Goblin Stone FINISHED!!
Three MegaBoss fights in Goblin Stone are fun. At least! They are tied into narrated story screens, which also have a nice comics/cartoon style giving many laughs!
Naturally the fights and special moves of Goblins become quickly BORING. If you try the extremely boring grind it will be the Death of your Goblin Stone gameplay. So i near entirely bypassed the unbelievable BAD Grind..
Even without grind, you must fight your way to story events, which only unfold at the end of maps and even those fights become quickly BORING. Since Goblin powers remain same from Midgame, there are no new Guild Powers/Spells Upgrades offered. Well for me, who hacked and maxed out everything grindable by midgame... So when a longer fight-special attack-spell sequence started I just ALT+TABBED out of Goblin Stone and was eagerly reading the supremely exciting South Korean
SOLO LEVELING WEBTOON as CBR with SumatraPDF, which is the best amazing smooth-scrollable +
smooth zoomable Webtoon/COMICS CBR reader in the world!!
You just have to fine-set its zoom levels. I just manually entered increments until 140, IIRC. So I could smooth-zoom the supremely beautiful "comic book pages"!! Also made many screenshots - as I always do, when encountering HIGH QUALITY ART in movies, TV Shows, cartoons and now Webtoons! For my diary titled, "Monster-Ideas / NPCs Compendium" for games development.
This way, the boring fights in my grind-hacked Goblin Stone were tolerable..
The Steam MIXED rating is totally justified as well. It was mainly for the bad bad bad grind and early bugs..
I hacked and thus nullified all grind and mostly went for the story. In the end the game grind for 'Access Badges' that allow progress into new maps was sooOOooo BORING that I was forced to hack he badges as well (game said I had 8/14, so I hacked it to 14/14 so I don't have to fight those boring grind-maps again and again just for these stupid badges) and also I created DemiGod Goblins. The usual maximum stat is 13 for Body = HP. 11 for Mind, which governs critical hit chance and about 12 for Spirit, which is for healing and priest attack spells. I set my characters around 47 to 30 in each of these. As a result, their HP increased drastically improving their survival rate and also their critical chance, plus they got bonuses to their POWER = Weapon Damage too. This way I could end boring fights quickly. The Gene-Mix minigame - to breed more powerful genes / Goblins I stopped, since I already made my six Goblins superpowered.. Also it became a time waster.
I could also eloquently bypass power-offering Dark Shrines, which permanently enhance goblins with dark power. But chance of failure at these Dark Shrines is high and then you can totally lose your goblin you are trying to enhance this way...
"- He ran away maddened by dark power..."
Even with DemiGod goblins the MEGABOSSES were able to kill a party member or two, if I didn't pay attention!
As a bonus, the game allows re-loading savegames between turns. Since I made backup copies of my save folder regularly, it was like re-loading a save. Normally the game only works in Ironman mode, but I didn't want to waste time with re-trying all stupid chance-tests, Dark Shrine failures = you lose your fav goblin and soldier-losses during fights.... Which were dramatic and felt exciting for about 3 hours, then the insanely bad grind quickly killed this soldier-losing drama fun as well. Plus I have little time for games nowadays, so I reduce game-time via hacking my way through hundreds of hours of grind in games to get through those in just a couple hours..
Also there are frequent Attribute Checks in form of special events. If your attributes are low, you are naturally FAILING these. But since I already increased all attributes to DemiGod level, I passed all such tests. There is an extreme test, where each of your attributes are tested THREE TIMES and you must - nigh impossibly - succeed. The end reward for this sole ingame Mega-Test was totally disappointing. I barely got a regular chest-worth of treasure...
So the Steam game rating of MIXED is justified. With the latest patches / fixes the developers at least made the Mid-Endgame stretch way less annoying. So I could finish the story.
There is a
NewGame+ offered, but I immediately rejected the offer with a crafty UNINSTALL. GOOD RIDDANCE!!!!!!! I just wanted to see the story, because the concept artist drawing the black&white story pictures is talented and the jokes were spot on!
Anyway, I'm glad, I could get through this game at least.
Onto finishing Wasteland 3 then!
With considerable hacks as well.
Attributes = playing 'All Builds During One Playthrough', money and of course I play 'Gaining the Bonuses of The Other Decision-Outcomes As Well'. By editing the savegame to give me all the bonuses, from the two other different story-decisions I didn't select.