Running my mouth off with various pieces of advice last time made me juusst a little curious to try out some of the strategies I enumerated therein, so I played Ragnarok ~ Hikari to Yami no Koujo (Ragnarok Tactics
) again to finish Yuri’s route and get the True ending. I also made an attempt at getting the Dark route, but it’s not that easy to unlock and I still don’t know exactly how it’s done.
On breaking the game with Kaplas and Champions
Snipers are your best option for damage on a first playthrough, but if you really want to break the game after that, you need champions. Their hit-all skill (Tenchi Houkou in Japanese) at job level 36 is a flat out game-breaker, since it allows you to strike down enemies all over the map without moving a single step. I even Tenchi Houkoued the final boss of the true ending (level 60, HP 6000) to death without breaking a sweat.
The ideal situation is to have three or four (I had 4) champions so that you can end everything in a single turn. Skip everyone else’s turns, or heck, only take those guys and your MC into battle and finish everything off ASAP. You need to raise them carefully for maximum damage however. I found out that despite appearances, Tenchi Houkou is actually a magic-based attack (update: no longer sure about this, take stat-related advice with a pinch of salt), and INT is the one stat that champions don’t get any job-based bonuses in. This is the reason why those pesky shamen and high priests tend to survive it so well when they should be dying on the first hit.
If you want really effective champions then, you will forget boosting their strength and just pour everything you have into their INT. If you raise them as snipers until, say, level 20 (I said 25 last time, but it takes longer than I’d expected to raise characters to job level 36) their speed and attack should be decent enough. Raising INT should also give them the SP needed to use Tenchi Houkou more than a few times, though this isn’t really important if you have enough champions and enough SP-filling items.
But still, what if you don’t have that many champions? Maybe you don’t like champions. Maybe you didn’t find out about this strategy until much later. Or you enjoy the battle system and don’t particularly want to break it, but you want to have the option of breaking it if you ever choose to. Either way you will always have at least one champion in the form of Trenet, and there’s a way to spam you-know-what continuously without – or heck even with – more than one champion. The secret: Kaplas.
Kaplas have a skill, No Time to Rest, that works like Smile Toss in the FFTA games, bringing up the chosen character’s turn immediately. Tenchi Houkou is normally balanced (haha, balanced, that’s a good one) by a very long cool down period. By taking advantage of the Kapla’s naturally high speed as a DEX-based class, you can completely ignore this restriction and thus achieve the same amount of destructiveness with one champion as you could with two or three. You could make your MC the Kapla, go in with one champion and take everything down within 5 minutes, ze endo. The reason I go for overkill on the champion front is simply because there’s no point in having any of the other classes once you get Tenchi Houkou.
Of course I should also note that you don’t have to kill everything on the field if you don’t want to. The move is just as effective for weakening enemies so they fall quickly to single hits or Burst Strikes, thereby making it easy to level weaker classes up. It also works well as a magnet for drawing in enemies who wouldn’t normally approach your party that early. It can probably be combined with the Paladin’s Soul Provoke for some interesting results. But really, why not just kill everything at once?
On Unlocking the Dark Route
Unfortunately I have no idea exactly how this is done. There appears to be some sort of invisible karma meter that judges you by the answers you give and determines whether you get to go on the Dark Route. It sounds like you may have to finish the True End first and then replay to get the Dark one. However even if you do all that and then finally decide to be a jerk on your 4th playthrough, your combined
Thank.
niceness on the three previous runs may shut you out of the Dark end anyway. You may have to play 5 or 6 times, being a dick each time, to get that end. Or better yet just be an ass through and through from beginning to end? Or maybe there’s something else you need to do. The Japanese FAQs I consulted were inconclusive. Plus the Dark side is really unsympathetic in this game, so I’m not that psyched to see what they have to say. It’s bound to show up on Youtube one day, I’ll just wait.
Btw, the True ending is not worth getting either, since it consists of all of two battles, one against random fodder. The “true” boss shows up almost Necron-style and is easily disposed of since you’ve played the game three times. That’s another one worth Youtubing when the time comes.
Conclusion
Well, finally finished-finished the game. 4 playthroughs, 6 blog posts, 79 hours, 96% completion. And I still don’t think it’s a very good game. You can look at this two different ways. Glass half-full: it’s the kind of game you can play for 79 hours, even if you don’t really like it. Glass half-empty: It’s the kind of game you can play for 79 hours and never really come to like. Despite the fact that the battles get better as you progress, the story never really changes from your first playthrough. A certain amount of inertia and the fact that it’s not quite bad enough to quit over kept me going, which I’m kind of regretting now I’ve seen the useless True ending.
Bonus – All Special Burst Strike Combinations
Champion + Dancer
Zonda + Kapla
Paladin + High Priest (Area Heal only)
Lord Knight + Assassin Cross (+poison effect)
White Smith + High Wizard (earth damage)
Lord Knight + High Wizard + Champion
Clown + Dancer + Shaman
Dark Knight + Champion + Sniper
Sniper + White Smith + Clown/Dancer
Paladin + Dark Knight + White Smith
Paladin + Shaman + Kapla
Lord Knight + High Priest + Zonda (damage + area heal)
Assassin + Kapla + High Priest (damage + area status recovery)
was good all the way to the end, and didn’t outstay its welcome (22:10h) but I never regained that “ZOMG this is awesome!” feeling I had in the first few hours. Incredibly easy game. Really glad I never grinded, or I would have felt like a right ninny when I got to the final stage and went down a few steps to find a bonus dungeon where the enemies gave 100-300,000 EXP per battle (by comparison the last boss’s 2 forms gave less than 40,000 combined).
