Various Thoughts

So I ended up going through all 3 endings and even wrote a walkthrough.

First the Bad End: This ending is not as bad as its name might suggest, at least from a metagaming perspective, as while the story’s conclusion is certainly quite bad you do get access to a bunch of Guild Commissions that are otherwise only available to complete in the True End. Next the Normal End: It’s okay and you can get a couple Items that are normally only found in the True End from the final boss.

Which leaves us with the True End. The path the story takes in this ending is remarkably dark. Quite dark indeed with a surprising amount of death, and whether the goals/conclusion justify that or not is debatable. The most surprising thing about this ending though is that Schwarz has somehow managed to become a decent person.

Funny story:

While on the third playthrough, my PS3’s disk drive decided to start refusing to read disks after I ejected the game once during a freeze. So I was left with a dilemma. Get a new PS3? Turns out they’re still remarkably expensive. Get the PC version? The save data won’t transfer. Fix the drive? I couldn’t find the right tool to open the case. Which left me with: Buy the game digitally from the PS Store and play it directly off the HD… which is what I did. It ended up running a hell of a lot smoother that way too and I never had another freeze.

Second generation now complete. While the protagonist never gets any better where the heroines are concerned he does show glimpses of a decently entertaining personality when dealing with opponents, so that was a bit of a help. Less helpful is the front and center brother/sister incest plotline that makes up about half the main storyline of that generation.

The third generation looks to be a return to the first, with the new protagonist being rather subdued. A bit too subdued perhaps… and goth as fuck. All these new characters being recently introduced (the elf girl from last gen, the new hero, and the ‘fake little sister’) though is playing a bit of havoc with my skill setup. I’m not sure who exactly I want to use in the final party, I don’t have any points left to train the new additions, and there’s still apparently two more new characters that will join. I was using Fiona and Eva (the Blackhole special move is a godsend) but now they’ve become kind of redundant with one another with Eva being just slightly better overall.

Some general things I’ve since discovered:

• In the upper right corner of the battle screen you can see if any extra enemies are set to appear later in the battle.
• Out of the way areas of the world map often have glowing spots that pop up when you get close which contain Attribute+ items.
• You can press R2 to skip attack animations.
• Reinforcing and Enhancing your equipment makes a huge difference in combat, and most Enhancing at this level is pretty cheap relatively speaking (40k gold and some Ore to max out an item).
• The free DLC dungeons are fantastic places to train/grind since they’re mostly populated with monsters from the next generation.
• Agility is nowhere near as useful as it first appears. It only comes into play if two characters have the same Wait value, otherwise Wait alone determines turn order. Meaning you only need it high on one character to get the first turn.
• Strength/Dexterity (melee) and Intelligence (caster) are pretty much the only stats you should be spending level-up points on. Vitality is only useful on low-level characters (the HP gain is not retroactive) and Mind isn’t really useful at all.
• After completing a main story mission and heading back to town through the portals, leave the town manually to see if any events are waiting to trigger at the outside entrance.

So, I made it though the first generation after all.

Turns out that, a lot like the first game, once you get access to better combination attacks the battles become… not easy exactly, but much faster and less of a slog. There’s still quite a bit of grinding involved however, so if your console’s connected to the internet I strongly suggest grabbing all the free DLC to help with Gold and TP (and get the bonus dungeons).

You may not want to use the free DLC items though, as they’re quite overpowered and may make it harder to pick up on the combat system’s quirks (while I used them in the first game, I avoided using them here).

If you’re worried about missing things, I strongly, strongly suggest checking out one of the two True End guides around, as after finishing the 1st generation I took a quick look to see what events I missed, and apparently something like 50% of them never showed. It seems most require extremely specific character affection levels to trigger and are timed besides. I also tried out that Bathhouse minigame to see if it was as terrible as suspected… and it kinda is. Speaking of ecchi:

The ecchi issue is still quite serious, with the end-of-generation ‘choose a wife’ bit being much worse than I remember it being in the first game. And then there’s the protagonist for the second generation, who’s a huge asshole and hates his predicament. He’s even worse than the equivalent in the first game, apparently being vocally misogynistic on top of it all. This generation might actually end up being more of a trial than the last if his personality never improves.