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SA2's Gaming Blog Topic

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Marie Rose
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« Reply #225 on: 02 November, 2014, 03:04:41 am »



So I decided to start playing the first game a while ago, first time too, I most likely won’t make updates on it, just briefly mentioning it. When I did start sadly I wasn’t enjoying it very much…for the first 7 hours. Reason being that the early game was hard as fuck, holy shit. This baffled me, whenever I heard people rave about the game, no-one would ever mention that the early game could be around as harsh as Dark Souls if you went into that expecting a typical hack & slash game. You start out with only around 1000 HP for your characters & a lot of stuff hits you for around 200-300 HP, you don’t have much to quickly heal you because Raine doesn’t have good support spells yet, and gels cost too much because the enemies give you pennies for the first ¼ of the game. I spent far more time sleeping at the inn than buying a gel that would let me take 2 more hits at most. I was straight up running from certain enemy encounters & bosses felt so frustrating. Kinda takes the fun out of the game when the boss is killing your team almost as fast as you can revive them so you’re spending more time in menus trying to organize things & barely holding on than actually fighting the boss. All this just confused me, how it just felt so hard to actually progress. I had to wonder what the hell I was doing wrong because I’d never had so much trouble adjusting to a Tales game’s default difficulty. Found out this version was a port of the PS2 copy which received some tweaks to make the game harder by basically buffing enemies. Wonderful, it wasn’t like I considered Tales bosses to be a little overpowered already.

I mean, it’s hard enough having to put up with the plain stupid ally A.I. (though bad ally A.I. is a Tales series tradition at this point), especially when they do shit I told them not to. Genis had a big tendency to be a fucking moron & run right up to melee the boss even though he still has enough MP for spells & I specifically told him up & stay in the back. Raine has stupidly tried to attack or heal near the boss too. Turning up the difficulty on Tales games usually just involves deciding how much work you wanna do, since after a certain point your team will be dying like flies & you’ll regularly be soloing. The only character in a Tales game I fully recall actually having really good A.I. is Sophie in Graces. Regularly backed me up or drew aggro if I needed it, tended not to bunch up right next to me on a boss so it doesn’t hit us both, actually knew how to dodge etc. I normally didn’t have to worry about her fighting a different enemy on the field & getting knocked out within 10 seconds. Seeing as she was a brawler, obviously I’d notice her playstyle more (has nothing to do with her looking like a little girl), but still, I could rely on her on anything below Evil difficulty. There was also one boss where I didn’t bother to revive anyone but Sophie & I held out with her as backup for several minutes for a boss I was underleveled against.

Symphonia is pretty vague on some other things too as far as I can remember, like how using certain EX gems will add bonus effects to a character, and that using certain moves during a unison attack will trigger an extra move once its over. Feels even more in the vain of Dark Souls where bothering to look this shit up greatly helps to get accustomed to the game. Though honestly the biggest factor with the difficulty is as I said earlier, early on they try to give you as little money as possible while some enemies just do ridiculous damage which is hard to cover since gels & life bottles cost too much to regularly store up on them. Wasn’t till I grinded for like an hour to store up money, gear up everyone &  looking up those tips mentioned above while roaming around this water temple that things finally went smoothly & I wasn’t dreading every boss fight. Especially since the combat is as basic as can be. You get a few hits in, then block & let the enemy attack. Don’t you dare attack during their turn otherwise you eat a combo, it’s pretty much turn-based. Apparently it's rude to interrupt. If your back is exposed to the enemy, you can’t quickly turn to face them either, I just eat a critical. I’m too used to later Tales games that focused far more on being like DMC where you keep that combo going as long as possible, and you got rewarded for dodging their swings. Trying to backstep an attack is likely to get me hit anyway, I’m better off just blocking. Once Zelos came along & and I started whoring him out like a pimp, having a full stock of restoration items was no issue & I can save all my money for stocking up completely on gear.

So I’m enjoying the game a lot, but it took a long while to get there due to how unforgiving the early game came be. It somehow gets easier as you progress through the game. 
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~SA2
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