we now have a Quintar Pass! This lets us acquire Quintar from the shack next to the east gate out of Sequoia, but if we dismiss a Quintar we're riding from the shack, we have to go all the way back to get a new one, and while Quintar can jump farther than we can, they can't jump as high, so our exploration radius with a Quintar would still be rather limited.  First, though, this crystal.          If you actually head straight for the crystal, reaching it is pretty effortless.             Hunters are... a bit odd. They have a decent number of skills and can output solid damage, but they can't really deliver any conditions or do tricks(like interrupting enemies), and they suffer from very few other classes having any Bow skills, meaning they're rather limited in crossover potential. Additionally, all their skills, and bows, suffer from reduced Accuracy, so they're a bit RNG heavy unless you add on +Accuracy items to compensate. Before we go enjoy our Quintar Pass, I also pop back to the Capital since there are a few small changes.       Hamza: So can we... Tau: No!    Also these dorks are hanging around now.      Tau: I'm sure they've learned their lesson and won't cause us any trouble again in the future.       Hamza: Well this is kind of neat. Charity: It is not. Let's just hurry up and get to a less horrifying mount.        The quintar is probably my least favourite mobility option in the game, because it always takes me a while to adjust to the way it moves and I keep stumbling off of edges rather than nailing the jumps. The lowered jump height also gives you less room for error.          You might also think we could now loop back and get access to a bunch of new stuff with the Quintar, but surprisingly there's relatively little of that. When you arrive in an area, the local mobility options are enough for just about everything there, though later options can certainly make stuff easier.         Personally I think I prefer that to enforced backtracking.               I like that these dorks have their own party mechanics.       The Quintar Sanctum has the same music as the Quintar Nest. Charity: Now this is what I'm talking about!!! Giant mushrooms! Cool cave poo poo!       The enemies here are a bit nastier than in the Nest, though.        Mosses are like the Skumparadise shrooms, but with self-heals and resurrects. This will also provide our first Scholar resurrection option.          Wispettes loving suck, if no one's immune to Sleep, they'll take their chance to Dream Eater your dudes, or otherwise Firen them for massive damage. Another useful Scholar skill, at least.  Hamza: Hmmm, not much else this way.        Hamza: Or this way... am I missing something? Vanessa: I think we can use that giant mushroom as a platform. Try it?    Tau: Whoah! Charity: Whee! Vanessa: Argh! The mushrooms are bounce pads, and our way of making progress upwards. They'll also bounce flames, which can be modestly funny at times.   Crystal Project doesn't have many palette swap enemies, but it has a few. This one is just a Green Legs from above but with bigger numbers.         Here a flame rushes at me as I jump up past the ledge...    ...flies out into the darkness, hits the mushroom and gets bounced into the drink somewhere.          More platforming ensues. None of it is difficult, the main challenge of the Quintar Sanctum is making sure you've actually got the loot, since it's all over the place.   Vanessa: Did a quintar write this? Tau: Kind of weird if someone else did, it'd be like making a sign that reads "woof" outside of a dog kennel. Vanessa: But if quintar are literate, that makes keeping them in pens and riding them weird.            And thus we get my least favourite class in the game, the Chemist. I can kind of see their gimmick in regards to very specific setups, but overall just about any other class can do anything they do better. Their thing is using items in-combat to have various effects, including ones the items do not inherently have, like invisibility or Float.   Before I continue, I'll also just grab two easily missable items in here.           These two mushrooms will pass you a pair of pretty decent defensive caster items.    This path is the way out, if you follow it, an NPC at the end will ask you if you fought the boss in here. I figure it was a response to a lot of players managing to miss it.         Hamza: Sneaky! Trying to hide a boss battle from me!    Because you can't walk up here, only bounce, and the boss flame doesn't chase you, actually getting the fight can be a bit finicky.       The Fancy Quintar is a simple boy, a big damage race.   His Whirlwind hurts, but nothing you shouldn't be able to out-heal.    What's more dangerous is when he pops Quick and then does two Attacks in a row which can really hurt if your aggro management is bad and he ends up hitting a caster with it.   It gets a bit pinchy, he drops Vanessa, but I manage to eke out a win.   And with it, another new kind of Quintar Eyeball! We should bring that to the local creepy weirdo who lives in a backwoods shack.            Tau: Back in the Overpass again... There's another Overpass Scrap up here.     Charity: And some nice views of the Quintar Fields!             I don't believe you need the Quintar Flute, and can in fact get everywhere you need to go without it, but it will absolutely make your life easier.     When used, there's a little smoke puff and then we get our Quintar... which has a new colour scheme, too! Charity: I'll admit, it looks a bit less horrifying this way.     Another advantage to the Quintar is that it can outrun most flames unless they manage to corner you, so it's also great if you really can't be hosed with enemies in a given area.  It also has a use back in the capital if you've struggled a bit with the platforming.      Getting on to the walls is trivial with a Gaea Stone, which you can just buy, and the four-square jump is enough to cross over the gaps in the walls, letting you get just about everywhere.         Vanessa: There's just something wrong with her. If you miss any of these encounters where Astley's gang gives you stuff by advancing the plot too fast, they'll leave the item behind on the ground for you to pick up later.     Also the moat has another secret boss that's currently way out of my power range.        Imagine eating 2600 damage from a Hydro Spike after Enami leads with a Curse of the Moat. Kneurotoxin is also brutal, unless you use a self-heal or lifesteal action of some sort, it WILL kill the target. Anyone know if the name "Enami" means something in this context? It's one of the few that aren't in some way descriptive.  Lastly, after getting flattened by Enami, I also remembered where the last penguin was.                Vanessa: Ooooh, stylish. Charity: Try it on! Vanessa: Alright, give me a moment and... there! How do I look?     Hamza: lmao Charity: Absolutely not what I was expecting, Kinda cute, though! Vanessa: Y'all can take a flying leap.    This also makes Billy and Milly have their final bits of dialogue on the penguin situation.   Tau: Well, this is obviously the only path left to us, and clearly the way we should go. Vanessa: Obviously, there's no other direction we could go in. Hamza: I'm glad our next choice of destination is so obvious! Charity: Yes, no interesting and unique-looking area we could choose to explore otherwise. Tau: Thank God we know exactly where we're going next time. END SESSION VOTE A: Go in the obvious direction, Greenshire Reprise. B: Greenshire Reprise is the only way we could possibly go. C: You're not missing anything, the only option is Greenshire Reprise. D: Really, this vote is just a formality on the way to Greenshire Reprise. E: Find a way past the Crag Demon of Cobblestone Crag.
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Dec 4, 2023 14:21
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Alright, looks like the non-secret mystery option won by a small amount. I'm gonna close the voting here and do some recording because my fever finally broke and I wanna play some good games.
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Dec 5, 2023 18:26
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Update 10: Greenshire Reprise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA7lEZG1ktI Hamza: This place had better be tough. Vanessa: You never know, maybe that guard was just messing with us and this place is super easy.         Greenshire Reprise is made up of narrow valleys and tall ridges. Along with the local BGM and an increase in the local mistiness, it makes the place feel more spacious and ominous than it actually is.       Hamza: An enemy! Tau: Do you have to? We could just keep going west... Vanessa: Too late, he already jumped.    So the locals here are actually reasonably tough... and also completely optional. You can just walk along the bridges and skip the valleys entirely.      Cultists will vaporize you with lightning.     While the Familiars provide physical muscle and will use the Escape skill if their handlers are killed.       Vanessa: Tough enough for you? Hamza: ...yeah okay, that's my daily fill of getting my rear end kicked.      There are a few chests in the valleys, but not many. I would say it's a very skippable section, though it does look nice.             The waters at the south end of Greenshire Reprise are the same waterfalls that spill over the edge into Delende.        The full Cultist formations are probably the easiest thing to fight in Greenshire, because their lower defense means that if you've got enough fast AoE attacks, you can blast them all down before they get a chance to cast any spells.        Tau: ...I don't think this is getting us anywhere, let's just head back up top.      We're also being teased by chests that, as far as I know, we can't reach until we get our hands on more mobility options.     And this bridge is why you need the Quintar before going this way, you can't cross this gap otherwise.     It's a jump that always challenges me more than it should, but if you jump off the railing instead of actually from the bridge, it's a lot easier.           https://soundcloud.com/vindsvept/never-to-return Charity: ...oh this music is so sad. Hamza: If an elf shows up and cries at us I'm logging off.           Down along the south side of the cave there's this rather excellent book, one of the few I've occasionally found a reason to use. Being able to get spells off faster can make fights a good deal easier and give you more of a chance to exploit slow spells like Reverse Polarity.         Vanessa: Oh thank God, a new zone already. That music was making me all maudlin.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUkDC--_7E4         Tau: At least now we know we're on the right track. Vanessa: The right track where? Tau: You know... onwards, forwards. Usually when we've been making progress we've bumped into those guys. Vanessa: Could just mean they're confused in the same way we are.      So the gimmick of this area is that you'll be moving up-river, jumping from log to log as you go, and something over half of the logs will have a flame on them, rushing back and forth. The flames don't chase you, so if you time your jumps right, you can hop over them and avoid most of them.  Of course, I intend to show off most of the enemies here, so I won't be dodging ALL of the flames.       Most of the enemies and formations here aren't individually powerful, but if you fight EVERYTHING you'll be going through I think something like ten or fifteen encounters before you hit a save point, meaning you'll probably be tapped out on MP and HP unless you come here late.            Which isn't to say that some of them can't hit hard on their own if you're careless.          Hamza: This is what an ideal area is like: lots of fighting, lots of jumping, no one talking!        There are also a couple of mean jumps, like this one, where the tree will obscure the flame, making it hard to dodge.         And of course if you miss a jump and end up in the drink, you'll get reset usually just in time to get immediately attacked by a flame.    Charity: ...that is an unsettlingly swole turtle.        If I hadn't tagged the Shelldin with a physical attack down condition, it would've bench pressed Charity into oblivion with a single hit. Vanessa: This is why people shouldn't flush their steroids, that's how you get angry, burly amphibians.            Hamza: ...do we have to dodge so many of the fights? Vanessa: We don't have enough recovery items for all of them, they all chip away at us. Tau: And I'd rather not get stuck grinding the first five encounters here over and over just so you can brute force your way through.        Charity: And, personally, if I never have a frog try to shank me again, it'll be too soon.          Hamza: So, would you guys rather fight one horse-sized frog or a hundred frog-sized horses? Vanessa: That's a completely nightmarish hypothetical. Hamza: Well since I'm not allowed to get into fights here, I have to pass the time somehow.     Tau: ...one horse-sized frog. Frogs aren't that scary. Charity: Frog-sized horses for me. I feel like you could just ignore them. Hamza: See, Vanessa? Everyone else is playing along. Vanessa: ...horse-sized frog, single big things drop better loot. Plus there'd probably be some fancy restaurant that'd pay big bucks for frog legs as big as your arm.          While you need a Quintar to get here, I don't believe any of the actual jumps up along the river require a Quintar to make, though some of them are certainly made easier by having one.     Tau: We made it! Charity: And what a lovely little cottage at the end!              Vanessa: I think ALL of these dorks have something wrong with them.              Vanessa: At least they're giving us presents, I guess... though they feel kind of like pity. The Courtyard Key, to me, makes it obvious that this is the intended path to take before going to Cobblestone Crag, but it's also not necessary at all. You can get to the Crag either through the Quintar Nest OR you can just get up on to the walls trivially and walk to the same place the Courtyard Key would unlock.  Tau: I wonder where they're going next... Vanessa: They're probably going to shadow us and then rush ahead and stand around dramatically just before we arrive the next place we're going. Tau: Doesn't it ever get tiring, being so cynical? Vanessa: Hey, you'll see I'm right.      Charity: Cute bears!  Charity: Cute little bear ears!    Charity: Cute little bear noses!   Charity: Cute little bear capitalism! Vanessa: What she means is yes, we want a ticket.  So, anyway, surprise, the "stadium" out in the water at the Seaside Cliffs is one end of the the Salmon Run minigame.     https://soundcloud.com/vindsvept/vindsvept-westward   The "trick" to getting ahead is primarily jumping BEFORE you hit a waterfall. The jump will give you a good bit more upwards momentum than just flopping into the waterfall and then swimming up it.   Hamza: Whoah, these fish can get some air! This rules!   Tau: Pffflllblargh! Surface! Surface!     Hamza: We're faster this way, just close your mouth!     Charity: Such a cute audience! Vanessa: They're bears, they're not watching us, they're watching the fish.      After a run up from the seaside, we end up back at the Salmon River.   The flames are entirely real and its possible to end up in a fight if you jump into them. Bumping into the logs is also a good way to lose a bunch of time, so either jump over them or swim under them.        With a "rental salmon," it's not possible to get better than a 10th place, I believe, so we'll have to take another crack at this when we have our own salmon. In any case, what I'm really here for is the consolation prize you always get.      The Poseidon Shard!        The Poseidon Shrine is just behind the Salmon Shack.     So now we can get the Poseidon Stone and have a permanent warp back here. It can both be used to break a bit out of bounds, in the sense of getting into the Overpass and some places I don't believe we're meant to get to yet, and simply as a way to return here once we get our own Salmon without needing to climb the river again. Speaking of, the Salmon is the last mount you're supposed to get, but you can actually get it from this point onwards. The secret is that while you're in the Salmon Run, you're on a timer... but there are no walls keeping you in the run. So you can technically swim to the exit of the dungeon that gets you your own Salmon, and grab it with the rental Salmon. I will not be doing that since it would completely gently caress the intended progression of the game, but it's funny that you technically can.    Before going to the crag, I'll take a quick step past the capital garden where our seeds have sprouted. What did we get?        Pretty much anything you can plant will result in a pretty nasty encounter if you plant it as soon as you're able.    Landslide is a mean spell.   In any case, the only real reason to beat this thing up is to get Nan's Secret Stew ingredients. Time to go use our new Courtyard Key.          The West door mostly serves as easier access to Enami and you can walk westwards across the walls and, I believe, end up at Lake Delende.              And the east door gets you an easier trip to Cobblestone Crag.  Tau: I bet that big demon is still around, how are we going to get past it? Charity: Don't worry, I planned for that. Tau: ...you made a plan? Vanessa: She made a plan and it almost makes sense.   Charity: There's no way a demon would bother to chase down a cute penguin!     Vanessa: I'm still going to treat this as a stealth mission, mind you.   Charity: It's working so far!   Tau: ...I'm starting to have my doubts. The Crag Demon hovers out of view off the cliffs but will start chasing you any time you're not hidden behind something, which means that it'll occasionally just show up while you're in a very bad position and it's hard to tell where it's patrolling when you haven't aggroed it yet.      Vanessa: I think we're busted!  Charity: I can't believe a demon would try to hunt a poor, innocent penguin!    Charity: Call the quintar! Call the quintar!     You can't jump this gap without a Quintar, but you could almost certainly get a quintar down the Quintar Nest and out that exit and get it over here without getting the Quintar Flute. It's just easier this way.     Charity: Is it gone? It's gone! Vanessa: Stupid penguin outfit, it didn't help at all! Tau: Well, no, but it was pretty funny watching you run around in a panic while wearing it.             Vanessa: I'll give you ten silver if you shove Charity off the cliff, too.       In any case, the Cobblestone Crag leads over into the Underpass.             Hamza: Hmmm up... or down... up... or down... up- Charity: Just go up, please.               The way up is kind of a switchback that leans outwards more as it goes up, rather than leaning inwards. This is excellent because it means that if you gently caress up and fall you usually go into the drink and just reset.           This is sadly one of the other music tracks I couldn't find anywhere. But imagine it as being kind of Asian-y and relaxed, appropriate to climbing a mountain covered in what I presume are meant to be flowering cherry trees.         The switchback is meant to continue, but you can use the trees growing out of the mountainside to skip parts of it in a couple of places.        These chubby little squirrels are not any sort of threat, but this mountainside does have something scary.          Axebeaks are the scary part of this mountain. A single one isn't too bad, but still...      ...it will loving HURT if it hits. So, let's find the even scarier formation they're part of.             Two Axebeaks! The trick is not to get tempted by multi-target attacks and instead just focusing on killing one of them at once. It still takes me multiple tries to take these guys down.    This is how the first couple of tries end up, i.e. with the party getting torn apart by large angry parrots.     The reward is a nice enough knife for rogues, but since Vanessa's currently using a bow, it feels a bit anticlimactic.            Charity: I wonder what's going to be at the top... dragon's lair, maybe? Tau: ...a bit early for a dragon. Maybe a roc or a phoenix, though. Vanessa: Sure, but this climb has been sort of Asian-themed. Do they have rocs and phoenixes in Asian mythology? Hamza: Whatever is up top, we're gonna beat its rear end and take its stuff. Just as long as it has the decency to be a little bit challenging.             Vanessa: What the gently caress is a Yashiki? We'll find out next time.
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Dec 12, 2023 23:44
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Update 11: Ninjas & Sand Tau: Wikipedia says... "some kind of manor or estate." Charity: So like Resident Ninja.    Welcome to the Ninja Yashiki, it has the same music as the trip up the mountain. There's only one flame here, but there are still combat encounters, for instance, you walk under this arch...    ...and this fucker on the roof drops down to stab you.   All of the ninjas kick off the battle with this skill which is their only real mean trick.     Because I piled +accuracy accessories on Vanessa, she can actually still hit them about half the time, but otherwise it's really just a matter of swinging away until the dodging ends and the murdering begins.   Monk Tau is also useful because one of the Monk skills has a guaranteed hit effect. Normally a guaranteed miss would take precedence, but because this skill technically just makes hits very unlikely rather than outright impossible, it still works.    Technically you only need to run into one ambush, since you need to hit the very first one, but I'll be bumping into all of them on purpose.      To the right there's this little sort of ninja training ground you can use to get up on the walls.      Once we have a way to get some extra jumping height, I believe we could use this wall to do a bit of sequence breaking, though we wouldn't necessarily want to.   If you try the other entry gate, you get ambushed by this other ninja down here, by the way.   If you spot him under there and walk up to him, he's got a bit of dialogue. He's the exact same as Moruto but has a different elemental seal attack.    Hamza: Ninjas are only fun if there are swarms of them. Vanessa: I disagree, ninjas are inherently rad, they're badass thieves.     Sukara has Counter as a passive ability that the others don't, making them marginally more dangerous.         Oddly enough, the inside of the dojo, yashiki, place, is probably the place where you get ambushed by people with swords the least. It's exactly complicated enough that you feel smart for finding paths but not so complicated you feel like you're playing Baba Is You.       Tau: Did we miss a secret path or something down here? Hamza: What we missed... was jumping.       Hamza: We have to out-ninja the ninjas at ninja'ing to ninja their ninja ninja ninja ninja. Vanessa: You can just stop.           You can't get up without doing that little bit of platforming outside, and there are also a few surprises in here.      Our first katana, it'll be a while before we can actually use it. Now, there's actually a hidden ambush in here if you go down into the dark.    An NPC samurai! Vanessa: Ugh, samurai, they're just pretentious fighters. Hamza: Wearing sweet armor and wielding a big sword is cool...     The Samurai gimmick is that they have a number of AP-requiring skills that are free actions and drop "combo" tokens on an enemy for one turn. And the more combo tokens are on a given enemy, the harder their "finisher" moves, the "Ken" attacks hit.    He completely obliterates Vanessa in a single turn. Hamza: Hell yeah! Samurai! Cool poo poo!  Hamza: Not so cool I'm not gonna beat you up, though.     The way down to the "hidden" part of the ground floor is behind the stairs up.   Which yields up this odd book that gives you extra AP per turn. I think I can see some sort of Cleric+Monk skill where you wield the Art of War so you can use the Monk's apex skill that runs off AP and has damage based on Spirit, one of the Cleric's strongest stats, more often.        We still gotta keep going up, though, and there are no more stairs, however, if we go out on the balcony, we can still find a way.   If you're on the right or left side of the building you can make the jump up to the higher level.      And then we get us a boss fight. Oh boy.    Kuromanto's skills are all ones we've seen before. A normal attack(that he almost never uses), a multi-target physical attack, a multi-target fire spell, the dodge ability the ninjas outside used and a spell that makes the target die in a couple of turns unless the condition is removed. The first fights, well...    He beats my rear end pretty badly! I get him decently damaged but he wins in the end.      The main problem is that the only way I can see to beat him reliably requires a Rogue, so I need to switch Vanessa over, and I need Tau's full mana pool, so they're back to being a Cleric again for this fight. After that, I still get dunked on a few times because while I can neuter Kuromanto with Trick Slash and Eye Gouge, when I need to make a bunch of "empty" swings to wear off his dodges first, it can be hard to time. However! There's still a ~20 to 40% chance for some characters to hit, and sometimes they get in a hit when they shouldn't, so instead of prepping Kuromanto for being blinded or interrupted, Hamza just ends up doing damage or something, goddammit. I also end up having Tau need to throw out some Lucky Dice to attract aggro.     The run at him that actually works ends up going surprisingly smoothly, Kuromanto can't one-shot any member of the party, and as a Warlock, Charity is able to remove the Death Sentence from Hamza(who's Taunted Kuromanto into being the target for any single-target attacks) without Tau needing to take a break from multi-target healing with Sun Bath(Tau's secondary remains Scholar).   Hamza: Paper? He dropped paper? Charity: Now if only we could unlock a class that can read.    Predictably we get the Ninja here. Ninjas are... one of my least favourite classes. All of their abilities are powered by Scrolls, and they have access to a number of elemental attacks, as well as the dodge-boosters we've seen(including one that allows them to no-sell magical attacks, too). They have access to a ton of elements, which makes them flexible for hitting weaknesses, but their limited number of scrolls(max 30, and I do not think there are any scroll pouches) make them somewhat of a liability on longer dungeons, and they have no multi-target or condition-causing abilities. They also get the ability to dual-wield(though to not make it totally busted they lose 35% of the attack value on each weapon), so you could if nothing else use them as a primary class to get more physical bonkery or have a mage wield two wands for more Mind.  Hamza: That was a pretty cool fight, even if we got a lame class- Vanessa: I'm so turning into a Ninja next. Hamza: -but I think there's more we can do here. Tau: This is absolutely not where we're meant to be. Hamza: Good. I love going where I'm not allowed.     From the yashiki's roof, you can escape into the Overpass. You can't really do much with it... but it's there, it's the principle of it.       There's an Overpass Scrap, and this pool will have a purpose later.     Charity: Ugh, this place is so barren and drab... hey, is that some grass down there? That looks kinda neat.    So, if you like not dying, for a good while, any time you spot grass in the Overpass... you haul rear end away from it. Why? Lemme show you. Vanessa: Oh joy, we get to be lab rats.   There'll usually be a gray flame, a Quintar Egg or several, hanging out near the front, and then inside, a deep red flame!     The Quintars out here, uh, will just absolutely dumpster us. There's nothing we can really do yet.  Tau: Well, the mountain was a dead end- Vanessa: Emphasis on the dead. Tau: -so this must be the way to progress, onwards!    Charity: The purple lanterns are a nice touch. I wonder where this goes? Hamza: Down. Charity: I mean, yes, but down to what? A mysterious cave? Mysterious water? Mysterious mysteries?    https://soundcloud.com/schematist/last-samurai-21-days-of-vgm-day-17 The music here is another melancholy track. I feel like it conjures up a mental image of mists and darkness.       We descend all the way to the sea, which is far enough down that if we drop off the cliff from the top it takes multiple seconds before we get down there and drown.    Charity: A goat! Finally some kind of normal animal! C'mere goat.      As soon as we interact with the goat, it walks into the wall and sort of... glides up it. I guess to suggest goatish abilities to climb near-vertical surfaces. Charity: Noooooo, goat, come back. I just wanted something normal...     Hamza: Feels like this place is falling apart.         Hamza: Even with the Quintar there's no way we can jump over to those stairs.  Tau: Hey! Can you throw us a rope? A ladder? A cutting remark? Anything? Hello? Vanessa: Either she can't hear us or she doesn't care.      Tau: A dead end and a shrine stone for a shrine we haven't visited yet. Vanessa: Seems obvious we're meant to use it, but where the heck is it going to bring us? Charity: Hopefully somewhere a bit less depressing.   When we use the Mars Stone, we get a fade to black instead of an immediate arrival.  And another quote from the creator before we get to arrive at our location.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elpocD1WwRY The version used in the game is without lyrics.   Hamza: Where the hell is this?    No one in here saying Hail Mars. This place is ruined.      There's only one intact structure in the Poko Poko Desert, but ruins are scattered across it.       Hamza: No people and no buildings, but at least we still have fights!    The desert has a number of cactus enemies with Counter moves responding to physical damage, which is rude, none of these enemies have any notably special skills otherwise.   Not that this means they aren't tough, Pinching Pincers are absolute powerhouses in terms of damage. Like an idiot, I figure I can get to safety without reviving Vanessa and Tau, just using the Quintar to dodge encounters, but...        Charity: ...this is just a badly spelled Cactuar.  It's like the little cactuses we already fought, but now the counter is multi-target and thus a lot nastier. You do NOT want to hit this guy with anything physical unless you've got him blinded first. Of course, I entered this fight with one of my casters dead, so I had to rush and have Charity revive Tau and Vanessa and try to pull out a win.  Not that it doesn't come at the cost of a few party members beat up.         Hamza: ...okay those were some spicy fights, but we should be safe up here for now. Charity: Is there anything out here but sand and enemies?    Charity: I think I see something to the south... at least it's different from more desert. Hamza: Fingers crossed the Quintar can keep us out of trouble for that long.            Welcome to the Sara Sara Bazaar, once again another track I can't find uploaded anywhere. It's a chill, strings-heavy track with a drum backing, or perhaps the other way around, I'm bad at describing music.  Not incorrect advice, if you wanna dodge most of the fights, you need your quintar ready.       ...and here's one of the odder bits in the game.                  Tau: Well, that was a thing that happened. If you have the Fresh Salmon and the Rotten Salmon from the fishing shack back in Delende, this guy gives you a pretty decent Rapier for your time. You can just buy more Fresh Salmon if you need, and if you've somehow tossed the Rotten Salmon, you should be able to get it back from the Lost & Found, since I don't believe there are any further opportunities to interact with the Scam Salmon Seller(tm) after he bolts.     Nan really is everywhere.            The main reason to pay to use this inn is so you can get this staff, which is a pretty nice upgrade for Tau as a Monk, but would be pretty meh if you weren't rolling a Monk on anyone. However, the idea of leaving behind a piece of equipment galls me deeply.  Vanessa: Ah, one of these guys again. Let's see what's new.             Vanessa: ...you know, these guys feel kind of arrogant, like they know the world better than we do. Tau: Quest, though. Hamza: And he's also gonna give us stuff, I like stuff. I know you like stuff. Vanessa: ...yeah, which is why we're still gonna do it.         Charity: A tram key? Does this place have trains? Tau: Technically a tram isn't the same as a train. Charity: Train-like. We gotta keep this place in mind.      More stuff we need to find in the Poko Poko Desert. We'll get started on that next update, but it's a lot tougher to do than it seems if you don't know what you're doing, and some of it is still a bit pinchy.        The Sara Sara Bazaar also has some docks.        Tau: ... Charity: What's up, Tau? Tau: This... thing. Charity: This orc pirate? Pirates are kinda cool, they're like sea ninjas. Tau: It's the orc part! We haven't seen any elves or dwarves or anything so far! Everyone's a human! Why are there orcs? Why?!      Once we've interacted with the merchants in Sara Sara, the merchants back in the Capital also start selling their stuff, which is a nice way to avoid you having to travel back to merchants in the rear end end of absolutely nowhere to buy the Zorgosword or whatever.          There are 24 classes in the game, we start with 6 of them, thus 18 crystals, and we currently have 8 of them, so this is a while off unless we can find another way to get a pass.  Not just an off-hand comment. Actually relevant.         This guy gives us access to gold upgraded armor, though we still don't have access to gold upgraded weapons. This also transfers to the smiths back in the capital.   More of the goons again.           Something weird here is that I swear the ferry's meant to actually be there in the water so Chloe's comments make more sense, but it's not there. I don't think it spawns until we get the ferry pass ourselves, though, but I swear it was here the first time I got here originally.              Up here is a semi-hidden shop that lets you turn smaller consumables into bigger ones in exchange for money, mashing a bunch of the weaker ones together.   And a map for somewhere we haven't been yet, hmmmm.           Now we could go out into the desert and get started, but the update's already running long, and there's something back in the capital I don't want to miss.    First, the notice board has gotten updated.         Vanessa: You know when someone tells me not to do something, it makes me want to do it. Hamza: Off to the castle, then? Vanessa: Absolutely.     Vanessa: Guards, huh? Hamza: If someone's guarding something, that just means it's important and they should be beaten up and their stuff taken. Tau: Come on, do we have to fight everyone? Hamza: Just everyone we're allowed to. Tau: Well, I'm convinced that if we just take a little break, sanity will prevail. Right, Charity? Charity: ...I do kinda want to see what's in there, it might look cool! VOTE A: Kill the guards. B: Be nice and don't kill the guards. We'll be going to the desert afterwards in either case.
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Dec 25, 2023 03:20
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Cattail Prophet posted:Huh. I assumed that particular bulletin board message was triggered by poking around the castle yourself. Because it's totally possible to have done that already at this point. I never actually encountered them on my first playthrough, so I believe at some point they may actually despawn.
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Dec 25, 2023 16:33
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Chillgamesh posted:I really liked Ninja because it confirmed to me that the dev definitely played FFXI Ninja actually saved my rear end this next update, which I'm somewhat huffy about because that makes it notably harder to insist that it's a trash badman class.
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Dec 29, 2023 13:24
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Update 12: Sand 2 Hamza: Alright, I won Rock Paper Scissors, so we're going to see what these guys want, and if they give us sass, we're going to fight them.   Hamza: This legally counts as sass.        Tau: They're really high strung. Charity: They'll either have a heart attack or log off. Vanessa: Also FYI get ready, Hamza's about to attack those two guys.   So, we're not winning this fight right now. These guys are WAY faster than us, and generally any enemies that act before you are bad news.   Orchard starts out by weakening Tau and murdering Charity.  And then Little H. drops a multi-target attack that clears out everyone except for Hamza. Love to see it.   Orchard is a very strange Ninja/Hunter mix, which means he can't use most Ninja skills and since bows are always two-handed, can't really benefit from the Ninja passive either.   Little H. is a more straightforward pure Samurai whose basic attack is a multi-target Cleave instead. He's got a passive effect that gives him +30 AP at battle start which lets him whip out all the brutal Samurai combos near instantly, which is probably what he'd do on his second turn if we didn't all get owned by Orchard next.  Yeah, not happening for the time being.  Back to the desert. Tau: Well, I feel like we all learned an important lesson. Charity: Not to attack strangers for no good reason? Hamza: No, we learned to min/max and grind before we attack strangers for no good reason.    Until you get a map of the Poko Poko Desert, it's a deceptive area where it's easy to get lost and confused. One of the BIGGEST things to know, though, is that the two exits from the Sara Sara Bazaar do not actually lead to the same area despite both saying they drop you into the Poko Poko Desert. Rather, the right exit drops you into an elevated section of the desert that can't be reached from the lower part of the desert(with our current mobility options). Thinking they were similar got me very confused my first time playing since I kept looking for stuff that wasn't there, heading out of the western exit every time.      Our first goal will be to find the lost child, since that's the easiest. Just get out of the eastern gate and stick to the right wall all the way.   The desert still has plenty of formations and several enemies we haven't seen yet.          Occasionally these sandstorms start, blurring up the screen and spawning a type of enemy that to the best of my knowledge does not otherwise spawn, and which is extremely aggressive, targeting you well beyond the range of what other enemies do.     This ain't it, though, the Tusk Thruster is just a burly single-target enemy.      Also I think that bar one, all the ruins have some sort of loot. Silver upgrade materials, new gear, etc.            This is about the easternmost part of the desert.        Hamza: How does a kid make it all the way out here without getting eaten by monsters? Vanessa: Forget about how, consider why. There's no candy, toys, comic books, videogames or other kid stuff out here. Not even other kids to play with. Hamza: Yeah, probably possessed by a demon or something. Oh well, there's a reward for getting him back.       Tau: ...is he going to get back okay? Hamza: He somehow got out here okay, so he's probably tougher than we are.     Just west of the boy are some rocks to platform off of. Pretty much any time there are isolated chunks of rock in proximity in the desert, you can use them to platform somewhere.    Mostly showing this place off because I got attacked by a new enemy here.   Despite having a number of nasty spells, the Chimera actually goes down like a chump after a single casting of Haze(single-target low-damage spell that weakens damage output for a few turns).    After that I jump down and get lost in the desert for a while. Vanessa: Whoah, is that...      Vanessa: LET ME IN! LET ME IIIIIIN! There's treasure in there, I know it! Hamza: Come along now, we'll probably find the key eventually. Vanessa: But what if the treasure gets bored and leaves without me.              Lots of ruins. I'm looking for the right one, but without a map it's more or less impossible to intentionally find anything in this loving sandbox.   While searching, I also get ambushed by the sandstorm-specific enemy.    Most if not all enemies that know Star Glow start the fight by self-buffing with it, giving you some time to murder them before they blow you up with a big spell. They're not very threatening as single enemies because you can just pour all your murder on them.   Finally I find the ruin I want. Advancing in the desert requires switching on your Platformer Brain.        If you find what you're looking for, you can also backtrack to a place to get started on getting to it, but simply going to the tallest places you can all the time will otherwise serve you well.      What I hate about the desert's platforming, though, is that you need the Quintar for some jumps, and it has a bit of slipperiness to its movement, and if you drop down once, you need to backtrack and start over because there's nothing underneath to kill you, just sand.            Tau: That's two out of three of these trinkets.  There's also something to collect if you go south after reaching the ridge rather than north.             If you have a Fencer, the Dueller is VERY good for a while. The guaranteed crit means that the Nighthawk skill, which does an additional 150% crit damage, can be used for some real gnarly alpha strikes on something that needs to die turn one, or you can use Swallowtail to do a boosted chunk of damage to everyone on the field.             Elsewhere a ruin holds the "Butter Cutter" a nice dagger with a special attack. One of its oddities is that the "reduce to 1 HP rather than killing" effect also seems to apply to skills, though that may also be an odd artifact that only pops up when it's dual-wielded by a Ninja. Not having to sacrifice first turn damage to get a Steal in is nice, but making a normal attack also means getting your Rogue some Threat, so it goes best with a different dagger-wielding class.          There's also a hidden axe nearby. A lot of higher-tier axes have bonus AP at start of combat effect, which can be extremely useful. 4 AP isn't the biggest thing, but just getting a bit ahead of the game in terms of getting your big attacks out can be a big deal, and others give even more.      Hamza: Nnnngh, can't... jump... high enough... Vanessa: Maybe we should just head back to the Bazaar and cash in that quest before you strain something, big guy.       Vanessa: ...well I asked why he was out in the desert, the answer was darker than I expected. Tau: Ferry pass, though, progress! Vanessa: We're not leaving here until we get into that goddamn pyramid.         So the last token can't be reached unless you head out of the East gate, from the West gate it's completely inaccessible.          If you do head out of the East gate, though, just stick left instead of right, and take every chance you can find to get higher, and you'll easily get to it.     Mostly I find the Poko Poko Desert a great example of how denying the player a map can make an area that's in reality not particularly huge, feel massive. So time to head back and hand them in to Reid.             Vanessa: Okay, these guys may be weirdos, but at least Reid is okay with me. Now let's go rob a tomb!   Charity: I've loved old ruins like this ever since I first played Tomb Raider. Vanessa: Oh, I guess they look cool enough. Charity: You really just like them because there's loot in there, huh? Vanessa: It makes number go up.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKgTe8wpazI I really love the theme for the Ancient Reservoir. Vanessa: ...a crystal already? Whoah. Charity: Whoah? Vanessa: Yeah, think about it, a crystal's usually been the reward for an entire dungeon, if they frontload the crystal... then the reward at the end has to be even cooler. Charity: Probably just some swords with big numbers. Vanessa: Mmmmmm, yes.    Dervish is one of my favourite caster primaries. Its passive ability is that any amount of AP it regenerates, it regenerates just as much MP, which is very useful for longer areas or fights, since it's at minimum 6 per turn, possibly more depending on equipment and events. Additionally it has a good selection of Wind and Earth offensive spells.         The room also has a couple of hidden items, one high that I just found, and one low that I always miss and only remembered on rewatching my footage.     Before heading into the Ancient Reservoir proper, I also turn Vanessa into a Ninja(Rogue secondary) and Charity into a Dervish(Shaman secondary), Charity equipped with the Art of War which means she recovers 12 AP and thus also 12 MP per turn.    See? There's that hidden chest I missed, at the top of the stairs sort of slipped into a crevice on the top step. Cruel.     Charity: Ooooh! Mystery desert water! Under a pyramid! That's cool. Vanessa: Oh, I agree, that's the sort of opulence that promises big treasures. Maybe some kind of vault...     There are two directions to head at the start of the game, with the Reservoir being split into roughly three sections. I'll take it from right to left since that's the opposite order you want if you want to complete the dungeon, but the right order if you want to loot everything.    Most of the enemy flames are also underwater and leap out at you as you pass. About the closest this game gets to unspottable, unavoidable random encounters.    Gaulems are unexceptional single-target attackers. I don't think they feature in any larger formations and are no threat on their own.       The navigational gimmick here is that the floating boxes in most rooms will either float around on the surface or disappear and re-appear making them harder to platform off until you know the trick.    On the right side of the Reservoir, all the chambers are collapsed, just containing a bit of loot.          Sand Claws are like Gaulems but with all melee attacks and one of them can paralyze. Once again not threatening on their own.   The Ancient Reservoir is a bit interesting is that a lot of it almost feels designed for a mobility option we don't have yet. With our own fish this place would be a lot simpler to get around.         Ah, yes, it's not a jRPG without a suicide bomber enemy that looks kind of like an orb. And like usual, it's a learnable skill, too!   Hamza: Aurgh! Why'd you let it hit me?! Tau: So I could learn to... blow myself up? Um. Hamza: Let's never speak of this again. It does massive damage but it's very doubtful in terms of utility because, you know, it kills one of your characters.        Charity: More dungeons should have water features in them, they're cozy. Vanessa: They'd be nicer if we were able to swim. Charity: Maybe we'd be better able to swim if our packs weren't full of rotting Quintar eyes. Vanessa: I keep telling you there's no "drop" options for quest items.               This little bit of platforming is a lot easier than it looks. I still fumble the gang into the drink, but, you know, it'd be easy for someone who wasn't an idiot.      Can't have a pyramid desert dungeon without mummies. The Bandages are superficially unthreatening, but they're still a DPS check. They have a normal attack, a paralyzing physical attack(Wrap) and a self-heal boosted by their passive effect, which means that if you can't kill them fast enough, they have time to wear your down.  Still a dead end, though.      This looks into the left branch, which we need to loop back to reach, so let's visit the center branch.            The Sand Blaster... blasts people. I would consider it to be the sole enemy in the Ancient Reservoir that's threatening on its own, because it has big numbers.       Tau: Well, they wouldn't put switches here if we weren't meant to press them. Vanessa: It could be a trap of some sort. Tau: ...this is a jRPG, not the Tomb of Horrors. Vanessa: Good, because if you ever run that module again I'm sticking my head in a blender.     Charity: Ooooh! Another cute goat!   Charity: Augh! Okay, okay, I won't pet your cute little head, or scratch your cute little ears or...    The Ancient Reservoir isn't too labyrinthine but it's worth coming here first to get the map if you get lost easy. Anyway, time for the last branch.     Half these crates dip in and out of the water. The trick is to only jump towards them when they're already underwater and rising, otherwise you WILL miss them.         These gratings prevent us from reaching any of the buttons directly. Rude.           Charity: Some sort of floating platform in the water? Vanessa: More like a big slab of rock, like those big switches... Hamza: I'm gonna jump on it.    Charity: Ooooh, it's like a raft! It moves surprisingly fast once you get on it and it gets a chance to build up a bit of speed, but keep your eyes open...   Because you want to get off midway during the ride and hop into this alcove. You also want to get to the end later, but for now we want to get off here.      You go down the stairs to reach the raft, to the lowest place in the Reservoir, then up the stairs from the alcove, to reach the highest place in the Reservoir, which can feel a bit confusing.         Tau: Where the hell are we going?    This is one of the more troublesome formations, because you want to kill the bombs fast, but if you ignore the Sand Claw for too long it can paralyze your mans. And the bombs tend to start off by Barrier'ing one of their number after which it queues up an Explode, this means if you don't start murdering fast, you have a high-defense bomb ticking down to an Explode.   Here we are, right above one of the switches! If you jump down on the right side of the chamber, btw, you need to head back and restart because you can't get to the button. I totally didn't learn that the hard way.            One out of two required buttons!      If you ride the raft all the way to the end, you get to the second button instead.        Circle the room to get to the bottom, but there's a side bit at the top.             The reward is this item that lets you swap magic resistance for physical defense, there's also a reverse version in here somewhere.          And we're two for two on pressing big buttons. If you just go straight for the buttons, you can avoid most of the encounters in here.       Vanessa: ...I didn't know you were that sad, goat. Charity: I don't think he, uh, wanted to end it all, I think I see... plants down there?          Charity: Is something upsetting you, buddy? Something scary up ahead?       Charity: ...I don't think goats eat meat, do they? That looks like a bone.        Charity: I think that thing's eating the goats! Hamza: Sounds like an excuse to punch it in the face!           These two work simply: The Possessor summons Masks and does damage, the Masks paralyze party members until killed, the Possessor uses Atmoshear so you can't focus down the masks fast with single-target attacks.   First showing of Tau's new Monk skill, which generates extra AP and guarantees a crit on next attack. It works well to get the big punches out faster and harder.   The masks keep paralyzing Hamza, and then Vanessa and Charity keep blowing up the masks.    Hamza and Charity have enough AoE attacks to make Atmoshear not particularly scary, and Vanessa outputs most of the spike damage.    High Resistance + Magic resistance buff = no damage.       One mask survives the death of the Possessor for one whole turn, and we get a nice suit of armor from the fight and then...  Charity: We did it, Hamza! We saved the goats!  Vanessa: ...I'm not sure they're happy about it. Did we do the right thing?   Charity: ...a bell? What happens if we ring it?        Well, it gives us an Ibek mount. The Ibek adds another block of height to our jumps, but requires a "charge" before it gets its full height.   It'll open up some new pathways for us. But for now lets get out of here.               It's sort of a soft Ibek tutorial because you can't get out without using the Ibek's higher jump.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjoxsVV6fFo The Sara Sara Beach exists west and east of the Sara Sara Bazaar, not a very large area to the east, but we're here now. Also from up here and with the Ibek we can harvest a ton of pickups, especially silver pickups, from the cliffs.    Tau: There's Astley again! Vanessa: If they give us something nice like Reid did I might actually start liking them.            Tau: ...I think they just gave us regicide. Hamza: Astley is cool with me now. Charity: Since we're on this nice beach... what's farther down it?       It's the goon squad again. With the Ibek we can actually reach them before we fight them.    Not very clever, but, you know, it fits.       The main difference is that Doist is actually pretty scary now.        I take them lightly the first time around and it does not go well.  Hamza: I refuse to let those dicks beat us. We're going back as many times as it takes.      With Vanessa going first, I force Doist to target her with a Fuzake, this prevents him from murdering a caster.   Tau then gets to Sleep Aura them, which lets me murder them one by one at my own pace.       And once again we steal their lunch money.   Hamza: ...well what now? Tau: I can think of a few options.          Tau: There's something different to the east, looks a bit spooky. Charity: I like eerie stuff.     Tau: And with the Ibek, we can probably progress in the Meat Tunnel. Vanessa: Heh heh heh. Hamza: Pffft. Tau: Grow up, you two.   Tau: Personally I think we should just take the ferry to Shoudu Province. It's clearly where we're meant to go.   Tau: And obviously, the beach goes the other direction, too... Vanessa: I'd hate to leave any loot over here behind... but I'll have to think about it. Charity: I think we should all think about it for a bit before we make a choice. It's a big decision! END SESSION VOTE A: Head East along the beach to the burned-looking area. B: Head West by the ferry to Shoudu Province. C: Head Up and Down to western Sara Sara Beach and the Meat Tunnel.
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Jan 3, 2024 03:01
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Cattail Prophet posted:Re: Dervish, the one wrinkle with its passive is that you need to be able to actually gain the AP; if you're already at full it doesn't do anything. Not a big deal for throughput in normal encounters, but for longer fights it's best to pair it with a class that uses AP so the battery can keep running. I've never tried it, but I imagine Monk works well. Chi burst lets you dump all your AP at once and scales off of a caster stat, and there's just enough utility in the rest of the skillset that you don't need to feel compelled to build toward mixed offenses to get your money's worth. Focus energy into a wind spell might be fun, too. I think the ideal combo would be with another class we don't have yet, the Nomad, since they're a spellcaster that uses AP for their spells, if you're focusing on the AP-MP dimension. I don't think their skills would be a great combo, but it would definitely provide considerable endurance for long fights or expeditions.
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Jan 4, 2024 11:59
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Update 13: The Beach Episode    Welcome back, this time we're going to the beach... among other things.      Getting here starts off with a little bit of Quintar-requiring jumping, but if we didn't have an Ibek, our exploration in this direction would be pretty short.     Charity: A beach where the wildlife isn't trying to murder us, this is nice! Hamza: I always get bored at the beach.     Charity: How can you be bored at the beach? The point of the beach is to not do anything. Sand! Sun! Lying down! Maybe a soda! Hamza: Yeah but... like five minutes of that and I need to do something. I usually bring a shovel.      Charity: Oh my God, you're one of those assholes. Hamza: Sometimes you just need to dig a hole! It's relaxing! Or, you know, dig a tunnel... or dam a small stream... Charity: I'm adventuring with psychopaths.     Charity: You know, it's almost eerie nothing's tried to kill us so far. Vanessa: Not much loot either, just some of these minerals for gear upgrades. Tau: No enemies, no loot, perhaps a hint that we're off the path? That we should go somewhere else? Charity: You're not getting me with that one.     There's one enemy you can encounter before you need an Ibek.      The Snapper is identical to the Shelldin from the Salmon River, but with notably higher numbers. He actually loving murdered my party the first time. This guy is monstrous.         Moving on, there's a non-beachy interlude.      This features one new enemy, the Seafeeder, which isn't too threatening. It can hit decently hard and has a self-heal, but if you can get past the Snapper earlier, I can't imagine the Seafeeder being a threat to you.         It can be hard to tell, but that tree's branches are just one block higher than the lowest ledge, so getting on that lets you Ibek jump to the higher ledge.   You can, of course, also just jump from the other tree to the little ledge on the right side of the pond and off that to solid ground, but this feels like more of a flex.              Tau: Where are we even going? All we're doing is... jumping up and down cliffs. Hamza: I know, it rules.             There's this odd little section that lets you get to a high part of the Poko Poko Desert. It doesn't have any loot, any enemies or function as a shortcut to anywhere you'd otherwise have a hard time reaching.         Charity: At least we're back on the beach again. I'm almost starting to agree with Tau, though, this is starting to feel a bit pointless...            The main challenge, if you can call it that, here, is identifying the right jumps necessary to get some height again and cross the next obstacle.    Hamza: How about we go beat up whatever that is? That should cheer you up. Charity: ...not really. Vanessa: Only if it has good loot. Tau: Whatever I say, you're going to rush down there anyway, right? Hamza: Well, yeah, because it's gonna cheer me up.    I have no comment on this name. Gross.   Scentaurs can be bad news if you're not equipped to tank their attacks or kill them quickly. Harvester will hit everyone, Adrenaline will let them generate AP at an accelerated pace and Executioner is a skill that just loving murders whatever it hits. It does the big numbers in a painful way.  They're one of the enemies who, like Snappers, are still very scary even when they're just on their own. Look at what this rear end in a top hat did to my poor party.       It's not just Charity who likes this area, I love beaches in RPG's. They're always some of the coolest areas, with some great visual design. The closer you are to the sea, the better all the design is. This is fact. I will brook no dissent.     Climbing this tower is a bit annoying because, as you can tell, the next step each time is just high enough that it isn't entirely drawn in. It's not a huge problem, but a bit annoying.       Like all this game's other towers, it hosts a class master.  Charity: ...is that a building over there? Vanessa: I don't see any doors or windows, looks more like a wall.      Charity: Walls can be part of buildings. Having walls is basically what defines a building. Vanessa: What about a gazebo? Hamza: Hmmm, I see ledges...       Charity: What about a gazebo? Vanessa: It's a building but it doesn't have any walls. Hamza: ...lots of ledges, but no way to reach them.  Hamza: I think this is a dead end. Charity: What? Oh. You climbed it. Tau: Maybe they walled something off because it isn't done yet, you know, like a placeholder, and they're going to put down something cool later, like a dragon or a huge wizard or a huge dragon wizard. Hamza: I don't know... these ledges feel... deliberate. Navigable. We're just missing something to navigate with. Vanessa: ...this isn't just a wall, this is a vault. We're so breaking in here when we find the key.       We can't really do anything with the Big Wall for quite a few more hours of gameplay yet, but we'll eventually want to visit it for bragging rights, considerable amounts of annoyance and little else. But we're going to loot the Big Wall's neighbour, this cave.         The reason we're doing this is because the Blank Pages is a powerful contender for one of the most insanely useful things a caster can hold, even when staves, wands and other books have bigger numbers. That's because it GUARANTEES that the holder goes first and, though it doesn't say so, negates the CT cost on what you're casting. So you're GUARANTEED to be able to get in buffs, debuffs, nukes, whatever you like before anyone else, as long as it's something you can do while holding a book rather than, say, an axe.           Tau: Well, I think we've walked on every inch of sand and looted every shiny rock around here. Are we done? Can we proceed? Hamza: Not quite.    The beach has a borderline secret path. Take note of those huge pillars in the foreground of the screenshot. We can get up on those, but the trick is figuring out where to start, as is the case of much Crystal Project platforming.      Once you've gotten up here, there's really only one way to go. So start jumping.              Tau: Where is this even going? Is this even a path? Hamza: It is now.            Tau: Congratulations, you brought us back to the desert we've already been in. You'd be tempted to think this is a pointless shortcut like the last one that lead to the Poko Poko Desert's higher sections, but!       Hamza: Pretty sure we didn't see this before. Vanessa: ...weird, it looks like it's made of the same materials as the Vault.   Vanessa: Doesn't seem to do anything, though.       The interesting part here is this oasis and camp.     It's got a map for somewhere we haven't been yet, but the existence of a Salmon River should provide a clue towards where it is.    Tau: ...you think? Charity: ...oh, definitely. Hamza: ...so that isn't a vault. Vanessa: It's a Labyrinth. Must've been built to house some greedy king's treasure. That's the only reason anyone ever builds labyrinths. Charity: What about hedge mazes?        Vanessa: I mean, if it's a proper one you'd hide something neat at the center, also I don't think it really counts as a labyrinth unless it has monsters in it. Charity: Nothing's stopping you from putting monsters in your hedge maze!       Hamza: Man this labyrinth is massive. Check this out. Tau: Whoah, okay. I'll admit Charity's right, sometimes it's worth going places just to see weird poo poo. Hamza: You'll probably have to tell her later once she's done arguing about gardening. I don't think she's hearing anything right now. Tau: Hm, sounds like they'll be at it for a while. I guess... Meat Tunnel? Hamza: Meat Tunnel.        We've seen the start of the Meat World before, but now we can finally get over those accursed boxes.       The monsters here would likely still vaporize us turn one, but thankfully they're designed with a very low aggro radius. You can either just walk past them if you time it, or they'll aggro "late" enough that you can just run past.        Hamza: Left or right? Vanessa: Always go left first.    Vanessa: I said left. Hamza: Look at the screen! This is left! Vanessa: But not our l- oh never mind.        Charity: ...continental tram? This is a subway? Not just a meat tunnel, but a meat subway?      Vanessa: But why? Who wants to ride the Tendon Train? Tau: It doesn't look... intentional. Look at the way it's sort of spattered around?     Vanessa: So you're saying a shipment of beef overturned in the tunnel? Maybe here? Tau: ...I'm saying it invaded. I don't think we're ready for this. Ignore it and keep going. We'll want to go here eventually, but probably after the monsters here stop being red flames.          Charity: Meat aside, this is a nice station. Nicer than most of the ones around my part of the world.         Charity: But I wonder what's up here... where are we? Maybe somewhere new and exotic!       One easier entry here that doesn't involve dodging anything nasty is if you get the watergoing mobility option before coming here.    Also since no one's here let's mess around in the ticket office.     Tram Key... where have we seen that before...           Yeah, we're just back at Sara Sara. But what if we'd gone the other way?      The tram speeds things up.          Vanessa: Train vs Meat. Meat Wins. It obviously can't get past the blockage but it's way faster than a Quintar for this first stretch.         Tau: Looks like someone tried to wall off the meat infection here and succeeded.       Tau: ...I hope it doesn't get into the sea. Meat Tunnel is bad enough, Meat Ocean would be worse.       Two locked doors, a save point, a button.  Button unlocks the doors. Let's try one of them at random.      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqM6Huu7xs4 Tau: ...man I really don't feel like we're meant to be here. Vanessa: You say that about every place we go.       Now, we could explore around here a bit, maybe even snag some truly out-levelled loot if we were clever and speedy. It might even be some form of pro strat for a speedrun! But...    We'd have to be real loving careful, because everything here super outlevels us. It's probably the most out-of-our-depth place we've poked our noses into so far. We'll be able to take on the Crag Demon and Enami sooner than we can make headway here. But what about the other door?      Like most of the other Jay Man tracks used in this game, I couldn't find this by itself. It sounds vaguely mystical and eastern, like a slightly more electronic version of something you'd find playing in a movie in a bazaar or as the clueless western protagonist steps into an incense-filled temple, baffled by the mystics sights and unfamiliar rituals.  Vanessa: Diamond?! Oh baby yes, this is mine, all mine... Diamond is the third upgrade material. We still haven't met any Diamond upgrading vendors, though.     Hamza: Otherwise this is just a... glass box so we can look at... some water and four huge fish? Charity? Charity: Yeah, I've got nothing, this isn't cool, cute or dramatic, it's just weird. With our odd explorations done, let's hop back to the Capital since there have been a few changes there, including one that I missed on the last visit.       The Grand Master is tightening the screws...      And most of the wandering "player" NPC's have something to say about it.           Everything from panic, to fatalistic acceptance, to grumbly complaining about the people who precipitated the situation.       What I missed was that the Luxury Shop is now accessible, and was in fact accessible several crystals ago. Whoops.         They sell something for every slot except for accessories, which I'd largely rate as being somewhere between silver and gold gear in terms of quality. A few pieces are still slightly better than what we already have, but most of it's irrelevant until we get access to their super assortment in several more crystals' time.   Vanessa: Also we gotta find this key and rob their storeroom. Videogame shops exist to be robbed. Anyway, that's it for Capital content, so all that's left is to find a new place to go...      ...which is going to be seeing what's in that blighted-looking area east of the Sara Sara Bazaar. It gets its own update since it's a dungeon, and I'm picking it since it's clear that everyone's mood is for side content rather than progress, and also doing it a bit earlier than I did in my first playthrough would definitely make it more of a fun challenge.
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Jan 12, 2024 02:17
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Einander posted:One more big thing is available in the capital city, for a certain value of "big thing." You need the goat for it. Oh, poo poo, I completely forgot that thing. I think based on that, you can tell how often I used it in my first playthrough(zero, zero times).
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Jan 13, 2024 09:52
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Update 14: Beauroir Volcano Late update this time because a friend gifted me FF9 for Christmas and I wanted to finish it. I would rate it as one of the better Final Fantasies, but 5 remains my favourite main-line FF.  Before we head off to the volcano, though, as Einander helpfully pointed out, I missed something back in the Capital. The first time I played actually missed this all the way until the endgame when I wondered why people were talking about a thing I hadn't seen at all, so...  This chimney cannot be reached without either the goat or a much later mount, but I believe it's the only thing in the Capital that can't be reached with just the Quintar, so it's easy to forget, or to miss it and assume you already have everything here.   Vanessa: What the hell is this? Charity: Easter egg?   The crystal is real enough and provides the Beatsmith class, they are... technically useful and I know some people have made great strats with them, but I don't like them. Their gimmick is that despite having quite useful skills(including an MP recovery skill that recovers more than it costs, and for the entire party...), all of their skills lock them in to using the same skill three actions in a row, whether that's an attack, a buff, etc.. I don't like that it yoinks some of my control away from me, though, and I feel like I rarely have a fight where a given character is doing the same thing round after round. I'd also say that they're Crystal Project's most original class, though, without any kind of Final Fantasy analogue, unless you want to compare them to a Berserker type of character, which they're not quite, because you still get to choose what they do, but then they just keep doing it. Anyway, back to going the places we were going to go.       Tau: Are we sure we're ready for this? Hamza: We've been ready for everything so far! Tau: Except for Gran, and the troll, and Enami, and the Crag Demon, and those Quintars out in the wild, and the mushrooms underground, and the Jidamba place... Hamza: Well almost everything.         Beauroir Volcano has no music, just a windy ambience.         Charity: Well, this place is bleak, I guess it'll be too much to hope that it leads somewhere a bit more interesting to look at.    There are two enemies on the way to the next area, one is the "Mettal Beak," which are forgettable single target attackers. If you somehow got here too early, they could absolutely hack your party members in half, but they don't really present a threat to me.       The others are "Hot Shells," fiery snails that do fire things to you. The main danger is if they manage to set Burning on a character and then finish up with Spit Fire which does double damage to Burning characters. Their high physical resistance makes this a real threat if you're running with a party of purely physical combatants, but I've got a lot of magic so they don't manage to scare me much.        The broody, lamplit path of precarious volcanic ledges and constantly falling flakes of ash actually made me think of this place when I played Elden Ring and got to Mount Gelmir.       Charity: Is that a door? Tau: Certainly looks like one. Charity: Into the side of a volcano? Hamza: Can't argue with that. Charity: ...well that's delightfully whimsical, I can't wait to see what's inside!      Quiet, spooky ambience as we step in. The same sort of "brooding horror" ambience as we got in places like Gran's basement.   If you notice a slight distortion on the screenshots from here on out, it's because the game overlays a "heat shimmer" effect on your screen any time you're inside Beauroir Rock.  Hamza: Three doors, hmmmm... Vanessa: I always go with the left path first. Charity: I like to go right, helps to have a pattern. Hamza: Center it is!   Behind the center door is a spike pit and a locked door, so clearly not where we're meant to go first.        Left door leads to a chest containing a key. The right door also leads there, completely identical choice.     To progress the dungeon we need to find these single-use keys and unlock the way onwards from time to time, but it's not really much of a puzzle, relatively trivial, all in all.   Our reward for finding the first key and going down is also that now we have some surprisingly chill music for the dungeon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCQyy6DoMh8 A bit of an unusual pick for a fiery volcano dungeon, but somehow it helps bring a unique mood to the dungeon even so. I dig it.    Hamza: Hey, they're not moving towards us, you think they're gonna run away like some of the others?   Vanessa: I think the ruling on that is "no." All battles inside Beauroir Volcano immediately sets permanent Burning on all your characters. This means that they'll be taking 15% of their max health in damage every turn, and means you need to be quick about fights to avoid getting melted.   Devil Bombs, predictably, have Explode! So that's another good reason to finish the battle quickly, as well as Spit Fire, which does double damage when we're on fire and... we're always gonna be on fire. Bottom line is: They hurt.  This is a good example of how fights usually turn out in this dungeon even when I manage to avoid the Devil Bombs exploding.     It can be hard to tell, but once you're a few steps into this room, the doors lock and will only open if the flame in the room is killed. Hamza: A battle challenge! Excellent! Vanessa: Well, poo poo, I guess you're right, we do have to pick this fight. Hamza: Check it out, I'm going to rush at them mindlessly. Rargh!    Hamza: ... Vanessa: ... Hamza: ...I'm going to count that as a glorious victory. So my experience is that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when you rush at this enemy, they'll yeet themselves into the magma and destroy themselves, which also counts for the purpose of unlocking the doors. I can't tell if this is intentional or not, but it is somewhat funny.          Vanessa: Loot but... loot we can't get to... Tau: Maybe it's just there to taunt you, forever unreachable.  The thing to remember here is that while everything is split into cubes, your movement is not strictly limited to only one part of a cube. If a cube is only partially occupied, you can still walk on the unoccupied part, like the outside of these grates.    The Guard Crown is a decent hat, but our only current Light Armor wearer is a spellcaster who would prefer more blasting to less dying.      This little bit of gold is actually kind of sneakily hidden since you won't notice there's anything to jump to unless you go to the bottom of the starter platform.    The door to the right of the warp pipe leads to another Small Key, necessary for progressing.       Beauroir Volcano delights in having a non-obvious layout, with every second door being an elevator rather than a horizontal entrance, so nine times out of ten if you see something you can't reach yet, you just need to wait until you loop around.      Another room where the doors lock when we enter. Since this one is also necessary to pass through to get to the rest of the dungeon, if you die, you WILL be redoing this fight every time.     Salamanders are chonky and interesting. Firebreath is a really good, but expensive, Scholar skill to learn. With no CT time it's easy to barf up and with its partial resistance ignoring, that's also handy. Cauterizer is another all-target physical and Spotlight is a Cleric spell that gives a single target a temporary weakness to Fire damage. It has some useful synergies in our hands, in enemy hands it really adds to how much hurting they can put on us.     That ledge over there is a mean trap, it's EXACTLY out of reach of a quintar jump from the same level, so you can waste a lot of time trying to make it and circling around, I learned that the hard way.    Hamza: Okay, we need to be careful here. Vanessa: So we can avoid a pointless fight, right? Hamza: ... Vanessa: ...so we can avoid a pointless fight, right?   Hamza: It would've been just awful if they landed in the magma again and we missed this fight. Vanessa: You suck.   Rock Lizards are probably the least scary enemy in Beauroir Volcano, their only interesting skill is En-Fire, an ability that enemies occasionally have which makes all their physical attacks count as fire damage.       Another warp pipe leads into the fire basement again.        A small key, but... Vanessa: ...maybe we should try the same thing again. Charity: What thing? Vanessa: I bet we can walk on that narrow ledge by the grating.    This is the first of the game's bosses that I would call a hidden boss, but not the last one. Gran and the Troll sort of count, but they were on the path to somewhere or hard to miss otherwise. This one, though? I imagine a lot of players missed it. Now, in the real timeline I skip this guy, get to the next save point, and then come back for him with Tau as a Cleric and a nearer place to restore at, but we're going to gently caress with the chronological order of things a bit because it fits better to put the fight here. Hamza: Oh my God! An extra boss fight, this rules! Charity: I don't really get the hype about fights but... I love secrets. They always bring a cool vibe to places.     The Ancient Sword has all skills we've seen before: a basic attack, Wind-Up(very strong attack with a charge time, rare for physicals), Blood Spiller(all-attack that causes Bleeding, another -15% health per turn) and En-Fire, which makes all its physicals do fire damage.  Blood Spiller hurts like hell, but after starting with that, it always uses En-Fire as its second ability, which means...   ...that Blackout makes us completely immune to everything the Ancient Sword does for three actions. With one exception: Since Blood Spiller technically still hits, it technically still sets the Bleed status, which means everyone's losing 30% of their max health in current health while affected by both it and Burning.    It takes me a couple of tries, because of bullshit like Typhoon missing on a 90% chance to hit, and at the end Tau is down to literally zero MP, since they're simultaneously on healing duty, revive duty(Vanessa gets melted by fire and bleeding a couple of times) and Blackout duty.    The reward is... mediocre, but it's about the principle of it, the principle that says every boss needs a good dunking on just for existing.     Anyway, back on the main route, it quickly becomes obvious that we're actually circling the volcanic caldera itself, occasionally crossing it, as we work our way upwards.       More sinking and rising platforms, the trick is the same as when they were in water: jump just as they disappear, not when they appear, though the timing can be a bit trickier since the lava is opaque and you can't gauge the movement of the platforms as easily as a result.       Charity: For a volcano lair this place is really surprising. Tau: You think so? I thought the fiery enemies and heat shimmer were kind of predictable. Charity: I mean more the... colours, all I'd expect to see in a volcano would be reds and blacks. It's a nice change.      When the game tells you if a piece of gear is better or worse, note that it doesn't take special attributes into account, only stats. With the buff effect, for the first couple of turns you're definitely better protected than by a lot of other armors, but the limited duration of the effect also means it's largely relevant in fights you can also finish fast.   Charity: See? Who'd ever expect deep purple in a volcano? Tau: I think I get your point.       Some parts of the volcano are kind of surreal in their presentation. Actually, scratch that, a lot of it is. It doesn't really pretend to be a "real" place like some do.         Doing the full loop around gets you another Ether Pouch. It's one of the less important Pouch types since MP refill items are comparatively pretty expensive for most of the game unless you do some grinding or tactical stealing(some enemies have some relatively expensive steals, or can have Ethers stolen from them), so out of the endgame you're probably not going to be filling up even your starting max of Ethers.   This is probably the nastiest "disappearing platforms"-puzzle in the game, since BOTH the center AND lower right platforms disappear, so you have to be VERY on the ball when making the jump. I generally find the only easy way is to be on a Quintar, which gets you just that bit more speed for getting on and off the platforms.        The "Cold Touch" is another dubious weapon since its main special ability more or less requires picking a caster class as a primary or secondary, and then not wielding a wand/staff/book that buffs the class, and instead picking this up. I'm somewhat dubious of the utility.       Just to gently caress with you, the boss room actually isn't on the top level, instead if you jump off the top bridge, to the platform you couldn't reach from the middle bridge, you'll get there.     The one on the top floor instead contains this strange room full of flames that run from you. If you manage to catch one...       And then DON'T attack it, it'll cast Curena on the party and then run away. They also have a unique steal.   If it works with lifesteal effects, then it makes sense, but if it only works with direct healing effects, then it's once again one of those "you have to make a weird janky hybrid setup"-gear pieces when by and large you want to specialize.    Anyway, it's BOSS TIME.   One of the important parts of this boss fight is identifying who the dangerous one is.   Iguanadon isn't too scary, being a single-target attacker who doesn't hand out unmanageable amounts of murder per turn.  Iguanadin, on the other hand, is a priority target for killing or lockdowns. Harvester is a multi-target physical, which is bad news, and Spit Fire was bad enough on normal enemies, on a boss with higher stats, it can one-shot even Hamza. Hamza: What the hell's the point of being a tank if a single hit can take me down?! These two are notably more difficult than the first time I fought them as a consequence of knowing the game well, which may seem paradoxical, but easily explained: knowing where to go, when and in what order involves me bumping into a lot less rando fights and thus I've been consistently slightly underlevelled for everything I hit.  Vanessa: First things first, how about the dangerous one doesn't get any turns. Sleeping Iguanadin both prevents it from taking a couple of actions and also gives Hamza the breathing space to Taunt both of them, making sure he draws every single-target attack they've got. My first attempt got the party clowned on because Hamza could only draw one's fire and the other would hack Charity in half or something.  Tau: Ha ha, no, no, you don't get to do that. Blackout remains useful for preventing Sear and Spit Fire from killing anyone.  And Harvester is negated by blinding the Iguanadin.    Meanwhile Charity and Hamza are on damage pressure duty, keeping the pain flowing. Everyone being on fire and Tau's non-infinite mana pool still presents a limitation in terms of how long I can allow this fight to go on, I can only do so much healing.  This is what it looks like when a Harvester lands  Tau only BARELY survives to heal the party up, and that about does it for the last of their MP.   Thankfully I can always rely on Vanessa for having stacked up enough AP for some spike damage once enemies' names are in their "very badly injured"-red colour. Hamza: By the skin of our teeth! I love those kinds of fights. Vanessa: Ugh, I don't. They'd better drop some good stuff. Charity: I'm just curious what's behind that door, we've been going up for a while now, we must be almost at the top of the volcano... Tau: I just can't wait until we're done with this boondoggle side journey and can get back to the actual place we're meant to go. We could've gone there days ago! Literal days! It's right there, the boat! Charity: Raft. Tau: Raftboat!  The Bone Mail is an okay piece of armor but a bit outdated already.  And I have no idea how you're meant to swing the Bone Trophy. The stance itself is just an exaggerated version of Berserker Stance, but -50% health!? Maybe you could stash it on a Ninja and rely on being able to dodge? Or a Rogue and really good aggro management?     Tau: Fresh air, hallelujah. Charity: I guess it is nice to see the sun again. Are we really at the top?       Vanessa: We're on the stairs leading to the top, if that counts.       This is the caldera itself, the pit we've been circling all along. If we dropped down here and missed the magma we'd be right back in the dungeon.     I loving LOVE the Valkyrie class, they're amazing. They've got a Taunt skill like the Warrior, but it affects ALL enemies, which means you'll never have one or two attacking squishies on their first action. They've also got party-wide heals, inherent Re-Raise and Re-Raise on allies, a good selection of gear, some okay attack skills, etc. stack them with a Warrior secondary for the various attack and defense-weakening bonks and you're golden. Now, let's get the hell out of this volcano.  Tau: Did you have to keep the beard? Hamza: Yes, I like the beard.   Charity: I think the viking warrior look suits you. Hamza: See? Charity likes it. Charity gets me.    Tau: Fine, whatever. At least now we can go to Shoudu Province and nothing weird is going to happen. No strange distractions. No odd occurrences. We're just going to have a nice trip across the water. Next Time: Nothing weird happens, they have a nice trip.
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Jan 30, 2024 17:43
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AweStriker posted:The screenshots all say Beaurior but your text commentary all says Beauroir (with the “o” and “i” switched). Ah you see that's a clever hint to the reader that lets them know I'm incompetent if they're paying attention.
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Jan 30, 2024 19:36
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 04:57 |
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Olesh posted:I think you didn't look closely enough at it - Berserker Stance is deal 25% more physical damage / take 25% more physical damage. lmao oh my God I've played through this game like five times and every single loving time I've misread that item because of what I expected it to say.
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Jan 30, 2024 23:27
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