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Divine Prison Tower: Mary Skelter - Import Impression Thread

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Before we begin this game does contain the usual Fanservice type of content that some Compile Heart titles are known for. So lets keep this thread from getting locked and not be dumbasses by posting pictures which are obviously inappropriate for GAF itself. This thread is for those curious about the game and its mechanics not the usual suspects looking to stir shit up.

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Product Info
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Title: Divine Prison Tower: Mary Skelter
Platform: PlayStation Vita (PSVTV Compatible)
Release Date: 10-13-2016 (JPN)
Genre: Riddle Solving x Panic x Active 3D Dungeon RPG
Publisher: Compile Heart
Player(s): 1
CERO: D (17 and Up)
Price PlayStation Vita:
Package : 7,344 JPY (tax inc.)
Limited : 9,504 JPY (tax inc.)
Download: 6,480 JPY (tax inc.)

Frequently Asked Questions

#0:
Q: Has there been any word on a localization announcement for this game yet?
A: NA / EU Summer 2017

#1:
Q: What type of game is this?
A: Mary Skelter is a narrative heavy Dungeon RPG (First person grid based navigation / Random encounter & Turn based combat). So those familiar with the genre should know what to expect.

Being a Compile Heart game they usually put in a lot of effort with the story that goes with the game so expect a lot of story event scenes. All of these scenes are fully voiced. Will be addressed in another Q&A section here.

Although also being a Compile Heart game and this one in particular contains fanservice heavy event scenes also and touch minigame. So those interested in the title but dislike fanservice might want to look through more information provided at the very bottom of this OP through the Gematsu article links which describe the various systems in the game itself.

#2:
Q: Are the touch minigame mechanics necessary?
A: Thankfully it seems to be just granting extra bonuses to your characters if used. Does not appear to be something that you must use constantly.

#3:
Q: Are the story scenes in the game full or partial voice?
A: Mary Skelter's event scenes are all fully voiced. Including the male MC Jack. Although when he is thinking to himself those lines are not voiced for whatever reason. You can also set the MC and Male Character voices off in the Game Options.

#4:
Q: How long is this game?
A: Clear time would be a bit longer than this, but from a trusted source they say its around 27 hours. Though this player in particular is quite adept at roflstomping games so their clear time is usually a lot faster than the average players. So Id say 35-40 would be a fair estimate for the average player.

#5:
Q: How difficult is this game?
A: Im playing on the current hardest setting that is available from the start of the game and honestly this title is not too difficult yet. Even more so if one is used to the genre. Once you get your characters properly leveled and equipment upgraded you can pretty much steamroll most enemies.

The difficulty settings Easy / Normal / FEAR also effects your Exp / $$$ gains. Easy mode will cut your EXP / $$$ gains by 25% while FEAR will double that.

Most important factor in this title would be getting your AGI (Agility) rating high due to it effecting your turn in combat. Along with defense of course.

#7:
Q: Do I need to know Japanese to play this game?
A: Since this game is narrative heavy to fully enjoy it having some sort of understanding of Japanese would be helpful. On top of being able to read all the various skills for your characters since leveling is done via assignment of Skill Points. So you do not exactly want to waste those, unless you want to constantly regrind your characters by leveling down and re-earning more points to allocate again.

There are a lot of varied descriptions in the dungeons with events and other whatnots where reading them would be helpful.

#7:
Q: Are there any official review scores out?
A: Divine Prison Tower: Mary Skelter (PS Vita) – 8/8/8/8 [32/40]
*Credits to Gematsu

For those who can read Japanese here is an actual Japanese review from a trusted source. Though would be warned as they do a complete review it potentially contains spoilers and such.

http://game.girldoll.org/mary-skelter-review/

#8:
Q: Is there a list for the trophies?
A: Here is the Japanese Trophies list (In Japanese)
JP Wiki says that it may take up to 80 hours to obtain a platinum with this game.

#9:
Q: Is there a wiki for this game?
A: No English Wiki if thats what you mean, but heres a Japanese one instead.

#10:
Q: I like the games music when will the OST be released?
A: The OST for Mary Skelter has been announced for a December 12th 2016 release. It will contain the OP / ED song + 25 BGM for a total of 27 tracks and will cost 2,500 (w/o tax)

------------

MEDIA
Official
Launch Trailer (Possibly NSFW during brief touch mechanic content)
6 Minute Promo Trailer (Possibly NSFW during brief touch mechanic content)
Opening Movie
Job System Trailer
Music Video for the Mary Skelter OP song「予め失われた僕らのバラッド」Music Video(Short Ver.) by the EARPHONES


Unofficial
Recorded gameplay footage from first chapter of the game - Part 1 (not my footage)
Recorded gameplay footage from first chapter of the game - Part 2 (not my footage)


Finally got the chance to have a good amount of time set to play Mary Skelter. Been playing it directly on the Vita this time around and not the Vita TV at the moment. Game runs great and no real issues at the moment. Though it is suggested you update your game if you do have it due to fixes in the recent patch help address some issues with crashes and whatnots. Granted I have not run into any at this time, they do exist apparently. Which is no surprise for Compile Hearts stuff. The next upcoming patch will also have some useful changes to the game such as increasing the players inventory count from 35 to 99 among other things listed below. (Might translate this later)

Translations below might not be 100% accurate as folks familiar with me know I literally hate translating shit due to this is not my thing. Anyone who wants to make corrections please do feel free and let me know which sections in specific and will do an update to the patch notes.

First Patch 1.01
パッチ情報「1.01」(2016年10月13日配信)
・特定の独房エリアに短縮ワープゾーンを追加。 Addition of warp zones in specific jail cells.
・一部ギミックにカットインを追加。 Addition of new event cut-in scenes for some dungeon gimmicks.
・レベルアップ時に職業変更権利と血式退化権利を表示するよう追加。Additional information displayed during Level Up
・その他、細かな不具合を修正。 Other fixes made for various issues.

Current Patch 1.02
パッチ情報「1.02」(2016年10月20日配信)
・道具袋の最大所持数を35個から99個に調整 Player Inventory space increased from 35 to 99.
・推理をミスしてバッドエンドにたどり着いた場合、クリア後にセーブデータが作成できるよう変更。In the event of reaching a bad end due to an error with your choice? You will be able to create a safe file after the ending.
 そのセーブデータをロードすると、推理イベント直前に戻れるよう修正 Upon loading this save data you will be able to redo your choice for the event before the ending.
・血式退化をした後、「職業変更」を行うと退化ボーナスが2倍に増加し、The issue for the level down bonus not giving the correct amount when leveling up has been resolved. You will now receive the level down double bonus when you change your class.?
 その状態でレベルアップした際に、退化ボーナスが元の値に戻る不具合を修正
・各キャラクターのデフォルト職業に関して、職業権利と血晶なしで変更できるよう調整 Adjustments made allowing characters to change back to their default class without costing blood tokens.
・オートパイロット中にジェイルのきまぐれが発生しないよう調整 Adjustments made so that the Jail whims will not trigger during auto-pilot.
・ジェイルボーナス時のルーレットスピードを調整 Adjustments made to the speed of the Jail Bonus roulette wheel while spinning.
・ジェイルボーナス「放浪商人遭遇率上昇」の確率をより出現しやすいよう調整 Adjustment made to the Jail bonus (Wandering Merchant Encounter Rate) has been increased so that he will be easier to encounter.
・血式退化時に意図したのとは別のキャラクターが退化する不具合を修正 Fix of incorrect character being leveled down when certain conditions are performed during the character level down selection.
・親指姫が仲間になる際に自動でパーティINするよう修正 Fix made so that Thumbelina will join your party automatically when she becomes your ally.
・一部アイテムの売却額が想定より高額になっていた不具合を修正 Fix made so that items will be sold at the correct price, was currently selling higher than displayed.
・その他不具合を修正 Other fixes made for various issues.

This game plays like most other Dungeon RPGs in the sense of exploration and such. Though there are a lot more various gimmicks around which is appreciated as it adds a bit more flavor to the dungeons themselves. Apparently also gives you a bit more of a reason to drag along certain characters as some have skills which can be used on the map to open up new areas and such.

Combat is also fairly straight forward with the standard turn based combat fans of the genre are used to.

Though the one unique feature of the game is that Critical / Weak and Overkill damage on the enemy have the chance to cover your characters in the blood of your enemies which can activate your Genocide mode when the blood gauge is filled. When in the Genocide mode your characters stats are raised and new skills become available for use. Also depending on the characters when you damage or defeat enemy characters you are able to recover HP and SP. The one downside with Genocide mode is that you are unable to really plan for its use due to it will activate automatically once the blood gauge has been filled.

The next game system related to the Genocide mode is the Blood Skelter mode which is basically caused by negative actions towards your characters during battle caused by death or critical hits? But basically what it does is totally transforms your characters appearance and causes them to go berserk attacking both enemy and allies alike. You can prevent or recover from Blood Skelter mode by using Jack's blood on said character who has become tainted or transformed.

Jack the main character due to story related reasons his blood is able to purify the other party members if they become tainted. Once the Mary Gun becomes active for use Jack will come with a blood gauge showing how much you have available for use while in the dungeon. This gauge can be refilled through skills or items, though running out will cause Jack to faint. If he loses all Life Points he will become incapacitated. (These LP are represented by heart icons while in battle). The Mary Gun can also be used in the dungeon on objects and such. And just the same as in battle this will deplete Jack's blood gauge when used. Jack also has a chance to faint after using the Mary Gun regardless of blood remaining. So that needs to be taken into consideration when in battle and when to use it.

One other game mechanic related to Jack is that while he is unable to actually perform combat related actions he can act as a meat shield for one of the other party members totally blocking damage for said character. Though there is a potential chance he will be K.O.ed for a few rounds as a result. Too many K.O.s will result in him losing LP. Once all LP are lost he will become incapacitated. Jack is also able to use items on the other party members during combat. So far it seems that he will always perform said actions first in battle so generally using him as a way to heal party members or cure status ailments is quite useful.

The main portion of combat will be done through the female party members that you will meet during the story. These characters all come with a default class with skills that can be unlocked through spending skill points earned when you level up. Each character also has multiple Classes that they can change into if you have the required resources for the Class Change. These items are the Blood Tokens (forgot what the official name is) that are dropped from enemies after combat and are also used for upgrading your characters skill slots and strengthening equipment. So basically you will be doing a lot of grinding to collect these as the costs for the classes and eventually equipment will become quite high. Specific blood tokens are dropped by certain enemy types also which will add to the need for constant fighting.

This game also uses elemental type of damage that goes in the following order of Strong vs Weak

--> Fire ---> Wind ---> Lightning --> Earth --> Water --> Fire (Repeat)

Equipment such as Weapons, Armor, Accessories are found as item drops from combat, treasure chests in the dungeon or the wandering merchant that can be met at random while exploring. The actual shop within the town does not seem to sell equipment at this time outside of expendable items / furniture.

Equipment for your characters can be upgraded using those blood tokens which are dropped from enemies. Different pieces of equipment will require different blood tokens. Also each piece of equipment upgrades in a different way. So example one weapon when upgraded its ATK power goes up, while a different weapon the AGI stat goes up. So basically do not expect stuff to all upgrade in a similar fashion. This makes the player put a bit more thought into what they want to have equipped on your characters as it goes a bit beyond the simple ATK or DEF stats going up when upgraded.

Characters when they level up all stats are raised automatically. The only thing the player raises themselves is spending the skill points earned to learn new or upgrade existing class skills. Outside of the active skills some classes also have passive skills which can be upgraded by spending skill points into them. Such as Alice's HP UP for her Fighter Class that increases her Maximum HP.

-----

Outside of dungeon exploration back at the main town / base you can help upgrade your party members rooms by gifting them furniture which not only changes the rooms appearance but increases their affection towards you. The higher the affection rating the more character events will become unlocked for viewing. You are also able to give gifts to your party members back at the base to help raise the affection level. Each character has likes and dislikes so you will need to experiment to see what their preferred gift items are. From what Ive seen so far you will be spending a ton of cash on this due to how little the bar goes up when gifts are given.

There are a total of 9 known party members who will become unlocked for use as the player progresses in the Story. These 9 party members are broken down into 5 Main Classes which are as follows below.

  • Fighter (Alice / Cinderella)
  • Libero (Red Riding Hood / Rapunzel
  • Science (Snow White / Gretel)
  • Archer (Sleeping Beauty / Kaguyahime)
  • Magician (Thumbelina / *Hidden Character*

The subclass breakdown of these 5 main types is as follows below.

Fighter Type
  • Fighter
  • Paladin
  • Marshal
  • Destroy
  • Blood Lord

Libero Type
  • Libero
  • Poet
  • Fairy
  • Piero
  • Blood

Science Type
  • Science
  • Item Tooler
  • Mimicry
  • Logicalist
  • Blood Chemist

Archer Type
  • Archer
  • Sniper
  • Speed Gunner
  • Dark Seeker
  • Blood Hunter

Magician Type
  • Magician
  • Therapist
  • Counceler
  • Necromancer
  • Blood Witch

Job System Trailer

Once again as mentioned these classes can only be unlocked if you have the correct Blood Token requirements met. Basically you spend that amount to change classes. Due to the low amounts you gain at the start of the game do not expect to be able to go swapping out classes right away.

Classes also have specific weapons that can / cannot be equipped. Though you will be able to check this before changing classes to ensure you do not switch to a class that you do not have usable equipment for.

This game also allows you to Level Down your characters to specific set levels which allows for you to re-earn skill points that will help you max out your characters skills. Have not messed with this system yet so am not exactly sure how it works past this at the moment apart from what I saw from the tutorial text.

----

In game you have a maximum of 5 active combat Party Members who can be set to Front and Back row for their formation. Technically it is 6 members if you include Jack, but for members who can actually perform combat actions it is just 5 members. You will start out with 2 characters + Jack and from there obtain more party members as you progress in the story.

Game is not so difficult that you will have trouble with only 2 members for the first part of the story also so there is no real need for concern with the initial low party member count.

----

As some might have seen this game has something that looked like the F.O.E. system from the Etrian Odyssey system. Basically in this game there is an "unkillable" enemy type called a Nightmare. These events can happen at random, but you will generally be able to tell when you are near one / event possibly occurring due to the map area becoming dark and you hear the growling noise made by the Nightmare. If the Nightmare chase event starts, you basically need to run as far away as possible from said Nightmare creature to escape from the event. The Nightmare will be moving in real time so you are unable to stand around and think about where to go. Your minimap will also be disabled during this event and the darkened map makes navigation much more difficult. Thankfully if there are blood splatters from enemies defeated on the ground it helps light up the surrounding area. The Nightmare can also damage your player while chasing you so be sure to try to keep out of its general line of sight. You will also be unable to open the standard game menu during this time so any healing that needs to be done must be done during battle with the Nigthmare.

If you become trapped or collide with the Nightmare creature combat will begin. While you will be unable to "kill" the Nightmare you can knock it out for a short period of time allowing you to pass through it and continue your escape from its pursuit. Once you escape from the Nightmare you will be able to continue your exploration as normal.

While this may sound like a pain in the ass to some, its not as bad as it seems. Have not died from it yet and am playing on the hardest difficulty. Though you will take a lot of damage from single attacks during combat with the Nightmare so just be sure to keep yourself properly healed during combat if the situation calls for it.

----

During dungeon exploration there will be various bonus roulette events that can occur when specific conditions are met. Some info below taken from Gematsu give a brief explanation of the three desire system.
In order to grow, the living prison known as “Jail” is always hungry for the big three desires of “appetite,” “sexual desire,” and “desire to sleep.”

You can satisfy these desires in both battle and while exploring dungeons, and by satisfying a desire to the maximum amount, you can obtain a whimsical “Jail Bonus” from the prison.

Whether you satisfy or do not satisfy the big three desires is up to you. However, if you use these desires skillfully, you can discover new paths and overturn the course of battle.

Satisfying Jail’s desires will trigger a roulette that will let players obtain a bonus.

The contents of the Jail Bonus changes based on whether you’re exploring the dungeon or in battle. From status recovery to an increased rare item drop rate, to the generation of a “new floor” in the dungeon, there are also special bonuses.

Satisfy the three big desires to get various bonuses.
*Credits to Gematsu

In my own game managed to unlock a new area with this roulette system. Pretty interesting and the gauges can be filled rather quickly so its not as if your progression will really be hindered by this. Something fresh which is appreciated for a genre that is always seen as being too simplistic.

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In regards to the touch mechanics with the game have not gotten to that part yet as am still exploring / leveling currently as my 2 new members started off a bit lower level than my current party due to us over leveling from collecting Blood Tokens and resources.

----

Overall am quite happy with the title as it has fantastic artwork both with the characters and backgrounds used. Dungeon design is nice and the varied gimmicks are appreciated. Do hope that this keeps up through all the dungeons as it makes exploring much more interesting. The game also sports a pretty good soundtrack.

The one small issue Ive seen so far is the lack of variation with the monsters currently in the first dungeon. As there are palette swap types, though seems as if they are using the colors to represent the potential elemental weakness of said monster. That and in general Compile Heart games were never good at enemy variation to begin with so there is that too. Also this game seems to be a bit on the easy side so far even on the hardest difficulty setting available for a first run through.

But overall with the characters / story and gameplay mechanics do think this is most def a title worth picking up for DRPG fans. Though as mentioned before it can be fanservice heavy as expected with some Compile Heart titles. So do keep that in mind when making the decision to purchase the game or not. This more has to do with event scenes or the purification touch minigame rather than enemy designs. (At least so far anyways)

The story though seems to be a bit more dark than the usual stuff they do which is interesting. Nice bit of mystery thrown in there too so it helps you want to progress with the story to see how things play out with the narrative. Voice acting is well done also. Though the MC is a bit irritating with how his character is written though thats more a personal issue of mine since I hate whiny motherfuckers lol. Hopefully that should improve as the story progresses. As he is not a total dumbass thankfully. While not exactly the same there is a bit of Mikasa / Eren type of chemistry going on between Alice and Jack. Though Jack is not as stupid as Eren thankfully.

While I know the whole formatting of the info and whatnots in this OP was a bit of a mess hope that helps give folks a general idea about the game. Will be editing this post a bit more but just putting it out there now as am late as is with the Import Impressions. Downgraded this from an OT as in general the import community seems to have shrank quite a bit over the years and schedule wise do not have as much time to waste on OT projects that wont get much attention. So usually smaller titles will wind up being similar to this one if I take the time to do any in the near future.

For those looking for more information on Divine Prison Tower: Mary Skelter check out the loads of information that Gematsu has translated.
 
Great thread. Was worth the read.

As a fan of dungeon crawlers on the Vita I'd love to see a western release. The art looks good and in general it looks more apealing than MeiQ to me. Though I still enjoy the latter, but there are better games in this genre and on the Vita.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Great thread. Was worth the read.

As a fan of dungeon crawlers on the Vita I'd love to see a western release. The art looks good and in general it looks more apealing than MeiQ to me. Though I still enjoy the latter, but there are better games in this genre and on the Vita.

Yeah so far this game seems pretty good outside of being fairly easy. Though the various game mechanics and story so far will most def be keeping my attention. As am quite curious to see where the story goes due to the cast of supporting characters.

Would like to think they will bring this title over seeing that its one that appears they actually spent money on producing and such. Plus how the Vita is pretty much the DRPG machine that there is an existing audience in the West waiting for new titles in the genre.
 

joe2187

Banned
I kind of wish these games actually had something less stupid and pandering to replace the "touching" mini games.

I've heard good things about criminal girls, but after playing monster monpiece for a long while, they're not entertaining or fun...it's just tedious and frustrtating and makes me write off any other games that inlcude those types of minigames.

at least an option for something different, or turn it off, not asking for censoring or taking it out...just replaced with or an option to turn it off please.
 
The game looks great from everything I've seen, from dungeon art design, music, monster design and character design. As I said in the Vita thread however, I'm honestly getting tired of all these drpgs where random encounters do not matter at all. All the other features are nice, but encounter balance is my main issue with every drpg on the system besides Dungeon Travelers. You should not be able to walk into a new dungeon and mow down everything without the enemy having at least some chance to fight back.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
I kind of wish these games actually had something less stupid and pandering to replace the "touching" mini games.

I've heard good things about criminal girls, but after playing monster monpiece for a long while, they're not entertaining or fun...it's just tedious and frustrtating and makes me write off any other games that inlcude those types of minigames.

at least an option for something different, or turn it off, not asking for censoring or taking it out...just replaced with or an option to turn it off please.

Pretty much since honestly they add little to the actual gameplay for the most part. I never liked anything with touch mechanics in general since they are rarely done right or have any sort of actual meaning.

Demon Gaze 2 is one of the latest examples of this being totally unnecessary and winding up as a larger pain in the ass than anything due to having to constantly reload in order to not waste resources. At least in this game they actually have a separate content made for said mechanic rather than just a static pre-existing graphic.

Even then though this game would have been perfectly fine without it.

The game looks great from everything I've seen, from dungeon art design, music, monster design and character design. As I said in the Vita thread however, I'm honestly getting tired of all these drpgs where random encounters do not matter at all. All the other features are nice, but encounter balance is my main issue with every drpg on the system besides Dungeon Travelers. You should not be able to walk into a new dungeon and mow down everything without the enemy having at least some chance to fight back.

Yeah combat is hilariously easy at the moment. I had set it to the hardest difficulty since wanted to see how hard the game actually got and right now Im literally steam rolling everything.

Actually if you want to get fucked up in a DRPG series go play Elminage. As that game is pretty much Wizardry minus the actual license. Though dont play Gothic as that is the worst one of the series.

Thankfully Coven by NIS does put in a bit of a challenge as even when I was over leveled if my luck was bad and I took a critical hit could really mess up my party. That game they did a fairly good job with balance, since granted while you could roflstomp things at the same time if you were unlucky the same could happen to you.

This game Id say if you want to keep things challenging most def you will have to avoid over leveling / upgrading your equipment. Though the downside is that with how this game is designed you are inclined to fight a lot in order to gain those blood tokens which you need for changing class and upgrading your equipment. Otherwise you will be locking yourself out of content. So yeah the game balance bit is kinda off. Seeing the patch notes does not look like they are adjusting the difficulty either for combat / monsters.
 
This is the game I'm most looking forward to right now. If a localisation isn't announced at the IFI press event next month I'll be a sad panda.

Thanks for the detailed write-up. I've been following the game fairly closely, but at the same time I haven't looked that deeply into the mechanics so your post has taught me a lot. A few questions about the party, apologies if you're not far enough in to answer them yet:

- What're the roles of the Libero/Science types in combat? I'm assuming the Fighter/Archer/Magician types are pretty traditional.
- How quickly do the characters join you? Having an incomplete party for half the game is always a pet peeve of mine.
- Do you know if there's a hidden 10th character?
- Who is best girl and why is it Gretel?


I was planning on using these 4 plus whoever else took my fancy, but having 5 main class types / 5 party member slots makes me feel like you're meant to have one of each class in your party. Hopefully that's not the case, since Sleeping Beauty and Kaguyahime are both archers, and neither of the Liberos (Red Riding Hood/Rapunzel) have made a good first impression on me.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
This is the game I'm most looking forward to right now. If a localisation isn't announced at the IFI press event next month I'll be a sad panda.

Thanks for the detailed write-up. I've been following the game fairly closely, but at the same time I haven't looked that deeply into the mechanics so your post has taught me a lot. A few questions about the party, apologies if you're not far enough in to answer them yet:

- What're the roles of the Libero/Science types in combat? I'm assuming the Fighter/Archer/Magician types are pretty traditional.
- How quickly do the characters join you? Having an incomplete party for half the game is always a pet peeve of mine.
- Do you know if there's a hidden 10th character?
- Who is best girl and why is it Gretel?

I was planning on using these 4 plus whoever else took my fancy, but having 5 main class types / 5 party member slots makes me feel like you're meant to have one of each class in your party. Hopefully that's not the case, since Sleeping Beauty and Kaguyahime are both archers, and neither of the Liberos (Red Riding Hood/Rapunzel) have made a good first impression on me.

The Libero and Science both can be used as front liners. The Libero (Red Riding Hood) for example is a combination of a front liner and healer. Since she has healing and offensive spells but at the same time can hold her own with standard melee. Also with the stuff she can equip you can bring her AGI level up rather high allowing for her to keep up with the Fighter class (Alice) for example.

Science has a bit less HP it seems, but can also be used as both a front / rear character. The standard class item which is a bomb? Can be used from the rear row without any sort of damage penalty. Though it seems to effect her AGI rating slowing her down in the combat turns. So I went and equipped Snow White with a dagger that increased her speed and def instead and left her in the front. The Science default class comes with healing and offensive spells also. Along with status ailment protection spells I think? You need to choose what you will unlock at the start though as when you get
Snow White and Sleeping Beauty
they will come with no skills unlocked. So be sure to check that before bringing them into the dungeon.

The game you will start out with Jack / Alice and Red Riding Hood. In the 2nd chapter you will get
Snow White and Sleeping Beauty
at least where Im at. So that brings you up to Jack + 4 characters total. 3 of which can be used in the front and one made for the back row.

If you blast through the first chapter it does not take too long to get the other 2 characters. I took my time gathering resources and equipment which pays off since the stuff the 2 new characters come with is a bit shite lol

Yeah there apparently is a 10th character.
Available after completing an extra scenario, though am unsure of when this scenario is able to be accessed.

Am looking forward to finding out more about Sleeping Beauty or Rapunzel lol. Though for some reason Rapunzel reminds me of Perpell from Makai Shin Trillion... Not sure if thats a good thing or not lol. The first encounter with
Kaguyahime
is amusing though. That occurs in Chapter 1 I think.

Have not obtained a mage yet, but the archer and fighter are pretty typical. Though they also contain offensive type elemental spells which can be unlocked spending skill points. Alice as the Fighter has Water based and
Sleeping Beauty
has lightning I think. Though for whatever reason her standard bow attack even at lv 8 does a pretty high amount of damage as is. The odd thing is though even though shes is in the back row enemies seem to constantly target her. Makes me wonder if there is any actual purpose to putting characters in the back due to this lol. At least you have the option of using Jack to prevent this to some extent using the guard command if necessary as long as you do not go and exhaust his LP.
 

joe2187

Banned
Pretty much since honestly they add little to the actual gameplay for the most part. I never liked anything with touch mechanics in general since they are rarely done right or have any sort of actual meaning.

Demon Gaze 2 is one of the latest examples of this being totally unnecessary and winding up as a larger pain in the ass than anything due to having to constantly reload in order to not waste resources. At least in this game they actually have a separate content made for said mechanic rather than just a static pre-existing graphic.

Even then though this game would have been perfectly fine without it.

.

Oh dammit. I didnt even know Demon Gaze 2 had that in it. Demon Gaze was one of my most played dungeon crawlers on my vita, and I'm still trying to platinum it now...stupid shield demon is ridiculously hard.

Demon Gaze did fine all on it's own, why did they feel they need to include the damn "touch" shit.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Oh dammit. I didnt even know Demon Gaze 2 had that in it. Demon Gaze was one of my most played dungeon crawlers on my vita, and I'm still trying to platinum it now...stupid shield demon is ridiculously hard.

Demon Gaze did fine all on it's own, why did they feel they need to include the damn "touch" shit.

Yeah not sure why they added it as its not as if the game was popular due to stuff like that. The other main problem with the mechanic too is the fact that it is pretty much necessary in order to get the full use of the skills demons come with.

Thankfully its nothing really "lewd" so to speak, but still does not excuse the fact that its an unnecessary gameplay mechanic that gates off skills.

The supposed reward for doing it is that you will get event scenes with said demon of choice each time the affection level is raised. Which are amusing to watch depending on who your favorite demons are, but the act of getting there not so amusing.

The import OT below if you are interested in general info.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1285913

Thankfully outside from that and having "preset" characters for your party (the demons) rather than making your own the games core mechanics and flow is still Demon Gaze for the most part.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Managed to get a bit further into the game. Within the 2nd dungeon was taking damage again thankfully, although that will be changing soon as our levels are increasing. Got lucky too and ran into the wandering merchant early, who usually carries some good equipment right off the bat.

Though we will most def need to grind out combat to gain more blood tokens for upgrading equipment again. All works out as we do need to level once again to be able to go toe to toe with the enemies.

Am curious if the Paladin class in the Fighter tree has a taunt skill. I should check the wiki for that since noticed that its really random almost to the point of not being random with who the enemy attacks in your party as they seemed to focus on my most squishy character in the party. So she was the very first death of a character I had. Thankfully due to constantly hitting the harvest points in the first dungeon have a good stock of recovery items. Would be useful having a taunt skill as Jack is pretty useless for the most part outside of the Mary Gun and being able to use items. The guard function is pretty much a 1 time thing with how long he gets knocked out and you can usually end fights before he wakes up lol

It seems that there is even a "bug" where you can save your game, exit the game, reload the save and the harvest point will respawn. This does not seem to work for all harvest points though. So if you are really bored its possible to do that constantly to gain a bunch of items from the set randomized loot table for the first dungeon. Didnt bother doing that though, but did test it a few times to confirm the theory had noticed by accident when I had to exit the game to check something in the digital manual and reloaded my save near a harvest point.

Also with the 2 new characters in the party Ill be able to backtrack a bit and access other areas that I was unable to before thanks to their exploration skills.

Do think one thing that might drive folks slightly crazy is how opening up some new sections in the dungeon will be related to the roulette outcome for the 3 desires of the Jail. Granted it has not been much of an issue for myself, can see others not liking the system if they want to rush through the title for whatever reason. You will be able to tell when there are no other areas to open up once the cut-in scenes of the new section opening up stops. Am not sure if the roulette for opening new sections only pertains to that particular floor or the whole dungeon in general though. You usually can check what opened up by looking at your full minimap and trying to locate newly opened sections which will be displayed by the "wall lines" being missing from a particular section of the map that used to have them present.

Found out that maxing out the 5 hearts for the characters friendship rating is actually not that difficult? As long as you have the proper gift item it goes up fairly fast. Though have not advance the story far enough yet for anything to have taken place as a result of this I think? Most of the gift items early on it seems you will find being sold by the wandering merchant in the dungeon. While a lot of the stuff is fairly cheap due to the mass amount of things hes selling its a bit hard to tell what gift is for who outside of a few obvious ones. Such as blankets for sleeping beauty or bandages for Alice as you would imagine that she uses it on Jack, which is why she seems to be happy with receiving them.

For those not wanting to waste time with trial and error for the gift items use the JP wiki below. For those who cant read Japanese Red = Good, Lavender = OK, Blue = Dislike.
http://gametter.com/mary-skelter/15_present.html
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Lets see got through playing a bit more and experimented with class changing one of the characters. Alice in particular as had enough resources stocked up to do it. Went for the Marshal class as it grants me all party attack skills along with not losing my speed advantage by dropping my AGI due to equipment restrictions.

What is interesting about the class changing is the fact that you get to keep all of your previously learned skills from other classes and can swap things out as you wish as long as you have skill slots available. The skill slots can also be increased by spending the blood token resources. (Btw blood tokens are actually something along the line of blood crystals, but typing crystal out every time is a pain in the ass)

The few downsides with class changing is first off the cost of blood tokens to class change. Also due to your level not resetting for that specific class, you will have to take advantage of the level down system in order to earn more skill points to spend on the new skills. Though you are unable to partake in the level down system until you go past Lv 15. As the first tier for the level down system is lv 15 and from there it goes up. What I mean by tiers is that the game will drop you down to lv 15. Allowing you to level up again and gain skill points from there.

The other small downside is having to prep weapons in advance. As the other classes become more specialized with the equipment they can use. Some weapons you will not find early on either. Such as the microphone for the Poet for example in the Libero tree. Same goes for other classes. So it is important to be sure to check what the allowed weapons are for a class before changing. Otherwise you will be a bit screwed.

One major downside is that Class Changing and Level Down system uses some sort of Permission Point which is displayed in both of those status windows. Im currently 0/1 for Alice due to having class changed. The issue here at the moment is am unsure how to renew this point to be able to change class again. So will have to look that up. I might have skipped over it in the brief tutorial. Will check the wiki later. So right now for my game I am unable to change back to another class right away until this permission point is renewed. Then again with the blood token cost its not like you will really want to be hopping all over the place.

The positives of the class change system though is if you do take your time to grind out tokens and exp you can make some interesting classes due to how free form the skill system is.

Granted the following example is without taking into account what the proc rate is for certain skills, with Alice by combining skills from her Paladin and Marshal classes you can have a class which taunts enemies to them and has the potential to perform counter attacks upon being hit. The taunt skill comes from the Paladin and if you equip that on the Marshal, there is a class specific skill (Class Specific skills only work when said class is equipped) which the character has a chance to counterattack upon taking damage.

Its due to this freeform system and Id imagine how you would be able to create broken classes is why they added in that Permission Point system with class changing. Along with the blood token cost.

While I have not tested it out yet it also seems that you can still put in skill points for previous classes as the skill point allocation screen you can switch to the other classes that are not equipped. Though it could be possible that the game is just displaying what skills were also previously earned, but actually prevents the player from investing a point into a previously used class. Will need to test this later.

When you class change also similar to Dungeon Travelers 2 the character portrait will also change to a new graphic.

-----

In regards to combat, Ive pretty much stabilized my party once again so we are not taking too heavy damage and are able to destroy the enemy fairly fast in the 2nd dungeon. Also by constantly going for actions which will cause blood spray from the enemy side we are entering genocide mode quite frequently which helps bring back small amounts of TP. Though at the same time we still are gaining a fair amount of exp so when we do level up our HP / TP get refilled anyways. So right now its more grinding out for blood tokens / money for equipment and generally fighting for loot drops is what I am doing in the 2nd dungeon due to the new loot table.

In regards to loot with this game it does the "diablo" where it adds words in front of item names that adds extra perks to pieces of equipment. Status ailment proc chance, more exp, more $$$ etc. Though they are not super common they do exist. Sometimes though it seems there are some which do not appear to add anything? You are also able to find items with a + status already attached to it. If you find an item with a Crown icon it means that item is maxed out which is basically +10. The plus status is fairly important also and a huge help when you find items like that as the blood token cost can be pretty hefty considering how rare some tokens are starting out and the cost increases each time you strengthen said piece of equipment.

The wandering merchant who shows up at random also comes with new loot in a dungeon. Though the general base items that he sells in terms of equipment does not change each time you meet him. Though I think? the gift items and such might change. But not things like armor or weapons. So basically what this means is for example in the First dungeon he will contain the same armor / weapons upon meeting him. So it is not like Dungeon Travelers 2 where the wandering merchant had random items each time.
And in the Second dungeon he will have different weapons / armor than the First dungeon. Basically just think of it as his loot table is always visible / changes with each dungeon. But do not expect random equipment with the selection of what he sells. Though the upside is that what he sells is actually fairly useful as its a good way to get decent equipment quickly rather than trying to depend on the low equipment drop rates from battle. He basically is the best place to buy gift items for the girls though since he has a massive selection and also seems to stock furniture later on that is not sold in the town store.

One other small thing with the wandering merchant is while am not 100% sure on this, his buyback rate for when selling items to him might be higher vs selling stuff back to the shop keeper in town. So what I have been doing is dragging out equipment with me that I no longer need in hopes of selling it to him out in the dungeon. Might be imagining things with this though as now its seems like the prices are correct for selling stuff. Odd. Though the unpatch version of the game apparently did have some bugs with pricing so perhaps it was related to that...

-----

Back to the topic of combat, honestly yeah the game is a bit easy again right now. The main purpose to play the (FEAR) = Hard Mode vs Easy or Normal is due to the EXP and Money bonus that you receive. The following example chart below is taken from the JP wiki

gfBdSEh.png


As you can see here in the chart there is little to no reason to really play the game on Easy. Even on FEAR the game is not exactly challenging unless you try to rush through it. The JP wiki mentions that on Normal difficulty you would not need to mess with stuff like the Level Down system at all if you wanted to see all the content. So that should help ease some concerns when it comes to what difficulty mode to select and if the Level Down system is really necessary to use.

Playing on Easy also reduces your EXP and $$$ gains by 25%. Whereas FEAR doubles gains for EXP and $$$

Combat is fairly easy and straightforward so there should be little issues there. But as mentioned before initially I personally feel that AGI is the most important stat currently really does make a huge difference having everyone able to take their turns before the enemy. Since as you progress enemy groups will start to become slightly larger and you will most def want to thin the herd at the start of the round. With that being said one attack skill type that will be getting a lot of use and I see why the devs made the TP cost so high is the all party attacks / spells. Since it helps you finish fights a lot faster and helps set up enemies to get overkilled allowing for more blood spray to take effect.

---

One important mechanic which I had forgotten to add initially is during combat you are able to choose a command called "lick" which basically what it does is clears blood off of one of the other characters in your party. Each character when licked will grant a specific bonus at the cost of losing all of the blood in their gauge. For example when another character performs lick on Snow White you gain a set amount of TP back. This bonus effect is different for all characters as mentioned before. I think a character has to have at least 2 bubbles in the blood gauge filled before the lick command can be used on them. Also by performing the lick command it raises the Jails Sexual Desire gauge which when filled grants a bonus roulette spin. There is nothing "lewd" so to speak when the action is performed as all it shows is a screen filled with the pink blood being wiped away and the character making a surprised sound. The bonus effects from lick also seem to level up. For example at lv 20 it will turn the lick effect to a Lv 2 version, that upgrades the effect. Quite useful in particular for the TP recover one.

---

One other important mechanic which folks might have noticed with how the dungeon gets covered in pink blood after combat is that the blood is highly visible when being chased in darkness during the Nightmare Chase mode. So it helps you find your way in the darkened dungeon. If you are really OCD about using this mechanic you can pretty much constantly walk along a same set path to areas of the dungeon getting into combat so you paint a specific path of blood for yourself to follow in the event of the Nigthmare Chase occurring. Though if you are a player that levels up a lot you really should not have an issue with the knocking down the nightmare to get past it. For example Im kicking its ass in the first round it appears so we do not even take any damage from it during said encounters. But its a fun little mechanic to think about and adds a bit to the world building of the game and some visual flair. The amount of blood that gets splattered around the dungeon depends on the amount you cause during a battle. Which is displayed at the battle results screen after combat.

The hilarious thing is my own dungeons currently look like something Jackson Pollock would love, cept just that everything is in fluorescent pink lol.

There are some side quests that request the player to get a specific location in a dungeon covered in blood also. So its not as if the game itself forgets about the mechanic which is good to see. Since combat happens fairly frequently its not all that hard to do either.

Also added the official music video for the OP song for the game, to the media section of the OP.

Music Video for the Mary Skelter OP song「予め失われた僕らのバラッド」Music Video(Short Ver.) by the EARPHONES
 
Man, thanks a lot for the detailed updates. More questions/comments after reading up:

- How's party balance looking so far? Any characters that're clearly outshining the others? Based on the initial reveals, I'm assuming the join order for the remaining characters (excluding the hidden 10th one) is Thumbelina → Kaguyahime/Rapunzel → Gretel/Cinderella. Getting Gretel near last is painful.

- What're your feelings on the story/characters so far, or is it too early to say?

- Does putting characters in the back row reduce the damage they take? Doesn't seem like it decreases their chances of getting hit from what you've said, so I'm not sure what its purpose is from a defensive standpoint.

- Bit of a shame that you're handling the Nightmares so easily. I was kinda hoping they'd be this genuinely terrifying adversary that would send the player into a panic whenever they showed up. Getting double EXP/money gain from Hard makes me feel like it could be easier than Normal, unless there's a major difference in monster stats to make up for it. Aside from the Nightmares, I'm not that bothered about the low difficulty. I found Demon Gaze pretty easy even on the highest setting but it didn't stop me having a blast with it.

- Has the touching mini-game reared its ugly head yet? I'm still not clear on what its actual purpose in the game is.

- I said it before in one of the older threads, but the OP theme is hot. Leagues ahead of Trillion's, though that game has the GOAT ED theme to make up for it.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Man, thanks a lot for the detailed updates. More questions/comments after reading up:

Went and wrote answers to your questions below. Might be a bit of a mess to read but should fill you in on what you wanted to know.

-------------
- How's party balance looking so far? Any characters that're clearly outshining the others? Based on the initial reveals, I'm assuming the join order for the remaining characters (excluding the hidden 10th one) is Thumbelina → Kaguyahime/Rapunzel → Gretel/Cinderella. Getting Gretel near last is painful.

Right now honestly Ive made
Sleeping Beauty
a mass murderer as she is destroying almost everything on the first turn with her all enemy attack skill. Due to killing 90-100% of the enemies on the first round creates a mass amount of blood allowing for the blood gauge to fill up on everyone pretty quickly after a few fights which means when she goes into her Genocide mode and kills everything on that turn she will get a fair amount of TP back depending on amount of enemies killed. If that does not net enough TP can use the lick command on
Snow White
which will recover around 70ish TP on the first level of the skill and when you hit lv 20? I think it was that lick effect levels up to lv 2 which gives around 110 TP I think it was. Thanks to that made collecting resources and money a lot easier, along with leveling up. So right now Id have to say that
Sleeping Beauty
is my most useful character.

Second most useful might be Alice just due to how much damage I can deal with her by using her Charge (attack up) skill for 1 turn then doing the Large Damage attack skill the next turn. For example 600~ damage turned into 2000 damage with that. I forget what lv my charge skill is though. Also she is the 2nd fastest character in the party. Its actually tied between her and
Sleeping Beauty
due to the equipment we have on is geared towards AGI.

For healing Red Riding Hood seems to be more useful than
Snow White
though to be fair I did max out Red Riding Hoods all party healing ability. She is also faster than Snow White and has more HP.

Id imagine once I get deeper into the other classes for the characters and do some leveling down work Id be able to make some pretty broken combinations though.

According to the JP wiki the order of characters obtained is as follows below.
Jack, Alice, Red Riding Hood
Snow White, Sleeping Beauty
Thumbelina
Kaguyahime
Cinderella
Gretel
Rapunzel
*Hidden Character* (if extra scenario is cleared)

Hidden Characters name is
Hamelin

---------
- What're your feelings on the story/characters so far, or is it too early to say?

So far so good actually. The game gives a pretty strong setting from the start once you make your way to the town where all the survivors are living. So with that in mind gives you a fair bit of motivation to move forward in the game and progress the story to see how things play out. The characters too are fairly well done. Voice acting is fairly well done also for the most part. Will be looking forward to seeing the other cast also as they appear in the story. Do think Ill be trying to clear this game to see how it ends.

While am not sure how many endings exist in the game, there apparently is more than one ending as
I have seen information in regards to a choice the player will make at some point in the game changes the outcome of the ending. Which is why the future patch notes is addressing an issue with that.

Right now while she doesnt say much I must say that
Sleeping Beauty
is my favorite. Still waiting to see Rapunzel and how she is in the story lol. Have also already met
Cinderella
in the 3rd Chapter, though she did not join the party yet.

---------
- Does putting characters in the back row reduce the damage they take? Doesn't seem like it decreases their chances of getting hit from what you've said, so I'm not sure what its purpose is from a defensive standpoint.

Actually right now it seems that the enemy is focusing more on the front row characters. For the 2nd Chapter I only had 1 character in the back row and she only got attacked once I think during the whole time. Though the enemy did seem to focus their attacks on
Snow White
who is the weakest character in the front row though. I still kept her in the front due to the equipment she had on was meant for melee combat, but the stats on said weapon helped up her various stats including AGI by a lot.

My play style in general is always trying to get the fastest turn order as possible. Even more so with this game since sometimes after the first round turn order seems to be a bit odd come the 2nd. Such as enemies going before other characters who are clearly faster than them in the turn order list. Know it sounds odd but it will make sense when one plays the game.

So right now it seems that the back row is working its purpose which is to help take the heat off of certain characters. Also if you equip ranged weapons it seems that they do not have an attack penalty to them for attacking from the back row or attacking the back row. Where as if you use melee weapons and try to attack from the back row they will have a damage penalty to them. Also if you try to attack enemies that are in their back row of a formation.

In regards to damage reduction for back row characters am unsure of that. Since have not tested characters in the back vs front with damage taken.

--------
- Bit of a shame that you're handling the Nightmares so easily. I was kinda hoping they'd be this genuinely terrifying adversary that would send the player into a panic whenever they showed up. Getting double EXP/money gain from Hard makes me feel like it could be easier than Normal, unless there's a major difference in monster stats to make up for it. Aside from the Nightmares, I'm not that bothered about the low difficulty. I found Demon Gaze pretty easy even on the highest setting but it didn't stop me having a blast with it.

The nightmare chases are actually bad if you are not ready for it or have an injured party. This is due to the fact that you are unable to open your menu during the chase event so no using items outside of battle to heal yourself. The nightmare can also attack you while it chases you with attacks it does on the map itself. If you encounter a random battle and the nightmare is close by it will begin to deal damage to all members of your party it seems. This is called "booking battle" or something like that. So its quite bad if this happens. Happened to me once and we all took around 130~ damage from one round before we finished off the monsters. Only time you can attempt to heal yourself is during battle. Depending on how strong your party is can be a risk on its own due to that means using up a turn to heal instead of damaging the nightmare in order to knock it out allowing it to potentially get off another attack on a member(s) in your party. The other thing is if the whole chase occurs while you are exploring a new part of a dungeon or in a cramped section of a dungeon it does add tension since you are in semi unfamiliar territory hindering escape from the chase zone or in a section where you know it will take you a while to escape due to the map layout. Low visibility adds to this issue also, which is where the whole painting the dungeon pink with blood comes into play for having some sort of escape route marked out. I forgot to try Alice's wonder hole ability (like a rabbit hole, since Alice = Alice in Wonderland) which is a portable save / teleport to town. Though things like stairs will instantly end the event if you manage to make it to one.

With the Chapter 2 nightmare with us kicking its ass its mainly due to our damage output and the fact that we are all able to act before it. Although if it gets the chance to hit us it can dish out around 300~ damage which is around 30-40% of our life depending on the characters.
The actual boss fight with it, it took us a fair amount of time to kill it and this is with my over leveled party that is kitted out with some pretty good gear that has been upgraded. We were landing attacks in 600+ and I got off one 2000 damage attack and still the fight lasted pretty long.
So with the information in the spoiler section there is challenge with the game, though with the normal monsters once you reach a certain point with your characters for that dungeon you will be wiping the floor with them for the most part. Or at least I have been so far. Only the starting off part of my adventure into the Chapter 2 dungeon was I taking some heavy damage and getting used to what the monsters weaknesses / resistances were. Though since this game it seems that they do not have a really large variety of monsters it does not take too long to figure things out. While the monster selection is not anemic, its not plentiful either. Though thankfully since the gameplay is enjoyable it shouldnt bother you too much. At least its not bothering me too much as am more focused on the exp, cash, loot and blood tokens. Fights are fast too so that helps also.

Though if people try to rush on FEAR mode they most def will wind up dying. Even the JP wiki warned of this, which must mean that htings ramp up later on. As an example from my playthrough so far, the boss fight for chapter 2 we were taking some heavy damage regardless of being overleveled / kitted out well. Fight lasted a lot longer than I had expected considering how much damage we were dishing out too. So someone who does not spend as much time leveling and scrounging around for equipment Id say would most likely die. Will be looking forward to the third dungeon which I am currently heading out towards now. Although I most def will need to be upgrading defense on some characters. Also leveling up and kitting out the newly joined member. I might also go and level down Alice so she can gain more skill points to earn. Once we all hit lv 25. So she will get reset to lv 15. Allowing for an extra 10 point gain on top of the small status bonus for the level down.

Also if one does not pay attention to their AGI rating and the monsters get to go first, the AI does seem to have a tendency to focus fire on targets basically constantly attack a single target. Not sure why this is. Id imagine later on when we get monsters with more irritating skills things will become a lot more difficult including the negative status effects. As blind is pretty bad, during boss fights.

But overall am not having too much of a problem yet. And it was nice to see that the Chapter 2 boss put up a fight. As honestly was expecting to steamroll it big time.

According to the Wiki the EX scenario or dungeon? is supposed to be where things get really crazy. So that will be interesting to see.

--------
- Has the touching mini-game reared its ugly head yet? I'm still not clear on what its actual purpose in the game is.

Yeah it finally unlocked
in Chapter 3.
While am not sure how many times it can be used as have yet to use it. Apparently it acts as a buff for the character you purify. Which increases like HP and I forgot what else. In any case it adds positive status effects for the character which last until you leave the dungeon / return to the town. So basically it seems to be something that can help boost your characters a bit for your dungeon exploring. Will see how it goes when I actually use it. Though thankfully perhaps its not something which is required to get the most out of the game, where as for example in Demon Gaze II you literally need to do it or else skills are locked away on your Demons due to being gated behind the affection levels. Was not too happy about that, since the feature in DG2 is a pain in the ass as its like "Battleship" in the sense of having to find the perfect spot which you have no idea where it is. So a lot of save scumming is involved.

With this game all affection raising is done through the room decorations or giving gifts and quite easy to do actually as long as you give them the items they like. All affection seems to do with this game is unlock the sub events. Though no idea when those show up must all be planned or something as apparently just because affection gets raised does not automatically trigger the events for viewing it seems. Class Skills and whatnots are locked away via Skill Point spending.

Will update this section once I find out more after trying it out.

Ok the minigame requires blood from Jack and since you cant refill blood while at the base you will only be able to perform the cleansing on a few characters. Not sure what determines the percentages on each character either on the selection screen. Basically all you need to do is scrub off the pink blood from the selected character during the minigame. If you clean off all the blood before the time runs out the purification is successful and that character will obtain a random buff for the duration of your next dungeon crawling session.

---------
- I said it before in one of the older threads, but the OP theme is hot. Leagues ahead of Trillion's, though that game has the GOAT ED theme to make up for it.

Yeah was quite surprised with how good the OP was and the actual Opening Movie in the game was pretty great. Im looking forward to hearing the ED theme for the game as I have zero clue as to what it is lol.
 
Thanks again. Sleeping Beauty's tier 2 behind Gretel so I'm glad she's proving useful. Also I'm fine with Rapunzel joining last (kinda), her character type is way down my list of preferences. I can see the Perpell resemblance.

Been really curious about what the hidden character looks like so I did a search and found this partial image. There's probably a better/full one on the wiki you linked if I could navigate it properly.

(hidden character spoiler) http://i.imgur.com/yyIiCrb.jpg (hidden character spoiler)

I'm feeling better about the Nightmares / difficulty after what you've said. My play style is usually a midway point between rushing and taking my time, so FEAR mode hopefully wouldn't be a walkover. I wonder if there're any harder difficulties that unlock once you clear the game, like with MeiQ.

The touching mini-game sounds like it can be safely ignored. It was bad enough in C******* G**** when you had to spam it to unlock every skill.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Thanks again. Sleeping Beauty's tier 2 behind Gretel so I'm glad she's proving useful. Also I'm fine with Rapunzel joining last (kinda), her character type is way down my list of preferences. I can see the Perpell resemblance.

Been really curious about what the hidden character looks like so I did a search and found this partial image. There's probably a better/full one on the wiki you linked if I could navigate it properly.

I'm feeling better about the Nightmares / difficulty after what you've said. My play style is usually a midway point between rushing and taking my time, so FEAR mode hopefully wouldn't be a walkover. I wonder if there're any harder difficulties that unlock once you clear the game, like with MeiQ.

The touching mini-game sounds like it can be safely ignored. It was bad enough in C******* G**** when you had to spam it to unlock every skill.

Right now in Chapter 3 the third dungeon we are taking some heavy damage and with that having characters changing into the Skelter Mode due to becoming tainted due to all of the damage. Although at the same time too I kinda hamstrung my party by changing 2 more classes and cutting Alices level by 15. So she was starting out at lv 11 in the 3rd dungeon.

I made a mistake with the lv down system. The tiers is how many levels it will subtract from your current level and not tiers that the level down system will drop you to. So for example we were Lv 26 did the Lv down 15 levels so Alice became lv 11. So its a bit different from like how Dungeon Travelers 2 worked.

Switched
Snow White
to an Item Tooler due to the item drop rate up from enemies. So that is helping collect loot faster and saving money with having to buy healing items and such. And turned Red Riding Hood into a Fairy due to the status debuffs the class has mainly ATK / DEF down ones. Money at the moment is a non issue and managed to max out all the girls affection levels currently, since ran into the wandering merchant who was thankfully selling all the weird gift items again. Needed some for a subquest too so it was perfect timing. All that I gotta do now is progress more in the game to get the onslaught of events again lol. Though apparently I think the JP wiki had mentioned you can miss events if you like progress the game without watching some, so its suggested to watch all events at the town before progressing.

Enemies are also
starting to use magic
so we need to be a bit more careful about that.

There is one odd thing about the game which is I cant seem to find any info in regards to exactly what all of the Status effect for a character. Some are more obvious ones such as AGI effecting turn speed. STR for Physical Attacks / TEC for Magical Attack but wanted to look it up regardless to make sure. Am guessing MIND is for Magical Defense. Did not see anything on the current JP wiki am using either. Game devs should literally NEVER forget to give a general explanation at the very least about what each status does. Didnt see anything in the in game tutorial archives either which is odd. The digital manual was worthless too.

Back to the 3rd dungeon Ive managed to level up to the point where as long as we get the first turn we can pretty much wipe out anything that is coming towards us but in the event where the enemy goes first some characters can take pretty bad damage still due to our equipment being a bit weaker for the area. As Im keeping on some older equipment due to things like the perks they offer such as more exp or $$$. Though at some point will have to switch it out as the loss of other stats increases and higher def will become a problem during the boss fight Id imagine.

About the hidden character
she looks like shes in Skelter Mode or something lol. Or some sort of weird hybrid of the Jail & Humans. Since the Jail itself is a living entity apparently.

Also good news it seems 1.02 has gone live and the largest help to us players is the increase to the inventory system from 35 to 99. HUGE help. Since 35 was hilariously stupid due to how many healing type items the game has which takes up 70% of the space.

Oh one important thing in regards to making an AGI based party. Its a bit of a double edged sword. What I mean by this is in the event if your characters go Skelter generally Jack will be the last or near the last to take his turn in the party meaning that the randomized berserk AI will be able to take its turns before you will have the chance to purify them. Or even perform a preemptive purification before they change to their Skelter form. So that puts your party a bit at a risk, so do keep that in mind. The other odd thing is while Jack gains levels and such there is no way to see what his actual AGI rating is. At least I have not found a way if there is one, which basically puts you a bit of a bind if you want to try and think where he might be in combat relative to the other members. Then again you can see generally where hes at when a battle starts, but knowing his actual AGI value would have been useful.

Reason why Im putting a large emphasis on this is when your characters go and take large portions of damage its real easy for them to become tainted and change into the Skelter form. Its even worse when it happens to multiple characters in a single round. In FEAR mode even more so due to how much damage enemies can deal out when you progress further into the game and they start doing all party attacks. Thats good though that the games difficulty is ramping up as I progress will make my class building more interesting and kitting them out with gear to help take full advantage of their skill set and perks.

But still even with the downside of AGI party build being dangerous, personally its a lot better than letting some enemies go first in combat. Even more so when the bad status abilities will come into play. Right now I think I hate darkness the most as you still are able to perform actions but its a crap shoot if said action will hit or not. Suppose its the same like paralyze where you dont know if you will actually be able to perform your turn for the round...

The Item Tooler class is useful as it allows for that character to also be able to use items in combat. As normally only Jack is able to use items while in combat. The 5 party members do not have access to the command by default. Considering how Jack can be knocked out for several rounds by chance when either guarding another character or using the Mary Gun having another member who has the Item command is a HUGE help, even if the class itself is not exactly powerful combat wise.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Just managed to make it through the third chapter. Must say that the the choice I made with
the dungeon selection
was fairly interesting as the location was HUGE for 2 of the floors. Will see about if I can transfer things to the PSVTV to get some images for reference for those curious.

The nigthmare fight was interesting also, granted it was easier than the second dungeon, still was pretty cool and had some good music to go with it.

One important bit of information is that the game apparently still has crashes in 1.02. I had one last night which is what I used as my stopping point lol. It occurred in town after an event with a new character joining and was loading back to the living quarters so I could access my storage vault. Game froze right there.

With that being said do save often in both the dungeon using Alice's portable save / warp point skill or right when you return to town be sure to save by opening the menu with Triangle then selecting System.

Thankfully this only happened once during my 25 hour playtime I have clocked on the Vita, so am not too concerned with it now. That and as mentioned before its fairly common for Idea Factory stuff to have all sorts of odd bugs in it lol

Am looking forward to progressing in the 4th chapter later in the evening. Although its getting harder to change up my party due to how set I am with some of the characters currently. But will have to eventually swap some members out as to earn exp a character needs to be set as a party member it seems.

Also need to earn more cash and blood tokens in prepping for new equipment in the 4th dungeon. Blood Tokens in particular as the type A blood I seem to be needing the most but never have enough of in general. Am not 100% sure but I think causing more bleeding from enemies might effect after battle gains with blood tokens. Wonder if the JP wiki has any info on this.
 
When you say choice for
dungeon selection
are you talking about the roulette or something else? I'm kinda curious about the layout size, but I suspect I may be the only one so don't worry about getting any images!

Freeze glitches are infuriating, but it sounds like a once-off and nowhere near as painful as a crash after 30 minutes of fighting Trillion.

How's your party lineup looking right now? I'm guessing Thumbelina's joined, anyone else? Any thoughts on who you're going to bench once more characters join?

I must've listened to that video of the OP theme 50 times over the last few days. So good.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
When you say choice for
dungeon selection
are you talking about the roulette or something else? I'm kinda curious about the layout size, but I suspect I may be the only one so don't worry about getting any images!

Freeze glitches are infuriating, but it sounds like a once-off and nowhere near as painful as a crash after 30 minutes of fighting Trillion.

How's your party lineup looking right now? I'm guessing Thumbelina's joined, anyone else? Any thoughts on who you're going to bench once more characters join?

I must've listened to that video of the OP theme 50 times over the last few days. So good.

In regards to the choice
its an actual choice given to you in the story for which dungeon you take on first in Chapter 3. The two different choices is the city entertainment district and the japanese styled temple stage
in regards to the choice itself
am unsure if this effects who joins you first such as Cinderella or Kaguyahime. Also if said choice has any sort of impact on the ending itself.
As with my playthrough
I picked the Japanese temple designed map which as part of the story has Kaguyahime join your party. After clearing the dungeon the next chapter starts with Cinderella joining you before you set out to the entertainment district.

I think you will be pretty impressed about the size of the dungeon as I was considering it was only the 3rd location Ive been to. Though honestly it would have been nice if they took a bit more time to add more events or other things to the dungeon to make up for the various dead ends and such. Granted they have the harvest points for random items it still does not populate the dungeon in a large quantity. Also one thing that drove me insane is how the treasure chests are filled with garbage like eyedrops or other status recovery items rather than actual equipment. In my opinion chests should never contain things that are actually useless and as thats what the harvest points are for and be more equipment based as chests unlike harvest points are one time events therefore should give something of actual value.

Right now in my party am running
Alice, Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella
. Though might consider removing
Red Riding Hood and see if its possible to remove Alice for a while, if not I might have to remove Snow White
though if I remove her will lose the extra item drop percentage which does hurt a bit as trying to get new equipment outside of the wandering merchant is taking a while. In regards to equipment there is one odd detail that I still have not figured out which is when
Kaguyahime joins for whatever reason she is a Sniper but the problem is that there has not been any "gun" type of weapons dropped so the only other weapon she can equip is the knife type though her not only being low lv to begin with when she does join, most def is not made for front line combat.
Thankfully with the 1.02 patch you can switch to the original class type for a very very low cost to unlock it. As characters who start out as a different class do not have the default one unlocked.

It really is going to be hard to see who to bench and whatnots since as mentioned earlier the game does not appear to award exp to characters not in the party. Though I will try to take a closer look at that since you can add characters as "supporting" members who give a specific effect to a single in party character. For example Thumbelina is able to recover HP on occasion for the character she is paired off with as a supporting unit, quite useful if you stick her to a weaker party member or if you plan on using a class that has the taunt ability, the random heals can be a big help.

One useful thing to keep in mind about Class Changing and such, is that so far I have not run across any skills which are weapon based in particular. So for example the all party attacks that
Sleeping Beauty
learns can be used with other weapons also. Since right now I have her as a Sakura Miko for her class and she is using a scythe which is destroying enemies due to the damage output. Though due to the stats change where her AGI seems to have been lowered slightly had to sacrifice some DEF to raise that AGI up higher to get her in the 1st / 2nd turn tier again.

The Sakura Miko class was a preorder bonus that adds a new class to the game. Though the skills that you can learn are really nothing special, but where the class shines is with the variety of weapons it can equip along with the fact that it costs zero blood tokens to switch to. So this allows for you to use it as a stopgap which is what I have done. The skills that the class comes with which can be unlocked is weak / normal water attack, some HP healing spell and a water damage resistance buff. So as you can see the skills are kinda not worth spending skill points on outside of that healing one maybe... But the variety of weapons that it can equip more than makes up for that.

The equipment drop balance so to speak seems a bit odd as have noticed there are still many weapon types that have yet to show up in the game and with how some classes can only equip certain types of weapons gates them off from being used for a while due to this. Since the wandering merchants goods is determined by what floor of the dungeon you are on rather than an actual "randomized table" if the weapon type you need there is not present then you will have to rely on luck of the draw with post battle loot. Which is why the Item Tooler class is so important with their class specific skill of increased loot drop rate. Though even with that you wind up with a lot of recovery related items. Though having a bunch of various items stocked up does help a lot in harder battles. The large TP recovery and all party HP recovery items in particular.

Yeah the games OP is pretty great, I watch it every time when I do a fresh boot of the title.

---

Oh one important thing I had forgotten to mention with the classes is that apparently some classes have very similar skills so while its not something everyone likes to do, looking up what skills are available ahead of time is useful that way to make sure you dont go wasting skill points or blood tokens in a class that you may not need.

---

Will try to see if I can load this up on the PSVTV later on to get the screenshots taken. Laptop currently does not have that Content Manager program installed.

---

Stupid side note about the games plot with Jack
have realized that the tower is basically the "beanstalk" for the Jack and the Beanstalk fairytale.
not sure why I did not recognize that right away lol. Only dawned on me last night... Reason for the connection is that
each time you destroy a core in the prison the tower apparently grows as a response. I think what they had said about the cores is that they suppressed the growth of the tower, which is why it reacts each time a core is destroyed within the dungeon.

Once the
Tower
becomes unlocked in the story it is highly suggested to steer clear from it and not enter that particular dungeon. You can access it from the first dungeon and just heading straight up the middle I think or something like that. I just went and looked in the tower and got into a fight my lv 30+ characters were getting 1 shotted pretty much and only 2 characters were able to do triple digit damage to the enemies when our turn finally rolled around

The game tells you to not go in there also, but usually when a game does that its not as bad as they make it sound. This game though yeah stay out means stay out lol
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Heres the pics of the 3 floors in the 3rd Dungeon. Hopefully the spoiler tags will work correctly...

*fixing

Hmm looks like the spoiler tags are no longer currently working with images for whatever reason. Wonder if it has to do with the issues the site had. Will ask one of the admins later.

Anyways heres the 3 links in order of 1st, 2nd, 3rd floors.

http://imgur.com/VRafffw
http://imgur.com/Ue177Jg
http://imgur.com/M2Dl490

Apparently the crash that I had I forgot to save before hand so I need to do the whole boss fight over again at the 3rd dungeon. Though to make up for that Ive been leveling up more instead and collected some new equipment also changed Alice to a Paladin just to unlock her paladin skills. Though might need to level her down again in order to boost her stats up. Though the level down mechanic most def does help strengthen all stats categories as her stats is up to par with my characters that are lv 38.

We tried to wander in the tower again. As usual we all took around 4 digit damage from the enemies when we were attacked first lol. So even lv 38 apparently is not even close to being high enough to attempt to fight the monsters in the tower's first floor. Do see that place as having to take advantage of the lv down system if I want to try and tackle it early on in order to get unbalanced loot Id imagine. But that time spent I might as well progress further in the game lol.

Was going to record the 3rd dungeon boss fight, but at the moment am stuck with working on some other stuff so that will have to wait. Managed to gain at least 3 more levels though while fully mapping out the 3rd floor so stopped the game there and offloaded the screenshots of the map for you few folks here reading lol

Oh yeah also with combat. When you try to attack enemies in the back row with a non "ranged" type of weapon you will take a damage penalty. So basically even things like all enemy attack skills the rear row will have their damage reduced. So in that sense it might be better to keep characters who are specced out for all party attacks with ranged weapons that way an even amount of damage is dealt with the attack. Granted if your ATK rating is high enough it wont really matter anyways. But evenly spread out damage to all enemies = higher chance of making the blood fly with the next attack on everyone due to overkilling the targets.

Thats the one downside with having switched from the bow to a scythe and been plowing through enemies regardless since am dealing around 800 to the front row and 600 to the rear. But as you can see the 200 point dropoff is kinda high. Thankfully the game does not really seem to consider things like "casters" and whatnots with who is in the front vs back with enemy formations. At least not yet. Since it just seems to shuffle the positions at random for the formations.

Also at the max enemies only seem to go 2 rows deep and 4 wide I think. Usually when there is a 4th enemy on the screen your character stats / portraits on the right side cover it up lol.
 
I would've made the same dungeon choice, particularly if it means getting Kaguyahime earlier (guns or no guns). Also HOLY MACKEREL those maps look intimidating. Though past experience tells me that a simple looking map with a nasty gimmick/puzzle is far worse than a straightforward large one. I sure hope you can bring up the maps when you're being chased by Nightmares.

I'm glad you're agonising over removing Snow White. From your early posts I thought she might be your least useful party member, which worried me a bit since she's the same main class as Gretel. Usually I'd prefer that benched party members got some EXP to prevent them becoming dead weight, but in this case I'm largely decided about who I'd use anyway. Though it might be problematic if you temporarily lose party members at any point or get forced to use certain ones.

Hoping any western release gets the Miko class as well, if only for the extra artwork. There were a handful of other shop specific ones as well, but I'm not sure if those are just outfits or if they have actual gameplay consequences.

Is the Tower an optional dungeon or something you'll have to clear later in the game? From a difficulty standpoint it's reassuring that something's giving you trouble at least. Also I didn't click the spoilers about Jack towards the end of your post, since plot info is something I'd like to avoid!
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
I would've made the same dungeon choice, particularly if it means getting Kaguyahime earlier (guns or no guns). Also HOLY MACKEREL those maps look intimidating. Though past experience tells me that a simple looking map with a nasty gimmick/puzzle is far worse than a straightforward large one. I sure hope you can bring up the maps when you're being chased by Nightmares.

I'm glad you're agonising over removing Snow White. From your early posts I thought she might be your least useful party member, which worried me a bit since she's the same main class as Gretel. Usually I'd prefer that benched party members got some EXP to prevent them becoming dead weight, but in this case I'm largely decided about who I'd use anyway. Though it might be problematic if you temporarily lose party members at any point or get forced to use certain ones.

Hoping any western release gets the Miko class as well, if only for the extra artwork. There were a handful of other shop specific ones as well, but I'm not sure if those are just outfits or if they have actual gameplay consequences.

Is the Tower an optional dungeon or something you'll have to clear later in the game? From a difficulty standpoint it's reassuring that something's giving you trouble at least. Also I didn't click the spoilers about Jack towards the end of your post, since plot info is something I'd like to avoid!

Yeah I was quite surprised to see how large the 3rd dungeon was. Which is why am quite curious to see how the next one will be along with the others. As this most def was a "well that escalated quickly" situation lol. One thing for sure is the addition of those warp points from the update patches is a life saver with time. Since otherwise as you can see if one had to navigate through those to get to each floor would eat up a fair amount of time otherwise. The warp points are represented by the green and lavender? looking swirls on the maps. They usually are right next to eachother as one goes up the other down. Smart choice by the devs to add it in. Also some of the map sections shown in the 3 pictures were opened up by the roulette bonus. Though thanks to the speed adjustment to the roulette it makes it easier now to actually land on what you want for a fair amount of the time once you get used to how it works timing wise with the spin. Prepatch the speed was a lot faster making it quite difficult to get the timing down if at all. So that was a large improvement and a smart one. Otherwise the system is more a frustration to players.

Bout getting chased you lose both your ability to open the map (since the ability to access the menu is disabled) & minimap vanishes. Which is why if one has bad memory of where they are in the dungeon itself it can be a pretty serious problem with getting away from the Nightmare. As you have seen with the 3rd dungeon example pictures a lot of routes are not straight shots, so you really need to be sure to know where you are going later on when being chased.

My guess is the tower will be the final dungeon. Am not sure what the extra dungeon is yet. Though the tower being the main plot point makes it seem that it indeed will be the final destination. Esp considering the insane strength of the enemy in there D: I tried again before putting the vita away and yeah once again we did not have a chance to act at all lol. Alice and Sleeping Beauty survived the first volley but barely. Whats odd is for whatever reason Snow White has the most HP as shes in the 1000s now. And that is before doing the level down mechanic. So am wondering if its just the class she currently is which boosted her max HP. A bit odd if so since the class she is currently is not exactly a front line type of class... The other reason to stay out of the tower once it opens up is the fact that there is a nightmare which is active right from the get go on the first floor. Considering what the normal enemies do, Id imagine taking its map attack damage will pretty much kill the party seeing how the damage ratio of normal vs nightmare has been in this game so far. Am actually quite impressed with the amount of fixes / changes they did in such a short time. Shows the devs / pub really give a shit about the game doing well. So with that being said would imagine the localized version will be the most stable one with all of the JP fixes included based off of the feedback from players here.

Right now I have Kaguyahime set as an archer which she has been doing fairly well as. I think will use her as a slight stopgap while I level down Sleeping Beauty 30 levels then build her up again.

With the story it seems that it does something similar to Dungeon Travelers where as certain characters may be the same "base class" the class they start out with will be a different subclass from others.

The other store extras look like they are just reworking of the starting default class outfits for the characters so do not think that its an actual class itself unlike the Sakura Miko. Though yeah for the Western version Id imagine they will be adding it as a bonus for the game. Since its not something that takes any sort of actual effort to localize thankfully, which raises the chances of it being included. Plus seeing how for the most part the West usually gets all if not more extras than Japan on occasion on launch.

Oh shit thats right, forgot to mention that it seems characters attached as the support partners do get a small portion of exp. So that is good to know. Am not sure about 100% benched characters yet though as do not have any who are not attached to another character at the moment. Not sure what the ratio is for the support character exp gain. But it most def seems to be less than the amount earned by the main party.

There is one small oddity I noticed with skills. For example the Fighter / Marshal vs. Archer / Archer class, their All Enemy Attack skill. The Marshal one seems to have the chance to miss enemies for whatever reason even though that is not written in the skill description. While the Archer all enemy attack skill has always hit 100% which also is not written in the skill description. Quite odd too as have tested this on the exact same enemy type multiple times. AGI does not seem to be a factor since both Alice and Sleeping Beauty have 100 AGI. Really do wish I had a list of the stats / what they dictate with characters as otherwise everything is a guessing game... I should do a deeper search for other wikis later. But the one I linked here for the most part is a pretty good one source stop so far. Though have not been referring to it outside of the gift and looking up class skills when Im still in the dungeon to decide what I want to change to later on.

The thing with those 2 class skills is that it is the skill itself and not the actual class equipped. As Sleeping Beauty is the Sakura Miko now and not the Archer, so its not as if the Archer itself helps up the accuracy. Which means that these skills have their own base settings which possibly are not written out in the description in the example here with the discrepancy between the accuracy of the two skills.

Oh yeah the Jack thing is not so much a plot point but rather just a thought in regards to the character settings. As all of the characters are named after fairy tale characters along with parts of their personality. So was just something funny had though about and always was wondering why Jack was named Jack. Ah wait nevermind, yeah slight plot related but nothing major as its general info that appears after the first dungeon.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Few days ago patch 1.03 came out which adds a couple more fixes / adjustments and such. Might translate this later.

Third Patch
NEW パッチ情報「1.03」(2016年10月27日配信)
・ジャックの部屋にある格納庫にソート機能を追加
Added sort function in Jack's room with the item storage.
・親指姫以降に仲間になるキャラクターの初期装備を追加
Asides from Thumbelina all other characters that join the players party will come with starting equipment.
・戦闘中に前列キャラクターが全滅し、後列キャラクターが強制的に前列に移動した際、戦闘終了後も前列にいる不具合を修正
Fix for the issue where in battle if the front row dies and back row is moved up to the front automatically, after combat the back row remained in the front.
・血晶が上限数に達している時に、依頼の成功報酬として血晶を受け取れる不具合を修正
Fix for the issue involving request rewards in the event when the players blood crystals are full? and the request blood crystal reward can still be received.
・難易度「FEAR」のバトルの報酬、敵の一部ステータスを見直し
Adjustment made for FEAR difficulty level with end of battle rewards and to some enemy status.
・その他不具合を修正
Other issues fixed.

Really must say once again am impressed with the support they have been giving the title with these 3 updates already.
 
Really must say once again am impressed with the support they have been giving the title with these 3 updates already.

Even if many of the changes are just minor fixes, it's great that they actually seem to care about the game after release. It's something that they honestly should have done with Trillion as well considering it sold decently well, especially since the game was loaded with crashing issues. Even as a niche developer, there was no excuse for letting a gamebreaking issue slide like that.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Even if many of the changes are just minor fixes, it's great that they actually seem to care about the game after release. It's something that they honestly should have done with Trillion as well considering it sold decently well, especially since the game was loaded with crashing issues. Even as a niche developer, there was no excuse for letting a gamebreaking issue slide like that.

I kinda wonder if it has to do with all the stats that the game runs that was causing the crashes and such. Thats the only thing I can really think of which would be a major trigger point. Outside of other stuff that has to do with number crunching like taking an insane amount of damage or dealing it out etc.

But yeah being an owner of the JP version at launch that never was a fun thing to constantly worry about when progressing with the title... D:
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Nice. I was interested in seeing impressions on this, it seemed to be fairly high quality.

With the map objects there are a bunch of oddities and whatnots, some other stuff related to the animations used during the dialog scenes. But for the most part thankfully this game does not seem to have any real major issues yet. Outside of that 1 crash I had 20+ hours into the game.

Overall its a fairly decent title that does offer a lot in terms of trying to be creative. So think when it gets localized for the west fans of the genre should be fairly amused.

Though for those who do not like to having to fight a lot the one turn off would be collecting the blood tokens which are used for various aspects of the game with your characters and upgrading equipment. Plus having to constantly fight to gain better gear to equip yourself with as you progress. Though thankfully there is a class that helps raise the drop chance and has the ability to steal items so that does help. Have not seen a random stat that increases item drop rate, but there are ones for exp or $$$.

Pretty much everything written here should give folks a fairly good idea of what to expect with the title.

Would have to say out of all the recent DRPG newcomers that the most impressive one so far with taking mechanics to a new level has been Coven and Labyrinth of Refrain by NIS. So thats another to look forward to whenver they plan on releasing it that is. I really did wish that the game had a PS4 version as its always a pain in the ass to go behind and unhook the cables from the ps4 and get it set up to the PSVTV again to play on that. Since dont have an hdmi switcher.
 
Has Gretel joined you yet?
Has Gretel joined you yet?
Has Gretel joined you yet?

Also I've seen some artwork in the last few days that I'm having a hard time telling whether it's official or really well photoshopped. If it's the former then I'm feeling less confident about the game's localisation chances, IF's censorship policy being what it apparently is.
 
Also I've seen some artwork in the last few days that I'm having a hard time telling whether it's official or really well photoshopped. If it's the former then I'm feeling less confident about the game's localisation chances, IF's censorship policy being what it apparently is.

Ehh I wouldn't worry too much about artwork at least, we've gotten some pretty lewd stuff in the past for other games and we've still gotten them (although official stuff for this is pretty damn lewd). The only thing that could possibly keep this game from releasing here is the rubbing, which you could argue we've gotten just as bad in the latest PQube games. Just do not expect this game to release in either Australia or Germany either way, I honestly wouldn't even expect them to bother trying to have it rated there.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Has Gretel joined you yet?
Has Gretel joined you yet?
Has Gretel joined you yet?

Also I've seen some artwork in the last few days that I'm having a hard time telling whether it's official or really well photoshopped. If it's the former then I'm feeling less confident about the game's localisation chances, IF's censorship policy being what it apparently is.

Unfortunately not yet progress has slowed a bit due to other titles. D: Will be playing more tonight to try and finish the 4th dungeon. I need to go and collect a ton of blood tokens again as spent a massive amount upgrading equipment. The better equipment starts to get crazy with reqs for upgrades...

Im curious if this games localization will take a bit longer due to them dubbing the game and such or if they will dub it for that matter. With all of the voiced scenes and stuff. Then there is that strike going on so wonder how that would effect the project and voice quality if they do decide to dub this title.

Thats if the decide to localize this title of course. Which they hopefully do considering they seem to localize most other stuff.
 
Im curious if this games localization will take a bit longer due to them dubbing the game and such or if they will dub it for that matter. With all of the voiced scenes and stuff. Then there is that strike going on so wonder how that would effect the project and voice quality if they do decide to dub this title.

I would honestly be amazed if they even bothered to dub half of it. We don't even get full dubs in mainline Neptunia games except for Rebirth 2, and since this seems to be about on par with those in terms of voice work, I highly doubt they'd put in that much effort for this.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
I would honestly be amazed if they even bothered to dub half of it. We don't even get full dubs in mainline Neptunia games except for Rebirth 2, and since this seems to be about on par with those in terms of voice work, I highly doubt they'd put in that much effort for this.

Yeah never understood decisions to go half dub. Its far better to go all or nothing. Then again with games like Neptunia in particular where there are a ton of event scenes, dont blame them either as cant even imagine what the cost must be to get all of that recorded.

Am wondering if they will just do a text localization job and leave the voices as JP that way they dont have to go trying to dub EFIGS.

Then again there is always the pushback from those who dont like it when a game has JP only JP VOs and localized text.

Next question is how much would getting the JP VOs licensed for "global" cost. Since seeing what has been said in the past with other localized titles does seem like that they are on a bit of a budget. At least the up side is this game is not as event scene heavy as Neptunia for example.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Small side note dont bother with the tower before you can actually survive in there. Reason being is that even if you defeat the enemies there the exp payout is shit for the amount of risk involved. Wonder why the devs did that?

They must have planned this to prevent folks from leveling faster. Damned shame. Since just confirmed where im at now i earn more exp for waaaay less the risk than the tower.

*Also FINALLY am able to access the encounter rate up items. Though at the moment only can get them from the wandering merchant so stocked up on 50 for now. This should help when I level down some of my characters.

Had to go a bit backwards for a bit in the game as collecting certain blood tokens require me to go to previous dungeons. Type A in particular. Need it for class changing & upgrades. Thankfully the enemy glossary shows which blood tokens they can potentially drop. So thats helping me figure out where I need to go. Also along with the encounter rate up is a HUGE help now making it a bit faster to stock up. Same with the Item Tooler as getting a ton of items from after battle rewards.

Although I still think this title has a bit of an issue with equipment drops. As I still have yet to find the gun weapon type and weapons in general are still fairly garbage. Using the Item Tooler's steal skill though helps to check what kind of items enemies have. Since it appears that you can only steal one type of item per enemy type? So been trying to steal from every enemy type I come across again. Dont think bosses carry anything as the game says stealing has no effect when you attempt it. Which is good since you dont have to worry about missing out on something special from boss fights.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
パッチ情報「1.04」(2016年11月7日配信)

・エリア移動時等で発生するフリーズを修正
・戦闘後のジェノサイド化、ブラッドスケルター化の解除演出を決定ボタンでスキップできるよう調整
・依頼のクリア条件を満たした時にポップで報告をする機能の追加
・敵を特定の方法で撃破した時に「ジェイル内生物図鑑」に登録されない不具合を修正
・メニュー画面操作時の処理を軽減
・一部の武器(「銃」「鎌」「鋏」「水晶」)を追加し、敵からのドロップや宝箱、放浪商人で入手できるように調整
・イベントCG「大団円2」を開放していた場合に「大団円1」も開放されるように調整
・主人公ジャックの「気絶率」「AGIステータス」を一部見直し
・入手できる血晶の数を一部見直し
・シンデレラが特定の職業時に「舐める」を受けた場合に別のカットイラストが表示される不具合を修正

Patch 1.04 went live earlier in the week. As said before am quite impressed to see all of these improvements. This one seems to have added a bunch of other useful things. One major one being adding more weapon types to enemy drops / treasure and wandering merchant. As this was a general problem before for some weapon types being highly rare. The gun type in particular. Asides from additional changes they did a bunch of adjustments to various things in the game and fixed other bugs and issues.

Might translate this later / might not seeing as there is not that much attention on this thread anyways.

But overall its good to see that with all of these fixes going in, it should mean that the Western release will have a far more complete version by the time it comes out. As these are not only genuine fixes to things, but also useful additions to the game which helps make a better experience overall.

Though unfortunately dont think they can fix the game balance at this point. As my initial statement about the combat basically being whoever can go first the most wins, still stands. That JP reviewer which I had initially linked also said the same thing, as I went and read through his review now that Im around Id say maybe 80% through with the game.

Its a bit odd with how much damage you can still take even though being massively over leveled. Which has me thinking something is a bit off with how defense vs damage in the game works. Or something is not right with the game balance. Though for the most part as long as you have characters with high AGI and all enemy attacks you can mostly bowl over a lot of enemy groups without taking any or too much damage.

Right now I managed to have collected all the characters except the hidden one. Which I need to finish the required conditions for being able to unlock them, thankfully it seems not too difficult just a bit of leg work.

In the tower when you can access it as mentioned before the exp and money payoff is shit compared to the normal dungeons that you can go to. Although what I have found out by being persistent with my attempts to fight in there is the items dropped make it well worth it. As there is some pretty high level gear that can be dropped for various pieces of equipment which outclasses anything in the other dungeons outside. Before the 1.04 patch it was also pretty much the only place where I found a
Gun
also.

For the tower to be able to actually act before enemies, while Im not sure of the value under what Im about to say works, Sleeping Beauty was at AGI
180
when she was finally able to perform actions before the enemies in the first floor there. Though if you progress in the first floor a bit further away from the entrance some enemies can be faster than that. Also I think I was around Level
50?
maybe when we started to be a bit more successful with our fights there. But we still would take heavy damage or casualties due to having multiple enemies target a single character. So with that being said the risk of going Blood Skelter is pretty high and its hard for Jack to keep up with the purifications due to how much damage is constantly taken and his passing out if you are unlucky. Best way to keep this down a bit is by constantly licking off the blood from the characters who are more likely to get their turns first and transform. Then having Jack purify what he can when possible.

In regards to purification while I dont think Im missing something with a game mechanic its a bit unfortunate that you can only purify while in battle. As they honestly should have added a command for that when wandering around the map. Since otherwise its difficult to purify characters in battle without skipping turns depending on how your AGI is set up on characters. By skipping turns can also mean the enemy has the chance to attack you causing your other characters to become tainted due to the potential damage received.

Really am enjoying the dungeons though as they all have been rather different though none have anything that would be considered highly irritating. The puzzles that exist on occasion are a good change of pace too. The tower right now has my favorite music though for the dungeon BGM.

For interesting design would have to say the
Old School
where you find
Gretel
was really well done.

One thing for sure is you can tell that someone on the team really liked the character
Gretel
as she has the most fleshed out story connected to her. Fairly interesting character too.

Though my personal favorites still go to Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel. Right now for my party am running Alice, Rapunzel, Gretel, Sleeping Beauty and Kaguya Hime. The main firepower of the team is SB and KH as they can act first and deal all party damage which usually kills everything by the 2nd turn. Using R & G to raise their levels. Plus Gretel can be class changed to an Item Tooler so she took the place of Snow White. As the item drop up class skill most def helps with filling out your stock for expendable items and getting equipment. Though due to not having the exact equipment Rapunzel is not quite to the level of Red Riding Hood for damage output.

As usual Blood Tokens are the neck with leveling up equipment, class changing and skill slots. So been spending a lot of time harvesting those. As we have currently outfitted ourselves with new gear its really eating into the supply. Plus having to change classes to open up other skills.

Anyways with that all being said overall am quite enjoying the game and the story most def is good. As there is some real interesting stuff going on with the narrative. Though am curious if IFI will be translating all of the extra novel content for viewing online also. As a lot of it is the backstory of how everything came to be which can be considered fairly important if one is really into the lore / story. Would have to say that narrative wise really do dig the story so far and like the setting as its something interesting, similar to how Trillion was something different.

One last thing is its more of a personal issue that am sure not everyone will share. Jack to me is quite irritating just due to how hes written. Really dont like characters like him the dense / naive type. To me he is the weakest link with the story bits just due to how his personality irritates me. But thats just me, so am sure others will be perfectly fine with how hes written.
 
One thing for sure is you can tell that someone on the team really liked the character
Gretel
as she has the most fleshed out story connected to her. Fairly interesting character too.
Hurrah etc. Whoever it was on the team, they clearly have exceptional taste. I was a bit worried that the later joining characters would be overlooked, but apparently not.

Any reason you're not running Thumbelina / a Magician, or it is just because your two Archers are doing so much damage that they're irreplaceable? If having both of SB/KH in your party is optimal then that's great, since both of them have made a good impression on me.

The dense/naive male MCs annoy me as well, so I'll try and tune Jack out as quickly as possible. It's a side effect of watching/reading too many harem series.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Hurrah etc. Whoever it was on the team, they clearly have exceptional taste. I was a bit worried that the later joining characters would be overlooked, but apparently not.

Any reason you're not running Thumbelina / a Magician, or it is just because your two Archers are doing so much damage that they're irreplaceable? If having both of SB/KH in your party is optimal then that's great, since both of them have made a good impression on me.

The dense/naive male MCs annoy me as well, so I'll try and tune Jack out as quickly as possible. It's a side effect of watching/reading too many harem series.

Yeah at least you can turn off his VO in the options lol.

Right now my party is all about speed so being able to attack first is the most important next is having characters who can withstand hits in the event enemies get by the first 2 volleys is important. Though magic can deal a ton of damage too but to get the most out of their damage output you usually have to forgo the AGI increasing items for TEC stuff. D: Esp when I do my runs in the tower to collect new equipment.

Though due to spending a lot of blood tokens on the other characters I have not delved that deeply into the Magician category outside of the starting class and Therapist. Though am curious about the Necromancer. Might go work on the hidden character with that class. Currently on my way to go about finishing up the pre-reqs before I can attempt to get them to join the party.

This game really the balance is odd as the amount of damage you can take vs your equipment and levels is kinda weird. Which is why I cant really take out SB / KH as we will lost the first attack advantage. As constantly taking damage builds up the impurities on the party members making it a pain to constantly wait for Jacks turn to clean off while managing his blood levels. So although we can do all sorts of neat stuff with the character builds by allowing us access to all the unlocked skill trees, for the most part its kinda pointless due to how fast you will want your battles to be over. Its why that JP reviewer they seemed to go a different route and used Marshals as his speed characters. The reviewers party is below.

MhcbNxl.jpg


Where as in my party I have 2 Speed Gunners, Destroyer, Item Tooler and Poet. Right now most characters are lv 60-70 in my party.

One thing the JP reviewer is says which I agree with is the games lack of actual balance so to speak is what brings down the adventure, though due to the story being good it makes you play through it. As long as you keep your characters fast you generally wont see the kind of damage you can take outside of the boss fights. I honestly hope that they do a larger patch later with full game balance readjustments. Since right now its mainly whoever goes first wins lol. Id say about 99% of the non-boss fights =s All party attack x Number of characters who have high AGI.

With that aside I have put in a ton of time with the game though since regardless of the battles being easy if your party is set up right, the experience has been enjoyable.

For crashes or freezes total Ive only had 2. One that I initially reported in this thread and today when I turned my game back on from standby mode it froze when I got into a battle. Though I think that might have had to do with the fact that there were various elements going on at once in the game that potentially caused that to happen. So overall Ive been quite lucky with running into issues. As other users seems to have had more with the earlier patches.

Also not sure if its a Vita thing specifically or this game that is doing it. The touch screen, the location of the character vs where you are touching to get a response seems to deviate over time. Not sure why. Doing a full shutdown of the Vita fixes it for a while. Noticed this since on any status screen or certain NPCs you can poke them for fun and they will get a response if you poke their head, hand or leg. Noticed the location started shifting downwards away from said 3 locations no idea what causes it. First time Ive seen something like this honestly. But its not that it really effects anything gameplay wise. Well besides the rubbing minigame thing that can be ignored anyways.

So far best event scene music has been
Rapunzel's
though not exactly sure if its hers or not but seems to be since its the only time its played so far.

Speaking of events am not exactly sure how the game deals them out to the player besides the fact that events appear after certain amount progress is made with the story. Since its not triggered just by having the characters affection at MAX. Although I have the feeling its far more advantageous to just have every character maxed out as soon as possible in order to not miss events. As the game does seem to hand out events after progress is made in the game, but if these can be missed or not if you progress further without watching them is unknown. Didnt look into that as I generally always max out a new character once they join.
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
Tiny update

Went and finally got the hidden character
Hamelin
unlocked. The reqs to do so are not that bad just takes a bit of leg work by
Going into 3 different dungeons and collecting the upgrade parts for the Mary Gun. Then using it after the final upgrade to reach a previously unreachable location which is the entrance to her Dungeon.
Although am not sure if you will miss out on being able to obtain her if you progress past the
7th Chapter
. Since you need to be on the
7th Chapter
to meet all the pre-reqs before proceeding to her area. Though as mentioned the pre-reqs are not that difficult so its not much of an issue to prep everything ahead of time and have her join the party before finishing that chapter, so its not really something to worry about.

One precaution with trying to obtain her though is that
there will be a battle against her and in my game Im on the FEAR difficulty level with my characters being around lv 60-70 we did take a fair amount of damage from her all party attacks and some high damage focused single target attack. JP wikis say that generally if you can survive in Red Riding Hoods dungeon then you should be able to win the fight against her. One other thing though is she apparently has quite high AGI as she was taking her turns after my SB and KH.

As mentioned in the the OP shes a Magician Class starting on the
Necromancer
sub class. Although the level she starts out at when she joins you is kinda low
Lv. 40
so you will most def need to work on leveling her up if you like her character. Also having the gift items ready ahead of time to max out her friendship level would be a good idea. I generally buy around 50 items of said type. Some characters take less it seems to max out, but just so that I dont get stuck with a partially filled meter 50 seems to be the right number to max it out for sure. Possibly even 40, but since money stops being a problem buying 50 is little to no issue.

Have her set as a pure glass cannon with one of the major spells that is on the
Blood Witch
sub class. Costs around 100~ TP to use. Though seriously need to get a bunch more blood tokens to look for other equipment to help raise her AGI. As if the enemies go first and manage to hit her its usually a pretty bad thing lol. Since honestly third of fourth time Im saying this, AGI is literally the most important stat in this game...

Would have to say shes an addition to my favorite characters in the game lol. Wished that she would have joined earlier.

Also doubt these will be making their way to the US as these extra classes are designed after the 3 Japanese retailers Tsutaya, GEO and Joshin. Pretty cool designs though and do imagine that similar to the Sakura Miko they dont have any like super awesome skills that would piss off users from missing out on them. Besides the cool looking artwork. Also the HP itself says that these will not be released later on due to being store specific DLC. Meaning basically said stores paid out for said content. Also unlike the Sakura Miko these extra classes are only for the characters displayed in the image.

J O Singer
T Healer
G Assassin

And since I have nothing left to write atm here is a cute Rapunzel Gif.
BH0AZsY.gif
 
oFiWR3c.jpg


If I'd known this was a thing I would've bought it way earlier. Not reading it until I've played the game because of spoilers, but after flicking through it seems pretty similar to the Trillion book, with all the CGs/art and some gameplay guides (which I can't read).
 

Parakeetman

No one wants a throne you've been sitting on!
oFiWR3c.jpg


If I'd known this was a thing I would've bought it way earlier. Not reading it until I've played the game because of spoilers, but after flicking through it seems pretty similar to the Trillion book, with all the CGs/art and some gameplay guides (which I can't read).

Oh very nice! I had seen that in the bookstore but am on a tight budget at the moment so didnt pick it up as much as I wanted to. D:
 
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