Ok, I see a lot of claims about this game's greatness but I watched a gameplay video of it and it looked quite shitty - encounter monster, spam same aoe spell over and over, kill monster, continue, repeat. Not to mention the atrocious pedophile-approved character art.
Is there something you can only get by playing the game yourself? Can someone mention at least a few good features of this game? How's the character customization, enemy variety, loot and exploration and all the other stuff that make up a blobber? Also, how does it compare to something like Wizardry 7-8, or some of the newer blobbers, which I liked, like Etrian Odyssey, Might and Magic X and Lords of Xulima?
I have only played the first one.
Basically, the main good feature is the hardness of boss battles (the game has some of the best if not the best boss battles ever). I can try to develop.
You must pay attention to the skills they use and to their strenghts as to their weaknesses (speed, magical or physical attack with their elements, status ailment, buffs, debuffs, etc...). Many bosses are a puzzle, but even when you nearly understand what to do, they are still very hard. Generally you will have to use your 12 characters, first because some of them will die, but also because your 8 "hidden" characters regain their MPs. Compared to most other games, the bosses are (much?) harder to bet, so you have no choice but to do the things right, which brings us to character customization.
You can always change the 12 characters you use between all the ones you have already unlocked. Every character has 4-5 unique fixed skills, and various stats, element resistances and status ailment resistances. Also, besides level-ups, you have an overall total of stat points which you can distribute as you wish between stats and element resistances. Understanding a boss then preparing to rightfully fight him is very cool.
Two examples of bosses :
- very fast ,whose attacks are physical, one is aoe and the other is not, who can temporarily double his strength, is "debuffable", and relatively weak to status ailment.
- slower, with one attack on one character which totally ignore your resistances (which will one-shot any of the characters except the few with many HPs), one strong magical attack on your 4 characters, and one that can paralyze your 4 characters.
Sounds almost classic, but once again the difference with another game is that these fights are really hard (and that you have to use 12 characters), you definitely can't tackle the different fights the same way. Typically your average warrior will die of a strong magical attack, whereas your average mage will systematically die of a physical attack, this is violent during a 20 minutes battle.
Concerning other features, the loot system is very basic, the exploration is average with good floors and void ones.
The non-boss enemies are mostly not interesting (but still, some of them for example can rape you if you don't kill them first, or are very resistant to physical attacks or to magical attacks, etc...).
shit notwithstanding. I guess controlling an entire army of crappy weak characters that are only good at 1-2 things and throwing them to their deaths in order to delay a powerful enemy long enough for the rest of your party to kill him is something I never knew I wanted until I had it.
