What made MARDEK fun for me was the reaction system in general. It made battles slightly more interactive. Some kind of management of mastering those reactions was also present there. You could try to master some reaction on a couple of your party members to make certain bosses/monsters less difficult due to dealing more damage, negating status effects, or taking less damage from a particular element or you could not and face making important decisions like making a compromise of equiping an armour piece/accessory over the other for it's reaction it gives. Even then, you only got a limited amount of Reaction Points to spend depending on your character level, which made it battles more complex and fun. I guess the cons of having this reaction system, is the possibility of making the game a little bit grindy, if you want a particular reaction mastered on more than 1 party member.
I just looked at my old save and it was funny to see how nutty the reaction system can really be too. Like in this link [LINK] . Like how my Mardek has a lot of chances to cause a lot of different status effects with one hit. Well, you also see a couple unavailable reactions you cannot normally learn since I edited my own .sol file and made Mardek learn unavailable reactions to see them for myself, but only did so when I was near the end of this chapter.
I am not sure how I feel about introducing the Body and Mind stats to replace the other ones. It brings another form of managing them in battle, but I am not sure if it is just as fun as the existing system, but it does make the battle slightly more realistic. To me STR, VIT, SPR, AGL, DEF, MDEF and EVA statistics seem to make perfect sense of what they mean jus like how it's clear what Physical Attack Reactions, Physical Defence Reactions, Magical Attack Reactions and Magical Defence Reactions are meant for. However, the only exception here is that STR and ATK seem ambiguous to me. Though If I am correct, ATK is just the base attack of a party member and STR only influences how strong physical attacks are? But again these stats are also great for bringing in the management aspect of the game and making compromises over things. Like being slightly under-leveled for a boss, the decisions would have to be made to use armour/accessories over the other one in case you do not want to get 1-hit KO'd from a particular skill/attack, but outputting less damage in general. Those elemental statistic are also fun, requiring you sometimes to use armour/weapons over the other than using always the same weapon. Also in general you need a battle tutorial either way, or at least most games have them of educating the user of what each statistic is meant for. I guess people who would have played pokémon in the past would seem to better understand those elemental statistics over other who do not, but that's an inevitability I suppose. It's at least more creative than those ordinary RPG maker games with the same ATK, MATK, DEF, MDEF attributes in a battle.
2
Tobias 1104~4Y
I suppose we'll need to find out from direct experience how well and how fun the system plays. From my own testing so far, it's fine, but it's hard to know how it'll be in the long run.
And I think having that many reactions equipped is just way too much! What level is Mardek there though??
1
ExtremeHunt3~4Y
He is level 99 in my save. So he deals quite a lot of damage, but also heals for a lot, to almost full HP every hit due to mine chosen reactions. I also seem to have stumbled upon an other save were I appeared to fiddle around with playable characters you can always choose from the save crystal. I guess there's never too many Deugans in my party :P . [LINK] Same with the Mardeks in my save crystal [LINK] , with a bunch of other characters you could play in previous chapters.
1
Tobias 1104~4Y
Ha, that looks so ridiculous! I never played around with the game like that myself, despite making it. I can see the entertainment value in it!
1
JohnnyBoi45~4Y
Would you consider uploading any of those sol files to dropbox or something? I'd love to play around with them. I've dabbled in soledit but I've never done anything like add other playable characters.
0
ExtremeHunt3~4Y
Sure, I also added a couple new characters too. like these: [LINK] . Unfortunately they do not have any skills, since it seemed it was never programmed in the game, unlike for Aalia and Bartholio, which you can control at the end too.
I use this tool for .sol [LINK] . As other tools makes my Mardek saves be called "undefined" and I am not sure what else it may have done wrong. Also with this many characters, adding a couple new ones is pretty undo-able through the .sol editing tool I use as it reloads every new change I do which takes a couple of minutes. To battle this I use a HEX editor instead [LINK] and copy any existing character in my party and change variables accordingly (changing a variable value doesn't make the .sol editor tool reload the tree-like structure it as it already exists).
I just looked at my old save and it was funny to see how nutty the reaction system can really be too. Like in this link [LINK] . Like how my Mardek has a lot of chances to cause a lot of different status effects with one hit. Well, you also see a couple unavailable reactions you cannot normally learn since I edited my own .sol file and made Mardek learn unavailable reactions to see them for myself, but only did so when I was near the end of this chapter.
I am not sure how I feel about introducing the Body and Mind stats to replace the other ones. It brings another form of managing them in battle, but I am not sure if it is just as fun as the existing system, but it does make the battle slightly more realistic. To me STR, VIT, SPR, AGL, DEF, MDEF and EVA statistics seem to make perfect sense of what they mean jus like how it's clear what Physical Attack Reactions, Physical Defence Reactions, Magical Attack Reactions and Magical Defence Reactions are meant for. However, the only exception here is that STR and ATK seem ambiguous to me. Though If I am correct, ATK is just the base attack of a party member and STR only influences how strong physical attacks are? But again these stats are also great for bringing in the management aspect of the game and making compromises over things. Like being slightly under-leveled for a boss, the decisions would have to be made to use armour/accessories over the other one in case you do not want to get 1-hit KO'd from a particular skill/attack, but outputting less damage in general. Those elemental statistic are also fun, requiring you sometimes to use armour/weapons over the other than using always the same weapon. Also in general you need a battle tutorial either way, or at least most games have them of educating the user of what each statistic is meant for. I guess people who would have played pokémon in the past would seem to better understand those elemental statistics over other who do not, but that's an inevitability I suppose. It's at least more creative than those ordinary RPG maker games with the same ATK, MATK, DEF, MDEF attributes in a battle.
And I think having that many reactions equipped is just way too much! What level is Mardek there though??
I use this tool for .sol [LINK] . As other tools makes my Mardek saves be called "undefined" and I am not sure what else it may have done wrong. Also with this many characters, adding a couple new ones is pretty undo-able through the .sol editing tool I use as it reloads every new change I do which takes a couple of minutes. To battle this I use a HEX editor instead [LINK] and copy any existing character in my party and change variables accordingly (changing a variable value doesn't make the .sol editor tool reload the tree-like structure it as it already exists).
Anyway, here are my .sol files [LINK]