I agree about physical nukes being seemingly better in lot1... for single target... however I didn't really consider if the formulas were the source, but one thing I did notice is that an awful lot of them are non-elemental, and late/endgame, enemies have more resistances than neutrals! and rarely any weaknesses. Making those non-elemental physical nukers useful all the time, whereas nukes with elements will likely be neutered for many fights, especially ones like serpent of chaos who resists most elements by 300 IIRC.
I mean, take a look at some formulas:
Spear the Gungnir (2*ATK - 0.5DEF)*1.6
Knockout in Three Steps (2.5*ATK - 0.4*DEF)*2
Scythe that Chooses the Dead (2.5*ATK - 0.5*DEF)*2
Croaking Frog Eaten by Snake (3*ATK - 0.5*DEF)*2.65
PDLC99MW Megawatt Linear Gun (8*ATK - 0.5*DEF)*1.25
Silent Selene (2.5*MAG - 0.25*MND)*2.5
Moonlight Ray (2.5*MAG - 0.5*MND)*2.65
Fujiyama Volcano (2*MAG - 0.5*MND)*2.75
Saigyouji Flawless Nirvana (3*MAG - 0.5*MND)*3
Beautiful Spring Like Suiga (2.5*MAG - 0.5*MND)*2.5
The way I see it is that physical attacks tend to have better defense piercing, leading to more steady strong hits, while magical nukes depend more on multipliers. Elements are also a big issue, yeah. Or else we'd all be all over Yuyuko and how good her nuke is. But SPI sucks hard as an element. The elemental resists aren't very different in the post game, though. Serpent of Chaos is a barrier shifting boss and you can hit its 100 "weaknesses" instead of its 500 resists if you pay attention to what it uses. The rest of the bosses mostly have the usual 100 for most of their resists.
Also I used sanae in my very first playthru, and I built her for defense in that one, and in my first playthru, I was like 10-20% higher in level than other playthrus, maybe even more, and she STILL was prone to being 1-shot by anything that could hit harder than a wet noodle. [...] Even minoruke could take physical hits better, and I spent her level up points on mnd I think, probably because she levels up faster or something.
My definition of off tanks comes from my experience in using her. She is almost as defensively strong as Remilia... only a little weaker in the DEF department and definitely weaker in the HP department since I opted for more elemental and ailment resistances instead.
Minoriko has 10HP/3DEF and Sanae 10HP/5DEF. The reason your Minoriko tanked hits better is probably a combination of her initial HP multiplier, faster level up rate and WAY WAY cheaper library levels on both DEF and HP than Sanae. It could also just be confirmation bias, though.
Looking at those screenshots that seems to be a DEF Sanae compared to an ATK Remilia, right? She's also 50 very expensive DEF levels above Remilia to reach that DEF. If you have what it takes to make such heavy investments, then sure, Sanae can be an off tank. But that's a really skillpoint heavy endgame thing.
And yeah, I'm one of the people who favor 1 over 2. I love 2's looks, not just the portraits, but the glow and the dungeon graphics and menus and everything. I love 2's character customization, and subclasses, and class points, I love 2's music (well I do 1s as well, so that's more like a tie... default 1's.. notsomuch expansion disc 1's). 2 does nearly everything better than 1, it's objectively IMO a better game...but.... I still prefer 1 because I just felt that the enemy balance, boss balance, everything was better balanced to be more difficult but fair.. endgame bosses didn't require abuse of op characters, or defense-ignore formulas, but if you did or not, they didn't get easier, and if you had a bad party, they were still doable without gimping you THAT much (unless you have no tank or something), but in 2... like... if you don't have super nukes like nitori, hina, parsee, I forget them all atm... you really are going to be pulling your hair out for some of hte bosses, which kinda sucks.
1 actually has better maze-potential too.. The way 2 draws the tile/grid thing.. it's not possible for the map to be drawn in a way where 2 tiles are 'next-door' to each other but have a wall in between.. because walls in 1 do not take an entire tile.. but in 2 they take an entire tile, making the mazes much less dense and maze-like. This may be a good or bad thing depending on your tastes.. I for one enjoyed figuring out stuff like 10-12's maze, and 18fs pachinko-maze gimmick thing.. But some people hate it, soo ehh.. but yeah. 2's maze system just can't do that.
"2 does nearly everything better than 1, it's objectively IMO a better game"
This is the only part I heavily disagree with you on. 2 has better and more interesting -concepts-. But it utterly fails in proper implementation and balance. In the first game every single character has a bit of a niche and, while some are objectively better than others, they're all more or less in the same power level. It's like in the first game tiers go from C+ to A+. Some are meh but everyone is comparable in some way. In the second game tiers go from B to S+. Everyone is stronger than in the first game but the top tiers are MUCH MUCH stronger than the bottom tiers.
Not only that, the overspecialization that the game allows you made it so the bosses had to be extremely difficult to non specialized parties and still trivial to minmaxed ones. Like you said, in the first game, using the best characters makes your life a bit easier, but it doesn't trivialize the game. And using the worst characters makes you struggle a bit more, but you still don't have to grind to absurdly high levels unless your team is purposely VERY bad.
And yes, LoT1 has much better maze potential. Walls do make a great difference in what you can do.
Fun fact about the original OST of LoT1: it's all public domain stuff. This page has a list of where the songs came from and their titles
http://www19.atwiki.jp/th_maze/pages/108.htmlI also like the originals a lot better than Plus Disk.
As for that party setup, let's just say I feel it's much less ideal than I ever thought 'team-unappreciated' was or whatever. Mokou and Sakuya are both two of the first characters that come to my mind as never excelling at anything, and not having a particular strength to compensate, though I hear mokou makes a good trash cleaner, there are lots of those though.
I like Yuyu too, but again, she doesn't really excell at much other than owning trash on occasion, and it's very occasional given the price of her nuke and her slow speed...I thought she'd make a good end game spirit nuke for bosses for the few that don't resist spirit (there are more than a few) given nirvana's best potential in game non-gimmick formula...But by the time she gets the sp pool to actually be able to use it enough times during a boss to pull its weight around... they start using stuff like destroy magic and djinn storm.. argh.
Team Unnapreciated was never a bad team, though. It was actually a team with some ridiculously good characters I have no idea why people didn't like.
Mokou does have an area she excells into: SP recovery. If you switch them in and out efficiently, she spams Fujiyama as easily as Suwako spams Croaking Frog, despite the former having a much higher SP cost. She is also capable of taking a few hits, so if the boss is about to act you don't need to remove all of your nukers from the front. Mokou can stay there and give you a more steady strong damage output.
Sakuya doesn't really excel in anything but, built offensively, she's a fast bulky offensive utility character who depends on buffs to deal decent damage. That's quite a few roles for a single character.
there are a few more characters I feel aren't that hot but whatever... Also, who says cirno can't do trash.. she's one of the best trash owners in the game! I mean marisa's good too but asteroid belt will NOT solo trash for very long unless you're over level, and cirno's comes with par, which is one of the staples for problematic trash enemies even until the very end!
Offensive Cirno is indeed a fantastic trash cleaner and general offensive support character, yeah.
