Touhou Labyrinth of Touhou: Hardcore PC dungeon-crawler - See OP for links etc.

[Jaesun]

In many ways Pool of Radiance did it better than Fallout. There actually seemed to be mechanics behind avoiding fights through various means such as "dialogue". Everything was pretty much scripted in Fallout.

You honestly think that a game made in 1988 should have the same exact mechanics in Fallout?

This is what 1eyedking believes.

English, motherfuckers! Do you read it? I didn't question the mechanics, but the coherence of random encounters. Their justification, their reason of being.

Stop with the brainfarts already.

Apparently you cant read? Here, let's try again!

Ah, I used a bad example. Pool of Radiance wasn't that bad, in fact I recall some monsters asking for items in exchange of their silence. Primitive, but cute; still, it's nowhere near Fallout's level of quality.

You honestly think that a game made in 1988 should have the same exact mechanics in Fallout?

This is what 1eyedking believes.

 

[Jasede]

Got it set up. Played a bit, enough to get my party to level 2 and make a 2nd trip into the dungeon, promptly getting myself killed trying to stretch my weakass tiny party too thin. I'm liking the mechanics though, except for one thing: is there some way in game of finding out what the enemy's stats are, or do they expect you to trial and error spells against everything and take notes (Or read someone else's notes)? Although I can make strategic decisions on party makeup and stat distribution in the abscense of enemy data, tactically it's rather aggravating to have a moveset that factors in 2 different kinds of defense and an elemental affinity AND evasion without knowing any of those numbers.

I think you are just supposed to do trial & error. However, for players that don't want to there is a (japanese) html document listing all the enemies and their exact stats in the game's installation folder. Failing that, since it's in Japanese, just keep the Wiki open and Alt-Tab as needed.

I like the game a lot so far. Just cleared floor 1. Not a game for graphics-whores, truly. Ah well, guess some here just aren't hardcore enough for real RPGs.

 

[1eyedking]

Cut the gay fan-fiction, Jasede. It's really making your reading comprehension suffer.

I was talking of the coherence's quality. Monsters asking for items is very basic make-believe. To make an example we can all probably relate to: can you imagine goblins asking for Frodo's belongings had they found him in the mountain caves? Probably not, but if they did he could have tricked them as he did with the trolls (read: skill-check) who wanted to eat him (which is believable and coherent).

 

[Jaesun]

I was talking of the coherence's quality. Monsters asking for items is very basic make-believe. To make an example we can all probably relate to: can you imagine goblins asking for Frodo's belongings had they found him in the mountain caves? Probably not, but if they did he could have tricked them as he did with the trolls (read: skill-check) who wanted to eat him (which is believable and coherent).

Again, you expect a game made in 1988 to have such mechanics?

Whats next? PONG is shit because it was in black and white and not in color?

 

[1eyedking]

What's so difficult to code about that? If Diplomacy > 4, then "Urgh, you make head hurt. Leave."

JESUS CHRIST WE NEED SIX INTEL I7 CORES TO PROCESS SUCH INFORMATION.

 

[Jaesun]

Ah, I used a bad example. Pool of Radiance wasn't that bad, in fact I recall some monsters asking for items in exchange of their silence. Primitive, but cute; still, it's nowhere near Fallout's level of quality.

You honestly think that a game made in 1988 should have the same exact mechanics in Fallout?

This is what 1eyedking believes.

What's so difficult to code about that? If Diplomacy > 4, then "Urgh, you make head hurt. Leave."

JESUS CHRIST WE NEED SIX INTEL I7 CORES TO PROCESS SUCH INFORMATION.

This is how 1eyedking sees cRPG's.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Sorry, I skipped the last four pages of inanity that suddenly appeared out of nowhere while I was gone from the Codex for a few hours ---

--- ah yes, 1eyedking ---

-- but to answer Renegen's question:

Can you describe to us in words what actually makes this such a good game?

Like, does it have 50 hours of mercyless grinding, or actually interesting character development, skills, tactics and monsters?

I know I already said that in my OP, and Black Cat said that, too, but still. This game does not require grinding at all, if you're grinding you're doing it wrong. What it requires is combat strategy, such as mastering the use of skills and affinities, of which there are a lot and which are all useful in different situations, mastering the enemies' and player character's strengths and weaknesses, which are really vital in different ways for different combat situations -- you are assembling a team, a party after all, and you must have a well-developed character for every combat role you might need -- developing each character in a way you think useful, managing your equipment and resources such as TP, fine-tuning your team with the character switching mechanics, popping them out of combat when needed for a couple of turns, then popping them in again for them to deliver an attack and be switched out again to avoid dying, all the while keeping track of their HP, SP and TP, as well as the elemental affinities and defense stats. In fact, you can defeat the bosses underleveled with a correct use of tactics, which excludes the grind. And if you can't do that, well, you suck.

Monsters also have very different sets of skills, affinities and attributes, always keeping things fresh. Also, you must fight the characters you want to recruit first, and they are using the same skills they'll have when recruited, which lets you see those in action first and, as the skills are very diverse, makes you devise new tactics and think hard about the composition of your party in order to deal with them.

tl; dr No grinfest at all, no, just pure strategy and mastering the system.

In any case, you don't really need to grind. I did get up to Rin Kaenbyou when I did play it and I never really had to grind. Instead, I had to study each character's strenghts and weaknesses, plan their levels up, and then plan how to line them up and switch them during the battle so certain characters would benefit from certain buffs, combine during certain attacks, etc.

However the tactics, while deep, and the combat, while hard, are blobber tactics and combat. There is no exploiting the enemy AI, no taking advantage of positioning or movement rules. It is about who uses the best skills, lines up the best resistances, plays the enemy weakness against her, etc. Also, the combat and tactics are one hundred percent gamist. If you enjoy the kind of combat in, say, Generation XTH or Strange Journey you will love this. If you don't, well, you will not.

And the game is brutally challenging, as it is obligatory on a Touhou related game. That makes finally understanding how to defeat a given enemy without grinding rewarding, given all boss battles are uphill ones. Grinding will not take you anywhere, the dungeons are so big you will get all the XP you need just by exploring all the tiles.

Character development is simple and to the point. Each character has a growth rate and a set of skills, and there's no changing that. You can't turn Patchouli into a tank, no matter what. You can't turn Chen into a heavy hitter, again no matter what. You must study their skills, resistances, weaknesses and then develop them on the way you believe more convenient to exploit those strenghts and cover those weaknesses, while straying out of this plan only every now and then. They aren't your characters, and you don't build them. That's why you have so many to choose from: You must pick and match them to the challenge you are facing and the monsters you risk encountering.

Well, that and because the fans would riot if their favorite one wasn't there.

The skills are, again, quite varied, and the formulas are quite transparent, which makes picking which spell to use for each situation and what stats to develop for every character a matter of planning and number crunching goodness, as you know what you are gaining and what you are sacrificing at every level up and every training session.

Finally, you also have to plan your expeditions to the dungeon. You only find terminals every so many levels, so you must balance who fights when and in which area to make sure you can explore longer, first, and then to reach the encounters you need to reach with the right characters fresh and ready. If you just run into the dungeon you will do badly, always.

Quoted for those who don't feel like reading through the entire thread.

The only thing I disagree with is that positioning doesn't matter. It matters, and a lot, at least for a blobber. You must always keep track of your team's positioning as not only do the front-row characters take the most physical damage, so you must build them accordingly, but bosses have different attacks and patterns of attacks, some of which target only the back row characters at certain in-battle moments, making it necessary to cleverly switch in and switch out your back row characters. In fact, at some moments you will want to not have any back-row characters at all (!), which is always a possibility, only to switch them in a moment later to deliver a mighty counterattack.

number crunching goodness

This, so much this. It's all about managing numbers in a complex way, not grinding. This isn't a JRPG strictly speaking as it allows for A LOT of customization. In fact, it's all about it.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Also, since many people seem to have weak google skills, I'm letting ya know the following page has a direct download link for the 3.01 English version of the game:

http://aceofhearts.weebly.com/english-version-touhou-games.html

Scroll down to Labyrinth of Touhou and click the large "Download" button on the right.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Thanks for the tip about this game. I love blobbers, and this looks extremely interesting. I'm going to play it ASAP.

A bit too anime-ish, but oh well, I completed Etrian Odyssey 1, 2 and 3, so after a while I guess you don't even register the desu stuff anymore.

So there is no first person view, just some sort of overhead grid?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Just finished the second floor. Much better than I expected, wholeheartedly recommend it. Figuring out the basic enemy weaknesses is actually pretty interesting once you have the character variety to make suitible tests. (eg. an enemy suffers very high damage from a mystic elemental pure magic attack but almost no damage at all from a spirit elemental attack of combined physical and magical attributes. A powerful physical attack does medium damage, and a weak physical attack that tends to ignore some defense does almost nothing. Finally a purely magic wind based attack also does massive damage, confirming the enemy has a very high physical defense, but no particular elemental affinity.)

Boss fights are cool, it's interesting figuring out what their weaknesses are and desperately trying to pull off the win on your first attempt so you don't need to backtrack. Cirno nearly buried me with speed debuffs and paralysis but I managed one last fire attack to finish her off. Finally have enough people that burning off some SP then putting them into reserve to recover is a viable option. (Was actually what gave me that last shot to kill Cirno.)

Only gripe right now is trivial battles taking a bit longer than I'd like. Makes backtracking through old areas a pain, but I doubt there'll be much need for that.

Question: Stats seem to be rising quadratically. Since I'm guessing spell costs never change and there's no attacks or equipment to lower your SP, is it a waste in the long run to invest any level up points in SP? Does everyone have 500+ past the midgame anyways?

 

[Overweight Manatee]

General thoughts so far... (3F atm)

- Random encounter spawns are annoyingly high. Cutting them in half would improve things a lot. Too many long paths leading into dead ends as well, which seem to be for the sole purpose of requiring you to backtrack constantly and face more random encounters. Fighting all those battles is grinding, the fact that you don't have to intentionally grind by running back and forth on a long hallway just to beat the bosses is besides the point, you fought far more than you should have just to get there in the first place.. Hopefully there is some kind of encounter minimizing item/skill/ability at some point, if not I can't see myself making it through 30 levels of this.

- Only seeing 1 square in front of you is a PITA when you are running along and then don't notice you are running into a boss monster before its too late. Cue going into a fight with 4 half-full SP characters and several characters out of the party. This happens half the time.

- God Fucking Damn all boss enemies that have the generic '?' icon. Whoever did that should be shot. I'm not sure how rare it is, but now I am deathly afraid of every single chest and conversation turning into a boss while I (again) have only half SP left and am several characters down.

- I'm not sure if I'm missing anything, but where is this stat information regarding skills? Some of them offer semi-detailed information ((2x ATK + 2x MAG) * 1.5, hey fucker who made Reimu's skills that just translates to 3x ATK + 3x MAG), others tell you generic things (hey this does lots of damage, cast it on bosses!). Some of the worst tell you absolutely useless things (despite Meiling's low ATK, Mountain Breaker is actually good. Its weakness is in its user. Holy fuck that spell description helped me figure out what this did!). Also, is attack supposed to be as pathetic as it is? Does it ever become even slightly useful or is the first action on every single character's list just there to fill space?

- Seriously, EVA doesn't work? The Version number is 3.01, not .31. How does this shit get past basic testing? I already have one character who apparently misses out on 95% of her power because her EVA 9 and +100% EVA skill are both junk. And of course, this also makes all your spells hit 100% which screws over all skill variety between powerful but inaccurate vs weaker but sure hit.

- Interface is horrible with the z/x/a stuff. Also, requiring double confirmation to run back to gensokyo annoys me every single time. No remembering the last skill used on each character and preventing you from needing to scroll down every time. No hotkey to instantly focus/skip turn (present in I believe every single other game in existence and its what I use for half of my characters in random encounters.

- Character development seems pretty simplistic at the moment. Gee, my character uses Magic for every single thing they do. Magic also goes up by 3x as much when I put a point into it as Attack does. I wonder what I should put the level up point into? Derp. Of course there is also HP/SPD as an option and possibly a little of their better defense, but in the end we have 15 stats all coalesced into about 3 or 4 that are actually meaningful to a character, and you get plenty of skill points to keep all of those fairly high anyways and give the rest of the stats a token buff whenever they need it.

Overall, its Good For What It Is. It should be a lot better, by 3.01 half of these problems should not still exist if someone competent was in charge.

The only thing I disagree with is that positioning doesn't matter. It matters, and a lot, at least for a blobber. You must always keep track of your team's positioning as not only do the front-row characters take the most physical damage, so you must build them accordingly, but bosses have different attacks and patterns of attacks, some of which target only the back row characters at certain in-battle moments, making it necessary to cleverly switch in and switch out your back row characters. In fact, at some moments you will want to not have any back-row characters at all (!), which is always a possibility, only to switch them in a moment later to deliver a mighty counterattack.

What exactly is the front/back row distinction? First two slots front second two back? I can't see I've seen any difference so far, and in fact I've kept all my casters in the front to better regen SP.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Complaining about a simple three-button interface, really? But the lack of hotkeys can be annoying, true. And Evasion being worthless is really really bad, agreed. Hopefully they'll fix that at some point. Indies, bah.

Random encounter spawns are annoyingly high.

Well, I disagree. You only need to escape, like, three or four of them to get to a boss encounter. And yeah, you do know there's a 100% escape button, right? Sure, you lose 3TP for that, but by placing high TP characters in your active party that stops being a problem at all, as you can still explore great chunks of a dungeon.

Only seeing 1 square in front of you is a PITA when you are running along and then don't notice you are running into a boss monster before its too late.

A valid complaint, I guess, but... impatient much? It's like being wary of traps in a "normal" dungeon crawler: you shouldn't be just running along. Try doing that in Chaos Strikes Back or Dark Heart of Uukrul; it won't be pleasant.

I'm not sure if I'm missing anything, but where is this stat information regarding skills? ... Also, is attack supposed to be as pathetic as it is?

I didn't have any problems with skill descriptions, but you could always consult a Wiki if you need more detailed information. ATK is used for physical spells, not for regular attacks, which can still be useful for dispatching weak random enemies without wasting SP. I know I do that occasionally when I don't feel like running away but want to preserve SP.

Gee, my character uses Magic for every single thing they do. ... Magic also goes up by 3x as much when I put a point into it as Attack does. I wonder what I should put the level up point into?

Uhm, yes and no. There's a difference between physical spells, relying on ATK, and magical spells, relying on MAG. SPD can be extremely important once you face really quick bosses. And raising, say, Reimu's defense has worked wonders for me. As for the multiplier when a character levels up, you do know the formula, right? And it really depends on the character's natural strengths. Not all characters are MAG-inclined; those with naturally low MAG shouldn't increase it, it's useless.

in the end we have 15 stats all coalesced into about 3 or 4 that are actually meaningful to a character

Yes, but that's kinda the point. Those meaningful stats are different for different characters, some need SPD investments, some HP, some ATK, some DEF, etc., all tailored for different combat situations. If you can get away with investing all points in MAG, you either grind too much without escaping random encounters or you're just an individual too elite for this game.

What exactly is the front/back row distinction? First two slots front second two back? I can't see I've seen any difference so far, and in fact I've kept all my casters in the front to better regen SP.

What, you haven't noticed any difference!? I mean, do you really keep Patchouli in a front slot? And without switching her out? I guess you're just too good to be true, then...

Let me also quote the Wiki, as I've found the following quite true:

The order you put party members in during battle can matter a lot - single-target attacks tend to target party members in the first or second slot far more than the third or fourth, although there are attacks that specifically target a given slot. In addition, there are attacks with Row damage - instead of the obvious "Single" or "All" targetting-spells, Row target spells will deal less damage to characters in the back. To be specific, the first character takes 100%, the second takes 80%, the third takes 40%, and the last takes only a mere 10% damage. There are moves like this that you can use too, so be aware of the difference, as enemies have an order too.

Since I'm guessing spell costs never change and there's no attacks or equipment to lower your SP, is it a waste in the long run to invest any level up points in SP?

Well, I've been investing some points in SP, especially for the healers, and it's been useful, but I'm not past the midgame, so dunno, really. Keep in mind that SP is different from other stats, though:

Furthermore, the base stat multiplier goes up passively on level up even without any bonus investment on most stats (especially HP) but not SP. For each level, HP goes up by 3% and ATK/DEF/MAG/MND goes up by 2%. SPD starts at 100 plus 2.25% of your level times the SPD growth rate, and goes up by about 0.0645% per level. SP growth rate is always at 12.5% of the listed SP growth value for each character, and never increases regardless of your level.

Just finished the second floor. Much better than I expected, wholeheartedly recommend it.

Yay!

 

[Damned Registrations]

Oh, and while I don't know what evasion does for characters, ACCURACY is definitely not pointless. It doesn't reduce the attack to an outright miss, but I definitely notice Marissa hitting enemies for 39 damage when she should be hitting for 800 on occasion while using earthlight ray. Ditto for Reimu's 40 SP skill. Misdirection, on the other hand, is perfectly reliable. Seems to only affect multiple target spells though, need to do more tests. I assumed this has the same kind of effect for player evasion; that it causes a chance for the attack do be reduced in damage by some %. Obviously much harder to test that.

 

[mondblut]

jesus christ yet another nice topic title just to get blasted with jap crap >9000HP anime shit in my face when I clicked it.

Someone stop the fucking weeaboos already.

 

[Andhaira]

This game seems intruiging. One question: does it have random encounters or are enemies shown on screen?

 

[Andhaira]

Ok I checked out 2 gameplay videos of this on youtube. The biggest bummer is that battles are not animated. That SUCKS.

On the bright side, the spell effects are pretty sweet.

Will definately be checking this out. I just wish it wasn't just one big dungeon, but actually had a story. Story has always been the biggest strength of JRPG's.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Complaining about a simple three-button interface, really? But the lack of hotkeys can be annoying, true. And Evasion being worthless is really really bad, agreed. Hopefully they'll fix that at some point. Indies, bah.

Random encounter spawns are annoyingly high.

Well, I disagree. You only need to escape, like, three or four of them to get to a boss encounter. And yeah, you do know there's a 100% escape button, right? Sure, you lose 3TP for that, but by placing high TP characters in your active party that stops being a problem at all, as you can still explore great chunks of a dungeon.

Still a PITA, at least a few enemies are faster than me (and for some reason my faster characters don't seem any faster on the first turn, only later ones). At least a few bosses take a good 4/5 encounters. Since I don't even know who to use against the boss, I'm risking losing an important character that I would have needed against the boss early by using them to run. I'm sure this won't be a problem after I have 20 characters in backup, but its annoying now to be kept guessing too much. Its not like fighting a battle every 10s adds to the game.

Only seeing 1 square in front of you is a PITA when you are running along and then don't notice you are running into a boss monster before its too late.

A valid complaint, I guess, but... impatient much? It's like being wary of traps in a "normal" dungeon crawler: you shouldn't be just running along. Try doing that in Chaos Strikes Back or Dark Heart of Uukrul; it won't be pleasant.

I suppose I'm highly used to roguelikes where you simply press a button to run in a direction until something awesome turns up.

Gee, my character uses Magic for every single thing they do. ... Magic also goes up by 3x as much when I put a point into it as Attack does. I wonder what I should put the level up point into?

Uhm, yes and no. There's a difference between physical spells, relying on ATK, and magical spells, relying on MAG. SPD can be extremely important once you face really quick bosses. And raising, say, Reimu's defense has worked wonders for me. As for the multiplier when a character levels up, you do know the formula, right? And it really depends on the character's natural strengths. Not all characters are MAG-inclined; those with naturally low MAG shouldn't increase it, it's useless.

in the end we have 15 stats all coalesced into about 3 or 4 that are actually meaningful to a character

Yes, but that's kinda the point. Those meaningful stats are different for different characters, some need SPD investments, some HP, some ATK, some DEF, etc., all tailored for different combat situations. If you can get away with investing all points in MAG, you either grind too much without escaping random encounters or you're just an individual too elite for this game.

My example was just to point out that there really isn't much of a decision for specific characters, not that ATK was useless. So far there are no real ATK/MAG combination characters so there is no use in half of the stats for most characters. Its like in DA2 where, even though there are technically 6 stats, only 2 are used per class which takes out any variety in character advancement. HP/SPD/high defense are good, but everything else suffers from both not being as useful and not scaling well which makes them nigh useless. Not that you can't even get boosts in them, with the way the skill point requirements scale your bonuses to attack can be 1/2 as high as your bonuses to magic just from spending 1/10th as many skill points, which again takes away from any possible variety.

What exactly is the front/back row distinction? First two slots front second two back? I can't see I've seen any difference so far, and in fact I've kept all my casters in the front to better regen SP.

What, you haven't noticed any difference!? I mean, do you really keep Patchouli in a front slot? And without switching her out? I guess you're just too good to be true, then...

Let me also quote the Wiki, as I've found the following quite true:

The order you put party members in during battle can matter a lot - single-target attacks tend to target party members in the first or second slot far more than the third or fourth, although there are attacks that specifically target a given slot. In addition, there are attacks with Row damage - instead of the obvious "Single" or "All" targetting-spells, Row target spells will deal less damage to characters in the back. To be specific, the first character takes 100%, the second takes 80%, the third takes 40%, and the last takes only a mere 10% damage. There are moves like this that you can use too, so be aware of the difference, as enemies have an order too.

I certainly haven't seen the "attack first and second characters more often" thing. I asked because for some reason 75% of attacks seem to land on my 2nd/3rd characters, I didn't know if 1/4 were back and 2/3 were front. I've kept Patchouli in the back because my front characters need to have better SP recovery to spam more spells, I didn't know if the reduced damage from AoE spells was just because of her really high mind.

Oh, and while I don't know what evasion does for characters, ACCURACY is definitely not pointless. It doesn't reduce the attack to an outright miss, but I definitely notice Marissa hitting enemies for 39 damage when she should be hitting for 800 on occasion while using earthlight ray. Ditto for Reimu's 40 SP skill. Misdirection, on the other hand, is perfectly reliable. Seems to only affect multiple target spells though, need to do more tests. I assumed this has the same kind of effect for player evasion; that it causes a chance for the attack do be reduced in damage by some %. Obviously much harder to test that.

Sure that isn't simply people in the back of the group taking less damage?

Since I'm guessing spell costs never change and there's no attacks or equipment to lower your SP, is it a waste in the long run to invest any level up points in SP?

Well, I've been investing some points in SP, especially for the healers, and it's been useful, but I'm not past the midgame, so dunno, really. Keep in mind that SP is different from other stats, though:

Furthermore, the base stat multiplier goes up passively on level up even without any bonus investment on most stats (especially HP) but not SP. For each level, HP goes up by 3% and ATK/DEF/MAG/MND goes up by 2%. SPD starts at 100 plus 2.25% of your level times the SPD growth rate, and goes up by about 0.0645% per level. SP growth rate is always at 12.5% of the listed SP growth value for each character, and never increases regardless of your level.

Also, take into account this:

There are two other stats of note. SP Recovery is a set value for each character that can only be increased by equipment. Using Focus in battle or Rest out of battle restores that percentage of their SP; however, in battle, the amount restored is capped as if their maximum SP was 200. Therefore, characters with 200 or more SP will recover 2 points of SP per 1% of Recovery. Characters in reserve also recover SP based off their SP Recovery stat, but it's also worth noting that characters with higher Speed recover faster when in reserve.

The 200 cap on focusing hoses you, and the fact that speed increases SP recovery rate when switched out makes me think that raising SP with level up points is suboptimal. Marisa does have her Armageddon attack that deals more damage the more SP she uses on it, so that might be a decent reason to throw a few points her way for that.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Yeah it probably is. Wasn't aware that that was the distinction between row and multi target spells.

On the subject of characters getting attacked in higher slots, I've noticed elemental attacks getting used to target characters weak against them (i.e. Chen getting raped on the second floor regardless of where she goes.) Physical attacks definitely favour the first 2 slots though, with something like a 70/30 split between first and second.

 

[Volrath]

Ah, I used a bad example. Pool of Radiance wasn't that bad, in fact I recall some monsters asking for items in exchange of their silence. Primitive, but cute; still, it's nowhere near Fallout's level of quality.

You honestly think that a game made in 1988 should have the same exact mechanics in Fallout?

This is what 1eyedking believes.

What's so difficult to code about that? If Diplomacy > 4, then "Urgh, you make head hurt. Leave."

JESUS CHRIST WE NEED SIX INTEL I7 CORES TO PROCESS SUCH INFORMATION.

This is how 1eyedking sees cRPG's.

Well what could you possibly expect from a guy who thinks the witcher is an intelligent game?

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Hardcore PC dungeon-crawling experience

What does it even mean?

 

[Damned Registrations]

Wow. Youmu is a fucking CUNT. I was sure I was going to win last time but it just dragged on and on.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Haha yes, it's probably the most difficult of the early boss fights. Her Ghost counterpart is very easy to kill, but after remaining alone she starts spamming very strong attacks like crazy. I have one tip that worked for me: try killing her first, even if she has some insane amount of HP. Another thing is, iirc, she uses her most powerful row attack -- which is of WND element, by the way -- right after the Cherry Blossom spell, so switch the less resistant characters out. Also, try paralyzing her and reducing her Speed with Cirno's spells -- and pray that works.

@ Awor
"Experience", as in "Experience!!"

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Against Youmu my biggest problem by far was the ghost. If that AoE poison spell decides to proc on all 4 people (which I swear happens 50% of the time) its pretty much game over since you only have a single poison remover. You can try to do some funky things switching people out, but they degen while in reserve so you are still crippled a ton and probably aren't getting past the fight unless you are a lot higher leveled then I was. Of course, as far as I can tell there is exactly zero ways to increase your poison resistance at this point so the whole fight is spent praying the ghost does stupid things until you kill it.

Her big sword attack is not going to kill anyone who isn't an absurdly weak character or already hurt so long as you have Reimu's defense barrier up. Pile the SP recovery items onto her, you should nearly double her rate of SP regeneration. Crino probably deserves the other SP recovery items, since the slowing effect of her ice spells gradually wears off every turn spamming it as much as possible to keep it at full strength is ideal.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Yes. Some encounters serve no purpose at all but to give you loot and experience, their existence unjustified by any type of surrounding circumstances.

To be fair PoR did something neat with the random encounters, after you completed a certain number of random encounters in a block, the random encounters would run out. And finishing off all the random encounters in a block along with the fixed encounters allowed you to "clear" a section.

PoR was pretty ambitious compared to some of the later games in the series.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

@ Awor
"Experience", as in "Experience!!"

And "Experience!!" means game?