raised up muse's hp to above 500 (it had been around 440, lol, i'd used a bunch of invisibility and parhelion against the sinistrals and stuff) and tried again, i made it a lot further but then found out that i was getting to the point where i was running out of battle resources and the boss was still not dead
so i looked some mechanics up and decided to try again after i hit a few breakpoints (getting to about 600 hp with her, raising up MP and SP on other characters to get certain amounts of big moves). near the end she suddenly gained like 30 hp in about a dozen battles instead of getting 1 hp a couple times in a row most of the time and then occasionally 5 or 6 instead. so i think i ground for about three hours and saw the battle rank go up a bit (we also finally mastered net dodge which was nice), because i started seeing at least one enemy i know i hadn't yet (those skeletons that look like they're holding umbrellas but it's a bat). she hit 590 around the same time as i reached the other goals so i decided to go again, and after a couple times the boss didn't use about 7 aoes in 3 turns halfway through the battle and i won
i honestly went into this game expecting to like it a lot less than rs2, sg, frontier, and ms. and possibly even unlimited. especially after my first attempt fizzled. and to be clear, that's no great shame, i think all those games are incredible. even now i'm not really sure what grabbed me about it, but i did just want to keep on playing it, and i'm super excited to have another go with more knowledge and new ideas (plus i really want to check out a bunch of characters i basically didn't use this time). there's a lot of the same chaotic energy that defines frontier even though i feel like (at least given my current impression) the character gimmicks and genre/tonal shifts don't color the experience quite as strongly as in its successor. they're still pretty prominent, though...even though the core plot feels very "80s rpg" with a basic sketch of portentous prophecies and the elemental lords and all that there ends up being a lot of appeal to the characters and world, and a lot of the big dungeons have really cool defining aesthetics that really made me want to see what more the game had in store. especially the sort of giger thing going on in buné's...i'm definitely going to have to give a go through on the original version sometime to see what everything looks like because even though i think the hd backgrounds are a huge improvement on 2's they still have a tendency to look sorta weird and this is clearly such a gorgeous game.
i definitely agree the balance and mechanics are a bit of a shortcoming, since basically this game takes the skill learning that 2 relied on because it keeps recycling your party members over and over and seems to assign heavily exploiting it as the new baseline, while at the same time making spell learning much more expensive than 2 which feels like a big deterrent against switching characters too often since it's such an important mechanic. it feels assumed that you would use it to stack your best skills on both ends as a default mode of play (particularly due to the prominence of aunus, who you need bows or other ranged attacks to fight, being a major boss twice), so defensive skills are more annoying to learn permanently and boss hp is really high since you can slam whatever good move on 3-5 characters at a time. at the same time, building up max SP and especially MP is a very long process, and there are fewer incentives to pick up new party members. it's still saga, it's really fun, and ultimately a lot of the reason my playthrough completely halted for grinding a couple times was a general misestimation of how things would generally go in terms of dungeons, boss strength, and so on. it definitely doesn't feel as much like some of the other games where i tend to feel like you have more freedom to choose whatever in terms of character builds/party comp and let it play out.
though, like i mentioned, a big part of that was having made some choices that felt like the worst things i could've possibly done; i used sarah a ton in the first half of the game and only started grinding her less actively because i needed to focus on other characters for aunus (she was already ready by the time i beat forneus). i got herman in the party super early even though it took me 10-12 hours after that to beat forneus (you can't kick him out and he's really bad in the meantime) and i guess muse and monika are characters who specifically don't get stat level ups (except muse's hp) without being used. and i got leonid for a bit, but ended up kicking him out after xuan because i wasn't confident in my ability to overcome his downside at the end. also he wasn't really learning new martial arts moves which annoyed me. as i'm looking back now, i kind of think that probably those things all had less of an effect than it seemed like at the time and just felt "worse" because so much of this game felt like a general struggle to figure out what the game wanted. at least peony (the last character i recruited intentionally) was awesome and not too much work, heh
even with all that, it's easy for me to see why this game's remained popular with many people though. i found a lot of it really likeable in the face of all the frustrations and there's still a ton of complexity and interesting concepts to play with, and i'm really excited to play it again and expecting to start that almost right away. i'm probably going to pick julian or ellen because they have my next favorite theme songs and i figure this one might not be much shorter than the last one. hahahaha. certainly i still don't think this one's going to become one of my absolute favorites, but it's very good nonetheless
so i looked some mechanics up and decided to try again after i hit a few breakpoints (getting to about 600 hp with her, raising up MP and SP on other characters to get certain amounts of big moves). near the end she suddenly gained like 30 hp in about a dozen battles instead of getting 1 hp a couple times in a row most of the time and then occasionally 5 or 6 instead. so i think i ground for about three hours and saw the battle rank go up a bit (we also finally mastered net dodge which was nice), because i started seeing at least one enemy i know i hadn't yet (those skeletons that look like they're holding umbrellas but it's a bat). she hit 590 around the same time as i reached the other goals so i decided to go again, and after a couple times the boss didn't use about 7 aoes in 3 turns halfway through the battle and i won
i honestly went into this game expecting to like it a lot less than rs2, sg, frontier, and ms. and possibly even unlimited. especially after my first attempt fizzled. and to be clear, that's no great shame, i think all those games are incredible. even now i'm not really sure what grabbed me about it, but i did just want to keep on playing it, and i'm super excited to have another go with more knowledge and new ideas (plus i really want to check out a bunch of characters i basically didn't use this time). there's a lot of the same chaotic energy that defines frontier even though i feel like (at least given my current impression) the character gimmicks and genre/tonal shifts don't color the experience quite as strongly as in its successor. they're still pretty prominent, though...even though the core plot feels very "80s rpg" with a basic sketch of portentous prophecies and the elemental lords and all that there ends up being a lot of appeal to the characters and world, and a lot of the big dungeons have really cool defining aesthetics that really made me want to see what more the game had in store. especially the sort of giger thing going on in buné's...i'm definitely going to have to give a go through on the original version sometime to see what everything looks like because even though i think the hd backgrounds are a huge improvement on 2's they still have a tendency to look sorta weird and this is clearly such a gorgeous game.
i definitely agree the balance and mechanics are a bit of a shortcoming, since basically this game takes the skill learning that 2 relied on because it keeps recycling your party members over and over and seems to assign heavily exploiting it as the new baseline, while at the same time making spell learning much more expensive than 2 which feels like a big deterrent against switching characters too often since it's such an important mechanic. it feels assumed that you would use it to stack your best skills on both ends as a default mode of play (particularly due to the prominence of aunus, who you need bows or other ranged attacks to fight, being a major boss twice), so defensive skills are more annoying to learn permanently and boss hp is really high since you can slam whatever good move on 3-5 characters at a time. at the same time, building up max SP and especially MP is a very long process, and there are fewer incentives to pick up new party members. it's still saga, it's really fun, and ultimately a lot of the reason my playthrough completely halted for grinding a couple times was a general misestimation of how things would generally go in terms of dungeons, boss strength, and so on. it definitely doesn't feel as much like some of the other games where i tend to feel like you have more freedom to choose whatever in terms of character builds/party comp and let it play out.
though, like i mentioned, a big part of that was having made some choices that felt like the worst things i could've possibly done; i used sarah a ton in the first half of the game and only started grinding her less actively because i needed to focus on other characters for aunus (she was already ready by the time i beat forneus). i got herman in the party super early even though it took me 10-12 hours after that to beat forneus (you can't kick him out and he's really bad in the meantime) and i guess muse and monika are characters who specifically don't get stat level ups (except muse's hp) without being used. and i got leonid for a bit, but ended up kicking him out after xuan because i wasn't confident in my ability to overcome his downside at the end. also he wasn't really learning new martial arts moves which annoyed me. as i'm looking back now, i kind of think that probably those things all had less of an effect than it seemed like at the time and just felt "worse" because so much of this game felt like a general struggle to figure out what the game wanted. at least peony (the last character i recruited intentionally) was awesome and not too much work, heh
even with all that, it's easy for me to see why this game's remained popular with many people though. i found a lot of it really likeable in the face of all the frustrations and there's still a ton of complexity and interesting concepts to play with, and i'm really excited to play it again and expecting to start that almost right away. i'm probably going to pick julian or ellen because they have my next favorite theme songs and i figure this one might not be much shorter than the last one. hahahaha. certainly i still don't think this one's going to become one of my absolute favorites, but it's very good nonetheless
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