Dark Dawn's combat is still broken

Bee

I mean the game is wonderful on every other level, but the combat has all the same gaping holes as the last games.  Hell, if anything it's worse.


-Non-physical spells don't scale with stats (or at least any you can affect in a meaningful way) and become useless for everything but clearing random encounters with 4+ mobs a bit quicker.  Non-physical party members get demoted to healers, buff bitches, or benchwarmers.

-Stat effects still don't land on anything you care about.

-Summons are still too powerful and can wipe out most things in a little more than one salvo.

-Everything seems to do way less damage than usual.  This exacerbates the above by taking the only downside of summon rushing (survivability) out of the equation.

-Also because of the above, combat items are even more pointless than before.  I don't think I used a single one over the course of the whole thing, and never even came close to feeling like I should sometime soon.  Exacerbated by your fastest character having AOE heals of her own, so there's not even any point stockpiling her with nuts for an emergency band-aid.

-All of the above get exacerbated by poor tuning on experience gain.  You may well outlevel content just in the general course of what you're already doing, and Avoid becomes necessary not for convenience but to avoid trivializing the game further.

-No Hard Mode to even try giving a better challenge, not even TLA's blind number tweaking.  As much as I wish Hard modes included expanded enemy movesets and stuff to spice it up, it's not like it even takes any particular effort to go the minimal approach.  Just write if(HARD) enemy.allStatsMult(1.5); or if(HARD) exp *= 0.5; during the initializing and closing of the battle.  Hell, the former already happens with ramping scale in Monster Battles.

-Oh my god Matthew and Sveta are so frigging broken.  It'd be awesome if there was something to meet how broken they are, but as is, with very few exceptions they could basically two-man the whole game with ease.

-This isn't even getting into the shield Djinn.  Which you get a ton of them.


I get that they want to make it accessible.  That's great.  The story is awesome and I wouldn't want to lock the kiddies out of it (even if it is a bit dark for anyone young enough to be having trouble with the combat).  I just wish they'd also give an option to make the combat combat and not just mindless filler to try and fool you into thinking you're doing something useful.

Nyktos

Yeah, I completely agree. The easiness of combat is the one major problem I have with the series, and if anything Dark Dawn made it even worse. Matthew and Sveta really are too good. Sveta I can forgive since she does new stuff, but Isaac and Felix were already somewhat overpowered in the original games, so you'd think they'd try to balance Matthew a bit...

Bee

It's kind of hilarious to see those two each hit as hard as the rest of the party combined.  Like I said, it would be awesome if there was a Duel Boss or something to at least specifically highlight them as badass instead of poorly tuned.

And with the overleveling, for a frame of reference I outleveled Amiti when he joined by a fair bit, and I wasn't even dicking around looking for the more devious hidden stuff, getting lost, or hunting for field Djinn.

Vorpy

Dark Dawn? It sounds fun. Is the combat bad enough to drive away new players and force "adapt to the controller" mode or is it just not as good as it should be?

Bee

It's a turn-based JRPG, so (hopefully) you're not tripping over controls :P

The problem is that in a series rather notorious for handing you a giant box full of way too many ridiculously broken ways to utterly demolish your opponent, they gave you more.  It's a case of a surprisingly deep combat system that just never lets you climb out of the kiddie pool.  The story and puzzles are still amazing, so it's still a blast all around, but maddeningly disappointing in the one area.

Nyktos

Someone seriously needs to make a hack version (of any of the games) that's more challenging.

Vorpy

I would play that.

It reminded me of Hard Mode on The Sacred Stones.

It was fucking hard. Not only did all of the normal enemies appear on the map, but constant reinforcements of Pegasus Knights, Baals, Generals and Cavalry would pop up and search for the weakest possible units and kill them.

Bee

Anyone who said Sacred Stones was too easy never tried Hard (or Lagdou Ruins.  Or heaven forbid both).

The boat level.  Oh dear lord.  You got jumped by like ten flying casters.

Vorpy

At first i didn't think Lagdou Ruins was hard until I came to the Dragon Zombie Ruin using nothing but Steel Weapons.

You have got to be kidding me.

Bee

Heehee.  Yeah, I had to whip out S-rank weapons there.

Of course, I also hit it on Hard mode, so that was actually the easiest floor by far because you can just blitz one half of the room with legendary weapons and take the other half at your leisure.  6-8 are the ballbusters.  Something about getting bombarded across the room by five shadowshots that can kill anyone in your party in two hits and gangraped by chain-spawning arch mogalls that can also kill anyone in your party in two hits and medusas that can stone people from extra range to drop their evasion to nil.

Bee

Okay, so I finally found the time to beat Dark Dawn (Apollo Sanctum is quite possibly the most epic thing I've ever seen on the DS btw).  I was surprised to find that Chaos Chimera is actually quite hard -- somewhere between Doom Dragon and Dullahan, actually.  Still got him on the first try, but I had to pull out a hell of a lot of stops and took a few near-fatal surprises (Most notably, Sveta and Matt did summons for element power, recovered all their Djinn and got attack buffs...then both got instakilled on a Retaliation).  That was actually appropriate difficulty for the last boss, if a bit even on the high side.  Very satisfying.

Which just makes the rest of the game being so pants-on-head easy and Scratch Damagey, including the triple boss right BEFORE the Chimera, even more jarring.

And then when I was reading a faq for my 100% run, it said to grind the Tua Warriors at the Lens up to like level 55 "before you'll even have a chance" and I died a little inside.

Icalasari

What was your level, Bee?

Bee

41-42 across the board.  I just killed whatever came my way while doing my own thing, and actually used Avoid a lot.  I figured the game could go ahead and decide how much I should be fighting since Avoid encounter rates are tuned to drop off at the appropriate level.

Bee

And finally found the time in between work days to finish the bonus bosses.  Ogres and Star Magician were a joke, Ancient Devil was a cool gimmick with a bit too much of a glass jaw to be challenging (they probably could've beefed it up if status effects were remotely reliable, but sadly it just came down to a damage race), and Dullahan was actually very satisfying if you stuck out a long-term fight instead of trying to blindly summon blitz (level 46).

Here's hoping Camelot remembers a Hard Mode next time around.

Hint -- make things vulnerable to debuffs!  It gives you enough avenues of approach and strategic options that you can afford to beef them up harder!