Nutmeg
Arcane
I have been playing Busin: Wizardry Alternative, or Tale of the Forsaken Land. Got to floor 5, but will be pausing and moving on to a few other dungeon crawlers as I attempt to get a better feel of some titles I've had my eye on for a while.
Excellent presentation and art. It feels like a love letter to Wizardry from people for who played Wizardry when it was fresh and in whose imagination it represented a much greater adventure than the primitive technology of the time could depict directly.
Flows well and can be played through intuition rather than careful planning and number crunching. This means that dungeon exploration takes the center stage over combat and party management, although there's plenty of that too. The floors consist of a few building blocks beyond simple grid cells. Namely, you have curving hallways and staircases as well as diagonal corridors, much like in Shining the Holy Ark. This makes the dungeon more understandable as a series of actual locales rather than just a bunch of abstract mazes strung together. Some dungeon floors are random. The dungeon is littered with NPC encounters, five or more a floor, that spring up on you and add surprisingly welcome reading breaks to all the exploration and combat.
Random encounters are replaced with visible "ghosts" of enemies, telling you a bit about what you can expect should you occupy the same position and combat begin. Combat is much more predictable than in the classic Western Wizardries, which functioned as slot machines more than anything. This is, IMO, a big improvement. Like the dungeons, the combat has also evolved from its primitive forebearers through the addition of "allied actions", basically a team playbook menu that lets you use the turns of two or more characters for the round towards various tactical effects.
Spells are gained through an exceedingly simple crafting system that does not irritate me, and I hate crafting. There's a bit of calendar based spice here that's also welcome. Classes are the same as in the classic Western Wizardries (1-5), although I think stat growths and level caps have been changed, as has the MP system. My memory is fuzzy here so please verify this yourself if it's important for you. There are recruitable NPCs as well as character creation (unlocked after the first floor boss). The recruitables have better stats but you can't change their class except with special items.
An important note here is that the game eases you in to its systems. Firstly, you simply create one character to begin with, and are immediately dropped in the town, where you can recruit just 2 more companions at the bar. Better yet, IMO, there is no rolling in character creation. I found this very welcome because it reduced the amount of planning and research I had to do before I started playing. The game is very well "paced" to use an ambiguous term, which to me is really all to do with the balance between learning and play.
My complaints are that the encounters are all quite easy beyond the short amount of thinking it takes to come up with a winning set of moves when you come across a new composition of enemies, and there's no macro (Why did no one copy this from Phantasy Star 4?) system or animation skip feature to breeze through them. Speaking of animation skip, this is my main complaint. The animations are very long. Everywhere. The game really does waste your time in many ways, from slow text speed, to an annoying pause when identifying items, to a stupid little graphic animation when crafting spell stones. Since I'm emulating, I just turn off the frame limiter, and the game becomes playable. It would not be playable at all without this feature and I would have dropped it long ago. Other crawlers are much better in this regard. I think Diablo1_reborn mentioned in some post in some other thread that this is fixed in the sequel? I don't know yet.
tl;dr if you play it in an emulator and can fast forward, it's more enjoyable IMO than at least the first 2 classic Wizardries, in no small part due to the geometrically complex, 3D, only loosely grid based dungeon, and much more sensible combat. That said you're not going to get gold standard blob combat or party management. For that, the best I have experienced is still Labyrinth of Touhou 2.
Anyway, moving on to Kyuyaku Megami Tensei.
Excellent presentation and art. It feels like a love letter to Wizardry from people for who played Wizardry when it was fresh and in whose imagination it represented a much greater adventure than the primitive technology of the time could depict directly.
Flows well and can be played through intuition rather than careful planning and number crunching. This means that dungeon exploration takes the center stage over combat and party management, although there's plenty of that too. The floors consist of a few building blocks beyond simple grid cells. Namely, you have curving hallways and staircases as well as diagonal corridors, much like in Shining the Holy Ark. This makes the dungeon more understandable as a series of actual locales rather than just a bunch of abstract mazes strung together. Some dungeon floors are random. The dungeon is littered with NPC encounters, five or more a floor, that spring up on you and add surprisingly welcome reading breaks to all the exploration and combat.
Random encounters are replaced with visible "ghosts" of enemies, telling you a bit about what you can expect should you occupy the same position and combat begin. Combat is much more predictable than in the classic Western Wizardries, which functioned as slot machines more than anything. This is, IMO, a big improvement. Like the dungeons, the combat has also evolved from its primitive forebearers through the addition of "allied actions", basically a team playbook menu that lets you use the turns of two or more characters for the round towards various tactical effects.
Spells are gained through an exceedingly simple crafting system that does not irritate me, and I hate crafting. There's a bit of calendar based spice here that's also welcome. Classes are the same as in the classic Western Wizardries (1-5), although I think stat growths and level caps have been changed, as has the MP system. My memory is fuzzy here so please verify this yourself if it's important for you. There are recruitable NPCs as well as character creation (unlocked after the first floor boss). The recruitables have better stats but you can't change their class except with special items.
An important note here is that the game eases you in to its systems. Firstly, you simply create one character to begin with, and are immediately dropped in the town, where you can recruit just 2 more companions at the bar. Better yet, IMO, there is no rolling in character creation. I found this very welcome because it reduced the amount of planning and research I had to do before I started playing. The game is very well "paced" to use an ambiguous term, which to me is really all to do with the balance between learning and play.
My complaints are that the encounters are all quite easy beyond the short amount of thinking it takes to come up with a winning set of moves when you come across a new composition of enemies, and there's no macro (Why did no one copy this from Phantasy Star 4?) system or animation skip feature to breeze through them. Speaking of animation skip, this is my main complaint. The animations are very long. Everywhere. The game really does waste your time in many ways, from slow text speed, to an annoying pause when identifying items, to a stupid little graphic animation when crafting spell stones. Since I'm emulating, I just turn off the frame limiter, and the game becomes playable. It would not be playable at all without this feature and I would have dropped it long ago. Other crawlers are much better in this regard. I think Diablo1_reborn mentioned in some post in some other thread that this is fixed in the sequel? I don't know yet.
tl;dr if you play it in an emulator and can fast forward, it's more enjoyable IMO than at least the first 2 classic Wizardries, in no small part due to the geometrically complex, 3D, only loosely grid based dungeon, and much more sensible combat. That said you're not going to get gold standard blob combat or party management. For that, the best I have experienced is still Labyrinth of Touhou 2.
Anyway, moving on to Kyuyaku Megami Tensei.
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This is just pure retardation, since only a superunit can survive 8 hits from enemies. AND if your fag kills any of these 4 enemies, another ones will join the attack.
, mostly for Orochi's and Kagero's bouncy boobs. First Fire Emblem I've dropped, definitely the worst game in series that I've played so far (only Echoes and Three Houses left).
