RPG Backtrack Episode 215: Captain Diabetes

Not satisfied with a single venture into the RPG realm, South Park returned in 2017 with another turn-based excursion through a small mountain town in Colorado.  Be prepared for language that is in keeping with the source material.

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1 Response

  1. UltraKev9 UltraKev9 says:

    I have listened to about a hundred of these podcasts and am quasi-slowly getting through them. I recently listened to a good favorite of mine, ep. 192 Dragon Force. Phil said something near the middle-end about not doing a Class of Heroes Backtrack because you don’t have anyone that’s been through them. I can honestly say I’ve been through CoH, CoH2 and I have CoH2G on my PS3 but I haven’t started it. As was said, they are extremely difficult and pay enormous respect to the Wizardry series, in fact, it’s pretty much a new coat of paint on a very old system. The first Class of Heroes is arguably twice as hard as the second game mainly due to static maps in the second game. The second game has hand crafted maps for every single area and once they are explored they stay that way for very fast travel. The first game has a “shifting dungeon” aspect to it where the top and bottom floors of each dungeon are static due to story reasons but every floor in between pulls from a random group of maps that number between 20 and 30 or so and every time you enter the dungeon all the middle floors are randomized. Explored floors fortunately stay that way so sometimes you can get lucky and bypass a floor quickly but due to the sheer number of random floors you’ll need to explore some dungeons far more times than necessary to map everything. Also, only a couple of dungeons in each area “share” maps so if you make three or four trips total in that area you’ll most likely explore random maps every time you’ve not seen. The floors in the first game are also extremely “hard core” Wizardry style on a grid of something like 19 x 19 and utilize every single square and many have mirrored sections to add frustration. Fortunately, 99% of these maps once fully explored have about a three to five step short cut enabled.

    Both games use classes that get a random additional number of bonus points during character creation, just like Wizardry which means that one can exploit rolling characters for hours trying to get ludicrously high amounts of bonus points to start with very powerful characters or start with advanced classes that need very high stats in the first place. There are extra classes in both games that are a bit redundant that Wizardry didn’t have and it adds to confusion since you really don’t know what some of these classes are capable of in much higher levels and if they’re worth the trouble or if they’ll end up being an enormous party liability.

    Class of Heroes 2 was a minor graphical upgrade over the first with the difficulty in exploration turned down but with approximately the same combat difficulty. Class of Heroes 2G puts the second game on the big TV screen with slightly enhanced graphics to accommodate the larger area and adds an insanely high level bonus dungeon for those that think they’ve mastered the game.

    Speaking of bonus dungeons, the three of you were also chatting about doing Wizardry spinoff games and I’ve recently played through Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land for PS2 which I thoroughly enjoyed. Very gritty and dark and quite difficult. I sincerely wish more games were released that played very much like this one. After immense grinding and preparation I tackled the bonus dungeon in Tales only to be completely murdered by the boss. Upon realizing how incredibly quickly I was destroyed I pulled a Phil and claimed the game to the be the victor as I truly didn’t want to grind for another twenty hours just to beat some overpowered stupid nine-tailed fox.

    Keep up the great work guys. You keep me awake on my long night shifts of driving.

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