So the game normally lets you retry battles and I just went through all of the Lambda cocoon beat both bosses and got the shuttle thing. I found some random area by scanning and had to fight this little humanoid kid, and it explodes and kills my whole team and the only options are load save and return to title screen...

The last time I saved was at the beginning of that lambda cocoon because the game normally lets you retry battles when you lose, so now I just lost like 2 hours of gameplay that I don't think I have the will to go through again, how far was I from the end? There's nothing more frustrating than when a game does something like this, its either you retry when you die or go back to a save when you die, not one for the entire game, then switch to the other for one random fight.

Nearly the same thing happened to me. Did about two hours worth of sidequests, stumbled on this fight and promptly asploded and game overed having not saved. It sucked, but I went back the next morning and did everything again in about half the time.

After the cocoon is one final dungeon that's about two hours itself (without a guide) and then the future arc stuff if you're interested in doing that.

Yeah after I went back in after a couple hours and just watched some videos with the battle set to easy and full auto til I was through the cocoon again. Still pretty lame, but I'm actually really enjoying the sidequest part of the game, I think its always my favorite part of a JRPG, right before the final dungeon. Well I like it as long as they put some story stuff, even if its minor into the sidequest stuff, definitely one thing thats always great about the Tales series.

Actually, only the story-related boss fights allow you to retry battles. The majority of the fights in the game including sidequests (including the ones with stars) and random mobs don't give you a retry option. So you should always save before doing any sort of sidequest, especially if you don't have a guide to go by. But yeah that sidequest in particular is very annoying if you don't know what you're getting yourself into.

Yeah the first time I ever died was during a story related boss fight and it offered me a chance to retry. So of course having no reason to believe otherwise at the time I assumed that the game was just really forgiving about death. Sometime down the road, about 35+ hours into the game I decide to grind some titles so I go to a zone set the difficulty to max for the extra SP and grind away for about 2 hours. At the end of said 2 hours I fight a mob where things just happen to go sour really fast and I am out of life bottles at the time, so I die and learn the game only let's you retry on story related boss battles.

It's a terribly communicated design decision. Personally I wish they just kept the retry option for all battles, but even if that's just not what the developers want to do, the least they could do is communicate that there is indeed a difference. In all likelihood a person's first death is going to be against a story related boss battle and thus they are gonna be given the impression that the death penalty in the game is lax. There is no reason to believe that the game would handle death differently with other enemies if your first time dying is to a story related boss.

yea, that fight was kinda surprising. think i lost some time to him as well, but not 2 hours, that sucks, lol.

Wow! Just came to make a random post to blow off steam about this just happening to me, and I find this old thread about the same thing. Screw that explodey little dickhole. ( Of course I should probably have saved at least once or twice during all those sidequests. )