I’ve done the first three Encounter bosses with three of the characters so far.
Thoughts
The combat seems better, although we only have one party member during a run so there’s not really a lot to keep track of there. Having to decide what to pump up with your FA actually seems important to think about, and there’s also the fact that doing the EX limit break thing with a weapon (which costs 5 FA) can be extremely powerful, but you have to sacrifice your character’s potential level up growth to do it. I feel like I have to put more thought into building my character and because of the massive amount of RNG during a run I have to stay on my toes. It feels more like I’m actually playing a roguelike-style dungeon crawl compared to the main series so I think you’ve accomplished making the combat and RPG mechanics better.
The actual writing/story is very minimal currently, it’s mainly just a couple lines of dialogue when someone reaches a level milestone. I know you mention that the actual story content isn’t in the game yet so we’ll see what that is like at some point. I don’t have much to say on the writing because this is basically a gameplay demo right now.
The art is fine. I think the jump from character’s initial appearances to future stages is jarring. I like how characters have front and back views which you can now switch between if you want. Some of the enemies/bosses have pretty wild designs. It’s pretty similar to the mainline games overall.
The music is also good. I don’t really know the sources (one of the dungeon songs you can cycle between sounds like Parasite Eve to me?), but some of the boss songs are pretty awesome. Too bad you only get to hear them once and sometimes you murder a boss on the very first turn if you have a really good build. I think the dungeon crawling music you can pick from is better than the main series, that default song in the second game is pretty rough to listen to even if it sounds ridiculously funny to me at this point. I also noticed that cycling the music also changes the normal battle song which is neat.
I did my first run with Valentine against the First Encounter. I found the Hellfire gun thing with the triple shot on the very first floor I’m not sure if that was lucky or what, but either way the run was incredibly easy. I never had to struggle with resources and I murdered everything. The game still has crash problems so I recommend saving often like with the other games, unfortunately. I hit Max Level on literally the last floor before the final boss which seems like a tradition with Valentine at this point.
I did my second run with Valundyne against the Second Encounter. The Blood Rabbit encounter that harasses you completely wrecked me so I just started avoiding it the entire run. Valundyne gains levels incredibly quickly thanks to their Fusion Weapon so that sort of offsets the higher difficulty. I found the run more challenging and actually had to think about how to do things. I reached max level probably halfway in and things started to work out more from there. There were still a couple crashes, most of the time the music would continue to play too instead of stopping so I couldn’t tell when a crash would happen.
At this point I noticed some stat stuff seemed really wonky. For example if you eat a doughnut it says you’ll gain 6 levels, but I would gain far more levels than 6 when I used one. I think I went straight from level 16 to 25 at one point using one. I also noticed while messing with equipment that when I equipped a new shotgun my max HP would actually drop from 160 to 110 or something. I didn’t have any other gun there before so I don’t know why it dropped. Max HP seems to go up too if you keep using the same weapons or make them into EX weapons or something. I have no idea why a lot of things happen.
Feeling confident, I started my third run with UT (who the heck is this?) against the Third Encounter and got absolutely fucking wrecked before even leaving the first tier. The Blood Rabbit encounters are way more frequent, which is okay because I can run away from them, but the problem is that when you get a Blood Rabbit fight you’re not getting an apple drop event, or a shop, or a campfire, etc. And UT just doesn’t seem to have the skills to deal with the harder enemies so I just got bodied and ran completely out of resources around level 15.
So I tried again using Darx (who is this too?, who is Dawn??) instead against the Third Encounter. The first half was still really challenging, but I managed to squeak by with better luck and execution I think. I’m not sure Darx is that much better than UT, but I got an Alien Blaster early and was able to stay alive until I snowballed into a win. It really felt like I was trying to survive floor to floor, which isn’t something I ever felt playing the mainline games even on Hard. I think luck played a large factor, but that’s fine in a roguelike dungeon crawl thing and you can just save scum anyway.
I would probably try UT against the Fourth Encounter, but it says I’ve only defeated 1 out of the 9 Elite Fiends. I’ve had to fight an enemy that looks like Limit a bunch of times, but that’s the only one. I have no idea where the other 8 Elite Fiends are, so I can’t do the Fourth Encounter and I also don’t have access to the Fifth Character which I assume is locked behind beating the Fourth Encounter, so that’s where I’m at.
The first run took about an hour, with the later (successful) runs taking about 45 minutes since I knew what I was doing more, even with them being harder. I didn’t die at all against First Encounter, died a couple times against Second Encounter, and died a ton against Third Encounter.
As a combat showcase so far I think it’s pretty good. I’m looking forward to the story content as well as the Ultra EX Special Edition for the main series.