lobotomy42

Crimson Shroud

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This is a great little jRPG on the 3DS eShop. It has everything I want from a jRPG (complicated battle system, slightly pretentious linear storyline) without any of the crap (unskippable cutscenes, huge stretches of grinding.) It also throws in some neat aesthetic references to tabletop RPGs: rendering the characters as figurines, having the player roll dice with the touch screen. I recommend it!

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It was talked about a bit in the recently played thread.

I think it's quite a neat thing, i would recommend it highly.

The way the story is conveyed via the aesthetic of a tabletop game narrated by an unseen dungeon master is just so cool. The battle system also draws an interesting balance between JRPG mechanics and PNP ones.

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I just finished this and really enjoyed it.  Somehow it's really nice to have a JRPG that doesn't take months to finish. 

 

Also really enjoyed the tabletop element and the way the story was told.  The whole thing was like an easier, thoroughly enjoyable offshoot of vagrant story.  And even though the art was kind of cribbing from the old Squaresoft stuff it still managed to look quite nice, hopefully the team will release something in the future.

 

I got it on sale too (5 clams), I love these level 5 Guild projects, they are the games that I am the most excited for these days. 

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I've been stuck in Crimson Shroud forever, apparently i need a random drop to progress, and i just can't get the thing to drop. Seems to be a common roadblock issue people have with the game.

Still, huge love for the game.

The Guild games have all been very interesting so far, it's been a pretty fascinating little anthology.

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It was released in Europe, so it should be there. It came out a while ago now, so maybe you might have to dig a bit.

... I just checked, it's still on sale too, alongside the other Guild 01 games. (Liberation Maiden and Aeroporter.) Look for the sales heading in the eShop.

Edit: In response to a comment Andrej made, I feel like i should point out that Crimson Shroud was designed by Yasumi Matsuno. So if it feels like it's cribbing from old Square stuff like Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics, it's because it's from the same designer.

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Edit: In response to a comment Andrej made, I feel like i should point out that Crimson Shroud was designed by Yasumi Matsuno. So if it feels like it's cribbing from old Square stuff like Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics, it's because it's from the same designer.

 

Well I meant specifically the art style. The lead artist on Vagrant Story was Akihiko Yoshida and he didn't work on Crimson Shroud, but the game is definitely stretching to emulate his style (mostly succesfully).

 

Also to get past the place where you are stuck you have to repeadetly go back to the area named "waterway" (or atleast waterway is part of the name, can't quite remember now) until you get an 'Obsidian Daphne' as loot. Skeleton Mages drop the Obsidian Daphne, make sure to kill the skeleton archers first to get some mages to respawn as replacements.  The rest of the game doesn't have a wait-for-item-drop sequence, so it moves more briskly.

 

Also...atleast on the first play through...the ending didn't really make much sense to me.

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Oh, silly me, I thought it was a more recent game, I didn't even know the eShop had a sale section.

 

I'll probably get this and Liberation Maiden, but when Lobotomy said the combat was complicated it did worry me. Just how complicated is it?

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Also to get past the place where you are stuck you have to repeadetly go back to the area named "waterway" (or atleast waterway is part of the name, can't quite remember now) until you get an 'Obsidian Daphne' as loot. Skeleton Mages drop the Obsidian Daphne, make sure to kill the skeleton archers first to get some mages to respawn as replacements.  The rest of the game doesn't have a wait-for-item-drop sequence, so it moves more briskly.

Yeah, i know this, but i did like a dozen battles or more and it still didn't drop.

I'm absolutely certain i was doing the right thing in the right place.

 

I'll probably get this and Liberation Maiden, but when Lobotomy said the combat was complicated it did worry me. Just how complicated is it?

It's a very indepth, richly complex JRPG. It's supposed to be a shorter, smaller game, but it's a set of systems that could easily support a full-length adventure. It's pretty excellent. I'd say it's more complex than the typical JRPG, but i don't think you should be put off by that.

Liberation Maiden is a lot of fun too, i quite like it. I find the unskippable dialogue prompts extremely annoying, but it's a very cool little action game.

 

Aeroporter is probably the toughest Guild 01 game to get into, it's an extremely specific appeal, a very masochistic puzzle game. Don't feel bad about skipping it.

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I second the excellent combat system.  You shouldn't be afraid of its complexity, I think this is by far the easiest Matsuno game I've played-- I never saw a game over screen.

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So it's a baby game then?

I may go ahead and pick it up, though the trailer in the eShop didn't really convey any complexity. Could anyone elaborate on the system?

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It's been a while since i played, so let's see what i can remember.

For starters, there's just loads of statistical granularity, and you don't gain levels in the traditional sense, most growth your characters see is via crafting/finding better equipment. (Thus allowing a great deal of flexibility in their builds, though you're still going to broadly end up with a tank, a rogue, and a mage no matter what.)

You can attack or cast magic and additionally perform a special skill per each character turn, you can combo elements together across turns to earn dice of increasingly higher values as the combo goes on.

The dice go into your inventory, and you can spend them to buff hit/damage values for various actions.

There's also a bit of a variable turn cooldown depending on which moves you use.

I think that's more or less the core of it, as i recall. A lot of the spells and skills themselves also function in fairly interesting ways.

I think i might be underselling it, i think it's a really good battle system.

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I started playing and it's pretty great so far, but I must know something is there a limit to the monsters in each area? I did encounter enemies twice in the same place, so I'm not sure.

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An area that has spawning monsters will keep spawning monsters until the plot advances (I think).  At the beginning there are many such areas but less and less as it goes on. 

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Is it me or do you have to actually grind before the final boss? I can't barely do any damage to it with any of my weapon... Way to reproduce a tabletop game, guys... I'm pretty sure you can't and don't have to grind in those. :|

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I didn't have to grind beforehand but it was a bit of a slog going through the fight as only Giauque could do any damage, so I just supported him with the other two characters.  It was a slog, I used that Club you get from the minotaur + Thor Smash to do enough damage per turn to make the fight winnable.

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As I recall, I did "grind" a few times, but it's usually just trying out new abilities / combinations to see what would be effective.  What I really liked about this game was the way you had to make decisions about what skills to include on a given character's item build - it felt like I was making real cost/benefit tradeoff decisions.

 

Of course, what I *didn't* like was the (intentional?) ambiguity of a lot of the skill descriptions, which meant that the only reliable way to determine good combinations was to actually test them.

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