Last Remnant

Oblivion had particularly obnoxious level scaling. At higher levels enemies turned into bloated HP sponges that you'd have to hack away at for ages. It could also be abused in the opposite direction by leveling up all your combat skills but never increasing your character level, so you could run around as a level 1 character blowing the shit out of enemies scaled to fight a level 1 character.

They should've made the fighting system in isometric view instead of flashy Final Fantasy-type animations. All the flanking maneuvers are annoying as hell as it is.

Also if you play without a guide you need to visit every pub each time you beat a main mission. Just tedious and boring.

I am convinced the developers of thus games stat and level sysyem are super autsists the likes the world has never and may never see again.

Everything in this game affects a stat.
The items, the losition of character mext to each other while fighting, their levels, the monsters they fight and their levels, the attacks you use and are hit with, the environment this is taking place in as well as they order they are killed and the mission its on.

Say you fight with a sword but also know a heal spell with light magic. You do that enough times and you become the games version of a paladin

BR gain seems to be affected by various factors. Number of enemies in the encounter (and number of links/Calvary Calls you have to suffer through), maybe how long it lasts, how many units/unions fall during battle and how many units are left standing. I think all of those are taken into account for how many "points" are gained to push the BR up. The question now is, at what point does BR go up? Does the gap get wider per BR gained? Does BR difference, which is used for multipliers, affect how quickly it goes up? Is each set of encounters a set number of "points" that is then modified? Most of these points can be ignored if you're not going to poke at the finer details.

As for stats, you can influence them based on the units' actions. Be careful about this since it can also influence their focus through whatever commands you give the union. All require the unit to be alive at the end of battle to receive the upgrade.

HP: Get hit. Don't be afraid to get them a little roughed up.
AP: Use arts. Well, more like spam them.
STR: Use physical attacks (normal, CAs)
INT: Use MAs
SPD: Use IAs/healing, make them run laps around the battlefield, scoring a CT (a CT popping up and missing won't count)
UA: Use IAs/healing.

A note about the CTs… Those are affected by the equipment and current army morale.

>Realize I forgot to talk to the Duke of Ghor a third time, locking myself out of a sidequest chain and having overwritten three save files, I lost out on 40h of gameplay

F-feels good man

No. The story is the worst part of the game.

Jesus fuck, 40 hours from ONE sidequest? Tell me youre joking.

Well basically, I spent the first 10 hours dicking around and doing whatever to re-familiarize myself with the game.

I made sure that I did all the sidequests in Part 1, completed all my party quests and talked to everyone of importance etc, which took about 20h, and then I started Part 2. Again, did sidequests as I went, and I was about 40h into the game when I made my mistake (and keep in mind I have multiple save files, but got greedy).

Anyways, if there's certain quests you didn't do in Part 1, you're locked out of them forever. In my case, the Duke of Ghor has you assault 6 enemy bases in any order you want, just kinda pick away at them to advance the story. After clearing each odd number base (1, 3, 5 total) you need to talk to him to advance a subquest. I forgot to do the 5th once, and basically fucked my save

Oh and the best part is that there are some quests that don't appear unless you talk to some random people.

Like, anyone of importance will have a red speech bubble. You sometimes have to learn a "fact" from someone with a white, ordinary speech bubble.

Fucking hell. I picked it up on steam during a sale having heard good things about it, but it sounds like you need some serious autism prepared for a 100% run.

It's not that bad, I didn't get into the difficult content, though. Just basically follow a guide on the wiki and make sure you have everything on the checklist completed up to that point.

I played it for 15 hours or so casually and didn't have any problems during that period. I avoided grinding because of everything I heard about grinding but I was doing every side quest I could. Maybe just playing it normally isn't bad, but you won't see everything the game has to offer.
I want to pick it up again but I need to do it at a time when I'm ready to play an autistic JRPG and nothing else, and I just got done playing Chrono Cross.

The last time I played this game years ago, I was wandering around looking for sidequests before some big progression point in the main story, and I swear to fuck that I discovered an entire set of hidden optional cities. Like they just kept coming, and they were full of new characters and quests and the rabbit hole had no bottom.
It's been so long that I have no idea where it was, or what it was about. I vaguely remember something about a mage or an alchemist or something like that in one of the locations.
Also some fire fucker in a lava cave that wasn't there the previous 5 times I'd passed through skullfucked my entire army without half trying. So that was a thing.

I don't even remember why I stopped playing that game, or how far I got. I do remember that at one point, every single unit in my army started casting spells called "whiteout" and "blackout" constantly. Just spamming the fuck out of them. I still have no fucking idea where the hell that spell came from or why everyfuckingbody suddenly had it.

This game is like an autistic acid trip. I've gotta play it again soon.

Just about a third of the way into the game, you actually have the opportunity to access just about every area in the game way before you actually have to go there for plot purposes. As for the mystery spells, you unlocked the ultimate type of spell, Arcana, which are bascially magical nukes and mandatory for late game. The reason your unions were spamming the shit out of it is because the only requirements to use a particular Arcana are
1. The leader of the union has access to certain spells of a certain type(ie Invocations for Blackout)
2. Said spells are of a certain rank(Spark V, Wind Shear IV, Caustic Blast II, Permafrost for the first rank of Blackout), which you're gonna get anyways if you spam magic
3. At least 2 other units in the union can use the same type of spells. They don't even have to know the spells, they just need to have ability to cast the same type.
4. No ailments on the union except elemental afflictions and paralysis
When those conditions are met every time that union uses mystic arts they have a chance to re-assess into the fucking Arcana and nuke the fucking battlefield. After which the leader actually learns the Arcana as an ability and can use it so long as the above conditions are met.
Even fucking better you can actually force arcana to be cast by having the union use the prerequisite spells which guarantees an Arcana cast and since you can disable unwanted abilities from units on PC you can basically nuke shit on demand.
If you play your cards right you could technically have access to Blackout long before you reach the end of Disk 1.

I said it before and I'll say it again: The Last Remnant is the FF2 of modern JRPGs.
That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Not true. I beat the hardest level of The True Conqueror. There is a broken art called Cachexia or something which drains opponents energy and he cant cast arts. This is how I beat the true conqueror rank 8

Thats strange. I basically played the game casually until I got to the eagles nest or something, thats where I got stuck. So I grinded a bit and I managed to beat it. My second obstacle was the fallen, which since I played the PC version was required in order to get access to the final optional dungeon that had the materials so you can build end game weapons. For that, people from GameFaqs helped me. The last obstacle was the last boss, which I grinded until I got cachexia and then it was easy

We'll never see a game like this again.

You are absolutely right Jesus it really is the FF2 of modern JRPGs.

The same guy is behind both games.

He also took over for FF12 after Matsuno left, too. Can you spot his design choices?

And SaGa. Dude loves his automation and non linear character advancement.

Is there an easy way to "predict" what stuff monsters drop?

For example, it seems like each monster type has 2-3 common ingredients from its family, and then additional shit, depending on the exact enemy

HAHAHAH good joke user! But look at the wiki since it will be the greatest asset you have.

I did every side quest I could and fought every enemy I came across. There was one spot where a ton of enemies spawn where I did some grinding but I never had a problem throughout the game with difficulty.

Just use the damn wiki, because monster drops vary by fucking area, I am not shitting you.

Or if you read a book or not.

Which book was that again? I remember there being some non-quest shit that enables specific drops

Oh yes, I remember that. Also fun is that certain monster groups may or may not appear when you pop into an area, so you might have to reset it. But to access that area you need some fuckoptional side quest from way earlier

By completing certain guild tasks and maybe some other shit, you get magazines that let you get additional exclusive drops from specific monster families, separate and in addition to the normal drop tables.

To be fair, FF12 does that too.

FF12 was basically a prototype for Last Remnant.

Either way, FF12's were pretty easy to unlock, and pretty obvious how to get them, more or less. And in both cases, they just enable a high-level drop that's useless to you until you get a bunch of other shit

TLR is actually closer to the original concept of 12 before they had to rework it a billion times what with you hiring a large roster of NPCs from guilds and only having control over the main character.

I like everything in it except I don't have the autism spark that allows me to understand the formations

There isn't all that much to get.
Formations provide bonuses/penalties to a unit's stats depending on the unit's position in the formation as well as provide a unique bonus to the union on top. These bonuses scale with the formation's rank which depends on if the units meet the requirements. For example for Pincer's Grip III you need 2 unique units and 1 Yama(the burly fish blokes). Same goes for higher tier formations.
The final thing is whether they're loose or dense, since that'll determine how many people an AoE attack is likely to hit.

The way the bonuses work, it can be helpful to think of them as a "class". For example, there might be a formation that gives you a bonus to STR at the cost of DEX; thus, this could be a "fighter" class, compared to other games.

Depending on the races or specific unique leaders you put into a formation, it might be upgraded to increase the bonus/penalty, and possibly add a different effect. For example, there's a formation that's good against Beast-type monsters, but with the right units, the formation upgrades, and instead becomes better against Dragons.

So for a simple way to do it, grab all your casters, put them in a +MAG group, and treat that formation as a Black Mage. There's a lot more subtlety to it, like making specific groups for certain boss monsters, but that's the gist of it.

Gee you think? pic related

Autismo Kawazu was brought in on FF12 mainly to supervise and finish its development after Matsuno broke down and couldn't take working with Square's executives anymore.

This user gets it, it's in a way assigning a role to your union, beyond simply what units you put in it.

As far as I know Matsuno quit cause he got so overworked as a result of having to rework the goddamn game god knows how many times to appease the execs, that he actually developed health complications and a several month sick leave, that he used an excuse to leave.

That kind of statement usually comes from someone reading about how something happened from someone else. The game was fucked with multiple times over a full decade. They set it out to be their first Final Fagasy franchise with merchandise, games and shit and completely fucked it up, chasing multiples of devs away from the company.

Wasn't FF12 actually the most expensive game to produce, for a good while?

Have you seen Squeenix for the past fucking decade? They're literally textbook insane, 3 god damn times and billions used is well beyond that point.

I ain't that ignorant.
XIII was a trilogy for some inscrutable reason.
XIV would be the MMO flop of the decade if it wasn't for TOR, and they made an entirely new XIV to replace it because it was so shit.
XV was in development hell for at least 10 years, got reworked at least twice, and is still technically under development cause of the DLC and the PC port.

Bump

How do you get someone to get past the learning curve?
I have this friend that i'm sure that will like this game but i can't think of good ways to introduce him without spoiling the fun of discovering it yourself

Just give him the obligatory warnings to save in as many slots as possible without overwriting, somewhat often, don't grind(for the most part), and check all the towns in between outings, and not to rush(hue) the main plot.

I found the game easy and I did a lot of grind. The key is the group attacks from formation. I made sure that each grouping could do group attack or have one do one big one.

my experience was that i had more fun when i ditched the save scumming and started making more long term decisions, the high risk/reward made me ecstatic at times

Well, what's the difference between physical and magical attacks? Just that monsters have different resistances?

Or rather, when should everyone use Spark IV, versus Emm using one of her big sword arts?

There is very little little difference aside between low tier attacks like Knee Splitter and Spark for example. But when you get to the third tier and beyond the difference in effect is drastic. For your example Resonance Edge deals massive single target damage and can Black Out an enemy, while the third tier Invocation Caustic Blast will deal multiple ticks of damage and potentially inflict Acid Burn(aka all defenses are 0) across a large area and will devastate unions composed of smaller units, but will only be decent against bigger single targets like a boss for example. Also Combat Arts tend to come out faster and consume less AP than Mystic Arts, so they might be a better pick if you're trying to kill an enemy before they kill you.

its a jrpg, story are bound to be convoluted as fuck

Did you even play the game? The plot really isn't very complicated.

I'll bump it one last time

wait a minute, where do wagram, the conqueror and the god emperor connect? because i feel like tlr's plot is trying to tell us something here. like who is who's bitch? because that can be:
>buff-trump is one of (((them))) and wants to free (((the chosen people))) and will kill the goyim to do so
or
>(((they))) need she-jesus to conquer the world but she is in a cave somewhere so (((they))) use the daughter instead who is also she-jesus but they forget to kill the guardian dog and the dog goes reverse john wick on their asses
or

if a discussion can't survive on its own it doesn't deserves a bump and failing that we can always make an jrpg thread to contain our autism

Unfortunately we don't know since the conqueror's campaign got cut.

That's all going to be explained in the sequel.