16th February 2004, 7:20 PM
(This post was last modified: 16th February 2004, 7:38 PM by A Black Falcon.)
Quote:You cannot kill most enemies with just one weapon and you know it. The ring system is crap--every reviewer has acknowledged that. They should have either made switching weapons as easy as a single button press or not make it so that you have to change your weapons so frequently.
Not true, not even remotely. Just because you and a few reviewers have some strange problem with a great system doesn't mean it is bad! I don't get you... how you can think so strongly that there is no way for anyone else's opinion to ever be right about this... oh I may defend my position too but I do not come even close to your level of certainty that everyone agrees with me. It's totally ridiculous. Everyone doesn't.
Ooh, so you have to press two buttons and then spin through the weapons and then press one more instead of pressing one button multiple times... OH SO HARD I CAN'T HANDLE IT!!!!1111`!!!!!!11
Seriously, it's simple, quick, and the best it could possibly be. Complaining is really stupid.
Quote:To be honest I wish they kept Secret's weapon switching. It was as simple as going into the ring menu for weapons and selecting it like that. Same with magic. That made selecting spells and weapons VERY easy, regardless of having to pause the game to do it. The way they put item magic and weapon seleciton into SUB rings didn't help. Yes it's nice to have hotkeys, but considering that before it was only one level deep and now it's two, it's still awkward to get to it.
That's what they do, though... pause into the ring menu, go to Weapons or Magic (or press L or R during battle in the ring menu), and you're in the Weapons or Magic rings... or do you mean you had different buttons for each ring? You'd need a lot of buttons then... Weapon, Magic, Stats, the rope (which I have never used) level up, Popoi's Notebook, etc...
Oh, I prefer this to SD3's menu/ring system, definitely. Far quicker and easier to use. That has three different menus... Start which lets you switch items between people, and two face buttons, one of which opens the Ring Menu, which is your item ring. Pressing up or down switches to the Magic Ring if you're a spellcaster. And on another face button you go into the main pause menu. This is a 9-screen area you can scroll around, with a lot of options -- equip weapons/armor (that that character has), set AI companion behavior, menu background color, seeing which spells you have, character stats, the savefiles (though you can't save here), and controls configuration... a huge and quite bulky menu that is a bit of a pain to navigate especially when to move items (well weapons and armor to be specific -- items are in a collective pool, but each character carries their own weapons cache... and though you equip weapons and armor in the 9-screen menu, if one character has armor for another you have to exit that and go to Start and switch items there and then go back...) has between characters you have to exit that and go to Start.
Sword has an all-ring system and compared to SD3 it's the model of simplicity and ease of use. Sure it doesn't have all of those options, but being able to look at your save files, having control config (at least in the patched version; don't know about the original of course) and changing menu colors is somewhat superflous...
And the ring system is great. It's noticably faster than the menus in FFA... yeah it had fewer options (because there were two seperate menus) but it was slower, and finding what you wanted took longer. And you had to do it way more often because magic and items were on the same button. This new design, with magic having its own button and items just in the menus, is way, way better... cuts down significantly on your switching, while making it quicker to switch. I just don't understand the complaints. Especially when the ring menus are so quick to navigate through!
As for AI I can ignore the stupid pathfinding because its the most fun to kill the baddies on your own anyway and when you go to the next screen the ally's there, I just wish they could program them to use magic. That would really, really help.
I've noticed they are most inept at jumping obstacles. When you jump up cliffs or over pits they usually fail to be able to follow you... but it can be tough to get in the right place for that yourself so I understand it. Still, that's the most obvious example of bad AI I can think of that matters. Well other than the times they fail to get around corners. :)
Quote:I'll only add that this doesn't defend them from the whole thing with the AI killing itself on those barrier sphere things like ABF was talking about. It would have been a simple enough thing to do to tell the AI that those are NOT targets and they would have ignored them completely (meaning if they were standing next to them for some OTHER reason, they would still get attacked over and over again, but still they wouldn't be walking TO them at least ).
Last time my AI companion was auto-attacking a sphere it couldn't break (and when the thing is in 'attack' animation YOU can't destroy it with the proper item of course) I eventually had to retreat and wait for him to die... I've been killed several times in that situation, so it really is very annoying.