2011-02-22, 06:46 AM
Final thoughts on Future Arc more or less
Appears to be about ~10 more hours of exclusive game play available. I have mixed feelings about it.
A good portion of the Future Arc is actually cut scenes and dialogue. Though it was rather interesting story that fleshed out the characters more, I felt it heavily detracted from the more action-packed game-play. Since it's post-end game, you have your air ship available so you're not required to walk anywhere. There's four dungeons in the story arc, but they appear to be somewhat sparsely populated with monsters. I just felt the number of encounters overall was lower compared to other parts of the game. Last two dungeons are rather interesting, but the first two are pretty linear. Last dungeon is rather quite long so that was enjoyable.
However, a large impact on my experience that occurred was I grinded through the bonus dungeon quite a bit since I read it became inaccessible in the Future Arc, which is partially true. You still have access to it for the first 1/3rd of the Future Arc. Due to this grinding, I was grossly overleveled so I played through on Chaos difficulty. I feel that the way the bonus dungeon becomes inaccessible is actually a bug. It's significantly more difficult than the Future Arc content, and the equipment you get is ridiculously better than the Future Arc equipment. It doesn't appear to be acknowledged as such though from what I can tell. I particularly feel this way because the moment it becomes unavailable is before you get access to Pascal's 4th Blast Caliber, and the second set of Future Arc weapons. This leaves there to be very little left to do if you go past this point other than finishing the game and starting your second playthrough. All I have left to do now before beating the boss is finishing up a few aliases so I can inherit them for my second playthrough in the future. Other changes include the arena monsters and rewards changing, and you no longer being able to enter a character to solo the entire thing. You're required to play it in Masters Mode which means you choose one character per round out of six rounds. i.e. you have to play as each character minus one once. Also, the final boss of the original story is obviously inaccessible as well.
Otherwise, Richard is an okay character, but given how I had leveled up ridiculous amounts on my other characters and then acquired him, he had much fewer aliases learned, and thusly significantly less stats overall and sucked as such. Otherwise, his Artes style seems a bit too slow some times, but is quite good for crowd control, and his Burst Style has some ridiculously powerful spells. Avenger Bite does absurd amounts of damage and is the fastest spell in the game. Holy Lance and Shooting Star cause seizures.
You can also earn aliases for every character to get costumes of each other, so you can have a party of 4 Cherias <3 and they'll all actually be Cheria and only be able to use her artes. Pretty funny, and the screen looks amazing when you spam Shooting Star with four Richards.
Hopefully, I'll be able to play Vesperia PS3 this week and be able to compare them.
Appears to be about ~10 more hours of exclusive game play available. I have mixed feelings about it.
A good portion of the Future Arc is actually cut scenes and dialogue. Though it was rather interesting story that fleshed out the characters more, I felt it heavily detracted from the more action-packed game-play. Since it's post-end game, you have your air ship available so you're not required to walk anywhere. There's four dungeons in the story arc, but they appear to be somewhat sparsely populated with monsters. I just felt the number of encounters overall was lower compared to other parts of the game. Last two dungeons are rather interesting, but the first two are pretty linear. Last dungeon is rather quite long so that was enjoyable.
However, a large impact on my experience that occurred was I grinded through the bonus dungeon quite a bit since I read it became inaccessible in the Future Arc, which is partially true. You still have access to it for the first 1/3rd of the Future Arc. Due to this grinding, I was grossly overleveled so I played through on Chaos difficulty. I feel that the way the bonus dungeon becomes inaccessible is actually a bug. It's significantly more difficult than the Future Arc content, and the equipment you get is ridiculously better than the Future Arc equipment. It doesn't appear to be acknowledged as such though from what I can tell. I particularly feel this way because the moment it becomes unavailable is before you get access to Pascal's 4th Blast Caliber, and the second set of Future Arc weapons. This leaves there to be very little left to do if you go past this point other than finishing the game and starting your second playthrough. All I have left to do now before beating the boss is finishing up a few aliases so I can inherit them for my second playthrough in the future. Other changes include the arena monsters and rewards changing, and you no longer being able to enter a character to solo the entire thing. You're required to play it in Masters Mode which means you choose one character per round out of six rounds. i.e. you have to play as each character minus one once. Also, the final boss of the original story is obviously inaccessible as well.
Otherwise, Richard is an okay character, but given how I had leveled up ridiculous amounts on my other characters and then acquired him, he had much fewer aliases learned, and thusly significantly less stats overall and sucked as such. Otherwise, his Artes style seems a bit too slow some times, but is quite good for crowd control, and his Burst Style has some ridiculously powerful spells. Avenger Bite does absurd amounts of damage and is the fastest spell in the game. Holy Lance and Shooting Star cause seizures.
You can also earn aliases for every character to get costumes of each other, so you can have a party of 4 Cherias <3 and they'll all actually be Cheria and only be able to use her artes. Pretty funny, and the screen looks amazing when you spam Shooting Star with four Richards.
Hopefully, I'll be able to play Vesperia PS3 this week and be able to compare them.