so hows the combat?

[Kaitri]

ive played a handful of rpg games that refilled hp after every battle and they either were way too hard, or way too easy.
the battle system also used to be boring.
how is this one?
how does the balance and the combat system feel?
what do you think about getting hp restored?

[EL Truco]

i dont know but the combat feels not balanced at all with some kind of enemies, earlyu game the game looks really hard for no reason....even if you upgrade your equipment

[Mr. Welldone]

It's great. It's challenging. You need to be careful in battles. Some battles are easier than others thanks to the proper skills being flagged to cool down your overdrive, others are tougher. It's always doable. Getting smeared for being complacent and just hitting attack is pretty refreshing.

I think the best way to describe battle is *engaging*. You need to pay attention and think ahead, but also it's not overly difficult. Not sure what the fellow above is saying about balance, I've had no issues and have agreed with the battles I lost.

If you die, it doesn't throw you back to a save point, it puts your right back into the battle you lost with an option to switch up gear and try things differently.

I am absolutely in love with it.

[StrawberryZachary]

Combat overall is good, however it suffers from one thing: inconsistency.

I'm referring to battles in which the turn order is variable at times and for some reason, enemies just inexplicably get to go twice even though they didn't use the ability "act twice".

Unsure if this is a bug or bad programming but either way, combat is flawed in this regard.

[ninakoru]

In today's day and age, the combat, being a turn-based game, is on the hard side, specially compared to many modern games where difficulty is usually non-existent.

Even knowing what you're doing, very back luck could net you a loss from time to time, there's not much randomness, but battles are tight, turn order, and what is needed to keep the overdrive gauge is random, and some skills and triggers are chance based. As said here, you can retry the battle or load a previous save, and auto-save happens very often, so there's little punishment for failing.

Also some harder battles are optional and can be postponed for later in the game progression, like the very first unique enemy on the fields, or the second class challenge.

And that's in normal difficulty: you cannot over-level as progression and leveling are tied, so your only margin is to level skills, explore carefully for the extra stuff, and keep your gear updated and leveled-slotted whenever possible.

There's some adjustments to difficulty, to me is a bit hard but fair, I will keep it on normal, still, you can tune a few things like enemy stats/aggressiveness (I guess they focus-fire more/less and use more/less skills) to make things easier/harder if you're uncomfortable with the difficulty.

[Zalugar]

Originally posted by StrawberryZachary:

I'm referring to battles in which the turn order is variable at times and for some reason, enemies just inexplicably get to go twice even though they didn't use the ability "act twice".

Unsure if this is a bug or bad programming but either way, combat is flawed in this regard.

Can't say I ever had an issue with turn order on hard where the enemy stats are at their highest. I can think of two things: 1. Your agility is awful. Victor can possibly be lapped by enemies, but characters like Sienna should be on par if not lapping enemies herself.
2. Not sure if it ever got fixed, but when I played there was a bug where enemy buffs and player debuffs could stick around after game over and you choose to 'retry' the battle.

Originally posted by ninakoru:

And that's in normal difficulty: you cannot over-level as progression and leveling are tied, so your only margin is to level skills, explore carefully for the extra stuff, and keep your gear updated and leveled-slotted whenever possible.

You can over level; that's what the reward board is for. You can even kill those really hard field boss monsters obviously intended to make you come back later if you try really hard as well. I was super on top of the reward board for the entire game and had very little difficulty even on hard. And you can just straight up overlevel Sky Armors the normal way.

That said, the difficulty does somewhat catch up in the very late-game for the endgame optional lads.

[sorethroat]

I like that the combat is hard but forgiving, but as options open up you can try out various combinations with an array of characters. This game had like a moveset limit though, so you can't just make a character able to use all of their learnt skills.

It's kind of like FFT where the difficulty starts brutal. but as you gain more options you start to see the game as something that can be broken if you know what you are doing.

[Wirewing]

Not good. You get punished for going all out. They made the game too easy and put a throttle on it, instead of balancing their game.

[sorethroat]

Originally posted by Wirewing:

Not good. You get punished for going all out. They made the game too easy and put a throttle on it, instead of balancing their game.

If your team is built well with the right equipment, crystals & passives the overdrive mechanic became kind of obsolete to be honest.

[Wirewing]

Originally posted by sorethroat:

Originally posted by Wirewing:

Not good. You get punished for going all out. They made the game too easy and put a throttle on it, instead of balancing their game.

If your team is built well with the right equipment, crystals & passives the overdrive mechanic became kind of obsolete to be honest.

Obsolete isn't the word. Ineffective is. It's ineffective from the first minute you see it. It's just a lazy tack on to address a regret.

[ninakoru]

To me @Wirewing you are just being a bit delusional. Makes me question if you have played the game? Well if this game is easy, most of the other turn-based games out there are walking simulators. Maybe you're comparing this to an action game? If this is easy, you have played, say, Persona 5 for example?

The system makes sense: you warm up, until you enter "the zone" (overdrive), if you go all out too much you enter a frenzy state, and this is reflected with a lower defense.

Is a mini-game mechanic, it's a GAME remember, the dev decided to choose a skill type you can use to lower the bar. Is just a mechanic inside the battle system, it has little to do with balance overall, and nothing with being lazy.

[Wirewing]

It is lazy. You notice that your game is boring because people are going to steamroll through combat so you put on limiting factor to act as a detriment. It extends battletime, and therefore, playtime, if you try to obey it because it makes you do useless, unnecessary actions in order to stay in the zone. Just because something is a GAME doesn't mean that's an excuse for that kind of lazy gimmick.

[ninakoru]

I guess you don't really understand what lazy means. Lazy would be not adding anything new to the table, or copy-pasting something from other source because you're too lazy to do it from scratch, or commission an asset, or design a new system.

Pulling a game of this caliber by a small team, or a single person, means thousands of hours of work. And programming in gaming is quite hard and demanding, you need a very strong commitment to your vision and project.

Is quite hard to associate the effort needed to pull off an entire game with laziness.

I didn't experience any situation of un-needed padding. I think the game pretty much respects your time, but it is what it is, turn-based combat is not for everyone. Battles are a bit more lengthy than in some other RPGs, but in return, these are meaningful, and you don't get that much combat during exploration.

I guess you're entitled to your own opinion, is just baffling to me.

[Enfys Ellezard]

I really like the overdrive mechanic tbf. A lot of JRPG suffer from how they don't know how to deal with the resource management game. Going around blasting 1-shot spell spam and chugging mp pot along the way might be good for some but not really for me. The game combined starting fresh in every fight and then make you spice up your strategy with Overdrive limitation is good as characters like Sienna who is ridiculously fast might also benefit from just throwing Overdrive Item around to help manage it and that some boss fights are difficult because their multi-hit make it much harder to stay in the green zone.

But as Sorethroat mentioned though, being a JRPG, once you know what you're doing, it does lose its "Underdog" feel to it that keep the combat tense and fun and you can one-strat most of the game outside some fight with cheesy mechanic like instant-death stab. There are some clear issues that they leave on purpose as they cannot really just balance the game around min-maxer but without even optimizing stuff, a lot of bosses was constantly doing its "Interrupt" phase attacks because I hit too hard and one of the optional bosses with 26k HP got crit'd by Ba'thraz for 24k with only 3-summon.

[(Edgy) Asriel Dreemurr]

It’s harder at first when your movepool is limited, but gets easier as you get more skills and characters. There are also overdrive items you can use to push back the bar if necessary. One thing I learned that helps a lot is not being afraid to use the Ultra Moves (granted Glenn and Sienna’s will probably be the only ones you really use). These also push back the Overdrive a fair bit, so they’re good to use when you’re about to go into Overheat. My fear was they would be like Limit Breaks where they refill so slowly that you want to save them for bosses, but it actually refills pretty quickly to where it’s guaranteed to proc during a boss fight no matter what.

I’m still playing through the game and only recently unlocked another combat mode so my thoughts could change.