Cool. Thanks for answering my questions, it's been a big help!
Funny that this guy hates it and wouldn't recommend it to anyone due to it being 'needlessly complex'. Quite a long review before coming to it's conclusion.
http://diehardgamefan.com/2015/06/08/review-operation-abyss-new-tokyo-legacy-sony-playstation-vita/
I do find that turn-based dungeon crawlers tend to review relatively badly, as the complexities of various systems that allow you to tweak the party to your liking and inch forward, exploring every nook and cranny and sidequest, don't go down well with reviewers looking to bomb through as quick as possible.
Lets start at a simple, all-encompassing example. About sixty percent of the way through the game, during the second semester, a sequence of events occurs where your team is hit with an effect called Code Breaker. This effect completely robs the target of their ability to use Code-Rise; in short, you cant use anything Code-based, including items, weapons, or skills, and all of your stats are nerfed. Youre basically a walking target, in other words. Conceptually, this is fine, and had the game introduced the effect, then healed it to show you it was scary business, itd simply be a scary skill. Instead, the game then spends a long amount of time going through narrative before dumping you in a subway car where you must fight two mandatory battles, AT LEAST, and gives you three healing items you can only use at the end of battle. Each battle is against robots that miss often, but hurt like hell when they do hit, and while you hit constantly, you deal one and two points of damage every time. This leaves each of the two (again, mandatory) battles to take about fifteen minutes apiece, for little profit, at maximum risk. It is one of the single most boring and excessive sequences I have seen in a video game ever, and it is purely by the grace of God that I didnt put the game down entirely at that moment.
I thought this part was somewhat weird, but the enemies hit me, like, once throughout that part. Just held onto the 'X' button and won, basically. And yeah, 15 minutes is quite the exaggeration.
Instead, I went onward through another mission, which revealed where our next target was, at which point
nothing happened. Searching the Japanese wiki revealed that I needed to complete a entirely optional submission that was literally in no way related to the main mission before it would unlock. After recycling the submission six times (it wanted items I didnt have and couldnt easily get), I was finally able to complete the submission and go onto the next main mission, at which point (after beating the boss of the prior mission handily) I watch two characters instantly get one-shotted by the first enemy I encountered in the zone, because it was fifteen levels above me.
I completed the ten code quest in like, ten minutes total. Changing which item he wants you to deliver is trivial, and hardly a nuisance.
Cemetery was 15 levels above him? At a low level encounter gauge, these guys are around, 25. Enemy levels tend to be above your party anyway, so noted the level difference isn't very useful. I cleared the tank boss at that place (which is ~four missions and major boss later) at level 20. Get good, son.
Item and weapon creation involves swapping around through four or five different menus, and theres no unified front-end that just says Heres what you can buy or create, do you want to do that? to speak of.
So, the crafting was a little confusing at first, but crafting in most games typically is. You have to become familiar with which item list you need to go into (like, you select
JW to see what weapons you can create, not any of the weapon lists). But it's something you learn after navigating around for a few minutes.
Its also annoying gear-wise when you have to try and understand why the gear simply doesnt work the way youd expect; some gear can be equipped but ends up glitched, which seems to do nothing but make it hard to remove, while other gear cant be equipped, which could be due to level, job, alignment, gender or even your starting stats, which crosses the boundary from complex to bizarre.
You have to pay attention to your code, gender, level, and alignment. That's it, and nothing really more intricate than most job systems. I've never actually tried equipping something that doesn't match (for example the menu seems to allow my male Knight to equip a Valkyrie armor, but it's listed for women, so I knew not to try).
Healing is also poorly thought out because theres never any reason to use the mid-tier option if you have a healer, when you can cheap out to replenish their magic, have them heal everyone, then replenish their magic again.
This is a classic 'trick' in a lot of games with pay-for-healing systems. I dunno, nbd.
His argument about limitations in party selection is silly too. Yeah academics are great outside of battle (and inside with their unity gauge filling), so maybe there's too much import placed on that class to substitute them. But for offense you could go with a number of things: Warrior/Monk/Archer/Assassin , and of course these classes have their benefits/detriments.
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I think the 'trickiest' part about this game is how it changes so words from very familiar ones. Like: Blood Code instead of Class, Issue instead of Buy, GP instead of Money, Items are called Item Codes. Getting used to the jargon I guess.
, that and there's also a max level trophy too I believe? Hopefully they don't take too long.
