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[XBLA & PC] Gyromancer: Square-Enix & PopCap take on Puzzle Quest
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Although there are other crazy JRPG rules, the basics are pretty straight-forward.
When you make a move that makes a match, your meter fills up. When you make a move that doesn't make a match, your opponent's meter fills up. Make a match with your special color and your meter improves more, make a match with your opponent's special color and his meter goes down.
When your meter fills up, a special gem appears. Match it and good stuff happens (usually gems disappear, damage is dealt to your opponent). When your opponent's meter fills up, a special gem appears with a turn counter on it that decreases every turn. Match it in time and you're safe. If it's still there when its meter is 0, stuff happens (usually gems disappear, damage is dealt to you). Whoever runs out of HP first loses. The specifics of what happens is dependent on what beast you're using and what opponent you're fighting.
Yeah I don't get why these are "crazy JRPG rules". I mean it really isn't that hard to understand.
I can't see this 'JRPG' thing either.
he mad
I've found the best way to farm points is to use one of the spider monsters and realllllly drag out each fight. If you stall for time you can get your puzzle points up to the 200+ range before you pop one of your ability gems. Then just make sure a few of them fire at once for a 99% overkill bonus and you're good to go.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.
Other Popcap games are like that too. I think the game being 2D is one of the main reasons for it.
All of these "slightly broken but not really broken we swear!" ports coming to Steam make me think it's time to hold off on buying stuff.
Gil I get, though that's more Japanese than JRPG.
It doesn't have ATB or anything similar. Chains? Rush? What's JRPG about those?
-You don't create your character. You play as some random dude the developers spend the entire time desperately trying to make relatable.
-You can customize your character to an extent but it's mostly a "replace old stuff with better stuff" model, with pretty clear-cut "best" strategies for any given situation.
-If you just do the main quest you'll be underprepared, and most of the sidequesting is a grindy timesink.
-The game blurs the specifics of its own mechanics. I still don't know how damage is calculated and the game doesn't tell you much beyond "Attacks hurt things."
I'm not saying the game is bad, just that I notice a lot of things I generally don't like about JRPGs and Square-Enix games in general. Now, admittedly I'm not very far into the game, but that's what it looks like from where I'm standing.
Can someone give more detail on this 'idle twist' concept? Cheers.
Remember in PUzzle Quest, how if you made a move that didn't result in a match you'd lose some life and the move would reset?
In this game, you can, on your turn, rotate any 4 gems regardless of whether they make a match or not. Sometimes it's important to do so, in order to set up a later match.
The problem is this: every move you make, regardless of whether it makes a match or not, adds some power to your opponent's ability gauges. Meaning that if you make a lot of switches without making matches, you are helping your opponent out and not getting any benefit.
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
Yeah the demo shows that much, but the below quote made it sound like there was a more active punishment for not making matches later on.
There is. The penalty gets worse and worse as you level.
I think I was expecting the options because it's inspired by Puzzle Quest (which has a plethora of resolutions, which you can combine with windowed mode to make more useful) and has a lot going on graphics-wise.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
The game auto-saves after every battle so I've never lost any progress because of it.
I played it for over 3 hours so it must be doing something right. After beating the second stage I went back to the first one and completed all the challenges and found some new monsters that look pretty good. I was level 8 when I started that, and was level 11 when I left, even though I was beating up on lvl 1 -3 monsters most of the time (there were a few special guys around lvl 6 or so). They key to getting the high score is pretty much killing everything you see, and then making sure you are getting some good combos and cascades during the fight, hopefully getting some good overkilling to happen as well.
My experiences are almost exactly the same as Menasor. No crashes at startup, but I've had two crashes to desktop in six hours. The game was obviously designed for consoles, and the interface constantly reminds you of this fact every time you have to do anything. Sometimes information is stored in weird places (your inventory screen, for instance, is located in the system menu). Though I will say I'm not sure why people are confused about the battle system. There's a pretty comprehensive battle glossary that explains everything pretty well. I wish I had access to more stats about the monsters I'm summoning so I could decide whether or not to replace them, and I would sacrifice a goat if I could have a map of the area instead of only what little I can see on my screen.
That being said, it's RPG goodness + Bejeweled Twist. I can't stop playing it. The game does a good job (so far, at least) of making each monster play differently. I have an electric werewolf type thing, for instance, and he's an offense monster. Starts with one ability gem on the board, gets a couple more in 2-3 moves. Has no subtlety at all, but he often ends fights in less than ten twists. On the other hand, I have a tree thing that doesn't have much in the way of attack abilities, but it can slowly raise my vitality and lower my opponents (providing healing/damage on every twist, respectively). I'm really enjoying fiddling with all the different monsters.
I'm finding the characterization refreshing as well. I'll spoil this next section, but I'll just be talking about my general impressions of the main character for the first section of the game.
Overall, despite the nitpicks, I'm very pleased.
Torchlight, Borderlands, Dragon Age, this...and Armored Princess is coming soon as well plus the Borderlands DLC. Sigh.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Armored Princess is coming out soon?? God damnit. I just bought the God of War collection, having never played them on PS2. And we all know the giant list of new releases that everyone is playing. This season hurts so good...
Oh, and if AC2 is out on the pc (or soon) please don't tell me. And someone better delay the entire jan/feb lineup.
Currently playing: GW2 and TSW
Luckily for you, AC2 isn't out on PC until March. That's why I bought it for PS3. I have no willpower.
Before the penalty, it was normally quite easy to cancel your opponents attacks. There would only be one, maybe two on the board and you would have 6 or 7 moves to get it matched. I could pretty much cancel anything given that amount of time. And normally you would "need" to Idle Twist to do so, simply maneuvering your opponents block around the board in a few moves. In other words, you weren't expected to ALSO make 6 matches along the way.
After the penalty, the difficulty ramps up something fierce. Idle Twisting adds a LOT more to your opponents action bars. But the real kicker is that any Idle Twist that you use to try to cancel an attack decreases the clock by TWO. So typically it goes something like this:
1) Opponent gets an attack ready.
2) You try to make a move to cancel it.
3) The countdown clock goes down by two, you add a ton of juice to your opponent, he gets 2 more attacks ready.
4) Now the entire board is filled with attacks that you really can't cancel.
So you either have to spend the entire game trying to cancel their attacks, OR you can try to focus on your offense. I mean sure, obviously cancel an attack if it's convenient. I don't know about you guys, but so far I'm just not smart enough to say "okay an opponents attack is ready. In 3 moves I'm going to cancel it while simultaneously making matches in my favor and against his."
I'm not against the concept in general. I like the idea that maybe you just need to focus on the most powerful attack out there (you can highlight the attack block and see which one it is). Or maybe you just need to make sure they don't Rush you. I think what I would like to have seen is a gradual difficulty jump. Maybe start by adding the Idle Twist penalty but NOT the countdown clock penalty. That would have been a good middle ground for a couple stages. Also, I shudder to think what it would have been like had I not been 10 levels over everything I fought thus far.
Give it time. In PQ I went from 'WhatisthatskullohI'mdeadagainwhy?!?!?' to the 3-moves-ahead-thing like you imagined above. It just took lots of practise.
I've been playing that way so far, and I've never lost a fight yet. The only difference is that sometimes there really is no twist that makes a match. In the original, there was always a twist, the game would make sure that replacement gems would make at least one match available. It might not have been the one that blew up the bomb, but there was something.
You also learn to try to not leave orphan colors around if you can help it. Because of the twisting action, you want to twist in a way that puts colors together while you're making matches, because you have to have 2 colors adjacent to each other to have a chance at one. Staggered patters are fine for swap, but not here, so you have to be constantly be putting stuff next to each other in order to keep the board healthy and your options open while never breaking the chain. Like posh said, it takes practice.
Also, try to match from the bottom up. It helps keep the board healthy because gems only appear from the top, if you get staggered crap at the bottom it will never improve without idle twisting, so try to always make matches on the bottom of the board before taking some on the top, as a general rule. However, if you see that a bottom match would upset a higher up one, make the high one, then the low one. Just keep a closer eye on the bottom of the board more than the top. It makes for better cascades as well, can't get much action when only the top 2-3 lines are affected.
In other words, if I sit there for a minute between turns, does that penalize me? I'm guessing not, but want to make sure.
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
Also, keeping the chain nets you more breakthrough points anyway, and who doesn't love breakthrough points?
I'm wondering this also. Highest speed bonus I've gotten was 80%, and that was after finishing the game in like 5 moves total, seems pretty restrictive if it's only moves and not time.
Seems like you're better off dragging out combat as long as possible to set up one HUGE multi-hit attack rather than trying to finish it ASAP (point-wise anyway).
I'm guessing it's an item you recieve later as it always is, but the completionist in me can't bear to go to the next stage without finding out.
if they had just called them MAGICAL wooden barricades, that would have been enough for me
I'm starting to get less horrible at the game, though.
The lack of pre-release advertising on Steam (thanks Microsoft?) plus word of mouth on game-stopping bugs probably means that the pc version of this was essentially sent off to die.
I think I'm enjoying it more than Galactrix, but doesn't solve that game's basic problem of making me want to boot up Puzzle Quest.