I really do enjoy the art for the game, though. Especially Tia's new design.
Does she still end up leaving? Anyone know?
Tia leaves at first, but later she comes back when she learns that Maxim's and Selan's child is in danger. Also (at least from what I heard) she grows a spine and realizes that pining after a guy who doesn't love her back is a dead end (especially when the guy is an idiot like Maxim) and realizes that she doesn't need a man to be happy.
Actually, anyone know how much this game stick to the original plot?
One guy who posted impressions mentioned that they retooled the plot to tie in a lot closer to Lufia 1.
On the other hand they cut out a lot of the extraneous locations and stuff.
Also, MAJOR SPOILERS
in a New Game+ you can get an ending where Maxim and Selan survive
I really do enjoy the art for the game, though. Especially Tia's new design.
Does she still end up leaving? Anyone know?
Tia leaves at first, but later she comes back when she learns that Maxim's and Selan's child is in danger. Also (at least from what I heard) she grows a spine and realizes that pining after a guy who doesn't love her back is a dead end (especially when the guy is an idiot like Maxim) and realizes that she doesn't need a man to be happy.
This may be the single greatest thing I have ever read in my life, as far as video game characters go.
I really do enjoy the art for the game, though. Especially Tia's new design.
Personally I'm a mixed bag. Dekar looks awesome. Guy looks stupid. Tia seems to have been made into a standard animesque Rikku-type tinkerer genki girl, of which I'm not sure at all (I swear the first time I saw her in a forum, I actually went "WTF they turned Lexis into a girl?". The thought that she could be Tia never crossed my mind). Iris, on the other hand, looks freaking awesome - much more fitting for showing the duality with Erim's "destiny god" side that the "shadowy evil-looking shadow of shadowness" from the previous game's art :P.
So far as I'm concerned it's hit or miss. Still, the game itself looks pretty nice.
Oh, it got pushed forward? Interesting. But, in truth, I'll wait and see what people think of it. Whether I buy this game or not is hanging on a single factor - whether it still has Rise of the Sinistrals awesome puzzle focus or not. So I'll wait and see what people have to say about the puzzle density before touching it.
EDIT: Oh yeah, in other Natsume-y news, Amazon's finally got a listing for Rune Factory 3, so anyone who's been waitin' for it can get their shit squared out.
I've been playing it. So far, I really haven't been impressed by it. I'm only 2 dungeons in, but the plot here is pretty dang bad, which is weird because I remember liking the SNES game. I think it's the way it's written. It's like a super abridged version of the original, and there's like no buildup on anything. It's as though a 12 year old is writing the original game from memory, and badly to boot.
I'm also not really feeling the combat. This game screams for some sort of auto lock on system, and when you get knocked down, it takes forever to get back up. It just feels kind of clunky to me.
About the only really nice thing I can say about it is that the music is pretty great. It's all from the SNES game, and it's giving off a wicked case of nostalgia. I almost can't wait for a sinistral fight so I can hear that song. Assuming I even stick with the game that long though...
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"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
I've been able to try a bit of it. Namely, first two dungeons.
Impressions are... mixed. On one hand, the plot and dialogue feels all kinds of rushed, like they had a very strict limit on non-gameplay game hours and wanted to cram things and sum stuff up so much it barely connects with you. It just feels extremely disconnected and random. You're seeing Gades one minute, then in Parcelyte the next, then it's down to Tanbel mines, with just the barest explanation. And the translation is just plain what.
On the other, there is still a bit of the Lufia focus on the dungeons and environments - I'd feared the turn to real time would mean it basically being Kingdom Hearts, but enemies seem really almost ignorable in this game, bosses notwithstanding.
The music is awesome but it also feels a bit out of place in many places. It might just be me relating the tunes to their occurences in the previous game, though.
Having to play a musical minigame while in minecarts against everyone's favorite thieves was pretty chuckleworthy, though.
Still, better than I'd feared. Don't think I'll buy it, though, at least unless I find it around second-hand.
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited October 2010
Just now got home with this. It was hidden away on a bottom shelf where they only show you the slim side of the DS cases. And it was the only one in stock. No wonder I didn't notice this the other day.
Anyway, first impressions forthcoming!
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited October 2010
I'm still at the draw bridge, which is the first place you really get to do the dungeon exploring stuff, but here goes.
So, the music is very simple in terms of redoing it from the original. It's more or less just a quality upgrade, but all the instrumentals are the same. Like exactly the same. On the one hand I appreciate it, and on the other I wish they would've explored it some.
Jumping and moving around is pretty clunky. Combat drops the game's frame-rate a LOT, which is pretty disappointing. Making it an action RPG I like though. So I'm a little torn on it. Good idea, bad execution I guess?
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited October 2010
Okay that minecart shit was annoying.
Edit - I can't get over the performance issues this game has. It's not just when you enter combat. It's when you pick an object up too. The map for the bridge was really a pain in the ass to make sense out of, and I have a fear that later maps are going to end up being the same. Tia's voice work is pretty bad. Like her speech is one character type, then her screams and battle grunts are like a different kind of character altogether (which means bad voice directing). I'm still early in the game to be saying this sort of stuff, to be fair, but I expect it to be fairly consistent rather than somehow get better.
Edit Edit - To save myself from a quadruple post <_<
Holy fucking shit Selan puts this game into easy mode, she kicks ass.
I'll take this time to talk a bit about the character customization stuff they have going in this game. There's this big ol' grid thing that is sectioned for each character. In each character's section are varying buffs you can get (knockback resist, stagger resist, more HP, more element damage, etc). At the cross points for each character section is a starting point where you can put down gem things you're rewarded, which cover a certain range of tiles. Like there's 1x2 or 1x3 gems, etc. About half the tiles as blank, but some have buffs. Gems have to be touching a start point, or chained to the start point by other gems, to count as being active. You COULD split the gems up and buff people evenly, or you could just throw them into whatever character you like and have all the awesome shit available. Like I did for Selan. Did I mention she's fucking awesome?
Also there's a dude in the first town who awards your characters "titles" as you progress, which are permanent buffs. Guy just got one where if everyone in the party is dead except him, he gets a big power bonus.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited October 2010
Okay, I've spent a lot more time with the game, 10 and a half hours played.
My impressions of the game have gotten better. The Mystic Stone system, described in my post above, has sort of saved this game for me. I forgot to mention the individual gems you place on the tile board come with varying stat boosts, which is the bigger appeal to the whole thing. When you get to the Ancient Cave, you can start to upgrade the gems themselves to give more stat boosts. This is the replacement for the pet system they had in the SNES version. You pick a gem to upgrade, and then you pick a gem to be devoured for it. The stats don't combine, the first gem you pick just gets better stats. Going from level 1 to level 2 requires one gem to be consumed, going from 2 to level 3 requires two gems to be consumed, and from 3 to 4 requires five gems to be consumed (and I'm guessing from 4 to 5 requires 10 gems, since the "exp" for gems is measured by 10 bars). Gems come in 1x3, 1x2, 2x1, 3x1, and 2x2 sizes. Also, the entire gem doesn't have to fit in a given character's area of the tile board. If you have a 2x2 block with just one corner in Selan's tile area, you gain the full effect of the gem.
The game dialog is kind of rushed, and the middle segment of the game gets repetitive. And I mean that in the "they obviously needed filler material" way. Really disappointing.
The Ancient Cave at least gets down to the nitty gritty - the frame rate problems don't exist because the rooms aren't fancy at all. Gives you a chance to fuck around freely in combat.
Speaking of the Ancient Cave, something important to know about items - if you find items with their names in Blue, it means you can take them into the Ancient Cave (for those unfamiliar, the Ancient Cave is a random dungeon where you start at level 1 with basic equipment and no items). Probably your biggest life-saver are gems with blue names. They make a huge difference.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited October 2010
New Game + exists, with a very deliberate pointing to "beat the game again for more."
Overall this turned out to be so-so. Frustrating or disappointing things about it, but there are times where it's alright.
Ugh. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like the dude who came up with the boss battles in this game was a gigantic asshole. About ten hours in:
Gades 1: chuckin' around big-ass meteors that're a bitch to avoid and can chain you for three, four, five or more hits of ~15 damage each and stunlocking you for the downward stab that follows about 50% of the time, and then this on crack in the later part of the fight, not to mention all the spastic teleportation and shit he does right from the start.
Doom Eye: Motherfuckin' hostage battle, wonderful. If the shield they provided at least worked all the time so that you could set it down in a general area at the center to cover you while you whaled on the boss it'd be one thing, but nope, gotta' hold the sucker yourself and aparently Iris is too goddamn weak to do it herself, so the battle degenerates into a long-ass trial of deflecting the beam, throwing an Ice Blade, repeating ad nauseum.
Mecha Gades: The basics of this aren't too bad asides from some issues of the effective hitbox of his hands (if you're in the lower half of the platform and don't use Maxim's X special at the right time you're fucked, and if it's his left hand he's attacking with you're probably fucked half the time anyway) but at level 22 (which includes a level boost from trying to fight Gades the first time) jesus fuck does he have an absolute shitton of HP. Combine this with the limited windows of opprotunity for dealing damage to him, and this shit just drags on. The second phase introduces some nasty tricks, but the third is just mean in that it almost completily denies you of any effective mobility whatsoever by destroying the platform you're on to just a nub barely larger than the boss's hands, which, combined with the aforementioned hitbox issue, made me turn the game off right then and there. I'm probably going to have to wind up taking another boost in order to get past this fucker.
If it means anything to you, the Idura / Idula translation error didn't come up in the game for me!
It wasn't Idura, but around the time of the second encounter with him I'm pretty certain I noticed that someone did make the L/R gaffe somewhere, though for some reason I'm drawing an absolute blank to it. Selen, I think. Also, on Idura:
A) The look on his face after Deker makes his big damn enterence after Doom Eye is absolutly wonderful.
I think someone also screwed up which portrait they were using for the conversation following said enterence, since I'm pretty certain one of the frames had him in his blue jacket instead of the black he's in in his second appearance (why they didn't also spring for a black-coated model is a mystery).
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited October 2010
I can't speak much to the boss battles. Details below:
Fighting Mecha Gades TWICE IN A ROW in the middle of the game really fucking pissed me off. At this time, I didn't take advantage of the Mystic Gem system in the game so I was taking a beating from him. They don't provide you a safe avenue of attacking his stomach-eye, which pissed me off because at one point I had to change weapons to use a weaker sword that had a fireball attack attached to it.
But like I mentioned above, that was the last fight I was in before I started abusing the Mystic Gem system. After that, almost every boss in the game was hitting me for 1 HP and I was taking them down real fast. The Doom Eye boss you mentioned I actually took down by just circling Selan's ice blade around and around. If you hit it fast enough, it cancels the laser beam it fires.
So, in non spoiler form, some boss fights can be cheesed via tactics and the whole game can be cheesed by using the Mystic Gem system.
By the time I finished the game, I realized the whole thing isn't a disaster, it's just really disappointing. If I didn't know it was a remake, I'd maybe be less critical toward it. The voice acting was an awful decision, and they should've stuck with sprites if the game was going to have the awful slow-down issue. But the game is alright. At best.
Edit - OH, about the gem things - level 4 is the max you can get gems leveled to, and there are 1x1 gems in the game that are super rare. Also, the level of a gem you're feeding into another changes how much the fed-gem grows.
And something regarding beating the game:
Blue items and gems carry over to your new game +. All white items / gems clear out.
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HenroidMexican kicked from Immigration ThreadCentrism is Racism :3Registered Userregular
edited October 2010
I just did the Ancient Cave (the 100 floor dungeon). Took me 5 hours in a straight shot, clearing every room. I -think- you can leave partway through and return again, but I didn't want to take that chance; there are power gem things you find that say they "create portals" but it could just mean they're an escape item. Also, at floors 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 99, you need to clear the floors 100% to find a set of the item to be able to warp to the next floor.
And all I got was this stupid sword and armor. ARBksjlf
Posts
One guy who posted impressions mentioned that they retooled the plot to tie in a lot closer to Lufia 1.
On the other hand they cut out a lot of the extraneous locations and stuff.
Also, MAJOR SPOILERS
Platinum FC: 2880 3245 5111
3DS: 1607-3034-6970
Personally I'm a mixed bag. Dekar looks awesome. Guy looks stupid. Tia seems to have been made into a standard animesque Rikku-type tinkerer genki girl, of which I'm not sure at all (I swear the first time I saw her in a forum, I actually went "WTF they turned Lexis into a girl?". The thought that she could be Tia never crossed my mind). Iris, on the other hand, looks freaking awesome - much more fitting for showing the duality with Erim's "destiny god" side that the "shadowy evil-looking shadow of shadowness" from the previous game's art :P.
So far as I'm concerned it's hit or miss. Still, the game itself looks pretty nice.
They pushed the date up a week.
EDIT: Oh yeah, in other Natsume-y news, Amazon's finally got a listing for Rune Factory 3, so anyone who's been waitin' for it can get their shit squared out.
I'm going to try to get it tomorrow.
From what I heard, Tia: (Plot spoilers)
Can't say I really saw that coming.
Platinum FC: 2880 3245 5111
I'm going to get it as soon as I can, but EB yesterday said they might not get in here for awhile. Gonna take a look around again on Monday.
I'm also not really feeling the combat. This game screams for some sort of auto lock on system, and when you get knocked down, it takes forever to get back up. It just feels kind of clunky to me.
About the only really nice thing I can say about it is that the music is pretty great. It's all from the SNES game, and it's giving off a wicked case of nostalgia. I almost can't wait for a sinistral fight so I can hear that song. Assuming I even stick with the game that long though...
Who let the fanfic writers do the updated script?
I am a freaking nerd.
3DS: 1607-3034-6970
Impressions are... mixed. On one hand, the plot and dialogue feels all kinds of rushed, like they had a very strict limit on non-gameplay game hours and wanted to cram things and sum stuff up so much it barely connects with you. It just feels extremely disconnected and random. You're seeing Gades one minute, then in Parcelyte the next, then it's down to Tanbel mines, with just the barest explanation. And the translation is just plain what.
On the other, there is still a bit of the Lufia focus on the dungeons and environments - I'd feared the turn to real time would mean it basically being Kingdom Hearts, but enemies seem really almost ignorable in this game, bosses notwithstanding.
The music is awesome but it also feels a bit out of place in many places. It might just be me relating the tunes to their occurences in the previous game, though.
Having to play a musical minigame while in minecarts against everyone's favorite thieves was pretty chuckleworthy, though.
Still, better than I'd feared. Don't think I'll buy it, though, at least unless I find it around second-hand.
Anyway, first impressions forthcoming!
Platinum FC: 2880 3245 5111
So, the music is very simple in terms of redoing it from the original. It's more or less just a quality upgrade, but all the instrumentals are the same. Like exactly the same. On the one hand I appreciate it, and on the other I wish they would've explored it some.
Jumping and moving around is pretty clunky. Combat drops the game's frame-rate a LOT, which is pretty disappointing. Making it an action RPG I like though. So I'm a little torn on it. Good idea, bad execution I guess?
Edit - I can't get over the performance issues this game has. It's not just when you enter combat. It's when you pick an object up too. The map for the bridge was really a pain in the ass to make sense out of, and I have a fear that later maps are going to end up being the same. Tia's voice work is pretty bad. Like her speech is one character type, then her screams and battle grunts are like a different kind of character altogether (which means bad voice directing). I'm still early in the game to be saying this sort of stuff, to be fair, but I expect it to be fairly consistent rather than somehow get better.
Edit Edit - To save myself from a quadruple post <_<
My impressions of the game have gotten better. The Mystic Stone system, described in my post above, has sort of saved this game for me. I forgot to mention the individual gems you place on the tile board come with varying stat boosts, which is the bigger appeal to the whole thing. When you get to the Ancient Cave, you can start to upgrade the gems themselves to give more stat boosts. This is the replacement for the pet system they had in the SNES version. You pick a gem to upgrade, and then you pick a gem to be devoured for it. The stats don't combine, the first gem you pick just gets better stats. Going from level 1 to level 2 requires one gem to be consumed, going from 2 to level 3 requires two gems to be consumed, and from 3 to 4 requires five gems to be consumed (and I'm guessing from 4 to 5 requires 10 gems, since the "exp" for gems is measured by 10 bars). Gems come in 1x3, 1x2, 2x1, 3x1, and 2x2 sizes. Also, the entire gem doesn't have to fit in a given character's area of the tile board. If you have a 2x2 block with just one corner in Selan's tile area, you gain the full effect of the gem.
The game dialog is kind of rushed, and the middle segment of the game gets repetitive. And I mean that in the "they obviously needed filler material" way. Really disappointing.
The Ancient Cave at least gets down to the nitty gritty - the frame rate problems don't exist because the rooms aren't fancy at all. Gives you a chance to fuck around freely in combat.
Speaking of the Ancient Cave, something important to know about items - if you find items with their names in Blue, it means you can take them into the Ancient Cave (for those unfamiliar, the Ancient Cave is a random dungeon where you start at level 1 with basic equipment and no items). Probably your biggest life-saver are gems with blue names. They make a huge difference.
Overall this turned out to be so-so. Frustrating or disappointing things about it, but there are times where it's alright.
... but one character spoke out of turn when another was suppose to be introducing her at one point. That was a little goofy.
Doom Eye: Motherfuckin' hostage battle, wonderful. If the shield they provided at least worked all the time so that you could set it down in a general area at the center to cover you while you whaled on the boss it'd be one thing, but nope, gotta' hold the sucker yourself and aparently Iris is too goddamn weak to do it herself, so the battle degenerates into a long-ass trial of deflecting the beam, throwing an Ice Blade, repeating ad nauseum.
Mecha Gades: The basics of this aren't too bad asides from some issues of the effective hitbox of his hands (if you're in the lower half of the platform and don't use Maxim's X special at the right time you're fucked, and if it's his left hand he's attacking with you're probably fucked half the time anyway) but at level 22 (which includes a level boost from trying to fight Gades the first time) jesus fuck does he have an absolute shitton of HP. Combine this with the limited windows of opprotunity for dealing damage to him, and this shit just drags on. The second phase introduces some nasty tricks, but the third is just mean in that it almost completily denies you of any effective mobility whatsoever by destroying the platform you're on to just a nub barely larger than the boss's hands, which, combined with the aforementioned hitbox issue, made me turn the game off right then and there. I'm probably going to have to wind up taking another boost in order to get past this fucker.
But like I mentioned above, that was the last fight I was in before I started abusing the Mystic Gem system. After that, almost every boss in the game was hitting me for 1 HP and I was taking them down real fast. The Doom Eye boss you mentioned I actually took down by just circling Selan's ice blade around and around. If you hit it fast enough, it cancels the laser beam it fires.
So, in non spoiler form, some boss fights can be cheesed via tactics and the whole game can be cheesed by using the Mystic Gem system.
By the time I finished the game, I realized the whole thing isn't a disaster, it's just really disappointing. If I didn't know it was a remake, I'd maybe be less critical toward it. The voice acting was an awful decision, and they should've stuck with sprites if the game was going to have the awful slow-down issue. But the game is alright. At best.
Edit - OH, about the gem things - level 4 is the max you can get gems leveled to, and there are 1x1 gems in the game that are super rare. Also, the level of a gem you're feeding into another changes how much the fed-gem grows.
And something regarding beating the game:
And all I got was this stupid sword and armor. ARBksjlf