I used a cheat table to "skip" the gameplay and damn, this was still well worth it.

[Arndell]

After 5 or so hours of finding the combat annoying, even on story mode when you can take plenty of hits, it was still just tedious because of so many slow animations and low attack power making it take longer.
Yeah if i enjoyed the combat I would appreciate the attempt at telegraphing and I wouldn't mind the low damage because it means you actually have enough turns to set up an attack.

I do feel like this halfway point is an example of trying to please everyone, jack of all trades master of none.
A lot of fans of turn based games likely wished it was actually turn based and not twitch reflexes.
A lot of fans of twitch reflex games likely wished it wasn't turn based at all.

Broad generalisations I know, i'm sure for plenty this hits just right and they like both, I think it's both a bad turn based game and a bad twitch reflex action game.


Anyway! i'll stop moaning about the game mechanics now, I feel I have justified my thoughts on them enough.

I just used a cheat table to have the first turn, infinite AP and one shot everything, I played the game basically like it was a visual novel, yes you do lose incentive to explore for gear upgrades, but this games story, world and music are worth it on their own.

17 hours of quality content when fast fowarding through all the battles, I don't think the plot took a wrong step even once and every location looked incredible with a soundtrack the rivals the best of Final Fantasy imo.




TL:DR - I'm someone who thinks the gameplay sucks, but if you like RPG's for the plot, just cheat so you can see this through, well worth it for story game fans.

[Mugiwara]

More power to you Op. I personally haven't modded or used the cheat engine. But I believe if people would consider using either of these options rather than whinging the game is too hard they will get far more out of the game. Glad you enjoyed, I also think the story is epic.

[Arndell]

Originally posted by Mugiwara:

More power to you Op. I personally haven't modded or used the cheat engine. But I believe if people would consider using either of these options rather than whinging the game is too hard they will get far more out of the game. Glad you enjoyed, I also think the story is epic.

For me it wasn't specifically because I found it "hard"

It was because the reaction based defence negated the combat system.

I can learn timings fine enough and don't have issues trying to get the hang of things, story mode was still easy and my characters were taking loads of attacks from normal enemies.


The thing is with turn based games, if something beats you and you're stuck on a boss, the first thing you do is think about your strategy, what were you doing wrong, were there any elemental weakness or status effects you needed to defend from or exploit in the enemy, were there any attack patterns to watch out for to know when to prepare and top up HP for a big attack.

In this game, everything boiled down to "Damn, I died, guess i need to parry / dodge more"

I turned it down to story mode after a few hours because I had accepted i'll never see past that, but then the combat system that I had already given up on became tedious.



TL:DR - It wasn't because it was "too hard" it was because I found that having a perfect defence and incredibly powerful source of damage just from getting some timings right completely negated the whole point of turn based strategy, no matter what situation you are in "parry good" is a complete win.

[Theo]

Sciel was the first character in my game that hit the damage limit 9,999. That's below level 20? I don't understand how you deal so little damage. Counter is one hit, max 9999 damage. There are skills that hit 7 times. That's potentially 70k damage in a turn for 1 character.

[Notius]

Originally posted by Arndell:

I could spend 3-4 turns setting up a burn stack and the right stance on Maelle to get a big attack out, but if i pulled off any parries during the setup, the enemy is dead before it matters.

On normal enemies? I put all of my points into attack on every character and normal mobs die in less than one turn, sometimes I only need Gustave to attack because Free Aim gets a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of boosts from Pictos.

For bosses it's like 2-3 turns, I just use normal dodges to get a hang of parry timing, but have beat most bosses before learning the timings aside from stuff like the Elemental Trumpet optional boss.

[zuppaclub]

don't worry, I also use trainer for always parry ( I could handle jump and gradient counter ) , it helps me a lot lol.

[AnonomBot]

Originally posted by heather1348:

This could be an option. I haven't bought the game so far because people are complaining that even the story difficulty level is too frustrating. It is starting to make me wonder if the story mode is bugged - labeling a difficulty level as "story" implies little to no challenge, so even the most reflex-deficient of gamers shouldn't be getting frustrated by it. I've never used Cheat Engine or anything like it, and getting it running on my Linux system might be a bit of a hassle (and I'm too lazy to bother with it right now), so I'll probably wait for a while and see if the story mode gets fixed or other options are added in a patch. If not, I'll look into this and/or see what mods turn up on Nexus. So far, there is one that makes the dodge/parry system more forgiving, but that isn't enough for me, because I despise systems like that and I don't want to engage with it.

The only combat system that I enjoy at all is classic turn-based with no dependence on reflexes, and even then, only when it is well designed, as in Baldur's Gate 3. For any other type of combat, I'm simply not interested, and I want it to be either extremely easy or possible to skip entirely. This game looks great from a story standpoint, so if I can play the game like a walking simulator, I'll be satisfied.

I've played 60 hours on story mode (1st play thru on Game Pass), 40 hours on steam on normal difficulty, I've got to be honest and say the difference in parrying on either setting(at least for me) is barely noticeable, story mode still presents a considerable challenge to gamers that don't really play these types of games.

There is a discernible differences on dodging but again it no story mode. Just like Khazan The First Berserker we are getting conned on so called easy modes.

This game is that special it's worth the effort in overcoming the obstacles to complete the main story path.

I would say the story bosses of this game are not that difficult, the optional bosses however will generally stomp your arse if you don't have the right stats but thats why they are not required to complete the story.

[deadLine.Ono]

I was getting crushed at Stone Wave Cliffs but then took some time to reassign pictos, lumina, skills, choosing appropriate weapons and reshuffling attributes a bit... after that I became a killing machine again. I had been winging it and just building the characters quite randomly but you really need to take a step back and rethink things at some points of the game, it seems.

[jl3544]

hmm, turn-based combat is not something that you can power through, like players expect to when they play single player story driven game, but that's what makes this game great isn't it, a beautiful story in a beautiful world, that has incredible depth to it's skill system and sysnergy, requiring you to actually build for a powerful combo, rather than giving you everything to easily breeze thru the content, that's what the majority of the players prefer unfortunately

[Arndell]

Originally posted by jl3544:

hmm, turn-based combat is not something that you can power through, like players expect to when they play single player story driven game, but that's what makes this game great isn't it, a beautiful story in a beautiful world, that has incredible depth to it's skill system and sysnergy, requiring you to actually build for a powerful combo, rather than giving you everything to easily breeze thru the content, that's what the majority of the players prefer unfortunately

Except you absolutely can just "power through" in this much more than with actual turn based combat because you get completely impenetrable defence, you will take zero damage and beat everything with just timing alone.

I'm not claiming that i'm so naturally good at timing that I dodge and parry everything with no effort so it's boring, I still need to learn specific timing for each specific enemy before i'm actually invincible.

My issue comes from the state of mind I have behind doing that, if I get stuck on anything, there is no thought for what strategy i'm trying to do, i'm not thinking about tactics to do anything new in the turn based combat, the only strategy is "do the same but dodge more next time"

It also looks like it's a fairly common method to just build the whole party with stacked defence and HP so you have more second or third chances if you fail dodges and parries.

And another really common thing people seem to be doing end game is just building a party that hits for hundreds of millions per turn the "one shot builds" because if you kill something before you need to dodge or parry, that also bypasses it.

[0wnz0r]

bro u wasted ur money, should jus watched a youtube upload

[MrQun]

I managed to 100% the game and that is despite my being hard of hearing. I didn't want to use any cheats or mods, at least until I have completed the story. I'm a bit stubborn that way.

Anyway, I have downloaded the parry mod from nexus, and my goodness, parrying feels much better now.

I sure that I don't need to tell you this OP, but it is a single player game, so you're free to play it however you like. Don't let any one tell you differently.