Summon Night: Twin Age

[ZetaBladeX13]

[Riseatrance]

[ZetaBladeX13]

[Teclo]

[Kitsunexus]

[ZetaBladeX13]

[Riseatrance]

[bathedinsin]

[Teclo]

[bathedinsin]

[Kimiko]

I've finished both the main game and the EX content now, but somehow my Bestiary isn't full yet. I did visit the area you miss during the main game because of a choice between two areas you have to make, so that isn't it. Anyone know what I've missed?

Also, is there a point to the RPS game that Ticah plays with you near the end of the EX content other than getting some healing items?

Re: the difficulty thing, At first I thought the game was too easy since I could easily beat the monsters with just Reiha, let alone with Aldo and a third character. Then the boss fights started to get harder. Waay harder. The regular monsters were still fairly easy to beat with some minor leveling, but near the end of the main game, the bosses become so hard that the only way to defeat them is to give up on using magic other than spamming the healing spell on Aldo while he does all the attacking. That kind of spoiled it for me, since I didn't really care for Aldo much.

What makes the game fun are the interactions between the characters. Too bad you can't ditch Aldo, and that the main characters' battle roles are about as cliché as you can get (boy with sword/axe/spear, girl with magic staff)

Oh, and I hated the voice acting. The American accents are ugly, and Ticah/Ayn sounded like adults trying to sound like kids by pitching their voices higher than feasible. That's one thing Atlus got right with [i]Izuna[i]. Just leave the Japanese voices intact and use subtitles if needed.

[Teclo]

Yeah, the "adults speaking in a squeaky voice to sound like kids" thing is something that plagues US dubs of both anime and games. I had a feeling the bosses would get a lot harder while the enemies stay the same. It's also quite disappointing that magic becomes useless, apart from heal. It tends to be that way in RPGs. Attacking magic isn't powerful enough to make up for being slow to cast and limited in use. Status magic tends to become pointless because bosses are usually immune or at least highly resistant to it. Some RPGs get around that by making certain bosses particularly weak to certain elements but then that just feels dull; "Oh it looks like I need to cast ice on this guy"... *casts ice 100 times*.

[Kimiko]

I hate dubbing in anime. If I accidentally forget to switch the sound track to Japanese (in case it isn't the default) I always think 'eww, they did that to the characters' real voices?'. I wonder how hard it could be, storage-wise, to give a dual-audio option in games.

Well, the magic thing does get better in the post-game EX content with some leveling up. Reiha can take out half a group of monsters in the time it takes Aldo to hack through one or two.

Oh, and I figured out where the missing monsters were. They're summon-only, so you need to create them yourself to complete the bestiary.

[Teclo]

I'd like to get back into this game. It's very playable in short bursts whereas EO tends to play better in longer sessions and Dragon Quest VIII, by it's very design, is near impossible to play in short bursts. For those that have never played a Dragon Quest game; you can only save at churches - there are no Final Fantasy-style save points whatsoever and since the world is one massive Oblivion-style overworld there's no world map per se and therefore no saving on the world map, a la Final Fantasy etc.

It's remedied to some extent by the Zoom spell, which lets you teleport to certain previously visited locations. So you could get to a boss, use the Escape spell to leave the dungeon, teleport to a place with a church, save, teleport back to the dungeon, walk through the dungeon with some spell or item in effect that lowers the encounter rate. So yeah, it doesn't really encourage lots of saving or a pick up and play mentality. On the flip side, you can't permanently die - if you are "killed" you just wake up at the last church you saved at in, with all the exp, items, plot progress etc that you had when you died but just with half the money you were holding at the time (you can leave money in the bank, though).

[scy]

If only DQVIII had a hard boss fight (pre-optionals, that is) That said, the game was pretty awesome and I really didn't get the amount of random hate it got on various boards I frequent ... though I will say I wish some of the skills sucked a bit less.

That and I'm tired of silent protagonists. I really don't think it adds much what-so-ever.

As for SN:TA ... yeah, the bosses get harder but I still never found them actually hard. Just became figuring out when they attack so I don't end up wasting mine when they're invulnerable. Meh.