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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Performance problems aside (menus take ages to load in), I like the game quite a bit. There is just so much stuff: 120 characters, two additional fighting systems for special events, a card game, a bayblade minigame, a castle/town upgrade system and probably much more - I’m not even halfway done. The combat is quite auto-attack heavy and therefore simple, but keep in mind I’m olaying with double MP cost for all abilities (one of the additional challanges to tweak your own difficulty, like the ones in Dragon Quest XI).

    As for the EXP thing, there are a few things that happened to align for me. EXP works like this:

    • Each level requires 1000 EXP.
    • You get EXP based on level difference between you and your enemies. There is a maximum value of EXP a single enemy can give to usually prevent what happened to me - I think it’s about 1000 for most enemies.
    • If you get say 3000 EXP, that’s 3 level ups. Remaining EXP does not get adjusted upon each level up. That’s great since you can recruit 120 characters and if you miss someone at first, it does not take long to catch up if you want to use them.
    • You fight with 6 charaters. EXP is split between them, meaning you get more EXP per character if only e.g. 2 of them survive.

    Now, what actually happened to me is: I fought a unique mini-boss encounter with 5 enemies. I was overall underleveled and got wiped twice. The third time however, I won with only my weakest character still standing - he was 8 level below my team average. He got about 1200 EXP for the level difference * 5 enemies * 6, since only he survived, resulting in about 35 level ups.





  • Back on reddit, I mostly interacted with communities relating to JRPGs. There are some communities over here, but at most they post some trailers every now and then. There are also some more focussd communities about Dragon Quest, Xenoblade or SMT - all of them practically dead. I don’t think there is an instance.

    I could go over to a programming related one, the german instance or even one of the vegan instances for secondary ‘interests’, but those aren’t things I often find myself posting about online to be honest. They seem to be mostly about memes anyways.


  • Yep, there’s both a normal and a hard mode - normal is quite easy. On top of that, you can get most digimon without much trouble, I just happen to like the ones that are difficult to get.

    There’s also a farm feature where you can level digimon passively. Due to a bug on the switch version, the ingame clock and therefore the farm continue running on standby if you don’t close the game properly.


  • My partner and I are playing through “Digimon Stories Cyber Sleuth Hacker’s Memories” in some kind of challange run similar to a Soullink in Pokemon games.

    The Digimon Story games are basically just grinding, but sometimes I’m in the mood for that. Although, I prefered the older ones on DS.

    Digimon have 7 different stages and many different paths to evolve from their first stage to their last one. Bacially everything can become everything. Each stage starts at level 1 and is stronger than the one before, with certain stat and level requirements to evolve. They can devolve too and that’s where the grinding comes in: There is a special stat called ‘ABI’ that’s raised by d-/evolving. If you need a certain amount of ABI, you will train your digimon, evolve it, devolve it right away and start from level 1 again. Repeat until you have enough.

    During older games, you would accumulate power by doing so - you kept a certain percentage of your current stats when devolving. In the Cyber Sleuth games you don’t. Each Greymon e.g. has the same base stats at the same level. ABI only slightly increases a hard cap for permanent stats you can get from a different mechanic. It’s kinda tedious.


  • It’s quite easy, actually. I usually play everything years after release, however, if I’m really into a certain series, I’ll buy it right away. If I don’t care for the wait, I probably don’t care enough about whether or not a sequel is being made.

    Of course that only works if you don’t get hyped easily. I play a lot of games, but usually only 1-2 per year are released within said year.



  • While I do agree with the problems identified, I can’t help but think they also made forums a lot better. Due to the lower discoverability and higher effort to actually join communities felt more personal. You interacted with smaller groups and came to know specific people. I still have friends from back then.

    On larger platforms, I never had that. Even lemmy, which is small in comparison has enough people that I barely even think about specific users. Let alone speak with them on a personal level.






  • I’ve come around to really liking them. In short, they vastly improve dungeons in my opinion.

    Most RPGs don’t manage to create interesting battles outside of boss fights. Heck, an increasing amount of RPGs fails to create any kind of challange. However, random encounter can add another layer to dungeons: resource management. You have to plan out how to tackle fights in order to get through the dungeons with your limited items/MP - do you sacrifice more HP or do you go for your strongest attacks? How much exploration can you get in? Do you need to be extra careful and plan for stronger rare encounters? Maybe even plan around lvl up healing.

    Sadly, this layer is easily removed. Overworld encounters? Just dodge everything. Adjustable encounters? Grind just enough, go heal and disable encounters. Non-challanging fights? Just use basic attacks. Healing stations? No need to plan anymore. Ideally, the dungeons provides no healing at all - especially not before encountering the boss.

    If you’re interested in a game with great dungeons, I’d recommend every single Etrian Odyssey.






  • Unicorn Overlord, the tactical JRPG. I love how much depth there is to team building, there are so many classes, skills and synergies to plan with. After everything is maxed, you can build 10 squats of 6 units each.

    However, about halfway through the game, I’m starting to feel burned out a bit. My squats are mostly done, further upgrades are rather expensive and there is little need to swap units if the old ones win every battle. Without the constant planning, the core gameplay gets a bit stale. But nothing a break won’t fix, I’d assume.