JRPGs

Malakriss · Dec 9, 2020

I've been working on Ursula in the postgame and using her to fill out affinity charts while i work on the 1000 quests i still have to go through. For kicks I hopped in the Challenge mode and got the 2 DLC blades, then squeaked out a Dino Dash win to make them permanent. Two more meats for the grinder, Ursula.

Aside from quests and maxing out affinity charts is there anything else I should finish before I swap over to NG+?

Vorph · Dec 9, 2020

It's been a long time but from what I remember:

I got all the blades available in NG (even KOS-MOS) and farmed a bunch of legendary core crystals before starting NG+. 99 is ideal if you don't have Nintendo Online for cloud save scumming, if you do you can get away with much less grinding. I did most of their affinity charts and blade quests, but Ursula and Zenobia are the only ones I remember that really matter.

Rather than just kill the Relentless Arduran over and over, I did the bulk of my farming for cores from other bosses that also dropped the best chips, like Moon Matter from Ken and Tachyon from Kurodil. I went and got legendary versions of most of the accessories I used too. Once you're done getting other stuff and just need cores, Arduran smashing is your best bet though (and if you don't feel like doing it all in NG or you screwed up and killed it before completing the quest, you can farm all the stuff to feed it in NG+ ahead of time).

There's some chests you should loot because they have extremely limited/unique items in them. 10 Dilation chips after killing Ophion and the three Overdrive Protocols are the important ones.

Pretty sure I got all the shop deeds too, and a bunch of whatever consumables I used a lot of.

Whatever you do, do NOT farm Tiger Tiger for Poppi stuff. You only need to do TT for the affinity chart unlocks plus enough crystals to craft a Tank Mod III and then never touch it again, as once you get into NG+ there's a vastly easier way to get ether crystals and all of her parts.

Malakriss said:
For kicks I hopped in the Challenge mode and got the 2 DLC blades,

There's 3. Look for the Otherworldly Fighter challenge battle, followed by the Redux battle to get the link relay.

Derkon · Dec 9, 2020

I never got KOS-MOS

Kind of want to do a replay of XC2 sometime soon, game was a bit rough around the edges at launch but it really clicked for me.

Malakriss · Dec 9, 2020

Vorph said:
Whatever you do, do NOT farm Tiger Tiger for Poppi stuff. You only need to do TT for the affinity chart unlocks plus enough crystals to craft a Tank Mod III and then never touch it again, as once you get into NG+ there's a vastly easier way to get ether crystals and all of her parts.

I 50ked stage 1 TT and went for a couple Master Mods and a Dark core on 5, the rates on the unique stuff seem super low anyways. I'll probably do enough to open the final skill slots and not much else then.

Would the chips from Relentless w/ +50% against titans be better to farm Tachyons than doing Moon Matters first? I did Smash farming to get legendary scopes and bursts which went rather quickly but I know that Challenge modes have upgraded versions of everything. My general direction was to use the duration of Ursula to fill out blade progressions while the real power grinding would be saved for NG+ to make use of the power increases.

Vorph · Dec 9, 2020

Malakriss said:
Would the chips from Relentless w/ +50% against titans be better to farm Tachyons than doing Moon Matters first? I did Smash farming to get legendary scopes and bursts which went rather quickly but I know that Challenge modes have upgraded versions of everything. My general direction was to use the duration of Ursula to fill out blade progressions while the real power grinding would be saved for NG+ to make use of the power increases.

Not sure about that. I think I smash farmed Ken so getting Moon Matter chips didn't take that long either. Kurodil was the only hard one I remember, I had trouble with that fight until I maxed out QTpi in NG+.

Malakriss · Dec 9, 2020

Vorph said:
Not sure about that. I think I smash farmed Ken so getting Moon Matter chips didn't take that long either. Kurodil was the only hard one I remember, I had trouble with that fight until I maxed out QTpi in NG+.

+50% titan effect wiped the floor with him with only 3 orb chain, didn't have more cause it instantly puts you in battle after the 12 fire mastery check.

Still no sign of Perun being pulled, getting annoying.

Vorph · Dec 9, 2020

Heh, she was my very first pull, but that was because my pity pulls were column 3. Looks like she can be a real pain in the ass to get if you're column 2 though.

joz123 · Dec 10, 2020

Started up Yakuza 7 and the combat is refreshing. Got burned out playing Judgment but this feels like a totally different game because of the RPG aspect.

Hateyou · Dec 10, 2020

Finally picked up Octopath Traveller after itching for an old school rpg experience. I am digging it but man they could have made this so much better with a few simple changes.

1. Allow you to switch out the main person you selected. None of the stories are connected in any way with each other so I don’t see why this would have been a problem.

2. Allow you to change party members at save points and/or give party members that are sitting out 50%-75% minutes experience & SP to eliminate the boring grinding.

Those changes would have made this much more enjoyable. As it stands it feels like you were not meant to play all the characters (and maybe that’s what they intended) but fuck them that’s what I want to do.

It could have been AAA tier if they had those changes as well as actually tied stories into each other instead of eight completely unrelated stories. As it stands I see no reason why any of these people would even be traveling together at all, they’re all on separate quests.

Those are my only real complaints (Performance is crappy too, it dips into 20FPS when going into buildings and stuff) but it’s still enjoyable, I just wish they would have made it even better. The combat gets boring when you have to grind for party members you don’t play with as much. Makes me want a well done final fantasy with these graphics. I’d love a FF 6 remake with this graphic style.

Rude · Dec 10, 2020

Hateyou said:
Finally picked up Octopath Traveller after itching for an old school rpg experience. I am digging it but man they could have made this so much better with a few simple changes.

1. Allow you to switch out the main person you selected. None of the stories are connected in any way with each other so I don’t see why this would have been a problem.

2. Allow you to change party members at save points and/or give party members that are sitting out 50%-75% minutes experience & SP to eliminate the boring grinding.

Those changes would have made this much more enjoyable. As it stands it feels like you were not meant to play all the characters (and maybe that’s what they intended) but fuck them that’s what I want to do.

It could have been AAA tier if they had those changes as well as actually tied stories into each other instead of eight completely unrelated stories. As it stands I see no reason why any of these people would even be traveling together at all, they’re all on separate quests.

Those are my only real complaints (Performance is crappy too, it dips into 20FPS when going into buildings and stuff) but it’s still enjoyable, I just wish they would have made it even better. The combat gets boring when you have to grind for party members you don’t play with as much. Makes me want a well done final fantasy with these graphics. I’d love a FF 6 remake with this graphic style.

Octopath Traveler was a pretty mediocre game, and that's being gracious. Once the battle system gets old it's pretty shitty. The reasons you've stated, the real last boss is tied behind a bunch of side quests that ends up being a Megaman gauntlet where you better have leveled up all 8 characters.

Best thing to do is abuse the dancer ability that can give your experience exponential modifiers and the mage area attacks to quickly grind levels. Not really much else to discuss regarding the game, because it's just devoid of anything else otherwise.

elidib · Dec 11, 2020

best thing to do is pick a solid team of 4 characters, finish all their stories, then swap to the other 4 and do theirs.

Malakriss · Dec 14, 2020

Had a eureka moment while learning to speed farm Chickenheart challenge for XC2, Hunter's Chemistry V on the two Poppis you don't start with applies to the whole party. Seems important to know.

Vorph · Dec 17, 2020

Bravely Default 2 'Final Demo' is available from the eShop now. Have only downloaded it so far, but it's supposed to be the first chapter of the game. Far as I can tell there's no progress or any unlocks that carry over to the full game though. You do get 100 useless platinum points for downloading it though, yay.

Hopefully they've made a ton of improvements in the last year or so, that first demo was just bad.

Ritley · Dec 17, 2020

Seems like everyone but the fangirls are hating on it. Like nearly every change they made from the BD1 formula was for the worse

Vorph · Dec 17, 2020

Ritley said:
Seems like everyone but the fangirls are hating on it. Like nearly every change they made from the BD1 formula was for the worse

Damn, that's the same sort of feedback they got from the first demo and they were supposedly going to fix a lot of it.

Rajaah · Jan 9, 2021

So with Ys IX on the way in a few weeks I was thinking about picking it up at launch. Have a few questions about the other Ys games in the meantime.

-I've played Ys 6 and the remakes of Ys 1-3. Someday I'd like to go back and emulate the first five in their original, super-hard (at least in 3's case) incarnations on Turbografx-16 / SNES.

-Right now I'm more curious about the later ones. Ys 8 looks amazing so I might play that in the meantime, but what about Ys 7? It being on PSP-only is unfortunate but I'll make do. Since Ys 6 was the last one I played and I kinda fell off with the series after that, it'd feel weird to skip 7 and go right to 8. Unless 7 is really bad. But yeah, I'd like to play 7. Is 7 worth playing? I could probably fit 7 and 8 in before 9, or maybe I'll hit them up after 9, but either way that's what I'm thinking at the moment.

-What about like, Ys: Origins and Ys: Memories of Celceta? I looked up their durations on HLTB and they look much longer than the numbered entries, so I'll probably skip those unless they're great. Like really great. I don't have a lot of time for this stuff at the moment, and 7's shorter runtime is appealing.

Also, kind of unrelated to JRPGs, but I wanted to get a couple of PC RPG remasters on console to play around with, since I totally missed that late-90's renaissance of D&D-inspired PC RPGs due to being busy with EQ. I picked up Planescape: Torment and Pillars of Eternity for PS4. Did I make good choices? Also available for PS4 were Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights. They all look pretty cool. I only recently developed an affinity for that style of game after watching some Youtube videos covering them and realizing how similar a lot of them are to D&D.

TL;DR: Is Ys 7 worth going back and playing before I get into 8 or 9? What about the non-numbered recent Ys games? And did I make a good call picking Planescape: Torment and Pillars of Eternity over Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Neverwinter Nights?

Right now time is my main adversary, a lot more so than money, so a shorter length for a game is actually a plus right now and the main thing I'm considering when comparing, say, Ys 7 to Ys Origins. And as much as I wish I were younger and "all of the above" were an option for that PC RPG lineup, unfortunately it isn't.

AladainAF · Jan 9, 2021

I have Ys7 on steam. It looks dated, but it's very fun like all the others. I don't know if you'd gain much playing it before 8/9 but if you like the series, by all means 7 is worth a play.

It's also got one of the best boss music tracks in the entire series (and it's fitting, because it's also from one of the hardest bosses in all of Ys)

elidib · Jan 9, 2021

Ys 8 is amazing, heavily recommend. combat is so fluid and quick

joz123 · Jan 9, 2021

Definitely get 8. The story is great and the combat is fun and fast paced.

Tried the demo of 9 and it seems similar to 8.

Derkon · Jan 9, 2021

Yep 8 is great. Looking forward to 9 next month.

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