Let's abandon Earthbound.
Jun. 26th, 2012 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indigozealEarthbound is going on hiatus effective immediately after I ran into a series of horrible design decisions.
It began with me having problems with the boss of the Threed section. His attacks aren't overly powerful (still boss-league, but hardly OHKOs), but he a) can trigger a "poison" effect that's a bit dangerous and b) can call lackeys who can c) trigger a different status effect that makes your physical attacks miss 3/4 of the time. You can actually freeze him and distract him pretty frequently in battle with low-level spells, but he has so much HP that the combination of status saps, limited MP, missed attacks on your side, and the attacks his side does get in will wear you down eventually.
After my initial failures, I thought that perhaps a few more status-healing herbs and a few more levels would help matters. To this end, I went through the dungeon in two stretches - my inventory wouldn't hold all the loot in one go - and gained about seven levels in the process. I also got a broken laser weapon for the inventor character, which the inventor is supposed to be able to repair if you stay overnight at an inn. Apparently, though, he does this only if you stay in certain motels or something, as he refused to do anything even after several nights' stays. Therefore, he got stuck with his previous, presumably inferior air-gun weapon, unable to contribute much firepower to the fight.
Anyhow, despite the levels and the herbs, my second battle went little better, largely for the same reasons as the first. Though the herbs largely negated the poison issue, I still was vulnerable to the your-physical-attacks-miss-a-whole-bunch effect, which, I thought, was seriously throwing off the damage I could do and leaving me with only items and (admittedly effective but still limited-use) spells for attacks. I thereby got rid of my regular herbs and rearranged my pitifully narrow inventory to hold a bunch of SUPER herbs that could counteract the frequent-miss status issue. I also resolved to use no spells on my way to the boss, reserving my MP for the hard-hitting spells. I planned to recharge from random battles through the game's pizza-delivery system - call the shop, and it'll send you an HP-recovering pizza in the field a set time after you place a call. I mean, why would such a shop exist if not for situations like this, right?
Well:
- A great deal of the random encounters consist of those small fries with the nasty status effect that the boss can summon. You have two choices in these battles: use your ultra-super spell to wipe them out quickly, thereby consuming your MP, or wait things out till the law of averages deals them a slow defeat, thereby consuming your MP through the subsequent heals (remember: I had little room in my inventory for healing items with all the herbs). Hey, did I mention the small fries will very often summon others of their kind, thereby dragging out the battle interminably?
- The pizza guy never showed up, so I guess they don't deliver to dungeons. Which I would understand normally, but dungeon vs. overworld has about as much meaning in Earthbound as it does in Secret of Mana, and again, there's otherwise no damn reason for the shop to exist in the first place.
But, with luck (what else?), I did get to the boss in kinda-sorta good shape. Problem, though: while the Super Herbs do take care of the frequent-miss status issues, they don't take care of both frequent-miss and poison at once. Meaning: if you have stacked status issues, you'll need to use two or more herbs in succession to clear yourself up. I also couldn't stock enough of the suckers in each character's personal inventory to keep up with the status afflictions. Eventually, my limited ability to heal caught up with me; it took longer this time, but I fell once again.
At this point, I felt that I'd wasted enough time and resorted to a guide. Guess what I learned? The boss doesn't have just a lot of HP; he has, for no discernible reason, INFINITE HP. Against all indications, instead of fighting things out, you're supposed to use in battle the key item you needed to gain access to the boss's fortress, which will distract him from attacking. He will henceforth, with no in-game explanation, default to a normal, beatable number of HP.
But I had already been distracting him from attacking and immobilizing him. In multiple ways. And I'd already dealt enough damage to him to beat him at his "normal" number of HP many times over. Look, there are plenty of puzzle battles in the genre, plenty that're no-win until you take a certain action, but it's fairly consistently clearly signposted from the start in these affairs that you're going to have problems without special intervention - Doros from The 7th Saga splits into three, each casting a spell that's nearly OHKO; nothing you do to FF4's Zeromus will scratch him until you use the Crystal, which you learn to do in the preceding cutscenes. The boss of Threed is just a mook who has infinite HP for no reason until he doesn't, and he has no eyebrow-raising reputation for invulnerability preceding him that might clue you in to the existence of a plot-imposed invincibility shield. The boss's long life didn't alarm me at first because I was failing not due to his insurmountable attack scheme per se, but because of a host of stupid flaws in the game design (tiny inventory/useless herbs/runaway stacking of enemy special abilities) affecting how that strategy was executed in-game and buffing it up past all reason. The weird things the game was doing on the wrong path weren't any different from its usual shenanigans on the right path.
The incident crystallized a lot of the gameplay decisions that were frustrating me about the game, and the alleged charm of the setting just isn't compensating. I think at the very least I need to set Earthbound aside for a good long while; if I continue, I'm only in for more pain.
.
It began with me having problems with the boss of the Threed section. His attacks aren't overly powerful (still boss-league, but hardly OHKOs), but he a) can trigger a "poison" effect that's a bit dangerous and b) can call lackeys who can c) trigger a different status effect that makes your physical attacks miss 3/4 of the time. You can actually freeze him and distract him pretty frequently in battle with low-level spells, but he has so much HP that the combination of status saps, limited MP, missed attacks on your side, and the attacks his side does get in will wear you down eventually.
After my initial failures, I thought that perhaps a few more status-healing herbs and a few more levels would help matters. To this end, I went through the dungeon in two stretches - my inventory wouldn't hold all the loot in one go - and gained about seven levels in the process. I also got a broken laser weapon for the inventor character, which the inventor is supposed to be able to repair if you stay overnight at an inn. Apparently, though, he does this only if you stay in certain motels or something, as he refused to do anything even after several nights' stays. Therefore, he got stuck with his previous, presumably inferior air-gun weapon, unable to contribute much firepower to the fight.
Anyhow, despite the levels and the herbs, my second battle went little better, largely for the same reasons as the first. Though the herbs largely negated the poison issue, I still was vulnerable to the your-physical-attacks-miss-a-whole-bunch effect, which, I thought, was seriously throwing off the damage I could do and leaving me with only items and (admittedly effective but still limited-use) spells for attacks. I thereby got rid of my regular herbs and rearranged my pitifully narrow inventory to hold a bunch of SUPER herbs that could counteract the frequent-miss status issue. I also resolved to use no spells on my way to the boss, reserving my MP for the hard-hitting spells. I planned to recharge from random battles through the game's pizza-delivery system - call the shop, and it'll send you an HP-recovering pizza in the field a set time after you place a call. I mean, why would such a shop exist if not for situations like this, right?
Well:
- A great deal of the random encounters consist of those small fries with the nasty status effect that the boss can summon. You have two choices in these battles: use your ultra-super spell to wipe them out quickly, thereby consuming your MP, or wait things out till the law of averages deals them a slow defeat, thereby consuming your MP through the subsequent heals (remember: I had little room in my inventory for healing items with all the herbs). Hey, did I mention the small fries will very often summon others of their kind, thereby dragging out the battle interminably?
- The pizza guy never showed up, so I guess they don't deliver to dungeons. Which I would understand normally, but dungeon vs. overworld has about as much meaning in Earthbound as it does in Secret of Mana, and again, there's otherwise no damn reason for the shop to exist in the first place.
But, with luck (what else?), I did get to the boss in kinda-sorta good shape. Problem, though: while the Super Herbs do take care of the frequent-miss status issues, they don't take care of both frequent-miss and poison at once. Meaning: if you have stacked status issues, you'll need to use two or more herbs in succession to clear yourself up. I also couldn't stock enough of the suckers in each character's personal inventory to keep up with the status afflictions. Eventually, my limited ability to heal caught up with me; it took longer this time, but I fell once again.
At this point, I felt that I'd wasted enough time and resorted to a guide. Guess what I learned? The boss doesn't have just a lot of HP; he has, for no discernible reason, INFINITE HP. Against all indications, instead of fighting things out, you're supposed to use in battle the key item you needed to gain access to the boss's fortress, which will distract him from attacking. He will henceforth, with no in-game explanation, default to a normal, beatable number of HP.
But I had already been distracting him from attacking and immobilizing him. In multiple ways. And I'd already dealt enough damage to him to beat him at his "normal" number of HP many times over. Look, there are plenty of puzzle battles in the genre, plenty that're no-win until you take a certain action, but it's fairly consistently clearly signposted from the start in these affairs that you're going to have problems without special intervention - Doros from The 7th Saga splits into three, each casting a spell that's nearly OHKO; nothing you do to FF4's Zeromus will scratch him until you use the Crystal, which you learn to do in the preceding cutscenes. The boss of Threed is just a mook who has infinite HP for no reason until he doesn't, and he has no eyebrow-raising reputation for invulnerability preceding him that might clue you in to the existence of a plot-imposed invincibility shield. The boss's long life didn't alarm me at first because I was failing not due to his insurmountable attack scheme per se, but because of a host of stupid flaws in the game design (tiny inventory/useless herbs/runaway stacking of enemy special abilities) affecting how that strategy was executed in-game and buffing it up past all reason. The weird things the game was doing on the wrong path weren't any different from its usual shenanigans on the right path.
The incident crystallized a lot of the gameplay decisions that were frustrating me about the game, and the alleged charm of the setting just isn't compensating. I think at the very least I need to set Earthbound aside for a good long while; if I continue, I'm only in for more pain.
.
