Q: “how do you get the good ending/avoid getting the bad ending (in the kingdom route) in Epica Stella” (epica stella was released in the US as “vanguard bandits” which was a totally nonsensical name) A: You need to be liked enough/your team needs to have a high enough morale by the end of stage 19/before the start of 20. There was a rumor that Randy/Bastion had to have his unit’s final attack which you get by having all his stats at or above 20 but I don’t think that’s true, even if it were true it is pretty easy to accomplish with the massive stat boosts he gets from his unit (BAS+5 all but WEP+2), stone (+1 to all), and weapon (+1 to all) . As to the best way to get your team to have a high morale, you are almost guaranteed of this if you get umm Nana (the fat duke’s daughter) and Milea (randy’s female friend), or just Milea after beating all enemies in the version of stage 7 that has Randy in the arena. The latter is a lot harder to do (you have to use the save and reset cheat and have an ideal (really fast and with the double attack skill) Randy) but it boosts the morale of your teammates by quite a bit. On the other hand you are likely to lower your teammates morale by attaining Nana since you miss out on some other good stuff and are likely to have them get killed, just let Randy get killed on stage 6 when he’s surrounded and have everyone else run away and defend. You get Milea by having Randy at or (more safely) below level 19 when chapter 15 ends, she will ask to join up with you and of course you want to let her, if your level is higher she won’t join.
Other than/in addition to having those two join up or storming through the arena, talk with Rejina/Reyna all 3 times on the intermission screen until Andrew joins, after he joins talk with him all 3 times. If you get Milea (was it milly in the jap version?) you might want to talk with her in some kind of split with Andrew if his affection is high (heart). I recommend those three rather than trying to talk to characters that are unhappy (usually russel/devlin) because their morale goes up the most when randy talks to them at their given points in the game. Russel and most others are +2, rejina is +3, andrew and milly are +4 so it makes a bigger difference. I think that other characters like each other when they use spells on each other, so you can give that a shot too but it usually doesn’t matter unless….
The main reason people get the bad ending is because too many of their units get beaten down. The main reason that happens is because the game gives you no indication how to get skills and attacks so it is entirely possible to be running around with a group of characters that can only use basic moves and have really bad stat spread which does not cut it at the end of the game. Just for the hell of it I tried playing a “slash/thrust” only game while trying to max BAS out and it eventually became impossible to proceed that way. The safest way to get through the game is by having everyone that has an option using a wind stone and stunning the enemy (overloading their gauge by making them defend the wind knockdown moves you get from the second stone by having enough dex and agi) while having the other characters (randy, nana, grado etc.) bring the heat. Of course if you are reading this then you can be free to go to gamefaqs.com and look up all the information you want on the game. I myself have written redundantly on my game strategies here as well so just check my tags which are adequately categorized.
By the way I happen to know that being unable to get anything but the “bad ending” on the “kingdom” route was a major put off for people who played this game. Also there was no way anyone was going to incidentally figure out how to get onto the empire path, you have to try pretty hard to pull that off. Yeah really it was so unpopular (which might be one of the reasons I still love it) that I was able to obtain a factory sealed copy of the game from a stingy (they wouldn’t slash the price to get rid of it) major retailer many years after it was released. Conversely both the company that released it in japan and the company that translated it in america have since gone out of business. I don’t think this game was a direct contributor to that but it’s a little hard for me to believe that it made anyone a lot of money. Ah shit that is quite a lot to write about a single question. I must reflect again that I still do not know why I like this game so much though it has been almost a decade since I first played it, but every game seems to have at least one person who is really into it, and memory issues aside (you’d think that after playing the game something like 20 times I’d remember the character names, even between the two versions), for this game that person is apparently me. I also do not know whether the fact that I’ve never contributed to the fan community of this game lessens the believability of my fervor for it or is a result of it; I’d rather just play the damn game and sometimes write or talk a bit about it than bother doing really obscure things with or about the game. It seems like a moot point to me at this juncture (both companies defunct, probably everyone who worked on it in any definitive way as well) anyway. Hmm that does bring up the question of where game industry people go to die.
(should have put this at the top) Remember: all my titles are intentional but I will not remember later what they meant to me at the time.
I actually started this post just to say that even though some of my game purchasing choices have worked out well lately one has not: they are releasing, or have released, a lower priced version of Super Robot Taisen Original Generations for PS2. I didn’t really think about that being a possibility when I bought the game a couple of months ago (and proceeded to not really play it) along with OG gaiden. On the other hand OG gaiden has sold out in a fair amount of places now and I’m not so sure that will get re-released as a PS2 best. It once again occurs to me that if they just priced games that low in the first place they would sell that many more units but whatever, just continue to undermine your true fanbase by making them pay way too much for crappy promotional goods and dubious limited editions only to re-release the game for half the cost within a year. Of course the whole point of being otaku is that you pay too much even though you know you pay too much. I wanted the game, I didn’t want to be unable to get the game, and even though the game is not impressive (a 3dish remake of 2 gba games, big deal, why the fuck didn’t they just make og 3?) I don’t really regret it because it was a kind of symbol of something.
Yes I do think that I’m getting stupider lately, so glad that you noticed I can do it in the course of a paragraph. I’m pretty sure I could do it in the course of one breath if given the chance. I’m not sure if the thought “Michael Phelps getting 8 gold medals is not necessarily a positive reflection on the US” is stupid or not so whether or not it is there you go. There is actually a lot I could say about the (worthless) olympics but I can’t decide if I want to go there or not. OK I will say that having to capitalize “olympics” is stupid. There. Also China has really made asses of themselves. That country can’t possibly fall apart fast enough (remember: genocide is always an option, start with your children and parents they’re weaker) for my liking. On the bright side the olympics are probably hastening them towards that. And the IOC is the biggest joke in the world. Does anybody really have any faith in them? The very idea is the most sanctimonious bullshit I’ve ever come across, and I’m counting my most hated nazis/germans, even trumping the MLB in america. Aw god just strike me down, I don’t even care about heaven at this point, you’d have to get acclimated to hell eventually right?
The Sky Before Dawn 