Culdcept Revolt -- #2. A Real Mock Battle
0The sky is still falling!
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By which I mean... the 3DS eShop is dying, and I want to at least feel like I've gotten something out there for people to gawk at in case they were magically on the fence about it and somehow also found this game very specifically during the last day or so of their ability to acquire it for cheap.
I don't know what the aftermarket prices are for 3DS games, but even one like this presumably had nowhere to go but up once retailers proved they weren't interested in holding out for the VERY niche target demographic just wandering along by their precious shelf space.
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To cap off all our precious LEARNING with a certified amnesiac, it's time to have a big ol' fight. Kinda. It's a pretty basic fight, all things considered, and Alicia's definitely pulling her punches by way of an extremely generous AI script.
I'm still going to count it. It's a real battle! If I have to use this wimpy starter deck you saddled me with, I'm going to enjoy it!
Speaking of which, the starter deck choice seems a lot more significant than it probably should... even though they also preface with "don't worry, in the long run, it doesn't matter"... but in the immediate short run, it kinda very much matters, if only because you'll need a fair amount of grinding to shore up the resources needed to build the equivalent alternate starter deck.
Y'know, from absolute bottom-of-the-barrel ingredients and whatnot. All on the query of "high attributes" versus... um... "special attributes"? Which is also a fair bit misleading, I'd say, since the generally aggressive and not-misleading stats of many starter Fire and Earth element creatures doesn't mean they don't ALSO have their own share of special abilities... and the Water and Air starter deck doesn't ENTIRELY rely on gimmicky traits to make things work.
Neither deck would get very far at all if this was the case, since you need a mix of both to make much progress against even super basic adversaries... heck, it actually applies all the MORE against basic adversaries, since their advances will be that much more emphasized solely around raw brute force and "simple" straightforward card combinations that you're meant to be learning right now.
That's because "advanced" cards are really not especially (too much) more powerful than the starter-grade stuff, but they DO come with a litany of excess fine print to balance out their more particular on-paper power and esoteric effects. So, overall, it's not EXACTLY power creep being staved off so much as... trying very hard to avoid piling on too many detailed rulings to suss out all before we've even had our chance to get a feel for the game.
You can definitely find more than modest amounts of success with a deck like this... probably MORE so than average if all you do is pile on a bunch of rarer or seemingly powerful monsters with extra bonus attributes. The more complicated your deck is on average, the more likely there is that there's some specific weakness you've inadvertently built into it without very specifically considering all the possible angles from which its strong fronts can be probed. (Especially if there's many more angles than those that you haven't even begun to consider!)
Which is the REAL reason why I think these decks are pretty good for teaching you to start absorbing the game mechanics. Even if I'm not entirely on board with the manner in which they posed it to the player.
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Case in point: the game's overall mechanics are strong enough that you can just obliterate an opponent with basic tactics and no real need for any fancy extras to make sure it happens in a specific other way.
...the degree to which this was possible was shocking even to me, honestly, but that only proves I've played enough of the game to know which parts of it to emphasize and when... ... ... and a healthy feel for what's likely to happen or not, since at least SOME of this was down to a certain amount of chance, one or two moves out BEFORE I could actually have the opportunity to make it stick.
(Alicia also doesn't play her cards effectively enough to keep it from happening in a few places, as even the most rudimentary non-tutorial opponents are going to show us in a real hurry.)
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Full disclosure, I had to play the tutorial TWICE (not counting my original playthrough back when this game was new and I was just enjoying it for my own purposes), mostly because of a lingering audio issue... that WAS actually present through the preceding video, and I didn't want to do it a THIRD time, seeing as how I squashed it midway through THIS video...
This and the Tolls lesson have been the worst I've ever seen the tutorial crash and burn in the face of actual gameplay.
It's possible Jo doesn't actually need the refresher course, then?
(I considered letting him keep the default name of "Allen"... but I like the personal touch of giving him my name instead for funsies.)