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Dread is long finished and I've been crushed by boredom lately, so I'm back at this! The timer says 36 hours, so I've actually been playing for about a dozen hours, and I've made it to the port town where everyone is trying out for the starring role in the Mario movie.
The game wouldn't let me name my hero Hans, so I had to go with Hanz. Seems like there's a whole bunch of regular old names that are banned for some reason. Really weird.
I think I regret investing in boomerangs for blue hair guy, but even though there seems to be an option to easily re-spec, I'll keep at it a while. In general, like that the skill tree is both simple and supplemental to abilities the characters seem to learn automatically at specific levels. Too many games get bogged down in character growth junk.
Veronica is a really fun jerk, Sylvando is just Too Much enough, and I even like blue hair guy, though I keep forgetting his name. Serena is just sort of there so far, though. For the most part, all the characters in the game are fun and lively, and I like that each town has its own dialect or language quirk for its NPCs, which goes a long way of differentiating each location when the single town theme refuses to.
I have everyone set to Fight Wisely, except for Serena who's a healbot. I just don't feel engaged by this kind of standard JRPG battle system anymore, so I'm happy to let the game do that for me. Honestly, I kind of wish I could put the whole game on autopilot and just watch it while I eat or exercise or whatever. |
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Zero said:Though 50/50 odds on Zing is still one of the most frustrating things in Dragon Quest, I came up short on like 6 Zings in a row during a boss fight and was yelling at the screen like REALLY? THIS HAS A 1 IN 64 CHANCE OF HAPPENING AND IT HAPPENS NOW?! and my wife was looking at me like WTF is going on (I'm usually not a very vocal gamer, lol.) I had a battle against an early sidequest boss enemy that swung dramatically based entirely on how the RNG went in the three times I went to him. Attempt #1, he got the first action and silenced my entire party, and the attacks he and his cronies had would almost OHKO my characters far faster than I could heal them with items (let alone attack any of the enemies at all), so that fight was basically lost from the start. Attempt #2, he got the first action and only silenced a few characters, then I did a group-confusion ability that confused a few of his cronies, helped me survive a while before eventually losing the war of attrition. Attempt #3, for seemingly no reason I got the first action, and this time the group-confusion ability succeeded on the boss himself, which through further RNG luck I assume made it so he was completely out of the fight for several turns while I gradually took out his cronies, then could focus on him, and it was a walk in the park. Three different attempts with wildly different outcomes based entirely on highly opaque RNG systems, basically sums up why I don't care to really engage with these kind of old school JRPGs anymore. Thankfully the penalty for losing is much less awful than it was in the golden years of JRPGs, at least, since I could just load the auto-save and skip all the monsters on the overworld instead of wasting 30 minutes trekking from the last save point and fleeing (hopefully!) from random battles. On a more positive note, I brought all the dragon balls to the flying tree, and now it's Sylvando's time to shine, honey! |
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