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In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, somehow Games Workshop has put out the 40,000th edition of their Warhammer roleplaying and miniature wargame.
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Nov 5, 2021 05:14
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Harrow posted:I'm reminded of a recurring argument in the RPG thread about whether Disgaea is, if you just do the main story, "grindy." At least one poster insists that Disgaea is a very grindy game even if you just want to do the main story, pointing to how grindy the endgame is (by design, it's all about grinding to super big numbers), while other people who have actually played some Disgaea games point out that no, you can generally beat the main story without grinding. (This argument recurs because any time someone brings up grinding in Disgaea's endgame the argument starts again.) It varies from Disgaea to Disgaea, but most of them are doable without much grinding as long as you can solve Geopanel puzzles- I beat the first Disgaea the first time about level 50, with the only 'grinding' I did being doing a couple reincarnations just to mess with it then because the game was brand new at the time and running one of the 'gg ez xp' maps three or four times to get their levels up again. The worst about it is probably 3, where you can definitely hit some roadblocks if you haven't leveled either a broad enough range of units to bring teams to tackle fairly specific problems in the late chapters, or have a team beefy/synergestic enough to just muscle past it. But none of them fall into the 'hours and hours of grind' category until you start hitting the post-story, and even early endgame is usually 'grind smarter, not harder.'
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Nov 16, 2021 16:42
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Ashe isn't the player avatar for a lot of reasons- she'd have no interest in anything resembling side quests or the hunting, and the plot of XII does not work as it exists if it was Ashe's head we were in- Vaan provides us a comparative viewpoint, being her foil as a character, without showing us what she's seeing or thinking at any given time and this preserving the core tension of the plot. The joke is that Vaan is Ishmael, and in that comparison Ashe very much is Ahab- the most compelling character in the story, but a large part of Moby Dick is learning just how far that bastard would go to finally overcome the whale, so you can't write Moby Dick from his point of view and get the same story. Ashe's role in XII is mostly the same, if not even more important to stay out of her head so we can learn over time how much the Occuria are loving with her. Basch, from what I recall, WAS the main character in early versions but they swapped him out for both plotline and audience appeal reasons to Vaan since he both fit the role the player viewpoint character needed to fit better, and FF is still as ever a series targeted primarily at Japanese teenagers. C'est la vie.
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Nov 18, 2021 16:46
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jokes posted:Waiting on an FF MMO that looks and plays like that pixelated FF14 joke video Still got a ways to go until we hit FF11 PR.
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Nov 24, 2021 23:21
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Bardeh posted:Thanks all, will just tinker with things as they become available and see what I like. Also, is there any difference between characters base stats? So does it matter which character I set to which job initially? Or are they all identical as a base? They're all slightly-different- I think 4 points is the biggest difference between a stat on two characters, whereas jobs can swing them almost by 60, so it barely matters in the long run. If you're really trying to min-max, then Faris is an all-rounder, Lenna leans magical, Bartz and Galuf leans physical with Galuf leaning harder (but for Galuf, those will not be the final stats you're dealing with, eventually Agi then Magic will be the focus there)
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Nov 27, 2021 17:35
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pretty soft girl posted:There are some fights in 14 like this and if you thought this was bad in a game where you control all of your party members imagine trying to get a group of illiterate teenagers to comply with the instruction of "STOP KILLING THEM THEY NEED TO ALL DIE AT THE SAME TIME WE'VE BEEN AT THIS FOR HALF AN HOUR" Counterpoint: This Never Happens. If you get a group heavily of new people, it might cause a wipe once, then someone will explain the mechanic in Team/Alliance/Shout and the next time it'll clear. Usually someone explains it beforehand and if it doesn't clear first run, it's usually not to the death mechanic. Like, I've run plenty of Castrum Lacus Licore in the last month to squeeze out a Resistance Weapon before expansion, which has one of the single hardest to coordinate versions of this in the game since it's two entirely separate fights that need to be beaten within a very short time of each other, and I've seen it fail once because of this mechanic- an entire group on the bottom floor was a bunch of friends doing their first even run and missed the calls in Shout to slow damage. It cleared the next attempt.
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Nov 29, 2021 01:25
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HD DAD posted:It’s literally just our Bermuda Triangle and X-3 takes place in Ft. Lauderdale. Oh drat, what a swerve. FFX-3 is also FFXIII-4 as Lightning gets wrecked in the Triangle traveling abroad her modeling career in France to fight a new incarnation of Hate Whale with Wakka and Lulu's kid and a middle-aged Brother. "Aw poo poo, here we go again."
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Nov 29, 2021 23:43
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Cardboard Fox posted:Dude has giant forearms and quads that he needs to lift that big dumb sword. I dunno. If I shot you a bunch of times with an automatic rifle, would you take scratch damage that impale me with the railroad sign that you call a sword? To be fair tho, seems like everyone on that world takes hits like brick shithouses. Even a fat ol' nerd like Palmer can take a small truck to the face like a champ. Everyone's so beaten down, the standards to actually give someone a beating have suffered inflation.
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Dec 9, 2021 23:23
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2PR is probably the one that has the most changed mechanically between itself and it's previous versions and not always for the better, like 100% success rate statuses when tied to attacks. It's fine but it's not a particularly good version of FF2 in any way mechanically nor.is what it's become a significantly better game then the flawed versions before it. Definitely the most skippable of the PR releases so far.
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Dec 11, 2021 00:09
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zedprime posted:If you don't kill Garland then Chaos never happens so the only winning move is not to play. You misunderstand. I'm here to goddamn kill Chaos. If Tin Man over there has to go before there is a Chaos to be killed, then call me Bowling Ball cause I'm gonna knock him all kinds of down, strike after strike. Hire me to write your dialog, SE.
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Dec 16, 2021 23:00
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The worst part of the segment isn't even the Snow/Hope pairing, it's who they make leader for that segment. You've got this massive pile of undying beef that is Snow and your leader is Hope in a segment full of enemies capable and willing to murder an actual child. It's not completely awful cause, yeah, it's short, but you quickly learn exactly how bad the aggro management of Sentinel really is in that segment.
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Dec 24, 2021 12:15
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NikkolasKing posted:IIRC, Bart's heads have elemental weaknesses and that is how I beat him in my second run to avoid getting nailed with his super gently caress off laser attack. In my first run I didn't think to scan him but it really does make a world of difference. Libra/Librascopes are something I wish the game explained better because information is very, very important in FFXIII- in particular, your AI partners act on what's been revealed in a monster's scan data- and I think Librascopes in particular get like a two-sentence tutorial that just does not let you know how radically they can change how fights go because they reveal EVERYTHING in one shot. I remember a lot of players complaining that the AI is dumb as balls, and this is the way to stop that and most people don't even remember they exist.
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Dec 27, 2021 00:05
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NikkolasKing posted:There was no way it was going to happen given the response to XII but XIII really could have used Gambits. There is absolutely strategy in XIII but it's akin to the strategy in Persona 3 - you gotta strategize around the AI instead of just fuckin' doing things yourselves like you should be able to. Nah. The AI in 13 is very good once you have that info and getting enough to get them out of dumbass mode is spending 1 TP on Libra, which is trivial. You just have to DO it, which most people... don't. Plus the game is just way too fast to be trying to jam commands for 3 characters without constant time stops, and gambits if anything would make them dumber since enemies in the same random encounter sometimes require very different tactics to win. The one role they don't handle particularly well is Synergist, which is why most people suggest controlling Sahz or Hope when you're finally building your team (besides manual Sahz being the best way to get Full Auto spam to build Stagger like mad, too.)
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Dec 27, 2021 01:06
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Ventana posted:I can't be the only person who always scans every enemy I come across in RPGs....can I? It's kinda got the same problem status effects do in RPGs where they're of varying worth- in a lot of games random fights are too easy to be worth scanning, and often when you run across something where scan might be useful, like a boss, it doesn't work at all. It's less apparent in FF, which has been pretty consistent on making scan-type spells or abilities useful, but a lot of other games run afoul of this. That said, XIII isn't unique on how it uses Scan- it's an evolution from the one in Persona 3/4 where it works on the same principal- the AI will just spam whatever until an enemy's profile has uncovered if it's strong or weak to a thing then stop using it/start using it exclusively depending. It's just that P3/4 are also lousy with useless and inaccurate status effects (while XIII's status effects are both mostly limited to one role and are really useful) and more importantly your allies never learn the enemies tactics like XIII does (second use of Libra, a few wins, or just Librascope) so they'll never tailor their tactics either. Also, Persona lacks a scan skill, so usually the only way to get there is to spend a few rounds eating poo poo, which is part of the reason why bosses can be such huge difficulty spikes in the PS2 Personas- it can be hard to get past the opening turns without burning a bunch of resources because your AI companions are useless morons until they fall into the pratfalls you might have already figured out are there.
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Dec 27, 2021 03:46
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Gaius Marius posted:The clothing is far too normal in VII to be only one generation removed from the clown closet that is X's wardrobe. You seen the poo poo your parents wore? You seen the poo poo kids wear these days? You seen the poo poo WE wore? I'd say the shift isn't drastic enough to be realistic.
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Dec 29, 2021 02:22
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Dennis McClaren posted:My question is about Final Fantasy Tactics The only easy way to play all 3 in one place is emulation, yes. A DS with GBA cart slots can play Advance and A2 but I don't believe they've escaped that environment, and as far as I know FFT is still only available on PS systems or mobile.
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Dec 29, 2021 19:49
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Switched.on posted:I bounced off of Octopath Traveler really hard, so I hope Triangle Strategy is more interesting. Something about Octopath was just so bland, but I'm not sure I can even pinpoint what it was. The main problem with Octopath is that the difficulty curve is entirely out of whack. Octo is fun when you're really working in the battle system and completing your first story or two can be interesting... but then your group starts outscaling the content even if you liberally swap in and out characters, and if you're clearing all stories, you still have six more to go... repeat for four chapters, and then there's the massive gulf of content between the stuff that opens up right after you clear your first final story and the True Final Dungeon where you generally outscale all of the former very quickly but likely need another five-ten hours of grinding for the latter do be doable without a walkthrough or having found some very specific abuse. Also yadda yadds mileage may vary on individual character arcs blah blah main stories don't intersect except for in the finale so it really just feels like you're playing eight separate short games in the same engine and it's a good engine but not good enough to carry that kind of weight. I cant say I have terribly high hopes for Triangle Strategy after the demo and Octopath, but who knows, maybe the team'll show some better design sense on this one because the framework for Octo was solid, it's just they made a lot of bad decisions on what to do with it.
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Dec 31, 2021 00:56
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Fabricated posted:The only thing about FFT that's kind of a bummer is how the special units overshadow any of the generics you might've gotten attached to early on. Yeah yeah- you can make a generic into a calculator and then use them to dunk entire encounters on the first round, but that's more work than just taking your 3 magic sworders around one-shotting everything they target. I find the opposite problem- by the time you get any of the special characters except Mustadio or Agrias into the party, your generics already kinda outstrip them as long as you actually worked towards something worthwhile and not just Monk or Dual Wield. Outside of Calculators, most uniques just don't keep up with elementally-boosted summons, draw out teleporting Wizards, faith-boosted Oracles, gear-breaking gunman healer Chemists, and the such, and NO unique has a utility moveset on par with the likes of Summon, Time Magic, Draw Out, or Item except Beowulf, who's tucked away behind multiple sidequests and a very very late marker in the story. By the time you get these fresh-faced special wee babes, you have a fully developed team of generics and who needs to raise up a new crew? Yes, even Orlandu. He often gets to stay more or less entirely on the fact that he can use Knight Swords in a better class then knight and that Excalibur is too good not to be doing something. e: also, who needs to grind? You don't need to buy every skill, just the ones that are worthwhile. If your Black Mage has a full spell list built, you bought Ice 2, Bolt 2, Flare, Toad, and 12 useless spells. Mr. Locke fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Dec 31, 2021 |
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Dec 31, 2021 21:26
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Fabricated posted:It takes a lot of JP to get stuff like the full set of equipment steal skills (which is where you get most of the best equipment in the game if you're trying for it), a breadth of calculator-compatible spells for your godnuker if you're going for that, all the good draw-outs, teleport, etc. Especially if you want most of it before you're in the back half of the game. Most of the uniques are quite good right out of the gate- and Mustadio is a primo chemist. Generics can absolutely be better but you can pretty much faceroll to victory with well-equipped uniques without having to get 10000JP worth of poo poo to do so. Why are you holding the cost to do a bunch of things you don't need to do against generics, then saying Uniques don't need any setup when most of them still need to power into other classes to get the reaction, support, and movement abilities to keep up with said generics? Ice Rod Shiva costs less then 1400 JP, most of which is just unlocking jobs, and will carry you through the majority of acts 2 and 3 as hard as most people lean on Orlandu in Act 4. You can even go back and run Summon as a Wizard and Time Mage after getting that setup going to get Magic Attack Up and Teleport to make it even stronger while still using said setup, making it scale even further. More importantly, you have THESE nerds all game, so they HAVE all the time to become good. Orlandu comes out of the box pretty great... some 20+ battles into the story and still needs to unlock other classes to get to the movement, reaction, and support abilities your generics have gotten to over the course of those fights. While not even necessarily being as strong as a built-up generic using Summon, Yin/Yang, Jump, or Draw Out. You don't need steals- stealing is even really bad unless you ARE powergrinding- most story fights have gear protected by Maintenance or will be buyable when the next shop upgrade comes- there's very little you can't just buy shortly after and most of what you can't is better found through poaching or Move-Find Item. It's overleveled generic random encounters where stealing shines, and if you just play the game you'll never see random encounters 10+ levels above the story to exploit steal that hard with. You don't need a giant pile of Math Skills spells- CT, 5, and Holy plus a suite of robes you can buy starting mid Act 2 solve 99% of all encounters due to how CT works. If something Absorbs Holy (very rare, limited to I think one monster type, one boss, and generics with said robes) that is what the rest of your team is for. Mr. Locke fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Dec 31, 2021 |
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Dec 31, 2021 23:08
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Fabricated posted:You don't really need to take Orlandu/Mustadio/Agrias/Meliadou/Beowulf through the job tree for them to be plenty good enough to just...complete the game. Like you can flat out just leave Orlandu as a Holy Swordsman and not bother trying to get better movement/reaction abilities because he's so loving good you can just have him swording stuff. Spend 5 minutes getting the rest of Mustadio's machinist skillset for the base abilities (I actually like the utility of leg/arm shot and seal evil) and make him a chemist and you're done with him. The normal Holy Sword skills are plenty versatile enough that you could just leave Agrias as a holy knight and with a shield/mantle they're tanky enough that their poo poo movement doesn't matter. Meliadou you can just leave as a Divine Knight and have her sword non-humans in the face with Save the Queen (or does she have a defender? I forget) and be just fine. Beowulf you get super late but you can again- not even bother with the job tree for him. I mean, of course you can- most special units show up in Act 4, after most of the difficult parts of the game. What are the main challenge points in the game? What stages usually come up when people talk about fights that wrecked their run? Thieves' Fort, Zaland Fort City, Golgorand Execution Site, Lionel Gate, Yardow, Riovanes... all Act 2 and 3 fights except for Thieves' Fort, which is Act 1. Most of them come so late in the run that they're playing catch-up with your team- you don't need to swap them out, because unless you built your generics like garbage they're outclassing your new, shiny recruits. Even the old man. Mustadio is probably the best Chemist you could ask for, but the quiet truth of Agrias is that her class is... kinda garbage, outside Holy Sword. It's a strong skill set, but so's Black Magic, Summon, Time Magic, Jump, Draw Out, Yin/Yang, Throw, Dance- and, as said, even without grinding you should have generics moving into many of these niches well before you see even Agrias, forget Cid. If they're immediately outclassing your generic dudes, it's because you built trash generic dudes, spending a lot of time and JP buying useless poo poo just to have it. The uniques aren't more powerful then whatever else you can find, they're just easy because they come strong without any learning. Generics have options, and you can choose bad ones- god forbid how much sugar monks get talked up in FFT when the subject usually comes up despite being a very weird and middling class in the grand scheme of things- while uniques come with a built-in foolproofing in their base kit that basically says 'spend points here and you know I'll be ok.' They're fun to use, they're really shiny when you get them, but none of them are a straight-up improvement over a well-built generic except Beowulf (who's a Super Oracle) and maybe Cid just due to how broad All Swordskill is as a skillset. And well-built generics don't cost that much time or JP to get as long as you're canny with your skill picks- certainly not compared to how far you have to go into FFT in order to get most of the special characters. Mr. Locke fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Jan 1, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2021 23:55
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Fabricated posted:Does Rafa count as a good unique despite the terrible class/skill set just because of the incredibly low inherent Brave stat that makes them perfect for finding items in the Deep Dungeon? Weirdly enough, while her skillset is iffy unless you're real good at manipulating enemy positioning, Heaven Knight/Skyseer is an amazing caster class in most other aspects- one of the best 'carry' classes in FFT for any MA/Magic-focued skillset hands-down... ... but Rafa's bigger problem is that she starts with a whopping 22 Brave, which is just... bad. Really, really bad. It basically means that her choice of reactions is basically locked to Weapon Guard or Abandon, one of which doesn't get the most milage out of her weapon selections, and the other requires a hefty investment down physical jobs to get to Ninja. She makes a great Move-Find Item mule since you get rarer drops out of it with lower Brave, but either you need to spend a lot of time patching up her brave, spend a lot of time digging her into Ninja, or just kinda go without a real reaction command which is... fine. It's fine.
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Jan 1, 2022 01:06
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Things have been looking pretty good for Square-Enix lately- time to find some new rocks to crash yourself upon chasing trends, I guess.
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Jan 1, 2022 05:04
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Or, considering there are lv 1 Speedruns of FFXV as well, which requires considerably more knowledge AND execution then a normal play, everyone's talking out their rear end and FF as a series is one that both rewards skill and knowledge by enabeling exeptional feats, but has the levers and knobs avaliable just brute force with raw numbers, with different installments just asking different questions of what 'skill' and 'knowledge' is. Even XIV Savage Raids can be brute forced if you just wait an expansion later for the level and gear cap to go up. Such is the nature of the RPG- it's rare the obstacle you cannot force your way past with enough XP and GP, but also one you can usually clear well earlier then intense did you know the tools for the job. It's a feature, not a bug, of how the entire genre is constructed. Mr. Locke fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 19:58
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Vermain posted:Level 1 speedruns are not how the overwhelming majority of players - even relatively skilled players - are going to encounter the game on their first playthrough. Saying that it's possible to complete a game in an absurdly counterintuitive way with a lot of skill and planning is not an endorsement of the game's combat systems as a whole. And most people don't kill NeoExDeath as a lv 1 Frog Chemist but that was marked as a point in V's favor. Besides, people are real bad at voicing straightforward poo poo- XV's combat is bad (on Noctis and to a lesser extent Igniz) because it's weightless, heavy on context commands, and flanks you with three borderline-useless fuckers outside of said context commands at any given time, not because there's a lack of mechanical substance or skill or player expression. That's all there, and it lets you do some amazing poo poo that just isn't fun or satisfying to pull off because of the flaws with the base. (XV is a better game if you just play as Gladio or Prompto but that wasn't even a thing for a while in XV and still isn't amazing)
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Jan 14, 2022 21:27
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Vincel Valentineless
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Jan 19, 2022 20:33
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Yeah. I haven't played FF7R yet, but if it's like other SE actiony-JRPGs things Wizard Protagonist is almost always gonna be stronger then Beatstick protagonist. Kingdom Hearts, FFXV, Trials of Mana- I would be more surprised if FF7R Cloud didn't continue this proud tradition of being better at making the magic happen then just pummeling something to death, even IF Cloud is best known for carrying around a giant piece of sheet metal and calling it a sword.
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Jan 30, 2022 10:12
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NikkolasKing posted:Personally, I think FFVI is just too frontloaded with comedy and makes everything schizophrenic. You mention certain characters being silly and heralding comedic relief, but where Gaius is just now is "Cyan's arc." Cyan is not a comedic character. Immediately after getting game's goofiest character in a silly contrivance where he forces his way into your party, you get dumped into a hellzone prison where Barret finds the father of his adopted daughter and is forced to confront the sins of his past then kill the man he'd call brother. You kick off disc 2 and celebrate Aeris' death with a wacky Turk encounter where you can send their new rookie sliding down a mountain on her bum for comedically whiffing a punch, followed by a rad snowboarding segment. FF7 is not the game you want to use in comparison to this.
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Feb 3, 2022 07:26
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Maybe it's coming to SNES jRPGs via the route of Mega Man and Bard's Tale where every resource is a tool to be used but any Megaelixer still in my inventory by credits roll was a wasted megalixer to even my 13 year self when I played FFVI for the first time. I have a very vivid memory I had was traumatizing a friend by popping an Elixir to refill someone's MP- I think whoever it was that had most of my strongest healing spells- during a rough but not lost Atma Weapon fight on the Floating Continent and a friend blew a gasket that I'd waste something that valuable just because things were tense. I just reopened the menu to show them I still had like three more but they were like 'yeah, but what if you need four?' .. what if I needed four? 
Mr. Locke fucked around with this message at 18:03 on Feb 4, 2022 |
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Feb 4, 2022 17:56
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Electric Phantasm posted:Haven’t leveled my machinist enough, but it isn't? Where did I get the idea it was? Nope, it's a line AoE that fired out chainsaw blades. I like the fluff of the new, tool-using machinist but it's really a mechanically-empty class anymore, especially compared to the old version. Ditto the revamped Summoner. Makes me really afraid of future heavy class reworks in that game.
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Feb 4, 2022 19:43
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DrPossum posted:My favorite rom patch is one that doubles the charge speed and it's a real game changer. I'm going to be upset if the pixel remaster doesn't improve this The FF6 mobile port elegently changed this by just letting you continue to give other characters commands and just tell Cyan when to go off independent of anything else. Say what you want about how it looked or this post-Woolsey translation, the mobile FF6 port at least PLAYED a better game of FF6 then previous versions. Which really sucks that we never got a 'definitive just good' version of FF6 like FF5A or FF4 Complete PSP because mobile port compromises vs GBA compromises vs SNES extreme jank for FF6.
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Feb 4, 2022 21:11
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WrightOfWay posted:Mimes famously need to talk to perform, after all. Turns out mimes perform at a frequency human ears can't make out, but still vulnerable to getting their throat jabbed all the same. Who knew?
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Feb 11, 2022 20:08
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Gaius Marius posted:I'm gonna guess that I can't get myself another Altima weapon, probably shouldn't have wagered it in the Coliseum Nope that poo poo's gone- the sword you get for that is very, very good (honestly, probably better by most metrics until it's weilder gets a bunch of HP bonuses and levels behind it) but it doesn't share Atma's perks of ignoring defense and bypassing most damage penalties that make it pretty unique among weapons. Mr. Locke fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Feb 17, 2022 |
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Feb 17, 2022 23:39
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Final Fantasy VI is a great example of what happens when time leaves a game behind. By the standards of 1994, Final Fantasy VI is a loving miracle. It's beautiful, it's by far the most ambitious storytelling in the medium by the end of it's generation, and it does a lot of work trying to marry mechanics, medium, and plot. Others have gushed about it's theming, it's presentation, the sheer number of ideas it throws out and the surprising number that stick. Not every piece of the pig is for everyone, but you'd have to work pretty hard to find something that didn't appeal to someone- back in the day I loved messing around with Gau and seeing what all his weird nonsense did and occasionally finding some really fun toys to play with. That said, a lot of that came at a cost, and the cost seems to have been the core game itself- there's a lot of nuance to the combat, but you never ever need it- while there's occasionally a fight that'll ask something interesting of you like Wrexsoul or force you to really put your tools to work like Atma Weapon, most are basically stat races you're almost never in any danger of losing- early on items are super-powerful and can carry you through any fight and later magic basically takes over. The back half of the game especially suffers because, since they can never be sure what your party's potential is, they can't make fights that actually are tied to any given particular skillset because who knows if you even have it. It also took to the third rerelease to finally hammer out a lot of the game's mechanics because FFVI is also the buggiest mess in the franchise, at least among core entries. Relic and magic balance is all over the place- most status magic and niche tools have never been more useless, unless they're doing something completely broken like Vanish bypassing spell immunities. And then there's the translation- neither English translation got a lot of time or budget behind it because the original is flavorful but inaccurate, rushed, and heavily censored, while the new one is more functional but a bit of a dry turd- it's very similar to the FFT translation debate except there's actually a real case to be made for the OG because it has a lot more character to it, and when it biffs it completely at least you can usually figure out what they actually wanted to say. The scope of the story is huge but it comes at the cost of opportunities to tell it, leaving huge swaths of personal growth to be inferred or told instead of shown. It's clear here that their reach kind of exceeded their grasp- hell, take Gaius' personal dislike of Locke and the fact he has some weird old man preserving Rachel's body back in his hometown. Which is a fair surface read, because that's what the game presents on the most literal level. You really have to look hard to and put in the work to find that Locke's not having some weird old man watch his girlfriend's corpse because he's a creeper- up until he runs afoul of the plot of FFVI, his personal goal is to find this treasure he's heard of who can bring back the dead, and the entire World of Balance for Locke is basically a huge distraction from that goal because turns out he found the way to really stick it to the Empire in Terra, and they're an immediate problem for basically everyone. His arc started well before FFVI, and the game is in no hurry to tell you that, especially if you're not really looking for it. You get a couple hints of it here and there and if you find the clues about where he wound up in the World of Ruin it's more or less directly implied, but Locke himself never really gets a character moment about it barring the conclusion to the sideplot. He's keeping Rachel in more or less stasis until he can find this 'Phoenix' he heard of in his travels and do right by this woman he loves that he's done wrong now twice. That's a hell of a character beat to tuck away in side content and flavor dialog you never have to see, and FFVI relies a lot on the player to put a good-faith reading on it. And this is arguably one of the three main 'leads' of VI, and the one that bridges the other two who's arcs are more central to the plot itself. Most characters plots are like this- Space Fish covered the Thasama duo, others have talked about Edgar/Sabin, and it's amazing considering this is a story being told with the limitations of in-engine character sprites and 24 megs of space. But they come at the cost that most characters only get snapshots of their personal arcs shown. Cyan (assuming you actually find his entire WoR sidequest chain,) Terra, Celes, and Setzer are the only character who get the majority of their stories told on screen for the player, and most everyone else has details buried away in side content and dialog moments you can miss or told that yes, this character has grown now without actually showing the growth. There's an elegance to letting the player put the pieces together, but there's also something to be said that if they did Final Fantasy VI ten years later they would have had the space in the medium to show more and tell less. I think you could make a case that, even moreso then FF7, 6 is the Final Fantasy that would stand to be the most interesting to be given a second shot at a remake. There's something to be said of the art of limitation, but FFVI is a game that definitely shows the damage it's constraints did to it, and thus it doesn't probably quite hold up as well today as a video game as the system-heavy video game-rear end video game that is Final Fantasy V or the less ambitious, but polished to a perfect sheen Crono Trigger.
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Feb 20, 2022 07:36
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Grimthwacker posted:"Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin: ALL of the Final Fantasies! ALL OF THEM!!!" Oh no. But the old prophecies... ... every Final Fantasy is the Worst Final Fantasy...
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Mar 5, 2022 19:59
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Calaveron posted:What was the trick to have Shadow hang out with Sabin the longest in his scenario? I forget Rush for Phantom Train ASAP and otherwise try to avoid non-mandatory fights. Shadow has a random chance to piss off after completing random encounters, but IIRC he won't leave after any forced fights, he definitely won't leave if you run from encounters, and once you're on the train he's stuck there with the rest of you. This is the same every time you can hire Shadow to join your party- avoid random encounters and beeline major objectives if you want to keep him around.
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Mar 5, 2022 23:57
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Ultima is more broken, the Ragnarok is the more unique, less replaceable effect and is one of the main ways to make a physical attacking Locke, Celes, or Terra useful lategame- doubly so if you can upgrade it in the Coliseum.
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Mar 6, 2022 04:17
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Elephant Ambush posted:Speaking of late game Locke, he sucks! What's a good way to make him do meaningful damage? Right now I have him with a Genji Glove and his 2 highest attack weapons but he's not doing much to the dinosaurs. His best setup is Atma Weapon/Valiant Knife with the glove, since they ignore defense and you should have both by the time you get him back in the WoR. Pretty good candidate for the offering too, if his damage is high enough per swing but that generally takes Levels (since Level is by far the most important number in the Attack formula.) Dual Wing Edges are pretty good when facing enemies weak to instant kill. If you have the Ragnarok/Illumina, those tend to hit real hard even with them not ignoring defense thanks to MP Critical and chance for on-hit casts and also bring high evade bonuses. If your level is particularly low, even the Gladius might be better then the Valiant Knife for a bit due to the higher attack and Holy Element. The main thing to remember is that if you're using Locke for damage or weapon properties later in the game, DON'T USE CAPTURE\MUG. Capture as a command ignores a lot of the unique traits of weapons, which is about the only way the Attack command can even begin to keep up in the late game. Locke's problem is that almost all his merit is in his gear, which is probably the most expansive list in the game, but he doesn't get many of the strongest armor in the game (The Minerva, Behemoth Suit, and Snow Muffler are better body gear then anything Locke can wear, and a lot of the better helms in the game are also female-exclusive) and Attack just doesn't keep up with unique commands and Magic due to it's formula due to how enemy defense scales through the game and how tied Attack is to Level unless you either grind or learn hard on MP Critical, Ignore Defense, or special effect weapons.
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Mar 6, 2022 05:44
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Last Celebration posted:Doesn’t Ultima Weapon suck before level 64? I thought it had an oddly specific caveat where it has a Level/64 multiplier, in addition to the obvious HP = power thing, which doesn’t seem to gel well with min/maxing the Valiant Knife. It takes until level 64 to get back to the normal weapon formula (Since the Ultima Weapon's actual damage at the end of the formula is divided by 64) but the defense-ignoring properties of the weapon realistically make it better then a vast majority of other weapons at a considerably lower level then that in the World of Ruin. By the late 20s/early 30s it'll hit harder then all but the strongest of non-defense ignoring or MP Critical weapons- most normal runs would get Locke back fairly late, being one of the characters in the most difficult locations to recover, it'll likely outclass everything but the Gladius, the Ragnarok/Illumina, and maaaaaybe the Wing Edge for a bit longer if you're there particularly early. (That said, if you're trying Critical HP strats to maximize the Valiant Knife, any of the other weapons would work better because of how the Ultima Weapon loses damage as you lose HP from your max until higher levels, but part of the nice thing about the Valiant Knife is that it's still very good even at base power because of Ignores Defense) Mr. Locke fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Mar 6, 2022 |
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Mar 6, 2022 07:22
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Cleretic posted:Sastasha is a very 'are you absolutely sure' kind of pick. Like, there's MANY more iconic and visually interesting XIV areas you could fit into FFI's world (Shisui of the Violet Tides for the Sunken Shrine, Hell's Lid or Malikah's Well for Mt. Gulg, Stone/Dusk Vigil for the Ice Cave, really trigger people and go Aurum Vale for Marsh Cave), but if there's any FF dungeon that deserves a punch-up, Sastasha's probably pretty high on that list. I'm pretty sure it was picked because it let them turn Bikke into a full level and encounter, and the only other major 'pirate level' is from FFV, which is even more generic 'pirates in a cave.' In that sense, Sastasha is probably a hard win. That said, it's a shame they went with that instead of turning Castle of Ordeals into The Great Gubal Library or The Grand Cosmos, or the Sky Castle into Azys Lla, but it could always be worse. They coulda turned the Marsh Cave into the Aurum Vale, possibly the only way the Marsh Cave could have gotten even worse.
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Mar 9, 2022 17:03
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We had one brief moment when it looked like someone was going to step up to challenge Mario Kart and we got Sonic and All Stars Racing Transformed which basically forced Nintendo to go all out on Mario Kart 8 instead of being lazy like MK7... And then it took years to get the next game, and Sonic Team Racing was such a weird step back, even without the odd but sometimes really fun Team Racing mechanics. And seeing that, Nintendo has decided it never needs to move on from Mario Kart 8, and Chocobo GP is not the game that will change their mind. Oh well. Mr. Locke fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Mar 11, 2022 |
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Mar 11, 2022 01:04
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