Tactics Ogre takes such a nosedive in the last chapter. Once there are only two major conflicting forces left, supernatural elements become at the center of the story to raise the stakes, and you go multiple battles without much plot, it’s hard to care. Thinking about it every Matsuno game has a strong beginning / weak final act?
It starts slowly transitioning into a postgame million hour grind lootfest which is just an extremely bizarre choice for a TRPG. Battles get relatively easier though, and you can start autobattling through most of the big dungeons which makes for a chill time.
Also pushing enemies into bottomless pits has never been easier
Replaying TO now, I really like the parts that have always been criticized about the plot.
Namely Catiua and Vyce eventually leaving Denam no matter which path he chooses. You can’t just pick the Perfect Route, there are forces at play that are larger than the player’s input like Vyce’s jealousy and Denam’s ambition
Love how the game goes out of your way to make the player feel awful even in the most moral path Denam gets framed for a massacre and instead of leaving / staying quiet he continues to fight and kills his own people including a guy who’s just trying to get medicine for his sick daughter
knocked a flier into a bottomless pit and appreciated the dramatic pause before they flew back up
attempting the postgame lootfest because i realised i’ve never actually finished palace of the dead and yeah it’s a great ‘podcast in the background’ game at this point
iirc you really only need to do the first five floors of the dungeon to get Fudo and then between that and four summoners (I want to say one Lich, one princess, one or two Shamans, and one other class that can summon?) you’re pretty much good to go
Canopus falls off at last but Haborym really doesn’t just by being unhittable and getting more movement options, and between a water lich having healrain and the princess having revive you finally don’t need to double up on cleric/priest and can just use Olivia
this is very old SNES advice though and may be tied to the neutral route
Canopus has been a beast for grabbing cards everywhere (new mechanic) and taking care of bosses almost by himself in Chapter 1-3 though he definitely becomes worse in 4
I found archers OK with a status bow and Eagle Eye (which guarantees 100% status accuracy) but yeah. Witches are just better at this job. Ninjas and archers are maybe the worst basic classes now which is nuts
remembering this post-mortem by the developer of Zero Tolerance (that Sega Genesis FPS) where he mentioned how when he first pitched the game his producer replied with “No one likes 3D games.” (link (timestamped))
with games like that as context, yeah I think I can understand where that producer was coming from
to provide you a sense of closure: I eventually got out of the pit I dug for myself and finished the game last night. Not sure if that was the best use of a snow day, but I enjoyed it at least.
yomi and honor are the two weirdest resources in the game, since unlike everything else their accumulation doesn’t appear to increase exponentially. if nothing else it’s a nice wrinkle in the design of a game full of little wrinkles.
(can’t believe people speedrun this game lmao)
went with the (imo) canon ending (reject), because it felt more in character
This was my issue with New Vegas—after doing three of the DLC expansions, my save data was taking so long to load that the entire program started to crash. That was my only complaint with the console version.
You know what the worst part of this list for best Nintendo game of 1989 is? Zelda II won this award the previous year and was somehow up for it again in '89.
I looked that up to double check but I knew that already, the early Nintendo Power awards scarred me as a child.
idk if this is actually helpful, but i remember reading somewhere that creating a new save file every time helps mitigate any save issues. couldn’t tell you how many save files i ended up with bc i would save, then save again in a new save file every 20 minutes or so
new vegas is fairly unplayable without using the anti crash plugin on the PC version, which makes it so if you’re prudent about what mods you install you crash like once every 20 hours or so instead of all the time
there was this one point in that old world blues dlc where there was a huge stack of gold bars that i figured i could steal and sell but i think the only way to do this was by like… taking bits of them, carrying them and like crawling away bc i was crouching and over encumbered? i don’t know why i did it like that, thinking about it now. but i was rich af!!
thats in dead money and thats the only way to do it because its a ripoff of treasure of sierra madre and youre not supposed to be greedy in a game that directs you to pick up like everything not nailed down. One of the many reasons why it’s an awful dlc
