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

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Saint_007 said:
I'm guessing it was developer foresight in case the players came in with no tents to initiate the cutscene. The scene itself happens when you lay down a tent to recover, so the players dying with no way to get a tent if they forgot to bring any would break the game. They just didn't feel like changing the variables after that, so that island only has that one encounter with that one drop.
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Oh, for sure that's the reason. What just makes it funny to me is that because of this, you can also drop by the island again later for free infinite tent farming.

Granted tents only cost like 500 gil so by this point in the game they really aren't much of an expense, but still.
 
Omicron said:
Okay, so each 'Purobolos' is basically a non-elemental Bomb; it can use a normal attack, a Critical Attack, and a Self-Destruct move which kills it and inflicts its HP in damage to a single character, maximum 1500, which is a one-hit kill on anyone. But, and here is the thing, if you kill a Purobolos, its dying move is to use 'Arise,' which resurrects all currently-KO Purobolos at full health. That's right! When you kill one of them, it respawns the entire encounter minus itself! But when you kill another, it respawns the entire encounter minus itself, including the one who'd already died. This happens over, and over, and over…
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Hm... Now I haven't played the game but it sounds like you could also turtle up with everyone in high health, high defense classes, plink the bombs a little to lower their hp without killing them and just defend/heal until they all used Self-Destruct (resurrecting a character after each one, if necessary). Unless they also use Arise when they kill themselves and not just when you kill them.
 
Omicron said:
I hate this fight. I hate this fight so much. I went to look it up on the Wiki afterwards to see what obvious strategy I was missing, and there's NOTHING. It's just the intended design. What intended design, you ask?

Okay, so each 'Purobolos' is basically a non-elemental Bomb; it can use a normal attack, a Critical Attack, and a Self-Destruct move which kills it and inflicts its HP in damage to a single character, maximum 1500, which is a one-hit kill on anyone. But, and here is the thing, if you kill a Purobolos, its dying move is to use 'Arise,' which resurrects all currently-KO Purobolos at full health. That's right! When you kill one of them, it respawns the entire encounter minus itself! But when you kill another, it respawns the entire encounter minus itself, including the one who'd already died. This happens over, and over, and over…
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Bob-omb here is one of those pseudo-boss encounters that are vulnerable to assuming direct control. With a Bestmaster or three, you can simply order them to self-destruct at one another, which, IIRC, doesn't even provoke Arise.
 
Omicron said:
The only way out is through. You have to kill every Purobulos until they run out of MP to cast Arise, popping Raises and Phoenix Downs of your own as your own characters are killed by their Self-Destructs, and it takes forever. Genuinely the worst fight in the game so far.
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Well, there is another way:
SolipsistSerpent said:
Hm... Now I haven't played the game but it sounds like you could also turtle up with everyone in high health, high defense classes, plink the bombs a little to lower their hp without killing them and just defend/heal until they all used Self-Destruct (resurrecting a character after each one, if necessary). Unless they also use Arise when they kill themselves and not just when you kill them.
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Yeah, they only cast Arise if you kill them. If they go boom, they don't. So you can carefully track their HP and whittle them down to low health so Self-Destruct does pitiful damage, and then they all stay dead.

What's that? How are you supposed to figure that out? LOL get fukt.
Omicron said:
Oh my god, he's literally holding us captive and coming to our cell to gloat. We're in saturday morning cartoon villain territory right here.
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Omicron said:
He has a giant hologram machine which he uses to threaten our friends by gloating over holding us hostage? Incredible. What a guy. I see that the writers decided to jettison 'character depth' as unnecessary weight and to replace them with four-color supervillain clichés, and Exdeath is living it.
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I love Exdeath so much. His personality is "evil." Exdeath's career, home life, and lifestyle are "villain." He carries an embossed business card reading "EXDEATH: Dastardly Villain." His national anthem is "I Like Evil" from the Donkey Kong Country cartoon:

View: https://youtu.be/W2YmvT0RevA
Omicron said:
What matters is who he's summoning, because it's time for THE MAN. THE MYTH. THE LEGEND.

GIIIIIILGAMEEEEESH
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Aw yeah, it's Gilgin' time!

This whole scene, with the Big Bridge music blasting and Gilgamesh making his debut, is super iconic for FF5. The bot that runs the Four Job Fiesta every summer is named Gilgabot, is how iconic this is. This area is peak FF5.
 
Now to be fair to Gilgamesh, he actually is fairly strong. He can tank multiple summons and last several rounds 1v4 the Light Warriors. It's just that no one could be powerful enough to live up to his arrogance and he's also pretty cowardly when pushed. But given his strength, I bet a lot of the time he can blow into encounters and win handily, which helps keep his attitude up.
Warclam said:
Yeah, they only cast Arise if you kill them. If they go boom, they don't. So you can carefully track their HP and whittle them down to low health so Self-Destruct does pitiful damage, and then they all stay dead.
What's that? How are you supposed to figure that out? LOL get fukt.
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Well, I figured it out, but I had the advantage of Omi flat out telling me that Self-Destruct did their hp in damage and not having to figure that out on my own.
 
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So at last we've arrived at the best part of the soundtrack. Clash on the Big Bridge. God I love this track. Synth doing arpeggios at breakneck speed and sassy trumpet in one great package. Incredibly catchy, and the turnaround gives it the right amount of heated battle oomph that makes you want to hear it all over again.

First off, the original. Again, note the arpeggios and sassy trumpet. At this point it's more of some sort of hybrid reed trumpet combo since it doesn't have much of the brassy crunch that this era's brass midis usually have, but it does have just a hint of vibrato on the sustained notes which is why I always thought of this as just a trumpet variant.

Now let's listen to what the Pixel Remaster gives us. First off, arpeggios are still there but now we have guitars for even more energy. Absolutely love it. And then we get it. Sassy trumpet bringing the sizzle. Vibrato so wide you can drive a truck through it. Great falls, and also shooting up to the screamer at the end of a shake is just so over the top. So !@#$ing good. For those that like listening for details, I will mention that they did a stellar job of mirroring and bringing out the articulations from the original. Super dry stacattos and very well executed slurs (slurring up can be a total pain in the ass on brass, for those not aware).

And lastly, a remix. I have no idea how I first stumbled on this thing originally. It's just a hyper octane synth guitar feature, taking the high energy of source material and cranking it up to completely absurd levels. The thing that really sells this take for me is that a little under two thirds of the way through they just break down and shred on the intro riff and turnaround. There is absolutely nothing artful about this remix and I am 100% here for it.
 
For Purobolos I've always just tried to get them all with the same AoE (anything will do, though I'm personally fond of !Zeninage for style points) thus causing their Arise counters to fire before any of them get a chance to actually die.

More importantly, though, Gilgamesh! There's not a whole lot of recurring RPG bosses out there that quite get the perfect storm of entertaining writing, fun battle mechanics, and kickass theme music that he does.
 
You have to kill every Purobulos until they run out of MP to cast Arise, popping Raises and Phoenix Downs of your own
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This was exactly the moment I realized the importance of following the code of Bushido, by which I mean spending money to save money.

As to the music, let's not forget The Black Mages, the best album of 2003 and the prototype for all of the later versions of this song:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KtKbcTSpp8
 
I'm sometimes surprised Gilgamesh wasn't called Benkei, given he's the legendary figure he has more in common with, namely the sword-stealing and bridge association (...though would that make Exdeath Yoshitsune? Or maybe Yoshitsune's Enkidu?) Not that dubious legendary names are anything rare for FF, plus for a Japanese audience I imagine calling him Benkei would've been too on the nose.

I bring this up as I kinda have Benkei on my mind right now, since I'm writing a story with Yoshitsune as a central character and have been watching LPs of the Genji duology (I definitely know Giant Enemy Crabs have showed up at some point in FF, though forget where)
 
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ArlequineLunaire said:
I'm sometimes surprised Gilgamesh wasn't called Benkei, given he's the legendary figure he has more in common with, namely the sword-stealing and bridge association (...though would that make Exdeath Yoshitsune? Or maybe Yoshitsune's Enkidu?). Not that dubious legendary names are anything rare for FF, plus for a Japanese audience I imagine calling him Benkei would've been too on the nose

I bring this up since I kinda have Benkei on my mind right now, since I'm writing a story with Yoshitsune as a central character and have been watching LPs of the Genji duology (I definitely know Giant Enemy crabs have showed up at some point in FF, though forget where)
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Not to mention his design definitely looks like Amano was told "hey, draw Musashibo Benkei" as the starting point. Big guy with baggy clothes, a scary face, and a polearm?

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Man, here I was thinking "oh man when I get home I should really post a link to Battle on the Big Bridge for the thread, forgot to do that in my post since it was just before I went to work."

Get home and there's already six versions and counting :V Shows people got good taste in one of the best pieces of music Final Fantasy has churned out.
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
I'm sometimes surprised Gilgamesh wasn't called Benkei, given he's the legendary figure he has more in common with, namely the sword-stealing and bridge association (...though would that make Exdeath Yoshitsune? Or maybe Yoshitsune's Enkidu?) Not that dubious legendary names are anything rare for FF, plus for a Japanese audience I imagine calling him Benkei would've been too on the nose

I bring this up as I kinda have Benkei on my mind right now, since I'm writing a story with Yoshitsune as a central character and have been watching LPs of the Genji duology (I definitely know Giant Enemy crabs have showed up at some point in FF, though forget where)
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Yeah, he pretty much just takes a name from Gilgamesh; as a character he's based on Benkei first and foremost. The development process for monsters at the time was visuals-first, so Nomura had various monster proposals in his sketchbook. One was a monster named Gilgamesh and another was based on Benkei, and they decided to fuse the two ideas into one monster. Thus Final Fantasy's Gilgamesh was born. (Here's the Benkei one, noted as BEN K in the Nomura's sketchbook.)

Given that the PCs are the ones to fight him on the bridge, I think that makes our party the Yoshitsune equivalent, more or less.

 
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I love that he has like a hundred unique swords stashed in his backpack and he decides to fight us with a naginata instead.

He didn't want to go full power and crush us right off the bat 😔
 
Omicron said:
I love that he has like a hundred unique swords stashed in his backpack and he decides to fight us with a naginata instead.

He didn't want to go full power and crush us right off the bat 😔
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Also a Benkei reference- the story goes that he fought with a spear, and collected the sword from everybody who challenged him that he defeated, the swords being trophies more than weapons to him.

Thats also why he carries Genji equipment - Benkei swore loyalty to Minamoto no Yoshitsune after being defeated on the bridge, and the Minamoto clan was also known as the Genji clan. Which obviously makes it OK to steal them from him since youre the one playing the Yoshitsune role.
 
Exdeath is great. I read every one of his lines in his Dissidia voice, improving the quality immensely.

The man is in his element! He floats ominously, monologues at you, and calls you a big dumb loser coward. He and Kefka are just having a blast, and you can tell.
 
Clash on the Big Bridge truly is one of the best tracks in the history of Final Fantasy.

@Omicron when you started the game, you mentioned that you expected Gilgamesh to appear in this game, and it seems like he didn't disappoint (not that he ever would! He's too great to ever disappoint!), but I'm a bit curious - if you had not known he was to be here, and only knew him from his FFXIV appearance, would the tone of the game have been enough for you to expect him? Or would his appearance have been more surprising?
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
Thats also why he carries Genji equipment - Benkei swore loyalty to Minamoto no Yoshitsune after being defeated on the bridge, and the Minamoto clan was also known as the Genji clan. Which obviously makes it OK to steal them from him since youre the one playing the Yoshitsune role.
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It's also ok because we beat him so stealing a weapon from him is ok.

Amidatelion said:
Exdeath is great. I read every one of his lines in his Dissidia voice, improving the quality immensely.

The man is in his element! He floats ominously, monologues at you, and calls you a big dumb loser coward. He and Kefka are just having a blast, and you can tell.
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People used to shit on Exdeath for having a stupid name (ok kinda fair given it was translated as X-Death) and for having a stupid origin. "Uwwaaah he's a treeee how duuuumb." These people were fucking idiots and were rightly silenced by the progression of time and people waking up to Exdeath genuinely being one of the best villains of the series.
 
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