Elkor_Alish: Bring a heavy magic group? Half your opponents will have the passive to negate all magic. Bring a combat heavy group? They will have passives that debuff so after every attack you make you have to spend a turn getting rid of the negatives allowing them two turns to your every one. But don't bring too many support units or else the game will punish you with combat that goes on FOR-F***ING-EVER.
And the enemies always know what passives you have and act accordingly while you have to figure things out blindly for yourself. Take the No Flank passive on your entire squad, you will never see an enemy try and flank again. They always know what the max movement is of your entire party so when you do start to dominate they can cheese away to little corners where you have to run them down.
You would think this makes the game difficult but it doesn't. It isn't hard, it is just tedious and absolutely frustrating. It is a poorly conceived, poorly designed, and poorly executed game.
The only way to win is not to play.
Very later reply, but thanks for the info and observations. I am considering the game, so what your said here gave me pause.
So just to be clear, are you saying the enemies ALWAYS scale with the player and then get a boost on top of it? And does this occur for every single battle or just some specific scripted battles?
Speaking of battles, are they random or scripted or a mix of both?
I don't know if you still recall much about the game since it seems you played a while back, but thanks for any replies. :)
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Enemies scale with the player in all battles, but there is a limit that depends on the map and on one of the difficulty options. By default, the early game maps will always have weak enemies, no matter how high you level up. This can be quite useful if, say, you want to get characters to recover from injuries. (In default settings, a character who dies during battle gets an injury afterwords, which penalizes stats and goes away when you fight a battle without using the character.)
As for battles, they're scripted. However, for most areas, you can return to the area and select a menu option to start a "random" battle. Unlike Final Fantasy Tactics, random battles only occur when you select the menu option to start one, so no worries about getting into too many random battles when trying to get where you need to go.
Speaking of difficulty, the game has a rather nice custom difficulty menu, where you can individually set difficulty parameters. For example:
* You can separately adjust enemy stat multipliers and the amount of equipment enemies get.
* You can set how high enemies scale. (I believe there's an option to uncap it, so you could fight level 99 enemies on an early map, for example.)
* You can turn off injuries, or make them permanent.
* You can change how often enemies are allowed to use revive abilities. If you really don't like enemies reviving each other, you can disable that entirely. (Note that the game also puts a limit on how many enemy healers can spawn. This can't be changed, but is there because players often find it no fun to fight against enemies that can all heal each other.)
