kjorteo | (no subject)

You know, I used to be annoyed at the way the solo sea quests force you to have NPC party members taking up valuable slots, thus only leaving room for you to send about 2-3 of your own guys. If you're OCD about keeping your entire team at the same level, it means you have to do every quest 2-3 times just so everyone on your team gets a turn, and it will be a lot harder on certain runs if your party's power is at all lopsided. (That is, the missions tend to suck when it's the Farmer's turn to take them....) Even then, even if you do that, it's still not going to keep the experience levels 100% precisely even, due to variations in whether the enemies kill any of the NPCs before you win, or this one particular boss that has a habit of randomly calling for allies.... I honestly wish the sea quest battles just didn't give you experience at all (or I wasn't so weird about keeping my team level like that.) That's still something I have to work around.

However, as obnoxious as that remains, I have come to appreciate the way the NPCs expose you to alternate party builds you probably hadn't considered. As someone who is currently running a Prince/Hoplite/Monk/Arbalist/Farmer, the mission with the Buccaneer/Zodiac/Arbalist trio really opened my eyes to something of which I had been completely unaware, which is just how much of a holy terror against groups Buccaneer Chase Element skills are when you have multiple sources of group-wide elemental damage. Even with just those three by themselves, Chase Fire + Binary Fire + Fire Barrage = hitting every enemy on the field a lot. When it was Simone's turn to take that quest and I therefore added my own Arbalist with another chasable Fire Barrage to the mix, we basically slaughtered everything that moved in one round (except the big boss at the end because the NPCs were dumb and only did the element chase combo when there were multiple enemies on the field, and just attacked otherwise.) It was awesome.

I have yet to see any characters on any of these quests that are godly enough to make me reconsider my own party build (though I will admit that the chasing was a lot better than I expected it to be,) but I just like how reassuring it is that apparently everything is viable, even the stuff I didn't pick. We've come a long way from EO1 where the game is impossible without a Medic and you're dumb for trying, it would seem.

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I'm getting the first game now, damn you.
You wore me down post by interesting post.

When it arrives, I'll have to regale you with all the minutiae of my party information and hope that you find it as interesting as I do yours.
(Did that sound sarcastic? It wasn't. I do find it interesting.)

Oh, no, trust me, I didn't infer any sarcasm at all. Half the point of the series is to look at all the classes and skills, figure out how you want to play, and assemble a party ~~and get horribly killed by FOEs~~. Half the reason I'm posting about it so much is because you can make your party so unique like that that I'm just proud of what I've come up with, and the other half was that I was hoping someone else would get into the series and tell me all about their party so we can compare. :)

Granted, EO3 is so overflowing with options even by Etrian Odyssey standards and I'm so spoiled by it now that EO1 seems... not as open as EO3 by comparison, but I certainly didn't think that at the time, so I'm sure you'll be fine. (If anything, it gives you something to look forward to if you like EO1 but just plain want more!)

Edit: In your recounting, feel free to include any roleplay-related details you come up with about your party's backstory or something, since, as I've said before, the series can surprise you with just how much of that you come up with when it leaves you with almost nothing but room for it. When your characters are otherwise completely blank, sometimes even the stupidest things can lead to interesting imagined personality quirks... for example, the Survivalists are just anime enough that the genders on the portraits can be... not 100% obvious at first glance. I just happened to guess wrong with mine, and named her Cedrick. I didn't even notice the mistake until way way later on, much too late to make a new one or anything. Oops. :( But... by then, I considered her part of the team and really liked her (I mean, I'm not just going to kick her out and get a new Survivalist just because she's a girl even if I could, that would be dumb and cruel!) so my subconscious just sort of filled in a King from Art of Fighting-esque tomboyish gender issue thing to explain why she hid it from everyone else (up to and including her name) for so long. Awww.

Edited 2010-11-06 11:44 (UTC)

The extent to which I come up with backstories varies wildly, but it tends to happen at least to some extent with games that don't impose one on you, and I'll be happy to share what I come up with.

Your example reminds of of Dragon Quest 3 - I don't know if it was badly translated or what, but when you make the protagonist a girl half the NPCs seem to refer to her as a boy anyway (and many of the others don't commit themselves one way or another) so I just sort of decided that HARRIET - nicknamed HARR in battle for the space limitations - was presented to the outside world as a boy, so as to deal with the oppressive societal judgments of her medieval-ish world, and be able to freely indulge her adventurous spirit and realize her legacy as the ~~son~~ daughter of a great hero.

In doing so from the beginning of the game (and I haven't progressed much further now) I made a lot of assumptions about the world based on what was just probably an oversight (albeit one caused by male-centric gaming), and some may not really be accurate. But I enjoy my little explanation for it anyway.