Duke Reivier's Grand Game Emporium

 Energy Nede started rather rough, with Insane Lords and Rikkas flattening Celine before she could get any spells off. This was a striking wake up call; her spellcasting was just too slow to reasonably keep up. I sighed, and switched her out to an offensive melee setup. That did work out, especially since I found out that Earrings of Magnetism always cast the Power Up spell, not give a random buff as I thought! However, this meant that Celine's swings were just objectively better than her spellcasting, which meant she was playing like a gimped Rena. I detested that fact, I had hoped that she would rely more on her spells, and that they would work better for her, despite all the problems with spellcasting. Thankfully, Southern Cross remedied this by being a hard hitting spell with a reasonable charge time. Someone on the dev team realized that long charge times on high end spells was NOT a winning combo. If only they applied this principle to other spells! This spell quickly turned ...

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 BACK TO INDEX

We now turn to Celine, our first non main character. Celine is a wizard. That means she specializes in casting damage spells. I already covered how spells work in Rena's run, go read  it if you want to familiarize yourself. Celine is recruited at Krosse, and recruited for real at the end of the Krosse Cave. However, she can be set to fight solo the moment she joins, so that's what I'll do. In addition, I felt that Writing broke character progression too much, so I'm adding another rule to my runs from now on: I will not use books to raise character skills. Note that I will still put points in Writing, and still use it to complete guild quests, but won't make the characters read any of the books, whether written or found in world. Hopefully that's pretty clear. GALAXY Celine started her journey by completing all the guild quests. She starts with a level in Alchemy, and that's pretty helpful actually; the initial 60 points required for Faeriology is actually q...

 Rena went ahead and got a level in Customization to craft the Emprezia. She kept a Kaiser Knuckles that rolled Poison on it, but sold everything else. Then, she leveled up Art until it was level 8 with Rainbow Diamonds, and started putting the rest of her SP into Effort. She also maxed out Body Control, and was close to maxing out Sidestep. I put one perfunctory point into Hasten Speech and Concentration, and would only invest further in them if she suddenly had to rely on her damage spells, which I seriously doubted. Energy Nede certainly was a huge step up from the Ell continent, especially since the particular strip of land connecting Centropolis and North City drew encounters from both the Cave of Crimson Crystals and the Field of Might. The latter dungeon in particular was quite a ways away and so drew rather overleveled enemies for her. While her damage was good, it took a while to grind them down, and their strikes were quite ferocious. Her stack of Blueberries got chewed u...

I will play through the game on Galaxy and Universe once, using fresh save files for both. I will not use anyone besides the character I pick. This includes Super Specialities. I will not savescum my Item Creation results, what I get is what I roll with. I will not redo successful fights unless I deem it absolutely necessary. I  will  use Assault Actions, but I will not invoke other party members for them. From Celine's run onward, I do not use books to raise my character's skills.

     UNIVERSE Rena's introduction to Universe was a bit milder than Claude's, as she didn't have to face any souped up gorilla. It was still clearly harder, but less jarringly so. What was jarring was how much slower she was in combat without Godspeed, I would definitely invest into it and Qiqong first! Allen Tucks was her first "hard" fight. Not because he was a particularly difficult foe tactically, but because of how bad her damage was! She needed a weapon upgrade, and quick! I upgraded her Customization to level 5 and Alchemy to level 4 before fighting the Gargoyles, she wouldn't stand a chance against them without a weapon upgrade. The upside of all this grinding, she got a Meteor Ring from Challenge Missions and that made Krosse Cave's encounters considerably more manageable.  The Gargoyles still hurt hard, but with a Metal Fang on, and some quick maneuvering, they were easily dispatched. She also got the Square Shift 1 formation, and switched to it,...

 Rena reached Energy Nede and forged a veritable spread of fighting gloves: The Kaiser Knuckles were just a really strong pair of gloves, but this particular set rolled a chance to paralyze, and so was worth keeping. The Magic Knuckles were considerably weaker, but raised spell damage by 50%. The Knuckles of the Moon were considerably less interesting, but did provide a hefty 30% MP boost. These knuckles had also rolled the Poison property, and you've seen how potent that can be. The Sorcerer's Knuckles reduced MP consumption by 33% and granted 2% MP regen every three seconds, thus being potentially useful for fights of attrition. Lastly, the Emprezia had the highest raw stats of them all, but no further properties besides. For now, she donned the Emprezia and paired it with some damage boosting equipment. Sadly, her crafting hadn't turned up much useful, so she still stuck to the Meteor Ring and the Chain of Might. Her regular attacks were considerably weaker than Claude...

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 BACK TO INDEX

 Next up on the challenge is Rena. Rena is a cleric. In gameplay terms, this means she is less physically robust than Claude, but has access to largely healing and buffing spells. Spells are interesting in that they differ greatly from special arts. They don't have to be equipped to the two special arts slots, a character can cast any spell they know in battle. They also ignore defense and evasion entirely. However, spells all have a charge up time, and getting attacked before they finish being charged stops them entirely. Thus, they are kind of a high risk, high reward mechanic. As mentioned earlier, most of her spells perform healing or buffing duties. This leaves her ranged offense a bit underpowered, but to compensate, she is built more sturdily than most spellcasters, and can melee through most of the game in "regular" play. That said, I anticipate her journey to be much tougher when she isn't backed by any fighters, and doesn't have someone to hide behind to...

Claude had reached Energy Nede, and was now ready to tackle this brave new world. Like before, he Alchemized a bunch of Rainbow Diamonds to boost his item creation skills. Unlike before, he wouldn't  immediately forge the Aeterna - rather, he would hold on to the Blade of Minos to capitalize on its Dark element against the Guardians, then upgrade it. In its place, he would gamble on, and land upon the Aurora, a 1200 attack sword that also rolled the Lone Wolf factor! Talk about getting lucky, eh? For random encounters, he decided to combine the Berserker Ring with the Ring of Might. This nifty ring doubled his attack, at the steep cost of making him vulnerable to all elements. Well, random encounters largely didn't have much elemental damage, so this wasn't too much of a concern there. At 3260 attack, he was getting lots of strong hits on them, often hitting the 9999 damage cap! It could have gone even further with a skill that unlocks after dealing a total of 40 million da...