I know that it’s terribly uncool of me, but I have to admit to absolutely adoring watching various JRPG combo videos on YouTube. Mostly of Namco Bandai’s Tales Of series, just because the gameplay in those lends itself so perfectly to massive, awesome-looking chain combos finished off with flashy cut-in attacks – as Mento said in his review of Tales of Vesperia, they do not skimp on the spectacle. The Star Ocean series is another one that I enjoy, which makes sense as its battle system is reminiscent of Tales (given that part of the Star Ocean team worked on Tales of Phantasia before founding tri-Ace, this is not surprising). But truly, on days where I’m feeling very lazy – too lazy to go play the games myself, even – I like to take “YouTube journeys” through all the awesome combo videos that get produced. Today is one of those lazy days, and I figured I’d share some of my favorites with you guys as well – that way I can at least pretend that I’m being productive by watching all these movies!

That’s all for today, though maybe another time I’ll do another post like this – less Tales-focused, perhaps, but no promises… it’s an obsession, I can’t help it!

In my last post about Eden Eternal, I covered all of the cash shop goodies and the various ways for you to throw money at the game. Today, I’m going to start talking about how to manage in the EE world without spending any real-life money at all! I’m planning on going a bit more in-depth about this, so expect multiple posts as I figure things out.

As I’d mentioned awhile ago, I rolled a new character on the new Diamond server in order to get a feel for both how the lower levels had changed since I’d first played (since my first character did her level 1-30 grind back when the game was brand spanking new to English servers – there was only one race to choose from, only like 1-2 guilds had actually built up enough fame to have towns, and huge amounts of the game hadn’t been implemented fully yet) as well as to try out one of the shiny new (to me, at least) races – but also to have a character that I could run COMPLETELY without the “taint” of any cash shop spending (yup, my other char benefited from a random AP rebate that I got, so she’s already spoiled), so that I could more honestly experience how the game plays if you choose to truly embrace the whole “free to play” aspect of Eden Eternal.

So many people selling delicious AP items... so many delicious AP items that I can't yet afford D=

My adorable fuschia-haired Halfkin has been on her grind over the past week, trying to get her to level 30 – since that’s when the whole world really opens up. Prior to 30, you don’t have access to the auction house, mail, or racial crafting – just to name a few – so as you can imagine, it’s hard to get any real feel for the economy and how to make money long-term when you pretty much have to rely on the horrible prices NPC shops give you for your loot.

My char is at level 34 now, and is taking a break from killing monsters with the power of rock (she’s a Bard, with the long-term goal of specializing in the Blade Dancer class) to get started on the racial crafting aspect of the game. So right now, let’s look at that in a bit more detail!

FIRST STEP: GATHERING MATERIALS
I can already tell you that gathering materials is pretty tedious – you basically have to buy the necessary items (once you hit 30, you can purchase a pickaxe, gardening gloves, or crystal ball from vendors in Aven – each item is 2g, and you’ll be able to recoup that and more after selling the produced items, so it’s worth it), lead your character to the correct spot (mine, garden, or energy pool in any guild town, respectively), right click the gathering item, and then… probably minimize the game and go do something else! You can’t move or really activate any other functions without interrupting your material farming, so unless you’ve got a really chatty guild or friend online to distract you, you’ll probably need to find something else to do here. On the bright side, this means that all of you MMO addicts will have a window of time where you absolutely have to back away from the game and go do something else – it’s like a forced break, unless you have some strange ability to NOT be bored out of your mind by staring at the same “gathering” animation for an hour or more!

Battle Dog, you are not being a very good team player. Can't you see that the pickaxe is bigger than my Halfkin? Offer to help her already!

SECOND STEP: LEARNING RECIPES
I’m just showing screenshots of the Halfkin crafting system, but the general idea is that there are various levels of crafting (for example, Halfkins make trophy enchants, so there are level 30 trophy enchants, level 35 ones, level 40, etc and so on), but you can only have one active recipe per level at any given time. The recipe that you unlock is random as well, so if you didn’t learn the one that you wanted, you have to “forget” it and then feed materials back into your crafting interface to learn another random recipe. It might be easier just to see it in action, so here we go…

First, you sacrifice certain crafting materials to create your race's basic crafting material. For the Halfkins, this means some sort of thread.

Once you fill up the thread's meter, you are given the opportunity to learn a new recipe.

A recipe will appear, and you can see the benefits of the produced item as well as the crafting materials necessary for its creation.

See? Not particularly challenging at all. And as long as you’re willing to put in the effort of gathering the materials, it’s not a terrible way to pad your in-game bank account…

FINAL STEP: PRODUCTION & SELLING YOUR CRAFTED ITEMS
On Diamond server, where prices tend to be lower because it’s a new server without any oldbies with massive savings to inflate prices, I was able to sell each Level 30 Trophy Enchant for between 8-10 gold each, and Level 35 enchants for 12-15 gold. I’ve noticed that the higher level enchants jump in price SIGNIFICANTLY.

On the Diamond server, we've got a Level 6 Trophy Enchant going for 140g - a nice payday for the creator!

So there you have it. An incredibly basic how-to on the racial crafting system. While I focused on the Halfkin skill, all the other races follow the same basic premise – gather, learn, produce, sell. If you have the time to dedicate to gathering, racial crafting can definitely be a decent way to make an income without spending real-life money. I’ll begin investigating some of the other ways to generate gold in EE and report back on that later, so until then…

See you later~

So hey, I haven’t written much lately. My bad. I’ve been super busy (at least in terms of internet blogging about games, which isn’t perhaps busy by any traditional sense of the word) writing about cutting down my Steam backlog in a daily series of blogs on Giant Bomb throughout this month. But whatever, that’s like half the internet away. Today I’m here to talk about the Deck13 Interactive-developed, dtp entertainment-produced German ERPG Venetica.

In a nutshell, Venetica follows the adventures of Scarlett – the estranged daughter of the Grim Reaper (or at least the democratically elected spectre of death; they do things a little different in this world it seems) – as she avenges the death of her beloved Benedict and saves the world from the machinations of a tricky antagonist that has defied the laws of God and nature to become immortal. This all takes place in a fictional version of Venice, if you’re wondering where that title comes from.

The actual gameplay is runs along the similar vein of other prolific German RPGs like Gothic or Risen (the sequel to which has recently come out) with third-person real-time combat and the usual XP-funded character development that requires you find skill trainers to procure new abilities rather than picking them off a menu after hitting a new level. The combat starts off rather button-mashy, but you soon get a tutorial on maximizing your damage output with careful timing as well as evasion, blocking and using your uniquely macabre powers to your advantage. Nothing ground-breaking, but it’s an adequately enjoyable system to carry you through the game.

Poker? I hardly know 'er.

The game is broken up into a traditional “hunt down the henchman boss of the week” format, with each new chapter opening up a new region of the city (and primary setting) of Venice. With each new area, there’s a smattering of new side-quests, explorable regions that often have some connection to same and a higher calibre of treasure. There’s not a huge emphasis on equipment in this game, with each new set of armor (which, cleverly, requires some altering before it’ll fit our svelte and distinctly unmasculine heroine) incrementally doled out or well-hidden beyond the leather set you find towards the start of the game that will more or less suffice for the remainder. Weapons are a bit more varied, giving you a choice between your default scythe “Moonblade” – necessary for some of the more supernatural foes you’ll face – and player-preference mainstays like the quick swords, the safe spears and the slow and powerful hammers and axes. Spells can be useful against crowds, with mana recharging slowly or instantaneously with items.

In Venetica, death is but a door and time is but a window, as losing all your health will drop you into a Soul Reaver-esque ghost world which, besides costing a considerable portion of a tertiary status bar (“Twilight Energy”), isn’t going to inconvenience you too much. This, of course, directly ties into Scarlett’s uncommon heritage and the concept with which this game attempts to set itself apart from its contemporaries. Scarlett’s other twilight powers don’t lend themselves quite as frequently to combat (unless you really want to keep replenishing mana constantly), but do feature heavily in solving the puzzles behind many story and side-quests, such as eventually being able to talk to the dead and dissolve magical barriers.

A neat little inclusion I wanted to point out, worth as much as the customary “game complete” achievement, is another achievement that asks you to beat the game without using any curative items. The game is extremely easy if you’re popping potions constantly, since it’s not like the game’s “death is a slap on the wrist” and “save anywhere” policies make it a Herculean task to begin with, so I’d actually recommend you follow this unusual requisite if you want a little more enjoyment out of the game. It’s a good example of an achievement actually improving a playthrough, rather than being the sort of inconsequential/incidental bonuses given at various checkpoints in the story or the grind-fests that usually inundate any given game’s achievement list.

I’ve mentioned “ERPGs” a few times, which is something I’m tentatively introducing as a separate subgenre from the Japanese and Western RPGs. ERPGs (the E is for European) frequently take a classic PC RPG model and try and build on it without diminishing the level of strategy or depth that the North American RPGs are frequently scaling back to broach a wider audience. This isn’t to add my voice to the unfairly reductive criticisms of “shallow” BioWare RPGs like Dragon Age 2 or the Mass Effects, but rather to simply observe that their model of the classic RPG is evolving to be more widely approachable thereby leaving an enterprising and burgeoning game development community to pick up the slack. Thus, what we have now is the once cottage industry of European developers creating deliberately old-fashioned CRPG experiences for PC and consoles becoming more widespread and visible.

German RPGs aren't lacking for oddball characters.

The grand-daddy of this format is probably Piranha Bytes’ Gothic games, which have been around since the 90s and show no signs of slowing down, even if the most recent entry (2010′s Arcania: Gothic IV) didn’t exactly set the world alight with dragonfire. A better example would be the highly acclaimed Witcher games, from Polish studio CDProjektRED (who also owns GOG.com – the best source for the CRPG classics of yesteryear). There’s the Divine Divinity series from Belgians Larian Studios, Two Worlds from Polish Reality Pump Studios and the Sacred series of Diablo-clones from German team Ascaron.

If there’s anything to link these games beyond geography and their predilection for a well-aged style of RPG, it’s that they are generally less well-funded than American studios. It sounds dismissive, but this actually gives them space to experiment with the format some. They don’t have the fervent, expectant fanbase of, say, Blizzard or BioWare to contend with, so the games they produce – while varying in quality – tend to be breezy, fun, “let’s see what works” ventures that the developers can then learn from and use to create vastly improved sequels; sequels which might feasibly challenge the Blizzards, BioWares and Bethesdas of the RPG market.

And this is pretty much where I stand with Venetica. It has some janky design decisions, which can only be expected from a fledgling studio, but there’s also a lot of heart and soul, some goofy Teutonic humor you’re unlikely to experience elsewhere and a 30-hour+ RPG experience that didn’t feel like a slog or a waste of time. I’m damning it with faint praise, perhaps, but Venetica’s not bad at all.

It's not terrible-looking either.

Well, it’s not much to go off of, but the world has gotten our first tiny sneak peek at what the next game in Namco Bandai’s “Tales Of” franchise may look like:

Click this thumbnail for a slightly higher-resolution version~

So yeah, nothing too specific, just some pretty concept art. The main image does look like some sort of large city, with (I think) some sort of rail system and skyscrapers in the background. To be honest, I’m totally fine with the vagueness of these sorts of info releases – I tend to avoid as much information as is possible about games I’m interested in until I can play them, to preserve some of their mystery and shininess. With Tales games specifically, I’ll watch the OP and check out all the playable character’s designs, names, and fighting styles once they’re revealed, but that’s about as much information as I like to know at first!

According to my favorite Tales fansite, Abyssal Chronicles, some speculation has been birthed regarding the similarity in both design style and font choice (particularly the “X” in “Next”) being extremely similar to the last mothership release, Tales of Xillia. So it’s plausible (though purely conjecture) that this could be a Xillia sequel, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Keep your eyes on this domain as well, since it’s where new information and details will eventually be hosted.

More information will almost certainly be released at the 2012 Tales Of Festival, which is slated to be held in June. Which reminds me, any Tales fans out there who have not yet voted in this year’s character popularity polls – get cracking! You only have a little over a week left to get your votes in, people.

The only correct answer for EVERY CATEGORY.

You can find the voting form here, but do remember that if you want to add a write-in vote for anyone (ahem, Walter Delques in every category please), most people think that it’s safest to translate the character name to Japanese characters first, in case the form can’t process English correctly.

Here are the categories:
Favorite Character – this is the big red button, and you only get one character choice.
Favorite Combo – Any pairing of two characters, whether it’s your favorite battle partners or some romantic pairing, can be voted for her. It’s the left orange button.
Favorite Younger Sibling – The middle, pink button. Pretty self-explanatory category.
Favorite Mascot – The right orange button. Your favorite of the Tales ‘mascot’ characters, like Mieu, Repede, or (correct choice) Legendia’s Oresoren.

Voting is up until May 21st, 2012, so make your decisions and get your votes (for Walter Delques, ofc) in soon!

Okay, first things first, let’s get the inevitable “wait, there’s a Shin Megami Tensei MMO?!” out of the way – because yes, there is, and it’s been running on both a Japanese and English/International server for years yet still seems to be widely unknown. If you’re curious, you can play either at the Japanese server hosted by CAVE or on the the English/International server over at Atlus Online.

Anyhow, the big fuss here is that for the Japanese server’s 5th anniversary event, they’ve released an as-yet unprecedented event: players get to take on the Demi-Fiend (or Hitoshura, whichever term you prefer), also known as the main character from series favorite Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne.

That spiky-haired silhouette in the middle looks just sliiiightly familiar, hmm?

The Shin Megami Tensei MMO references the rest of the series’ games constantly in the form of gear for your character to wear (including the Nocturne outfits of Isamu, Chiaki and the Demi-Fiend – which are actually highly prized as they all give really good skills to the player as long as you’re wearing their costume), hairstyles (you too can have the luscious locks of Louis Cyphre or Persona 2′s Lisa) and in some rare cases, even weapons (the DMC electric guitar weapon is a reference to Devil May Cry’s Dante, who had a decently-sized role in the aforementioned Nocturne). So the MMO definitely doesn’t skimp on the MegaTen fan service as it is, making this sort of cameo battle, perhaps, an inevitable progression.

Case in point: these delicious Yuzu and MC costumes from the first Devil Survivor game!

Now, He of the Glowing Tattoos has shown up as a cameo battle in other console SMT games, but thus far, the MMO had yet to actually pull characters from other games into its world. Seasonal or special boss fights tended to be just new or rare demons – such as getting to fight a ghostly Alice on Halloween or a gigantic, buffed-up version of King Frost for Christmas.

Don't underestimate cute little ghost girls, especially not Alice. Just a tip there, buddy-bud.

Unfortunately, I am a gigantic lazybutt who doesn’t read or speak Japanese, so I am having to rely on information given by those in the MegaTen community who do, but here’s the basics of the event as I understand it:

The Demi-Fiend is currently NOT a contractable demon partner (sad, as many of the enemies in these sorts of fight do have a chance to drop their Summon PG, which allows you to form a contract with them and use them whenever you want as your partner), but given how things have worked out in the past, it’s really not completely impossible for him to be implemented as a functional partner demon in the future – though if he is, I can almost guarantee that they’ll make you jump through some sort of crazy-ass hoops in order to get him! For now, he’s just a fun boss fight with interesting mobs (anyone who has played Nocturne will understand why he’s summoning murderous Pixies, for example). I’m not clear on what, if any, items he may drop after his defeat, though.

He might just look sad and not give you anything for your troubles. He is part demon, after all.

Also worth noting is the fact that Jeanne D’Arc and Michael are also involved in this event, and to my knowledge, they are both new additions to MegaTen’s demonic roster. They’ve both been tucked away in the client files for awhile now, but I think that this is the first time we’ve gotten to see them in action. It’s my understanding that Jeanne D’Arc does NOT drop her Summon PG (she and the Demi-Fiend are just jerks, apparently), but Michael does have a chance of giving the player his as loot. Shiva, Vishnu, and the fly form of Beelzebub are also involved but not new enemies, and I know that at least Shiva and Vishnu’s plugins (an achievement that allows you to fuse them whenever you want, provided you have the required demonic materials) were already implemented – though incredibly hard to get – on the Japanese server. Not quite sure about fly-form Beelz, though.

Oh, Jeanne D'Arc... that bowl cut...

You can currently take on the Demi-Fiend now on the Japanese server – though you’d probably have to grind a bit in order to be strong enough to not instantly die – or you can wait until the content is localized for the English/International server, which has no ETA but will almost certainly come our way eventually.

A plasma blast from the past, Doom is an evergreen FPS from once-giants Id Software. It’s about some guy on Mars who shoots all the bad guys. It’s perhaps not a game that requires much of an introduction, though that is not to say that there isn’t a lot going on here.
Like any child of the 90s, Doom was a huge deal among those who only occasionally had access to their parents’ Windows 3.1 PC. It was crazy, it was intense and it was super-violent. This was around the same time I was discovering the VHS copies my parents had of RoboCop and Terminator as well, so it all coalesces into a bloody mist of wonderful, premature grown-up entertainment that I could only occasionally (and surreptitiously) have access to.

Pfft, four imps and a shotgun zombie? Puh-leeze.

I have to say, though, that most of my time spent in the UAC laboratories on the twin moons of Mars were on the SNES version, in many ways perhaps the hardest of the iterations. For one, you could barely see shit, due to the considerably lower visual fidelity that Mode 7 and Nintendo’s other graphical wizardry could provide in lieu of cutting edge PC technology. For another, the SNES Doom did not let you make intervening saves during missions, which meant I never had the courage nor patience to play on anything harder than “Hurt Me Plenty” (Doom’s colorful analogue for medium difficulty). It also doesn’t have cheats, at least not any I was cognizant of. No IDKFA or IDCLIP to rely on for difficult situations. It was more than nerve-wracking, let’s just say.

Oh, that's not good...

Now that I finally have the XBLA copy, deciding I had very little else to spend 400 points on, I’ve been rocking Ultra-Violence (the game’s Hard mode) and having a blast. The game’s changes are ever so subtle on this mode: The mechanics behind the game won’t change, so you don’t take more damage, get less bullets per ammo pick-up or have any other unjustifiable impediments. Instead, there’s just more monsters. Way more monsters. Tougher monsters, too. The game then becomes more focused on skill than exploration, though the latter is still important if you want to have something more than a few pistol clips to kick the next roomful of demonic butts. It’s a classic example of a difficulty mode making a considerable gameplay difference, beyond simply “you will die more and get frustrated a lot”. It’s really the difference between “Alien” and “Aliens”: Some of the atmosphere of dread and trepidation is gone with having so many of the monsters in your face with every new door you open and corner you turn – but it’s no less tense, especially when your ammo conservation skills are failing you.

Needless to say, it’s gotten me a lot closer to figuring out why Doom was such a hit back in the day. Buy some points below and get Doom II as well! It’s the same, but with even more antagonistic map design and a demon that resurrects other demons!

So I’ve been getting back into the swing of things with Eden Eternal over this past week, and while I surely don’t know everything, I feel like I am starting to get a handle on some aspects of the game.

I’ve mostly been focusing on my character that was already 39; once I hit 40, I swapped her from her previous Thief class to the Martial Arts class that unlocks at level 40. Since I finally achieved that goal (I’ve had my eye on Martial Arts since the moment I created her), I’ve mostly been working on leveling up her new class, getting her to 43 so that I could craft her some new gear, and doing my best to play the market enough that I could score her some decent cash shop gear as well. Today, I’m going to talk exclusively about the cash shop goodies – what they are, and the different ways to obtain them, and what I think about the whole setup (spoilers: just read the post topic).

So basically, there are special AP (Aeria Points) costumes, pets, and mounts. Now, when I say ‘costumes’, I’m going to be referring to all of the looks-changing items that cover up your basic, in-game gear. So “costumes” = AP boosting items that work in tandem with, not replacing, your in-game weapons and armors.

The items with diamond toggles near them are costumes - your actual stat-boosting gears are the things listed below them.

For costumes, it seems that most items are one of three ranks – basic (ie, just the costume – it will change your looks but nothing else), Alpha (will give a small boost, for example +5% critical damage from a certain Alpha rank back item), and the coveted Prime (the highest boost, so continuing the example that I gave for the alpha, it would be +10% crit damage for the same back item with a Prime rank). Since, as you can probably guess, the Prime rank items are the most in demand, they’re also the hardest to obtain as well as the priciest.

Look at all this cool stuff that I can't afford!

Now, as a note, if you’re solely interested in the looks and don’t really care about getting an alpha or prime version of a costume, then I’d suggest that you look into the Alpaca Capsule Machines in Tranquil Hill. It’s slightly more labor intensive than just AP spending your way to fashion victory, but the quests that give you the Alpaca Tokens do also reward you with Experience, Class Points, and money, so it’s not a bad deal at all. The rewards are random, of course, but you can end up with plenty of other handy things, like pet food or safety stones, even if you don’t get the costume you wanted on your very first try. You can read more about the Alpaca Capsule Machines & Tokens here, since I don’t really see the need to just reiterate what’s already a perfectly good guide.

Because even adorable anime fantasy worlds can't escape the lure of gambling.

In regards to pets, each type of pet has its basic form that can’t participate in combat, but can still pick up loot for you… but there are also many other forms of each “base” pet that give a wide range of combat abilities and player boosts. For example, if you look in the Pets/Mounts section of the current Item Mall, you can see the differences (in both abilities and price points) illustrated very clearly. The basic Himalayan Cat, at 499 AP, does nothing beyond pick up your drops and follow you around looking cute. The “Brave” Himalayan Cat’s cost jumps up to 2999 AP, and it gives the player a +10% Crit Dmg boost as well as giving the pet the ability to join in combat with basic attacks. The “Robust” Himalayan Cat, at a whopping 4999 AP, gives the same boosts as the Brave as well as having a higher durability (100/100 as opposed to the 50/50 – when the pet’s dura reaches 1, you either have to feed it or it can no longer be used in combat) and some special skills of its own (Ambush and Swift Attack, in this specific case). So as you can see, differences in abilities translate to VERY large price jumps in this game.

Adopt a virtual cat for almost $50 USD. The fact that it's not much less than a real cat's adoption fee is... either sad or funny, idk which.

It’s the same with mounts. Various mounts have different movement speeds – the basic alpaca freebie mount that the game gives you only has a 15% movement boost, as opposed to cash shop mounts like the Stalwart Sabretooth, while will run you 6999 AP (yes, that’s $69.99 in USD) in exchange for a 50% movement boost. There are also rarer mounts – things like dragons that can carry multiple people or seasonally-themed mounts like pumpkin stagecoaches for Halloween – that command very high in-game prices due to their ‘rarity whore’ appeal.

It’s worth noting that most of the desirable or limited-time weapons and costumes and such can’t actually be purchased straight from the Item Mall: to get what you want, you’re going to need either a lot of a luck or a lot of AP, since obtaining the newest items requires a whole lot of gambling.

Eden Eternal's Crystal Altar - Where players worship at the shrine of (usually) bad luck

See this? This is the Crystal Altar – the first, and seemingly most popular, form of gambling for cash shop items in Eden Eternal. In order to use the Crystal Altar, you first need the pink Eden Crystals. These can be purchased with AP or acquired in-game (you can buy them from other players, usually at around 65-80 gold per crystal on Sapphire server, and I believe that there are some highbie quests that allow you to get the crystals as well).

Basically, you “transform” your crystal into a new item each rank, with your chances running from the coveted primes or rare mounts to mundane but useful items like safety stones to the more disappointing “prizes” like pet food (easily obtainable without AP) or a blue or gold crystal. The blue or gold crystals hurt the most, as landing on one of them ends your crystal’s journey and you have to accumulate either 10 blue or 10 golds in order to get ONE transformation process (they do start higher up on the tiers, but still – there’s a very high chance that you’ll accumulate 10 gold crystals only to win… one gold crystal – so, yeah, ouch).

In the spirit of scientific curiosity, I purchased 10 Eden Crystals. Here is how my mini-gambling attempt worked out:

FIRST ATTEMPT:

1. Blue Eden Crystal on the very first tier. Ouch!

SECOND ATTEMPT:

1. Class Points Charm (skipped because charms are easy to obtain via the free rewards box)
2. Austere Pickaxe (used for racial crafting, I passed because I already have three)
3. Blue Eden Crystal ends the game

THIRD ATTEMPT:

1. Portal Stone (skipped because I have around 300 of these already and never use them)
2. Eternal Chisel LV 50 (skipped because I’m so not level 50)
3. Gathering Aid (skipped because it’s easy to get non-trade versions of these)
4. Heroic Trait Reassignment Tome (I claimed this because it can be sold for around 100 gold in the auction house)

FOURTH ATTEMPT:

1. Portal Stone
2. Gardening Gloves (Claimed because I didn’t have these yet)

FIFTH ATTEMPT:

1. Crystal Ball (skipped because I already have a few)
2. Austere Pickaxe
3. Gathering Aid
4. Blue Eden Crystals x3 ends the round

SIXTH ATTEMPT:

1. Class Points Charm
2. Austere Pickaxe
3. Gathering Aid
4. Heroic Trait Tome (skipped because I decided to see if I could make it all the way to the top tier)
5. Loot Charm
6. Safety Stone (skipped because you can get these via the alpaca machines)
7. Gold Eden Crystal x3 – Aw, man, we made it to the top tier but landed on the crap prize… oh well~

SEVENTH ATTEMPT:

1. Portal Stone
2. Blue Eden Crystal ends the round

EIGHTH ATTEMPT:

1. Shattergem (skipped because I have a few)
2. Blue Eden Crystal ends the round

NINTH ATTEMPT:

1. Crystal Ball
2. Pet Food
3. Gardening Gloves
4. Heroic Trait Tome
5. Loot Charm
6. Safety Stone
7. Corona’s Essence LV 65 – Wow, we actually won a top-tier item! You can either sell this for around 450 gold, or save it and use it to boost the success odds of a crafting attempt (which is what I will be doing, because having crafting fail on you sucks so hard)

TENTH ATTEMPT:

1. Shattergem
2. Pet Food
3. Gathering Aid
4. Blue Eden Crystal ends the round

BONUS BLUE ROUND (10 Blue EC needed):

1. Gathering Aid
2. Gold Eden Crystal ends the round

BONUS GOLD ROUND (10 Gold EC needed):

1. Loot Charm
2. Gold Eden Crystal ends the round

Overall, it’s not HORRIBLE, but you can end up with a whole lot of wasted rounds if you’re not willing to claim some of the lower-level prizes every so often, as most of your attempts will get cockblocked by a gold or blue crystal. But still, making it to the top tier twice in ten attempts is probably the luckiest I’ve ever been with these things. I’ve come to the conclusion that I prefer to just sell the Eden Crystals themselves and then buy the items I want from people who are either far luckier or just more dedicated to gambling than I am… but then again, I’m not really the gambling type, so that may be why I don’t really find this method of obtaining cash shop items to be that appealing. I like to know that I am definitely getting something for my money!

Unfortunately for me, most of the alternatives in EE involve gambling: Loot Forge is very similar to the Crystal Altar, except that instead of “failed” rounds producing a blue or gold crystal that can at least be used in the future, a failed Loot Forge round gives you… nothing. I personally wouldn’t touch this with a ten foot pole, the risk of completely losing money is far too high. Loot Wheel is a bit better, where you put in some AP and spin the wheel, and whatever it lands on is what you get. At least with this system, you’re always going to get a prize, and you can look at the prizes beforehand and decide if the lowest prize is worth the cost of the spin or not. And, of course, there are the mystery boxes, where you pay a set amount of AP for a supposedly fair chance at winning one of the prizes in the bag. To be blunt, most of the time you’ll just get Eden Crystals or various low-tier useful items (think Safety Stones and World Calls), but at least you can sell the crystals and items that you don’t want without the risk of just completely losing your money.

The last way of directly purchasing cash shop items with AP is the “tiered spenders” that seem to run every weekend. Quite frankly, as long as you want the items on the promo, these are pretty win-win opportunities. You unlock certain items – usually you have a choice of which item you want – for every level of AP that you spend during the given timeframe. So you get both the promotional item and whatever you actually spent the AP on, so really not a bad deal at all. Out of all the various ways to throw money at Eden Eternal, I’d say that the tiered spenders are probably the best way: you can get the most bang for your buck and at least the items are guaranteed. No gambling!

Of course, this post has been SOLELY about the cash shop portion of the game. In the interest of not having each EE post be the length of a novel, I’ll be closing up shop on this particular topic here – next in the tube will be information on how to make money and get gear WITHOUT any aid from the AP side of things. Expect that post in the next week, since I want to talk about crafting in it but need a few more days to get a better handle on the topic (and I need time to get the items – the entire time I’ve been typing this post out, my EE character has been parked in a random guild town, farming for crafting materials with the gardening gloves that I won earlier – shit is time-consuming as hell).

So yeah, stay tuned if you’re not completely bored with these posts by now! And please feel free to tell me if I’m missing anything – remember, I’m trying to be as thorough as I can be here, but I’m still a guildless newbie stumbling around in the dark =3

Until next time, I'll be grubbing around in the dirt in poor, unsuspecting guild towns~

If you’re actively keeping track of coming-soon conspiracy MMO The Secret World, then you are most likely already aware of The Secret War, a pre-beta “social online experience” (translation: it’s a Facebook game) that lets you have your first taste of the game while giving you the opportunity to win such prizes like guaranteed access to the actual MMO when it goes into closed beta.

Come, advertise for FunCom via your Facebook page! We'll give you prizes, maybe!

There are other prizes – you can win a trip to Montreal, or things like (much cooler, imo) having your name written into the actual MMO’s lore/world. Regardless of the prize that you’re hoping for, supposedly the more time you spend playing the Facebook game, the higher chance you’ll have to win big.

The mini-game itself seems to basically be a thinly-veiled way to get you to tell your friends about the game. Basically, you have to recruit your Facebook friends as “agents” in your preferred faction (the personality test recommended that I join the Illuminati, so that’s what I went ahead and rolled, if you’re curious~ So I guess anyone reading this should totally join them as well so we can conquer Facebook together, or something?) in order to deploy them in missions to take control of certain world areas from the enemy organizations.

Apparently, it's my deepest, darkest, desire to wear creepy gasmasks and pose stylishly with guns.

You also gain points by doing “missions” (liking the game’s Facebook page – 30 points!) or posting stuff (“propaganda”) about the game on your Facebook wall, and the more of your friends who click your Secret War posts, the more points you get. Like I said previously, it’s a not particularly well disguised attempt at free word-of-mouth for the game, but if you’re interested in the prizes and have a Facebook friends list full of gamers, it’s not so bad. I’m not sure if I’ll really bother – to be honest, I really don’t use Facebook – but for those of you who do decide to play, good luck~

So now that I’m finished with Devil Survivor 2 (you can read my thoughts here, if you haven’t already), I’m trying to think which console game I should go for next. If I was at all organized like Mento and actually remembered to use my Backloggery, this decision might be easier! But since I tend to be horribly about remembering to log into single-purpose sites like that one, I’m just going to go ahead and keep track of my backlog of games here, on-site. The link should be at the top of the page, but I’m gonna link it again anyway because I love redundancy:

Sarah’s Backlog

I’ve written out all the games that I could find while I was packing them up this week that I still have yet to finish (or, in some cases, even begin). Feel free to let me know which game you think I should prioritize and tackle before the others, if you have any opinions on the matter at all~

As you could tell by the title, I wanna shout about Fez for a bit, the new Xbox Live Arcade game by Phil Fish and the others at Polytron. Fez has been making all sorts of waves recently, given its storied, troubled background and the slightly, let’s say, incendiary comments Fish made on the creativity inherent in the current Japanese game development community, or apparent lack thereof.

It’d be all too easy for me to turn it around (so to speak) on Fez and talk about how puzzle platformers with a cutesy retro approach and at least one central gimmick is hardly a soapbox from which to deride the lack of creativity of others, but instead of doing that (or, I guess, concurrently with doing that), I’ll go on record to say that Fez is pretty great.

Protagonist Gomez, pre-hatwear.

One’s first playthrough of Fez is the sort of low-hassle Indie platformer we’ve all experienced a few times before, whether you’re a fan of Braid or PB Winterbottom or have spent any amount of time in Newgrounds‘ games section or Kongregate or Armor Games (all great time-waster sites, incidentally). The collectible cubes are lying around the topography waiting for you to figure out how to spin the world around in such a way to form a path to them. The universe is spread out as cuboid nodes on a map, so there’s some degree of Metroidvania-esque exploration to be done though the many branching areas. Otherwise, it’s a rather simple jaunt through a series of very pretty pixel worlds, which are filled with nice little graphical details such as cute pixel animals hopping around and a sky changing color as it slowly goes through a day/night cycle.

It’s the other half of the game where things start getting cerebral. The player will have encountered several rooms that, instead of presenting its golden prize from the offset, will require a puzzle of some sort to be solved beforehand. Doing so awards you “anti-cubes”, which are just as plentiful as their regular counterparts but far harder to find. These puzzles require you decrypt the in-game language, decipher the meaning behind oft-spotted glyphs formed of tetranimos (which are, as all gamers know, the shapes from Tetris) and occasionally go a little meta such as manipulating the console clock and using a QR code reader (though it’s purported that the QR puzzles have alternate solutions found elsewhere in-game for those without that technology).

The 2D worlds are actually 3D. But I won't tell if you don't!

Fez likes to envelop itself in mystery, possibly to prompt the sort of “what does this mean?” viral promotion that has, inevitably, surfaced from how vague some of the puzzle leads have been. A cynical viewpoint, perhaps, but it’s not hard to mistake intent given how successful it’s been in spreading awareness for the game.

So, ultimately, what am I saying about Fez? It’s a fine game, is what. It’s expansive for an Indie game, but not expensive. It’s colorful, cartoonish and bright, but also thoughtful, deep and subdued. It has the sort of metaphysical aspirations in puzzle design that the Myst games had prior (and Fool’s Errand prior to that), and given Fez’s predilection for gloriously rendered yet hauntingly lonely environs as well it’s clear Fish is a proponent of the Miller bros’ CD-ROM epic.

It doesn’t feel like a brand new paradigm in gaming, but rather a layered homage to one man’s fondest game experiences. I’d say that’s perhaps more than enough reason for anyone to want to share the experience, especially for only 800 MS points. Buy some below, and maybe use the other half for something less cute? Like Doom 2 perhaps.