7th Dragon 2020 ~ Sympathy for Chisa Inomiko (an LP EOV Anniversary Project)

Put your Let's Plays in here.
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in my experience they're more than fast enough to use it before the enemy attacks, usually. plus a lot of these telegraphed attacks are pretty slow anyway. and popping an entire heal aero when only two people got hurt tends to be pretty unnecessary, destroyer can usually tank another hit (and if they can't then the attack killed the last person because seriously), trickster is prone to just dodging the thing, and not all attacks you wanna defend against are full party attacks. in my experience decoy mirror is a really good skill because of a lot of edge cases, worst case scenario is it's a better defend and that's pretty great

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Appendix A: Regarding the Backgrounds of Unit 13

During the runup to the LP's launch, I posted short stories about each of the characters' backstories in Rea's server. These are canonical to the LP, so you might find them interesting.

ImageThe Young Lady and the Cloaked Man
ImageThe Camera Girl and her Cats
ImageThe Haggard Woman and her Family
ImageThe Hitchhiker and the Waiting List
ImageThe Hermit and the Rabbit Doll
ImageThe Otaku and the World that Wasn't
ImageHomura Akaneno and her Old Friend

—hey, you haven't shown up yet, Homura! Fine, you can stay.

Angel wrote:
Wed Nov 04, 2020 3:54 pm
in my experience they're more than fast enough to use it before the enemy attacks, usually. plus a lot of these telegraphed attacks are pretty slow anyway. and popping an entire heal aero when only two people got hurt tends to be pretty unnecessary, destroyer can usually tank another hit (and if they can't then the attack killed the last person because seriously), trickster is prone to just dodging the thing, and not all attacks you wanna defend against are full party attacks. in my experience decoy mirror is a really good skill because of a lot of edge cases, worst case scenario is it's a better defend and that's pretty great
I'd argue that if you're in a situation where you need to heal two people, you probably don't have the spare actions to take heal up one at a time, and as such popping an aero is the best play, but that might be colored by my experience of playing the game underleveled (I like rotating classes and dislike grinding) making the game that much more vicious.
It really is a skill that I would describe as "the best skill you never use" because even a really good defend command is still a defend command, and as such something that you don't really use unless you really feel like you need to.

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Appendix B: The Boy's Got Wings (Regarding the Events of Eight Years Ago)


A summary of the events of how Chisa and Mio met. Satsuki wants those hot deets.

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Fun fact, this game actually has difficulty modes, Standard and Casual. They're both what you'd expect, though Casual is blatantly tacked on. As for why I say this. What Casual does is reduce damage by 15%, and reduces enemies; life by 15%. As well as giving a 5% boost to SP and EXP payouts. Sounds good, but there's one big problem. The damage reduction applies to everyone's damage! From what I can tell, they just slapped on a check at the end of the damage formula that goes "Is the player playing on Casual mode? Multiply damage by 0.85 if so." Without any regard for who is dealing the damage. So the 15% HP reduction is entirely negated by that mistake, meaning the only thing it really does for you is reduce damage and put you ahead on the level curve ever so slightly.

Later games just straight up have an entirely different stat table that's used for enemies on Casual mode, avoiding this mistake entirely.

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that's dumb AF

Oops.

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I'm living for two things specifically: Satsuki's enthusiasm for Chisa and Mio's story and Araxx's discoveries as he goes through the data

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Part 6: Tiny Village in the Desert
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We get the lay of our new house. Also, Mom shows up.

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rinzukodas wrote:
Thu Nov 12, 2020 12:08 am
I'm living for two things specifically: Satsuki's enthusiasm for Chisa and Mio's story and Araxx's discoveries as he goes through the data
I have basically finished tearing apart 2020 (not II yet) to the point where it is basically an entirely open book now.

Speaking of which guess what, the Samurai buff over time skills are bugged! The data table is misaligned. Normally the turn 1 values (which are stuck at 1x) are there as dummy values as casting it on the first turn doesn't do anything. Unfortunately, the turn 2 effect starts off at the turn 1 column instead! Meaning that on the turn after you cast the buffs... you get no benefit. And have to wait for the turn after that for them to start kicking in. And because 1 of the turns is accidentally wasted, the effect cuts off at the turn 9 column instead of the turn 10 column, making these skills worse than intended.

This bug was not fixed in II.

What's one of these games without a misaligned data table or two, eh? Though considering the state of those skills as designed that's just insult to injury. At least it's not EO2j evade buffs.

just going to point out that going off of my napkin math, that bug cuts Redfire to an average boost of 3%. without the bug Redfire barely outpaces a single use of the samurai's charge skill over its entire duration. factoring in the bug one use of motionless yield a significantly higher damage increase.

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Part 7: Dancer in the Street
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In this one, we head to the next dungeon and Richter incurs the ire of some slimes.

Getting hit with slime and traffic signs has got to suck, poor Richter.

Oh man regenerator, I wrote that skill off as complete trash because just look at it. 3-4 HP is completely worthless. percentage based healing is good later in the game, but early on? and with a low level skill too? I'd definitely say it should have been unlocked later in the game so it can actually have remotely respectable numbers instead of something so worthless no player will ever use it again.

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I'd say it's relatively fine where it is. It's a little more than the amount of effective HP increase Defense Booster would be, and it helps undo MAT damage which Defense Booster can't do at this point, and the SP cost system makes grabbing suboptimal skills a lot less punishing in an EO game or 7th Dragon DS. And really, what's a Hacker even going to do at this point in the game, where they still haven't gotten their hands on their core mechanic? Even at 15% max Life Heal, I got a ton of mileage out of it by mid to late-game.

Also that remix of Jungle Navigation is nice, maybe give that a listen.

Oh I can certainly see that it's useful, but it suffers a lot from being percentage healing available very early, when your HP pools are too small for it to be able to generate a significant amount of health. when the action economy is as tight as it is in this game the first impression from a skill is really important, it's all to easy to get turned off by early results and not give it a chance when the skill can really shine, for a class like the hacker that's particularly a problem since they're going to get their fun/flashy gimmick stuff soon and that's going to make the turns that could be spent using regenerator much more valuable.
It really is an unfortunate situation because regenerator is useful, but 3-4 HP of healing gives a seriously weak first impression and by the time your HP pools are beefy enough for it get decent numbers the hacker has fun stuff they could be doing instead, making it hard to justify giving the skill a chance to shine when the percentage healing can get decent results.

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Cloudmonkey98 wrote:
Thu Oct 15, 2020 8:18 am
I think starting Hacker with the Def Buff was a smart design move, because it makes you notice that Def Buff GOOD, and it'll only get stronger(also Hack is useless without follow up skills, and nobody gets more then 1 skill to start save Trickster, who gets 1 Dagger and 1 Gun skill)
Meanwhile Chisa is adorable and I love her
Also as it turns out, the Hacker's Attack and Defense Boosters have an additional hidden effect. Attack Booster directly increases the ATK stat by +5 and Defense Booster directly increases the DEF stat by +3, and the multipliers are applied right after that. Not only does this let those buffs do more in the earlygame due to the Paper Mario math, it also scales well later on due that number effectively making the party's stats go up to the next equipment tier, since those increases are about as how much weapons and armor get more powerful numerically for each upgrade.


Oh boy I have many words about luvshock and they mostly boil down to "free turns? in this (action) Economy? Sign me the hell up!" especially when you're underlevelled getting a free turn can really make a huge difference in a lot of fights.
Oh and hacking's a thing too, I really like the way it's implemented; you have plenty of time to get used to the core function of the Hacker as a buff support, then they give you access to the fun gimmick of hacking, and the hacking weakness is a really neat way to keep it clear that hacking is something you do after the important support stuff is dealt with.

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Part 9: Working Today, Too
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In this one, we do some manual work with Counters.Party and Chisa deals with the tribulations of motherhood.

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Part 10: Smash Up!
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In this one, Richter suffers from job anxiety.

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Rival Arrival is one of the best tracks in the game. Definitely give that one a listen! Also yeah counter parties are just nuts and tear through dragons since they activate twice if the dragon opts to attack your party twice.

Counter party quick kills on dragons are really satisfying and never get old.

Unlike the underground.

Not too long before the game makes up for that though.

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I don't have an update for you all, but happy new year. 2020 is over now for us. Thankfully, since this LP covers two games, I still have a year to go before I become obsolete and dated and wither into dust. Please wish Unit 13 luck in escaping 2020.

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We're back now.

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Part 11: The World Beneath Your Feet
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Remember to eat candy, kids.

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Unfortunately in 7th Dragon DS, Curse is still poop due to being basically a direct sister of EO. (Also for some reason Curse got nerfed there???)

In the later games, it's an actual DPS ailment. Feedback is absurd. Most dragons and bosses just have a 0.8x multiplier against Curse, which basically amounts to a 76% chance on average to land it. Which is absolutely ridiculous when it basically takes 1 to 2 turns on average to land Feedback (averaging close to 1 turn), meaning you can save EX for Hacking attempts instead so you can set up luvshock.exe easily. Combo that with luvshock.exe and enemies essentially shred themselves for 1575% damage! On top of denying a turn to them which can be huge in dragon and boss fights. Unfortunately luvshock's damage does take into account the target's defense stat, so if it's particularly high, the self attacks won't do much, but fortunately there's not too many cases where you have to worry about that.

Hackers can be a ridiculously strong support if you use them right.

Incidentally Thunder Breath here is a mistranslation. It's actually supposed to be Sand Breath, which is why it blinds instead of doing something like paralyzing, and not the first time this error is made either. Which is funny cause there are actual Thunder Breaths in this game. This version of Thunder Breath has a 35% chance to blind for 3 turns and multiplies accuracy by 0.85x. Enemy blind for the most part can be face tanked through, namely cause a ton of player skills in this game have super high accuracy.

Well that's one way to make curse relevent.

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Not following this LP, but the theme song was recently remastered by it's composer, sasakure.uk. It's good.

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you should follow this lp imo


Even by trash EO/7thD skill standards, I have no idea how anyone looked at Sacrifice and thought "yes, this is something someone would willingly spend skill points on." I can only assume it involved copious amounts of alchohol.

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Blind is basically not a real ailment in 2020. In fact accuracy is a really underutilized mechanic overall in 2020 outside of very specific circumstances. The accuracy formula is really simple: Accuracy = (Unit Accuracy * Skill Accuracy * Blind Factor) - Evasion. Most of the time everyone has 100% innate accuracy. The blind accuracy multipliers are rather ineffective. Most of the time enemy blind just applies a 0.75x multiplier to accuracy. The thing is, on the player side, most attacking skills in the game have at least 1.5x accuracy. Just look at the Samurai and Trickster writeups. So your party can easily bypass the blind by either not giving a damn if they're a Hacker, or just using an attacking skill since that still has over 100% accuracy.

And against enemies and dragons? Well it can work but a 15% reduction isn't really something notable, though you can stack ailments. But against bosses, don't even bother. Nearly every single attacking skill from a boss has the "Cannot Miss" flag. Meaning most of the time it'll only have an effect on their regular attacks (which they do use periodically so it's not entirely nothing.)

Venom Boost got nerf hammered hard from 7th Dragon DS, because in DS it can be stacked infinitely, and always multiplied poison damage by 1.3x no matter how many Healers were in the party, which is rather ridiculous when you have 4 Healers in the party. (Yes they handed the lethal poison to the medic class.) It's still really damn good in 2020, which kind of speaks to how game shattering it could be in DS.

Surprise Hunt nullifying only dragons walking into your back seems like a rather small bonus, doesn't it? Guess what, it's bugged. It was supposed to work on all surprise attacks period, but doesn't work on random encounters in 2020. This was fixed in 2020-II. Sadly the preemptive aspect doesn't work on dragon battles or boss fights, but you can already walk into dragons' backs anyways for the former.

There may be several of you wondering why Sacrifice even exists. That skill originated from DS. For those of you familiar with that game, that is probably all the explanation you need. To go more into depth, it was one of the Rogue's skills. What's worse was that it was an EX skill and easily the worst one in the game because it permanently killed the Rogue there too! Also it deleted whatever equipment the Rogue had as insult to injury. At least 2020's version returns them to you because there is plenty of one time equipment in the game. It had slightly different effects there. If no one in the enemy party was 10 or more levels above the Rogue, they would either have a 100% base chance to instantly die, or take 70% of their max LIFE as damage if the former effect didn't activate, as well as the full heal. Otherwise if even a single enemy was that much stronger, everyone just got smacked for 100% typeless damage. This still kills the Rogue. I can only assume the thought was "what if we let players have their characters commit heroic sacrifices through gameplay instead of cutscenes?" I'm not sure why it made it into 2020 though.

Incidentally, quite a few players ended up permanently killing the Trickster by accident and were understandably pissed afterwards. How did this happen? Well the Japanese description is kind of vague...
Large damage to all enemies + Party fully recovers + User disappears (LOST)
Yeah. Pokeytax's skill descriptions tried to be more accurate and his version of Sacrifice's description was at least:
Lose one's life forever to turn the tables.
Though it can be easy to gloss over that because "What kind of game would permanently kill my party members through using a skill?" is probably an easy thought to have.

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God I love Rush Shot, initially the numbers seem weird, the attacks numbers all get smaller save for hit count, but when you actually look at it, its still cumulatively getting stronger, far stronger, Rush Shot MAX is just a hell of an attack and can dish out absurd amounts of hurt while being pretty friggin reliable at spinning the Assassin React wheels, I usually would spin some off of Bush Trap since its cheaper, and good utility to have in effect still
Now who's Zach? I grow curiouser and curiouser about Wonderful Satsuki

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I'm posting this on Kinu's behalf.
Kinu Nishimura wrote: Image

Part 12: Watch Your Step!
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In this one, there’s a big boy.

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Part 13: Steel Myself for Battle
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In this one, Chisa wakes up on the wrong side of the bed.

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According to a developer interview, that was intended to be Gigawatt, not Jigowatt (It's a Back to the Future reference, yes.) But one of the writers misspelled it and they just ended up rolling with it.

Make sense.

I forgot how much underground there was between Inverted Toyko City Hall and the next real dungeon.

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Part 14: Lost in Green
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In this episode, let's talk about our feelings.

Oh. That. Thaaaaaat secret passage. Yeah that's just rude.

I, too, appreciate Richter and his endearing dorkiness.

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