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/vr/ - Retro Games

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4278846 No.4278846 [Reply] [Original]

Fuck you, I hated it.

>> No.4278849

>>4278846
brainlet

>> No.4278850

Dropped it after like an hour or two. Don't fall for the hype, kids.

>> No.4278941

>>4278846
Can't beat the challenge, kiddies?

>> No.4278965

>>4278846
>>4278850
Cool story, Op.

>> No.4278973

>>4278941
>>4278849

whats the gear like? vanity reasons. any stylish armor and weapons?

>> No.4278978

>>4278941
There isn't any challenge if you don't fear the combat system.
>Don't chain too high or you'll miss alot and take massive damage
fuck that, chain to 50+ on everything you see and run around at 100 risk all game. Fuck the danger, you'll kill everything, even bosses, before they act once. The real way to play the game is as a man that doesn't fear death, knowing its just an illusion.

>> No.4278982

>beat the game for the first time 15 years ago at the age of 12
>supposed adults today are struggling with it in spite of having an in-game manual and quick manual

embarrassing

>> No.4278986

>>4278846
What do you expect from a PlayStation 1 game?

>> No.4279003
File: 103 KB, 640x438, 1725_front.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
4279003

>>4278986
Much more than the typical N64 game of course.

>> No.4279021

>>4278850
How can you even make an assessment of a game after playing an hour or two? That's like watching the first 15 min of a movie and saying its shit.

>> No.4279026

>>4279021
First impressions are a hell of a thing.

>> No.4279041

>>4278982

Understanding the game's mechanics isn't the issue. It's the retarded way that enemies are immune to virtually everything except a single affinity. You have to spend hours building up your weapons' affinity levels before you can begin to scratch the surface of any given enemy's hit points.

Imagine playing a Final Fantasy game. The game has all the traditional elemental parameters like fire and ice and lightning. Now suppose that every enemy in the game is immune to all but one of these parameters, and has insane physical defense power to boot. Every random battle would require you to cycle through magical swords or waste MP playing roulette with elemental magic until you eventually find that one parameter that the enemy *isn't* immune to. This is Vagrant Story in a nutshell.

>> No.4279045

>>4279041
>You have to spend hours building up your weapons' affinity levels before you can begin to scratch the surface of any given enemy's hit points
Apparently my strategy of using only three weapons, for slashing, blunt and piercing, and just buffing myself and swapping gems around is factually wrong and I didn't play the game correctly, despite beating it easily.

>> No.4279051

>>4279041
You can kill any enemy with any weapon, even doing 1 damage. Here's a protip: if you miss or do 0 damage, don't chain. If you do even 1 damage, chain. The chain is based off the first attack damage so you will always do AT LEAST as much as the first attack.

Congratulations, no enemy is a threat as you will be able to do 4-5 seperate chains for each action the enemies get. Doing a 50 chain in each chain will net you several hundred points of damage to enemies before they get their first action, and thats assuming you are doing only 1 damage with each attack. If you can net a whopping 3 damage per hit you just killed every boss before they attacked you once.

Risk means nothing if it never comes up. And it never will if you just don't fear death and rush in to every encounter.

>> No.4279070

>>4279051
>>Congratulations, no enemy is a threat as you will be able to do 4-5 seperate chains for each action the enemies get

Yeah, and dispatching common foes will require an upward of 20+ minutes of chaining attacks for scratch damage.

>> No.4279072

>>4278846
I sure as hell thought the battle system was convoluted as hell. I remember every botton, EVERY SINGLE ONE, had a function.

>> No.4279076

>>4279051
Actually, n-th hit in the chain, if it gets through, does AT LEAST n points of damage - not counting any bonuses from the strike itself, from the first strike in the chain, etc. What I mean, is that the 50th hit in the chain WILL strike an enemy for AT LEAST 50 damage, if it connects.

Now add Raging Ache to that.

>> No.4279078

>>4279070
well yeah. My setup is taking into account you are "playing the game wrong" but can still make even tiny amounts of progress. If you just carry around 1 weapon of each of the 3 types (edged, blunt, piercing) and switch accordingly you will be doing 12-20 damage per hit easilly. That makes a single chain in the 20s enough to kill damage sponge enemies reliably.

Find the path of least resistance, but even the path with the most resistance is a feesible way to beat the game. The game is more a rhythm game than it is anything else. Learn how to chain past 13 hits (the reliability on swings goes down as variable times start after 13 hits) and you will destroy the game and its myriad of systems. Play at 100 risk, seriously. There is a chance* that you will be oneshot by enemies this way, but its an illusion that only comes up if you aren't playing fearlessly.
*chance of oneshot is virtually zero if you kill every enemy before they act, which you will do if you can chain.

>> No.4279081

>>4279045
>Apparently my strategy of using only three weapons, for slashing, blunt and piercing
Pretty sure you needed elemental gems for some bosses, and affinities like beast or dragon as well.

>> No.4279090

>>4279076
I found raging ache just added a reliable n+2 damage to each hit so it just climbs by 2 each hit in the chain.

>>4279081
"no." even dealing 1 damage will start to scale into higher numbers. A boss with 500 hp can be killed in a few chains (which you trigger virtually back to back) with no chance for the enemy to act. I havent even seen a single dragon type enemy attack in the 3 or 5 playthroughs I have done. I literally don't know what their attacks look like or how much damage they do. Its irrelevant when they don't act at all in the encounter. All enemies can be dispatched this way. There is no functional difference between a human enemy with a weapon and a boss enemy, beside size. And their bigger size just means they enter your zone of attack quicker, making the encounter even shorter and less threatening.

Only magick based enemies are iffy with this strat, but you learn magick ward minutes after encountering your first magick using enemy.

>> No.4279131

>>4279090

Keeping up chains for that long practically requires TASing skills. Are you sure you weren't emulating the game with liberal abuse of slowdown?

I don't doubt that strategy may work, but what honest to god player can be expected to pull it off? You're suggesting ludicrously chaining your way through literally every combat sequence in the game. And somehow I doubt this is how the game was "intended" to be played, so my point still stands about the retarded ways that affinities are balanced. Normally, you would be utilizing gems, Analyze and extensive affinity grinding to deal with bosses.

>> No.4279147

>in some foggy ass forest
>birds and lizards everywhere
>weapon is strong against birds but weak against lizards
>as I go through the forest my weapon keeps jumping between being good against one and bad to the other
>forest is a teleporting maze with every room having at least two of each
>would have to go through the menu and switch weapons every room to actually do decent damage to both
This is when I stop playing a game usually. Which doesn't happen often so I guess VS is just poorly made? Seems like if they made weapon switching easier it would have improved the game a lot. Either by having a quick menu or setting up different equip sets that you could switch with one button like in the later Castlevanias.

>> No.4279174

>>4279041
sounds like megaten

>> No.4279369

>>4279131
I'm playing on my PS2 hooked up to a CRT. People will tell you how to time the attacks and look for the exclaimation points to time it. I just went with Ashley's grunts when he swung. You just hit the button right as the audio ends. You'll hit your chains consistently into the 30s. It becomes variable after 13 hits but the "variable" is always the same.

It definitely isn't the way the game was intended to be played, in the classic sense. But I suspect it was not totally taken out as a valid way to play because of the risk/reward aspect. You go beyond the pale of the risk element, realizing its YOU the player that inserts the risk into the situation by doubting your own abilities.

Seriously, the best way to play the game is build your risk up to 100, don't give a shit about dropping it and just chain every encounter you find yourself in. The easiest way to chain is just alternating box and triangle. Don't even map a skill to circle, the unique animation makes the timing all sorts of fucky. With just box and triangle its just swinging back and forth, back and forth. There is a slightly longer animation on every other swing but its the same longer animation every time. Don't listen to people telling you not to use audio queues, its the real way to time your attacks.

>> No.4279383

>>4279369
I'll add that I play alot of roguelikes, while there is zero timing involved in those, they teach risk assessment and risk management as the singular mode of playing the game. The biggest threshold to cross in roguelikes is to redefine the threat assessment until it can't even really be described a threat. This takes time and effort to finally realize, but when you do you won't play games the same anymore.

It took me about 2 hours of messing with VS when I first started playing to realize how little of the immense set of game mechanics mattered at all. Elemental affinity doesn't matter at all once you realize that weapon TYPE trumps it in actual usability. Risk as a factor stops being a factor when you kill everything without it having an action negates the very concept of the "risk" of Risk. The first time an enemy jumps up on an elevated surface, then back down, and you've chain attacked it 5 separate times in that interrum you realize the enemies can't break their scripting. So you start going up high, just to drop down when they chase you, catching their AI in a loop.

The game is immensely breakable, in its design I think.

>> No.4279436

>>4279383
>is to redefine the threat assessment until it can't even really be described a threat
What do you mean?

>> No.4279456

>>4279436
The game tells you that raising your Risk too high will be your downfall as you will miss more and the damage you take will be scaled to lethality. This is a semi-true statement. True in what it presents, only semi so in its implication. If you kill the enemy before their first action, there was no risk of you dying to them attacking. This entirely negates the very CONCEPT of the Risk system. It stops being a factor in the likelihood of success. You remove it from the equation.

I'll take a modern game like Skyrim as another example. People who go bunny hopping on hills sometimes die from slipping and falling a terminal drop. This is a real threat in the game. The problem is they also have a spell that turns you ethereal, negating incoming and outgoing damage, including fall damage. So you just pop that spell when traipsing along mountains. You can still fall that terminal distance, but no longer take terminal damage (no damage in fact). The "threat" presented with ever present fall damage is effectively removed from you the player's threat assessment. It is no longer something you should factor into your actions, you've supplanted it with a proactive action of negating it.

In the roguelike Angband elemental damage becomes a real hurdle mid to late game. But you can get elemental resistance to 100% thru gear. You do this, you negate the entire hurdle presented to the player.

You stop being swept up in the current of the games systems and you become the current itself. You can (and probably will) die from time to time, but it always feels like you had a hand in it instead of it being you being subject to it.

It's manifest destiny in game form.

>> No.4279593

>>4279456
anon please just shut the fuck up and go back to work

>> No.4279598

>>4279369
>Don't listen to people telling you not to use audio queues, its the real way to time your attacks.
this is wrong, the sound will mislead you unless you're a robot who memorizes the offsets

>> No.4279631

>>4279593
Its saturday anon.

>> No.4279635

>>4279631
lol btfo

>> No.4279656

>>4279456

Its interesting all your examples are RPGs. RPGs are the most stats based, mechanistic, and "gamey" form of game design, to the point there's literally no player skill involved except item equips.

>> No.4279673

>>4279656
You can easily apply them to all sorts of games. Puzzle games are too easy. If the "clue" negates a possible answer it does your brainwork for you.
In action games you stay out of range of melee attackers, and in close for ranged enemies. It seems basic but you are still doing your threat assessment and altering your plans to get to your win state. Sports games like Madden you do what they do in real life, abuse the clock lategame. Abusing the clock denies your opponent from taking their plan into action or forcing them to adapt to you.
Driving games like Gran Turismo its all about your tire selection since most races are in a range of PP so you can't outright abuse it. You winning usually comes down to how efficient you can handle a turn, not your topspeed on straights, so you push yourself to the limit on how fast you can go in then out.
Shooters are rife with this. your setup is entirely designed so you can kill without being killed. Laying suppressing fire with extended mags over going akimbo is a valid target if your enemy tries to bottleneck you.
Adventure game tells you there is a murky pond with bones around it, you avoid it instead of just wading into it.

All games allow for you the player to manipulate the variables, even RNG itself, so you can win or make winning more likely. You are right that RPGs boil the choices down to pure maths and leaves very little up for interpretation. Vagrant Story is more like a roguelike than it is like a normal RPG. The entire game is rife with systems just waiting to be exploited. And the framework of the game allows the player to capitalize on it without it being underhanded or cheating.

If it doesn't work, don't do it. If it does, do it. Its as simple as that.

>> No.4279701

>>4279041
That sounds like Crystalis but with grinding.

>> No.4279719

>>4279041
this is semi true. it would be completely true if you were also always perma-hasted and every enemy was always perma-slowed. You can act a good 10 times for every 1 of the enemies. The menu hopping does get tiring pretty quick though.

>> No.4279759

>>4279673
most races are in a range of peepee?

>> No.4280795

>>4279051
This. Retarded 11-year-old me just rushed through the game using the strongest 1H sword I could get my hands on via crafting, then just swapped gems and cast elemental affinity spells and buffs/debuffs as appropriate. I didn't even take into account type affinity (which would've been way more efficient). Hell, I didn't even know about how to cheese bosses using Raging Ache or Phantom Pain until my 4th playthrough.

>>4279041
The Analyze spell exists for a reason.

>> No.4281892 [DELETED] 

yolo strats are legit, but chain evasion is a thing, so sometimes the high-risk chain method will take you several times longer than basic low-risk attacks (with type/gem/buff-fusion/debuff-guard strats for bosses).

>>4279081
not him but literally the next thing written was
>and just buffing myself and swapping gems around
but even then you usually don't -need- gems because fusion adds at least 60 to affinity.

>> No.4281903

yolo strats are legit, but chain evasion is a thing, so sometimes the high-risk chain method will take you several times longer than basic low-risk attacks (with type/gem/buff-fusion/debuff-guard strats for bosses).

>>4279081
not him but literally the next thing written was
>and just buffing myself and swapping gems around
but even then you usually don't -need- gems because fusion adds at least 50 to affinity.