Change Difficulty (aka level of tediousness)

[Nab]

The game doesn't really get hard with higher difficulty levels. You just have to grind more and longer to be able to safely defeat the next bigger monsters.

Since the game doesn't allow switching of difficulty after starting the game and I had no intention of restarting the game in low tediousness mode, I took a look at the savegames.

The Savegames are located at
<wherever you installed Steam>\Steam\userdata\<your user id>\251150\remote\FC\SAVDAT*.sav

Start the game (so the save files are synced with steam) and wait until the Start/Load/Options/Exit Menu is visible
Alt-Tab to windows
Pick a Savegame and use a hex Editor to change the byte at offset 0x2A6BD
0 - Normal
1 - Hard
2 - Nightmare
3 - Easy (is there any way to legitimately get to Easy?)
Save the file and Alt-Tab back to the game
Click Load
If you did everything right, the savegame already shows the new difficulty level.

[Berahlen]

The game actively discourages grinding, and if you ever feel like you need to (including Nightmare), you're missing something strategically.

Like, I've beaten Nightmare without grinding. This is a thing.

[chaosbringer42]

The Trails games NEVER need grinding. If you need to grind to do things on harder difficulties...you have real problems with strategy in RPGS.

[theclaw135]

You hardly could if you wanted to. Experience point gain is too slow in this game for grinding to be even rational.

[LrdDimwit]

Yeah, the exponential decay bottlenecks you where the developers want you real good.

Grind for Sepith? Sure. Grind for item drops? Doable. Grind for EXP? Not without extreme tedium.

[Berahlen]

It also does a very good job of making sure you're never underleveled unless you run from literally everything.

Hell, there have been minimalist runs to only kill required encounters. Not on Nightmare (...probably :P) but it's surprisingly reasonable on Normal.

[Cid]

Originally posted by Waypoint:

It also does a very good job of making sure you're never underleveled unless you run from literally everything.

Hell, there have been minimalist runs to only kill required encounters. Not on Nightmare (...probably :P) but it's surprisingly reasonable on Normal.

Yep, minimalist gets you to the final boss at level 17 (although I wasn't actually able to finish it off and you need either retry offset or godly RNG to get through a certain fight in chapter 3).

[Berahlen]

Is it the health-leech dog? That was a pain.

[Cid]

Originally posted by Waypoint:

Is it the health-leech dog? That was a pain.

Nope, it was the five dog fight with dorothy biggest issue in the fight is NPC death, second is the limited quartz options that come along with a minimalist playthrough.

Health-leech dog definitely needed RNG as well though, from memory I lured the regular dogs to basically form a shield so health-leech couldn't attack

[Just leave me alone]

Oh, so many pro players here it seams. I start game at hard lvl, and know what? In 1st boss fight against Kurt he hit me ~1100-1200 dmg, i hit him 5 :) with phys atack ofc, my magic hit him ~400-500. So yeah, game not so hard, ofcourse :)) *sarcasm*

Speaking about SC btw.

[Gambio]

Originally posted by Just leave me alone:

Oh, so many pro players here it seams. I start game at hard lvl, and know what? In 1st boss fight against Kurt he hit me ~1100-1200 dmg, i hit him 5 :) with phys atack ofc, my magic hit him ~400-500. So yeah, game not so hard, ofcourse :)) *sarcasm*

Speaking about SC btw.

First: that's a necro
Second: Kinda spoilery man
Third:. Kuuuuuuuuuurt!!!!!!

[tcassat]

I'm playing on Hard and up to chapter 3 I haven't had any major difficulties and I haven't wasted any time grinding either. But I finally reached a wall in the part where three soldiers dressed in black kidnap the old scientist.

The battle was almost impossible for my characters and I had to go back to the city to try to think of better combinations of orbments. I turned Estelle into a true healer and now I'll try again, but without much faith that it will work. I think there's something missing that I didn't notice in the game to make my characters more effective in battle.

[Berahlen]

You can just walk in with full CP and explode them.

[tcassat]

Originally posted by Berahlen:

You can just walk in with full CP and explode them.

Thanks. I was avoiding doing this out of laziness to accumulate CP, but I remembered that in the hot springs it goes to 200 and you just go to the little door. Now I'm going to kill the guys.

[tcassat]

WTF? This battle is impossible. Even if I enter CP at 200 with all characters and kill one of them immediately, after that they go into a cycle of infinite attacks where they keep skipping my turn. They basically play 6+ turns one after the other and kill all my characters without me having any control of the battle.

[tcassat]

Here an example:

https://youtu.be/WUweEvUvqio

The guys keep skipping my turn. How do I avoid this?


EDIT: I did it, after Joshua went up a single level he unlocked a new special attack that is extremely overpowered. I also took off the attack quartz to make the character's defense higher. After that it was relatively easy to win the battle.