Bought this at release but hadn't touched it. Lately I've been craving an oldschool JRPG experience (extremely rare for me to play RPGs these days due to having less free time), so last night I decided to finally give this a try before bed. Ended up playing for almost four hours and staying up till 2 AM; safe to say I'm enjoying it. :)
I
really dig the battle system. No random encounters is always welcome, but there are a number of other QoL improvements here I'm not used to that are super nice. In particular, Items being "single use per battle" rather than exhaustible removes the worry of whether I can afford to use something now or should save it for a potentially more difficult encounter, while still forcing me to be selective with *when* I use it. Going along with that, I like not having to deal with healing everyone and clearing out status effects every time I finish a fight. At this point in my life I'm all about less stress/tedious stuff and more just enjoying my time with something.
Oh, and this is small, but being able to rearrange where the various abilities appear in the action menu is appreciated. I like to go all attack abilities across the top row, then status effects and healing on the bottom. I've settled into a nice rhythm of initial buffs/debuffs (Sue's counter ability, wow) then planning ahead to use each character's best attacks when they hit Hyper mode.
One question - not sure I entirely get the tech dude's (haven't learned the characters' names yet :p) Enrage ability. I understand decreasing the damage dealt by the target enemy's area of effect attacks, but what's the bit about taunts?
You can do crazy broken stuff in CSH by the end of the game if you know what you're doing.
Even though I'm early on, I'm definitely getting the sense that this is the case. Need to get a better handle on everything and experiment more.
EDIT: Forgot to mention I've only died once thus far (playing on Heroine), to the Overseer who summons those robots that grab your party members and basically render them helpless until the robots are defeated. Ended up kind of caught off guard by that, and once I had all four members snatched, well, it was a quick game over. Fortunately managed to win my second time around, as I was able to utilize Stun effects to keep that from happening as often and focus more on depleting the Overseer's HP as quickly as possible.
