Well, I started my '1980s' run of Paper Sorcerer and had my first binge and it's not really what I was expecting. The two first battles were really tough, I even needed Revive potions for the second one, but after that it all seemed to get very easy, until the end boss of the first stage, which was over-the-top hard, but I just managed to beat him first time, literally by the skin of my sorcerer's teeth, 2 out of my four characters left alive with under 30HP each.
And then it got easy again, all the way to the end-boss of stage 2. Well, Fighters were hard, until I had over 70 Defence per character, then they too became easy. But then that end-boss was brutal and my entire team died in about 4 turns. There could be many reasons for this, from character choices to character level to skill points to equipment, but at character level 10 it seems somewhat impossible, not just challengingly hard. And this brings me to my three main beefs with the game:
1. The phased combat is not at all helpful for applying heals and the like. At the beginning of the round I haven't a clue which of my characters is going to get hit the most and if my Cultist goes last I can't assign a heal in the first round but waiting until the last turn of the second round is waaay too down the line for anything approaching 'tactical' play. It's more finger's crossed reactionary play than forward planning. It has many options to force the enemy to attack one specific character, but I don't want one character to be wailed on, that's what I'm hoping they wont do.
2. The game doesn't give any indication of what's actually going on during combat. Again, its an awful lot of guesswork and finger's crossed. It says Defence is deducted before damage, but most of the time you'll get and give both damage and defence reduction at the same time, turn after turn. So how's it calculating that? Also, Resistances aren't statisised, so I have no idea how much Physical Resistance anyone has, whether the physical resistance spell is making much of a difference nor whether the purchased skills for this are either worth it or making a difference. Again, not really tactical decisions, but rather just finger's crossed decisions.
3. Like many of the 'casual' games that we mock the difficulty in this game seems to be entirely based on random spike damage and not a lot else, whether you're on easy difficulty or 1980s difficulty, the only real dangers are sudden influxes of ridiculously out of proportion spike damage and that this comes from a very small proportion of enemies to which it's either that or virtually no damage from very easy enemies. The kind of thing people complain about in Diablo-likes every day after a patch or expansion.
I have lots of other quibbles, mainly surrounding the awkward UI and lack of music options etc etc, but I could cope with all of those if the gameplay just felt more involving and understandable.
I've kind-of quit, but at the same time I want to experiment with some ways to see if I can beat this boss, it does at least have the challenge factor, which is always a strong motivator, but if the design of the game is a need to grind the respawning side-dungeons in order to manipulate character level rather than simply playing well at the correct character level then I doubt I'll be able to cope with grinding the game out, the main nonrespawning dungeons are grindy enough even without respawns.
