Right. FFXII's battle system actually requires to use buffs and things, and you can eventually null certain status immunities. Other FFs have sort of conditioned everyone to, er... do this less, I guess.

And as for levelling up, just develop a good rotation strategy for your characters and you SHOULDN'T need to do much extra fighting to keep everyone roughly even.

Actually, you might need to grind, but that would be MUCH more for money than for the exp. Usually you can get by with older equipment though.

Every JRPG I've spent longer than 60 hours playing:

Xenogears
Chrono Trigger
Tales of Symphonia
Legend of Mana
SMT:Nocturne

They're could be more. We're not entirely sure.

It's philosophical if, say, you're 15 and don't know what philosophy is. Other than that, it just doesn't really make sense. I mean, it seems to be saying that religious people are murderers. Sure. Okay. That's a nice sweeping generalization. It might make sense in the context of the game, but beyond that, no, it's very simple on a philosophical level, and too inspecific to mean anything.

Ahaha. This. Yeah. See, I don't might it being real time hack 'n slash at all. However, I believe that if a game is an action RPG, it needs actual action, which DS did not have.



Do you mean losing, or getting knocked over? If it's the latter, that's just some visual effect that doesn't matter at all.

Also, your experience level doesn't matter much, so much as your equipment does. Whether or not it's hard depends on if you've been using the licenses properly.

Did Square always have such horribly emo writing in their games?

Ultima 3 is actually... beefed up from the PC version, somewhat substantially. Ultima 5, like Ultima 7 on the SNES, seems to have very little to do with the PC counterpart. At least visually and engine wise, it's totally different. It's also real-time and runs at about three frames per second, so I have no idea if it actually IS that different. It is, in any case, utterly unplayable.

Basically if it matters, though, in Ultima 4 PC, each NPC had a dialogue tree of sorts, and gathering information, finding out things to ask certain NPCs, and basically getting info from people was a VERY substantial portion of the game. Ultima 4 NES just reduced everyone to one-line, signpost NPCs. So basically, were talking reducing everyone from about 4-8 sentences down to about one to three.

The NES version removed on the order of somewhere betwen 75 and 85% of all the text in the game, which is PROBABLY why you never knew what you were supposed to be doing.

Anyway, I don't quit playing games because i stop liking them. I quit playing games because i tend to lose interest in things quite rapidly. Of the 600 odd games i've played, I've finished less than twenty. The other thing I need to note, though, is that I don't care about finishing games.

The RPG systems aren't veiled, if you mean what I think you mean. You're given plenty of direction in the PC version. It's quite non-linear still, but if you actually talk to people they usually tell you what to do. I mean, pretty clear instructions.



Wasn't this only in the NES version?

It just looks like a beta version of PSIV sort of I guess.

Okay, still not getting the strategy here. The main difficulty for me is apparently the fact that, at where I'm at, I should have about 500 HP max and I've got, eh, 370 HP max. i'm also still finding it incredibly cluttered on a visual level, although my small tv probably makes this more severe than it should. so other than the fact that i have't been level grinding, it's relatively easy. People keep telling me that button mashing gets you killed, and they give me various strategies, and the only strategies I've found that seem viable  are drinking painkillers and using one of the two* useful psypher skills that i have. In every sense, just mashing square while running into the enemies after letting them wander apart a bit is the most effective thing.

also, downing painkillers isn't even that useful. I have nowhere near enough HP, and I'm still doing alright. Furthermore, you level up by eating food, not by using painkillers. So just taking the damage and keeping food objects on hand is... more effetive for everything but bosses.

the knockdown and dive attacks seem especially useless. just mashing square does more damage than either of those, and dive drains the POW meter much, much faster. knockdown still tends to get, uh... well, if you slide into a bunch of enemies, you're still probably going to get hit by the third or forth one in half of the time, and the combo finisher tends to knock them all down anyway.

i don't really know how useful the alchemy system is really. maybe it gets better later on when you get more interesting recipes. so far I've just been throwing materials away and eating mandragoras raw.

* Psypher burst is sort of powerful. Cyclone less so. The thing that ups your attack power is okay against bosses, but most normal enemies die in like, five hits anyway. PB and cyclone seem more useful for just stunning the enemies. i'm still wondering why 'invisble' exists.

Ultima 7 has a few, most of which will be by me later posted:

"You see a lovely naked woman. She is not in the least bit concerned that she is wearing no clothes.

Sparks eyes widen and his jaw drops."

Spark is some 15 year old kid that's dad is killed in the first town. He hangs with you for some reason and is AWESOME.

Weirdass Naked 'Caveman': Mmm. Mama! Me Papa. She Mama. We make zug-zug. Maybe someday make Boy or Girl.

They're actually tax evaders. They live in a cave and eat giant bees.

RPGs have been pretty mainstream since FFVII. Also sports, racing, and FPS games have tons of RPG elements. Like, my old roommate had some football game where you could level up your football player and buy furniture for his dorm and take tests or retarded crap like that which had nothing to do with football jesus christ i need to unremember my freshman semester blguglfgulg

superflat: So far as I know, you can't.

Using knockback doesn't seem to help much. Whenever knockback attacks hit, there seems to be some sort of odd screen shudder or something. Also, the enemies I hit aren't really down that long, they tend to get pushed relatively far away, and it takes a second for my character to recover, stand up, and start running after such an attack. By that time, the other enemies are usually back up. Also, the knockdown attack doesn't do much damage, it seems. It also requires a lot of deliberate action to duck and slide into the enemies, where as just running into them is ultimately quicker, more damage, and equally viable is just jumping and flying away after doing that.

I have no idea why I'm utterly terrible at this. The enemy AI isn't even good. It just moves towards the player and fires off attacks seemingly at random.

Maybe my controller is damaged. It's possible my ex-roommate damaged it, or one of the retards that I lent it to.

There's also another problem with offscreen enemies raping me while I'm doing it, o the enemy I'm trying to knockdown, not falling, and then attacking and bouncing me into some offscreen enemy's attack.

I know this game has zooming in and out things. I have no idea why they're not using them. The sprite work isn't that impressive, honestly, so I don't see the need for a constant closeup of it.

I don't really know if I feel like putting up with the alchemy system enough to actually play around with it. It seems like it involves a lot of, uh, grinding and item farming in order to get stuff. After that it's just a matter of sticking stuff together in the most tedious and brainless way imaginable. It's just... rotely following recipes. There's no sense of experimentation or discovery involved. You can't create unique potions based on the properties of what you're putting in it ala elder scrolls.

Anyway, do the dungeon layouts change at all between characters?

where do you get food ingredients for the restaurants? I've seen onionnes and eggs frequently, but nothing else.

Also, just curious, but is anyone else finding the english voice work incredibly stiff and, uh... stiff? I don't know japanese so I don't know if it's any better, but I've got that track playing now. One too many lines with completely botched intonation and other prosodic processes. "I'm a POOKA merchant." Yes. I imagine you DO in fact sell Pookas. The japanese voicework sounds much better, although, as I said... I don't know the language so maybe it isn't.

I don't particulary trust my own opinion on this game, anyway. Opinion formation seems completely arbitrary in a lot of cases, so it's quite likely my dislike of it is just some knee-jerk reaction to its popularity, even though a much more appropriate arbitrary and pre-formulated opinion would've been to have found it to be exactly like legend of mana, in which case I'd probably just complain because everyone's creaming over odin sphere and still hating lom, even though i found them really similar, thus inconsistent viewpoints, etc. etc. I'm either completely misjudging myself, assuming I'm still using a schema I abandoned years ago, or I just don't really care anymore.

I do that. The game also specifically says that if the number on the material is higher than in the recipe, it's okay.