7th Dragon III Code: VFD

You've got the cause and effect backwards, friendo. It's more like
The Shining Force incident alone is enough for SEGA to deserve death.
The day one paid DLC alone is enough reason for this game to deserve no sales.

fug off matey

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Character designs look awful to me honestly.

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How about prequels, are they good too?

I still don't know what Sega's done.

Well, that's totally acceptable then. I'll have to swing by the local torrent warehouse and pick it up.

Is the MC a cute girl, or a self-insert?

MC is just a create-a-character, but they're infront of your other party members on the world map.
I don't get why they call it the MC, they're fully change-able. Hell you even should switch them out if you want a different party comp

Well in that case, OP should bring it back up whenever it gets an all-dlc-at-once version. Until then, no deal.

for a moment i though I was going to read NISA or 8-4

it's cameo character skins from the games that weren't released in the US. It's pretty benign.

Yup. Here's all the DLC.

Because I'm still playing the first game. I'll get to VFD eventually.

Isn't all of that online because of the CIA leak

Day 1 DLC is pro consumer now?

fucking dropped

What? There aren't any DLC classes.
Those are just skins.

Because i dont own consoles. Fuck that noise.

This sounds barely tolerable.

This is definitely unacceptable though. Particularly the outbreak things. Paying to grind easier gives developers incentive to make grind worse so you need to pay just to make it manageable. Same with other games having payed-for better healing items or whatever, if that works the obvious next step is making it so the better items don't merely make the game extra easy, but the game is particularly difficult without them. Otherwise, why buy them at all? Even if it's at a milder level, it's the same pay-to-win cash shop garbage that ruins f2p games. I won't play those games for free, no way I'm paying for a game just to still put up with any of that. Even if you could buy the base game and somehow hack the optional dlc stuff in without paying, buying the base game alone would be legitimizing this stuff too much.

Having to buy those ultimate weapons is more the standard dlc problem of "sell me all the content at once or none at all," but it's not cool either, and definitely not just skins.

What does "Recruit the X character" DLC mean?
Just skin?

I'm gonna be the casual faggot and ask the question casual faggots always ask when they first see a game: how hard is it? How's the difficulty curve?

Because I am not about to pay 40 bucks on a game only to get stuck on a super hardcore fight with a level 99999 boss on the first 2 hours.

Sure, because modern games are all about getting more difficult. :^)

Yes, those classes and races are already in the game. They're just new portraits.

It's not as hard as a typical dungeon crawler. It took me ~12 hours to get to the first fight that wiped my team. It's probably easier still if you fix your party composition instead of relying on healing items, but I'm stubborn.

A good deal harder than most standard JRPGs. Your stats are tied more to your gear than to your level so generally leveling doesn't do a massive amount (it still helps and you can outgrind you're just a faggot if you do)

It's actually harder with a healer.
Every healing skill is pretty bad, basically you just use items. The buffs those classes get on the other hand, are phenomenal.

Just a skin

I thought I was looking at an S4 the league sequel.

Looked cool, but I couldn't find any reviews online so I didn't grab it while I was at FUCKING GAMESTOP yesterday.

Also, my 3DS backlog is getting huge.

So I've made it up to Chapter 5, maybe 4, and I have to say that some of the starting classes are pretty awful compared to the later ones.

What does a Duelist have over a Mage? What does a solo Monk have over a solo Rune Knight, aside from ez extra turns.

I do like that the game allows a lot of freedom with party creation and you could do some stupid strats like 3 Monks to stack up God's Depth, 3 Samurais that just constantly heal themselves, and other general synergies

Oh Monks are the most OP class in the game later, they have a much better attack/defense buff.
They do lack damage compared to Rune Knights though, but Monk has much better lockdown.

Also mage does way less than duelist if you're fishing for Judgement which is unfortunately the only viable strat as a duelist. But damn is judgement stellar

I want to fuck Yuma.

Duelist can also rely on X Burn damage, it can get pretty crazy too.

Maybe I just overgrinded or something, but fights with dragons usually only last about 4 turns, even the True Dragons take less then 10 turns, so I don't really see the point in buffing up as that would, at best, remove 2 turns and, at worst, add turns.

The problem with X Burn is that you need to waste 2 turns, one to get fire cards and one to set it up, before you even do damage. Mages might not have the same raw damage output, but you aren't wasting turns to set this up.

Is there a class that focuses on punching things? That's what I care about.

Duelist always needs to set up unfortunately. I still like the class.

God Hand

I might have to look in to this

Technically you can have any avatar for whatever class. I found these guys as cooler brawlers.

You buff your damage dealers, generally a buff was making them do about double damage.
Red Breath Exhale or whatever the samurai one is called makes them do about 4x on the last active turn. but that takes 10 turns to get going.

That sounds disappointing. My mage in the first game was how I saw myself through to the end. Huge burst deeps on practically all their skills.

ezmode grinding is a staple in modern JRPG's. It's designed for people that play these games on the train.
Also, as someone who's almost beaten the game I can tell you they didn't make it so that you need to use the DLC.

The character skins are just that, skins. It's all just fanservice for the people that played the other 2 games.

The ultimate weapons are post-game content. So that's more for a powertrip once people finish the game and want to run around one-shotting things.

Also, all the DLC is free the week it's released. Meaning you can get all of it for free.
please use archive.is/2016/07/07/piece-7th-dragon-iii-code-vfd-dlc-will-free-week-launch/

I didn't know I needed to archive any link, but alright.
archive.is/HOZnZ

oh well that's neat, on cart DLC is still shit but whatever. That's slightly more excusable

Truth be told, I'm a happy overlever. I enjoy just plain being a bit overpowered. (Plus, in a lot of jRPGs, winning at "normal" or lower levels requires much more frequent equipment/skill/etc swaps, and constantly re-equipping is more annoying than some extra grinding if you ask me.) So the question, is how bad is the overlevel grind WITHOUT the boosters? If the default grind is normal, and the boosters make it easy, not such a big deal. If the default grind is tedious and the boosters make it easy, not cool. So, on the five-point grind scale, is the default a 3?

Also, just so we're clear, I don't even mind the idea of easy grind for people in a hurry or whatever, or alternate difficulty easy modes in any games, it's the sold separately part that bothers me.

That free first week thing is kinda cool, but since I probably won't be buying the game particularly soon either way, it probably won't do me much good.

Overgrinding won't help you much so it's about a 3.4. It's not hard but it's a little slow.
generally there's a best in slot armor/weapon for your tier and then you have your accessories which you change before bosses.

How do people even have trouble with most RPGs these days? It's just good decision making and using the right tools at the right time. And they usually give you the right tools early on. Most RPGs aren't even hard. With maybe 2 brick walls that cause the player to think outside the box.

Well normal enemy grinding seems a bit worse than some other games, I don't know the recommended level of the area I'm in but I'm still getting levels every 5 to 8 fights depending on the mobs. Though, most of your levels will come from killing the dragons, each dragon will usually give a level, or at least half a level, and there's a finite number of them, which, I think, 255.
So for xp grinding, I'd say with dragons around it's a 2/5, but without it's about a 3.4 like the other user said.

Normal mobs are more for grinding out SP to level up skills in my experience, or when you get your second and third teams they'll help those catch up to your main team, because the game uses relative experience (If someone is a lower level they'll gain more experience from an encounter than if they were a higher level.). The whole relative experience is why most people say you don't need to grind, as long as you kill all the dragons in an area you'll usually be at the level you need for the area.
The only time I'll say grinding will become a chore is if you decide to mess with class switching, because class switching removes 10 levels from a character while giving them a minor bonus based on their level when you switched (IE: A Mage in the 50's switching classes will get a permanent +2 to MAT.).

All that being said, overleveling in this game doesn't do much for you. Levels are mainly just for the HP and MP. You usually get +1 to all stats, but like +3 MP and +10 HP per level.
Meanwhile tier 0 equipment compared to tier 4, which I'm at, is usually a +100 to your main damage stat for the weapon and +50 to defensive stats on armor.

Defend is a glorified wait command with few valid uses.

Where did that say mages are weak?

Right there.

Even if it is, it still has a purpose. A super attack is just a glorified attack command, but that doesn't mean it's not important. Defend can protect a squishy character from instantly dying to a strong attack or live long enough to heal. Some games makes the defender soak damage for others or deflect attacks.

Let me help you out here then.

Draw 4 cards at battle start, none are fire. Turn 1 use Fire Search, no damage. Turn 2 use X Blaze, 25 damage. Turn 3 use Fire II, 350 damage, X Blaze activates at the end of the turn and does 800 damage.
Total damage: 1125 in 3 turns.

Turn 1 use Flame, 500 damage. Turn 2 use Flame, 500 damage. Turn 3 use Flame, 500 damage.
Total damage: 1500 in 3 turns.

Now, Duelist might do more damage if they have extra fire cards, but that's usually complete RNG. Meanwhile Mages are static. Not to mention that Mages also have heal, revive, and other support skills while Duelists have only damage skills, aside from their traps which only activate when they get hit.

If a character has 10 hp, but can do 1000 damage there's no reason to not just let them die and do the 1000 damage. Especially in this game where they still get full XP while dead, most revive skills heal more than normal healing skills, and there a ton of passive skills that trigger when a unit dies.

Bump

ah that's where you fucked up, Duelist basically has no purpose outside of traps. Xblaze does decent damage but to get it to rival mid-late game output you need to be extremely lucky, not to mention starting with 4 cards you're more likely to have 2 types.
Judgement is really what duelist aims for, that and My Turn which is really great