Part 6: Feinne's Notes: Daichi Shijima and Io Nitta

Picking back up on first-run Unkillable notes, this map is not a particular challenge in that regard. The only dangerous enemy party is Bai Suzhen's even allowing for the fact that you've only got three demons, and you've got Makoto to help with her. It might be fruitful to kill the Kobold group with Makoto, though, just to dodge potential bad luck with Aggravate. You should be able to safely kill Bai Suzhen yourself for the extra experience without too much risk, but as Dragonatrix suggests it's not that crucial. There are ample opportunities to level up as the game goes on, so you're just saving yourself a bit of time really. Just don't have someone go run off where you can't get some sort of healing ability in range of them. In fact get used to hearing that, because that's basically rule number one of this sort of run. Everyone always has to be able to be healed, and unless you've got some really compelling reason to split up everyone should always be in range to be cross-healed by other groups. When we get to more in-depth discussion of demons I'll lay out how we accomplish this.

Now let's talk a bit about Daichi and Io.

Daichi: Oh Daichi. What do I say about you? So, Daichi is just not very good. Daichi is sort of a Strength/Agility character, except he never actually maxes either of those stats out. He puts way, way too many points into Magic than are really necessary, especially since I tend to just give my physical characters demons that make up for their inability to pack a really good healing skill. He's also very scattershot about these early levels, which amplifies his badness by making it seem like he's never going to really specialize in much of anything for much of the early game. The only good thing I can say about Daichi is that he's not the absolute worst character in the game, because there is in fact at least one person more worthless than him. You can certainly find uses for him but there are two other characters much better at the only thing he is even okay at so just keep that in mind.

Io: Io on the other hand is pretty alright. She's a Strength/Magic character and does her levels reasonably well, so the only real problem is one she shares with every other non-Vitality character, that she's a bit glassy in comparison. Still, there is actually room for a character using both physicals and magic a lot of the time and Io is a perfectly good option for that. You'd be amazed at how often you will even just use your regular Attack and there's something to be said for having one of your magic characters being decent when they're up against something they don't have a good magic attack for. There's something else to be said about Io that will wait for a new system to be introduced, more on that later.

Next time I'll probably give my thoughts on our current demon options and building parties in the early game along, once we've seen the systems that relate to getting new demons.