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By any objective standard the voice-acting in this game is bad so I cannot begrudge Seyser Koze for not sticking with it, but it always had some kinda B-movie charm to me, or of lovely late 80s/ early 90s anime dubs. I'd list my favourite voice-acted lines but then we'd be within end-game spoiler territory by the next two posts so I'll just say that I'll be following this LP.
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Mar 13, 2014 17:45
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Applesandoranges did an LP of Covenant of the Plume, so you can judge for yourself. As for VP2, I felt like replaying VP1 and it when Applesandoranges LPed CotP but gave up a quarter through. It's much more of a standard JRPG with a linear plot progression and a core cast of playable characters while einherjar are basically just recolours of each other now. This is not an exaggeration, every character within a cast shares a list of normal attacks they can use, except the main characters can learn their own unique attacks to set them apart from the generics. You also learn new skills by putting on specific combinations of equipment so if you wanna get the most out of your characters you will spend a long time swapping around equipment, which gets old quick. My first time through VP2 I completely ignored einherjar to absolutely no ill effect while making an active effort to use them in my second run, which I think is why I got burned out on it so quickly. VP1 did a great job of making me like every single character so I had no problem using them all for at least a couple dungeons each, in VP2 everyone who's not a main character has no personality, shares animations and soul crushes, I think each class might even only have one or two voice actors. Maybe I'm too harsh on it, I dunno, I do like the core concepts of VP2, but playing it straight after VP1 just kinda soured me on it.
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Mar 15, 2014 18:12
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Crepuscule Adepte posted:...By the way ApplesandOranges, are you planning to show the attract mode mini-story? I remember that one well, because it was my first experience with the voice acting of the game. ApplesandOranges got a plan for this LP, so don't worry if some parts aren't shown as soon as they're available.
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Mar 17, 2014 19:58
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The combat music is kinda battling with the voice acting there. The second disc has a sound collection including all battle quotes you've encountered, so you can record them without the combat music getting in the way. Unless that's too much effort for what amounts to five second sound-clips, I dunno.
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Mar 17, 2014 23:48
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The evaluation level being the green number shown in the main menu here, so it's not some hidden value or anything. I'm sure ApplesandOranges will go into what low Evaluation does relatively early in the LP. As far as the periods go, you've got more than enough to do anything to do everything that Spiritual Concentration shows you. It's other stuff that makes the game convoluted at times. Incidentally it's not the number of attacks that determines which level of Nibelung Valesti you get. There's some swords with three attacks that still do the level 1 version while there's a couple weapons with only two attacks, and one with just one, that do the level 2 version. The level is just plain baked into each weapon, with level 2 just being reserved for the rare and good stuff. I always recruit characters in the order they show up during Spiritual Concentration so let's go to Lassen.
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Mar 20, 2014 04:18
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Yeah technically speaking spending points on traits for characters you're not gonna send to Valhalla are wasted, but I still spend the first couple levels of every character on maxing out their stats, including Arngrim's. I just like my Einherjar being paragons of virtue even if it has no gameplay effects or benefits whatsoever, I guess. By the end of the game your main crew's most likely got everything maxed out anyway, so no bother really.
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Mar 22, 2014 20:32
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Mehuyael posted:These stories are so short. I guess they want to get them over with so the player can start killing things. There's one story in particular that makes you wish they were all that short. Other than that one though I think most of them have a pretty decent length to introduce you to a character before killing them off for you.
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Mar 23, 2014 17:06
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Yeah, that's not my reading on Lenneth at all. I'm pretty sure if she wanted to she could go grab Llewelyn and not give a gently caress about his personal problems. I read the Goddess of Love line as her being overwhelmed when an Einherjar doesn't take after Arngrim and immediately decides being a warrior of the gods is cool, so she ends up unsure how to help them move on.
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Mar 23, 2014 19:47
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:VP2 may not give wholly-unique attacks to every character, but each character still has a different set of attacks and easier/harder access to different skills. They aren't as individualized as in VP1, granted, but they aren't completely interchangeable within a class either. It still doesn't help that Einherjar in VP2 are more or less recolours of each other with mostly identical voice clips and a couple kinda-hidden in-battle exchanges between them. Or that you recruit Einherjar by just touching some glowing artifacts in dungeons which just dumps an Einherjar in your party without much fanfare, or that each artifact has several mutually-exclusive Einherjar so you couldn't even get them all. I don't know, I never really get into the mechanics of JRPGs, so I usually just use characters if I like them as characters. VP1 did that beautifully by introducing your characters through their death scenes and I actually used every single character in that game. My first time through VP2 I actually completely ignored Einherjar, and my second time through when ApplesandOranges did his Covenant of the Plume LP I actively forced myself to use Einherjar and burned out on the game not even halfway through.
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Mar 24, 2014 04:00
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Omobono posted:Does current level also go into HV? ApplesandOranges said in his post that you get 2 Hero Value per level. Anyways, I usually just send up Llewelyn because he barely meets the requirements here and very quickly won't be able to reach the Hero Value requirement at all, and on Midgard he'd just be a benchwarmer. Dude never got a chance to shine in all my playthroughs. On a different note, I kinda like how human-made weapons have a chance to break while divine weapons you can materialize are basically immune to wear-and-tear. It does a nice job showing the difference between human and godly weapon-crafting.
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Mar 25, 2014 20:07
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Yeah how about we try not to discuss future events in a thread with a no spoilers policy? As Dis Astranagant already mentioned, Llewelyn doesn't even fill the archer niche because we already got Lenneth. It cannot be understated how much better Lenneth is with a bow. If you're kinda poo poo at the game like me, giving Lenneth a bow can make the difference from getting the meter only to 50% to filling it out entirely, and if I remember correctly it also lets you use her PWE third in the chain while the sword version can only fill the meter up from the second spot. Then of course there's also the ever-looming thread of ranged enemies in the back row that can be made infinitely easier with a ranged Lenneth and a sorcerer of your own. Switching from swords to bows was honestly a pretty big game changer for me.
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Mar 26, 2014 01:42
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Bloodly posted:19th is one of the lowest ranks, mark you. For comparison, Lenneth is considered mid-level as a 6th rank goddess. I think the lowest possible rank is 20th, so Llewelyn is just barely above divine cannon fodder. Man, it's been a while since I played this on Normal, I completely forgot about the forest dungeon here. It'll be fun seeing all the dungeons I forgot about again in this LP.
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Mar 26, 2014 20:10
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Keldulas posted:I do like the general system for Freya giving you information on what's going on up there, but does anyone find the bar-graph kind of... weird? Did she lovingly draw that for Lenneth or something? Even gods need hobbies. Freya's love for charts, graphs and statistics is the entire foundation of the Aesirs' war effort.
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Mar 27, 2014 14:45
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W.T. Fits posted:Seriously, though, it's a shame that we didn't get to hear any of his voice clips here, because he's got some of my favorite lines. He and the character we get next are tied for favourite successful PWS quotes for me. They're just so ridiculously dumb, it's perfect.
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Mar 29, 2014 03:56
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MadHat posted:Time for some Justice! A couple Einherjar get some scenes together if you send both to Asgard, so at least it's better than Covenant of the Plume in that regard. TooMuchAbstraction posted:VP2 had some interesting ideas, but its character customization was a gigantic clusterfuck. "Gigantic clusterfuck" sums up Tri-Ace's design philosophy during the PS2 era pretty well, yeah.
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Mar 31, 2014 23:48
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vilkacis posted:I'm like 99% certain Grimrist has a line in its description about this, but I'm not 99% certain it's entirely obvious from the description what it actually does. If you check the Grimrist's elemental attributes it says "Lightning/Death", so it's more or less obvious what it does.
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Apr 2, 2014 18:27
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Omobono posted:Speaking of liberal translations, I've heard that what Lenneth shouts at the start of Nibelung Valesti ("It shall be engraved upon your soul") is a bit of a mistranslation and in the original Japanese it was far less Apparently it was also meant to be called Nibelung Velocity, but the translators couldn't figure out the second word wasn't a nonsense-word and just went with Valesti.
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Apr 3, 2014 15:43
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. Any truth to it?
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DontMockMySmock posted:Huh, the different valkyries share the same body? Isn't that disproven in VP2? I just thought they were identical triplets. The short answer is it's not disproven in VP2 and the long answer would be a bit much of a spoiler.
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Apr 5, 2014 19:10
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Obviously the afterlife has an after-afterlife a la Beetlejuice.
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Apr 7, 2014 17:48
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A mermaid who died by drowning is pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel. Also just because her meeting with her parents never happens on-screen doesn't mean it never happens. I pretty much take the opposite reading of Bloodly here, Lenneth pretty much states she did nothing to be worthy of Valhalla, but this is one of those moment's where a hint of compassion shows through Lenneth's veneer of duty, so she recruits her into the Einherjar anyway to give her a chance to meet her parents.
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Apr 11, 2014 20:33
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Sientara posted:Kashell: Valkyrie Profile is a wonderful world where you either die tragically or get saddled with survivor's guilt. Kinda curious if there's people who can interpret Lenneth catching the vial as a cold uncaring move and proof that she doesn't give a gently caress about humans.
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Apr 17, 2014 17:39
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Bloodly posted:No, I don't see why you'd skip Lezard's Tower when you've already done Brahms. Lezard at least can be said to 'complete' as a scenario regardless of ending, in that everything is resolved. Well, the thing is where Brahms' deal with holding Silmeria hostage is pretty minor and doesn't really make an impact on either ending, the part ApplesandOranges is skipping is hugely important for the A ending but absolutely irrelevant for the B ending, so it makes sense to skip it for a B ending run.
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Apr 24, 2014 15:57
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Nothing's mandatory in this game. You could probably send up an einherjar and do a single dungeon every other phase and still get to the end. The game's just non-linear enough like that.
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Apr 26, 2014 11:45
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As short as the recruitment scene is, they at least tried to make up for it by having her spiritual concentration dialogue precede her recruitment scene rather than being from it. Of the top of my head there's only one other recruitment where that happens. I also wanna say it's cool you show off the einherjar before their recruitment. In all my playthroughs I never really bothered exploring the towns so I wasn't even aware they existed in the game world before their recruitment.
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Apr 28, 2014 17:51
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Rigged Death Trap posted:So we get another little thread of info on the worlds cosmology. Well, that's not quite true. It pretty much never comes up unless you intentionally go for it, but your einherjar can die in Asgard if they're underlevelled and underequipped. I guess the idea's that there's an afterlife, but no after-afterlife.
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Apr 28, 2014 17:59
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ApplesandOranges posted:The Dragonsbane is a wand with 600 Magic Power. This is twice as strong as the Element Scepter, at the cost of not being able to use Great Magic, however, it can't break. We have the Ether Scepter now though, so unless we really need an extra PWS the Ether Scepter is better. On the other hand, if you get Nanami and consequently the Dragonsbane in chapter 2 it's a really nice power-boost. Plus I usually prefer using wands that don't have Great Magic so I can let mages in on PWS chains without worrying about breaking them, even when I end up with like a dozen Ether Scepters and never use more than one mage.
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Apr 30, 2014 15:14
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I always kinda figured the whole incredibly self-sacrificing deal was some weird Japanese thing.
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Apr 30, 2014 20:59
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Miacis posted:Aelia's Sonic Edge is kinda annoying. She will often throw her spear right past the enemy (like she did there) if she's in close combat. It would work better as a first attack, but then you lose a lot of guard crushing power... I find that usually waiting half a second to let the character take a short hop backwards before attacking again usually fixes the problem some characters have with being too close to hit enemies. It can get a bit complicated though when juggling three different characters, so yeah, I prefer sticking with characters that basically hit at every range.
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May 3, 2014 00:45
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I'm gonna be honest, I'm pretty surprised you didn't cut out one of the spiritual concentrations there. It's also kinda funny they needed a negotiator for the fairies when they just send Loki there, anyway. You'd think the trickster god could get this done on his own.
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May 6, 2014 19:35
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:There seem to be a few wish fulfillment things in this world, and they all seem to work. So do the gods know about these and are compelled to obey them when they occur? I don't think that the gods are compelled to obey them so much that they grant wishes/cause miracles in a more abstract sense. In Badrach's case, the moment the flower bloomed he had an epiphany about the one good deed he committed, and despite what Lenneth says about being a harsh judge she has shown herself repeatedly to be sympathetic to humans beyond what's required of her as chooser of the slain. In a hypothetical scenario where the flower hadn't bloomed Badrach wouldn't have remembered his one good deed and Lenneth never would've figured that even men like him have a chance to be redeemed. Basically the miracle wasn't that Lenneth just arbitrarily decided hey, a flower bloomed, let's make that guy an einherjar, but that even in a man as wicked and selfish as Badrach there's still that tiny shred of good in his heart.
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May 9, 2014 14:27
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Can't you buy water wings to make up for the lack of Swimmer? If I remember correctly, you can also buy possessions that give the Nimble trait this chapter. I think the only thing you can't make up with possessions are class-specific skills like Attack Pow this chapter.
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May 14, 2014 20:01
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Bloodly posted:Plot reasons-of a sort. I forget whether normal mode has the dungeon that explains more. There's a reason Freya stated 'Fate is a cruel mistress' straight after getting him. I think it's one of the few dungeons that are available on every difficulty, actually.
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May 15, 2014 16:30
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I almost wish Celia would die just because Jayle and Aelia are the only female warriors and the rest of the female einherjar are relegated to being sorceresses. Bit of a shame really.ApplesandOranges posted:It's unclear exactly what Grey was trying to do to revive Lemia, though Lenneth's remarks suggest he was trying to accomplish his own means of Soul Transfer, albeit in a way that doesn't seem all too pleasing to the gods. I thought Lenneth was pretty clear with saying "through the same means" that Grey tried to soul transfer Lemia right back, except it doesn't work on souls used for a soul transfer already so Grey ended up a loose soul without a body himself. I figured the gods are just really touchy when it comes to souls. Edit: I do think this vignette is a pretty neat take on the whole "a person I love sacrifed themselves so I can survive, so I must live on for their sake" thing you see in a lot of stories. Rather than accepting Lemia's sacrifice, Grey outright rejected it and consequently ended up wasting it. You don't see that too often in fiction. a cartoon duck fucked around with this message at 16:18 on May 18, 2014 |
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May 18, 2014 16:15
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It's a bit of a moot point anyway as Grey gets a shiny new einherjar body once Lenneth recruits him anyway. I forgot, has ApplesandOranges shown off what happens when Lenneth gets defeated in combat? I thought it was a neat touch how without Lenneth in combat to maintain the physical forms of her einherjar they only have three turns to revive her or finish the battle before they fade away.
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May 18, 2014 16:50
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Mzbundifund posted:That is interesting. I wonder if it was the peasant or his commander who did that. With the way the commander tilts his head back with his eyes closed I'm gonna guess it was him. It's the kinda mourning gesture by stoic warrior types you see a lot in anime and poo poo like that. The peasant I imagine didn't feel too strongly about killing the dude who was there to slaughter his entire family.
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May 28, 2014 20:15
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To be fair though, there's nothing stopping you from just equipping Jun and Suo with normal swords instead. Aside from individual differences and general differences in stat growth, there's nothing stopping samurai from filling the same role as swordsmen.
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May 29, 2014 00:16
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Man, if there's one thing I realized the last couple chapters, it's that Normal mode is really gimped on dungeons compared to Hard mode. Are there any Easy mode-exclusive dungeons or is the meat of the game just straight up reserved for Hard mode?
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May 31, 2014 20:57
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Derek Barona posted:Well, remember that the entire point of Lenneth schlepping about Midgard was to basically be the enherjar boot camp and send them up as ace soldiers for the army once they're good enough. Since she's leading what is more or less the most important assault mission of the war, they're gonna stack the deck as high as they can and give her all of their best men. The fact that she trained them is more of a coincidence and game convenience than any real generosity on the story's part. I know that the war effort statistics are basically just fluff to make you feel like sending up einherjar does anything other than stopping Freya from coming down and nuking you, and that the endgame doesn't change whether the Aesir and Vanir are equally matched or not, but I still love how everyone goes all "Lenneth, the outcome of this battle rests entirely on you!" when the Aesir are three times as powerful as the Vanir and all other forces are basically taken care of. Kinda makes Lenneth feel more like a glorified divine hitwoman rather than an important commander.
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Jun 3, 2014 09:52
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One thing to note about the final dungeon is that it's basically the only dungeon with respawning enemies. I guess the developers didn't want to take your last chance at power-leveling away even though it's completely unnecessary and actually more of a nuisance really, what with the purgatory flame.Bloodly posted:I have no issues with the line trying to alert you that something ain't right, except you've got little evidence to go on by the game itself. And even A ending isn't very much about this matter. It's like this plot thread is dropped outright or doesn't exist. The game doesn't do much with it, but I wouldn't call it a dropped plot thread, but we get to that when we get to that.
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Jun 5, 2014 15:42
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Darth TNT posted:Or it's a sequel hook, not exactly unheard off either. The game straight-up tells the player there's multiple endings. With that in mind it's not exactly unreasonable to assume there's more behind what Surt said.
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Jun 8, 2014 17:02
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