Fuurai no Shiren 2 – Sabaku no Majou

a.k.a. Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer DS 2. I have very fond memories of the first game, even though I died 14 times in 4 hours and concluded it just wasn’t for me. I’m playing Sabaku no Majou with the same “I’ll quit when it gets too much for me” mindset, but after 6 hours and only 3 deaths, I think I’m finally getting the hang of this Mystery Dungeon stuff.

I’ve been able to make better progress this time due to a number of factors:

1. This game has more of a story than the previous one. It involves a demon castle and a princess with special powers, nothing too unique but fun in its own way. I’ll save you, Princess… whatever your name is!

2. The game is easier because you don’t start over from the very first dungeon whenever you die. You do lose your items and go back to level 1, but you get to try again from the bottom of the dungeon you were currently working on.

3. It’s also a lot easier because there are helpful items like a bank, recovery pots, revival herbs (auto-revive once), Take Home scrolls (flee the dungeon with everything you’ve got), healing bracelets, etc. All these things may have been in the first game, but I never got far enough to find out.

4. I actually paid attention to the explanations and instructions this time round. Last time I tried to play anyhow and figure things out as I went along, but this time I took the time to pay attention to what people said and what items do. Thanks to that I’ve been able to make good use of the storehouse, the blacksmith and the training dojo to prolong my life.

5. I actually use whatever I pick up this time round. Trying to hoard items when you’re on the verge of death is an extremely foolish idea. Why die now when you can die later? So I’ve been using the scrolls and staves and pots like there’s no tomorrow. You’ll lose them all if you get yourself killed anyway.

6. I’ve gotten a bit more experience in dungeon crawling over the past year and a half, and now I’m used to unfair dungeon design and cheating bosses. I don’t take it personally when I die any more, it’s all part of the game.

Doesn’t mean I’m going to finish it, but I’m doing to play a little longer and see where the game takes me. If nothing else I’d like to beat the battle in the Tenshuukaku place where the full-moon ceremony is being held. I made it to the boss last time, but I had no healing items left so he killed me in one hit ;___; Won’t make the same mistake next time.

Btw, you might have been expecting me to be playing Phantasy Star Portable 2 by now because of my last post. I thought of it. I want to. But I’m holding myself back for three reasons. One, I just finished playing an Action RPG in the form of Star Ocean. Two, it hasn’t even been three months since I finished the first game, gotta let a little time pass first. Three, there’s no Phantasy Star Portable 3. If I rush into this and finish it too quickly then I won’t have anything else to look forward to. Then what’ll I do, huh? Huh? Sega should take stuff like that into account when designing games from now on.

Is this love?

I wanna love you and treat you right;
I wanna love you every day and every night:
We’ll be together with a roof right over our heads;
We’ll share the shelter of my single bed;
We’ll share the same room, yeah! – for Jah provide the bread.

Is this love – is this love – is this love –
Is this love that I’m feelin’?
Is this love – is this love – is this love –
Is this love that I’m feelin’?
I wanna know – wanna know – wanna know now!
I got to know – got to know – got to know now!

Star Ocean: First Departure – Finished

Not much to say about this one. Star Ocean was good all the way to the end, and didn’t outstay its welcome (22:10h) but I never regained that “ZOMG this is awesome!” feeling I had in the first few hours. Incredibly easy game. Really glad I never grinded, or I would have felt like a right ninny when I got to the final stage and went down a few steps to find a bonus dungeon where the enemies gave 100-300,000 EXP per battle (by comparison the last boss’s 2 forms gave less than 40,000 combined).

The Good stuff

  • Not too long, not too short.
  • The story made sense, more or less. It wasn’t particularly interesting, but it made sense.
  • You could change the controls. I’ve been playing a lot of Japanese games lately so I’m more comfortable with O being ‘yes’ and X being ‘no’.
  • I liked, or could at least stomach most of the characters.
  • Lots of skills to learn, quite a number of sidequests to pursue as well.
  • I liked the virtually automatic battles that let me kick back and AWAKEN! DRAGON FROM BEYOND THE CLOUDS! AWAKEN! DRAGON FROM BEYOND THE CLOUDS! DRAGON ROAR DRAGON ROAR DRAGON TORTOISE SMASH ROAR DRAGON ROAR DRAGON TORTOISE SMASH ROAR DRAGON ROAR DRAGON ROAR TORTOISE SMASH AWAKEN! DRAGON FROM BEYOND DRAGON ROAR THE CLOUDS! AWAKEN! DRAGON FROM BEYOND THE CLOUDS!
  • Your party AI was pretty good. I could actually trust Millie to heal me as necessary.
  • Voice-acting was good, as far as English voices go.
  • Music was okay, didn’t notice anything one way or another.
  • While the dungeon encounter rate was just as bad as the world map rate, it makes up for that with a high EXP payout and frequent level ups. I don’t mind fighting a lot as long as I feel it’s worth it.

Must you even ask?

The Not-so-good stuff

  • A little too easy, even for me.
  • Private Actions were a boring pain in the ass. At least I wasn’t forced to do them so that’s good.
  • A lot of the skills and abilities were completely useless. But again, I wasn’t forced to use stuff like Publication and Compounding, so that’s good.
  • It’s called “Star Ocean” but we only visited 2 planets.
  • Forced backtracking. I hate forced backtracking.
  • World map encounter rate was pretty high, and skills like Scouting and Music did not do much to help.
  • The latter parts of the story felt rushed. Jie Revorse and the whole Fargett thing took less than an hour, but he’s supposed to be the “third party” around whom the whole story revolved? It’s just too hasty.
  • What was up with that planet blowing up in the beginning? I get the part about Revorse trying to take over the Earth, but why blow up a planet?
  • Apart from a cloaking shield, what did the Fargettians need to turn the Roakians to stone for? It’s not like they put the cloaking shields to any particular use anyway. Those poor 150k Roakians…
  • In fact the last 2 or 3 hours of the game were just … meh, whatever, it’s over.

Conclusion

I enjoyed myself. It’s a good game, and I’m looking forward to playing Star Ocean: Second Evolution down the line, since I hear it’s even better. My only other experience with Star Ocean was Till the End of Time, which I didn’t really give the time of the day. I’d like to work my way up through the series and give that another try someday.

Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo (6) – This time I’m really done (spoilers)

Running my mouth off with various pieces of advice last time made me juusst a little curious to try out some of the strategies I enumerated therein, so I played Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo (Ragnarok Tactics) again to finish Yuri’s route and get the True ending. I also made an attempt at getting the Dark route, but it’s not that easy to unlock and I still don’t know exactly how it’s done.

On breaking the game with Kaplas and Champions

Snipers are your best option for damage on a first playthrough, but if you really want to break the game after that, you need champions. Their hit-all skill (Tenchi Houkou in Japanese) at job level 36 is a flat out game-breaker, since it allows you to strike down enemies all over the map without moving a single step. I even Tenchi Houkoued the final boss of the true ending (level 60, HP 6000) to death without breaking a sweat.

The ideal situation is to have three or four (I had 4) champions so that you can end everything in a single turn. Skip everyone else’s turns, or heck, only take those guys and your MC into battle and finish everything off ASAP. You need to raise them carefully for maximum damage however. I found out that despite appearances, Tenchi Houkou is actually a magic-based attack (update: no longer sure about this, take stat-related advice with a pinch of salt), and INT is the one stat that champions don’t get any job-based bonuses in. This is the reason why those pesky shamen and high priests tend to survive it so well when they should be dying on the first hit.

If you want really effective champions then, you will forget boosting their strength and just pour everything you have into their INT. If you raise them as snipers until, say, level 20 (I said 25 last time, but it takes longer than I’d expected to raise characters to job level 36) their speed and attack should be decent enough. Raising INT should also give them the SP needed to use Tenchi Houkou more than a few times, though this isn’t really important if you have enough champions and enough SP-filling items.

But still, what if you don’t have that many champions? Maybe you don’t like champions. Maybe you didn’t find out about this strategy until much later. Or you enjoy the battle system and don’t particularly want to break it, but you want to have the option of breaking it if you ever choose to. Either way you will always have at least one champion in the form of Trenet, and there’s a way to spam you-know-what continuously without – or heck even with – more than one champion. The secret: Kaplas.

Kaplas have a skill, No Time to Rest, that works like Smile Toss in the FFTA games, bringing up the chosen character’s turn immediately. Tenchi Houkou is normally balanced (haha, balanced, that’s a good one) by a very long cool down period. By taking advantage of the Kapla’s naturally high speed as a DEX-based class, you can completely ignore this restriction and thus achieve the same amount of destructiveness with one champion as you could with two or three. You could make your MC the Kapla, go in with one champion and take everything down within 5 minutes, ze endo. The reason I go for overkill on the champion front is simply because there’s no point in having any of the other classes once you get Tenchi Houkou.

Of course I should also note that you don’t have to kill everything on the field if you don’t want to. The move is just as effective for weakening enemies so they fall quickly to single hits or Burst Strikes, thereby making it easy to level weaker classes up. It also works well as a magnet for drawing in enemies who wouldn’t normally approach your party that early. It can probably be combined with the Paladin’s Soul Provoke for some interesting results. But really, why not just kill everything at once?

On Unlocking the Dark Route

Unfortunately I have no idea exactly how this is done. There appears to be some sort of invisible karma meter that judges you by the answers you give and determines whether you get to go on the Dark Route. It sounds like you may have to finish the True End first and then replay to get the Dark one. However even if you do all that and then finally decide to be a jerk on your 4th playthrough, your combined

Thank.

niceness on the three previous runs may shut you out of the Dark end anyway. You may have to play 5 or 6 times, being a dick each time, to get that end. Or better yet just be an ass through and through from beginning to end?  Or maybe there’s something else you need to do. The Japanese FAQs I consulted were inconclusive. Plus the Dark side is really unsympathetic in this game, so I’m not that psyched to see what they have to say. It’s bound to show up on Youtube one day, I’ll just wait.

Btw, the True ending is not worth getting either, since it consists of all of two battles, one against random fodder. The “true” boss shows up almost Necron-style and is easily disposed of since you’ve played the game three times. That’s another one worth Youtubing when the time comes.

Conclusion

Well, finally finished-finished the game. 4 playthroughs, 6 blog posts, 79 hours, 96% completion. And I still don’t think it’s a very good game. You can look at this two different ways. Glass half-full: it’s the kind of game you can play for 79 hours, even if you don’t really like it. Glass half-empty: It’s the kind of game you can play for 79 hours and never really come to like. Despite the fact that the battles get better as you progress, the story never really changes from your first playthrough. A certain amount of inertia and the fact that it’s not quite bad enough to quit over kept me going, which I’m kind of regretting now I’ve seen the useless True ending.

Bonus – All Special Burst Strike Combinations

Champion + Dancer
Zonda + Kapla
Paladin + High Priest (Area Heal only)
Lord Knight + Assassin Cross (+poison effect)
White Smith + High Wizard (earth damage)
Lord Knight + High Wizard + Champion
Clown + Dancer + Shaman
Dark Knight + Champion + Sniper
Sniper + White Smith + Clown/Dancer
Paladin + Dark Knight + White Smith
Paladin + Shaman + Kapla
Lord Knight + High Priest + Zonda (damage + area heal)
Assassin + Kapla + High Priest (damage + area status recovery)

Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo (5) – Final roundup 2

4. What style of play is best? Unless you grind a lot, storyline enemies will usually be higher-leveled, and they can hit pretty hard. Like, 1/3rd of your life in a single hit kind of hard. That, and if your MC or a story-related character dies it’s an automatic game over, and enemies like to gang on up on them when they can.

For those reasons, I like to play things safe by ganging up on them in return. 99% of enemies won’t move unless a) They sustain damage or b) You come into range. What I do, then is to keep my whole party together and carefully approach the enemies one or two at a time. Once they’re close enough, I either hit them with a Sniper or put a character in range to draw them down, then beat them normally or waste them with Burst Strikes.

But that’s just me. I’m a coward. And I hate having to restart easy battles because important characters got taken out by cheap hits. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with splitting up your party, especially if you love a challenge,  but I’d recommend sending a priest along with each group and still not taking on more than one or two enemies at a time.

5. Miscellaneous Tips and Hints

  • If I had to play this again, I’d start out with only snipers and one or two priests, then change a few snipers into Zondas when I start the second playthrough. I’d keep 4 skill points on hand and then switch 2 or 3 to Champion once they hit level 25-ish, allowing me to take advantage of the all-attack at job level 36 (update on my “clever” plan here). The rest of the classes can snuff it.
  • Most classes really come into their own at higher levels, so your first playthrough will probably be slow and boring. On one hand there’s no reason to force yourself to play this game. On the other hand, battles do get faster and more bearable on subsequent playthroughs.
  • Always get new recruits at Level 1 so you can use stat distribution to its fullest extent.
  • You can safely ignore all treasure chests. They either contain healing items or shoddy armor, nothing worth going out of your way for.
  • You can safely ignore sidequests as well. They are amusing and often have strong enemies and good cards, but you don’t have to do them.
  • You can skip Burst Strike animations with START. @__@ I only realized this recently.
  • The more battles a character takes part in, the longer their Burst Strike gauge gets. This is a good reason to fight free battles in the beginning.
  • Frozen and stunned enemies and characters take a lot more damage than usual. Cure anyone important who gets struck with them. Silence and poison can be ignored.
  • AFAIK there is no “correct” order to play the routes. Cynthia’s is the route that deals most with the titular “Imperial Princess of Darkness and Light” (wait, it’s not in the title any more now, is it) so it’s a good one to start with story-wise.
  • I don’t know what the best choices are, but worst ones are usually the 3rd on the list. Apparently you only want those on the Dark route.
  • Story-related characters you don’t raise yourself (i.e. all of them) will be invariably weaker than your self-created generics, so don’t spend too much time trying to level them up.
  • You get better cards by over-killing enemies with solo hits. Burst Strike finishes tend to yield lesser-quality cards.
  • Enemies in the Mirage bonus dungeon drop great cards, so don’t worry if you can’t get anything good in regular battles. In fact you can just ignore regular free battles once it opens up.
  • You can save Skill and Bonus points for later, but they may be lost for story characters who are forcibly leveled up when you switch routes (not 100% about this). E.g. if you’re on Trenet’s route and he’s level 25 with 2000 EXP stored and you switch to Yuri, Yuri too will be 25-ish (if that’s the base level of the enemies), even if he was level 10 the last time you saw him. Furthermore, you might come back to Trenet later to find him at level 30, but those 2000 EXP he had saved will be gone forever.
  • You maintain your character levels and old job levels when you switch jobs, and new jobs level up relatively quickly. In other words, don’t hesitate to change classes if something isn’t working out.

The Ragnarok Tactics press release from Aksys is… interesting. “Multiple factions” = 3 factions, plus 1 secret one after completing them. “Plethora of different endings” = 3 shoddy, insulting endings to the 3 faction routes, plus 1 True ending, plus 1 Dark ending. “Unique tactical mechanics” = this is mostly true. Unless you’ve played Blue Roses, the Burst Strike system will probably be new. Overdrives are just super-attacks, and you won’t be seeing too much of them unless you go out of your way. Resting in battles is really cute, and actually quite useful when you’re weak in the early stages. “Unique” doesn’t equal “fun” though, so don’t get carried away. “Customizable characters,” yeah sorta. You can’t do too much about their looks, but you can change classes, hair and voices, and you can make a real difference to their stats with your point distribution. You can’t actually modify what skills they get, but you can boost the ones you like.

That’s enough. You guys figure out the rest for yourselves. Final verdict on Ragnarok Hikari to Yami no Koujo: an average but playable SRPG. Story and characters are pitiful. Battles get much better on subsequent playthroughs when your party is stronger and you have access to more classes. I won’t actually say “Go get it,” but if you’re walking down the street and you trip over it and you’re very bored that day… yeah. It’s that kind of game.