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I'm drawing up on the end of the game now, had a stab at the real Night's Nexus fight last night but got destroyed by the second phase. Overall, I don't know, the difficulty of this game has been all over the place. Normal battles haven't mattered in a long time (Godspeed Strike is just a broken ability, especially with someone with Spiritmaster as a subjob with BP Discount and Devotion to back them up - like I don't even know why you'd keep any spellcaster around when that ability exists). But some of the later bosses are just piles of bullshit counterattacks for mundane things (like daring to buff your party). I guess it's my fault for going for such a one-trick pony route, though... but then again, the way I actually beat the aforementioned bosses is by just not bothering with anything fancy and just spamming that ability even harder, so go figure. I have to say, though... this game has disappointed me a bit. Bravely Default was always kind of a nice return to the simpler times of cookie cutter JRPGs, which I enjoyed in the first two games, but this time it's a little too much cookie cutter for my tastes. There's no complexity to the story, the game feels like it's just ticking boxes on a scorecard as it moves you towards the next Asterisk. I kept expecting some kind of twist akin to what the first two games did, and I assume there's still something to go (having been spoiled on what the last Asterisk is), but at the same time the game feels like it's really almost over. Like, there can't be that many hours of content left to go. Certainly not enough to flesh the story out much further. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Mar 16, 2021 |
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Mar 16, 2021 10:05
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I actually like the counterattack mechanics... but I think they designed a lot of the monsters, bosses in particular, rather poorly. I think it's cool to have the occasional enemy that punishes you for specific strategies as a way to keep you on your toes and force you to switch it up and not be a one-trick pony. But near the end of the game especially, they got real lazy with that poo poo. There are some enemies that literally have stuff like "counter any ability". Come on, that's not forcing me to strategize differently, it's just punishing me arbitrarily. "Stop using abilities" is not something you can expect me to adopt as a counter-strategy. Really they should've kept the counter chance at 100% for each type of counter and used them more sparingly.
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Mar 16, 2021 13:19
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Holy poo poo who designed the (endgame) D-Vergr fight? Who thought having a cloud of limitlessly spawning enemies constantly reset your ATB gauge was a good idea? edit: Part of me thinks Red Mage + Arcanist is a pretty neat idea. But that was somewhat predicated on that not resulting in attacks dooming and charming your own party because of Nuisance. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Mar 16, 2021 |
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Mar 16, 2021 14:22
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SKULL.GIF posted:It amuses me that they deliberately made the working project name even worse than "Octopath Traveler" to avoid having their working name stick a second time. I for one am looking forward to Icosahedron Detective, the visual novel I'm sure they're working on in secret.
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Mar 16, 2021 20:06
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I did not realize until now that Freelancer's JP Up abilities also affect JP Orbs.
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Mar 17, 2021 21:31
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Pollyanna posted:Relatedly, are there any other JP grinding spots besides the Prologue beach in Chapter 2? Or is that still the best option? I've been using the snake miniboss you access through the waterway in the desert city, since you can just back into the dungeon and come out again and it'll have respawned. It's about 300 JP a fight before JP Up. But it helps to be at a point where you can one-shot it with, say, Godspeed Strike spam. As an additional bonus, this gets you a shitload of Defenders. I'm tackling the Halls of Tribulation and, boy, I would not be having any chance of dealing with any of this poo poo without constant all-party Reraise spam, so White Mage + Spiritmaster is pretty much required at this stage. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Mar 18, 2021 |
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Mar 18, 2021 08:05
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Pollyanna posted:The job system and scaling is kinda weird this time, really. Level 12 moves kick profound amounts of rear end, e.g. Godspeed Strike and the Monk one, such that getting any of them early trivializes bosses. It feels very odd and I can’t put it into words. Godspeed Strike is a level 9 ability, it's crazy. That one alone will carry you through most of the game until eventually Ninefold Flurry knocks it out of the park. At no point does magic feel like it catches up, unfortunately... even now when I can do things like chainspell big spells for upwards of 8,000 damage or whatever, a single Ninefold Flurry can deal 30,000+ damage. It's ridiculous how off the scaling is.
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Mar 19, 2021 08:44
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Okay, well, wrapped up the game. Uhm. Boy, this game sure didn't really know what to do with itself, did it? There are so many half-baked ideas that don't go anywhere. What was the deal with Seth's origins? He behaves kind of like an amnesiac protagonist but we have no reason to believe he actually can't remember anything. What was the Night's Nexus? Some... woman from the past who ate a lot of memories? Why is Mag Mell just introduced in the last ten minutes of the game and has nothing interesting in it besides the (semi-) final boss? Is the boat supposed to be plot significant somehow? So many characters are completely underdeveloped for how much mention they get, like Emma, Lonsdale and perhaps most importantly, Adam. Every villain except Edna comes off as a complete stooge, and Edna's motives in turn are just completely opaque. What happened to her anyway? I can't believe the heroes going "uh, actually, let's not fight the big bad villain" at Musa was actually a plot point. That just... worked itself out somehow I guess? Almost no one has any depth. No questions get resolved. What the hell happened to the story from the other two games? I feel like Bravely Second in particular set up a whole lot of stuff that just farted itself out of existence completely. Most importantly, I feel like I was cheated out of a moment where we get to see the title screen and the II turns into III. Like what the hell, is this even a Bravely Default game? All that said, I spent almost 50 hours on the game so it clearly wasn't a bad game. Mechanically speaking it delivers, wonky balance aside.
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Mar 19, 2021 21:48
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Dirk the Average posted:And Edna, the apparent catalyst of everything, the one who started all this crap, just... turns into a statue? We never see what happens to her, nobody ever bothers to ask, Adelle doesn't even bother to ask, and nobody ever delves into the Night's Nexus at all. People don't ask questions about anything, even when they really should, and plot points keep getting dropped the instant they get slightly interesting. What was Folie's deal? Was she just some crazy girl who liked to paint whose parents didn't like her very much? What about the arcanist guy? The phantom lady? And Adam, whose motives seem to come down to "want build airship, want conquer world"... except we don't even know the airship exists until we're literally on it, and it promptly crashes. Meanwhile we know nothing about his personality or where he comes from - apparently he's the heir to the former king of Holograd or whatever, a place that doesn't matter and never goes anywhere afterwards either (you'd think there's be some concern that their dictator-king has apparently just died in a fiery airshipwreck). The villains all had hints at some kind of backstory, but it's bare-bones as hell. And I have no idea why Edna did anything she did. The reason Mag Mell and everything post-Edna stands out is because it's all so... perfunctory. First of all, the tension of the game kind of deflates once the option of just not fighting the villain apparently is on the table. There's even that statue (?) cutscene that seems to nail home the idea that... I guess the world wasn't really in trouble after all and we could've just waited and it would've sorted itself out. The heroes don't do anything to stop Edna. They just leave her to self-statuefy and instead go to Mag Mell, where they're basically immediately allowed inside despite what we're told is some kind of unmendable schism between fairies and humans (which likewise is never explained or addressed since no one in Mag Mell seems to actually give a poo poo after the first five minutes), and actively ask the fairies to uncork the sealed evil in a can so they can fight it. Okay, I get it, JRPGs have had the "oh no meteor is falling, let's breed some chocobos" thing since forever. But that doesn't bother me when I'm doing side activities that are clearly dubiously canon. It's a whole nother thing for it to be an apparently planned out part of the storyline. You can't just work up to a climactic battle only to pull a Camelot on it and then act like this is fine in terms of the story progression without actually explaining why that is. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Mar 19, 2021 |
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Mar 19, 2021 23:07
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Kind of a big problem with the game is that there aren't really any ability synergies that outrank Brave x4 + Godspeed Strike for most of the game in terms of damage. Most other synergies come down to one kind of utility or another, like mugging/capturing entire enemy parties in one go or all-casting Reraise or whatever.
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Mar 20, 2021 18:58
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The big late-game one does 99,999 damage to the entire enemy lineup, but that requires every single asterisk in the game and there's practically nothing powerful enough to warrant that kind of overkill.
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Mar 20, 2021 19:15
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I mean I'm the kind of crazy person who puts on some podcasts and just grinds the snake in Savalon for three hours straight to max out jobs, so that's the only time I really bothered with JP Up.
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Mar 20, 2021 23:11
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Evil Fluffy posted:I'm not sure if I've seen a good place to just power level jobs. Go to the waterway in Savalon, pop through the teleporter and go straight up. It'll take you to an oasis on the world map with a miniboss snake that has about 22000 health and gives 300 JP. Less than Baba Yaga, but you just have to take two steps into the dungeon and then exit back to the world map to force it to repop. The snake is vulnerable to... spears and swords, I think? Anyway, it's not at all hard to get to a point where you can one-shot the snake in one turn if you max brave.
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Mar 21, 2021 17:13
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:Seriously, a handful of the right mob will just poo poo on bosses completely. The skeleton sellswords in particular are pretty ridiculous, having a low hit rate but dealing percentage-based damage that works on bosses, which is pretty nuts at that point in the game.
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Mar 21, 2021 23:06
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Pollyanna posted:Why are these dungeons so goddamn big? There’s so much empty space and without anything to justify the size. I think the only two dungeons I think had something interesting in it was the ice dungeon where you get to slip around on floors to get to a chest at one point, and the airship. Other than that, the dungeons have unfortunately been some combination of too long, too tedious and too inconsequential. There's nothing going on in most of them, no puzzles, no switches to throw or paths to open, just follow the yellow dot until you reach the boss.
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Mar 24, 2021 09:03
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You know, it's weird. I give this game a lot of poo poo for Adam being such an under-developed nothing of a big villain. But I don't know if Exdeath was all that great, either - he's the prototypal early-Final Fantasy "big bad guy in evil-looking armor", distinguishable from Garland or Golbez only because of the color of his armor. So why do I feel disappointed by BD2 but not FFV? Is it just because it's been two decades since I played FFV and that was great, even excellent for its time but we've come to expect more now? Maybe it's that weirdness you're talking about. Maybe Exdeath has so little story justification that you accept him as a weird super-dimensional threat that doesn't need further motivation, whereas Adam has just enough smattering of story to make it seem like there should be something behind it all, but there isn't. Maybe it's that the other characters in FFV are far more interesting - hell, even Bartz has more going for him than Seth does. And FFV has some unforgettable fan favorites like Gilgamesh.Pollyanna posted:If the interesting parts of BD2 are the battles, why is there so much downtime between the interesting parts? And where are the gimmicks and twists on battles? There’s so much cool stuff you can do with those, like a gladiator arena, or you have to protect a target from oncoming enemies, or pick out an impostor from a group of FOEs, or you come across a monster house in a dungeon or something. Instead it’s Hallway and Random Battle Simulator 2021, and that’s one of my least favorite things about JRPGs. I'm a little biased, having been on the other side of this exact thing (and somewhat regretting afterwards that we didn't manage to do a better job on that front - not that we did a bad job, but it's hard to not feel that way as a creator). But, because of that, I might be able to sympathize a little. It feels like BD2 was made by a crew too inexperienced to really be able to handle it, and it kinda shows that there are a lot of plot threads and ideas that are fundamentally very much promising, they just don't go where they need to go. For us, the problem was running out of time, and I suspect the same in a slightly different form might apply here, too. As a consumer, it's kinda unsatisfying. But I do think when it comes down to the wire and you can only pick one thing about your game to make as good as possible, at least they chose the right thing and made the combat and job system the highlight of the game. (Pity about the lack of balance in places though...)
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Mar 24, 2021 15:03
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raditts posted:If they make a Bravely Second type sequel to this, I want it to be a Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead type store with Dag and Selene where all their exploits around the world keep getting upstaged by the "real" heroes. It's a shame their character arc is locked entirely behind side quests. I admit for a good chunk of the game I was expecting the game to do a flip and reveal we were the baddies all along and Dag, Selene, Bernard etc. were all good guys that made some bad decisions and had some bad PR.
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Mar 24, 2021 15:34
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That is definitely part of why I expected it to happen.
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Mar 24, 2021 15:39
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Natural 20 posted:Freelancer 3 gives you immunity to dungeon effects but I don't recall a single dungeon in Bravely Default 2 having an effect to be immune to! You know, come to think of it, that's true. I remember equipping it early on because, well, it was one of the few abilities I had. But I don't remember in what situation it would've been actually useful. The ice floors in that one dungeon halfway through the game, maybe..? By that time I had more important abilities to equip. Anyway, you're right that it was a bit of an own goal in the sense that both the previous games do much better. And it's not that the new team wanted to distance themselves from the old, because they also went back to some of the simpler jobs from the first game rather than inventing - personally, some of my favorite jobs are from Bravely Second. Who doesn't like a job that literally gets to equip four weapons at the same time? So that's what makes me go for the "inexperienced team" angle. It feels like they had a few careful ideas that didn't go anywhere, and then for the rest of it they played it very safe, to the point of bland.
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Mar 24, 2021 16:32
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Ragequit posted:I liked Adam solely because he sounded like Bill Nighy playing Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean but with a Russian twist. No one seems to have much of an accent with the Japanese voiceover, unfortunately... Sloan has generic old man voice with a lot of old-fashioned pronoun use, and Elvis uses wagahai a lot, but other than that. I don't even remember if Adam had any particular features to his voice...
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Mar 24, 2021 19:15
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I just dealt with the few instances of reflect phys by just... constantly spamming all-party reraise and letting the reflect kill my characters. Godspeed Strike and Ninefold Flurry are just that good.
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Mar 24, 2021 20:12
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THE AWESOME GHOST posted:How the hell am I supposed to counter the enemy getting BP every time I do an ability? I feel like I'm really missing something here, I was hoping to get those jobs to 15 before I got into the end of the game but I'll have to settle with having 1 useful job unlocked This is the dumbest thing about the fights. "Counter any ability" is a dumb counterattack, there's no real counterplay. You just need to play it as if the enemy will have 4 BP every turn, no matter what, and focus on one-shotting one or two of them so that it doesn't matter how many BP they have. Figure out which is weakest and Godspeed Strike x4 at the start of the fight on two or three characters, then have the last character spam heals and reraise and hope you get another turn to repeat. Spearhead (the Beastmaster passive) helps. In some of them you can equip certain items to get an advantage (e.g. the Pictomancer spams an instant KO attack, but if you're immune to instant KO then she basically does nothing). But that's the basic principle of how I won most of them. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Mar 25, 2021 |
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Mar 25, 2021 08:56
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Kin posted:Presumably there's a better end game farming approach though. Not really, at least that I've found. There are other world bosses that give you more JP per fight, but they have no easy way of respawning them so it cancels out in the end. It's hard to beat just how fast you can get into a fight with that snake, wipe the floor with it, and respawn it in under a minute. The one possible exception is the portal fights, since they can drop 3000 JP orbs. But by the time you can kill those quickly and reliably you don't really need more JP, it's more about the asterisk weapons.
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Mar 25, 2021 10:57
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Ramc posted:I got a lot of milage out of Equalizer, on the Bravebearer/Black Mage/Bastion gate. Really I got a lot of Milage out of it period at the very end. I really wish stuff like this was more viable, it's just kind of sad that so many of the game's challenges (including that one) can be solved so much more easily by "All-cast Reraise, then Godspeed Strike x4/Ultima Sword+HP/MP Converter/Across the Board" than doing anything interesting. Well, I guess the second thing is a little interesting, at least, but it would be nice if it didn't demolish practically everything in the entire game.
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Mar 25, 2021 12:31
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You know what I actually kind of think is a shame? (True ending spoilers) "The end boss saved her game in your list of savegames and keeps reloading it, and you have to overwrite her savegame" is not a bad twist for a Bravely game. But they don't push the idea nearly hard enough! I'm convinced it's entirely possible to complete the game and not reflect on that at all, especially because all you really need to do is think to yourself "huh, I wonder what that swirly purple thing is" and the game won't really drive the point home for you. edit: Actually, "thing X is not a bad idea but they don't do enough with it" is emblematic of almost every part of this game that I didn't like. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Mar 25, 2021 |
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Mar 25, 2021 15:09
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It varies a bit - none of them are vulnerable to instant KO, for example - but a startling number of bosses are susceptible to paralysis. It is incredibly possible to stunlock bosses forever.
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Mar 25, 2021 19:07
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SKULL.GIF posted:How exactly does dual wielding work? I keep getting stat losses whenever I try it. I am not going over the weight limit. You get a big chunky stat penalty across the board when dual wielding, so it's only worth it if the second weapon is really that good. The two main ways around this are a passive ability from one particular job, and the level 12 specialty from another, which negate the penalty entirely. (There's also another passive ability that lets you dual-wield shields if you're into that.)
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Mar 26, 2021 08:18
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The music is one of the things about BD2 which is unambiguously great across the board. Even where it's kinda generic it's charming and fits the mood. Shame that the blandest player character gets to have the coolest special attack theme. And also that the second battle theme isn't as good as the first one, imo.
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Mar 26, 2021 14:56
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Pollyanna posted:Pop quiz, everyone: what stat affects the chance of inflicting status ailments? I was going to say "luck" because of that Freelancer skill, but, uh, Luck isn't actually a stat. Aim? No, I bet it's going to be Res Power or something.
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Mar 26, 2021 18:20
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raditts posted:lol, so if you break the storyline in New Game+ by defeating Adam in the scripted prologue battle (or I guess if you're insane enough to powerlevel enough to beat him on your first playthrough), Edna basically pops up and says "I'm taking my night's nexus and going home" and the game ends and tells you that you have to lose if you want to go any further. I wonder if you can somehow beat Galahad on the first try in New Game+ too... Pollyanna posted:What possesses people to do this? Let me tell you about my pile of 99 Defenders... Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 08:49 on Mar 27, 2021 |
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Mar 27, 2021 08:26
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Pollyanna posted:God, the more I think about BD2's story, the more I'm disappointed. I could write an absolute shitload of words, but I dunno if anyone else is interested in talking about it. If you won't, I will! Beforehand though, I just want to restate what I said before and others have since: I spent way too many hours in this game to call it a bad game. I bounced hard off Octopath Traveler and didn't get close to finishing it, for example. So for whatever that's worth. I just think it's interesting to think about just what happened to this game, and how to not do it. Maybe it's the game designer in me, who knows. Complete full game spoilers below. In my mind the biggest problem is the raw number of unfinished, undercooked ideas. There are lots of plot threads that start promising and seem to be leading you somewhere interesting, but then just... don't. This is especially the case later on in the game, with the biggest issue of them all being Edna; if some of the other storylines are undercooked, Edna's story is loving raw. She's practically nothing. Did you notice she doesn't actually do anything in the game itself? We're told she runs away from Mag Mell with the asterisks, but all that happens before the game begins, and we're only ever told about it. Then she stands around in some cutscenes with Adam, then shows up at Musa where you can fight her if you like... or leave her to turn into a statue for unexplained reasons, and no one gives a poo poo about what just happened. Nobody! Not Adelle, not the fairy queen, nobody. And she's supposed to be the mastermind behind everything that happened? What happened? Why? You know, the characters outright ask Edna why, and the best reason she can give is "it was really easy to manipulate humans into loving everything up, so I have to destroy them so they don't gently caress everything up". Her motivations make no goddamn sense. Okay, so let's imagine she's being manipulated by the Night's Nexus, as the party believes. This just raises further questions, because the Night's Nexus is another under-explained piece of nothing. Apparently some woman drank from the knowledge-pool the fairies have in their basement and... went mad or something? Why? Why does the Nexus want to destroy everything? Why does it keep yammering on about never forgiving... forgiving who? Humans? Fairies? For what, exactly? None of this is ever explained or elaborated on, so for all purposes the Nexus is just an angry space flea out of nowhere. It's a sealed monster that lives in the fairies' basement, or maybe in Musa, or maybe on a misty island somewhere. None of the villains make any sense. Not the Nexus, not Edna, not even Adam - at best he seems to want to conquer the world basically for shits and giggles. There are many more plotlines of varying degrees of incompleteness. For starters, basically all the later villains - Vigintio, Lonsdale and Marla - have storylines that end before they've barely begun. There are hints at stories - Marla is the daughter of someone who was mistreated by the Savalon nobles, Vigintio was, uh, some crazy guy I guess? And Lonsdale made a promise to Adam's father and for some reason seems to think that means he must remain loyal to Adam despite clearly thinking he's in the wrong. But these stories don't go anywhere, they're unfinished. And the end result is just feeling confused and unsatisfied. Earlier villains are only somewhat better. Bernard and Anihal have a weird dynamic going on where it seems like Bernard used to be a good guy in the past and then turned into an abusive rear end in a top hat for... no real reason we're ever shown. He just did. We never really get a good idea of what the hell made Folie do what she did, only that she seems to have had a vaguely alluded to lovely childhood that... made her go crazy, I guess? How old is she, anyway? Some people have suggested that all these people went mad with power after they got their asterisks, and that they are to blame. After all, that's why Edna hands them out, ostensibly. But there are too many glaring exceptions that this doesn't make much sense; Elvis, Martha, Anihal, Lonsdale and whatever the Salvemaker guy's name was all seemed to suffer no ill effects from theirs. The Wiswald crew were being mind-controlled, nothing to do with the asterisks, and Castor had plenty of reasons to do what he did before ever getting his hands on his. But if the asterisks had nothing to do with it, then we are left with no explanation at all why certain villains like Adam and the Halcyonian prime minister did what they did. I also don't understand what the point of the whole fairy thing is. We're told fairies and humans went through some horrible schism in the past that left them on very bad terms, but we never find out why. And nobody in the world outside of ice town seems to care, anyway. Hell, when you show up in Mag Mell, it takes about 5 seconds to convince them to let you in anyway, even though they explicitly despise Adelle for leaving the way she did. None of it is explained; instead we rush straight to the basement to resurrect a weird mummy from their pool of magical memory-ade so we can slay it again. Why is that thing there, anyway? Or is it at Musa? I just don't understand the Night's Nexus at all, or how any of the fairy nonsense connects with the rest of the story.
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Mar 27, 2021 22:35
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Pollyanna posted:
Will you believe I spend a good chunk of the game actively thinking that "the heroes are being used by the crystals for nefarious purposes" was going to be the mid-game twist? It's kind of telling what my expectations for a Bravely game were when "I bet we're going to go back in time and not accept the wind crystal's blessing" is a guess I both thought reasonable and was hoping would come true. Anyway, I think almost every part of the game is perfectly salvageable. You know, I actually think a lot of the story could be improved by changing two admittedly rather major elements: First, cut Adam out of the story. He's almost completely superfluous and has no interesting story of his own. Second, have Edna do all the stuff Adam did. Have her be actively searching for the crystals rather than being the one who gave them to people in the first place. Have her show up and kill Sloan at the beginning, revealing her fairy wings in the process - Adelle has an incentive to shut up about clearly recognizing her anyway, especially if Elvis and Gloria start explaining to Seth (who has never heard of fairies before) that fairies are all evil monsters that hate humans or something. By doing this, we give Edna an opportunity to become a recurring villain rather than someone who just stands around doing nothing, and a reason for her to actively pursue the party herself. (As an added bonus, we also set up the icetown events to hit all that much harder.) Many of the local villains like Castor, Bernard, Folie etc. work completely independently of Adam's invasion, or would with a little rewriting - and I bet they would be better that way! Imagine this. The crystals are a powerful (but not entirely benevolent) force that used to be allied with the fairies in the past, created the asterisks and fought against the Nexus, but in its final moments the Nexus ate humanity and fairykind's knowledge of the crystals itself. Everyone has forgotten how the crystals work and that fairies and humans used to be allies. Edna was present at the incident at Musa 50 years ago when Sloan, Godric, Emma and the fairy queen fought the Nexus, except in this version the same thing happened again and the Nexus ate everyone's knowledge of Musa itself and the crystals were lost. When Gloria and Sloan show up with the wind crystal, nobody else recognizes that a place called Musa even exists and maybe even Sloan only hazily remembers it. Now the story becomes this two-sided tale of the crystals reappearing and trying to reassert their power over the world on one hand, and the Nexus having corrupted Edna - who has spent the last 50 years trapped in Musa and having that thing whisper in her ears - seeking to collect the missing crystals and destroy them so she can be free. The heroes are chosen by the crystals, but is it really in their best interest to empower them? It beats having the world get eaten by the Nexus, but would a world ruled by the crystals be all that much better? Now, for example, Castor works fine entirely on his own without any of Edna's influence. He's being corrupted by the crystals from someone who desperately wants to help his people into a power-mad despot in the making. Helio and Domenic are framing people as being fairies and killing them because the crystal doesn't want to compete with the dragon religion over worshippers. And so on. In the end, the heroes have to reach some kind of end state where the world not only does not get eaten by the Nexus, but also does not fall under a horrible crystal hegemony. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Mar 30, 2021 |
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Mar 30, 2021 21:44
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The more I think about this game, the more I wish they did something interesting with the elements they used, cause it's absolutely possible.
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Clarste posted:Honestly I thought that we'd eventually go back in time and fix everything just because a lot of stuff in this game is so over-the-top pointlessly tragic that I thought they couldn't just leave it at that. And then they did. Yeah, it really is like that, isn't it? I was actually kind of shocked how many (frequently innocent) people are just outright slaughtered for no good reason. Pity the characters don't seem particularly concerned about it in the long run. It really does feel like each chapter was written independently.
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Mar 31, 2021 08:45
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It strikes me that there are more differences between the chapters that point to different authorship: * Dragons show up in chapter 3, but have never been mentioned before. Fairies also show up and while I can't actually remember if they're mentioned beforehand, they've certainly not been emphasized. * In chapter 1, the water crystal being the water crystal is directly relevant to character motivations - Castor wanted it in order to provide water for the people of his desert city. But in chapters 2 and 3, the crystals are kind of an afterthought. Folie uses the crystal as... a trap for that little girl whose blood she wanted? It never actually matters that Wiswald is overgrown with crazy vegetation, the chapter is really all about Folie's crazy paint-making scheme and mind controlling people. And in chapter 3 the only mention at all I can recall is that people say it's a little warmer than it should be or something. And the plot of that chapter has nothing to do with the crystal at all, it's all about Helio wanting to soften up the place for invasion! * Chapter 4 has nothing to do with the events of 1-3 either. None of the new villain underlings have any relation to what happened in those chapters, at best they've got vague connections to the backstory. The only real connection is to the prologue, in that Adam ostensibly stole the wind crystal to power his airship. * In chapter 5-6, fairies are suddenly a big deal despite, as mentioned, barely being mentioned before. On the other hand, the ostensible conflict between fairies and humans is only paid minimal lip service when the party reaches Mag Mell, but is almost instantly discarded. It's as if every author had a completely different idea about what the story was, and they didn't sync much up besides basic worldbuilding elements.
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Mar 31, 2021 15:33
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I don't really think any of those things change what I said significantly. Domenic's thing about being passed over for the blessing only comes out as a single line in the dialogue immediately before you fight him and never matters outside of that. Rimedhal having been colder in the past doesn't really do anything for the story when the place is still completely frozen over - it's not like Savalon where the place is literally flooded. Most importantly, though, none of the things you actually do have anything to do with the fire crystal, or Domenic's theoretical desire to help his people get warmer - the chapter is all about Helio and his fairy conspiracy theory/mass murder operation, on which the climate has no bearing. Likewise, the things that actually happen, that you do in the Wiswald chapter barely involve the earth crystal; it's about Folie and her mind control/mass murder operation (lots of those in this game for some reason). Sure, she got the yellow paint from the tree bark, but that's about where it ends. Much more significant is murdering Mona and mind controlling Roddy, Lily and Galahad to get the remaining paints, and that's what you spend most of your time concerned with. Compare both of these to Savalon, where from the start to the end it's all about investigating the water crystal itself, trying to figure out how it's connected to the flood, and where it's located. Imagine what would happen to either chapter if we took the crystals out of the story entirely. Rimedhal's story works almost entirely unchanged if you invent literally any reason for Helio to be able to convince Domenic; the characters have every reason to help Martha and the dragon save the city. In Wiswald's story, Folie has to get the yellow paint from somewhere else, but that's about it. Everything else about that chapter works unmodified, and the heroes again have every reason to want to snap Roddy and Lily out of whatever is happening to them, given their relationship to Elvis. But Savalon doesn't work at all without the water crystal - Castor's desire to possess it even through theft drives his entire arc. Without it, the king doesn't get killed, Bernard doesn't get rich (probably - it's a bit unclear whether that was more the asterisks or the crystal), the town isn't flooded, the party has no reason to get into a conflict with Anihal or investigate Bernard's mansion.
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Mar 31, 2021 22:33
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black.lion posted:The eyeglass says weak to [white magic icon] so what are they weak to? Light. There are like only two jobs that have access to that element, and they're relatively late.
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May 20, 2021 15:29
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:Painter is chapter 2. The very end of chapter 2.
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May 20, 2021 18:49
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