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for even more lolz http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?mwmmcktd3d5
took longer for me to upload than to download

Meh its not as funny as downloading 80k+ files =P

Think they were wondering who the hell was hammering their site?

lol "a few clips" of hunting rifle takes how long to load?
looking at the damage, load time, and the 5 round clip, there's almost nothing good about hr. the only semidecent thing its got going is the small spread and accuracy. i was using it because almost all supermutants drop 32 shells. just because you can 1hit a brute doesn't make it good, because sneak crit with almost anything other than a pistol can onehit a brute

regarding challenge, like i said, the vanilla game is a joke. i played the first 20 hours on hard using nothing but hunting rifle and vats and took no damage at all (except maybe 1 or 2 random spread from 3 brutes holding miniguns, but at that time i'm already using mods. i have 308 stimpacks in my megaton home storage). i got to hand it to the modders and that monster size mod makes the game pretty damn hard even at regular difficulty. now my sneak crit doesn't even take half hp off brute, while they do a LOT more damage (like 2 seconds standing in front of minigun and you're dead)

i thought one of the bugs with the vanilla game is that the vats perks didn't add damage or accuracy. i remember that at 100 small arms and the small arms upgrade i was only getting around ~30% chance to hit unless i am almost at melee range. are you sure you weren't using some mod?

i dont know how anyone sees fallout 3 as a fps. the combat is at least twice as slow as 99% of the other games. i'm not sure what you mean by it only having rpg elements that adds to the game. there's stats, equips, weapons, skills, stories, npcs, quests. what am i missing here? there's no sword and magic? owait it does have swords.... the point is, take out the fps elements, and you can still see the mechanics leftover from a rpg. take out the rpg aspects, you get a "fps" where you run slower than you walk in any other fps on the planet, not to mention no grenade key, no vehicles.... i can keep going on but i think you get my drift.

people always say fallout 3 is a fps because of the guns. i say it's the opposite: the ONLY thing that links fallout to a fps is the guns. just out of curiosity did you ever play morrowind or oblivion? even though the mechanics is very far detached from fallout, they are considered some of the best open ended rpgs due to the exploration and character interactions (though i consider the character interaction in fallout to be better). it seems to me that if fallout 3 is considered a fps then oblivion should be considered an action game as well, or, say, baldur's gate or dungeon siege should be strategy games because you can command multiple units. hell, i feel like even mass effect is more of a fps than fallout 3, due to the different abilities you can pick up like in bioshock, and bioware makes exclusively rpgs (but then again so does bethesda...)

now bioshock is a fps. i think one of the differences here is that you are confusing role playing and storyline. to me, the more you can tweak or interact as your character, the closer it is to the literal sense of "role-playing" due to attempt to emulate immersion. bioshock has a pretty good storyline, but it has almost no element that constitutes a role playing experience (except maybe that you can buy items and stack them up?) one of the bigger disappointments though is how weak all the enemies are despite their looks, like once you encounter big daddy, you realize what a piece of shit it is. then there's.... big daddy, and more big daddy, and....

edit: now that i thought about it i think bethesda has developed other games before, just that the most famous ones are all rpg

Well the reload doesn't really matter at all when you can kill pretty much most mobs with those 5 bullets. Hell its fun to take out multiple mobs using VATS with only the HR and most go down with 1-2 bullets. So that's around 2 guaranteed kills per clip even indoors. Though again the plasma rifle does a better job so I switch between HR outdoors and PR indoors to conserve ammo.

I never had that much difficulty with FA3, though it was pretty taxing on my system so heavy firefights usually left me dead due to video lag. I had small arms and VATS fully upgraded and I just mowed through ALL mobs with no difficulty. Can nail deathclaws with the HR using VATS before they can even get within range. I played vanilla and never downloaded a mod for FA3, but the way you're talking about it makes me want to download some to try them out.

Well it has crosshairs so I classify it as a shooter. I consider the rpg element to be just something extra, though its always fun to customize your character to your liking. Don't think we'll reach a consensus here so let's just agree to disagree? Nah haven't played any of those, but oblivion has always interested me.

*shrugs* I could care less what genre these games belong it. They are fun to play, albeit exploring the wastelands of Fallout 3 can get very boring. Huh Bioshock is a pretty hard if you take out the unlimited respawn function. Don't use the electric gel and the game gets hard, especially when you fight the big daddy with the drill. Try a telekenesis-only run, always fun xD

lol those are some of the most famous rpg games on pc. i guess the rpg you had in mind is the more linear console jrpgs, which admittedly focuses more on a plot (not always a good plot, but a plot)

Well I play my games first and foremost for the story, hence why I'm a very big fan of RPG games. Fallout 3's story is alright, but STALKER is better, which pales in comparison to Bioshock, which is somewhat equal to Deus Ex.

I don't really play RPG's all that often on my PC, more of a shooter/RTS platform in my opinion. Is it really that good? Granted that I already have too any unplayed games as it is, but I'll try it out if you recommend it.

most people consider morrowind better because oblivion's more action-oriented combat system, but oblivion's characters are less generic looking for the most part and has better quest organization.

if you don't like fallout 3 you probably won't enjoy either, because they are even more open ended. in morrowind for example, i spent over 20 hours before i finally got onto finishing my first main quest quest. you also seem to favor a traditional linear storyline; personally i think the fallout stories are great. they might not be particularly strong alone but there's always enough to keep me occupied, whether it be the vr or some enclave quest. morrowind and oblivion is pretty much the same way, except the side quest-to-main ratio is so ridiculously inproportionate it's very easy to get lost (especially in morrowind). that's fine though because it's what i'm used to and like (hence preference for anime like mushishi and aria and mononoke).

if you are playing for a solid sotryline (having a tale presented to you as opposed to participating in your story) bioware games might be closer to what you're looking for. the last 2 games they released are mass effect and star wars kotor 2 i think

I'm at wits and and have tried everything except a full re-OS to fix this issue. To start, this little problem suddenly appeared while playing a round of Team Fortress 2 with a friend of mine.

The first sign of the issue is how I would describe it as corrupted textures within the game itself, but otherwise playable if you don't mind the drug-induced graphics. Then comes the dreaded Nvidia infinite loop errors that I get rather frequently due to an incompatibility with my system and Nvidia 8 series and above cards. A reboot usually fixes this issue and it usually won't pop up until 'x' number of reboots.

After the reboot, the problems still persisted and in increasing frequency. It soon got to the point where the game locks up frequently rendering in unplayable. I first thought that this was probably due to the corrupted update the client downloaded for the game recently. So I completely uninstalled and reinstalled the game twice to no avail...

The problems I have with games usually doesn't spill on over to the video/anime side, but it did. Videos started appearing with random artifacts here and there with increasing frequency the higher the video quality, as in it appears more in 1080p video than 720p and doesn't even appear at all with xvid stuff.

So I go ahead and try to isolate whether this is my cpu or my gpu acting up by switching the decoders. CoreAVC without CUDA had the artifacts, CoreAVC with CUDA had the artifacts, MPC with and without DXVA had no artifacts, ffdshow's H264 decoders had no artifacts albeit with some video lag.

So now I'm scratching my head wondering if CoreAVC is the culprit behind the video artifacts, but how the hell is that possible when it was just working a few days ago before the whole Team Fortress 2 graphical corruption issue. It even affects pure software decoding without the use of CUDA.

Hell now whenever I reboot my computer, the PCI-E x16 slot is reporting itself as running at 8x speeds. Now this isn't really much of an issue but it has always run under x16 and the problems mysteriously started popping up when it suddenly decided to run at 8x.

Other than not being able to play games at the moment and having to use workarounds to watch videos, the computer itself is fully usable. I'm just curious as to what the hell is causing all of this since I pride myself in my troubleshooting abilities. The peculiar thing is that all the components of the computer itself passed with flying colors when it comes to benchmarking and stress testing components, but it starts to fail spectacularly when a game is loaded or artifacts that were never there a few days ago start popping up in videos...

It would be nice if I could isolate the problem, but tests show that all components are green. Though good thing this rig is quite dated (heh s939), but I was hoping to get another year of error-free usage out of this before I build another rig ='(

try using older driver version,
check gpu temp,
revert/update bios,
reinstall coreavc

and as a last result: buy ati ;D

i dont run nvidia atm so i'm not familiar with the nvidia infinite loop; that's all i can think of atm unless you're trying to dual gpu or your psu isn't providing enough power on the 12v gpu rail

I don't think it could be a driver issue since these were the same drivers I have been using before all the problems started. Though I already tried a clean install of the driver and nothing. I'll try a previous driver, but it would be odd if it were the problem given that these drivers were more stable than the previous one. 186.18

GPU idles at 67C and maxes out at 86C under load. Yes I know those are a little too hot, but within parameters of the temperatures the card can handle. And no I'm not going to go buy an aftermarket cooler =P

I've been using the default and most updated on the mobo. Though funnily enough it needs another bios update to fully support higher end nvidia/ati cards but Asus no longer supports the board. Hah why did my old mobo's x16 slot had to break ='(

Not really much to install with CoreAVC since you just have to register/unregister the .ax file. Hah one of the things I forgot to do and it works! Though I'm wondering how coreavc got corrupted now hmm...

Yeah my next rig will have an ATI/AMD since they have finally gotten their act together with their drivers. Nah no dual gpu since its only one x16 slot and the infinite loop doesn't cause corrupted textures. The PSU has enough power to handle SLI so I doubt it, three 12v rails rated at 12, 12, and 8 iirc.

Well when its all said and done...why the hell is my x16 slot reporting itself as a x8? So far this has been the only real noticeable change when crap started hitting my computer. This has been the one bugging me the most and I can't find an explanation for it. Hell I'm thinking that this computer is messing with me since one random boot had the x16 reporting as x16...

This computer hates me...and welcome back shin xD

This has officially been upgraded to wall of text status.

Yea, between commercial and fanmade releases, there are probably over 100 I would find worth playing in Chinese, whereas that number is probably like 20-30 for English ones. To give you an idea, This is a list of top 15 games as voted by ErogameScape by mean and median. Out of the 20 games listed there, 11 are in Chinese. 6 are in English. As much as people bitch about how the commercial English titles sucks, after you take out Ever17, Eve, and Phantom; only Clannad, FSN, and Cross Channel are left (would have been 2 if this post was made a month ago). For top 50, it's probably even worse, probably like 30 Chinese and 10 English.

My biggest disappointment from Utawaresjdkfljsd comes from the battle system. This is a problem with Eushully games as well. Everyone always talk about how the gameplay system is the greatest thing since sliced bread, when in reality it's really.... not that good. The original Disgaea has better mechanics than any galge I've played to date, except possibly Cross Hermit and Wind Fantasy series (later is actually Chinese and more of SRPG than NVL).

Ranting aside, I was able to get the Clannad patch working, though from what I heard YMMV. Some sentences gets cut off and there are parts that need editing, but it should be playable. The reason I put it last is because it's just so long and there's already anime out for it.

You can google Saya no Uta for screenshots. For the majority of the game, that's going to be pretty much the stuff you will be looking at. It has a decent storyline and isn't too long.

There's no real point in using ATLAS for a game, unless it's EXTREMELY short. I tried playing Little Busters with AGTH. Yea, didn't get very far. The only 2 games I've played that worked decently with AGTH was Kimiaru and the Sono Hanabira series. Between the AGTH and my (lack of) Japanese knowledge, I could figure out about 80% of the plot. Anime probably added 5% to that too. I played through the Sono Hanabira series because they are really short and I am a very big Yuri fan >_>
I also played a couple more like Koihime and Xross Scramble and dropped a couple more, but I really can't say I recommend the method. Be warned, unless you have a VERY strong desire or preference, AGTH will be a torture.

The number of decent English titles are growing slowly but surely, even on the commercial front. Beyond the ones I mentioned, Kira Kira is a cross between Detroit Metal City and Nana; Yukizakira and Kana Imouto has had pretty good reviews; and I heard that Phantom of Inferno and Eve: Burst Error are really, really good detective games (though the English speaking community really favor the mystery/suspense genre for some reason). Note that the only game I mentioned above that I finished is Kira Kira, and that I haven't even played Phantom Inferno and Eve: Burst Terror.

@Valkyrie Profile 2:
Well, I played 3 or 4 chapters or Valkyrie Profile 2. With +20% atk/matk and 4 characters equipped with Soul Crush weapons, you can take down a RIDICULOUS amount of hp in 1 turn just mashing enough buttons to get the Soul Crush activated. I set it up set my mage and heavy attacker gets all linked +matk/atk/soulcrush, and most boss leaders in normal battles die in 1 round before I even finish all of the Soul Crush

My heavy attacker and mage's soul crush alone does over 3k combined. If you ever get low on hp, just dash out and run around on the map. I've been reading how it's one of the hardest games, but the battles themselves don't really seem that challenging. Now the puzzle and adventure part leaves a lot to be desired.... They are hard, but for bad reasons. There's a lot of trial and error and unintuitive stuff involved.

So my earlier comment in the VN club holds some credence then? =P

Oh yeah I'll be the first to say that Utawarerumono's battle system sucked hard no question about it. Though I think what made it great (in the eyes of the community that thinks the battle system is great) is that it was the first to introduce this kind of system into a VN. Granted it could have used way more work, but hey I play/read for the economics ;)

I have no doubt that I can get the Clannad patch working, but I'm against reading unproofed crap. I read fan translation patches so I can escape the horrors that is ATLAS...

Well I have to use ATLAS because my comprehension of Japanese is pretty much nonexistent. Sure I can understand/read a few phrases here and there...but that won't exactly cut it in the grand scheme of things. I've never had problems using AGTH and all the text on it always hooks. Are you sure you are using the recommended settings for it, using /h codes, etc? This site here

http://blgames.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=gametips&action=display&thread=250

has a decent amount of /h codes that is guaranteed for the text to always hook give or take. Using AGTH isn't a torture, but trying to make sense of translated text in ATLAS...

Heh of all the VN's you've mentioned, I only know of Kana Imouto xD
Yes I have much to learn...

@vp2
Well either you are ridiculously leveled or you have some insanely powerful weapons, there is just no way in hell you can reduce that much hp in a single turn. My soul crush (I only have three characters with SC weapons) can barely dent bosses, the most I've done is like 25% in one blow using critical skills. Hell that dragon you fight in ch3 at Chateau Obsession is just insane. My first run with it having three characters with the crit skill + my heavy warrior having dragon slayer, shit like 10% per full 100AP attack turn.

See problem there is that I don't think you've dealt with bosses that can just annihilate your party. I just recently fought with the Kobold King and his simple fire storm spell decimated my entire party in one hit, even if I had the -50% fire sealstone. Granted I could have just used another sealstone to completely nullify his magic, but that costs 30k to restore and his physical attacks still decimate me in one hit.

I find it hard to believe that you just breezed through the game unless you had godly weapons or you out level the mobs at least 1.5 to 1. Hell that same dragon that I was talking about still take 4 turns to kill even with the crit skills and I've gained several levels by then.

The puzzle stuff is pretty easy and most of the stuff you are having problems with are usually the ones with solutions you just overlooked. I'm actually enjoying the simplicity of the world and dungeons while keeping the battle system relatively complex, and it is complex when you factor in the different combination of gear, skills, and sealstones you can use.

That zombie dragon at the palace of venerated dragon was a bitch...I'm using UNDUB versions and it doesn't exactly help when battle advice is given in japanese...xD

I'm not having problem with AGTH. I said I wouldn't recommend playing most games using AGTH was due to translation issues. Kimiaru and Sonohana series are pretty much the only games where I have a full understanding using only AGTH. You can theoretically play through Key and Akabei games via AGTH, but you'll be missing out a LOT to say the least; in fact, I'm not sure if you can even understand what's going on with in Sharin no Kuni and Little Busters Refrain route with ATLAS.

Clannad is 99% proofread and way better than whatever babelfish can spit out. I meant there are minor spelling, grammatical, and formatting issues. The only problem is that it is really, really long, so I'm not sure how much the aforementioned issues will detract from the overall experience (I already played the Chinese version beforehand, which was much better, so I didn't pay nearly as much attention when I got the unofficial English patch).

@VP2, buy the heaviest attack sword with 1 attack and a staff with great magic. Link up blue +3/5% atk/matks, and it'll be hard not to end regular fights in 1 round. Coupled with the +20% skill, that's basically 300% damage applied to your flameberge or claymore or whatever. If you are confident in driving the Soul Crush gauge up to 100, you might even be able to use 2 mage or 2 heavy warriors with Alicia or Rufus. To play it REALLY safe, just dash out and run around till you have 100AP and full hp again. Don't even get me started on the puzzles. Put 3 random orbs on the dais??? Yea that's really intuitive....

Maybe I didn't get far enough into the game, but I got pretty bored of the game and moved on. Replaying Chrono Cross for the fourth time, and once again I'm reminded of how mind blowing the storyline is and how confusing it can get at times. I think that's one of the biggest reasons Chrono Cross sales didn't go as well as expected. People without any cosmology background simply dismisses the plot as convoluted and nonsense before giving it a try.

In other news, I'm currently playing the Chinese translation of Scarlett, and so far it's really good. Almost as good as Moshimo Ashita ga Harenaraba and Sharin no Kuni I finished earlier. It seems like I've been missing out on a few really good Chinese titles. Speaking of games I really like, I find it ironic how one of the Umineko games didn't even average 80 on ErogameScape despite being hailed as the best VN ever by a big portion of the English speaking community. Umineko and Sonohana are the only games I really liked that didn't score 80 on EGS. I guess I'm more in-line with the traditional Japanese otaku crowd than American ones....

Well of course its a given that the translation you get from machine translations are spotty at best. Really up to you to put two and two together, but hey beggars can't be choosers.

Yeah Clannad as a whole is longer than FSN right? I really just want to go through the Tomoyo route so I can go ahead and read Tomoyo After...

@vp2
I prefer multi-attack, lower damage weapons with SC over high-attack, 1-hit weapons with SC since its a bitch to rack up enough heat for SC unless you have Heat Up and my current skill setup has no need for it...for now anyway. I think we have a misunderstanding here...I'm talking about bosses, not regular mobs. It is easy to annihilate normal mobs even without crit skills depending on your level or what weapons you have equipped, and I only have crap weapons since I don't feel like part hunting. The dash to dodge their range doesn't really help all that much later on especially when bosses become faster than you, have insane range, and the field is restricted as hell. The dais thing you are talking about is the forest ruins and you can actually use the dais to your advantage if you have some negative sealstones, but yeah you usually just end up placing random ones + one 150% element to help with the boss fight. I don't even think you've fought bosses that can counter attack and use their own soul crushes...need a lot of lube when that mage casts his Great Magic...

I play rpg games for the story and VP2 is shaping out to be something great. If you don't mind a spoiler...



Hell wasn't it voted by Gamespy/spot as the best ps2/whatever game no one played, like Disgaea. What platform is Chrono Cross on? I wanted to play VP1 first, but eh the graphics on it make me want to barf...I got spoiled with pretty CG and whatnot.

Shit rub it in how you can play Chinese translated VN's T_T

Well see there is the problem with your statement. You have access to way more visual novels than your run of the mill English community who doesn't want to use AGTH. Pickings are rather slim so whatever is available may be considered better than its supposed to be. I mean lets use the first FMA anime as an example. Its hailed over here as the best anime evar! but the second part (anime original stuff) kinda sucked... I can only take your word and the ratings of Umineko since I haven't read it yet (nor will I ever really since no killer lolis), but it is true that the American crowd has different tastes than jap ones...I mean look at their games =P

My point about ATLAS is that there are some games where you wouldn't understand what's going on even with the machine translation. I tried Little Busters and the results are indecipherable half the time. Koihime would have been the same would it not for the anime subs despite the altered storyline. More importantly, I was pointing out that Kimiaru and Sonohana are games that would work well with ATLAS even without much Japanese background the the limited number of titles I played.

Yea Clannad was the longest visual novel before Little Busters EX! Came out. Basically, each route is almost as long as a route in a normal eroge, even after taking out the common routes. There's a Chinese guide for 60, 100, and 300 hour walkthrough. If you try to go through all the options for the Tomoyo route, it'll probably end up taking about 10 hours, give or take 1 or 2 if you decide to skip some jokes or scenes. I'm not sure how well ATLAS would work for Tomoyo After though, seeing as Jun Maeda writes in a complex way as I recall. If you manage to pull through though, it'll almost guarantee making Tomoyo your favorite Clannad character.

@VP2, at some point in chapter 3, you get that item that lets you have extra attacks with double AP or something like that. As a result, it's really easy to drive up the AP while doing massive damage with those 1 attack weapons. Like I said, I haven't tried using 3 mage/tank, but I know 2/2 works and takes out over4k in a single turn. I was using the normal monsters as an example of how easy the monsters are. Bosses still only take a couple of full turns to kill. I was bitching about the Dais because in one of those mazes you have to place 3 random orbs on all the Dais in the dungeon before you can proceed, and you basically have no fucking clue until you consult a walkthrough. It was just an example among many other things.

Chrono Cross is a PS1 game. Graphics is about FF9 level (though there's a HUGE variety to the environment), but the soundtrack has often been hailed as the epitome of VGM. Storyline is often described as convoluted, and while some parts are confusing, a large part is due to the fact that Chrono Cross gets far more technical than Chrono Trigger, with subjects such as relativity and uncertainty principle. Of course, it doesn't use those terms and doesn't go very in depth, but it's still a subject your average 17 year old wouldn't be familiar with.

Well, more than just title selection, I think there's a more fundamental difference in preferred genre. While there were some translation issues, I thought Kazoku Keikaku is great despite its faults, worthy of being #3 on EGS as a romance game that preceded Clannad with a strong family theme. Most of the English posts I have seen just talks about how it was a letdown, being a boring romance game with cliche characters and hackneyed plot development. Meanwhile, a game like Saya no Uta, with basically NO character development, is hailed by many as the greatest thing since sliced bread. Don't get me wrong, Saya no Uta is a decent game that spotlights a story in a unique perspective, but it has nowhere near the depth of Tsukihime or Air, or even lesser known games like Otoboku or Yunohana. It seems like many westerners hold the preconception that if a game revolves around romance, it doesn't have a plot and automatically takes 10 points off because _insert_mystery/suspense/action_title is "deeper."

Now that rant mode is over, my point is, Japanese/Chinese crowd seems to favor romance/comedy games, while Americans and Euros seem to favor myster and action. Story driven games tend to receive lower scores on EGS, while Westerners aren't too enthusiastic about character driven games. I really like both, which might be why I side closer with Japanese choices because there's quite a lot more character driven games than vice versa. It's one of the reason why I love Sharin no Kuni so much; it has the best of both world. G-Senjou, on the other hand, is mostly story driven and better received (relatively) in the English community. In fact, I'm kind of surprised that there hasn't been another English update for so long after all the positive feedback.

Well so far my experience with AGTH/ATLAS has been nothing but favorable. It works pretty well with the Da Capo series and it handled Kanon pretty well. Of course granted that many things are lost in the translation, I can't really complain since its either that or raising my level of Japanese comprehension. My experience with ATLAS has shown that you need to rearrange the kana/kanji sometimes to get a better translation, that and use different machine translators if ATLAS fails you. I think I've heard that ATLAS handles kanji well, but has problems with kanas.

Well no problem there since Tomoyo is already my favorite character! Though I'm not sure whether I should wait out the TA patch. I know the Fakku guys have plans to take over the translation, but I'm not sure if that has gotten anywhere yet.

@vp2
Are you talking about Time Blessing or whatever that lets you do more attacks than your weapon allows in exchange for doubling AP costs? I'm in chapter 5 and did most of the side quests in chapter 3 and haven't seen an item like that. I know there is a way to drive your AP gauge up per attack depending on the amount of purple gems you get, but that requires semi-complex planning since you gotta spike a mob down and just beat up on it...which most bosses are practically immune to.

Again it also depends on your level. If you haven't been powerleveling your characters, new mobs in every dungeon will hit pretty hard and some can take a good beating until you get a few more levels and some weapons. I don't know what setup you had, but some bosses took me several turns to beat...hell those mages were so brutal with their 1-hit aoe magic spells. Do you remember what level you were on? Since again I'm on ch5 and my guys are only on level 32 and the two einherjar I'm using are on 25? and 21.

And I believe you are talking about the dungeon in the Forest Ruins. It wasn't really that confusing once you read the stone thingy where the boss would appear. If you make use of sealstones, then you will notice how the lightning stops when you remove the lightning stone out of the dais. Some dungeon puzzles aren't exactly very complex, but they require some thinking and using the correct sealstones can make the difference in a boss fight.

Well as long as the graphics are decent...might give it a go one of these days. I'm not exactly very knowledgeable about Norse mythology and I'm finding VP2 interesting. Oh well I think of myself as a semi-intelligent person so hopefully I won't get lost...xD

Well of course there is a big difference in the preferred genres, just look at the popular video game titles between the two countries and you'll see the glaring difference. To the western audience, I can see how a romance game can be seen as boring. I mean quite frankly it is if you personally don't enjoy what the genre can offer. Romance just doesn't cut it in comparison to the fast paced action, the suspense, and mystery something like Umineko? can offer. Really a shame how a lot of westerners aren't too keen on the romance, but hey let's just chalk that one up to cultural differences.

Good old east versus west and while I like both, I'm leaning more towards the east. You can salvage a story with great characters, but a story won't go anywhere with stale characters unless the plot dictates it.

Well, the biggest strength of AGTH is the automation. If I had to look it up manually, I might as well just use a dictionary. In my experience, ATLAS handles hiragana the best. It does Kanji pretty well but sometimes it'll confuse the words. Katakana translation... usually consist of spelling out the romaji verbatim....

Yea the item that lets you use double AP to go over your weapon attack limit. I just use firestorm twice or, more accurately, mash buttons until it goes to 100. It usually takes only about 75AP. I don't remember exactly. I was around level 15 or 20 when I fought the hydras. I'm not sure if I powerleveled but I'm not sure if that matters; it takes as long to kill a normal mob as it does to kill them most of the time.... Yes, the monsters are hard the first 2 or 3 battles when you enter a dungeon, but afterward they generally die in 1-2 turns.

Well of course the biggest strength of AGTH is automation...same with ATLAS. Just a pain in the ass to get SYSTRAN to work properly with AGTH. I use a names dictionary for ATLAS to handle most Katakanas. It does a pretty good job of translating the names properly rather than having a random word where the name was supposed to be.

Well the staffs I'm using for my mage doens't have any attack and has no great magic, but does tremendous damage. So if I use his attack, it costs 32-34 AP compared to the max 30 or so I can do by chaining 3 attacks together. Then there is also a casting delay and the heat gauge goes down fast when you break the combo. I have a light warrior to use the various swords that have crit skills, an archer for multi-hit attacks that raise heat, a heavy warrior to nuke SCs, and of course the mage for elemental attacks.

The hydra was a pretty tough battle. I mean granted his attacks don't really hit that hard, but having the status effect frailty which prevents use of any healing item/spells plus not having the item used to cure it made the battle hard...of course the battlefield consisting mostly of water didn't help.

Well its not really a matter of taking down mobs in 1-2 turns, its whether you can actually take the damage they deal. I mean the dragon palace had insanely powerful mobs plus a small battlefield. So while I can manage to take 1 mob down, I'm within range of another which can cut my hp to half. In fact, I actually find boss fights easier than dealing with a dungeon the first time given that the boss is usually by himself.

It really is a great game and shame you stopped playing it before the story started to kick off. Finish chapter4 and see whether it is worth continuing or not.

I usually just go for the leader. No need to worry about other monsters if you kill the leader in 1 hit, no?

As long as the monster doesn't regen or kill all my party members in 1 hit, I could just run around to regen and heal back back to full health. The storyline was decent, but it doesn't really help when 80% of the game is in gameplay and mechanics, which I didn't really like, feeling like it's a big time sink. No worries, sure Moshiraba and Scarlett more than makes up for any story I missed in VP2 ;D

Well going for the leader is a good strategy...but only if you can take out the leader in one attack turn since you are pretty much scarred if the leader survives, the other mobs are ranged/moves fast, and you don't have enough AP to dash. Don't forget that the leader has better overall stats than regular mobs so it can take more punishment.

Mobs that regen aren't really much of a problem since they are usually slow and it can easily be countered, like say causing frailty, using the hp sealstone that has the opposite effect of regen, or causing poison. Problem is that you haven't exactly faced mobs that can annihilate your party and tight battlefields that don't offer much in terms of dodging enemy attacks. Mage that has a full circle attack that fills 1/4 of the field and another one that can target you anywhere on the field, 1-hit KO aoe spells unless you are seriously packing some gear or have some godly sealstone setups, and of course Great Magic...yeah that strat won't get you that far into the game =P

Well you are playing the wrong game genre if you don't expect some form of time sink in an rpg game. Enjoy those then...which I'll probably never even get a chance to play. Way to rub it in man...so cruel!