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Baldr Sky (Out now!)


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So I just finished Dive 1 and well, I can see how it got its 8.45 on vndb. The VN is incredibly well paced for the most part. The gameplay blends in seemlessly with the plot and is fun enough in itself. Still, for me personally there a couple of aspects that keep me from really loving it.

My main gripe is that Baldr Sky doesn't really care about all the interesting ethical and philosophical questions its world poses. For example, the story takes place in society where part of the population has implanted bio-chips into their brains, basically connecting them to the internet 24/7, where intelligent AI controls everything, and these people make up one faction, while the other (apparently bigger) group of people look at AI very critically. At the same time the rich people (anti-AI people) built a seemingly impenetrable fortress while the outside suffers greatly from corruption and a refugee crisis, leading to many people throw themselves into virtual reality to flee from the actual one. There are so many possible angles the writers could have taken and so many moral gray areas worth exploring in this world, but they basically went with "one faction is right and the other one is wrong" and the setting is basically just a backdrop to spin an epic tale about people in mechs fighting. Very rarely does it happen that any faction's core values are actually challenged. When the motives of some of the "good guys" get questioned, it always has to do with them secretly schemeing something instead of their ideas possibly negatively impacting other peoples' lives.

This also plays into my issues with the cast and how part one's heroines got developed. Each one of them had a background that would have allowed for interesting character arcs and instead they got pretty generic anime trope stories.

Anyways, I still enjoyed the overall experience so far quite a bit, it's just a little frustrating for me that there are quite a few places where there's a lot of wasted potential imo.

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finised sora's route... this game is hard in normal mode if you focused on leveling weapons. even with very easy, you cant win if you have chaff, barrier, anti air weapons and few weapons equiped.
the old reliable rifle->machine gun->gatling carry me to the end.

the only problem i have is on nanoha route where: 

Spoiler

you need to protect her walls on her mind. that said walls can be damaged by your own weapons and some of the enemies sticks to the wall making splash damage weapon a risk. i beat it in normal but didnt get the rewards because i sucks.

other than that, i can beat stages in 1-3 tries using long range combo guns even tho its nerfed

my issue in the game was the skip read where the game didnt skip read the teXt you already read... especially on the past scene where you need to read it all again.

another issue is how you use long range weapons. if you equip a weapon in move slot, you trigger the weapon by moving regardless of distance. however if you dont have any weapons in move slot, you cant use close or long range weapons while moving. you need to complete stop to use close range and long range weapon. 

regardless. its a good read and nullifies my sleepiness when im reading aokana if i lack hours of sleep.

might go for youtube for very hard mode of some certain battles.

also question: do i get anything if i clear some routes that is not the best ending to them???

sorry for my english

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Got started on Baldr Sky a couple of hours ago. The combat is making me pretty confused, honestly.
Is it normal for completely different types of attacks to occur inbetween the ones you're actually using? I thought I was going to be able to chain together attacks of the same type, but so far, I've been unable to do so. Whenever I punch in melee range, the character switches to the handgun after my first punch, despite the fact that it's set to dash and I'm not actually moving. (And yes, the enemy is within the circle.) Likewise, when I'm trying to low kick, the whatchamacallit energy orb follows after the first kick, although it's set to long range and I'm actually in melee range. Is this really the way it's supposed to work? Seems kinda weird to me to mix in long range attacks in melee range.

Another thing.
I checked out a walkthrough for the game, and according to that, the routes (or at least the first one) have both a normal and a good ending. Which ending you get is apparently decided based on if you take less or more than two minutes to finish fights in a certain chapter. What I want to know is, will I have to replay the entire game if I want 100% completion, or can I just save at the start of the chapter, go ahead and get the normal ending, replay the fights to get the good one and thus keep the progress from both of them? Or should I just go for the good ending right away?

Edited by Seraphim88
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2 hours ago, Seraphim88 said:

Another thing.
I checked out a walkthrough for the game, and according to that, the routes (or at least the first one) have both a normal and a good ending. Which ending you get is apparently decided based on if you take less or more than two minutes to finish fights in a certain chapter. What I want to know is, will I have to replay the entire game if I want 100% completion, or can I just save at the start of the chapter, go ahead and get the normal ending, replay the fights to get the good one and thus keep the progress from both of them? Or should I just go for the good ending right away?

What I heard is that after completing all good endings  (baldr 1 & 2) you'll obtain a way to be teleported anywhere you want in the story so you can do the other ends

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3 hours ago, Seraphim88 said:

Is it normal for completely different types of attacks to occur inbetween the ones you're actually using? I thought I was going to be able to chain together attacks of the same type, but so far, I've been unable to do so. Whenever I punch in melee range, the character switches to the handgun after my first punch, despite the fact that it's set to dash and I'm not actually moving. (And yes, the enemy is within the circle.) Likewise, when I'm trying to low kick, the whatchamacallit energy orb follows after the first kick, although it's set to long range and I'm actually in melee range. Is this really the way it's supposed to work? Seems kinda weird to me to mix in long range attacks in melee range.

If you press the same button several times, it switches to a different type of attack. I don't remember the exact sequence, but if it starts with a short-range attack, it will later switch to a long range. There will be more tutorials soon, so that will be explained.

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Ah, I figured using the punch button several times should result in a punch combo, consecutive kicks in a kick combo, and so on, but I guess it doesn't work like that here then. Gotta admit though that it makes the whole system of allocating attack skills to specific skill slots seem a bit redundant if the game is just automatically gonna shuffle them around without any regard to attack range in the end. Kinda feels like they overcomplicated things for no reason, but I guess it might make more sense later on when I have more attacks at my disposal.

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On 12/28/2019 at 1:34 PM, Seraphim88 said:

Ah, that sounds like something I can live with, as long as it isn't so hard that I have to replay the same fights over and over again. I was afraid I would have to spend like 30-50% of the total playtime fighting, managing inventory and whatnot.

The only really challenging battle on normal is the final battle of Dive 2... the rest can be handled fairly easily if you have a good combo set up, with fairly minor adjustments for tactics on occasion.  I won't make any suggestions on combos, because this game provides a decent array of weapons/attacks that can be stringed together in ways that suit your temperament.  In my case, I used the basic sub-machine guns, homing missiles, and the grenade launcher the most.  

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8 hours ago, Seraphim88 said:

Ah, I figured using the punch button several times should result in a punch combo, consecutive kicks in a kick combo, and so on, but I guess it doesn't work like that here then. Gotta admit though that it makes the whole system of allocating attack skills to specific skill slots seem a bit redundant if the game is just automatically gonna shuffle them around without any regard to attack range in the end. Kinda feels like they overcomplicated things for no reason, but I guess it might make more sense later on when I have more attacks at my disposal.

The way it goes is if you're close range and not holding down the movement buttons but have already used the close range attack it will use the attack that is listed below it in the equipment menu and if that one is also used, the one below that etc.
It can be rather helpfull once you get used to it since you can't use an attack again until your heat gauge has depleted anyway.

Edited by ArgentstR
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Finished the first route yesterday and I'm currently halfway (I'm guessing) into the second one. Can't say I enjoy the gameplay very much, but since it's not that time-consuming, it's not really a big deal.
By far, the biggest issue with Baldr Sky is that content is flagged as read/unread based on scenes rather than individual lines of text. This means that now that I'm in the second route, I have to wade through a ton of dialogue I've already read in the first route, just because there are some (often very minor) alterations that marks entire scenes as unread, thus rendering them unskippable. There is a force skip function, but using it would mean I run the risk of missing out on the new content that's been added here and there, so it's not exactly an option.

Will I have to keep repeating these same scenes over and over again whenever I go down a different route? If so, I'd have to say this is one of the worst VN experiences I've ever had, despite me loving the story, characters and music.

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Does anyone have any idea what "stages" is referring to in this walkthrough? It's obviously not battles, since there are way more of those, so are they actually talking about the story chapters but calling them "stages" instead for some weird reason? (meaning chapter 10 in Rain's route would count as stage 1, chapter 11 as stage 2, and so on)
If so, how am I supposed to interpret the timings for the respective endings? Do I need to finish the final battle of each chapter within the listed time limit, or every individual battle within the chapters?
I also have no idea what they mean by "[First priestess prompt]" in Nanoha's route (which is the one I'm currently reading), although I should already be past that point in the game.

This all seems overly complicated for no reason whatsoever.

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There are certain battles where you have to beat a certain amount of enemies (I think) to clear them. If you fail to beat that threshold in a certain timeframe you get a short cutscene and enter the next stage. So, for example, to get Rain's good ending, you have to kill a set amount of enemies before the second cutscene after the start of the battle, and if you manage to get there before the first one, you unlock Spectral Missile. For the Normal End, you have to beat the level between the second and fifth scene, and so on.

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So how do I know which battles actually affect the endings? Being told by the walkthrough to finish "3rd stage" within 2:15 doesn't really help me when I have no idea what "3rd stage" even is. I've checked everywhere I can think of in-game (preparation screen before battles, UI and pause screen during battles, etc), but I've not found a single mention of any "stages". The only things that are numbered are the chapters, but that can't be what they're talking about either, because I just finished Nanoha's route and there aren't enough chapters when compared to the stage list in the walkthrough.

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Am I correct in assuming that I'm on track to the good endings as long as I don't get these so called "humiliation scenes"? If so, how do I know if I've triggered a humiliation scene? There's plenty of humiliation and bad stuff going on in some of the regular scenes as well, so I'm not sure I'd be able to tell them apart unless there's some obvious indicator.

I'm asking all this because I want to pick up all the good endings right away in order to unlock the scenario skip function.

Edited by Seraphim88
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I haven't dared looking further into the walkthrough before (since I want to avoid spoilers at all costs), but I just did a Ctrl + F search for "humiliation scene" and it actually seems like only Rain's and Nanoha's routes contain those. In other words, will I not have to worry about battle timings in the remaining routes? That would be a load off my mind.

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Is the school life reminiscence stuff worth the bother? There's supposedly some new content there, but it mostly seems to consist of stuff that I've already read in the main story and it feels like a pain in the ass to go through since the skip function doesn't work and there are no indicators for what's new and what isn't.

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34 minutes ago, Seraphim88 said:

Is the school life reminiscence stuff worth the bother? There's supposedly some new content there, but it mostly seems to consist of stuff that I've already read in the main story and it feels like a pain in the ass to go through since the skip function doesn't work and there are no indicators for what's new and what isn't.

The new contents is mostly near the end, you should carefully read everything even if it is really boring sometimes 

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On 8.1.2020 at 1:06 AM, alpacaman said:

So I just finished Dive 1 and well, I can see how it got its 8.45 on vndb. The VN is incredibly well paced for the most part. The gameplay blends in seemlessly with the plot and is fun enough in itself. Still, for me personally there a couple of aspects that keep me from really loving it.

My main gripe is that Baldr Sky doesn't really care about all the interesting ethical and philosophical questions its world poses. For example, the story takes place in society where part of the population has implanted bio-chips into their brains, basically connecting them to the internet 24/7, where intelligent AI controls everything, and these people make up one faction, while the other (apparently bigger) group of people look at AI very critically. At the same time the rich people (anti-AI people) built a seemingly impenetrable fortress while the outside suffers greatly from corruption and a refugee crisis, leading to many people throw themselves into virtual reality to flee from the actual one. There are so many possible angles the writers could have taken and so many moral gray areas worth exploring in this world, but they basically went with "one faction is right and the other one is wrong" and the setting is basically just a backdrop to spin an epic tale about people in mechs fighting. Very rarely does it happen that any faction's core values are actually challenged. When the motives of some of the "good guys" get questioned, it always has to do with them secretly schemeing something instead of their ideas possibly negatively impacting other peoples' lives.

This also plays into my issues with the cast and how part one's heroines got developed. Each one of them had a background that would have allowed for interesting character arcs and instead they got pretty generic anime trope stories.

Anyways, I still enjoyed the overall experience so far quite a bit, it's just a little frustrating for me that there are quite a few places where there's a lot of wasted potential imo.

Finally managed to finish Dive 2 and my gripes are still the same as they were after finishing the first part. It's focused on making every little piece of information fit the extremely elaborate plot without leaving any holes to a point where it doesn't leave space for most characters to develop in a meaningful way or to explore the themes inherent to its world. The plot itself and the pacing are still amazingly well executed considering the immense length of the VN (it took me nearly 100 hours to reach the true end), I just wish there was more depth to the overall experience. 

Edited by alpacaman
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