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Spuzzz posted:I like Vaan's outfit from this raid and the chemist robe is fun. I only see that look on male Roes
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Nov 21, 2023 17:29
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OddObserver 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? Minor in the sense that he doesn't play a part in the narrative at all aside from being part of another character's motivation. Kind of like how Uncle Ben is an important part of Spider-Man's origin but he's not a major character in most of the adventures being presented.
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Nov 21, 2023 17:29
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Ran Rannerson posted: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. The Bangaa being reimagined is basically one of the few parts of the story side of things I was completely happy with. They were always my favorites, especially Rinok, so them getting more complexity than early_game_bandit_script.txt was a pleasant surprise from a story that I just was not otherwise enjoying.
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Nov 21, 2023 17:46
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It's true that the Return to Ivalice story is a bit too verbose and has a few too many moving parts, but I think fewer people would have checked out if Ramza wasn't so relentlessly awful. Like yeah maybe this is how most Garlean boys are being conditioned to view the world but at some point the kid needs to be told to shut the gently caress up and that keeps pointedly not happening.
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Nov 21, 2023 18:12
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Ramza made me racist against Garleans
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Nov 21, 2023 18:14
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Ridorana is such a fun raid, every boss has mechanics that are very satisfying to get right. Especially the math boss. There's a bit of text on the way up there only exists to remind players that 1 is not a prime number. Not sure if it was always there or added later, but it always makes me laugh 
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Nov 21, 2023 18:20
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These both link to the same thing, which is Background Story.
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Nov 21, 2023 18:26
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Kheldarn posted:These both link to the same thing, which is Background Story. Link corrected, thanks. GilliamYaeger posted:It could be the other way around, actually. Remember that the Primals Shiva, Moggle Mog and Enkidu (from Hildebrand) were all false idols based on real people (with Shiva being an especially notable example since the real Shiva is still "alive," albeit as part of Hraesvelgr). It could be that this is the original Belias, and the Primal version was based off the Lucavi. I did consider that but I don't think it makes much sense for the Dalmascans to have been using a giant sentient monsters who apparently just loves fighting and war as their Lighthouse beacon and also blocking that water/aether pump for hundreds if not THOUSANDS of years without breaking it. The only thing that really makes sense is Ba'Gamnan created it on the way up IMO.
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Nov 21, 2023 19:04
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Nov 21, 2023 19:24
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Thundarr posted:It's true that the Return to Ivalice story is a bit too verbose and has a few too many moving parts, but I think fewer people would have checked out if Ramza wasn't so relentlessly awful. Like yeah maybe this is how most Garlean boys are being conditioned to view the world but at some point the kid needs to be told to shut the gently caress up and that keeps pointedly not happening. Even NPCs in the story feel that way, so the writers had to recognize how unpleasant he was! 
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Nov 21, 2023 20:15
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Ran Rannerson posted: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.)
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Nov 21, 2023 20:38
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I find it really interesting that Ramza's odiousness turned so many people off the story when its something I found so intriguing. The push and pull between his father trying to parent him to be less lovely but also being distracted by his mission, Ramza being his father's biggest supporter in that mission even while his behavior is escalating influencing that dynamic, and Alma trying and failing to help BOTH of them was all just fascinating to me. It never felt like this was an accident or anything. Ramza's attitude always felt like it was there to serve something important in the story. Of course, to this point that aspect of the plot has been all set-up and tension-building. Whether the payoff ends up being worth it we'll have to wait and see in Chapter III.
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Nov 21, 2023 20:41
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While I didn’t skip anything, I do recall coming out of this story having checked out a bit and not really paying attention to the Lexentale’s deal. At the end I don’t think I really understood Ramza or his arc. And really, it’s not for lack of trying, especially when Lina turns to the camera and says “boy if only his father would give a poo poo maybe Ramza would be less of a prick.
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Nov 21, 2023 20:48
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a lot of peoples' reactions to this are colored by the fact that it's actually written by matsuno himself. the man has a very particular style and it is not to everyone's liking--your complaints about squeezing vital context in lore blurbs off to the side is 100% how ivalice and tactics ogre games are presented. some people are head over heels for the idea, others not so much. relevant in perhaps a few years is that the person from the 14 staff assigned to assist him in this was hiroi daichi, soon to be head writer for the next expansion (and beyond? the Oda era was three expansions, the Ishikawa era was two, maybe they'll end up rotating out) Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Nov 21, 2023 |
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Nov 21, 2023 21:01
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Sanguinia posted:I did consider that but I don't think it makes much sense for the Dalmascans to have been using a giant sentient monsters who apparently just loves fighting and war as their Lighthouse beacon and also blocking that water/aether pump for hundreds if not THOUSANDS of years without breaking it. The only thing that really makes sense is Ba'Gamnan created it on the way up IMO. When you put it that way it sounds like something the Allagans would do.
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Nov 21, 2023 21:05
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Mister Olympus posted:a lot of peoples' reactions to this are colored by the fact that it's actually written by matsuno himself. the man has a very particular style and it is not to everyone's liking--your complaints about squeezing vital context in lore blurbs off to the side is 100% how ivalice and tactics ogre games are presented. some people are head over heels for the idea, others not so much. Ehh, on the other hand, you also got pretty much all of the most important details of the plot presented to you over the course of just playing through FFT’s story; you don’t have to go hunting down side quests or talk to people after every plot beat to know what’s going on. Like, the only potentially missable thing for the main story I can think of is reading the Germonique Scriptures after you get them, and even then, they’re treated as such a big deal by the narrative that anyone following the story is likely going to read them ASAP.
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Nov 21, 2023 21:13
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FuturePastNow posted:When you put it that way it sounds like something the Allagans would do. It was Allagans all along!
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Nov 21, 2023 21:14
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Sanguinia posted:I find it really interesting that Ramza's odiousness turned so many people off the story when its something I found so intriguing. The push and pull between his father trying to parent him to be less lovely but also being distracted by his mission, Ramza being his father's biggest supporter in that mission even while his behavior is escalating influencing that dynamic, and Alma trying and failing to help BOTH of them was all just fascinating to me. It never felt like this was an accident or anything. Ramza's attitude always felt like it was there to serve something important in the story. Not being able to give even token pushback to a nominal ally being incredibly racist (even if he probably wouldn't listen) probably doesn't help. The game consistently insists that the WoL is a hero, so it weakens a lot of how the WoL has been written to this point that they're little more than a cardboard cutout in more than one scene with Ramza slinging slurs at their allies. My stance is, even if Ramza is being deliberately written to be abrasive and unpleasant... he's abrasive and unpleasant in a story that forces it to happen but has given you no reason to not be able to at least verbally cuff the kid for his poo poo, and keeps giving major focus on how unpleasant he is in a format with very limited screentime. Like, even if it's a deliberate choice, he's too realistic in his unpleasantness to be enjoyable to hate when he starts taking up screen time, especially with how the raid story is written—I am not generally a cutscene skipper, but I kept mentally checking out during the Ivalice cutscenes despite my best efforts. And I'm not innately opposed to Matsuno's work as a rule! I just think this questline is some of his weakest writing.
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Nov 21, 2023 21:22
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Blueberry Pancakes posted: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! I didn't actually miss the HP on my first time (as a healer Warrior of Light, I am fairly used to monitoring the party's HP totals and noticing the numbers drop so sharply was a pretty apparent change), but I did take a little bit to adjust to the orbs and missed a pad. I've heard it expressed more than once that people felt tricked by the mechanic lowering the health being labeled "Subtract" and giving them the wrong idea about what to do next. FuturePastNow posted:When you put it that way it sounds like something the Allagans would do.
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Nov 21, 2023 21:42
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Like Clockwork posted:Not being able to give even token pushback to a nominal ally being incredibly racist (even if he probably wouldn't listen) probably doesn't help. The game consistently insists that the WoL is a hero, so it weakens a lot of how the WoL has been written to this point that they're little more than a cardboard cutout in more than one scene with Ramza slinging slurs at their allies. Yeah, that's the thing, when it's an explicitly villainous character eating up the scenery being awful and racist, it's satisfying to then fight them or see them put in their place. Ramza is more like... being stuck with a racist relative at thanksgiving, and you're not allowed to start a big argument with them. You're ostensibly on the same side, and in fact he is sort of the protagonist of this little side story. But he's just so lovely and abrasive, combined with the impenetrable aether mechanics (which is a funny gag) and boatloads of exposition, it's very easy to just check out early on. That's what I did, never skipped anything but I wasn't really paying attention to the cutscenes by this point. It's a shame, in abstract the idea of "a garlean theater troupe gets involved with discovering the secret history of Final Fantasy Tactics" is 100% my poo poo, but the execution... leaves a lot be desired.
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Nov 21, 2023 22:20
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Apple Jinx is actually a member of my FC on Ultros, and so it never stops being funny to see this screenshot circulating.
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Nov 21, 2023 22:22
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Thundarr posted:It was Allagans all along! 
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Nov 21, 2023 22:45
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This is especially true when you're a summoner 
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Nov 21, 2023 22:46
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No, no, the Allagans are the cause and solution to Summoner’s problems. The caulution, if you will.
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Nov 21, 2023 22:55
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Blueberry Pancakes posted: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. That blog thing sounds interesting whats it called?
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Nov 21, 2023 23:07
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Here it is.
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Nov 21, 2023 23:14
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I kind of liked excavating through the general shittiness of Ramza's rhetoric to find his occasional gem. But I had managed to forget exactly HOW lovely he could be in some of these screencaps.
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Nov 21, 2023 23:23
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Sanguinia posted:I find it really interesting that Ramza's odiousness turned so many people off the story when its something I found so intriguing. The push and pull between his father trying to parent him to be less lovely but also being distracted by his mission, Ramza being his father's biggest supporter in that mission even while his behavior is escalating influencing that dynamic, and Alma trying and failing to help BOTH of them was all just fascinating to me. It never felt like this was an accident or anything. Ramza's attitude always felt like it was there to serve something important in the story. It's so funny because the eventual payoff in the final leg and how it contrasts is legit interesting and a really cool Commentary on the place of heroes in culture through his dad and some other stuff the game likes to talk about sometimes. But we can talk more about the idolized heroic figure versus the present we try and mold into it versus historical truth and how that forms against and around imperial culture later.
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Nov 21, 2023 23:30
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I did the Heavensward Moogle stuff before Ivalice, so Ranza’s behavior towards moogles always seemed perfectly rational to me.
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Nov 21, 2023 23:35
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Re: Ramza. I think another thing about Ramza turning people off is that the Alliance Raid quests here are incredibly wordy, and when that happens, people have a tendency to come away with their largest impressions (due to most of the text going in one ear and out the other). The largest impressions here being "This kid won't shut up with the most dislikable stuff ever". There's also some of the audience coming in with FFT experience. Ramza here stands for everything that the original Ramza really doesn't, so that limits people's patience with the character (even though that's obviously intentional). Trust in the writer and all that. A lot of this stuff has interesting bones, but I think it could have been done through another perspective to help make it go down a bit smoother. AncientSpark fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Nov 22, 2023 |
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Nov 22, 2023 00:00
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I feel like a lot of the issues people have with the Ivalice storyline is due to switching off and not engaging with it. If there were more points where the Warrior of Light could participate in dialogue, which would result in the player being actively drawn into the conversation as opposed to just sitting by while people talk past them, it might help? At the very least, verbally swatting Ramza for being racist all the time would be cathartic.
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Nov 22, 2023 00:13
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The rule of what makes prime numbers is very straightforward  All three Ivalice raids, as raids themselves go, are extremely fun, and Lighthouse is no different. The main thing I will say about much of the mechanis in Lighthouse is that FFXIV is fundamentally built around dying not being all that punished (outside of DPS races in Extreme and such), and pretty much all of the mechanics here should generally kill you once, followed by you going "Oh that's how that works." Save Mathbot. There really should be better signposting or similar that it's going to be connected to your HP. As for the story, I had no problems having patience to deal with Ramza. I work in education and, to be frank, Ramza's not even close to hitting top ten worst kids I've had to deal with, and I guarantee no small number of people talking about how they couldn't stand Ramza probably weren't that much better at earlier points of their lives. Ramza is a believably lovely 16 year old who can still be a far less lovely adult. That said, it IS very verbose in ways I could see scaring away some players. But then, if the claim is made that there isn't much in the game like this, then I hold it's all the better the game DO have this. We're all big boys and girls; we have enough raids and quests with minimal wordage, we're allowed to have one where the author just loving lets loose. Also... Khizan posted:I did the Heavensward Moogle stuff before Ivalice, so Ranza’s behavior towards moogles always seemed perfectly rational to me. Yeah gently caress those dumb flying mole rats. Ramza was entirely in the right for the first time in his life, there. I will also agree that their presence doesn't actually add much to the story here beyond "hey remember these guys???" Either way, much as I loved FFT, I have never even played FFXII. Or Vagrant Story for that matter; wonder if there's any Vagrant Story here. So, much of the references in this chapter went entirely over my head. Still a drat fun raid though.
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Nov 22, 2023 00:13
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AncientSpark posted:
This was kind of the case for me, since FFT Ramza stood out for being one of the few genuinely, earnestly good people in a setting that did it’s damnedest to try to wear him down. Going from that to… this one was one hell of a system shock, to put it mildly.
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Nov 22, 2023 00:22
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GilliamYaeger posted:If there were more points where the Warrior of Light could participate in dialogue, which would result in the player being actively drawn into the conversation as opposed to just sitting by while people talk past them, it might help? this is 100% what most people mean when they say "I wish the story pushed back on ramza more," imo, they just wanted a chance to say "shut up ramza, jenomis your kid sucks dude." probably doesn't help that the very passive ivalice raid WOL contrasts heavily with the much more active WOL of the MSQ at this time, and ramza/asahi are a particularly instructive example of this.
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Nov 22, 2023 00:24
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ProfessorCirno posted:Either way, much as I loved FFT, I have never even played FFXII. Or Vagrant Story for that matter; wonder if there's any Vagrant Story here. So, much of the references in this chapter went entirely over my head. Still a drat fun raid though. The Wandering Dramaturge did drop a few Vagrant Story names as members of past iterations of the Zodiac Braves.
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Nov 22, 2023 00:25
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Sanguinia posted:The gate opens when Famfrit falls, and we find a mysterious engraving on a nearby wall:
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Nov 22, 2023 00:33
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I would love for a Vagrant Story raid series. Let's delve into Lea Monde and see if Ashley really is wearing assless shorts. Let's have stupid sexy Sydney Losstarot hamming it up to a very confused and concerned Ashley Riot.
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Nov 22, 2023 00:37
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I've never played the Ivalice games however I support a Vagrant Story raid series because the glams might be insane. I want Sydney's drip.
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Nov 22, 2023 00:41
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Roegadude players deserve to have their characters' nonexistent asses (not an insult, nobody in ffxiv has an rear end) hanging out of their shorts as a speedo alternative Also yeah the Sydney Losstarot drip needs to be free, I would commit so many crimes for Losstarot Pants of Casting
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Nov 22, 2023 00:50
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Like Clockwork posted:Roegadude players deserve to have their characters' nonexistent asses (not an insult, nobody in ffxiv has an rear end) hanging out of their shorts as a speedo alternative Casting (and Healing, why not) get Sydney's outfit. Scouting and aiming Ashley. Maiming Rosencrantz and Fending gets Romeo Guildensturn. This should be thr final set, earlier sets could include other characters like Hardin.
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Nov 22, 2023 01:02
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