Touhou Labyrinth of Touhou: Hardcore PC dungeon-crawler - See OP for links etc.

[Crooked Bee]

Red font sucks!

 

[laclongquan]

No argument from me there. Never watch an anime if I can read a manga first.

 

[betamin]

No argument from me there. Never watch an anime if I can read a manga first.

 

[Kawaii Theurgist]

@ Introdeker

Let's play a little game, yes? Make a party oriented to, as you said, deal the most damage as fast as possible and tell me how far you get. In the game buffing, debuffing, and status effects are much more important than total damage, or at least as much.

And when talking about how many actual stats you have you forgot the Affinities.

 

[Introdeker]

(...) you forgot the Affinities.

Affinities are not real stats in the D&D sense. Besides, they are a joke. Every 100 points above AFF. 100 reduces damage from that element by 25%, apparently maxing at AFF 400, when the player get 75% reduction. Since there are six affinities, it would cost 2.400 points to cover all possibilities. Half as many points divided between SPD, ATK, MAG, DEF and MND would bring better results.

In the game buffing, debuffing, and status effects are much more important than total damage, or at least as much.

They would be if not for that ancient rule enforced by the god of rpg designers: If they work you don't need them, if you need them they don't work. The only targets you'd really want to debuff have high resistances, making status effects worthless. Buffing, however, is good, and that is why I said you need characters like Sakuya whose only function is to buff the party and leave.

...and tell me how far you get.

I've already deleted the game so I'll leave the testing to you. One cheap trick you can use is setting a fast char (Chen is ideal) as a manager. Focus her build on speed, use her attacks until she runs out of SP but keep her in the active party a little longer so you can benefit from her incredible recovery time to swap other chars. This way the dmg dealers can quickly come in, attack, and move out before the bosses can do anything.

Make a party oriented to, as you said, deal the most damage as fast as possible.

You do understand you can carry 12 chars at any time, right? Only 6 or 7 of these should focus on dmg. These should be chosen by the best dmg equations. The rest should be healers, buffers, tanks and, if you accept my sugestion, a manager.

All in all I think I've argued convincingly that this game is not any more complex or challenging than your standard japanese fare. Sure thing FF is less demanding, but at least it doesnt try to fool anyone. Many players were baffled by the game's lack of documentation, to the point of thinking that 6 choice of stats (one of which apparently doesn't work) + 6 choice of affinities made for challenging char development. It may have looked like a fancy Honda from afar, but a quick glance under the hood showed that it was nothing but a glorified wheelbarrow.

 

[Atheist]

Which touhou would you play RPGs with?

 

[Crooked Bee]

Don't feed the troll, KT.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

@ Introdeker

Let's play a little game, yes? Make a party oriented to, as you said, deal the most damage as fast as possible and tell me how far you get. In the game buffing, debuffing, and status effects are much more important than total damage, or at least as much.

And when talking about how many actual stats you have you forgot the Affinities.

Problem is that the player has absolutely no control over buff/debuff/status effect potency. If skills weren't preset for all characters and were instead upgradable, there would be a bit more depth. As it is, I've leveled literally 90% of my characters with 100% of their level ups going into DO MOAR DAMAGE! and I'm at F25 with no problems so far (though it looks like the grind requirement is rapidly escalating, I might not go much further). Also, affinities are completely marginal, pretty much never worth leveling unless costing significantly less than other stats.

There is plenty of depth in battle tactics, but individual character building has pretty much none. Putting together a good party composition for boss battles is generally far too easy because you can have so many characters in back up and they all regain SP really fast while doing nothing. I would say there is somewhat more thought that goes into making a party for random encounters since only your active characters really count as switching people in is too slow and yet you still need to have a workable party for any set of enemies. Sadly, the random encounters only really got deadly enough at 20F+ to make the exercise actually require more thought for me than Cirno + SPD buffs = can't lose.

 

[Niektory]

 

[villain of the story]

Heh.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Updated the OP with all kinds of links to various patches, versions of the game, etc. All the patches/versions this game has can be quite a pain to find, with lots of dead links floating around and whatnot, so hopefully the OP will be useful to the [faggots] who have not yet played this game.

(As for those who do not enjoy it, only a god can help them.)

 

[CryptRat]

This game is evil. I want to cry.

I put everything in spoiler, just in case.

Spoiler

I killed the boss of the 30th floor and...he respawns.





I killed him a second time, he was exactly the same and the dialog after the battle was the same than the first time, so I don't think there's any interest in killing him several times.

That gave me a 7th star, though, so I'll have to see if it unlocked something new or if I've finally done everything and it will be time to start LOT2.

To be honest, I think everything except this last boss was cool and deserves to be beaten. There are a lot of cool bosses after the 20th floor.
But for this last boss, I don't even remember how long I grinded, but I'd say 40 hours. So even if I am really bad, I can't imagine the boss is really beatable without some insane grinding.
My advice would be not to try and beat him (I couldn't personally follow such an advice because I'm an insane autist, I have no problem not finishing a lot of games because I am too bad, but here it seemed to be theorically possible via grinding so I could not resign myself to stop).

 

[Crooked Bee]

I can't believe you beat the entire post-game content

 

[Average Manatee]

You poor, poor man

 

[Celerity]

>Sees thread about hardcore, Wizardry style RPG.
>Starts reading.
>Sees most of the posts are about some casual come lately who can't handle the game and people arguing with him instead of talking about the game.

 

[Suicidal]

Well this is RPG Codex, a forum where a topic about any given game can start with discussing said game and end with talking about anything else - from the role of women in the military to the fall of the western civilization

 

[Celerity]

Yeah, but wasn't exactly what I was looking for. Well, back in Elminage. I'm sure the rekt will begin soon enough.

Edit: Oh yeah, have a bunch of videos from someone who understands this game's mechanics well: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpxFkyKJqS5gNh9B1ww4kzo9tCbk6aKeG

 

[Suicidal]

Well if you want to know about this game here's what I think:

It is a good game. And I think most people here who weren't immediately scared away by the toxic levels of weeaboo in it would agree.

I already wrote a sort of mini-review/impressions/wedding proposal to it somewhere else but if you're interested I could go into greater details.

 

[Celerity]

I'm already familiar with the game's mechanics, seeing as I know the guy whose video channel I just linked and first found the game through him. I did want more people's perspectives on it (and salt at getting rekt by the varied boss mechanics).

 

[Suicidal]

No salt here, I'm very happy I played it (well, part 2 at least, still haven't played part 1 but I'll start soon). And I enjoy getting rekt by challenging games because if I don't get rekt I get bored. I'd rather be rekt than bored.

My only criticisms is that the interface sucks and the dungeons themselves are pretty boring to explore compared to blobbers that had an actual budget to work with. The combat more than makes up for it tho.

 

[Celerity]

I have a very facetious posting style. There certainly are some here who would get very salty very quickly. Oh, Darth Roxor ? I got some nice Cursed Hounds for you!

But I'm the same way as you. If a game requires no effort there is a 99% chance it will lose my interest quickly.

 

[Darth Roxor]

judging how the newfag tags me everywhere i think he desires my dick

 

[Celerity]

You're just easy bait and stress relief.

 

[aweigh]

so there's no equipment or character creation in the game? i just installed LoT 1 and there was no char-gen nor can i seem to find any way of looking at the character's equipment.

i just assembled a party from the available 5 (or 6, can't remember) units and entered the dungeon. i got into a few battles and it seems the only attacking options were spells which would wipe out the enemy very quickly. the game intrigues me, certainly, but it's a very different kind of game than what i was expecting.

 

[Suicidal]

There is no character creation the game basically gives a bunch of premade characters with specific skills and roles, and as you progress you unlock more and more characters. In a way it's similar to Darkest Dungeon except there's a lot more variety (there's like 50 different characters). Some of them can also be built in different ways depending on which skills you choose to level and which stats you choose to invest in.

There is equipment and it plays a very big role, but each character only has a few equipment slots so make the best of them.

I don't know how LoT 1 goes but when I was playing LoT 2 the first 2 floors where kinda unimpressive but starting from the 3rd the game started throwing really difficult encounters at me that required a lot of strategizing to get through.