I had indicated I wouldn’t do a post this week, but I like reading these later for my own memories at least, so I’ll do a brief one. Last time I had gotten through mission 3, now I am halfway through 8 — there are 13 missions plus I think an endgame section and an optional dungeon, so I still have quite a ways to go.

Mission 4 is mostly a big dungeon with a boss fight, but there’s also an interesting battle where we have to make two sides think they are fighting each other and then retreat before Julian can spot us. Most of the event battles in this game have more to do than just “kill all enemies,” unless you ignore the vacation days.

Battle 19 is a common structure that has shown up in a lot of the battles — you have to save NPCs while beating the enemies. Sometimes saving the NPCs is just for getting extra vacation days. I use a general strategy for these of Magic Arrowing any spellcasters then moving forward and using area effect spells. One (or sometimes two) characters are on support duty, casting Protect on the NPCs and then holding Healing spells until the enemies attack. So far this strategy has worked on all the NPC battles.

Mission 5 has a few battles with these Yung enemies. The one below is tricky; actually in this one you do not have to save the villager that’s outside already because he dies anyway after the battle for a story event. But I didn’t know that so I saved him anyway. Fireball.

Mission 6 is quite short, just one protect fight.

Mission 7 is longer. First we escort a supply train through monsters.

Then we engage in several battles along with the army (protecting them, of course), and finally a dungeon with a bunch of Yung fights.

I’m halfway through mission 8 — so far the hardest fight in that section is actually an optional battle (which helps recruit Julian). It’s yet another “with the army” battle where you have to protect a bunch of people. I had two people on support duty for most of this fight (Misha and Luise).

And that’s where I am. If I actually decide to do the arena fights and optional dungeons I have a feeling I won’t be done next week, so it will either be a post like this or maybe I will play the next Famicom game.

I’m making somewhat slow progress on this but I am moving forward. I think this will be the last post until I finish the game, which probably will not be this coming weekend but the weekend after that.

One element of the system I forgot to mention last time is the skill learning system. When you level up, you earn skill points — this starts out at 1 per level but increases as you gain more levels.

The circles there are how many points you need. So at lower levels when you are only getting 1 point per level it will be easier to get the small things. The things you can learn include spells/skills, and passive abilities like increasing critical hit rate, stealing things, or quickening spellcasting time. I think the difficulty of this game changes a lot depending on how efficiently you spend these points.

Last time I was in the middle of the quest to save Sandra by giving her a medicine from the Featherians. This whole sequence is mostly story and exploration; the main remaining battle is the tournament in the main capital which you have to fight with just the main character and Luisa. The main walkthrough on gamefaqs makes it seem like you really have to be prepared for this but it’s not quite as crucial as that — you have to win six battles, but you get a fair amount of money and XP for clearing each one, and after each one you can save and rest, buy things, and even leave the capital to fight random battles. So it’s not like you will get stuck if you end up here with an inadequate party.

After winning the tournament, we can continue this section of the game, going through a lot more story sequences until the next dungeon, where we save the Featherian queen. The main event battle here is a race against time to solve a door puzzle while endless enemies come at you, although you can destroy the generators they are coming out of.

This finally finishes the first major section of the game, and puts the Featharian story aside for the time being — now the game switches modes a bit. We become operatives for the kingdom and are given missions to complete (apparently 12 total followed by the endgame). After each mission, depending on certain factors during the mission, you will get 1-3 “vacation” days where you can go around to various places and talk to your party members.

In one sense this is a rather frustrating system because each character has a sequence of events that you can complete to ultimately see that character’s ending, but there is no way to tell where these events will be. (I may be wrong about this endings thing, I haven’t checked the later parts of the walkthrough so I’m not completely certain that seeing all a character’s events are necessary).

You choose where to go to spend the day, and then talk to your characters, but you only get a limited number of chances to do this before the day ends. A character might have one of their specific events, but even if they don’t, they just say a few lines and that wastes your time. So there is a fair amount of randomness involved in this.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell, nothing you do in these vacation sequences affects the main gameplay — that is, you don’t get any items or hidden skills or anything like that. So if you end up wasting all your time and not finding many events, it won’t affect the main story or your ability to do any of the battles.

I’ve done the first three missions so far — the storyline now has switched to a war between your kingdom and the neighboring one. As usually, most of the battles involve more than just killing all the enemies. In battle 9 you have to protect the princess, battle 10 collect an item (although it’s easier just to beat all the enemies), and battle 11 stop thieves from leaving the screen. The only battle in this section I found particularly tricky was battle 14 in mission 3.

In this mission you are trying to save the princess from a carriage that is taking her to a prison. You hide behind a rock until you think it’s the right time to move out, then you have three successive goals — collapse the left bridge so the carriage can’t cross the chasm, collapse the right bridge so the soldiers can’t escape with the princess, and then defeat the remaining enemies (without the princess being killed).

You lose if the carriage crosses the left bridge; it’s hard to judge when to jump out. Partly it’s challenging to figure out exactly where you have to move to drop the bridge, and the enemies will immediately block you from doing it. I made a save state right before the fight started just so I wouldn’t have to go through all the dialogue again, and it took me about 10-12 tries to get it right. Then you have to make sure someone is close enough on the right side to take out the bridge, but I was able to do that on my first try.

Battle 15 is slightly challenging if you want to prevent the NPCs from dying so that you can get the maximum vacation days, but spamming Magic Arrow is sufficient.

Anyway that’s the end of mission 3. Whether I make a post next week depends on whether I think I have enough to write about — otherwise I’ll skip that week and just do a wrapup the following week (hopefully 2 more weeks will be enough!!)

Growlanser (グローランサー), released 11/25/1999, developed by Career Soft, published by Atlus

After Langrisser V, the developer Career Soft moved on to a new series, Growlanser. I’m not sure exactly what was going on behind the scenes. The Growlanser series eventually had 6 games (plus some remakes). I’ve seen it described as a spiritual successor to Langrisser, but it’s pretty different — the art is done by the same person and the developers are the same, but the gameplay is very different.

This time rather than a straight SRPG, the game is much closer to a regular RPG with strategy like battles. The battles are done in real time, with an action system that is similar to the Bounty Sword games. There are fixed encounters (both boss and “story” battles), but you can also encounter monsters on the map that you can fight. You can sometimes avoid these encounters by walking around the enemies.

The game is heavy on story, with a lot of voiced dialogue scenes. You will spend most of your time (if you know Japanese) reading/listening to the dialogue, at least in the early part of the game. Fortunately the game didn’t try to use the bad-looking 3D/polygon graphics that too many games relied on.

The main character is “Player” — you can choose the name but as all the dialogue is voiced it never gets spoken. He has been brought up in the house of Sandra, imperial magician, along with her daughter Ruise. He’s never been outside his whole life but now he sets out along with a homonculous created by Sandra. This homonculous (Tippi) seems to mostly be a way to have a silent protagonist but still reactions from the protagonist side.

In the first part you wander around town, ostensibly to shop for equipment but this is actually a way to decide your character’s growth rates. To get the best rates you have to be very quick and do a lot of subquests in the right way. This is a strange system for deciding your character growth — you can repeat the sequence as many times as you want but I’m still not sure I like it. I used a walkthrough to figure out where the events were, and ended up with a good growth rate:

I don’t know how hard the game is as a whole, maybe it’s not necessary to do this really well.

The main character repeatedly has dreams where he seems to inhabit the bodies of other people — some of them show a thing that is currently happening or has recently happened, but I think other ones are much further back in the past. I’m still early on in the game so I’m not sure why this is.

The two other support characters for this early stage of the game are Ruise, the main character’s sister. She was born under a full solar eclipse which gives her strong magic power. The main character also can use magic but this is not explained (yet). Ruise is studying at the nearby magic academy.

We go nearby to a place that Kurisu saw in his dream; it’s a promontory where we can see the floating city of the Featharians. Along the way there are small slimes and such to beat, but on the way back, the first event battle appears.

The battle system is like Bounty Sword — you issue commands to the characters and then when their turn comes up, they execute them. Everyone moves in real time. I got very frustrated with this system in BS (and I think there were at least one or two other games I played that had a similar method). This game is much better for three reasons:

• Like in the other games you can hit a button during the battle to bring up the orders screen and change orders. Unlike the other games, if you press the button during a dialogue or animation, it will register the input and bring up the screen afterwards. This means you don’t have to furiously mash the button to try to bring up the screen.
• When someone’s order becomes finished (because their target is dead or their spell is finished), the orders menu automatically comes up. Again, this removes the need to mash the orders button to try to get things done as fast as possible.
• Finally, although you can set your companions to Auto fight, you have the option of issuing specific commands to everyone. So there’s no frustration that your characters are doing dumb things.

It may be that eventually some flaws of the system will reveal themselves, but at this point, I am enjoying it.

Anyway, the first battle is you against 3 thieves. Your goal is to stop the head thief from taking Karen off the screen. The two subthieves try to block you; I killed one and then went for the main one. Afterwards there are reinforcements, but you quickly get a helper of your own so it’s not too bad.

The next goal is to recover a stolen book from Sandra’s library. The second event battle has you fighting several thieves, who try to run off the screen.

Wallace and Ruise are with the party now. Wallace is a fighter and Ruise is a mage. I had both the main character and Ruise cast magic missiles while Wallace went for a third thief and Julian (NPC) blocked the exit. The first time I lost because I tried to send everyone at the same person.

The third battle is against bandits in a town. Your goal is to not let too many of the villagers be killed by them.

I found that with repeated magic missile castings by the hero and Ruise it was pretty easy, despite the reinforcements that repeatedly arrive.

The fourth battle has us protecting Sandra from enemies. Once again, double magic missile casting makes quick work of the enemies (and Sandra isn’t that weak).

Unfortunately Sandra gets poisoned from her injuries here, and the only ones who know the cure for her are the Featherians, who are hard to reach and don’t like humans.

This seems to be a fairly long section and I’m still not finished with it yet — we have to get a researcher Ariost to help us reach the Featherian land (with a flying machine), but this involves going through the first larger dungeon.

The Will o Wisps that appear here are tricky; they only have 1 HP but they block most physical attacks, absorb thunder, and can sometimes reflect magic missile. The boss fight here isn’t too bad because Ariost himself is helpful (and not that weak), and if you can quickly take out the WoW’s with magic missiles (and not get too many reflected back on you) the rest of the enemies can be easily cleaned up.

This is basically as far as I have gotten; I’m in a section now where we have to learn more about the Featherians (because they refuse to give us the cure unless we can tell them a way that humans are better) but it’s involving some nested fetch quests.

So far the game is good; hopefully my good impression will hold up for the whole game.