Having played Midnight Suns for so long, would you recommend it? I’m interested in the gameplay, but I don’t like Marvel at all. At least the movies - I couldn’t get through a single Avengers one. Haven’t tried any comics thus far.
As for my own week, I continued with Baten Kaitos. Thus far, with each passing hour, I like the game more. It’s just so charming and there are so many unique things about it. This week, let’s talk about cards. Everything in this game comes in the form of card:
- Your battle deck, of course, and there is one for every character you can get.
- Out of battle healing items
- Equipment
- Quest items / Overworld puzzle items
- Special items
And these cards have so many weird things about them. Let’s focus on the actual battle mechanics:
- Each card has at least one number, but some have multiple from which you can select each time you play them. You get percentage based bonus damage/healing for pairs or straights - think of Poker. You just have to play them in order in a single turn - called a combo. The bonus is only applied if all your cards played belong to a pair/straight, therefore playing less cards can do more damage. At the start, you can only play 2 cards a turn, but these increase with your class level.
- A lot of cards have elements attached to them. Damage is calculated for the whole turn, not per card. Because of that, they can cancel out each other! Play a fire and a water spell in a single turn, and they negate each other’s damage.
- Some stronger cards can only be played after your combo has enough cards played already, and these usually end the combo, regardless if you could otherwise play more cards.
- Based on your affinity with a character, cards can temporarily transform mid-combo into stronger attacks.
- There’s a crafting system built into your battle system. Playing a combo of a flower bud and a light spell? You get a bloomed flower card after the battle. A lot of the cards used for crafting recipes do nothing on their own. And these things can get complex fast - want steam rice? Play rice, a pot, a water spell and a fire spell in a single turn! (I think, I haven’t managed yet.) Hints for recipes are written into a lot of the card descriptions.
- Cards age. Most healing cards are food based. After a few hours, they permanently perish and turn into debuff or damage items! This does apply to other cards too. Your nice flaming swords? After a while, they turn into normal ones.
- Once your deck is exhausted, you skip a turn to reshuffle your old cards into your deck. The same happens to your enemies, which adds more decisions to boss battles, which can last awhile.
This results in a deck building and battle system which, I think, won’t get stale even for minor encounters. There’s always an interesting decision to be made, and you constantly get new cards, too. I think there are about a thousand different ones in the game.
Even grinding comes in different forms! Of course, you can grind for EXP or money. Grinding could also mean fighting weak enemies to craft a lot of cards. Due to the ageing, it could technically also mean waiting for certain cards to grow stronger. Conversely, if you ignore the crafting, you could get weaker by grinding too much since all your healing items spoil!
The shampoo, I think, ages after 336 hours. 100% completion seems like madness. Luckily, I’ve botched that already, so I’m not tempted.
As for breaking items: I usually hate those, too. Both the recent Zelda games and the last Animal Crossing suffered from them. But they work here, for reasons I can’t explain. For the most part, I got better items long before the old ones perished.