Wow

So.  It took a good while, but I finally got a TPK in Atelier Rorona.  I wasn't even sure it was possible, but there you go.  I waltzed into a late-game dungeon, brought along my preferred team (Sterk and Gio, in anyone cares), and managed to tear about the first few areas without much more resistance than usual.  Hell, I took having to actually use curatives as a pleasant surprise.

Naturally, pride goeth before the fall.  I found these angry shadow griffin things (pretty much the local griffins in a goth phase and all toughened up by constant incense and raged up by constant MCR), and boy howdy, did my dudes get wrecked.  It was like the game had finally realized that the critter population had little to challenge an experience RPG'er.  It felt a lot like jumping combat difficulty from "aw look at the cute critters let's keep this at Super Mario RPG (easy, but still awesomesauce by the way)" to "heh, you're in the realm of eternal night now, so welcome to turn-based Dark Souls, bitch!"

It proved an inconvenience, but hell, I've never pulled off a perfect first run in an RPG (I think), and it's good to stay a bit humble.  You gotta know the game has some teeth somewhere.

The only real problem now, is:  What the hell do I do about it?  Rorona has some the nastiest passive anti-grind mechanics I've seen this side of Romancing SaGa, so I can't just stop plot progression and blitz a few dozen freaks for XP (at least without risking a Bad Ending, and I'm in part 11 of 12), and making gear takes time, and I don't have the resources to make the top-tier stuff anyway.  I guess that all I can do is just not go in that direction, and hope I can score enough goodies to stave off the machinations of Minister Bad Touch anyway.

The game is still a good deal of fun to play.  I'd forgotten how much I'd enjoyed a good Gust game, and this one delivers.