Seems to be playing the import, since he seems unfamiliar with the reason why Jian heads to the city of beastmen early on (wasn't he making a delivery?).
With experience and money divided into a mutually exclusive game system, and money being earned in such an indirect manner, it should be no surprise that Dragon Song requires quite a bit of "grinding" – repetitive combat excursions to build up the characters. The game's target audience of hardcore, traditional RPG fans probably won't mind a bit.
I wonder what Kizyr and Alunissage will say about his comments as a whole... Accurate?
A little, but I gather from Kizyr's comments that missions are much more lucrative if you know what you're actually being asked to do rather than just looking at pictures of items and reading a name and taking those items to that person. I did find myself in one bad situation where there were no missions available and equipment to buy that I couldn't afford, but again I may be missing something big there. EXP-wise, I've usually gone through each area only once in the EXP-gathering mode, which has been sufficient so far. I did do some levelling up for one boss, but overall it's almost always been a matter of affording better equipment than of levelling up. However, I'm probably less than halfway through; had to put it on hold for several days.
Well, the preview was all right. The only thing that's inaccurate is the 'grinding' comment.
Levelling up is really fast (I'm at 43 right now, though it's 33 hours into the game). Money's not much of a problem, usually, but I've been doing occasional jobs on the side as I go through the main story, so most of the time I have a semi-steady cash flow. It's like TSS in that there are occasions when you can't buy everything all at once, and you have to pick and choose based on what you can afford.
They usually involve carrying items (dropped by enemies or bought in one town) to a person in a given town. After that, you take the receipt to any Gad's Express and get paid. Sometimes this takes a while if you need to hunt down some items in a few forests or caves, sometimes you either have almost all the items you need to deliver, or you can buy them in Eau Belrouge (still don't know how they'll translate that town).
Jobs with rarer items or higher quantities have better payoffs. KF
If I remember correctly wasn't there something similar in Lunar2 for Sega CD where you deliver bottles between East and West Nota for a little Silver? It's a very trivial amount of pay, and is just a little side thing, but it's a delivery job in a Lunar game.
Yeah, you can do that if you want. It's about the stupidest way imaginable to earn cash, though. 10 S for several screens worth of walking.
Well... YEAH! Unless you belong to People for the Ethical Treatment of Monters, it's a boring, crappy, low-paying job. I just think it's kind of cool that Hiro and his party got to play the roles of delivery folks. Almost like unintentional foreshadowing.
Um yeah... delivering packages was just getting started as a trade, so naturally the techniques of transporting the packages weren't very efficient so they only got 10S per package. 1000 yrs later with much more efficient means of delivery it's grown into a thriving... aw dammit! I forgot how much later DS took place.
Aw hell, why am I even bothering trying to correct you.
Probably because there's a lot of things wrong with what I just posted. Sleep deprivation can do awful things to a person, (like make them post with typos, and mix up when games took place), especially when that person's sarcastic.
I kind of took an extended break after one point in the game making more deliveries--partly to afford the last piece of some really expensive equipment. It's kind of fun now being able to see missions rated three stars--some of them have payoffs of about 9000S.
I know if I do get around to doing a walkthrough, it'll have to have a detailed list of which monsters in which areas drop which items. But, it'll be odd doing a walkthrough for a game that's out in English. ...maybe I can just get a head start?
By the way, finding some way to rip the sprites from Lunar: DS, or connect my DS to my computer, would be really helpful in that regard. Maybe I could make some movies to show more of what the gameplay is like--unless y'all want lousy webcam quality with my hands getting in the way of the screen. KF
Honestly, I don't believe there is a way to hook your DS up to your computer unless a place like LikSang has a gadget for it. I believe there's also no DS emulators, which means I won't be doing large screenshot sections for it anytime soon. Which is fine, I don't like the idea of doing that for a new game. Once it's been out a few years and has sold what it's going to sell, then it's nice to have large libraries for referencing.
There's plenty of NDS emulators: Dualis, IdeaS, Ensata, and DSemu to name a few. It's a big problem for Nintendo and other third party developers, because unlike Snes and Nes emulators they can (and probably will) lose profits. That's why Nintendo started cracking down on emulation sites when the GBA came out. Fortunately, the current selection of DS emulators all suck, and usually only run demos or are glitchy.
There is a method of hooking the DS up to the PC to rip games/screenshots, but I don't think it's legal. It's a similar process to how roms are ripped.
I don't see how the hardware needed to connect a DS to a computer is any more illegal than using a webcam to record playing the DS. Ripping games, yeah, I can see the problems with that. But that's with usage, rather than the hardware itself. KF
Wouldn't it be legal for the one backup you're allowed to create of your own software? ROM ripping is only a problem if someone other than the owner of the original media is using it.
Um yeah... delivering packages was just getting started as a trade, so naturally the techniques of transporting the packages weren't very efficient so they only got 10S per package. 1000 yrs later with much more efficient means of delivery it's grown into a thriving... aw dammit! I forgot how much later DS took place.
