Status Chovus Dec 24, 2019
Beat the game and did almost everything there was to do. I started off by deleting the starting party and using my own characters. I had to change the races around because of the ridiculous race bonuses and penalties. No way am I having a team of mostly elves with that kind of health penalty, especially with literally no advantage …
Beat the game and did almost everything there was to do. I started off by deleting the starting party and using my own characters. I had to change the races around because of the ridiculous race bonuses and penalties. No way am I having a team of mostly elves with that kind of health penalty, especially with literally no advantage tradeoff for most classes. For some reason the half orc and gnome race portraits were switched so I was able to make a half orc knight with the beautiful blonde gnome portrait. I normally would not touch a half orc with a 10 foot pole regardless of stats but with that portrait I say she is more like a genetically engineered super soldier, kind of like a Sacred Seraphim. My team:
Golden the half orc knight: 21 might, 19 endurance and speed, 14 accuracy, 17 luck (I misread the 4 as a 9), 10 personality, 9 int
Chovus the human paladin: 20 might, 16 speed, accuracy, endurance and personality, 5 int
Valcaria the elf ninja: 18 might and speed, 16 endurance and accuracy, 12 luck, personality and int
Aevariel the elf archer: 19 might, 18 speed, 14 accuracy, 13 int, 12 personality and endurance
Crystal the human cleric: 22 personality, 20 speed, 17 endurance, 16 might, 13 accuracy, 11 luck, 10 int
Endora the elf sorcerer: 19 int, 18 speed and endurance, 15 luck, 13 might, 11 accuracy and personality
I definitely felt the low hp of the elves; they went down a lot and required constant healing. The hp difference between the half orc and the elves was ridiculous, but it became manageable once I got them some endurance improvements. I decided not to buy any equipment and killed what I could. I decided the dungeon in the starting town was too hard and went outside. I followed a general pattern of doing 1 zone at a time, including dungeons. I focused my money on training and skills, and fairly early found all the boosting wells and the merchant skill. It was only then that I purchased new equipment.
I did not play the game in the optimal way difficulty wise. I abused the wells to defeat enemies and clear dungeons that were way too hard for my level. The best character was the sorcerer because of the massive damage from nukes and the amazingly useful mobility spells. Jump was my favorite, which I used to kite melee enemies and kill from range, and to jump into spellcasters to melee them before they could cast. I piled speed on the ninja so she could go before enemies and one shot them. She was also the first to get an obsidian weapon. I cleared out the starting continent and by then I had found town portal, allowing easy access to the last 2 towns.
I found the puzzles to either be silly easy (mostly the riddles) or mind numbingly obtuse, so I used a walkthrough to quickly solve them. The biggest wall I hit was the limited inventory space to the point where each character only had 1 to 3 free slots. I hated it and it was so tedious and demoralizing that I almost did not want to play. But I got rid of some jewelry and kept it manageable. Did not help that I only made the knight a merchant and tediously moved every item I wanted to sell to her, often selling items 1 or 2 at a time. I did make some mules to keep at the inn but I never bothered to use consumables. One mule even ended up with a hologram card and I had to take him for the ending.
I tried to make as much gold as possible and found over 650 million in a pyramid. By the end everyone was at max level 200 and I still had 600 million gold in the bank. Everyone except the sorcerer had top tier obsidian weapons and all had AC well over 100 with plenty of obsidian gear. I went everywhere but did not bother with every sidequest or little thing. The last thing I did was kill all the terminators in the last dungeon, and the paladin and cleric with mass distortion did the best there. I liked the game and it is a massive improvement over the first 2 games. The core gameplay reminds me of 6 and 7, which I grew up with and love. I did not care for the obtuse riddles, archaic navigation, and power up wells. The only thing the game really needs is to allow each character to carry more items, like 255 each.