First things first, we have to create our party. You can either choose from the pre-made batch of characters, or make your own. I, of course, choose to make my own (Moe the Wizard just doesn't strike fear into the hearts of my enemies...). During character creation, we encounter the first "thing" in the game that the game doesn't explain to you at all. Getting no explanation for things happens A LOT in this game. You'll see, just wait. So, when creating we "Enroll" the first character, the character is assigned bonus points, which you use to increase certain stats of the character. This is important because many of the games classes have certain stats requirements in order to become said class. For a new player, you would simply select Enroll and go with whatever Bonus Points are assigned, and go on happily creating your character. What the game doesn't tell you is that the BPs are randomly given to you when you hit Enroll. The range of BPs you can get is 6-60. That is quite the big range. You typically get around 10 points, and only get 60 if you are really lucky. So, what you can do here is hit Enroll, then see how many BPs you get. If it's a low number, simply exit out of the Enroll screen, then go back in. BPs are again chosen randomly, so you can repeat this process until you get a nice high number of BPs. However, getting a really high number may take a while, so if you want beefy characters early on, be prepared for some monotony. I typically settled for BPs in the 20-40 range. I don't have the patience to keep rerolling for hours before even starting the game to get 60 BPs.
Anyway, there are 15 classes and only 6 spots on your party, though you can have multiple parties of adventurers if you really want to. So, what to choose? Things here aren't as quite as simple as making a standard D&D party and going off to fight baddies. You need to take into account certain skills you need. Pretty much every treasure I have encountered so far has been trapped, so you need some Thievery skills to prevent from springing the traps. Thieves are, of course, the best at this, but Rangers and Ninjas also have some Thievery skills, but not quite as good as the Thief. But the Thief doesn't bring a whole lot to the table during your actual fights. Also, Clerics can Appraise (Identify) the items you find. Every item you pick up is unidentified, so you either need the Cleric in your party to do it, or pay the Campus Store to do it. So, Clerics can save you a lot of money. Luckily, Clerics also learn Black Magic in this game, so they can do some damage in combat. Also, you create new weapons in this game through Alchemy, so an Alchemist in your party will help with this, and again prevent you from paying the Laboratory to do it. So yes, lots of options. This is the party I went with:
Male Drake Warrior (Straight up melee damage)
Female Felpier Samurai (Melee damage with some Black Magic)
Male Dwarf Devout (White Magic (heals) and some melee damage)
Male Diabolos Alchemist (Alchemy as mentioned above, with some Black Magic)
Male Erdgeist Wizard (The Boom Boom)
Female Halfling Thief (For... Thievery and being useless in battle)
So, I haven't mentioned what the Races do yet. Besides determining your starting stats and stat growth, the races also determine your groups Affinity rating. Basically, Affinity measures how well your group gets along together, and that is determined by race and alignment. Drakes only like other Drakes. Halflings like and are liked by everyone. Everyone hates Diabolos. Dwarves and Elves hate each other. So once you pick your races and Alignment (Good, Neutral, Evil), you are assigned Affinity. A higher Affinity rating means your character gets a stat boost, while a low one means a stat decrease. So, you need to keep that in mind when choosing races/classes. As it is, all of my characters have a 100% rating except the Diabolos at 94% and the Halfling at 97%. I figured the Diabolos would be risky, but I like their stats way to much not to use them. And its a friggin half-demon.
The Gang is Ready to Rock
So you finally have your party after all of that planning. Time to raid some dungeons! The 1st-person dungeon crawling aspect of the game is more or less standard fare seen in other games of this type. What's nice here is that the map automatically fills itself in, so you don't have to do the drawing like in Etrian Odyssey. That also means you can't make little notes to yourself on the map. Ah well. It seems like you won't be traversing the same dungeons/floors over and over here like you did in EO, so it probably fits better for CoH.
Aside from the map, the fights are fast, the enemies are interesting looking, and there is quite a bit of challenge here. Some enemies you breeze through, while others decimate you at first. Once nice change is that now when you get into fights, you don't simply fight against one row of enemies like you would normally see. Now, fights usually include multiple rows of enemies. Usually, the enemies in the back rows can't attack you unless they have ranged attacks, so you don't have to worry about getting hit by 10 enemies at once. The multiple rows of enemies serve to keep the fights a bit more interesting and make it so you get a bit more out of the game loading into the fight (which isn't to say there is an actual load time, it simply makes fights last a bit longer and give you more XP per fight).
So many Enemies... Let's FIGHT!
So far, I have enjoyed the dungeon crawling aspect of the game. The dungeons are pretty big and usually have multiple levels. Also, the layout of the maps is such that I feel like if I get into trouble and need to exit fast, I can get back to the entrance pretty quick. This may change in later dungeons however. As far as the classes, I haven't tried having one of my characters switch classes yet. Switching classes let's you keep spells you have learned from your previous class(es) (as long as you have enough spell slots on the new class), and resets yours level back to one. Basically just another customization option and a way to give your characters some more spells. You don't keep skills though, so you can't have a Warrior who can Appraise from his previous life as a Cleric.
So far, I am a bit unhappy with my Samurai and the Alchemist. The Samurai levels much slower than the Warrior and doesn't have the damage or HP of it either. The alchemist has yet to learn any Black Magic, and also levels slow. And since the equipment you can create through Alchemy is based on level, there have been a few items that I have had the materials to create, but had to go pay money at the Lab because my slow leveling Alchemist couldn't make that item yet, even though he knew the recipe.
There are a few elements of the game that bug me so far, such as certain things not being explained to you at all (as previously mentioned) and how much time you need to speed out of the dungeons micro managing your inventory. The process of getting everything Appraised, checking the Lab to for the Recipe Book to see if you can make anything new, checking for materials and dropping items off at the Dormitory lockers, and finally resting your characters is quite time consuming and cumbersome. I would like to spend more time adventuring and less time dealing with my inventory. I kind of hope that in the sequel (which is being released in Japan soon) removes the clunky Alchemy system and uses the material system that was used in Etrian Odyssey II. That system was nice, since you just sold back the materials you found to the shop, which automatically unlocked equipment and weapons to buy. No slow and boring Appraising and material juggling. This is about the only aspect of the game I don't really enjoy. Who knows, once I start rolling in the money, I may just pay for my weapons and not worry about the whole process, but the beginning of the game makes Appraising and Alchemy a necessity since money is hard to come by.
I will keep updating as I get deeper into the game, and give an update on how each class is doing. Until then, happy dungeon crawling.
Who Knows What Lies Ahead...
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