• Tag Archives Fantasy
  • Serpent in the Staglands – Initial Impressions

    At this point, being at level 4 after having cleared the first set of areas, this game reminds me most of the first Baldur’s Gate. You start with basically nothing, most things can easily kill you, and the mechanics can be opaque. Visually speaking it looks pretty good (which is amazing considering that the native resolution is 320×240) while the gameplay is a more mixed experience.

    Early on at least, magic is not a viable damage dealer. So encounters come down to either baiting/kiting enemies away from their friends to beat them down 5-on-1, or making use of spells like Fearful Light and Festering Ooze to disable parts of otherwise unavoidable group attacks. You never, ever want to get into a ‘fair’ fight… because you will lose. Offsetting the deadly encounters is the ability to fully heal your party essentially at will outside of combat; there’s no limit to how much magic you can use, so just spam-cast the basic healing spell.

    Character progression is both simple and complicated. On level-up characters get 2 Attribute Points (used to raise attributes) and 2 Skill Points (used to raise skills, spells, and aptitudes). The attributes are relatively straight-forward (though Dexterity not affecting dodge is bizarre), the skills/spells/aptitudes however are far trickier. Many spells do not improve much at all at higher levels, you can only have 3 skills active at a time, and some aptitudes can become incredibly powerful indirectly (if you have the right tools). So it’s quite difficult to choose what to advance in and extremely easy to end up wasting points.

    Then you have weird ‘ease-of-use’ contrasts like being able to create infinite ranged ammo with a Linguistic Incantation, but the ammo has to be dropped on the ground first. Or new incantations being automatically written down as your Linguistics skill increases, but not having anything automatically marked on your world map or journal.

    Some starting things:
    – Create two additional Avatars at the start.
    – One of them should be a Drow Frost Jackal for the item.
    – Avoid fighting more than one enemy at a time.
    – While the game is paused, healing items cannot be used in battle.
    – If you use Woodwise on yourself, you can detect traps.
    – Parasitic Orb is required to unlock Fairy Rings.
    – Read everything, nothing is written down for you.
    – Don’t sell keys, drop them on the ground instead.
    – Merchant inventories are limited and extra items disappear.
    – Set traps will disappear if you save/reload.
    – If you only kill part of an enemy group, saving/reloading will respawn them.
    – Wands are very good, and anyone who can cast spells should have one.
    – Whether it’s day or night affects which encounters you’ll find.
    – Day/night can be changed at will with Linguistics 4.
    – GOG Galaxy installs the patch wrong, you have to move the contents of the 32/64 folder into the main directory.

    ‘Secret’ Linguistic Incantations:
    – “Davi Bone(s)” to turn a bone or bones into healing items.
    – “Shoar [Gem] Chip” to turn gem chips into whole gems.
    – “Grafitus [Ammo]” to refill any stack of ammo to 100.
    – The items above have to be dropped on the ground.
    – “Nufri [Ruin Name]” to reveal some kind of secret.
    – These are provided in the out-of-game Erlein’s Handbook.

    Spells to consider raising:
    – Blood Cocoon (works faster)
    – Festering Ooze (increased radius/duration)
    – Heat Metal (so it does damage)
    – Feverish Haze (works faster)
    – Cat Poly (up to 3dx dodge chance)
    – Wolf Poly (up to 5d6 physical hit chance)
    – Nauseate (works faster)
    – Strangling Vines (up to 5d6 dodge penalty)
    – Shimmering Scales (up to 3d17 AC and spell resistance)
    – Ethereal Weapon (up to 6d8 damage and 3dx hit chance)
    – Siphon Poison (works faster)
    – Searing Light (up to 5d7+15 damage and 12 radius)
    – Zana Morph (increased duration and up to 5d6 magic hit chance)


  • Radiant Historia

    After seeing a number of comments claiming this was one of the best RPGs ever, I finally got around to playing it recently.

    It’s a good handheld game, sure… but it’s certainly no RPG masterpiece. There are quite a number of flaws, beyond the inherent simplicity of being designed specifically for short play sessions. The most glaring of which would have to be the plot structure and storyline itself:

    This is a game about jumping around between timelines and modifying the past to change the future, yet it’s just as linear as a conventional RPG with every single decision point having a rigidly right and wrong answer. If you choose the wrong decision you have to immediately re-do the choice to pick the right one, and if you do things out-of-order or miss something you’ll be blocked from continuing until you do everything the right way.

    So it has all the negatives of a time travel story (questionable logic, forced backtracking) with none of the positives such as multiple endings. There is only one here, though it’s accompanied by a number of sidequest-unlocked epilogue scenes (only the Conuts one advances anything), and ultimately you’ve gone on this epic journey just to… restore the status quo. The actual progress toward saving the world is put off with a sequel hook.

    The combat system is fine at least, despite fundamentally making no sense whatsoever and having a penchant for tossing over-populated encounters at you that basically require the use of magical AOE attacks. And I can’t really complain about getting ~32 hours worth of playtime out of it to see everything, even if some of that did only just amount to running on a treadmill.


  • Bakuretsu Hunter

    When sorcerers cross the line and start using their powers for evil, the Sorcerer Hunters are contracted to eliminate them: Carrot the skirt-chaser, his magic-inclined brother Marron, the brawler Gateau, and the dominatrix sisters Chocolate & Tira.

    An action comedy, centered primarily on Carrot’s manic behavior, set in a grim world where the common people live in fear and poverty. It mostly consists of episodic stories with only about a quarter of it being plot-driven.

    More Information:
    aniDB
    Wikipedia

    Continue reading  Post ID 2418


  • Maze☆ Bakunetsu Jikuu

    Maze and the gang stumble upon a fairy and become enmeshed in the troubles surrounding the nearby country of Babylonia.

    An alternate version side story not much different from the TV series featuring higher quality visuals. If you can ignore the minor (character design) and not so minor (Randi’s introduction, more nudity) differences it fits into the series well enough right around the 10th episode or so.

    More Information:
    aniDB
    Wikipedia

    Continue reading  Post ID 2418


  • Maze☆ Bakunetsu Jikuu (TV)

    Waking from a bad dream Maze find her room a mess and her memory in shambles. Worse, it seems she’s been transported to some sort of fantasy world. There she becomes entangled with a princess on the run and develops strange powers… not least being the uncontrollable ability to transform into a completely different person at night.

    An action comedy whose comedy comes from silly faces and harem antics. Two things to be aware of are that the romantic attractions here are remarkably varied, with there being all sorts of pairings (though girl<->girl is the most prominent), and a little ways past the midpoint it begins to acquire a distinct focus on an incestuous relationship.

    More Information:
    aniDB
    Wikipedia

    Continue reading  Post ID 2418


  • Akatsuki no Yona OVAs

    Yona and the gang head to a hot spring, where some of Kija’s background is revealed after Jeha notices a scar on his back.

    The first OVA is half standard hot springs fanservice episode and half serious flashback. It’s not directly connected to the second two.

    After a drinking contest one night, Zeno finds himself dreaming of the past.

    A two-episode flashback showing the beginnings of the Kouka kingdom and the details of Zeno’s history. There’s only a small amount of comic relief here with the rest consisting of reflective scenes and serious drama.

    More Information:
    aniDB
    Wikipedia


  • Flip Flappers

    As a studious, slightly boring girl, Cocona doesn’t have any particular direction or goals in life. One morning that all changes when she encounters the wild, impulsive Papika and finds herself suddenly tossed into a bizarre dream dimension.

    Bouncing as it does between settings and genres, this is a difficult series to pin down. I suppose at its core you could call it an embellished magical girl family drama. The comedy is a mix of reaction and situational while the ecchi aspects do not often have any particular attention drawn to them.

    More Information:
    aniDB
    Crunchyroll
    Fansub.co
    Wikipedia

    Continue reading  Post ID 2418


  • Agarest War Zero

    While originally I had no intention of ever playing this game, when I went to try out the PC version of Agarest 2 I found that you could import a Zero save to get some free items.

    Since the GOG version of the game does not appear to have access to any of the DLC (and I obviously can’t import a PS3 save file) getting a Zero clear save appeared to be the only way to cut down on the early grinding. Which gave me an excuse to stop ignoring it.

    Honestly I wish I kept ignoring it.

    While it does show you exactly what the characters in Agarest 2 were talking about during the artifact and Chaos/Summerill conversations (and you get to see an early version of Eva) it turns out that nothing of note was omitted from those conversations. When you combine that with the large amount of required grinding and ‘unwinnable’ battles that you’re supposed to lose… well, there really ends up being no reason whatsoever to play it.

    I’ll just leave these here though in case anybody else wants to see for themselves:

    Cheat Engine Table (GOG Version)
    True End Post-Game Save (GOG Version)


  • DRIFTERS: Battle in a Brand-new World War

    After Toyohisa Shimazu is critically wounded while holding the rearguard against the Eastern Army, he finds himself suddenly transported to a different world. There he meets others like himself, transplants from Earth called Drifters who have been recruited to fight a war against an implacable foe who wishes to eradicate all human life.

    A mix of hyper-violent action scenes and picture-drama style comedy skits. While it involves characters from a wide variety of time periods, it mainly depicts warfare out of the medieval and Sengoku eras.

    More Information:
    aniDB
    Crunchyroll
    Fansub.co
    Wikipedia


  • Magic-Kyun! Renaissance

    Wanting to be more like her mother, Kohana transfers into the Hoshinomori School of Magic Arts. There she meets six boys, each with their own artistic specialty, who all take an interest in her unusual talent for arrangement and cheerful smile.

    A school life harem with a comedic style closer to that of a gag comedy. It doesn’t actually begin to focus on romance until around the eighth episode, instead mainly being concerned with resolving the characters’ personal issues and getting everyone together to organize a successful school festival. It’s also not much of a fantasy show; up until the twelfth episode the ‘magic’ on display only exists to visualize the artists’ skill level.

    More Information:
    aniDB
    Crunchyroll
    Wikipedia

    Continue reading  Post ID 2418