The Lost Child: The nasty bits

 
It should be abundantly clear by now that I love TLC to pieces; however, that intense love doesn't make me blind to the game's flaws. Whilst I'm tolerating TLC much better than some players out there, there are still a couple of things that rub me the wrong way; and here they are in all their unholy glory.  

 

The 'Fruits of Wisdom' system: A.k.a. randomized skill acquisition. This is hands down TLC's biggest flaw, because it seriously hampers the player's ability to build a well-assorted party. Sure, it may seem innocuous at first, and even a bit entertaining: after all, what's more delightful than to suddenly gain a brand-new skill in the heat of battle? However, the cracks begin to show when one realizes that there is simply no reliable way to predict an Astral's growth in the Skill department beyond (wild) guesses based on said Astral's base set of skills and stats. Some Astrals learn only physical skills, some only elemental ones, some only buffs and healing spells, and others a mix of all that; some Astrals learn metric tons of skills (cue Enoch), whilst other learn very few (cue Baphomet). In practice, this means that every single Astral is pretty much a bet. You might pin your hopes on a brand-new Astral, only to realize after a couple of hours and scores of battles that they cannot learn the skills you want. Even worse, if one of your party members learns a skill and you lose your progress afterwards for any reason, there is no saying when — or even if — they'll learn it again. I've lost a good five skills so far, mostly due to intempestive crashes; and whilst three of them have popped up again, two seem to have been lost forever. 

 

The Spirit Reset: As the name implies, that feature allows you to reset an Astral's level to 1 in order to gain a massive stat boost. Sounds neat and nifty, right? But wait, there's a catch: Spirit Reset also wipes out all the involved Astral's skills in the process. Combine this with the Fruits of Wisdom system, and you get a giant hassle and a monumental display of fake longevity. How many battles could it take before your Astrals regain all their skills? In my opinion, far too many to justify resetting any of mine. Although to be fair, that particular criticism is to be taken with a pinch of salt: Spirit Reset seems to be designed especially for those who want to conquer R'lyeh Road, the game's cut-throat 99-floor complimentary dungeon. If you take up that gauntlet in the first place, I guess you won't mind grinding for hours on end, now will you?

No instant save: Given how crucial mapping is in FPDCs, you'd think that instant save would be a fixture in the genre by now. Yet it's not, and it's a royal pain. Having to retread previously cleared ground after a Game Over/random freeze (insert murderous eyes) just so that it'll show on the map is not challenging, it's just tedious and a complete loss of time.

 

Pointless monster drops: Apart from the occasional potion, most of the monster drops are random items with fancy names. You never get to see what they look like, nor do you get to use them in any kind of synthesis; their sole purpose is to be sold for cold, hard cash. Fair enough; but in that case, why can't I get the cash directly from the monsters and dispense with the selling part? Sure, one might argue that it wouldn't make sense for monsters to roam around with monies; however, they do roam around with stuff called 'medals', 'gems' and 'coins', which is just as implausible. Just gimme the cash and spare me the trip to Leon's store every time I come back from a dungeon, thank you.

I hesitated about putting the random crashing issue here as well; however, I finally decided against it, as I've found no mention whatsoever of that particular problem on the internet. This means that it could be restricted to my own version, maybe because of an incompatibility between the software and my Vita's OS or memory card. At any rate, I hope that the upcoming physical release will be free of any freezing issue. And with that, dear fellow gamers, I'm done with my pet peeves with TLC. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!