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Compilation Of Turn-Based Dungeon Crawlers (Western/Japanese) - UPDATED: MARCH/06/2016

Siveon

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Hey, I'll have you know it only took me 3 hours to get a dagger in CoH 1.

Personally I find the games too dull to bother, but I'm sure they get good eventually.
 

Dorarnae

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you don't buy gear in CoH1, and probably CoH2 but if I remember CoH2 can be done with only drops, you don't have to bother with the crafting.

you need someone to identify all your crap (junk,material ect...), crafting your gear is A LOT less expensive than the shop(anyway the shop probably only offer garbage).
 
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aweigh

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Dorarnae

hehe, my man, i know al that :D

they overprice the shop weapons on purpose, plus all of the shop weapons are "BASIC", as in they don't come with +'s. What I was referring to is the endless unenjoyable grind that is CoH 2... the encounter rate is unrelenting, just trash-mob after trash-mob after trash-mob and every fight drops a ton of shit like:

the broken weapon or armor "mold" that you need in order to alchemize that with ingredients
the actual ingredients
and/or sometimes a rare ingredient which must be made with 10x or 20x, etc, of the regular ingredients

so you're basically walking along very slowly through each maze (and to the game's credit CoH 2 does indeed feature legitimate mazes, in fact, i can say with 100% certainty that they are better mazes than the ones in Stranger of Sword of City, but that's the only praise i'll give the game); and you get into an encounter about every 5 steps or so, and since i was just playing CoH 2 right now this moment before making this post I can attest that sometimes you will get encounters after *one single step*.

the endless amount of trash-mob fights are never-ending and in no time at all you will have an absolute clusterfuck of weapons to alchemize filling up one inventory tab, then in another clusterfuck of ingredients filling up another inventory tab, and then you'll have your regular every-day usage items in yet another inventory tab, oh, and guess what?

you have to travel to specific places to alchemize. for the first half of CoH 2 this means the main city, and this means that you will have so many metric shit tons of shit in your inventory when you get back to the main city it is guaranteed 30-60 minutes or more of alchemizing. It's basically everything I've complained about in Exp Inc / Team Muramasa's previous games where I have said their crafting system is tedious and too much busy-work but ZeroDiv thought otherwise!

ZeroDiv said NAH SUN, DIS FAGGOTS THINK CRAFTING IS EASY LOLOLOL PLAY DIS SHIT

CoH 2 even takes it a step further in sheer, redundant obnoxiousness than Exp Inc / Team Muramasa by making their weapon molds IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL WHAT THEY ARE BY NAME ALONE.

In Generation XTH: Code Hazard you get a Broken Dagger, and you get in another encounter 10x Steel Bars (or something very close to that name). It doesn't take a fucking genius to figure out what that shit is for, right? Or am i wrong?

In CoH 2 I just received just now, before quitting the game, a STRONG STONE, and I also received COARSE HIDE.

Guess which one of those two is the actual weapon, and which one is the ingredient? I'm not lying, i am not exaggerating, those are the names of the shit and one of those two things is a weapon and the other an ingredient. Give up? the strong stone is the weapon mold for THE MOTHERFUCKING SLING. THE SLING. and the COARSE HIDE is the main ingredient in a few pieces of armor, mostly in cloaks.

I know the story behind the CoH team, ZeroDiv; Michaelsoft made Wizardry XTH 1 and 2 for PS2, then the studio shut down and one half (the more talentend and creative half apparently) formed Team Muramasa (which later became corporately known as Exp Inc) and started making Generation XTH for japanese PC...

...meanwhile the less talented half of Michaelsoft formed ZeroDiv and spent their first decade or so making contract games (just look up their games only crawlers theres are CoH and most recently the PS3 Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls) until eventually, after they saw that others were having success on the PSP market making Wiz-clones they made CoH 1 and re-used all of the dungeon maps/dungeon designs from Wizardry XTH 2. :D

I will give the games credit where credit is due: both coh 1 and 2 are perfectly playable dungeon crawlers and coh 2 even features some good mazes, and if there were absolutely nothing else ever coming out i'd be just fine playing them but since they are not new nor original, i'd actually rather re-play wizardry 1-8 for the 100th time.

Sidenote: the metric fuckton of unending ingredients/items also make it p. much impossible for me to play CoH 3 and 4 in japanese. It's not like japanese elminage 2 and 3, or japanese wizardry empire where the only jap text is either brief dialog or the items themselves. in CoH games you'd basically have lists of hundreds of items in japanese each with no graphical picture for help so that's just a sidenote for anyone considering playing 3 and 4 in jap.

elminage 2 and 3 are 100% playable in jap though primarily because items' info-box brings up a huge graphical image of the item so you know immediately what the item is.
 

Courtier

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No need to bother trying to play Class of Heroes 3 in Japanese, anyway.
Sivvy-kun old boy we have been waiting for this to come out since 1984 and they haven't posted a single update, instead they are focusing on gutting Summon Night (mediocre localization, removing ALL voice acting, dubbing over songs with terrible pop music, bugs galore...somewhat understandable though because they couldn't get rights to some of that shit)
 
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aweigh

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after writing all that about CoH 2 I forced myself to play more of it just so I can safely say whether it is good or bad after having played enough of it and I gotta say: CoH 2 is good.

In some ways it is much better than Exp Inc / Team Muramasa games as for example the classes in CoH 2 are *great* and feature a lot of diversity and there is a lot of focus in the game's design placed upon making each class viable without being redundant. Unlike Exp Inc / Team Muramasa games they placed equal emphasis on making both random encounters and also the boss battles worth fighting and you are always being rewarded for exploration and for combat.

Those are all great things, but none of them are done to an above-average degree. For example the praise given for the classes can also be said of Etrian Odyssey and the EO classes are leagues ahead in terms of design. And the exact same things about encounters and bosses is also done better by others, like EO, as well. It goes without saying that I am also including in this "comparison" games like Wizardry series and Dark Spire or whatever.

Class of Heroes 2 has grown on me and even though I still think it's crafting system is detrimental to an enjoyable playing experience it is the very definition of a "just good enough to get a passing grade". It's a B- term paper, and depending on the player's mood/patience that B- can go down to a C+. Meanwhile something like Gen XTH: Code Hazard starts at B- and can go up to an A-.

tl;dr: The game is alright but it ain't nothing that hasn't been done better before. It's good enough however that I kept coming back to it until I eventually "got it", so that says a lot. I can actually see myself replaying CoH 2 in the future because of the character classes and the itemization (annoying crafting notwithstanding), while I will never, ever replay SoSC once I finish it. That says something.

also lol @ my weird term paper analogy
 
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Siveon

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No need to bother trying to play Class of Heroes 3 in Japanese, anyway.
Sivvy-kun old boy we have been waiting for this to come out since 1984 and they haven't posted a single update, instead they are focusing on gutting Summon Night (mediocre localization, removing ALL voice acting, dubbing over songs with terrible pop music, bugs galore...somewhat understandable though because they couldn't get rights to some of that shit)
That's true Courtier-sama, but, they didn't say they were not working on it. You'd think they could handle a dungeon crawler but they're probably understaffed. They really need to establish a better relationship with their developers, XSEED got Falcom to work on the PC again while these guys could barely program in the PSP title. Pretty sad, to be honest.

Who cares, anyway. Swordcraft Story >>> Any main line Summon Night.
 

Dorarnae

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after writing all that about CoH 2 I forced myself to play more of it just so I can safely say whether it is good or bad after having played enough of it and I gotta say: CoH 2 is good.

In some ways it is much better than Exp Inc / Team Muramasa games as for example the classes in CoH 2 are *great* and feature a lot of diversity and there is a lot of focus in the game's design placed upon making each class viable without being redundant. Unlike Exp Inc / Team Muramasa games they placed equal emphasis on making both random encounters and also the boss battles worth fighting and you are always being rewarded for exploration and for combat.

Those are all great things, but none of them are done to an above-average degree. For example the praise given for the classes can also be said of Etrian Odyssey and the EO classes are leagues ahead in terms of design. And the exact same things about encounters and bosses is also done better by others, like EO, as well. It goes without saying that I am also including in this "comparison" games like Wizardry series and Dark Spire or whatever.

Class of Heroes 2 has grown on me and even though I still think it's crafting system is detrimental to an enjoyable playing experience it is the very definition of a "just good enough to get a passing grade". It's a B- term paper, and depending on the player's mood/patience that B- can go down to a C+. Meanwhile something like Gen XTH: Code Hazard starts at B- and can go up to an A-.

tl;dr: The game is alright but it ain't nothing that hasn't been done better before. It's good enough however that I kept coming back to it until I eventually "got it", so that says a lot. I can actually see myself replaying CoH 2 in the future because of the character classes and the itemization (annoying crafting notwithstanding), while I will never, ever replay SoSC once I finish it. That says something.

also lol @ my weird term paper analogy


whoa whoa whoa, COH better than exp inc. game.... they're nice sometime in the beginning but eventually it becomes boring in my opinion. Mage in COH2 can cast wish without losing lvl. (I don't remember exactly how it was but I know it was broken, like I had infinite mana...).
and many class I don't even bother with their skill.
 
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aweigh

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Dorarnae
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Siveon

Well Exp Inc / Team Muramasa games feature something that is counter-intuitive to proper DRPG combat and that is that they define creature types by almost complete immunization versus specific weapons.

In Elminage, especially 1 and 2 where l33t weapons are rarer than in 3 and Gothic; there is only one creature that is immune to conventional weaponry and those are the Spirits but your Level 1 Cleric has a spell that blesses everybody's weapons, and (3) three out of all of the game's character classes come with built-in anti-Spirit skills or attacks. Eventually you find l33t weaponry and so therefore this aspect of gameplay never becomes tedious.

By contrast in both Generation XTH : Code Hazard and in Stranger of Sword City there are multiple creature types that feature almost complete immunization versus specific weaponry and that means that:

- In Gen XTH: CH you spend the vast majority of your play time inside the Laboratory wading through menus just so you can make sure you have crafted enough weapons with the specific anti-Type properties, because otherwise every single attack will do 1-10 points of damage or simply 0 damage.

This is not strategy. This is not "depth". This is tedious busy-work for the player.

- In Stranger of Sword City this means that since there is no crafting system you spend the vast majority of your time staring at your party's status screens agonizing over whether to equip 1 weapon that is great against Undead (Immortals) but not so much against Spirits or whether to equip two weapons that are both great against the same type or equip 1 weapon for each type, that is until you suddenly remember that you just "ran out" of good weapons with those properties so you have to spread them around the rest of the party.

Another consequence of this paper-rock-scissors design in SoSC is that since you will never, ever be able to always have up-to-date weaponry for all 6 party members that cover every creature-type you will always begin every single fight in the game by having 2 of your party members cast Holy Weapon and the other cast Magic Weapon.

No exceptions, ever. Every single fight in SoSC begins with two actions wasted because of the god-awful rock-paper-scissor creature-type immunization system that Exp Inc / Team Muramasa implements into their games.

So far CoH 2 hasn't devolved into the extremes that Generation XTH: Code Hazard and SoSC do in terms of creature immunity and while there is an obvious elemental system in the combat design it does not over-saturate the gameplay to the extent where you are obligated to specifically waste hours crafting anti-enemy weapons because you SIMPLY HAVE NO OTHER IN-GAME CHOICE BUT TO DO SO; THERE IS NO OTHER WAY TO WIN WITHOUT ENGAGING THE ROCK-PAPER-SCISSOR SYSTEM IN Exp Inc / Team Muramasa GAMES; THERE IS NO WAY TO OUTWIT THE ENEMY: THERE IS ONLY HAVING THE SPECIFIC ANTI-TYPE WEAPONRY OR YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO DEAL DAMAGE. THAT IS THE HEIGHT OF BAD COMBAT DESIGN.

I wholeheartedly believe that such a thing as what I have described above is tantamount to extremely bad itemization and more importantly and more telling: an extreme lack of knowledge about WHY and HOW games like Wizardry manage to feature enemy design and combat design that is far better than games like SoSC that were made 30+ years later.
 
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aweigh

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Oh, I also did not touch upon another incredible oversight on both Generation XTH: Code Hazard and also in Stranger of Sword City:

1. The "gorgeous" artwork of the enemies makes it literally impossible to tell what type they are so even if you have a moderate arrangement of anti-Type weapons spread throughout the party you can never truly be sure just which specific creature type you are fighting because it, for example, enemies like Kobolds are classified as Human and so are Orcs and meanwhile enemies like Slimes are classified as Spirits.

2. Etc, etc, tedious, etc, busy-work, etc, counter-intuitive, etc.
 

Dorarnae

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aren't ghost and elemental type quite resistant in COH?(considering it's a copy of Wiz xth2) putting energy chip(or whatever it's called) isn't really a pain in the butt, COH1 use the exact same crafting.
magic often(probably always) works against ghost.

SOSC all you need is magic weapon and holy weapon. and to be honest I liked how they used it, it felt a lot more useful, compared to Demon gaze where I pretty much never used it.

as for enemy type, there's often an encyclopedia in their game, just like Elminage (well probably less in depth, but it's there).
 
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aweigh

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that's all true but my point is that none of what you mentioned is good.

- having to constantly check creature types in an menu is bad design. that stuff should be visually or otherwise obvious to the player just from the encounter.

- having to always cast the same skills/abilities in order to be able to damage enemies (magic/holy weapon) is bad design. it takes the strategy out of the player's hands and leaves the player without any tactical choices to make. if you don't use them you are not playing correctly; i.e. there is no thinking involved.

- it is boring, tedious and completely unnecessary to divide every single enemy between a damage-type and every single weapon to target a different damage-type. Instead of enjoying combat the player is forced to spend half of the play time sorting through menus.

Anything that forces a DRPG player to spend more time organizing their inventory and sorting through weapons and writing down on a piece of paper which enemies are what elements because that information is not available to the player during actual combat... is bad design.

An example of good design using the very same type of creature-type immunization is Elminage and the ghost and undead types. You cannot damage them without proper weapons or alternatively you can cast Cleric spells that allow you to damage them.

Oh, and not only that but in Elminage there are also CHARACTER CLASSES (!) that come built-in with anti-type abilities as well. That's called: giving the player strategic options to play with so he or she can play the game SMARTLY instead of always having to use the same commands.

You can also easily enchant weapons with the ability to damage any creature-type. Now, the difference between the implementation here and the implementation in SoSC is that in SoSC every single fight features different immunity-types, whereas in Elminage it is only every once in a while.

Quality of content over quantity. Imagine for a second if you had to have a Cleric cast the Blessing spell in Elminage every single fight. Doesn't sound fun, does it?
 

Viata

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No need to bother trying to play Class of Heroes 3 in Japanese, anyway.
Sivvy-kun old boy we have been waiting for this to come out since 1984 and they haven't posted a single update, instead they are focusing on gutting Summon Night (mediocre localization, removing ALL voice acting, dubbing over songs with terrible pop music, bugs galore...somewhat understandable though because they couldn't get rights to some of that shit)
That's true Courtier-sama, but, they didn't say they were not working on it. You'd think they could handle a dungeon crawler but they're probably understaffed. They really need to establish a better relationship with their developers, XSEED got Falcom to work on the PC again while these guys could barely program in the PSP title. Pretty sad, to be honest.

Who cares, anyway. Swordcraft Story >>> Any main line Summon Night.
Ban Siveon. Summon Night 1 and 2 are great. Didn't play the rest. Swordcraft Story 2 is meh, though.
 

Dorarnae

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that's all true but my point is that none of what you mentioned is good.

- having to constantly check creature types in an menu is bad design. that stuff should be visually or otherwise obvious to the player just from the encounter.

- having to always cast the same skills/abilities in order to be able to damage enemies (magic/holy weapon) is bad design. it takes the strategy out of the player's hands and leaves the player without any tactical choices to make. if you don't use them you are not playing correctly; i.e. there is no thinking involved.

- it is boring, tedious and completely unnecessary to divide every single enemy between a damage-type and every single weapon to target a different damage-type. Instead of enjoying combat the player is forced to spend half of the play time sorting through menus.

Anything that forces a DRPG player to spend more time organizing their inventory and sorting through weapons and writing down on a piece of paper which enemies are what elements because that information is not available to the player during actual combat... is bad design.

An example of good design using the very same type of creature-type immunization is Elminage and the ghost and undead types. You cannot damage them without proper weapons or alternatively you can cast Cleric spells that allow you to damage them.

Oh, and not only that but in Elminage there are also CHARACTER CLASSES (!) that come built-in with anti-type abilities as well. That's called: giving the player strategic options to play with so he or she can play the game SMARTLY instead of always having to use the same commands.

You can also easily enchant weapons with the ability to damage any creature-type. Now, the difference between the implementation here and the implementation in SoSC is that in SoSC every single fight features different immunity-types, whereas in Elminage it is only every once in a while.

Quality of content over quantity. Imagine for a second if you had to have a Cleric cast the Blessing spell in Elminage every single fight. Doesn't sound fun, does it?

I don't see the problem in using that ability once in a while depending on the zone you're in (any way at some point you don't even need to cast it, your ninja can deal with them even without it and the samurai gets some katana in the game that are good sometime against them).. to me it's just like elminage where my cleric use breath on most battle, because it's strong and works against undead, I VERY rarely use dispel. don't get me wrong though, I prefer elminage than exp inc. drpg. but seriously, COH is a mess, I tried COH1 again a few weeks ago and I just can't, I rather play Wiz xth2 again or generation xth than that.(and I'll play SOSC new version next month for a 5th time).

I replayed COH3 a few month ago, there's a tons of class but you mostly choose class for their equipment affinity and stat growth. you'll VERY rarely use any of their skill (except the light mage for healing and maybe cover with the knight) and you'll use team skill to kill everything.
COH final was pretty much like COH3.

COH2 is the one I remember the less, but I remember searching the wiki quite a bit for all the quest that keep poping in zone you've already exlpored. and had 2 wizard which was just too op. If I remember the wizard have all the spell too, i mean healing, atk, wish,teleport...it was a bit absurd.
 

Siveon

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Ban Siveon. Summon Night 1 and 2 are great. Didn't play the rest. Swordcraft Story 2 is meh, though.
Not like I'd know, considering I don't speak in moon runes. But 5 was meh. Swordcraft Story 1 & 2 were at least fun.
 
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aweigh

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Dorarnae

The more I play CoH 2 the more I agree with you. It is quite possibly the RPG game I have most flip-flopped about simply because you can see the promise in the game, you can clearly see the potential that ZeroDiv has a DRPG developer but over and over again the game manages to stay completely average.

Like I already posted I am currently enjoying my CoH 2 playthrough but you are correct that it is a "mess". The fact that the Sorcerer class has both healing and damage and buffs and debuffs makes the class unbelievably OP, and you can kill everything by throwing magic at it.

When you level up your hit points and magic points replenish instantly. But anyway I'm done talking about CoH 2; like you I would also rather replay Generation XTH: Code Hazard on PC, or pick up my Wizardry XTH 2: Unlimited Students playthrough on the PS2 emulator. The only reason I stopped the Wizardry XTH 2 playthrough was because I wanted to see if I could translate it (and yes, it can be translated, however it would require probably 2 years of work for one person to do it).

I've never played a game like Class of Heroes 2 and I don't mean that as praise. I mean that in the sense that I have never played an RPG that is so, so close to being good yet at the same time impossibly far away from the goal.

I can also imagine how unbelievably OP having 2 Sorcerers in the party would be: having just 1 in my party plus the Samurai who also gets access to a similar range of firepower is already ridiculously powerful, and when you run into trouble you have to use the Team Skills.

I only played the beginning of CoH 1 but simply could not stomach the horribly designed 'randomly generated' dungeons, and I've yet to play the japanese-language CoH 3 and 4 (and doubt I ever will unless they get officially translated).

BTW, the CoH developers are the ones who did Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls for PS3, which Courtier owns and has played. This was ZeroDiv's chance to prove once and for all that they have the balls to make a true, hard-core Wizardry dungeon crawler.

How'd they do Courtier?
 

Dorarnae

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Dorarnae

The more I play CoH 2 the more I agree with you. It is quite possibly the RPG game I have most flip-flopped about simply because you can see the promise in the game, you can clearly see the potential that ZeroDiv has a DRPG developer but over and over again the game manages to stay completely average.

Like I already posted I am currently enjoying my CoH 2 playthrough but you are correct that it is a "mess". The fact that the Sorcerer class has both healing and damage and buffs and debuffs makes the class unbelievably OP, and you can kill everything by throwing magic at it.

When you level up your hit points and magic points replenish instantly. But anyway I'm done talking about CoH 2; like you I would also rather replay Generation XTH: Code Hazard on PC, or pick up my Wizardry XTH 2: Unlimited Students playthrough on the PS2 emulator. The only reason I stopped the Wizardry XTH 2 playthrough was because I wanted to see if I could translate it (and yes, it can be translated, however it would require probably 2 years of work for one person to do it).

I've never played a game like Class of Heroes 2 and I don't mean that as praise. I mean that in the sense that I have never played an RPG that is so, so close to being good yet at the same time impossibly far away from the goal.

I can also imagine how unbelievably OP having 2 Sorcerers in the party would be: having just 1 in my party plus the Samurai who also gets access to a similar range of firepower is already ridiculously powerful, and when you run into trouble you have to use the Team Skills.

I only played the beginning of CoH 1 but simply could not stomach the horribly designed 'randomly generated' dungeons, and I've yet to play the japanese-language CoH 3 and 4 (and doubt I ever will unless they get officially translated).

BTW, the CoH developers are the ones who did Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls for PS3, which Courtier owns and has played. This was ZeroDiv's chance to prove once and for all that they have the balls to make a true, hard-core Wizardry dungeon crawler.

How'd they do Courtier?


yeah COH start off interesting but after a while you just get bored with them and want the story to finish asap. I am glad I've played them, it's still better than games like Moero Chronicle, but I dunno, it miss something, and the dungeon design isn't something I really like too(like I said, it's fine the first couple map but then it becomes a bit boring).

Wizardry on ps3 and on ds are ok. not the greatest but they're ok. I guess when you've played Etrian odyssey then elminage, the lack of music while exploring is....but other than that it's ok. first game is very basic with the class.
the thing I kinda hate with the wizardry on ps3 I guess is the post game, you have an optional dungeon with monster about lvl 80-99 and it's pretty much kill them before they kill you(or cast stun wave or cloud of death...) and they have so much hp too, like the second game(which is japanese only) I had to rely on the summoner pet to kill monster because he could hit for 9999.


while the second game(japan only) has more class and stuff, I think I still recommend more the first game because the second game when doing the first scenario, at one point you can visit a village from the second scenario and buy gear that make you Op, so the ending of the first scenario become a joke, and the game becomes challenging only at the end of the second scenario. and you don't get new gear for the third scenario, it start off a bit easy because you have weaker ennemy at first, but at the end it's stupidly hard but the final boss is a complete joke compared to the normal encounter.

the post game for the wizardry on DS were better...
 

Courtier

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LoLs is a sort of hybrid that copies a lot of things from Wizardry Empire while removing or simplifying almost everything that made it good. Enemies are recognizable, you'll find creeping coins and vampire lords and ninjas and shit, but combat is very ''oneshot them or get oneshotted'' with no inbetween.

There are only a couple of dungeons which are pretty much empty save for switches and teleporters. Trade system was included but what you get is shown in advance, items refresh extremely slowly (hours of playtime) and only a bit faster when selection is cleared, requiring you to make shit trades. Itemization is absolute bollocks and the worst part because loot is per-specific-enemy and chances of getting anything decent are slim. It's basically a huge slog through empty corridors to level enough so you don't get destroyed at the bottom of the dungeons, and praying you find some good gear. I reached the last floor of the main dungeon with some of my guys still using starting weapons. At least the game looks good and has a decent story.

I really like CoH, way better than I like GenXth, mostly because of the setting and characters.
 
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aweigh

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Courtier

Would you agree w/ me that a sign of a developer not truly understanding Wiz-clone combat/enemy design is what you have described (and I have too) as "one shot or get one-shotted"?

It seems to me that making fights go that way is pretty much the complete opposite of how it feels to engage end-game enemies in Wizardry 1-5 where you can always at least have a chance to "out-smart" your opponent via smart/lucky usage of the existing spells or by simply playing smartly.

You've seen me rail against this design before when talking about Class of Heroes and more recently, but to a lesser extent, in Stranger of Sword City. ZeroDiv and Exp Inc / Team Muramasa seem to not get the fact that a big, big part of the reason mid-game/end-game enemy encounters are such fun to fight in Wizardry/Elminage is because you don't feel tied down by Level-dependancy or creature-type immunity. The spells are also much more magical and a single spell can turn the tide of battle, which is why they're Vancian and therefore you only get a limited amount of them; whereas in CoH and SoSC (or Gen XTH: CH) you have a ton of MP and are almost never without spells but they are very basic stuff that is only for dealing damage (which follows the same rock/paper/scissor system as the weapons) or for buff/debuff/healing.

Etrian Odyssey does this too, but to a lesser extent than these games. I suppose this can be referred to as "gated gameplay mechanics" where the game itself places arbitrary elements that are intentionally designed to prevent the player from going outside the beaten path, so to speak.
 

Courtier

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The spells are also much more magical and a single spell can turn the tide of battle, which is why they're Vancian and therefore you only get a limited amount of them; whereas in CoH and SoSC (or Gen XTH: CH) you have a ton of MP and are almost never without spells but they are very basic stuff that is only for dealing damage (which follows the same rock/paper/scissor system as the weapons) or for buff/debuff/healing.
This sums up a good deal of what is wrong with some modern Wiz clones.

If we look at EO, that series at least has items, buffs, binds and statuses that specifically allow for weaker parties to overcome much more powerful enemies, with tactics that are for a good part independent of level. And the same goes for monsters that can use smart ability combos to wipe out even overleveled player parties. It is possible for a player with the right know-how to beat endgame enemies with relatively low level characters. I think there always needs to be a number of ways to ''game the system'' outside of pure stats for both the player and enemies, because this provides more depth to combat. When status effects and e.g. miscellaneous/situational spells are dumbed down or removed, it turns fights more and more into just numbers vs numbers.
 

CryptRat

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Sep 10, 2014
Messages
3,548
Look at that, it's made with OHRRPGCE :
mPgxRpU.jpg
Perhaps it's just a 2 hours long game, I am only at the beginning so I don't know but it has some cool skill system, you're stealing enemy skill "patterns" which you can use to modify yours :

Link : http://www.slimesalad.com/forum/viewgame.php?p=124084

EDIT : the game is indeed a 2 hours long game, no reason to play it, but I'd actually play a longer version of the game or another first person turn-based RPG made with the same engine, which works fine.
 
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