A Black Falcon
Member
CoH1 official thread, to read more about the game: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=364217 (I was considering posting this there, but that thread hasn't been posted in in five years, and I wrote a lot here, so I didn't.)
Read this on my site with slightly better formatting.
Okay... so, several years and like 150+ hours into playing this super addictive but at times nightmarishly unfun grinding simulator (or at least that's what it is right now!), I really should write something about it, shouldn't I? I mean, the hour count alone is way higher than anything I've played in the past few years apart from the DS Picross games and not much else, probably... there HAS to be some reason I'm playing it, even if most of the time I'm not sure if I'm actually having any fun at all or not. Or maybe I'm just too stubborn to just giver up on it for good, as I should have after beating the main game -- it's the postgame that I kind of hate, up to that point it was mostly fun. (So why "lttp" if I got the game a few years ago? Well, it released in '09, so I did get it several years after release.)
Where I Currently Am in the Game: Post-Credits Class of Heroes (Note: A full review will follow this section)
As in other similar games like Etrian Odyssey, Class of Heroes doesn't end when you see the credits. Right on my CoH file, now the games' clock is over 100 hours played, which doesn't count the many times I've turned it off because of having my party get wiped out yet again. I beat the main game back at about 70 hours, back in late 2013 I believe. After getting over the games' starting difficulty cliff, it evened out and was fun and not too hard until after "finishing" the game... when it promptly becomes nearly impossible. After seeing how hard and grindey it got I took most of 2014 off, but late in the year got drawn back in because I decided to finally get around to playing CoH2, but couldn't help but start playing the first game again too shortly afterwards.
But despite all those hours played, my characters are only level 32-38 (plus one newer character ten levels lower). I've fully explored all but one of the maps I've found in the game; there's one more area I haven't been to yet, but I'm not sure how to unlock that. Mostly it's just been Haint Path for a very long time now. Just in the last few days I finally managed to level just high enough to manage to not die immediately in every battle on the middle floor of Haint Path (one of the last areas in the game), though the bossfight there (for a quest) is still way too hard.
So, what does one do in this situation? And there's more of that, too -- there are new super-hard bosses in the middle floor of most every area, and I still haven't beaten the instructors in that quest either because they're all still like ten levels higher than I am. The amount of grind required at this point in the game is completely unreasonable! I like exploring out the whole map in a game, but can't tolerate walking around in circles grinding. The main reason I quit this game through most of 2014 was because it seemed like that's what the game had become. I've found a few more areas to explore, bu those are about to run out soon, and I'm not much closer to actually being able to compete in these last few quests I have to do, because those level 40-plus bosses are impossible with my characters at the levels they are at now and leveling now takes ludicrously long, hundreds of thousands of experience between levels!
And that's not even mentioning the enemies late in the game (or maybe only in the postgame?) who can take a level away from your character randomly when they attack you... except unlike, say, Dungeonsd & Dragons, undoing the level drain is impossible. Essentially, if you ever see a 'Character X has lost a level' message in battle, seriously, save yourself the pain and just turn the system off immediately, it's not worth continuing after that because getting that level back will be a MASSIVE grind.
And now on to a summary & review of the game as a whole.
Class of Heroes is a first-person dungeon-crawler RPG with random battles. The game was inspired by the original Wizardry titles. It's got somewhat basic graphics and simple gameplay, and can be quite frustrating, but I found it compelling enough to stick with it this long, so it does something right at least. The game has nice anime-style art design and writing, with plenty of dark dungeons to explore. Before you start there are few options to set. The main one is save difficulty, Normal or Masochist. I played the game 100% on the harder setting, because if you just remember to save often to save files the more forgiving respawning of the Normal setting isn't needed, and monsters are slightly harder on Masochist too, supposedly. I'm not sure if that's true. But if you are going to play a game like this, I think the harder setting is the way to go. It's not much harder, but I like it more than the easy setting. Again, even on "Masochist" you can save anytime you're not in battle to a save file. But first, you have to make a party.
CLASSES
Class of Heroes has nine races and fifteen classes, each with different stats required to get them. A balanced party is important, but there are many ways you can make a solid party in the game. I recommend spending an annoying amount of tiem re-rolling characters, though; those extra stat points are useful, so keep rerolling until you get good numbers! You don't need to settle for a party with 5-10 starting points, you can get up to 40 or more if you're patient, though numbers above the mid 30s are quite uncommon. Above 30's pretty good, that should be able to get any race any class. Each race has different starting stats, you see, so it'll take more bonus points for some races to take on some classes. CoH2 locks half of the classes to only one race, in perhaps its worst design change, but in this game all classes are for any race! I like it better this way for sure, it's quite sad that I can't make a Felpier Ninja in CoH2 for example. The second game does have unique character art for each race+class combo, though, which is cool; in this game, each race only has two character portraits, one for each gender.
My main party:
--front row--
Drake [Bahamut in CoH2] Valkyrie (Good) [Paladins are basically the male-only version of Valkyries; I'll refer to the Valkyrie below since that's what I have in my party]
Felpier Ninja/Kunoichi (Evil) [Ninja and Kunoichi are slightly different gender-exclusive spins on the same thing; I'll just call them Ninjas here, because Kunoichis are female ninjas, anyway.]
Human Samurai
--back row--
Celestian Cleric [Clerics can cast both White and Black magic and identify items.]
Erdegeist [Gnome in CoH2] Wizard
Diablos Evoker
There are several things every CoH party needs. First, and most importantly, you really MUST have a character which can identify items in your party if you want to have any fun at all. Unfortunately, you won't get identify untiol about level 7, which was one of the biggest complaints most poeple have about this game. It's a valid criticism, because the game before that point is awful: identifying in stores requires spending THE AMOUNT THE ITEM SELLS FOR to identify it, which means that until level 7 it is impossible to make money from item drops. This makes the early hours of the game much more difficult than they should be because you're always starved for cash, at a point in the game where you actually need it (it becomes less important later on). I like the idea of identifying items, and dislike that CoH2 and beyond ditches it completely, but they should have had cheaper identification in the store, that's for sure. The two classes which can identify are the Alchemist and Cleric. I have the latter in my party now (used to have an Alchemist too; now that character's in my other party that I don't use much).
The second rule is that you need a healer, of course. Multiple characters with Resurrect is also fantastic. Fortunately I have two, the Valkyrie and Cleric. The Valkyrie has the most health in my party by far, so it's great that she has resurrect because it has saved me quite a few trips back to town -- the Valkyrie has died probably half as often as the rest of the party members, not counting times I got wiped out and turned it off of course. Naturally Resurrect is a level 7 spell, the highest level, so it'll be a while before you get it. Before that, it's back to town every time someone dies... argh. That's always frustrating. Unfortunately my Valkryie didn't get any healing spells, but at least she got Resurrect so she can bring back the healer! You can't use Resurrect during battle, unfortunately, but still, it's great to have.
Last, have a Thief, Ranger, or Ninja to open chests; some mages have spells which can do this, but spells are limited, while thief abilities aren't. You really need this as well. Thieves and Ninjas can also see hidden doors.
Beyond those requirements, fill up the party as per usual in this genre -- fighter-types in the front three spots, mage or ranged-types in the back. I have found that having two characters with full sets of Black magic is extremely useful; the Cleric does get healing spells slower than the Devout, but having both schools of magic is great. A dedictated Wizard is also great, though, even if theyr have only one class of magic, because the Focus ability is extremely useful. Focus is a Wizard-exclusive class ability, and roughly doubles magic power for a spell you can use the next turn. This basically saves you a spell, so instead of having to use up two of the same spell you can get that same amount of damage with only one casting. Specialized classes like the Alchemist, Evoker, Thief or Ninja won't do as much damage as Warriors or Valkyries, so they're not going to be as important in combat as the mages or front fighters. They're more useful for other things. The Ninja is a bit better in combat than those other classes, though, at least for me. Hide is nice, when it works.
And as an addendum, have a second character or party who you keep back at Particus, the main town. This is to sort of exploit the annoyingly small inventory size in the game. Your inventory will fill up quickly with the games' mountains of crafting materials. The solution is, actually, to drop them. You see, any dropped item is put into a global dropped-items pool which can be accessed from the magic orbs that are present near every floor entrance in the game. So, drop stuff in any dungeon, and your party near town can go to the magic orb right next to Particus, grab those items, and deposit them in the much larger item storage back at base. You'll need to give this second party items to sell though, because they otherwise won't be able to afford the costs of rezzing and teleporting back to town a fully dead higher-level party!
Finally, you can switch classes during the game. This can be useful if you, say, want to start with a base class, and only move up to one of the higher-stat-requirement classes later on. The higher-level classes level more slowly than the faster-levelling base classes do, so there can be a definite advantage to doing this; though in CoH1 I didn't, maybe I should have, it'd have given my characters more health than they currently have, probably. Switching resets your level to one and cuts your health in half, but that still gives you a lot more health than a new level 1 character would have, and you keep most of your spells, limited by the restrictions of how many spells per level the new class allows. This can mean losing good spells, so dedicated classes can have an advantage there. You can also change alignments, because characters of similar alignment will have MUCH better Affinity than Good + Evil. My party now actually works well -- 92% affinityor above for all characters - but compatibility problems can hurt character stats. Still, I think the manuals overstate how important affinity is, you can mostly ignore it I think. Diablos+Celestian, Good+Evil? Eh, it works. The worst I've seen so far is in CoH2, where one Evil Ninja in an otherwise mostly Good party has 44% affinity. But really, Affinity is only important if you really want the highest possible stats, and there are ways to boost affinity as you play as well. That low-affinity character is early in the game.
As far as CoH2 goes, bizarrely, that game gets rid of the separation between clerics and mages; there's just one mage class that gets both types of magic, so basically it's just Clerics instead of Devout, Wizard, and Cleric. Some new classes are added in (Puppeteer, Idol, etc.), but still... weird. And those one-race-only classes, which make up HALF of the total number of classes, really limit things.
MAGIC
CoH1's magic system is obviously inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, in that spells are broken up into classes and levels, you have a set number of spells of each level that you can cast without resting. Unlike D&D, though, you can't rest while out in the field, only in a town, so when you run out of key spells is about the right time to start back to the nearest town. Characters who have magic will have between two and four spells at each of seven levels. How many spells a character gets depends on their class, and maybe also stats. I love D&D, and I really like this games' magic system too! It's great that the levels of magic aren't just merged together; this adds some strategy in spellcasting, so instead of just always casting one spell you have to mix things up in order to not run out of that spell-level you use so heavily. Unfortunately, CoH2 ditches this system in favor of a generic magic-points system, with each spell casting a set amount of magic points from the characters' mana pool. I like CoH1's magic system better for sure. I don't think that some spells are particularly well balanced, though -- the stat-boost and levitate spells last for the entire floor, for example, which is kind of odd. Well, unless that floor has no-magic zones in it, that is; those dispell all boost spells and make casting magic impossible while in them.
There are four classes of magic in this game, White, Black, Psychic, and Summoning. White is healing and protective magic. It is obviously important. Black is attack magic, mostly, and some useful abilities too (Levitate, Teleport). Attack magic is great because you get a bunch of spells that hit all enemies in a row, and one which attacks all of your foes. Psychic I've used less, but it has a variety of status and protective functions. Last, Summoning is a class of magic exclusive to the Evoker class. This class works uniquely in this game. A party can only have one Summon active at a time, so there'd never be a reason to have more than one Evoker in one party. You don't just get summon spells like the rest of them, though. Instead, there is a summon circle in the center floor of each of the games' areas, and you get one summon for defeating the (easy) enemy in each of those summon circles. CoH2 ditches this in favor of just giving them to you like normal spells, but it's more unique in the first game. It's a bit quirky, but works. Summons aren't great, but enemies will sometimes attack your summon instead of your party members, which can save your life sometimes. You'll have to choose between another stronger attacker (another Wizard in the back row, say) versus the protective help of a summon.
ITEMS AND CRAFTING
Items in CoH work like they do in many RPGs. Each character has an individual inventory, and there is also a pack for extra item storage. However, equipped equipment takes up space in character inventories, so by the later game half of the character inventories at least will be taken up by your equipment. Then add to that the various required items you need to carry around like a few maps, healing items, etc., and you have very little space indeed. This is where the technique I mentioned earlier about dropping stuff and having a team at home to go pick it up comes into play. Just as long as you remember that the dropped-items pool has a maximum size of 100 items, you'll be fine. The inventory system is pretty good apart from not telling you anything about crafting formulas or what you can make, and moving items between characters, or buying them in stores, works great. I like having separate inventories for each character, CoH2's "solution" of getting rid of separate inventories and just having one large pool isn't as good. Also, if your party is wiped out, the stuff in the bag is dropped, while characters keep their character inventories. This is key, because if there is already too much stuff in the dropped-stuff pool, you can just lose some items! So yeah, watch out for that. The bag is much smaller than the dropped-items pool, but if there was already a bunch of stuff there you hadn't collected there could be an issue. The sequel does at least take equipped things out of your inventory and into separate equipment screens for each character, though, so those aren't cluttering it up.
CoH also has a crafting system, sadly; I hate crafting! There are two types of crafting items, the base items and materials. Only one class, the Alchemist, can do crafting when you are out in the field, and even then you're hamstrung because there is no in-game list of crafting formulas that you can access when not in an Academy! You can buy formulas, but can't see them anywhere other than in the Academies. Absolutely baffling stuff, this is one of the more annoying things about CoH1 and I don't think CoH2 fixes this problem either, from what I've seen. If there was a nice web list of all the combinations this wouldn't matter nearly as much, but as far as I know, there isn't; there is very little out there about this game, at least in English (I don't know about Japan). If you are in an Academy, though, in the alchemy room you can look at the formulas you've gotten, and either pay to have them make stuff for you, or do it yourself if you have an Alchemist. I mean, you can do that anywhere, but good luck remembering those formulas. In the rare cases where I try to craft something I've got to keep going back and forth between my items list and the formulas list, because there's no way to see exactly what I can make. Now, part of the issue here is that I have always greatly disliked crafting in games; I don't find this stuff fun at all. Maybe I'd find this game easier if I actually did craft stuff regularly, but I almost never do, and just have piles of crafting materials cluttering up my Particus storeroom.
You can also upgrade items and add abilities to them, but how exactly you do the latter I'm not quite sure... how DO you add those various Bane abilities, and such? I don't see any ingame crafting recipes which explain this. Upgrading items is simpler, but requires a specific, and uncommon, item, so you can't do this as much as you'd like. YOu can also disassemble equipment to turn it into its component parts. Crafting formulas aren't too complex, with only one base item and up to two component slots per formula, but still there are FAR too many components to just guess which ones go with each type of base item, and you'd need enough of the component in question as well. Ugh, the whole thing is so annoying, but I always have kind of hated crafting in games. But overall, I think it's unfortunate that crafting had to be included in this game. Why do people think that if it's a modern wgame of course it needs to have stupid crafting in it? It's not fun! Just give me items and stuff... and if you MUST have crafting, give me an easy way of recording the formulas. But it would be better to have no crafting; crafting almost always makes games worse. (No, I do not like Minecraft, as anyone reading this can probably imagine. ) It's too bad that crafting stays in the series and seems nearly unchanged in the second game, as far as I can tell.
GAMEPLAY: BASIC DESIGN, GRAPHICS, AND SOUND
CoH is a first-person dungeon crawler. The game is broken up into a network of Academies and Towns which are connected by dungeon path areas. Towns are 2d, with a picture of the outside, and then separate images for each room or building where you do the various functions, such as creatin characters, choosing your party, getting quests, buying items, doing alchemy, dropping off items in your storage, and such. Once you leave and choose an area to travel to, you go to the 3d world. This is a tile-based game, so each move either turns your party 90 degrees or moves you forward once space.
Fast-travel is disappointingly limited, unfortunately. From magic orbs you can access the dropped-item storage from, you can also warp back to the starting Academy, Particus, for free. There are no other free warps to anywhere anytime in the game, though. With the Teleport spell you can quickly get through an area, but travelling across the main map requires using a special rare item that you can only craft starting very late in the game, and even then they're expensive and limited. How annoying! You should be able to warp to any of the academies for free at some point, in the postgame at least!
Graphically, CoH1 has basic 3d graphics in the dungeons. You can only see two spaces in front of you. So, you can see the space in front of you, and a wall, say, on the space beyond that, but a wall one space farther back wouldn't be visible. The Light spell will double your vision, but two tiles of visibility is still very poor; I rarely bother with it. A lot of the screen is covered with an omnipresent black fog. There is no sunlight in this game, only dark dungeons 100% of the time you're not in a town or Academy. There are a few graphical tilesets, but little variety within each of them. Apart from the special tiles, described below, you'll mostly just be looking at identical-looking walls and floors. There are very, VERY few graphical touches making things interesting. No rooms have furniture in them, there are no wall-hangings anywhere, all walls in each area look pretty much the same, and such. There are some torches or such around the left and right entrances of each floor, but next to nothing else.
As for sound, there isn't much music in this game. There are a handful of songs, including one that plays while the character/inventory/spell menu is open, one on the main menu, and not much more, but that's about it. The few songs aren't great and quickly get very repetitive. That one menu-interface song gets old after a while, and you'll be listening to it a lot. The sound effects are good, however, but don't play this game for the audio.
Read this on my site with slightly better formatting.
Okay... so, several years and like 150+ hours into playing this super addictive but at times nightmarishly unfun grinding simulator (or at least that's what it is right now!), I really should write something about it, shouldn't I? I mean, the hour count alone is way higher than anything I've played in the past few years apart from the DS Picross games and not much else, probably... there HAS to be some reason I'm playing it, even if most of the time I'm not sure if I'm actually having any fun at all or not. Or maybe I'm just too stubborn to just giver up on it for good, as I should have after beating the main game -- it's the postgame that I kind of hate, up to that point it was mostly fun. (So why "lttp" if I got the game a few years ago? Well, it released in '09, so I did get it several years after release.)
Where I Currently Am in the Game: Post-Credits Class of Heroes (Note: A full review will follow this section)
As in other similar games like Etrian Odyssey, Class of Heroes doesn't end when you see the credits. Right on my CoH file, now the games' clock is over 100 hours played, which doesn't count the many times I've turned it off because of having my party get wiped out yet again. I beat the main game back at about 70 hours, back in late 2013 I believe. After getting over the games' starting difficulty cliff, it evened out and was fun and not too hard until after "finishing" the game... when it promptly becomes nearly impossible. After seeing how hard and grindey it got I took most of 2014 off, but late in the year got drawn back in because I decided to finally get around to playing CoH2, but couldn't help but start playing the first game again too shortly afterwards.
But despite all those hours played, my characters are only level 32-38 (plus one newer character ten levels lower). I've fully explored all but one of the maps I've found in the game; there's one more area I haven't been to yet, but I'm not sure how to unlock that. Mostly it's just been Haint Path for a very long time now. Just in the last few days I finally managed to level just high enough to manage to not die immediately in every battle on the middle floor of Haint Path (one of the last areas in the game), though the bossfight there (for a quest) is still way too hard.
So, what does one do in this situation? And there's more of that, too -- there are new super-hard bosses in the middle floor of most every area, and I still haven't beaten the instructors in that quest either because they're all still like ten levels higher than I am. The amount of grind required at this point in the game is completely unreasonable! I like exploring out the whole map in a game, but can't tolerate walking around in circles grinding. The main reason I quit this game through most of 2014 was because it seemed like that's what the game had become. I've found a few more areas to explore, bu those are about to run out soon, and I'm not much closer to actually being able to compete in these last few quests I have to do, because those level 40-plus bosses are impossible with my characters at the levels they are at now and leveling now takes ludicrously long, hundreds of thousands of experience between levels!
And that's not even mentioning the enemies late in the game (or maybe only in the postgame?) who can take a level away from your character randomly when they attack you... except unlike, say, Dungeonsd & Dragons, undoing the level drain is impossible. Essentially, if you ever see a 'Character X has lost a level' message in battle, seriously, save yourself the pain and just turn the system off immediately, it's not worth continuing after that because getting that level back will be a MASSIVE grind.
And now on to a summary & review of the game as a whole.
Class of Heroes is a first-person dungeon-crawler RPG with random battles. The game was inspired by the original Wizardry titles. It's got somewhat basic graphics and simple gameplay, and can be quite frustrating, but I found it compelling enough to stick with it this long, so it does something right at least. The game has nice anime-style art design and writing, with plenty of dark dungeons to explore. Before you start there are few options to set. The main one is save difficulty, Normal or Masochist. I played the game 100% on the harder setting, because if you just remember to save often to save files the more forgiving respawning of the Normal setting isn't needed, and monsters are slightly harder on Masochist too, supposedly. I'm not sure if that's true. But if you are going to play a game like this, I think the harder setting is the way to go. It's not much harder, but I like it more than the easy setting. Again, even on "Masochist" you can save anytime you're not in battle to a save file. But first, you have to make a party.
CLASSES
Class of Heroes has nine races and fifteen classes, each with different stats required to get them. A balanced party is important, but there are many ways you can make a solid party in the game. I recommend spending an annoying amount of tiem re-rolling characters, though; those extra stat points are useful, so keep rerolling until you get good numbers! You don't need to settle for a party with 5-10 starting points, you can get up to 40 or more if you're patient, though numbers above the mid 30s are quite uncommon. Above 30's pretty good, that should be able to get any race any class. Each race has different starting stats, you see, so it'll take more bonus points for some races to take on some classes. CoH2 locks half of the classes to only one race, in perhaps its worst design change, but in this game all classes are for any race! I like it better this way for sure, it's quite sad that I can't make a Felpier Ninja in CoH2 for example. The second game does have unique character art for each race+class combo, though, which is cool; in this game, each race only has two character portraits, one for each gender.
My main party:
--front row--
Drake [Bahamut in CoH2] Valkyrie (Good) [Paladins are basically the male-only version of Valkyries; I'll refer to the Valkyrie below since that's what I have in my party]
Felpier Ninja/Kunoichi (Evil) [Ninja and Kunoichi are slightly different gender-exclusive spins on the same thing; I'll just call them Ninjas here, because Kunoichis are female ninjas, anyway.]
Human Samurai
--back row--
Celestian Cleric [Clerics can cast both White and Black magic and identify items.]
Erdegeist [Gnome in CoH2] Wizard
Diablos Evoker
One of my characters is male. Guess which!
There are several things every CoH party needs. First, and most importantly, you really MUST have a character which can identify items in your party if you want to have any fun at all. Unfortunately, you won't get identify untiol about level 7, which was one of the biggest complaints most poeple have about this game. It's a valid criticism, because the game before that point is awful: identifying in stores requires spending THE AMOUNT THE ITEM SELLS FOR to identify it, which means that until level 7 it is impossible to make money from item drops. This makes the early hours of the game much more difficult than they should be because you're always starved for cash, at a point in the game where you actually need it (it becomes less important later on). I like the idea of identifying items, and dislike that CoH2 and beyond ditches it completely, but they should have had cheaper identification in the store, that's for sure. The two classes which can identify are the Alchemist and Cleric. I have the latter in my party now (used to have an Alchemist too; now that character's in my other party that I don't use much).
The second rule is that you need a healer, of course. Multiple characters with Resurrect is also fantastic. Fortunately I have two, the Valkyrie and Cleric. The Valkyrie has the most health in my party by far, so it's great that she has resurrect because it has saved me quite a few trips back to town -- the Valkyrie has died probably half as often as the rest of the party members, not counting times I got wiped out and turned it off of course. Naturally Resurrect is a level 7 spell, the highest level, so it'll be a while before you get it. Before that, it's back to town every time someone dies... argh. That's always frustrating. Unfortunately my Valkryie didn't get any healing spells, but at least she got Resurrect so she can bring back the healer! You can't use Resurrect during battle, unfortunately, but still, it's great to have.
Last, have a Thief, Ranger, or Ninja to open chests; some mages have spells which can do this, but spells are limited, while thief abilities aren't. You really need this as well. Thieves and Ninjas can also see hidden doors.
Beyond those requirements, fill up the party as per usual in this genre -- fighter-types in the front three spots, mage or ranged-types in the back. I have found that having two characters with full sets of Black magic is extremely useful; the Cleric does get healing spells slower than the Devout, but having both schools of magic is great. A dedictated Wizard is also great, though, even if theyr have only one class of magic, because the Focus ability is extremely useful. Focus is a Wizard-exclusive class ability, and roughly doubles magic power for a spell you can use the next turn. This basically saves you a spell, so instead of having to use up two of the same spell you can get that same amount of damage with only one casting. Specialized classes like the Alchemist, Evoker, Thief or Ninja won't do as much damage as Warriors or Valkyries, so they're not going to be as important in combat as the mages or front fighters. They're more useful for other things. The Ninja is a bit better in combat than those other classes, though, at least for me. Hide is nice, when it works.
And as an addendum, have a second character or party who you keep back at Particus, the main town. This is to sort of exploit the annoyingly small inventory size in the game. Your inventory will fill up quickly with the games' mountains of crafting materials. The solution is, actually, to drop them. You see, any dropped item is put into a global dropped-items pool which can be accessed from the magic orbs that are present near every floor entrance in the game. So, drop stuff in any dungeon, and your party near town can go to the magic orb right next to Particus, grab those items, and deposit them in the much larger item storage back at base. You'll need to give this second party items to sell though, because they otherwise won't be able to afford the costs of rezzing and teleporting back to town a fully dead higher-level party!
Finally, you can switch classes during the game. This can be useful if you, say, want to start with a base class, and only move up to one of the higher-stat-requirement classes later on. The higher-level classes level more slowly than the faster-levelling base classes do, so there can be a definite advantage to doing this; though in CoH1 I didn't, maybe I should have, it'd have given my characters more health than they currently have, probably. Switching resets your level to one and cuts your health in half, but that still gives you a lot more health than a new level 1 character would have, and you keep most of your spells, limited by the restrictions of how many spells per level the new class allows. This can mean losing good spells, so dedicated classes can have an advantage there. You can also change alignments, because characters of similar alignment will have MUCH better Affinity than Good + Evil. My party now actually works well -- 92% affinityor above for all characters - but compatibility problems can hurt character stats. Still, I think the manuals overstate how important affinity is, you can mostly ignore it I think. Diablos+Celestian, Good+Evil? Eh, it works. The worst I've seen so far is in CoH2, where one Evil Ninja in an otherwise mostly Good party has 44% affinity. But really, Affinity is only important if you really want the highest possible stats, and there are ways to boost affinity as you play as well. That low-affinity character is early in the game.
As far as CoH2 goes, bizarrely, that game gets rid of the separation between clerics and mages; there's just one mage class that gets both types of magic, so basically it's just Clerics instead of Devout, Wizard, and Cleric. Some new classes are added in (Puppeteer, Idol, etc.), but still... weird. And those one-race-only classes, which make up HALF of the total number of classes, really limit things.
MAGIC
CoH1's magic system is obviously inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, in that spells are broken up into classes and levels, you have a set number of spells of each level that you can cast without resting. Unlike D&D, though, you can't rest while out in the field, only in a town, so when you run out of key spells is about the right time to start back to the nearest town. Characters who have magic will have between two and four spells at each of seven levels. How many spells a character gets depends on their class, and maybe also stats. I love D&D, and I really like this games' magic system too! It's great that the levels of magic aren't just merged together; this adds some strategy in spellcasting, so instead of just always casting one spell you have to mix things up in order to not run out of that spell-level you use so heavily. Unfortunately, CoH2 ditches this system in favor of a generic magic-points system, with each spell casting a set amount of magic points from the characters' mana pool. I like CoH1's magic system better for sure. I don't think that some spells are particularly well balanced, though -- the stat-boost and levitate spells last for the entire floor, for example, which is kind of odd. Well, unless that floor has no-magic zones in it, that is; those dispell all boost spells and make casting magic impossible while in them.
There are four classes of magic in this game, White, Black, Psychic, and Summoning. White is healing and protective magic. It is obviously important. Black is attack magic, mostly, and some useful abilities too (Levitate, Teleport). Attack magic is great because you get a bunch of spells that hit all enemies in a row, and one which attacks all of your foes. Psychic I've used less, but it has a variety of status and protective functions. Last, Summoning is a class of magic exclusive to the Evoker class. This class works uniquely in this game. A party can only have one Summon active at a time, so there'd never be a reason to have more than one Evoker in one party. You don't just get summon spells like the rest of them, though. Instead, there is a summon circle in the center floor of each of the games' areas, and you get one summon for defeating the (easy) enemy in each of those summon circles. CoH2 ditches this in favor of just giving them to you like normal spells, but it's more unique in the first game. It's a bit quirky, but works. Summons aren't great, but enemies will sometimes attack your summon instead of your party members, which can save your life sometimes. You'll have to choose between another stronger attacker (another Wizard in the back row, say) versus the protective help of a summon.
ITEMS AND CRAFTING
Items in CoH work like they do in many RPGs. Each character has an individual inventory, and there is also a pack for extra item storage. However, equipped equipment takes up space in character inventories, so by the later game half of the character inventories at least will be taken up by your equipment. Then add to that the various required items you need to carry around like a few maps, healing items, etc., and you have very little space indeed. This is where the technique I mentioned earlier about dropping stuff and having a team at home to go pick it up comes into play. Just as long as you remember that the dropped-items pool has a maximum size of 100 items, you'll be fine. The inventory system is pretty good apart from not telling you anything about crafting formulas or what you can make, and moving items between characters, or buying them in stores, works great. I like having separate inventories for each character, CoH2's "solution" of getting rid of separate inventories and just having one large pool isn't as good. Also, if your party is wiped out, the stuff in the bag is dropped, while characters keep their character inventories. This is key, because if there is already too much stuff in the dropped-stuff pool, you can just lose some items! So yeah, watch out for that. The bag is much smaller than the dropped-items pool, but if there was already a bunch of stuff there you hadn't collected there could be an issue. The sequel does at least take equipped things out of your inventory and into separate equipment screens for each character, though, so those aren't cluttering it up.
CoH also has a crafting system, sadly; I hate crafting! There are two types of crafting items, the base items and materials. Only one class, the Alchemist, can do crafting when you are out in the field, and even then you're hamstrung because there is no in-game list of crafting formulas that you can access when not in an Academy! You can buy formulas, but can't see them anywhere other than in the Academies. Absolutely baffling stuff, this is one of the more annoying things about CoH1 and I don't think CoH2 fixes this problem either, from what I've seen. If there was a nice web list of all the combinations this wouldn't matter nearly as much, but as far as I know, there isn't; there is very little out there about this game, at least in English (I don't know about Japan). If you are in an Academy, though, in the alchemy room you can look at the formulas you've gotten, and either pay to have them make stuff for you, or do it yourself if you have an Alchemist. I mean, you can do that anywhere, but good luck remembering those formulas. In the rare cases where I try to craft something I've got to keep going back and forth between my items list and the formulas list, because there's no way to see exactly what I can make. Now, part of the issue here is that I have always greatly disliked crafting in games; I don't find this stuff fun at all. Maybe I'd find this game easier if I actually did craft stuff regularly, but I almost never do, and just have piles of crafting materials cluttering up my Particus storeroom.
You can also upgrade items and add abilities to them, but how exactly you do the latter I'm not quite sure... how DO you add those various Bane abilities, and such? I don't see any ingame crafting recipes which explain this. Upgrading items is simpler, but requires a specific, and uncommon, item, so you can't do this as much as you'd like. YOu can also disassemble equipment to turn it into its component parts. Crafting formulas aren't too complex, with only one base item and up to two component slots per formula, but still there are FAR too many components to just guess which ones go with each type of base item, and you'd need enough of the component in question as well. Ugh, the whole thing is so annoying, but I always have kind of hated crafting in games. But overall, I think it's unfortunate that crafting had to be included in this game. Why do people think that if it's a modern wgame of course it needs to have stupid crafting in it? It's not fun! Just give me items and stuff... and if you MUST have crafting, give me an easy way of recording the formulas. But it would be better to have no crafting; crafting almost always makes games worse. (No, I do not like Minecraft, as anyone reading this can probably imagine. ) It's too bad that crafting stays in the series and seems nearly unchanged in the second game, as far as I can tell.
GAMEPLAY: BASIC DESIGN, GRAPHICS, AND SOUND
CoH is a first-person dungeon crawler. The game is broken up into a network of Academies and Towns which are connected by dungeon path areas. Towns are 2d, with a picture of the outside, and then separate images for each room or building where you do the various functions, such as creatin characters, choosing your party, getting quests, buying items, doing alchemy, dropping off items in your storage, and such. Once you leave and choose an area to travel to, you go to the 3d world. This is a tile-based game, so each move either turns your party 90 degrees or moves you forward once space.
Fast-travel is disappointingly limited, unfortunately. From magic orbs you can access the dropped-item storage from, you can also warp back to the starting Academy, Particus, for free. There are no other free warps to anywhere anytime in the game, though. With the Teleport spell you can quickly get through an area, but travelling across the main map requires using a special rare item that you can only craft starting very late in the game, and even then they're expensive and limited. How annoying! You should be able to warp to any of the academies for free at some point, in the postgame at least!
Graphically, CoH1 has basic 3d graphics in the dungeons. You can only see two spaces in front of you. So, you can see the space in front of you, and a wall, say, on the space beyond that, but a wall one space farther back wouldn't be visible. The Light spell will double your vision, but two tiles of visibility is still very poor; I rarely bother with it. A lot of the screen is covered with an omnipresent black fog. There is no sunlight in this game, only dark dungeons 100% of the time you're not in a town or Academy. There are a few graphical tilesets, but little variety within each of them. Apart from the special tiles, described below, you'll mostly just be looking at identical-looking walls and floors. There are very, VERY few graphical touches making things interesting. No rooms have furniture in them, there are no wall-hangings anywhere, all walls in each area look pretty much the same, and such. There are some torches or such around the left and right entrances of each floor, but next to nothing else.
As for sound, there isn't much music in this game. There are a handful of songs, including one that plays while the character/inventory/spell menu is open, one on the main menu, and not much more, but that's about it. The few songs aren't great and quickly get very repetitive. That one menu-interface song gets old after a while, and you'll be listening to it a lot. The sound effects are good, however, but don't play this game for the audio.