You know, I'd love to do one of those introductions that says "This is such a
great game, I love it, blah, blah, blah" but I can't. This game drove me
absolutely crazy. The only reason I finished was because I was writing this
FAQ for it. It's not the worst game out there, the story and characters are
good, but it's really the same thing OVER and OVER and OVER. Maybe this FAQ
will make it so the game drives all you reading it less crazy than it drove me.
Yeah sounds kinda familiar. It sounds like me! Except I'm not finishing to write a guide I'm finishing so I can bitch about it here. Well, I didn't finish but I don't plan on finishing. Its just way too repetitive and boring.
You start off the game with an introduction where this chick is running away from majins (demons) and then this wolf jumps out of nowhere and saves her. Then the screen shifts and you see some Gothic chick in black frilly clothing. Then its over. That was disappointing. Well get used to it. Well you start with some "training stage" where you play as the wolf, Raki, and Thage the Gothic witch. When you start playing you'll notice how fucking long the combat takes. I know I constantly complain how much time is wasted on loading for some games, this one takes the cake. Every time you go into combat with an enemy the screen goes black for about 10-15 seconds then you load your characters in 3d and higher graphics and if it happens to be the first time you meet this specific target on the map he/she will often sing if its a majin or talk if its a human, then the combat animation begins. You run over and wack them on the head with a book and the damage shows and then you wait another 10-15 seconds of blackout before you go back onto the tactic screen. Every single time.
That is not all. You can hit the button and cancel the combat animation but you have no indication of how much damage you did or took. But that doesn't stop the blackout you have to sit though. It may save 10-15 seconds of the combat animation but not the loading. So what do you want, to sit and wait 10-15 seconds to see the damage or hit the button save 10-15 seconds and have no idea what happened. Fortunately I found that you can set an option to turn off all this shit. THANK GOD. Because half the time you're waiting for loading during combat. The other half is useless stupid bullshit being spoken by your characters. Here is an example of the combat chatter you are forced to listen to.
Thage: Where is the eternal poison?
Majin: Die humans!
Raki: Be careful these majin are stronger than the ones we fought before
Thage: Don't worry I'll trap them all in my librum and then grind them into dust
Majin: eieieieieieieieie give me the book
Majin2: eeieieieiei you die human
Majin3: eieieie book
Retica: Why do they go crazy when they see Thage's book?
Majin: eieieiei die heretic
What the hell? Every battle has stupid boring talks like this. Most of the time its even worse. Well after the "training stage" you go into the main start up screen again and now you can start a new game, which lets you pick three out of the five possible characters. The first three that are open are Thage, which you saw already some knight named Olifen and the priestess Ashley. After you beat one, the legendary hero Rondenimium is open and after that the asshole guy. So I picked Thage just to continue where the training left me off at and they started talking in terrible voice acting. Some are decent, most are retarded. Luckily, Thage's route has some nice voice actors. Can't say the same for Olifen though but we'll get to that later. The story all takes place in Besek which is kinda like Castlevania. Its the homeland of the majin which appears randomly in the world and every time it appears its different.
Well to start off Thage's route, you (Thage) and Raki (wolf) are wandering around when you see a boy. What do you do when you see a boy? Obviously you fucking cast a spell of servitude and make him your slave. Just to show off your dominance over him you nearly break his skull and send into into a shivering pile of pain. I wanna point out that Thage is one of the cooler characters in any game. Its not often you see in a Jrpg, a female caster that's not soft spoken. In fact, her ego is bigger than the moon. She goes around acting all high and mighty and doesn't take shit from no one. If someone tries to go against her she fucking locks them into the Librium then takes them into a giant grinding pot and release them in there and listen to their screams.
So you start walking around in Besek capturing every majin you see. This leads to another thing. In combat, you will often be forced to capture majin. How do you do this? By overkilling them. This is a very annoying thing to do. Half the time when you try to overkill you fail and when you don't want to overkill you do. This is how it works. Say a majin with 100 health for simplicity has an overkill amount of 30. This means if you do over 130 damage its an overkill but if you do 100-129 its not. Say you bring it down to 20. The next hit you do 60 damage that's a 40 damage overkill. You've captured it. But it doesn't just get captured no it gets impaled onto a pink cross on the tactic map. You have to waste a characters turn by walking next to it and hitting capture. If you did say 30 damage instead of 60 damage that's only a 10 damage overkill and it disappears instead of being captured.
I have a few complaints about this overkill thing but I'll start with the most basic one. Not letting us decide if we want to overkill it or not. Say you overkilled it, and you end your turn. But another enemy's turn happens to be next what does he do? He walks over and frees the captured majin healing him to full health. What the shit is that about? If I knew his turn was next then I wouldn't have overkilled the shitty majin. But here is the problem, try as you might, but your damage is way too high that you cannot kill it without possibly overkilling. What do you do? Leave it alive until you are sure your party member can finish it off and let it deal damage to you? Also I like to point out that enemy damage in this game is ridiculously high. You don't get many healers or healing skills and if you die you're dead for the entire fight. That's pretty normal in a tactic game, but when two hits from two different majins kill you that's not normal. If you blindly charge in half your party will die. If you stay back and pick them off one by one then your melee don't get exp and end up being completely useless in the end.
Magic in this game is ridiculously powerful. Compare it to other tactic games. Whats magic like? Usually medium-high damage multi-target but a long cast time or slow moving mages. In this game though casters are fast, high damage usually single handily killing or over killing majins in one single shot. Lets take the common tactic characters.
-Slow moving heavily armored melee that hits like a truck but at the speed of a snail
-Fast moving lightly armored melee that packs a punch but takes hits like a wet paper bag
-Horribly overpowered archers that can shoot down enemies from range without ever getting hit
-Mages that suck because by the time the spells cast the enemies are already dead or nearly dead.
In this games mages are the best followed by light melee then archers than the heavy melee. Why? Because melee don't get skills/spells so they can only normal attack for around say 40-50 damage and they are also going to take many hits. Heavy ones can probably do 60-70 damage but good luck getting them over being being blasted to death by mages. Archers do pitiful 10-20 damage and they cannot shoot diagonally only in a straight line but they also get magic but that magic also does a pitiful 20-30 damage. Now mages, they do around 200-300 damage a hit and can hit up to 5 targets at once. They also have high magic defense so they don't get blasted to death by enemy mages and could also heal themselves with magical spells. Even with the massive health pool that a slow ass heavy melee has the magic will completely destroy them in a single hit because they don't have any magic defense at all making them completely useless except for maps which is heavily melee oriented. But good luck getting them to a high level for those maps.
Leveling is bullshit. To gain exp you must do one of the following, hit something, kill something, capture something, heal someone. Hitting an enemy may give you a dinky 5 exp, while healing an ally gives you 15 exp. Capturing gives you maybe 20 exp. Now killing something gives you like 200 exp. Which happens to be all your mages. So near the end of the game, I was purposely sending all my melee in to get slaughtered while my mages picked them off one by one and my archers were my healers and buffers since they were low level and couldn't do anything. Its not like you can pick and choose a bunch of mages and have many heroes to call into battle. No for every route all the heros you can get are exactly the same. All the things they say are nearly exactly the same and all the skills are nearly the same(will get into that). There are around ten heroes in the game that you can hire. You may only bring a maximum of eight heroes into combat, which includes your main story characters for example Thage's route is Thage, Raki and Reticus the slave boy, this gives you five slots to pick characters from.
Horrible combat, horrible leveling, horrible character interactions. What else could be next. A lot. Lets get back to the story. Thage's route you are on a quest of world domination with your two slaves. Every time you finish a map you go back to town to talk to people, play mini games and other useless shit. Buy your gear and get out. When you leave the town you go into the map selection screen. I like to point out that you can only keep going forward and can never backtrack or repeat a stage. This means that if some characters are too low leveled they are screwed forever because they cannot get exp. Besek is split into three stratum's. The first stratum varies from the chosen storyline hero. The first stratum changes based on the memories of the hero. Which helps introduce the character a bit. Then you reach the second stratum which is the same for every hero. The second stratum is divided into three large branching paths each leading to a gate. Each path is laid out like a column and you can jump from column to column at specific maps on the paths. Jumping usually doesn't do anything so there is no reason to do that. Once you pick it stick with it to the end. The last stratum is two columns leading into two different gates. Behind that is the ending. I thought it was pretty cool at first being able to pick and choose the path you want to take. Until I realized you cannot beat the game without the good ending. The gate on the third stratum will remain closed and you game over and start all over from the beginning.
Yes at the beginning as in you lose everything and it automatically saves you to New Game+. Now start climbing and pick another path because the one you took before is wrong! Here's the kick in the crotch. To get the good ending you must follow a very very specific path AND satisfy some very specific criteria. No point spoiling it or explaining it because its too specific and hard to understand. In other words, if you don't have a guide you'd be playing the same character over and over again just to find out what that path is. There is no clear indication telling you where to go which path to take as there are way too many maps. There are say about two-three smaller in every large column. So if there are three columns in the second stratum threes around maybe 20-26 maps in total. You probably take 5-6 maps to get to a gate. To walk in the correct order to the end is fucking impossible. That's not all. On some maps the only way to summon the "secret" boss is to satisfy some conditions. The first condition is actually calling them out. For example one boss you must capture both golems on the map. This means if you accidentally killed one instead of overkilling then the boss failed to get called out and if that boss is needed for your route then you get locked into going to the bad end. Some of them are ridiculously hard to satisfy as well. Like one you have to capture a jade sylph and a thiefler but every time you overkill the enemies will kill them when they are impaled so you can never capture them. While others you must kill every enemy and leave a specific one alive. That is hard as hell because it'll keep running towards you blasting you with magic.
Now that we got all that covered its onto the inventory! Your characters can equip up to three weapons an armor and two accessories. What is the point of equipping those weapons? Not much. You can use a slash weapon, a pierce weapon, a blunt weapon but most characters can't equip more than one so its wasted. You can equip skills that's drawn out from grinding up majin in the grinder but that's locked onto your weapon. I still don't get how it works and the game never bothered to explain it. Neither did they explain how to summon a majin and it wasn't until my second play though and searching online that I found out how to do that. Sometimes one character from one hero's route can wear some equipment and then suddenly they can't. For example there was a light fighter, Ares who in Thage's route was one of the stronger melee. Shes fast and can run twice as far as anyone and has could use a spear which has a two cell range and could hit two targets at once by piercing them. But in Olifen's route she can only use a sword which sucks. Nena from Thage's route is a massive spellcaster but in Olifen's route her magic can't do anything. Infact, everyone in Olifen's route sucks. Olifen sucks too.
Now if you equip three weapons and say you want to use a combo. The combo won't let you select what weapon to use. Say a majin is weak to strike but resistant to pierce. If you have a spear and a hammer and you used a spear on another majin earlier using the combo will force you to use the last weapon you used. Also for characters that can use say a book and a sword. The book adds int and the sword adds damage. If you use the sword you are locked into using the sword until you hit with a book. This means if you use magic the damage is severely reduced. I think. I don't even fucking know because the game never explains it to you. Even with a book the magic of a melee fighter does nothing. Is it better to equip three books? No your stats never increase more than your first book. The levels of the gear are too far apart as well. Say you buy a sword for a lv 8. The next sword is at say lv 14. The sword does decent damage at 8, start sucking at 9 and at 10 you can barely kill anything and you're stuck at lv 11 while the mages are lv 25. Great.
Magic also sucks shit. There are a few elements, Fire, Dark, Earth, Holy, Wind, and Water. The only ones that matter are Fire, Dark, and Wind. These are the three elements that actually do damage and your characters have the "mastery" to use. Mastery as in, even if you equip a spell that you have extracted from a Majin say a water magic attack may still only do 50 damage even if it was Water4 and you're using Dark1. If it doesn't fit your character its garbage. Unfortunatly the only mages you seem to get are Fire, Dark and Wind. And the skills the enemies cast are that as well. Then you get the deal with the bosses. They start off with a "Demon Aura" that you have to break. This is completely random. Some are easy like "hit it with a strike attack" even though he has no weakness to strike. Until you hit it with a strike attack it is immune to damage. Then there are the more annoying ones like "Use skill from boss that you captured many maps back. Oh wait you didn't overkill him? Well too bad its game over start new game+." Then you get annoying bosses that need "earth magic" to break. The hell? You barely even get earth magic in this game.
I like to point out that this game has a really gothic feel to it. You get people in black frilly clothes, too much mascara and guys that look like chicks and chicks that look like guys and all that shit. And everyone talks all twisted and evil or incredibly cheery. The english dub doesn't help because its just terrible. This is getting very long and there is much more to say about this game but since I haven't finished I can't really judge them yet. Maybe if I finish it one day. But that day probably won't be happening in this lifetime. Maybe in the future someone will dig up this CD from some ancient dig site from the past, find a playstation, a TV and put this in. Then the whole civilization collapses because everyone commits mass suicide. So until then, this will be the last you hear of this shit. Game sucks, if you want to play tactic games theres way more. Try Disgaea by Atlus its not that good but its decent. Lets end it with one more quote from our FAQ writer.
For some reason I don't understand, to clear the first story you need to see
both the good and bad endings, but after that a story is cleared by seeing
either the good or bad ending. This game just keeps making up rules as it goes
along...
There you go this game cheats
