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

Put your Let's Plays in here.
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Amazing writing, I was expecting a THATS NO MOON joke but no one's in the mood for that

They are in the mood for loot though, blessed boxes of joy

Lore-A-Lua is either hell on earth or a joke, I was running Destroy/Gun Trick/Hacker for this myself and once again, it must be said, Trash Pickup is an absolute monster of a buff, completely tearing her gimmicks apart and enabling continued offense at a breakneck pace, Bush Trap feeding off Counters is nice and all, but it just can't be overstated how much action economy Trash Pickup gives


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Destroyer is pretty much the most broken class in 2020. It just deals out shitloads of damage, more than any other class in the game. In fact it was the class the developers recommended for solo runs.

Counters are absolutely ridiculous and a big difference between DS and the later 7th Dragon games was that in DS, every enemy (except for 1 boss that was not even a dragon) could only act once per turn. Since all dragons now attack twice per turn, Hard Target essentially deals octuple damage, on top of protecting the rest of your party, and is a free 2-Depth.

Even if you have a luvshock Hacker in the party denying the enemy turns, that's not even a detriment as Destroyers can just swap to spamming Quintets instead. And the way SP works in the later 7th Dragon games makes it far easier to spread out your skill build instead of having to treat every last bit of SP as a precious resource.

The base infliction rate for a Destroyer inflicting D-Depth is 100%, though in practice it'll either be 50% or 45%. Random encounters multiply the infliction rate by 0.5, while dragons and bosses multiply it by 0.45. I don't even know why that 0.05 distinction is there. Only 3 enemies break this rule. D1 and D2 have a multiplier of 1, so they're guaranteed to be smacked with D-Depth after a punch. (Most likely so you can actually use Forward Punch and see what they can do.) The hopeless boss fight version of War Cry is literally the only enemy in the entire game that's immune to D-Depth. And every other ailment, frankly. Even Bloom Seeds can get hit with D-Depth despite being immune to all other ailments.

All of the guaranteed D-Depth skills just bypass infliction calculations. So not even immunities (if they existed) save enemies from being inflicted with it. Funnily enough, God Hands in VFD work a bit differently for some reason. Jab and other "guaranteed" infliction skills just have their rates set to 200%. In practice this doesn't really do much, as the actual main change was that they removed their innate ability to inflict D G-Depth and just set it to 100% for various attacks, so basic attacks can no longer inflict them outside of using God Charge. (G-Depth multipliers doesn't go lower than 0.5x in VFD, and no enemy is immune.)

Fun fact, Destroy React is the only react skill in the entire game that's RNG based. All other reacts just have the chance set to 100%. This was likely because the condition that sets it off is far more reliable than any other react condition. (Score a crit with the Trickster. Hack into an enemy. Or make sure an enemy takes off enough of your Samurai's life.) And you can get extra turns within extra turns, (capped to 3 after certain setups in DS could generate infinite extra turns.) so you can easily rack up 3 free extra turns to deal damage with, and can start slamming down Quintets right off the bat.

Rita was good.

Destroyers are, indeed, that broken if any hypothetical people were still doubting after all of that. With some game knowledge they pretty much destroy (heh) what difficulty most normal dragon encounters have since the AI in those is so heavily patternized and they have the highest physical attack in the game just to make their counters and Quintet even more disgusting than those multipliers look. And of course Destroy React is just ridiculous. About the only issue (if you can even call it that) is how finnicky getting milage out of Rage Bomber is but tbh they don't even need that to be the most broken class in the game.

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Destroyers good, Death's Door is wonderful, and since its just a buff, you can just throw it up whenever and enjoy the safety net for the rest of the fight, especially because like way too much of the Destroy skillkit, it costs 0 MP for some fucking reason

Destroy On Sight is just rad, as you said, its free real estate, but damn if it doesn't make its value heard in full when it just wipes randoms or gives you a nice upper hand at the start of a boss, its a power thats utterly unnecessary, but delightfully mighty to have regardless, it truly impresses the dominant physical might of a Destroyer just from their presence

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Part 25: the quiet rooms
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Welcome back. Happy Birthday, Koron. Chapter 4 begins now.

Update 25 wrote:ImageSo no matter how life may throw wrenches in my path, I'm going to continue being positive! Let's Positive Thinking, a wiser reporter than me once said.
Maya is pretty great, I agree.

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You see, Captain Inomiko, from the readings we've taken, it appears you're unaffected due to antibodies you generated during your month-long coma.
This is pretty much the in-universe reason why 2% max life as Bloom damage is no longer a mechanic and the Bloom is just decoration in dungeons. Evidently the world of Eden had weaker immune systems. Imagine if you had to deal with that mechanic in the post-DS games.

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Part 26: one thing reality
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It's another Underground chapter!

Heck yeah Stealth II. Also double heck yeah Cerberus, that thing stays relevent for a rather absurd amount of time.

Not quite as enthusiastic about the Kokubunji Searsand but they can't all be gold (well okay they could but gotta have realistic expectations).

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Part 27: lily in desert
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You know, sometimes I wonder if some parts of this whole update name theming are too obscure for people to get. Anyway, sand is literally sand.

oh so that's what volcanic turtles do

also my cultural illiteracy tends to be such that if there was a theme i probably wouldn't get it even if it weren't obscure

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There were times during my playthrough of 2020 and II where I was just stunned and had to recheck the release dates of the games just to make sure they weren't recent releases. I have to wonder what the developers think of these games now. I know some of the localizers for VFD were quite horrified when lines about 2020 in that game were pointed out to them in that year.

Snapdragons are using Sand Breath, not Thunder Breath, hence why it blinds you. :v:

Machine Dragons are utterly pathetic. Only has like 1100 HP when several other dragons around this point had 2000 or so.

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Part 28: electric chair
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In this one, we discuss the meaning of the word 'tsundere'.

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Ugh, Stony Dragons. Absolute assholes in DS, assholes here too. Especially since those fuckers can attack twice per turn now!

Neck Bite makes their petrification more likely to hit... which barely matters for one of their petrification moves cause uh. See for yourself.
Neck Bite: Non-elemental Fang attack to one party member. ATK-based. 0.75x damage. Hits 2 times. Debuffs the target. Multiplies ailment susceptibility by 1.5x for 5 turns.
Stone Gaze: Targets one party member. 99% chance to inflict Petrification for 5 turns.
Stone Breath Non-elemental Breath attack to all party members. MAT-based. 0.25x damage. 35% chance to inflict Petrification for 5 turns.
Yeah they got a lot of upgrades from DS! Stone Gaze isn't a coin flip anymore and is basically guaranteed death, and they picked up an AOE version because fuck you. Of course if you have Petrification immunity they're complete and utter jokes.

Also, I'm going to say now that Petrification is fucking weird in 2020. For some reason it has a defined turn duration, which is why Trash Pickup was able to cure it in the update. Waiting out the duration normally will also make it wear off. So it's just like EO5 Petrification, right where it's just a super stun and not a different flavor of instant death? Not really. While it is essentially a super stun, it carries over between battles. It also doesn't deny EXP or SP gains so if you're about to finish the battle, you don't need to worry about dispelling that to avoid losing out on payouts. However, it still counts as death, even if it's temporary. This means that a petrified party, even if they were 1 turn away from the ailment wearing off, triggers a game over. Yeah I dunno what the fuck. :psyduck:

Later games fixed this and changed it back to being a permanent duration ailment, which also means Trash Pickup no longer works on it.
Image They are certainly hunters.
Nice callback, 2020. :v:

Wait, petrify has a finite duration in this game? How odd and that kind of makes Stony Dragons even more rage inducing, somehow. And now I'm trying to think of other games that had temporary fatal status ailments and failing.

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Some Dungeon Crawlers have temporary Paralysis that's considered fatal(and some have persistent paralysis, because why not), uhhh, yeah I can't think of a whole ton of examples even though I know they exist.

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Part 29: Crimson Fighters
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It's time for the main event.

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Normally human type enemies are immune to hacking in 2020 (later games it varies. Cybersecurity in the future just isn't what it used to be, it seems. :v:) however Neko and Daigo are an odd exception. In the previous bouts with them, they were immune to Hacking (and Curse for that matter.) However in this battle, their firewalls apparently stopped functioning, cause they have a 0.5x multiplier to it and a 0.65x multiplier to Curse. Takehaya on the other hand is immune to Hack, so his firewalls are working right. Though he still has a 0.65x multiplier to Curse, so feedback.exe can be used to get some free bonus damage in this fight.

Don't expect it to backlash against the entire party though when they use the team attack. SKY Impact is sourced as coming only from Takehaya, there's just a lot of custom animation data involved to make it look all fancy. Which is still a lot of free reflect damage mind you, it'll only just hit him. And it's also the reason why everyone else still gets to act after that. Incidentally despite the animations, it's flagged as a non-elemental melee attack. So Icebreaker won't help against it, but Parry Shield will.

Ah, Takehaya, you terminal idiot. Also geez Natsume sure is a fucked up piece of work isn't she.

Also SKY Impact really hurts if you take it on the chin, good thing Neko only has 1800 HP because that'd probably be pretty unpleasant if you had a low offense party.

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In a deep, dark night, in a grassy field,
a beast struck flint, making stars.
Wind blew past, howling, stirring up the winter.

Light had long forsaken the beast;
only the moon's glow did it know,
and the stars held in its arms.
It welcomed its pain, hatred, savagery.

Memories surged like the waves after rain:
a sweet, sweet serenade,
and the slave became as beautiful as a queen.


-Adapted from Chuuya Nakahara's poem, "Young Beast's Song".

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Chisa Inomiko's Reminiscence, I: The Farmhand and the Young Lady


(Reminiscence updates contain no gameplay, but are important for the narrative. Those interested in the narrative, please enjoy.)

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You're really trying to make us all want to tear some heads off aren't you? I mean this is good context for a bunch of things, but also this is riling up a kind of anger I feel only for disgusting guardians, it's really impressive and I await the conclusion!

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Chisa Inomiko's Reminiscence, III: The Young Lady, the Farmhand, and the Monster


This concludes Chisa Inomiko's Reminiscence. The next update will resume normal gameplay footage.

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Merry Christmas! Here's a Christmas miracle for you.

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Part 30: You Are Not Part Of The Control Group
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After a thirty-thousand word detour, we finish Chapter 4.

Trinitro is one of those bosses that never managed to leave that much of an impression outside of its design. It burns you, sometimes it burns you a lot, at points it puts up regen that's too minor to be a significant setback but might let it live for one more turn and sometimes you have to scramble because it decided your psychic needed to take a nap on the hot metal floor. Like don't get me wrong, it's a nice breather after Lore-A-Lua's fuckery but overall one of the game's less mechanically interesting bosses.
Update 30 wrote:ImageThe depths of human depravity in the name of upholding tradition never cease to amaze me.
Mood.

On a happier note, heck yeah baths and heck yeah Stealth III.

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Trinitro... exists. The design itself is neat, but it's definitely not what I'd consider one of the more noteworthy Imperial Dragons in the game. Its impact on the environment is a lot less grandiose compared to an upside down building, the graveyard, and the motherfucking rail cage.

Gameplay wise if you have a Hacker that skilled right, yeah basically GG. They can completely destroy this fight. Most of Trinitro's attacks are Fire damage, so Firewall at max level makes it a laughingstock. Tail Blade and the basic attacks are the only attacks that aren't fire damage and they're just neutral damage. Add in Trash Pickup or Burn prevention, and regeneration and it basically can't do much to you. The fight can take a while though cause 9000 LIFE is quite a lot at this point in the game.

If you don't have a Hacker or didn't skill it in such a way to make the boss a training dummy, yeah you're definitely going to want to come in with Burn protection because that damage will add up with how hard it can hit. You absolutely don't want to take that much incoming damage and Trinitro can hit very hard where Firewall is basically a permanent defend command that lets you facetank even its special attacks. Flame Bane basically goes from facetankable to something you have to spend a turn guarding against.



That thing Kinu mentioned with the 2 different attack animations is something the Imperial Dragons (and a few other dragons) have. While most enemies have 1 attack animation, these guys have 2. It is kind of neat seeing these big bad dragons have multiple attack animations, though the other main reason for that is to basically screw with the Destroyer's counters to make them a little less effective. They did make some mistakes assigning the wrong attack type to the wrong animation. Jigowatt's basic attack animation where it headbutts you is mistakenly classified as a ranged attack, meaning that both of its basic attacks are ranged.

Sadly VFD dropped this. Because God Hand (the Destroyer equivalent in that game) no longer has access to separate counters for each animation type, there was no need for this, and all enemies, bosses included, are now stuck with 1 basic attack animation, and it's always classified as melee. Melee and ranged are the only remaining animation types, as there are some skills that do make a distinction between those.

Also bizarre fun fact, Neko does not have a melee attack animation, so if you luvshock her in the 3rd SKY battle, you'll just see a damage number come out of nowhere because she doesn't have an animation for doing that.


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Ah, Psychics. Yeah they're about as simple in gameplay as they look on the surface here. Just a reliable, glass-cannon-y beatstick. Not much to say other than that veils are way more powerful here than in DS cause you can stack a counter team to ridiculous heights and it's just a ton of damage.

Well, for those of you familiar with the DS incarnation of the class, the Mage. You might be familiar with the sheer caveats and mechanical favoritism that class had. Their attacks cannot ever be blocked if their damage is too low, any enemy with over 100 INT is considered to only have a 100 INT when it comes to damage calculations defensively (which doesn't even apply to the Mage holy shit). But on the other hand any damage that is dealt over 10 times their INT is reduced by a whopping 80%!

If you're wondering if Psychic has to deal with any of that, then no. There's no damage cap in place. Concentrate away once you get your hands on that. There's no downside for using it, unlike in the DS game. Heck unlike EO, 7th Dragon's charges are patient enough to wait for you to actually use up an eligible attack instead of being wasted on a non-applicable skill. On the other hand they don't benefit from the sheer mechanical favoritism Mages had, so that's a bit of a downer. They also can't easily toss out EX where you had 3 uses of it in DS where it charges up far slower in the post-DS games so that's a considerable damage loss. They don't have a different damage formula either, it's just a stat swap with magic stats so nothing really complex under the surface either.

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Part 31: Atheistic Love
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I'm back. Unfortunately, I happen to be coming back with an update of nothing but sidequests. In this one, the gang cures COVID.

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On a replay through this game a year ago, I did a bit of an eyebrow raise when I saw this sidequest.



But holy shit seeing that text pop up was an uncanny coincidence. Game was released in 2011 too.

EDIT: Actually I did some checking around and this prophetic coincidence can be more attributed to the fan translation, which was released in 2016. The original Japanese text was more akin to "Document of infectious diseases."

7th Dragon 2020, in which things continue to go wrong in extremely depressing and occasionally painfully realistic ways.

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Part 32: A God's Beast
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In this one, we find out how that whole disappearance business is going.

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So uh, some of the people you rescued in this game? Yeah a few of those went missing, and subsequently got killed. Essentially you led them to their deaths... except not really. See if you didn't rescue the NPCs that were going to die later in chapter 5 by the time they went missing in chapter 4? They'd actually disappear from the game forever from their original spots. Effectively meaning that they died either way, so at least you gave em shelter for a bit if you did rescue them.

However if you didn't rescue them? If you failed to do so before the cutoff point of finishing chapter 3, that'll actually be counted against you, and you won't be able to obtain all the rewards from the person who rewards you for rescuing people. Though don't worry too much about that, as they accounted for that and the missable rewards aren't exactly vital. Nothing to fret over really.



My favorite part about this dragon is that this is a pun the devs specifically went out of their way to make, as the Japanese word for dragonfly... is something completely unrelated to dragons.

That scene is (well, this whole chapter, really)... uh yeah I hope people didn't think that 7th Dragon 2020 would be done with the suffering yet because we've still got more circles of hell to go through.

Meanwhile, destroyers just casually breaking the game by functioning as intended.

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Part 33: Destruction
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In this one, we meet our boss for the evening.

What -is- Sleepy Hollow even supposed to be anyways? Other than incredibly annoying, I mean.

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I suspect it was originally much longer, possibly with a unique area, but something happened and we ended up with an imperial dragon wrecking Shibuya.
Right, so about that. According to the artbook and the game data, it seems like originally Shibuya was meant to be the 2nd area period, with Sleepy Hollow being fought then. Like it's visibly fucked up, but the Imperial Dragon doesn't come into play until later. So the order would have been War Cry, Sleepy Hollow, Jigowatt (this explains why this dragon was a bit of a difficulty spike amongst some of the playerbase, along with its ailment resistances being lower than they were supposed to be), Lore-A-Lua, and then Trinitro.

Also no you can't kill Sleepy Hollow here. It has 80,000 HP in these 2 fights. (The real fight only has 9,000 HP.) Even if you, did the game would just say that nothing happened and continue the game like normal. VFD's cast might be able to burst that down, but 2020's classes? Yeah no, even at 99, no party makeup will have enough damage output to deal that much damage in 5 turns.
RandomKesaranPasaran wrote:
Thu Mar 24, 2022 11:42 pm
What -is- Sleepy Hollow even supposed to be anyways? Other than incredibly annoying, I mean.
It's supposed to be taking after a butterfly.


Ah, there's the t-rex without a destroyer experience I remember.

Sleepy Hollow is kind of a chump if you can deal with the confusion one way or another, otherwise, kind of a bad time. But really, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to.

Koron and Richter continue to be great.

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