I lied and bought this game for full price last week. I was having fun until they forced the healer/fun AOE spell character out of the party and then sent me into a “protect this character” boss fight where none of your attacks can interrupt the multiple enemies who rush her all at once and do damage far faster than you can spam healing spells. I’m not interested in grinding so I turned the game off.
ha. That was also the first time I saw the gameover-screen. And quite often:
About 5? times in as much minutes.
Then i remembered that this is tri-Ace, and went off to learn some more skills, saw that you can buy upgraded weapons/accessories and felt stupid. I also decided to figure out how the break the game, and lo-and-behold, did so:
You might have gotten some DLC-items with your game, which you can retrieve from the heroe’s bed in his hometown. If so, equip the EXP+20 (iirc gold bunny) accessory and e.g. do some sidequests to quickly get some level-ups. If you equip the hero (Flipper? talking about a forgettable name, i’ve played this 52 hours and can’t even remember the heros name?! ) with some slashing skill, you can cancel-break enemies’ attacks and fill the EXTREMECOOLNAME-bar on the right side of the screen with magenta-colored stuff, which give you another EXP-boost (about up to 300+%).
Back to the boss, unleash at least a LV4 RUSH-attack (R2+X) with Flipper and that might have gotten rid of one attacker already (watch out that you’ve chosen the right chara, can be aggravating to reload just because of that … ).
If you discover that you actually like battles - you just …
- need the skill to forgo getting EXP and instead boosting SP instead
- do some battles, use the EXP to boost the skill (to get some 3ish % more SP on top) and max out the item-dropping skills.
- These help you with gaining items that you can drop off for sidequests, which give you EXP that is converted into SP …
- which boosts your skill-max’ing time …
- which give you the “Ocarina”-skill at one point. You can manipulate enemies to reapper by virtue of a few button inputs, which - you’ve guessed it by now - helps with farming items and gaining EXP/SP, which can be used to further max out skills …
- additionally, you also get some rare materials you can use in crafting. Getting some equipment in the last few dungeons which is ~ 400 points below items you’ve created hours before is a sign that you can go and finish the game in a swoop.
… or you can just leave it at that!
I did decide to continue and had a great time with it, but i might be weird, granted …
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Oh, I totally could go grind. The thing is, up until that exact battle, I was having a pretty smooth curve. If anything, the game had gotten pretty mindless in even other “boss” encounters so far. Then here’s this brick wall that isn’t fun in any way to deal with, it’s just a flat “hey, guess what? You’re actually failing this stat check. Go home.” And that’s not satisfying at all.
that’s basically my tri-Ace experience … hitting walls, fullspeed, and at least once or twice in any title!
i am seriously of two minds about whether i ever want to play this one, and more so than i am/was with i am setsuna. i don’t even have a traditional jrpg for my ps4 yet, so that alone piques my interest, and i really did like star ocean 2 back in the days of 32 bits. then again, nostalgia sure can be a desert mirage. besides, i also keep thinking back to my ffxiv subscription, and it’s very interesting to me that some folks get excited about a thing like this and still won’t touch the mmo version of the single best jrpg in years (imo). damn. maybe, maybe…
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“MMO version of” kills my interest more than “mobile free to play touchscreen version of” honestly
I love a lot of things about FF12 and find none of them in 14
the notion that 14 is a lot like 12 just because 12 was kind of “mmo lite” compared to past ff titles is… yeah, incorrect. it’s definitely a real mmo. but i won’t try to convince anyone! just saying, i think it’s a shame that it’s being missed by so many who i think would really enjoy it if it weren’t for an aversion to any and all mmorpgs. i’d say it’s easily the most legit ff since 12, though i wouldn’t go too crazy with direct comparisons.
this might be kind of neither here nor there for a thread about star ocean 5. i only mention it because of the way some of the settings and landscapes look here, and because of the psychedelic lightshow you get in battles — it reminds me of ffxiv where you’ve got 30 or so players all piled up on an elite hunt out in the open field, and as soon as the battle begins it’s just an explosion of light and color. but it’s also a game with a story that excites me way, way, way more than whatever animu space opera star ocean 5 is supposed to be.
don’t mind me, tho
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Sadly XIV is also the grindiest since… well, technically XI.
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I thought this meant “the mmo version of FF12”
Frankly the only common ground between standard RPGs and MMORPGs is superficial, you get entirely different things from these genres.
ah, i worded that poorly and actually meant to make some point about not necessarily differentiating between jrpgs and mmos if there’s enough of a mechanical and narrative/aesthetic similarity, and my feeling is basically that ffxiv is a genuine final fantasy game.
it’s true that traditional jrpgs and even jrpg-styled mmos like ffxiv offer different experiences and i don’t have a particularly smart response other than, well, yeah, but i guess for me, and what i want out of rpgs as my tastes have developed, perhaps beginning with squaresoft rpgs of the snes and psx eras and going through panzer dragoon saga, skies of arcadia, dragon quest 8, eventually wow and then… not much for a while until ffxiv, i guess… ffxiv more or less captures what i want out of a thing called final fantasy, at this point. personally. and so i look at a game like star ocean 5 with immense curiosity and skepticism, because i guess i’m concerned that it looks nice, but i’ll be groaning about my decisions in life if it turns out there’s creepy, weird baby talk and other such terrible anime shit in this one.
Maybe someone else that also played the game (someone should/has, right? …… right???) should weigh in here, but I’d definitly say YES, you will be in for creepy weird baby talk, or at least that’s what I felt like with that kid that tags along. I didn’t even touch the japanese language option, so I just can ytube the first best cutscene-result, and here you go
…… you can compare that to Star Ocean 5: The Movie
-cutscene collection.
i’d say then you better stay away from this. i was basically always busy staging cutscenes in a way that wasn’t supposed to be done this way* to distract myself from the unbearable animu-behaviour of some characters, especially of nursery teacher miki who drove me up the wall (or would have, if I wasn’t busy doing all sorts of emotes)
*: the emotes that are actually included in the game do look like someone knew that the story would be unbearable, and wanted to give these poor souls (that have to suffer through this experience) a chance to at least get some enjoyment out of the enforced animu-cutscene(s). especially bodybuilder posing and loitering around on the ground do serve not-too-many purposes other than making the player feel like he’s trolling the sequences. Of course, you can use them outside cutscenes as well, but why would you? You can battle dinosaurs or 12-foot-turtles then.
tl;dr-version: you really do have to enjoy this kind of gameplay, and I don’t think I can recommend it when I do not know your taste(s), sorry!
that’s not actually all that bad. overly cutesy and all, but it’s not this:
nothing - nothing - tops the dinner dance.
(p.s. I actually found lyml to be more likeable than some of the SO5 cast…)
well,
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the last star ocean game i played was Till The End of Time on the ps2 and it is one of my most loathed games ive ever touched
so
i may embark on this journey since i have no family to spend thanksgiving with
good … god … i mean, have fun while it lasts!
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