>>1923731 >Simon He has an attack that hits a single character 18 times, 5 attacks of 3. There's enough bullshit in this game that I just got fed up.

>>1923731 >>1924017 You see, your mistake was letting him get attacks. Even with the nerfs you can still Maelle one shot him. Or do the Verso burn shit. Just look up cheese strategies for him. There are plenty.

>>1924017 I assume thats the lightspeed attack of his, or whatever the name of that attack is. Thats the attack thats rapes my entre party one by one. >>1924229 >You see, your mistake was letting him get attacks. Only strat for this that i can think of it using Sciels attack that delays enemies turns, Ill try more later. >Just look up cheese strategies for him. I prefer beating games myself, looking up guides and/or cheese is the normalfag pleb way, usually. At most I like talking to others about stuff I strugge with, much more enjoyable than googling stuff.

>>1669954 >The prologue hooked me right in. I felt like the prologue was the weakest part of the game. It went on for too long and made me worried that the game would be another hyped up walking simulator. Glad didn't drop it, 10/10 game and unironically what I wish modern FF games were. Only really complained is how blurry, grey and artifact-ridden the graphics are, but I can forgive that since it's a huge game from a new studio and the fact that it's turn based means the graphical artifacts are less of an issue.

>>1923731 Simon is a bonus boss that exists for cheese builds. The cheesiest way to beat him is probably to make an over-the-top one-shotting build and just nail him before he does anything, but there are also builds that fully heal the party every single turn and deny Simon the ability to kill party members before they get a turn. >>1924796 >that pic Now there's an old meme recycled. >Only really complained is how blurry, grey and artifact-ridden the graphics are, but I can forgive that since it's a huge game from a new studio and the fact that it's turn based means the graphical artifacts are less of an issue. It's actually a real issue for the dodge/parry mechanic it loves so much, as well as other QTEs. The worst part is how DLSS causes screen lag because the only way for DLSS to AI render extra frames is to already have a real frame from the present as reference material to make extra frames inbetween the present frame and past frame and delay showing that real frame from the present to show the AI frames first, which means you get delay, which means dodge and parry mechanics are unnecessarily hindered by this bullshit. Personally, I don't forgive that shit. Real frames only please. There are ways to make E33 stop doing frame fakery though.

I really should get around to finishing my first run of E33, but I just wasn't enjoying the dodge/parry side of the mechanics at all.

>>1925181 Where abouts are you in the game? Depending on your build, it can really trivialize those aspects to the game.

I finally beat Simon, it took a while. I found a Verso weapon that couldnt hit S-rank and paired that with the End bringer skill, and got 'fill enemy break bar on death' for everyone. I found it very cheesy, but as anons have mentioned, its a boss made for cheese strats. I had Maelle for damage and Sciel for buffs, debuffs and utility. Greater rush and greater slow made more of a difference than I thought they would.

>>1925181 Don't play on Expert mode and just maximize the Defense stat (put everything and I mean everything into Defense) on everyone and you can facetank everything except chromatic bonus bosses that you can come back to later. You'll have to dodge/parry against Maelle and the mime in the prologue but other than that you should be able to go through the entire game without parrying or dodging at all with a starting build like that.

>>1925206 According to the achievement tracker, I'd just unlocked Monoco as a party member.

>>1925557 I should probably get around to playing the game again and fighting simon authentically. I cleared him back when Maelle could one shot every boss in the game, so I cheesed as much as a Chicago style pizza. >>1925995 As >>1925982 said, reset skills and invest as much as possible into defense. In addition, I think that at this point in the game there are perks for having armor/shell along with weapons that lend those skills as well. The shell effectively allows you to tank a number of hits from opponents. Are you on easy or expert?

>>1926008 There's Story (Easy) Mode, Expeditioner (Normal) Mode, and Expert (Hard) Mode. Story mode is not a game. Expeditioner works fine if you max defense. Expert will make you want to hang yourself if you want to play it without dodging or parrying because you will have to do way too much autistic level grinding and it's just a laboriously slow, painful fucking experience with trial and error reloading to boot. Expeditioner works great with defense maxing though. You can even disable QTEs with the accessibility setting (no option to auto-dodge or parry though). By the way tints reset at every expedition flag (some people miss this) and you should really max the upgrades for those. If you're having trouble finding those (extra tints for more uses and shapes for improved effects), consult a walkthrough.

>>1926008 Someone mentioned a healing build vs Simon amongst others but I have no idea how youre supposed to beat him without stacking insane damage or stunlocking him because when you get him down to about 1/3 HP, he will do a unblockable move that wipes the entire party.

>tfw currently marrathoning all the streamers who got mindbroken by the game This game can be enjoyed in so many different ways holy shit >>1669978 Imagine getting filtered by the explanations thrown at you by the game so you're not completely lost. The entire story revolves around relatives manipulating each other for various reasons and lying and spreading dinsinfo, I guess such a plot is too complicated for fortnite kiddies >>1684668 It's clearly bait

I just tried this game out for the first time after ignoring it for months. Right after the overlong tutorial that is mandated by law for every modern game, this game commits suicide by parry. When I finally got to the game proper, I quickly ran into a boss enemy, so for the first turn I do all the tactics, mark the enemy, build up elements, set everything up, then it does a delayed attack, I miss the parry and get one character KOd in one hit, same thing happens for the second character in the next turn. First death in the game, then I see that a game over just puts you close to the fight you died in and I realize you're supposed to just fight the enemy over and over until you memorize the timings for its animations. This is suicide by parry, because the way they made it, it's the only mechanic that matters. When you parry an attack, you don't just counter, you take zero damage and you attack for more damage than even your special skills, so when you give enemies high damage, the game becomes the parry. All of the RPG mechanics and tactics, all that about building up elements, AP, the overcharge gauge, weaknesses, marking, etc. none of it matters anymore, because if you can get the parry consistently, you can use all of the worst attacks, the worst builds, ignore all the mechanics, and you will win 100% of the time, but if you can't get the parry consistently, you can use all of the best everything and you will lose 100% of the time. At that moment, the entire game became the parry. This is not an RPG anymore, this is the game where you memorize the animation and press the parry button, and nothing else matters, because the parry is so overpowering it overrides every other mechanic in the game by a wide margin. But it gets worse. After playing it a bit more, I've noticed that every single attack by every single enemy I've encountered, even the most basic trash mobs, has a delayed spring timing. So they start the attack animation, and then hold it, and hold it, and hold it some more, until it suddenly comes out like a spring at an unreactable speed. So not only is the parry the entire game, but learning to parry enemies has been made as annoying as humanly possible. Since the spring portion of the attack is unreactable, and all enemies have different animations, the game has basically no fundamentals at all, you just have to memorize each animation. There is nothing you can learn as a player that will be applicable across the game, or across a spectrum of situations, every time you find a new enemy with new animations, you have to start over from scratch and memorize its timings, because every enemy is an independent game of simon says, and learning the timings for one will not help you with the others. I cannot believe that this fucking game is getting praised as much as it has. To me this puts the nail in the coffin, it's conclusive proof that absolutely nobody gives one iota of a fuck about gameplay in a fucking video game.

>>1928934 You either didn't play the game or have the worst case of git gud I have ever seen. 2/10 for getting me to reply.

>>1928949 There is no game to git gud at, that's the entire point. Once you memorize the timings, that's it, the game is over, there is nothing more to dig into in terms of gameplay, because the parry overrides everything else. Somehow they managed to make the parry in this game even more unbalanced than the i-frame dodges that have been plaguing action games nowadays.

>>1927561 >Someone mentioned a healing build vs Simon amongst others but I have no idea how youre supposed to beat him without stacking insane damage or stunlocking him because when you get him down to about 1/3 HP, he will do a unblockable move that wipes the entire party. That's when you use your reserve squad, son. >>1928957 I honestly agree. It's why I play without dodging or parrying. I just max defense and later health and facetank.

>>1929225 >I just max defense and later health and facetank. I'm surprised to hear that the game is even playable without parrying or dodging. Are you playing on normal? I'm still early in the game, but so far it seems like the game is designed around the parry because enemies do relatively high damage and there are not a lot of healing items.

>>1929276 Yeah. You can do it on Expert too but then it's just a fucking disaster of a grindfest. Don't do Expert. Just do normal/Expeditioner.

>>1928934 >Right after the overlong tutorial that is mandated by law for every modern game It's not a law but it should be. I hate it when I have to look up guides to play a game

>>1719158 Good thing Tomb Raider, Metroid, Resident Evil, Bayonetta and Witcher 3 didn't exist then. I'm as opposed to faggotry as the next guy, but come on. If you played the game you'd know the women in the game (though they may not be pure trad waifus) don't spoil everything. One is a slut and her advances can be rejected with a simple button and the other is a young immature girl that mourns the brother she lost in a fire that disfigured her beyond repair and the entire plot revolves around her being so desperate she is for escapism she replaces the villain you just defeated moments earlier. And it turns out her dad who was trying to keep her in check was in the right all along and was only doing things to protect his family. >>1749113 >>1749146 >>1749283 He's right and wrong. Kids do get gommaged but not in the prologue, only when the first villain gets defeated and it turns out she was trying to warn the people she could no longer protect as her power was waning, but everyone mistook her warnings for the cause of the gommage. The prologue established that only people above a certain age were gommaged but as a consequence of the player killing the Paintress, everyone got a taste of it. It is commonly referred to as a plot twist but when a braindead nigger bases their opinion on shitposts and decontextualized tiktok clips this is what happens.

>>1749325 You see kids surrounded by petals when their family members melt, so I get how it might look that way if you're not paying attention and trying to speed through to the actual game.

>>1686745 >doesn't end up being some A or B choice That was extremely bold considering >it's a small studio >it's their first game >the current political and social context I still can't believe they stuck to their guns as you say and made a daring choice instead of going for YAAS SLAY slop and validate Maelle's selfishness. I think what helped them was establishing the characters as feeling beings with agency early on. This groundwork burdens Verso's ending with the weight of implied genocide thus evening out of the moral dilemma. I'm tempted to think that they tried to even out the moral weight of each option to shift focus of the emotional aspect. In most streams I've watched, players tend to rely on the feelings of the characters more than moral considerations to justify their choice Consider the support system: it levels up relationships between pairs of characters but only unlocks skills for individual characters, which should logically depend on individual levelling. Though the support system may seem inconsequential or poorly integrated for providing no gameplay advantage to having two characters with maxed out support out on the battlefield over two characters with no support, I think the real purpose of that mechanic was to flesh out their motivations and personalities in order to amplify the moral impact of the final choice and giving seemingly equal downsides to each option. This cohesive design is illustrated in several instances throughout the game, for example remember how the void left by Maelle's ending fading to black when Verso is on the verge of playing is filled by the sad piano track of the credits. I haven't seen such an integrated approach in game design since MGS' use of the controller vibration to mimmick Psycho Mantis' power lmfao. You can also add to the list the intentional lack of a minimap which forces the players to pay more attention to the pretty environment for orientation despite the linear structure of the world, and this allows the game to sprinkle even more content without begging for the player's attention with dialog boxes or the classical Japanese cardinal sin of characters describing with words what everyone can clearly see on the goddamn screen. More than one character suggests that the Writers exploited Alicia's love of books, and Painted Alicia just so happens to talk like one, to the point it may even seem weird. You can really see how the devs were all heading in one direction through different paths (storytelling, art, gameplay...) >Maelle They literally wrote Anakin. Hurt, grieving and disfigured. Lost and defenseless against temptation. Everyone emphathized with the slippery slope that led him to the dark side while also acknowledging the evil in doing so. I guess both stories champion the idea that evil actions don't necessarily require evil intentions and can sometimes be the product of misguided idealism or selfish desperation. It's very good writing as far as I'm concerned but watch contrarian faggots call it pretentious lol.

>>1686745 >>1932609 That's a crock of bullshit. It really is just A or B ending, and of the two of them picking the Maelle ending is clearly bad, because Maelle is killing herself and forcibly controlling the canvas and once she dies the canvas is going to perish anyway. It's also very obvious that the Verso ending ends on a positive, forward-looking note whereas the other one ends on a despairing note. Claiming both choices have equal validity and equal weight is pretentious bullshit. It's very obvious we're getting funneled in one direction and claiming that "life forces cruel choices" is a cop-out for characters forcing unnecessarily bad choices on their own when there are far better options that only require a bit of compromise and would not end in the canvas ultimately being destroyed. "Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean." -Aristotle, "Nichomachean Ethics" There is no virtue here, in either ending. You're forced to choose between two bad choices and one of them is obviously the worse option, and if you don't like it that must be muh "deep, bold, morally complex writing" as opposed to just a consequence of putting unnecessarily bad choices before people.

>>1933943 As mentionned in my previous post, the game makes a deliberate effort to shift the focus of the final choice from its moral underpinnings to the emotional weight the choice carries, the point being to make players feel how hard of a choice it is. It is literally the purpose of art, and especially dramaturgy, to evoke the strong feelings caused by dilemmas and tragic situations. To help people understand their work, the devs stressed more than once that they didn't intend for any option to be more correct than the other, which could potentially indicate an intention to push moral relativism -we've seen it happen many times- but many signs here converge to strengthen the hypothesis I'm trying to explain: >the devs said so >the players focused more on the eomtional struggle than the moral complexity of the situation >art has a consistent history of making stylistic choices that deliver stronger emotional pay-offs, focusing on the audience's experience rather than the outcome of the story Once again, Maelle's selfishness and immaturity are laid bare for everyone to see with no attempt to disguise or justify them -I cannot count the parallels drawn with the way junkies behave.- so I fail to see a reason to even entertain this train of thought. The apparent purpose of this game isn't to solve a given problem ; if solving issues is your desire, I think there is a number of activities beside playing video games that would better align with your intention. Painters, Writers, Gommage, the Eiffel Tower, Renoir, 19th century Paris, sculpture and piano recitals at the opera all strongly hint at the artistic experience the game aims to evoke, hell they scream it in your face. Gustav's fight with Renoir concluded with a success screen, yet success wouldn't be the best fit to describe its outcome. Winning isn't the point. The big evil bad of the story was defeated and it turned out to be a tragic mistake. The game seems far less interested in triumphs or accomplishments and seeks rather to be experienced as an interactive story, a bittersweet adventure defined by contrast. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiaroscuro And like it is often the case with art works, it is hardly surprising that this one doesn't earn everyone's adherence. You will probably find more enjoyment playing another game, and that is totally fine. Have you tried Skyrim?

>>1934452 >that pic Yeah, it's a plot that runs on wilful retardation. >To help people understand their work, the devs stressed more than once that they didn't intend for any option to be more correct than the other, Yes, they have said that. They just haven't delivered on that. As I already said, and as just about everyone knows, it's obvious which ending is the one to choose. >muh emotional struggle Annoying people with shitty false dichotomies is the wrong sort of "emotional struggle." Feelings gain sincerity when they have avenues to be expressed. If you're left with unnecessarily shitty choices it's only natural to have unnecessarily shitty feelings. >it's art I tell you! >chiaroscuro! Yes, world is fucking full of artistes who think that calling something art or draping it in artistic imagery inherently elevates the work and moves it into a realm beyond common, vulgar criticism. It does not. Using shit like that as a shield against criticism or as though it inherently ennobles your work is just pretentiousness. Deftness, meaningfulness, and tact in expression are still the important factors and it's all still just as open to criticism.

>>1934747 >my bad faith shitposting is valid criticism It's not.

>>1934747 >If you're left with unnecessarily shitty choices it's only natural to have unnecessarily shitty feelings. Well yeah, that's kind of the point. Tragedies in writing have been a thing since the ancient Greeks. Do you want every single plot to have a 100 wholesome chungus ending?

>>1935297 >valid criticism of something I like is bad faith shitposting It's not. >>1935585 There's a world of difference between being a tragedy and being a good tragedy.

>>1935655 >There's a world of difference between being a tragedy and being a good tragedy. Such as?

>>1935890 A good tragedy doesn't run off of stupidity.

>>1935890 A good tragedy makes you cry, feel sad and/or depressed. A bad tragedy makes you angry, because it didn't make you feel sad.