Slime Time (Patreon)

We’re in Garbage Time. Our schedules are thrown off by holidays and days off, the week between Christmas and New Years a blur. I usually take this time to get some gaming in and that’s no different this year. I’m wrapping up my playthrough of Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake and will probably finish it tonight or tomorrow. It’s a great remake and I have only minor gripes. The fixed camera angle mixed with the 3D environments makes it tricky to navigate a few areas. Not every status effect has a correlating icon on the battle screen, requiring players to look at the character themselves. Minor, but keeping all of the information in one place would be handy. I also wish there was a full Auto Battle mode that only stopped between turns if cancelled. Otherwise, it’s a great version of a great RPG.

I used the Tactics menu and allowed the game to make most of the battle choices for my party members through much of the late game. I usually prefer to control every aspect of my party, but it made grinding much faster so I stuck with it. I noticed that the party fights much better than it ever could under human control. When players choose the party’s actions they pick all four actions (one for each party member) at the start of a turn. Then, like most traditional JRPGS, these actions play out with the enemies actions in an order determined by hidden agility rolls. You can plan, but not with a lot of specificity. When the computer controls the party’s actions it chooses each action one at a time. So if an enemy attacks my priest and takes it to low health the computer will use the hero’s turn to cast FullHeal. It can adjust on the fly whereas the player cannot. An amusing effect of this is that if an enemy is at very low health the computer knows this and will pick attacks for the party that will do just enough damage to kill them. Unless players have a strategy guide and are calculating enemy HP totals in real time, there is no way to plan in that way. I didn’t feel like I lost as much as I thought I would by letting my party fight on autopilot as much as I did. Each location has a few enemies and once I knew the best way through each encounter I’d sit there and choose the same actions over and over. Not much of a difference in the end, although I did take back control on occasion when the party would make boneheaded decisions. Surprisingly, it didn’t happen that often!

I hope you all enjoy some relaxation in during the final days of the year and have a safe New Years Eve.   

-Ian