Incline Elminage Gothic (former Japan only dungeon crawler)

[Latro]

man, i wish someone could mod the summoner 1 monster cap out. putting together a team exclusively full of mons sounds fun.

 

[Latro]

decided on teams

team 1:

pure fighter
brawler
pure cleric
mage (cleric -> summoner) - summoner with support spells
pure alch
valk

team 2:

pure fighter
samurai
shaman
mage (cleric -> bishop) bishop with support
full alch
thief (to neenja)

team 2 is more straight-forward, but i want to keep team 1 around for summoner shenanigans (and I hear brawler is stronger early game). pure alch and pure fighter will be corner-stone for the boys I guess. to cut down on grind time i may use summoner to catch thief type enemies, or even cut down on pure cleric for cleric -> shaman.

 

[Haplo]

man, i wish someone could mod the summoner 1 monster cap out. putting together a team exclusively full of mons sounds fun.

You do know you can fill your whole roster with monsters turned adventurers via summoner blood pact (or some such) EX skill (don't need it on "main" summoner, just park a level 1 summoner with this skill at the tavern)?

 

[glass blackbird]

man, i wish someone could mod the summoner 1 monster cap out. putting together a team exclusively full of mons sounds fun.

There's a summoner skill, as Haplo noted, which lets you actually turn monsters into party members. The extra monster slot for summons can't be expanded but if you want a bunch of ghosts or something (not a bad idea since monster party members have unique resistances, etc) you can do that.

 

[Haplo]

Not just resistances (both of the elemental and status flavors, up to full immunity to most statuses and/or elements). But also regen, elemental attack boosts (up to 300%) and, perhaps most importantly, status affliction chances (in some cases multiple statuses, for example Nue has like 3 types at 30% AFAIR, including Paralysis; Dragonfly has 30% charm, some decent Behead and multiple others at 5-10%).

 

[Matador]

Daily reminder that a party without a ninja is just a bunch of fags.

If you are not cheap and don't behead like a boss, you don't deserve to run the game, just uninstall.

 

[Haplo]

Dragonfly is an awesome ninja :D

 

[aweigh]

Daily reminder that a party without a ninja is just a bunch of fags.

If you are not cheap and don't behead like a boss, you don't deserve to run the game, just uninstall.

Bruh, in Elminage Gothic even my ninja has a ninja thanks to Replicate EX Skill lol

I liked equipping my ninja with some shuriken or some other broken ranged shit, replicating him so that the replica had the ranged equipment, then switching back to melee weaponry. Worked a treat in Ibag's Tower.

 

[Matador]

My 2 favourite things about elminage are:

- Everybody plays by the same rules. If I'm not mistaken you can behead everyone even bosses although the have higher resistance. This is why is disappointing playing ninjas in other games like stranger of sword City.

- The balance is giving you the ability to use overpowered stuff. No more complaining : those guys are cheap. They are, but you are also. Sawyer would balance the game giving you pitiful 1% beheads giving you a 33%HP critical and a dialogue apollogizing for being so cruel to the enemy. And beware the patch! In elminage you are a walking machine of dead against cheap bastards. Joy vs balance antifun.

PD: Virgin muh HP bloat VS I behead everything.

You choose.

 

[Latro]

people wasting $60 on AAA sawyer vomit when they can spend $10 or less on this is very sad!

 

[aweigh]

you can get a free ninja in the 1st dungeon of elminage: gothic by recruting the devil child you can run across in there, but he doesn't come with the Replica ex skill. you can only get that ninja-specific ex skill during char-gen, and it's a great skill that gives a lot of flavor to the ninja class.

EDIT: And yeah, this also means the Hermit's Knife in the royal tomb that you can get as a drop also won't allow access to Replica Ex skill, because it turns you into a ninja but you still keep your same ex skill.

 

[Haplo]

When you create a monster adventurer, they are assigned a random EX skill. I guess save scum if you're keen on a specific one.

 

[Dorarnae]

My 2 favourite things about elminage are:

- Everybody plays by the same rules. If I'm not mistaken you can behead everyone even bosses although the have higher resistance. This is why is disappointing playing ninjas in other games like stranger of sword City.

- The balance is giving you the ability to use overpowered stuff. No more complaining : those guys are cheap. They are, but you are also. Sawyer would balance the game giving you pitiful 1% beheads giving you a 33%HP critical and a dialogue apollogizing for being so cruel to the enemy. And beware the patch! In elminage you are a walking machine of dead against cheap bastards. Joy vs balance antifun.

PD: Virgin muh HP bloat VS I behead everything.

You choose.

I dunno, ninja in stranger of sword city are pretty OP, like with 2 or 3 you can one shot any boss.

 

[Matador]

My bad then.

 

[Matador]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/291960/Elminage_Gothic/

80% discount, 2 euro on steam. No excuses.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

So good, and reduced to mere 2 EUR.

 

[Matador]

The game is really huge, insane amount of content, and all quality.
- Classes, races, spells, skills. One of the best party development mechanics in a game.
- Dungeons. First ones are week, but from the Church the quality goes up.
- Loot. Meaningful, not randomized shit, and you can customize with alchemy!

Combined with great and dangerous combat. Really insane.

I have yet to complete the last 2 postgame dungeons. This is the perfect excuse for go for the Cave of the ancients.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

The game is really huge, insane amount of content, and all quality.
- Classes, races, spells, skills. One of the best party mechanics
- Dungeons. First ones are week, but from the Church the quality goes up.
- Loot. Meaningful, not randomized shit, and you can customize with alchemy!

Combined with great and dangerous combat. Really insane.

I have yet to complete the last 2 postgame dungeons. This is the perfect excuse for go for the Cave of the ancients.

It's 2019, so if there are no VN elements, then it's not a good (or even real) RPG.

 

[Silentstorm]

So good, and reduced to mere 2 EUR.

I guess it's too niche and hard nowadays?

I do see many people complain about the mapping and such even though compared to some dungeon crawlers, it could be a lot worse, or the grinding or what not, so it got to a point where Elminage Original is considered to be better(hey, it has free automap) for being more friendly to newcomers.

Of course, i assume these people don't know there are mods that make grinding faster or that give you unlimited maps making those complaints moot.

 

[Haplo]

Besides automap and autowalk, Original also has maps that almost could be actual places (and not just symbolic mazes), you get way more freedom in order of tackling content, it has some semblance of NPCs and quests.

Its definitely a lot more accessible.

Unfortunately most enemies feel same-y, have the same status resistances and no specific weaknesses. Also there are much fewer of them.

 

[Mastermind]

So good, and reduced to mere 2 EUR.

I guess it's too niche and hard nowadays?

I do see many people complain about the mapping and such even though compared to some dungeon crawlers, it could be a lot worse, or the grinding or what not, so it got to a point where Elminage Original is considered to be better(hey, it has free automap) for being more friendly to newcomers.

Of course, i assume these people don't know there are mods that make grinding faster or that give you unlimited maps making those complaints moot.

Minimap in Original is a huge positive compared to Gothic. it's also harder to get lost in original even without a map because of the superior level design. I only use the full map to check for places I haven't explored yet.

Both elminages have consoletard shit for an interface but the fact is Gothic is a huge downgrade in playability compared to Original.

Souls series proved difficulty is not a barrier to success.

 

[Ventidius]

Elminage is always going to be limited to the tiny niche of the market that turn-based blobbers inhabit. It's hard to tell what the ceiling on this (sales-wise) is, since one of its most successful franchises - Etrian Odyssey - is limited by Nintendo portable exclusivity. It's still probably not a huge slice of the RPG market either way. However, it is true that Starfish seems to do worse than many of its counterparts, though I am not fully convinced that this is because it is "too harcore for the masses" either.

The interface is not really a problem in the console versions, and Etrian Odyssey proved you can achieve a modest degree of commercial success with complex systems and challenging content, while also limiting yourself to consoles. Minimap was an issue in Gothic (though it was easily moddable), but not Original. Aside from Gothic's post-game, the games are not that much harder than Stranger of Sword City or Etrian Odyssey anyway, even if they can be a bit more obscure in their mechanics. If I had to guess, I'd say the biggest factor in the relative lack of success of Starfish/Elminage probably has more to do with their refusal to adopt anime aesthetics and its low degree of fan-service than anything else, really.

 

[Lutte]

I don't think anime aesthetics are the sole reason. Even for people who tolerate anime EO's aesthetics are rather repulsive if anything. It had been a reason for me to be put off the series for a long time before I gave it a try.
Mechanically they're a lot more streamlined than Gothic and that would contribute a decent amount to people first impressions. Just compare party building in EO. You don't even have to decide on stats allocations during character creation. You just pick a class and.. that's it. The games gain more depth as you progress and there's some decent party synergy stuff to be learned about composing a party but a new player getting into those games for the first time doesn't have too much to wonder about at first.

Meanwhile Elminage has you pick races then roll for stats which in turn will determine whether you're even able to pick a class at all and a player unfamiliar with that type of game will wonder why some classes seem inaccessible too.
It may seem like a minor detail but it's just an example of one of the first things that comes to mind in mechanics, EO overall don't ask as much to think about from the player. And when Etrian Odyssey's devs decided to try to reach an even higher audience they decided to even go with static no-party-creation story mode in the Untold remakes of the older games. It didn't quite pan out (I believe the untold didn't sell better than the average of the series) but it shows where they think the direction has to be taken to reach more rather than less.

 

[Ventidius]

Yes, Codexers hate animu, but that is not the case with the normie audience. When it comes to the contemporary fanbase of even this subgenre, anime or anime-like aesthetics tend, if anything, to be a plus.

Elminage character creation probably is at first more outwardly intimidating to the complete newbie, but then again, the same thing could be said of character creation in Exp Inc. games, and those too tend to be more successful than those of Starfish. Not to mention that even in EO, it's not really that far into the games that you get faced with the skill tree and the choice of allocating points on level up, which also should be fairly intimidating to a newcomer.

 

[glass blackbird]

There are some problems in this system though, like it's easy to make mistakes in character creation that a player couldn't be expected to predict. Some rely on knowledge of Wizardry generally, but others involve knowledge of which restrictions characters will have that matter and which ones don't matter; which EX skills are worth taking; etc. Yeah, you can make new characters, but it's a definite wall to overcome