Since I started school two months ago, progress on this game has dropped to a pathetically slow pace. I had wanted to get the prologue out before I started, but that just wasn't going to happen. I've been working on this in what little spare time I have nowadays, but don't expect rapid updates anymore.

Good news, though: I'm about 90% done with the prologue! All I have to do is write out a cutscene, then the boss fight, then the ending cutscene, and then the core of the prologue is complete! Then all I have to do is add more NPCs, make some tweaks to the battles, run some bug tests, update the character art, pick out some music, edit the dialogue, run through the prologue myself again... tweak the equipment again... Get eviscerated by beta testers...

*sigh*

Anyway, while I don't want to commit to a hard date yet, I think I'll have the prologue ready for public consumption sometime soon. One thing I can say with certainty is that it will be out this month. I'm really sorry to keep you waiting for the prologue. Believe me: I did not expect it to take as long as it has.

But enough whining. No one wants to read my whining. Although it's fun to whine.


While there are no official classes in PotF, a character's equipment loadout is designed to be something akin to a subclass. Adding in an official class changing system would be a bit too rigid, so instead, players will be given a healthy amount of weapons, armors, and relics, and it'll be up to them to pick and choose who gets what given each character's stats and innate abilities.

Equipment has three major functions: Altering stats, applying bonus effects, and enables Drives if said equipment is a weapon or offhand item. Some gear leans more towards one category than the others, but that's the general idea.

Let's use Amalie as our test subject since she's the most standard party member in the prologue. (Aeyr doesn't have his power yet and Mia breaks the normal routine in character building) Amalie, unaltered by any equipment, should play similarly to a Final Fantasy Paladin. At the start, she comes with a mix of aggro moves and state restoration abilities. This is her starting equipment loadout:



Here's the catch: She is a Manna, and Manna are typically weaker than a standard human. This means that her Attack and Guard stats will be below average compared to others at her level. After you gain a healthy amount of equipment, you'll have a number of options to get around this problem. Here are a few examples:

1: Turn her into a Sentinel by boosting her defense.



So we've equipped her with medium armor and swapped her shield to a heavier one. The Helmet prevents Head Injuries, so she'll always be able to use her aggro and defense abilities. The Drives that come with the shield enables her to stagger the enemy, leaving them open to further damage, and go into a counter stance, which prevents her from taking any more actions that turn, but nearly guarantees a counter if physically attacked. Plus, her Guard stat has jumped up, so now she won't have to worry about using too many abilities to leave her with less SP and consequentially, more open to damage.

However, note the drop in max SP. There's much less flexibility in what she can do in combat. She can't attack or use her abilities as often as she could otherwise. This is because she's been loaded down with medium class armor, which takes off a percentage of your max SP.

So the result is Amalie becomes more of a hands off character than she was originally. Less SP and actions to perform, but a more solid Guard stat that can't drop no matter how low your SP goes. If you prefer a more offensive, high risk/high reward style approach, you can...

2: Turn her into a Duelist by boosting her counter attack rate.



This loadout makes Amalie much lighter on her feet than the other one. The Rally Drive she gets from the sabre enables one ally to perform a critical attack on their next action. Her Target Shield and Guerilla Boots combine to give her a constant 30% counter attack rate, which nullifies damage to Amalie and hitting the enemy for a boosted damage value unaffected by their SP.

To tweak it further, you could swap that Sabre with the Swordbreaker, losing a Drive and a bonus to her Magic stat, but boosting your counter rate even further, or Ruhiel, which inflicts Bleed (losing HP every turn) on a target. However, Amalie has one of very rare magic attacks of all the party members have. And if you're fighting a crowd of enemies with high SP, you'll lose the chance to do some preemptive damage.
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Hopefully it's more clear now how much more of a difference equipment makes than levels. This was actually more detail than I had intended (why bother playing the game when I'm pretty much talking about it all right now?), and so now I'm going to go into my little hole and get back to work on finishing this prologue. Next time you hear from me, it'll be announcing that it's out and ready for public consumption!