u/TrapFestival

I'm not saying I expect all of these things to be stock features, in fact I'm fully aware that some of this stuff is extremely pedantic, but well, that's the nature of the post.

1 - Meaningful Gameplay

- Party of seven. To my awareness this is something that a group is working on, so there's nothing really to add here, I'm just affirming that I'd like to see it in action because I want to use all the characters (even Shana, despite her being Shana and therefore boring), and it'd also be interesting to explore how to balance it.

- Item Storage, accessible from save points. If you pick up an item that you can't fit into your bag right away, it goes here instead and there is no limit to the amount of items that can be stored. This seems like a nice in-between of the retail item limit and just expanding the retail item limit.

- "No counters" setting for Additions, in addition to normal and automatic. I find counters to be poorly implemented due to how abrupt some of them can be (Rod Typhoon) and how the long delay after processing a counter completely destroys the rhythm of the Addition. It'd also be interesting to explore how to implement them better, but a "no counters" setting is probably the path of least resistance.

- Setting to enable Additions to level up within a battle, for example such that doing Madness Hero for the 60th time will yield 120 SP as normal, but the 61st time will yield 150 without needing to go into a new battle. I imagine this with a "Level Up" graphic, probably borrowed from the results screen, to make it apparent that this is happening.

- Setting to enable knocked out characters to receive experience. This is absolutely to do with how there's one situation where a character losing experience because of this is unavoidable. If you know, you know.

- Ability to skip non-FMV cutscenes. Related, while it might not fit as a stock feature, it also would be kind of nice to have an auto-story button in towns which will cause Dart to automatically move to the next checkpoint to advance the plot. I imagine that in particular this could serve as a helpful option in Fletz since that... is Fletz.

- No EXP setting, so as to be able to farm them Bandit's Rings, Dancer's Rings, Sachets, and what-have-you without bloating your gained experience. If you have it on for a boss, that's your own fault.

- Setting to change boss (and Magician Bogey) item drops to 100%. I find bosses having sub-100% rate item drops to be very ill-conceived, and I don't think the game should be doing that. Could also extend to a general cheat that forces the next enemy taken down to drop its item, for if you don't even want to farm those special items in the first place. I do acknowledge that having four Magical Hats on Disc 2 is very likely to break the game if they're taken advantage of, but you can just not use them or sell them if it means that much to you. Or turn the setting off for the Bogeys and turn it back on after the fact, if it is a setting. I have been told that this should be doable on the user end soon-ish, but I'm still restating it here to be as complete as I can be for this list.

2 - Nitpicks

- Ability to disable the play timer because I find it annoying. Ideally it should display as either being jammed on 0:00:00 or as -:--:--. If there are concerns about tomfoolery, I could see this being something you have to turn on when starting a new game and which cannot be turned off ever. Ideally, the time should not even be counted behind the scenes, if the question is "How long have I been playing?" then the answer is "I don't know, you told me not to count."

- Ability to prevent run-on counting. For example, making it so that when an Addition is done 80 times, the display says something like "Master" instead of 80/--, and likewise upon reaching the maximum Level or Dragoon Level the EXP counter changes from numbers to just say "Master" or something similar. This is, again, because I find it annoying, and again ideally the counting doesn't even occur behind the curtain, the game just completely stops counting once there's nothing left to count to and writes the values off as "[Amount] or higher, I don't know, I stopped counting."

- Optional information display with different counters that can be activated or disabled separately. One to list how much treasure including Stardust is in an area (both on the map where you currently stand and that overall area), sensitive to treasure that exists but which you aren't supposed to be able to get yet (such as the Hellena 2 items) and one to list how many non-repeating actions you can perform (NPCs that say one thing then loop saying another, etcetera). The latter should ideally also come with some kind of information display on the world map to point you toward out of the way limited time events (revisiting Seles, Bale, etcetera).

- Setting for fast magic. Multi items used by the player excluded for obvious reasons. I am aware there is a fast forward button, that is why this is under Nitpicks.

I more or less stand by what I said about Spinning Cane and Hard Blade being the second and third worst Additions numerically, but as for worst Additions in practice Spinning Cane is better off because you get it in such close proximity to getting Lavitz in the first place that it's not realistic to have Harpoon 5 by then and more to the point the numbers are so low that the DMG% modifiers don't particularly matter so just playing hot potato and going back and forth between Harpoon and Spinning Cane results in the latter not feeling like a burden at all. Neither is competent at generating SP anyway, so it's no loss to use both before getting Lavitz's Dragoon Spirit.

Hard Blade, on the other hand, at face has that massive drag of a start-up before it actually gets good, but in practice it's way worse than it sounds because if you use Rose at every boss she can participate in and don't level grind then you'll probably get Hard Blade after Lenus 1. From there, the pace is such that unless you go out of your way to grind it then by the time you get to Lenus 2 it'll at best probably only break even with More & More's damage while still losing to Whip Smack. It's a complete load there unless you baby it, and grinding Additions does a really good job of breaking the game's difficulty curve, especially for Lavitz and to a lesser extent Rose due to how all of Lavitz's Additions are extremely frontloaded despite him having five of them and Rose has the second fewest ahead of only Kongol while being the third character with Additions that you get.

My evaluation of Burning Rush has also gone down from passable to mediocre, as I found it annoying to use due to its sub-par DMG%. I didn't use it straight through in my most recent go as I decided to pull out power Additions like Volcano for bosses and use other things against fodder encounters so that kept Volcano fresh until around the second to last guy of Disc 1. Not helping Burning Rush is that its timing means it'll almost certainly be Dart's latest Addition by the Hero Tournament, so unless you're comfortable overusing Volcano (or Double Slash, but why would you?) then you have a high likelyhood of using an SP Addition in a context where you can't get SP, enough times to churn through an entire level of the thing in fact. Then this comes up again later for reasons, though at that point since Dart isn't alone you can just have him Guard and throw support items while feeding Additions to other characters and you probably have Crush Dance so it's less of a thing then. Nevermind that Crush Dance is, level for level, a better SP Addition than Burning Rush except for the meaningless 102 vs 100 when they're both at Level 5 while actually having DMG% growth to boot.

For Haschel, Meru, and Kongol, I can't really say anything. I don't like to use Haschel before the end of Disc 1 or Meru before Lenus 2 even though I know the SP yield of Double Punch (and especially Ferry of Styx) and Double Smack are negligible since their D-Levels will be carried by Summon 4 Gods and Cool Boogie anyway, but it just don't feel right, while for Kongol he has the really unfortunate disposition of having worse MDEF than Albert and joining the party right before the magical nightmare that is Lenus 1. Being able to immediately get his Dragoon Spirit doesn't help the impression.

Oh, and I've commented before on Dart having an awkward level gap between Madness Hero and Moon Strike. I can't deconfirm this yet, but it seems highly likely that the part I was leaving out and not acknowledging is that I used to have the habit of grinding out Double Slash in Hellena 1 for whatever reason. Not doing that is more likely to put him into a situation where he'll be bouncing between Burning Rush and Crush Dance and then Madness Hero and Crush Dance, but I can only wait and see if Moon Strike turns up before Madness Hero and Crush Dance are both done.

That's a thorn in my side with this game, but it's unclear how I might go about changing the drop rates myself. If there were savestates to resolve the issue that way then that'd be fine, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

For that matter, I'd also like one that disables the in-game play timer and just forces it to always be 0:00:00, but that's a personal nitpick rather than anything that actually has an effect on how the game behaves.

All for the same basic reason, in fact, being that they are each damage focused Additions with no SP growth whatsoever and which ramp so slowly that they need to reach Level 3 to just match a preceding Level 5 Addition and Level 4 to actually do the best damage among themselves and their precedessor(s). That's not to say they're not worth using, if you want that final Addition you gotta do the dirt, but they're unlikely to be the best option in any given situation until you've already used them 60 times out of 80 (and besides Spinning Cane, the moment you hit 80 you get that final Addition unless you skipped ahead).

I take Inferno for being the worst because it only has 20 SP and a 100-200% curve on top of Bone Crush also doing 200% out of the box with five times the SP yield so there is no point whatsoever where Level 5 Inferno is better than Bone Crush (whereas Demon's Dance and Omni-Sweep do have to ramp before they outdamage Level 5 Hard Blade and Hex Hammer and Spinning Cane isn't Lavitz's second-last Addition so it's not up this creek to begin with), Spinning Cane to be the second worst because it has 35 SP but still a 100-200% curve, Hard Blade third worst because it has a 100-300% curve and its 35 SP isn't actually a loss from Whip Smack (though a significant loss from More & More), and Hex Hammer fourth worst for having a 200-400% curve despite having the absolute worst SP yield of all additions in the game at 15 from end to end, even being lower than the likes of the aforementioned Inferno or Moon Strike, Cat's Cradle, or Haschel's own Ferry of Styx which all yield 20.

Does that make sense?

Oftentimes I see language used that equates hitting picture slots to drawing, and I'm just here thinking "Well you're the one being disrespectful to the concept of drawing here, not me." because they're the "artist", right? Or at least going to bat for the "artists", so they should know better than anyone that there is a colossal difference in execution between manually drawing a picture and just plugging in what you want and clicking that Generate button.

It's the damndest thing. No, picture slots aren't drawing. They have the same kind of output, but the means of production couldn't be more different.