In this dungeon, there are three healing stations. The one at the entrance, one after a fight, and the third before a large doorway. We are stopping at the third.
Side Quests
Nothing this week.
Apparently there are extra mini bosses if you have the Evolution version of the game? I know nothing about what this entails, good luck.
Vocab Sheet , thank you to everyone who has been helping with this.
We also have an arts sheet if you’re struggling with the in-game version.
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Discussion Questions
What sentence/passage gave you the most difficulty? Feel free to request some help, or if you figured it out on your own break it down for the rest of us!
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Since this week isn’t really Japanese practice much, I’ll split it into 2 chunks, as I just reached the new healing point and apparently am about halfway.
Dungeon thoughts
Well, the layout is pretty similar to what we’ve seen, maybe the multiple looping connections are a little more intricate than other places at least, and it’s good that the aesthetic stands out. It’s nice how rewarding the chests scattered everywhere are; I’ve tried to be kind of thorough for that. So far this is the Sexism Dungeon because all the clothing is male only, but I got the weapons for Tita and Olivier so that’s nice (and Jin and Schera, meh).
Treasure chest robots are tanky but not very threatening, just a time killer. Difficulty in this game is all over the place because the rematch with… the lady whose name I’m blanking on now and her two robots was SO easy. I was looking for chests everywhere because I’m wary of the final boss or something suddenly being a pain, and it might still be because the enemy damage values for a fight feel haphazardly chosen, but after rolling over her that gives me some hope that we might be ok.
Booo gender-locked gear boooo. That said if you’ve only found men’s armor so far, you might’ve missed a chest or two. I finished this week’s part this morning and definitely remember getting women’s armor by that halfway point.
Anway the place is a maze. For the most part the fights weren’t tough, but I had trouble in the second half with those big tanky monsters that spam aoe magic. That wasn’t great for my team of fragile children and musicians! I probably should’ve switched in Agate but didn’t want to get lost on the way back to the halfway point
It’s definitely pretty elaborate in layout; I was admittedly less thorough here because I doubted my ability to easily re-find a progress point when I stumbled into it. Certainly willing to believe that despite my efforts, I missed some stuff in the first half anyway. I found Joshua’s weapon here which is great. Missed Estelle’s but 3/4 is pretty good, and I at least got a piece of women’s armor finally. We’ve prepared well enough, probably. It feels so good to be using a team I chose now.
For people who want to know, the equipment you should be able to find in here is a weapon for everyone, 2 guy armour, 2 guy shoes, 2 girl armour, 2 girl shoes. I agree the gender locked equipment is stupid, unfortunately it’s just going to be a thing from here on out.
Oh, and for my own team I took Agate and Kloe/Croze. Because big sword and heal, but big sword + metal enemies turns out to not be the most effective.
A lot of exps / level ups and gems this week, or did I start too low level?
Anyway, public poll!
エステル、ヨシュア以外の ２名のメンバーを選択してください。
シェラザード
オリビエ
アガット
ティータ
ジン
クローゼ
0voters
this week
Members can be chosen again at the start and after save 2, but I feel that many level up and choosing a new member afterwards doesn’t worth it.
I tried entering every doors and rooms, to get most items, but no dungeon map, so only opened chests can be relied on. (I didn’t use paper and pen yet.)
Double throw monsters, and machine-bomb’s with long life, get troublesome sometimes.
Tita is pretty good for immediate spread with no cost and smokescreen. Olivier has de-art (which doesn’t spread), but I think Scherzade has that too. Also Olivier has one row of quartz, for easy art customization; but Croze has that too.
Joshua is good attack delay and status. Maybe Estelle is the least useful right now. (I can’t unchoose her, though.)
Lieutenant woman sucks EP and that’s annoying, but no problem destroying her team anyway, when comrades were all removed first.
I forgot to bring enough food ingredients to the dungeon.
You probably noticed but the amount of XP you gain from a given monster scales inversely to your character’s level (so for instance if you have a lvl 10 character and a lvl 20 character in your party, for the same combat the level 10 character will gain massively more XP). With this system the devs can effectively guarantee that you’ll always be of appropriate level for anything because if you’re over-leveled you basically stop gaining XP and if you’re under-leveled you’ll quickly catch up.
More generally I always found basic level up systems in RPGs to be a bit dumb usually. If I was to develop one I think I would remove all level ups and automatic stat boosts and just use a skill/tech tree when you can allocate stat points to unlock perks or whatever. Because otherwise what’s the point? You gain strength/stamina/whatever but then the enemies have to be scaled up proportionally to keep things interesting, so in the end it’s a wash. It just makes the numbers bigger and that’s it.
I kinda like dark-souls style level ups where you manually allocate points to every stat, this way you have to really build your character and weigh the pros and cons of every attribute.
Isn’t that the point? Number go up, brain feel happy. I like the souls system too, but this game’s style of level up fanfare with noise and notifications of new abilities and all that is more a simple way of making you feel good about progressing the game rather than a way to control character growth. I think that’s fine for a guided experience like Trails. This dungeon is generous with the dopamine hits though, I’ve gotten maybe 3-4 levels running through it.
Yeah it’s cool to rethink these basic systems but I don’t mind them as they are either. Functionally it gives the appearance of both you getting stronger and the enemies scaling over time whether the gap between you widens or not, and if a game allows for easily avoiding combat this fulfills the reward needed to keep you engaging with it. I don’t really like grinding but some people seem into it and I think it’s somewhere good to neutral to allow for brute force as an option anyway. And on the opposite end I’ve seen people do intentional non-levelling or low level runs in games where you’d really think you need to level with some crazy contrived strats. For a “normal” playthrough it’s kinda on rails within a certain range but it’s cool that it doesn’t have to be.
I will say the way Trails FC has done it has made leveling feel kind of like a background thing that I don’t care much about – honestly the tight control on rewards is not really to my taste because at times I’ve noticed we’re getting nothing at all which incentivizes avoiding combat, especially knowing if I do skip a bit I’ll accelerate forward later anyway. Feels like orbments and the like are the real power system anyway. But there are definitely other games with just normal leveling systems where it has felt good to me.
I guess the reason that I find the situation a bit silly is that it feels like at this point almost every single RPG messes with the traditional level up system in order to make sure the game remains balanced and challenging throughout (be it by changing the XP you gain like Trails or by leveling up the enemies based on your level like Skyrim, Final Fantasy VIII and many more). This is effectively the devs acknowledging that the standard level-up system is just not very good but instead of just getting rid of it outright and replacing it with something better, they just render it practically non-effective but keep it for tradition’s sake.
I have to admit that I have a particular bone to pick with the games that level enemies to your level (which Trails doesn’t do, admittedly) because for me it does the opposite of what the level system is supposed to do: instead of feeling a sense of progression I feel like I’m stagnating completely because I can revisit the starting area of the game at level 100 and still be perfectly matched with the enemies that are now hitting as hard as the final boss. I just feel like I made no progress at all.
I do agree with you that the way it’s handled here in Trails is fine though, I don’t think it does much but it’s certainly not a problem either. However I do think it would be more engaging if, for instance, you had more opportunities to develop/change/upgrade your orbment. I’m reminded of the Sphere Grid of FFX which had its own issues but was generally pretty fun as far as I can remember.
I honestly feel like, especially more recently, so many attempts to heavy-handedly move away from standard leveling are more of a reaction to the very exaggerated reputation of these kinds of RPGs requiring grinding. If it’s evidence devs think it’s bad then I think they’re wrong, but the Final Fantasy devs think turn based combat as a whole is bad now so it wouldn’t be a first.
If the numbers aren’t terribly off I think the systems are functional enough and usually games include a more customizable system of some sort on top of the leveling so it’s not like you get predetermined power increases only. Like I said leveling in Trails is kinda whatever, and that’s true, but the orbment system is complex enough I probably wouldn’t want another tree of skills to manage. And imo it’s easy to think of examples of these replacement heavy handed systems where they cause problems but I think the traditional leveling tended to work out fine imo, the only real risk is if the numbers are terribly off.
I don’t like games leveling with you either cause that causes more problems than its solves usually, especially when occasionally you get cases where leveling can outright make you weaker relative to the enemies. Skyrim at least puts caps on how high certain types of enemies can scale which is a useful compromise to let you eventually outpace the trash, but it’s also such a different case because their whole goal with Skyrim was complete openness to let you go anywhere at any time and do anything so that was the solution, and it comes with a whole host of tradeoffs but it certainly works for their design goal, I’m just not that big of a fan of it. I’d much rather a Fallout New Vegas type situation where I wander the wrong way out of town and get annihilated by some deathclaws.
One element that I do like in Trails’ level up is that it fully heals you. That adds a small level of strategy because you can effectively use magic “for free” if you know a level up is coming soon.
I’m surprised that Croze is not very popular with the rest of you (minus @RebBlue ). She’s a good mage, has decent physical attack options and arts and her healing/buff S-craft can come in very clutch since you can trigger it out of sequence.
Admittedly this is even more apparent in hindsight because it turns out that this dungeon favours AoE spells heavily over physical attacks given how often you’re facing large spread-out groups of enemies (and many of them have large pools of HP).
On that theme I really wish that the devs had bothered coming up with unique encounters instead of reusing the same enemy setup over and over again. I’m on level 3 of the dungeon and so far I think there were 2 different setups for trapped chests and 2 setups for normal encounters. You just feel like you’re going through the same fights with the same sequences of moves over and over and over again.
Olivier’s flirting with everyone is learned behavior. He knows we love him.
Kuroze is a strong pick and I like her, but I also feel like I’ve got magic covered by Olivier and Estelle at this point. Joshua’s role is also set in stone getting CP up as fast as possible to do his murder-all special move. The 4th spot is the experimental spot, that’s where the weird picks go.
