This is an alternate sub-account for kjorteo. If you like my writing or want to start watching me more closely or something, that's really where the action is. This journal is basically for reviews, reactions, rants, and general commenting on whatever video games I happen to be playing at the time. I make no promises that any of it is anything other than pointless, but it was that or keep spamming my main journal with it.

I have progressed far enough in my second EO3 run to have unlocked Shoguns, and taken a break from plot-furthering to train up the newest addition to my guild and possibly my team (depending on whether Shoguns are actually as good as I'm hoping they are,) Felix. (I actually have a good reason for that name, too! It's a ... reference, sort of. Anyway,) I went with that unhappy-looking fellow on the far left, who looks like he's perpetually forcing himself to remain icy and aloof as a personal favor because it keeps him just slightly too restrained to murder everyone around him. (Oops, I guess it's too late to name him Jan-S, isn't it? Oh, well, Felix is still appropriate.)

The storyteller in me is trying so hard to interpret his coldness and the fact that I basically stopped the game to focus exclusively on him as a Poo-in-Earthbound-esque "meanwhile, here's an extended shot of this character being hardcore in preparation for his joining the party" sequence, complete with what I can only assume is sadistic and borderline abusive training meant to deliberately turn him into a cold-hearted killer, but ... I don't know. It's a little hard to see it as a Training From Hell montage when his entire regimen from levels 28 (where he started) to 72 has consisted solely of him attempting to run away from Scylla.

Anyway, going for a Shogun/Gladiator build with emphasis on Second Sword/Katana Mastery, 5-Ring Sword supported by Berserker Vow/Charge, TP Up, and I'm thinking maybe Bloody Lance if I have spare skill points. Definitely no Kaishaku, no matter how thematically appropriate it would be for him.

I just beat the Scarlet Wyrm. (I don't care if they only gave him that full-titled nickname like that in other games; it sounds so cool that I'm using it forever. Just like I'll forever refer to Dragon by its name since they actually gave it one in EO2.)

My super-defense, barely-any-offense party bunkered down and held on for an almost comical 54 rounds, which ... um ... well, let's just say it didn't beat the record of that time I beat EO2 Drake in 8 and leave it at that. Anyway, I was fine until he started spamming Howling (massive attack debuff, to the point where Front Mortar's damage went from 450-ish to 60, plus it also confuses.) The problem was that his speed appeared to be exactly tied with Julian and Other Julian, so whenever he used Howling twice in a row, and on the second round one of the Julians got his Prevent Order back up first ... well. But I came back from that, somehow!

I had Wyrm down to a single pixel-wide bar of health, and started trying to fling the four bottles of Formaldehyde I took with me at it. In round one, all went almost perfectly according to plan (Jonas Formaldehyded, everyone else and their defenses and buffs and stuff held on, Simone finished the round with a full-powered Front Mortar) except that it had enough HP left that it didn't die. Round two, Jonas used another Formaldehyde, and it immediately threw Howling, and obviously a Front Mortar under that condition would barely even be enough to finish off an early-game random encounter, let alone Wyrm.

On round three, everyone was still almost literally too attack-debuffed to damage their way out of a wet paper bag, I was therefore concerned that it would outlast my two remaining Formaldehydes at this rate. Thus, I ordered the Julians to put up new Prevent Orders, Rachael to remove the Howling debuff from the front row so they might actually be able to damage something, Samuel to Bodyguard Simone so she wouldn't have the crap killed out of her, Simone to Front Mortar (for like 60 but OH WELL) and Jonas to just Attack.

That was the plan, anyway.

Instead, at the beginning of the round, Jonas (Ninja/Farmer = ridiculous speed = goes first) did a Howling-addled regular attack for roughly 22 damage, AND THE STUPID THING DIED.

I'll go back for the stupid conditional drop later, when I've ascended and done a New Game Plus or two, and therefore have access to levels higher than 70 and Shoguns. Meanwhile, vexing as it is, it's actually almost worth it just for the story of how A) I cherry-tapped one of the post-game dragons to death, and B) Jonas killed it. Jonas. While under the effects of Howling.

OH GOD THE STUPID PETRIFICATION SHEEP GOT MY HEALER, ABORT

OH GOD IT GOT THE GUY WHO KNOWS TO MARKET, I CAN'T ABORT

In related news, I figured out what those eyes on B23F do.

"Maddening abundance of gates." Well, at least they're honest.

Also, the thing about my team is that everyone is absolutely incredible, but not at the same time. However, the final stratum is turning out to be some sort of carefully-constructed Eigen Plot, where everyone takes turns being the least useful member of the team just long enough for me to notice how little help they've been lately and start to wonder about that, and then the game suddenly throws something at me that said character was specifically created just to handle.

For example, Julian turned into a Prince/Ninja who can Prevent Order both rows at the same time using his own clone just before seemingly every enemy in the game started to love status attacks.

And Samuel ... I was just about to start questioning the importance of devoting an entire party slot to being Simone's living shield (since she's so squishy, his job is basically to spam Bodyguard and stand in front of her every round,) especially since he's been learning the anti-elements, which are 10 points to max each and there are three of them. In other words, he has been doing absolutely nothing but dumping points into skills I figured I'd never use until the postgame (where they will suddenly become absolutely mandatory if the three dragons are back) for the past 23 levels, now! But then, I just ran into an FOE whose thing is to go crazy with a spell that blows up the party at random (about five hits to completely random targets, fairly major damage, to the point where 2-3 could kill a person outright depending on how squishy they are) which was giving me trouble until I realized it's a Volt attack....

Mortal Hunter? Really?

Okay, Atlus, we need to talk. I actually have been greatly amused by EO3's newfound love of Trauma Center-esque hyperbolic descriptions for FOE names (Abyssal Death! Calamity God!) but that's a Stalker and you know it.

On the other hand, that's twice now that I was disappointed that a classic notorious early-game enemy from one or the other or both of the first two games did not reappear in EO3, only to find out that they actually just got buffed and moved to the endgame and there they are after all. (Three times if you count the Petaloids, but I don't, because those were always late-game enemies.) I swear to God, if the postgame bonus stratum endboss is a Rapelope or something....

The EO series has always been fairly good about rewarding intelligent choices in your class selection/build/skill point allocation/etc. rather than just "if you can't beat this enemy, try again in fifty levels." (Although, since this is the series that invented FOEs, there is definitely a lot of that too....)

Case in point: I was getting absolutely nowhere with EO3's fourth stratum boss. (Note: the boss of the fourth stratum changes depending on which decision you make at a crucial plot point, so for the sake of avoiding spoilers, I'll just say the insanely status-happy one.) This was the only enemy I had encountered to date who was so insistent with status ailments that Julian's Prevent Order actually wasn't enough. The boss would generally go first, then mass-confuse my entire party before Julian could have fired off a Prevent Order that only would have saved one row or the other anyway. That just ... wasn't going to work. I was starting to get a "maybe I should just go do other stuff and try this fight later" vibe, but then....

I was never 100% ecstatic with the retired and remade Gladiator/Prince Julian. The idea was that he was supposed to keep doing Prince stuff (Attack Order, Prevent Order, the autoheals) while having a main class that was better at actually having offensive power. Sure, Prince Julian was at least competent with the Attack command, but up until that point I had exactly one person in my entire party (Simone, the Arbalist) who had any offensive moves whatsoever.

Well, that idea didn't work. It turns out that being a Troubadour-like buff dispenser is a full-time job anyway, and one for which Gladiators do not have nearly enough TP. I put points into Rush and Blade Rave and Bind Cut and everything, but he almost never actually used any of them--he spent random battles preserving his precious TP supply by just Attacking, and bosses kept him too busy with the Orders.

So, if he's just another Attacker anyway, I turned him back into a Prince main, and subbed Ninja. Being a Prince main gives him better equipment options (especially armor,) more TP, and the ability to recover it when buffs are added and removed, and being a Ninja allows him to cut his own HP and TP in half to make a persistent, able-to-be-controlled-with-skills-like-a-real-party-member-and-everything clone of himself. The idea was that the team of he and himself could Prevent Order both rows at the same time, and just by doing so, refill the TP hit each half took from the split.

Holy God did that work. I not only beat the fourth stratum boss just with that substitution alone, I humiliated it. After getting set up, almost every single round went like this:

* Julian, who is faster now because he's a Prince, goes first and casts Protect Order! Everyone in front row is safe from the next one status ailment that tries to get them!
* The other Julian, who obviously has the same stats, also goes first and casts Protect Order! Everyone in the back row is safe from the next one status ailment that tries to get them!
* The boss casts a party-wide status ailment spell! It bounces off everyone's Protect Orders!
* Julian, Julian, and the boss pretty much cancelled each other out, so the other four members of my party basically get to do whatever they want completely unopposed!
* REPEAT

Even the TP restoration worked just as I had intended; after starting at half TP and casting Prevent Order almost every single round, both Julians were actually full by the end of the fight.

Actually, I was so comfortably in control of the battle that I toyed with the boss, getting it down to a sliver of health and then having everyone else (except the Julians) just sit there while Jonas kept trying to bind its head, so I could get the conditional drop. It took about six rounds, but it's not like I was in any kind of danger or anything.

Speaking of conditional drops, let's see what I can get for this FHHHJJJJGRK

okay i pretty much have to have that crossbow

Well yeah, of course I happen to get the obligatory "stratum boss conditional drop = ridiculous 250,000+ en endgame equipment" unlock from going back and trying the third stratum boss again (though the series never, ever gets tired of doing that on any boss ever) in the form of a rapier, right when I was actually seriously considering re-retiring Julian back into being a Prince main again. (Prince/Ninja, perhaps?)

It's been a while since I planned out my entire team's builds up to level 70, so just to make sure I'm still on track with everything, I re-thought everything and planned them all out again. Most changed is Simone, least changed is Samuel.

( big huge build dump, don't mind me )

Oh. Um ... I ... I guess I'll do that stratum boss later, then. I guess I'll ... um... I guess I'll go back to some of that sea stuff I had been neglecting. Yeah.

:(

Aaaaanyway.

Oh, right, I remember why I stopped doing sea stuff for a while, there. Because I'm OCD about keeping everyone at the exact same amount of experience down to the single experience point, and Cotrangl Corotrangul is one of those bosses that summon minions and that makes it hard to ensure that both broken-up halves of my team fight the same number of enemies and therefore get the same amount of experience when the AI allies are IDIOTS that KEEP KILLING THE MINIONS EVEN THOUGH THAT ONLY MAKES IT SUMMON MORE ARGH