A Better Place (Day 166)

We acquired our first round of class changes in Seiken Densetsu 3 last night. I think we're about five or six hours in, maybe level 20 or so. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but we did restart the game with a different character comp. We started out with Angela/Hawk/Lise but we decided we weren't happy with how often we had to pause the gameplay to cast Angela's spells. We started over with Duran/Hawk/Kevin, a full melee composition. Duran and Kevin both have healing spells available to them, while Hawk has access to elemental jutsus if we ever need to expoit a specific weakness.

We decided to promote Duran and Kevin to their light classes (Knight and Monk), while promoting Hawk to his dark class (Ninja). All of their base stats went up by quite a bit and they acquired a new technique (which you activate by pressing B). Duran and Hawk have standard single-target techs that unfortunately pause gameplay to activate, but Kevin has a tech that hits all targets on screen. Unfortunately, he randomly alternates between it and a single-target throw attack. It does good damage as well, but generally the multi-target attack is preferred.

Since I'm taking Duran along the light path, he gained the ability to equip shields. This increases his evasion significantly (apparently there's no block mechanic in the game) and even shows up in game. I was surprised, considering his default sprite does not include a shield. For some reason, I assumed he would continue wielding his two-handed sword as normal. Kevin is a werewolf; on the light path he acquired the ability to assume some of his wolf powers during the day with an ability called Pressure Point. Hawk acquired the ability to throw shurikens and use various elemental jutsus.

I still haven't made a final decision on Duran's class. My option are Paladin and Lord. Paladin is a very strong offensive class with access to Saint Saber, a spell that adds Light damage to melee attacks. This is apparently quite helpful against some of the game's final bosses. The Lord class acquires the ability to cast his Heal Light spell on multiple targets, which would mean we wouldn't have to rely so heavily on Poto Oils. The Paladin route is the only way we would be able to get Saint Saber, so it's a tough choice.

On the other hand, Kevin has access to a multi-heal class as well, but my co-op partner would prefer to go God Hand, which gets an ability that fills the tech meter instantly. I'm not sure he's completely decided yet, though. We're more or less agreed that we're going to upgrade Hawk to Nightblade, because it has a lot of useful damage spells that debuff stats, as well as some other useful damage skills. I think it might also be Hawk's most offensive class.

I think I do enjoy the game more than Secret of Mana, but it does inherit some of its poor traits, most notably the unfortunate frequency that combat is paused to play animations. It reminds me of Tales of Phantasia in a way. Several spells pause combat (mostly summons) but there's a good variety of spells that don't. Almost all spells in SD3 pause combat for a noticeable duration. I'm not sure how difficult it would have been at the time to allow action in the background while some of these spells were casting, but it would have been nice.