hackncrazy
Savant
- Joined
- Jun 9, 2015
- Messages
- 415
Oh come on, how can you people say Strange Journey is good for noobs?
-Instadeath galore.
-Party has elemental weakness enemies can exploit for free turns (No wizardry game has such a hardcore feature)
-Weak leveling and equipment (hope you like shitty guns and knives for 30 hours)
-Trick bosses and trial-and-error combat (bring the right demons or you're screwed)
-Good luck figuring out the alignment system without a guide
Just grinding enough to the point the shop sells any items is a massive chore. I would NOT recommend this game for beginners, ever.
Wizardry Tale of the Forsaken land is solid if you want an oldschool-ish game without some of the bullshit features. Has an automap and no random stats/HP on level up, so your characters can't get gimped, and the difficulty is fairly forgiving. Slow animations drag it down though. The recent Starcrawlers is also a fun blobber-lite and friendly to beginners.
I've also recommended the nes Story of Llylgamyn port of Wizardry 1-3. It's still the classic wizardry experience but with better graphics and music. Save states also take the edge off the difficulty.
SMT: Strange Journey is very noob friendly. Any older blobbers like the early Wizardry games are impenetrable in comparison. I'm not sure what you mean by screwing up your build in SMT: SJ since you can't really screw up your own character since skill points allotment is not vital in the grand scheme of things, and the rest of your party is made of up demons who you can catch, release, mix at any time. It's very, very difficult, or maybe impossible, to get into a situation where you can't complete the game, which is not the case for many older blobbers. You should probably just go back to it and spend some more time looking at the demon alignment, demon fusion system since I can't think of a better game for someone new to blobbers.
I'd also recommend trying some of the Japanese Wizardry games, the remakes and the original stories. Wizardry: Forsaken Lands for the PS2 is very good. They're similar to the American ones but with better UIs, less esoteric puzzles and mechanics, etc. Far easier to get into.
Grampy touch on a lot of points that were key for taking me away from SJ.
Mainly these three:
-Weak leveling and equipment (hope you like shitty guns and knives for 30 hours)
-Trick bosses and trial-and-error combat (bring the right demons or you're screwed)
-Good luck figuring out the alignment system without a guide
Now, I won't pretend here that I'm good at blobbers, because I'm definitely am not. On Elminage, I gave up because I felt that my party wasn't evolving the way it was supposed to, along with the fact that I had no idea about how multiclassing worked. I started getting frustrated (which is not a bad thing always, when it happens because you just suck, but in this case I felt it was because I should have a knowledge from the Wizardry series or D&D that I don't have).
Anyway, back to SJ, along with the points that Grampy made, the whole demon negotiation thing waas the main thing that made me gave up on the game. It just felt....random. More than once, I found the demon X, and when tried to negotiate with him, the answers A, B and C caused a bad reaction and he would get angry and attack me. 2 minutes later, I found the same demon and went with the same answers and magically he was happy and joined my team.
This in conjunctiuon with the trial-and error combat and the alignment/demon fusion system made me go crazy because and some point, I felt that I was advancing just by sheer luck and/or by spamming magics and the next enemy until I found out his weak point.
Then again, as I said before, the philosophy behind these games are very interesting to me, I really like the navigating system and such (and as I said, finished both Grimrock games and loved them, even with the "dancing battles").