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DrNutt posted:
Basically every game design decision involving items, money, and equipment in FFXIII is the wrong one. I love FFXIII and its my favorite FF game but I could talk your ear off about its various issues. That fight is such a difficulty because theres no iteration on what you need to learn to do to beat it prior to that and it operates on basically the same rules as a player party. What defeats you the player is messing with your ability to get setup and your limitations in targeting multiple foes, so the solution is either alpha-strike them with deceptisol or debuff into stop-lock* neither of which youve ever needed to do before and wont need to do again**. Theres a boss a little while later that similarly fucks with a gameplay system, the stagger bar, and usually shithouses players the first time they trigger its particular behavoir around it. *Post game sucks because the thing you need to kill roughly a million of can randomly do this **Theres another post game foe whose a real piece of poo poo about this in additiont to inflicting the only none resistable starus effect but by then you have death magic and can just reload fights till it dies.
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Apr 8, 2019 16:13
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I mean, yeah, they've lost all their old poo poo. Like we know for a fact that they did high-quality renders for all the background art in FF9, like so  which they then downscaled to 320x240 for the Playstation and have since lost the originals.
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Apr 8, 2019 16:15
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Ventana posted:There's plenty of chests althroughout the game, it's porb just cause Chapter 11's area is so huge that they spread out the chests very far. In a lot of ways, Chapter 11 is designed for people to explore a lot, even though most people just end up following the hallways for the story anyways. It's not so much that I stopped finding chests, more that they stopped having shrouds in them. And it would be nice if the game told you what to sell and what to keep for upgrading. I sold all the chips I got because those explicitly say they are to be sold for money. But I don't really get the rest of the upgrading/economy system because the game never bothers to ease you into it despite the first twenty hours of the game being a glorified tutorial. I've probably burned a bunch of sellable stuff by slapping them into upgrades hoping for a bonus multiplier. Barudak posted:Basically every game design decision involving items, money, and equipment in FFXIII is the wrong one. I love FFXIII and its my favorite FF game but I could talk your ear off about its various issues. The funny thing is that it IS a harder iteration of a similar enemy that you fight in some caves a bit earlier, but in that one the big guy wasn't rushing my leader and knocking off like a third of a health bar per hit, which makes a pretty substantial difference. I've been trying to start by buffing/debuffing but my characters just can't take any hits whatsoever. What do I do with all the "ites" in my inventory? I thought they would be upgrade mats but they are always greyed out in the upgrade screen. Professor Beetus fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Apr 8, 2019 |
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Apr 8, 2019 16:16
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DrNutt posted:It's not so much that I stopped finding chests, more that they stopped having shrouds in them. And it would be nice if the game told you what to sell and what to keep for upgrading. I sold all the chips I got because those explicitly say they are to be sold for money. But I don't really get the rest of the upgrading/economy system because the game never bothers to ease you into it despite the first twenty hours of the game being a glorified tutorial. I've probably burned a bunch of sellable stuff by slapping them into upgrades hoping for a bonus multiplier. As my above post hinted, dont deal with the upgrade system without a guide. Its a pile of traps nested on other traps.
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Apr 8, 2019 16:18
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DeadButDelicious posted:So, GBA Versions of I & II, IV and V are all solid right? I have I & II on GBA somewhere and a work friend has IV and V on GBA that they will lend me. Yeah, they're fine. 1, 2, and 4 are technically superseded by the PSP versions. I prefer the PS1 version for 1 since the newer rebalance is a lot easier. Some versions of 4 GBA have minor combat bugs that tend to work out in the player's favor.
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Apr 8, 2019 17:09
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MikeJF posted:I mean, yeah, they've lost all their old poo poo. The thing that always surprises me is whenever they have a FMV which changes to a pre-render background on the PC or Switch version of 9 and 8, you can see the high quality version of the background before it turns back into the compress background.
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Apr 8, 2019 17:55
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Rirse posted:The thing that always surprises me is whenever they have a FMV which changes to a pre-render background on the PC or Switch version of 9 and 8, you can see the high quality version of the background before it turns back into the compress background. Yeah, the FMVs more than likely had a different compression algorithm than the backgrounds. I wonder what resolution the FMVs were originally rendered at anyway, before they got run through 1998’s version of Adobe Media Encoder.
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Apr 8, 2019 18:05
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Bongo Bill posted:Yeah, they're fine. 1, 2, and 4 are technically superseded by the PSP versions. I prefer the PS1 version for 1 since the newer rebalance is a lot easier. Some versions of 4 GBA have minor combat bugs that tend to work out in the player's favor.
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Apr 8, 2019 20:07
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DACK FAYDEN posted:V GBA is best V, though. Since you didn't explicitly say it. (the PC/mobile port fixes some bugs, but most of those bugs are tilted in the player's favor for stuff like Four Job Fiesta challenge-esque runs, and it doesn't change the translation or actual play experience) The PC port is hideous and not that the GBA version is much better but at least I'm playing it on a tiny rear end GBA SP screen so it's not nearly as noticeable.
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Apr 8, 2019 20:09
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Onmi posted:Like... if they'd decided to keep that hilariously dark poo poo like "Hey if you failed to save the child in the house, then Sabin would be crushed alive and killed. Then, if you brought Edward back to the town, he'd wander through the streets at night clawing at the rubble trying to dig his dead brother out in a delirious attempt to save his life." Then it'd be no loving contest. Woah there. Tell me all of these plans.
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Apr 8, 2019 20:46
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Cavelcade posted:Woah there. I dunno how many more plans there are, but I found that detail here: quote:During the development, for the Tzen event in the World of Ruin, originally if the time ran out, Sabin would actually die! Then if you came back to Tzen with Edgar in your party, it would trigger a scene with Edgar wandering forlornly around Tzen in the middle of the night, searching through the rubble in vain for his brother… “I’m coming to save you!” But we decided that the World of Ruin already had more than enough dark stories, and changed it for the final version of the game. For Sabin fans, it’s a good thing we did!
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Apr 8, 2019 21:36
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They "lost" it much like the printer that was "lost" in Office Space.
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Apr 9, 2019 00:31
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DrNutt posted:It's not so much that I stopped finding chests, more that they stopped having shrouds in them. And it would be nice if the game told you what to sell and what to keep for upgrading. I sold all the chips I got because those explicitly say they are to be sold for money. But I don't really get the rest of the upgrading/economy system because the game never bothers to ease you into it despite the first twenty hours of the game being a glorified tutorial. I've probably burned a bunch of sellable stuff by slapping them into upgrades hoping for a bonus multiplier. Ah that's more fair, cause yeah the game actually has much higher shroud drop rates itself too in earlier chapters, so by in large getting them later on is more difficult. You can buy all the shrouds (for some expensive prices) later but that's only in a shop that you won't get till after Chapter 12 bosses. Basically you had the jist of the sellable things, which explicitly say "can be sold for a high price". I just wouldn't forget to sell some of the weapons too since you really don't need a bunch of them. Some materials can be sold too for some more cost/efficient ones but that's getting a little more deep into upgrading stuff than you really need to, probably. DrNutt posted:What do I do with all the "ites" in my inventory? I thought they would be upgrade mats but they are always greyed out in the upgrade screen. Those are the transformation catalysts yeah. You can only use them on fully leveled weapons/accessories (when they have the * mark on them), and each specific item can only be upgraded by one of the specific catalysts, so if you already have fully leveled weapons it's possible you have the wrong catalyst for the upgrade.
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Apr 9, 2019 01:00
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Evil Fluffy posted:They "lost" it much like the printer that was "lost" in Office Space.
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Apr 9, 2019 01:11
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i know next to nothing about how programming or computers in general work, so can someone explain to me how come square cant just like, pull the game assets off a random disk?
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Apr 9, 2019 01:18
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mandatory lesbian posted:i know next to nothing about how programming or computers in general work, so can someone explain to me how come square cant just like, pull the game assets off a random disk? Because the assets were made in much higher resolution than the PS1 can support by PCs more powerful than it.
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Apr 9, 2019 01:27
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I'm more curious as to how a multi million dollar company couldn't buy a harddrive, drag the files into it and write "ff7 master files (DO NOT THROW AWAY)" and shove it in a safe. E: Like they had to have like 80 bucks laying around right?
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Apr 9, 2019 01:28
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Leal posted:I'm more curious as to how a multi million dollar company couldn't buy a harddrive, drag the files into it and write "ff7 master files (DO NOT THROW AWAY)" and shove it in a safe. Uh harddrive space in 1998 was still expensive and the idea that they should pay to house this stuff in very expensive vaults because in 20 years theyd redo all the graphics at higher res was unfathomable. SE isnt alone either, a lot of devs used to routinely wipe drives when projects were finished and then use those for the next game. Or hell, Id doubt the master assets for a game like SID: Crash Test Dummy still are saved and that came out in 2008 because nobody cares about it.
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Apr 9, 2019 01:31
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Nah, even back then a backup tape with all this poo poo would've been a drop in the bucket and reasonable companies would've archived all their resources, it was an organisational issue.
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Apr 9, 2019 01:33
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Imagine...Square of all companies having an organisational issue...
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Apr 9, 2019 01:33
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Last year I saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on 70mm film. I don't remember the details of the story but it was along the lines of "nobody thought a copy of this still existed, someone was cleaning out an old storage closet and holy crap it still worked!" Not everything that's big now was obviously going to be big when it came out, and people didn't put much thought into preservation.
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Apr 9, 2019 01:43
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I just got the eyeball from the water "dragon" in FF3 and I'm liking how unabashedly old it is. Like an old leather glove that has been well preserved.
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Apr 9, 2019 01:49
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Barudak posted:Uh harddrive space in 1998 was still expensive and the idea that they should pay to house this stuff in very expensive vaults because in 20 years theyd redo all the graphics at higher res was unfathomable. Was just thinking about this, anyone have any guesses as to how big the the filesizes probably were and the cost of storage for them? But yeah mostly I think it's that no one had thought of a rerelease yet. The only one I can think of before then was Super Mario All Stars. On a related note, I've been playing FF7 with the uprezed backgrounds and while it looks really nice it also makes me sad it's the best we'll get.
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Apr 9, 2019 02:11
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When I played through ff15 with my buddies, there came a point where noctus and friends were in the evil empire's evil capital, and there was some crazy strong daemon chasing us around, later revealed to be the king who had transformed into a daemon. It's been a few months, so my memory might be kind of fuzzy, but there have been some details about this that have bugged me ever since. So, first off, we ran into what I can only fathom was some kind of glitch, and I want to know if it's at all common or if we got the king twist spoiled for us by some incredibly bad luck. There's a part of the dungeon where you walk into the evil emperor's throne area, which has a smaller, more lavish throne room inside of it. From what we were able to piece together, the first time you enter this area, the smaller throne room is supposed to have a massive locked door in front of it, and you go around the throne room, then later backtrack once the door is unlocked to enter the throne room proper. When we played, the throne room door didn't exist, and we just kinda walked in confused at the lack of any cutscene or dramatic dialogue about the fact that the king's clothes are sitting on the throne in a crumpled heap. After a few minutes of loving around in the throne room, trying to see if there was an interactable inside we had to trigger or something, we realized there was supposed to be a door there, left the room, and continued with the rest of the dungeon. Does anyone know of this happening to anyone else? We weren't playing on the release version or anything, the game had been out for a decent while when we got to this part. Secondly: upon "unlocking" the door and returning to the throne room, a cutscene did play, and we were directed to the next place to go to, but at no point did any character acknowledge the king's crumpled clothes laying around right in front of them, an obvious dramatic set piece that was just kind of... ignored? Is it possible that we were glitched out of a cutscene because of the door thing, did we maybe just completely miss the characters at all noticing the incredibly heavy implication that the king had turned into a daemon, or is that just how the game is? It was honestly a kind of bewildering experience.
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Apr 9, 2019 04:08
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No, no thats it working properly. The king dies off screen and its never commented upon.
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Apr 9, 2019 04:12
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They kinda at least show scenes building up to it on the Gladious path, as it shows the king conflicting Ravus while he covered in dark energy and summoning demons. Then he appears before them with a image of the King appearing briefly before he starts talking.
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Apr 9, 2019 04:32
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The bug where the door doesn't appear first time through happened for me, too. It's definitely a bug, things weren't rendering properly, and it kinda ruins the dramatic reveal. Also, the ring is so strong that you can kill the king-monster with it. He respawns later, but it's another reason that current Chapter 13 is the best part of the whole game.
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Apr 9, 2019 05:36
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ItBreathes posted:Was just thinking about this, anyone have any guesses as to how big the the filesizes probably were and the cost of storage for them? Tape storage for large file sets was pretty cheap. And it's not even a matter of preparing for rerelease: it was always just good practice to archive your data after major projects.
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Apr 9, 2019 05:41
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I decided to go back and do some more hunts and come back to the hardest fight in the entire game later. It was a slog getting back out to the archlyte steppe, but I did a few more of the hunts and unlocked the most bizarrely limited fast travel system I have ever seen in a game. I guess the completely serviceable one from 12 where you could just teleport via certain save points was a little too user friendly so they had to take it down a notch. Another thing that is brought into focus by the giant open areas is how terrible the map system is. Rotates rather than fixed point, which isn't a big deal when running through the game's story corridors, but is problematic when trying to navigate Gran Pulse. Also, why the gently caress do you just get a small glimpse of the world in the map screen, and why are you unable to see adjacent areas? It would be really helpful since the hunts are all listed by area. What a cluster gently caress of bad game design. On the positive side, I've been spending more time trying out different paradigm combos and different combat strategies, and killed my first King Behemoth. The game still feels wildly unbalanced as some enemies will be a cakewalk in a given area while others remain quite difficult no matter how much grinding I do (no I'm not talking about the big super enemies you're not supposed to fight yet shut up). But at least I feel like I'm sort of making progress? Oh I did one hunt that created a big shiny orb that I couldn't interact with in any way, what's up with that?
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Apr 9, 2019 15:49
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Oh, we have a new Final Fantasy thread. Here's a little bit of Final Fantasy music on piano for you guys. If any of you are interested in that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY6_HQlCxHc
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Apr 9, 2019 16:53
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DrNutt posted:On the positive side, I've been spending more time trying out different paradigm combos and different combat strategies, and killed my first King Behemoth. The game still feels wildly unbalanced as some enemies will be a cakewalk in a given area while others remain quite difficult no matter how much grinding I do (no I'm not talking about the big super enemies you're not supposed to fight yet shut up). But at least I feel like I'm sort of making progress? Some enemy groups will be harder than others but for the most part it'll just get better from you trying different/more efficient paradigms or team setups. The game mostly led your hand till now with forced parties and now it's up to you to factor in all the combinations that can make fights easier or harder. And don't worry about the shiny orb, it's supposed to appear and you'll see it later if you keep doing the missions. But you can't do anything with it till then.
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Apr 9, 2019 18:35
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Ventana posted:Some enemy groups will be harder than others but for the most part it'll just get better from you trying different/more efficient paradigms or team setups. The game mostly led your hand till now with forced parties and now it's up to you to factor in all the combinations that can make fights easier or harder. Yeah, my biggest stumbling block right now is that I feel intense pressure to always have at least one of each role available, which means either running Lightning/Hope/Snow or Vanille/Sazh/Fang. I do have all roles unlocked now but it's so expensive to level a fourth role that it seems like a trap/grind sink.
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Apr 9, 2019 18:53
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DrNutt posted:Yeah, my biggest stumbling block right now is that I feel intense pressure to always have at least one of each role available, which means either running Lightning/Hope/Snow or Vanille/Sazh/Fang. I do have all roles unlocked now but it's so expensive to level a fourth role that it seems like a trap/grind sink. Yeah you're not meant to invest in secondary roles until you're done with your primary ones for the most part. Getting Ruin from Hope's commando tree is a good idea though. If you're still having trouble with the Ambling Bellows, it's susceptible to Pain, which completely shuts it down. Make Vanille your party leader and spam it until it connects, then the rest of the fight should be easy.
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Apr 9, 2019 19:10
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Fister Roboto posted:Yeah you're not meant to invest in secondary roles until you're done with your primary ones for the most part. Getting Ruin from Hope's commando tree is a good idea though. That's really loving good to know because I don't think I had unlocked Pain the first time around. I am pretty much maxed out on unlocked abilities at this point until more role levels open up so I will eventually make my way back and hopefully show Ambling Bellows what it's like to come back swole. Going to try and unlock as much fast travel as I can first though because good lord is Gran Pulse massive. I do absolutely love the sense of scale you get when you pop out onto the Archlyte Steppe and see those big loving turtle things stomping around. And then the last time there was some massive dude walking about, just loving towering over those guys. They nailed that in FF15 too, but they also gave you a car so you can get around faster which was nice.
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Apr 9, 2019 19:15
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DeadButDelicious posted:So, GBA Versions of I & II, IV and V are all solid right? I have I & II on GBA somewhere and a work friend has IV and V on GBA that they will lend me. Personal opinions: didn't play much of 1/2 on GBA but they're going to be better than the originals as far as gameplay. The new translation of IV and restoration of cut content from the American version is good. V on GBA is my definitive version. I will also, hesitantly, call VI on GBA my definitive version. The music, sounds, smaller screen and slow down are extremely regrettable though somewhat mitigated by ROM patches. The translation is worlds better while still retaining a lot of the good Woolseyisms. Phantom Beasts and Eidolons are dumb, give me Espers  It also fixes most of the worst bugs from VI, as it would be generous to call the original "adequately programmed". This includes the Vanish + Doom/X-zone bug but this game is not even remotely hard if you know some things about how the game works.
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Apr 9, 2019 22:01
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I've been messing around with the randomizer, and while I always knew, it's crazy to see just how powerful tools/blitz/basic magic are once you don't have them.
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Apr 9, 2019 22:51
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DrNutt posted:I decided to go back and do some more hunts and come back to the hardest fight in the entire game later. It was a slog getting back out to the archlyte steppe, but I did a few more of the hunts and unlocked the most bizarrely limited fast travel system I have ever seen in a game. I guess the completely serviceable one from 12 where you could just teleport via certain save points was a little too user friendly so they had to take it down a notch. Another thing that is brought into focus by the giant open areas is how terrible the map system is. Rotates rather than fixed point, which isn't a big deal when running through the game's story corridors, but is problematic when trying to navigate Gran Pulse. Also, why the gently caress do you just get a small glimpse of the world in the map screen, and why are you unable to see adjacent areas? It would be really helpful since the hunts are all listed by area. What a cluster gently caress of bad game design. also I know this is like the least relevant part of your post, and I only bring it up because I spelled and pronounced it wrong for years before I noticed, but it's not Archlyte Steppe, it's Archylte Steppe. a similar thing happened with cactaur and cactuar
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Apr 10, 2019 14:34
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The fast travel in 13 is weird and the stupidest part is the gauntlet area of hunts you unlock doesnt have fast travel directly to it so you always have to walk it. The general recommendation is complete the first 14 hunts on the steppe then progress the game. By doing that youll be able to do the fast travel hunt quests at temujins tower and oerba which if you ever want to do more hunts makes that massively less painful to do the odd ones located there. Also by doing the first 14 hunts its possible if not likely youll instantly be able to complete the games only sidequest which is in oerba and the rewards are nice. Dont invest anything beyond first skills in roles outside someones main 3 until youve finished the game as the final tier of a characters crystarium is unlocked by beating the game. Further the cp:stat ratio on main classes is absurdly higher than on side classes so you are wasting time doing it before end game.
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Apr 10, 2019 14:53
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All the more reason to remake FVIII
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Apr 10, 2019 15:26
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Wait a second. Once I beat this Final Fantasy game, it let's me keep playing?  And you can't even complete the crystariums until you do???
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Apr 10, 2019 15:50
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