Sykar
Arcane
Sion is my favorite bro!
-
Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.
"This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.
Incline Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children - isometric tactical Korean SRPG
- Thread starter hexer
- Start date
-
- Tags
- jrpg rpg tactical tactical jrpg
Nutmeg
Arcane
For an experienced SRPG player, the game is very easy on cruel without any modifiers and without playing challenge mode. I am now playing always challenge mode + cruel + high risk high reward + limits to growth + mind body unity + paranoid + fetter of the past and it's much better. Also self imposed challenge condition of never repeating missions and playing them as soon as they're available.
Strongly recommend these settings to anyone who has played e.g. Fire Emblems for S ranks before.
Tse Tse Fly
Savant
- Joined
- Dec 26, 2017
- Messages
- 710
Itching to restart it from the beginning (156 hours already logged in the current playthrough notwithstanding) since I've spoiled like 65% of the game for myself because of the joke difficulty thanks to overlevelling
Yeah the story was a surprise for me. It took a while to get into first time round because it's told so non-linearly, and I was more into the mastery system and the tactical gameplay; but on my recent, second playthrough I really concentrated on the story and it was all making more sense. It's actually quite good as far as games go, and has the full gamut of emotional ups and downs.
You've got a huge amount of fun ahead of you
Dadd
Self-Ejected
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2022
- Messages
- 2,727
Sykar
Arcane
Do you play DDO hardcore like that too?
Reinhardt
Arcane
- Joined
- Sep 4, 2015
- Messages
- 31,996
of course. with my current internet it doesn't change much.
- Joined
- Sep 25, 2012
- Messages
- 29,855
Bitch please, I'm playing this without input or output devices. Just turning on the CPU and bashing it until I win.
Nutmeg
Arcane
It's getting easy again even with all the difficulty modifiers. Here's my level 15 bloodwalker build for Sion, which has lowered the difficulty of this part of the game tremendously (around the end of chapter 2).
Final resistance in particular synergizes very well with bloodwalker. Will be giving him defensive choice level 17, just to make him even more tanky.
Final resistance in particular synergizes very well with bloodwalker. Will be giving him defensive choice level 17, just to make him even more tanky.
It's getting easy again even with all the difficulty modifiers. Here's my level 15 bloodwalker build for Sion, which has lowered the difficulty of this part of the game tremendously (around the end of chapter 2).
Final resistance in particular synergizes very well with bloodwalker. Will be giving him defensive choice level 17, just to make him even more tanky.
It'll get harder again as you meet new mob types. And wait till you try the Battle Mage sub-class, once you've ranked the sub-class up and gotten all its sub-class masteries it's like a super-tank - plus not quite as much damage as Black Mage, but good enough.
The Common masteries and mastery sets are pretty good up to about your level, but you'll want to start filling in with some of the Elementalist and specialized Black Mage and Battle Mage masteries and sets soon (the Battle Mage sets are the most synergistic in the game, basically you just slot all Battle Mage specialties you get, plus some of the Elementalist, and you more or less can't go wrong, a whole slew of sets just automagically pop together, though lots of refinements in various directions are still possible). Irene also has a Battle Mage sub-class that works similarly, but is more based around roving/skirmishing than tanking for the team, which Sion eventually does superbly.
As the game progresses, you will find that you adjust your builds slowly as you go - e.g. Albus starts off as kind of your main tank, but he eventually becomes an amazing skirmisher/assassin in either of his sub-classes (though they play very differently).
The Lightning sp masteries and sets for Sion are great too (note what his main Lightning sp mastery does up top left and build in the Lightning masteries around that to start with), but they really only go with the Black Mage to any great extent, the Battle Mage doesn't have much use for them. Generally the sp masteries for all the characters (Lightning, Fire, Wind, etc.) seem unimportant at first, but they start to work their way into builds eventually.
Also note that once you've fully unlocked both sub-classes for a character, the abilities that were formerly specialized unlocks towards the end of levelling up the sub-classes become available to either class, and most builds mix and match abilities from both sub-classes in both builds.
Sykar
Arcane
Yeah, the difficulty flutuates and is not a steady curve. More like a frequency alternating between going well and get your skull caved in.
Wow the game suddenly got much more difficult when the white tiger started showing up. Good thing at least, it was too easy before.
Sykar
Arcane
Oh that is just the first spike. More to come.
Now i am afraid to do the 4th violent case
Rafidur
Learned
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2019
- Messages
- 411
There's a violent case where you face all of their bosses at once in a giant fuckpile. Very tough at appropriate levels.
My current build is so focused on offense because the previous enemies barely hits any damage, so i am struggling when the snipers started coming and hits hard. Might need to make new mastery board. level 27 ish rn.
Albus focus on countering, with retaliation and bleeding.
Sion is a a aoe magic damage dealer
Irene is a speedy counter with the distance mastery set for rescuing/looting chests.
Anne is all purpose support/damage dealer witch since her attacks are surprisingly good.
Heixing is a glass canon AOE sweeper.
Albus focus on countering, with retaliation and bleeding.
Sion is a a aoe magic damage dealer
Irene is a speedy counter with the distance mastery set for rescuing/looting chests.
Anne is all purpose support/damage dealer witch since her attacks are surprisingly good.
Heixing is a glass canon AOE sweeper.
Nutmeg
Arcane
Don't really know how snipers work quite yet but I just played "Strength competition" and they posed very little threat. In fact, I'd say they made the mission easier. They need 2 turns to shoot, and this is disruptable.
Last edited:
Sykar
Arcane
Oh you will have a lot of fun with them later, especially the leaders.
Rephyrnomicon
Novice
- Joined
- May 19, 2022
- Messages
- 48
This is on sale on steam until the 19th. Just picked it up. Hoping it lives up to the hype!
Nutmeg
Arcane
Played through some pretty retarded story missions jn ngl. Such as rescue all the civilians, but you can do it in 4 moves, or defeat all the animals in the park, but white tiger gang defeats all of them for you, and finally, fight mobs, but they're tiny and confined to walled spaces where they can't alert anyone. Well at least that last one had a cool twist with the berserk robot.
Also did a couple of violent cases. Now those were great. Having an active Javert quest adds a good twist, as he'll alert 2 or 3 mobs when you get close so you have to fight a fat wave of mooks. Didn't manage to catch him in the last one.
Also did a couple of violent cases. Now those were great. Having an active Javert quest adds a good twist, as he'll alert 2 or 3 mobs when you get close so you have to fight a fat wave of mooks. Didn't manage to catch him in the last one.
Last edited:
Nutmeg
Arcane
I've probably sunk over 100 hours into this game at this point and am gonna take a break. I'll write up my full thoughts when I finish the game - right now I'm up to S29, so about 60% through the non-DLC content. For now, a smaller review in the form of pros and cons.
Pros:
Even with the incredible set of tools at disposal, at the highest difficulty with all extra difficulty modifiers turned on, I have not managed to break the game outright (although for certain, mostly story, missions, my builds happened to be very OP) on a blind play through. In fact, a few missions, especially early on, but later also the violent cases, I needed to replay around 5 times before coming up with a winning strategy.
The character building system through mastery boards, classes and abilities goes well beyond just "numbers go up" (although, sadly, many are just "numbers go up", although the fundamentals of economization here aren't broken when playing with limits to growth), and actually greatly affect your tactical options in a meaningful way, at least when playing on the greatest possible difficulty (not so much below).
A very high decision to (single character, the game works like FFT) turn ratio i.e. good fundamental moment to moment tactical play, at least during the missions where your builds alone don't carry you across the line (there is a primitive satisfaction in those too, that doesn't wear thin because at least in my experience, I only achieved it a few times).
The writing is OK, and you can skip through everything anyway. I even got used to some of the initially very confusing explanatory text and now it just kind of makes sense to me? Did it break my brain? I don't know.
Cons
The art is very amateur from a purely technical stand point (as I have some knowledge of visual art, I can also tell the artists' (I suspect there's been a few artists involved, one is quite good, the others are quite bad) lack of ability is influencing their designs), and the art direction, while not entirely soulless, is sophist, at least to my tastes.
I find all the monster hunting stuff to be particularly distasteful, mobage, MMO cringe.
With the exception of maybe one or two tracks, the music has 0 personality. It's not something I'd listen to outside of playing the game.
The extremely tedious Diablo (or other Western ARPG or MMO) style loot system. You'd think if you played it with the challenge run rules I play with (never replay missions once you beat them, play new missions as soon as you get them from lowest level to highest, so as not to over level), it wouldn't get in the way. But it does. Oh it does.
In fact this last one is my greatest complaint, and it betrays the main problem with the game design overall which is that while the game presents a solid non deterministic tactics engine, and a good character building system to go along with it (i.e. nailing the fundamentals of an SRPG) it is sprayed with MMO mobage skinner box fecal matter (loot boxes, "drop rates", obvious affordances to "farming" and "hunting", among other garbage) and then painted over with a few well thought out difficulty options (although you still need to self impose a no replaying missions restriction, as there is no such modifier (pussy devs didn't want to upset 100% losers, I guess)) namely "limits to growth", and surprisingly all the HP bloat in challenge mode, cruel and high risk high reward being a good thing for once (as it averages out the RNG hell, making it so risk mitigation through modifying various probabilities with your builds is beyond simple gambling due to the number of dice rolls you'll be doing).
Conclusion
If you like tight, clean, thoughtful design, avoid. Or, actually, don't, because really, just a little tolerance goes a long way. For as horrible as the "outer loop" of the game design is, the core is quite good, and only a few self imposed restrictions are necessary on top of all the ones the devs gave you options for. In fact, even less than in some more tightly designed games.
Pros:
Even with the incredible set of tools at disposal, at the highest difficulty with all extra difficulty modifiers turned on, I have not managed to break the game outright (although for certain, mostly story, missions, my builds happened to be very OP) on a blind play through. In fact, a few missions, especially early on, but later also the violent cases, I needed to replay around 5 times before coming up with a winning strategy.
The character building system through mastery boards, classes and abilities goes well beyond just "numbers go up" (although, sadly, many are just "numbers go up", although the fundamentals of economization here aren't broken when playing with limits to growth), and actually greatly affect your tactical options in a meaningful way, at least when playing on the greatest possible difficulty (not so much below).
A very high decision to (single character, the game works like FFT) turn ratio i.e. good fundamental moment to moment tactical play, at least during the missions where your builds alone don't carry you across the line (there is a primitive satisfaction in those too, that doesn't wear thin because at least in my experience, I only achieved it a few times).
The writing is OK, and you can skip through everything anyway. I even got used to some of the initially very confusing explanatory text and now it just kind of makes sense to me? Did it break my brain? I don't know.
Cons
The art is very amateur from a purely technical stand point (as I have some knowledge of visual art, I can also tell the artists' (I suspect there's been a few artists involved, one is quite good, the others are quite bad) lack of ability is influencing their designs), and the art direction, while not entirely soulless, is sophist, at least to my tastes.
I find all the monster hunting stuff to be particularly distasteful, mobage, MMO cringe.
With the exception of maybe one or two tracks, the music has 0 personality. It's not something I'd listen to outside of playing the game.
The extremely tedious Diablo (or other Western ARPG or MMO) style loot system. You'd think if you played it with the challenge run rules I play with (never replay missions once you beat them, play new missions as soon as you get them from lowest level to highest, so as not to over level), it wouldn't get in the way. But it does. Oh it does.
In fact this last one is my greatest complaint, and it betrays the main problem with the game design overall which is that while the game presents a solid non deterministic tactics engine, and a good character building system to go along with it (i.e. nailing the fundamentals of an SRPG) it is sprayed with MMO mobage skinner box fecal matter (loot boxes, "drop rates", obvious affordances to "farming" and "hunting", among other garbage) and then painted over with a few well thought out difficulty options (although you still need to self impose a no replaying missions restriction, as there is no such modifier (pussy devs didn't want to upset 100% losers, I guess)) namely "limits to growth", and surprisingly all the HP bloat in challenge mode, cruel and high risk high reward being a good thing for once (as it averages out the RNG hell, making it so risk mitigation through modifying various probabilities with your builds is beyond simple gambling due to the number of dice rolls you'll be doing).
Conclusion
If you like tight, clean, thoughtful design, avoid. Or, actually, don't, because really, just a little tolerance goes a long way. For as horrible as the "outer loop" of the game design is, the core is quite good, and only a few self imposed restrictions are necessary on top of all the ones the devs gave you options for. In fact, even less than in some more tightly designed games.
As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.