Finished the game today. Decided to restart with the mod from half-way point after all and I think it improved the overall experience due to numerous quality of life changes, faster XP gain and the bosses being slightly more challenging due to smaller caps on your buffs/debuffs and increased stats.
I gotta admit, towards the end I was kinda getting annoyed and wanted the game to be over and the final boss in particular pissed me off because he REQUIRES you to have a party that all has over 900 HP and immunities (or at least resistances) to statuses and all basic elements because the alternative is getting hit for 1500 damage with AoE elemental attacks when your max HP is 999 so I had to sit for several hours and reroll skills on my units until I had all the stuff I needed.
Some thoughts on the game: overall, it's quite good and I enjoyed the dungeon crawling, atmosphere and making different monsters the most.
Monster fusing is simultaneously my favorite and most hated part of the game. It's very fun to fuck around and experiment with different recipes and after every dungeon run I always was looking forward to coming back to base and mixing my newly acquired monsters and getting that perfect party comp that covers all the bases. But whenever you need to make something specific, getting the right skills on the right creatures is an extremely painful and unfun process that involves playing the skill slot machine sometimes for a few hours straight. I'd much rather select 2-3 skills myself than randomly roll for 5.
As for the combat, to be honest, I didn't find it very good. At first I thought it was decent enough but the more I played the more it started falling apart.
First of all, I think the turn system of the game, where you get bonus turns from critting/hitting weaknesses is retarded and here is why: it makes the combat very onesided and viable strategies for beating bosses extremely obvious. Because of how the combat works, it becomes impossible to lose to random encounters if you go first, but there is a very high chance to die (at least at the beginning of the game) if the enemy goes first. If you go first, you just spam whatever shit the enemy is weak to and they die before they get their turn. If the enemies go first, they do the same to you. Getting a back attack in the early game is pretty much guaranteed death because the enemies not only go first, but also get a huge crit chance bonus. In the second half of the game most of your units start having immunities to a lot of things and you just stop dying to random encounters altogether and they stop posing any threat and turn into a waste of time.
When it comes to bosses, the vast majority of them are defeated by just having a few units that are immune to their most dangerous element because it makes them waste turns and if a boss is unable to kill you in 1 turn then it's actually impossible to ever lose to him, which brings us to the next problem with the combat is that healing is very overpowered. I don't think a spell that heals all your party to full HP and removes all negative effects should cost 10-15% of the caster's mana, especially in a game where mana restoration options are plentiful and you are unlikely to ever run out of it in a fight. Even the early game healing spells are extremely strong. The aoe "medium" healing spells heals you for most of your HP and costs very little mana.
So preparing for bosses barely requires any thought because getting the right immunities is usually all you need to do, and fighting them requires even less because all you do is spam your strongest attacks and heal every turn. After applying the buffs and debuffs, naturally, which you also usually don't need to worry about because rarely do the bosses actively try to remove them. There were very few exceptions that forced me to do more than that. Even the final boss I complained about earlier went down like a bitch once I brought in a party he could not kill with 1 elemental spell because as I said, if a boss cannot kill you in 1 turn, victory is inevitable.
Still despite my complaints, I had a good time and I'm interested in trying the other games in the series at some point. Strange Journey and Apocalypse look interesting. Are there any other ones you guys would recommend?
