Board 8 > The worst part of TotA are the wildly imbalanced difficulty levels.

(+) Yeah! (+)

My party is level 12. On normal, Arietta is a hilarious pushover that can literally be beaten by me mashing A and doing nothing else at all. On hard, Arietta is a horrifying demon that murders my party in seconds and takes no damage from anything.

Is there no in-between here? Can't I please play on hard without having to do a new game + first?

I've never played an RPG where there are four difficulty levels and none of them are "reasonable challenge for a first playthrough"! I mean, you'd think that would be somewhere in there. I just want something in between "ridiculous cakewalk" and "new game + or get out".

no.

isn't that how almost all rpgs are with their higher difficulties?

you wanted hard and you got hard. make up your mind!!

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no.

isn't that how almost all rpgs are with their higher difficulties?

Yep. All RPGs are either hellishly difficult or trivially simple.

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Its because "hard" doesn't mean "increased challenge", it just means "all the enemy's stats are higher, so you can only have equally matched stats if you're doing a new game +, and then the difficulty level will be exactly the same, just all the numbers will be higher"

The difficulty curve is screwed up too though. Up to this point I was actually having fun with hard mode - the random encounters were meaningfully challenging and the Liger Queen was a hard but satisfying boss to survive. It is pretty reasonable to get to Arietta and be prepared for all the encounters in the Choral Castle area at about level 10-11, but then to beat her you need to be level 20+. If you're good you can do it at about 18. The hell?

From what I've been told, Arietta is the toughest boss in the game on any difficulty except Normal, with the possible exception of the bonus boss.

Haven't touched hard mode or higher myself, though, so I can't say whether that's true or not.

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Ariettia is a brick wall type boss with her insane defenses. Once you get past her, the rest is fairly simple for a while.

It's the same with the other difficulty levels as well. I can win against a certain boss quite easily on Very Hard, but on Unknown I do 1 with each attack.

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Well, that makes me feel hopeful at least, because I do want a challenging run of this game (it's my second playthrough) where I might actually have to sweat out boss fights a bit. Hopefully things will improve. I'll just have to switch through normal and blast through Arietta since there's no way I'm grinding up to level 18+.

I remember my friends and I had a horrible and hard time fighting against Arietta on Unknown mode even though we bought everything from the Grade Shop. I'm pretty sure we were doing only 1 damage with each hit against her and manage to win after a very very long time.

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I'll only recommend hard to veterans of the game or on New Game+ but if you're going for Unknown difficulty you better hope you have enough Grade to transfer a LOT of stuff for your playthrough.

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Hard is too easy for New Game+. I personally jump to Very Hard on a second playthrough. The extra mystic artes are fun. Though yeah, you need to bring over stuff if you're going to do that.

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it seems like most hard modes in RPGs aren't actually fun. I think Persona 3 and 4's sweet spot of game balance is normal mode. everything else is whack.

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Actually, Persona 3 and 4's Hard mode is where the game actually feels challenging. Normal is too easy, you heal too much and the bosses deal little damage. I've seen some bosses churning out new attacks you don't see in Normal mode.

The only thing changed is item/equipment/persona prices and difficulty IIRC which makes you use almost every equipment that the game has. Normal mode earns you items easily which makes you skip a lot of weapons and equipment. Costumes becomes useless because you can get higher ranked equipment easier in P3FES on normal

Tales of the Abyss had a large difficulty gap between Normal, Hard, and Unknown which was sometimes ridiculous during Boss fights. I think the game needs more balancing but it's good as it is already. Hard and above becomes much more reasonable once you get to New Game+

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I don't think Hard is too bad beyond a few choke points. Ariettia is just a pain in the ass in any difficutly besides normal.

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Hard mode is basically a really great mode after you arrive at Din's Shop. You don't even need to make really overpowered weapons there, just some that give you the ability to deal more than 1's to bosses.

From what I've been told, Arietta is the toughest boss in the game on any difficulty except Normal

Nah the fight at the end of the team arena is by far the hardest. Arietta is the most difficult mandatory boss fight though.

The difficulty curve is screwed up too though. Up to this point I was actually having fun with hard mode - the random encounters were meaningfully challenging and the Liger Queen was a hard but satisfying boss to survive. It is pretty reasonable to get to Arietta and be prepared for all the encounters in the Choral Castle area at about level 10-11, but then to beat her you need to be level 20+. If you're good you can do it at about 18. The hell?

It's more of a question of "how much time do you want to waste?" with Arietta than anything else. She's just so badly designed on higher difficulty levels.

On a similar note, Unknown mode is pretty "fun" too. Imagine fighting the very first enemy in the game with 1130 HP where your attacks do 3 damage at the most. Or spending an hour fighting the Liger Queen waiting for Jade to show up. Yeah.

it seems like most hard modes in RPGs aren't actually fun. I think Persona 3 and 4's sweet spot of game balance is normal mode. everything else is whack.

I didn't find Persona 3 hard mode to be terribly unbalanced other than Sleeping Table and the crazy amount of yen you need. Persona 4 hard mode mostly feels like Persona 3 normal mode and is pretty fun.

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Arietta specifically is a problem. Even on a 2X EXP NG+ it took me 5 tries and many life bottles on Hard mode, and I'd been playing on Very Hard before that.

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And while I love TotA, I'd say its biggest flaw is the terrible AI. Casters and healers regularly go up to smack enemies for no reason, and there's nothing you can do to stop them other than manual control, and characters often take more than 5 seconds, sometimes almost 10, to use an item or spell you tell them to.

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Yeah, the AI isn't a help either. I'd say that if I had three other people and the 3DS had co-op (why the hell doesn't it?), Arietta on hard might be possible with only a little more grinding instead of a lot more grinding, since a lot more things become possible when you have four intelligent humans coordinating a plan instead of standing around like morons. Even then though Arietta is just overpowered. I'm not really sure what they were thinking when they designed her this way. Thank goodness she's a piece of cake on normal, I guess.

Actually the WORST thing about the AI is how they handle items.

In Symphonia if you have a melee fighter use an item, they stop in their tracks and use the item.

In Abyss they won't use the item until they finish up their combo, and rush back.

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Okay, I'm handling the game all right now. I switched to normal for Arietta, and then decided to kill the Sword Dancer while I was at it (not easy even on normal, but completely doable) and that gave me an extra four levels to work with. After that, hard was exactly as challenging as I wanted it to be again, with tough random encounters and bosses that generally took me about 2-3 tries. Abaddon was a pain but I tweaked Tear's healing strategy a bit and got it to work out. Sync/Largo was pretty bad since Sync could do his mystic arte, but I took out Largo first and used a few life bottles and it was okay. Legretta was my next major hard roadblock - I got her down to about 2000 HP with just me (Guy) left alive and I screwed up at the end and died. But that was on a really good, lucky run where I had to use all my items, so I just switched to normal and called it a successful fight. The AI is too goddamn stupid to dodge her easily dodgeable magic.

Kaiser Dist RX (in St. Binah) is a jerk right now but I might be able to pull it off if I grind a couple more levels and update my equipment.

Don't use Guy against Kaiser Dist IMHO.

Set Jade to Splash only, Tear to healing and Water FOF only (and use Holy Song manualy), Luke spamming Raging Blast on Water FOFs. And then either Natalia on healing or Anise on Limited only, set all strategies to Fonic Artes only.

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