I can’t beat the Richalia Rose mission. You know, the one where you fail if a single one of the bad guys reaches the end of the battlefield? I can’t seem to kill them all in time, and they have RIDICULOUS move ranges! (Is the AI cheating here?)
I’ve tried blocking off the side entrances (using Lock Hex, with area expanded with Sacred Slayer abilities) so as to force them to come towards my group, but the spells fade too fast (is the duration random or something?) and the moment they do, someone slips right by. Arrgh!!
Seriously, I have tried more than 5 times, and even looked for tips online. So now I turn to you guys for help. I’m playing on a borrowed PSP so I have to hurry.
I HATE it when things like this happen. I was really enjoying the story, and now I’m stuck on one overly tricky battle. Bah! I was hoping to be into Act 2 by now!
BTW, how do you spot a target’s elemental weakness? I know it’s possible, but I can’t figure out how to do it. That might help.
There are much tougher fights ahead, jsyk. And WAXF lasts over 40-50 hours. Its a really long game.
If you want to see the elemental weakness areas on the ground, you have to use the right class: the geomancers. If you want to see individual character elemental weaknesses, select an enemy character and move around the status tabs. It will tell you what element they are weakest to. Use the right spells to do severe damage on them. No choice. The enemies come in different waves and each successive wave appears after you’ve killed enough of the previous waves.
Make Labyrinthia and an extra Drifter elementalists so they can do severe damage.
If you’re really worried, have 1 sentinel to act as a meat shield and to do his area of effect slow to prevent the enemy from moving forward very fast. What you do with your other 2 characters is up to you. Felius is good as a secutor in general. I liked having some of the geomancer abilities on Levin because translate is a very useful skill to send the enemy back.
Clarissa’s and Levin’s turn cancelling skills are crucial in this fight.
You want to kill the excavators first in this fight. While berzerkers move more, they move in straight lines. You can mess with them by properly placing your characters at choke points. The excavators however can move around you. Take them out first. Do proper elemental damage to kill enemies fast and make sure half your party is on the left an half is on the right to be able to nab the reinforcements.
There are much tougher fights ahead, jsyk. And WAXF lasts over 40-50 hours. Its a really long game.
Neither thing bothers me. It’s the battles where you lose by unfair tricks like “one enemy made it to the goal line!” (seriously, WTF does that matter in-story? Is one guy going to take over the whole town??) that piss me off.
If you want to see individual character elemental weaknesses, select an enemy character and move around the status tabs. It will tell you what element they are weakest to. Use the right spells to do severe damage on them.
How do you do that, with the R/L buttons? (the manual probably says how, but the blasted thing has such small typing I cannot even read it.)
Make Labyrinthia and an extra Drifter elementalists so they can do severe damage.
If you’re really worried, have 1 sentinel to act as a meat shield and to do his area of effect slow to prevent the enemy from moving forward very fast. What you do with your other 2 characters is up to you. Felius is good as a secutor in general. I liked having some of the geomancer abilities on Levin because translate is a very useful skill to send the enemy back.
Clarissa’s and Levin’s turn cancelling skills are crucial in this fight.
My Lab is already an Elementalist and a Geomancer. Felius is a Secutor/sentinel. Clarissa is a Fantastica/Sacred Slayer, and Levin a Gadgeteer/Excavator. I have two Drifters as Sacred Slayers/Geomancers (for the Hex-blocking trick- should I bother with that?) How about Tony, should I use him at all? (he’s got the longest range, but his attacks keep missing on these enemies, I mostly use him to slow them down.)
Sacred slayers can heal but their damage is crap. You need to focus on having only 1-2 healers max and have other classes driven to do damage. You haven no penalty from swapping classes.
Pressing L/R should allow you to move around the tabs. I’ll check my PSP when I get the chance later today. Using Tony is a good idea, but I’d focus on using a 2nd Drifter for more damage.
You absolutely need 2 elementalists to nail the incoming attackers and use at least 2-3 characters to block incoming berzerkers. Use the turn canceling techniques.
Done! Well, actually, my nephew Angel (who loaned me his PSP) beat it, but hey, I planned the strategy. 
We did use the Slayers to herd the enemies but otherwise bombarded them with elemental magic. Angel also figured out how to spot the elemental weaknesses… BUT I FORGOT TO ASK HOW AFTERWARD! Thud
Sooo, if anybody knows how it’s done…
When its your character’s turn, press circle to move the cursor. Select an enemy and press x twice. You should see your enemy’s stats. Then press right or left on the d-pad (not L/R - that will swap unit).
Thanks, Sin. I got it now. Geez, you’d think they would make such a necessary battle feature more obvious. 
Ok, now I’m having trouble with the first Battle of Elensia. The one where you have to hurt (but NOT kill) three enemies to open the gate, and then escape through it before time runs out.
This is hard mostly because it’s VERY easy to accidentally kill off one of the targets, getting an automatic lose, OR get a single one of your party killed by being overwhelmed by enemies. And I haven’t even gotten to the part you have to run for it yet! Sheesh!
I actually came very, very close tho, I had my WHOLE party next to the gate, and got it open, I only needed to step through it- and then Clarissa got killed by a long-range attack. ARRGH!
Suggestions?
Its a pretty obvious feature, sorry to tell you
That battle is very difficult, yes. Do what you can to get your whole party near the gate, then send everyone in when it pops open. Look up the FAQs if you need more details, though they won’t help much. A key move I find is to use the disarm with Felius. Disarm as many people as you can to make them not kill your guys. Watch out for the casters, as they’re very dangerous. Finally, if you’re worried about counterattacks, unequip your weapons and equip it using the change equipment skill.
The fact you have to switch to Free Cursor mode to do it makes it less obvious than it is in other games.
That battle is very difficult, yes. Do what you can to get your whole party near the gate, then send everyone in when it pops open. Look up the FAQs if you need more details, though they won’t help much. A key move I find is to use the disarm with Felius. Disarm as many people as you can to make them not kill your guys. Watch out for the casters, as they’re very dangerous. Finally, if you’re worried about counterattacks, unequip your weapons and equip it using the change equipment skill.
Hmm… disarming and rearming… hadn’t thought about that. OK, now to redesign the strategy…
Btw I’ve now added the new jobs to the characters: Clarissa as a Strider, Felius as a Berserker (what’s with their not being able to turn wide angles??) Laby as an Enigmancer (love this class) and Levin as Grappler (Foe-tossing fun!) Just so you know, doesn’t mean I won’t change the pattern if needed.
Oh, and a Drifter named after me. Secutor/Elementalist. Just cuz I can. 
I don’t entirely approve of your choice of classes but its up to you. I didn’t like the zerkers for the reason you mentioned. Their use is limited. What I liked to do was combine elementalist with sacred slayer to do area of effect elemental magic. The grappler class is extremely useful for crowd control. Furthermore, throwing heavy people and monsters like sentinels does extreme damage. I agree that the enigmancer is a powerful class.
I believe the grappler class also has a passive skill called accelerate. This is one of the single most important skills you can have and you want every one of your party members to have it. It randomly adds numbers to the RFX after every turn, very often giving people double if not triple turns. It is absolutely necessary. Another key skill is the spell that allows people to swap turns. Combine that with accelerate, you do very interesting things on the battlefield.
Grrr, still haven’t beaten the Gate part. Again came VERY close only to have a party member killed off at the very last second! :thud:
Still, I did great progress. Once disarmed, the Sentinels were harmless. The Elementalists are my problem; so far the only way I can handle them is by lowering their magic with Laby’s Enigmancer spells. But they recover too quickly. Maybe I should use a second Enigmancer? How about using Clarissa’s ability to burn off MP?
Btw, I hear that this is just the first of a series of SEVEN battles in a row! Is that right? Hope my items last long enough (I did buy a lot.) Any advice I might need there?
It is the first in a series of many battles, but this is the toughest battle in the whole set, if not the whole game. The rest are doable, though are still challenging. Using the enigmancer spell against the elementalists is a good idea. I just disarmed them too with Felius and it worked wonders. Elementalists require good +MAG equipment to do big damage (which is why I don’t approve of your secutor/elementalist combo). The only +MAG equipment are the books.
Burn MP isn’t a bad idea, but you’d have to use more than 1 character to do it to be effective, making it difficult. When the gates open, it becomes a bit more difficult since reinforcements appear, but don’t be alarmed. They’re not as strong as the original group. I’d focus on disarming them with Felius and making them lose their turns with Clarissa and Levin.
I think that map also has a ley point which you can use to move your characters all the way to the other side of the map. Grapplers are very useful for that fight as well as Clarissa and Levin’s turn stealing abilities for protecting weaker party members. Be sure to build up a couple of sacred slayers. Their skillset is probably one of the best ones in the game.
GAAHH!! Failed AGAIN! And I had succeeded in making almost every foe harmless- I disarmed all the sentinels and left the Elementalists without any MP! I even got the gate open! But the enemy surrounded my Sacred Slayer and while they couldn’t hurt her, she couldn’t walk out either. I decided to have Labyrinthia magically switch places with her, then I was going to Warp her right out- but, RIGHT THEN, one of the elementalist recovered enough MP for ONE spell- and it killed off Laby. ARRGH!! She’s the one who gets killed off the most, if I could I would leave her out of the mission, but she’s the only one that the game forces you to include. :thud:
I’ve half a mind of turning everybody into grapplers and just toss all foes aside. Though that will probably still get somebody killed at the wrong time.
EDIT: Well, I’ll be damned, that’s exactly what I did (the grappler thing) and guess what, IT WORKED! O_O Well, Felius almost got killed at the last second, but he survived long enough to walk out. The important thing, I MADE IT THROUGH!! Yeesh, worst RPG fight I’ve had in a LONG time. Gimme one of those million-hit-point Bosses any day instead, just let me fight without stupid illogical requirements!
Now let’s hope the next round of battles doesn’t wear my party out…
You’ve reached the difficulty peak to the game. It’s downhill form this point.
The grappler idea was a good one and it will be useful for you again. The elementalist thing is why I TOLD YOU to disarm them, but you managed anyway.
While the game is hard and that kind of requirement seems silly, I like the way its designed because it is grind proof. You have to figure out a tactic and make it work. There is no way to cheaply just grind your guys 5-10 levels higher and then steamroll through and I like that A LOT about the game.
Do NOT forget to give EVERYONE accelerate. For slow characters like labyrinthia and your 6th non-drifter (you’ll get that one soon-ish), it is ESSENTIAL.
I’m SO glad to hear that. I actually really, really like this game, including the gameplay- it IS fun to come up with combat strategies. When they work.
The fight afterwards was SO damn easy I actually laughed. I didn’t even bother with the gravity device, I just blasted all the enemies with magic.
The Asgard battle was kind of a letdown, I was expecting it to be much harder. But it was slow as a tank and after I burned its MP off, it was defenseless.
Now for another timed mission- I hate those, but since all I have to do is turn off some switches, it shouldn’t be hard. Right?
One thing I really like about this game is the unconventional strategies you can use. One boss was giving me a bunch of trouble until I decided to bust his MP and use the Excavator’s ability which swaps hp and mp totals.
Back to complain not about another battle (yet) but about the story.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the story so far- in fact, it’s my favorite Wild Arms since the first! Nice premise, great characterization, involving dialog…
But man, they TOTALLY ruined King Hrothgar’s death scene! I mean, the guy’s being CRUSHED TO DEATH by a giant robot but he still has time to give a speech to Clarissa to convince her to shoot him??? In another situation it would have worked, but that robot was slower than Dr. No’s deathtraps, dammit! And shortly thereafter, while not as bad as the previous thing, the way Clarissa was revealed in public to not really be Princess Alexia was SO lame - I mean, despite all the rebel’s preparations, the ONE thing they didn’t prepare her for was how to convince people of who she was? She didn’t even know Alexia’s birthday?? So much for Laby being so “competent.” :thud:
Back to the gameplay, is it possible to kill the monster in the bridge, or should I just settle for dropping the bridge? it seems resistant to everything I throw at it…
Drop the bridge. I liked the way they ended the 2nd chapter honestly.
OK, I’m approaching the game’s final stages now, so I’d like to know: is it possible to beat Ragu O Ragula on the first play-thru?
I tried it and it killed my whole party off in like two rounds! :eek: This is one CHEAP Boss, with like 6 turns at a time and an attack that hits all the characters nevermind where they are (and they start all spread out, to boot). His normal attacks seem one-hit kills too. Gee, I don’t remember it being that cheap in the other WA games. Hard, yes, but doable.
All my characters are around level 50, they have nearly mastered all their respective classes, and my equipment is around +3/+4. Thing is, from what I hear after scenario 4.8 the chance to fight Ragu is gone, and that’s two battles away for me, so not much time for grinding left.
So in short: should I try it again with a new strategy, or save it for a replay (with post-first play bonuses?)