My biggest fear, besides insane loadtimes, is the ratio of time spent cooking, eating, and doing alchemy over standard combat. All of the footage I’ve seen mostly involves constant pauses as whomever is playing quaffs all sorts of potions or sits in some cafe eating pancakes.
The combat seemed a bit light too, not much variation to attack patterns, just simple 3-hit strings followed up with lots of downtime spent menu surfing for new potion combinations and manually picking up oodles of condiments that explode from chests. I’m usually a fan of item crafting, but this seems severely bent on prioritizing it in favor of the game. Is that impression justified?
My biggest fear, besides insane loadtimes, is the ratio of time spent cooking, eating, and doing alchemy over standard combat. All of the footage I’ve seen mostly involves constant pauses as whomever is playing quaffs all sorts of potions or sits in some cafe eating pancakes.
The combat seemed a bit light too, not much variation to attack patterns, just simple 3-hit strings followed up with lots of downtime spent menu surfing for new potion combinations and manually picking up oodles of condiments that explode from chests. I’m usually a fan of item crafting, but this seems severely bent on prioritizing it in favor of the game. Is that impression justified?
I only saw about 10-15 minutes of the game, with the majority of that being cutscene/story development (this is a JRPG after all). From what I saw the action was light, nothing more than button mashing 4 hit combos (maybe more later in the game), it’s no GoW or DMC, but I don’t think it’s supposed to be. They do throw lots of enemies at you and I can see some decent tactical situations arising and there’s a type of magic system aswell. It seems play will be somewhat like a side scrolling secret of mana.
I don’t know how big a role the crafting type stuff plays, in those early parts it wasn’t that prevelant but that might not mean much. The only “crafting” I saw was planting a seed and making it grow. It grew off the energy released when killing enemies though so combat might play a larger role than you’re thinking. You do level up your max HP by eating so I could see people doing that as often as they can.
It seemed like it would be fun, I hope it doesn’t get bogged down in all that crafting stuff aswell, I don’t want a gardening/cooking/alchemy simulator.
Every time I mention that a game looks cool, my wife tries to talk me into buying it. I told her about this one, and well you know the rest…
However, I’m torn between this and Etrian, and I don’t want to get both (she wants me to get both…but I like saving money). I know they are very different games, so no one can really help me choose.
But knowing how long it is would help. A lot of these actiony games don’t last very long. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad in this case, if the action is repetetive.
I picked it up today and played through the first two chapters. It is foremost a brawler with the other elements in the background. You do have to grow plants to get fruit as healing items (shops sell them but money is scarce) but the only thing to worry about there is whether to let the souls power up you or your plants. There’s also an alchemy system where you combine flasks with seeds and such to make potions and souls.
It’s a little hard. I’m playing on easy and I’ve died once (walked into my own cyclone, heh) and barely escaped death a few more times. Status effects are common and enemies are plentiful. But so far it hasn’t felt cheap and the only penalty for death is restarting the stage. Since most stages are only a minute or two in length, no biggie.
The latest issue of Play has a pretty massive feature on this game. It’s a pretty good read, and they talk a little bit about the animation process.
The game’s creator said the game is about 50 hours long, iirc. (That’s just to finish it)
I can try to help you choose One is for the PS2 which to my knowledge requires a TV to be played on, the other is a DS game for optimal portability, so the question becomes do you want a game for portable or for sit down TV. Sure I’d get both eventually but for right now I’ve got Odin’s Sphere still holding out Etrian as I already have 2 rather lengthy portable games for my DS.
I got a couple hours in last night, after just barely finding a copy. Out of the 3 area GameStops only one of them had a copy left, and it was their last one. Fortunately they hadn’t gutted it yet either.
First impressions… very pretty. Lots of nice touches. The way the game begins (and when loading from save) w/ the little girl, book and cat. When you browse goods from a merchant they pull the item out of their bag and hold it up. Inventory has a really slick presentation. Graphically everything has such nice polish and detail. Oh, and I was really pleased to discover that dying didn’t mean sending me back to the last save.
Combat is disappointing so far. Square, square, square, up + square, down + square, square, square, ad infinitum. One basic move. Sure, I’m not expecting God of War here, but another move or two would be nice (maybe still forthcoming?).
Inventory space is rough. It’s really going to force me to break my item hoarding habit, heh. I was already having to drop stuff left and right once I started getting into Alchemy. Hoping to get another bag soon, from the manual it looked like you eventually have 4 or 5.
pfreak: Gamestops had the game yesterday, but I canceled my preorder there and got Etrian Odyssey instead, ordering Odin Sphere on Fry’s Outlet. The impression I got from Gamestop is that they weren’t carrying OS past preorders, for right now, though they like to say that a lot.
Once you get access to alchemy, you’re pretty close to shops having bags to sell. And it seems like you never really want to drop items, but rather use them to power up your materials.
Oh, and little tip before anyone else gets boned: a 10x10 material is a 0. :(
I’m kind of amazed that all the EB/Gamestops in my area sold out in a day. My area is not exactly a hotbed of RPG sales, and there are plenty of other Atlus games in stock at these places. Is this the power of a stray Penny Arcade paragraph, or word of mouth, or did they just ship an unusually small number of games, even for them?
All of atlus’s games seem to become super rare quick. I picked up the last copy of Etrian Odyssey last week from EB, and I think they only have one copy of Steambot Chronicles left.
For the other people who ordered from Fry’s I just got an email saying that they should be getting copies of the game in for orders around June 13. Not sure how big a factor the wait will be for buying it.
