You won’t regret it - it took me until I was 80% through to realize it was the best thing I’ve played in many many years, and I’m still grinding endgame content because I can’t imagine parting with it
You won’t regret it - it took me until I was 80% through to realize it was the best thing I’ve played in many many years, and I’m still grinding endgame content because I can’t imagine parting with it
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think I got fed up with how feast or famine the combat was. They wear FromSoft inspirations on their sleeves, but in those games, you can safely hang back and observe behaviors and patterns before you go in and try to dodge and parry and take them down. The wider normal dodge window did not seem to serve this purpose in this game, unless there’s some crucial mechanic that I completely missed. Often times, trying to dodge while learning the patterns, I’d lose a character to a single attack with intentionally tricky timing, and it would be easier to throw the fight and restart than it was to try to get them back in the fight and get my strategy up and running to deal damage. Then, of course, once I know the patterns, the fight is over in like 3 turns, and I take no damage at all.
Screen_Shatter@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is why I ran Lune in party as a healer for 95% of the game. Layering healing pictos results in healing / revives that buffs the party too. If I couldnt survive that long enough to practice parries then I felt underleveled and would go explore elsewhere, upgrade weapons, etc.
8H2k2139@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Yeah once you get some decent pictos on, you can build little engines for constant auto-healing by mid-game, and then dodging becomes less essential. The dodging for endgame bosses gets almost ridiculous and so your picto strategy becomes critical.
I admit I was annoyed by the unfairness of dying to a pattern I haven’t learned yet early on, but you learn to work around it - and I say this as someone who detests QTEs and games with dodging 😂
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
I’m far from a parry god myself, so I simply built around it. Stacked HP and Defense on Maelle along with the First Strike Pictos and started every fight with her using Egide, which let her absorb damage for the team. Ran Lune with constant healing through Tsunami. Reasonable investment in HP and Defense on all my characters. The only times I ran into an issue of getting one-shot through the main game was when I deliberately went into a higher level zone - and at that point I felt like I had it coming. The optional superboss is a different story of course, but that’s a whole different issue and also kind of par for the course.
Also this was on Normal mode and not Expert so YMMV.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I was on normal, spent basically every skill point I had on defense and HP starting around halfway through Act 2, since my damage was just about capped by that point. The combat feels great after you’ve already learned an enemy’s patterns, but the later game enemies (I basically only did the main story) were where they started one-shotting characters and this problem sunk in. Having to go through this huge discrepancy every time you find a new enemy just started to become annoying.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 3 weeks ago
I did a ton of side content (basically all of it) so I probably was overpowered then in terms of levels/weapons/Pictos for the main story?
The balance of the game is all over the place, that much I agree on. Especially the final act, which is a mess quite frankly. If you do any side content at all the final boss is a complete joke you probably kill in one shot and miss a bunch of cool attacks and mid-fight cinematics.