He’s just so pokey, though. I mean, I get that he’s slow and hits hard, but I can only use him against things that stand still. :)
I should admit I haven’t really explored his skill set, though. He’s someone I like to watch lumbering around the battlefield, lugging that giant purple scythe, occasionally slicing purple arcs through the air or summoning his bubbling purple buff pond. I also have Zeta in the party and I was hoping they would banter more, but I think I’ve only gotten a couple of comments between them, if any.
I presume this is reviewing well? I’m obviously not interested in reading any of them, but I’ll be delighted if it’s a commercial success. Do we know one way or the other yet?
Vaseraga hits so hard that he doesn’t have to hit much. Here are a few tips I learned in the last couple days:
in his first combo (XYY), the two Y skills are gap closers. Use them without charging to go to targets that move around.
you don’t need to always charge - if the target is about to move, just press the Y attacks without charging to do some damage.
build Vaseraga with high stun/break; broken enemies stay still, and when they do you can do the big, hard hitting attacks with impunity.
if they move around too much, there’s a skill for Vaseraga that inflicts Slow on enemies. It can be really useful.
after every link attack you get a free Y attack. You can charge or not depending on the situation.
always keep Stout Heart on. If the enemy is about to hit super hard, dodge or guard; if it’s a smaller attack, just take the damage. You can use a sigil that increases defense when under the effect of Stout Heart - that sigil is made for Vaseraga, and helps you tank hits so you can keep attacking.
XXYY is your big hit combo, mostly. XXXYY does more damage but it takes longer, so it’s better to save that one for link time or broken enemies.
as for sigils, use sigils that decrease charging time and increase damage of combo finishers AND charged attacks, since your big attacks are both at once. Also use Aegis to increase your health and help you tank.
When I figured all that out, Vaseraga became my MVP on nearly all missions except those against flying enemies (in which the ranged characters excel). I didn’t think I would enjoy playing as him, but it’s one of my favorites now.
Pretty much so, yeah. Getting a 90 from PC Gamer isn’t easy. But it’s a critical success and it sold well enough (over 1 million copies in 11 days), and I’m glad it did. It’s a great game.
The only thing for me, as beautiful as the game is to watch sometimes the colors lighting up all over the screen gets in my way of understanding what is happening.
Heh, looks like someone has a new favorite main. I’m all about Zeta’s spear right now, but these are some great tips to try with Vaseraga!
Also, I still can’t swap the main character out of my party. I guess you have to be at a specific point where no story mission is underway? But every time I try it, it tells me “The Captain must be in your party” or some nonsense. It’ll be moot soon as I’m on the penultimate chapter, but I really wish I had that slot available for another character. : (
Well, if you ever want to play online, let me know. You can bring Zeta and I’ll bring Vaseraga. ;)
Ferry is quite interesting. I haven’t fully grasped her yet, but in the right situations she can be devastating.
On that note, as I said before, I can’t pick a main in this game. I find myself switching characters all the time because each one has something interesting and fun to offer. At this point, the only characters I haven’t unlocked/played yet are Percival and Ghandagoza. I’ve played all the others and every one was interesting in different ways. And there are more characters coming - at least two are already confirmed, and who knows how many more they’ll add… hopefully they’ll keep finding unique and interesting takes to make me even more indecisive. :D
That said, I’m having a ball with Vaseraga. It feels like playing Greatsword in Monster Hunter, but less frustrating and equally as awesome. So I guess I’ll stick with him a bit longer than usual. :D
I completed chapter 3 last night and I’m loving this game.
I beat the Furycane boss battle on my first try. I ran out of health a few times but my teammates helped me back up and we finished the fight.
I guess it’s still pretty early but I’m getting worried that the campaign is too easy. I’m kind of mashing my way through and succeeding but I’d prefer to learn the systems and attack patterns and dodges and have more of a challenge overall. Should I be careful what I wish for?
But overall this game is just tremendously appealing.
On the default difficulty, I don’t think the game is going to push back much. Also, I feel like it’s really easy to get caught up exploring characters and quests, so that before you know it, you’re overleveled. That seemed to be my situation for much of the campaign.
But also, I get the feeling the campaign isn’t intended to be the sum of the game. I’d venture this is one of those action RPGs where the characters are the content more than the storyline. And it seems the post-game stuff will let you push difficulty levels freely.
Here’s the thing: early on, there isn’t a lot of challenge. And if you don’t do quests in the quest counter, but focus on the story quests and some side quests, then by the end things get more difficult, but not overly so.
The real challenge is in the post-campaign game, though that happens mostly when you’re below the “suggested power level” for a given quest. Which will happen if you experiment with other characters and team builds. I have my share of failed quests after the campaign, especially on very hard and extreme quests.
You know, come to think of it, I don’t think my party wiped once during the campaign. I certainly died a few times, but my AI party members always rezzed me. On Normal, the whole thing was pretty much a cakewalk.
Normally, that might bother me and I might raise the issue, like @rrmorton did. But it didn’t even occur to me until I was writing this post. Somehow – I suspect it was the relentless ebullience – Granblue tricked me into not noticing that it wasn’t even pushing back!
Well, part of it is the way they handle the “fail state”, so to speak. The whole thing where, if a party member gets to “critical state”, it starts eating on the critical bar at a fixed rate - it forces you to try to not die, but you also know there’s some leeway there, since it’s not a fixed number of “deaths” (like in Monster Hunter, for instance), but at the same time it is something you can fail if you die too often, or too many party members die at the same time.
One of my most memorable failures was against Very Hard or Extreme Furycane. You know how Furycane will place those hurricanes that pull you in? Well, if you go into critical state close to one of those, it pulls you in, and as such party members will either not come to help, or get trapped themselves, and if that happens to 2 or 3 there’s usually not enough time to recover before the critical bar goes out. There are similar situations in other fights, but I appreciate that Relink is less interested in killing you than it is about making you consider your positioning and the mechanics of the fight and the way you engage with skills so you don’t fail.
Completed main story last night. Took me 30-ish hours, not speed running it at all. I played all the quest counter stuff as it opened up, and the fate episodes of my main party members. Spent time reading archives and exploring. Good lord the end credits were long.
Now I’m in the second stage of the game it appears. New upgrade mechanics, new side quests, an epilogue story, plus a lot of fate episodes to go through and characters to unlock and play (Id is a beast! Wowzers!) Played my first matchmaking quests, it takes a few tries to party.
I think I might go for 100% cheevos because this game is just a lot of fun to play.
30-ish hours! Did you forget to press the Turbo button on your 386? :) I can’t imagine it taking longer than 15 or 20 hours to get to the end of the story. Steam showed 26 hours for me, but that was with me leaving the game running in the background for hours at a time. But regardless of how long it took anyone, I thought it was the perfect length.
Now that I’m in the “second stage”, as you rightly call it, I’m feeling a bit of pointlessness. The objective is to do the hard missions to save [redacted], which will involve a bit of grinding up a party, so I guess that’s what I do now? Keep playing the same dudes I’ve been playing to level them up? Get them high enough level to finish off the missions? I was hoping there might be some incentive to assemble and level up all the different crew members, kind of like how Xenoblade Chronicles did, but that doesn’t seem to be on offer.
But at least there are tons of ways to play! The missions, the options to finish the story chapters, and online all feel like pretty hearty options. Reminds me of the Marvel Ultimate Alliance games, and particularly the last one, for how the developers are all, like, “hey, we’re gonna give you about 20 different characters and the overall game isn’t really the story or the levels, but just you leveling them up, okay?”
I hopped into an online game and found everyone was level 100 (!), but it was easy enough to tag along and do the mission, which involved scattering to the four winds to collect doo-dads, then reconvening for a couple of battles. At least there didn’t seem to be an issue with everyone being different levels (my mains are level 50). It was seamless, short, and weirdly non-interactive, but it piqued my curiosity to try more online matches. It reminds me a bit of Phantasy Star Online, where I bring my characters online to level up alongside other players’ characters. At least that seems to be how it works.
Who else is into the post-story part of the game? Once that part of the storyline was over, did it make you more or less interested in continuing to play?
I’m in post-story, almost unlocking the “maniac” difficulty, and I guess only then I’ll finish the epilogue (Chapter 0). I’m interested in continuing to play because 1. the gameplay itself is really fun, and all the characters play pretty differently, and 2. there’s a lot to unlock yet in terms of weapons, sigils, and some interesting twists in character abilities. Kind of like a classic ARPG in that sense.
Haha yeah, I figured 30 hours would be a high number, and I didn’t AFK. I’m just a slowbie! I spent a bunch of time meandering around the towns, collecting chests and eavesdropping on the NPCs. I got invested in the little story arcs some of them have as the story progressed. Add in the fate episodes and quest counter. I didn’t go straight through! There is a coziness to the game that made me take my time before hitting the next segment of story. Now that I see all the content open up, I’m very pleased, as I much prefer having options and choosing what to do over following storylines.
Yep. Seems like most of the characters got some rebalancing love. And it’s a big-ass patch, too! I actually had to delete games from my hard drive to make space for the update!
