What's everyone playing?

[Julius Seeker]

There's only one battle that I can remember like that. Marquis Elmdor. Also, the other place you can get stuck at is Wieglaf, just have Ramza use yell a bunch of times while playing keep away for a few minutes, and when he transforms to demon form, it's rather simple to anihilate them in a few turns.

You probably will not need to do any leveling up; I only leveled up the first time I played. Of course there are multiple ways to go through, the one I listed above, Monk class, two handed (Ninja), Move +2 (Thief), will get you through the game easily. Hamedo or something is also quite useful. Use Orlando, all the other special characters are pretty useless in comparisson to your Monks. Oh yeah, also, do not use 5 characters, use 4; you'll get their skills up faster that way.

[Garford]

Well, dungoen crawls actually makes your characters weaker as opposed to 'hug the save point/restore spot'. In some extremes you get say Grandia 1, where regular encounters are fairly difficult so you just hug the restore point and use H&E or Dragon Slash until you run out of MP, run back to save point, and then see if you can go a little bit further next time. I always question what's the point of even having random encounters when you get a game layout similar to Grandia/FFX where it's trivial to get all your HP/MP/whatever back and each restore spots are separated by a negligible amount of distance so that the chance of dying in between them is very small.

Ah, but what if your save point does NOT return your hp/mp at all? Dungeon crawls are hard in the Megami Tensei series due to that. At a lot of places, you just can't instant recover your hp/mana. A save point is literally just a save point, and at times in some of the games, there are 5-6hrs before you even see one

In addition to that, leveling up your characters is quite pointless, because your demon allies can't level up, except via fusion to make them stronger, and the bulk of your abilities come from them.

Add the requirement to manage magnetite, hp/mp recovery items etc, you have a series where the average fight, near the end of a dungeon is harder then most boss battle in recent RPGs, due to resources being slowly expended. The more recent MT games from the 32 bit consoles onwards are much more forgiving, but the earlier one are a hell damn tough to play.

On the flip side though, there are encounter influencing items in MT, and they last decently long enough.

Anyway, to me, MT draw has always being its rich storyline that takes place in quite an urban environment.

As for games I'm currently playing, I'm replaying some Neverwinter Nights modules while waiting for a decent MMORPG to be release. WoW was boring Have SMT:DSS 1 and 2 staring at me, but can't play them since my TV is spoilt and I'm too broke to get a replacement......

[Tortolia]

Yeah, SMT1 is a fucking marathon at times.

Thank god for wide-spread machine guns and charm bullets, because I have no idea how I'd get by otherwise.

[SineSwiper]

It is quite possible to be stuck in a situation where you can't win and you can't get out if you play it like that.

I was stuck at a hard part a few times, but I was able to get past it eventually. That, however, had to do with the saving system (my only save was right before a difficult battle; no way to go back and get stronger).

Heh, you too? My first battle with Wiengraf was this:

Wiengraf - Move + Attack, Critical 200+ HP
Game Over

I seriously thought it was a joke or some sort of thing that I was supposed to lose.

But, the game can be quite hard if you don't get your abilities. It's true that the enemies' levels match yours, but the ability they get are somewhat fixed, so if you get better and better classes/abilities, you can use it against the enemies' poorer versions.

[Kupek]

Heh, you too? My first battle with Wiengraf was this:

Wiengraf - Move + Attack, Critical 200+ HP
Game Over

I seriously thought it was a joke or some sort of thing that I was supposed to lose.

That one gave me a little bit of trouble, but I think it only took a few tries. The battle I was stuck on was the final one with Wiengraf. It's the one where he turns into a demon and a bunch of other demons come to his aid. It took me a week to beat him.

But, the game can be quite hard if you don't get your abilities. It's true that the enemies' levels match yours, but the ability they get are somewhat fixed, so if you get better and better classes/abilities, you can use it against the enemies' poorer versions.

Like I said to Don, I'd rather arrive at a balance naturally than follow a prescribed pattern. The system they provide is free-form enough that there are many different combinations that work.

[Don]

The enemy levels are fixed in the story battles.

Wiegraf is more about whether your birthday or whatever you picked as a birthday is compatible with his. If you've someone with worst compatability with him (damage reduced to about 50% both ways) it's actually pretty easy because then you can actually heal the damage he does instead of dying in one or two hits.

[Imakeholesinu]

Jesus, I didn't know everyone would get all nostalgic about FFT.

[Torgo]

Jesus, I didn't know everyone would get all nostalgic about FFT.

Think of it as a testament to how great it was. It was challenging but not overly difficult, save for a few battles. And if you still found it too hard, the game gives you one of the cheapest characters ever as part of the storyline, not as part of a secret quest or unlockable. And the plot was excellent despite the shitty translation. A lot of people consider it to be one of their favorite FF's, even though it's not a part of the main series.

[Tortolia]

In non FFT news, Shin Megami Tensei was good up to the end, despite a few neutral alignment issues (quite possibly related to rom haxing/translation problems).

Now for SMT2!

[Julius Seeker]

Jesus, I didn't know everyone would get all nostalgic about FFT.

Think of it as a testament to how great it was. It was challenging but not overly difficult, save for a few battles. And if you still found it too hard, the game gives you one of the cheapest characters ever as part of the storyline, not as part of a secret quest or unlockable. And the plot was excellent despite the shitty translation. A lot of people consider it to be one of their favorite FF's, even though it's not a part of the main series.

The way the plot goes and everything, it is much closer to the Ogre Battle series than the Final Fantasy one. Either way, yeah, the translation on thisgame really does bother me, especially on the spelling of names since a large portion of names of various people, places, and objects come from history and mythology. For example, They called Orlando Orlandu because they Japanese spelling would have it as Orlandou; plus in the Japanese version he has his proper sword Durandal, but in the North American version they gave him Excalibur (which wasn't Orlando's sword, it was Arthur's; though both are probably equivilents of each other, Excalibur was based off of Durandal, added in by the French during later time periods, Excalibur did not exist in the original Arthurian legends). Another name is Wieglaf, the translation has it as Wiegraf, and that is fairly self explanatory as r and l are interchangeable in Japanese.

Other than that, I completely agree with all you said, the game actually is not difficult at all if you know what you're doing. In fact, I find it to be quite easy, but I do know it would be difficult if I used classes outside of Monk and Ninja. Also, remember to use 4 characters instead of 5, it helps since 4 characters will be getting the experience instead of it being spread among 5, using 4 will allow you to avoid any stopping the story to level up at any point in the game.

[Don]

You seem to have a fascination against Excalibur or for Durandal. In the end Excalibur is simply the synonym for 'the greatest sword ever' in just about anything and it's quite fitting that the Thunder God Cid uses it. In high-fantasy settings, the weapon exists as a status symbol of the user. It certainly makes a lot more sense than the alternative Square likes to use (Ragnarok).

[Julius Seeker]

You seem to have a fascination against Excalibur or for Durandal. In the end Excalibur is simply the synonym for 'the greatest sword ever' in just about anything and it's quite fitting that the Thunder God Cid uses it. In high-fantasy settings, the weapon exists as a status symbol of the user. It certainly makes a lot more sense than the alternative Square likes to use (Ragnarok).

Actually, Excalibur is a sword based off of Durandal; both have their origin in France. In the original Arthurian Legends spoen among the Celts, there was no sword of power, Arthur's primary weapon was a spear called Rongomyniad, and he had a shield called Wyneguthurcher (or something), also a knife called Karnwennan, and a sword called Kaleduch (which is not excalibur). Anyways, how Excalibur got into the story, there was a migration of people from the peninsula of Cornwall to the peninsula of Brittany France (due to Germanic Anglo invasion). Then when the Arthurian legends were brought back to England during the Angevin dynasty after the Norman invasion, they had come from France and were completely re-written, baring fairly little resemblance to the originals. Of course, in the French legends had already existed the legends of the Germanic Frankish Emperor Charlamagne (founder of the original France, Germany, and Burgundy) and the sword Durandal and Roland/Orlando who wielded it. The thing is being in English society, we know much more about Arthur than any other mythological legend in existance, save perhaps Bibilical legend (England was a Christian nation as well).

Anyways, yeah, perhaps for most people it is not important, but I am a crazy bastard when it comes to this sort of stuff. I don't like the translation =)

[Tortolia]

FFT is the game that gave us Daravonese, and you're still going to concern yourself with translation nitpicks?

[Julius Seeker]

Daravonese? Don't recall anything about that. As I said in my first post, I care about the translation because it annoys me. Why it annoys me? I have my reasons, two primarilly: first I grew up with the stories (Beowulf, Charlemagne, etc..), and second I am very proud of my Germanic heritage. I mean, I am the type of person who was annoyed when Marilyn Manson wannabees called themselves "Goths", but then again, maybe I just never liked those people, so it's hard to say.

[SineSwiper]

Deathspell 3, by far the worse translation in the game. (No you mean D-I-S-P-E-L-L! FUCK!)

Also, I didn't know that the zodiac compatibility was really that important in relation to damage.

[Don]

It's actually Deathspell 2, not 3. Fire/Ice/Thunder Bracelet is another good one.

The hard 1on1 bosses are all Virgos (Wiegraf and Gafgarion) if I recall so you want to pick a birthday on Ramza where you do reduced damage to Virgos (and hence they do reduced damage to you) unless you're confident you can kill them before they can kill you (which is very unlikely). As an added bonus if you pick a worst compatability with Virgo, you also get the best compatability bonus on Altima.

[SineSwiper]

Reading up on it, the Zodiac beasts were unisex (in the battles where they changed form, but this includes their human forms in the same battle scene). So it was impossible to get the "best" compatibility. You could get a good compatibility, but that was it. BTW, Altima was a Virgo as well.