Double Posting to say, Lol Slowflake. Megaman 2 is WEAK, WEAK WEAK GAME. YOU WANT CHALLENGING GAME? GET MEGAMAN 9. Also Lulz. >_>

After reading topics on gfaqs of people wanting others to gift them games, I found them pathetic enough to nerdrage.

And, no, Slowflake, he doesn't. They weren't TOTAL douchebags though, because they didn't also give him status blocking. One user said they tried spamming Thunder and retreating until he was paralyzed, then got in a few more hits.

His super armor is actually what ensured my demise- I Cross Chopped him and he just stood there, and immediately used that 5-way Psychic thing, and next thing I know Machamp is laying on the floor with 1582 in red letters above his body, which conveniently was more than twice his max HP. "LOSE..."

I think I'm gonna look for a good Magnezone tonight.

Edit: Since I'm guessing you haven't unlocked EX-4 yet (or haven't made it to the second round) I should tell you that you don't face Mewtwo twice; the legendary birds are the final part of the first round, and then Mewtwo joins once you've done enough damage to the uber dragons.

What I don't get is why a Gliscor is among the assortment of pokes Mewtwo brings into the fray. Gengar, P-Z, Alakazam, Electabuzz, even Honchkrow to a degree, I get. But Gliscor? Why not Magnezone or Togekiss to complement the whole "special attack" theme?

Whoa there, I'll let you know that I DOMINATED MM3. Well, in relative terms... it seems like it was designed to be a walk in the park compared to MM2. Up to Cossack's castle in MM4... I'm going to try and do both castles today, after E-tank grinding in Skull Man's stage. Too bad that I don't get to keep my E-tanks when closing the game like in MM3, but at least I don't lose them every game over like in MM2.

And Repto, you were right, MM4 has quite the amazing arsenal. The one weak link is the Skull Barrier, which epically fails in comparison to even the Leaf Shield, but other than that, I'm impressed. Seven good weapons are just as good as two exceptional ones like in MM2, plus I don't get to suck against as many Robot Masters because their weakness is a sucky weapon. You know, like Air Man?

Edit: Done and done. Jeesh, that gauntlet took a lot of E-tanks, though. Skull Man and Dive Man were especially nasty. The rest? Not so much. Loved Wily level 1 with all the Mettaurs, though.

And guess what? ToS2 came in the mail today. Yes, I'm aware it doesn't measure up to the original, but I'm having a hard time thinking of many games that do.

You're LPing one right now, Slowflake...

Whoa whoa whoa, I said OoT was only something I could be looking at in a few years.

I was referring to the SMB3?

Enjoy ToS2, Slow. Don't compare it to the original, because you're right, it doesn't measure up. That doesn't change the fact that it's probably my fourth or fifth favorite game of all time, now, and the battle system is both a step up and a step down from the original. Unison attacks are weakened and made more accessible, with the advantage that you can execute a Mystic Arte almost every battle. Also, the monster system is kind of addicting, but the monsters are too overpowered. Trust me, it's not uncommon to have monsters doing several thousand damage more than you per hit in the first ten hours of the game. If you want a challenge, use the ToS cast, but they suck. Hard. I would just advise trying to evolve your monsters enough so that they revert to level one and never get too strong, because they really do overshadow the human characters by a great deal.

Right now I only have the two monsters from Lake Sinoa Cave, so I'm not exactly seeing the awesomeness. I assume they're this game's equivalent of Pidgey and Rattata. So many friggin cutscenes, too. At least the original kept a reasonable balance.

As for the battle system, obviously I'm still too early to judge, but one thing I noticed is that the merging of the worlds clearly had some effect on the gravity, because I'm jumping like I'm on the freaking moon. With that said, I can actually attack in the air without anything called Twin Tiger Blade or Omega Tempest having to do with it.

Edit: So apparently I'm like two minutes away from the end of the first chapter. Are you kidding me? That's it? I know there are eight chapters in the game, but unless this one is the shortest and most cutscene-heavy, this isn't going to be a very long game!

Edit 2: New video, Crystal part 136!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwv7i-PtJ0Y&fmt=18

I forgot to mention... one chapter into ToS2, and I've heard more apologies than in the whole first game, I think. Had Emil not gone apeshit at the end, I would've written off his chances to get out of my hated characters list.

MM5 is likely to feel like a major step down both in difficulty and weapon usefulness (it has a weapon that sucks so much it's not even useful against the boss; you'll know what it is immediately) but it has some really cool levels, music and bosses nonetheless, so I liked it.

Since this was one of the first MM games I played aside from 2, it scored a bit of fondness on that alone.

Lemme guess... Star Crash? Just a wild guess, but shield weapons suck so much... I mean, the only reason why Skull Barrier was any good against Dive Man is because he can take so much abuse from every other weapon.

And my brother was reading the ToS2 manual just now, and he kept insisting that Richter was Kratos. While I can see some resemblance, I had to drill the fact that Kratos isn't in the game into his head over and over and over. I don't know much about the game's story, but I do know this. Kratos decided to isolate himself on a drifting comet for the rest of time. He's not coming back because some fanfiction plot bunnies wanted him to.

He's not Kratos, don't worry. Don't be surprised if you don't get a lot of monsters early on. The element grid is fairly random and hard to manipulate early on, but once you get an elemental tech for Emil, it becomes quite a bit easier. Be patient with the game, the story and characters get better, I promise. The whole point of Emil is that he's a whiny, cowardly bitch close to the start of the game. As for Emil acting under low gravity... Yeah, he can be a major air-based character. You can leap 10 meters in the air with him, slash the enemy 3-8 times, do a base, arcane, base, arcane, and then follow up with a Mystic Arte, I believe. It's awesome.

Also, the first chapter is the shortest. The only other short chapter is chapter seven. The game lasted 40 hours for me on my first playthrough, but keep in mind that a lot of that is doing quests, which are pretty much pointless unless you want slightly more powerful items and like being overlevelled. There is a sidequest that you can only do by participating in a series of quests beginning in chapter five, though.

Of course Slow doesn't mind being overleveled, even if he didn't get that way on purpose ;)

Actually I wasn't thinking of Star Crash, though it's still a shitty weapon. Better than Skull Barrier only in that you can fire it and consume more energy in the process (it's useful against Wily 1.)

The worst weapon in the game as well as quite possibly the shittiest weapon in any MM game... is Power Stone. It has not one redeeming quality. It's hard to hit with, forces you to pause to remove the shots that are guaranteed to never hit, lest you wait forever for them to stay offscreen, and doesn't even do enough damage to warrant using it over the broken charge shot in this game.

This game pretty easily wins the award for worst weapon assortment, methinks. MM6 isn't going to do an awful lot to make up for it, either, but that's just because the letdown from 4 to 5 was so huge, and no game has such a good collection until 9. Speaking of that, are you even willing to pay to download MM9?

Edit: Thank you, youtube! Want a (sort of) safe way to deal with the nearly unstoppable killing machine in EX4 named Mewtwo? Get a Darkrai. And teach it Dark Void. It even works while Mewtwo is preparing an attack, which hitting him alone will not prevent. Move in, get in several smacks, back off, and try to void him again before he attacks. From what I saw, sleeping him constantly so that he doesn't do anything at all is a little to precise to manage, so it does take a little running far with your tail between your legs (not that Darky has one) to avoid that evil 5-way Psychic move.

I'll probably buy MM9 once I get there.

As for recruiting monsters... yeah, I can see how that'd be a hard task. Right now, the only way for me to do so would be using Marta's entire TP clip on First Aid. Hardly convenient. Speaking of First Aid, I'm wondering, is the rest of the white magic selection as brutal as in the first game?

There are still fewer options than other elements for Light magic, but monsters can learn quite a few light-based techs of their own. Marta's offensive light techs... Photon, Prism Sword, and Divine Saber. They're all fairly powerful, but yeah, Light magic is still pretty rare.

As an aside, you'll find that there are reasons that monsters are broken beyond just incredible stats and levels that grow at rates ten times that of the human characters. Example: Fenrir and Orion, two of the three final evolutions of a Black Wolf, have techs that are essentially high level magic cast instantly. A Fenrir has a clone of Absolute as one of it's techs, one that does just as much damage and is classified as a physical move, getting rid of any cast times and possible interruption. It's not uncommon for a single monster to finish a battle before you even arrive at an enemy.

By white magic I was referring to healing magic. All kinds of offensive magic stunk big time in ToS, but Nurse and Revitalize were just crazy.

I've also been hearing a lot of good about Ravenous, Wolf Heddin and Sandsl... err, Galf Beast. How do Fenrir and Orion stack up compared to those three?

And speaking of clones, I was checking a FAQ that mentioned a Healing Circle clone that cost 112 TP at one point. Would that one be instantaneous as well?

Ravenous is a black mage, and probably one of the best you'll find. Wolf Heddin and Galf Beast are probably both better than Fenrir and Orion, but I haven't used either and can't vouch for them personally.

Sorry about the white-light mix-up, there. Marta is broken when it comes to late-game healing. Speed casts stack in ToS2, and if you can get Marta up to the 8-11 range of speed casting levels, she can pretty much cast any mid-level spell instantly, including Photon and Heal. In fact, with Photon, she'll skip the incantation entirely, replacing it with 'Blah blah blah, PHOTON!'

Marta may stray towards Raine's S-line of skills, but she pulls it off a lot better than Raine ever could. She can cast more quickly, or even instantaneously, and free run allows more control over the battlefield and gives her options to dodge. As for other healing in the game, Raine sucks just as hard as all the other ToS1 characters, but monsters have potential. You'd have to make sure that the monster you're aiming for will have the 'Heal' strategy, but you can just give any monster the grimoires that teach First Aid, Heal, Dispel, Cure, and other healing abilities.

How hard to find is the Healing Circle tome? Might slap this on a spellcasting monster...

Good to see Marta has some use as a white mage... the way you were talking about how brutal monsters were, I was thinking of maybe having Emil with three monsters, while keeping Marta on the sidelines. Which reminds me, do characters and monsters that are in your party, but not your active one (as opposed to being in storage), gain experience?

And my brother just raised a very good point... what's up with Colette still having her Cruxis Crystal? Whatever happened to bye-bye Exspheres? Don't answer if it turns out to be a major plot point, of course.

You can get a Sylph's Circle grimoire with two methods: One, you can synthesize it with Ink, Bear Skin, Phoenix Wing, and two Elemental Fragments. The only item I can see being a problem there is the Phoenix Wing. In fact, you can pretty much forget it, because I think the only way to get one involves a missable sidequest and a battle with an extremely overlevelled group of monsters. The other way is with an S rank quest, which don't appear until the last two chapters. I believe that covers all of the ways of getting the Healing Circle tome.

To answer your other questions... I think that monsters and characters (only Emil and Marta, of course) gain experience if they don't partake in combat, but only the base experience. Bonus experience applies only to characters in battle, which is significant in this game because it's not uncommon to receive bonus experience that is more than five times the worth of the regular experience. (I have fond memories of glancing at the victory screen and see 35,000+ experience gained from a group of monsters that normally give out 8,000 total.)

I think everyone who had exspheres in ToS1 kept them for the sequel, although I could be wrong. They likely used the same reasoning that they did in the first game, that being they couldn't survive without exspheres, and that they should be used for something. It might have something to do with Cruxis Crystals being a bit different from exspheres, too, though that seems less likely to me. OR - The developers could've just missed that, or were lazy, or any number of other things. In any case, exspheres really don't affect the story of ToS2 at all, so it's probably best to just not worry about it and ignore their existence.

By bonus experience we're talking about the combo bonus, right? My brother was playing yesterday, and he had a party of Emil, Marta, two monsters, and two more monsters not in the active party, and he checked that out, and the result was that everyone got the same amount of experience.

Yeah, I was talking about combo experience. Also, if that's the case, it appears that I was wrong. Certain Tales games use the system that I described, but it doesn't look like ToS2 is one of them. ToS1 does use the system, from what I remember.