Because I was in the mood for it I’ve been re-playing the obscure original Playstation (psone) strategy role playing game (SRPG) “Epica Stella” recently. The game is now almost 10 years old and quite frankly in most aspects it has not aged well. In particular the gameplay is really iffy with the AI and interface in particular coming across badly.
I don’t want to harp on a 10 year old game made by a bankrupt company (even the company that released it in america has since folded) so I won’t go into specifics. But basically the main problem with the game is how unbalanced it is, if you play a few certain ways it’s really easy, but if you don’t rely on the available exploits you’re in for a very taxing time. Since I’ve played the game many times I was really assing my play through this time in order to intentionally get the bad ending and I was almost unable to finish the 2nd to last stage.
That stands to reason in a way right? Well the problem is that my assing was the way that a normal person would play the game. It’s been a long time now but I still remember an acquaintance complaining that try as they might they did terribly and could only get the bad ending (actually if memory serves you should be given a route choice after even beating the game with the bad ending). Such frustrations leading to abandon of course.
Probably the high points of the game are the customization and characterization/character interaction. Before I forget about it the strange katakana names which I’m not even positive how to romanize, let alone translate, are another low point. Anyway, it’s always been rare (I’ll say about 1/20 of the games I’ve played at the most, which could be something like 1/50 rpgs) in console RPGs of any type to be able to fully allocate your stat points at all upon level up, let alone for all of your characters. The only games I can think of off the top of my head that you can even adjust your main character is the Shin Megami Tensei/Persona series. Lately in the Super Robot Wars games you can manually increase stats but level gains are still automatic and random. Although the very nature of the stat allocation is what adds to the artificial difficulty of the game. In my opinion the key to success is to first of all allocate your stats to get your best abilities (attack 2 times being the game breaking ability) and desired attacks and then focusing all your gains on agility and power. Dodging, having your turns come around quicker, and slamming the enemies being much more effective than balancing your characters or trying to play defensively. In fact throughout the game there are many times you have to desperately go on the offensive before the enemy moves to wipe you out… hmph…
So that said I primarily focus my units on using wind or fire stones/attacks. The wind attack set is on the whole the most useful, however since they’re unlocked by raising dexterity, which increases hit rate, your units end out less powerful. Fire attacks are unlocked by raising power so even though they’re not quite as diverse that’s covered by the sheer damage. There’s one combat strategy you can use which essentially makes hit rate meaningless. As units use attacks and respond to attacks they build up “TP”. The enemy will not act if they have more than 50-60 built up, and if you can knock a unit over 100 it will freeze up making all attacks temporarily guaranteed to hit. Once you get the third fire stone which lets you use the third fire attack (you only need the second one for wind stones/attacks) you can just have your characters focus attacks on an enemy 4 times in a row to stun it. Even if the enemy isn’t hit by any of the moves once it gets stunned any unit can hit and with your powerful fire moves you might only need one or two attacks to take something out.
In the end however the main draw of the game for me are the multiple routes and endings. The default route with the “kingdom” is pretty straight forward plot wise though it has a few splits early on and is the only route with optional characters. The hidden “empire” route (you can get it your first time playing through but you have to get your main character to level 8 by the end of stage 3 which is much higher than the average level at that point) is somewhat more interesting but the fewer characters and tougher enemies can be daunting. Both of those routes have two endings, the kingdom has a good and bad but the empire has an actual route split near the end which mostly revolves around a couple of choices you can make, with each side of the split having a different ending. And then after beating the game once you can split from the normal kingdom route for the… I guess officially it’s like an alternate/parody kingdom route which mostly consists of the main characters being irresponsible and getting into trouble. That has its own strange end and beating it lets you view an alternate opening sequence which is an out and out parody. That route is probably my favorite and I’d say it nets you the most concentrated force (the empire and this parody kingdom both have you end out with 6 characters) with only one dead weight character although you get the most units and almost all of the powerful units and characters on the kingdom route. I’d say the main difficulty in the empire route is only having two characters with attack twice whereas you get 3 in the alternate kingdom and… 5 in the normal kindgom route.
Looking back on this game after all this time I’m actually only more disappointed that you never get to use two of the special units (the earth one used by Sharon’s brother (duel? duwar? ????) and the fire one used by Barze (balze? balsac?)) and that there’s one particular area of the continent you never visit. That was just kind of the way that things worked out in the context of the plot but… Yeah it was really a fairly weird game if you think about it. You don’t really see these screwy rpgs that I enjoyed on the PSone on consoles very much anymore. I’d say that they were more common on the SNES but there just happened to be more released on PSone. There are still games like this on handhelds though. Thinking about it a bit the games released by Nippon Ichi and Gust on the PS2 like Disgaea and Ar Tonelico are similar but that’s all that come to mind with a similar sort of spirit. Oh well.
Right now I’m thinking doing some kind of strange gameplay log with screen caps for the game in japanese. I don’t think the copyright for the game is owned by anybody any more so… hmm… well it’s probably not worth it. On the horizon for me and Epica Stella is seeing if I can beat the game using only the weak default cut and/or thrust attack (there are a couple of units that don’t get cut). I kind of don’t think it could be done at all because of how retardedly strong the final enemies are if nothing else. On the other hand if one relied more on the stone spells for healing and boosting stats and fought using a strategy to isolate single enemies with 4 characters while having two roam around healing or boosting it might be possible.
Normally the advantage of the wind stone is the long range, cheap, 2nd attack which does almost no damage (actually it’s only rated a bit lower than the cut) but is by far the most useful way to stun the enemy without taking any damage since the enemy will always defend in practice since it knocks them down (thus canceling their move) when it hits. So usually the way to succeed is having a few wind stone characters knock enemies with that (the two super units and one unique unit that use wind stones are used by characters with the attack twice ability so just two of them in a row will stun any enemy) and then having the other characters use their low hit rate high power moves to take them out without being countered. In other words somewhat of a finesse hit-and-away outfight.
On the other hand If you were to just use the normal type slash then the enemy would absolutely counter by default under normal circumstances, which would generally be with strong cut (I think a lot of people translate “giri” 切り as slash into english), and that costs 60 tp to use as a counter attack, so you’d only need two moves to stun an enemy rather than 4, and one move to get them to pass a turn. As a side note the most efficient move for that strategy normally is the lowest overall cost kick (which not all units have) and the most useful one is the first fire attack (low ap cost, moderate tp cost, above average hit rate and power). So sticking with the boxing analogy it would be a smash mouth infight where you’re trying to knock the enemy out before they knock you out. There are theoretically plenty of advantages to that strategy in general, and over the former if executed properly in particular. In the first place the enemy never uses any spells so you can (eventually) heal yourself though they never will which gives you the potential long term advantage to grind them down. The problem is with the low potential damage under the “only use slash” limitation.
Of course ideally you fight either way when appropriate and I just tend to prefer the former (much more cautious and totally reliable) strategy. It might be worth a try though… Hmm I wonder if I should endeavor to create a sort of “restriction challenge” guide a la the single class challenge in myriad of the final fantasy games. Using that analogy, I’d say that an only use slash, spells allowed, challenge would be along the lines of the thief only challenge. Restricting spell use would be like the white mage only challenge… Using only the puny stat down attacks which do ridiculously low damage (even with maxed power the defense down fire attack only ends out doing perhaps 10-20 damage whereas the strongest attacks can do 1-300 damage when power is maxed) would probably be a next to impossible prospect.
Again in most of the challenges I’m thinking of I can see things getting bogged down mostly in the end of the game when the enemy units are exponentially better. While playing for the bad ending I experimented with focusing almost exclusively on different stats with different characters and stones and the effectiveness of that varied wildly. That’s not something worth writing about here though. hmm… actually I think the main problem was sticking with the default units for the first three characters you get instead of switching them out for other more powerful units that become available. The default weak units have the lowest movement and no stat point (each unit has a different base hp) augmentation and that was progressively more of a problem as the game went on when you start facing enemies with stat boosts. *sigh… Yeah what the hell maybe I’ll write a guide using my blog here replete with screen caps that I can turn into a .txt version and put it up on the cesspool gamefaqs.com. Why not? Apathy.
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