Golden Deer Pub Community Forums

Farewell Zypose.... you will be missed

Youre walking a thin line.... try to not get too involved... my curiosity turned into like 6 years of commitment... we only want the best for you and your productivit-
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....................i need to re-evaluate my life now..

Yah, MMOs can be huge timesinks. Fun, but dangerous to your other interests.

I couldn't possibly even begin to figure out how many hours I've spent playing all kinds of MMOs, I can barely remember all of them. And I played them 95% by myself, most of the team up happening when it was mandatory like in ARR:FFXIV and Elsword.

Play Wonderland Online. Do it. Don't listen to anyone else. Wonderland Online is awesome. If you can get over its bad translation, at least.

I can join you on your beginning quests if you decide to play.

Just play it.

Geeehhhhhh I need to still re-download it on this computer though. If it can even handle it...

Shining Force: Sword of Hajya

we talking eshop gamegear port? or beautiful authetic sega cd gloriousness?



(dont mind me. im a shining force fanboy)

I'm finally playing the .hack// (PS2, emulated) games. .hack//SIGN is one of my favorite anime, so it's really cool to be in "The World". I already met BlackRose, Balmung and Helba. And Kite of course, he's the player character. Remember them from .hack//SIGN and .hack//Legend Of The Twilight Bracelet?

The PS2's resolution disappoints though. I expected better than 640×480. PCSX2 has some widescreen options, but they don't work in the 3D part of the game it seems. It makes Chaos Gates into ovals instead of circles.

I own all those manga. All of G.U.+, Legend of the Twilight Bracelet, and SIGN. That was from my manga phase in middle school/early junior high. They're probably in a box at my parents. I used to love them. How do the games hold up?

The only thing related to .hack i own is .hack//Infection. i have been unable to locate the other games in the series.

Finally ordered Monster Hunter 3U, I can't wait to give it a try. Meanwhile, I'll spend a few extra hours on Soul Hackers.

Note: Just before posting this I noticed how freaking long it ended up getting, so to tl;dr a lot of me fangasming over Ragnarok Odyssey Ace: if you like ARPGs and have a Vita or PS3, buy it. Like right now.


Last Saturday I finally got around to playing Ragnarok Odyssey Ace and I must say that it is an absolutely brilliant game. I got completely hooked and stayed up all night playing (something I haven't done in years). Then I did the same on Monday night and took a sick day to play it on Tuesday (something I have never done in my life)!

Combat wise, it is like a weird hybrid of the Musou series, a monster hunting game and an airdash fighter. The progression mechanics are part Monster Hunter and part old-school RNG loot based dungeon crawler.

To clarify, the combo system is basically lifted straight out of the Musou games; you have a standard string and pressing your other attack button at different points leads to a different finisher. The game is very fast paced and, as long as you have AP (basically works like stamina) you can infinitely dash and airdash (and do mid-air jumps in fights with extra large monsters, or monsters that can fly). You can also equip up to three "ACE Skills", techniques which can be anything from a special attack to a buff and you map to a face button+R1. These use up a lot of AP and each has a specific cooldown period. Finally, when you hit or get hit, you build up SP. When your SP gauge is full you can enter what is known as Danslief mode. Once you trigger it your SP rapidly decreases. In this mode you get a huge attack boost, gain massive amounts of stagger resistance, have infinite AP, recover almost instantly from a step/airstep and regain health every time you land an attack. On the downside, your health drains extremely fast and not staggering from an attacks can actually be more deadly than not; in many cases you will be hit multiple times (and killed) by an attack that would normally hit you once and send you flying.

As for progression, it has the Monster Hunter standard breaking monster parts for drops to enhance weapons, but you will typically be acquiring the base weapons to be upgraded as drops and quest rewards. There is a large degree of randomness here however. There can be many, many variations of any given weapon. Each has a range that its base attack will fall in and a pool of skills that it can have 0-2 of.

As well as weapons, you also can equip cards into your armour. These cards grant you various skills. Each card has a cost and the sum of the cards you equip must not exceed your armour's capacity, which can be "expanded" using money and materials (you can never equip more than 8 cards total however). To complicate things further, if you fully enhance a weapon, you can then turn that weapon into a card possessing the same skills.

Probably the coolest thing however, is Halomonas weapons. These weapons are rare, but customisable. They will have a set number of upgrades that can be performed on them and you get to choose which ones they get, though many will have prerequisites for balancing purposes. Upgrades either give the weapon more ATK, give it a new skill or level up an existing skill. Each upgrade requires you to perform a certain task before you can apply it, such as "kill 5x Hrungnir & 50x Hillgiant Chief" or "Clear mission 5-7 three times". Once you have completed as many orders as possible, you get to choose a branch to go down and start again with a whole new set of orders. From what I have read, the best post-game Halmonas weapons branch 4 times.

Something that stood out to me about this game is that it makes fighting extremely large monsters fun. This is a huge breakthrough for monster hunting games. These fights, whether it's Lao-Shan Lung or Dire Miralis, Shen Gaoren or Jhen Mohran, have always been excruciatingly boring. None of them have felt like actual fights. Lao doesn't even know you are there and Jhen is basically an interactive cutscene, but in ROA the giants want you dead and they make sure you know it. The first time you fight Hrungnir you are just trying to distract him from the fort until they can get out the giant cannon and shoot him (and that is really easy/boring), but later on you fight him in an EXtra mission where he has much higher stats and has you, and you only, in his sights. That fight was simultaneously one of the most difficult, frustrating and plain fun fights I have had in a game in years.

Which brings me to my next point, the difficulty. I have seen many people shoot this game down since it is "way too easy". I have to wonder how far these people played. True, it is super easy for quite a while, but it ends up getting very, very difficult. Beating Loki is the single hardest thing I have ever had to do in a video game and there's no way in hell I'm fighting him again until I get a much more powerful build (and this is coming from someone who basically gets off on a challenge). I can't remember the last time I have considered a game this difficult, and I am still only early in the new stuff that ACE added.

My favourite part of the game however is the Yggdrasil Tower, my new favourite videogame area. It is a 200 floor dungeon, which is randomly generated each time you enter (with the exception of certain boss fights, which are set). Each time you beat a set of 25 floors from then on you can start from that floor, by paying some Yggdrasil Drops (items you get rewarded by doing the tower).

In the tower, the game will randomly issue you with an Ordeal of Valkyrie, a challenge to complete on your current floor. It could be anything as simple as "Launch 5 enemies" or as difficult as "Kill 20 Frostgiant Chiefs in 60 seconds, without taking damage". If you clear the challenge, you will be awarded with a "Valhalla", which could be anything from a drop rate boost to a huge swarm of enemies spawning. It is completely random (in my limited experience, harder challenges seem more likely to give better rewards, but I don't think that is actually how it works). Each time you clear an OoV, you have a chance of triggering Ragnarok, which gets higher with each successful Ordeal. When it does trigger, as long as you don't leave that floor, for the next 30 seconds you get an absolutely ridiculous attack boost (you will kill most stuff in 1 hit and I've yet to see anything take more than 2) and a massive drop rate boost. In my first Ragnarok I got almost 1/6 as many cards as I had gotten in the entire game up until that point (remember that the tower is post game content).

My only problem with the tower is that the difficulty is kind of uneven. At least as deep as I have managed to get so far, the regular floors are usually pretty easy, but the game likes to make you fight bullshit bosses like Hrungnir and Surt at the 25 floor marks, annoyingly ending your runs just before you would unlock the next section of the dungeon. I pray Loki doesn't show up until much deeper...

Anyway, I think that's enough rambling for now. I'm going to go play it again.