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I posted this in the "Before I play" thread:GloomMouse posted:Anyone played Final Fantasy XII: International Zodiac Job System and know what Jobs to pick? I'm pretty familiar with the original version, and I'm aware of a couple of changes regarding item locations (Nihopaloa for example), so I just don't want to end up without an important Technik/Magick. I'll be playing it on PCSX2 for the save-states and graphical boost, so I can use a save editor if I gently caress up, but I'd rather not have to. ...and voltron lion force reminded me that we actually have a thread just for final fantasy stuff. He gave some good tips (black magic is actually useful now, etc), but more people weighing in would be great.
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Dec 4, 2012 01:45
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Artix74 posted:Admittedly it's taking the mechanics of a game from ~12 years before its time, but you'd be hard pressed to find a more faithful Chrono Trigger clone than Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled. It's a shame, because by virtue of using Chrono Trigger's mechanics it played really well, and the plot was actually kind of interesting. It was glitchy as gently caress though, and the encounter rate was loving ridiculous so a lot of people hated it. They also thought having to move around in combat worked well. It would have if I didn't have to waste two turns shuffling my guys around because they block each other's way.
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Dec 4, 2012 01:50
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again and again about XIII - it's the pacing that kills it. The combat system is fairly decent (though with a few problems), the linearity works in the sense that the player is never really overlevelled (if they're losing to a boss, they just need to shake up their tactics more), and the story has an interesting premise. The way it's all paced though is just plain terrible - Too long stretches of nothing much happening in too long dungeons, repetition of the same piece of irrelevant information, antagonists that make too few appearances or are unceremoniously introduced and killed just as quickly, etc, etc.
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Dec 4, 2012 02:07
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GloomMouse posted:I posted this in the "Before I play" thread: There's also a Let's Play going on of that version right now, and it has covered some job recommendation stuff. You'll probably want magical healing and item lores, several characters that can hit flying enemies, and magical and physical offense. That said, the jobs are really well balanced and you'd have a hard time making a group that didn't have all these things. If you want to put more thought into it, think about splitting your guys into two relatively balanced teams of 3, and maybe consider what skills can be unlocked by Espers in each job, so you don't have two jobs that absolutely depend on the same Esper for a lot of their versatility. I made a post on GameFAQs years ago with a breakdown of the jobs and esper-locked skills: http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/939426-final-fantasy-xii-international-zodiac-job-system/52876031 Remember that Vaan, Balthier, and Fran all start with steal no matter what job they're in, Basch comes with Libra, and all the females come with the basic heal spell (that can be useful pretty much all throughout the game for after-battle healing). Character stats really aren't that important, but if you're a super-twink: If there's a job that has physical and magical-based moves (Samurai, Uhlan, maybe Monk and Knight), you'll probably want Vaan or Ashe, (with Fran as a distant 3rd choice) as they have the most balanced stats. Otherwise, girls in magic jobs, guys in physical jobs. Edit: Correcting link. Schwartzcough fucked around with this message at 04:51 on Dec 4, 2012 |
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Dec 4, 2012 02:16
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GloomMouse posted:I posted this in the "Before I play" thread: I've been rolling with Monk/Red Mage/Samurai and it's been pretty smooth sailing up through the Lab. Those guys get enough in the way of +HP licenses (and light armor for the Monk) that you don't run into the same durability issues that can come up with a White Mage, for example. It's a little light on utility at times, but you get the good green magic and most of the -ga buffs eventually.
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Dec 4, 2012 02:35
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While we're on the topic of XIII-2... The biggest issue I had with the game was that it pretended to be something it wasn't. It claimed to be all about time travel, yet the time travel was merely superficial story fluff; there was very little in the actual gameplay or story progression to support that it was anything other than an adventure favoring a main hub over intermediate travel areas. Yeah, there were past and future maps of certain areas... except in most cases they were almost indistinguishable from the base map. And once you solved the paradoxes in an area, that was pretty much it. You didn't really see how it impacted the time stream; you just moved on to the next XIII actually had a similar issue, in retrospect. Consequent areas were just kind of shoehorned in one after the other, with no regard to flow. Like teleporting with a hub menu, sans the teleporting, or the menu. There were also the constant story jumps between areas and parties (and thus playstyles, given the pretty set paradigms in the first half of the game), and so it didn't foster a sense of story or gameplay unity. Following along with the Dark Id's playthrough of X, it almost has a similar issue, but the water based art direction holds things together rather nicely. XIII on the other hand didn't even have a coherent art direction. Sorry if I made any mistakes. It's been a while since I played either game, so I could just be remembering things wrong. 
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Dec 4, 2012 03:33
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No, that's pretty correct. All three games suffer pretty heavily from just sort of... things being places. The older games have that a little but not quite to the same degree because there's a greater sense of separation.
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Dec 4, 2012 03:37
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Schwartzcough posted:There's also a Let's Play going on of that version right now, and it has covered some job recommendation stuff. Holy poo poo that LP is amazing. Also that link is broke as hell.
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Dec 4, 2012 03:46
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ImpAtom posted:No, that's pretty correct. All three games suffer pretty heavily from just sort of... things being places. The older games have that a little but not quite to the same degree because there's a greater sense of separation. Graphical limitations probably helped the earlier games, too. Sure, in FFVI you could be walking from a snowy mountain peak to a grassy plain to a desert in roughly ten seconds, but given the limitations, you could just imagine the transitions. Though that does make me appreciate that despite its other flaws, XIII's world had a sense of size to it. Pulse looked and felt immense, whereas the entire planet in earlier games (except maybe XII) were all around the size of Rhode Island. Even Spira in FFX felt small, despite rejecting the previous 'world map with people the size of towns' model.
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Dec 4, 2012 03:54
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I always figured Spira was supposed to be small, that it was just a tiny Hawaii-like archipelago in a the middle of a vast ocean.
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Dec 4, 2012 03:57
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GloomMouse posted:Holy poo poo that LP is amazing. Also that link is broke as hell. Whoops! I'm an idiot. Here, try this.
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Dec 4, 2012 04:51
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I'm chiming in to say I loved X (probably my favorite of the series?) and enjoyed XIII-2. I didn't really hate X-2 or XIII but neither wowed me the way the former two did. I do think that X is overall the best of the bunch though. Seems hard to argue with it considering the characters were pretty much universally more interesting than XIII's cast.
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Dec 4, 2012 06:47
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ShadeofDante posted:I'm chiming in to say I loved X (probably my favorite of the series?) and enjoyed XIII-2. I didn't really hate X-2 or XIII but neither wowed me the way the former two did. I dunno, I think from a gameplay perspective XIII was a lot more fun to me than X. X just had a lot of dumb moments that made me cringe really hard (though, XIII did as well). I like the world, but I hate the people that populate it. Whereas with XIII I sorta liked some of the characters as well as liked the world. Basically, X was barely edged out by XIII just by virtue of not having Tidus. Or Yuna. Or Rikku. Or Seymour.
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Dec 4, 2012 06:53
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ShadeofDante posted:I do think that X is overall the best of the bunch though. Seems hard to argue with it considering the characters were pretty much universally more interesting than XIII's cast. Not really. Tidus is kind of okay, but the rest of the cast that's not Auron or Jecht are either really obnoxious or bad, I'd say Wakka's kind of okay too considering he actually undergoes some decent character development. FFXIII's characters aren't that much better and I really hated Snow and Vanille more than I probably hated any of X's characters, but at least only two were violently stupid over the rest of the cast being average or non-entities at worst and the main villain not being terribly overdesigned. Although, I don't factor liking the characters as a major part of my video games, so I guess it just goes to what you value most in a game.
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Dec 4, 2012 07:27
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I would have appreciated Square writing characters like Sazh and Fang, if in the game immediately after they hadn't regressed to spunky hotheaded anime boy and demure lovestruck anime girl. In fact, finding even two words to describe XIII-2's characters is a struggle, considering I spent over 20 hours listening to them.
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Dec 4, 2012 10:08
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That loving Sned posted:In fact, finding even two words to describe XIII-2's characters is a struggle, considering I spent over 20 hours listening to them. "Shut" and "Up" seem to be fairly useful descriptors, from what I've gleaned of responses in this thread.
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Dec 4, 2012 10:15
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That loving Sned posted:I would have appreciated Square writing characters like Sazh and Fang, if in the game immediately after they hadn't regressed to spunky hotheaded anime boy and demure lovestruck anime girl. In fact, finding even two words to describe XIII-2's characters is a struggle, considering I spent over 20 hours listening to them. Noel's background is kinda depressing, but it takes way too long to get to it after listening to them be idiots.
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Dec 4, 2012 10:34
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I like Noel. His backstory and relation with Caius could have been explored more, but he called out Serah and Snow on their poo poo sometimes, and he's never really annoying. Also his theme is really nice.
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Dec 4, 2012 10:45
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Terper posted:I like Noel. His backstory and relation with Caius could have been explored more, but he called out Serah and Snow on their poo poo sometimes, and he's never really annoying. Also his theme is really nice. I agree. Him and Caius have two of the best character themes in the series.
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Dec 4, 2012 10:57
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But Rocks Hurt Head posted:Hey guys, totally random change-of-topic, but I've been playing through Jeff Ludwig's rebalance of FFI Dawn of Souls. I played through this recently, and it doesn't make major changes to the overall game. Stats increase faster, spells increase faster, while weapon skills increase slower. Most importantly you'll always get some spell/weapon experience from fighting, no matter how weak the enemy is. A lot of enemies are stronger, but with FFII being FFII I barely ever noticed. Instant death still instakills 99% of the enemies in the game, so it really doesn't matter that a Red Dragon now has 9000 HP instead of 5000.
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Dec 4, 2012 18:43
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So I tried out that FF1 hack last night. Rolling a party of Knight/Master/Ninja/Sage, and so far it really feels like your party gains strength much more quickly, though random encounters have also been buffed. I loving love my Sage, which already has more MP than I could ever use in a dungeon, even if he has the endurance of a wet piece of paper. Master hits like a truck, Knight can take some hits, and Ninja's fast as hell and already has two hits at L1. Of course, Master's also kinda fragile, Knight has a tough time hitting at times, and the Ninja's attacks can suck sometimes (though it has black magic to fall back on). I'm digging it so far, and my only major complaint is that I can't afford to outfit them with all sorts of awesome stuff.
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Dec 4, 2012 21:40
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I love it when you encounter Caius in Blade Runner land, and it's later explained that it was a fake Caius you met. It's not often you see retconning within the same game. He's also a pathetic Sephiroph tryhard, right down to his theme music. If he was the villain in XIII, it would have been a direct remake of VII with all the coherency and fun sucked out of it.
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Dec 4, 2012 21:59
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voltron lion force posted:Out of curiosity what'd you think of FFX and FFX-2? Its sort of a pet theory of mine that people that like the 10 series inexplicably hate on the 13 series. FFX may well be my favourite, I enjoyed X-2 as well, thought XIII was fairly average for the most part and XIII-2 is a heap of fun but utterly ridiculous and cringeworthy plotwise, kind of game you have to turn the volume down for cutscenes. So you might be on to something, seems a few others agree. It's an odd thing. We're never gonna get FFX HD  .Artix74 posted:Well, there's good and bad news. The good news is that the battle system is back with some enhancements (the stupid "We're changing paradigms!" scene the first time you change in battle is gone, and you can specify "cross" or "wide" versions of paradigms to have the team focus on one enemy or spread and and go with AoE attacks respectively), and if you're a fan of Numbers Going Up™ the monster system lets you break the game over your knee. The bad news is that as a direct consequence of the latter, it's very easy to get overleveled and plow through the game without much consequence, especially if you like doing optional areas as soon as possible. Ugh, I didn't know you could specify 'cross' and 'wide'. That'd be really handy, I'll have to look at it when I go in. I skipped basically all the tutorials as I'd just come off FFXIII. The game is insanely easy though, I'm worried that I'm overleveled. But it's nice that at least I can be if I'd like to be. Are there any optional bosses? Actually, I was wondering something that maybe the thread can help me with. I'm up to Academia 4XX, just beat Proto Fal'Cie Adam and I'm looking for a replacement Ravager monster. I'm still using a Gremlin which I think was the first monster I caught. It's working fine but I'd just like a change and I'm wondering what some interesting/good ones available around where I'm at would be. I have a blue chocobo but I haven't trained it up a lot. Caius is also a terrible villain and Noel reminds me a heap of Sora for whatever reason (just more FF-ish). But good voice acting and themes, yeah.
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Dec 4, 2012 22:41
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That loving Sned posted:I love it when you encounter Caius in Blade Runner land, and it's later explained that it was a fake Caius you met. It's not often you see retconning within the same game. That isn't retconning. It's a direct link to the fact that there are multiple Caius' and Yeul's across the timeline. The true Caius is the one who is in Valhalla with Lightning.
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Dec 4, 2012 22:49
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Artix74 posted:Admittedly it's taking the mechanics of a game from ~12 years before its time, but you'd be hard pressed to find a more faithful Chrono Trigger clone than Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled. It's a shame, because by virtue of using Chrono Trigger's mechanics it played really well, and the plot was actually kind of interesting. It was glitchy as gently caress though, and the encounter rate was loving ridiculous so a lot of people hated it. I have that game. It definitely gave CT vibes at first but if CT is a polished gem sparkling in the sun then Black Sigil is a lump of coal half-buried in the dirt. Neat story. Decent attempt at being a CT-like game. Bad everything else. It's also hilariously imbalanced. I'm not sure if their are bosses immune to the dual drain ability but the two characters who use it are basically immortal and you can spam it constantly because you rarely spend more MP than you get back. In the desert where you need to avoid the giant worms you can just bulldoze through them with that skill.
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Dec 4, 2012 22:55
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Half the difficulty in XIII-2 is to not get overlevelled. For some strange reason, i actually liked that. Somewhat-liking the story at the end, and spending 11 hours wiping against the final bosses (which probably is around 30% of my total playtime on that game) helped i guess.
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Dec 5, 2012 00:00
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Azure_Horizon posted:That isn't retconning. It's a direct link to the fact that there are multiple Caius' and Yeul's across the timeline. The true Caius is the one who is in Valhalla with Lightning. Actually that Caius is a hologram created by the proto-Fal'cie. (like the guys in Augusta Tower)
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Dec 5, 2012 00:22
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The issue with XIII-2 is that with very, very few exceptions, it's not hard at all. This lasts up until the final area, which slams your head into a coffee table repeatedly with enemies capable of murdering you before you can even take an action.
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Dec 5, 2012 00:47
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MrAristocrates posted:The issue with XIII-2 is that with very, very few exceptions, it's not hard at all. This lasts up until the final area, which slams your head into a coffee table repeatedly with enemies capable of murdering you before you can even take an action. This is why everyone should get all the coliseum DLC battles and beat them without a guide. The're all pretty awesome, especially good ol' Gilgamesh.
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Dec 5, 2012 01:24
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I have seen a SE game on my Android, Chaos Rings, along with FF1 and FF3. Are these decent games and worth the purchase?
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Dec 5, 2012 20:59
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Raphus C posted:I have seen a SE game on my Android, Chaos Rings, along with FF1 and FF3. Are these decent games and worth the purchase? Chaos Rings is a complete push-over of a game where you can beat 90% of all battles with just slamming the attack button as hard as you can and where while it features 4 separate questlines you carry over stat-breaking equipment and repeat 100% of content while the story circles a drain that Star Trek would be ashamed to be involved with. FF3 is still the updated version of FF3 aka the "gently caress you if you want to beat this" version. Not bad but be prepared for the game to destroy you and then make you lose an hour+ of progress. FF1 is FF1 but slightly souped like the PSP version was. If you're nostalgic or never played it its not a horrible choice. Edit: And I know its not Final Fantasy but you mentioned Chaos Rings so I'll mention the Chrono Trigger port that just dropped has had its resolution smeared and text-boxes redone by someone who apparently does not care. It does include the DS additions to the game which while extra content are tedious, pointless, and badly made. Barudak fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Dec 5, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2012 21:05
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Aureon posted:Half the difficulty in XIII-2 is to not get overlevelled. I usually plow through RPGs doing the bare minimum just to get to the ending. XIII-2 is definitely not as difficult XIII, but it's pretty easy to be underlevelled if you just go from A to B. I had to grind a few hours to get through the last dungeon and bosses.
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Dec 5, 2012 22:24
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Krad posted:This is why everyone should get all the coliseum DLC battles and beat them without a guide. The're all pretty awesome, especially good ol' Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh hits like a truck and he's a goddamn dick.
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Dec 6, 2012 00:08
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Yeah, about 400 Academia is when I realized I was starting to steamroll everything, and also when I started avoiding all enemy encounters for the next area or so. Made Academia 600 a BITCH (loving behemoths) but the difficulty was reasonable. Honestly, it's possible to overlevel in every RPG, but it's just way too easy in XIII-2. If they'd had monsters give you less XP the game probably would have been fine.
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Dec 6, 2012 00:55
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Why is it that every endgame level in FF recently has to have behemoths all over the place? It's just padding, it isn't fun after a few times.
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Dec 6, 2012 01:03
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Why is it that every endgame level in FF recently has to have behemoths all over the place? Because it's been traditional for Behemoths to be an end-game enemy since Final Fantasy II back on the NES?
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Dec 6, 2012 01:08
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Gilgamesh hits like a truck and he's a goddamn dick. I had to go on an epic quest to get all the ingredients to upgrade my monsters (without that stupidly broken Chichu) and figure out what the best paradigms were to finally beat him after 20+ tries. It was glorious. 
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Dec 6, 2012 01:51
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Krad posted:I had to go on an epic quest to get all the ingredients to upgrade my monsters (without that stupidly broken Chichu) and figure out what the best paradigms were to finally beat him after 20+ tries. His theme for that fight goes a looooooooooooong way towards making all of that worthwhile. I mean, come on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAZXVv7azKA
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Dec 6, 2012 01:56
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I just got gifted the DS version of FFIV from a friend, and heard it can be easy to screw up the Augments thing. Anything I should know that doesn't involve reading every page?
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Dec 6, 2012 12:09
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Seedge posted:I just got gifted the DS version of FFIV from a friend, and heard it can be easy to screw up the Augments thing. Anything I should know that doesn't involve reading every page? If you give enough augments (2 or 3? I forget the right number) to a character who later leaves the party, you get a better augment in return. If you've played FF4 before you should have an idea of which characters leave and when. If you haven't, then you're probably not getting the best augments without a guide. Augments carry over to new game+, and you'll continue getting new ones. You won't get the absolute best ones until the end of your third playthrough. Getting Draw Attacks, Counter and Kick on Cecil (and setting Kick as the ability he counters with), and Doublecast on Rosa, can be a big help against the bullshit spikes in the difficulty curve.
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Dec 6, 2012 12:48
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