Yeah, the three or four new characters I’ve gotten have all come with new formations. I wonder if there really is a unique formation for each recruitable character (I think there are close to 90 characters).
Also haley apparently there actually is Stuff in the second region, where we found axe girl. We just completely missed it. Apparently you can steal the pirate ship and go explore the ocean.
i figured there had to be something there but zero idea of how to trigger it. the pirates showed up to the shop, got mad and left in one fell swoop. super weird. then the whole thing with the bees buzzing back and forth but not actually doing anything, damn.
I recommend switching weapons if you feel like it, I gave a bow to one of my brawlers and he got new weapon levels like mad and one role that required brawling + bow skills.
Roles don’t seem essential though, it’s probably only worth it if you have a good weapon and an empty role slot
I’m now mostly using the contingency plan formation, which reduces starting BP but also reduces every conditional skill cost to 1 BP (conditional skills are interrupts, blocks, counters)
Very fun to play around and makes Jolt Counter viable
Whoa, contingency plan sounds like a very good defensive formation if you know what you’re up against. I’ve been trying to pay more attention to enemy conditionals now and I guess “???” is always a conditional of some sort? I was thinking it meant a new attack I had never seen but recently it seems like if I leave them alone then the enemy doesn’t actually do anything. If that’s the case then quelling is more for making an enemy susceptible to damage that turn. I was thinking quelling was, like, stopping someone from doing a strong attack and I was always focusing on doing that. But if I can ignore an “???” then that means it’s actually just one less enemy to deal with that turn as long as I know what attack type to not use.
Yeah, I chased the pirates away when they showed up because I wanted to be a Good Person but nothing happens after that that I was able to discover. But I guess if you don’t chase them away, if you save the bees you can collect some honey, give the honey to the bartender, and then he will make a new drink that gets all the pirates super drunk. Then you can steal their pirate ship.
Not sure what was up with the dog though.
???'s are really scary since I’ve had them interrupt attacking a different character and sometimes even interrupts the ranged attack I use to quell it (which seems like that should be against the rules!). i usually get scared and don’t do anything unless i’m positive what it is and how it triggers
now that I’ve sparked some interrupts myself I figured out that if an interrupt hits a ranged attack I should test out a different ranged damage type until I figure out which one doesn’t get interrupted
I would be unhappy that this game is so combat focused except the combat is SO good even if I’m getting total party wipes maybe once an hour (thats more a testament to how long ago since I played a kawazu)
Yeah, enemy ??? attacks are always conditional skills.
You can -mostly- ignore enemies that are going to use these attacks, but if they’re using a block they can fuck up your chain attack plans by protecting the enemy you want to kill, and if they’re using an interrupt they can interrupt anybody in your team even if they’re targetting somebody else (and interrupt skills can be very bad news)
Quelling is hitting an enemy charging a conditional skill with a ranged attack (bows are the best for it) This cancels the conditional skill.
seemed like the jp consensus was that ‘stray sheep’ is the best formation, you get a full bp refresh on landing a unite attack
unsure who you need to recruit to get it though
earlier on i was pretty much fucked vs a boss and just about to quit out when i somehow got two back to back unite attacks and won, goty
I feel like I really fucked up my playthrough because everything’s so high difficulty right now and I’ve avoided going to elemental mines to grind resources and even battles tagged “normal” difficulty still destroy my party
I’m paranoid about that but the area I’m in has three different mines so I’m seriously considering grinding out til I can upgrade just about every piece of equipment I’m able to.
For now I’d say don’t worry about the difficulty modifier. If you want to go grind at mines to reforge your sword, go grind at mines. I keep reading that this game has virtually no un-winnable situations so don’t let the difficulty stuff scare you from grinding at different spots. This is probably a mechanical factoid for people who are interested in the game design but completely ignorable information for most people.
I don’t even know if that 2% vs 10% thing I mentioned earlier really just means that the 10% kicks in when you do a brand new, first time battle. Maybe you can cycle through 5 different elemental mines and still only get the 2% difficulty boost if you’ve done those mines before. In this case, this difficulty modifier probably only comes into play with Leanord’s playthrough because he’s fully open and you can keep doing new stuff.
But again, the higher the difficulty gets then the faster your characters level up, rank up, and tech glimmers to keep pace. It’s just a system to help the game have a steady difficulty since for some characters there’s no set order what battle nodes you choose to fight when. If I feel like I can’t beat a hard battle then I generally try to re-think my defensive strategies and/or see what equipment I can upgrade. I’m playing Urpina and have not bothered with grinding, only doing each battle node once (for the most part- I think there are some mines I did several times to see if they changed). I have my fair share of hard battles but it’s possible to pull through.
No clue how your playthrough works though @Tulpa tulpa, sorry. I’d imagine it’s the same. Get crystals if you need them, don’t worry about the difficulty modifier. It might even make your characters boost strong enough to beat harder battles before the battles themselves get more difficult.
Yeah, like tulpa said I think conditionals are based on Slash, Pierce, and Blunt attack types. So ranged attacks can still be interrupted if they’re the wrong type. If you don’t have another ranged attack then you can try doing a status effect like Sleep or Paralysis (though often times these are paired with slash/pierce/blunt), or just play it safe and have no one use that one attack type that turn. So it’s good to have a spread of different weapons in your team.
I do like how difficult the game manages to be at all times myself, even at the most frustrating of times. Even easy battles go south very quickly for me if I’m doing an un-optimized strategy aiming for specific battle rewards. There was a segment where I felt I had a strong set of 5 characters who were working for me for all battles, and I had a gameplay that worked for most battles, and I felt the game was actually getting stale at that point. The constant push out of your comfort zone keeps you thinking rather than letting it turn into rote repetition. It’s an RPG where the battles are the game, so every battles needs to engage you.
I’m probably fucking myself over by playing leonard, then! My constant search for new activities rather than grinding probably bumped my difficulty up disproportionately
Its funny because random minor encounters destroy me way more than fighting those giant worms that break through the earth and I think thats because those don’t get affected by difficulty scaling.
Yeah, I haven’t played Leonard but I’d like to think they’d account for that, right? That’s the entire drive of a completely open character. But maybe you really do have to strike up some mines with him if you’ve explored too fast. Have you been upgrading your equipment too?
I remember reading that suggested beginner characters were Urpina and Leonard so there’s gotta be something you can do. Apparently the other woman (I guess this is who’s Tuxedo’s playing) is structurally similar to Urpina but can be more difficulty since she’s a caster. And Balmaint is apparently not recommended for beginners because he can be very open or extremely constrained depending on what you actually do on your playthrough. Sounds like he’s high variance.
FYI she’s super strong and not very difficult to use. Her quest does feel very weird and challenging so far but I’m not sure how much more compared to the other characters (probably not at all considering everybody’s reactions ITT)
i gather she’s the speedrun character
oh I have been upgrading my equipment, I stopped for the night right after upgrading a whole bunch of stuff at once, so I don’t know if that’ll rectify the sudden difficulty spike I faced.
Its kind of weird that I’m always prompted to just walk away from quests like “there’s no reason we should be concerned with this, do you want to leave?” has been in almost every dialogue so far.
I’m thinking it’s possible that if they give you an option to opt out of doing something it might actually mean you’re making a choice that has an effect. Like I was alluding to earlier, there’s a part where you walk by a village and then suddenly pirates invade it. If you go to the village you’ll see that pirates are pillaging and the game asks if you want to fight them. I thought this was just double checking if I wanted to do a fight. I beat them and the pirates ran and that was it. Nothing really happened afterward. But apparently if you choose to not fight them then there’s further stuff you can do with the pirates, interacting with some other sidequest in the same region.
So basically any time there’s a choice of “do you want to do X” out of nowhere, I’m going to assume it has some sort of reaction, either enabling, changing, or ending a side quest.
yeah it does, and sometimes things will change if you don’t even interact with something on screen. I ignored some monsters attacking a dam and fought something else and as soon as the battle ended, the monsters I didn’t fight destroyed the dam and one nearby city.
this really is a saga game, huh