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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]

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Even assuming maximal downtime, you should still be hitting something like 30 runs of chocobo hot and cold in an hour. What is the drop rate of the chocographs? Typically I feel like I get one every four or five rounds, so some level of RNG dammit can happen, but one per hour sounds like a horrible drop rate from what I remember. Clearing out a forest of chocographs felt basically the same time investment of hunting down a bunch of blue magic, or level grinding to get a key ability or two before moving on.
 
Quoting from the wiki page:

The chance of digging up a Chocograph (if there are any currently available) depends on how many items the player has unearthed in that particular Chocobo Hot and Cold game. The probability starts at 1/16. After unearthing 3 items, the chance goes up to 1/14. After 4 items, it is 1/9. After 5 items, it is 1/5. After 6 items, it is 1/3. On the last item, the probability is 1/2. The player can find one Chocograph per game of Hot and Cold. After there are no more Chocographs to be found as of yet, Mene will inform the player.

Hence why save-stating to ensure maximal item retrieval is the most practical way to find Chocographs.
 
Omicron said:
no i am putting my foot down on this

Sure, in-character Dagger wouldn't have brought it up to Zidane unprompted. But that's why writers create scenarios when something needs to be explained?

No. If your character 1) has a unique magic power that is rare and special in the setting, 2) knows she has this power, 3) is afraid of using it, then your two possibilities are "this is treated later as a shocking reveal when she tells us she has this power," or the reader needs to know this information.
FF9's problem is that it makes the reader aware of 1, but not of 2 or 3. We know Dagger is a potential summoner, but nobody brings it up until after the eidolons have been drawn, so all we know is 2 and 3. We're left to infer an answer as to why she isn't summoning and why no one is talking about it.

If this is a dilemma Dagger is facing, we need to know before she resolves it. We can't learn that she knew about the summons but was afraid of using them in the same breath as her getting over it. That's not how writing works!! If there is no in-character reason for Dagger to disclose this information, then you have a hundred solutions to this issue, ranging from "flashbacks" to "inner monologue" to "contrive a scenario in which she brings it up" to "one of the antagonists gloats about it to Zidane."

I don't care if there was never a situation in which it would have come up until it was too late because the result is bad plotting. It was the writer's job to ensure a reason would present itself so we could have the information that's relevant to us, or, failing that, actually make it a twist. Like, you could have just have Dagger say "I... knew all along I had that power inside me... Even though I never talked about it to anyone..." and then everyone acts shocked, least of which because they went through multiple boss fights where that might be relevant and because it suddenly explains why all these Black Waltzes were so gung-ho on getting her back.

But no! This is not treated as a surprise to anyone. Dagger talks about the summon power as if the characters knew this entire time she had it and no one is bothered in the least.

It's poor craftsmanship.
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My impression so far is that FFIX had a strong disc 1 followed by a very rocky disc 2 (there is obviously there is room for things to smooth out). I think a good way to inform the player of Dagger's issue with her summons might have been to give her a first Trance event like Zidane and Vivi. Let her transform, begin a summon, and then freak out, ending her trance prematurely. Maybe have her actively refuse to explain, and then lock her Trance gauge until the Ramuh encounter.

If the theory that each character was supposed to have some sort of story beat surrounding their Trance is true, then I think the dev team did themselves a disservice in cutting them.

Omicron said:
ngl, having some flashbacks to Queen Brahne being an actual loving mother would genuinely help this game's so much. Right now her former goodness is a purely informed quality and she is one of the most comically over-the-top villains we've had in the whole franchise, with about as much depth as Exdeath. It would also really help having scenes of Brahne in which she's a serious/loving/tragic character instead of a continuous fat joke.
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Over in the spoiler thread I brainstormed a few ways that could have been handled in a subtle manner other than via flashback.

I think there was room for some subtle foreshadowing, rather than leaving everything to inference.

Example: have Garnet start with two lockets: the big plot relevant one, and a second that sits in the key items area doing nothing. Selecting the locket describes a portrait of Brahne, Garnet, and Garnet's father all together and smiling.
Or have someone during the pre-play segment with Vivi comment on how this is the first happy event since the death of the king, and they're glad things are getting back to normal.
Or maybe when Garnet mentions her love of "I Want To Be Your Cannary", she mentions that is something she shares with her mother.

Nothing in the spoiler block is a spoiler, just using that instead of quoting myself from the other thread.
 
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All I really have to say about the Dagger Discourse (Daggerscourse) is that while it's not egregiously awful, it's just kind of grating/off-putting to have this extended section of the game where the writing just feels...less good when you know that they can and have done way better just a couple of in-game hours before. The best I can describe it is that it feels like she's being left behind by the plot, not because of any conscious decision of the writers, but because they're actually fumbling the ball a bit.

While I'm happy for an FFII reference (I think it's underrated sue me), I have to wonder who on the writing team felt that Joseph's death was such a burning injustice that they needed to bring it up 10+ years later so as to have the player adjudicate whether or not Firion/Guy/Maria are infact moral cowards. Which speaks more to the inherent hilarity of having a bunch of temporary party members with fully formed personalities and narrative arcs dropping in and out of your game being juxtaposed against your core three main characters who's defining personality traits are "almost fucked a snake" "speaks beaver" and "woman".
 
Cypocryphy said:
While I'm happy for an FFII reference (I think it's underrated sue me), I have to wonder who on the writing team felt that Joseph's death was such a burning injustice that they needed to bring it up 10+ years later so as to have the player adjudicate whether or not Firion/Guy/Maria are infact moral cowards.
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You know, it occurs to me we could look at this another way:
What other story could they have used?

Like, if Ramah wanted to tell a little vignette in a few short parts that he could use to quiz Garnet about her moral character, and the writers wanted that vignette to be a callback to one of the previous games... what other options did they have?

Honestly I could see where "what was the morality of the people sacrificing the old guy" applied to both Joseph from FF2 and Ramah here in FF9, that made FF2 the best little vignette to use, where the parallels were pleasingly obvious enough that Ramah is clearly talking about himself, too.

But what other little story could Ramah have used here? Desch throwing himself in the Reactor Core in 3? Review Cecil's whole Deal... actually something about Tellah being full of rage might work better, if we're looking at 4. Galuf is probably the other really good match in terms of "old guy who sacrificed himself" so I guess it's between him and Joseph, really. And implicitly I suppose the writers here want to reach back into the pre-Playstation era, rather than pulling a story from 7 or 8.
 
Go for the ethics of bombing the mako reactor and have Ramuh have to spend three times the length of the actual story explaining to the FF9 characters the concepts of reactors, corporations, and megacities.
 
cB557 said:
Go for the ethics of bombing the mako reactor and have Ramuh have to spend three times the length of the actual story explaining to the FF9 characters the concepts of reactors, corporations, and megacities.
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"Okay, so you know Cloud. Okay first i gotta explain Mako, but to understand that you gotta understand the lifestream. Of course, if i'm tackling the lifestream i think that the ancients is important, granted cant' start a proper without even mentioning Jenova, but wait-
 
cB557 said:
Go for the ethics of bombing the mako reactor and have Ramuh have to spend three times the length of the actual story explaining to the FF9 characters the concepts of reactors, corporations, and megacities.
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Sa'kage said:
"Okay, so you know Cloud. Okay first i gotta explain Mako, but to understand that you gotta understand the lifestream. Of course, if i'm tackling the lifestream i think that the ancients is important, granted cant' start a proper without even mentioning Jenova, but wait-
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Ramuh: "-so, the Cat asks the Terrorist if harming innocents is acceptable in the pursuit of justice, especially when said justice is an elaborate self-deception to inflict violence on those who've wronged you. And then the Terrorist rebukes him by asking if willingly serving evil is absolved by you personally attempting to do good, even after you've harmed another in service to it. And then-
Vivi: "So is the cat alive or a puppet or..."
Ramuh: "I don't know, they change the answer like five different times."
Zidane: "Yeah, and where's this guy's daughter? We haven't heard from her for hours."
Ramuh: "Listen, I don't-"
Dagger: "What is a 'power grid', anyways?"
Ramuh: "... ... ...Okay, so going back to Disc 1-"
 
Have to check with other but do the images for ff 5 load for others? I have been rereading from the start and when I came to FF5 all images are broken for me but other instalments work properly as far as i see, does anybody else have this or is it just me?
 
At a quick glance, it looks like it's specifically from the start of the FFV updates, to FFV part 16. No idea if it has to do with what hosting service those parts are on that's different from the rest, or just some "it's been X time since these images were uploaded to our database we're clearing them to make space" nonsense.
uztgft said:
I hope that is a morbid joke?
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This is like... the fourth or fifth or sixth or who even knows how many times time this has happened to some degree or another. Omi is, understandably, a bit frustrated with the fact that large chunks of his picture LP will spontaneously break, forcing him to go back and figure out what exactly the problem is and fix it yet again which I assume can easily be hours and hours of work fixing links and re-uploading pictures, not to mention that the farther back it happens the more likely we eventually just run into "yeah I straight up don't have those pictures anymore".

Sometimes I really do wonder how places like the LP Archive do it, they've got picture LPs that are 10+ years old holding up fine. I guess they've got their own server space paid for somewhere?
 
VagueZ said:
Don't worry—this type of thing has happened every now and then and it's almost a thread meme at this point. You did nothing wrong, Omicron's not going to do anything beyond fixing it, and, yeah, he'll probably have to fix it. Welcome to the thread!
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That's a relief, I never want to take chances with that
McFluffles said:
not to mention that the farther back it happens the more likely we eventually just run into "yeah I straight up don't have those pictures anymore"
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Maybe some trustworthy readers could save the images on their own PCs as backup drives?
 
It looks like the root document, the gdocs on which I hosted the pictures, are... Gone. If I search Final Fantasy V, I get a few results for my updates for part 22 to 28, but no earlier. Searching "Galuf" or "Faris" provides no additional results.

That doesn't make sense. Every update is written in gdoc before posting it onto the site. That's how I host the pictures.

Now, the idea that gdoc could be deleting my docs past a certain cutoff date without telling me is... insane? But I went and looked and I cannot find most of the updates for IV, III, and II. I still find some, as well as older docs, but it seems like a solid chunk of what I saved over the last few years is... Gone.

Now, this would be absolutely terrifying because it would mean the root documents for II, III, IV and V are simply gone and I have no way to restore them, so all these updates' screenshots will die to link decay in the coming months. However, this also... Has happened once before? A solid chunk of my older saved docs seemed to have vanished into the aether, but then a while later they were... back? Maybe?

This is either the worst thing that has ever befallen this LP or an inconvenience of a few days and I have no clue which. It's anxiety-inducing. I do not know what to do.
 
Omicron said:
It looks like the root document, the gdocs on which I hosted the pictures, are... Gone. If I search Final Fantasy V, I get a few results for my updates for part 22 to 28, but no earlier. Searching "Galuf" or "Faris" provides no additional results.

That doesn't make sense. Every update is written in gdoc before posting it onto the site. That's how I host the pictures.

Now, the idea that gdoc could be deleting my docs past a certain cutoff date without telling me is... insane? But I went and looked and I cannot find most of the updates for IV, III, and II. I still find some, as well as older docs, but it seems like a solid chunk of what I saved over the last few years is... Gone.

Now, this would be absolutely terrifying because it would mean the root documents for II, III, IV and V are simply gone and I have no way to restore them, so all these updates' screenshots will die to link decay in the coming months. However, this also... Has happened once before? A solid chunk of my older saved docs seemed to have vanished into the aether, but then a while later they were... back? Maybe?

This is either the worst thing that has ever befallen this LP or an inconvenience of a few days and I have no clue which. It's anxiety-inducing. I do not know what to do.
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My assumption is it is a backend issue and some part of Google's hardware was down, thus, your documents saved on that particular hardware was down.

Remember, "the cloud" is just a fancy term for "other people's computers".
 
Adloquium said:
There's a funny thought experiment about what would happen if Brahne was just gacha-ing the eidolon summons, and while preparing to nuke a city, what comes out is Chocomog or Cactuar.
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Given that the city killer versions are supercharged, Chocomog would be a stampede akin to the Rumbling from Attack on Titan while Cactuar would launch needles like Lavos, or something similarly horrifying.
 
SirKaid said:
Given that the city killer versions are supercharged, Chocomog would be a stampede akin to the Rumbling from Attack on Titan while Cactuar would launch needles like Lavos, or something similarly horrifying.
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Queen Brahne Of Alexandria Uses Summon Magic, Brings Forth The Eidolon Ragnarok, Turns Entire City Of Lindblum Into One Hi-Potion

"Oh good, just in time for Auto-Potion," Says Visiting Monkey Boy
 
McFluffles said:
At a quick glance, it looks like it's specifically from the start of the FFV updates, to FFV part 16. No idea if it has to do with what hosting service those parts are on that's different from the rest, or just some "it's been X time since these images were uploaded to our database we're clearing them to make space" nonsense.
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Can someone look up one (ideally more than one) of the FFV updates before Part 16, scroll down a bit, wait like... A minute or so, and confirm to me whether at least some of the pictures are loading? I'd appreciate a second set of eyes to confirm what I'm seeing now.
 
Omicron said:
Can someone look up one (ideally more than one) of the FFV updates before Part 16, scroll down a bit, wait like... A minute or so, and confirm to me whether at least some of the pictures are loading? I'd appreciate a second set of eyes to confirm what I'm seeing now.
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Looked up the first 6 parts of FFV posts, i'd say around 50% of the pictures were loading to me, give or take 10%. Was about samish amount of picture on every post, except first one, which was around like 30% or so. (Numbers are just a rough vibe, then stopping to count how many were missing)
 
If images get too much outside traffic, google will temporarily cut them off after a certain amount of bandwidth is exceeded. I think that's usually for images uploaded individually to Google Drive, though. Uploading a whole bunch of them into a specific document and then using those images as links on a forum is fairly non standard usage.
 
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