RPG Insanity

Before bothering to do things like show up for work today, I put the finishing touches on this one.

Only thing I didn't do as far as killing stuff was the stupid little cactus bounty you get roughly mid-way through the game. I tried, but never found him. Apparently, the gods of random battles were not kind.

Took about 18-19 hours with most of the final 3-4 of that total being me grinding like crazy to beat the first boss in the final dungeon, as 3/4 characters have to be out of their golems, he has brutal party-wide attacks and can take a beating before falling. That guy was the toughest thing for me easily. FAR tougher than the second boss in that dungeon and a little bit harder than the final boss or the super-tough optional bounty (Gilanoss or whatever). A big part of that was because you could be in the golems for those other fights and if you put the $$$ into your golems, they'll be SO much stronger and more durable than your actual characters.

The final boss wasn't that hard -- you just might want to get used to the idea you'll be finishing the battle without a full party, as he will, at some point, charge an attack and then blast someone for enough damage to go through all their armor defense and golem health. The ultimate bounty was more a battle of attrition where if you're really patient and have enough of those barrier recharge items, you'll be okay (at least if you've moved on to the top golems and have worked with them enough to be really tough -- I ran into him while grinding to fight that final dungeon boss that was giving me trouble and that was late-game enough for me to be able to stand up to it.

Nicley done. I've played the game that inspired Rusted Emmeth (Metal Max Rerturns) And i have to say that Metal max was NOT forgiving. The 1st boss was a long as heck battle of attrition against 2 turrets that could take care of your tanks easily. I guess the games did a good job of replicating the battle of attrition war is.

I'd played Metal Saga on the PS2 and it took about no time at all to figure out that Rusted Emeth was a small scale version of the games in that series, with golems replacing tanks.

I wasn't a huge fan of Metal Saga overall. It was just a weird, unfocused game with a plot that stayed behind the scenes while you hunted bounties, so you just went around the world, killing whatever the bounty board told you to kill while occasionally moving the plot (maybe, I have no actual memories about the plot other than "occasionally met a couple mysterious enigmatic people"). I remember that game being kind of similar as far as difficulty spikes, too. You'd go awhile without being overly challenged by much and then suddenly start getting stomped.

If anything, I thought the smaller focus of Rusted Emeth was a strength. The plot was paper-thin and simple, but it was at least the thing that motivated the party's actions. The bounties were a nice addition, ranging from random boss-level encounters to side-quest bosses to actual in-game bosses. The latter was a nice touch, because as I mentioned before, one minor annoyance I have with Kemco games is just how many bosses have nothing to do with anything and are essentially nothing more than a big monster that appears because, well, it's the end of the dungeon and we need something tough to fight. You didn't have that here. The bandit leader you have to fight to get the ability to sail to the western continent was a bounty that you'd tried to take out before, but he was well-hidden. When you have to fight the insane doll in the abandoned town on the northeastern island, there are a lot of people in the nearby town who have dialogue about it. To me, it's always nice to have that bit of background that sort of places those bosses in the game's world. Just makes things feel a bit more fleshed out.

I can understand that. To be fair, it was one team's successful attempt to make a JRPG fully open-world hence the very unfocused gameplay. The SNES version was no exception as i needed to use GameFAQs and then gave up on the game itself being too open for me. It's always nice to have a direction.