Playin' any games today, Flying Nun? (WGAYP - 2011 Edition)

[TranceHime]

SaGa remake Human Solo: The beginning was MUCH harder than Mutant almostsolo.
Then I realized in the second world that humans have a cap of 99 in every stat instead of 255 in this game (I guess this was a bug, as it was still shown as "99" in the menu) so my human would have turned very crappy very fast, and not in a fun way.

The cap isn't 99, it's more like 100~ish because you can still use stat potions to break 99 when the stat is 98. But yeah it's no longer 255. Plus there are equipments that boost the stat. Well I'm assuming you're referring to SaGa2 remake, anyways.

WiZMan's World
Cooler game than I thought. Eventually have to end up grinding for a bit, because bosses are pretty damn painful. Elemental weaknesses are a big deal, I think it's like x1.75~x2.50 damage to target if you hit weakness. Really enjoying the Homunculus Fusion system, but only because ~*~lol monster girls are hawt~*~ or something. The plot itself is kind of typical "i'm a wizard and do stuff" plot but it's Jaleco making an RPG, what the heck do you expect, the gameplay is at least solid! Looking forward to more~

[Pyro]

The music is amazing you get the hell out. 

I will grant you that it is of generally good quality, with some tracks (FLauchtraut battle, Peaceful Ruins, Op/Ed) approaching very high tier indeed. Definitely a positive aspect of the game! But doesn't exactly floor you either.

[Luther Lansfeld]

SaGa Frontier, fun with monsters- BABY UNICORN KING SEI THE BEST~ SQUEE SQUEE!!

[Meeplelard]

Dead Rising 2: I think I reached the game's equivalent of overtime mode.  Just unlike DR1, its not a whole extra mode, just "GAME DIDN'T END WHEN YOU EXPECTED IT TOO!"  On the otherhand, if you so muched as checked the case report, you'd see the game had more cases than could be alotted during that time, so its hardly a spoiler.

Okamiden: LIGHTNING VILLAGE ONI ROCK BAND.  That is all.

[SageAcrin]

SaGa Frontier, fun with monsters- BABY UNICORN KING SEI THE BEST~ SQUEE SQUEE!!

It's more of a My Little Unicorn, really.

FF4: TAY:

Halfway through Depths.

Currently need to level because it turns out that TAY is actually hard enough to require your levels to be above 45 on more than a few black mages. (Twinhead Dragon managed to die...on my second to last possible action, on the first try.) Awwww I was hoping I could beat the whole thing at low 40s thanks to a lot of swapping and good equips... :|

[Captain K.]

KoF13:  Got enough achievements to finish unlocking the Invitation picture in the Gallery.  Have about six more arcade playthroughs to finish getting the rest of the illustrations.

[AndrewRogue]

Three resets vs Week 6 Berserker so far. 4th attempt on hold because of battery dying and no plug nearby. Being able to spam out magic endlessly vs randoms made me a bit arrogant, it turns out, and my inability to correctly predict ARROW'D is messing me up.

[Hunter Sopko]

Koudelka: Just beat this. Awesome game. Drinking scene was amazingly done, the VAs somehow perfect in their imperfection. Just a tightly made game, does what it needs to do and keeps things moving and I'd even say manages to stand the test of time despite the battle system. Really good times. Highly recommend people play this if they like Shadow Hearts.

[superaielman]

FF13: Chapter 8. In going back and reading the games topic, I realized that every time this year I got into FF13 I had a family member died. Soo yeah if granddad or an uncle croaks on me day after tomorrow, I am taking a sledgehammer to the damn game and deleting my file. (Actual game commentary later, still thinking on it.)

[Dark Holy Elf]

Saga Frontier - Beat Blue's quest, using five swordsmen! Yes, the silliness. Blue himself was weaker at swords than the rest (has some trouble getting a good ST move late) but made up for it with LightSword ShadowServant Triple Thrust (so sextuple thrust) or something similarly silly. Hell'sLord was pretty hard because I wasn't using any of Blue's abusive strategies and was a bit underlevelled and Blue only had 4 LP (sword playthrough requires Asura -> Blue is a sissy in that stat), nothing else in the game was really (well once I PsychicPrisoned Kylin so he didn't win instantly). Also so, so much Deflect. It is glorious.

Order of Ecclesia HM - Finally beat Eligor without using items. And perfected him for good measure. All medals get except Dracula's.

[Hunter Sopko]

Enchanted Arms- Started this. Game is kind of endearing despite it's obvious shortcomings. Maybe it's because I'm sort of MST3K'ing the playthrough as I go along though. Either way, the game seems to be sort of self aware of it at least, making it sort of entertaining.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Wild Arms ACF : Finished this recently while reading the LP for it. Really fun game once you get past the slow beginning. Randoms were somewhat challenging and the really gamebreaking stuff wasn't -too- easy to get. In fairness, I -was- following an LP, so I played with most of the broken stuff as soon as it was available.

I was particularly a fan of the Personal Skills equipping system. More games need to try this point-based equipment thing. Really balances a lot of things well while giving the player lots of freedom to experiment. Want to see this done with slightly-more-traditional Equipment types. I miss the Holy Parasol ;_;

Enchanted Arms: Started this with Sopko. I probably like it more than him, though the battles are a bit slow. I find the voice-acting to really sell the dumb humor scenes so far. Also, the character designs are wonderfully ridiculous and the game loves to actually use color despite its more-realistic (comparative to more recent colorful RPGs) character and background models.
Also, I learned a new word: supercilious... as in "Your cold, supercilious eyes turn me on, professor."

[Captain K.]

I know that word because it was on the Tech Specs of the Transformer Hook in the 80s.  I asked my dad what it meant and surprisingly he knew!

[Celdia]

FFT - Celdia's Complete Patch

Downloaded this, played through chapter 1 and Dorter 2. Don't know if I'll play any more. I enjoy the classes, I like alot of the concepts, but so many of the design decisions make me want to rip my hair out. The last few fights have felt more "rocket tag" based then even vanilla FFT(which is not my prefered style of play), the lack of univeresal access to gained JP up so job building(to unlock and play with the new classes) is horribly slow, and now I get to the next set of equipment to find that the clothes upgrade gives innate Gained Exp Up. Which...is exactly the opposite of what I want. My clothes units are already surpassing my armor units becuase of Gained JP Up from Training Vest, I don't want them to end up higher leveled as well. Especially since from what I've heard enemy levels scale to yours(I would assume based on your highest level people? Dunno exact mechanics here), and my team is already getting high 2HKOd by basically every enemy, so I don't want to put an even BIGGER gap between the enemies and the armor units that are supposed to be my frontliners.

Mostly it's just that the playstyle the patch encourages and the playstyle I want to use are two ENTIRELY different things. It's like my gripe about the TO remake. Don't give me a ton of interesting classes that I want to mess around with to see which ones I want to use and then punish me for doing that.

Short version: I have been SO fucking spoiled by LFT. <_<;

Hello there! I was informed it wouldn't be out of place to reply to this here.  Someone brought up your post in IRC so I thought I'd see what was said. First off, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy CCP further. I've been getting some very different feedback since I started hearing opinions from DL's members on CCP and you all take things into consideration with FFT that I never even thought of. I would like for my patch to reach to a larger audience and be fun for everyone to play, but I realize that's technically impossible. That doesn't mean I can't try to modify for a wider player base though. I appreciate any and all feedback, positive, constructive and negative. That said, let me try and explain why some of what you ran into happened in the first place.

Things like the Gained Exp Up clothing existing is because I got my hands on pretty tools for editing equipment and I let the possibilities run away with me. I tried to throw just about everything onto some piece of gear just to DO it. Equipment is undergoing modifications as I continue to update and any suggestions - be it RSMs on gear to elemental Str./Weak/etc or even HP/MP balance - are VERY welcome. I'm usually the first to note that I have very poor skills when it comes to balancing things for my patch (just look at Loremaster) and the more help I can get, the better. As for enemies scaling, if the ASM hacks I'm using are working right, the enemy units should be limited to shop-available equipment no matter how high of a level you go. I would hope this would limit some of the gear scaling problems found in other hacks where overleveling makes the game virtually unwinnable, but if their stats just plain being higher is the issue more than gear then that's something else I'll have to take into consideration. I don't find myself with a lot of time to really sit and play my own hack from the start to the end to get a good feel for the difficulty curve of differing playstyles. I just work from what feedback I get from playtesters on FFH and that's a fairly limited bit of information. Getting people to post about the hack is like pulling teeth sometimes.

If you had other specific questions I'd be happy to address them. I don't lurk around here as much as elsewhere but I'm always a PM or post away over on FFH and I'm usually logged into IRC (irc.esper.net #ffh) most hours of the day even if I'm AFK. If anyone else has given CCP a try and has questions or suggestions, please let me know! I'm trying to make something that's fun to play, no matter how you approach it and the more people that show me how they look at it, the better it will be in the end. ^_^  (How many times did I just repeat myself in that whole post? -_- )

[VySaika]

I'll probably play a bit further eventually(started playing FF13 and that has absorbed my time quite neatly), since getting to where propositions open up will fix my jp concerns quite neatly. Though I would note along those lines that my biggest suggestion would just be "throw Gained JP Up back on Warrior, or do the LFT thing and give every job innate Gained JP Up." That mitigates the problem of not getting to take many actions during assassination fights, and lets you catch up anyone who's fallen behind in a single random.

As a note, I do like the idea of various gear giving RSM abilities, or having elemental resists/strengthens/weaknesses, etc. I just think that JP up or EXP up abilities on gear is a very bad idea, since it makes it harder to keep your team about the same level of ability(and actual level, in exp's case). And when the enemies are packing high grade offense, this means that anyone who's fallen behind is likely to get killed fast while your people who are already stronger race to finish the battle before the timers run out...resulting in them getting even stronger while those behind get no chance to catch up.

Oh, another random note. Is it just me or do you have Jump priced as more valuable then Move for the most part? I know move+1 is 100 while jump+1 is 80, but I swear you have the Ignore Height ability at more expensive then move+2, and on a harder to unlock class at that. Also the ignore height ability comes with move-1. MINUS ONE. I would never use that. Ever. Especially not for the price. Also, the jump+1 shoes seem more expensive then the move+1 shoes. Do they do anything else, or is it just jump being valued more?

EDIT: oh, is there anywhere else I should be posting these observations? If you liek to have notes on your hack all in one central place or something, I'll be happy to make my posts there instead of here.

[Celdia]

The innate Gained JP Up idea may well make it into the next update. I hadn't thought of it before and it does seem to be a nice easy fix to a lot of complaints surrounding JP.

Re: Move vs. Jump - This is very likely just me not paying attention to costs of things or changing items and skills around without modifying their costs when I do it. Going back to what I said before, balance is not my strong suit nor has it been something I've focused a lot on yet. That will come with the final polish I put on the patch when I feel like everything else is where I want it to be.

What few notes I've posted are over on the FFH forum in the CCP subforum which you can get to here: http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?board=60.0  The Master Guide is a half-broken WIP. I'd have better resources for players available if I weren't so burnt out on my own project. -_-

Also, apologies to everyone else for the potential derail of my posts. I'll try to keep any other posts on CCP out of here and in its own thread somewhere. If there is a specifically appropriate place for that, please let me know.

[Nephrite]

We have a Forum dedicated to game design and modification that I'm certain you'd be welcome to make a post in to try and encourage other people to give feedback at.

[VySaika]

We generally don't care much about derailing conversations here, so long as they aren't derailing into flamewars. But yeah, if you want to open a thread up in the game design forum here, you'll probably(eventually) get more feedback then just mine.

[Glen Veil]

So, picked up the PSP version of Disgaea 1 a month or so back, along with some other games.  Up to chapter 5 atm, dear god this game hates it's player, storyline geo setups just love to stack things against you starting from early game even >.>.  Normally not so bad, but I seem to have unintentionally allowed like 3/4ths of my non storyline characters fall behind somehow to the point they are like only 2/3rds the level of storyline enemies <.<  So after I notice that I figure it's time to slightly boost some crappy equipment as an excuse to grind those people up in the item world, floor 9 of first item, impossible level~, I have no Gency Exit, great.

So, taking a break from that and playing the PSP version of Persona 1 instead.  BEST SHOP MUSIC EVER.  Ahem, anyways, took four or five gameplay hours but just beat the first boss.  General thoughts are HOLY ELEMENTS BATMAN.  Kind of digging the whole positioning and attack areas thing.  Talking to monsters is also amusing, and potentially a decent way to end a battle that's turning to crap fast.  Currently maxed out everyone's initial persona because honestly there was not reason not to spam skills since you couldn't use SP fast enough before getting it restored with a level.  Managed to find 3 persona fusions I liked right before the boss, Quetzalcoatl for the main, Jack Frost for Maki, and some other dude for smug bitch, err Emmy, who I'm kind of wondering if she was a trap since not only does she like the same weapons as main, but she seems to like Ice Persona just as much as Maki, so the overlapping is kind of lamish, but oh wells.  Kind of wish I could dump Nate because he's a lamer but whatever.  Totally looking forward to when matt hits 20 because I'm pretty sure I saw a person he had best affinity to that learns Medigola already, which just sounds sexy.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Order of Ecclesia - Beat Hard Mode.

Sort of an inconsistent HM as I already touched on. What they did with damage and adding some enemies makes randoms waaay better in certain early spots, most obviously the Ruvas Forest and the Skeleton Cave, but as time went on the difference became much less noticeable. Bosses felt largely untouched except a few who are now disproportionately challenging compared to the rest (story boss #2 and Death, mostly... yes, there's a Castlevania game mode where Death >>> Dracula, wtf is this). I'm not really complaining because the improved boss fights were great fun and generally show off what I already liked about this game. Still a bit of an odd experience, not as overall consistent fun as the original NM playthrough, but I'm never going to complain about games offering up multiple difficulty modes.

Glyph-wise the main thing I did differently this playthrough was I tended to just use two of the same arm glyph almost all the time (with the exception of my old standby of confodere/secare anyway). To some extent this is a bit frustrating since it meant more accessing the menu (only three attack glyphs instead of six) but it seems to pretty clearly lead to a better performance. I actually used Ignis this time since people insisted it didn't suck, and indeed it doesn't, for all that it is still one of the trickier ones to use effectively and goes pretty obsolete when you get Nitesco, but there's not much shame in that. Umbra was the one I really didn't manage to get much out of, on the other hand.

Collected all the boss medals! This was a pretty fun diversion and did make up for some of the bosses being unchanged. Of course the bosses who were already hard took plenty of tries. Glyphs used for this...
-Anthroverta: Confodere/Secare (also I perfected him on the first try which convinced me to try for all the medals <.<)
-Giant Skeleton: Macir
-Crab: Macir
-Maneater: Luminato
-Rusalka: Vol Confodere
-Goliath: Vol Confodere/Secare
-Landshark thing: Vol Grando (this boss kinda sucks)
-Story boss #1: Vol Confodere/Secare
-Story boss #2: Vol Luminato
-Wallman: Super secret strategy
-Blackmore: Vol Luminato
-Death: Nitesco. SCYTHES EVERYWHERE~ at least Nitesco clears them out while attacking.
-Eligor: Melio Ascia for the bows, Lapiste for the knees, Melio Falcis for the head. Ended up using the glyph union against the head even though I don't like them normally, because his HP is low and he has a nice alternating pattern between making you dodge and just sitting there.
-Drac: Drop HP to singledigits with pre-battle use of Dominus. Use Melio Macir for battle. Volacticus destroys form 1, Arma Custos' ridiculous boost combines with Death Ring for a surprisingly quick clear on form 2, which is good because I never found a highly reliable way to deal with dogs -> Destruction Ray without taking a hit.

Speaking of Volacticus, I saved some sidequest hunting (I don't do them all, just easier ones) until after getting it so I could enjoy abusing it in levels. Good times. Not too much left to do with this game... maybe I'll FAQ how to get those optional areas or something.

[SnowFire]

You got away with Vol Luminatio on Blackmore?  Impressive, I always felt it just doesn't kill him fast enough for what's a straight damage slugfest.  Of course you apparently also medaled him and I never learned his pattern well enough to consistently dodge, so I suppose if you do, you can kill him with whatever.

Death is pretty intense, I certainly Potion'd my way through it.  Used double (vanilla) Luminatio for him which also helps clear out the scythes, but Nitesco is probably more damage at the cost of worse vertical reach.

Actual reason I'm posting, though: Volacticus vs. Drac what?!  I think I tried that twice, and Drac just gets pissed off and nukes the screen until you stop.  Which is a shame since Vol certainly would be awesome vs. Drac if you can get to the otherside a la Albus mode, but how'd you pull it off?  (And agree it's a shame the game doesn't give you more areas to abuse Volacticus in, since it's great fun.)

The side quest areas are pretty hard to miss if you were religious about testing walls.  Just take the bottom right exit in Drac's castle.  There's a breakable wall somewhere beyond Blackmore IIRC, break it and then explore the bottom of the castle.  That said I didn't find the Ancient Cave all that appealing since they absolutely scream out for Refectio abuse, which is boring and slow, and then cause lots of cursing when you get caught and die anyway after carefully nursing your way through.   Training grounds is all right though, fun Magnes times.

[Dark Holy Elf]

If you use Volacticus against Dracula, he'll hit you with a big purple flame attack, but it appears wherever you are when he snaps his fingers, so if you move forward after taking to the air he'll miss you, leaving you free to smash him in the face. This lets you easily fly over his fireballs, and the best part: it resets his pattern so he'll never use anything BUT fireballs. It's pretty much a free ticket to form 2.

EDIT: regarding Blackmore, he always feels like he dies pretty quickly to me regardless since it's hard to actually miss him. The reason I like Vol Luminato is you can just fire them in the air and be confident they'll hit, so you can focus all of your mental effort to just avoiding his attacks.

[Sierra]

LA Noire: Hot hot insurance claim investigation action.

--Wait, is that a Hudsucker Proxy reference in the ledger? That is a Hudsucker Proxy reference in the ledger. Awesome. Also apparently the crew of the Enterprise finally got tired of Barclay so they dumped in the past and now he sells morphine or something. Something tells me I should have been paying more attention to the throwaway names in this game's ledgers and correspondence.

[Grefter]

TitS - This game confuses me.  Using [] instead of " is kind of creepy as fuck until you work out how they are using it.  Maybe not use it so much in translation I it isn't a character in your font set yah?  Whatevs though.  Up to chapter 1 and did some grind on this mob on the way to Bose that dropped some accessory I couldn't find what it did in a quick google search.  Skull Pendant gives ID protection for the record.  Now I know and have plenty of septim.  More on the game and it's systems when posting from a computer.

Grind only done because it fit in with other activities bein done at the same time.  Mobile games lend themselves to it.  Short low focus activity.  Not done to break game so much as to be playing it.

[VySaika]

FF13 - Highly enjoying this. Got up to where you get SNow back and it's now a Snow+Hope section, which just sounds like an emotional trainwreck waiting to happen(for the chars, not me. I like them, but I'm not THAT invested in them~).

Plot wise: A bit heavy on the tossing out words that send you scrambling to the datalog, but otherwise fine. Whoever's calling the shots in the sanctum is clearly the badguys, dunno if the fal'cie(sp?) are or not, but leaning not. Most of the soldiers and such you're taking out...honestly, nothing wrong with them except they drink the kool-aid and are fully invested in the sanctum's policies. Whole bunch of people who probably aren't badguys just fighting for the wrong reasons. Cocoon seems to be an even MORE fear/hate/blame based society then our own, which is impressive. Something goes wrong, find an enemy to blame! Chars are...honestly, none of them bother me. These people are stressed beyond belief, of course they're not being entirely rational. Everyone's got thier reasons for acting like they do, and they're all good reasons(Snow and Lightning haveing the least good reasons. Lightning is just emotionally crippled and doesn't know anything besides violence, while Snow is a manchild who refuses to grow up. I can still accept that because the game doesn't try to pretend that these are not problems).

Gameplay wise: It's breezy and "turn your brain off and play" right now, I look forward to getting into the real meat of the game when I get the whole party together and have options. Simple but works well for the speed at which it plays. Which is FAST. Even the worst fight has taken me like a max of 3 minutes, and those are the slogs. Continues just punting you right back to before the fight, with a chance to access your menu to change up paradigms, works excellently. I'm not afraid to play around with options instead of just playing it safe, since if I lose it doesn't take me out of the action long. Eidolons are the only part of the game I don't care for so far. The eidolon battles are annoying and using them in battle is...confusing. I've decided to just sort of treat it as free damage and not sweat the details.