Khantael
Khantael's last update: is still underlevelled on P3:FES but spent an awful lot of money creating awesome personas, so is now 1 hit KOing the random encounters with agidyne/ziodyne
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Nov. 18, 2009
  • is still underlevelled on P3:FES but spent an awful lot of money creating awesome personas, so is now 1 hit KOing the random encounters with agidyne/ziodyne
    3 days, 6 hours ago
  • I'm slightly worried about playing the Answer now. I'm still on the Journey (mid... December now? Maybe November. Well, one of them. :P) and I really can't stand Yukari already!   Favourite is Mitsuru though. It would be Aigis if she was on the list. :P
    3 days, 6 hours ago
Nov. 15, 2009
Oct. 18, 2009
  • Textbooks. I get too easily distracted when looking at e-books plus it makes me strain my eyes more than reading plain text. And I like having a book tangibly in fronjt of me as I do a lot of course reading travelling around rather than sit around and silence.
    1 month ago
Oct. 9, 2009
  • 1. Final Fantasy 8 2. Final Fantasy 9 3. Curse of Monkey Island 4. Age of Empires II5. Grim Fandango  ...I like RPGs and adventure games. :P
    1 month, 1 week ago
  • I am absolutely, absolutely terrible at finishing some games. I'll rocket through them, then run out of steam right before the final boss battle (normally as there'll be a load of sidequests that completist me wants to do). Some of such games are:  Final Fantasy 10 Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Fantasy 12 .hack//QUARANTINE for a long time though I've done it now (come on, a 10 floor dungeon where nearly ...
    1 month, 1 week ago
Oct. 3, 2009
  • 1 month, 2 weeks ago
  • Khantael had a submission approved for .hack//QUARANTINE - Part 4 and earned 5 points (for a total of 1,456 points).
    Fixed some formatting issues
    1 month, 2 weeks ago
  • Khantael had a submission approved for Knights & Merchants and earned 161 points (for a total of 1,456 points).
    Added some info
    1 month, 2 weeks ago
  • Khantael had a submission approved for Seven Kingdoms and earned 2 points (for a total of 1,456 points).
    They are games I consider very similar
    1 month, 2 weeks ago
Sept. 24, 2009
  • I'm a girl and I really like Yorkie bars. I always feel kind of guilty when eating them while being stared at in the face with a "NOT FOR GIRLS" sign.  Then they taste good, so I promptly forget all my concerns. :D
    1 month, 4 weeks ago
Sept. 17, 2009
  • @Stang: Strictly speaking I'm not a sir, I'm a girl. :P   I'm actuallly really enjoying the Atlus RPGs which is refreshing actually, as I've been struggling to find good PS2 games (especially in terms of RPGs). My first RPG experiences were the Final Fantasy games, which I really like but are obviously a very different sort of game... not a bad thing, however!   Out of curiosity: why didn't you like ...
    2 months ago
  • @FluxWaveZ: Thanks, I need to take a closer look at the Quick Look. It got about a quarter of the way through and cut out for me (Giant Bomb doesn't show me where it's loaded up to, so it's a bit of a guess on the videos). I've been wondering whether to get PSP version of Persona too - there aren't many PSP games that interest me so more is ...
    2 months ago
  • @gakon5: Negotiation is in Nocturne, isn't it? I was wondering about that - is it as confusing as it sounds or just a matter of you get used to it when you're playing?   I've also heard lots of good things about DDS2. How do you mean it's savage (don't answer if it would end up spoilering me if that's okay)? Difficulty level or storyline?   The save points thing sounds a ...
    2 months ago
Sept. 16, 2009
  • @PenguinDust: Fair enough!  @eclipsesis: Sounds good to me. :) That's Nocturne under a different name, right?   @endaround: I think I'll give that way a go. I only really realised the use of Elizabeth's requests in P3FES when taking up the quests in Persona 4. Sounds bizarre really but it's kind of true - I just feel Elizabeth's requests are held back a bit by the fact you can only have ...
    2 months ago
  • @ryanwho: That does sound annoying. Probably the best way of doing it checking on the worth of the awards anyway! :)  @Radium: Nocturne was actually the game I was looking at before Digital Devil Saga! I chose to go for the latter because the consensus seemed to be that Persona 4 was okay, Persona 3 FES was harder, Digital Devil Saga was still harder, and Nocturne was a game where ...
    2 months ago
  • Since I got Persona 3 FES, I've been slowly going through some of Atlus' games. It's actually quite interesting to look and see how ignorant I was coming into the system (and still am, in some respects):  Persona 3 FES - I've really messed up on this. I'm somewhere in November if I recall (so far 2 or 3 people have upgraded their personas) and I'm still around level 41. ...
    2 months ago
Sept. 15, 2009
  • Uh, let's see, trying to work from some of these lists (as I wouldn't consider some of them RPGs)  Final Fantasy VI Final Fantasy VII Final Fantasy VIII Final Fantasy IX Final Fantasy X Final Fantasy XII Persona 4 The Legend of Dragoon .hack//INFECTION .hack//MUTATION .hack//OUTBREAK .hack//QUARANTINE  Rogue Galaxy   The "these apparently count as RPGs but I'm not sure" list  Kingdom Hearts Kingdom Hearts 2 Pokemon Yellow/Blue/Silver/Crystal   And (irrelevantly) I'm ...
    2 months, 1 week ago
Sept. 14, 2009
  • @Lashe: That's pretty much what I was thinking!   For me personally... I'm sure there are people who find it funny, but I don't really understand this type of humour. :/ Ah well, each to their own and all that.
    2 months, 1 week ago
  • Khantael commented on Khantael's topic Game Nostalgia
    @Sir_Ragnarok: Ah, I remember that bit. I thought it was a bit fiddly but I did manage it alright after much x button pressing (far more than it warranted, probably!). I also did the same thing with leaving the game alone after my problems escaping the D-District Prison, but when I finally went back to it I did it easily enough (even though the 'right' way makes it look like ...
    2 months, 1 week ago
Added by Khantael on Sept. 16, 2009

Since I got Persona 3 FES, I've been slowly going through some of Atlus' games. It's actually quite interesting to look and see how ignorant I was coming into the system (and still am, in some respects):
 
Persona 3 FES - I've really messed up on this. I'm somewhere in November if I recall (so far 2 or 3 people have upgraded their personas) and I'm still around level 41. XD I am notorious for being badly levelled up in games, but this is ridiculous, even for me. I think it's just that the layout of Tartarus confuses me - can't go back down floors, only up, access point, or teleport. So I run between teleporters fighting battles along the way but not exploring the full floor and only sometimes go back when not bored to fight things. The net result is the world's most ridiculously low levelled characters! Okay, so I'm exaggerating, but it's pretty bad.
 
(On the bright side, I'm doing pretty good with the social links if I do say so myself, and have my charm and courage maxed out, and my academics one from maxed out.)
 
Oh, and to make things worse, I came into this not understanding the Persona system and so haven't been fusing as well as I should have. Heck, I don't think I've even done a triangle fusion. I think it was Igor's lecturing me about fusion accidents put me off a bit. :P And I totally still have Orpheus and Asparas because I rely far too much on cadenza. I have a ton of money though, so when I get back to it I can raid my compendium and fuse crazily. Perhaps I'll also figure out how to go for a bad version of an ending (though I'd need to look it up to be sure) as I really can't see myself managing to get myself into a reasonable level to take on a final bonus boss. I really, really can't. Then I can correct my blunders in a new game+. Sounds good to me! 
 
I think my current deaths count is 12. Hehe, I'm still learning.
 
Persona 4 - (WILL CONTAIN SOME SPOILERS) I learned from Persona 3 FES here and started dungeons early to give myself time to do things in case I failed horribly and needed to train up. This time I only died 6 times in the whole game - and like I said, I'm prone to be underlevelled so that's pretty good going. At my worst I was eight or nine levels below the boss I was fighting (maybe 10 on the true ending boss) so the deaths were kind of understandable. I think it worked out like this: one random battle death (how embarrassing), one death right at the end of Yukiko's shadow (she died next hit -evil eye-), 2 deaths on Kanji's shadow, 2 deaths on Mitsuo's shadow. (Shockingly I managed to get through Rise and Teddie's shadows without ever dying. I was shocked too. And I never died again after shadow Mitsuo.) 
 
Also my fusing initially was almost exclusively triangle fusion... see, I'm learning slowly. :P I did get up and make a Yoshitsune though. Trumpeter too. Also, I used Melchizedek quite a lot, though he isn't anything more than a normal or triangle fusion I think.
 
On the other hand I'd generally spend 3 or 4 days on a dungeon so I lost S Link time, I finished around 8 of them (3 being the story S Links, then Kanji, Naoto, Yukiko, Young Mother, Nurse) and I'm pretty sure that in November in P3FES I've got more done than that! On a new game plus I plan to do a lot better (I am in Kanji's dungeon on my new game+!). 
 
I did get a bit lazy in Persona 4 with attacks I'm weak to though. Part of the reason I like Shin Megami Tensei battle system is it forces me to do what no other game ever has done - actually use magic properly. I am a total MP conserver and reserve MP only for curative spells normally. That's a death warrant in some of these games. The lack of knock doswns lasting a turn made it less of a worry in Persona 4 so sometimes I'd find myself happily physically attacking (regularly) to save MP for mediarama/mediarahan. But ah well, can't have everything. 
 
Now onto the actual reason I made this blog post (lol, I don't half go on) was to write about my current and first playthrough of Digital Devil Saga. So!
 
Digital Devil Saga - (Please don't spoil me for this! I am currently at Coordinate 136, just done the first floor.)
 
The weirdest thing for me about this game is this time your character actually has a name and is a leader... but still never speaks! Serph leads silently, apparently! I'm back to actually attempting to properly utilise the weaknesses system too, even if I find it a bit weird at times (weak to force spells? what are force spells? ...) though I'm now used to it. 
 
I'm pretty sure I'm still underlevelled. On the bright side I've only died once! And it was on a huge hoard of the... uh, green horse things that cast mazionga on you, in the Maribel's base when you open one of the gates (forced battle... if I recall, three sets of three and then a final one). I did fine for the first two waves, then they went crazy with mazionga and Gale kept giving them extra turns.
 
(After I died I ran around learning void elec and extra fire spells and that strategy worked much better.)
 
Speaking of learning things I've pretty much screwed this up too, I'm sure. I'm still learning what stats correspond best to what people/skills. Also I kept up my regular thing of making everybody have to have the capability to heal at least a little. I think I'm a bit better with it now though... got Margilla focusing on magic and Gale is becoming heal guy. I have no idea what the hell Serph is, he's learning random bits and bobs. I... could really do with putting together a plan with what to do for him. Ah well, worst comes to the worst I hang out in front of the large karma terminal and train up. 
 
In any case! The plot seems quite fun, I've been enjoying watching things unfold. Even if in doing so I have grown very, very sick of traps and may never want to see huge statue heads or portraits again. :P
 
How do other people cope when they first walk into a Shin Megami Tensei game anyway? I always find the systems a little hard to adapt to, but it's also an interesting learning curve... and obviously, it's interested me enough to try other games in the franchise. :)
 
(Eventually went for putting this in the Persona 4 forum given that that's the only one I've completed. Less spoiler chances!)


Added by Khantael on Sept. 12, 2009

It's probably a little sad that many of my games of (mostly nostalgic!) interest won't play on my computer anymore. I knew I had some reason to keeping some rather terrible PC hardware!
 
Here are some games that won't play that really should:
 
Knights and Merchants
- I'm probably never going to be able to play this game again as the issue lies in the fact it requires DOS on the machine and so isn't really XP compatible. This was an absolutely amazing game, I loved it when I was younger... even if I did always get horribly distracted and forget that, hey, supposed to be fighting a war there! (Note to self: write review for this, and possibly write something for wiki entry: something is better than nothing, even a decade or so old recollection.)
 
Stay Tooned! - I could complete this easily enough by myself when I was a kid (except Kartoon Kombat... I was terrible at that, and the addition of 3D glasses just added to the confusion), so god knows how simple I'd find it now, but it was an amazing game. Quirky fun with something a bit different in every playthrough. (I seem to recall making several playthroughs after my first purely for the chance I could run into Schleopardy again. Schleopardy was amazing.) The TV was hilarious too - how can you not like a game with a Friends parody called Frauds where people's limbs randomly fall off?! (I like how that didn't even mildly alarm me as a kid.) 
 
The depressing thing is nobody has ever heard of these games, so the conversation possibilities are... pretty much none. I'm pretty much the gamer girl who played the obscure games that only a tiny minority of people have ever played... pity, really!
 
At least several of my other "games of nostalgia" can still be played... even those that terrified me when I was a kid. (LeChuck's Revenge. ...It was the swamp, okay, the music and look of it creeped me out. :P I suppose this speaks well of the music composition, though - I was probably a bit young to be playing Monkey Island! Actually, the extra odd thing about this is the fact that while the swamp terrified me to the point of giving me nightmares, the whole voodoo doll "of the bone" thing also didn't phase me at all. What was wrong with my sense of creepyness?!) 
 
On the bright side I can still play Final Fantasy VIII, which isn't exactly my earliest gaming experience (the PS games came after the PC games in my chronicle of gaming), but I still remember playing it the first time... and constantly tripping over the fact I was lame at levelling up. On my first playthrough of Final Fantasy VIII I got near the end of disc 2 (this was the Cerberus boss fight) and got totally, totally owned. I was too weak to really do anything, I didn't really stock enough magic and didn't understand the magic junctioning system (I played it not shortly after it came out, and I reckon I'd have been about seven or eight at the time), and I ran away from battles if I couldn't be bothered fighting (this was normally when I'd got lost and ran around in circles for a bit. Embarrassing story of running around in circles: it took me 2 hours after getting off the train (I think this was to Galbadia Garden?) to actually get there. The destination was about two feet from where I was standing (triggered forest event) but even though I had instructions to find a forest, I was totally lost with the directions as I was apparently a bit rubbish at following compass points. FUN TIMES. At least I gained some levels there!). My second playthrough I died about five times right at the beginning of disc 2 in an explosion: turns out that the cutscene confused me to the degree I was moving TOWARDS the exploding building rather than away. Yeah, that was awkward. I did figure it out... eventually... though! 
 
I still love revisiting Final Fantasy VIII - though I understand the system and can complete it with ease now. I actually find it the most accessible battle system of the Final Fantasy games, probably as it's the first I played, even though I'm well aware a large part of my first playthrough problems were due to my inability to understand the magic equipping system... even with a tutorial. Funny how those things work out!
 
Heh, it's fun to reminisce. :D  


Khantael's Reviews
An interesting story that prefaces Final Fantasy VII (PSP)
Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core is a strong game; there’s no other way of saying it. It is part of the Final Fantasy VII compilation and the prequel to Final Fantasy VII itself, centring on Zack, who is referenced several times in the original game.  The odd thing about Final ...
Reviewed by Khantael on Sept. 7, 2009
More dungeon crawling and frantic searching than story (PS2)
.hack//Quarantine is the fourth game in a series that follow Kite playing a MMORPG called The World. Unfortunately, people have started dropping into comas from playing The World, and Kite’s friend is one of those victims. There are odd things going on in The World, and Kite’s the person with ...
Reviewed by Khantael on Sept. 7, 2009
A worthy addition to the franchise (PS2)
Kingdom Hearts II is the third game in the Kingdom Hearts series, and it improves on a number of mis-steps that the previous games provide. While there is little comparison in terms of gameplay with Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, which employs a card based battle system, this is not ...
Reviewed by Khantael on Sept. 7, 2009
Charming fun with some mild issues (PC)
  Psychonauts is a very charming game that is a hybrid of a platformer and a more adventure orientated game. This both helps and hinders the experience depending on which genre you favour. Psychonauts is the story of Razputin, a boy who has broken into a government training facility in ...
Reviewed by Khantael on Sept. 6, 2009


Date Joined: Sept. 2, 2009
City:
Gender: Female
Alignment: Sony
Points: 1,456 Points
Ranked: Ranked #734 of 60,829
1,456 points you are ranked
734 of 60,829 users

.hack//QUARANTINE - Part 4
game - 567 points
Stay Tooned!
game - 528 points
Knights & Merchants
game - 161 points
Skeith
character - 41 points
Kite
character - 41 points
Mistral
character - 41 points
BlackRose
character - 41 points
Aura
character - 26 points

Ryan 5 hours, 32 minutes ago
Awesome Yelp review typo on local burger joint: "Nothing spactacular. Ambiance leaves a lot to be desired. Prices are ok and god is so so."
Brad 6 hours, 28 minutes ago
There are multiple delicious-smelling things going on in the kitchen here.
snide 12 hours, 35 minutes ago
The reason I still believe in PC gaming? I've played a dozen LFD2 pickup games now all with great people using voice chat and teamwork.
Jeff 14 hours, 12 minutes ago
My new power to change the GB homepage's tagline at will is surely going to lead to ruin.
coonce 14 hours, 51 minutes ago
new frontdoor looks sweet!
andy 1 day, 9 hours ago
Has anyone found a clever solution to solve Django's lack of a "ready-to-go" signal? Something that works with both web and mgmt commands?
gpbmike 1 day, 10 hours ago
trying out this CleverCSS stuff
Vinny 1 week, 1 day ago
So easy to join! RT @jeffgerstmann: Square's new Scientology recruitment video. That guy looks so calm and in-control! http://bit.ly/3OtQH2