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Post by Sarge on Feb 27, 2019 11:51:54 GMT -5
Oh, yeah, it's happening! I think the game is a bit long for my tastes, and honestly, this area I've been in has a lot of backtracking in ways that are not fun. I'm not sure if I'm going to slide in under the 30-hour mark or not. I'm guessing no. But I should be able to finish it before the month is up!
There are definitely teams that seem to work together better. I could probably also throw Lux in instead of Reeshine. Both are powerful attackers, but Reeshine has the edge in pure speed and power from a physical standpoint, and again, has Powerwave. Lux has some nice magic attacks, though, and the Atomic attacks, which use his HP for powerful attacks. Not all that much, though: Full Atomic hits everything quite hard, and only costs 20 HP. While Reeshine has several hit-all attacks, they tend to have very low accuracy, so she ends up being more of a single-enemy attacker. But she's awesome for bosses just because she's able to take hits so well. (In retrospect, though, her lower Magic stat probably makes her take more damage from spells.)
The other benefit from Meisia, assuming you're not just healing for Powerwave, is that she has buff spells. So you can beef up that physical defense, power, and speed. Speed can be extremely useful, because it does affect your accuracy. Fast enemies dodge a lot! She also has a free ability that lets her restore a small amount of MP in a turn. I think the range I've seem is from about 10-20 MP. Pretty sure 20 is the absolute maximum. That sounds piddly, but a 20 MP boost gets you another "heal everyone for 180 HP" cast.
Another thing I'll note is that, much like The 7th Saga, you can manipulate your turn order a bit. You can choose who to attack with at the start of a turn, so if you have someone that got whacked last round, you can choose to use healing right off with another character. Enemies will always attack the person you just attacked with, with the exception of the hit-all spells. This, also, can be used to your advantage: letting your weak healer go last usually means all other enemies have had their turn. But in the case they haven't, you know they're going to attack her, so you can plan accordingly to survive the onslaught.
Whew, that's a lot to talk about. Anyway, I actually like the battle system a lot. I just wish the plot were doing more for me.
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Post by Ex on Feb 27, 2019 12:23:41 GMT -5
How much of a sequel is Mystic Ark really to The 7th Saga? Are there reoccurring characters, world areas, plot ties? I think I remember the name "Lux" from two years ago when I was playing through The 7th Saga.
And speaking of The 7th Saga, if I didn't mention it yet, I plan to replay - and beat - that one for our White Whales month. With the proper team it shouldn't be an issue this time around.
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Post by Sarge on Feb 27, 2019 12:39:28 GMT -5
It's more that there are some characters and enemies that show up from the previous game, although not in any plot-related way. It's more of a reuse of assets or a callback, but the game stands by itself. I actually wish it had a bit more of the darker tone of The 7th Saga, honestly. That game stays more consistent, anyway. Mystic Ark throws a lot of different (and often very weird or goofy) scenarios against the wall.
The 7th Saga is one of my white whales as well, so I might join you in that endeavor.
EDIT: I forgot to mention one of the more annoying things in Mystic Ark: the inventory system. I realize that my favorite JRPG series, Dragon Quest, has also had inventory issues, but you'd think a 1995 SNES RPG would be a little cleaner about things. Healing doesn't just require navigating menus, but it literally kicks you out of the menu as soon as you cast it, so you have to dive right back in to do it again. It also isn't always very clear when transferring between characters which items they can equip and can't. You have an "Info" tab that tells you what something does, or its attack power or defense, but it doesn't actually tell you who can equip it. And the game actually modifies attack power based on who equips the item. Something that would have, say, 84 Atk on one character might only have 56 on another. There is sometimes a rhyme or reason for some equipment (Reeshine will always take the nunchaku, for instance, and it's obvious the Tetsujin parts are for Lux), but sometimes, there isn't. Especially when it comes to characters like Tokio or Kamiwoo. You've got a lot more inventory slots than Dragon Warrior III, but you get a lot of extra junk, too. And there's no item storage that I've encountered.
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Post by toei on Feb 27, 2019 17:43:37 GMT -5
So I ended up finishing Xak SNES. My asshole neighbor started making a racket that wouldn't end, and after an hour, I gave up trying to sleep. Being too tired to do anything else, I started listening to the radio with my headphones, and decided I might as well grind up a few levels. Turns out I was much closer to the end than I thought; at the last proper dungeon, in fact. There's a nice idea at the end (though I think Spellcaster did it first): you have to cross a sea of lava on a dragon, and it actually turns into a vertical shmup level! Unfortunately, it's bad. The dragon's too big and too slow to dodge attacks reliably, and it ends with a truly awful boss battle against an enemy that has an insane amount of HP, spends most of its time offscreen, and has no set pattern. I think I had to redo that mediocre level 5 times to beat the damn boss. The final boss plays like a shooter, too, but this time you're fighting by yourself, and you're firing balls of energy from your sword; this is actually a pretty good fight! It's just annoying that the final conversation replays every time you die, since a single hit kills you, but the pattern is straightforward.
I've already talked at length about the negative aspects, so I'll talk about what I like. One, the way the dungeons are designed, with NPCs, subquests and substories that take place within them, is rather cool. It gives each of them a distinct personality and makes them more memorable. The story is nothing special on paper, but it's definitely above average for a late '80s RPG, with a few memorable moment and more character interaction than was customary. One of the things I like about Xak as a series is that the games take place within a few years of each other, and follow the same group characters. Latok's hometown of Feares / Fearless features in every game, as well, so even the main NPCs (like the shopkeepers, or Latok's blind mother) develop a personality and history from one game to the next. Early in this game, you rescue a young girl who's under attack in the forest; this is Fray, who went on to have her own shmup/platformer/RPG hybrid a few years later, and appears as one of the possible companions in Tower of Gazzel. The music is good, too.
It really wouldn't have taken much to make this a good game; fix up the combat system, reduce the grinding. That's it. So it's really a shame how this particular port turned out.
Since this is Fan-Translation February, a few words about patch. It was released by Dynamic Designs, but Wildbill was not involved, and no political bullshit or bad jokes to be found. In general, the dialogues read well. There's a few attempts at giving some lines an old-fashioned medieval feel that come off as corny, but they're rare. The hacking seems top notch, no issues there. The font they used seems a bit weird for a SNES game, but apart from that, it's quite readable. In general, a solid effort. And I prefer "Latok" to "Ratok" (which is what they called him in the Xak 3 fan-translation).
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Post by Sarge on Feb 27, 2019 17:58:19 GMT -5
I actually wonder if I shouldn't have tried Dynamic Designs' patch for Mystic Ark instead. I think Gid's patch looks nicer, but I have run into a few strange bugs. Like the area that is supposed to have arrow tiles that work like conveyor belts that just... didn't work. You could walk across them like they weren't even there. I should consider trying out that area in the other version and just see what happens.
I also know there was an area that triggered a C7 error on the SNES Classic in the AGTP patch. Clearly there's something weird in the code.
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Post by toei on Feb 27, 2019 18:29:59 GMT -5
I would say no. I tried both at the time, and the dialogue in the DD patch was just bad. I never ran into issues with the AGTP patch. What are you playing it on?
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Post by Sarge on Feb 27, 2019 22:32:58 GMT -5
SNES Classic. At least for the latter half. I was on a real system for the first 15 hours. Now I'm also curious as to whether that issue crops up on real hardware. I plan on testing when I'm done with it. (Also, I have patched it so the C7 Error doesn't occur. The Classic community has a guy that has patched a ton of games to run better in Canoe.)
Speaking of which, I might not finish it tonight. Been out with friends after choir practice, so my gaming time has been cut into a bit. But I had a blast, so definitely a worthy tradeoff.
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Post by Ex on Feb 28, 2019 1:26:14 GMT -5
The 7th Saga is one of my white whales as well, so I might join you in that endeavor. I'd be more than happy to play through it in tandem with you, although I suspect you'll quickly jump ahead of me in progress. But still, trading protips and war stories would be great.
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Post by Sarge on Feb 28, 2019 13:32:03 GMT -5
Despite my thinking I wouldn't finish it last night, I did. It took me staying up until 12:20 AM to do so, but hey, that's not awful.
Turns out the last boss is pretty rough! Not awful, though, even though I did cheese the battle using a save state for the first time in the whole game because I decided to mostly waltz into the battle unprepared. So having Magic Mirrors turns out to be a good thing, as they can protect you from any magic spell for up to ten turns. This proves very, very useful, as you can guess, especially against a boss that unloads hit-all spells for most of the fight. Having a healer present helps a ton, though, because she can bring you back when you run out of said Magic Mirrors. And you will run out, at least at the level I was at.
No, the more dangerous thing is when you're having to negotiate the fight without them, and your healer gets petrified without any items to bring her out of it. She's the only one with the Cure spell on my team, so... yeah, that's when I rewound the game a bit. I did not want to have to traipse back to town, get the necessary items, make my way back, and fight through a very long HP sponge again. If the Darkness has a lot of HP, this boss has about five times that. Pretty sure it was at least a 20 minute fight. It also doesn't help that I was probably a bit underleveled.
I did adjust my Powerwave strategy, though. You need to conserve more MP for this fight, since it's so long, so you want a source of consistent damage without having to constantly keep your team at full HP. So using Reeshine's War Cry and Meisia's Power spell to boost physical strength gave a more consistent source of damage through the fight while letting me hold on to MP for when I seriously needed healing.
As you might be able to guess, as a late-gen SFC game, it looks quite nice. I really like some of the enemy designs, especially some that moved over from The 7th Saga/Elnard. There are some great tracks in there as well. My biggest gripe has been the story, which has the potential to be intriguing, but doesn't seem to delve quite as much into interesting reveals, and uses the various worlds as self-contained scenarios that strike a bit more goofy tone than I'd prefer from an ostensible spiritual sequel to T7S. And even that is probably because while it feels like they were going for humorous in spots, the dialogue isn't actually all that funny. I still think the game is quite solid, definitely not awful or anything, just not ascending to the upper tiers of the SNES library. I'd probably give it a 7/10, in that it has all the elements to be a great RPG, but its weak points drag down the experience. Others might enjoy it a lot more than I did.
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Post by toei on Feb 28, 2019 14:05:44 GMT -5
What did you think of the ending? It was intriguing, at least, no? Whatever it actually means.
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