Bruma Hobo
Lurker
- Joined
- Dec 29, 2011
- Messages
- 2,412
... and it's still the best game in the series. By far.
I mean, it's clearly not a masterpiece, it's an unpolished mess with a silly anime plot and too many random encounters, but unlike the rest of the series it actually tries to be an actual game. Here the player has to actively build his characters and monitor their attributes all the time, and if they don't grow the way he anticipated, he should better change his strategy or they will soon become useless. This game will punish those who expect to effectively level their characters up by just killing random shit, and that's what Final Fantasy fans hate the most, they despise not being able to turn their brains off to play on auto-pilot and let the plot unfold by itself. Which is why people should avoid any modern release of this game, SquareEnix is trying hard to turn this into yet another Final Fantasy game by dumbing-down its systems and focusing on its retarded plot.
The use-based system's not perfect as it encourages some degenerate behavior, but the game's quite balanced, people who resort to silly exploits and griding are morons ruining their own experience. My biggest complain would be that you have to mindlessly cast some very useful spells like Heal (Esuna?) during random encounters, since it's impossible to level them up organically, but other than that, grinding is not necessary.
For instance, during the second half of my game my main character became so agile that he was impervious to physical damage, his evasion grew up so high despite wearing heavy armor that I had to turn him into a dual-wielding guy, but because of this his HP growth stalled, making the end-game still challenging, especially against enemy casters. That of course would have been ruined if I decided to attack him with my own party members to artificially inflate his numbers.
So, I would like to play more games like this one. I've tried a couple of Romancing Saga games in the past expecting the same kind of experience, but I was utterly disappointed. I could be wrong (it has been a while), but attributes there seemed to level up at random, so what's the point of that? I want to be able to tune-up my own characters, not to select their backgrounds and watch how their stats grow regardless of what I do in combat. Any suggestions?
I mean, it's clearly not a masterpiece, it's an unpolished mess with a silly anime plot and too many random encounters, but unlike the rest of the series it actually tries to be an actual game. Here the player has to actively build his characters and monitor their attributes all the time, and if they don't grow the way he anticipated, he should better change his strategy or they will soon become useless. This game will punish those who expect to effectively level their characters up by just killing random shit, and that's what Final Fantasy fans hate the most, they despise not being able to turn their brains off to play on auto-pilot and let the plot unfold by itself. Which is why people should avoid any modern release of this game, SquareEnix is trying hard to turn this into yet another Final Fantasy game by dumbing-down its systems and focusing on its retarded plot.
The use-based system's not perfect as it encourages some degenerate behavior, but the game's quite balanced, people who resort to silly exploits and griding are morons ruining their own experience. My biggest complain would be that you have to mindlessly cast some very useful spells like Heal (Esuna?) during random encounters, since it's impossible to level them up organically, but other than that, grinding is not necessary.
For instance, during the second half of my game my main character became so agile that he was impervious to physical damage, his evasion grew up so high despite wearing heavy armor that I had to turn him into a dual-wielding guy, but because of this his HP growth stalled, making the end-game still challenging, especially against enemy casters. That of course would have been ruined if I decided to attack him with my own party members to artificially inflate his numbers.
So, I would like to play more games like this one. I've tried a couple of Romancing Saga games in the past expecting the same kind of experience, but I was utterly disappointed. I could be wrong (it has been a while), but attributes there seemed to level up at random, so what's the point of that? I want to be able to tune-up my own characters, not to select their backgrounds and watch how their stats grow regardless of what I do in combat. Any suggestions?
