Posted September 27, 2017
Sarisio: Looks like quite a big game. Is it? How big is the world so far?
And how is the character progress, is it very strict or you can munchkin your way through the game if you want so?
It's pretty big. I've finished exploring two large islands, each of which had maybe 7-8 dungeons to explore and 3 or 4 towns, and I've just started on a third. I'm pretty sure that's the last island before the finale. Mostly it's long because there are lots of battles against large numbers of enemies that take a long time. The game is primarily about tactical combat between your party of eight and hordes of opponents. Exploration is a mixed bag; some locations are interesting with lots of secret passages and cool stuff to find, others are boring repetitive caves. The later parts of the first island were especially bad for this. Combat is pretty fun though, although I did end up using similar strategies most of the time. And how is the character progress, is it very strict or you can munchkin your way through the game if you want so?
Character progression is a bit weird. There are no character levels. Character skills only improve through use, and there aren't any random battles or repopulating areas, so players have to fight everything they can in order to improve. Character stats can only be increased by training in towns or through very rare potions. Since the trainers are in specific locations, that happens in spurts. Having just traveled from the second island to the third, I got a big bump in stats when I stopped to train everyone.
The magic system is interesting, because characters don't "learn" spells like in other RPGs. Instead, all spells are constructed out of three magical "syllables" that define the spell. This means that in addition to finding spellbooks which give the words for a spell, you can often guess at them. For example, if I know the spell spark ("throw small fire") and I then discover the spell for major healing ("heal large wound"), then I can probably guess that "throw large fire" will give me a more powerful attack spell. Whether or not I can actually cast it depends on my characters' magic skill, which improves through use like anything else. So after enough battles of throwing weaker spells around, I can start successfully casting more powerful ones. Early on, spells fail a lot.
So in the end there's little choice in how characters progress. It's also important to have good starting stats because those determine how good starting skills are. This is especially important for magic, because if you can't cast basic spells at the start, you won't get anywhere. My first attempt at making a party had this issue, but I restarted in short order to fix it. You then "roll" skills based on starting stats, so you can pick which weapons you want to be good at. Most loot is random, but since there's some high-quality stuff that's NOT random, it can be bad if you have no one that's good with certain weapons. Fortunately I was advised to take someone who's good with 2-handed swords, so I was ready for this. I did feel like I couldn't viably try out some of the weirder weapons though, like fencing weapons or brawling weapons (think iron knucles and the sort) or polearms. There are lots of weapon categories but I needed to specialize, so there were lots of things I couldn't try. I would have preferred just choosing 1-handed weapons vs. 2-handed weapons or something.
dtgreene: Incidentally, MM3 doesn't have weapon proficiencies, so it doesn't have this particular issue. On the other hand, I find that Barbarians and Ninjas are too restricted in what they can equip, so you end up with the wasted loot problem; In MM3 I prefer Knights and (if not waiting for the place I can get Thievery) Robbers. In the Xeen games, Barbarians and Ninjas have better equipment options and are more viable, plus there's a certain guaranteed weapon in Clouds that anybody can use that ignores resistance outright. (One thing: If you play Swords of Xeen, whose loot is mostly non-random, you don't want to use a Robber or Ninja, yet the default party uses both classes.)
Good to have some MM3 discussion after I've been horribly derailing this thread for so long! I actually haven't played MM3 yet, but I intend to. I have played the Xeen games before, and, more recently, MM1 and 2. Are robbers in MM3 able to equip more stuff than ninjas can? I had a robber in MM1 and MM2 but that was mostly because I imported my party into MM2. But I kind of have a soft spot for robbers just because I like the idea that they focus on thievery and doing it really well, even if they're not that useful in a fight. Also, thanks for the advice for Swords of Xeen, which I haven't played either. Hopefully there's a way to learn thievery in that game, if I don't have a ninja or thief in my party?
Post edited September 27, 2017 by Waltorious