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ZenMasterBullshit posted:The English version of the eyes talk for Ysh does at least make sense for her character though. Doing something incredibly dangerous for herself to further a goal with little heed paid to the consequences is her deal. She's lucky she's got 9 lives because she likes to burn through them. The downside of the English version has people constantly wanting some payoff, though, wondering when she's going to "inevitably" face the consequences, which is unfortunate.
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Nov 15, 2023 19:50
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 21:58 |
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the line gives a good pretext for giving yshtola glasses, which they should really do because I like glasses.
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Nov 15, 2023 21:33
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We've got Y'shtola with glasses at home.
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Nov 15, 2023 21:53
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considering what i know about y'shtola and her self-image i can one hundred percent believe she would rather be blind than have glasses
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Nov 15, 2023 23:42
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She doesn't need those aether goggles anymore!
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Nov 15, 2023 23:47
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It makes for some dramatic irony playing through Limsa!ARR.
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Nov 16, 2023 01:41
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The matching kiddie aether goggle sets were one of the weirder bits of ARR era scions
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Nov 16, 2023 03:02
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The goggles were pretty useful for being able to identify scions before you got to know the characters.
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Nov 16, 2023 03:06
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Except we never got one! So it felt like we weren't really part of the secret club
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Nov 16, 2023 03:51
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dyslexicfaser posted:Except we never got one! So it felt like we weren't really part of the secret club We don't have a doctoral tattoo from Sharlayan and the Scions are really into credentialism.
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Nov 16, 2023 04:56
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1stGear posted:The biggest meaningful breach between the Japanese and English scripts I can recall was the conversation between Matoya and Y'shtola"s aethersight, with the English making it sound like it would inevitably cause her death and the Japanese just saying she's consuming aether faster than normal. I personally prefer the Japanese because it creates the mental image that any time Y'shtola isn't on screen she's absolutely chowing down in order to sustain herself. I dunno, maybe it's just because I am a huge nerd and watch and talk about a lot of a certain type of anime but I read that and my brain immediately went to "oh this is just the trope about burning your future life span for immediate things you care deeply about" and knew that it was never meant to be taken as "she's going to Die from this".
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Nov 16, 2023 07:43
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Chapter 68: No One Lives Over the Lighthouse A message from Cid draws Kheris back to the Prima Vista. He's been working with the Scions to study Auracite, hoping to learn why those pirates wanted the Duma. Y'shtola soon decided we need someone even nerdier than Urianger to crack this and called an Archon named Mikoto.  Since being recruited, she's run exhaustive tests on the piece Jeno found in the desert, which legend names the Otius. The results indicate that Auracite is very different from standard crystal. It can absorb and transmit aether, but instead of merely acting as a magic reservoir, it can harmonically amplify any energy inside its matrix.  You thought I was joking when I said she was nerdier than Urianger, didn't you?  …  …  I understood that, but I can't fault Cid for taking the low-hanging fruit. What she's saying confirms information from the Durai Papers. Auracite sucks in willpower which radiates from the mortal soul when a person has wishes, impulses, and strong emotions. Aetherology has measured the existence of such emissions in much the same way modern science can track the electrical impulses that constitute thought. That's pretty neat, and it explains Kheris and Fordola's pseudo-precognition. We're like living EEG machines, picking up what our enemies want to do before their bodies move. This "wish aether," continually intensifies until discharged as a magical effect. The form of the spell will be influenced by the desire imprinted on the captured energy. Mikoto describes the process as similar to Primal Summoning, the main difference being that Auracite doesn't need any external power once it has a spark of aether. It's like an alternator. The jump start will get it spinning; after that, it doesn't need any help to make electricity. Are these metaphors helping? They didn't make this lore easy to parse, but I'm doing my best. Perhaps the similarity to Summoning explains why Auracite tends to create the Lucavi, as well as how their creators shape their forms. Argath was never king of Ivalice, but he wished it so vehemently that the stone made something derived from his vision of kingship. Based on our reports, Mikoto further speculates that the desire attached to Auracite can overwhelm the wielder's mind. This is why the Lucavi we've fought were so obsessive and habitually repeated phrases. A lore reason for bosses to repeat lines? The script is getting cheeky. Cid notes how these stones are suspiciously defiant of the natural laws of magic, then compares their perversion at the hands of people like Argath to the Empire's weaponization of Magitek.  Mikoto is fascinated by the idea that Auracite might be artificial. She doesn't know who or what could produce it, but it doesn't make sense as a natural phenomenon. The conversation makes Alma nervous. Her father spends a lot of time around Auractie, and she heard him talking to it. Mikoto assures that Auracite must attune to a user before it can absorb their desires, and based on her scans, the Otius hasn't done so with Jenomis. Jeno adds that the original Ramza never lost control despite gathering several Auracites. There's no reason to think we're in danger.  …  Oh good, Ramza forgot he had character development. He berates his sister for daring to question their mission just because it's dangerous with nebulous benefit until he's interrupted by an intruder.  This chap is Montblanc, from the Dalmascan desert. There are no historical records of Moogles on this side of the world, but he explains that his tribe is small and nomadic, making it unsurprising that few know about them. The actors note that legends reference Moogles in Ivalice, but they're described as having rabbit-like ears and long limbs. When did we get to Tactics Advance?  Montblanc wants a place among Jenomis' acting troupe. He once saw the Zodiac Braves musical and was so inspired that he felt an overwhelming urge to pursue a career on the stage. He goes so far as to boast that the role of King Delita was made to be played by him. Jeno seems receptive to the little fuzzball, but others are less enthused. The rest of the troupe, for instance, are…  …  …their usual selves. Stronger objections come from another Moogle named Hurdy. He bursts into the room and points out that this isn't the first time Montblanc has found his 'life's calling.' Geomancy, swordsmanship, mathematics, and the Marauder's arts have already been tried and discarded, so acting will surely be no different. Montblanc brushes off this criticism and assures us that THIS dream is the real deal.  The most violent opposition naturally comes from Ramza.  At first, he's offended by the mere presence of the "flying rodent," though this blatant prejudice draws chastisement from his father. He then changes tact, noting that their company is the finest group of actors in the world, each a proven veteran of the stage. If Montblanc is too afraid of monsters to be a warrior, then in Ramza's eyes, he isn't fit for the challenge of an audience. The Moogle does not take kindly to this insult.  Ramza is taken aback, as he never intended to issue a challenge, but Montblanc is gone before anyone can stop him. Our junior fascist shrugs, feeling it's no skin off his nose, but Hurdy is soon in hysterics. He shouts that if anything happens to his brother, it'll be on Ramza's hands for all that goading. Alma adds her voice to this condemnation, asking if Ramza learned nothing from the elitism of Argath and how it led to a horrific end. Even Lina pipes in, wondering how this kid became such an obnoxious idiot when his sister is so kind. Their disapproval actually gets through his thick skull.  Maybe he's not hopeless. Interestingly, while everyone else is shaming the boy's behavior, his father is so lost in thought that he barely notices.  This is noteworthy because Jeno did go out of his way to scold Ramza just minutes earlier. The writers wanted us to notice this, too; Lina has a line that explicitly points out how screwed up it is for a father to let his son say such horrible things without comment. Hurdy suggests that we hunt for Montblanc along the One River, and we find him having bitten off more than anyone would want to chew.  How these bastards made their way from Dalmasca is anyone's guess, but they have a lot of HP and practically spam their Meteor attack. It's a heck of a battle for a random quest. When the chickens are fried, Montblanc thanks Kheris but then gets weepy about how Hurdy was right. He's nothing but a failure and a coward who could never be a hero nor play one on the stage. Lina interrupts the pity party with a speech about how even the greatest heroes need help. King Delita had an army of followers and the Zodiac Braves to support him. When it comes to achieving dreams, friends are always your greatest weapon.  …  With that interlude resolved, it's back to the airship for…  poo poo. Thankfully, things are not as dire as they appear. After Jenomis agrees to hear them out, the Bangaa hand over Alma, the journal they stole from us, and their weapons. They're willing to place themselves at our mercy because their leader, Ba'Gamnan, disappeared without warning or trace shortly after our last encounter. They believe it has something to do with the Duma because they'd seen the man speaking to the stone as if it were an old friend.  …  She really missed her calling as a therapist. Ramza doesn't much care to help these intruders, referring to them as "lizards," like he referred to the Moogles as "mole-bats," well-known slurs for the respective races. Rather than take offense, the Bangaa grow morose and say they deserve it after their many failures. Their crew was once an elite unit of Fusiliers, part of the royal regiment under the direct command of Dalsmasca's Crown Prince. Thirty years ago, the castle they garrisoned fell to the IVth Imperial Legion. It was such a morale-crushing defeat that all organized resistance to Garlemald soon collapsed. Captain Ba'Gamnan intended to die at his post, but the prince's final order gave the Fusiliers a mission worth sacrificing their honor to accomplish: to escort the last of the royal family, Princess Ashelia, out of the warzone. Unfortunately, mere miles from the ship that would take her out to sea, a Garlean patrol fell on their unit.  …  See? She definitely should have been a therapist. Her actual point is that the Duma must have detected the same emotions in Ba'Gamna that Argath had been feeding it for millennia. That's why it attuned to him, kickstarting the creation of a new Lucavi.  Kid, can you hold in the racism for, like, two minutes? We have only one clue regarding the captain's whereabouts, a word he scratched into the margins of the stolen journal: Ridorana. The name refers to Ridorana Cataract, a chasm in the ocean commonly believed to be an entrance to the Hell of Water. No explorers have ever returned from its depths. Less known is the tower that sits on a neighboring island. The Dalmascans once used the ancient structure as a lighthouse, its beacon warning ships of the Cataract's presence. The Empire's conquest left the place abandoned, so it must be where Ba'Gamnan took the Duma. The only question is why. Ramza and Jenomis leave to study the Durai Papers, hoping to find that answer. While we wait, let's have that deferred discussion about this storyline's music. Final Fantasy Tactics has a legendary soundtrack. Even those who've never played the game will have heard a few of its tracks on playlists over the years. Some are counted among the greatest compositions in videogame history. I expected to hear modern orchestrations of those songs, and I did. What I didn't expect was their unprecedented quantity. From the first quest's first cutscene, XIV's standard array of background music is replaced with songs we've never heard before. If you look them up, you'll see titles like  "Character Creation," "Protagonist's Theme," and "Background Story. The Prima Vista has BGM called "Save/Load Screen." The second chapter we're playing through now added two new tracks, "World Map," and "A Chapel."After suppressing the urge to laugh at these names, you'll notice the songs' beautiful and complex melodies. Once you're absorbed how good they are, laughter will transmute into incredulous chuckling, complete with shaking of the head in disbelief. Entire games are made these days without a single song on the level of the one that plays in Tactics while you're changing your character's name to Assface. It's not hard to understand why they squeezed these easily overlooked pieces in, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. The Royal City includes several choice selections. The zone BGM, "Trisection," is a mixture of militarism and mystery that perfectly fits the raid's central narrative of walking into a warzone and discovering unknown monsters. The first three bosses get "Precipitous Combat," a brassy, percussion-heavy sound that effectively blends heroism and horror. It's the kind of track that would play while an armor-clad knight fought Jason Vorhees, which is fitting, given the destruction caused by the Lucavi.When we reach Argath, we see something unusual. In addition to his actual theme, the weirdly named and even more horror-film-ish "Ultima's Transformation," they jammed two extra tracks into the encounter. His introductory cutscene features "The Enemy Approaches," and after his death, we're treated to a unique victory fanfare. These extra bits are a departure from the usual pattern for music in Alliance Raids, but it's minor, so most people probably didn't notice. It's worth noting because it foreshadows how wild things will get with music formatting in the instances to come.When the Lexentales emerge from their studies, they bring a startling revelation. Or rather, the complete lack of one.  This is strange because a mile-wide hole in the ocean and a gigantic lighthouse are pretty significant landmarks. It seems impossible that the legends would never bring them up. The logical conclusion is that Delita and OG Ramza's war predates the existence of the Cataract, but if that's the case, why would Ba'Gamnan take the Duma there? Jenomis and Ramza have a theory but won't tell us until they investigate the site. Lina is immediately suspicious. Ramza never shuts his mouth for anything, so why the reluctance? Alma is upset for an entirely different reason: thirty years of abandonment has undoubtedly left the tower infested with monsters. She wants to help the Bangaa save their captain, as do most of the crew-  …  -but she can't even pretend that's why we're going. Her brother and father are risking their lives for this quest. What purpose, if any, does their crusade serve? ~*~*~  Though dwarfed by the Cataract, the lighthouse is massive. Its design is modern and industrial, bordering on brutalism with its absence of concern for aesthetics. It's also in bad shape, with several chunks of its superstructure lost to Imperial gunships. Metal and stone debris litter the grounds, and the outlying buildings have been obliterated. Even Ramza seems uneasy and mutters that something is wrong with this place. Regardless, he quickly assigns everyone else to search for Ba'Gamnan, then sneaks off to examine the ruins alone. Kheris climbs the tallest thing she can find to make use of a spyglass and soon finds her target. He is limping and nursing a chest wound. The Duma is clutched tightly in his hand, and he speaks to it apologetically, as if both the prince and princess he couldn't save are listening.  Our party rushes over, Ba'Gamnan's crew shouting that their one-time foes have promised to help him. Unfortunately, he sees enemies he's not keen to make peace with.  …  The visions only grow worse as Ba'Gamnan sees his men become Imperials and imagines us drawing our weapons. It is Montblanc who realizes this must be the Duma. He's WISHING to see enemies so he can use its power to strike them down. Then, the vision shifts again.  Livia!? How does he know her? (Spoiler: this doesn't get explained for a long time)  …  …  ...  It's left ambiguous if Kheris merely deflected the pistol or struck the shooter, but whether from new wound or old, Ba'Gamnan collapses. He thinks this is the end, but before he fades, a heartbeat begins pounding in his ears.  The Auracite spoke?! What the hell is this stuff? With the last ounce of his strength, Ba'Gamnan recites a chant. His crew surrounds him, begging him to cling to life, but he doesn't notice. Only the Duma matters.  …  …  …  The creature teleports away rather than confront us. Back on the ship, the pirates are divided on what to do next. One is certain that their captain is dead, while the other two refuse to accept that his will could not overcome the stone.  For his part, Jenomis believes that Ba'Gamnan's soul is gone. Having surrendered to the Auracite, his life's essence was removed from his body. Though it will become part of the mass of magic inside the Duma, much as Argath did, the original person no longer exists, just as if he had returned to the Lifestream. Only the twisted reflection of the Lucavi remains. Jeno is obviously upset by our failed rescue, and Alma is devastated by our descriptions of mutated flesh and glowing eyes. She wonders how the legends could speak of Auracite as a 'holy stone' given what it does to people. Ramza is…  …awful. Alma asks again if the risks we're taking are worth it, given how little we understand the powers we're meddling with, but Ramza tells her to shut her face. Jeno says nothing. In fact, he prompts his son to report on what he found in the ruins, yet again allowing his obsession with this mission to blind him to the boy's behavior. So, what was the big theory they couldn't tell us without investigating the island firsthand?  Goug was mentioned in the Ivalician legends as a hub of science and industry. It was the origin point for things like airships and firearms that were lost for generations after their civilization fell. The Durai Papers do not tell exactly how Goug was destroyed, but they mention its towers were abandoned shortly after an explosion. Jeno's theory is that the blast caused a tectonic disturbance that eventually widened into the Cataract. That would make the tower part of Goug, explaining why its top was damaged when it was discovered and why none of the ancient texts mention a chasm in the ocean. A later conversation supplements this theory by noting that the Cataract is not merely a hole. It's a dimensional rift that disrupts the local aether to the point that rebuilding the city would have endangered the people living there. That makes me feel bad for the guys who kept the beacon lit for several millennia... Ramza mainly cares about a tertiary side element to this theory: the people who left Goug may have gone on to found Garlemald.  The idea has a certain logic to it. Back in Heavensward, we found the Pre-Imperial Garlean Revolver, so we know they had advanced technology even before Magitek. Still, I think it says a lot that Ramza is practically jumping up and down with excitement at this idea while Jenomis didn't even see fit to mention it. The Principal's motivations for revealing the truth about Ivalice seem deeply personal, focused on his family, their legacy, and how they're tied to the lost history. Ramza's view is far more grand. I think he's internalized the idea that being involved in this expedition is his destiny and, by extension, the destiny of Garlemald. He feels a connection to the Ivalician legends, as do many people in his nation, but Imperial ideals don't allow for something foreign, and therefore barbaric, to be so valuable. Now he has a palatable reason: it was a Garlean legend all along. Fascism likes to tie itself to historical 'golden ages,' like the Roman Empire, to legitimize its ideas. Nazi Germany took this concept even further, funding archeological efforts to prove the existence of an imaginary Aryan super-civilization that was the root of all technology and culture in the ancient world. Those non-Germans couldn't have invented things like pyramids or math themselves! To some within their regime, this was just a propaganda tool, fueling their narrative that history is a series of race wars in which lesser humans steal things from Germanic people unless they are destroyed. Others, like Heinrich Himmler, were true believers in the idea that the Master Race was responsible for all that was good in the world. I think Ramza cares so much about the theory that the Garleans came from Goug because it links them to Hydaelyn's most universally recognized golden age, making Ivalice THEIR story in a certain sense. Garleans were around in the ancient past and were already the source of all technological wonder. They're not superior because they copied Allag a hundred years ago; they were ALWAYS superior. Even the legendary kingdom looked to Garlean ancestors for mechanical genius. This read on Ramza explains a lot about his violent reactions to Alma's efforts to stop this adventure, as well as his quick regression into racist perspectives on the things transpiring around him. Kheris may have proven that she's "one of the good ones," last time, but he can't stop clinging to the idea that being born Garlean makes him inherently better. He respects his father and bites his tongue when told, but he refuses to truly believe that he's the same as the lesser beings invading his world. The problem is shown again when one of the Bangaa notices a necklace that Alma wears. Her mother passed down the jewel, but it's an exact duplicate of one worn by Captain Ba'Gamnan. He considered it so precious that he never took it off. After hearing this, Ramza leaps to the absurd conclusion that the 'savage' is accusing his family of stealing. Jenomis lays into him.  ...  Jeno wants to instill his values into his son, and Ramza listens to him, so it's possible. Yet the great dissident firebrand whose efforts to reform the Empire led him to exile is so obsessed with Ivalice that he can't even see how badly he's failing at that much more important job. But enough drama! We have a Bangaa to find. ~*~*~ Ridorana Lighthouse starts in the courtyard where we last saw Ba'Gamnan. Most of the team has opted to leave things to the professionals, but Ramza is once again by our side to collect evidence. Montblanc also tags along, presumably because he's not going to let that little racist have further grounds to call him a coward. As for Kheris, her beloved teacher has joined her team for a second time.  We find a monster guarding the door. It's not immediately clear what it is, but Ramza speculates that it was created by the Duma.  I suppose that would still make Famfrit a Lucavi. I'd assumed that each of the monsters we fought in Rabanastre had been like Argath, an Ivalician who lost themselves after pouring wishes into one of the Zodiac Stones and spending thousands of years trapped underground. There are supposed to be twelve in total, so it was reasonable to think they each represented one. This raid's implication (especially with the next boss) is that one Auracite can generate enough magic to conjure multiple Primal-level threats from a single mortal's will. All the critters we fought last time must have come from Argath, reflections of people he knew who could help achieve his desires. It's a relatively minor point in the grand scheme of things, but I'm continually baffled that this story often goes into insane detail on specific elements only to leave others frustratingly unclear. As for the fight, the boss is focused on area denial. His direct attacks are all designed to force movement because he creates several varieties of stage hazards. Aside from the damage-dealing arena wall, you'll see stationary puddles of water and flying pots that spray water straight down and rotate around the field. Each movement-forcing attack requires a unique calculation in relation to the active hazard. As safe space dwindles, you must be quick and accurate in selecting your direction (or deciding to hold your ground), or you'll have just enough time to realize you can't save yourself. It's a fitting mechanical metaphor for drowning.  …  The gate opens when Famfrit falls, and we find a mysterious engraving on a nearby wall:  Days unborn? God-blade bearer? Did the people of Goug somehow know a Warrior of Light would come far in the future? The inside of the Lighthouse is as industrial as the outside, and advanced tech reveals itself almost instantly. Mystery automatons block our path, and their defeat causes a bridge to be 3D Printed into existence. Anti-gravity lifts, even more advanced than the Allagan models Kheris has interacted with before, are everywhere. Ramza is ecstatic, sure that he's on the cusp of proving his father's theories. This is the best stretch of the dungeon to take in the BGM, "Ascension," which struck me as an unusual piece. Tonally, it's a bit all over the place, the violins swinging back and forth between dour notes suited to a vampire's castle and a soaring anthem backed by rising trumpets. The two extremes are bridged by lower-register wind instruments, like French horns or bassoons, which sound almost comedic. I liked the song, but it didn't fit with the environment or scenario to the degree Alliance Raid BGMs usually do. Side note: a friend informed me that most of the songs in this raid come from Final Fantasy XII instead of Tactics. I knew the devs were blending the games' stories, but somehow, I didn't expect them to be willing to concede up any music slots. Lucky day for XII's fans! The most notable machine in the tower is a tube-shaped scaffolding that appears to be siphoning water out of the ocean. Given the end-point of the mechanism is a massive crystal (which the Dalmascans repurposed as the lighthouse beacon), it's more likely channeling water-aspected aether. My immediate thought was that this magical oil rig had to be responsible for the Tower explosion, but an easily missable line from Jenomis later explains it was OG Ramza that triggered that disaster. So much for environmental storytelling! If you look up while ascending the tower, you'll see that something is pumping out massive quantities of fire aether, cutting off the flow to the crystal.  This has deactivated an extremely powerful grav lift. When we reach the top, we discover another Lucavi is responsible, but this one made my eyebrows shoot up.  BELIAS?! The Demon King of Devouring Flame? The Elder Primal whose summoning knowledge was gifted to Tristan by an Ascian in SMN 50? He's even got the same recolored Ifrit-Egi Tristan used as a minion! This is our proof that the pre-ending bosses in both raids were simulacra. Belias isn't some guy who found an Auracite and got locked in this tower until his dreams turned him into a monster; he's (presumably) a god from Othardian myth, possibly the Bangaa's patron deity. There were no people or resources here to summon him as a Primal, so the only explanation for his presence is that Ba'Gamnan needed a being of fire magic to cut off the water, and when a fire god came to mind, that's what his wish created. Again, it's so odd how much lore this storyline is dumping on me and yet how tenuous the consistency feels. I can figure things out, or at least make some educated guesses, but given how much effort they've dedicated to laying out history, politics, and magical mechanics, I don't think I should have to. I'm starting to think this Raid Series needed a few more drafts to iron the wrinkles out. Belias' powers are an idiosyncratic combination of fire and time magic. He's far less chaotic than one might expect from a fire boss because his moves were designed to include the time motif. His grenades track specific players and can be steered away from the group. His charges are always in straight lines and mark the ground with a turn signal, allowing you to intuit where the safe zones will be. His exploding ground tile attack is marked with clocks, some of which spin faster than others, indicating which ones will detonate first.  Then there's Time Bomb, which explodes only the tile the clock hand is pointing at. Any player can turn the clock by stepping on it, giving them an exceptional amount of agency to create their own safe zones.  Agency is the name of the game in this fight. Individuals have a lot of control over how to deal with his abilities on behalf of the group, putting the ball in the raid's court at every step. This is exemplified by his last major mechanic, chains that need to be dragged away by the players they're attached to but will stun anyone who steps through them. Whether you have the chain or not, clarity of thought matters far more than speed in successfully working around it.  This design could have been a recipe for disaster, especially in an Alliance Raid, but for whatever reason, everything here clicked. I wonder if I'd feel the same way without modern scaling, which ensured he died before his attacks started to overlap too much. Let's take the win and leave that question hanging. The newly activated super lift takes our party to some sort of flying building. Metal bulbs with spinning lights are on the underside of everything, implying more anti-gravity tech is at work. Upon landing, Ramza complains about the air being hard to breathe. Looking up in the final room, you can see stars despite the sun still being at its zenith. If you look down, you'll see blue sky and clouds below.  …  If all the literal clockwork wasn't enough of a clue to our location, Ramza is quick to latch on to the advanced automata that lay rusting on the causeways and activate to block our path. There can be no doubt at this point: we have found the Clockwork City of Goug. Jenomis will muse after the raid that the original tower was so tall the explosion must have only destroyed its MIDDLE section, leaving the top abandoned but intact thanks to its gravity engines. That engraving wasn't kidding when it said this place challenged the sky. This is where the music situation starts to get wild. The Clockwork City has its own BGM, the eerie yet whimsical "The Mystery of Geruvegan." Unlike the last one, it's a perfect atmospheric fit for this abandoned, corroding marvel. We also get the uncommon feature of the penultimate boss getting a unique track. We faced our last two enemies with a song I can only describe as a High Fantasy orgasm. The understated title "Boss Battle," comes nowhere close to doing it justice. For the third guy, the devs decided that song didn't go hard enough and broke out "Apoplexy," the only Tactics track in this raid. In some ways, it's the more subdued of the two, using fewer instruments and having more down-beat sections. It's also relentless, which makes it ideal for Construct 7. Jenomis claims that OG Ramza's battle against a robot like this one destroyed the tower. I believe him. I'd heard oblique references to "The Math Boss," for months leading up to this encounter. Party chat made it clear that this was the guy, but my initial reaction was, "Why don't they call him 'The Million Attacks Boss?'" The sheer number of moves he throws at you in his initial flurry feels insane. In the span of a few seconds, he throws out a tank buster, a stack-up/spread-out combo, a melee-range AOE, a line attack, a charge/stage hazard combo followed up by AOE missiles, one of the most unforgiving proximity explosions I've seen to date, and an absurdly deadly rotating laser barrage that guarantees death if you mess up your strafing even slightly. These shock-and-awe tactics are further enhanced by the fact that every one of them has a unique animation.  This is the opposite of Belias' design philosophy, leaning hard into reflex reactivity and forcing pattern recognition. Going in blind, I died multiple times, which was frustrating but also kind of awesome. I haven't had this much fun being ground into the dirt by a mech since Brute Justice! Maybe I just have a thing for robots... When the sequence ends, we get to Construct's math mechanic, which I assume the developers knew would be infamous because they felt the need to foreshadow it with messages about multiplication and prime numbers on the way to the arena. In theory, it's simple: the boss will reduce your HP to a number between 1 and 8, then put circles on the ground numbered 1 through 4. Stepping onto the circle adds that number to your total. The boss will order you to match your HP to a specific multiple or a prime number. For example, if he says he wants a "Multiple of 3," and you have 2 HP, you can step on Circle #4 to reach 6. If you have 3 HP, you step on Circle #3 or stay out of the circles altogether. Get it right, and you're rewarded with a damage boost for the rest of the fight. Failure earns you a vulnerability debuff and likely death to his raid-wide attack a few moments later.  As I said, simple in theory. It has three giant problems. First, it's easy to forget that 1 falls outside the definition of prime on a technicality. So, that's annoying. Second, putting a time crunch on doing a math problem, even simple ones, can be super stressful. I'm sympathetic to any test anxiety types who ran into this boss when he first launched. But my main problem was that HP being part of the equation is far from obvious or intuitive. On my first attempt, the boss called out multiple of five. I got confused because there was no five space, failed, and soon exploded, never knowing what I did wrong. This would have been an ideal candidate for a system message, like we've seen on a few other Stormblood bosses, that tells you HP is the thing to keep your eye on. Making that one aspect so opaque dampened my enthusiasm for an otherwise very novel mechanic. After the quiz, Construct goes through a transition where he sucks you into a black hole and forces you to kill a robot before the gravity crushes you. The second phase then plays out much like the first. The only difference is that he activates Annihilation Mode, strengthening all his moves.  Construct 7 may be in the top five of toughest bosses I've fought in this game, including the extreme trials. I'll admit that I wasn't sure I liked him at first, but he's grown on me. Many MMOs overuse the combination of high HP, high reactivity, and feast-or-famine gimmicks because bosses that need all three inevitably extend the time it takes for players to "finish," content. That level of challenge can be immensely satisfying to overcome, but it needs to be used sparingly. Also, fun fact: you don't actually destroy him. When his health bar is depleted, he announces he's entering safe mode. If you come back downstairs later, you'll find him dancing. The final lift carries us to the top level, a vast garden surrounded by surprisingly lavish structures. They are similar to the ones below but decorated by slender minarets and ornate stone columns.  At the center of a nearby plaza, Ba'Gamnan awaits. He is not with us long.  …  Knowing Belias is drawn from myth, I can't help but be curious about where Yiazmat came from and why Ba'Gamnan's wishes adopted this specific avatar. It seems likely that he based it on a real dragon since the endgame of the battle sees him engage the glowing super mode we've seen time and again from Midgardsorm's descendants.  Perhaps this is the watcher the engraving warned about. A dragon with ultimate power over wind and gravity would be an appropriate object of prophetic dread for a city that touched the edges of the atmosphere. In terms of difficulty, Yiazmat doesn't hold much of a candle to Construct 7. Most of his abilities are straightforward, even going in blind. The only tricky aspect is that several abilities, like his charging claw attack and petrifying breath, have larger hitboxes than you might expect based on their graphics. This is counter-balanced by their cast timers being surprisingly generous. Once I realized that, making my adjustments was easy, which made the boss feel like a victory lap. His most noteworthy mechanic is a polarity gimmick, which allows players to float by stepping into the same charge and anchor themselves with an opposing charge.  On most bosses, there would be times when you'd need to do both. For Yiazmat, the answer is always to anchor. The game illustrates this by having some of his abilities knock you into the air if you've set yourself to float where they previously didn't. If you still haven't figured it out by the time he fires his giant tornado attack, it will instantly kill you, but that wasn't a huge problem. One new thing this boss introduces is a turn signal, indicating the direction he'll be going next during his charging slash. There's nothing significant about that. I just thought it was neat.  So, is the final boss of this raid a failure? I didn't think so. What Yiazmat lacked in challenge, he more than made up for with presentation. The boss theme, "Flash of Steel," manages to be even more over the top than the prior two, which I still struggle to believe. Each of his attack animations is visceral and has an incredible sense of force, allowing you to feel the size and brutality of your enemy in a way few bosses accomplish. This impression is backed up by the incredible performance of his voice actor.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgN6NFpPunw "I, BA'GAMNAN, SHALL DELIVER THE KING'S JUSTICE!" was my favorite from a character perspective, reminding us that this poor guy never stopped being a noble soldier of his homeland, but "SCREAM LOUDER! I WANT TO REMEMBER THIS!" was so raw that I felt a chill. The actual progression of the fight also has that vaunted cinematic vibe. For most of the battle, Yiazmat is borderline immune to damage. Only a sliver of his health will be gone when he starts charging his ultimate. Interrupting his power-up involves attacking that golden orb in his neck, the Heart of the Dragon. Once you do, you'll see that the Duma is hidden within.  Exposing the Auracite drops his HP from 90% to 35%, and from that point forward, he takes normal damage as the raid targets his power source. That's a neat bit of storytelling. When Yiazmat falls, the body vanishes, leaving nothing of poor Ba'Gamnan. Only the Duma remains, having consumed another life.  ...  Maybe the carving was warning me about Auracite. It's undoubtedly soul-hungry and unsated. We get another one-shot victory fanfare. Kheris grabs the rock, but Ramza is distracted by something else. It seems the good captain left a trace behind after all!  ...  Oh, geez! Well, at least I don't have to listen to him now. Back on the ship, Alma tends to her brother while the rest of us ponder the mystery of the two necklaces, presumably because none of us like him. Jeno doesn't have that excuse, but we've already covered that. A closer inspection from the Moogles reveals that they are two halves of the same chunk of Auracite. This prompts the Bangaa to admit why their captain treasured the necklace.  Jeno doesn't say so in this conversation (although he really should have), but he acquired the other necklace 17 years ago from a street vendor in occupied Rabanastre while honeymooning with his wife. How a random merchant managed to get his hand on a crown jewel more than a decade after the conquest is anyone's guess, but Jeno believes that the two halves must have an aetherial link of some sort. It can't be a coincidence that they came into the hands of our two groups and continually guide us to evidence supporting the Durai Papers. Mikoto posits that what he's saying is possible if the two pieces are materializing a wish imprinted when they were still whole. But who's wish could it be thousands of years after the fact?  Oh, hey, he's alive. Ramza concurs with his father's theory that nothing happening here is an accident. Touching the necklace made him realize that the two stones manipulated events to bring themselves together, leading us into Lesalia and Goug's dangers to measure their bearers' strength. If we are worthy, they will guide us to the truth. Sounds like the kid hasn't shaken off his concussion yet.  Lady? This is getting weird.  ...  ...  Ok, he's definitely possessed.  ...  ...  ...  Well, I guess he's back to normal. Which is... good? Regardless, this whole situation is rotten to the core. Lina sees it as well. She notes that what we've found should more than suffice to prove that Ivalice was a real place rather than a legend, but she's confident that Jenomis won't stop until he proves his ancestor wasn't a heretic. There's no reason that should matter when the church that branded him doesn't exist anymore. Could the Auracite be triggering this obsession? If we take Ramza's words under the necklace's spell as fact, then the thing worked to get itself into Jeno's hands. How far does that influence go? A second recording robot left by Cid gives us some insight into these questions. In one entry, Jenomis speaks openly about all the evil he sees the Auracites creating but then tries to rationalize around that reality. The reason why is painfully apparent.  For the record, this line is way too important to be in a potentially missable line of dialogue. Shameful. With this information, we have to ask if Jenomis' odd behaviors are being stoked by the Auracite. Are these stones making Jeno believe he has to clear his ancestor's name? Are they feeding him this idea that he could see his wife again? Are they making it easier to ignore his children? What about the Bangaa's necklace? Did it manipulate the prince so he would give it to Ba'Gamnan? Did it ensure that Princess Ashelia would die so he would keep the stone all these years? We saw the Duma browbeat the poor bastard into giving up his soul. We know that Jenomis has been talking to the Otius even though it doesn't seem to have imprinted on him. What the hell are these Auracites? Are they intelligent? Malicious? Merely driven to fulfill the wishes lodged within them no matter the cost? Or, as Mikoto speculates, is there another player in this game we don't know about?  At the start of this chapter, we wondered if someone had created the Auracites. Perhaps that creator has been pulling our strings all along. One thing is certain: this isn't an adventure Kheris can wash her hands of. The threat the stones present, the grand design they're attempting to engineer, and the fact that they've trapped quite a few innocent people in their web can't be ignored. She's in this one to the end. ~*~*~ Chapter II of Return to Ivalice really went places. The raid was another step up from the first's impressive benchmark. Despite its uneven elements, the story had me more intrigued than ever. Ramza's reversion to a complete piece of trash made him far more interesting than I expected. I'm invested in seeing how they'll resolve this tension between his Garlean indoctrination and his family's values. Jenomis, a failing father who can't tell that his son is a fascist despite being this great revolutionary, was also magnetic to me. That divergence between his reputation and shortcomings had me glued to my screen, eager to see what would happen next to his rapidly collapsing parent-child relationships. The possibility that the blame for that is on magic is iffy, but there are ways they can make that element work. Alma is an excellent Cassandra; her efforts to open her father's eyes while being continually ignored add even more dramatic tension as things keep getting worse. The tragedy of Ba'Gamnan and the gradual revelations about the insidious nature of the Auracite were also good stuff. This section of plot did a good job of recontextualizing some of the things we saw in the first part of the story, and I still like all this new lore and backstory despite the holes I'm seeing. The way the fall of Dalmasca, the mysteries of Ivalice, and the Lexentale family drama orbit around each other is well conceived. Each of the three storylines takes its turn in the spotlight, but the other two still feel relevant, and all three feel connected on the subtextual level in a way I want to see paid off. That said, there are big problems here. The largest is how the details are being delivered. I keep jumping around the timeline in this write-up and including information that I could have easily missed to make this whole thing coherent, and I shouldn't have to. So many things lack clarity despite all the words the story throws at me. The signal-to-noise ratio is awful compared to the usual FFXIV standard, and I can't help but wonder if that's a product of trying to make three storylines work at once instead of picking two and going all in on them. They can make this work in the end. The pieces are all on the board. I can see a lot of meaningful connections between the family's personal issues, the war and politics of Dalmasca, the Ivalice of legend, the reality we're glimpsing through the Durai Papers, and the powers and dangers of Auracite. Whether that messy collection of threads ends up a tapestry or a ball of knots will depend entirely on the last chapter. Let's all cross our fingers. Next time, Kheris progresses that OTHER big adventure, in case you were hoping to see it in this chapter! Sanguinia fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 08:47
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There are once again a million and one things which could be said about this update, so I'll cherry-pick a couple. The red chocobos between raids could be spawned by multiple people at once, as per usual. When many people hit this point all at once on release day, catastrophe followed. (This is a video of just some of the chaos as meteors rained.) Construct 7 is one of the funniest bosses in the game, the goofy dancing bastard. It's particularly funny when he lives long enough to do his Annihilation Mode laser blasts, because he spins so much faster. Oh, and Hurdy was also the name of Montblanc's sibling in FFTA, of course.
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Nov 21, 2023 09:20
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Yapping Eevee posted:The red chocobos between raids could be spawned by multiple people at once, as per usual. When many people hit this point all at once on release day, catastrophe followed. (This is a video of just some of the chaos as meteors rained.)
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Nov 21, 2023 09:33
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I know it's Ivalice based but they could probably have pruned the cast a bit, there's a few too many guys to comment on stuff. Like what are Hurdy and Montblanc contributing. Still I'm enjoying the revisit of the ivalice raids. I like the narrative though I forgot half of it, and it's as close as we get to messily presented but interesting Lore, and I can always get into that. Auracite's all over the drat place almost as much as the ironworks crew. Wrestlepig fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 09:33
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You can be a maximum height male Roegadyn, the tallest possible player character at a maximum height of 203.4cm/7'6.7", and you still won't be tall enough for her.Sanguinia posted:His most noteworthy mechanic is a polarity gimmick, which allows players to float by stepping into the same charge and anchor themselves with an opposing charge. Despite that, even back in the day I'd say the majority of deaths at Yiazmat were from the billiards stomping version of Rake. Like a knife through butter, indeed. Construct 7 getting a Tactics track is only appropriate, since it's the only boss fight here more directly from Tactics (well, sort of. Construct 8 was a party member in Tactics, but we already fought 3 Construct 8s in a different lighthouse - Pharos Sirius (Hard), to be exact).  Famfrit, Belias, and Yiazmat are all ports from XII.
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Nov 21, 2023 09:39
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Wrestlepig posted:I know it's Ivalice based but they could probably have pruned the cast a bit, there's a few too many guys to comment on stuff. Like what are Hurdy and Montblanc contributing. They do feel pretty superfluous. One would presume that whole aside where we learn that the real ultimate weapon of a hero is the friends we made along the way will play into the final chapter, but I we'll see. I do love Mikoto though, she's adorable. And the Bangaa pirates pulled some solid emotional weight to enhance the tragedy of their Captain's fate. We'll have to see how they fare the rest of the way.
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Nov 21, 2023 09:45
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I got Lighthouse in my alliance roulette for the first time in like a year a week or two ago. Wonder if it was because of you. 
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Nov 21, 2023 09:54
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one aspect of this lp I have always liked going back to the ARR journals is that you are a very attentive and charitable reader even for storylines many would consider underbaked, and it's interesting and insightful to see that turned to the stormblood raidsSanguinia posted:
for those who haven't played, ba'gamnan's little speech here is the distinctive and cryptic opening to FF Tactics.
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Nov 21, 2023 10:04
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As an additional fun fact, if you didn't see get to see it: The first group out of his Black Hole phase change will come out to see Construct 7 doing a jig before he pops his Phase 2 upgrade cast. Math Blaster, as I so affectionately like to call him, is a hell of a lot of fun even on a reprise. There's also some fun there from a design standpoint that you don't get to see due to the scaling: Most Alliance raid bosses have an 'Enrage Mechanic', where the whole raid needs to be alive to do the mechanic properly, or they'll wipe. Construct 7, despite (or rather, more likely because) being probably the toughest boss in Ridorana Lighthouse, has no such enrage mechanic (past his phase change, anyway), and as such players can limp to the finish no matter how many are left alive by the end of his 20th laser spin. I know this because on day one when I went in at 6 AM my poor squad of 8 needed not one, but two Healer LB3s to pull our asses off the ground . It was a meatgrinder, and I loved every second of it.
Monathin fucked around with this message at 10:11 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 10:05
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Unfortunately I can't really find a tie between "Belias, the Gigas" with his two heads with curling horns and four arms, digitigrade legs and hooves and fluffy tail, and the three-toed, skull-faced "Gigas" Beast Tribe with the most intense eyebrow game imaginable. I guess there's nothing stopping a Gigas from being the raw material being reworked into the shape of the Elder Primal Belias by the Duma, except that that doesn't make a whole heck of a lot of sense.
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Nov 21, 2023 10:10
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Oh yeah, another new Return to Ivalice raid means another tier of referential gear! Ivalician Ark Knight (Tanking) is inspired by FFT Delita's appearance from the middle of the game - though he was actually a Holy Knight in that get up, he's only an Ark Knight later on in his last outfit, which isn't this.  Ivalician Archer (Aiming) is inspired by the FFT Male Archer get-up. Ivalician Thief (Scouting) is a variant.  Ivalician Arithmetician (Casting) is based on the FFT Male... well, Arithmetician(/Calculator) garb. Ivalician Chemist (Healing) is a variant.  Ivalician Shikari (Striking) is based on Vaan's appearance in Final Fantasy Tactics A2 for the DS. This is to be distinguished from Final Fantasy XII Vaan by the all-important addition of shirt. Ivalician Uhlan (Maiming) is a variant.   (Seriously it's more of less the same get-up, except he also got heavier handwear as well.) Uhlan is a XII Zodiac Edition license board (job) that's basically their answer to "what if Dragoon didn't have Jump". Shikari is also a XII Zodiac Edition license board, but it focused on daggers and ninja swords rather than katana. C'est la vie. Hogama fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 10:17
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I'm still eternally mad the the Striking jacket isn't dyable. One of these days.
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Nov 21, 2023 10:50
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Yapping Eevee posted:The red chocobos between raids could be spawned by multiple people at once, as per usual. When many people hit this point all at once on release day, catastrophe followed. (This is a video of just some of the chaos as meteors rained.) I remember being there on Raid launch and just being absolutely stunned at the sheer amount of carnage these birds caused. Those meteors will one or two shot you. There were some red chocobo added to Tailfeather as well which can two-shot you at max level now, even. Choco Meteor hurts!
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Nov 21, 2023 11:06
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I'm pretty sure it deals percentile damage or something, yeah. Very dangerous! And yeah, I was there for the launch. It was hilarious.
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Nov 21, 2023 11:21
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Sanguinia posted:BELIAS?! The Demon King of Devouring Flame? The Elder Primal whose summoning knowledge was gifted to Tristan by an Ascian in SMN 50? He's even got the same recolored Ifrit-Egi Tristan used as a minion!
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Nov 21, 2023 13:45
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Ridorana is very fun, I do have to admit that I love the chaos of Construct 7 even if some of its mechanics do get me frequently (not the math, it’s the spinning that does it.) I think other people in the thread mentioned disliking this particular device, but one thing I actually like about these raids was the difference between Ba’gamnan and his crew in this game and XII. In XII Ba’gamnan is… well, look at his color scheme and the fact that a lot of people talk about how XII is extremely Star Wars. He’s a bounty hunter without many particularly redeeming qualities who you fight several times alongside his crew. His first cutscene in that game is actually being hired by Judge Gabranth, whose armor is effectively the same as the one in the flashback. As I mentioned before, I always really liked Bangaa, so the fact that the one that was the biggest story player was kind of a bit part villain bummed me out. He’s temporarily playable in the DS RTS sequel but the circumstances of that are kinda hosed up and he eventually leaves to fight you again. Seeing him and his crew in this game reimagined as loyal soldiers of Dalmasca who had taken the fall of the kingdom to the Empire really badly was kind of a nice treat for me, as well as a fun way to play with the expectations of people who had played XII while not really taking anything away from those who hadn’t. Personally I think it was pretty cool! One interesting thing about Ramza’s commitment to the Secret Glorious History of Garlemald is, uh, well, again, I’m not sure if this is another baffling omission that the story expects you to figure out by reading between the lines or reading the lorebook, but you can figure it out by looking closely at his model behind his bangs. I think I ended up trying to futz with the camera myself to check it out, though I can’t remember if I did it at this point or later. OH YEAH ALSO Yiazmat is one of FFXII’s superbosses and he’s infamous for having just an absolutely insane amount of HP. I think it’s like three million or something. I think the fact that his HP barely decreases in the first chunk of this fight is a reference to this. He was named after Yasumi Matsuno, as well. Ran Rannerson fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 13:50
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Ramza was so insufferable that I ended up skipping or defensively forgetting most of the dialogues featuring his rear end in a top hat self, which sadly happened to be the core of the story. As a result, the line that I remember best from the whole arc is Aenor's reaction to the troupe (which is characteristically Aenor).
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Nov 21, 2023 14:15
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This is one of my favorite raids, the voice acting of the bosses is top notch. Whoever they got to do Yiazmat really sells it. This is also the content block where I stopped reading the dialogue and started skipping the cutscenes. I couldn't take another second of Ramza. I had no idea Yiazmat was B'gamnan or why he was screaming about Imperials until much later; the story had completely lost me.
FuturePastNow fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 14:50
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On the note of Construct 7, I have to link the funniest scene in FFT.
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Nov 21, 2023 15:57
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Yiazmat had, at the time, by far the most HP of any enemy in the game to match / pay tribute to his super boss status in FF12. In that game you were generally meant to do the fight in multiple pulls rather than marathon it, since the game would remember his current HP even if you left the area to rest. I think breaking the gem might still be the largest amount of damage you deal with a single hit in XIV. Math Bot is such a wonderful fight. The only real downside is that it uses max HP as the variable, since who the heck pays attention to their max HP value mid fight? The bar is still full and therefore needs no attention! Then again, it's a great way to tell who is new to the fight and is enjoying combat arithmetic for the first time, so who is to say it's actually a downside? And yes, the launch week red chocobos were basically a mini Calamity playing out in the fields of Yanxia. It was one of the best ways to farm the "rez somebody not in your party" achievements. E: in FF12, Rassler was a minor character but Ashelia was actually one of the main party members. I remember being a bit shocked that they name dropped Ashe just to have her tragically killed off via cutscene as part of the back story for B'gamnan (who was also in FF12 as a secondary antagonist) Thundarr fucked around with this message at 16:21 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 16:06
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Not relating to anything else but I liked the chapter name on this one.
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Nov 21, 2023 16:20
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I like Vaan's outfit from this raid and the chemist robe is fun. 
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Nov 21, 2023 16:25
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A weird change in XIV is that Prince Rasler is Ashelia's brother, whereas in Final Fantasy XII he was Ashe's husband. That is certainly... a change. That someone made. For some reason. Sanguinia posted:
 This, except it's Kheris talking with Ramza about his xenophobic ranting. Sanguinia posted:We have only one clue regarding the captain's whereabouts, a word he scratched into the margins of the stolen journal: Ridorana. The name refers to Ridorana Cataract, a chasm in the ocean commonly believed to be an entrance to the Hell of Water. No explorers have ever returned from its depths. Ridorana is a location from Final Fantasy XII. The context of its role in the plot is that it's where the party meets, for a simplified explanation, the Occuria (Force Ghost Illuminati) who have been puppet-mastering Ivalice from behind the scenes because of their lust for power. One of their own, Venat, winds up splitting off from them and joins up with the Archadian Empire in order to create artificial magic sources called nethicite as opposed to the naturally occurring larger version that the Occuria tried to regulate by giving to people who do their bidding. To correct this mistake, they want Ashe to both mass genocide Archades (which is a decision she's already been struggling with out of revenge for her husband and father's deaths) and kill Venat in exchange for some of those sweet, sweet magical WMDs they have sitting in their basement. Naturally, none of this really comes up in XIV since the Occuria don't seem to exist. Now this is particularly weird, since Kheris outright turns into a vision of Gabranth, a character from Final Fantasy XII! It's not particularly odd that he'd be in the setting, given we already have Ba'Gamnan, Ashe, and so on, but it was still a bit of a surprise to see an Imperial plucked straight from that game, particularly one who was not exactly 100% on-board with the power structure of that game's main antagonist. Water!  I think I might have mentioned it to you previously, but Famfrit is one of the reference bosses from XII. While something like Chaos or Mateus are more direct in their references, Famfrit is a more subtle allusion to the Cloud of Darkness. Speaking of which, the first boss music in this Raid is the approproiately named "Boss Battle" from Final Fantasy XII! Shame there's no orchestrion for it. I wonder if this is a reference to the Treaty-Blade from Final Fantasy XII that was used for cutting off pieces of nethicite offered by the Occuria. But the Treaty-Blade in XIV seems to be more mundane, if ARR Hildibrand was any indication, so that's probably not right. ...Right? For all of the memes about this guy and math, I found that mechanic to be not so bad compared to him spinning around at mach speed, firing lasers that take up 5/6 of the room. Particularly if your latency is bad and you just get double-tapped to death by an inescapable, high damage hitbox! It also doesn't help that dying at any point after the math problems permanently loses you a damage boost if you got them right! That being said, I shared your situation of not noticing that my HP had changed the first time doing that math mechanic, so I wasn't immediately clued into what I was expected to do. Also, for the add phase, each group gets a different mechanic to deal with. Alliance A gets the Polarity mechanic from Living Liquid, Alliance B gets to dodge Missiles like the Guardian fight from Sigmascape, and Alliance C gets Acceleration Bomb. Behold, the superboss from Final Fantasy XII! While I've never played XII, seeing Yiazmat in the Ivalice Raid gave me so much dread because I knew about his notorious status as "That superboss with a ridiculous amount of health" and, sure enough, he actually has 50 million HP in Ridorana! Fortunately, the add phase shaves off a good chunk of that. But that is the gag of why his HP bar doesn't move at all in the early portion of the fight.
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Nov 21, 2023 16:28
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I do want to say with my mathematician head on that 1's non-prime status isn't a technicality - it actually turns out to be pretty fundamental to higher number theory that it isn't what we consider a prime. For one thing, a whole number can be uniquely factored into a set of primes, but that is no longer true if you're willing to include one. I realise this is boring pedantry but I didn't get four useless degrees to give up on boring pedantry now!
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Nov 21, 2023 16:28
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Hogama posted:Despite that, even back in the day I'd say the majority of deaths at Yiazmat were from the billiards stomping version of Rake. Like a knife through butter, indeed. It doesn't help that that attack becomes an instant kill when he's glowing red. Or, at least, it did on launch. I'm not sure about now. Something I did notice from experimenting, though, is that he always aims that attack at the farthest away party member. So I usually aim it whenever I do that Raid. Ran Rannerson posted:As I mentioned before, I always really liked Bangaa, so the fact that the one that was the biggest story player was kind of a bit part villain bummed me out. He’s temporarily playable in the DS RTS sequel but the circumstances of that are kinda hosed up and he eventually leaves to fight you again. I'm reading a person's retrospective blog about Final Fantasy games and they just got to Revenant Wings. The whole "And then the heroes attached a torture collar to Ba'Gamnan to force him to fight for them" bit prompted much disbelief, needless to say. Ran Rannerson posted:OH YEAH ALSO Yiazmat is one of FFXII’s superbosses and he’s infamous for having just an absolutely insane amount of HP. I think it’s like three million or something. I think the fact that his HP barely decreases in the first chunk of this fight is a reference to this. He was named after Yasumi Matsuno, as well. There is a refight with him in XII where he has 3 million, but in his original battle he has 50 million. Blueberry Pancakes fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 16:32
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Keep in mind the gimmick of FF12 was that it was an offline mmo where you could program your party members to do things so the idea was that you would set things up, start the fight then go to bed because you have school tomorrow
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Nov 21, 2023 16:45
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Feldegast42 posted:Keep in mind the gimmick of FF12 was that it was an offline mmo where you could program your party members to do things so the idea was that you would set things up, start the fight then go to bed because you have school tomorrow This is such a weird gimmick. Like bless Square but what were they thinking?
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Nov 21, 2023 16:47
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Thundarr posted:
Rassler wasn't that minor --- he is Ashe's tragically killed off via cutscenes as part of the intro movie backstory character (the said intro going briskly from their wedding to his death in (Archadian(sp?)) Empire's invasion), and his death kinda plays a big role in her motivations?
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Nov 21, 2023 17:04
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 21:58 |
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Feldegast42 posted:Keep in mind the gimmick of FF12 was that it was an offline mmo where you could program your party members to do things so the idea was that you would set things up, start the fight then go to bed because you have school tomorrow Mission accomplished, I tried to play it again a few years ago and fell asleep in the middle of gameplay
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Nov 21, 2023 17:05
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