According to the tutorial, “B”-ing them counts permanently. Which sucks, because they’re always in the way. However, it seems the permanent losses are only applied when you actually win the round – at least that was true when I lost a Champion and then the round in one of the special puzzle missions. Perhaps that’s different from standard battles?
And what I’m wondering: Does the pool size affect the reinforcements, i.e. if I have 10 Deer and 5 Druids in the pool, am I twice as likely to reinforce Deer?
Also, without spoiling anything, is there a way to “grind” out more money/resources? As the “big” units must be bought, it would suck to have a limited resource pool that could potentially diminish to the point of sticking you with just your core units…
There are areas with random encounters, for example the graveyard from the first side quest. I assume they’re infinite.
I really like the game after about an hour, but would it really have killed you guys to add a colorblind mode or some other way to distinguish between units of different colors? It’s not nearly as big of an issue now that I’ve got different units and can just make sure that the first two colors are always different unit types, but the first battle or two with just the archers were maddening since I was basically matching blind and I am still repeatedly mis-matching on top of my deer because I can’t tell the yellow and green colors apart. At the moment it’s teetering on unplayable for me, and I would hate to have wasted the money just because no one bothered add a colorblind option.
Not sure if this will make it better or worse overall, but the colors change later. The second character you play is white, tan, and blue. You can see the rest for yourself in the Quick Battle mode. Some of the units are hard to distinguish for me, even though I don’t have difficulty distinguishing colors. It’s one of the areas I hope they’ll tweak if we are fortunate enough to get a sequel.
Same, I jumped on it. Now I just need to resist breaking it out a few weeks as it is the perfect portable fun to have on hand during all the traveling and such coming up soon.
Yup, was very happy when I went into Best Buy this afternoon intending to buy it anyways, and it rang up for $10 less than I expected. I played through the elf section, very fun. The colors thing did cause me a few problems but I got used to it, and the game isn’t of a particularly punishing difficulty where I really got worked up over it. Great little game so far!
I found the second section to be much more challenging than the first (though like the first section, it eases up toward the latter part) but the colors should be a bit better. And the fight at the end… shudder Great stuff.
Picked this up today for $19.99 at Best Buy (on sale this week). Had a $10 RZ gift certificate and a $10 GC, so it cost me only tax - $0.01! Should be fun!
Thanks for listening! My wife helped me get past the elf section (honey, what color is this deer?) and the colors on the second section haven’t presented a problem.
Man, what a fantastic little game. Absolutely great design. Match 3 my ass, that’s like saying Deus Ex is an FPS. It doesn’t even come close to doing the game justice. This game makes Puzzle Quest look like its entire design was “Lets put some portraits on the side of a bejeweled game”. This one isn’t even remotely like that.
I’ve only played for an hour or so, but I’m blown away at how clever it is. It’s still a puzzler but there’s so much more to it.
Yeah, this one is really good. I mean, I play the DS often at night before bed and I find myself looking at the alarm clock and realizing I’ve just spent three hours playing when I should be sleeping. I do wish it was a tad easier to tell the colors and particularly to tell which color elite units need for powering up, and a toggle-able grid would be cool as I can’t always tell exactly where things will drop, but those are very minor things. Amazing game.
So far my only real issue is with the dialogue/story. It’s pretty weak. I mean, I know it’s probably targeted at kids or whatever, but with a game of this much complexity, I think all devs should aspire to quality writing. Even children can appreciate a good story.
Utterly random question having to do with colorblind perception - what would happen if you took a sheet of translucent plastic (Saran Wrap) that was in the same family as one of the offending colors and put it over the screen? Would that cause them to differentiate from one another? Or would it just turn everything brown? Or what if you’re, say, red/green colorbind and you use a yellow sheet of plastic as a filter? Some part of my brain is telling me that this could be a quick solution, but a different part is shouting at me that it cannot possibly work.
Okay so, I’ve found a quirk to this game that I’m not sure I like. It’s not game breaking, but it’s kind of lame. It’s significantly easier to win battles if you take one single normal unit, and one single (small) special unit. You chain like mad, you get a fuckton of free turns, and all your damage is amplified by the ability to chain and fuse.
I was having a bit of problems going in with a mix, so I went in with two units and damn if I didn’t own the shit out of the battle.
