Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
Licorice
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Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Licorice »

Thread for talking about SRPGs. Not sure how much interest there will be on this primarily action game focused forum, but since we have a crawler and JRPG thread, so why not.

Reserving OP for future edits if need be, I'll continue with a review of an SRPG I just completed below.
Last edited by Licorice on Sun Nov 27, 2022 8:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
Licorice
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Licorice »

Just completed Front Mission 5 normal mode, no arena, no survival sim, battle simulator missions only once.

Reminder of how I think about games, which is just as cute and valid as any other way to think about games, but might not align with how you yourself think about them:
Spoiler
I hate mindlessness in games. The opposite of mindlessness is mindfulness, more commonly called challenge, i.e. when player's neurons are forced to fire in order to win.

Given a game, potential mindlessness is the most mindless approach a player can take and still win. Alternatively, this may also be viewed as minimum challenge - the minimum mental effort a player needs to exude to prevail.

Potential challenge is the how mindful a player must be, on average throughout the course of the game, to optimize some axis of game performance, which has no bearing on the outcome of the game.

Rewarded challenge is how mindful a player must be (again, on average) for game noted achievements beyond basic win conditions e.g. score, rank or clearing "post game content".

Why do I make a point of saying "on average"? To account for mindless chores e.g. re-rolling (in various forms) or navigating through tedious UIs.

Challenge when playing for game time efficiency is a universally applicable measure of potential challenge and a good substitute for rewarded challenge in its absence. Henceforth called "Universal substitute challenge".

What is game time efficiency? It is simply minimizing the amount of game time (in turn based games, turns, in real time games, real time) passes before victory is achieved.

Specific substitute challenge is challenge in the presence of reasonable, clear cut, and easily executable self imposed restrictions. For example, in the classic Capcom brawler "Armored Warriors", not using the "Turbo Jet" legs. For non-example, fighting each enemy no more than once on the way to the boss in Falcom's "Y's Origins" - how are we to standardize routes? What if the player accidentally goes the wrong way and repeats a kill while backtracking? Should this invalidate the whole run, even if the player avoids a group of enemies deliberately later? This is neither clear cut nor easily executable.

(A/D/J/S)RPGs are interesting because they usually have almost 0 minimum challenge, i.e. they can be played entirely mindlessly, but they also may have decent substitute challenge (usually hampered by how infrequently they accept player inputs), and sometimes rewarded challenge.
Onto Front Mission 5. The best things about the game are the "link" battle system, the use of Action Points to abstract time, the way weapons work spatially, and the squad and mech management.

What is "linking"? Linking is just the fact that nearby mechs (within weapon range) will generally join in an attack initiated by some other mech. I say "generally", as they might not join in depending on the pilot type (e.g. "support" types might not join in if the chance of friendly fire exceeds a certain likelihood, while "tactical" types won't join in if their AP is below half the maximum, conserving it for their own action or counter attacking), and of course whether they have enough AP for an attack.

On top of linking is skill stacking and chaining. Skills are associated with pilots, and provide bonuses such as increasing accuracy by 20%, or the amount of shots fired by 20% etc. Chains are when multiple skills from different pilots activate in a linked battle, providing a damage multiplier on top of all the skill bonuses - 5 skills activated one after the other will double damage. However, there's build strategy and trade-offs here, as some of the better individual skills not only don't chain, but break chains. Skills proc randomly, with the probability of procing being different along the chain.

Lastly it's worth noting how the game's weapon types interact with the AP and link systems to give players (theoretically) a lot of potential for optimization and pushing their turn counts lower. Some rifles can "penetrate" through one mech and hit a number of mechs behind them, all bazookas cause damage to the 4-connected tiles from the target, while melee weapons favor targeting the body over other parts (killing the body, kills the mech). When attacking, you have the initiative, but you need to be very careful with your positioning not to convert potential damage on the enemy to damage to your mechs, to avoid your own mechs taking heavy damage from enemy links during their phase and (more easily) their counter-attack, and sometimes to avoid attacking altogether because there's more potential for damage on your own counter-attack. For example, it might be better to have your out of range rifle move last, so as not to waste their AP in links, to set up a counter that will penetrate and hit 2 enemies instead of 1.

All that said, for my first run, even though very restricted in terms of (IMO pointless) power gaming, I only had to do quick, off the cuff thinking about all the complexity above and was still able to hit par times in all missions, only losing 1 mech (bless you Christine Coolridge for your selfless sacrifices) 3 times in boss battles. Aside from missing the RP bonus for no more than 1 mech loss on normal (0 on hard?), and potential XP for your pilot during combat, there's no penalty to losing a mech.


Squad management and building consists of recruiting pilots (four things to consider: their starting level and job levels, their job specialty, whether they're S types, and whether they're "aces" or "veterans" - the latter important only to unlock other pilots and a simulator mission AFAICT from reading a guide after the fact), and building mechs from parts. After the initial set of "tutorial" type missions where you field less than 6 pilots and their mechs, you will always field exactly 6.

I used a very simple strategy for building mechs that is probably close to optimal without using survival simulator parts and grinding for CP (i.e. cash) in the arena - favor getting better weapons (or backpacks, in the case of a mechanic or jammer's mech), if weapons exceed current body power, upgrade the body, only upgrade legs with priority when new models increase movement, and arms only when they start getting shot off too easily (and not even then tbh, as I was always low on CP). I didn't every have much reason to use anything but 0 evasion penalty, high output bodies (Gust) and high evasion, high movement legs (Numsekar and Mungoss), with the exception of using low weight 4 or hover type legs (they have high movement, but low evasion) on my gunners so they could carry bigger guns. I used underranked Recson (high accuracy, low weight during late game) arms on everyone's gun hand(s), and very low rank Storms (then mid rank Frosts) on everyone's off arm. Launcher type mechs could possibly be optimized with other bodies, but I didn't use a launcher. So, while I didn't find much room for specialization and most of my mech frames were samey, being short on CP till the very end meant I would be careful with which mech I favored for upgrading ahead of the rest of the pack, so there was some degree of decision making here.

I found that out of the gunner (medium-long range) weapons, rifles were best, although bazookas might have the most potential if played carefully (and without running striker (melee) centric tactics, as I did). Likewise for assault weapons I found machine guns handily superior to shotguns and flamethrowers. I didn't use launchers, but I did put a grenade on my assault mech for one or two missions. I mostly forgot to use it, but a low rank, mass grenade strategy in mech building might potentially be superior to placing full priority on hand weapons and never having enough CP for a shoulder mount, as I did.

Pilots are leveled up in simulators and missions, and I found that new pilots I could recruit were always underleveled compared to the ones that had been hanging around a while. However, since the most important pilot attribute is their "type", I replaced my much higher level gunners with lower level "support" type recruits at some point to avoid friendly fire (gunners have long range, and often you don't even realize they're about to blow off your striker mech's arm in a link).

Since I skipped almost all dialogue in the game, I never read any hints to the benefits of S rank pilots (if there are any such hints), and when scouting them, they seem strictly worse than normal pilots (as they seem the same, just more susceptible to status damage). After my clear, from reading a guide, I learned they get some very nice skills other pilots do not. Again, room for optimization on a more serious hard mode run.

I briefly mentioned backpacks, but they're actually a big part of mech specialization. Aside from being simply useful, an EMP backpack's abilities are how pilots can level up the jammer job and gain jammer skills, and a repair backpack is how pilots can do the same for the mechanic job and skills. Carrying these backpacks restricts your weapon choices due to their high weight costs. On the other hand, there's also the turbo backpack (although you can't buy these), that increases output - very useful for striker (melee) builds, as excess output gives a percentage damage bonus for melee attacks.


How does hard mode differ from normal mode? Well if you don't play with any self imposed restrictions, it's easier, as you can grind to rank 12 parts as soon as you get access to the arena and survival simulator (which give you access to infinite CP and RP respectively), while normal mode caps how high you can upgrade your parts based on your progress through the regular missions, so your max power is limited even if you grind. I'm not exactly sure on how the survival simulator works in hard mode - whether you can access all floors right away or they get unlocked as you progress through the regular missions - but in any case, you will, along with the infinite RP the survival simulator gives, have access to very OP parts either straight away or after a few missions. This is true in normal mode as well, except again, for the aforementioned rank cap. Now, on the other hand, if you play on hard and restrict access to the arena and the survival simulator, you will get more challenge (theoretically - enemy pilots are higher level and have better mechs (I think?), and you get even less CP and RP (not that I've ever been short on RP) - but I've not seen the difference myself), with also more room for mech specialization through overranking parts at a high resource cost. Probably the most enjoyable way to play the game.

Finally, I need to note the rewarded challenge in this game, which consists of getting remodeling points for completing missions within so many turns and under so many mechs lost. It's very easy to meet these conditions on normal mode, employing very intuitive off the cuff field tactics and build strategies. I can't imagine how easy it would be if you could grind. Likewise, due to unrestricted part rank, it would be even easier on hard mode without restricting grinding. That said, my simple tactics and strategies were already buckling, especially on boss fights, so I can imagine hard mode requiring some thought to meet par when playing with restrictions. Of course, going under par (low turn counts) seems rife with potential.


The game's UI is good but not great. You can skip battles (but you don't get any battle trace, so you have to watch them to understand exactly what's happening - luckily you can watch them at double speed), all cutscenes, and fast forward through dialogue. Great for players like me who do not care at all about "story" (except as told through player actions) or even players who do but who are replaying to push their tactics. You can get most information at the (nicely indicated) press of a button, or it's just there already, *except* a visual indication of enemy weapon range or movement range - you have to count squares. Perhaps this is because multiple modes of attack and weapons can be equipped by the one mech, but I can think of ways the developers could have worked around that. Outside of battle the main pain point for me was the lack of a "trade in" option when buying frame parts, although I could work around it by selling all weapons and non turbo backpacks, adjusting bodies with a full bag of cash, and then buying back weapons.

The main point against the game, IMO, is the mission variety. They are all very similar. Out of the 20 battle simulator missions, I can only note 2 (the one where everything is a helicopter, and the one where new mechs were spawned whenever you killed one of the initial leaders) the rest fit into one of two categories - kill squads randomly scattered throughout the map, or regroup, as your squad itself begins scattered, and do the same. Out of the 26 regular missions, the boss levels were notable, and only a few others (the uneven terrain (arctic) mission, the flood mission, a couple of (or was it three?) indoor missions (no grenades or rockets allowed), one of those but with turrets, the train mission, and finally the protect the cargo, base and plane missions). Some of the aforementioned were actually boss missions, so all up about 8 to 10 missions? The rest were just take out enemy squads scattered around the map, no different from most battle simulator missions, and even out of those 10 or so "notable" missions mentioned, most devolved to the same thing, as their specific gimmick could mostly be ignored or quickly trivialized (perhaps less so on hard mode? I don't know). As a point of comparison, Fire Emblem missions also work with only a few primitives (fog of war, terrain, enemy composition, and reinforcements), and even fewer gimmicks, yet feel more different.

This is a typical "problem", or not, depending on how you look at it, with some games in the genre - chess has only one map and mission after all, but infinite variety. From the perspective of potential to optimize turn counts through tactics, the missions are fine. For the purposes of forcing the player to tailor their pilot and mech builds to meet the challenge, the missions fall short except only a handful few (the ones where you can't use AoE weapons, and the ones where you better bring the correct leg type).

I've noted elsewhere on this forum, but the survival simulator, while it can be abused to trivialize the main game, is in itself a fun rogue-like from what I've played of it. I might spend some time playing just that with no regard to the rest of the game some day, except maybe to see how cheesy it can get with all the OP parts.

The game has a very clean Japanese take on Bush Jr. era US army aesthetic, with a little hint of anime. The writing (or translation) is all over the place, along with the characters generally being quite juvenile for my tastes (but not so bad within the genre), so I just started skipping everything around mission 8 (or whenever it is your mechanic buddy dies) and have no idea what the rest of the game was about. Still, I appreciate the look of almost all the maps, and also the intermission locales. Music was OK, mostly techno stuff, a bit of annoying bagpipes, with an overly dramatic finale - most of it reminded me of Armored Core's music? Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me due to other similarities, as I don't really remember Armored Core's music.


Overall, I liked the game, and can recommend it to people who like the SRPG genre. I will also note that the game has reaffirmed, in my mind, the superiority of the SRPG genre to the DRPG and JRPG genres for challenge and gameplay oriented players, having played it just after Valkyrie Profile and Shin Megami Tensei, two of the most praise lavished games in terms of gameplay in the JRPG and DRPG genres respectively.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Steven »

I was thinking of making this thread myself, but here it is, and I didn't have to do it myself! Yay for being lazy!

Anyway, I finished Relayer Advanced the other day. I am not sure if I will review it (but I can if someone really wants me to), but it was decent enough, and it has a beautiful ending, which was quite surprising.

Also, play Devil Survivor.
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Sima Tuna
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Sima Tuna »

I'll remember this thread for whenever I get around to a new Battle Brothers run. I play battle brothers, FFT, Darkest Dungeon and Xcom Enemy Within fairly regularly, in rotation. I'm interested in that new Front Mission remake, but mostly for Front Mission 2. I already have the first Front Mission remake on nintendo DS and I'm not enthused by the new visual style they're going for with the current batch of remakes. I'd rather they gave the little chibi mecha sprites an HD-2D makeover, rather than replace them with fully 3d models. The sprites in the DS version are very charming. :)

Devil Survivor Overlocked is probably my favorite SMT game of all time, or else tied with Strange Journey.
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Air Master Burst
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Air Master Burst »

Front Mission as a series is pretty great, except for the shitty 3rd one (which sadly is the only one that ever got pushed in the west), though I've only dipped into 5 a bit. I keep hoping somebody finishes up that Front Mission 2 translation, but it seems pretty unlikely at this point, I should just go for it.

Sarpigs (I personally think they should be Tarpigs instead, as grid-based combat is tactics and not strategy, but that ship probably sailed years ago) are great as long as they don't have grinding involved. As soon as I'm expected to grind instead of face an interesting tactical challenge I check right the fuck out (looking at you, Disgaea and friends). Level-based with no grinding available is the best case (Shining Force, classic Fire Emblem, Front Mission 1), although that requires actually balancing encounters, so I get why most Sarpigs don't bother.

A couple of my personal favorite deep cuts are Yggdra Union and Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars, both for GBA (although the PSP version of Yggdra Union is VASTLY superior). Yggdra Union has a very unique formation combo system, it takes a bit to learn but very rewarding. ZOE is just a lot of fun and reminds me of Front Mission 1 with better mission variety.
King's Field IV is the best Souls game.
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BIL
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by BIL »

Great thread title. :lol: I dabbled in Front Mission 4 bitd, quite enjoyed what I played. Kind of a rainy day gametype for me.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Stevens »

I've played the fuck out of Wasteland 2 and 3 and uh...that's about it.
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Air Master Burst
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Air Master Burst »

I thought we were mostly talking Japanese console-style Sarpigs here, but if Carpigs count then Jagged Alliance 2 is still the all-time champion and it's not even close.
King's Field IV is the best Souls game.
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Volteccer_Jack
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Volteccer_Jack »

Oh boy an excuse to mention Operation Darkness, the Xbox360 exclusive that looks like a PS2 game, about a British SAS unit comprised of: Jack the Ripper, Van Helsing's granddaughter, Frankenstein's monster, Herbert East the reanimator, a witch, two werewolves, and a hot Irish lady. You know they're British because everyone pronounces it "leftenant"! They go on various covert missions during WWII, in an effort to defeat the Nazi Vampires and thwart Hitler's diabolical plan. Hitler is a necromancer btw.

The combat has a burden system, where the more weight a unit is carrying the longer they have to wait before their next turn comes up. Heavy weapons are devastating but very slow, and there's a nice balance to be struck of bringing enough firepower to get the job done while still being nimble enough to avoid disaster. Often you don't want to bother weighing yourself down with extra ammo, instead scavenging from corpses, or even tossing the empty weapon aside for a new one. You can even field a dude with nothing to his name but a grenade or two and have him acquire better weaponry in the thick of it. This unfortunately becomes a balance problem as you get into the last third of the game. Your characters get various supernatural abilities which don't require a weapon in most cases. So in the lategame you'll find yourself running into battle naked or mostly naked because spamming magic is just as effective as guns but leaves the characters with a much higher speed stat. Which is a shame because there's an interesting covering fire mechanic that guns use, and it completely falls to the wayside at the same time.

Also there's a mission where you have to destroy a missile before the enemy launches it, and the easiest way to accomplish this is to have a werewolf run up and punch it till it explodes. 8)
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Sima Tuna
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Sima Tuna »

I tried to find a copy of Operation Darkness for years and never could. It's so fucking rare and expensive.
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Blinge
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Blinge »

Basic Blinge time

soooo about that Fire Emblem..

I've finished Shadow Dragon, Path of Radiance.

I think I got halfway through Binding Blade when I got bored of it. That game was pretty tough. Battles seemed to take ages, huge numbers of reinforcements coming in constantly and acting immediately without letting me get a turn in. Urgh!

There's something that slows those games down and makes them less enjoyable for me - it's the fact that you can't just let your heavy hitters do the work for you and progress.. You actually need to rotate units and get everybody levelling up.. It leads to so much micromanagement and slows everything way the fuck down!
Just thinking about trying to level most of the squad makes me not wanna play again.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Mischief Maker »

If you're a fan of Final Fantasy Tactics, you owe it to yourself to try Fell Seal: The Arbiter's Mark.

A better Final Fantasy Tactics 2 than any of the Advance games turned out.
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Volteccer_Jack
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Volteccer_Jack »

Blinge wrote:There's something that slows those games down and makes them less enjoyable for me - it's the fact that you can't just let your heavy hitters do the work for you and progress.. You actually need to rotate units and get everybody levelling up.. It leads to so much micromanagement and slows everything way the fuck down!
Just thinking about trying to level most of the squad makes me not wanna play again.
There's nothing forcing you to use all your units, you CAN in fact just let your heavy hitters do the work for you in pretty much every FE game. I generally aim for about a 10-unit team for endgame, since that it is often how many you can bring into the final chapter. Then add in about 5 filler units who can keep up in the big battles where you bring more than 10 people.

Binding Blade being boring is an accurate observation :P (play superior Thracia 776 or Blazing Sword instead), although having the second half drag a bit with needlessly long battles is an unfortunate FE tradition.
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BryanM
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by BryanM »

I mentioned this in another thread about Another Bible: These games can have a tendency to use space to serve no purpose other then slowing everything down. The easiest solution is to go the Pool of Radiance route and cut out all the distance to begin with. You know how Final Fantasy Tactics maps are absolutely tiny? Little 16 by 16 dioramas at their biggest? Two or three turns to walk one end to the other? All because of the limitations of the Playstation? That was a strength, not a handicap.

Especially when you're talking about shuffling five or more units across a map. Giving twelve units, the same order twelve times in a row bogs things down big time.

The alternate route... is gimmicks. Lots and lots of gimmicks. So that things don't get stale. Fire Emblem likes to hide information so you have a "surprise" mid-map. ArKnights often likes to introduce some extremely bullshit enemies or mechanics that invalidate standard basic strategy, so you're forced to understand what the hell is going on to counter it. Things can be excruciatingly hard if you don't have a good answer for something.

ArKnights and FFT have taught me a lot about design; less really is often more. Having a load of skills and letting a unit do everything ruins turn based combat. The worst is having a ton of skills, but only like one to three of them ever matter.

At least use a vancian charge system like Final Fantasy 1 or 3, or icky smelly cooldowns, if you wanna have a battleship design...
Air Master Burst wrote:As soon as I'm expected to grind instead of face an interesting tactical challenge I check right the fuck out (looking at you, Disgaea and friends). Level-based with no grinding available is the best case (Shining Force, classic Fire Emblem, Front Mission 1), although that requires actually balancing encounters, so I get why most Sarpigs don't bother.
Disgaea games are quite different if you don't take advantage of any of the cheats; the second you use one even a little you're immediately desync'd from the power curve and can just roll over everything. Even playing them for real, not much substance is there beyond "buy armor" and rarely "exploit geopanels", but sometimes they'd feel almost like an actual game. The post game is definitely like pacing around in a room.

Shining Force offers infinite grinding. It is a very gentle series.
You actually need to rotate units and get everybody levelling up.. It leads to so much micromanagement and slows everything way the fuck down!
Yeah... I really hate this too... just award EXP tickets or give everyone exp at the end of a battle. Anything that incentivizes milking a map for EXP (memories healing/buffing dudes in Shining Force and Fire Emblem will stick with me forever) isn't good. Incentivize clearing the map and moving on to the next battle.

The absolute worst I've experienced was Tactics Ogre. Everything counter attacks in that game so any melee guys you have will eat shit if they're even a little softer than what you're throwing them against. (To quote Dungeon Hunter, "like throwing eggs against rocks.") But they had a fix for this!

... training mode. Have your guys fight against themselves. Auto-combat! Whee!

... I play and have played quite a few incremental games. Where progress is measured in months on the calendar, and not the hours of your life. This was worse than them.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Licorice »

Volteccer_Jack wrote: Anything that incentivizes milking a map for EXP (memories healing/buffing dudes in Shining Force and Fire Emblem will stick with me forever) isn't good.
Not sure about Shining Force, but how do you get good ranks in FE if you're wasting turns to power game?
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Sima Tuna
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Sima Tuna »

Ranks are irrelevant next to the almighty power of support conversations and arena grinding.
ArKnights often likes to introduce some extremely bullshit enemies or mechanics that invalidate standard basic strategy, so you're forced to understand what the hell is going on to counter it. Things can be excruciatingly hard if you don't have a good answer for something.
The same is painfully true of Valkyria Chronicles. Both VC1 and VC4 love introducing invincible or nearly-invincible boss characters who travel in a set route (which you have to memorize) and will one shot ANY character they aim at. They also tend to utilize extremely deadly interception fire, so you cannot move your own units once the boss has pinned them. "Getting good" in this case involves pure, rote memorization. You have to know where to place your characters. Often, you have to place them correctly before the invincible boss character even spawns.

One map that will always stick with me. It's not even as bullshit as some of the others. But I remember it. I think it's in VC4. There's a camp that's on fire. Early on, you're taught that the fire will block both yourself and enemies from traveling along certain paths. You have to go around it. Your main tank can plow through the fire, but no troops can. After a while, an invincible boss tank spawns. The boss talk can go through the fire, ok. That's fine. What's not so fine is that the boss can demolish buildings and shortcut to units you thought were out of reach. What's even LESS fine is that he can issue an Order which makes all his foot soldiers immune to fire, allowing them to walk through the fire and go anywhere they want. The first time he does this is on HIS turn, so you have no idea it's coming. For that matter, this map features respawning enemies who only respawn on ENEMY phase, not on player phase. What this means is you cannot do anything. They get 1 completely free turn to do whatever.

The way to beat this mission is by memorizing where the boss tank spawns and the path it takes through the level. Then memorize where the reinforcements spawn and the path they follow. Then station Lancers/your MBT near where the boss tank ends up and station Shocktroopers next to where the enemy foot soldiers spawn.

Following the rules of strategy in this mission is a great way to wind up dead. Hiding behind cover doesn't work because enemies will spawn on ENEMY PHASE and throw fucking grenades to destroy your cover. The best strat to keep your bases is to station your APC on top of the base and park an engineer behind it. Don't bother using cover. Use interception fire to force the respawning assholes to stop moving, so they won't be able to rush your base as hard.

See, everything you have to do to win this level involves memorization and foreknowledge. There's no strategy. The boss is nearly invincible on a first playthrough and his main cannon will oneshot any foot soldier out in the open. This isn't even a particularly hard mission. There are much, much worse ones in VC1 and later in VC4. The falling bombs in VC4 is a great example. Any mission with Valkyria in it is complete and total dogshit too.

Sure, it's kinda silly how any boss in FFT can be murderized in seconds by spamming Accumulate and doublehanding/martial arting/doubleswording them down. Or firing off CT5 Holy. But when the alternative is an invincible fucker who doesn't care what your tactics are...
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Volteccer_Jack »

In VC1 the pro-gamer strat is to have one scout spend all your actions running directly to the goal every turn, unless the objective is something physically impossible for a scout to accomplish.

It's a good game for casual fun but using strategy and tactics tends to be counterproductive lol.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Sima Tuna »

Blinge wrote:Basic Blinge time

soooo about that Fire Emblem..

I've finished Shadow Dragon, Path of Radiance.

I think I got halfway through Binding Blade when I got bored of it. That game was pretty tough. Battles seemed to take ages, huge numbers of reinforcements coming in constantly and acting immediately without letting me get a turn in. Urgh!

There's something that slows those games down and makes them less enjoyable for me - it's the fact that you can't just let your heavy hitters do the work for you and progress.. You actually need to rotate units and get everybody levelling up.. It leads to so much micromanagement and slows everything way the fuck down!
Just thinking about trying to level most of the squad makes me not wanna play again.
Depends on the FE game. Shadow Dragon is definitely not that way. The way Shadow Dragon works, the majority of the characters you get early on are stronger than the ones you get later. You're sort of intended to play with permadeath and accept it if a companion dies. Shadow Dragon showers you with units so you can easily replace a dead guy, but the replacement will be slightly shittier. As punishment for fucking up.

If you're reloading chapters then there's zero incentive to level anyone except your strongest units. Most units in Shadow Dragon are either mediocre or kinda bad, so when you find those bros who kick total ass, you'll want to use them forever. At least until they hit max level, at which point I tend to rotate just so they're not hoovering up XP.

Binding Blade is often cited as a boring game. FE7 and Shadow Dragon are my favorites and they do not at all require you to build up your weaker units. Without exploits, it's not even possible to bring every member of your party to level 20 in FE7. There isn't enough xp and there aren't enough missions. You have to decide early on who to prioritize and commit to them.

This is part of why there's so much debate over whether or not certain characters are good. In a game with infinite grinding like Awakening, endgame stats are the only metric for which character is best. But in a limited XP game, what level and stats the character starts with (how easy they are to level within the campaign) plays an important role. That's why there are still people arguing endlessly over whether or not Rebecca, Nino and Florina are good. Are their endgame stats good? Usually, fuck yeah. But do you have to hand-feed them kills like a baby bird for ages? Also yes. Then there are total fucking BROS like Oswin and Hector who can kick ass from day one with no help.

If you don't like grinding btw, don't bother with Fates or Awakening. They are grind games. I think Conquest technically has limited xp, but the limit is still so inflated that you can bring most characters to 20 (of their upgraded class.)
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Steamflogger Boss »

Sima Tuna wrote:I tried to find a copy of Operation Darkness for years and never could. It's so fucking rare and expensive.

It was $20 or less for a long time but really depends when you started looking. It's a silly game.

Anyway I've played A LOT of this genre between Fire Emblem, Disgaea, Super Robot Wars etc Back when I was a kid with nothing to really do I even cleared Vanguard Bandits multiple times. Very MID game but hey it had anime and robots that shit was hot for me.

Also not quite in the genre perhaps but I really enjoy the good Growlanser games aka not Heritage of War.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by SuperDeadite »

The original Growlanser is almost a perfect game. It's a serious must play even if you have to use the translated twxt script to follow along. None of the sequals ever came close to the quality of the first. 4 is quite good, but 1 is better. Also, 5 and 6 are actually quite fun games and well worth playing. The polygons are fugly, but you get used to them lol.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Blinge »

Yeah i reload chapters. I’m not having anyone die on me.
At least there how i felt when i played it a decade ago. Not sure how it’d be now.
But who the hell cares, i’m not gonna replay that game when theres a whole series to look at.

But even if you have 10 units you care about, you’d still have to rotate those 10 among each other, wouldnt you?
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by BryanM »

Sima Tuna wrote:What's even LESS fine is that he can issue an Order which makes all his foot soldiers immune to fire, allowing them to walk through the fire and go anywhere they want.
lol, but think about how boring things would be if you had perfect information.

The ability (often a pre-designed assumption the first few times) to fail is what transforms these into games, creates potential for that "pride and accomplishment" thingy to happen maybe sometimes. Otherwise it's just a slot machine optimization type game, racing to clear it as quickly as possible or make the numbers go up as fast as possible.

I can't remember even 5% of the jRPG "bosses" I've taken out during my life. But torture gimmick fights? I remember almost all of those.

That feeling of being faced with all the unfairness of the world, and making it eat shit.
Sure, it's kinda silly how any boss in FFT can be murderized in seconds by spamming Accumulate and doublehanding/martial arting/doubleswording them down. Or firing off CT5 Holy. But when the alternative is an invincible fucker who doesn't care what your tactics are...
It's kind of interesting how some games make the difficulty slider an intrinsic part of the game systems, as opposed to a stupid explicit option in a settings menu. You feel like a little baby if you set an option to "easy", but you feel like a chad supergenius for dual-wielding cosmic space meteorites with your bullshit shonen protagonist guy. They're both functionally the exact same thing at the end of the day, but they don't feel the same at all.

FFT always made me laugh, with having charge times for some attacks, instant hole in the ground for others. Just like Disgaea, you don't have to work particularly hard to desync yourself from the power curve. Personally, I actually feel like it'd be an awful lot of work figuring out what isn't broken in that game and limiting yourself to those options. Playing one of the many many hacks with a focus on balance seems way more fulfilling, instead.
In a game with infinite grinding like Awakening, endgame stats are the only metric for which character is best.
This isn't universally true. There's playing for completion/collection, versus efficiency/score, versus that nebulous subjective "fun" thing. Cost versus reward is always a thing. It's always different for different people.

The training maps in Gaiden and Awakening are an optional mechanic. And a lot easier to avoid using than FFT's busted chemist arts or busted knight arts or busted squire arts or busted white mage arts or super duper busted monk arts..

... I'm beginning to suspect calculator arts with zero spells is the only balanced skillset in that entire game. Maybe thieves too. Maybe.

... maybe not, now that I think about how much Steal Heart is used in the PvP autobattle tournaments...

[looks it up] ...Magic Attack+50% chance of landing. Yeah... at least you can't call status effects weak in that game.. : D
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Mortificator »

Front Mission could never have succeeded in the US no matter how much it was pushed. Any '90s gamer who was into turn-based mech combat was into BattleTech, and FM is so, so basic in comparison. It doesn't even fare well next to action games; customization in Front Mission 4 is more simplistic than Armored Core 1
Air Master Burst wrote:I personally think they should be Tarpigs instead, as grid-based combat is tactics and not strategy, but that ship probably sailed years ago
It's absolutely true that these game feature tactics and not strategy... but the "S" in SRPG actually stands for Simulation. Since English-speakers generally don't use the word in that way, some people who were unaware of the strategy-tactics spectrum mistakenly assumed it meant strategy and things snowballed from there.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Air Master Burst »

Mortificator wrote:Front Mission could never have succeeded in the US no matter how much it was pushed. Any '90s gamer who was into turn-based mech combat was into BattleTech,
This is entirely false; the tabletop/pc gaming crowd was a pretty small niche compared to console gaming in the 90s. I bet more people played Front Mission 3 because Square made it than ever played tabletop BattleTech (I remember how hard it was finding an opponent and usually having to play fucking 40k instead), and none of the BattleTech video games back then were even turn-based (except for that crappy ancient 80s DOS game).

If Front Mission 3 hadn't sucked it's possible the series could've succeeded over here, but we'll never know now. FM1 is probably the best Sarpig on the SNES, but unfortunately we didn't get it until the DS port. The Super Robot Wars games always sell really well too, so it's not like there isn't some precedent.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Sima Tuna »

I love both FM1 and FM3. I'm curious how Front Mission 3 "sucked." I did both main routes and had a blast when I played. I played Front Mission 4 as well but thought it was kinda mediocre.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Sengoku Strider »

Always loved this genre. My Switch's memory got deleted (my fault), so I'm playing through Three Houses for a second (fifth?) time. I had finished two of the main houses + the secret fourth one and was in the end game for the Black Eagles when it happened. So I decided when I felt like it again, I'd just redo the whole thing.

It's been surprisingly easy, I must've got sucked into the game for 8-odd hours yesterday. I really do love it, I think it's going to stand as one of the best rpgs ever made of any stripe. I'm kinda concerned at how mega-cutesy-anime the new one looks, after how deeply serious & intricate 3H's plot & world ended up being.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Volteccer_Jack »

Blinge wrote:Yeah i reload chapters. I’m not having anyone die on me.
At least there how i felt when i played it a decade ago. Not sure how it’d be now.
But who the hell cares, i’m not gonna replay that game when theres a whole series to look at.

But even if you have 10 units you care about, you’d still have to rotate those 10 among each other, wouldnt you?
The two biggest things that increased my enjoyment of Fire Emblem were playing with the aim of low turn counts, and accepting the occasional dead character. It's really how they're meant to be played. At least before Awakening and the arrival of Waifu Emblem, anyway. 3H gives you 9 mostly interchangeable trainee units at the start and that's pretty much it. The permadeath option in 3H is basically only there to pay lip-service to FE rather than something that you should actually turn on (kinda like the whole game!)

About army size, if you look at Path of Radiance or Blazing Sword as examples, nearly every map that gives you a choice of units allows you to bring more than 10. No rotation necessary, in fact you'll almost always have room to bring filler units to help out. A more compact group of 6 or 8 units will work just as well and even be easier due to having higher levels. Using large armies is kind of self-imposed difficulty in FE tbqh lol.

The one game in the series where rotation is mandatory is Thracia 776, because that game has a stamina mechanic that forces units other than the main lord onto the bench after a certain amount of usage.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Air Master Burst »

Sima Tuna wrote:I love both FM1 and FM3. I'm curious how Front Mission 3 "sucked." I did both main routes and had a blast when I played. I played Front Mission 4 as well but thought it was kinda mediocre.
The tiny scale of all the battles got old quick, especially only being able to send a team of 4. Mission variety was pretty weak too. The art design is about as bland as it gets, and even though they used ugly ass polygons for full 3D they don't give you manual camera control. You can't skip cut scenes and the translation is pretty rough by late PS1 standards. The loading times were nasty, although this isn't really an issue nowadays.

I also thought it was just too easy, but that might be due to how small the battles were.

ETA: I also really hated how skills were tied to specific parts, it limited build options a lot.
King's Field IV is the best Souls game.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Sengoku Strider »

Volteccer_Jack wrote:
Blinge wrote:Yeah i reload chapters. I’m not having anyone die on me.
At least there how i felt when i played it a decade ago. Not sure how it’d be now.
But who the hell cares, i’m not gonna replay that game when theres a whole series to look at.

But even if you have 10 units you care about, you’d still have to rotate those 10 among each other, wouldnt you?
The two biggest things that increased my enjoyment of Fire Emblem were playing with the aim of low turn counts, and accepting the occasional dead character. It's really how they're meant to be played. At least before Awakening and the arrival of Waifu Emblem, anyway. 3H gives you 9 mostly interchangeable trainee units at the start and that's pretty much it. The permadeath option in 3H is basically only there to pay lip-service to FE rather than something that you should actually turn on (kinda like the whole game!)
That's not really true; the game certainly does give you a ton of flexibility in how you develop them (which is its greatest strength imo, absolutely love the class system, it's so addictive), but there are innate qualities that students have which differentiate them and give them a few ideal lanes for growth. If you're playing on normal it's so easy it doesn't really matter, but if you're on maddening the endgame will punish you severely if you haven't got your crew in full-on boss mode. I mentioned above that I didn't finish Black Eagles before, it's because I hit a brick wall in the endgame battle vs. the Alliance. I guess there is a workaround if you know how to abuse the gardening system, but that's not something 99% of players will know how to do.

Not sure why you wouldn't turn on classic mode, the game loses a lot without it. On higher difficulties you really need to pay attention to your formation as enemies will pop out to ace your spellcasters at the back all the time. Just knowing your characters will be back next fight removes a ton of strategy and tension. That's really accentuated because 3H does a fantastic job with its cast and building up attachments to them; always an FE staple, but it's really in full force here with how much depth they put into the support system and character development in the attendant cut scenes. There's some surprising depth that comes out in some of them.
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Re: Sarpig pride worldwide. Sars are better than Jars!

Post by Steven »

Has anyone played Ronde? I've heard it's complete garbage and I really want to try it eventually.
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