I started DQVII last night. I played for about an hour, but I haven't fought anything yet. (Everyone in my party is carrying a cedar stick and a pot lid, however; so, I am ready for any threat! )
The game is charming JRPG "comfort food" BTW.
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How's DQIX treating you, Exhuminator? Last I read, it sounded like you were finally getting into the meat of the main quest. What kind of party are you using? (My party consisted of a mage/thief modeled after my then one-year-old son, a minstrel/luminary modeled after my then four year old daughter, and a martial artist/gladiator modeled after my wife. I was the priest/sage. We were like the Partridge Family of kicking ass.)
prfsnl_gmr wrote:How's DQIX treating you, Exhuminator? Last I read, it sounded like you were finally getting into the meat of the main quest. What kind of party are you using?
I'm currently in Coffinwell. About to go try and find the cure for the town plague. I've got about 7 hours in it right now.
My party ranges from level 13-11, something like that. My main is a minstrel, then I have a warrior, mage, and priest as well.
I'm still not crazy about DQIX. DQIX is decent JRPG comfort food, don't get me wrong. But it's 7/10 material so far. Nothing about the experience has significantly impressed me nor has it "hooked" me yet. I understand the grottos, optional bosses, crafting, and post game stuff is all supposed to be amazing... but what about the core experience? Yeah, not so much. The other Dragon Quest games on DS I've finished (DQIV & DQV) soundly trounce what I've played of this one so far. I keep holding out hope!
Really I think if you'd played through DQVIII on PS2, you would have a rather different frame of reference to judge this game by. That's a fair thing to say, considering both games had the same developer.
Exhuminator wrote:Really I think if you'd played through DQVIII on PS2, you would have a rather different frame of reference to judge this game by. That's a fair thing to say, considering both games had the same developer.
That's fair. I have read so many good things about it. That said, my second favorite DQ game is DQIII, from which DQIX draws a lot of inspiration. I guess character creation in DQ games is just my thing.
Well I've barely made any headway into DQII. Both my daughters decided this would be a great week to try out the whole "insomnia" thing. Go to sleep, babies!!!!!! May switch to a handheld game so I can play something upstairs instead of in my basement game room dungeon. It'd have to be DS, 3DS, Vita, or PSP, because, as odd as this sounds, I find myself enjoying Game Boy, GBC, and GBA on the TV more and more these days. Holy commas. I should stop "declaring" that I'm playing something until I'm like halfway done, I swear. I've been kinda aimless gaming-wise this year, and have abandoned so much of what I've started.
Dark Souls III - Down to I guess four bosses remaining, one of which is optional. Somewhat disappointingly, it seems like I managed to cut short some of the NPC questlines due to order I wound up finding areas. I did run into some of them for the first encounters, but not much past that.
Seems like the encounters assume you'll find the Crystal Sage/etc first instead of (easily) wandering past that and doing Abyss Watchers, catacombs, and so on? It's not like I did anything sequence-breaking.
I'm also probably missing some of them due to the game reverting to DS1's NPC invasion style where they only happen if embered, but actually have drops or quests attached. Since I've only been embered after killing bosses, I've probably missed a lot of those, though AFAIK I can go back and do those anytime.
Well, I finally managed to get back to this. It took me a second to orient myself on level 5, but once I finally did I managed to take a few steps and locate the dwarven "town," which comes complete with a cleric who could treat my injuries and a bunch of rations to grab. While it's not an ideal solution to my lack of self-sufficiency, it most definitely helps. I accepted a quest to kick some Drow ass and went on my merry way. A young dwarf warrior decided to join me, so I stuck him in the back with a spear he can hurl as needed. With the rest of the floor explored, I decided to go ahead and move on down to level 6.
Level 6 offers magic-casting bird people with a lot of HP, so they take a bit to kill. They can hit at range too, and they might be able to hit back party members with their magic, I'm not quite sure. What I do know is that they're a pain in the ass, and having now trashed three of them, I don't like the thought of having to face a group of them. I began my explorations of the area and even discovered an egg.
Soon after, I found a blue-robed villain who was more than happy to spout off about his evil plan for a second before attacking me. Have I ever told you guys I hate fighting wizards? Well, here's why: before I could so much as move once the exposition was over, he hit my party with a devastating spell. I pulled back a bit singed and bloodied, and then I laid into him like a tsunami with everything I had. With incoming knives, arrows, spears, magic missiles, and then my two tanks on full beat down, he quickly caved and collapsed. I then spent a few moments looking around to make sure the guy was actually dead because, you know, wizards suck.
Well, so that's where I am currently. I can go back for healing, but it's a long and annoying trip involving remembering how to use some teleports, and it'll further hurt my food supplies which, while replenished a bit, are certainly not infinite. But worse, taking more than a week off due to how busy I've been has gotten to me, so I'm not really pumped about playing and feel a little disoriented. I'm not quite sure how to proceed.
So, Megami Tensei II took the kid gloves off, and is starting to wreck my face with torturous delight. I can't remember the last time I was seriously enraged by playing a game, but it probably wasn't within the last decade. Shinjuku got me. I was actually getting a little worried that I might break something, because I don't think I've ever encountered enemies more detestable than the Junkies, and 'Vy-me's there. I've never liked the real Shinkuju (especially Kabuki-cho) either, but these things may have tainted my image of that place even more. The Junkies show up in groups of four to eight (usually around seven) and basically just ruin my day because they have this singing attack, which hits each of my party members, for minor damage, and can cause PANIC status (usually does), which is essentially a stun that lasts for a random number of turns. They generally end up stun locking me, and slowly chiselling away at my HP. What's worse are the 'Vy-me's (some strange truncation of "heavy metal") who are guaranteed to show up in a party of seven, and do the same thing as the Junkies, but with better stats, so I can easily wipe to them. Worse even still is that it's difficult to run from them, which turned almost every encounter with 'Vy-me's into an exercise in prostrating myself before RNGesus in the hopes that he would bestow his blessing upon me.
Certainly it couldn't get any worse, you might say, but wait: This was in a six floor dungeon, and the signal/vision "jamming" rooms are one thing, but MT II is already throwing in the pitfalls in the floors. One of these pitfalls is directly in front of a ladder up to the sixth floor, and drops straight down to the first floor. It took every last bit of resolve I had to get through that place, and once I did, the game finally gave me the opportunity to purchase some guns that can actually do some good damage to the enemies I'm up against.
I'm a little scurred, 'cause I don't think I'm much more than half-way through the game. I got Cerberus, but he doesn't seem like he'll be much help to me in MT II. I'm keeping him around, though, because I'm not sure if his presence is meant to affect the story at all. One thing is for sure, I will be working on my party for a while through repeated monster melding, before I continue on with the next part of the game.
Well, I finally had the chance to sit down and get back to this properly over the weekend, and as a result, I managed to make significant progress. When I had last left off, I had made it to level 6 of the dungeon, but the kenku bird people there were proving to be a pain in the ass. I soon learned that they often travel in packs, but if I played my cards right and used the large halls to my advantage, I could sometimes manage to split them up and take each one in isolation. Using this, it was easy to clear out the main halls of their threat. Side rooms proved a bit tougher though...until Noise finally leveled up and got access to the Fireball spell. From then on, taking on the teams of four became a bit easier.
Once the kenkus in the northern rooms were down, I took all of their eggs and put them in the nest. This gave me access to the Chieftain's Halberd, a particularly nasty magical weapon that immediately went into the eager hands of Ack the fighter. With this, the remaining kenku I found wandering the halls went down easy, and after navigating dart traps and opening up some passageways by putting darts into cubbyholes, I soon had a +3 mace for Bone to take. I also loaded up my new dwarven fighters with throwables, giving me a front line of armored beefcakes with a back line that could hurl spears over their shoulders phalanx style. In the middle, Exhum has a bow, while Noise now has devastating spells worth using when the situation gets hairy.
It did get hairy, almost immediately. I pushed on down to floor 7, growing wary of my slowly dwindling food supply. While kenkus do drop rations, they only do it about half of the time, so I couldn't rely on them too much. Otherwise they would drop staves, which are useless to me. But traveling down to level 7 immediately led me into a confrontation with a mob of drow. Drow can hit ok, but the nasty thing about them is that they can paralyze whoever they hit, taking that character immediately out of the fight. Thankfully they don't have an auto-damage button like the kenkus' magic missile, but it's still annoying. I fried them all with fireballs and plugged them full of arrows, darts, spears, and knives before having Ack and Bone finish off the horde. End result: they never touched me. Suck it, Drow.
I reclaimed my gear and rested, then pushed through into the Drow's territory. There are a lot of fireball traps on level 7, but there are easy tricks to avoiding them all too. This wasn't much comfort however as I consumed the last of my food. I worked my way past one, opened a door, explored a passage, and then found myself beset by the other, nastier foe in the area, the skeleton lord. These guys have no special powers, but they hit like brick shithouses. I separated the group of them and then picked them off one by one with everything I had. My reward: bones and a holy symbol. And not a paladin's holy symbol either...
I rushed back up through the level, through level 6, back to the dwarves on level 5. Along the way on 6, I tried using an alternate staircase and discovered to my horror that one of the rooms serves as a spawning point for kenku hordes. After a fight where I took on 20 of the bastards and lost half my party in the process. Reloading my game, I sealed the room they came from and left it well behind.
The dwarven cleric that sits on level 5 was happy to raise the dead bones I had found on level 7, but I had to kick out one of my two dwarven fighters. Since Taghore had the worse stats, he rejoined his people, and boom, I discovered the bones belong to a leggy blonde willing to join me to kick ass for the Lord. I finally had my cleric!
It sucked not having a more reliable source of food and healing beyond Bone's Lay on Hands ability. Having a cleric feels almost game breaking. Suddenly I can heal after every combat, and she can replenish my food stores with a single spell. What followed was an orgy of bloodshed as I made my way back to level 7 and slaughtered every Drow and skeleton lord in my sight. I briefly hit storerooms on level 8 and 9, taking down a displacer beast in the process, and then mopped up the remaining lords on 7, discovering a massive room full of portals to other areas. Level 8 followed soon after, where I cleansed the realm of Driders and hell hounds, eventually coming across a magical long sword to give to Bone and a Drow Bow to give to Exhum.
Now I sit at the proper beginning of level 9. Ack and Bone are both heavily armored thanks to magic gear I found. Exhum has a pile of arrows to turn everything in front of him into a pincushion, and he's got an upgraded bow to do it with. Noise has a wand of lightning bolt and a spellbook full of pain to fry whatever gets in my way. My dwarf fighter has a stack of spears, magic knives, and special darts at the ready, while my cleric holds the +3 mace and has a bunch of healing spells prepped and ready to go. We'll see how things go from here, but now I'm pumped and back in the game.
I am 10+ hours into DQVII. It is a very "talky" RPG, and you spend a lot of time just exploring towns, talking to people, and completing tasks. (Basically, if the "town" segments of JRPGs are your favorite parts, this is the game for you!) Nonetheless, my party is probably a bit overpowered at this point. (Eliminating random encounters makes it easier to avoid enemies, but it also makes it easier to grind levels!)
I also feel like I have only scratched the surface of the game's content. I just unlocked the ability to befriend monsters, and I haven't unlocked the game's job system yet. I am also really enjoying the game's "episodic" pacing, and I really like how it slowly reveals the world map. I anticipate spending well over 100 hours with this game, and I anticipate enjoying every minute of it! (The episodic pacing will also allow me to put it aside for a while in October to play through some horror games without missing a beat!)
Yeah, 100 hours is probably right. VII is definitely the most deliberately paced game in the series; as I recall you don't unlock the job system until your 10-20 hours in (can't remember exactly).
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