FALCOM Thread

Anything from run & guns to modern RPGs, what else do you play?
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gameoverDude
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by gameoverDude »

BulletMagnet wrote:Looks like the next Ys won't be a remake.
Ys IX it is, then. What a surprise, given the previous pattern of Ys games made after 2000. I'm guessing Trails/Kiseki takes next year off, while Falcom makes this their 2019 release.
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Mischief Maker
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Mischief Maker »

I'm gonna bet NISA doesn't get the localization deal.
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Sumez »

I think Falcom for some reason seems to think their collaboration was a success.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by bottino »

Squire Grooktook wrote:Finally picked up both Felghana and Origin again after too long. Was in the mood for some 3d melee combat that didn't rely on parry/i-frame dodges for all means of survival (fuck you, modern 3d character action).

Anyway, both games are fantastic but so far I think Origin is vastly superior. Felghana may be more iconic in its presentation but Origin boasts:
Ys The Oath in Felghana has become one of my favorite games after re-playing on Nightmare mode; I'm now just waiting for the right time to replay Origin on Nightmare mode as well.

I Agree that Origin is more polished than Oath and it's natural to be so, but I wouldn't call it vastly superior. That description is much more suited to point out the difference in quality between Oath and it's predecessor, The Ark of Napishtim.
-Better enemy variety (not that Felghana was bad in this department, but in comparison you spent too much time fighting goblin / bug variants with nearly identical attacks until it hits its stride in Valestein Castle.)
On Nightmare mode, the most challenging areas of the game are the Illburn Ruins and the Zone of Lava, which are early in the game, so there's that to consider. Also, the developers greatly improved in that department from the Ark of Napishtim ( where you basically had to use Jump - Down Attack most of the time ). So it was only natural from Origin to evolve from there.
-Better boss design (I like the increased emphasis on platforming in the bigger ones, and they're all actually challenging now without being memorizer hatefucks. I honestly found the telegraphing and massive hitboxes in Felghana to be simply shocking from a game design perspective. It's the kind of unbridled fuckery that normies erroneously think of when they picture 8/16 bit action game difficulty.)
There are a couple of bosses that I feel like that aren't particularly well designed, such as Ellefale, Guilen and Zirduros ( speaking of telegraphing, it's nearly impossible to dodge that fucker's cannon when there are so much stuff going on the screen at the same time and he only flashes for like a split second before firing it ).

However the final three bosses of the game are just exhilarating to fight on Nightmare mode and I think that Galbalan is by far the best final boss. Also, there's no human opponent in Origin that can match Chester's II ferocity and speed - he's probably the hardest boss on Nightmare mode, at least on Time Attack.
-Lots of misc improvements that overall make it a better experience. Spells/skills have tiny tweaks to their handling which make them more fun to use, there's a more fitting and enjoyable soundtrack (blasphemy, I know. But Silent Desert alone slays the entire Felghana ost for me), and even the platforming and "dungeon" layouts are much better paced and exciting.
Agreed about the spells/skills, although Origin seems to be balanced for Yunica and Toal, not Hugo and his Orbs of Destruction.

Although I'd argue that it is almost impossible to beat A Searing Struggle on the Zone of Lava or Valestein Castle and it's homonyms theme combo. But yeah, overall Origin stages are better and more ingeniously designed.

Both are fantastic games anyway and I'm really glad that my archaic Laptop can run them :lol:
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Squire Grooktook
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Squire Grooktook »

bottino wrote: However the final three bosses of the game are just exhilarating to fight on Nightmare mode and I think that Galbalan is by far the best final boss. Also, there's no human opponent in Origin that can match Chester's II ferocity and speed - he's probably the hardest boss on Nightmare mode, at least on Time Attack.
Indeed. The endgame battles are fantastic.

Goes back to what I was saying about telegraphing: it's really weird to me that early bosses are so meticulous in terms of trial and error, (good LUCK trying to dodge Dularn's homing knives when you see em for the first time on hard/nightmare) while the last thee bosses (though even more challenging) feel a lot more fair and improvisational. Obviously a big part of it is having the full movesets unlocked, but still, it's amusing.

Endgame bosses I mostly can only praise, except for two minor things (which Origin mostly addresses):

1: Anytime depth perception comes into play, things get silly. I really want to love Dularn II's final phase, except I can't fucking tell where those lasers are coming from or going most of the time and just need to dodge blind. Same for Galaban's purple bullets when used in the second phase.

2: Chester and the human opponents in origin are incredibly fun to dodge against, but hitting them pretty much come down to "jump around till he/she does the *one* punishable attack, then hit 'em with a combo". I wish there was a little more reward for being aggressive and finding windows to poke and rush them down, but it's mostly pointless and will just result in getting smacked. Origin partially addresses that by making the charged fire projectile a lot more hard hitting and fun to smack enemies with...but I still wish you had more of that brawler style of improvisational risk/reward + offense/defense balancing with melee.


But yeah, don't mean to come down harshly on Felghana. Nitpicks aside it's definitely a wonderful game.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Obscura »

In fairness, you don't really need to see where Dularn II's lasers are pointing exactly, since they're aimed. Agreed on Galbalan's second phase, but it's really a non-issue against Dularn.

You can get a bit more aggressive with Chester with clever earth magic parry usage, but it's risky (yes, Oath had a parry mechanic, and a pretty strong one at that!).
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Obscura wrote:In fairness, you don't really need to see where Dularn II's lasers are pointing exactly, since they're aimed. Agreed on Galbalan's second phase, but it's really a non-issue against Dularn.

You can get a bit more aggressive with Chester with clever earth magic parry usage, but it's risky (yes, Oath had a parry mechanic, and a pretty strong one at that!).
I remember trying the "keep moving, pretend they're aimed bullets" but I found I'd still inexplicably run into them at random anyway.

Earth Magic is great in both games. A good example of an offense/defense i-frame mechanic there. Mostly because it's an actual attack (and one that needs to be charged, at that) which can't really be abused in the same way a passive parry can.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Started playing through with Hugo in Ys Origin, ditched him and went straight to Toal.

Hugo I pretty much played for the story (call me crazy, but I find Falcom's presentation in all these games to be charming), but ultimately I found he got more and more boring to play and I didn't have time. Figure I'll just watch a video later.

Tragically, I feel like his playstyle could have been really fun and unique. The first fight with Epona is great. His low move speed means she outpaces him by a mile and he has to be super careful with his spell charging to survive. Sadly after that he gets the speed upgrade, and furthermore his following skills focus more on close range combat, so he basically ends up becoming a less fun Yunica-lite. I would have preferred if he remained more vulnerable to rushdown an had to make hard choices with his skill usage. Ah well.

Toal on the other hand...! This guy is great! I LOVE the speedy hit and run playstyle that his Godspeed enables, closing in and out of boss range. Let's you rushdown quite a bit more than the others. The rest of his skills are great fun too.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by ED-057 »

零の軌跡。 終わった。

It goes without saying that this game is superior to the other Trails games because the camera takes care of itself. (It's true!)

The game has some other things going for it. Combi craft are cool. I used a ton of those on the final boss. I was also a fan of the chests with high-level majuu inside, since they were the most challenging fights to be had. I returned to some of them over and over until I finally conquered them. First I took down the lv25 dudes during chapter 2 while I was lv21. That was an incredibly long battle. At lv22 I took out the lv30 dudes on the east road, they could be delayed so they weren't too dangerous. I think I was lv26 when I finally got the lv35 dudes on the Maintz road. Didn't get the sheep until chapter 4 at lv29 after many attempts. I got the lv40 guys in the tower on my first try at lv32 (suicide deathblow attack is げが高い)

I played on normal difficulty. The boss battles could have been tougher. In the other games there were times when they had me on the ropes and I had to resort to using a zeram powder, but not in this game. Though one time I went in the mine to retreive a library book and almost got zenmetsu'ed. On the other hand, the normal enemies were kind of all over the place. Some would fall like dominoes and give a bunch of EXP, others would take ages to kill and give single digit EXP. Some were just really annoying tedious battles against one or two enemies at a time and they would respawn every time you went into the room. I have to say my biggest disappointment was with the waves of soldiers coming at the gate. The game told me there was going to be a rumble. It told me to get my equipment and orbments sorted. It even gave me easy opponents to start with so I could build up CP. Two guys. Then three, oooh. Then what was it? Five? I knocked them all down in one hit with a combo to save time. Then eight, OK now that's something, but still the same whoosie guys I'd already faced. A crashbomb here, an absolute zero there, and they were all mopped up, and I was ready for the real fight. Except it didn't come. Instead my team layed down and somebody showed up to "save" me. Again. LAME.

Some things in the game I have to wonder about. DEF-UP status didn't seem to do much. I'm not sure what the bonus multiplier at the end of the battle actually multiplied. Some enemies would run up next to you and end their turn without doing anything. And whats up with the furigana that spells out a different word? I thought that was just a thing that song writers did to shoehorn their lyrics into a melody.

BTW in all of these games, I think the battle system could be a lot more interesting if they would steal the idea from Heroes of Might and Magic of being able to tell your character WHICH SQUARE they should move to when they attack, instead of just having them go to whatever spot they feel like.

One the last thing. The shoes! The shoes gave it away immediately.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Been playing YS Seven. I'm up to the Moon Dragon right now. Nightmare difficulty. Some thoughts on the game as a whole (broken up into individual elements):


FLASH GUARD

Fuck Flash Guard.

At first, it almost doesn't ruin the game, just because of how wonky the implementation is. Some bosses have some really wonky trailing hitboxes and attack timings that make no sense, so flash guarding certain attacks becomes much harder then it should be due to this nonsense.

"It's not broken because other things are broken" is not good game design though. Flash Guard is fundamentally a bad idea and should not exist in these games. Period. But in practice it wasn't too bad...

...until I actually got good at with later bosses, who felt like they had better designed hitboxes and easier to read animations anyway.

The Colosseum Boss I beat by standing in front of him and flash guarding every attack (because his main attack was actually easy to see the timing on it).
The Wind Dragon I beat by standing in front of him and flash guarding every attack
The Fire Dragon I beat by standing in front of him and flash guarding every attack
The Earth Dragon I beat by standing in front of him and flash guarding every attack ('cept the last phase)
etc.

It's a bad mechanic that caps the complexity and challenge. It doesn't matter that it's harder here than later games. It doesn't matter that you're punished for screwing it up. Character action games need to fundamentally rethink how they handle parry/block/i-frame mechanics from the ground up, if they want to move forward.


NO PLATFORMING

I'm not sure if this is my biggest knock against the game, but it's definitely up there. A big part of the fun of Oath/Origin was how it was such a manic hybrid of genres that elegantly brought huge amounts of variety to the table. Variety is the keyword here, because it's not that Oath/Origin's platforming was the greatest thing, but it was fun and it kept things mixed up and exciting.

The lack of running and jumping in the dungeons/"stages" in YS Seven really hurts the sense of manic fun. Combine that with Flashguard killing the danmaku elements (which are necessarily reeled back themselves due to the lack of a jump, and flashguarding projectiles is way easier than melee attacks, turning them into EXTRA-bait) and the game pretty much becomes a standard fare hack and slash masher (albeit a faster paced and more satisfying one, thanks to the Falcom-isms). Speaking of...


ENEMY DESIGN

100% of the difficulty in this game is concentrated in the bosses. The enemies you encounter on the way there are pathetic. Most of them sit around and get stunlocked, occasionally throwing out a simplistic frontal melee attack which you will never get hit by unless you're not paying attention or are simply blinded by the ten billion flashy skills flying around. There are one or two enemy types that you have to be a little more wary of, but they're few and far between.

Oath and Origin's dungeons felt like gauntlets. Ys Seven's feel like mashfests.


PARTY SYSTEM

This is why I picked up the game TBH.

I currently have an interest in party/team based mechanics in action games because reasons. And watching videos of it it looked like great fun. I like the ADD character switching and flashy moves constantly going off.

In practice...it's okay. Not bad, and there's some fun to be had here. Though it doesn't take the concept as far or utilize it as smartly as it could.

The characters feel just barely different enough to make swapping them every now and then fun. But they're still a little samey. No two characters feel as vitally different as Yunica vs Toal in Origin, for example. Part of that is because many, many, many of the skills don't offer much beyond flashy animations and are totally interchangeable in terms of utility. Attack/Combo speed is mostly what differentiates them (range feels negligible), and that barely so.

There's also a number of boss gimmicks that screw with your party and are completley pointless and stupid. Like status ailments that hit the whole party and force you to switch between them to wiggle out of petrified or stun status, or else have their HP drained to 1 the next time you switch to them. Party members in general are pretty much immaterial and dodge everything when you're not controlling them. But sometimes they don't, and that makes me cross.

Still, there's fun to be had there. It's not as flashy as it looks but swapping between characters, buliding up meter, and popping off flashy skills is pretty fun. The characters could have been a lot better designed but there's just enough variety there between their combos and skills to keep it fun. There are also a few half-baked but notable things you can do, like run away as a ranged character to dodge an attack and then swap back to the melee characters who are still whopping the boss due to being invulnerable.

It's kinda fun.


SKILLS / EXTRA

Okay so instead of 3 tightly refined skills that all have a unique utility, like in Oath/Origin, you instead get a massive laundry list of skills you gradually unlock through the weapons you acquire.

Most of them feel utterly interchangeable for the first half of the game, where the range/timing advantages of each one is largely negligble and they barely do any more damage then your normal attacks (often less due to their extra start up time). In the second half, they start to get more variety, but I quickly found that it wasn't worth using anything except the big gun super moves since those do the most vital damage and actually have i-frames.

It's not very well balanced or refined, but it does make for an alright SOTN-esque toybox to play with. A select few skills actually do have some decent utility besides their damage, and some of the later ones are very fun to pop off and clear rooms or catch multiple enemies at once. So there's some entertainment and satisfaction to be had in there.

There's also the limit break Extra's. Not too much interesting to say there. Just use them once or twice per boss.


OTHER SHIT

There is crafting. Enemies drop shit along with coins. But this doesn't really add much to the gameplay.

Really, that sums up a big part of the game for me. It feels like Falcom thought they had to do something different after Origin but didn't know what so they just threw a bunch of "modern" shit at the wall to see what would stick. The result is a game that's flashy but super wonky and silly.

The pacing and presentation is nice overall. You do hurtle from one dungeon to the next fairly quickly, and I did find the aesthetic/story/presentation to have that Falcom percular type of "earnestness" that made it all very endearing to me. Not to mention the ost mostly sells it all pretty well. Honestly this is what kept me playing more then anything else.

Chainsawing through enemies mostly feels as good on a visceral level as it does in Oath/Origin, too.


OVERALL

It's a bad game, but I like it.

Believe it or not, I kinda wanna play YS 8. I know it's gonna be even worse, but I can't help but be charmed by the experience and lust for more waifus and Adol chainsawing combos. I don't think I have time right now though, and my money is better spent elsewhere on nobler pursuits for the time being.
RegalSin wrote:Japan an almost perfect society always threatened by outsiders....................

Instead I am stuck in the America's where women rule with an iron crotch, and a man could get arrested for sitting behind a computer too long.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Obscura »

Disagreed on enemy balance. Yes, Oath has the best "normal enemy vs. boss" balance in the series, but Seven does much better in that regard than Origin, where the only non-boss thing that's threatening at all are the "vacuum plants" in the final area. I actually tend to get smacked around more by the common enemies in Seven than most of the bosses (aside from Colosseum boss and Moon Dragon, who are significantly tougher than the others).

Just parrying while standing still isn't really the best way to deal with, like, anything. For instance, the Colosseum boss -- yes, you want to parry the initial strike, but then you're much better off escaping the ring of mines than standing still to wait for the next parry, your i-frames won't carry you safely through parrying the strike but getting bumped into a mine, and you can't afford to take the damage (at least not in PSP or unpatched PC version; I know they did tweak some of the i-frame durations in the first PC patch, no idea how much that changed things).
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Obscura wrote:Disagreed on enemy balance. Yes, Oath has the best "normal enemy vs. boss" balance in the series, but Seven does much better in that regard than Origin, where the only non-boss thing that's threatening at all are the "vacuum plants" in the final area. I actually tend to get smacked around more by the common enemies in Seven than most of the bosses (aside from Colosseum boss and Moon Dragon, who are significantly tougher than the others).
Nope. Origin's commons on hard are harder than anything in Seven in Nightmare.

Origin's at least hit me and forced me to move around, on top of having a decent variety of attacks. Seven's don't even attack and spend all of eternity stunlocked. They don't even attack. On Nightmare.

Origin's also have way more variety than the Seven or Felghana. They move and attack in much more interesting ways. They're just slightly less threatening overall then Felghana for the most part, who's difficulty curve was like an egg reading.
Obscura wrote: Just parrying while standing still isn't really the best way to deal with, like, anything. For instance, the Colosseum boss -- yes, you want to parry the initial strike, but then you're much better off escaping the ring of mines than standing still to wait for the next parry, your i-frames won't carry you safely through parrying the strike but getting bumped into a mine, and you can't afford to take the damage (at least not in PSP or unpatched PC version; I know they did tweak some of the i-frame durations in the first PC patch, no idea how much that changed things).
>go up to a wall
>have him do the attack over and over
>mash parry (remember you can flash guard the same attack multiple times, for its entire hitbox duration)
>do skill

He can't accidentally bump you into a mine with his bounding box (lol) if he's too busy rubbing you into the invisible wall. So you can just stand there and and parry for eternity. Which speeds up the fight significantly by the way since you're multihitting skill of choice is now hitting critical on every strike (the rpg elements are also much worse balanced, requiring a lot more flash guard abuse or grinding to not be marathons). The only time I ever retreated was when he did his rolling attack, and that was purely so I could spend some time charging for more SP.

The fight actually looked challenging until I discovered this. Then he went down in a snap. Same for wind dragon.


Like I said, I like the game, but the only thing it does better than Oath/Origin is the toybox aspect. It's otherwise a very wonky and kind of shallow game. I like it but it's best appreciated on those terms.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Obscura »

That almost sounds like you're confusing Seven and Origin. Especially if you used Toal's totally broken thunder claw to steamroll every zako in Origin, that's what I call "enemies don't even attack". I also don't see how there's more variety in Origin than Oath, given how many variants of "slime"/"knight that you have to jump behind"/"plant that shoots things upwards that fall back down" you fight.

I never tried going to the wall intentionally against Colosseum boss, interesting. I wouldn't call the "bump into mines" accidental though, I thought it was pretty clearly an intentional design feature of the boss (and why the mines were there in the first place).

Wind dragon is easy no matter what you do; all of the first four dragons are. Fire is the closest to offering an actual challenge.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Obscura wrote:That almost sounds like you're confusing Seven and Origin. Especially if you used Toal's totally broken thunder claw to steamroll every zako in Origin, that's what I call "enemies don't even attack". I also don't see how there's more variety in Origin than Oath, given how many variants of "slime"/"knight that you have to jump behind"/"plant that shoots things upwards that fall back down" you fight.
Toal is definitely more empowered, Yunica's difficulty balance is pretty smooth though since she's basically Adol 2.0. Even with Toal though, enemies attack more. If you mash you'll get bonked, and you still need to dodge things even as you revel in the dark pleasure of scooping up a horde of zakos into your blackhole fist.

Oath spends too much time with "goblin who will eventually smash forward". From stage 1 onward in Origin, you start seeing things like those ninja knights who jump around (Water Prison), the Flame Thrower dudes (Guilty Fire), the flying dragon's and mages (Silent Desert), those assholes with the weird homing shots (Blight Blood), etc. Enemies move and attack with more variety much earlier. Oath doesn't really get to that point until the game hits its stride in Valstein Castle (the enemies in Mine Depths vs Tundra felt almost interchangeable to me).

Obscura wrote: I never tried going to the wall intentionally against Colosseum boss, interesting. I wouldn't call the "bump into mines" accidental though, I thought it was pretty clearly an intentional design feature of the boss (and why the mines were there in the first place).

Wind dragon is easy no matter what you do; all of the first four dragons are. Fire is the closest to offering an actual challenge.
The problem with the dragon's and such is that if you don't do the flashguard shit the fights take forever. The RPG/damage/hp balances are even worse than Origin/Oath. In those games, killing everything from point A to point B would generally give you the attack level to kill bosses in a reasonable time. Occasionally you'd hit one where spending 10 minutes of extra grinding would be necessary to prevent the battle from becoming a marathon. But in Seven, even when you do do all that and grind, a lot of battles just feel bloated unless you are being very aggressive with flash guard to get constant crits. Playing with the same mobile run-around playstyle as Oath/Origin vs the dragon's is a good way to ensure that plinking them to death takes 10 years.

Unless that's just Nightmare being stupid. I played Oath/Origin on hard. Oath felt like a bitch even off of Nightmare, but Origin scaled things back significantly, so I figured Seven would follow suit and continue to scale things back. So maybe that's why the stats seem bonkered. Still doesn't address the mechanical/enemy design complaints though.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Obscura »

I played Seven on Nightmare, and never found the dragon bosses to take that long, other than Moon. Are you attacking them on their vulnerable spots? Where you hit is much more important for damage in Seven/Celceta/VIII than it is in the Napishtim trilogy, it's not a binary "do damage/don't do damage" anymore. What's your party? Aisha + Cruxie/Mustafa is the peak boss-slaying team, with Adol just going along for the ride. Aisha gets SP, Cruxie/Mustafa spends them.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Obscura wrote:I played Seven on Nightmare, and never found the dragon bosses to take that long, other than Moon. Are you attacking them on their vulnerable spots? Where you hit is much more important for damage in Seven/Celceta/VIII than it is in the Napishtim trilogy, it's not a binary "do damage/don't do damage" anymore. What's your party? Aisha + Cruxie/Mustafa is the peak boss-slaying team, with Adol just going along for the ride. Aisha gets SP, Cruxie/Mustafa spends them.
The damage numbers on windy were identical for tail vs chest. By Fire/Earth I was committed to the speedkill flashguard starts so I didn't notice anything there.

I generally rotate the characters to make sure they're all level, but Aisha / Cruxie is good yes. Adol gives comparable numbers though with Flash Guard -> multihitting invincible skill (most likely sword dance, or pentagram later on). Honestly I rarely see any damage difference between the characters (outside of one or two who kinda suck). The most important thing is flash guarding before a multi-hitting skill, so that the whole chain will be a crit.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Obscura »

Wait, you did Wind and Water before Earth and Fire?!?! That might have been a part of your problem; yes, you can technically do the sanctums in any order, but the enemies and bosses aren't at the same level, and the "expected order" is the same order you did them the first time: Earth, Fire, Wind, Water. I suspect you were waaaaaaaay underlevelled for Wind.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Squire Grooktook »

Obscura wrote:Wait, you did Wind and Water before Earth and Fire?!?! That might have been a part of your problem; yes, you can technically do the sanctums in any order, but the enemies and bosses aren't at the same level, and the "expected order" is the same order you did them the first time: Earth, Fire, Wind, Water. I suspect you were waaaaaaaay underlevelled for Wind.
Water you can't do until the other 3 are done.

Wind -> Fire -> Earth -> Water

So maybe that was an issue, though tbh it didn't feel any different for any of the other bosses. Almost every boss from the beginning felt like it wanted me to grind for an extra 20 minutes in order to keep the fight length manageable (after the bore I was like yeah fuck this I'll put in the extra hours). Wind (without the flashguard strat) wasn't even that much longer then say - the big flying bird or the Colosseum boss.

Anyway I don't want to be too harsh on the game. Despite its flaws I am enjoying it, though I think it's overall pretty wonky.

I would recommend it...

-If Adol is your husbando and you simply enjoy Falcom's presentation and style for these games
-You want more of the series fast pace and visceral chainsaw handling, and don't mind something a bit shallower
-Want a decent "toybox" of flashy shit to play with.
-Don't have a problem with modern character action (and also don't have a problem with it being served up with a bit of grinding).
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Obscura
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Obscura »

Man, if you think there's a side of grinding now, you are not going to enjoy the endgame. I love Ys Seven and think it's one of the best in the series, but the big thing that holds it back from being truly elite at the level of Origin or Dawn of Ys is that horrible "grind a billion materials so you can get the top tier weapons on everybody" bit just before the final boss. Three hours or so of mind-numbing tedium...

As much as I dislike Ys VIII on the whole, it did balance its crafting systems much better than Seven does. Credit where it's due.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by ED-057 »

dudes, check out my ED7 cosplay. This is Lloyd Bannings as an old fart. Lost his hair in an orbment accident.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by gameoverDude »

The PS4 versions of Trails of Cold Steel I & II are coming to Europe & USA in early 2019 from XSEED/Marvelous.
All the extra voiced dialogue from the PC versions (5,000+ lines in each game) will be added, & they'll have DUAL audio. The PC versions will get an update to add the Japanese voices.

Boxed versions (ToCS Decisive Edition & ToCS II Relentless Edition) will be $50 each. ToCS will come with a 50 mira coin & ToCS II comes with an Ouroborus emblem pin. Both will include a musical selections CD with some full length tracks (21 for ToCS I, 23 for ToCS II).

What a good sign from XSEED. Could ToCS III probably be coming in 3rd-4th Quarter '19?
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Sumez »

Any reason to go with these versions over the Vita ones? Aside from the voice acting.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by gameoverDude »

They'll run at 60 FPS, & a PS4 Pro can get 4K resolution. There are other upgrades similar to the PC one, like HQ sound & the high-speed mode (like the PC's Turbo). Draw distance is improved.
Japanese PS4 versions have all the DLC included. I'm sure XSEED's will be like this.

The PS3 & Vita versions of ToCS 1 have a +9999 EXP limit on battles, which is lifted on the PC. Don't know if PS4 ToCS 1 is like that. No version of ToCS II has that limit.
PS4 versions also have that cross-save so you could use Vita & PS3 saves.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by KAI »

Nice jacket ED-057

I've been playing the Xak series lately (the Microcabin's Ys).
1 was decent, even if the grinding was godawful and the shmup section the shittiest hitboxes i've seen in my life.
2 was muuuuuch better that the 1st game, but it has a gamebreaking glitch when playing it on openmsx, dropped it.
3 on PCE-CD is beautiful and gory, too bad the english patch doesn't translate fmv sequences.

Planning to play Xak Tower of Gazzel and Xak Gaiden (the shmupy spinoff) as soon as i find how to fix the save glitches on the emulator.
I would have love to see remakes of these game like falcom did with Ys3, this series had a lot of potential. RIP Microcabin :(
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by theclaw »

I just started Trails in the Sky 3rd chapter. Much more appreciating it in order, tried to jump from Sky 1 straight to Cold Steel years ago. :roll:
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Steamflogger Boss »

Nice to hear about Ys IX. Outside of VIII running like ass, it was a really fun game.

As for Cold Steel PS4 I was waiting for that announcement. $50 each for a second purchase is a bit meh, so I'll wait for a price drop. I'll definitely be picking them up though. Probably on one of the first good sales at BB assuming they don't cut off people that still have GCU time.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Obscura »

Finally started MoC last night.

Oooof... this isn't good. It's like someone combined the worst parts of Ys SEVEN and Ys VIII's combat systems into one horrible clusterfuck. It's got Ys VIII's "you really should flash guard EVERYTHING, it's not a niche-option" focus going on, but with the weird unintuitive hitboxes and timings of Ys SEVEN.

Starting to see why people thought Ys VIII was OK. Not because it's OK (it's not), but MoC sure seems to set the bar awfully low.
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by FinalBaton »

I might be the only person on earth who really likes MoC. Lol

Eh, I don't mind that
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Obscura »

I haven't gotten far into MoC yet (all I've done is kill the tutorial boss), but based on what I've seen, if you like MoC, there's no reason you wouldn't like VIII more. Mostly the same issues, but a bit more polished with regards to hitboxes and not having to mash the flash guard on lingering attacks.

I'm not a fan of parry-heavy games (I can't stand Metal Gear Rising, for instance), so this is probably not going to be my idea of a good time...
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Re: FALCOM Thread

Post by Durandal »

Obscura wrote:Finally started MoC last night.

Oooof... this isn't good. It's like someone combined the worst parts of Ys SEVEN and Ys VIII's combat systems into one horrible clusterfuck. It's got Ys VIII's "you really should flash guard EVERYTHING, it's not a niche-option" focus going on, but with the weird unintuitive hitboxes and timings of Ys SEVEN.

Starting to see why people thought Ys VIII was OK. Not because it's OK (it's not), but MoC sure seems to set the bar awfully low.
I'm at the final dungeon right now, and I can tell you it won't get much better.

The bosses are the same Flash Guard/Dodge timing memorization challenges which all play out the same, dungeons are still oversized simplistic monster gauntlets with incredibly elementary 'equip this item' puzzles and enemy designs, everytime you interact with something in a dungeon it does that thing that most PS2-era games did where an unskippable cutscene plays showing you what pressing a button just triggered and is one of those worst things ever, playable character diversity is only slightly above Seven's, a lot of skills do the same thing, and getting an item early on which lets you teleport to a statue from anywhere completely removes the threat of death. The setting and worldbuilding feels like a massive themepark ride with little to no cohesion, and the villains are absolute throwaway.

You don't have to mash Flash Guard anymore when you're stuck in an attack, instead you can do a Simulflash by pressing dodge right after Flash Guarding which activates both Flash Guard and Dodge at the same time for bonus damage and free invuln/slowed time. There's no reason why you would not do a Simulflash when doing a Flash Guard, it's a bit silly. At least you don't have to mash FG on lingering attacks anymore that way. But it's made wonkier by the fact that you cannot FG inside an attack's hitbox while Flash Dodge is active, so trying to chain FGs this way is much more uncertain. Because Flash Dodging has a greater time window than FG, it's often a safer bet when you can't figure out the timing or hitbox of an attack at all. But trying to Flash Dodge is also wonky as shit, because it'll often happen that you dodge at the right time and activate FD, but still take damage anyways. This has happened countless times and I have no fucking idea how.

The camera perspective for many of the boss fights is made unnecessarily worse by the fact that it's less isometric and more placed behind the player (kind of like in Ys 8), so you have a more narrow overview of the boss arena and his attacks, which is especially painful when the boss can launch attacks which persist off-screen or are homing.

Stun doesn't seem to matter at all, not on Nightmare anyways. For regular enemies the stun gauge is invisible now, and for most later bosses the stun gauge will never even fill up no matter what you do, which almost gives me the impression it's bugged.

It's not at all bad though, there's been some improvements made under the hood. Enemies overall are more susceptible to air combos, Skill Finish gives you half of the spent SP back when you kill an enemy with a skill so you can stay in the action longer, and the Charge Attack finally charges automatically. Sidequests in a new town are all on a quest board now, which although cliché, means you don't have to talk to every NPC in town to ensure you aren't missing any sidequests. The game gets going much faster, as your base skillset is unlocked from the get go (you get immediate access to EXTRA skills and a decent SP gain rate isn't locked near the end of the first part of the game like it was in Seven), though that can also be a problem for some.

Weapon crafting is gone, and so is the grind associated with it. Gear is either found in treasure chests or bought in shops with good ol' gold. There isn't a new weapon each time a main story event happens, so the gear power curve doesn't feel completely linear anymore. This does change the way you learn new skills. Basically, you have to use skills against enemies with a higher level than you, and there is a chance that you will learn a new skill. I have no idea how this new skill acquisition system works, as it is never explained, it's completely invisible, and it feels like it's up to chance.

Since there's less weapons there don't need to be as many skills anymore, though a lot of them still feel redundant, and most characters have some variation of the same type of skill which restricts the character diversity. Skills only go up to LV3 now so you don't need to grind one skill for half the game if you want to reach it max LV, as you find items which grant you bonus Skill XP fairly early on.

Instead of weapon crafting there's weapon reinforcing to make use of those mats, which is still dumb and poorly realized, but at least it's harmless and can be completely ignored, although that's where the problem lies. Basically you can spend mats and gold to stack as many buffs on a piece of gear you want without a limit, but you cannot carry over these buffs to other gear. When you consider that you'll constantly be finding new gear, you'll soon come to the idea that maybe it's better to save up mats to use them on a better weapon so you won't waste them later on. Which in my case resulted in never using weapon reinforcing at all until I got the end-game weapons. If the amount of buffs you could enchant on your gear had a limit, like how it worked in Oath/Origin/VI, then you wouldn't feel like you're potentially wasting anything.

MoC also decided to become a map filling simulator for some reason, but you can fill out most of it with medium effort. You do have to hug some walls to get 100%, however. If you get 100%, then
Spoiler
the roman governor gives you an item which increases EXTRA gauge fill rate
, decide for yourself whether it's worth the effort. You do get like 10K gold for every 10% you map out. One upside is that there's no backtracking enforced by the game like there was in Seven, if you want to it's entirely on your own volition, but there isn't much to backtrack other than like one side-area and filling out some walls.

Basically, it's still the same stuff as Seven with some minor improvements under the hood, but with an even weaker story and for some reason strange regressions in some parts of the gameplay. I didn't enjoy it very much, nor did I expect I would, but since I got this far I might as well finish it.
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