Yeah, I am taking a break from the series, but the Torna expansion is on my list. I still have the expansion for 1 to play as well.
And you are right, the exploration in these games is way more fun than I would have thought. I knew exactly which hidden island you were talking about (the one on Mor Ardain, right?). It feels really good to find them. I ended up liking 1 a bit more just because it runs so smoothly on the Switch, but 2 has its definite charms.
It is hilarious how there is NO HURRY to do anything, even when the story tells you there is. Very much reminded me of Yakuza, in which the story is always like KIRYU YOU GOTTA STOP THIS BAD DUDE RIGHT NOW and you can just take a left turn to go buy a porn magazine for a teenager or save a cat or something. At the end of 2, there is an optional cutscene that even tells you THIS IS THE FINAL FIGHT and you can still just go do some sidequests to do whatever, and that is pretty funny.
1 is better about making you feel the scale of the world since everythingās directly connected as opposed to separate islands so i can definitely see reasons to prefer it. i do think 2 has a somewhat better soundtrack, which is a big part of making running around so appealing.
the 1 expansion is fun! thereās not much to the story at all but itās a cool area and worth doing. i might be crazy but i think the Torna prequel in 2 might actually both look and run better than the base game, like they figured out the hardware a little better.
so what is everyone doing with Erik? in my head, i imagine itās something like:
do a debuff
use his splitting ability
do the punishment move
??
i could see how that would do a lot of damage, but he is made of paper, and so i rarely get enough turns with him in this point in the game to ever execute that.
i guess this will be easier if i go get my tankās ability to uhā¦tank (lol why doesnāt he start with it?) and draw monster aggro.
Yeah itās this, he does 6x damage for each copy of himself when they have the status ailment, then factor in dual wielding and the guaranteed crit move. Also every other hit including the weaker off-hand ones have a chance for critical hit as well. So itās not uncommon for him to do damage in the thousands if you manage to pull it off.
Also what I was hinting at earlier is that thereās two pep powers that increase xp and turn all enemies into metal slimes, so together with Erikās guaranteed crit move and a bit of luck, you can rake in the xp. Itās tedious but if you have enough pep pops it should alleviate some of the grind
but yeah anyway everyone always said that the secret to enjoying dragon quest is to take it slow and savour all the individual scenarios which never ever worked for me on its own but when you combine it with a) needing to re-spec on a regular basis, b) an overarching plot line of being able to fix past mistakes, and c) a reasonable approach to random battles and pacing, I eat that shit up
That really makes it sounds like they fixed the biggest problem I had with DQ8. Skill points at the start felt like a nice way to take some control in your growth but after the half way point just felt so arbitrary when you really just wanted to fill out your toolbox and if you didnāt reach a skill threshold the points feel worthless. Now if there was some kind of hidden math where the skill points gave some kind of passive buff to those weapons it might have felt like you still got something out of them. DQIX mostly avoided this with a robust job system and let you farm skill points off other jobs that you knew you wouldnāt use with that character so I you were always making progress in some way.
Erik is not really useful for much outside of stealing and popping rabblerouser until you can set up his nuke game, which is a problem with a lot of the characters in this game imo. his nuke game is also, as others have mentioned above, completely broken and not necessary at all
I am sitting at the end of act 2 now and as long as I can make sure Erik can stay alive and active long enough to get set up i have used him and buff/debuff sport to vaporize every boss
iāll be curious to hear what you think of the the final parts of the game. they really do ramp everything up in a way that is unprecedented throughout the rest of the game. i.e. i wonder if that will keep working? i suspect it might!
iām gonna give it a go when i have the mental energy to dive in again
The way I tend to control my ship is I use autopilot almost exclusively for rotation (way easier than trying to manually align to a vector) and almost always manual for velocity (sometimes iāll click a nugget to autopilot if iām feeling lazy but thatās not as doable on the Eagle as it is on the tug). That might help you maneuver a little easier.
Also if youāre just cruising through the rings after building up 50m/s of speed or so, because you want to go deeper, make sure to turn your ship around so you can brake with your thruster instead of your RCS, itās way faster for obvious reasons.
I feel like every time I make the mistake of accepting a supercar/hypercar race in a Forza Horizon I immediately regret the decision when I have to do 200 rewinds just to try and avoid the AI crashing into my rear when I brake sufficiently hard that I can actually make a corner