I’m always a sucker for grinding levels and additions on this game. Especially when using fast forward it’s very easy to snag an extra level or so. I’m about to start zenbatos and my teams at 39 and their dragoons and additions have been maxed for quite some time. But I managed this capped 9999 today which I thought was cool and possibly a sign to stop pummeling randoms!
Scroll images for stills
Finally done with this. I need a break from looking at it.
Created in Paint Tool SAI 2
Anyone ever had an enemy attack a party member while they were already downed? Never had this happen in the 20 something years I’ve played this game lol
Haschel and Gehrich, one more red (purple) and shortish and the other green and tall, and both with big mustaches.
I joined it and was immediately banned. I don't understand why. All I said was "hello" in the off-topic channel. Can someone help me? My discord name is the same as on here.
Lately, I’ve been enjoying casual playthroughs where I don’t spend extra time grinding levels, money, or additions and just play the game at its natural pace. With that said, the game is naturally more difficult when you decide to play this way. Dragoon forms and magic become much more important for defense and attack damage.
As I’m sure you all know, you typically take 1/2 the damage in dragoon form as you would in your base form for any given attack. However, once you get to chapter 3, there are 3 very powerful main bosses that will completely trivialize your dragoon forms if you stay in dragoon form for longer than a single turn. These bosses are:
Grand Jewel - activates the Dragon Block Staff which greatly lowers your attack and defense while in dragoon form.
Divine Dragon - the battle is started with the Dragon Block Staff already activated, reducing dragoon form attack and defense greatly immediately.
Lloyd - uses the Dragon Buster Sword, which instakills anybody in dragoon form on Lloyd’s next turn.
Being limited to a single turn per transformation completely negates the dragoon defense buff considering you are forced to transform back into your base form at the end of your turn. However, there is a way cycle Rose Storm in a way that buffs your party’s defense continuously throughout the entire fight for each of these bosses if you use your turns effectively.
Explanation and Strategy:
For those who do not know or may need a refresher; Rose Storm is Lavitz’s/Albert’s second dragoon magic and allows the party to receive a 2x defense buff that lasts for 3 of Albert’s turns after he casts it. As long as you have Albert at dragoon level 2 and an addition that gives you at least 34 SP per completion, you can use this strategy.
You will want to start each fight with exactly 1 dragoon meter and full MP with Albert. It doesn’t matter how much dragoon meter the rest of your party has because they will not be transforming at any point. As soon as Albert gets his first turn, you will transform and use Rose Storm, granting the party the defense buff. Albert will immediately transform back into his base form, which will not allow the effects of the Dragon Block Staff from the Grand Jewel or the Divine Dragon to effect him, and Lloyd will not be able to use the Dragon Buster to instakill him on his next turn. Because the duration of Rose Storm is based on Albert’s turns, it is wise to choose a third party member that has a high speed stat so that you get the most out of the Rose Storm duration. This works especially well because of Albert’s comparatively slow speed stat to the rest of the cast. For the next 3 turns, Albert will simply use his additions to refill his dragoon meter back up to 1, and then repeat the process with his next transformation. You can use the other party members to refill his MP with items when he starts to get low.
Cycling the strategy correctly will allow you to keep Rose Storm active throughout the entirety of each fight without worrying about the repercussions of the Dragon Block Staff or the Dragon Buster.
I’m not sure if anybody else uses this strategy, but I wanted to pass my experience on to the next player!
Why are there so many creeps oogling over shana on this ship? Some of them act like they are her true love and its just kinda creepy. Like the one sweeping in the room Albert was in when you talk to him it even says it seems like he is ignoring you (Dart). Never noticed it as a kid but this playthrough its just wow. Sorry just needed to say this. Love this game but this ship is crazy.
I've tried and tried but I just don't know how to do it. I've been trying out software to rip the sfx sound files but it's not working for me. I've looked online and I only see the soundtrack files. Does anyone have or know of where I can get the audio file specifically of Dart saying "Double Slash" but without any background noise like the game music or other background noise. Thanks.
I've had more playthroughs than I care to admit and have tried basically every party combination, but I'm almost always tempted to gravitate towards Albert and Meru.
Meru is an obvious choice thanks to her excellent dragoon spellpool, high magic, highest speed, and her last two additions offsetting her otherwise low attack power letting her deal huge damage on both sides.
While Meru's physical bulk is poor even with a Physical Ring and you'll be relying on her pitiful Double Smack until she sees some development, Albert usually more than makes up for it. Having Lavitz from the start means you're investing in 2/3 of the team's additionz almost immediately and putting a Bandit's Ring on him combined with Gust of Wind Dance early let's him shred throughout most of the game.
By the time you get an underdeveloped Meru, Albert should be peaking with a leveled Gust of Wind Dance doing insane damage and should be close to acquiring his final addition, easily making up for the loss of damage. Rose Storm is also an obvious boon throughout the entire game, helping patch up his pitiful magical bulk and Meru's physical bulk while also still doing high physical damage in between.
The party's only glaring weakness is that Albert goes down HARD to magic, especially late game, meaning his biggest job is keeping Rose Storm up instead of attacking. This is especially an issue for Dragon Staff fights unless you can do a level 1 Rose Storm and transform back.
Im sure you all remember the events in chapter 2 leading to Dart and friends needing to retrieve the Red-Eye Dragoon Spirit from the Gehrich Gang while attempting to rescue Lynn in the process. After getting permission from the mayor to enter the Valley of Corrupted Gravity, Meru makes her first appearance and tells you that she planned on rescuing Lynn on her own anyways and ultimately convinces Dart to allow her into your party. This, of course, is well before we knew that she was a wingly and presumably much more capable than any typical teenage girl.
I’ve thought this to myself a number of times but never felt confident in any of the conclusions that I have drawn on my own, so I ask you all: how far could Meru have gotten on her own if she were to attempt to rescue Lynn on her own?
I’ve thought of a number of things to consider.
These are the main factors that I have thought about, but have never really been able to come to a comfortable conclusion on my own. So I ask you all, how far does Meru get in her journey to rescue Lynn?
Obviously, Emille was charmed by Albert's words, but I felt Dart's pain in this moment.
I’m seeing you must own a physical copy of the game to download severed chains? How do I download the game to my pc without a physical disc? Like is there a way to digitally purchase on pc?!?
I always skipped on the Soul Eater+Therapy Ring in favor of the Claymore+Atk Badge, but since people recommend it for Dragoon form I'm a little confused on what exactly what parts of your equipment do you keep and lose? Do you keep the base stats, but lose the special effects? What does that mean for things like the Dragon Shield(1/2 physical damage) or speed items? Have I been sleeping on Evasion accessories?
i know it looks awful and i hate it, but it took the better part of the last 2 days to make and i'm burnt out so i'm sharing.
since i couldn't find any fanart of it online, i figured i'd try to make a bonus soundtrack cover, with how i thought it might look.
i used gimp mostly, and i can't paint so i used primarily a bunch of filters and rotoscoping (from the original art of Lavitz in dragoon form). but no matter how hard i tried, i couldn't manage to get the color of the wings to 'blend' to the background like in the original, (at least not in any way that looked right) so i kinda made up my own thing.
If there's a better artist out there who can make this actually look good, I would appreciate it if you did.
(Original Lavitz Dragoon art and Original Soundtrack Cover art for reference)
Does the dragon helm stack with the physical ring? Can Kongol go higher than 9999hp with the dragon helm?
If they ever remake the game they should really add a way for you to leave the moon and return to other places. Sucks to get trapped there
Playing for the first time. Haven't really had much issue with any addition until Moon Strike. I've had it since before the end of disc 3 and am now in this horrific sand pit area and I have only hit it 12 times. I hate it.
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.