Stranger of Paradise FFO

I had forgotten about this topic (for some reason). Have you played more of it, Rorc? Believe you said something about going back to it in order to see if the knowledge you gained let you beat fights faster without the need of good or great gear.

>not designed around the AI
Sounds great to me.

Yeah I'm still playing, slowed down a bit due to splitting time with Tears of the Kingdom, but not stopping anytime soon.

^ Sounds good. As I said earlier, I'm highly interested in this game, so any notes on the mechanics will be a good read.

>Zelda
Heard mixed things about it. How has been your experience with it?

Pleasantly surprised with the story mode difficulty on repeat play. Where being just a little bit easier than I would like was a slight annoyance on the first playthrough, it's winning me over the second time around. Hard enough to always be engaging, and carelessness is always promptly punished, but just easy enough for relaxed play conditions. The last couple bosses still put me through the paces even on a replay.

I made heavy use of the Optimize button this time, to autoequip highest level gear, and it really does allow you to completely ignore the RPG elements if you so choose. A rather odd mechanic but I can appreciate the value. In the midst of Bahamut difficulty now, having used the provided level 200 gear to completely skip Chaos difficulty.

>Tears of the Kingdom
Probably the best 3D Zelda. Combat is not good but IMO the swordfighting mechanics are trash in every 3D Zelda, with the arguable exception of Skyward Sword. I play Zelda for exploration and problem-solving, both of which Tears excels at.

>story mode difficulty is engaging
Glad to hear. This is on vanilla settings (and not challenge runs), yes?

>able to use the Optimize button to skip the menuing
Music to my ears.

>swordplay on Zelda
Can't comment on it since I only played OoT once, and it was just a casual run (of course). I did hear that the Hidden Skills in TP had some notable utility, though.

Heard Bombs have some interesting interactions.

Fire causes them to explode and water puts them out. Any other enemy interactions?

>This is on vanilla settings (and not challenge runs), yes?
Yeah, just plain Hard mode. There's two easier difficulties, but I haven't tried them and anyone interested in the DLC should start with Hard, since the DLC content is substantially harder than Hard mode.

>Fire causes them to explode and water puts them out.
Hitting them with fire damage causes them to grow and become a bit stronger up to two times. If they have already grown twice they will instead self-destruct. The self-destruct can damage other enemies and also deals fire damage. The more powerful Bomb variants, Grenade and Neutron Bomb, do not self-destruct, and on the DLC difficulties Bombs no longer self-destruct either.

Water can put out environmental fires, but does not have any special effect on Bombs as far as I know, they just take bonus weakness damage from water. Most enemies have a weakness to at least one of the 8 magic elements and one of the 3 physical attack types.

>enemy interactions
Well the Bomb thing is pretty unique, I can't think of any other normal enemies reacting to a particular element like that. But most enemies have a gimmick of one kind or another. Sword-wielding skeletons can block and counter melee attacks, while spear skeletons can block and counter magic attacks, and in both cases their counterattack is a copy ability, so you can bait the counter in order to steal the copy ability. Gigas (giant humanoids) have a big scar on their back, and dealing enough damage to it causes them to collapse into a stunned state. Thunder magic is handy against them because it strikes from above, hitting the scar no matter which way they're facing. Griffons start out wearing armor that gives them a super armor effect, and when it breaks they become much more aggressive. Wolves come in packs with a larger alpha that can command the others.

More generally, there's a big emphasis on knocking enemies around and utilizing the environment. Aero magic is very very strong because it carries enemies a long distance, making it perfect for getting wallsplats, and if the enemy is already close to a wall, Aero will ram them into the wall repeatedly, dealing several wallsplats in a row which is pretty much guaranteed to put them in a break state. Stages have environmental features that you can use as well. Pools of water can be electrified, pillars can be knocked down onto enemies (or onto you). One stage has clouds of explosive gas that are dispersed by wind or detonated by fire.

This seems an appropriate time to mention the chain soul burst mechanic. When you execute a broken enemy, their body explodes in a 'soul burst' which gives you a chunk of MP. Where it gets cool is that the explosion damages and knocks back nearby enemies, possibly causing wallsplats for further damage, and any enemies who are broken or killed as a result of a soul burst will also soul burst. Small enemies are often killed by chain reactions in this way.

Bosses all have plenty of unique stuff going on. Lich summons skeletons to attack you and then uses their deaths to power a Flare spell, Kraken has a grab that steals your buffs, the Dragon Zombie makes puddles of poison that are destroyed by holy damage, etc.

>bomb weakness
I mentioned something about this in the FFXVI thread and may have misremembered something. Thanks for clearing it up.

Reading your posts just reminds me how fucking great this game is. Really is one of the best thing to come out in the last few years imo.

Okay, I just beat Death Machine at job level 120, which is something like 50 levels lower than my previous playthrough. The player is expected to be in the job level 150-200 range at this point. You get a ton of XP in the Rift, and I spread it across a dozen different jobs to keep my level as low as it was. Because I blitzed through DLC1 as fast as possible, I was short on some important smithing materials, which limited my ability to make powerful gear. Still, it was better than my gear at this point on the previous run.

The winning attempt at Death Machine was around 4 and a half minutes, so a fair bit longer than my higher-levelled character's 3 minutes. However my strat this time was more dependent on waiting for the boss to do certain things, so a 'lucky' run could have been faster. I was using Dimension Bringer, which first requires you soul shield a lot of attacks to charge it up, meaning I wanted Death Machine to spam multi-hit moves. Dimension Bringer itself is a time-slow effect with a limited radius, so I then needed Death Machine to put itself in a vulnerable position, at which point I would pop the time slow and beat it senseless. 3 cycles of that, plus whatever damage I got in between cycles, was enough to score the kill.

Another highlight was beating the DLC1 Bahamut boss fight in a little over 60 seconds, probably under if you were to cut out the cinematic finishers at the end of each phase. That was with a very burst-damage-focused build though, and Bahamut is still tough as nails, so I died a lot of times before I got my beautiful speed kill. Most of the base game bosses can be nuked in similar fashion with appropriate setup. This second run I've gotten a lot more acclimated to a wide variety of builds, and it's just so cool how wildly different the playstyles are from each other.