Tales Series

The colosseum is hard, but the fact that OVL removes casting times in Vesperia is kind of extremely abusable.

Rita OFC has the famous Tidal Wave spam, but Estelle and Patty can do it to a certain extent too.

IDK if the PS3 version removed Estelle's Eternal Support/Force Field trick, tho I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

Yes, they removed it. Ovl 1 removes the artes tiered chaining as well as casting times, 2 gives you super armor, 3 enables your Mystic Artes and 4 gives you total invincibilty. Hello, Barbatos. *uses items with impunity*

The recommended level to tackle the coliseum is... whatever level it took you to defeat the Bonus Boss in the Land of Memories, since he's the one that unlocks the option (Gauche and Droite's invitation card, which is stupidly missable, unlocks it in the 360 game... PS 3 expands it) to actually earn titles as rewards, which is what you would do the coliseum for.

On another note: I finally got an 80 hour long game out of my system. The Final Boss was hard but doable, then I was RUDELY interrumped so I turned off the console. Going back, I put the game on Very Easy to get it over with and something happened.

The boss used a never seen before spell that took my party from full to red HP in one go. About 800 damage to characters that have just a hair above 1000 HP at the recommended level.

While he had an Attack debuff and my guys had a Defense buff.

On Very Easy mode.

WHAT THE F*CKITY F*CK ATLUS. Can you even picture the kind of damage that spell would have done on 'normal' conditions? (hint: Enough to Total Party Kill the player 3 times over.) It's like the boss had a secret 'f*ck you, I win' button that he can choose to use whenever the heck it wants.

Do you remember any other case of There Is No Kill Like Overkill on Tales Series bosses? From the top of my head, Barbatos and his NO ITEMS EVER, Fodra Queen and her Maxwell extensions and recently, Heldalf and his auto-kill Indignation. Any more?

edited 12th Apr '18 6:59:04 AM by FlightMaster

Wait, what game is this?

Well, okay. Tokyo Mirage Sessions. An Atlus game, guys known for designing brutal bosses and Nintendo Hard moments. Yeah, it is true that you are given a special skill just for the final battle that stops ANY kind of damage for one turn, including Almighty type damage that's normally unblockable. But yeah. HOW the heck could I have guessed WHEN was the boss going to use his Total Party Kill move? In any other game you get some kind of warning, but not here.

Wait, on the subject of Tales Series, I remember another example: Duke and his Devil Weapon-boosted secret form that uses Brave Vesperia, a combo of 7 (8?) Mystic Artes' animations. Geez, enjoy the fireworks, because the next thing you will see is the Game Over screen.

World of Strength. The strong thrive and the weak perish.

Ah, should have figured it was a SMT game, or least kind of.

I really need to get back on that game.

Alexei is fucking bullshit.

I hate it when bosses can heal.

Duke's much the same way, at least in his higher level forms. I agree though. Alexei is also extra bullshit because Brilliant Cataclysm has ridiculous range but is not technically the entire field, so on higher difficulties it's an incredibly likely total party wipe if you aren't trying to keep everyone spread apart. I think the PS 3 version removed immunity to death from screen clearing mystic artes like Big Bang, so be wary of that.

edited 12th Apr '18 7:37:06 PM by Alfric

Well, I'm currently saved near Dahngrest. Before that, I finally managed to beat Alexei. I have to agree with Badguy that Alexei is a bullshit boss. It took me several hours to finally beat him. I used Estelle, Raven and Judith to win. Alexei's mystic arte is annoying and I had to sacrifice my team just so Yuri wouldn't get killed. Anyways, I now have to find a way to stop the Adephagos.

One of my favourite writing tropes ever is when the Goldfish Poop Gang get to be charming and badass, so I love the Schwann Brigade's actions throughout the game, especially when they're revealed to have saved everyone in the lower quarter.

I will say that it probably wasn't a good idea to have Yuri seemingly die, only to immediately reveal to the audience and cast that he's okay. I think it would have been cool if we had some length of plot focusing on the rest of the team and maybe even a dungeon without him.

Why the hell does this orphanage need 500,000 gald? What are they feeding the kids, gold plated quail's anus?

I like that there's a sidequest where Rita and Estelle become lesbian moms.

Why am I doing fetch quests while Greenhouse Gas Cthulhu is in the sky?

My reward for watching a man die in front of my eyes is the murderer's coat.

Whoops I accidentally colluded with terrorists.

DDR intensifies

Welp goodbye moral ambiguity, succession crisis, and treatise on vigilantism. It's time to save the fucking trees.

I kid, sorta. I think Duke's character nicely parallels Yuri's, but by the same token I liked that blastia and aer and all that jargon were part of the world without necessarily taking it over like in Symphonia or Abyss.

Christ am I glad I'm following a guide to the letter because son of a bitch I nearly missed out on the coliseum invite.

edited 13th Apr '18 4:32:52 PM by Mr.Badguy

So, in Tales of Vesperia, I've been doing the Gauche ad Droite sideguest and I am currently at Zaude. I've been fighting Gauche and Droite inside Zaude but I can't seem to beat them. I manage to beat Gauche but Droite always manages to kill me and my entire party. It doesn't help that she can heal herself. I think I'm going to just leave this sidequest alone for the moment and continue the story just so I can preserve my sanity. I should probably level up a bit as well.

Don't progress with the story until you've beaten Gauche and Droite. Also bring Repede so he can steal their swords.

Well, I managed to beat Gauche and Droite in Tales of Vesperia. It took me many tries but I finally won. I used Estelle, Judith and Raven to win. With that, i think I'll take a little break from that sidequest and focus on the story I managed to create Undine so I will focus on the other spirits.

Hey Duke we found a way to save the world

No shut up I must angst.

To be fair. Duke was at the point where he was just done with humanity.

I kinda likened it to Yuri's similar when the whole is poisoned, cut out the bad part speech (which I'm badly paraphrasing), only he's treating all of humanity as the part that needs to be cut out.

He just assumes they'll botch things again, so just get rid of them.

You're not wrong though.

I feel the same way about Duke. I'm 99% sure he's meant to parallel Yuri the way Alexei parallels Flynn.

The problem with Duke, and Act 3 in general, is that it's a story about saving the world using four elemental spirits from a pretty boy asshole who wants to kill everyone. That's freshman JRPG. So the work the game puts into Duke, in that he's a character in a story where people try to enforce their own views of justice onto the world with disastrous consequence until they learn to value the opinions of their peers and work together, gets lost amidst a sea of JPRG cliche.

Also the Green Aesop kind of doesn't work in this game when there's a cheap, clean, easy way to go green while ignoring the consequence of giving up the barriers.

So now that I'm over 40 hours into the game, I think I can safely make the proclamation that Judith sucks.

She's a fast attacker, only she does less damage than Yuri and gets in the way of combos, and as plot irrelevant as Repede is at least he can steal and is also a knife wielding doggo.

She's good for aerial enemies, except Raven can take care of that and heal, and cast magic.

She's sorta tanky, but so is Karol, and Karol can heal and his attacks don't propel the enemy into the air.

edited 14th Apr '18 4:38:02 PM by Mr.Badguy

Judith is meant to air combo people though. That's her thing. For example, this video shows off some nifty combos for everyone, with Judith having a showing early.Just gonna say potential spoilers because I don't remember if major bosses are used for punching bags anywhere.

She'd be a good character if this were Tales Of Berseria and everyone was a fast combo character. In Vesperia, where team composition matters because everyone has a specific role, she falters when compared to everyone else.

You're right that she's lacking when compared to the likes of Rita and Yuri, but strictly speaking I'd say she's slightly above Karol (I'd also say Repede in terms of combat, but unless PS 3 changed it, Gale Dog is still hilariously broken). Karol's support moves are hard to make work in the high power environment of Vesperia where people take crazy damage, and her being able to basically cross the battle field with her abilities and teleport above enemies with Moonbeam provides some really good utility for interruption and cross combos compared to Karol's relatively sluggish movement.

No one's bad, but I will say Karol and Judith are the weakest of the lot; raw combo power is easily dominated by Yuri, Repede provides being able to just turn invincible whenever later in the game, and mobility always, Rita is a nuclear warhead in overlimit, Estelle is the healer, and Raven has some crazy utility with his fairly strong spells and ranged attacks meaning he can kite enemies or fight them up close.

I personally like using Judith. She hits fast and hard and I prefer using her over Karol. In fact, I used Judith to beat Gauche and Droite.

edited 14th Apr '18 5:42:32 PM by pointless233

I put Karol above Judith specifically because he flows better in combat. Judith will knock enemies around every which way and throw them out of my combos. Karol just smacks people and they stay put.

Oh, as an AI Karol is definitely better since he's less likely to interfere with you. I played Vesperia with friends and one who played Judith generally worked really well.

I remember setting AI Judith to "Attack different target" since her AI was decent enough at juggling enemies that it kinda worked as a form of Crowd Controll.

First of all, gonna say it before I forget again, is about when Badguy called Yuri 'bloodthirsty'. Yes, it seems like he's become too trigger happy and would apply vigilantism to his own friends. But then Phaeroh appears and says 'I must kill Estelle to save this world, she is poison' and Yuri is all 'nope, not on my watch'. It shows that this 'justice' is flawed and can't be applied willy nilly because Estelle's 'crime' (and later Judith's) is waaay different than Ragou or Cumore's. If not, we are dealing with nazis again (they considered 'impurity' a crime!)

TLDR: If Yuri ever took to heart the 'cut the part to not infect the whole' say, he would discard it inmediately because the ample spectre of 'parts' should be judged case by case.

Not much to say about Judy. Me and friend used her occasionally, and always playing her strenghts. Yuri and Estelle were always in the party. Rita and Karol for resilient but slow bosses. Raven and her for flyers and mook summoners. And Patty and Flynn... were basically married to the other two soon after we unlocked them, if this was Fire Emblem . Poor Repede was only used until we got more than 4 characters, and only put back for stealing.

You keep talking about combos. I know, combos are desirable since they give you Grade, bonus Exp and generally crowd control and 'cool' factor. But for me they never are THE key factor about keeping or ditching a character on a ARPG. If I want a high combo at the end of a fight for its rewards I pop OVL 1 and spam a multihit arte. Cuz Vesperia uses what is possibly the best implementation of the Overlimit system, having 4 different levels of bonuses, being shared by all the party and most importantly being able to activate it whenever I want.

AND I AM NOT LOOKING AT ANYONE. *stares at Graces*

edited 15th Apr '18 7:20:52 AM by FlightMaster