Strangely, I realized earlier that this game just reminds me of Kingdom Hearts... the gifts abilities and the lemure monster coloring are so very Kingdom Hearts to me.
Strangely, I realized earlier that this game just reminds me of Kingdom Hearts... the gifts abilities and the lemure monster coloring are so very Kingdom Hearts to me.
Oh and the reasonings behind area barriers or the grimwald fights are artificial and feel forced, whereas in Ys that stuff felt more natural.
Still, that's just a minor gripe.
Yeah the barrier thing really got annoying. At least on the plus side raids feel faster this time around. Those were easily my biggest complaint in Ys VIII because they always seemed to happen at the worst possible times.
Speaking of Falcom games, I remembered that I need to eventually finish Xanadu next.
Took me a while to get into it, but I liked it.
Trails SC is unforgiving compared to FC (hard difficulty for both) holy shit. Can't imagine nightmare in either
You basically need a perfect BP FC run for a specific quartz reward at the start of SC to even consider trying it on nightmare without NG+. Lots of RNG needed to get through each of the prologue bosses, too. Watched my friend restart each fight like 50+ times in the first 5 turns because he needed to meet certain conditions to even have a shot, lol.
Yeah the prologue boss is a complete bastard on anything above Normal. I saw someone beat the boss on Hard (or was it Nightmare?) and it was a REALLY slow fight because they were on the defensive completely and spamming attack food.
SC difficulty levels off a little bit after the prologue, but still spikes.
I'm on the post-chapter2/before-start-of-ch-3 side-quest, and that boss... uh, after an hour of retrying I may need to reload my save. >.<
It's so brutal fighting a boss with like 6 mobs, and they ALL attack you before you even get a turn, and if two of them hit the NPC you're trying to protect it's automatically over. And status effects are a fucking bitch. I need to fix my quartz and arts. ):
Re: Ys IX. Nearing end of Chapter 4, picking up some steam now. Doll is lyfe. She is incredibly good. Though I just got her, so I don't know for the long run. But she rips shit to shreds.
This game feels so underdeveloped (the plot specifically) after going from 7 Trails games in a row. :< but I'm enjoying it.
Doll is probably my favorite character in the game from a character standpoint. Though I still used Crimson King, White Cat, and Feral Hawk as my team for everything.
Great breakdown of the main Cold Steel story (spoilers through 4 of course):
Maybe im missing it or not quite there yet. But CS3 has been kind of dull.
Nearing the end of Chapter 3 and I feel like the only major story point that had it feeling like the other 2 games was Stargazers Tower.
Have I just not hit the excitement point yet?
I finished about 2-3 weeks ago with CS33. Before you know it, you'll have more plot threads than you know what to do with.
Most of the Trails game have a habit of picking up the most steam in the last chapter or two. This one wasn't really any different. Still holding off on CS4 until Azure is out hopefully in a few weeks. The end battle in Chapter 3 was p.greeat
It is a bit "slower" than 2 but I really enjoyed it a lot, especially since all the games are finally starting to converge. 4 should be quite fun. I know literally nothing other than the cover art.
By the way, how is PSP Emulation? I may want to try out the LoH Gagharv trilogy.
Seems good enough? It's how I played one of the Crossbell games.
Finished Ys IX. It was... fine?
I didn't love it, didn't hate it. Most of the game felt very samey, even when you got to open areas. It was just a whole lot of nothing in these giant areas. It took me about 45 hours to do everything. I'm missing a couple trophies, but I don't care so much as to play through again, especially on nightmare. I played on normal and I don't think I had a character die once lol. It was very easy. The platforming annoyed me more than anything.
There were a few good music tracks, but the metal got tedious after a while. I appreciated the open areas a lot more. Ys VIII had a far superior soundtrack.
The city I wasn't overly fond of, but it was super quick getting around between gifts and fast travel. There wasn't much character growth and they were mostly 1 dimensional. I'd milk Yufa any time she wanted though. >_> lol.
Would have never been able to guess the direction they went with the plot. I was pretty surprised by that.
Overall it was like a "C+" if I had to grade it. This game really shows it's age with the engine it's using. There are so many shortcuts with the design and cutscenes, I couldn't help thinking about it whenever I saw one. They definitely need to work on some stuff before releasing Ys X.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not shitting on the game, it's just not anything really groundbreaking. Just more of the same.
It was a nice time killer waiting for Persona 5 Strikers (comes out Tuesday) and hopefully that tides me over until Trails to Azure. Really hoping it's early-mid March like they're saying. I've waited this long to play CS4, can wait a bit longer.
That sounds a bit fair. I never really judged Ys based on the story since I always thought of them being fairly simple in that regard. But yeah the tracks and areas this time around were weak.
Also I'll give this to Falcom regarding Ys IX. I did live all the references from the older games in the bosses/blue petals. That and as odd as it sounds (late game spoiler).
Spoiler: show
Kuro no Kiseki will allow you to switch between action and command battle systems:
https://www.siliconera.com/kuro-no-k...ction-battles/
First look at the battle system:
https://www.gematsu.com/2021/03/the-...tem-first-look