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ProfessorProf posted:The reason some people found Barthandelus frustrating - or at least the reason I did - is that if you don't have a very strong understanding of the combat system at that point, then it's very likely that his ultimate attack will wipe your party from full health. I went into it not realizing that having a Sentinel in the party boosted the defense of the entire party, so even at max level that attack was an apparently-unavoidable death sentence until I figured that out. I never used Sentinel, except for the very first battle that introduced it, so I think having a full set of buffs is enough to survive most attacks. Gologle posted:Every Final Fantasy, hell, maybe every RPG should have some kind of Auto system where it records your last manual action and does it over and over, but not completely like FF13 does (I know you have the option to manually pick your commands BUT WHY THE gently caress WOULD YOU DO THAT). You can set almost any Final Fantasy game to have the battle menu remember the last action. It's the same thing, but you have to confirm it. It's useful if you don't want a character wasting a turn doing something that's no longer necessary, like casting Curaga on a party at full health. That Fucking Sned fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jul 28, 2013 |
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Jul 28, 2013 17:27
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Schwartzcough posted:But Gambits DID speed things up- your team all acts simultaneously without needing to wait for you to micromanage every action (although you can if you want or need to, which makes a big difference). Most battles are over in seconds. I wouldn't be surprised if XII had the lowest average battle duration in the series (excluding Yiazmat and Hellwyrm...). Meanwhile, for a system focused on "finishing fights as quickly as possible," battles in XIII seem to take a really long time. They clearly wanted to get use out of the Stagger Gauge mechanic, which several of the classes are built around, so a ton of enemies require you to just pound on them for multiple rounds before you can start doing real damage. FFXII didn't speed things up though, except by removing the need to click buttons. I don't need a lot of time to make my decisions in Final Fantasy because there are so few viable decisions to make that the Gambit system barely influenced my time. It made it less micromanagy in that I didn't have to select my options but that is about it. It's not meaningfully any different from a classic FF fights. Some fights are over quickly, but they'd be over quickly no matter what you do. A lot of fights in FFVI are over quickly when I set Edgar to Memory > Autocrossbow. That isn't really a good thing. (And I like FFVI despite myself.) The fights that aren't over quickly are just as long as in other FF games, and for the most part play like other FF games, just with less interaction. And if you're taking that long to damage enemies in FFXIII then you're likely not taking advantage of everything given to you, rather than the enemies being that strong. Debuffs and buffs are absurdly powerful in FFXIII and the stagger bar can be raised insanely quickly if you are doing things properly. Not as fast as Memory > Autocrossbow at least in a way that encourages me to look at the screen. Tempo 119 posted:I agree with you for the most part, but I think you've kinda fallen into a trap here. Of course they designed it to be gambited, because they know you have gambits! If they didn't include that one system, the rest (hopefully) wouldn't have still been the same - they'd have put some other new angle on it, or at least made it easier to control by yourself. As much as 13 is a "do the normal stuff, as fast as you can" idea, 12 is "do as much stuff as you can, at normal speed". I didn't say it wouldn't have been, just that is what it is. One of the common comebacks to Gambit system automating everything is "well, you don't have to use it." That's true. You don't. However it was clearly designed for it and so the awkwardness shines through. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Jul 28, 2013 |
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Jul 28, 2013 17:41
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As somebody who went through all of FFXII without using Gambits because I didn't understand how to make them effective, it wasn't so bad. It was like playing a Final Fantasy.
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Jul 28, 2013 20:07
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The best way to automate came out ages before Gambits. Phantasy Star IV let you make battle macros that saved your party's actions.
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Jul 28, 2013 20:09
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Overbite posted:I don't like my games being automated. Whats the point in playing the game if it plays it for you? If it's not an Action RPG I want to control every party member. Because it isn't playing for you. Do you hate starcraft because you don't have to manually shoot with your marines? Paradigm shifting is the meat of the game. It is entirely about controlling the flow of battle and reacting to a changing field instead of micro-managing a bunch of commands that aren't really, and never have been, particularly interesting. Sentinel paradigm in particular is about a million times more interesting than every other defensive option in other games that I can think of.
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Jul 28, 2013 20:15
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For what it's worth, people always mention "Why pick commands when you can just auto-select" in FFXIII, and while it's largely true for Commando, Ravager, and Medic, during boss fights (and those harder-to-5-star regular encounters), I found it a lot more efficient when I controlled the Synergist, Saboteur, and Sentinel paradigms myself.
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Jul 28, 2013 20:31
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fount of knowledge posted:For what it's worth, people always mention "Why pick commands when you can just auto-select" in FFXIII, and while it's largely true for Commando, Ravager, and Medic, during boss fights (and those harder-to-5-star regular encounters), I found it a lot more efficient when I controlled the Synergist, Saboteur, and Sentinel paradigms myself. Medic is easily the most boring paradigm because it's just "heal." Regardless if if you selected it or not, there's only two options. (Heal/remove status effects.) I get that it was necessary but man does it suck.
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Jul 28, 2013 20:34
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I just found out about Lightning's boob job for FF13-3. Goddamit Japan I liked her before when she was just a cool soldier...
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Jul 28, 2013 20:34
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ImpAtom posted:FFXII didn't speed things up though, except by removing the need to click buttons. I don't need a lot of time to make my decisions in Final Fantasy because there are so few viable decisions to make that the Gambit system barely influenced my time. It made it less micromanagy in that I didn't have to select my options but that is about it. It's not meaningfully any different from a classic FF fights. Some fights are over quickly, but they'd be over quickly no matter what you do. A lot of fights in FFVI are over quickly when I set Edgar to Memory > Autocrossbow. That isn't really a good thing. (And I like FFVI despite myself.) The fights that aren't over quickly are just as long as in other FF games, and for the most part play like other FF games, just with less interaction. It's not just "clicking buttons" that takes time in the other pre-XII games- everyone took turns attacking. Character 1 attacks, then character 2, then character 3, then enemy 1, then enemy 2, then enemy 3, then enemy 4; start over. With XII and Gambits, those things are all happening simultaneously. You have a lot more happening at once to process and keep track of, especially at max battle speed. Of course it feels more "clunky" to try and input commands for every character one at a time, when the system is designed for everything to be happening at the same time according to a pre-set plan. You're supposed to take all the input stimuli and react when holes appear in your strategy, or maneuvering for optimal positioning. Hell, being able to position your characters at all is still unique to the non-MMO series, and is important in itself a lot of times, keeping track of targeting and AoE radii. Also, no battle transitions speeds things up a lot.
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Jul 28, 2013 21:01
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That loving Sned posted:What was really surprising about Pork Lift and wateyad's LP was that wateyad played each battle very conservatively, which meant he got through boss battles just fine, but wasted a lot of time in normal battles. It was painful watching him heal all his party members right at the end of a battle, when the enemy only has a sliver of health left, since the game restores all your health automatically. Yeah, there's no real reason to play defensively in that game. I ended up using a team with only one healer (Sazh/Vanille/Snow) and I finished almost every fight way faster than that, with no real repercussion.
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Jul 28, 2013 21:04
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Here's the deal, Final Fantasy's core gameplay is loving garbage, and some of the games have mitigated that with wonderful presentation or clever little stories or enough variety that you can entertain yourself by experimenting, and some haven't. But compared to anything but the bottom of the jRPG barrel, or maybe MMORPGs, it's really self-evidently crap. Until they throw it all out and start over, there's nothing to talk about but personal preference for one flavor of frantic boredom over another.
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Jul 28, 2013 21:08
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Basically, Final Fantasy should steal the Tales combat system. Specifically Graces.
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Jul 28, 2013 21:09
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Schwartzcough posted:It's not just "clicking buttons" that takes time in the other pre-XII games- everyone took turns attacking. Character 1 attacks, then character 2, then character 3, then enemy 1, then enemy 2, then enemy 3, then enemy 4; start over. With XII and Gambits, those things are all happening simultaneously. You have a lot more happening at once to process and keep track of, especially at max battle speed. Of course it feels more "clunky" to try and input commands for every character one at a time, when the system is designed for everything to be happening at the same time according to a pre-set plan. You're supposed to take all the input stimuli and react when holes appear in your strategy, or maneuvering for optimal positioning. Hell, being able to position your characters at all is still unique to the non-MMO series, and is important in itself a lot of times, keeping track of targeting and AoE radii. Then I guess we just played the game differently because there was never a lot going on that I had to process. Even at high speed and with the speed up button, the combat was slow and easily adapted to and it was pretty trivial to automate huge chunks of the game so that I didn't even need to react to it. At max battle speed, outside of the speed-up button, I didn't notice any huge significant increase in combat speed. It had good ideas but they weren't implemented very well and the end result was a mostly-automated system that didn't really change how I played the game except automating it. It doesn't help that there are a bunch of other RPGs that use similar concepts but use them much better.
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Jul 28, 2013 21:10
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Endorph posted:Basically, Final Fantasy should steal the Tales combat system. Specifically Graces. No I'd much prefer them stealing from KH's handheld games. Imagine a final Fantasy with gameplay as good as BBS 
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Jul 28, 2013 21:14
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Endorph posted:Basically, Final Fantasy should steal the Tales combat system. Specifically Graces. Every game should just be Tales of Graces, really.
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Jul 28, 2013 21:20
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:No I'd much prefer them stealing from KH's handheld games. Imagine a final Fantasy with gameplay as good as BBS I was so disappointed when I saw that FF15 isn't going to use the Command system. Then I was even more disappointed when I saw that apperantly not even KH3 is going to use the Command system.
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Jul 28, 2013 21:24
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Failboattootoot posted:Because it isn't playing for you. Do you hate starcraft because you don't have to manually shoot with your marines? Paradigm shifting is the meat of the game. It is entirely about controlling the flow of battle and reacting to a changing field instead of micro-managing a bunch of commands that aren't really, and never have been, particularly interesting. Sentinel paradigm in particular is about a million times more interesting than every other defensive option in other games that I can think of. I don't know who said this, but someone in the video game industry summarized good gameplay as a series of interesting decisions and when it comes to Final Fantasy's battles, I had way more fun making choices with FF13's 'press X to win' auto-battle mess than the classic battles of older Final Fantasies. Part of the problem is that Final Fantasy, compared to franchises like SMT and Dragon Quest, has a history of lackluster battles. For example, in several Final Fantasy games buffs and debuffs are useless for several reasons. FF13's battles weren't excellent, but I thought they were pretty good- definitely better than most of other mainline FF titles. I don't think there was anything intrinsically better about FF13's battle system compared to a battle system like FF9's, it's just that the fine-tuning of FF13's battles was better than other Final Fantasy titles. Sometime in the future I'd like the mainline Final Fantasy series to return to that classic ATB battle system, but not without fixing up the gameplay and making it truly great.
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Jul 28, 2013 21:37
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Overbite posted:I don't like my games being automated. Whats the point in playing the game if it plays it for you? If it's not an Action RPG I want to control every party member. I feel the same with people playing WOW and setting up huge amounts of macro keys to do 30 actions after each other with one button sorta thing
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Jul 28, 2013 22:10
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Terper posted:I was so disappointed when I saw that FF15 isn't going to use the Command system. For Kingdom Hearts III, are you just going by that teaser trailer? Or was it mentioned in an interview? I think the problem with Final Fantasy combat systems are that they're almost always designed to be possible for someone to beat without grinding or mastering it. You can't beat many other JRPGs by hitting attack and healing when you're low on health, even up to the final boss. Turn-based combat, even games using Action-Time Battle where your entering commands for your characters to perform, feel old-fashioned because they were a simulation of something that couldn't be done on the NES, which was to have a group of characters fighting a horde of enemies. The same goes for random encounters. I imagine that if it had the technology and the budget, the original Final Fantasy would have been more like Dragon's Dogma than Dragon Quest, but because you can't control multiple characters in real time, and the NES couldn't handle an action-RPG with four characters, then a system where actions and encounters relied on random chance was used instead. Even when the system has the technology to run everything in real-time, Final Fantasy XIII still has to go to a different screen to fight enemies, and you still need to tell your character what to do in advance, while they stand around waiting for an imaginary bar to fill. Lightning Returns at least removes one layer of abstraction, the menu, and replaces it with direct button commands. XV has a chance of being much more widely appreciated, because it replaces the obtuse, unintuitive battle system with one like Kingdom Hearts or Devil May Cry. It replaces the limits on character movement and responsiveness with skill and reactions. When an enemy attacks you, you aren't dependent on your defense or agility stats to tank or dodge the damage, you have complete control of your characters' positioning. XIII sold a lot of copies, but considering a lot of Final Fantasy fans didn't really figure out its battle system, I don't think people new to the series would have found it much fun either. If XV ends up being the gameplay of Kingdom Hearts and Devil May Cry, but without the tedious minigames and uninteresting storyline of KH, then it's going to be pretty great. E: I forgot to mention, but not having creepy poo poo in XV helps too. E2: It's impossible to remove all types of abstraction in a video game, such as health bars and the HUD, but I'm not suggesting that it shouldn't use a combination of both. Dark Souls uses stats, but you can't just grind away the difficulty. You have stats in the Mario & Luigi games, but with skill you can dodge every single attack in the game. However, in the first Final Fantasy game, your stats determined your outcome in combat, and so did random chance. It was random whether your attack would actually land, and your stats determined how much damage it did. Using action-based combat just removes the random chance, but even if a turn based game made every attack hit 100% of the time, if an enemy targeted your character, you'd have no choice to take the hit, and you'd only survive if your stats were good enough. In an action RPG, your skill determines how well you do in the game. That Fucking Sned fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Jul 28, 2013 |
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Jul 28, 2013 22:16
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The problem with that argument is that it assumes that direct control is the optional outcome of gameplay, which isn't really true. Abstraction and numbers-based gameplay are a legitimate style of gameplay. Regardless of how they began, they've since evolved and developed in such a way that trying to go for direct control significantly changes the game in ways people may not like. Especially when you combine the two and get fusions like Valkyrie Profile or the Tales games which are a little from column A and a little from Column B. It assumes that turn-based combat or whatever is the result of just not being able to make it real time, instead of the fact that real-time isn't the optimal configuration for every game. You can blend the two, of course, but there are countless games out there which would play significantly less interestingly if they were just about real-time combat. To use another example: Shin Megami Tensei has multiple games, including an action-oriented spinoff franchise. Despite the fact that they converted the gameplay into action combat, plenty of players still preferred the turn-based RPG style of the game. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jul 28, 2013 |
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Jul 28, 2013 22:19
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All games are abstractions. The goal of the game designer is to make sure that the abstraction chosen is an interesting one, both from a mechanical perspective and from an artistic one. Issuing every order to a group of characters creates a different relationship between player and character than does dictating a general (or a meticulously detailed) strategy, or taking more direct control over a single character.Eggie posted:I don't know who said this, but someone in the video game industry summarized good gameplay as a series of interesting decisions That would be Chris Crawford, I believe. It's a useful definition.
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Jul 28, 2013 22:28
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:The best way to automate came out ages before Gambits. Phantasy Star IV let you make battle macros that saved your party's actions. That's because PS4 is still the best RPG of that generation*.  *tied with Chrono Trigger
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Jul 28, 2013 22:35
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Vanderdeath posted:That's because PS4 is still the best RPG of that generation*. I like you.
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Jul 28, 2013 22:46
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Phantasy Star 4 is the best game in the franchise. Also the final one. So that makes it the best Final Phantasy too.
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Jul 28, 2013 22:47
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I really wish they'd make XII available to play through more avenues. It's not on PSN for some reason, and since Sony in all their wisdom decided to remove PS2 back-compatibilty from most of the PS3s floating around, I can't play it that way either. I'm not going to buy a PS2 just so I can play XII, especially if the best way to play it requires an unofficial patch. I think that makes it like the most inaccessible title in the series, which sucks because it looks interesting.
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Jul 28, 2013 23:23
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It's because they're probably going to be doing FFXII HD, assuming X/X-2 HD goes well. Same reason Persona 4 isn't on PSN. Also, removing backwards compatibility was a wise move, saving money on something most people didn't care about.
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Jul 29, 2013 00:00
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TFT3K7wyb4 Look at this smug dude. He so smug
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Jul 29, 2013 00:15
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Armor-Piercing posted:It's because they're probably going to be doing FFXII HD, assuming X/X-2 HD goes well. Same reason Persona 4 isn't on PSN. Also, removing backwards compatibility was a wise move, saving money on something most people didn't care about. I hope it gets a re-release, HD or not, just so I can play it. I find it hard to believe nobody cares about back-compatibility though, I know a ton of people that still play PS2 games and considering the number of people worried about it on next-gen consoles, it seems to be at least a moderately big deal. I wonder how expensive it actually was to include the PS2 driver in a PS3, though. I'm sure lowering the price of the PS3 accounted for a ton of additional sales, but it still sucks that a bunch of really good games got effectively cut off. Ah well.
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Jul 29, 2013 00:17
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Armor-Piercing posted:It's because they're probably going to be doing FFXII HD, assuming X/X-2 HD goes well. Same reason Persona 4 isn't on PSN. Also, removing backwards compatibility was a wise move, saving money on something most people didn't care about. I certainly cared. The PS2 had a ton of great games, which in order to play now requires me to keep around an extra console that's got countless hours on it and is of questionable lifespan, or buy the games all over again in some PS3 package or PSN if you're lucky. And I'm not super interested in saving Sony money; it didn't save consumers anything because the PS3 didn't get any cheaper when they removed backwards compatibility.
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Jul 29, 2013 00:18
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So are PS2s like some rare commodity right now because I kept mine up until this past year and played games just fine on it. It's not like the thing is expensive or takes up a lot of room (if you get the small one).
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Jul 29, 2013 00:21
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Schwartzcough posted:I certainly cared. The PS2 had a ton of great games, which in order to play now requires me to keep around an extra console that's got countless hours on it and is of questionable lifespan, or buy the games all over again in some PS3 package or PSN if you're lucky. And I'm not super interested in saving Sony money; it didn't save consumers anything because the PS3 didn't get any cheaper when they removed backwards compatibility.
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Jul 29, 2013 00:27
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The GIG posted:So are PS2s like some rare commodity right now because I kept mine up until this past year and played games just fine on it. It's not like the thing is expensive or takes up a lot of room (if you get the small one). I mean you can pick up a refurbed PS2 for $60, probably cheaper from Craigslist and such. But I don't want to pay that much just to play one or two games, and buying used electronics from strangers can definitely be a bad idea. Less of an issue with Gamestop or something, but they still don't offer warranties and most of the stores around here don't even carry more than 1 or 2 refurbed PS2s, if any. Maybe it's not a big deal for most people, I dunno. Personally I don't make enough money to toss $60 at a PS2 so I can play one game from a series I really enjoy. Pretty much anything else I've been interested in either got released on PSN or tossed into a re-released HD collection (Silent Hill, MGS, etc.)
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Jul 29, 2013 00:39
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Not sure how many people in here have played FFT 1.3, but given that there's an on-going LP of it I'll mention that there's a 1.3.0.7 update that just dropped. Mainly number tweaks, but also a few hacks to add functionality (ie, Equip Crossbows becomes Equip Bows, Meliadoul's swordskills work on monsters).
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Jul 29, 2013 01:59
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Working fat ps2s and network adaptors are getting a bit hard to come by, not to mention hard drives that will work with them.
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Jul 29, 2013 02:21
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Corvinus posted:Not sure how many people in here have played FFT 1.3, but given that there's an on-going LP of it I'll mention that there's a 1.3.0.7 update that just dropped. Mainly number tweaks, but also a few hacks to add functionality (ie, Equip Crossbows becomes Equip Bows, Meliadoul's swordskills work on monsters). The iOS version of FFT has the tweaks to Meliadoul(and I'm assuming PSP version is the exact same)
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Jul 29, 2013 08:26
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That loving Sned posted:For Kingdom Hearts III, are you just going by that teaser trailer? Or was it mentioned in an interview? A bit of both, actually. There's clearly an MP bar in the trailer, and there's no Command menu (this is obviously subject to change, but even DDD's debut trailer had one), and in interviews he has said that KH3 will play "more like the main games" and have Summons and all that, and that the handhelds were good for experimenting. In a recent interview though, he's said that if you play 3D you can get a good idea of how battles in KH3 will play out, but I'm afraid he means more Flowmotion, which while great for running around and GOTTA GO FAST, wasn't all that interesting in battles.
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Jul 29, 2013 08:51
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ProfessorProf posted:The reason some people found Barthandelus frustrating - or at least the reason I did - is that if you don't have a very strong understanding of the combat system at that point, then it's very likely that his ultimate attack will wipe your party from full health. I went into it not realizing that having a Sentinel in the party boosted the defense of the entire party, so even at max level that attack was an apparently-unavoidable death sentence until I figured that out. The first or second fight? Because I handled the first just fine but for the life of me I barely squeaked past the second after a bunch of retries and party retooling. One of my attempts was a Sazh/Light/Hope party for buffs but he had an attack that wiped buffs and forced me to spend valuable time rebuffing. And an all out attack using Light/Hope/Fang had me having Hope or Light constantly on Medic duty because damage was racking up so fast. I finally got it done using Light/Hope/Snow, teaching Hope Ruin and only Ruin as a Commando, and keeping Snow in SEN the entire fight. And I still only got it done with 5 seconds left on the Doom counter. Not looking forward to that fight again if I ever had it in me to replay the game.
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Jul 29, 2013 09:03
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The way I dealt with both Barthandelus fights was to abuse the gently caress out of Smite. You can take half his healthbar off in a single hit, so you can afford attacking slightly less often when he's about to get out of stagger, just so you can get that one hit timed correctly.
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Jul 29, 2013 09:05
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Overbite posted:I don't normally like to wish ill on people but Toriyama needs to be demoted or something, anything that will get him out of a lead role. quote:Masaru Suzuki (Designer): There’s an unreleased costume that exposes the l’Cie scar on her chest. Please think [carefully], is there any other information that should be disclosed? (laughs)  At least they're giving it an in-canon explanation, I guess  Vanderdeath posted:That's because PS4 is still the best RPG of that generation*.  And, actually, bringing this full around to gameplay discussion - that was also always one of my big issues with FF7. I kind of like the materia system, in concept, but I also feel like it sort of negated the point of characters. The choice between party members was largely a cosmetic one, I felt, with limit breaks being the only real meaningful distinction between one character and another. Sure you could choose who was in your party, but by and large it was a decision devoid of meaning or consequence.
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Jul 29, 2013 10:54
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Sure you could choose who was in your party, but by and large it was a decision devoid of meaning or consequence. Meaning you get to take your favorites, instead of who you mechanically were required to or was the best to due to stat differences/ability differences/etc., which is (IMHO) a very good thing.
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Jul 29, 2013 10:59
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