Road To Paradise - The Staircase

I suppose I'll quiet my unanswered clarion call for more alpha testers at this point. As you might have noticed I posted a few...dozen?...screenshots, with more coming on Wednesday. Many of them are hosted on this page so I can show off some of the game's many features.

Let's start off simple: STEALING.

As a seasoned CIA operative, one of the skills Simmons has available to him right off the bat is called "Lift", allowing him to pick pockets. Unlike in many other RPGs (right now that glare is directed in the general direction of FFVII, but that's just because that's the one I'm playing now) stealing actually succeeds far more often than it fails. Items that can be stolen range from useful to powerful (with the exception of gold, a stealable item from only one enemy; team Earth has not figured out how to make use of gold yet). Stealing is a crucial strategy to stock up on potions which are more effective than the gear you brought from earth, or flat-out fulfill functions it does not (like restoring mana), and snag magical equipment early on.

Simmons receives a +25% to his steal rate when he has used Stealth on himself.


Reflect is a very nice thing to have.

The next major feature I'd like to tout is Watanabe's ANALYZER.




Well, she's probably explained it more succinctly than I could. Here are some shots of it in action, none of which are super exciting, largely because it seems that when hitting print screen I have to choose between screencapping the animation playing or the pop-up effect, and I generally choose the latter. I plan on figuring out one of those gif maker things one of these days.


Here she has scanned default-Izuno, and therefore really has him dialed in. She can see all of his stats, elemental resistances, and his susceptibility to most status effects. (Incidentally, Izuno's Dexterity is only that crazy high because of the Haste that Teos, not pictured because grenade launcher, cast on him.)


Watanabe can learn some very powerful skills by using Analyze on the right enemies. There are two categories of skills she can pick up using analyze, Sorcery, and Enemy Skill, but that distinction won't matter much until later episodes, where Sorcery will become an option for several characters but Enemy Skills will be unique among PCs to her.


And here you can see her in action using one of those powerful enemy skills.

Depending on how many enemy skills you harvest, which ones, and how fast (it is possible to get several skills from a single foe) Watanabe can quickly go from being your weakest party member when you go down the staircase to your strongest half an hour later.

FEATURES DISCUSSED NEXT TIME: Identifying unfamiliar items, being unfamiliar with everything in general (okay, not a feature, more of a theme), and end-of-episode report cards: Research Points & Ordnance Points.