Cynic said:
Crafting was good in Vagrant Story, it was really simple and limited to just armour and weapons, but being able to name your new gear whatever you wanted and coming up with just the right equipment for the right encounters was fun. You actually had to do it to really win a lot of the harder fights in the game.
Heh... actually, the first time I played the game, I won every fight major pretty much the same way: first figure out the length of time between enemy attacks while buffing and doing some minor attacks, then chain as many attacks as I could 2-3 times, quickly down 1-2 of those risk-reducing items before the boss one-shotted me because my risk was at 100, take a hit, heal, and repeat. I tried crafting but only rarely seemed to be able to make anything better than what I was equipped with, and even when I did I still usually ended up doing 1 damage on that first hit. (I was excellent at chaining with the dagger, fortunately, and even if you start with 1 damage, a 20-hit chain will amount to 210 damage.)
Incidentally,
there's some good music in that game.
On topic, this thread inspired me to reinstall Neverwinter Nights 2 for an OC/MotB runthrough about a week ago. I installed them, downloaded the patch, got TonyK's AI and some mod that fixed spells, rolled up a character, and started the game... only to hear "The village is under attack! West Harbor is under attack!", quit, and not touch the game since.
Cynic said:
Okay just to let you know, I'm still playing this game and I'm into Act III now. I like it even better. I think the pacing and set up of Act I really could have put a lot of people off. There were a lot of quests and activities that really didn't need to be as long as they were, and got quite boring. I can't say the same for Act II & III they've been pretty awesome so far.
I think the problem is pretty much this.
I've finished the OC once, gotten past the orc caves twice, and gotten to Neverwinter 4 or 5 times out of what probably amounts to 10-12 characters by now. I swear, there is just something about the first act of the OC that kills any desire I have to play the game, and it only gets worse with each attempt since I've sat through the first part of the game so many times now. Is there any way to skip to chapter 2 but still define your character's decisions, get the loot, etc.? I don't want to download a savegame because I'd like to be able to design my character and have control over the decisions s/he makes in the first act.