SHADOWTEXT'S PROFILE

author=harmonic link=topic=1182.msg17686#msg17686 date=1211662315

author=Shadowtext link=topic=1182.msg17677#msg17677 date=1211658490
I rather enjoyed Path of Radiance, and played around a bit with the game boy iterations, but still haven't picked up Radiant Dawn. I keep meaning to, though. Is the challenge rating really a lot higher than usual Fire Emblem? Because Fire Emblem games are generally on the high end of the difficulty scale anyway. I'm fond of challenge, but with how unforgiving Fire Emblem is normally, I'm a bit nervous about it being much worse than usual.

Fire Emblem 5: Thracia 776 for the SNES is still harder than Radiant Dawn.

But yes, Radiant Dawn is really difficult, in a good way. Makes you use all resources available, including your brain. God for-fucking-bid we use our brains once in a while!

If you thought Path of Radiance was difficult... :-X

It's not so much that it's difficult to *beat*. It's that I am obsessive compulsive enough to find the permenant loss of any unit unacceptable. Which means I had to repeat a handful of maps quite a few times. The one with the ravens and all the ballista, for example...

author=brandonabley link=topic=1170.msg17574#msg17574 date=1211583313

author=kentona link=topic=1170.msg17573#msg17573 date=1211582389
In Saskatchewan, there is an entire Catholic school division, publicly funded through the provincial government.

Ugh I hope that there are Buddhist schools and Islam schools and Satanist schools and, most importantly, athiest schools - all paid for by the Canadian government.

T_T No love for the Dischordian Semi-wiccan Subgenii Neopagans?

Speaking of bosses with multiple "targets" to it, like the Black Tyrano fight (I don't immediately recall if that was one of the battles that I'm about to refer to, though...), I'm suddenly realizing that they also show a neat little thing I like about Chrono Trigger that I only occasionally see in other games.

Most specifically, I mean the bosses (and a few regular enemies) where there are multiple targets or foes, who smack you down hard for using attacks that hit all enemies. I can't remember all of the ones that did this, but I know Son of Sun did, and I'm pretty sure Dalton's twin golems did, and I think Giga Giygas did as well. Often when hit with more than one opponent, the obvious tactic is to hit everybody with one of the target-all attacks, like the Level 2 magic. But these monsters have pretty strong counterattacks when you use this tactic, and hammer you for it. They don't hit so hard that you lose the battle for attacking them (since that would be punishing the player for doing something that he's been rewarding for doing the whole game to that point, which is Evil Bastard Game Design), but enough so that it's shown to be a pretty bad tactic for this particular fight.

These same bosses are also ones where you have to destroy all of them at once, or else you have to destroy one or two to make the barrier go down on the "core" baddie.

These fights always mixed things up a bit, because generally your strongest specials are going to be the ones that hit everyone. So instead of spamming Ice 2's and Luminaires, you're going to end up using a couple of the double or triple techniques that pack the power of the multi-hitters into single-enemy attacks, like fan-favorite X Strike and personal-favorite Arc Impulse.

There are a handful of times that other games do this, but I seem to recall it happening more often in Chrono Trigger. I hadn't really thought about it before, but there's a lot of creative use of enemy teamwork in Chrono Trigger that really mixes things up a bit.

author=Dudesoft link=topic=438.msg17248#msg17248 date=1211317463
The new artist is really dragging down the series. I enjoyed Amano style, and the classic fantasy genre they drew on. They more or less dropped the Job Class idea, and went with anorexic dbz anime. FF12 was a saving grace of late, so we'll see where Gunblade chick of FF13 takes the series.
It's not over yet.

I don't quite get why people hold up Amano as a bastion of good character design, to be honest. I mean his work is certainly pretty, but as raw character design it's really flat. The characters are more or less interchangeable and have nothing that really stands out about most of them. The art directors for the games have to basically ignore a lot of the stuff Amano chooses to go for, which is why the sprites for the games almost never look like the characters in Amano's sketches.

He's a great artist, but I think Nomura's a much better character designer, if only in the sense that when he designs characters, his central goal appears to be to make characters that are recognizeable to a player even when they're shrunk down to sprite or in-game (that is to say, not cutscenes) model size.

Also, "anorexic dbz anime" is a really bad description for the path Final Fantasy went that strikes me as more or less designed to piss off anime AND Final Fantasy fans just for the sake of pissing them off. It's an oxymoron, too, since one of the signature visual elements of DBZ is how much attention is given to beefy muscle-men. It does add further evidence to my believe that the dislike of Nomura has as much to do with the divide on the internet between those who enjoy anime and those who don't as it does with any honest criticism of his work.

author=kentona link=topic=438.msg17181#msg17181 date=1211293598
The next game they should remake is a NEW game.

Well, they just made the World Ends With You. I assume if you support them focusing on new games (and new IPs for that matter) instead of remakes, you bought a copy to tell them so, right?