"DRPG" Stranger of Sword City

[aweigh]

BY DEFINITION A BREEZE CANNOT PIERCE THROUGH (...what? my god dat snytax!) CLOUDS AND LEAVE A TRAIL OF DUST.

THAT IS ALL.

 

[aweigh]

i'm literally at the very beginning. i made a 32 year old human male, fighter class, re-rolled until i got a 9, and put all 9 points into VIT to maximize early level hit point gain.

i'm literally still strolling through the "introduction area". the graphics are beautiful. i like the speed of the movement. haven't even entered a battle yet.

i was busy making an AutoHotkey script to re-map all of the keyboard inputs.

 

[aweigh]

HO HO HO HO! i spoke too soon! definite modification of character classes and "that sort of stuff" is absolutely possible through the main .executable!

any balancing ideas you guys have after finishing the game lay 'em out! what classes need what, which attributes should be more like this and etc, etc, etc.

 

[aweigh]

gotta say! i'm really enjoying myself!

i haven't played a crawler for purely entertaintment purposes since about 3-4 months ago.

it feels GREAAAT. i keep trying to find ways to "hack" the game and i have to remind myself: DUDE THE GAME IS DONE. JUST PLAY IT.

ahhhh good shit

btw, my initial VIT investment of 9 pts paid off in that 2nd level!

 

[aweigh]

btw, i modded all of the battle "hitting sounds" from empire 2 into empire 1. i don't think i've played a crawler with more satisfying cutting/slashing sound effects during fighting.

 

[aweigh]

you know, inserting a waifu into your standard crawler, regardless of whether it merits it or not... not such a bad idea.

edit: serious question: how the fuck do i switch the control categories inside the F1 menu?

 

[Courtier]

Take a deep breath and slow down with the posts, you're getting too excited man :D

 

[Filthy Sauce]

aweigh hasnt posted in this thread for 30 minutes now. Hes either dead or too busy jacking off over his wiz5 floppies.

 

[aweigh]

i have standards mang, i only fuck japanese NEC PC original floppies.

 

[Siveon]

Sextuple post, nice.

 

[aweigh]

Siveon
Courtier
Shackleton

[GAMESPOT'S REVIEW OF STRANGER IN SWORD CITY... THE INTRODUCTION]

When Stranger of Sword City starts, you are the only surviving passenger from a plane that left Japan and somehow ended up crashing into another dimension, a ruined purgatorial wasteland strewn with the remnants of our world. It’s an apt setup for a game that finds itself helplessly trapped between worlds. It’s too obtuse, too lackadaisical about its plot to hold your interest, and too threadbare to offer worthwhile depth. It’s a game fundamentally trying to be different, but trips up trying to fit any of its innovations onto the basic framework.

That framework is a rudimentary first-person turn-based dungeon crawler, a style that seldom appears in the modern age. You and a team of up to five other warriors set out to kill the world’s most dangerous monsters--known as Lineage Types--in order to collect special crystals formed from their blood. Those crystals can, in turn, be given to one of the three main factions for power, glory, and hopefully a way home. You accomplish this by wandering a crudely rendered 3D grid-based labyrinth, looting treasure chests and picking fights with painterly cardboard cutouts. There’s no elaborate summon animations or spellcasting here. Hits from the game’s varied assortment of blades, wands, and throwing weapons are displayed as chintzy slashes and flashes onscreen. It’s all very much in keeping with the retro styling, but for an RPG trying to prove its worth in 2016, it makes the game appear noticeably shabby.

L O L

if they were to see footage of the dungeon crawlers we like to play here i think that man's head would explode as if his soul burst into a Tiltowait straight to heaven.

 

[aweigh]

CHAR GENNING

 

[Shackleton]

Siveon
Courtier
Shackleton

[GAMESPOT'S REVIEW OF STRANGER IN SWORD CITY... THE INTRODUCTION]

When Stranger of Sword City starts, you are the only surviving passenger from a plane that left Japan and somehow ended up crashing into another dimension, a ruined purgatorial wasteland strewn with the remnants of our world. It’s an apt setup for a game that finds itself helplessly trapped between worlds. It’s too obtuse, too lackadaisical about its plot to hold your interest, and too threadbare to offer worthwhile depth. It’s a game fundamentally trying to be different, but trips up trying to fit any of its innovations onto the basic framework.

That framework is a rudimentary first-person turn-based dungeon crawler, a style that seldom appears in the modern age. You and a team of up to five other warriors set out to kill the world’s most dangerous monsters--known as Lineage Types--in order to collect special crystals formed from their blood. Those crystals can, in turn, be given to one of the three main factions for power, glory, and hopefully a way home. You accomplish this by wandering a crudely rendered 3D grid-based labyrinth, looting treasure chests and picking fights with painterly cardboard cutouts. There’s no elaborate summon animations or spellcasting here. Hits from the game’s varied assortment of blades, wands, and throwing weapons are displayed as chintzy slashes and flashes onscreen. It’s all very much in keeping with the retro styling, but for an RPG trying to prove its worth in 2016, it makes the game appear noticeably shabby.

L O L

if they were to see footage of the dungeon crawlers we like to play here i think that man's head would explode as if his soul burst into a Tiltowait straight to heaven.

Yeah, I think he's got it ass backwards personally. Thank god there's little in the way of flashy graphics, and thank god for the 'fast apply' button that whizzes through combat at 100mph. Wizardry: Tales of the Forsaken Land showed me just how tortuous it can be if a blobber has combat that's too slow and filled with unskippable bollocks like camera panning and fireworks.

Also from the Vita review:

"Inevitably, even if you take the time to level up several times before walking into a new dungeon, you will run into either a new trap, a new obstacle, or a super-powered, hard-hitting enemy out of nowhere that kills characters in one or two hits. Next you'll be subjected to the game’s least-welcome dalliance with current trends: permadeath. Each character has a certain number of lives, determined by the character’s age--the trade off is characters with fewer lives gain experience/abilities much faster. When a character’s life is lost, they can be taken back to home base to recover, which in itself can take hours, unless you have a rare item which can resurrect them immediately. Even then, the user interface for character management and recovery is clunky, and the process is poorly explained. Once the character’s final life is up, though, they are gone. Unless you’ve put serious time into having a backup character to replace them, you’re stuck grinding again. Combined with everything else slow and grueling about Stranger of Sword City, permadeath becomes the final straw."

This was not my experience at all. The permadeath was not something I ever worried about. Most of my chars started with 2, some with 3, Life points and if one of them died I just went back and swapped them out with another member and off to fight again. Not that many died, as by about the fourth dungeon the only thing that provides much serious challenge is the bosses and in 90% of cases you can use the Flash escape Divinity to get out of there.

Oh, one more piece of advice I wish I knew when I played- DO NOT USE UP THE REVIVE AND AUTO-REVIVE ITEMS EARLY! The item shop will never restock them during the game and post game you will wish that you'd kept at least a couple, *sobs*

 

[Zetor]

Yea, I learned the "conserve res items and the dolls that get fucked instead of your characters" lesson in Demon Gaze. Thankfully, some quests gave them out as rewards, at least.

Take a deep breath and slow down with the posts, you're getting too excited man :D

To be fair, the writing (or maybe just the translation) is pretty trrbl in SOSC just as it was in Demon Gaze etc. But then, playing a blobber for the plot/story is like reading Playboy for the articles (pre-2015)...

 

[aweigh]

...I'm playing empire 1 right now (play until i reach untranslated dungeon area -> translate -> play -> loop this function) and i'm being 100% honest here when i say that the wizardry empire series hooked me more thoroughly on their lore, their story and their interconnectedness with the larger Wizardry "universe" (the princess in question in the empire 1 and 2 game sub-titles is none other than Gnilda, from Wizardry 2).

i love the fact all of the npc characters return in empire 2 from empire 1, and my investment in the empire series narrative/world/lore/characters gives me extra motivation to do it RIGHT.

of course the game has to be good first of all. i mean, fuck, i've played and finished japanese Wiz-clones without ever reading a single word of dialog.

and if you saw the video i posted of creating some chars in SSiSC that is exactly the amount of patience i have with "stupid story / stupid characters / stupid dialog" games. Got dat ENTER key under a fucking dumbbell.

 

[aweigh]

anyway back to how mainstream reviewers fail completely in grasping the concept of game design before "competitive-looking graphics and presentation to help the game sell in this market!"...

the sort of people who thinks iron-manning or perma-killing a player's character is a step backwards in game design, which in itself is a fallacy; having concrete gameplay-related consequences for player actions is tantamount to what constitutes the greater interactive experience of a video game.

as for "backwards/throwback design decisions = bad/lack of progress"; no idea is old and no ideas are new... there is no backwards and there is no foward only varying degrees of seperation inside the circle.

to quote DR MANHATTAN from Watchmen comic books: "...perhaps nothing is made".

 

[Kruno]

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=699614893

Rolled a 21 bonus. :D

 

[aweigh]

i could read this in-game but... might as well: a positive number after the "HIT" property on a melee weapon indicates... what? amount of hits?

that number though does not match-up with the (example) "20x3" dmg range, as i would assume the x3 is the amount of hits.

 

[Zetor]

I think HIT is to-hit chance... blades give bonuses and some heavy armor / shields give maluses.

 

[Kruno]

i could read this in-game but... might as well: a positive number after the "HIT" property on a melee weapon indicates... what? amount of hits?

that number though does not match-up with the (example) "20x3" dmg range, as i would assume the x3 is the amount of hits.

20 - 60 damage for 20x3. It is random.

 

[Slimu]

I don't have any experience with Wizardry clones so I am curious how is dual classing usefull and when should be made. I don't mean necessarily for this game, but in general. I'm thinking of starting one of these: Wizardry 6, Wizardry Empire II, Elminage Gothic or SoSC. From what I saw on this forum, multiclassing seems useful to gain mostly buff/debuff spells. Aren't characters with only the original class better than multiclassed? I'm thinking they should have better skills/spells at higher levels than multiclassed chars. Multiclassing seems to involve having some metaknowledge about the game and I think this is why I'm not excited about it.

 

[aweigh]

my gaawwd is the exp progression slooowwwwwww. it's even slower than in previous exp. inc. / team muramasa games!

usually the wiz-clone exp table is smooth, fast sailing until 2/3rd's done with the current class and then that final 1/3rd's worth of levels take as long or longer to raise, each one, than all of the previous lot of levels combined.

exp. inc. seemed to think it would be a great idea to use a super grindy squared progression, which is very "japanese" of them. see also: what is etrian odyssey; what are small gains on every level up coupled with a mostly meaningless passive skill that is useless for half the game as it scales terribly; and other assorted such things.

 

[Hupu]

Take a deep breath and slow down with the posts, you're getting too excited man :D

aweigh might be a multiposting maniac, but his enthusiasm for the genre is highly contagious. Along CrookedBee's Wiz 4 LP, it's what made me try out Etrian Odyssey, realise the genre cherishes what I love in games (tight resource management, risky battles and the possibility to make bad decisions) and then dip my toes into Elminage Gothic, now I'm hooked proper. Keep on sperging about what you enjoy.

 

[aweigh]

I don't have any experience with Wizardry clones so I am curious how is dual classing usefull and when should be made. I don't mean necessarily for this game, but in general. I'm thinking of starting one of these: Wizardry 6, Wizardry Empire II, Elminage Gothic or SoSC. From what I saw on this forum, multiclassing seems useful to gain mostly buff/debuff spells. Aren't characters with only the original class better than multiclassed? I'm thinking they should have better skills/spells at higher levels than multiclassed chars. Multiclassing seems to involve having some metaknowledge about the game and I think this is why I'm not excited about it.

start with ELMINAGE: ORIGINAL. it is available in english for PSP. you can buy it or you can download an .ISO of it and play it on the PPSSPP emulator. your choice.

gothic is much more hard-core than elminage: original... but then again, i started with Gothic. So scratch what i just said: go play elminage: gothic.

after you've gotten your feet wet with any of the elminage games i recommend downloading the SUPER NINTENDO ROM game titled "WIZARDRY - STORY OF LLYLGAMYN".

it is a SUPER NINTENDO ROM GAME which features much-updated remakes of the first three Wizardry games, i.e. wiz 1, 2 and 3.

alternatively i also recommend the EXACT SAME thing, but on ps1. google/download an .ISO of the ps1 GAME DISC titled "WIZARDRY - AGE OF LLYLGAMYN" which contains POLYGONAL remakes of the first three Wizardry games, i.e. wiz 1, 2 and 3.

The SUPER NES ROM GAME version features beautiful, unbelievably gorgeous SPRITE ART and is probably one of the most visually pleasing games you will ever play. however the ps1 disc collection(s) feature much more accurate GAME SCRIPTS. the actual DUNGEONS are exactly the same.

BOTH PS1 AND ALSO THE SNES VERSIONS are "easier" than the original APPLE II releases, and also the DOS releases. This translates into ever so slightly altered encounter ratios and variables and eeeeeeeveeeer so slightly "tweaked" loot drop tables.

however either of the versions will kick your fucking ass, guaranteed, and you will love every second.

after all that then you are ready for wizardry empire 2. that game is harder (but ever so much more rewarding!) than either the elminage games or the first 3 Wizardry games (remakes or originals).

In-between all this also remember to download and play the Wizardry 5 16-bit remake on the SNES and polygonal remake on the PS1. the exact same caveats apply.

now as for your question about multiclassing: completely up to you. there are no hard and fast rules. all Wizardry games, and i mean the original ones on apple ii and DOS, and ALL OTHER WIZ-CLONES, are 100% beatable without any problems whatsoever even if you never ever change classes.

play the games first and experiment. have fun. let the games themselves shape your opinions.

other options that you should play but not now and only after having played the games i just listed:
class of heroes series on psp
generation xth: code hazard on windows pc
paper sorcerer on windows pc
wizardry 4, either original release or the ps1 remake.
stranger in sword city for windows pc.
wizardry gaiden 6: the prisoner of the battles for ps2 (japanese game but it was released with english-language options)

EDIT: ohh yeah! wiz 6... well whenever you find yourself bored or whatever some rainy day go ahead and either play the original DOS release or play the SNES remake. it's an alright RPG but not a very good Wizardry game. It was the beginning of the end for the Wiz series, with 7 and 8 departing further and further away from core Wizardry design. that said Wiz 8 for PC is a better game *overall* than either wiz 6 or 7.

 

[aweigh]

some goddamned purple butterfly emo kids just wiped my party after i'd accumulated enough xp for a lvl up.

F U C KKk