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The Spirit Engine 2 ranks as one of my favorite RPGs out there, if solely for the combat system.  This game takes place entirely in 2D. The battles are very fast paced, and incorporate the whole 2D aspect as a vital part of battle tactics. Characters will run from their respective spots to attack monsters, and so will the monsters, meaning that it's entirely possible for the two to collide and damage eachother. Projectiles will collide with the first person they meet. Attacking creatures in the far back row can only be accomplished through a few skills. Skills are selected through a radial menu. Each of the three classes (Knight, Priest, and Musketeer) have a combination of damaging skills and support skills, meaning that there's really no dedicated "healer" as such. Certain skill combinations are vital at parts of the game, since each chapter (of which there are 10 in total) features an entirely new cast of monsters with differing abilities. Some monsters have extremely high armor and resists (but low health), requiring you to use the Knight's Charge ability so that his next attack will break through a portion of it, or use the Priest's drat ability to lower the target's armor, or have your Musketeer use Empowder to make the Knight deal more damage. There's a multitude of potential tactical options, and you often find yourself changing them on the fly as the battle progresses. One of the more interesting mechanics is that all combatants, both players and monsters, will revive after a certain length of time in combat. This enables you to come back from the brink of defeat if you're careful, but also provides a potential for monsters to gradually wear you down if you choose to ignore the gradually-reviving monsters. Some of them even take advantage of this mechanic, such as undead creatures, who will die easily but have very short respawn times. Progression is skill point based, allowing you to invest points in individual abilities. You can never fully max out every skill, but the game generously provides respec points, enabling you to change which abilities your characters are strongest in. This is actually quite important on harder difficulties, since certain abilities function less well in certain environments (such as the Swordfaith skill, which can't be used in any of the underground areas you fight in). Here's a video of a boss battle. You can see some of the tactics present, even in a relatively simple boss battle like the Cloud Child: The Priest constantly uses Aurora (an ability that absorbs magic damage), only using Heal when the Cloud Child's blue shield is depleted and the party isn't in danger of constant magic attacks. The Knight uses Charge and the Musketeer uses Empowder in order to make the Knight's basic attacks formidable against the boss. The order of party members is being constantly switched to mitigate damage, since successive attacks against any character will make subsequent attacks do more and more damage to them (represented by the % number below each character). The thing I like the most about the game is that it's not a frustrating level of difficulty. The normal fights are, on average, even more difficult than the boss, but they're not impossibly difficult. What will often happen is that you'll fight something, die, and then gradually say to yourself, "This is why I died, and this is what I should do differently." All of the actual mechanics are very plainly spelled out for you, which means that all that you need to do is come up with a clever way of overcoming them. If I have a single complaint about this game, it's that it's very much on-rails. There's a few paths you can take through most of the chapters, though they don't differ significantly, and most areas are "run to the right -> fight monsters -> run to the right." Granted, most RPGs are like this, but this particular one doesn't do a good job of obfuscating it. This doesn't diminish my enjoyment of the combat at all, but I merely wish there were a few more things to do. The storyline in the game isn't Tolstoy, but it's an enjoyable enough RPG tale of war, betrayal, and Ancient Secrets Run Amok. The characters add significantly to this. There's 9 in total, but you can only ever make a party with three of them: one an anti-hero, one a naive altruist, and the other intelligent and often world-weary. While they do share some dialog, there's significant sections that are altered depending on who you picked. Conversations that you have with Mericious the grumpy old priest in the party differ significantly than the conversations you have with Ionae the fantastical and caustic bird/angel/demon/human thing. All of this is topped off by Mark Pay's wonderful graphical style (it's seriously wonderful stuff to look at, especially the backgrounds) and Josh Welschel's excellently-done score. I can't really recommend this game enough, especially considering that it's completely free. If you enjoy it, though, you can still send in a donation to show your thanks, since this dude's put out an amazing game for how much effort was put into it.
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Oct 2, 2010 06:49
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Myron posted:Does it get challenging at any point? I played the first three chapters years ago, but I stopped because the enemy A.I. seemed completely useless. Such a shame too, because there are tons of good ideas (feeding dragons, switching to RPG-style battles for close combat) and little touches(burnable trees, freezable water).Maybe I should give it another try sometime. It can be pretty difficult if you don't feed your dragons excessively. The desert missions were pretty big bitches, and some of the final missions before leaving for Altair are difficult as hell. If you feed the flame dragon up until he gains his Ultimate form, though, the game becomes a huge joke since he's completely invincible (who decided this was a good idea?).
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Oct 4, 2010 00:50
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Xythar posted:I liked SD3 a lot (beat it 3 times in fact) but I'm not going to call the combat deep. I got through most of the battles by just holding down whatever button made you auto-attack. It has theoretically deep combat where you can duck around enemy attacks, but in reality all you're going to be doing is mashing A like a madman (if you have Kevin/Hawke/Duran) or non-stop chaining spells (Angela), pausing only to eat some magic walnuts to regain MP.
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Oct 5, 2010 03:36
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Miketopus posted:When I say "deep" I'm usually referring to the plot, characters, setting, etc. I'd say those are SD3's weakest points. You can boil each of the characters down to a specific personality which very minimally changes over the course of the game, and the actual plot doesn't really innovate much aside from the three-way villain gangbang that goes on right up until the midpoint of the game (where the two other villain groups are disposed of with barely a word). Each villain's motivation rings hollow: the Lich wants to become a god (because he's crazy), the Dark Prince wants to become a god (so he can merge the Underworld with the main world), and the Dragon Emperor is, I dunno, just a huge dick and wants to rule over everyone. It just isn't a very good story. I still enjoyed the actual game itself, assuming you don't spam Angela's spells nonstop.
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Oct 5, 2010 05:56
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CommissarMega posted:Who's the best mage? There's two who are miles and miles away from everyone else: Myst (highest magic growth in the game and Focus to let him build MP even faster), and Reod (ridiculously high speed and Fire-based means he can Haste himself and get three or four turns in a row before everyone else and can also use Steal). You won't get Reod until about halfway through, but Myst can be obtained as soon as the Second Battle for Mayfall, I believe.
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Oct 11, 2010 05:40
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CommissarMega posted:All this talk about final dungeons and such, all while I'm grinding like crazy to get past Clint Just grind like a madman and buy physical defense stuff for your mages. If you're like me, you've probably just been sticking them in the back and putting floppy hats on them, but Clint can easily gently caress them over. Have your frontlines hulk out, keep your midlines healing and the mages unloading as much as possible. You'll need a lot of Cure-Alls to get through it.
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Oct 25, 2010 16:29
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At least Frostmonger had a gimmick that made him easy to defeat. Clint? He just hits hard.
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CommissarMega posted:I'm at Level 79, gonna face Demon Sick and Trevor- any tips? Party's Rock, Ayara, Daniel, Rorschach, Myst and Orlando (because he's got good magic and Focus). Most of the bosses near the end of Exit Fate can be summed up with "throw a shitload of magic at them," and those two aren't any different. Physical dudes unfortunately fall behind near the end of the game with the exception of a few heavy hitters (looking at you, Tarlia and Bruce). Note that you don't necessarily have to win the two solo side fights with Sick/Trevor to actually get to Sick + Trevor, but I believe it does make them much easier when you fight them together if you beat both of them separately.
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Nov 1, 2010 04:20
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Bruce also hits like a tank shell after you get Lock and Haste, since he gets whatever that skill is that lets you hit for extra damage but stuns you (which Lock negates).
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Nov 1, 2010 04:27
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CommissarMega posted:poo poo, really? Guess I'm gonna have to go grind through Vanrushal's mansion again The secret ninja village place (Shadow Village? or whatever) that you take Rorschach on his sidequest in was usually my favorite leveling spot. You eventually get to the point where Myst/other mage can dust them in a few rounds and they give reams of EXP.
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Nov 1, 2010 05:21
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Xythar posted:Where do all these apparently huge indie RPGs come from, anyway? Who makes them and how do they find the time, especially when entire developers have been scaling back their own RPGs these days presumably due to time and money constraints? I'm impressed, but puzzled. The Everlong guy has been working on it for a ridiculous amount of time (on the order of 6+ years, I believe), so it's no surprise the game is huge. Spirit Engine 2 took around 5 years for Mark Pay to make, but it's also only 10 hours long and he made everything in the game by hand (except for the music).
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Nov 5, 2010 23:25
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CommissarMega posted:EDIT: Is there any other reason to play on Absurd, other than increased difficulty? Nah. It's just if you really want to test how well you can micromanage the game's combat and skill systems. That's what I like about TSE2: if you get stuck in an area, the solution, more often than not, isn't to grind like a madman, but to adjust your tactics or respec some of your points into different skills. Even the item choices you make are significant. I'll completely agree about the characters, as well. Mark Pay went to great lengths to make their interactions believable and unique, which adds some great replay value, since it's genuinely interesting to see how the various characters play off of eachother. I'm genuinely disappointed that he's stopped making games, since he's got such an excellent feel for balance and fun. It's a true shame he's never made much money off of his ventures.
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Apr 10, 2011 20:15
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Enshadu's pretty self-contained since he's a Mysterious Dude. Mericious and PyanPau have some religious banter every so often. There's nothing especially dramatic that changes in the game depending on who you pick, but they all have their own separate banter at certain places, which is an incredibly nice change from the typical "select your party" RPG experience. I personally went with Kaltos/Charlotte/Enshadu on my first runthrough. It's quite interesting trying to make an imperfect party and see how well you can do, though, since it dramatically changes how you handle certain encounters. (Notably, not having a Musketeer makes things incredibly hard because of how great Powder Imps are.)
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Apr 11, 2011 03:56
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Lets gently caress Bro posted:I tried that patch too and gave up in the Kero Sewers. Really a shame, SMRPG is such a great game but a bit too easy, a patch that'd actually make it reasonably challenging would be so nice to play. Instead he just made it ridiculously balls to the wall hard. Why are pretty much all game fan hacks so needlessly difficult? I think the only half decent ones I've played were for FFT and Super Metroid. There's a new one that was released (SMRPG Revolution) which adjusted the difficulty in a proper way (that is, going through and balancing the game instead of just tripling everything's HP). It's quite well done, since timing your blocks and attacks is now instrumental to winning, rather than just being a convenience. Nickoten posted:Also the idea of a "Hard mode" patch for Super Mario RPG is pretty loving stupid. It's not like the battle system lends itself to a lot of strategic decisions like FFT's might, so what good does it do? It mostly serves to make the timed attack system a lot more integral to the actual game. I'd love to see someone combine SMRPG-style timed attacks with a more strategic battle system ala FFX.
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May 2, 2011 23:38
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Captain Vittles posted:The population is mostly descendents of the researchers from Chronopolis, who purposely kept themselves isolated to minimize further time fuckery (how noble!). If I remember correctly, FATE actually mindwiped all of them and sent them out to live on the islands. She had a weird mother-goddess complex.
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May 25, 2011 02:30
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Brannock posted:GameFAQs has some decent FAQs for Seiken 3. I played with the English patch a bunch of times and never had any issues - I also played with the French patch once and didn't have issues with that either. Seiken 3 was one of those games where a lot of it was really quite fun (the main combat system), but there's just a bunch of poo poo that makes it a little too tedious to play (grinding, the whole game stopping as they play the 5-second long spell effects). Trying to go through that game with Angela/Carlie without falling asleep is impossible.
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May 29, 2011 17:57
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WRPGs generally have far more complexity in player agency, which makes the game hella hard to fully bugtest and polish unless you have a lot of money and a highly dedicated QA team. Your average line of dialogue in a JRPG is just that: a line of dialogue, whereas the average line of dialogue in a WRPG could easily split off into three separate options, which could then also split into three separate options each, and selecting one of those options might impact a particular plot flag down the road, or spawn more monsters, etc. It means that you need a much longer development cycle in general in order to properly refine the product.
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Jun 5, 2011 18:14
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TooManyUzukis posted:Since we're on the subject of NWN2, I have always had the hardest time dealing with spirit hunger in MotB. Is there any advice relating to that system anyone can give? I would prefer to not "give in" to the hunger, but it feels very difficult to manage that. You can either just turn off the Spirit Meter (there's a console command that does it), or, if you want to play legit, follow these easy steps: 1) Go to Koveya Kurgannis (the big spooky ruined temple with a massive dock). 2) Find the group of Telthor stationed there. 3) Use Suppress. 4) Rest. 5) Repeat 2-5. The number of Telthor there (at least with Okku hanging around) is enough to make your Spirit Meter go down more than the amount it goes up when you rest, assuming a low-enough craving. Repeat this enough and you'll hit almost no craving and a filled meter in no time.
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Jun 14, 2011 02:39
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Jeabus Mahogany posted:So I've started playing Exit Fate, and I have a question before I move on with the plot: Yes. You need to recruit Johnny (who's at the port in the north of the Scotland analogue place) by winning 5000 in blackjack, then coming back and talking to the dog. The dog, unfortunately, isn't that worthwhile as a party member.
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Jun 30, 2011 15:05
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iastudent posted:I decided to give Neverwinter Nights 2 a spin, but when I go to create a character, no body loads to show what I look like. I already ran the updater to get it to the latest version. Did you install it recently? Anything in your Overrides folder?
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Nov 21, 2011 06:51
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casual poster posted:I just started FF6 a hour ago, and none of my friends have played this so I have to come here to complain. The whole time I've been hearing about Kefka is that he's some horribly twisted psychopath bent on world domination/destruction, but, from what I've seen of him in the last hour, he's just some loon who cracks the worst jokes ever. Why couldn't they of made him more sinister like Golbez or something? Ugh. Hope he gets better. Or maybe theres some character arc and I see his descent into madness. Oh well, one can only hope. Not to fear; he goes from "goofy clown villain" to "murdering psychopath" in record time. You'll see as you go through the game.
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Feb 25, 2012 18:37
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SSJ Reeko posted:http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Hakpaks.Detail&id=4510 Henchmen Inventory and AI mod 1.08 is what i'm looking for, yes? Yep. Tony K also did a big AI revamp for NWN2 that ended up getting included officially in the first expansion pack (in an admittedly really butchered way that broke a few things).
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Jun 3, 2012 23:28
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If they can make the dialog not sound like it was recorded underwater, that's all you'd need, really.
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Jun 4, 2014 14:47
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Irritated Goat posted:Ok. Maybe I've just outgrown RPGs but here goes, I'll throw out a personal cult favorite of mine for the PC: The Spirit Engine 2, which is also completely free. It's got an intricate combat system without a huge number of moving parts to keep track of (or, to put it another way, it's simple without being mindless) and a good story attached to it. Be sure to read the manual, though, since there's really very few games out there I could compare the combat to except maybe FFX-2.
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Nov 2, 2014 01:12
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I've kinda lost my taste for the Piers Solar-style RPG, anyways. I can still put up with some repetitive grinding, but the general paucity of tactical/strategic options in the majority of them really kills it for me. I tried playing FF6 a while back, and I just couldn't make it past about the first Ultros encounter.
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Jan 5, 2015 21:20
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If you gave me a choice between playing Pier Solar, Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, and blowing my head open with a pistol, I'd play The After Years while keeping the pistol nearby, just in case.
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Jun 7, 2015 04:47
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmMhzaF7puM
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Jun 7, 2015 16:12
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Wendell posted:I don't get the "gravity law" line. I can only assume, along with the title Pier Solar, that they're talking about some kind of celestial body getting all hosed up and Science Dude is saying it's not because of gravitation. It's just written in the style of someone patching it together from a dictionary and Google Translate.
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Jun 7, 2015 16:17
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Then again, he may also be talking about saggy breasts, but I don't want to loving know.
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Jun 7, 2015 16:18
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Hell, who doesn't love filling up their inventory with a bunch of randomly-generated garbage of which 10% is actually potentially useful for your character?
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Jun 11, 2015 04:46
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RPGs, to a large extent, are still built with the weird idea of barfing dull, unchallenging trash encounters everywhere. The reason people dislike turn-based combat is because it makes trying to get through them that much slower. Get rid of dull trash encounters and you solve the biggest hurdle to having an enjoyable turn-based game.
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Jul 1, 2015 05:18
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I had no loving idea. My god.
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Jul 1, 2015 21:16
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Japan will be better off when it finally accepts the glorious true dominance of the Personal Computer for playing role playing video games on.
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Jul 5, 2015 23:31
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I'd take a Batman RPG any day of the week over the loving miserable Space Marine Batman games that someone keeps pouring out of a tube for us.
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Jul 6, 2015 00:54
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Golden Goat posted:Playing KOTOR II again and this time I actually understand how the system works. When I first played it I really didn't know what the gently caress was going on with the D20 system and well it made the game harder then it really was. Now it's kinda ridiculous where my Exile has such a high defense that he wades into crowds and proceeds to murder everything without taking a scratch. It's really, truly amazing how drop-dead easy most RPGs are after you stop being 12 and begin to grasp simple mathematics. I had no loving clue how anything in FF6 worked when I first played it and only had the most vague idea of what statistics even were (I just equipped the stuff that made my numbers go higher), and I actually ended up struggling a fair bit with it. Now, I can break the game in half before even getting to the World of Ruin. It's a touch sad, since I otherwise really like the game, but it's just tedious to go through nowadays. I keep hoping for some kind of re-release or remake that provides a better balanced "hard type" for it.
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Jul 29, 2015 16:20
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Nakar posted:Most SRPGs seem exceptionally broken by one thing or another. Everyone loved FFT but it's tough to keep up the lie that it has any degree of difficulty. It's really just an inherent quality of the difficulty of balancing asymmetric games, especially when you're producing a product to sell to people where you often have to aim to cover a variety of playstyles ("the guy who loves to minmax" vs. "the guy who wants to play a themed party). The more variables you introduce into the game (like FFT), the harder it is to hold on to any semblance of balance.
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Aug 13, 2015 18:09
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Rascyc posted:I played this in the middle of work and had half the office playing it in between compilations and meetings. It holds a special place in my heart and everyone enjoyed it. It's pretty light weight all things considered. I'll eternally sing the praises of The Spirit Engine 2. It's got one of the most in-depth combat system of any RPG I've played.
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Aug 13, 2015 21:30
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The White Dragon posted:i thought treasure hunter g was ok It and Bahamut Lagoon are both pretty good games. I liked THG's "movement zone" concept a lot, actually; did any other SRPGs really do something similar? Phantasium posted:Should I feel bad for liking this Ryu design? The design ain't bad, but that Nina is, uh... they could've done better.
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Aug 14, 2015 15:39
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Alright, I want to start a war: what do people think of BoF4's spritework? I actually liked the really desaturated palette that they went for. Even today, it lends the game a really unique look (and the animations make my hand cramp just looking at them), but I know there's mixed feelings about it. What're peoples thoughts? Good or bad?
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Sep 13, 2015 01:27
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Locke Dunnegan posted:Quest 64's magic system was pretty cool but the leveling system and the MASSIVE boring dungeons killed it for me. It's like they just made the environments 400% bigger just to pad length with random battles, which wouldn't have been too bad but the battles were kinda boring if you didn't want to waste all of your mana immediately. It has a series of absolutely baffling design decisions. The max-level Water spell is Magic Barrier, which makes you completely immune to magic... in a game where every single enemy attack is magic. And you can keep it up indefinitely!
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Oct 5, 2015 21:28
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Tae posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EDTPvzAKKE Honestly, the old SNES RPG thing where your party members just walked like ghosts out of your main character's body when they needed to talk could be a bit weird, but it's still vastly superior to watching a clown parade of seven anime characters dash around.
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Nov 12, 2015 17:16
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