Yeah I remember thinking that looked like the best game ever made but nowadays there are like 50 different Atelier-style games that look like that, who cares, give me more garish plasticky shit or chibis that are simultaneously flowerly and ugly
The Switch version stops the game clock if you pause the game before putting it to sleep.
I think I found a Rune? I don’t remember which one, I can’t find it any of the menus. I’ll have to consult the screenshot I took. I have no clue what it does. I assume there are more. I think this is the only side quest-y bit I’ve accomplished? Maybe I should go to other cities.
Went to explore the swamp at yorkland and got confronted by the next big bad in Asellus’s story, a super powered mystic. After the last few bosses I expected him to be a nightmare, but I managed to quickly combo him to death with full health for everyone.
Meanwhile in the swamp, there’s all these cartoonish eyes watching all around, which when approached a goofy lizard jumps out and attacks. Every single one of them is actually a giant squid that can one shot my entire party
they’re soooooo fussy, like you have to at least build up asellus herself on her own quest, and ildon (I think) has a really good stun move that comes out quickly which is really useful for some of her later bosses, and mesartham’s group heal is good when you first recruit her, but… leveling them is no fun at all
What makes them difficult to level? Just making sure to absorb the right monsters on their mystic gear to get the right stats/skills? I got Nusakarn and Mesarthim on my first playthrough but I didn’t end up actually using them that much.
when I finished Riki’s story with him as a Dullahan, it put a Dullahan Shield in my inventory for NG+, so I get to just breeze through Emilia’s story with ridiculously high defense and evasion as well as an endgame weapon
i just started ng+ with Red after finishing Emelia and can’t decide how i feel about it, if it’s too broken for my tastes to have all that equipment or what. might start over
Emelia’s boss: lol at them not even attempting to explain what that was or why. alright
Yeah I picked to continue on NG rather than + because I like how the power ramp feels in this game, plus the narrative is so sparse it really benefits from having interesting gameplay stretches in between. With Red in particular it feels good at the start because you get a good sense of how weak he is as Red vs how strong he is as Alkaiser, and also there are some fights where you can only transform in the later half of a fight.
I did regular NG with red but NG+ as Emilia. After finishing Riki’s route and using it as a difficulty reference, I decided I wanted to play Red starting from zero, whereas I wanted to hurdle over Emilia’s barriers as quickly as possible
I’m feeling pretty ambivalent about the option in the remaster to show entrances/exits
On one hand, thank god. Big QoL upgrade, enormous timesaver. Essential feature.
On the other hand, the lack of clear entrances/exits added a lot to the game’s mystique. The game was a lot bigger then. It never felt like you mastered a place’s geography; you believed that if you looked at the right place, interacted with the tiniest pixel at the border of an inconspicuous screen you could probably access new weird hidden places. And it was true!!
The digital movement and lack of arrows drove me nuts, I’m so glad I can use the analog stick now even if it’s still only 8 way.
Is switching a character’s weapon late game a bad move? I think Liza is supposed to be very good at Martial Arts but I have her using guns…am I handicapping her by leveling up another moveset?
liza is extremely good at sparking martial arts techs, as I mentioned upthread she’s the only one who can trivially spark 3/4 of the DSC moves, i.e. by using air throw for like half an hour’s worth of battles (emelia is the only one who can easily spark 4/4 thanks to changing her talent pool per-costume, everyone else is 2/4 at most), but DSC is technically not as good as being able to throw out 4- and 5-person combos on a regular basis which guns lets you do, so if you actually know the combo system well, keep her with guns.
swords are the only weapon where you really need to use them on a character for most of a playthrough to learn enough abilities to be viable I think (they have that slow ramp in common with mystics even though they don’t appear that way initially) – guns don’t have that deep of an ability set and they’re mostly good for comboing, and most of the DSC moves (which are far and above more useful than any other individual martial arts move) are technically mid-tier on their own and will come up relatively early on if at all.
her stats are very nearly the same regardless and physical characters’ base stats are not too different from one another in general
