A fair warning

[Sleg]

(This has been crossposted from a post I made back when this was first announced, on the OWH forum)

I know this is very exciting, but don't blow your socks off yet, guys. I imported the game back at launch, and I have _a lot_ of problems with it. At least, with the Vita release. The extra content, classes, weapons, etc. etc. are all fine, and otherwise the equipment, items, and vendors/non-companion NPCs are all ported over 1:1, but there are so many other issues.

The first, biggest issue is that it's a Spike Chunsoft game. No, seriously. I love Spike Chunsoft, but their influence pretty much makes this game unplayable. It adds traps. These traps can do things like give your equipment permanent debuffs, knock you a handful of tiles away (possibly into lava or bottomless pits), send you to sleep (which can get you killed on the spot because you don't have a 100% chance to wake up when you get hit), paralyze you, or all other manner of things. No class has a higher chance to detect them. You can never, through items or level ups, ever get a higher chance to detect or disarm them. Even while levitating, you can still set off traps.

My next biggest issue (besides performance) is that the companions are all almost useless. In OWH, they're all great and can carry their weight. In the Vita release, around a third of them are actually worse than Soldier D. A few of them don't even attack. They don't get better as you have chats with them, most of them only ever give you a special bonus once you have your last chat with them.

~~~
In light of some recent posts, I must amend this section. Despite my misgivings and, I'll admit, my exaggerations, the companions aren't useless. A few of them are problematic and only situationally worth it, compared to the arguably unreasonably overpowered companions in OWH. Although some of them do not seem to gain any benefits before the final chat, a number of the more useful ones do, and at least around half of the cast is decent enough to consider taking depending on your build of character, whereas with this game's Bard equivalent, Queen, most, even the weaker ones, are completely viable. They can still be dangerously fragile and generally speaking they're at much more risk than they used to be in OWH, and, frankly speaking, I don't like any of them as much, but they're more of an extension of your equipment, to be based on your build, rather than a sure-fire bonus that you just have to nurse for a while.
~~~

I have a number of practical issues too, like the fact that the game takes 3x longer to load anything than OWH+ does, or that your screen is a few tiles shorter, or that the building/dungeon generation is nearly braindead. Rather than placing a building on the far end of your minimap, it's placed directly off screen to you. Effectively what this means is, if you're unlucky, a building that you need to access for a quest can actually get placed off of the edge of the map, well into the edge-of-map mountain range. The boss timer is gone completely. You can't repair anything in the dimensional vault. Arrows are extremely rare. (almost) Every monster has a special ability, and there are a few monsters (and a few traps) which will always ignite any bombs or flammables you have in your inventory, which basically means at any given time, with absolutely no way of being able to detect them in advance, you might step on a trap and blow up all of your elzite bombs and/or set yourself on fire. Some monsters now have spears and are able to stab you from inside of a dungeon before you can even see them for hundreds of damage, instantly killing a weaker character.

The balance in OWH+ is a masterful work of art, but this game has a lot of minor problems which, while all individually not that big of a deal, together make this game a lot more painful to play than I wished it was.

You're free to add me on Steam to ask me questions about this, but PLEASE don't get too excited. I'm already in enough agony just taking a look at the youtube comments.
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Now, despite all this, I'm not condemning it. I made another post just earlier, which I'm leaving here as well.


Honestly speaking, I can live with all of the rest of it, if not for the traps. Frankly, it's a weaker entry, but if you've already cleared all of OWH+, and are really hankering for more content, you can absolutely pick up Furikatsu/Mystery Chronicle! There are a few pros, or at least interesting things. There's significantly more content, a versus mode, if you're into that kind of thing, and the entire game is redone in a fresh coat of paint, albeit I must say I prefer the old style. That the monsters all have abilities keeps things much more constantly dangerous, and makes miniboss encounters that much more threatening. Even if it's less fair, that also makes it less predictable. Ultimately I can't rightfully recommend the game as easily as I can recommend OWH+, but for fans of the game that feel they've exhausted all the fun they can out of OWH+, it's worth playing. Hopefully at a reasonable price. For any prospective other buyers, though? I'd get your money's worth out of OWH+ first.
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I'm not saying the game won't be worth buying. In fact, I'll absolutely be buying it. But if you were a fan of OWH, don't expect the same thing. If you thought OWH was too easy, not professional enough, needed more content, love Spike Chunsoft/Mystery Dungeon, or just think the game looks neat, by all means, buy and enjoy it. I'm not going to try to dissaude you from doing so. Just be informed before you do it.
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Post-release edit:

Now that the game is actually out, I can say that the loading times are still oddly long even on PC, that the game is locked at 30 FPS, has poor resolution choices, lots of performance issues, and controls that are obviously ported from a gamepad. Some people are reporting crashes. One button function doesn't work at all, and you can't rebind all of the buttons. One DLC class is missing from the original release, due to licensing issues. Hero ticker is still tied to Twitter.

These are mostly minor issues, but the crashing and performance are rather serious.

Make an informed decision!

[Vexal]

Originally posted by Vashzaron:

Cool of course my first death had to be thanks to a trap exploding me at full health.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsMySTfXYAQCuT7.jpg

And this is why I plan to never carry Elzite bombs :P

[Maxx Saigen]

I hit my first trap on my 4th run. I think the OP was over-exaggerating a bit.

[Vashzaron]

Originally posted by Cetais:

Originally posted by Vashzaron:

Cool of course my first death had to be thanks to a trap exploding me at full health.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsMySTfXYAQCuT7.jpg

Well, at least they warned you about traps here.

Yeah I know, I actually read all the tutorial stuff and what the fairy had to say:

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=762877220

Originally posted by Vexal:

Originally posted by Vashzaron:

Cool of course my first death had to be thanks to a trap exploding me at full health.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CsMySTfXYAQCuT7.jpg

And this is why I plan to never carry Elzite bombs :P

I knew about not carrying them before hand and I still managed to be hold on onto one without realizing, I played the original and plus game for a long ass time to know the dangers of carrying explosive weapons but at least back then the dangers were actually visible.

[Sleg]

Originally posted by Maxx Saigen:

I hit my first trap on my 4th run. I think the OP was over-exaggerating a bit.

It's RNG, so of course your mileage may vary. I once stepped on 3 large landmines within a space of 20km. That's not exaggerating. I even have a screenshot to prove that.

[Chaika Trabant]

Good review.
I will still get this game after the bug are fixed but this seriously deflated my hype.

[OxY |]

So there are no items to repair items in the vault?

[koinzell]

Originally posted by OxY |:

So there are no items to repair items in the vault?

you can add the repair scroll in the vault
but finding them is really annoying since those show up randomly
and you have to equip the items and then use it
in order to fix the decayed equipments

even if you manage to fix them using the scroll
the scroll has the effect to double decay said item when used.

[Verile]

Man, you weren't exaggerating about the NPCs being borderline useless. Getting their epilogues, especially Olga's, is basically an escort mission, the worst kind of subquest (Draco and Aerdou are beastly tho). I wonder if they were designed to only be relevant for Charisma based classes. I just unlocked Queen so I'm about to find out how well they scale.

[Lailah]

Allies scale hilariously well for Queen. Even on Very Hard/Maniac. And tbh, with an Orange Music Box (I think that's def Up), even Soldier D could take a hit from anything short of a Strong, Big enemy using Powerful Blow (and possibly that.), or a Pyro King (In fairness, a dragon's fire breath would almost definitely punk him). And Soldier D is just awful. An Orange music box made an admittedly [Chubby] Aerdou a reasonable tank, and Keyton capable of surviving decently too, but I mostly was using it to keep Soldier D from getting punked like the chump he is.

Mind, if you don't pick up Merrill /and/ Aerdou, you won't be doing ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ one shots with Queen (at least, outside of buff time, where you start seeing reasonably giggles damage counts that I haven't seen outside of folks talking about Sorceror. And that's just Aerdou's chuuni thrust, Merrill's special must be even more stupid), but Queen can actually take a hit better than nearly everything I've played except Lord, and she's far less random in her survivability than a Lord is. As long as you remember what everyone's job is, the Charisma class is actually fairly bloody good (And I say this having struggled with Bard for ages in +)

Cole also scales perfectly - it doesn't matter how strong you are, "occasionally don't take damage" is always going to scale. And his defense seems pretty good too, though the one time I had him, he was [Scholarly] and that tag seems to just be made of amazing.

I found Dosey reasonably helpful, especially if you don't have Melt Arms, but that's mostly sustain, not actual emergency healing outside the beginning,, and Baldur does really great things on some classes (Lord, in particular, and Samurai come to mind), but he's aggressively useless for others (Anyone who doesn't rely well on an ST skill, in short).

Ally *NPCs*, on the other hand, are temporary distractions that you can not reasonably hope to make useful. Occsaionally a unicorn will spawn and you will love it and cherish it until someone else's Land Mine kills it, but skills that generate Ally NPCs are generally just a 'remove enemy from play' card, not 'get a useful pseudo-party member', b/c Allies don't regenerate hit points (I mean okay, they regenerate /2/, but that's...t hat's not real)

Also, I'm pretty sure it's untrue that they don't improve before their finale. Keyton, Nami, and Aerdou almost definitely don't, but Merrill's combo rate increases, Cole's Protect rate increases, and I'm pretty sure Dosey and Baldur do their thing more frequently.

Interestingly, I've never gotten a damage companion on a damaging class that had a decent run, so I'm less clear on how they directly compare when you don't have Charisma as your primary stat. But I'm skeptical that you don't get anything of value out of Aerdou, in particular (Though I'm vaguely terrified of getting a non-[chubby] Aerdou without Dosey) without heavy charisma.

[Sleg]

I relent. You're right. There are a number of companions that are still pretty okay in damage, but Keyton, Nami, Olga, Baldur, Coco, and Dosey are all either heaps fragile or not particularly strong. Aerdou, Merril, Cole, Draco and most especially Alma all do quite good damage even on non-CHA classes, (although I maintain that they're not tanky enough to survive really real late games) especially Alma, who is grossly overpowered.

I'll level with you here. I don't think Dosey's heals are useful once you start reaching mid-thousands. Melt arms is nice, but she's still too fragile in case you misstep and she gets stabbed by a dullahan or rear attacked by a shadow man. Same goes for Keyton, Nami, Baldur, Olga.

I personally would rather Baldur contribute the extra damage that I'd be dealing as a ST heavy class by himself, without merely enabling the more frequent use of ST skills.

Olga can get hit by a train. Keyton and Nami are scarcely useful early on and dead weight even towards midgame.

As for the progression, however, I'm aware of that. I had mentioned most, not all. Merril and Cole were who I had in mind specifically.

You're right for the most part, however, while I am overly harsh on the companions, they're not completely useless as I seem to imply. I stand by that I preferred their DPS over any form of changed utility. I don't want to get into another argument, though, so I'll refrain from harping on about why I personally believe what I do.

Thanks for being reasonable about it and giving a case-by-case, though.

[Tumalu]

I can definitely see where you're coming from about the companions, but honestly, I think it's more that they were crazy OP in OWH+.

Most of the "start with a companion" worlds were so massively easier to win with as a result in any length game that it was ridiculous. A single ally could do comparable damage to -your own-! This also made the negative charisma classes hugely unpleasant to play as for any of the tougher wins, (Pirates were SO BAD) unless you're an adventurer just trying to dash away from everything to the end of the world. At least you could get Iris if you managed to hit 1000km (if you knew not to bring a pet to help you through earlygame.)... but on, say, Very Hard, that's a really big If.

[Sleg]

Ha... You know, I guess I never really considered that. That having been said, however, the issue that I take is in OWH+, they were an investment of time, EXP, and being careful to avoid getting them killed, and they blossomed beautifully, whereas in MC, if you plan on playing for more than a few thousand KM, tops, they're more of a beginner's trap that end up becoming a long term handicap, with the exception of a few particular companions.

[Tumalu]

Unless you're doing EotW (and I mean the 10km version, not EotE!) a few thousand km is the tops you're probably gonna do, so that's not so bad. Hmm, I really need to do the lategame wins in MC, actually- I was spending all my effort just unlocking all the classes until like... yesterday. Queen/Zombie/Dark Knight didn't want to unlock until I got 15 different class wins. :T

[Verile]

So I got around to level 500 Queen with 100 Charisma, 6500 km on hard before I got tired of it; the traps get out of control. Literally land mines and summon traps everywhere. But I digress.

Party (harem) was Alma, Merril, and Nami. One thing I noticed is they're tiered according to their charisma cost and availability, which makes some sense. Alma relies on an RNG item to recruit (I wasn't able to recruit her until 5000 km), as does Merril unless you specifically seed her map, but Nami/Keyton are a gimme and cheap so I can see why Spike Chunsoft chose this route. Nami hit with a ranged non-elemental force for about half what Alma did on unarmored mobs, which really wasn't too terrible. She also made short work of slimes. Alma hits like a truck with hellfire, blocks attacks, and melees, worth all 3 CHA and then some, would waifu again. Merril was doing more damage than my MC with her relentless combos and crits, so much so in fact that I generally just spammed Full Guard with Queenie.

Some notes:

Charisma below 50 increases ally attack by about 2% per point. So like Rutee was saying, with how laughably bad ally NPCs are, even with a star and red aura, you're actually doing yourself more harm than good wasting huge chunks of Charisma via Discipline on mobs since you take a huge DPS hit. I don't know if it scales linearly but I'm guessing not since other classes experience diminishing returns, e.g. (Samurai starts getting 2 ATK per STR past 100). But at 100 CHA my team was roflstomping even Bug Emperors while Queen tanked it. Normal mobs, aside from armored/shield/undead would blow up so fast my allies would wipe out the mobs to the sides when we were surrounded, which happened frequently thanks to chained summon traps. I ended around 90% unharmed playing pretty loosey goosey.

tldr; DPS allies seem to be heavily balanced around Charisma, which is understandable, if unfortunate (~2.5-3x stronger at 100 CHA). Non-DPS allies probably only shine for non Charisma classes and even then are probably only worthwhile in short runs; you're not hurting for Stamina late game effectively making Baldur a wasted slot, Dosey's heal is too weak to compensate for better DPS (one shots = 0 dmg taken), and Olga is Olga.

[Sleg]

Wow. Thank you so much for doing the testing there. I play without saves, so that kind of stress testing is extremely tiresome for me. I'll make the necessary changes to my first post, even though this thread isn't very relevant anymore.