I’m playing this approximately one session every 7-10 days. Just got through the flying waters for example. the mechanics of the leveling with the skills / pictos / etc are starting to make sense after using maelle for a bit (and some googling). I commend them for making a pretty enjoyable system that doesn’t rush to explain itself to you.
when a large enemy straight up ATE Gustave I was like oh shit I hope he comes back later…!? then I “broke” him and he spit Gustave out. I thought stuff like that was super cool honestly the sense of like “omg was that supposed to happen” was quite novel for me, I guess I haven’t gone into a game like this relatively unspoiled in a long time and I’ve missed that sense of freshness and novelty.
it’s interesting too to play a game that (so far) is mostly about the “adventure” of it without it explicitly seeking to make grand philosophical or political arguments, and actually enjoying that experience instead of feeling like it’s frivolous or a waste of time. in other words, sort of avoiding the critical impulse that is basically always switched on for me. I guess that’s what happens when you make a good adventure!
this is very good
i neglected to put a single point into vit until act 2, seems like this was a mistake. sort of getting the hang of the builds and stuff now, getting a 9999 counter is very satisfying
the stat allocations are weird because circa act 2 you start getting huge stat boosts (health in particular) from equipped pictos. getting speed to ~40 for everyone out of the gate seems the most important
nothing’s that important once the game starts jizzing out dozens of trinkets that go into a hundred skill slots wherever you want. got forbid there wasn’t something in any single corner of this twisted time warped last dungeon of a final fantasy except 40 hours long ass world. if there was a randomize all button you could hit that and be fine most of the time. and i wish there was one because opening the menu to tweak your build Sucks. yeah, that’s right, i’ve gone full hater on this one. sorry i said jizzing though
yeah when i was a kid i really used to stress over stat stuff but i don’t think there’s many games made today that softlock you based on builds, at least to my experience - seems that it causes too many review complaints
nah messing with all the passives rules, it is the actual meat of the combat system.
I said this on discord a week ago
there’s a whole bunch of effects that can trigger on death and I think it would be really funny to win fights by dying as fast as possible
and it turned out that I could one shot the hardest boss fight in the game by doing exactly this. Game is thankfully free of the “+2% to attack if the moon is full” style bonuses, everything instead being significant enough that it actually has a major effect on the flow of combat
speed and luck both have fairly obvious breakpoints around ~40 and ~20 iirc, and you need a bit in vit initially, then you can treat the others more or less as dump stats
Yeah, its just that equipping a high level speed/crit rate picto gives 4-5x as much benefit to the character as a perfectly optimized spread of stats. The bonuses are so big it makes the stat allocation secondary to collecting good pictos
The way I spent points ended up with characters that had 70 in stats that give weapon scaling bonuses and 40 in other stats, so you can just land on those breakpoints without deliberately being aware of them
I think this game would be better without manually assigned stat points at all, tbh. It should auto-assign them for each character based on their combat archetypes and save me having to think about it. There are enough other ways you have to build your character.
I took a long break but I’m back in, at the start of act 2. I like how the world map opens up at that point. Volleyball was jank as hell but weirdly fun, felt like one of those warcraft 3 custom maps that used the engine to do something it wasn’t supposed to.
this is how i felt about the parkour, i appreciate that the game puts you in a minigame that is essentially “look at this janky and traditionally unfun thing we can make you do”, it feels like a certain confidence and jouissance that you don’t often see these days. bit of a throwback to the 2000’s era 3d games
Fight the two big bosses wandering around the world map, definitely. The dragon and the guy in the sea. They’re fun fights
Endless Tower is misleadingly named, it’s not a real dungeon. It’s a little menu prompt to fight a series of increasingly difficult battles. Some of the later battles in the endless tower are really nice puzzles
For story stuff, I would take a few minutes to max out the relationships with my party members (its funny that the relationship stuff is like a vestigial persona reference). A few of them lead to quests in various dungeon locations. The best is definitely Maelle’s quest at the Reacher
Flying Manor lets you fight Clea
Renoir’s Drafts + the Abyss is the big ultimate dungeon of the game, that’s where you fight the toughest boss. Highly recommended.
just beat the eveque trio in flying manor and fuck me those are some nasty gimmicks. changing up the timing of familiar attacks between turns + forcing you to distribute damage evenly between all three is so evil. i assume i’m not really meant to be here until post so i took the hint and headed to back to the main path.
game rules. i love pressing button on time.
Played this game on a combination of 8-10 year old mid range/high end hardware the other day (broadwell extreme cpu with 1070ti). I was shocked at how well it ran on medium settings at 1080p.
Edit: Okay maybe not that shocked looking at minimum system requirements.
sciel’s foretell mechanic is stupid fun imo. and as usual I’m a sucker for anyone with a lesbian straight girl vibe. I guess there’s romance in this game eventually but I really want a romance between sciel and lune, I don’t think they let you do that.
the sense of like “omg was that supposed to happen” was quite novel for me, I guess I haven’t gone into a game like this relatively unspoiled in a long time and I’ve missed that sense of freshness and novelty.
