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Penny Arcade - Comic - Numberotica
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Numberotica
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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I could be wrong though, I find I just don't get many jrpgs
Other than that it feels like either a Newgrounds game I played once, or a "SaGa" game but without the art, music, interesting and intricate little systems, skills, story, characters.....
Yeah sorry, my fetish is the BDSM of JRPGS... by which I mean story driven to the point of almost being a visual novel.
It's like that study they did about turkey mating where they took a plastic female turkey and the male was like "yeah, I'd do her". And then they would take off a piece and male was like, "yeah still pretty hot", until finally it was just a plastic head on a stick and the male was still all "so are we gonna have sex or what?"
Dungeon Encounters is extremely minimalist. I like it, but also agree with the criticism of the music. With there being basically no graphics or animation, and no real story, the incredibly lazy soundtrack just feels weak. I was sick of it by about 20 minutes and just muted the music and put on a playlist/The Simpsons instead.
Think more like a really old school grid dungeon game like Moraff's World
There's some neat stuff in it, like, there's a fixed pool of characters, but there's maybe about 20 of them. 6 or so are available from the start, but the rest are lost in the dungeon, often KOd it petrified and you have to find and revive them.
If your whole party gets KOd you start back at beginning with whichever characters you still had at the base (assuming you did still have any. If you had no spares at the base you'll get a game over) and send them to go rescue your other party.
Also word of warning, your money can go negative. Which I learned when I found a high level (like end game level treasure monster at an early depth) enemy with a stealing attack. I'm so deep in hole i haven't been able to buy anything for hours.
@Tofystedeth I want to buy this because I like gridders but I'm scared it'll just get hella boring. sell me on it.
I think this would definitely make Mike vomit immediately.
It should also be mentioned that this is released by Square Enix, directed by the director of FF6, 9 and 12 (and who is also the person who invented Active Time Battle), with music by a composer that worked on a whole bunch of Japanese RPG series (and composed all the music for all the Final Fantasies). It is beyond bizarre that this actually exists.
Well, first I'll say I'm glad I grabbed it at the current 20% off sale price (until Oct 29) as I kinda feel the full price was maybe a little ambitious given the extremely minimalist nature of the game.
And my upthread comment about the music is a strong negative.
So for a more detailed breakdown of what's going on in the game mechanically, aside from the previously covered:
It's grid based navigation. The dungeon floors go 0 through (I think) 99. Every location has Z, Y, X (z= floor number) coordinates. Aside from character/monster portraits and the party leader having an animated model in the overworld view, there's very little artwork to speak of. Every location (shop, healing shrine, event, etc) and monster battle is just indicated by a 2 digit hexadecimal number displayed on the grid. Some events, like stairs down/up, shops, healing shrines, etc can appear multiple times and will always have the same number. E.g. stairs down are 01, stairs up are 02, resurrection shrines are 05, healing fountains are 06, etc. Other's are one time events like treasure spots, riddles, or Fiend Lore, which will gray out once visited indicating you've investigated them. Events are grouped by type, so the hero academy, stairs, shops, shrines, teleporters etc, are 00 - 1F. Riddle clues are 20 - 3F, riddle rewards are 40 - 5F etc.
There is an event log showing all events, whether you've visited them, and their location (for recurring events like stairs and shops it shows which one you've most recently visited) so you don't have to remember all the numbers.
Throughout the dungeon you'll find abilities which you can equip on your party. You have a budget of ability points determining how many and which abilities you can equip at a time. You gain ability points by exploring. When you fully explore a floor you get 3, as well at set numbers of tiles explored you'll also get 1. Abilities are a mix of exploration and battle abilities, both passive and active.
Examples:
Exploration-
see monster tiles (passive)
see how far you are from nearest wandering hero (passive)
shuffle monsters (x number of uses)
shift to an empty tile 2 squares in any direction (x number of uses)
Battle -
Immunity to poison, Immunity to banishment (passive)
Flee from battle (infinite uses)
heal party member (x number of uses)
Monster battles are indicated by black numbers (once you equip the ability to see them but it's like the first one you get). I believe if there is a battle on a tile, it is always the same battle code, though actual enemy make up can very slightly. A floors monsters are rerolled every time you use stairs.
So for example, a tile may always have battle 0F on it. Battle 0F always has the monsters Black Bear, Wizard, and Shark in it, but there may be between 0 and 2 of each of them. Stuff like that. Like the event log, there is a battle log showing which battles you have encountered and the monsters (and their stats and drops) in it, though you have to have also found the Fiend lore for the monsters to show up in the log. They're usually within 1 floor of the first time you encounter that monster, with the exception being you start seeing wildly out of depth monsters after a dozen or so floors. Some are simply familiar monsters with higher levels, some are stuff like treasure hunters, or a black hole. Fucking black bole. The monsters in the battles scale with the battle number, so if you're on a floor where all the battles are between like 2C and 31 and you see something like 63 or FC, you know it's gonna be relatively gnarly, so you'll probably want to avoid it somehow.
As for battle itself, every character is almost identical in terms of mechanics. Some characters get more HP, or PP scaling, or speed but that's pretty much it. There are a few special items that only be equipped by certain characters, but otherwise anybody can use anything, as long as they have enough proficiency points (gained on level up or by using stat increasing item drops on them) to equip them. More powerful items cost more PP, fairly standard there. Every character can equip 2 weapons, one body armor, one head armor, and an accessory.
Body armor gives physical defense, head armor gives magical. There's usually an armor and a clothing version of each, with armor providing more defense but having a speed penalty, and clothing giving less protection but a speed boost.
Accessories run the gamut from rings that give either extra magic or physical defense, gems that increase damage, cloaks and shields that provide magic or physical evasion, and other more specialized effects.
For weapons, there's 2 main types, physical weapons and spells.
Basically every weapon has 4 properties.
Whether its damage is physical or magical
Whether its damage is fixed or random
Whether its attacks are melee or ranged
Whether it hits a single target or all targets
Weapons with random damage generally have higher top end damage than a fixed damage weapon of similar PP budget, but they basically have an equal chance of doing anywhere between 1 and the listed max damage value.
melee vs ranged, and multitarget all work as expected.
Magic and physical defense are basically just ablative defense. They will absorb damage of that type reducing the defense by the amount of damage dealt until defense is depleted. However, damage from an attack does not roll over to HP when defense is depleted. So e.g. a 100 damage physical attack on a monster with 10 defense, will destroy the defense, but do no HP damage. The next physical attack will damage HP.
There's a few special weapons which deal status effects instead of damage but I haven't really used them much.
So, that's probably a good overview of how stuff works. Whether you'll like that I can't say.
And he actually stopped solo composing FF pieces after 9. 10 was collabbed with Masashi Hamauzu with decreasing contribution for 12 and 13, and by 14 and 15 it was just main themes or opening cinematics etc.
When reading that, eventually I just started thinking of these song lyrics:
If the green grass is 6, and the soybeans are 7,
the junebugs are 8, the weeds and thistles are 11.
And if the 1s just hold thier place, the 0s make a smiley face
when they come floating down from the heavens.
My point was that all these legendary people were even associated with it at all.
Yes, I was sloppy. I was just trying to give people an idea of the level of fame the guy had. I will endeavor to list an entire annotated bibliography next time. :biggrin:
Yes, I was sloppy.
Big Dragon Small Mouth?
I could be wrong though, I find I just don't get many jrpgs"
Sounds like Speed Grapher. There was a serial killer on there who's kink was just that. That show had a kink for every character. Including the mc and his girlfriend that couldn't do it without a gun in one hand and a camera in the other.
A hint for those who never visit the forums (where the same comment threads live that you see when you click on the comments): you can put around the bit of text you are quoting and people won't be nearly so confused/annoyed when they read all your comments and try to sort out your thoughts from the block of someone elses. Especially when you don't put " at the beginning of new lines of text in the quoted comment.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I'd play that game
You are in luck, there is game called Tusks. It's about orcs dating. Inspired by Shadow of Modor, and how all the orcs talk about your character.
http://mitchalexander.wikidot.com/tusks