I was inspired by Sullla and T-Hawk to start doing challenge runs of Star Ocean 2's remake. Star Ocean 2 is a PS1 era action RPG which is best known for three things - being a real-time take on the "standard" JRPG formula that heavily borrows tropes from both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, having extremely extensive crafting mechanics, especially for an action RPG, and being made by tri-Ace of Valkyrie Profile fame. The original game had a lot of weird jank, which the remake largely removes and smoothens out with some quality of life additions. That said, neither version is perfect - while I definitely prefer the remake overall, it tends to get too easy during normal play, while the original's jank mostly makes it feel mediocre and tedious.

To that end, I decided to do a bunch of solo runs, both for challenge and for academic curiosity. The game doesn't play particularly worse when dealt with a solo member - in fact, a lot of mechanics feel tailored to a solo fighter scenario, like perfectly dodging blows or evading frontal beam attacks, and regular play with all four party members often gets quite chaotic.

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These runs do away with a lot of the clutter above by only featuring the actions of my controlled character and the enemies, thus letting me more accurately assess each character and their movesets.
My challenge follows these rules: Ruleset Link

I have written reports for six characters:

Claude's Solo Run

Rena's Solo Run

Celine's Solo Run

Ashton's Solo Run

Dias' Solo Run

Leon's Solo Run

But I'm not done yet, of course. I still have seven characters to go through. I will update this thread whenever I write reports on them. I don't know how regular I will be, but I will try to keep a steady pace.

Alright, hope you enjoy these!

As you know I try to make sure greens have ded lurkers in their first pitboss, but Mackoti backed out. So asking that even if you've read a bit, I think it would be fine if you switched to ded lurking Rickety. Pretty please!

For example editing a spell save modifier.

I just get some suggestion from one of my friend who is casual player who want to play Warlord mod but don't want to start without any kind of super overpowered build suggestion. I think my play style is too abnormal to suggest anything OP to him, so I decide to ask my forumer friends about what would be OP build to use and play in Warlord mod. So you all feel free to post and brag about. I will later compile them into guide in Moddb.

Hi,

A helper spreadsheet to help you keep track of which spells you researched and which you can research and how many remain to research in each realm.
I usually color a learned spell in green and researchable spell in yellow and write the number of available to research above  each group.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1...sp=sharing

copy it to your own spreadsheet to use it

Why do Rare spells take up MORE of a Zone's Treasure Budget than Very Rare? Shouldn't it be opposite?

I am not very good at this game and I don't claim to understand balance, but I am especially puzzled by Spell Binding. Why does it have such a LONG cooldown? Why does the AI want to Spell Blast it?
If this were a PVP game, I would be pretty happy if in the Very-Rare-Spells phase of the game (late game), my opponents were spending a huge amount of their casting skill just to give themselves a boost to research, which is kind of what I see when I look at Spell Binding.

In which ricketyclik learns how to play online multiplayer Civ IV.

And here I am again, trying to play two Pitboss games at the same time. Because last time I did that it went so well for me.

Way past time for a lurker thread for this.

Any expectations or predictions pre-map?

Speaking of the map, I've been rolling some different types and shaking my head no a lot.  But I think I finally have a concept I like.  More to come after I roll a few and get some screenshots together.