I ended the game at an average level of 35 or 36, with plenty of power boxes left unfilled. I imagine if you really work at it, you can probably hit 40, but I doubt it’s worth it - all of your essential powers, and many of the less useful ones, are probably maxed out by 35.
It benefits you in that completing Danger Room missions is a great source of experience, if you’re near the recommended level. Advancing a Danger Room tier doesn’t require that you complete all the missions in it, just the advancement exam, which is unfortauntely always found in a mission. Despite looking really hard I ended up buying the 100 and 400 exams; this is bad because they’re sold much, much later than when you would have found them, so you get the experience for the next tier of missions too late for it to do much good.
As the game progressed, I got into the habit of putting a +20% attack/movement speed item (and later +30%) on the character I planned to mostly use. Makes backtracking to hunt for those silly collectibles much less painful. And it’s all the better if the character is Wolverine with his frenzy, or Gambit with his kinetic enhancement is in the team. Sometimes it even got to the point where I felt like I was moving sluggishly at +30% speed.
And yet, sometimes it was still faster to fly. Silly land-bound obstacles.
There is one more benefit of the danger room. You can access it from any save point and any potions you collect in there are applied to your total. Very useful when low on health in certain stages and you want to restock your potions. Watch out, though, since after you complete a danger room mission it no longer gives you stuff when you do it.
I like to collect all the excess potions on certain levels, and sell them to Forge.
Can you keep doing that with incomplete Danger Room missions? As soon as I regain control of the PS2 TV, I’m going to have to try that.
A problem I’m having though, is keeping a little extra space in my inventory so I can pick up those ability amplifiers. I hate it when I have to drop something in order to pick something else up. I’d much rather sell my excess to Forge.
It took me about 21 game hours to finish the game single-player. I’m a bit of a gaming nut, so it’s probably not a good idea to base how much real time you’ll spend with it on my experiences. It’d probably remain good fun to run through it multiplayer until you’re sick of it, as it does support up to four players cooperatively going through the main storyline, or fighting it out in an arena.
I thought the game could have been a lot better than it was, but it’s a decent experience. In hindsight, it probably wasn’t worth my $50, but still probably worth $20 for a used copy a few months down the road. YMMV.
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If you’re looking for a much more time-intensive RPG (and a game with more hours to it- although personally, I tend to prefer shorter ones) along the lines of Knights of the Old Republic, I’m fifteen hours into Shadow Hearts 2 now and really enjoying it. It still feels like I’m in the early parts of the game, to get a feel for the length. Two warnings about it though: it has a pretty complicated battle system, and it is indeed a Japanese RPG with all of the unique quirkiness that that entails. There’s a good review of it here.
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Wow, that’s pretty good. I’m already over 30 hours and I’m pretty sure I have a ways to go. Yesterday though, I spent a lot of time in the Danger Room piling up experience points & collecting/selling potions.
I agree. It seems like a good start and I’m hoping there will be a follow on that’s a little more replayable. My main gripe is once you’ve powered up your characters, you can’t go back & revisit your old missions in order to find all the hidden goodies you missed, or to kick butt on all the old enemies that kicked your butt the first time through. OTOH, it’s also possible to get too powered up early in the game. I just finished saving the mutant kids from the city riots and I can take out a Sentinel with one power combo & a couple swipes from Wolverine. It’s not even a challenge when I use mutant powers.
Haven’t used multiplayer yet, hopefully that’ll add some value to the game, but I have a hard time finding anyone to play with.
I’m not much of a gamer (I don’t own any consoles at the moment and the only computer game I play with any regularity is the Civ series) so I’m not sure I’d be up for that game. Could you suggest something along the lines of The Secret of Evermore, the SNES Final Fantasies, Breath of Fire III, and even though I know it isn’t an RPG in the normal sense of the word, Metal Gear Solid? Those’re my favorite games that aren’t fighting related.
Well, it depends a lot on what you’re looking for, and how much things like character interaction and the combat system factor into what you like. So I can list some good, similar games in general, and then try to narrow it down some more with more information. It’s hard to find Japanese-style RPGs as computer games and even harder to find good ones; Diablo 2 is probably the closest to them on the PC world. So unfortunately these are all going to be console games. In (very) rough order of recommendation:
[ul]
[li]Final Fantasy 9 (PS1) is the easy recommendation if you enjoyed the SNES Final Fantasies. The last, and IMO best, of Square’s older style traditional RPGs, it plays much like Final Fantasy 2/4 with prerendered 3D scenery. The polygonal graphics look pretty dated though.[/li][li]Breath of Fire 4 (PS1) is similar to 3, as you’d expect. I liked it a little better. Graphics are similar too.[/li][li]Final Fantasy 10 (PS2) is about as non-standard as traditional RPG gets. They try a lot of new things in the game, but the overall result was very good. It’s completely turn-based, you can swap characters in and out during battle with no penalty, and the graphics look fine today, although they use fixed camera angles.Suikoden 2 (PS1) is an overall good traditional RPG. You recruit up to 108 characters, who flesh out your castle, and can take up to six at a time into turn-based battles, which tend to go quickly. The graphics consist of SNES-style sprites.[/li][li]Parasite Eve (PS1) is a decent single-character action RPG. Your primary weapons are guns and magic, so it’s much more of a ranged combat feel then Secret of Evermore. I haven’t looked at the game recently, so I can’t say how well the graphics have held up. Uses fixed camera angles.[/li][li]Kingdom Hearts (PS2) is an action RPG romp through various Disney worlds. If you can deal with that, you end up with a decent game similar to Secret of Evermore but with less stats. You control one character with two AI allies.[/li][li]Beyond Good and Evil (PS2, Xbox, GC, PC) is a good adventure game with stealth sequences, a cute photography gimmick, and some Zeldaesque combat. Depending on why you liked MGS, this might be worth a try.[/li][li]Fable (Xbox) is a single-character action RPG. I haven’t played it myself, but I hear it’s somewhere between decent and good.[/li][li]Skies of Arcadia (GC) is a party-based traditional RPG with a particularly vibrant world. Lots of people loved it; I didn’t care for the combat or the gratuitous camera work during fights.[/ul][/li]
Where I haven’t mentioned them, the graphics are up to modern standards and the game is fully 3D and uses a free camera. Generally, action RPGs are similar to Secret of Evermore, whereas traditional RPGs are similar to Final Fantasy 2/4.
Hm… I’m not much of a critic when it comes to entertainment so it’s difficult for me to explain what it is about some game, movie, or book that I like. I suppose the main reason I liked MGS is that it was a new format for me at the time and that it mixed an interesting storyline with a unique engine.
Of the games you mentioned, I know I’ve played Breath of Fire IV (I was thinking of it instead of III), FF IX, and FF X, and didn’t care much for the last two because of the scope of the games. It seemed like they focused so much on the sidequests that the main storyline suffered. Plus, I hate playing a game where I NEED a player’s guide.
Suikoden II reminds me of an old Sega Genesis game that I used to love to play but can’t remember the name of. It had the same basic gameplay and a huge amount of characters that you could choose from, all with their own abilities but hell if I can remember the name of it and it’s seriously bugging me. All of the last four games sound interesting too.
Are any of them similar in camera work to Ocarina of Time though? If so, I will have to pass… there’s something about polygons and that kind of view that gives me massive nauseous headaches that will lay me out for hours.
I’m having kind of a hard time liking this game. Mostly because of the camera, or more like a lack thereof. I constantly feel like I can see what’s around me, whether in a fight or just finding my way. The camera angle options don’t help. The map isn’t much of a help either.
Was it something in the Shining Force series? Sorry I can’t be of much help there; the Genesis isn’t one of my strong points.
All of them use an adjustable camera that follows after your character, although not as closely as OoT’s did, nor with just one button to control it. Generally, you control the camera with the right analog stick. None of them have visible polygons, if that’s what caused it, but if it’s the camera control and tracking style that did, I’m afraid you’ll probably have trouble with most current games.
Okay, that helps to narrow it down a bit. I can try to throw out a few other games:
[ul]
[li]Valkyrie Profile (PS1) is a good party-based traditional RPG where your characters have all been recently killed in significant ways, and are recruited by your Valkyrie to help fight the war in this world before ascending to Asgard and fighting the war there. The battles emphasize timing and combos, and the system is fairly complex. The overworld is viewed from behind the Valkyrie as she flies around, but the dungeons and battles are all sprite-based.[/li][li]Wild ARMs 3 (PS2), if it adheres to the principles of the first two games, should have a tighter focus on the main storyline than recent Final Fantasies. I can’t really recommend the first and second games due to graphics and combat system, respectively, and I haven’t even played this one, but it might be worth looking into.[/li][li]Suikoden 3 (PS2) might also be worth looking into if you’re primarily interested in a strong story. The game design is poor, but the storyline is good, and is seen from three different viewpoints. You pick six characters from your store of up to 108, as in its predecessor. The camera behaves the way I’ve described the adjustable one above.[/li][li]Champions of Norrath (PS2) and Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2 (PS2, XBox) are action RPGs, one set in the world of Everquest and the other in a D&D setting. They’re fairly similar games, both decent. You control a single character, with an emphasis on combat and a light story. Both can be played co-op multiplayer, and the camera is an overhead one you can adjust, rather than a behind-the-character view. I prefer X-Men Legends, but YMMV.[/li][/ul]
Speaking of, in an effort to get back on topic, which characters or even whole teams do you tend to use? Jean Grey, for her ridiculous power level, and Storm, for her ranged striking power, leadership, and later chain lightning, tend to be staples for me, but are replaceable by Gambit and Cyclops, respectively, if I feel the need to diversify.
I agree about the camera. A lot of times my characters enter a new room, get attacked and start fighting while I’m still stuck with the camera in the last room.
Finally finished the game yesterday. I really tried to see if I could max out at level 40 but it ain’t gonna happen. I did manage to get to level 37, but you need something like 10 million experience points to advance to the next level, and I can’t see any way to accumulate that many points before the end.
And once you finish the game what do you get? Nada. I guess you do get different costumes or something, but who wants to start the game from the beginning just to see them?
It’d probably remain good fun to run through it multiplayer until you’re sick of it, as it does support up to four players cooperatively going through the main storyline, or fighting it out in an arena.