Such spambots, so writings.
The Abyssal Campaign is going fairly well for once. Character development has settled in all around, and now most everybody is tolerable at worst.
There are some funny things about here. We actually have sidequests that revolve around Luke, the main character, bumping into to people that have family property, and then going and getting money from dear old Mom like the little mooch he is. Mieu the Cheagle (cheagle is Japanese for Viking Care Bear by the way), is actually fairly fun to have around, at least within limits. That cutesy voice screaming "FIRE!" is still disturbingly humurous, and watching the little thing smash rocks the size of Mack trucks is almost as good. Colonel Jade McAwesomesnarks is still a bit of fresh air around all the stereotypical JRPG nuttiness going on. I've gotten him back up to his beginning stats and then some (the guy got nuked with the equivalent of say 15 Level Drains), and thanks to the miracles of Capacity Core goodness, he's pretty much Black Mage with a spear and morals now.
The trade system that stands in for crafting has grown on me some, mostly because it encourages me to go out there and farm like crazy. With a bit of know-how, the proper investment (there's a sidequest requiring 200 thousand Gald, which is a crapton of money in this game, but worth it), and just the right bit of character selection, you can start farming the high-tier shiny bits pretty damn quickly. Unfortunately, the ordering/trading system itself has too much going on 'under the hood' to really suit me, and figuring out which bits get you what item type without an FAQ can be a frustrating process. That said, you can wind up with mid-game and even late-game goodies very early if you can figure out what you're doing! And I also like it better than the token system put in place in Legendia.
The loot drops themselves...well I think they were trying to compensate the ridiculous item drops from Legendia, but they kinda took things a bit too far. It's not horrible, and I know that loot systems are very hard to balance properly, and they did a decent job keeping things from going into Monty Haul territory. The biggest complaint I really have is that they included a Final Fantasy-style stealing mechanic, which has two major flaws. The first is that stealing is linked to certain attacks through special accessories; a problem, since the attacks still hit full force, and you can very easily kill the target before you get something, assuming you actually connect. The second, and much worse, part is that relatively few monsters have anything to steal, and typically with abysmal success rates. Again, without a guide, you can't tell what monsters can be robbed without trial-and-error. This can lead to literally hours of playtime spent on smacking critters with nothing to steal without realizing there's nothing to steal. Oh, and there are plenty of monsters with neither stealables nor item drops. This is likely to compensate for both the last's game's loot showers, and this game's ordering system.
All the ranting about the relative scarcity of shinies aside, I do like how we get a nice bit of flavor text about all the items that you can get, and that we actually have a bit of variation on the usual fantastic ores, metals, and monster parts. I also like that this game actually plenty of interesting monsters and locations going for it. One can only eradicate so many goblins, zombies, and EA employees before it gets old. A fairly novel monster group is a family of golems that are actually music-powered robots. I wonder if the spiky ones are run off of metal...
Well, I need to go. Those shinies aren't going to loot themselves.
No comments:
Post a Comment