Kongai: Card Get (4/24/08)

So, this week's challenge is to play the turn-based RPG battler Sonny. Which has been around, spreading doses of joy into the world for long enough that I hopefully don't need to go into any more detail than that.

This week's card is the Herbal Remedy. You can make up up your own jokes about that as I'll spare you my chronic attempts to craft the perfect pun. I'll also spare you from the still fermenting rant about the release schedule of these cards (Because, seriously, that's yet another item for a group of cards that I don't have. I mean, I am RANDOM4LYFE but, still... Grr!).

Beyond mentioning that it's a green bordered card which means it can only be slotted on cards with a similar border - namely Andromeda, Anex, Ashi, Helene, and Phoebe - I'm also going to skip any real analysis as with the past few cards since, you know, I must Frenzy and not just because Herbal Remedy is an underwhelming card. Not bad, mind, just not enough to convince me it's good - the simple explanation is that for a card like Herbal and its kissing cousin Healing Salve to be anything but a secondary option, at best, they need to recover enough health in relevant gameplay states to buy the character to which it is equiped an extra combat round. And I'm not sure that it does.

At the moment, anyway, and since the game is still under development that could change at any time, of course.

To gain a glimpse at the mediocrity that is Herbal Remedy and behold the awesomeness of recovering four health at the end of each round for yourself, you'll need to gain ten levels in Sonny.

Which, again, might take you a little while but isn't especially hard. You can always just grind out time in the training grounds if you get stuck.

Personally, I think the easiest to level with is the Assassin. Class doesn't really matter except for your attribute progression - which can be compensated with by gear anyways - since they all share the same abilities. Just head straight up the path towards Coup de Grace and don't look back except, perhaps, to get a spacer or two like Bleed or Master Strike. Just destroys those low-level foes.

Towards the end-game you'll want to switch to a stunlock strategy centered around Break and Shatter Bolt to keep your opponents from doing much of anything to you - that's pretty much how I got by the bosses. Except for the Doctor guy with health for days. He pretty much requires a timely Subversion to turn his jaw-dropping heal into a suicide pact.

You can go for the stuns straight away surrounding them with a bunch of other projectile spells - you'll probably want Gunslinger then - but I find it doesn't really work as well unless you can invest a lot of spare skill points in an energy engine like Re-Energize or Regenerate. Because while Veradux will occasionally reward you with awesome it's not exactly something you can rely on.

Since I beat the game already - breezing through all the bosses, yet again on yet another flash game site - I needed to level up again. Which wasn't exactly pleasant given my already vaunted level total. At least I got a bunch of points for all the new badges just for loading in. Oh, and the Herb Pack. Which, yeah, I can't use and I can't bring myself to care about.