Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls Launch Delay
Due to an unforeseen issue involving IP licensing, the game cannot launch today as previously intended. We apologize for the sudden delay, and will inform you of a new release date once it’s confirmed.
Last time I saw this, what had happened is they had not gotten the license for the Music, which isn't included in the game license with JP companies occasionally. Worse, many of the music companies involved flat out refuse to license music to US companies. Supposedly that's why Elminage swapped some music out for the PC release, and why Class of Heroes swapped the title screen music out.
I reached out to XSEED, the Western publisher of Labyrinth of Lost Souls, and they offered an encouraging statement over email. “GMO is the company who owns the Wizardry IP now,” they said. “[Acquire, the developer of Labyrinth of Lost Souls,] got GMO’s approval... but their contract with GMO wasn’t prepared before the release date and we were told to postpone it.” They said that getting the contract sorted should “be a simple formality.”
As for the last-minute timing of the delay, the XSEED rep said, “Acquire got the message from GMO’s legal department the day of our scheduled release, 5/29, Japan time, which they immediately relayed to us close to midnight, 5/28, US time. That was the first that we heard the contract between them was still in progress or that it would prevent us from launching the game, so we had to postpone the release an hour before the scheduled [1 PM Eastern] time.”
If and when Labyrinth of Lost Souls finally launches on Steam, it just might signal a new era in which the Japanese branch of the series could return to American home computers, the platform where it all began. “Labyrinth of Lost Souls actually had a sequel which was never brought to the West,” XSEED told me. “Theoretically once we release on PC and it does well, we could look into localizing and releasing that title for the first time to an English audience.”
So basically it's delayed on what seems to be a formality -- the original devteam and the IP owner hadn't signed a contract for the PC port yet. Once that's fixed, we're good to go. And if LoLS does well, we might end up with Wizardry: City of Trapped Ghosts or whatever the proper localized term for ウィザードリィ 囚われし亡霊の街 is.
Sorry to come here with some negativity but I started Elminage Gothic and I'm pretty disappointed with a lot of aspects of it.
There's really no hook at all other than crunchy, arcane party mechanics for their own sake. Or dungeon crawling and mapping for its own sake. While I enjoy these things I really need...I dunno, something more. Better presentation or more atmosphere or a little more sense/logic in the way mechanics are applied.
The story is a joke. On the macro level I no longer care about gods sealing away the demons in ancient times and there was a period of peace and now evil is returning. On the micro level I no longer care about "investigate this cave and we might grant an audience with the king." I want some kind of goal, or a character with a little charisma who sends me off, something like that. It doesn't take much, there's just nothing here. Everyone I talk to both in town or in the dungeon says exactly what I would expect them to say ("Welcome to the tavern, have an ale!"). Etrian Odyssey is awesome by comparison. Even old Wizardries are awesome by comparison. I don't feel like I have a mystery to solve, it's just the bare minimum framing for going off and killing things.
The dungeon design feels haphazard and random, like it was automatically generated. There is no sense that this is a real place. Why would anyone build all these doors? Where are the landmarks to help me get a sense of where I am? Where are the descriptions telling me what I experience in various rooms? Yes, sometimes it says "there's a lot of blood here," that feels just as randomly generated. Monsters are slimes, strange spikey things, puff balls, zombie women, giant birds and other stuff, there's zero sense of cohesion. Why are any of these monsters here?
Compare to something like Wizardry 6:
It's shaped like a castle and feels like one, various rooms have descriptions like bedrooms or sitting rooms or even just everything being trashed. Even as goofy as it is, there are people to talk to who don't feel that out of place. Monsters are bats and rats and rogues, the kind of people you might expect to find wandering a castle.
For presentation, I know it's an older game by now but the graphics are the bare minimum. It has different resolutions for all the graphics so you have blurry background art next to sharp UI. A lot of things just feel off. Like after winning combat, you can wait on that screen to hear the fanfare flourish and end...and then loop again endlessly.
I don't have any problem with difficult games or ones with a lot of mechanics, I like the races and classes here. But quite a few of the mechanics don't seem well thought out. Many stats feel pointless for many characters, and I know you can use them for multiclassing, but still. Also why would you tie both chance to hit AND potential damage to strength? My fighters are all amazing at their job and no one else can even hit to begin with. These games are often cited as being inspired by old D&D rules, but even old D&D had the sense to try to make each stat valuable to everyone in its own way.
Just feels very amateurish and sloppy. I appreciate some aspects of it...but it's real rough.
Still playing it sporadically though. Which speaks to the strength of the addiction of learning new spells and getting a little further each time.
I downloaded the infinite map mod because screw that. No minimap and also you're gonna make me use a consumable just to look at the map? Noooooo ma'am.
I'm not against drawing maps on a touchscreen like in Etrian but I'm not doing pencil and paper right now.
I loved Elminage Original. I especially loved having a ... uh. Demon-kin? Brawler, and a Thief, and having the thief steal stuff like a Crab's Claw attack and equipping it on the Demon-Kin, who could do so because they are immune to curses. I remember in the postgame dungeon just abusing the hell out of the fact that if you are solo you get 6 times the normal amount of XP -- once you were fighting those bosses that were solid white ghostlike things your XP just went through the roof.
Elminage Gothic PSP nerfed both of that into the ground, by leaving out all the items on enemies you could disarm and then steal, like "Strike +3" or "Bite" or whatnot, and by making Demon-kin a locked race. Elminage Gothic 3DS re-added the former (the latter I understand) but no one has successfully ported the data file changes from 3DS to PSP/Steam. There are file decompressers for both the 3DS and PSP versions that work on the steam version that let you rip a bunch of files, including odd spreadsheet files that seem to be notes the devteam left to themselves to remember stuff, heh. In fact, some of the mechanics are based off simple CSV files, which makes me wonder if anyone ever just took the 3DS remix version's CSV and ported it to the Steam release...
Anyway, I hear the new hotness in Gothic is abusing the Summoner class's ability to create new party members by taking summoned monsters and turning them into permanent partymembers. I guess they're not perfect, but you get some insane stuff like characters that have a natural 100% chance to behead or those that have innate regen in the triple or quad digits.
But ultimately what pushed me away from Gothic was encountering random enemy parties full of Ninjas and suddenly 3 out of my 6 guys are dead in a single turn to beheading. There's hard and then there's that.
Elminage Gothic PSP nerfed both of that into the ground, by leaving out all the items on enemies you could disarm and then steal, like "Strike +3" or "Bite" or whatnot, and by making Demon-kin a locked race.
This may be what you mean by "locked race" but I think you're still able to acquire one or more of them. One is the kid in an early game quest who will join your party, and obviously you have full control over him, multiclassing etc. Although I'm not sure what the big advantage is with that race.
Elminage Gothic PSP nerfed both of that into the ground, by leaving out all the items on enemies you could disarm and then steal, like "Strike +3" or "Bite" or whatnot, and by making Demon-kin a locked race.
This may be what you mean by "locked race" but I think you're still able to acquire one or more of them. One is the kid in an early game quest who will join your party, and obviously you have full control over him, multiclassing etc. Although I'm not sure what the big advantage is with that race.
Oh yeah, you can get them in several ways -- converting summons to PCs, as well as activating a specific reusable dungeon event point later on. But you can't make them at the start of the game, sadly.
Their big benefit is they aren't affected by curses. The enemy gear from. Elminage 1 through 3 was all cursed, which was fixable but Devilkin Brawlers could use it out of the box. There was something fun about the idea of stealing that shit and having your Devilkin Brawler running around with those oddball weapons, and I think I'm more mad at the loss of that than the Devilkin, really, heh.
Elminage Gothic PSP nerfed both of that into the ground, by leaving out all the items on enemies you could disarm and then steal, like "Strike +3" or "Bite" or whatnot, and by making Demon-kin a locked race.
This may be what you mean by "locked race" but I think you're still able to acquire one or more of them. One is the kid in an early game quest who will join your party, and obviously you have full control over him, multiclassing etc. Although I'm not sure what the big advantage is with that race.
I tried Shining on the Darkness. So far the controls are really not great. Is it worth fighting the controls for?
Shining in the Darkness is just sort of OK as gridders go. Not sure how you alternatives are on phone though after Grimrock and the delisted Doom game.
Y'know something else that's weird with Elminage Gothic...this isn't a complaint as much as it's an observation.
Time passes and your characters' age actually matters, it takes days to walk to each dungeon, a day to rest at the inn, resurrection ages someone a year, I haven't played that long and maybe 3 to 5 years have passed. Characters can die of old age, or something like it (vitality starts decreasing on level up, and when it hits 0 they die?). This even includes elves who live hundreds of years.
Yet the innkeeper and shopkeeper and king in his castle and all the quest givers stay the same age, dutifully waiting where you first found them to complete quests.
I find it weird that this beautiful young lady asks me to retrieve a gemstone for her and I can forget about her quest and screw around for 600 years and let even my elves die of old age and start a new generation and just keep going and then finally go back to her and finish her quest like it's perfectly normal she would wait in an inn 600 years for a gem.
I tried Shining on the Darkness. So far the controls are really not great. Is it worth fighting the controls for?
Well truth be told I only really played it on Genesis as a kid, haven't played it on the phone. I played Shining Force a bit and I found it tolerable. The controls are fairly simple, is it just the virtual gamepad you don't like? That's understandable.
Shining in the Darkness is still one of my favorite dungeon crawlers, but a lot of that could just be nostalgia. Every sprite has so much personality and the music is awesome. It's ultimately fairly simple compared to most, but it also feels kind of pure and focused on what it wants to do. PC ones like Wizardries and Might and Magics are crunchier and more technical, but also less focused on their presentation. Shining in the Darkness is like watching a cartoon show.
This is a detail that we don't have to worry about anymore these days with fully 3D games like Elminage or Etrian Odyssey, but back in the day the fully animated dungeon was enthralling and really helped to track your position in the dungeon, compared to the un-animated instant screen change that its contemporaries tended to do.
I will say beyond control issues on a touchscreen it has a bit of a slow start too. You'll get two other party members (spellcasters!) after finishing one full map and killing your first miniboss, that's when the game opens up and you'll have more options in combat.
The controls are fairly simple, is it just the virtual gamepad you don't like? That's understandable.[/url]
Yeah. I don't mind the virtual gamepad broadly, but half my time playing so far has been getting stuck on objects and trying to walk past them.
I'll also admit, Might and Magic 2 was my defining gaming point, and Wizardry 7 further refined it, so we have different nostalgia to fall back on. Still, I'll give it some more time.
If you like Gridders, some Japanese guy was remaking the various Wizardry games on Android. Not sure if they'r 1 to 1 remakes or just inspired by the various titles. From a quick peek, he seems to have added, slowly, the extended Wizardry JP classes like Alchemist and Brawler (Elminage classes, which actually were from other Wizardry JP games before Elminage, IIRC)?
They're free or you can pay him $5 or so to remove the ads.
Has anyone fiddled with Stranger of Sword City Revisited on Vita? Wizardry being delayed reminded me I have it, and I heard the Revisited additions (which I am still annoyed we never got on the Steam version) break the game balance, but I can't find much in the way of details. Apparently Revisited was US only, the JP team never got it.
New classes... Clocker, Puppeteer, Freeman.
Clocker screws with turn order and apparently has an ability called Clock Up that's OP?
Puppeteer is apparently a rear row tank? Is really good with passives after class change? It apparently doesn't get any direct attacks, though...
Freeman (which sounds like it's supposed to be NEET or hikikomori?) apparently is a non-combat class, but supposedly if you give Freemen the Deviant skill they gain a ton of combat passives, for later class changing?
I don't get it, hah. Trying to get my Vita memory card to not be garbage so I can fire it up.
Edit:
Been fiddling with two projects.
Stranger of Sword City Revisisted. Just finished the first map and the first 3 (well, two technically) variants. Using the default party + the main character as a Clocker, although I'm gonna toss the defaults out in lieu of a more diverse party.
To answer my above question, Clockers are Red Mages + Time Mages. At level 1 they get an ability that lets them repeat themselves (i.e., attack twice, cast twice, etc) every other turn. They also get a variety of attack and heal and support spells, as well as medium armor and a variety of weapons. They're absurd, especially later on when you can do Overclock (double moves) + Triple Cast + Omega Break (hit with all 4 elements) to hit uh... 24 times? Aka, the fuck your game balance combo.
Elminage Gothic, I'm doing a Summoner only run. That is, I have a single Dragonewt Summoner with the ability to turn Summons into party members, with my plan to only use said Summoner and Summon-turned-partymembers. Everything so far has been Fighters of iffy use, but after that first hellish few levels things got better. I'm hoping to get a Thief, Cleric, and Mage sometime soon.
To be honest, I should have went with a standard Summoner and then created an alt to do the "turn summons into party members" thing, although apparently that was considered an exploit and patched in the 3DS version, so...
I'm down to the final final part of Etrian Odyssey Nexus, and I've really enjoyed my time with it!
Unless you have a razor-honed party composition that can output a billion damage all of a sudden (which given the zany boss instant kill videos of previous EO games I have no doubt you can do in this game), I feel like the one class that is hard to do without against the post-game bosses (and wow is the post-game big in this one!) is the Medic. You just get so many ailments and binds thrown onto your party and the fights are so long that it's hard to clear them all efficiently without line Refresh/Unbind, especially when the ailments include paralysis. Not running a Protector for all of these fights was totally fine for me, though!
But my real favourite theorycrafted gimmick which isn't actually good but is really silly is the ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT STARS team.
Pugilist/Hero
(clone of Pug/Hero)
Shogun/Pugilist
Shogun/Pugilist
Shogun/Pugilist
Nightseeker/Pugilist
Everybody equips two weapons, everybody maxes Million Rush, the Pug/Hero maxes 1-2 Punch/Double Punch, and the Nightseeker maxes Swift Edge along with having points in Blade Flurry.
The prep turn is the Pug/Hero casting 1-2 Punch and spawning a clone, as well as somebody inflicting some ailment on the target.
The next turn is the Pug/Hero casting 1-2 Punch again, every Shogun casting Blitz Command, and the Nightseeker doing Swift Edge.
The total number of possible attacks is:
7
7
4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 8 = 28
4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 8 = 28
4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 8 = 28
10
total 14 + 84 + 10 = 108
It is pretty unlikely that you will manage to roll that, but the thought of some enemy getting punched/stabbed 108 times in a single turn is pretty funny.
You could also just do 5 Gunners with at least one Gunner/Hero all casting Ricochet while in Boost, so that along with the one clone you get a potential 7 x 3 x 6 = 126 hits, but where's the fun in that?
I think the Hero class is comically powerful in that it just does everything and has one of the most powerful abilities for any offensive class to subclass with (the clone generation on damage skills), and on top of that has self-synergy with other Heroes because the presence of anybody's Hero clone allows the activation of the passives and actives that need that as a condition. Any offensive class now being able to dish out party-wide heals (possibly twice) and basically being able to crit their abilities (due to the clone) is pretty nuts! And for reasons I don't understand, sometimes the clone's ability does way more damage, as if it critted with the ability (like, double the damage, which is a lot more than the Boost would normally do)! The net result is that if you have a Gunner/Hero (Gunstar Hero?), you could potentially score upwards of 5x the damage in a single cast due to all of the doubling those two classes have. Not only that, because the Hero has multiple low-TP cost skills that provide party defense and whack the enemy with the shield and heal the party, you can pretty much have the Hero just do those all the time instead of using sword abilities... and in fact, late game (but far from post-game), you can even acquire a shield which when using shield-based abilities effectively gives the Hero one of the most powerful weapons in the game because of how those damage calculations work. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
The Hero is one of the few classes that could clear binds from multiple party members, and the Hero can also self-clear both binds and ailments in one turn regardless of bind status!
It slices it dices it makes julienne fries?
In the post-game, I found a class which I eschewed for the entire game, the Survivalist, extremely useful!
The dungeon design in this game is also really really good!
What an absorbing experience!.... except for the really weak EOV presence. Literally no cast members from EOV are in the game! Lame.
Much like the post-game boss of EOV, you will almost certainly wipe one turn one to one of her gimmicks. It may be possible to tank through it without using one of the elemental nullifiers/absorbers, but it's gonna be hard. My party members are around levels 103 to 111, some of them have their class ultimate armor, and just her normal attacks threaten to kill us constantly. The reason why it might be possible to tank through it is that in EOV, the big attack of the post-game final boss, the Star Devourer, would do over a dozen hits, each hit could instant kill, each hit does big damage... so you got a pretty good idea that tanking it just wasn't going to work. In this one, it's just one single big party-wide hit, which makes me think it might be tankable without elemental nullifiers/absorb.
After going through enough of the post-game, your level cap gets raised all the way to level 129!
Much like in the only other EO game I've beaten, EOV, there's the entire game leading up to the final post game boss, and then there's the post game boss. I somewhat dislike the post-game boss design in this game because some party members lose so much of what they normally do that you either respec them into completely different characters, or you just put in another character entirely. Maybe if you are being reaaaaaallly clever you can use the Arcanist to put debuffs on the boss to occasionally make the boss lose a turn (if she ever has 3 debuffs on her, or the total number of buffs on your party + debuffs on her is above some number, she automatically does this move where she clears all her debuffs and all your buffs), but the ailment/binding circles really don't accomplish much in the fight: the healing from them is too small, the chance of status affliction is miniscule, the boss often isn't afflicted for more than a turn, etc. The Ronin is also not that great in this fight because the Ronin is always in real danger of just dying. I think most teams that aren't razor-focused on gimmicks or burst damage will have a very hard or even impossible time in this fight without a Medic.
The big elemental attacks can indeed be tanked through without a Protector, and if you happen to have a Hero that has an afterimage doing Elemental Shield or Guard Rush, you can have the Hero do the other one of those two and you are almost certain to survive. However, the big elemental attacks are not the real game over condition of this fight, it's the Gothic Spirit orbs which the boss summons. These orbs have no actions in the fight: they don't buff anything, they don't cast any abilities, they don't attack, they aren't even that durable. I guess they can tank some attacks if you use a random multi-hit ability. But if 4 of them are up at the end of a turn (not counting the turn they were summoned), the boss does a huge almighty damage attack that is all but guaranteed to wipe you. If you kill the boss and ANY orbs are up, the boss revives with health based on how many orbs are up.... if all four orbs are up, the boss actually heals 100% lol
I like this boss much less than the EOV post-game boss because this boss manages to have so much RNG in it that it's often not very fun. You can build a party to mitigate the RNG, you can build a party that will blow out the boss with a zillion damage if you have very good understanding of the game, you can build a party that can abuse part of its AI. But all of that basically involves throwing out your party that you've played dozens and dozens of hours with, and you still might lose to RNG. For this fight I dialed it down from Expert to Basic after over 12 hours of trying to beat it and trying to not totally remodel my party, but in the end I still had to remodel my party. The gap between Expert and Basic is really quite large in this fight, because the damage thresholds of dying/not dying make a big difference, and it feels like status infliction rate goes down. The durability of the boss is really not very significant as a difficulty factor until the very final phase of the fight, where there is no longer a pattern which big elemental attack the boss will do every third turn. There is supposedly some amount of command reading the boss will do before deciding its initial action, and personally I hope it checks if you did one of the elemental nullifiers or not, and if so, it just flips a coin between the one you picked and another one so that the chance of you getting lucky is 50% rather than 33%. Lower difficulty meaning the boss dies faster in this phase means there's fewer times you will be subjected to this particular RNG, and so your chances of winning go up significantly.
The boss after the Abyssal Princess ironically is much less frustrating of a fight because it is more a traditional damage dealing boss and isn't so loaded with RNG.
Out of curiosity, I tried making a copy of my save and took on the final post-game boss in Picnic mode. The bosses deal so little damage and your damage is so juiced that you actually have to make a deliberate effort to lose. I think you take MAYBE 10% of the damage the boss would deal you on Basic, so if you are using defensive abilities, you may well beat the final postgame bosses without even needing to heal.
Some of the more fun synergies I had in the game were:
Imperial/Farmer: probably my favourite, it has like 4 different sources of TP regeneration, provides all kinds of dungeon exploring utility, combines Imperial's top-notch attack stat with one of the biggest AOE damage multipliers in the game in Harvest Festival (875% against bound enemies!!!), and lets you share TP with your linemates. Thematically and mechanically it's a delight.
Gunner/Hero: can fire literally 42 shots in a single turn without being a Ninja.
Hero/Sovereign: you literally never need to use Mirage Sword because if you have another Sovereign throwing buffs onto you, each cast of level 4 Physical/Elemental Shield has a net TP cost of 1. You naturally draw aggro but the first time you get hit you heal. An absolute monster for dungeon exploration and sustaining through long fights for much of the game.
Landsknecht/Imperial: I didn't use this until basically post-game because the Landy wasn't a member of my initial party, but with the Imperial's bonus elemental attack damage passive and "hitting enemy weakness = TP regen", the Landy is both dealing more damage and regenning as much as 24 TP a turn every time it uses a Link. You get improved damage output and you never need to stop doing Link attacks! Bonus - if anybody uses a counter attack ability that the Landy is involved in, you might well regen over 30 TP in one turn. It's endless TP.
Sovereign/Shogun: Thematically fun and lets you combine all of the offensive buffs the Sovereign can throw down with a team attack that is further buffed, and now you have two chances to come back from the dead with Dauntless and Reincarnation!
Ronin/Ninja: Thematically fun, but mechanically fun in that you get to Air Blade for 1 TP and you can operate most turns using abilities at a net TP gain, even before the TP you get from dodging attacks. As you can guess, I like creating parties around becoming ever more powerful and long-lasting dungeon explorers!
Zodiac/Protector: The Zodiac can now protect your party from elemental AND physical attacks, can equip shields for a huge armor buff, and more! The idea of being heavily armored artillery piece feels more like a tank than a normal Protector is!
Zodiac/Hero: Maybe you just want to pretend that you are a Zodiac Brave, but really who can say no to dropping 30+ rocks onto some poor enemy in one turn with the help of an Afterimage?
Imperial/Gunner: This one is just a monster. Any offensive class can benefit from Gunner's passive the results in some attack skills doubling, but when that's combined with some of the single biggest nukes in the game, it gets hilarious. On top of that, what were once single target nukes now have a chance of hitting something in the back line, but best of all, Act Quick allows you to entirely sidestep the vulnerable period of the Drives.... while also cutting the TP cost of them, which are some of the most TP intensive attacks in the game.
Been playing around with Stranger of Sword City Revisited. In the definitively final dungeon. Can beat the intro boss, but the 3 bosses blocking the final boss have stomped me so far.
My MC has gone Clocker -> Fighter -> Samurai -> Knight -> Dancer. Not sure if I want to go Ninja next or aim for that sweet, sweet Cleric immunity to status effects ability beforehand.
My other party members -- the default ones -- are completely useless. Considering starting up a new group, but honestly I've literally soloed most of the game.
I think I was looking for a first person game like this back in May/June and was all set to buy the game until @KiTA posted that it was delayed...and must have added it to my wishlist at the time. Thanks, six-months-ago self!?
Alright, now that I have bought it I have learned that it's a 10-year-old PS3 game (not that this is really a problem), and its original Japanese wiki is dead. I think I found the wiki for its sequel which is not really helpful. When I want info on these sorts of games my go-to is usually the Japanese wiki through Google Translate because it's often the most complete source of information.
However then I took a look at GameFAQs and discovered that PA's own @cj iwakurawrote the book on this game, so I might look into that. :P Also...all of his maps appear to be destroyed by Photobucket.
I will probably not play the whole game following along with a guide, I just like to look into character build info, and keep an eye out for "gotchas." Like "don't make a thief in this game, they're actually useless." You never know!
Alright, now that I have bought it I have learned that it's a 10-year-old PS3 game (not that this is really a problem), and its original Japanese wiki is dead. I think I found the wiki for its sequel which is not really helpful. When I want info on these sorts of games my go-to is usually the Japanese wiki through Google Translate because it's often the most complete source of information.
However then I took a look at GameFAQs and discovered that PA's own @cj iwakurawrote the book on this game, so I might look into that. :P Also...all of his maps appear to be destroyed by Photobucket.
I will probably not play the whole game following along with a guide, I just like to look into character build info, and keep an eye out for "gotchas." Like "don't make a thief in this game, they're actually useless." You never know!
It's far from the best, but I had a lot of fun with it. Stupid photobucket, lol.
I reached out to XSEED, the Western publisher of Labyrinth of Lost Souls, and they offered an encouraging statement over email. “GMO is the company who owns the Wizardry IP now,” they said. “[Acquire, the developer of Labyrinth of Lost Souls,] got GMO’s approval... but their contract with GMO wasn’t prepared before the release date and we were told to postpone it.” They said that getting the contract sorted should “be a simple formality.”
As for the last-minute timing of the delay, the XSEED rep said, “Acquire got the message from GMO’s legal department the day of our scheduled release, 5/29, Japan time, which they immediately relayed to us close to midnight, 5/28, US time. That was the first that we heard the contract between them was still in progress or that it would prevent us from launching the game, so we had to postpone the release an hour before the scheduled [1 PM Eastern] time.”
If and when Labyrinth of Lost Souls finally launches on Steam, it just might signal a new era in which the Japanese branch of the series could return to American home computers, the platform where it all began. “Labyrinth of Lost Souls actually had a sequel which was never brought to the West,” XSEED told me. “Theoretically once we release on PC and it does well, we could look into localizing and releasing that title for the first time to an English audience.”
So basically it's delayed on what seems to be a formality -- the original devteam and the IP owner hadn't signed a contract for the PC port yet. Once that's fixed, we're good to go. And if LoLS does well, we might end up with Wizardry: City of Trapped Ghosts or whatever the proper localized term for ウィザードリィ 囚われし亡霊の街 is.
I have good memories of Eye of the Beholder games (especially 2), and started Legend of Grimrock. I’m not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I feel like combat is way more of a slog than EoB, and every monster is a real damage sponge. Every fight is like fighting Xanathar or Draggore -- it seems like you're expected to use the beholder two-step against everything, not just big bads -- and I’m spending way more time fighting than exploring.
Maybe the prebuilt party is junk. But after three levels I think I’m going to start over on easy instead of normal.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
I beat Legend Of Grimrock 1 legitimately, but Grimrock 2 was a bit of a chore. I will freely admit I used the console to enable cheats and cheated my way through that game. Like, do some fights, and heal for free. I didn't give myself the best equipment, I still left that much to exploration, but fuck it if I'm going to let my party starve or die because of a lack of heals and potions.
I have good memories of Eye of the Beholder games (especially 2), and started Legend of Grimrock. I’m not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I feel like combat is way more of a slog than EoB, and every monster is a real damage sponge. Every fight is like fighting Xanathar or Draggore -- it seems like you're expected to use the beholder two-step against everything, not just big bads -- and I’m spending way more time fighting than exploring.
Maybe the prebuilt party is junk. But after three levels I think I’m going to start over on easy instead of normal.
The "sidestep shuffle," or whatever you want to call it, is seen as one of the defining features of that branch of dungeon crawlers. I think most games that have been released in that genre between Dungeon Master and now pretty much expect you to do it constantly. Which isn't really my thing
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AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
I reached out to XSEED, the Western publisher of Labyrinth of Lost Souls, and they offered an encouraging statement over email. “GMO is the company who owns the Wizardry IP now,” they said. “[Acquire, the developer of Labyrinth of Lost Souls,] got GMO’s approval... but their contract with GMO wasn’t prepared before the release date and we were told to postpone it.” They said that getting the contract sorted should “be a simple formality.”
As for the last-minute timing of the delay, the XSEED rep said, “Acquire got the message from GMO’s legal department the day of our scheduled release, 5/29, Japan time, which they immediately relayed to us close to midnight, 5/28, US time. That was the first that we heard the contract between them was still in progress or that it would prevent us from launching the game, so we had to postpone the release an hour before the scheduled [1 PM Eastern] time.”
If and when Labyrinth of Lost Souls finally launches on Steam, it just might signal a new era in which the Japanese branch of the series could return to American home computers, the platform where it all began. “Labyrinth of Lost Souls actually had a sequel which was never brought to the West,” XSEED told me. “Theoretically once we release on PC and it does well, we could look into localizing and releasing that title for the first time to an English audience.”
So basically it's delayed on what seems to be a formality -- the original devteam and the IP owner hadn't signed a contract for the PC port yet. Once that's fixed, we're good to go. And if LoLS does well, we might end up with Wizardry: City of Trapped Ghosts or whatever the proper localized term for ウィザードリィ 囚われし亡霊の街 is.
Town of Forsaken Spirits.
Municipality of Disowned Spooks.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I have good memories of Eye of the Beholder games (especially 2), and started Legend of Grimrock. I’m not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I feel like combat is way more of a slog than EoB, and every monster is a real damage sponge. Every fight is like fighting Xanathar or Draggore -- it seems like you're expected to use the beholder two-step against everything, not just big bads -- and I’m spending way more time fighting than exploring.
Maybe the prebuilt party is junk. But after three levels I think I’m going to start over on easy instead of normal.
The "sidestep shuffle," or whatever you want to call it, is seen as one of the defining features of that branch of dungeon crawlers. I think most games that have been released in that genre between Dungeon Master and now pretty much expect you to do it constantly. Which isn't really my thing
I just don't remember monsters taking or dishing out this much damage in the EoB games. Basic monsters here take five or more passes to kill, and it's not that I can't do it, but I'd rather be doing something else, or at least a lot less fighting.
Also, magic seems like a fiddly pain in the neck. I have to mess with the runes every time I want to cast a spell, while dodging and attacking with my other guys? Will I be screwed if I just don't take a mage?
I have good memories of Eye of the Beholder games (especially 2), and started Legend of Grimrock. I’m not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I feel like combat is way more of a slog than EoB, and every monster is a real damage sponge. Every fight is like fighting Xanathar or Draggore -- it seems like you're expected to use the beholder two-step against everything, not just big bads -- and I’m spending way more time fighting than exploring.
Maybe the prebuilt party is junk. But after three levels I think I’m going to start over on easy instead of normal.
The "sidestep shuffle," or whatever you want to call it, is seen as one of the defining features of that branch of dungeon crawlers. I think most games that have been released in that genre between Dungeon Master and now pretty much expect you to do it constantly. Which isn't really my thing
I just don't remember monsters taking or dishing out this much damage in the EoB games. Basic monsters here take five or more passes to kill, and it's not that I can't do it, but I'd rather be doing something else, or at least a lot less fighting.
Also, magic seems like a fiddly pain in the neck. I have to mess with the runes every time I want to cast a spell, while dodging and attacking with my other guys? Will I be screwed if I just don't take a mage?
I made a post to similar effect years ago in this thread...as much as I liked Grimrock, I've fallen away from the fiddly real time nature of those kinds of first person dungeon crawlers. I just want to sit back and lazily click through turn based combat.
I think in Grimrock you are expected to use every tool at your disposal including throwing weapons at enemies and spells. From what I remember, the default party IS junk, but it's good to play with them for a bit so you learn what's good and what isn't.
A mage is worthwhile. You can learn spells to
resist elements and also cast light so you don't need torches.
Technically spells are a spoiler since I think you have to find scrolls in-game that tell you what runes to click on, but you could use them at almost any time if you just knew it. However I am still happy that if you search google for a Grimrock spell list, a fancy photoshop compilation image I made tends to be the first result.
I reached out to XSEED, the Western publisher of Labyrinth of Lost Souls, and they offered an encouraging statement over email. “GMO is the company who owns the Wizardry IP now,” they said. “[Acquire, the developer of Labyrinth of Lost Souls,] got GMO’s approval... but their contract with GMO wasn’t prepared before the release date and we were told to postpone it.” They said that getting the contract sorted should “be a simple formality.”
As for the last-minute timing of the delay, the XSEED rep said, “Acquire got the message from GMO’s legal department the day of our scheduled release, 5/29, Japan time, which they immediately relayed to us close to midnight, 5/28, US time. That was the first that we heard the contract between them was still in progress or that it would prevent us from launching the game, so we had to postpone the release an hour before the scheduled [1 PM Eastern] time.”
If and when Labyrinth of Lost Souls finally launches on Steam, it just might signal a new era in which the Japanese branch of the series could return to American home computers, the platform where it all began. “Labyrinth of Lost Souls actually had a sequel which was never brought to the West,” XSEED told me. “Theoretically once we release on PC and it does well, we could look into localizing and releasing that title for the first time to an English audience.”
So basically it's delayed on what seems to be a formality -- the original devteam and the IP owner hadn't signed a contract for the PC port yet. Once that's fixed, we're good to go. And if LoLS does well, we might end up with Wizardry: City of Trapped Ghosts or whatever the proper localized term for ウィザードリィ 囚われし亡霊の街 is.
Town of Forsaken Spirits.
Municipality of Disowned Spooks.
Previously Unmet Person of Blade Town.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Thanks @Iolo :biggrin: . Guess I got work to do... again...
Oh great now I have learned that while most of the time you get 7-9 bonus points for your character it's possible to roll a 40?! What the heck. Guess I got some character rerolling to do.
I have good memories of Eye of the Beholder games (especially 2), and started Legend of Grimrock. I’m not enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I feel like combat is way more of a slog than EoB, and every monster is a real damage sponge. Every fight is like fighting Xanathar or Draggore -- it seems like you're expected to use the beholder two-step against everything, not just big bads -- and I’m spending way more time fighting than exploring.
Maybe the prebuilt party is junk. But after three levels I think I’m going to start over on easy instead of normal.
The "sidestep shuffle," or whatever you want to call it, is seen as one of the defining features of that branch of dungeon crawlers. I think most games that have been released in that genre between Dungeon Master and now pretty much expect you to do it constantly. Which isn't really my thing
I just don't remember monsters taking or dishing out this much damage in the EoB games. Basic monsters here take five or more passes to kill, and it's not that I can't do it, but I'd rather be doing something else, or at least a lot less fighting.
Also, magic seems like a fiddly pain in the neck. I have to mess with the runes every time I want to cast a spell, while dodging and attacking with my other guys? Will I be screwed if I just don't take a mage?
EoB is the watered-down arcadey version of Dungeon Master, which Grimrock pays heavy homage to. Including things virtually every clone of it abandoned, like rune-based spellcasting, potion-based healing, maintaining your own light source, and the sheer volume of puzzles and traps at every step. No one can tell you to like it, but this game is much more of a DM clone than EoB clone. (AFAIK DM is the very progenitor of the realtime variant of gridder.)
I will agree that the two-step is laughably easy to pull off in a modern game with such smooth animation, it makes predicting most mobs' actions even easier. The sequel tried to design around it in interesting ways, but here one-on-one encounters are a bit rote, albeit that is also true to dungeon master.
As for magic, the only one you really need is the light spell, because torches get annoying. Everything else is quite optional, probably suboptimal even. As I recall you can punch out spell runes quickly with the number pad though, which would've been awesome to have in DM.
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cj iwakuraThe Rhythm RegentBears The Name FreedomRegistered Userregular
Oh great now I have learned that while most of the time you get 7-9 bonus points for your character it's possible to roll a 40?! What the heck. Guess I got some character rerolling to do.
Oh great now I have learned that while most of the time you get 7-9 bonus points for your character it's possible to roll a 40?! What the heck. Guess I got some character rerolling to do.
Lowers the points for others though, I think.
What does this mean? Rolling a 40 means all the other characters in the party's stats decrease?
I decided to reroll unless I got 25 or higher, that's a pretty reasonable target. I got 3 26s, one 28, one 30 and one 38!
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Last time I saw this, what had happened is they had not gotten the license for the Music, which isn't included in the game license with JP companies occasionally. Worse, many of the music companies involved flat out refuse to license music to US companies. Supposedly that's why Elminage swapped some music out for the PC release, and why Class of Heroes swapped the title screen music out.
So basically it's delayed on what seems to be a formality -- the original devteam and the IP owner hadn't signed a contract for the PC port yet. Once that's fixed, we're good to go. And if LoLS does well, we might end up with Wizardry: City of Trapped Ghosts or whatever the proper localized term for ウィザードリィ 囚われし亡霊の街 is.
There's really no hook at all other than crunchy, arcane party mechanics for their own sake. Or dungeon crawling and mapping for its own sake. While I enjoy these things I really need...I dunno, something more. Better presentation or more atmosphere or a little more sense/logic in the way mechanics are applied.
The story is a joke. On the macro level I no longer care about gods sealing away the demons in ancient times and there was a period of peace and now evil is returning. On the micro level I no longer care about "investigate this cave and we might grant an audience with the king." I want some kind of goal, or a character with a little charisma who sends me off, something like that. It doesn't take much, there's just nothing here. Everyone I talk to both in town or in the dungeon says exactly what I would expect them to say ("Welcome to the tavern, have an ale!"). Etrian Odyssey is awesome by comparison. Even old Wizardries are awesome by comparison. I don't feel like I have a mystery to solve, it's just the bare minimum framing for going off and killing things.
The dungeon design feels haphazard and random, like it was automatically generated. There is no sense that this is a real place. Why would anyone build all these doors? Where are the landmarks to help me get a sense of where I am? Where are the descriptions telling me what I experience in various rooms? Yes, sometimes it says "there's a lot of blood here," that feels just as randomly generated. Monsters are slimes, strange spikey things, puff balls, zombie women, giant birds and other stuff, there's zero sense of cohesion. Why are any of these monsters here?
Compare to something like Wizardry 6:
It's shaped like a castle and feels like one, various rooms have descriptions like bedrooms or sitting rooms or even just everything being trashed. Even as goofy as it is, there are people to talk to who don't feel that out of place. Monsters are bats and rats and rogues, the kind of people you might expect to find wandering a castle.
For presentation, I know it's an older game by now but the graphics are the bare minimum. It has different resolutions for all the graphics so you have blurry background art next to sharp UI. A lot of things just feel off. Like after winning combat, you can wait on that screen to hear the fanfare flourish and end...and then loop again endlessly.
I don't have any problem with difficult games or ones with a lot of mechanics, I like the races and classes here. But quite a few of the mechanics don't seem well thought out. Many stats feel pointless for many characters, and I know you can use them for multiclassing, but still. Also why would you tie both chance to hit AND potential damage to strength? My fighters are all amazing at their job and no one else can even hit to begin with. These games are often cited as being inspired by old D&D rules, but even old D&D had the sense to try to make each stat valuable to everyone in its own way.
Just feels very amateurish and sloppy. I appreciate some aspects of it...but it's real rough.
They took the trappings, but not the context.
I downloaded the infinite map mod because screw that. No minimap and also you're gonna make me use a consumable just to look at the map? Noooooo ma'am.
I'm not against drawing maps on a touchscreen like in Etrian but I'm not doing pencil and paper right now.
Elminage Gothic PSP nerfed both of that into the ground, by leaving out all the items on enemies you could disarm and then steal, like "Strike +3" or "Bite" or whatnot, and by making Demon-kin a locked race. Elminage Gothic 3DS re-added the former (the latter I understand) but no one has successfully ported the data file changes from 3DS to PSP/Steam. There are file decompressers for both the 3DS and PSP versions that work on the steam version that let you rip a bunch of files, including odd spreadsheet files that seem to be notes the devteam left to themselves to remember stuff, heh. In fact, some of the mechanics are based off simple CSV files, which makes me wonder if anyone ever just took the 3DS remix version's CSV and ported it to the Steam release...
Anyway, I hear the new hotness in Gothic is abusing the Summoner class's ability to create new party members by taking summoned monsters and turning them into permanent partymembers. I guess they're not perfect, but you get some insane stuff like characters that have a natural 100% chance to behead or those that have innate regen in the triple or quad digits.
But ultimately what pushed me away from Gothic was encountering random enemy parties full of Ninjas and suddenly 3 out of my 6 guys are dead in a single turn to beheading. There's hard and then there's that.
Shining in the Darkness is free on mobile! Or no ads for like a couple bucks.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sega.mega&hl=en_US
This may be what you mean by "locked race" but I think you're still able to acquire one or more of them. One is the kid in an early game quest who will join your party, and obviously you have full control over him, multiclassing etc. Although I'm not sure what the big advantage is with that race.
Oh yeah, you can get them in several ways -- converting summons to PCs, as well as activating a specific reusable dungeon event point later on. But you can't make them at the start of the game, sadly.
Their big benefit is they aren't affected by curses. The enemy gear from. Elminage 1 through 3 was all cursed, which was fixable but Devilkin Brawlers could use it out of the box. There was something fun about the idea of stealing that shit and having your Devilkin Brawler running around with those oddball weapons, and I think I'm more mad at the loss of that than the Devilkin, really, heh.
I tried Shining on the Darkness. So far the controls are really not great. Is it worth fighting the controls for?
Time passes and your characters' age actually matters, it takes days to walk to each dungeon, a day to rest at the inn, resurrection ages someone a year, I haven't played that long and maybe 3 to 5 years have passed. Characters can die of old age, or something like it (vitality starts decreasing on level up, and when it hits 0 they die?). This even includes elves who live hundreds of years.
Yet the innkeeper and shopkeeper and king in his castle and all the quest givers stay the same age, dutifully waiting where you first found them to complete quests.
I find it weird that this beautiful young lady asks me to retrieve a gemstone for her and I can forget about her quest and screw around for 600 years and let even my elves die of old age and start a new generation and just keep going and then finally go back to her and finish her quest like it's perfectly normal she would wait in an inn 600 years for a gem.
Well truth be told I only really played it on Genesis as a kid, haven't played it on the phone. I played Shining Force a bit and I found it tolerable. The controls are fairly simple, is it just the virtual gamepad you don't like? That's understandable.
Shining in the Darkness is still one of my favorite dungeon crawlers, but a lot of that could just be nostalgia. Every sprite has so much personality and the music is awesome. It's ultimately fairly simple compared to most, but it also feels kind of pure and focused on what it wants to do. PC ones like Wizardries and Might and Magics are crunchier and more technical, but also less focused on their presentation. Shining in the Darkness is like watching a cartoon show.
This is a detail that we don't have to worry about anymore these days with fully 3D games like Elminage or Etrian Odyssey, but back in the day the fully animated dungeon was enthralling and really helped to track your position in the dungeon, compared to the un-animated instant screen change that its contemporaries tended to do.
I will say beyond control issues on a touchscreen it has a bit of a slow start too. You'll get two other party members (spellcasters!) after finishing one full map and killing your first miniboss, that's when the game opens up and you'll have more options in combat.
If you want to play with an actual gamepad or keyboard it's also on Steam for 99 cents.
Yeah. I don't mind the virtual gamepad broadly, but half my time playing so far has been getting stuck on objects and trying to walk past them.
I'll also admit, Might and Magic 2 was my defining gaming point, and Wizardry 7 further refined it, so we have different nostalgia to fall back on. Still, I'll give it some more time.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wandroid.ofmo.p
They're free or you can pay him $5 or so to remove the ads.
Has anyone fiddled with Stranger of Sword City Revisited on Vita? Wizardry being delayed reminded me I have it, and I heard the Revisited additions (which I am still annoyed we never got on the Steam version) break the game balance, but I can't find much in the way of details. Apparently Revisited was US only, the JP team never got it.
New classes... Clocker, Puppeteer, Freeman.
Clocker screws with turn order and apparently has an ability called Clock Up that's OP?
Puppeteer is apparently a rear row tank? Is really good with passives after class change? It apparently doesn't get any direct attacks, though...
Freeman (which sounds like it's supposed to be NEET or hikikomori?) apparently is a non-combat class, but supposedly if you give Freemen the Deviant skill they gain a ton of combat passives, for later class changing?
I don't get it, hah. Trying to get my Vita memory card to not be garbage so I can fire it up.
Edit:
Been fiddling with two projects.
Stranger of Sword City Revisisted. Just finished the first map and the first 3 (well, two technically) variants. Using the default party + the main character as a Clocker, although I'm gonna toss the defaults out in lieu of a more diverse party.
To answer my above question, Clockers are Red Mages + Time Mages. At level 1 they get an ability that lets them repeat themselves (i.e., attack twice, cast twice, etc) every other turn. They also get a variety of attack and heal and support spells, as well as medium armor and a variety of weapons. They're absurd, especially later on when you can do Overclock (double moves) + Triple Cast + Omega Break (hit with all 4 elements) to hit uh... 24 times? Aka, the fuck your game balance combo.
Elminage Gothic, I'm doing a Summoner only run. That is, I have a single Dragonewt Summoner with the ability to turn Summons into party members, with my plan to only use said Summoner and Summon-turned-partymembers. Everything so far has been Fighters of iffy use, but after that first hellish few levels things got better. I'm hoping to get a Thief, Cleric, and Mage sometime soon.
To be honest, I should have went with a standard Summoner and then created an alt to do the "turn summons into party members" thing, although apparently that was considered an exploit and patched in the 3DS version, so...
Unless you have a razor-honed party composition that can output a billion damage all of a sudden (which given the zany boss instant kill videos of previous EO games I have no doubt you can do in this game), I feel like the one class that is hard to do without against the post-game bosses (and wow is the post-game big in this one!) is the Medic. You just get so many ailments and binds thrown onto your party and the fights are so long that it's hard to clear them all efficiently without line Refresh/Unbind, especially when the ailments include paralysis. Not running a Protector for all of these fights was totally fine for me, though!
But my real favourite theorycrafted gimmick which isn't actually good but is really silly is the ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT STARS team.
Pugilist/Hero
(clone of Pug/Hero)
Shogun/Pugilist
Shogun/Pugilist
Shogun/Pugilist
Nightseeker/Pugilist
Everybody equips two weapons, everybody maxes Million Rush, the Pug/Hero maxes 1-2 Punch/Double Punch, and the Nightseeker maxes Swift Edge along with having points in Blade Flurry.
The prep turn is the Pug/Hero casting 1-2 Punch and spawning a clone, as well as somebody inflicting some ailment on the target.
The next turn is the Pug/Hero casting 1-2 Punch again, every Shogun casting Blitz Command, and the Nightseeker doing Swift Edge.
The total number of possible attacks is:
7
7
4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 8 = 28
4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 8 = 28
4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 + 8 = 28
10
total 14 + 84 + 10 = 108
It is pretty unlikely that you will manage to roll that, but the thought of some enemy getting punched/stabbed 108 times in a single turn is pretty funny.
You could also just do 5 Gunners with at least one Gunner/Hero all casting Ricochet while in Boost, so that along with the one clone you get a potential 7 x 3 x 6 = 126 hits, but where's the fun in that?
I think the Hero class is comically powerful in that it just does everything and has one of the most powerful abilities for any offensive class to subclass with (the clone generation on damage skills), and on top of that has self-synergy with other Heroes because the presence of anybody's Hero clone allows the activation of the passives and actives that need that as a condition. Any offensive class now being able to dish out party-wide heals (possibly twice) and basically being able to crit their abilities (due to the clone) is pretty nuts! And for reasons I don't understand, sometimes the clone's ability does way more damage, as if it critted with the ability (like, double the damage, which is a lot more than the Boost would normally do)! The net result is that if you have a Gunner/Hero (Gunstar Hero?), you could potentially score upwards of 5x the damage in a single cast due to all of the doubling those two classes have. Not only that, because the Hero has multiple low-TP cost skills that provide party defense and whack the enemy with the shield and heal the party, you can pretty much have the Hero just do those all the time instead of using sword abilities... and in fact, late game (but far from post-game), you can even acquire a shield which when using shield-based abilities effectively gives the Hero one of the most powerful weapons in the game because of how those damage calculations work. BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
The Hero is one of the few classes that could clear binds from multiple party members, and the Hero can also self-clear both binds and ailments in one turn regardless of bind status!
It slices it dices it makes julienne fries?
In the post-game, I found a class which I eschewed for the entire game, the Survivalist, extremely useful!
The dungeon design in this game is also really really good!
What an absorbing experience!.... except for the really weak EOV presence. Literally no cast members from EOV are in the game! Lame.
Much like the post-game boss of EOV, you will almost certainly wipe one turn one to one of her gimmicks. It may be possible to tank through it without using one of the elemental nullifiers/absorbers, but it's gonna be hard. My party members are around levels 103 to 111, some of them have their class ultimate armor, and just her normal attacks threaten to kill us constantly. The reason why it might be possible to tank through it is that in EOV, the big attack of the post-game final boss, the Star Devourer, would do over a dozen hits, each hit could instant kill, each hit does big damage... so you got a pretty good idea that tanking it just wasn't going to work. In this one, it's just one single big party-wide hit, which makes me think it might be tankable without elemental nullifiers/absorb.
After going through enough of the post-game, your level cap gets raised all the way to level 129!
I wonder if I might need it for this....
I played through the entire game on Expert mode.
The big elemental attacks can indeed be tanked through without a Protector, and if you happen to have a Hero that has an afterimage doing Elemental Shield or Guard Rush, you can have the Hero do the other one of those two and you are almost certain to survive. However, the big elemental attacks are not the real game over condition of this fight, it's the Gothic Spirit orbs which the boss summons. These orbs have no actions in the fight: they don't buff anything, they don't cast any abilities, they don't attack, they aren't even that durable. I guess they can tank some attacks if you use a random multi-hit ability. But if 4 of them are up at the end of a turn (not counting the turn they were summoned), the boss does a huge almighty damage attack that is all but guaranteed to wipe you. If you kill the boss and ANY orbs are up, the boss revives with health based on how many orbs are up.... if all four orbs are up, the boss actually heals 100% lol
I like this boss much less than the EOV post-game boss because this boss manages to have so much RNG in it that it's often not very fun. You can build a party to mitigate the RNG, you can build a party that will blow out the boss with a zillion damage if you have very good understanding of the game, you can build a party that can abuse part of its AI. But all of that basically involves throwing out your party that you've played dozens and dozens of hours with, and you still might lose to RNG. For this fight I dialed it down from Expert to Basic after over 12 hours of trying to beat it and trying to not totally remodel my party, but in the end I still had to remodel my party. The gap between Expert and Basic is really quite large in this fight, because the damage thresholds of dying/not dying make a big difference, and it feels like status infliction rate goes down. The durability of the boss is really not very significant as a difficulty factor until the very final phase of the fight, where there is no longer a pattern which big elemental attack the boss will do every third turn. There is supposedly some amount of command reading the boss will do before deciding its initial action, and personally I hope it checks if you did one of the elemental nullifiers or not, and if so, it just flips a coin between the one you picked and another one so that the chance of you getting lucky is 50% rather than 33%. Lower difficulty meaning the boss dies faster in this phase means there's fewer times you will be subjected to this particular RNG, and so your chances of winning go up significantly.
The boss after the Abyssal Princess ironically is much less frustrating of a fight because it is more a traditional damage dealing boss and isn't so loaded with RNG.
Out of curiosity, I tried making a copy of my save and took on the final post-game boss in Picnic mode. The bosses deal so little damage and your damage is so juiced that you actually have to make a deliberate effort to lose. I think you take MAYBE 10% of the damage the boss would deal you on Basic, so if you are using defensive abilities, you may well beat the final postgame bosses without even needing to heal.
Some of the more fun synergies I had in the game were:
Imperial/Farmer: probably my favourite, it has like 4 different sources of TP regeneration, provides all kinds of dungeon exploring utility, combines Imperial's top-notch attack stat with one of the biggest AOE damage multipliers in the game in Harvest Festival (875% against bound enemies!!!), and lets you share TP with your linemates. Thematically and mechanically it's a delight.
Gunner/Hero: can fire literally 42 shots in a single turn without being a Ninja.
Hero/Sovereign: you literally never need to use Mirage Sword because if you have another Sovereign throwing buffs onto you, each cast of level 4 Physical/Elemental Shield has a net TP cost of 1. You naturally draw aggro but the first time you get hit you heal. An absolute monster for dungeon exploration and sustaining through long fights for much of the game.
Landsknecht/Imperial: I didn't use this until basically post-game because the Landy wasn't a member of my initial party, but with the Imperial's bonus elemental attack damage passive and "hitting enemy weakness = TP regen", the Landy is both dealing more damage and regenning as much as 24 TP a turn every time it uses a Link. You get improved damage output and you never need to stop doing Link attacks! Bonus - if anybody uses a counter attack ability that the Landy is involved in, you might well regen over 30 TP in one turn. It's endless TP.
Sovereign/Shogun: Thematically fun and lets you combine all of the offensive buffs the Sovereign can throw down with a team attack that is further buffed, and now you have two chances to come back from the dead with Dauntless and Reincarnation!
Ronin/Ninja: Thematically fun, but mechanically fun in that you get to Air Blade for 1 TP and you can operate most turns using abilities at a net TP gain, even before the TP you get from dodging attacks. As you can guess, I like creating parties around becoming ever more powerful and long-lasting dungeon explorers!
Zodiac/Protector: The Zodiac can now protect your party from elemental AND physical attacks, can equip shields for a huge armor buff, and more! The idea of being heavily armored artillery piece feels more like a tank than a normal Protector is!
Zodiac/Hero: Maybe you just want to pretend that you are a Zodiac Brave, but really who can say no to dropping 30+ rocks onto some poor enemy in one turn with the help of an Afterimage?
Imperial/Gunner: This one is just a monster. Any offensive class can benefit from Gunner's passive the results in some attack skills doubling, but when that's combined with some of the single biggest nukes in the game, it gets hilarious. On top of that, what were once single target nukes now have a chance of hitting something in the back line, but best of all, Act Quick allows you to entirely sidestep the vulnerable period of the Drives.... while also cutting the TP cost of them, which are some of the most TP intensive attacks in the game.
My MC has gone Clocker -> Fighter -> Samurai -> Knight -> Dancer. Not sure if I want to go Ninja next or aim for that sweet, sweet Cleric immunity to status effects ability beforehand.
My other party members -- the default ones -- are completely useless. Considering starting up a new group, but honestly I've literally soloed most of the game.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/948640/Wizardry_Labyrinth_of_Lost_Souls/
I think I was looking for a first person game like this back in May/June and was all set to buy the game until @KiTA posted that it was delayed...and must have added it to my wishlist at the time. Thanks, six-months-ago self!?
However then I took a look at GameFAQs and discovered that PA's own @cj iwakura wrote the book on this game, so I might look into that. :P Also...all of his maps appear to be destroyed by Photobucket.
I will probably not play the whole game following along with a guide, I just like to look into character build info, and keep an eye out for "gotchas." Like "don't make a thief in this game, they're actually useless." You never know!
It's far from the best, but I had a lot of fun with it. Stupid photobucket, lol.
Guess I'll have to replay it...
I actually lost that PS3, so I'd have to start from scratch.
Town of Forsaken Spirits.
Maybe the prebuilt party is junk. But after three levels I think I’m going to start over on easy instead of normal.
Original is MUCH better. Gothic is all bite, no meat. Great OST, too.
Steam: TheArcadeBear
The "sidestep shuffle," or whatever you want to call it, is seen as one of the defining features of that branch of dungeon crawlers. I think most games that have been released in that genre between Dungeon Master and now pretty much expect you to do it constantly. Which isn't really my thing
Municipality of Disowned Spooks.
I just don't remember monsters taking or dishing out this much damage in the EoB games. Basic monsters here take five or more passes to kill, and it's not that I can't do it, but I'd rather be doing something else, or at least a lot less fighting.
Also, magic seems like a fiddly pain in the neck. I have to mess with the runes every time I want to cast a spell, while dodging and attacking with my other guys? Will I be screwed if I just don't take a mage?
I made a post to similar effect years ago in this thread...as much as I liked Grimrock, I've fallen away from the fiddly real time nature of those kinds of first person dungeon crawlers. I just want to sit back and lazily click through turn based combat.
I think in Grimrock you are expected to use every tool at your disposal including throwing weapons at enemies and spells. From what I remember, the default party IS junk, but it's good to play with them for a bit so you learn what's good and what isn't.
A mage is worthwhile. You can learn spells to
Technically spells are a spoiler since I think you have to find scrolls in-game that tell you what runes to click on, but you could use them at almost any time if you just knew it. However I am still happy that if you search google for a Grimrock spell list, a fancy photoshop compilation image I made tends to be the first result.
Previously Unmet Person of Blade Town.
Thanks @Iolo :biggrin: . Guess I got work to do... again...
EoB is the watered-down arcadey version of Dungeon Master, which Grimrock pays heavy homage to. Including things virtually every clone of it abandoned, like rune-based spellcasting, potion-based healing, maintaining your own light source, and the sheer volume of puzzles and traps at every step. No one can tell you to like it, but this game is much more of a DM clone than EoB clone. (AFAIK DM is the very progenitor of the realtime variant of gridder.)
I will agree that the two-step is laughably easy to pull off in a modern game with such smooth animation, it makes predicting most mobs' actions even easier. The sequel tried to design around it in interesting ways, but here one-on-one encounters are a bit rote, albeit that is also true to dungeon master.
As for magic, the only one you really need is the light spell, because torches get annoying. Everything else is quite optional, probably suboptimal even. As I recall you can punch out spell runes quickly with the number pad though, which would've been awesome to have in DM.
Lowers the points for others though, I think.
What does this mean? Rolling a 40 means all the other characters in the party's stats decrease?
I decided to reroll unless I got 25 or higher, that's a pretty reasonable target. I got 3 26s, one 28, one 30 and one 38!