Your friends also develop a bunch of handy new combat abilities as you build up their social links, so it’s wise to keep your interactions with them positive. Occasionally your friends and other characters you know might get captured. Once you understand the consequences of falling into this dark realm, the reward for saving someone becomes very satisfying, especially after all the investigating you complete.
You usually have about two weeks before the fog returns to save someone. You can even get creative with your 16 save slots to use the timeline to your advantage and you don’t lose too much progress – an easy thing to do in this game without careful planning. The more you know about victims, the better, so pay attention to all the details in this immersing game.
In three difficulty levels, the easy route gives you 10 lives in each segment, but you lose the ability to change the outcome of the game with your choices, which produces an extremely high replay value. The default normal difficulty gives you opportunities to increase your skills by choosing the right answers to class questions. The game even expands on the background behind the correct answer, so you’re going to be learning as well. Expert is the of course the most difficult level. The game expands to five main statistics from the previous three: strength, magic, endurance, agility, and luck. The amount of magic often determines how long a group can last though the fatigue levels in the previous installment are gone.
The combat mode works well, but some of the styles, like kung fu over weapons, could have been expanded a bit more. With more control over your friends, the scenarios expand nicely while better combat controls help advance to the ultimate goal of finding the culprit behind these crimes while helping others along the way. You have the standard camera options and maps to navigate the irregular areas about 10 to 12 floors deep. You engage in combat by contacting enemies then fighting them using as many as seven different methods. Exit points exist about every five floors and save points are located on the highest floor in advance of each area’s main villain or boss. The challenging bosses can be defeated, but the trial and error technique makes your conquest a bit slower.
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