Spoiler
Actual structures, unique places, and a god damn ghost ship!
FALCOM Thread
Re: FALCOM Thread
Alright, I'm warming up to Ys VIII again. After reaching the northern side of the island, things really pick up. There's a lot more actual story, more aspects of the game start to open up (I'm a sucker for the recurring big dungeon with more floors opening up as you progress through the main game), and finally some much needed variation in the settings.
Why didn't the game do this from the start? In retrospect it's kind of interesting to build on a slow start like that, much like the first Etrian Odyssey which really starts pulling some surprises towards the late game, but the first several hours still feel like a bit of a waste. But this game is a lot bigger than I had expected. I'm still missing around 30% of the map.
Re: FALCOM Thread
I forced myself to finish my replay of Ys Seven on Nightmare mode, but it was still a borefest from start to finish and an unfathomable decline compared to the Ark-engine trilogy games. I'm not too keen on this new party system, It kind of diminishes the legend of Adol Christin and the reputation he built up in past games by being a badass all on his own with the help of his sidekick Dogi, by changing it into 'the legend of Adol Christin and more pals'. But it also feels like innovation for the sake of innovation where the perfectly good combat system of the Ark-engine games is thrown away with something entirely new because there had to be something entirely new, yet it's not an adequate replacement.
Jumping is gone, instead you roll around like it's Dark Souls if you want to dodge anything, so there's little platforming to speak of. You now control three party members, of which you directly control one with the others being controlled by the AI. Cycling through party members is easy and done with little fuss. The camera is still solid and doesn't get in the way at all. The traditional bubble-wrap feeling for combat does hold true in Seven. You can now carry healing items around again, and draughts are pretty much gone.
The new combat system revolves around skills, which are special attacks that deal more damage than regular attacks but also have some other uses on occasion, like launching enemies in the air, performing AoE attacks, aerial attacks, that sort of thing. Each character has about twenty of them, which you unlock by finding a weapon which has that skill embedded, and then using the skill often enough to the point where it levels up so you can select it at any time without having to equip a particular weapon. Each skill consumes SP, and you gain SP by dealing damage or performing Charge Attacks by holding down the basic attack button and then releasing it. Each character has about twenty skills, but you can only equip four per character at once, and most of them are superfluous to begin with.
Generally speaking, you'll be using the strongest AoE attacks which you know are the strongest because they cost more SP. Some skills have their particular uses like launching enemies, but whether enemies are launchable to begin with seems to be entirely enemy-dependent. Since you can only have four equipped at a time, the game can't really be designed around utilizing the quirks of a particular skill. A lot of skills feel like they do the same thing, largely because damage is all that matters. There's not a whole lot of comboability between skills to speak of given how irregular enemy stagger is and skills all mostly coming down to just dealing damage. Some skills are simply improved versions of existing skills. But the biggest problem is that you have zero idea of what a skill actually does aside from its given description. You don't know how much damage it deals, what its stun value is, or any other property which would make this skill in particular worth using over others.
What's worse is the absurd amount of grinding required to upgrade these skills. Each skill can be upgraded to LV10, and this is done by simply using a skill, which grants you 1 EXP per usage. For every skill level-up, your skill will deal 10% more damage. That's exciting. However, the level up requirements for the higher levels can range somewhere up to 100-200EXP, which is absolutely ridiculous for high SP-cost skills. You don't get more EXP if you hit multiple enemies with the same skill, which is rather contradictory since that would make the most efficient way of grinding EXP for your levels to have skills damage only one enemy instead of all nearby enemies so that you have more opportunity to use your charge attack to build up more SP to use skills more often, which you can't do if you already killed everything. Training Rings exist to help speed up skill upgrading exponentially by giving you one or more EXP per skill usage, however they are very rare.
When you perform a skill and there's still an enemy around, your party members will also perform a random skill which in turn also generates EXP for their skills, so you don't need to grind separately for each character. What's rather annoying is that these skills are picked at random for party members. You can choose to allow which skills get randomly picked or not, but it's still not ideal unless you want to train a skill in particular but don't want to constantly disallow or allow every skill and make your party members a lot less versatile. Even more annoying is that if you use a skill which uses 50SP, your party members will not use a 50SP skill of their own. They can, but they can't use a skill with a higher SP cost than for the one you just used (aside from an invisible and incomprehensible margin given the inconsistently rounded SP costs where some characters have skills which require 7 SP and 12 SP but most characters have SP costs divisible by 5). Party members won't follow up a 50SP attack with two 25SP attacks either (I'm not particularly sure about this one), so you're given the impression that you're just wasting SP.
This could have been partially fixed. If you used a skill bound to Square, all your party members would use their skills bound at Square provided the SP cost matches. This way you could string skills from each character into a combo and gain more control over what your party members do. Sometimes I could manage to juggle some enemies if my teammates would use the skills I wanted.
The strong reliance on skills also puts a strong reliance on Charge Attacks, which after a couple of minutes puts a massive strain on your thumb when you're holding your charge but are also trying to dodge at the same time. Anyone who has played Megaman will know what I'm talking about. There's barely any reason to use the basic attacks instead of a Charge Attack, but there's also no reason why an attack you always want to be ready even needs to be tied to a button-hold input. There's no reason why Charge Attacks can't automatically charge up as long as you are not attacking. Having to not attack in order to perform more Charge Attacks isn't particularly engaging, especially if you use faster ranged characters like Aisha to generate SP quickly and safely from a distance.
It feels like you have to Charge Attack everything. Enemies also leave corpses behind on death which you can beat for more materials and SP, but as usual performing a Charge Attack on the corpse nets the most SP. Why you can't get the SP amount of performing a normal Charge Attack by just attacking the corpse normally as opposed to having to waste time charging your attack first before striking a helpless corpse is beyond me. I see no reason why Charge Attacks can't be done away with in favor of increasing the base SP gain for normal attacks. At least mashing buttons would be preferable.
For the first part of the game, the farm for SP is very real, especially on Nightmare difficulty. Nightmare difficulty reduces the amount of SP gain (amongst gold, character EXP, and other things), so you'd get about six per Charge Attack. Raising your SP from 0 to the maximum of 100 would take 17 Charge Attacks, which is fucking ridiculous. Thankfully, after the Air Village, you receive an upgrade which doubles the amount of SP gained per Charge Attack on top of halving the time required for a Charge Attack to charge. Lo and behold, the game suddenly plays a lot smoother. I do not understand this mentality of locking basic quality of life features behind upgrades found much later into the story.
On the whole the skill system actually slows everything down. You constantly need to check which skills you want to train, and constantly juggle Training Rings when switching out party members to train their skills as well. It feels less like you're using the most suitable skill at any given time, but more like you're training them so they might be useful later on. Skills don't add anything the same way the elemental abilities did in Oath/Origin where they also doubled as platforming tools and had multiple uses beyond being a super move which dealt more damage. In Seven it's just more for the sake of more. If skills were part of a gradually expanding moveset with the game actually challenging you on that, then it might have been a lot more interesting, but as it stands whatever new mechanics Seven brings to the table are shallow on their own and barely explored at that.
Each character also has their own EXTRA Skill, a powerful ability which deals whopping damage, boosts damage, turns you invincible, and so on. Generally speaking I found myself going for the damage-dealing EXTRAs because I had the most confidence in them being the most effective kind of attacks. What each EXTRA does you can only find out through experimentation. There's no description at all detailing what an EXTRA does, how much damage it deals, what kind of bonuses it grants, you just have to kind of guess or look up information online. Each EXTRA skill will also get an upgrade twice per character, but what that upgrade does is also a wild guess. The name of the EXTRA gets changed and the animation for the attack is somewhat different, but that's it really. I wouldn't be able to tell if your EXTRA then gets a damage upgrade of some kind.
This also poses a problem when you have to decide which EXTRA of your current three active party members to use, especially if they're all of the damage-dealing kind. I just figured that I'd let the member with the highest strength stat use their EXTRA. That might probably deal the most damage. A more interesting solution for this problem would be that whenever you perform an EXTRA attack, that it would get augmented with bonuses similar to the EXTRA attacks of your currently active party members, so you could mix and match and decide whether you want your EXTRA to deal even more damage, or to deal more stun, or to turn yourself invincible, and so on.
You can use your EXTRA skill when your EXTRA gauge is full, which is filled up by performing regular skills (where higher-cost skills generate more EXTRA). A better alternative to filling up your EXTRA gauge is to perform Flash Guards. Aside in the options menu in the PC port, Flash Guards are never mentioned in-game, though they can speed up the game tremendously. On my first playthrough on Normal difficulty, I never even knew they existed until I looked up some gameplay footage on YouTube. If you hit L+R at the right time (why can't the FG input just be one button?), you can parry practically every kind of attack. If you pull this off successfully, you will gain a good amount of SP and some EXTRA as a reward, but you'll also receive a temporary damage bonus. So it's always recommended to Flash Guard before performing an EXTRA skill for maximum damage. But if you fuck up your timing and get hit during the recovery animation after a Flash Guard, you'll be the one receiving bonus damage and a good knockback.
Sounds cool, right? Well, the problem with an ability which lets you block any attack from any position is that it reduces each attack to being the same matter of timing. Homing projectiles? Flash Guard at the right time. Whirlwinds? Flash Guard at the right time. Ramming enemies? Flash Guard at the right time. The whole arena being covered in lava? Flash Guard at the right time. This effectively kills a large part of the variety in enemy attacks because you can deal with most of them in the same way.
For more persistent attacks like whirlwinds, Flash Guards can be chained and extended by repeatedly mashing the Flash Guard input, which in turn also grants you more EXTRA depending on how hard you mash, though I object at button mashing being any kind of pedigree for skill. Another problem is the slowdown incurred by whenever you successfully execute a Flash Guard, probably to emphasize the impact. So you're stuck in the eye of a whirlwind and you have no choice but to keep mashing Flash Guard because otherwise you're bound to take (bonus) damage, the mashing then taking forever until the whirlwind stops. This kills the fingers.
The damage boost from Flash Guarding does for some reason not carry over between party members. So you could Flash Guard with one member and then switch to another whose EXTRA attack you'd rather perform instead, but the bonus will be canceled entirely. Conversely, you could Flash Guard and perform an EXTRA attack immediately afterwards while enjoying your damage bonus and then switch to another member because other members can attack freely while the previous member is peforming his EXTRA and freezing the boss in place, but the damage bonus will cancel the moment you switch between members. So you'll have to stick to watching your EXTRA attack animation play out if you want to enjoy the full extent of the damage bonus.
The timing for the Flash Guard is strict enough to prevent everyone from being able to do it mindlessly, but then the telegraphs for some attacks are rather unclear. All the cool attacks the bosses may throw at you have their purpose and uniqueness nullified because of this universal parry. But you're encouraged to do so for that damage bonus and the bonus SP/EXTRA. The game would be better off if the Flash Guard slowdown was gone and Flash Guards could only be chained together at a fixed interval rather than by how fast you can mash.
There is actually one boss very early in the game, a giant boar, which pushes the shit in players trying to mash Flash Guard. One particular attack of the boss involves the boss leaping at you three times in a row. If you Flash Guard the first leap and keep mashing for more EXTRA, the second leap will hit you guaranteed unless you anticipate it properly again, because the time interval between leaps is large enough that if you are mashing, you'll be in the recovery animation for your Flash Guard by the moment the boss hits you with this second/third leap and get hit hard. You actually have to mind the timing here somewhat. Unfortunately this isn't really the case for most other bosses in the game where you shouldn't mash too hard.
There's also a stun gauge on each enemy, where if you hit an enemy enough times regardless of actual damage dealt, said enemy will enter a stunned state where he will not attack, and any attacks against it in this state will have their SP gain multiplied, so you could use that moment to fully stack up on SP. Some characters like Dogi (and Geis I feel) will have a higher stun value applied for each attack, and there's also equipment which boosts said value.
It gives you a breather moment during boss battles, but I don't really see the point of the whole system as you're not really encouraged to take advantage of it. For SP gain you just use charge attacks with ranged characters, perform skills with the strongest guy in your party, and repeat. There's no real point to aim for stunning a boss. You're usually bound to stun a boss at least once regardless of what you do. For basic enemies it's kind of pointless because they die fast enough before the stun gauge can even be filled up in the first place.
The lack of platforming and challenging enemy design especially caused dungeon variety to take a massive hit, as they're little more than enemy gauntlets with barebones key/lock puzzles. A large part of the Air Sanctum is just one big linear stretch for crying out loud. The only standout things from dungeons in Seven are some obstacles which require some really simple platforming to get past, or a key item you have to find later on in order to get past a certain obstacle. You might be thinking that it's like a Metroidvania where you find abilities which change the way how you can approach an entire dungeon, but in Seven all these obstacles come down to are equipping the right item and then moving forwards.
For spikes in the ground, you just equip the right boots and walk forward. For giant air propellers you just equip the cape and let yourself fly upwards. For walking on lava you just equip the ice crystal. There's really nothing much to it than equipping the right item for the situation which is done through a menu that pauses the game, so there's no real challenge to it, nor can it be qualified as a good puzzle. There's simply not much to challenge on the front of equipping the right item. There are some secrets which require that you use said items to get to a certain platform in a special way, but these are too simple and borderline insulting for this direction in dungeon design to be even warranted. The one-off usage of these key items and the uneven opportunities for them to be used only makes them come off as gimmicky.
It's only too late in the game that the dungeon layouts become somewhat complex and properly challenge your navigational abilities somewhat, however that's largely nullified by the fact that you have a mini-map which always shows you the layout of the area you're currently in. There's no real point to exploration when a map can always show you where you haven't been yet and where you need to go next.
But the decline in the combat and movement is especially felt in the boss battles, most of which are utterly boring. Depending on how you play, you're either constantly Flash Guarding everything before counterattacking or mashing the dodgeroll button like mad. As I said before, attacks having little functional variety anymore makes all of their attacks feel the same. There are some special attacks, like shockwaves, lots and lots of shockwaves, which you must guard or roll through. If you get hit by one you take no damage, but you get staggered for a few seconds. If you're the last party member standing, you're toast. Sometimes the boss will do something special like capturing a party member which you must free by attacking, or charge up for one powerful attack which can only be interrupted if you deal loads of damage within a small time limit, but these special moments do not happen as often as they should, which leaves the twenty or so bosses in the game feel incredibly samey.
The reason for this is again, that you deal with their attacks in the same way. The only thing which really sets a boss apart is how you deal damage to them. Which might involve breaking the boss' legs to stun him so you can strike his head, or the boss' weakpoint shifting between several positions, or the boss being one giant snake-like monster with loads of destructible parts, but I don't really think that really changes up how you play, it only has you choose some different targets.
The only exception to this is the Fire Dragon boss, who has four separate hitboxes for each of his legs which link to his main HP pool. The fun part here is that if you manage to hit multiple legs at once through an AoE attack, you can deal double or triple more damage. Cruxie's Dragon Blaze launches a large fireball which moves in a straight line but penetrates everything while dealing tons of damage, and getting it to hit multiple limbs at once made it incredibly effective in the fight. If the other bosses focused more on things like target prioritization through spawning grunts (which some do), trying to hit as many targets at once or anything else which would change up the base tactic of rolling around, building up SP, guarding when possible, and spamming skills, the game would be much better off.
It doesn't really help either that in Seven most bosses are comparatively way more HP bloated than in the previous games. While this could usually be solved through grinding or finding better gear, grinding levels in Seven really doesn't make bosses go down noticeably faster, probably because you also need to grind for three characters at once. The level/damage scaling isn't as crazy here, but then it rarely feels like you have ever gotten to a level where a boss fight feels reasonably long. The YouTube videos I've seen of boss fights going down at a brisk pace involve your party being overleveled for the current area to an incredibly crazy extent which would certainly have taken a ridiculous amount of grinding, even moreso than in the previous games. It doesn't help that bosses take longer to kill in Nightmare mode as well.
Boss fights in general feel way more drawn out. It takes much longer for you to die whereas the amount of hits you could take in Oath/Origin could be counted on two hands, but you also essentially have three HP bars for each of your party members, and you don't want any of them to die because they receive reduced XP if they do. Most bosses in Seven actually don't have much in the way of different phases aside from the Dragon bosses, which doesn't help make boss fights feel more exciting. Especially early and mid-game bosses will cycle through the same handful of attacks without any real change. Nightmare mode changes bosses to cycle through attacks more often and add some minor elements like homing projectiles and damaging spots on the ground to attacks, which honestly feels too minor and cheap to warrant a second playthrough.
Bosses also like to inflict status ailments during certain attacks, which are just annoying to deal with and add nothing but unnecessary punishment by freezing party members in place, inflicting poison, or preventing members from attacking. You can prevent this through rings which prevent a certain ailment, but each party member can only have one accessory equipped which I'd rather use for rings that boost damage and HP. Oath/Origin had this as well, but only for attacks which didn't deal a lot of damage on their own.
You can use healing potions in Seven now as opposed to healing only being possible through save statues and healing pick-ups on monster deaths, and quite frankly I'm thankful for that. Most of the boss fights are just tedious to deal with, so having healing potions to let me tank through for a bit is something I very much appreciate. The limit of healing items you can carry depends on the difficulty setting, and the higher-tier healing items are harder to find, so it's not like you can chug potions all the way through either.
Potions can also be synthesized through the new crafting system at any vendor, where you can find materials in the world and use it to craft gear or items. The things you can craft depend on how far you have progressed in the game, so there's no recipes or such to find. You can still buy items with gold as usual, with gold dropping from killed enemies. Though not every item is synthesizable. Materials are found through killing enemies and getting a good drop chance, or finding one of many spots to harvest a particular material from. Does Ys need this? I don't think so.
While powering through like normal will usually net you enough material to craft the most recent tier of gear for your party, some materials in particular have a rather rare drop chance, which in turn involves more grinding. Some materials can only be found through harvesting points, but once you harvested a point dry you need to wait before it regrows its material, which in turn involves more waiting if you need a particular material. This system doesn't add anything as much as it convolutes obtaining gear. Ys Seven originally being a PSP-exclusive, I have the idea that Falcom ran with this idea to attract the Monster Hunter audience, kind of explains why you're fighting giant monsters most of the time. I wish we had more human-sized bosses though. Aside from that particular one you're supposed to lose and might end up wasting too many healing items on until you figure that out. Said boss will also simply stop taking damage after his HP is halved, killing the illusion even further.
The general gear progression is also more similar to that of your run-of-the-mill JRPG. You go through the overworld or dungeon, kill enemies for gold, enter a new town, buy the newest tier of equipment, get out dungeoneering, find more gold, buy the rest of the equipment at the store, and then set off again towards a new town to repeat the process. I personally don't find this as exciting as the old equipment tiering in the previous games of which there were a handful of tiers, but progression then felt meaningful. You could feel the difference when you found a new weapon in the old games. Here I could barely feel the increase in DPS when I found a better weapon. It'd be a more interesting system if weapons had their own unique effects, but as it stands they're all just flat damage upgrades.
Particularly the final dungeon is atrocious with the required mats. If you want to craft the final and strongest tier of armor for each party member, you'll have to grind a fuckton because the mat required has a rather low drop chance. You can only find one stack, but at most you'll be able to craft only one of the strongest weapons, and some of the strongest armor. This shit is crossing the line.
Now you might ask: "Durandal, you know you don't have to optimize every single one of the seven party members, right?" That's a good question, let's have the final boss answer it for me: "YOU HAVE TO FIGHT ME WITH ALL SEVEN PARTY MEMBERS, IF ONE IS UNDERLEVELED, YOU'RE SCREWED". Meaning you can't ignore any party member for the whole game, meaning you need to constantly keep them leveled, find the right gear, and train their skills to a useful degree if you don't want the final boss to be a massive pain in the ass. Of course you don't know this at first, I found that out the hard way on my first playthrough, so there's my warning to all of you. Keep all your party members properly geared and leveled. You don't really have a choice but to be optimal here. And that involves constantly switching party members, training rings, and EXP boosting rings around. Joy...
Each party member has their own basic attack combo, attack type, set of Skills, an EXTRA attack, and some kind of passive ability. Party composition and utilizing different party members is forced through a resistance system where an enemy can be resistant to all attack types where two of your members are worthless against that enemy aside from one. It means you can't really go wrong in party composition as long as you have each type covered, but on the other hand such a Match-3 system is a rather hamfisted way of forcing you to use all party members rather than picking one to suit the current situation. I just don't want to play as any of the strike-type characters because their basic combo is slow as molasses.
Passive abilities range from stuff like more gold, more EXP, more damage dealt, less damage received, and 'accuracy'? God knows what accuracy actually does, but it's Adol's passive and you can't switch out Adol as per JRPG tradition where the main character must always be in the party.
What irks me the most is that party members can take damage when I'm not controlling them, albeit reduced. My party members have no business taking damage for any reason but me making a mistake. I still have to switch to them eventually during a fight and I don't want to deal with damage I could not prevent just because the ally AI decided to be a waste of space. The AI is equally as useless at dealing damage, where they just kind of whack the boss for barely any damage and only use skills when you do.
The fun things about parties in games is cooperation and coordination between members, but here they might as well be three different styles you switch between during combat. You can't tell your party members to do something useful like in Dragon's Dogma. In that game your allies would grab enemies for you to finish off, cast buffs and healing spells, take enemy attention away from you, and so on. The only really helpful thing the AI does here is harvest items alongside you, as long as there is no enemy around the edge of the screen which they will always prioritize. Ys Seven has a party system but the party itself is poorly utilized, as the different playstyles your party members offer aren't that wildly different. Your party members are just different HP bars with a somewhat different moveset. I don't see why there needed to be a party in the first place, and I think that if you were able to play solo as Adol, not that much would change, really.
Each party member also has several stat attributes like STR, DEF, AGL, and DEX. STR and DEF are self explanatory, whereas AGL determines your dodge chance and DEX determines your crit chance? I'm not entirely sure. What I'm also not sure about is why an action RPG needs to have dodge chance when you already have a dodge and guard move. STR and DEF is all you really need. The game is becoming too much of a RPG in places it never needed to be, and the action suffers for it.
Ys Seven has way too much dialogue than it should, and most of it is incredibly generic, as if I was playing some other non-descript JRPG. You're the chosen one, the king sends you on an errand to visit all the elemental-themed villages, the elites are douchebags, an apocalypse threatens everything, lost civilizations, hope will triumph despair, the first party member you get is the nota bene princess from Dragon Quest IV, red-haired tomboy with bow and arrow and all. Ys may have been a progenitor for Japanese role-playing games, but the scenarios in previous games were a lot more creative than the shit here, even if it had some of the aforementioned clichés. They had a classic feel to them which this game lacks.
There's some TitS-style worldbuilding and background NPCs, though I just can't really get invested into the world as much because I want to go on an adventure. Most of the themes presented feel hamfisted and are kind of difficult to take serious because of the scale involved, nor do they really impact the main plot. All of Altago is just three villages and a city? Suuuure... Thankfully the function exists to hold down the X button which lets you fast-forward through any dialogue or cutscene at a 16X speed so you can skip all that shit, else this post would have been several paragraphs longer.
Halfway through the game the story decides you should backtrack through the whole overworld again while taking away your fast teleport points. That's lazy. The overworld won't even change that much. Instead of redesigning all the overworld enemy 'encounters', the overworld is instead roamed by all the same low-level enemies from the start, just with some higher-level tough enemies thrown in here and there. That's lazy.
Honestly, I don't have a lot of praise for Ys Seven beyond its presentation and bubble-wrap feeling for its combat. It's nowhere as solid as the previous games and is a step down gameplay-wise no matter how you look at it. Most of the challenge comes from tests of endurance, and none of it compares to the nerve-wracking bosses of Oath/Origin. Ys games have never been the deepest, though they always made good use of their simplicity. I honestly don't know what they were thinking here or how they intended to explore whatever gameplay concepts they had in mind for Seven. The worst Zelda games have better dungeon design than Ys Seven, next to zero thought is put into enemy encounter design, all bosses are felled in the same way, and the new combat system is a poor and inadequate replacement for the previous games. I guess it works as a straightforward ARPG, but it's just too poorly thought out in too many key areas that playing it is an absolute bore. I wish I hadn't bought this game. Hopefully Memories of Celceta and 8 managed to improve this system somewhat.
Jumping is gone, instead you roll around like it's Dark Souls if you want to dodge anything, so there's little platforming to speak of. You now control three party members, of which you directly control one with the others being controlled by the AI. Cycling through party members is easy and done with little fuss. The camera is still solid and doesn't get in the way at all. The traditional bubble-wrap feeling for combat does hold true in Seven. You can now carry healing items around again, and draughts are pretty much gone.
The new combat system revolves around skills, which are special attacks that deal more damage than regular attacks but also have some other uses on occasion, like launching enemies in the air, performing AoE attacks, aerial attacks, that sort of thing. Each character has about twenty of them, which you unlock by finding a weapon which has that skill embedded, and then using the skill often enough to the point where it levels up so you can select it at any time without having to equip a particular weapon. Each skill consumes SP, and you gain SP by dealing damage or performing Charge Attacks by holding down the basic attack button and then releasing it. Each character has about twenty skills, but you can only equip four per character at once, and most of them are superfluous to begin with.
Generally speaking, you'll be using the strongest AoE attacks which you know are the strongest because they cost more SP. Some skills have their particular uses like launching enemies, but whether enemies are launchable to begin with seems to be entirely enemy-dependent. Since you can only have four equipped at a time, the game can't really be designed around utilizing the quirks of a particular skill. A lot of skills feel like they do the same thing, largely because damage is all that matters. There's not a whole lot of comboability between skills to speak of given how irregular enemy stagger is and skills all mostly coming down to just dealing damage. Some skills are simply improved versions of existing skills. But the biggest problem is that you have zero idea of what a skill actually does aside from its given description. You don't know how much damage it deals, what its stun value is, or any other property which would make this skill in particular worth using over others.
What's worse is the absurd amount of grinding required to upgrade these skills. Each skill can be upgraded to LV10, and this is done by simply using a skill, which grants you 1 EXP per usage. For every skill level-up, your skill will deal 10% more damage. That's exciting. However, the level up requirements for the higher levels can range somewhere up to 100-200EXP, which is absolutely ridiculous for high SP-cost skills. You don't get more EXP if you hit multiple enemies with the same skill, which is rather contradictory since that would make the most efficient way of grinding EXP for your levels to have skills damage only one enemy instead of all nearby enemies so that you have more opportunity to use your charge attack to build up more SP to use skills more often, which you can't do if you already killed everything. Training Rings exist to help speed up skill upgrading exponentially by giving you one or more EXP per skill usage, however they are very rare.
When you perform a skill and there's still an enemy around, your party members will also perform a random skill which in turn also generates EXP for their skills, so you don't need to grind separately for each character. What's rather annoying is that these skills are picked at random for party members. You can choose to allow which skills get randomly picked or not, but it's still not ideal unless you want to train a skill in particular but don't want to constantly disallow or allow every skill and make your party members a lot less versatile. Even more annoying is that if you use a skill which uses 50SP, your party members will not use a 50SP skill of their own. They can, but they can't use a skill with a higher SP cost than for the one you just used (aside from an invisible and incomprehensible margin given the inconsistently rounded SP costs where some characters have skills which require 7 SP and 12 SP but most characters have SP costs divisible by 5). Party members won't follow up a 50SP attack with two 25SP attacks either (I'm not particularly sure about this one), so you're given the impression that you're just wasting SP.
This could have been partially fixed. If you used a skill bound to Square, all your party members would use their skills bound at Square provided the SP cost matches. This way you could string skills from each character into a combo and gain more control over what your party members do. Sometimes I could manage to juggle some enemies if my teammates would use the skills I wanted.
The strong reliance on skills also puts a strong reliance on Charge Attacks, which after a couple of minutes puts a massive strain on your thumb when you're holding your charge but are also trying to dodge at the same time. Anyone who has played Megaman will know what I'm talking about. There's barely any reason to use the basic attacks instead of a Charge Attack, but there's also no reason why an attack you always want to be ready even needs to be tied to a button-hold input. There's no reason why Charge Attacks can't automatically charge up as long as you are not attacking. Having to not attack in order to perform more Charge Attacks isn't particularly engaging, especially if you use faster ranged characters like Aisha to generate SP quickly and safely from a distance.
It feels like you have to Charge Attack everything. Enemies also leave corpses behind on death which you can beat for more materials and SP, but as usual performing a Charge Attack on the corpse nets the most SP. Why you can't get the SP amount of performing a normal Charge Attack by just attacking the corpse normally as opposed to having to waste time charging your attack first before striking a helpless corpse is beyond me. I see no reason why Charge Attacks can't be done away with in favor of increasing the base SP gain for normal attacks. At least mashing buttons would be preferable.
For the first part of the game, the farm for SP is very real, especially on Nightmare difficulty. Nightmare difficulty reduces the amount of SP gain (amongst gold, character EXP, and other things), so you'd get about six per Charge Attack. Raising your SP from 0 to the maximum of 100 would take 17 Charge Attacks, which is fucking ridiculous. Thankfully, after the Air Village, you receive an upgrade which doubles the amount of SP gained per Charge Attack on top of halving the time required for a Charge Attack to charge. Lo and behold, the game suddenly plays a lot smoother. I do not understand this mentality of locking basic quality of life features behind upgrades found much later into the story.
On the whole the skill system actually slows everything down. You constantly need to check which skills you want to train, and constantly juggle Training Rings when switching out party members to train their skills as well. It feels less like you're using the most suitable skill at any given time, but more like you're training them so they might be useful later on. Skills don't add anything the same way the elemental abilities did in Oath/Origin where they also doubled as platforming tools and had multiple uses beyond being a super move which dealt more damage. In Seven it's just more for the sake of more. If skills were part of a gradually expanding moveset with the game actually challenging you on that, then it might have been a lot more interesting, but as it stands whatever new mechanics Seven brings to the table are shallow on their own and barely explored at that.
Each character also has their own EXTRA Skill, a powerful ability which deals whopping damage, boosts damage, turns you invincible, and so on. Generally speaking I found myself going for the damage-dealing EXTRAs because I had the most confidence in them being the most effective kind of attacks. What each EXTRA does you can only find out through experimentation. There's no description at all detailing what an EXTRA does, how much damage it deals, what kind of bonuses it grants, you just have to kind of guess or look up information online. Each EXTRA skill will also get an upgrade twice per character, but what that upgrade does is also a wild guess. The name of the EXTRA gets changed and the animation for the attack is somewhat different, but that's it really. I wouldn't be able to tell if your EXTRA then gets a damage upgrade of some kind.
This also poses a problem when you have to decide which EXTRA of your current three active party members to use, especially if they're all of the damage-dealing kind. I just figured that I'd let the member with the highest strength stat use their EXTRA. That might probably deal the most damage. A more interesting solution for this problem would be that whenever you perform an EXTRA attack, that it would get augmented with bonuses similar to the EXTRA attacks of your currently active party members, so you could mix and match and decide whether you want your EXTRA to deal even more damage, or to deal more stun, or to turn yourself invincible, and so on.
You can use your EXTRA skill when your EXTRA gauge is full, which is filled up by performing regular skills (where higher-cost skills generate more EXTRA). A better alternative to filling up your EXTRA gauge is to perform Flash Guards. Aside in the options menu in the PC port, Flash Guards are never mentioned in-game, though they can speed up the game tremendously. On my first playthrough on Normal difficulty, I never even knew they existed until I looked up some gameplay footage on YouTube. If you hit L+R at the right time (why can't the FG input just be one button?), you can parry practically every kind of attack. If you pull this off successfully, you will gain a good amount of SP and some EXTRA as a reward, but you'll also receive a temporary damage bonus. So it's always recommended to Flash Guard before performing an EXTRA skill for maximum damage. But if you fuck up your timing and get hit during the recovery animation after a Flash Guard, you'll be the one receiving bonus damage and a good knockback.
Sounds cool, right? Well, the problem with an ability which lets you block any attack from any position is that it reduces each attack to being the same matter of timing. Homing projectiles? Flash Guard at the right time. Whirlwinds? Flash Guard at the right time. Ramming enemies? Flash Guard at the right time. The whole arena being covered in lava? Flash Guard at the right time. This effectively kills a large part of the variety in enemy attacks because you can deal with most of them in the same way.
For more persistent attacks like whirlwinds, Flash Guards can be chained and extended by repeatedly mashing the Flash Guard input, which in turn also grants you more EXTRA depending on how hard you mash, though I object at button mashing being any kind of pedigree for skill. Another problem is the slowdown incurred by whenever you successfully execute a Flash Guard, probably to emphasize the impact. So you're stuck in the eye of a whirlwind and you have no choice but to keep mashing Flash Guard because otherwise you're bound to take (bonus) damage, the mashing then taking forever until the whirlwind stops. This kills the fingers.
The damage boost from Flash Guarding does for some reason not carry over between party members. So you could Flash Guard with one member and then switch to another whose EXTRA attack you'd rather perform instead, but the bonus will be canceled entirely. Conversely, you could Flash Guard and perform an EXTRA attack immediately afterwards while enjoying your damage bonus and then switch to another member because other members can attack freely while the previous member is peforming his EXTRA and freezing the boss in place, but the damage bonus will cancel the moment you switch between members. So you'll have to stick to watching your EXTRA attack animation play out if you want to enjoy the full extent of the damage bonus.
The timing for the Flash Guard is strict enough to prevent everyone from being able to do it mindlessly, but then the telegraphs for some attacks are rather unclear. All the cool attacks the bosses may throw at you have their purpose and uniqueness nullified because of this universal parry. But you're encouraged to do so for that damage bonus and the bonus SP/EXTRA. The game would be better off if the Flash Guard slowdown was gone and Flash Guards could only be chained together at a fixed interval rather than by how fast you can mash.
There is actually one boss very early in the game, a giant boar, which pushes the shit in players trying to mash Flash Guard. One particular attack of the boss involves the boss leaping at you three times in a row. If you Flash Guard the first leap and keep mashing for more EXTRA, the second leap will hit you guaranteed unless you anticipate it properly again, because the time interval between leaps is large enough that if you are mashing, you'll be in the recovery animation for your Flash Guard by the moment the boss hits you with this second/third leap and get hit hard. You actually have to mind the timing here somewhat. Unfortunately this isn't really the case for most other bosses in the game where you shouldn't mash too hard.
There's also a stun gauge on each enemy, where if you hit an enemy enough times regardless of actual damage dealt, said enemy will enter a stunned state where he will not attack, and any attacks against it in this state will have their SP gain multiplied, so you could use that moment to fully stack up on SP. Some characters like Dogi (and Geis I feel) will have a higher stun value applied for each attack, and there's also equipment which boosts said value.
It gives you a breather moment during boss battles, but I don't really see the point of the whole system as you're not really encouraged to take advantage of it. For SP gain you just use charge attacks with ranged characters, perform skills with the strongest guy in your party, and repeat. There's no real point to aim for stunning a boss. You're usually bound to stun a boss at least once regardless of what you do. For basic enemies it's kind of pointless because they die fast enough before the stun gauge can even be filled up in the first place.
The lack of platforming and challenging enemy design especially caused dungeon variety to take a massive hit, as they're little more than enemy gauntlets with barebones key/lock puzzles. A large part of the Air Sanctum is just one big linear stretch for crying out loud. The only standout things from dungeons in Seven are some obstacles which require some really simple platforming to get past, or a key item you have to find later on in order to get past a certain obstacle. You might be thinking that it's like a Metroidvania where you find abilities which change the way how you can approach an entire dungeon, but in Seven all these obstacles come down to are equipping the right item and then moving forwards.
For spikes in the ground, you just equip the right boots and walk forward. For giant air propellers you just equip the cape and let yourself fly upwards. For walking on lava you just equip the ice crystal. There's really nothing much to it than equipping the right item for the situation which is done through a menu that pauses the game, so there's no real challenge to it, nor can it be qualified as a good puzzle. There's simply not much to challenge on the front of equipping the right item. There are some secrets which require that you use said items to get to a certain platform in a special way, but these are too simple and borderline insulting for this direction in dungeon design to be even warranted. The one-off usage of these key items and the uneven opportunities for them to be used only makes them come off as gimmicky.
It's only too late in the game that the dungeon layouts become somewhat complex and properly challenge your navigational abilities somewhat, however that's largely nullified by the fact that you have a mini-map which always shows you the layout of the area you're currently in. There's no real point to exploration when a map can always show you where you haven't been yet and where you need to go next.
But the decline in the combat and movement is especially felt in the boss battles, most of which are utterly boring. Depending on how you play, you're either constantly Flash Guarding everything before counterattacking or mashing the dodgeroll button like mad. As I said before, attacks having little functional variety anymore makes all of their attacks feel the same. There are some special attacks, like shockwaves, lots and lots of shockwaves, which you must guard or roll through. If you get hit by one you take no damage, but you get staggered for a few seconds. If you're the last party member standing, you're toast. Sometimes the boss will do something special like capturing a party member which you must free by attacking, or charge up for one powerful attack which can only be interrupted if you deal loads of damage within a small time limit, but these special moments do not happen as often as they should, which leaves the twenty or so bosses in the game feel incredibly samey.
The reason for this is again, that you deal with their attacks in the same way. The only thing which really sets a boss apart is how you deal damage to them. Which might involve breaking the boss' legs to stun him so you can strike his head, or the boss' weakpoint shifting between several positions, or the boss being one giant snake-like monster with loads of destructible parts, but I don't really think that really changes up how you play, it only has you choose some different targets.
The only exception to this is the Fire Dragon boss, who has four separate hitboxes for each of his legs which link to his main HP pool. The fun part here is that if you manage to hit multiple legs at once through an AoE attack, you can deal double or triple more damage. Cruxie's Dragon Blaze launches a large fireball which moves in a straight line but penetrates everything while dealing tons of damage, and getting it to hit multiple limbs at once made it incredibly effective in the fight. If the other bosses focused more on things like target prioritization through spawning grunts (which some do), trying to hit as many targets at once or anything else which would change up the base tactic of rolling around, building up SP, guarding when possible, and spamming skills, the game would be much better off.
It doesn't really help either that in Seven most bosses are comparatively way more HP bloated than in the previous games. While this could usually be solved through grinding or finding better gear, grinding levels in Seven really doesn't make bosses go down noticeably faster, probably because you also need to grind for three characters at once. The level/damage scaling isn't as crazy here, but then it rarely feels like you have ever gotten to a level where a boss fight feels reasonably long. The YouTube videos I've seen of boss fights going down at a brisk pace involve your party being overleveled for the current area to an incredibly crazy extent which would certainly have taken a ridiculous amount of grinding, even moreso than in the previous games. It doesn't help that bosses take longer to kill in Nightmare mode as well.
Boss fights in general feel way more drawn out. It takes much longer for you to die whereas the amount of hits you could take in Oath/Origin could be counted on two hands, but you also essentially have three HP bars for each of your party members, and you don't want any of them to die because they receive reduced XP if they do. Most bosses in Seven actually don't have much in the way of different phases aside from the Dragon bosses, which doesn't help make boss fights feel more exciting. Especially early and mid-game bosses will cycle through the same handful of attacks without any real change. Nightmare mode changes bosses to cycle through attacks more often and add some minor elements like homing projectiles and damaging spots on the ground to attacks, which honestly feels too minor and cheap to warrant a second playthrough.
Bosses also like to inflict status ailments during certain attacks, which are just annoying to deal with and add nothing but unnecessary punishment by freezing party members in place, inflicting poison, or preventing members from attacking. You can prevent this through rings which prevent a certain ailment, but each party member can only have one accessory equipped which I'd rather use for rings that boost damage and HP. Oath/Origin had this as well, but only for attacks which didn't deal a lot of damage on their own.
You can use healing potions in Seven now as opposed to healing only being possible through save statues and healing pick-ups on monster deaths, and quite frankly I'm thankful for that. Most of the boss fights are just tedious to deal with, so having healing potions to let me tank through for a bit is something I very much appreciate. The limit of healing items you can carry depends on the difficulty setting, and the higher-tier healing items are harder to find, so it's not like you can chug potions all the way through either.
Potions can also be synthesized through the new crafting system at any vendor, where you can find materials in the world and use it to craft gear or items. The things you can craft depend on how far you have progressed in the game, so there's no recipes or such to find. You can still buy items with gold as usual, with gold dropping from killed enemies. Though not every item is synthesizable. Materials are found through killing enemies and getting a good drop chance, or finding one of many spots to harvest a particular material from. Does Ys need this? I don't think so.
While powering through like normal will usually net you enough material to craft the most recent tier of gear for your party, some materials in particular have a rather rare drop chance, which in turn involves more grinding. Some materials can only be found through harvesting points, but once you harvested a point dry you need to wait before it regrows its material, which in turn involves more waiting if you need a particular material. This system doesn't add anything as much as it convolutes obtaining gear. Ys Seven originally being a PSP-exclusive, I have the idea that Falcom ran with this idea to attract the Monster Hunter audience, kind of explains why you're fighting giant monsters most of the time. I wish we had more human-sized bosses though. Aside from that particular one you're supposed to lose and might end up wasting too many healing items on until you figure that out. Said boss will also simply stop taking damage after his HP is halved, killing the illusion even further.
The general gear progression is also more similar to that of your run-of-the-mill JRPG. You go through the overworld or dungeon, kill enemies for gold, enter a new town, buy the newest tier of equipment, get out dungeoneering, find more gold, buy the rest of the equipment at the store, and then set off again towards a new town to repeat the process. I personally don't find this as exciting as the old equipment tiering in the previous games of which there were a handful of tiers, but progression then felt meaningful. You could feel the difference when you found a new weapon in the old games. Here I could barely feel the increase in DPS when I found a better weapon. It'd be a more interesting system if weapons had their own unique effects, but as it stands they're all just flat damage upgrades.
Particularly the final dungeon is atrocious with the required mats. If you want to craft the final and strongest tier of armor for each party member, you'll have to grind a fuckton because the mat required has a rather low drop chance. You can only find one stack, but at most you'll be able to craft only one of the strongest weapons, and some of the strongest armor. This shit is crossing the line.
Now you might ask: "Durandal, you know you don't have to optimize every single one of the seven party members, right?" That's a good question, let's have the final boss answer it for me: "YOU HAVE TO FIGHT ME WITH ALL SEVEN PARTY MEMBERS, IF ONE IS UNDERLEVELED, YOU'RE SCREWED". Meaning you can't ignore any party member for the whole game, meaning you need to constantly keep them leveled, find the right gear, and train their skills to a useful degree if you don't want the final boss to be a massive pain in the ass. Of course you don't know this at first, I found that out the hard way on my first playthrough, so there's my warning to all of you. Keep all your party members properly geared and leveled. You don't really have a choice but to be optimal here. And that involves constantly switching party members, training rings, and EXP boosting rings around. Joy...
Each party member has their own basic attack combo, attack type, set of Skills, an EXTRA attack, and some kind of passive ability. Party composition and utilizing different party members is forced through a resistance system where an enemy can be resistant to all attack types where two of your members are worthless against that enemy aside from one. It means you can't really go wrong in party composition as long as you have each type covered, but on the other hand such a Match-3 system is a rather hamfisted way of forcing you to use all party members rather than picking one to suit the current situation. I just don't want to play as any of the strike-type characters because their basic combo is slow as molasses.
Passive abilities range from stuff like more gold, more EXP, more damage dealt, less damage received, and 'accuracy'? God knows what accuracy actually does, but it's Adol's passive and you can't switch out Adol as per JRPG tradition where the main character must always be in the party.
What irks me the most is that party members can take damage when I'm not controlling them, albeit reduced. My party members have no business taking damage for any reason but me making a mistake. I still have to switch to them eventually during a fight and I don't want to deal with damage I could not prevent just because the ally AI decided to be a waste of space. The AI is equally as useless at dealing damage, where they just kind of whack the boss for barely any damage and only use skills when you do.
The fun things about parties in games is cooperation and coordination between members, but here they might as well be three different styles you switch between during combat. You can't tell your party members to do something useful like in Dragon's Dogma. In that game your allies would grab enemies for you to finish off, cast buffs and healing spells, take enemy attention away from you, and so on. The only really helpful thing the AI does here is harvest items alongside you, as long as there is no enemy around the edge of the screen which they will always prioritize. Ys Seven has a party system but the party itself is poorly utilized, as the different playstyles your party members offer aren't that wildly different. Your party members are just different HP bars with a somewhat different moveset. I don't see why there needed to be a party in the first place, and I think that if you were able to play solo as Adol, not that much would change, really.
Each party member also has several stat attributes like STR, DEF, AGL, and DEX. STR and DEF are self explanatory, whereas AGL determines your dodge chance and DEX determines your crit chance? I'm not entirely sure. What I'm also not sure about is why an action RPG needs to have dodge chance when you already have a dodge and guard move. STR and DEF is all you really need. The game is becoming too much of a RPG in places it never needed to be, and the action suffers for it.
Ys Seven has way too much dialogue than it should, and most of it is incredibly generic, as if I was playing some other non-descript JRPG. You're the chosen one, the king sends you on an errand to visit all the elemental-themed villages, the elites are douchebags, an apocalypse threatens everything, lost civilizations, hope will triumph despair, the first party member you get is the nota bene princess from Dragon Quest IV, red-haired tomboy with bow and arrow and all. Ys may have been a progenitor for Japanese role-playing games, but the scenarios in previous games were a lot more creative than the shit here, even if it had some of the aforementioned clichés. They had a classic feel to them which this game lacks.
There's some TitS-style worldbuilding and background NPCs, though I just can't really get invested into the world as much because I want to go on an adventure. Most of the themes presented feel hamfisted and are kind of difficult to take serious because of the scale involved, nor do they really impact the main plot. All of Altago is just three villages and a city? Suuuure... Thankfully the function exists to hold down the X button which lets you fast-forward through any dialogue or cutscene at a 16X speed so you can skip all that shit, else this post would have been several paragraphs longer.
Halfway through the game the story decides you should backtrack through the whole overworld again while taking away your fast teleport points. That's lazy. The overworld won't even change that much. Instead of redesigning all the overworld enemy 'encounters', the overworld is instead roamed by all the same low-level enemies from the start, just with some higher-level tough enemies thrown in here and there. That's lazy.
Honestly, I don't have a lot of praise for Ys Seven beyond its presentation and bubble-wrap feeling for its combat. It's nowhere as solid as the previous games and is a step down gameplay-wise no matter how you look at it. Most of the challenge comes from tests of endurance, and none of it compares to the nerve-wracking bosses of Oath/Origin. Ys games have never been the deepest, though they always made good use of their simplicity. I honestly don't know what they were thinking here or how they intended to explore whatever gameplay concepts they had in mind for Seven. The worst Zelda games have better dungeon design than Ys Seven, next to zero thought is put into enemy encounter design, all bosses are felled in the same way, and the new combat system is a poor and inadequate replacement for the previous games. I guess it works as a straightforward ARPG, but it's just too poorly thought out in too many key areas that playing it is an absolute bore. I wish I hadn't bought this game. Hopefully Memories of Celceta and 8 managed to improve this system somewhat.
Xyga wrote:Liar. I've known you only from latexmachomen.com and pantysniffers.org forums.chum wrote:the thing is that we actually go way back and have known each other on multiple websites, first clashing in a Naruto forum.
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drunkninja24
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Re: FALCOM Thread
I will say this even though I did enjoy Ys Seven, that final boss fight was definitely some BS because of that, I just toughed it out and flash guarded instead of trying to go and level up my less used characters lol, was still tedious, would've highly preferred the fight just letting you use your regular party and going through the different phases with them.Durandal wrote: Now you might ask: "Durandal, you know you don't have to optimize every single one of the seven party members, right?" That's a good question, let's have the final boss answer it for me: "YOU HAVE TO FIGHT ME WITH ALL SEVEN PARTY MEMBERS, IF ONE IS UNDERLEVELED, YOU'RE SCREWED". Meaning you can't ignore any party member for the whole game, meaning you need to constantly keep them leveled, find the right gear, and train their skills to a useful degree if you don't want the final boss to be a massive pain in the ass. Of course you don't know this at first, I found that out the hard way on my first playthrough, so there's my warning to all of you. Keep all your party members properly geared and leveled. You don't really have a choice but to be optimal here. And that involves constantly switching party members, training rings, and EXP boosting rings around. Joy...
Re: FALCOM Thread
I played the Hell out of Ys Seven when it was first released - and then around 2 years ago purchased it again on a PSN sale and partially played through on Vita. At some point during that run I thought to myself that I didn't remember there being so much grindy BS... yes with the skill spam and item collecting.
Just to mention a few things though - for AI character skills, isn't it possible to either bind only a single button and leave the others unbound, or to bind the same skill to all 4 buttons?
I haven't played Nightmare mode but I imagine flash guard becomes much more important...
Just to mention a few things though - for AI character skills, isn't it possible to either bind only a single button and leave the others unbound, or to bind the same skill to all 4 buttons?
I haven't played Nightmare mode but I imagine flash guard becomes much more important...
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FinalBaton
- Posts: 4461
- Joined: Sun Mar 08, 2015 10:38 pm
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Re: FALCOM Thread
I started Ys Seven and after a couple hours (maybe 6-8 hours) I stopped playing. And didn't go back to it ever again.
I still want to finish it though. Sometime I'll pick it up again and clear it
I wasn't using the flash guard much though(while I was using the heck outta it(well, Flash Evade to be exact) in Celceta, and loved what it brought to combat) so whenever I pick Seven back up again, I'll had Flash Guard to my moveset for sure
I still want to finish it though. Sometime I'll pick it up again and clear it
I wasn't using the flash guard much though(while I was using the heck outta it(well, Flash Evade to be exact) in Celceta, and loved what it brought to combat) so whenever I pick Seven back up again, I'll had Flash Guard to my moveset for sure
-FM Synth & Black Metal-
Re: FALCOM Thread
Pretty much all of this is also true for Memories of Celceta and Ys VIII. I have no idea why Falcom keeps building on this obviously flawed concept. At least lower the number of skills to a set of four, drop the AI controlled partners, and get rid of healing items except maybe from a set small number that can be recharged at a town. That alone would be an enormous improvement.Durandal wrote:(giga mega post)
Ys VIII does the latter with bottles, but then breaks it again by including a bunch of other items that heal you, as well as a plethora of meals that can be cooked in infinite amounts.
To be honest... as much as an Ys fan as I am, I don't think the series really benefits at all from a silent mary sue protagonist who is immediately loved by everyone.Durandal wrote:I'm not too keen on this new party system, It kind of diminishes the legend of Adol Christin and the reputation he built up in past games by being a badass all on his own with the help of his sidekick Dogi, by changing it into 'the legend of Adol Christin and more pals'.
Having talkative characters with actual personality and history is one of the best things Ys Origin did, on the storytelling side of things.
Re: FALCOM Thread
As someone who really likes Seven (it's my third favorite modern Ys game, would be my second favorite were it not for that obnoxious material-grind that's mandatory before fighting the final boss), I have to defend it a bit.
The key to the party system is to think of it like a battery character/meter-using character team in Marvel. The faster-attacking characters (Aisha, Elk) build SP faster, so you'll want to use them for your basic attacks (there's a very good reason why, in the final boss battle, they pair Elk with Mishera and Aisha with Geis). Because using skills is the fastest way to fill your gauge for your ultimate attacks, it's *not* a given that you're going to want to use your biggest/most-expensive specials; in particular, a lot of Aisha's multi-hit linear specials are relatively cheap and very good for building up ultra gauge. As such, you need to take into consideration what you're fighting, and what they're weak to. Is this something you can build ultimate gauge on well with their weaknesses, or do you want to sacrifice some gauge building to use skills from a slower-building but heavier-hitting character to match damage types efficiently? This also adds an additional element to choosing what order you'll kill enemies in (Dogi and Cruxie have garbage normal attacks but amazing specials, so you'll want to go after blunt-weak enemies when you've got some gauge to blow; Elk has weak specials, but his normal attacks are super-fast and build gauge like crazy, so if he's in your party, you'll want to go after slash-enemies when your gauge is low and have Mishera in your party to use her powerful spells on pierce-weak enemies; etc). If you understand how this works and play accordingly, you'll find that skill upgrades basically take care of themselves, even without training rings.
Charge attacks aren't really great for building SP. Opening with a charge attack and following through with a normal combo is a better way of building SP for most characters, especially the fast ones (that is, the ones whose normal attacks you should be using).
Also, characters you aren't using auto-level as long as they're not KO'd, so underleveled characters shouldn't be a problem on the final boss. Materials ARE a problem, though, and that stupid endgame material grind is the game's biggest pratfall.
I personally really love the second-half's "turn off the teleport" section. Taking new paths through the overworld is a great way to re-introduce the feeling of exploration that inevitably gets lost about a third of the way through any Zelda-like.
The key to the party system is to think of it like a battery character/meter-using character team in Marvel. The faster-attacking characters (Aisha, Elk) build SP faster, so you'll want to use them for your basic attacks (there's a very good reason why, in the final boss battle, they pair Elk with Mishera and Aisha with Geis). Because using skills is the fastest way to fill your gauge for your ultimate attacks, it's *not* a given that you're going to want to use your biggest/most-expensive specials; in particular, a lot of Aisha's multi-hit linear specials are relatively cheap and very good for building up ultra gauge. As such, you need to take into consideration what you're fighting, and what they're weak to. Is this something you can build ultimate gauge on well with their weaknesses, or do you want to sacrifice some gauge building to use skills from a slower-building but heavier-hitting character to match damage types efficiently? This also adds an additional element to choosing what order you'll kill enemies in (Dogi and Cruxie have garbage normal attacks but amazing specials, so you'll want to go after blunt-weak enemies when you've got some gauge to blow; Elk has weak specials, but his normal attacks are super-fast and build gauge like crazy, so if he's in your party, you'll want to go after slash-enemies when your gauge is low and have Mishera in your party to use her powerful spells on pierce-weak enemies; etc). If you understand how this works and play accordingly, you'll find that skill upgrades basically take care of themselves, even without training rings.
Charge attacks aren't really great for building SP. Opening with a charge attack and following through with a normal combo is a better way of building SP for most characters, especially the fast ones (that is, the ones whose normal attacks you should be using).
Also, characters you aren't using auto-level as long as they're not KO'd, so underleveled characters shouldn't be a problem on the final boss. Materials ARE a problem, though, and that stupid endgame material grind is the game's biggest pratfall.
I personally really love the second-half's "turn off the teleport" section. Taking new paths through the overworld is a great way to re-introduce the feeling of exploration that inevitably gets lost about a third of the way through any Zelda-like.
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FinalBaton
- Posts: 4461
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Re: FALCOM Thread
been playing ys origin the past couple of days and i really want to enjoy it, but it seems to suffer from the same thing i didn't like about oath in felghana (which is the only other ys game i've played), which is you can be fighting a boss and doing like 1-3 damage per hit and it just makes everything a tedious marathon so you go away and grind two levels and come back and your damage is way higher and the fight is easy.
i'm only playing on normal difficulty, currently i'm fighting gelady and i figure you need to use a charged whirlwind to get the guys hands off, then hit whatever weak point but my charged, max level, whirlwind does basically no damage to him. when i knock one hand off then start working on the second one, he respawns his first hand before i can knock the second one off. so i switched to using the charged firesword skill which does a bit more damage and i manage to get both his hands off but then i do basically no damage to his head by the time he respawns his hands. it's just tedious. so after a bunch of attempts i check out a youtube video just in case i'm missing something.
https://youtu.be/OMiRiT8WRbE
this guy knocks the guys hand off in one rotation of spamming normal attacks and charged whirlwind.............
i'm only playing on normal difficulty, currently i'm fighting gelady and i figure you need to use a charged whirlwind to get the guys hands off, then hit whatever weak point but my charged, max level, whirlwind does basically no damage to him. when i knock one hand off then start working on the second one, he respawns his first hand before i can knock the second one off. so i switched to using the charged firesword skill which does a bit more damage and i manage to get both his hands off but then i do basically no damage to his head by the time he respawns his hands. it's just tedious. so after a bunch of attempts i check out a youtube video just in case i'm missing something.
https://youtu.be/OMiRiT8WRbE
this guy knocks the guys hand off in one rotation of spamming normal attacks and charged whirlwind.............
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Chaos Phoenixma
- Posts: 1304
- Joined: Thu Jan 06, 2011 7:12 pm
Re: FALCOM Thread
IIRC, most of those no damage vids are a bit overleveled for what you're expected. Of course, it still can be a bit impressive occasionally since there is some hard to dodge things in those fights.
Actually, checking the vid compared to a time attack vid, he has less health, so he is a bit underleveled, at least for that one. Time Attack does not have blessings or the HP boosting items used, while the no damage vid is in standard story mode and would.
But did you find the Cleria Ore for each area and upgrade your weapon as much as possible. That might be why you're doing so little damage since the weapon upgrades are a bit more important in Origin. Also, the boss is level 24, so it's expected to be at least that much, but it is possible a little lower than that. Each of the main area bosses is +8 to the expected level to be at for Origin, so level 8 for first, 16 for second, and so on.
Also, here's one from Time Attack. Unlike the no damage, this one intentionally takes damage in order to charge boost faster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8fAYTHx5Vw . It's also a Nightmare mode vid, so there is a damage penalty as well due to the difficulty. The boss is intended to be 4 cycled, but he is able to pull it off with 3 cycles by carefully manipulating the boss health. I really liked this guy's time attack stuff in general, but I don't think he does it anymore.
Actually, checking the vid compared to a time attack vid, he has less health, so he is a bit underleveled, at least for that one. Time Attack does not have blessings or the HP boosting items used, while the no damage vid is in standard story mode and would.
But did you find the Cleria Ore for each area and upgrade your weapon as much as possible. That might be why you're doing so little damage since the weapon upgrades are a bit more important in Origin. Also, the boss is level 24, so it's expected to be at least that much, but it is possible a little lower than that. Each of the main area bosses is +8 to the expected level to be at for Origin, so level 8 for first, 16 for second, and so on.
Also, here's one from Time Attack. Unlike the no damage, this one intentionally takes damage in order to charge boost faster. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8fAYTHx5Vw . It's also a Nightmare mode vid, so there is a damage penalty as well due to the difficulty. The boss is intended to be 4 cycled, but he is able to pull it off with 3 cycles by carefully manipulating the boss health. I really liked this guy's time attack stuff in general, but I don't think he does it anymore.
Re: FALCOM Thread
Maybe you missed the cleria ore on top of the devil's corridor. Getting the weapon upgrades is pretty essential. I missed that one when I fought the same boss you're talking about, and had a lot of problems with him due to that. The issue was completely obvious in the next area where I did 1HP damage to every enemy in the area.Immryr wrote: i'm only playing on normal difficulty, currently i'm fighting gelady and i figure you need to use a charged whirlwind to get the guys hands off, then hit whatever weak point but my charged, max level, whirlwind does basically no damage to him. when i knock one hand off then start working on the second one, he respawns his first hand before i can knock the second one off. so i switched to using the charged firesword skill which does a bit more damage and i manage to get both his hands off but then i do basically no damage to his head by the time he respawns his hands. it's just tedious. so after a bunch of attempts i check out a youtube video just in case i'm missing something.
https://youtu.be/OMiRiT8WRbE
this guy knocks the guys hand off in one rotation of spamming normal attacks and charged whirlwind.............
Re: FALCOM Thread
Hmm, I must have missed a weapon upgrade somewhere. I'll have a look in the Devils corridor again when I next get a chance. I *thought* I was searching everywhere pretty thoroughly, but I guess not 
Re: FALCOM Thread
There's one between each of the major bossfights seperating areas.
Re: FALCOM Thread
yep, i missed the upgrade mat at the top of devils corridor, went back down to see the weapon smith type guy and he gave me a free upgrade too, so i was two weapon levels down from where i should have been
Re: FALCOM Thread
If you missed the freebie from "weapon upgrade guy", you've been behind the whole game; you're supposed to get a free one from him in Wailing Blue when the rest of the party makes it to the tower. That's why the boss fights have seemed so drawn-out.
Re: FALCOM Thread
Yeah, I don't really feel that any of the bosses are particularly drawn out as it is. They seem to be well balanced around what's required to "get" the boss and prove that you can do well against them. The only boss that really annoyed me was the creeper one (plant-like thing in a sand arena). I didn't like fighting that with any of the characters, but at least it could be "cheesed" with Hugo.
Btw, I don't think you get the free upgrade until the Flooded Prison - Wailing Blue has the Roo that does it for you.
Btw, I don't think you get the free upgrade until the Flooded Prison - Wailing Blue has the Roo that does it for you.
Re: FALCOM Thread
yeah, i got the upgrade from the roo. i thought i had talked to everyone down at the base camp after everyone arrived, but maybe i either missed the weapon upgrade guy or just didn't exhaust his dialogue or something.
the centipede boss felt a bit long, but not so bad i didn't persevere with it, but the lava robot was really, really tedious. makes sense considering i was two upgrades down.
i think if i was more familiar with the series i would have probably realised that there was a weapon upgrade before each major boss, but i just thought it had really weird damage scaling. ah well.
the centipede boss felt a bit long, but not so bad i didn't persevere with it, but the lava robot was really, really tedious. makes sense considering i was two upgrades down.
i think if i was more familiar with the series i would have probably realised that there was a weapon upgrade before each major boss, but i just thought it had really weird damage scaling. ah well.
Re: FALCOM Thread
I don't think any other game in the series is structured like that. It *does* have some fairly strange damage scaling though, pretty traditional for the series, where each level up make a pretty major difference, going back to the first game. The EXP decay is also pretty severe though, so the game does a lot to control what level you are at any time.
Re: FALCOM Thread
Just started Tokyo Xanadu. Needs less anime bullshit and more painting dungeons with monster blood.
The combat is actually really fun... when you get to do it. But less highschool drama and tsundere sidekicks and more murder would be appreciated.
The combat is actually really fun... when you get to do it. But less highschool drama and tsundere sidekicks and more murder would be appreciated.
Re: FALCOM Thread
Very fun. As a side note, I found it to be a better "Japanese High School Life Simulator" than Persona 3/4.Obscura wrote:Just started Tokyo Xanadu. Needs less anime bullshit and more painting dungeons with monster blood.
The combat is actually really fun... when you get to do it. But less highschool drama and tsundere sidekicks and more murder would be appreciated.
ChurchOfSolipsism wrote:I'll make sure I'll download it illegally one day...
Re: FALCOM Thread
Anyone who picked Tokyo Xanadu instead of any other dungeon crawler might have been a little curious about the 'anime bullshit' for a moment.
Re: FALCOM Thread
It's more likely that they're like me and try to play every non-turn-based Falcom game they can.
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Obiwanshinobi
- Posts: 7463
- Joined: Sun Jul 26, 2009 1:14 am
Re: FALCOM Thread
Not so immediately in The Ark of Napishtim, in all fairness.Sumez wrote:To be honest... as much as an Ys fan as I am, I don't think the series really benefits at all from a silent mary sue protagonist who is immediately loved by everyone.
The rear gate is closed down
The way out is cut off
The way out is cut off
Re: FALCOM Thread
Ark of Napishtim is completely erased from my memory. 
Re: FALCOM Thread
Adol was very talkative in the original Ys III, but Oath at Felghana had him going back to being silent like the first two Ys games.
Re: FALCOM Thread
i'm up to what i assume is the last boss in ys origin. i've enjoyed the game quite a bit other than the blip in the middle where i didn't realise i missed two weapon upgrades. i still think the damage scalling is weird in these games. in fact i think the games would be better if they removed exp and levelling completely and just focused on item based character progression.
Re: FALCOM Thread
There's a third character you can unlock if you want to play the game to total completion. I don't think it's really worth it, but the game was fun and fast enough that I didn't mind playing it three times. Hugo and Yunica play very differently though, and the game does well on higher difficulties.
Just finished Ys VIII, and I gotta admit that it was a bit of a teary eyed departure. Over the course of the entire game, all the characters really grew on me, and the story is surprisingly dark shit. At this point I can forgive it for the mashing combat system - I now understand why people love it so much, it is definitely one of the best JRPGs I have played in ages.
Just finished Ys VIII, and I gotta admit that it was a bit of a teary eyed departure. Over the course of the entire game, all the characters really grew on me, and the story is surprisingly dark shit. At this point I can forgive it for the mashing combat system - I now understand why people love it so much, it is definitely one of the best JRPGs I have played in ages.
Re: FALCOM Thread
I may pick up Dinosaur soon, since I'm learning some japanese alphabet to pass the time. Looks like a nice dungeon crawler and the art is awesome. Just by looking at the cover makes me want to play; hopefully, is going to also have substance.
Re: FALCOM Thread
Playing more Tokyo Xanadu, damn, these bosses are great even by Falcom standards, provided you play on Nightmare and don't use healing items (seriously, I don't know why they're there, the game seems balanced well without them). There's still too much anime twaddle (although the game starts pacing itself a lot better at chapter 3), but when it's going, the game is a blast.
Re: FALCOM Thread
Is it worth getting Tokyo Xanadu eX+ over the Vita version, or is the "eX+" just an attempt to market the more expensive PS4 version?