Doesn’t ring a bell, no.
Prevail doesn’t help much in Valkyrie Falls where everything causes Instant Death all the time. Luckily, I’ve got more money than I can really spend, so I just bought a few hundred Blood of Revival. As an added bonus, that gives you extra actions. I’ve had people do 10+ actions in one turn in Falls where they just die all the time anyway. Although I do have the recipe for the Prevail III bracelet, so I guess I could use it for some of the other maps. Prevail is really a bullshit skill to try to fight against. (Burning Sands! Burning Saaaaaaaands!) I also found out that I can get Wil’s resistances to X O O O O A A now. (Null physical, oh yeah!)
As far as strong characters go, I find that as long as you actually get your characters to level 90+, they can handle the level 90 maps well enough. Of course, some are better than others (Wil, Ms. Eukleia, Aht, Emelita, Asmodeus, and Ragsmuena are my current go-to people for when I don’t care anymore and just want to finish the map. Mylen Ploa too, although I usually just give her a Hermit’s Monocle, and a Wing Bracelet if necessary, to run around maps after I’ve cleared out most of the enemies. 9 move and 2xAction helps a lot when you want to find those hidden rooms right NOW.)
Yeah, I’m getting my hands on a few of the artifacts now, it’s just too bad that there’s such a huge gap in usefulness between them. Some are awesome (like Crayl getting 2xAction, Regen All and Earth/Wind Blessing or Melodiana with 2xAction, Levitate, Regen HP and Light Blessing) while other are only useful for 2xAction (Sharty, I’m looking at you. Why would you only get Search when you already have both Thief and Adventurer as skills?).
The one thing that helps the most, though, is without a doubt Portal Stones.
No matter how bad Phema Mountains is, I’m sure it can’t piss me off worse than Burning Sands in the Mirage Forest. Prevail II-III + Cover II-III on every mob (and I’m pretty sure a lot of them have Regen All as well), meaning only your best characters have even a chance of doing anything useful. And then you lose a shitload of health every turn, just because.
Not that I can remember, but why not just give it a try and find out if it actually is a bad FE clone. It might be a good FE clone, or even a good game that just resembles FE at first glance.
The main thing is the Simes in Advent Falls. Once they activate their own Prevail Skills, anybody besides Mylen is shit out of luck trying to do decent damage.
Every single enemy, and I mean EVERY SINGLE ENEMY there has a Range 7 magic attack that causes Charm Status with a huge chance of success. Meaning that one status effect that, even if cured immediately, still makes you lose a turn, so they have another shot at inflicting you with it again. Nearly every single character is extremely susceptible to it. Also, most of the map is electricity or nothing, so you’ll constantly need to swap skills and accessories to get Flight and Grounded just to fucking move.
Didn’t think so. I’ve only heard of it through GameFAQs and only because its made by the same developers as Kamidori Alchemy Master. Of course I’m not even sure that the name isn’t Maboroshirin no Hime Shogun 2 since it seems to have the same cover as Genrin no Shougun 2.
For reference to what the hell I’m talking about here’s a link to GameFAQs Genrin no Shougun 2 entry and to Maboroshirin no Hime Shogun 2 entry.
And while we’re on the subject of FE-alikes, my True Harem run through Shadow Dragon continues into Altea. Debating whether I should keep or off Xane due to him being a him even if he can make himself into any of my other ladies. Also going to recruit Arran due to his Silver Lance being more useful than Samson’s Silver Axe.
Oh, if you’d just said that it was made by Eushully, I would have been able to dig up some info about it right away.
Anyway, apparently they’re both the same game and the full title is “Genrin no Kishogun 2 ~Michibikareshi Tamashii no Keifu~” (alternately read as “Maboroshi Rin No Hime Shogun 2”), translated as “Phantom Shogun Princess 2 ~Genealogy of the Guiding Souls~” and it’s part of a prequel series to their first game “Ikusa Megami” or “War/Battle Goddess”.
From what I can tell, the game system looks more like a very rough version of Kamidori than a Fire Emblem clone. (Not surprising since it’s a much older game by the same company.)
I haven’t played the War Goddess series yet, but I know a little bit about it. Just enough to understand the references to it in Kamidori, basically. I.e. pretty much anything with the word “Godslayer” in it. (Yuela’s Godslayer armor and the Godslayer Statue from the arena are the first to come to mind.) The Goddess Statue, and Serawi’s Elf Princess Tunic, is also a reference to another of their games, Meishoku no Reiki, or “Slave Princess of Darkness”. I’m assuming the Warrior Statue is yet another reference, but I don’t know what. (Each of the Statues has a small scene when you first place it, pretty much just some meta-jokes for fans of their other games.)
There’s also a lot of Himegari Dungeon Meister references (which is also a similar game to Kamidori, more so than Genrin). Mainly the Himegari poster telling you to “pay homage to your roots”, Emelita’s Little Devil Robe that makes her look like Lily and, of course, Lily herself who is actually a character straight from that game.
Yes, Kamidori has a crapton of weird references. Don’t know how many were that way to begin with and how many was because of the translation team but when you find Stasis Beds that still leave you hungry or “A Certain Railgun” to put in your workshop you can tell that somewhere along the line, someone had quite a lot of fun.
Thanks. Knowing that despite the UI similarities, it is not a FE clone means that I’m probably safe to ignore it for now.
Anyways, I’ve finished my Robotrek through the stars, so that’s one game I’m currently playing off my list. Next up should be Shadow Dragon which is already up to 17x. I probably should keep around a few more people for arena grinding for cash so that I can afford a forge or two, but space is increasingly limited as the middle is pretty female heavy. I have only Est, Tiki, Elice, and Nagi (once I enter into the final chapter without her) left to recruit.
Day Later Edit: Taken down the Neclord in my non 108 SoD run of Suki II. Killed off Ridley and recruited the tentacle trio to cement it. Probably should have done the run from Tinto option in the speed run since it looks a lot shorter than the alternative.
Just done fighting through twenty levels of Darksiders II’s Crucible, a boss-rush type arena where the game throws a buttfuck of enemies at you in waves, and you get to decide whether to continue or stop and claim your prize every few rounds. The longer you go in one go, the better the prize.
I finally decided to stop since I was running low on potions and the enemies where getting too tough, so I sauntered over happily to the treasure chest holding my prize… only to find the fucking game bugged out and the chest came out empty. This was after the game had also bugged out during a very expensive transaction with the merchant Vulgrim, eating up twenty of the limited-amount Boatman Coins but without giving me the fucking thing I bought.
I am not pleased by this bullshit.
Also, as much as you’d think having MORE dungeons in a Zelda game would be a good thing, this game brings to light a very severe flaw with the idea that just throwing extra dungeons will make things better, because it completely misses a very important aspect of how Zelda games balance progression with fun, though I’d have to go at more length to explain that one.
I bought The Secret World recently.
It’s pretty fun, especially some of the more “outside the box”-kind of quests. I.e. basically all the investigation quests.
I had a blast doing things like going to the out of game website for the (fake) Orochi Company to use their “Employee finder” to dig up a password for an in-game laptop, or when I had to die and go to a place in “ghost form” because the guy I was investigating was already long dead.
But my favorite was probably the morse code transmission. You get a message that is in morse code, you have to translate it to know where to go next.
The game does expect quite a lot of it’s players, but I like it. It’s not as if you have to actually do most of the investigation missions (and so far the few “mandatory” ones for the story mission weren’t too bad), so it’s not too bad if you can’t figure them out. And since a few of them involve using real websites for fake in-game companies the game has a built in web browser, which means you can always just google the solution if you get stuck. …Although it was kind of bullshit with the quest where a riddle tells you to look up something in the bible (as in leave the computer, go and get a bible, look it up) and you were supposed to figure out that you should look at the clock on the wall and use the time it’s showing to know which biblical quote to look up to get a password for a keypad. Fucking Illuminati and their fucking labyrinths. >_>
But I had to forgive them when the “mission complete” text for my character belonging to the Illuminati faction in-game started with “You know, if you wanted the keys to the family basement all you had to do was ask. Although I must admit it was super cute watching you run around and solving our own puzzles.”
There’s also a lot of voice acting in the game. I really like how it gives a lot more personality to the NPCs, and it also gives the developers the chance to have a lot of fun with the quest givers. Like the Illuminati riddles quest. You get it from a guy who claims to be a member of the Illuminati because he’s done “extensive research” on the Internet. “I found forums. Secret forums. Forums that don’t show up on google” and because he posts a lot there, he believes he’s a member of the Illuminati. Since my character is actually a member of the Illuminati faction, I imagine he must have gotten the urge to facepalm so hard when he heard that.
Besides, the final boss of the first instance is pretty much Cthulhu. And, as healer, I kept my team alive by shooting him in the face with an assault rifle!
Seriously. That’s literally how I healed that encounter. You have to love a game where the healer does his job by shooting Cthulhu in the face. 
Fuck my aging PSXs. Freezes at the drop of the hat and finds ways to fail at properly loading event flags (although that one could be on one of Suki II’s many many bugs). I practically have the Neclord(Tinto) arc down pat but I just can’t seem to get through it without something breaking in the process.
Also, I may have added a Heropon to my Xenoblade party.
Also also, goddamn does that tree have so much loot, quests and named NPCs.:hyperven:
Damn, that’s good.
Go on. Does it tie in with TP having the best dungeons in the series but feeling a bit off because you were constantly in one?
No, the thing is, Zelda games deliver progression in a steady flow: You have these tools, you can do these things, you can’t do those others. You enter a dungeon in which you can solve some puzzles and not others, until you gain the new item and can thus finish it completely. You exit the dungeon having gained a new tool, and thus having expanded what you have access to.
Darksiders II has a fuckload of dungeons, many of them optional, but has comparatively less tools than a Zelda game. What this boils down to is that you’ll be crawling through a lot of dungeons with virtually identical puzzles, since “gaining a new tool” is something that happens like once or twice every four or five areas. You don’t realize how much the Zelda games rely on the progression to keep you hooked until you lengthen the time between gaining each new ability. Doesn’t help that most of the tools in this game are so damn boring except for the Portal Gun.
Yes, they ripped off the Portal Gun. Wholesale. In the first game, the portals were even Blue/Orange.
This is made even worse by the fact that Zelda games tend to have minigames and sidequests for you to go do when you want to distract yourself from the main quest. In Darksiders, ALL quests consist of “go kill/find X”, so the whole thing turns monotonous VERY quickly. The Land of the Dead was downright painful to get through due to this, since there were so fucking many “go kill this thing” points in identically looking green-tinted dungeons.
I’ve been playing more Visual Novels lately.
Currently working on Muv-Luv, and… I’m seriously starting to wonder why I’m so unlucky with the VNs I find interesting.
It seems that all of the ones I’ve found interesting lately have been either nakige* (“nakige” means “crying game” as in “meant to make you cry”, btw) or utsuge** (“depression game”, so that’s even worse).
Considering I have a history of depression all on my own, the last thing I need is something actually CAUSING it.
Ah well, at least Muv-Luv Extra is a ridiculous high school love comedy thing.
*Muv-Luv Unlimited
**Muv-Luv Alternative
Thanks. Wasn’t that difficult once I got going. Managed to make it through without losing anybody (aside from Caeda for the alternate ending dialogue). Cain ended up being my MVP due to being the first to hit promotion as well as getting very lucky with his Def early on. Other mainstays were Abel, Caeda, Ogma, Barst, Hardin, Sedger, Merric, Jake, Beck (kinda but ammo constraints and a lack of Str/Skl/Luk fucked him over), the Peg Sisters (Est didn’t really do much outside of providing a support boost to Cain+Abel and her sisters but Catria ended up getting a mess of Str and Palla wound up becoming a ridiculous winged tank surpassing Cain and matching Sedger in Def), Lena (save for the two points where she hit the level cap), and Tiki (who had to share the Star Orb with my Ballistions because Ballista ammo is loving scarce in this game).
Not that surprising given how much of Darksiders 1 was basically them saying that they can build their own Zelda, with ‘grimdark’ and hookers.
Anyways, I’m more or less done with the second Neclord arc in my Suki II speedrun. Got to the save crystal right before the Golem boss and enough firepower to smoke both him and Neclord without too much difficulty (provided Neclord doesn’t insta kill [STRIKE]Simon Belmont[/STRIKE] Marlowe) and it only took roughly 30 minutes to get there from my save at Tigermouth which I staked down when I nabbed that second Window Set on my way through the pass. Probably going to tackle the next arc in my non-108 stars run (I’ve already recruited the Kraken family and Boris) before I finish off Neclord once and for all.
As for Xenoblade, I’ve got Melia back from her tomb raiding expedition and there’s a mountain of timed quests that I apparently have forever to take on. Maxed out my relationship with Colony 9 and have started on the third tier of Colony 6’s reconstruction. Also managed to complete both Sharla’s and Melia’s Personality quests netting them both their fourth personality skill sets along with Shulk who got his in forever ago. And speaking of, both Reyn and Sharla have maxed out one of their personality skill sets apiece, I’m kinda worried I’ll run out of skill sets before I hit endgame. Meanwhile I’ve long since ran out of space to hold extra ether crystals so I’ve been making gems and cylinders like crazy (but I don’t have all the relationship levels I need for the mass productions yet). In fact, I’ve been spending more time fighting with inventory management than anything else but it’s my only complaint thus far in this fantastic game (well that and how easy it is to fall to your death in places like Frontier Village).
So, I managed to finish Overlord after taking a year-long break. I was mostly uncorrupted although there was one villager blocking my minions from returning a big item and his friends started attacking me… I was pleasantly surprised that the ending had some urgency, especially considering a lot of the stages were self-contained. I will probably play the sequel at some point, but it still beats me how Codemasters wasn’t sued by New Line Cinema (I think) for copying the look of Sauron from LOTR (which was mostly like a Morgoth illustration by Howe to be fair) for their Overlord design wholesale. You can even buy a Lidless Eye banner.
Welp. I’m pretty sure I fucked it up in my Suki II speed run. I completely forgot that I needed to recruit Gordon during my final recruitment drive (part 1), which is made all the worse due to having to recruit the Ninjas since I went and recruited Valeria instead of Kasumi whom I figured I could recruit while recruiting Gordon. Now I need to purchase and trade enough gold bars to make up whatever deficit I need to clear the requirement for Gordon, run all the way back to the Toran Republic, then recruit Mazus (which requires running through a dungeon) and Genshu, and then progress the plot far enough to reach Sajah in less than 2 hours and 30 minutes (which includes three major battles, the Matilda arc, and remembering to bring Clive (and honestly make him become a permanent member of the party from here to Sajah) for his fricken sidequest).
At least I’m done with the Greenhill arc.
I finished Torchlight in Hard mode. I also started a Hardcore Very Hard (permadeath) run, but something’s wrong with my files, so I might let it be for a while. Essentially there’s a bug that randomly deletes my whole chest of dearly-enchanted items. My haste+defensive spells mastery+devastation barbarian (Vanquisher? I think) was quite effective and laid waste to everything but the logistics of identifying and selling items.
Well, I might just have salvaged my Suki II speed run after all. As in, I’ve managed to successfully do everything necessary to acquire the good end and made it in time to view the last of Clive’s events (just not without getting people wounded during the major battles along the way). Fortunately for me, it turned out that going through Matilda isn’t all that long if you know what you are doing and all the end game major battles are gimmicky as heck. Also helping matters is the fact that I was either over the trading earnings threshold or close enough to it needed to recruit Gordon with little more effort than just running up to Toran and chatting with him a couple of times. Now I have a saved dropped right before I get to gamble with Nanami and subsequently curb-stomping Gourdo. Now it’s just the matter of going around and collecting all the various items like recipes, seeds, farm animals, statue plans, window/sound sets, Karen’s DDR rewards, at least one full Mole set, unlocking the level 5 bath, and leveling up and maxing out the weapons of the guys that show up or pass on stuff to their respective selves/replacements ala Futch, Meg, Gadget, Viki, Luc (although I’m not too sure I want to do anything for him given how much of a rear end in a top hat he is in Suki III).
In either case I’ve now hit end game in both of my runs through the game more or less.
Meanwhile I’ve been stalling on my all harem run through of Shadow Dragon due to Suki II shenanigans. Now that I’ve more or less have that out of the way I can resume this where I left off at chapter 17x.
I’ve also been stalling on my Xenoblade playthrough but I should be getting back to that in the near future as well.
Edit: And on that note… “The shackles have been broken!” …to give those who’ve played through Xenoblade an idea of where I’m at currently.
I started playing Borderlands, the first game, and it’s way more shooter-y than I expected. Seems you don’t even get character points until you reach level 5, which is stupid, and it seems the game straight up spawns items and enemies when you take up a quest, which breaks my suspense of disbelief. Also there are all kind of caves and shacks that are textures instead of buildings, so that feels like cardboard Fallout 3. Not impressed 1.5 hour in. I’ll push on for a while, but my first impression is so so. If the game wants to play shooter, I hope the next weapons have a better feel because so far things feel floaty (though it might be my character’s mediocre skills). We’ll see.
Been playing X-Com: Enemy Unknown.
Currently 27 hours and counting. Classic mode is rather unforgiving, so now I’m playing on Normal to at least beat the game once and see the tech tree and such, first.
But I’m playing Ironman (constant auto-save in the same save slot), so when I basically had no choice but to abandon 1/3 of the world to the aliens I kinda had to start over, again. That’s my… 20th? try or so now, because I was always playing on Classic at first. >_>
I’m playing Borderlands 2 now. Possibly the first time in a game where I had a chance to play a female character and decided to go with a dude instead.