Thatās good to know. I have been really enjoying clearing stages lately but also the level for the stages hasnāt really been going up (even though I have been). I just thought I was really doing really good (even though Iām just guessing what beats what).
Note - I havenāt even saved my girl sister person. Josef keeps telling me sheās in danger and Iām leveled up enough but idc. Kinda neat that they donāt cap my level but yeah could make it boring for a minute
I think I might start recruiting more and using lower level characters.
Lots of Japanese SRPG lovers on the tube are loving this game so thereās gotta be something to bite into. I think a lot of them kept clearing the demo over and over so maybe itās also a speed run type SRPG??
Iāve also been finding the battles pretty easy. Last night* I went through a story mission that was actually pretty cleverly-scripted (the one where the long-haired swordfighter frees another character from a jail cell and you recruit them both on the battlefield) but I was surprised to find the enemy level for that mission so low given that it was after the big rescue.
Iām thinking the difficulty has to be balanced in favor of the player given that the game must be beatable on the highest difficulty with automatic battle resolution, and if youāre smart at all in your configurations then lesser difficulties arenāt going to present too much of a challenge. But there could very well be a difficulty spike yet to come, since Iāve only just left the first kingdom.
But even if things get more difficult, the game is fundamentally forgiving compared to other tactical RPGs (having no permanent death, for example). This hasnāt really bothered me yet, but if I reach a point where it no longer matters which of my unit blocks I deploy and aim at particular enemies because they are all so strong then the game might start to drag.
* Technically this morning because I got a late start and played until almost 5:00 a.m.
Tip: Thereās a setting that makes you run by default on the world map instead of walk. I didnāt learn this until just before it became irrelevant for a reason I wonāt spoil.
Iāve reached the point now where the enemies arenāt all pushovers anymore. Itās still not extremely challenging (on standard difficulty) but itās making me think enough that the battles are fun and I think I can see how itās likely to get trickier (especially after getting destroyed halfway up the ladder in the coliseum).
One thing Iāve learned is that if your unit is several levels higher than an enemyās, you get next to no experience for beating them (but other lower-level units in the same formation still get full XP). You can see this is happening after a battle because the experience number is red. This is why the paladin never levels up, but Iām very close to reaching enemies at his level now.
The formation pictured below became basically my favorite one a while back. Not just because itās fun to play with flying units (which it is) but also because of some of the interactions I was able to set up between the team members. For example:
The fighter protects the gryphons from arrows.
The witch adds magic to the gryphon ridersā attacks, which strike several enemy units at the same time.
The fighter has an item that gives the whole back row extra initiative.
The witch can teleport the group to the location of an ally, and this has helped me out many times now when other units have been in trouble.
Yea, when I stopped expecting a Tactics game and treated it like an interactive game of Stratego is when I really started to appreciate what Vanillaware is doing with this one.
Just entered the second area. My recipe for keeping the challenge level high:
Take all equipment off of every character and all characters out of every unit. The game really doesnāt want you to do thisāa lot of the design choices here seem intent on keeping your army mostly the same while making small tweaks here and there as you get new characters and equipment.
Take your five (or however many units you have) lowest-level characters and put one in each unit.
For each of those characters, look up who they have incomplete rapport conversations with. Whichever secondary character is at the lowest rapport level (that isnāt already in a unit) gets assigned into the unit with them.
Fill out the rest of each unit based on who would best complement the two characters already in there.
In the characters menu, sort by unit and then just equip each character with their optimum gear. Make at most one change to their tactics to avoid situations like Josef wasting all his time healing scratches.
I would have recommended repeating this process every time you get two or three characters, but the game has started throwing two or three new characters at me after every battle stage, so I guess just use your gut.
i also like how Yoko Taro was all like āeveryone needs to buy 13 Sentinels because Vanillaware is a treasure and it needs to always exist foreverā (this is a summary of the sentiment)
i get the sense Vanillaware is a place where a lot of game devs wished they worked (but i guess they like money more, so)
I found myself doing this initially because it was less work and also to keep the rapport bonuses, but over time Iāve started changing things up more often. A strange consequence of this is that when I come up with a combination that works very well I find myself bringing it out less often so not to further trivialize the battles.
I now kind of think of the liberation missions as interactive cutscenes. They are easy and take only a few minutes, mainly serving as a way to advance the story and maybe level up some of my weaker characters.
While Iāve reached the point where I can pay 200 to further increase the size of a formation, I havenāt done so yet because I still spend all of my points on promotions and because at this point the difficulty hasnāt increased to the point where that seems necessary. I hope it eventually does.
When I tried the online coliseum battles, the matchmaking system presented me with nothing but five-character units. I just backed out and didnāt try it because Iām sure Iād have no chance. Thereās still a level midway through the offline ladder that I canāt beat with any of my formations, even after gaining several more levels.
