This is interesting. As much as they're royals, Galuf and Lena are of the "willing to dirty my hands and pay with my own pocket" / "I can trust you guys to not fuck things up while I go do my thing" persuasions, and Faris only interest in her bloodline is mainly that she wants her lil sis and her dad back im not crying youre crying shut up
Compare to IX where Dagger, while still naive about many things and becoming a queen during the middle of the plot, is willing to commit what is essentially treason (when she still didn't suspect more than mundane political ambitions from her mother) and ally herself with proles and a noble that could be considered pro-laborer, if not pro-democracy. VIII makes a clear divide between democratic states and authoritarian figures, with one revolution in the background lore being presented positively. Then in XIV there's Sweet Sultanita being a bleeding heart, Best Bastard Boi instating a democratic system even if noble families are still a thing, and Himbo Samurai Lord going "my life is my people's to do with what they wish". Haven't played XII but I understand the party princess doesn't end up making a great case for herself and her family had plenty of failings.
(yes there's also VI with the coin flip for the throne but it has nothing to do with politics so I won't count it for this).
Is the Final Fantasy mere nobility whitewashing, or do the writers actually have a sense of class issues and want to give (some of) their nobility characters genuine sympathies? You decide.
instead it appears designed as a defensive power, which the game tells me "protects all allies from physical damage under a certain limit." Whether that is useful, I don't know, but at least it's making a real attempt.
While limited only to physical attacks, Golem is quite useful as if it blocks an attack, it also blocks any additional effects such as status. It specifically blocks ((20 + Caster Level) x 50) damage, and if it has even 1 point of "HP" left it will block a full attack. Certainly not a necessary summon but part of the rather strong lineup of potential buff spells if you aren't tearing through enemies with Ninjas and such.
Apparently some other versions of FFV have a Necromancer job that is permanently undead and has super powerful spells that you acquire Blue Mage style except by killing powerful does? Which sounds insanely cool, I would have a permanent subscription to that job if it were in this game, but alas.
Off the top of my head, the one I had the most fun with was Gladiator. High end physical class, but gets abilities like long reach to do full damage from the back row, bladeblitz for a free "hit all enemies on the field" attack, and a finishing strike command with a percentile chance to always do 9999 damage.
Sadly, once again, the Pixel Remasters are faithful to the original releases of the games, so none of them have things like bonus dungeons.
I really like the little touch with Galuf's world having a lot of things just be... slightly different in color and look from Bartz world. I can only assume what trees available to construct ships in this world are darker in general, like... swamp trees or whatever.
Oh yeah, last act of the game gets wild when Exdeath reveals that his plans all along were to eliminate the class differences by exterminating the monarchy, and Bartz switches sides and you have to choose which route to take for the rest of the game. Good stuff, really elevated FFV imo.
Look, you can fight the goblin bois, or you can fight Gilgamesh. Do you really want to fight the Bestest Greatest Warrior again, especially if this time he didn't forget to turn off the oven? No chance you win.
Right, for the non-FFV players sitting at home: what's got me curious about this setup is that Faris, right now, has Black Magic lv 6 and Dualcast equipped, but she can still cast White Magic.
I think it came up previously in thread, but yup Dualcast isn't just casting twice, it also gives you access to a decent selection of White and Black spells. Very nice stuff especially when Mimic finally comes along.
If you want to enhance the Mystic Knight, you're better off spending the slot on something that, you know, enhances physical attack capacity, such as two handed or duel wield passives, mug, or perhaps especially humorously... Blue magic
"Badass heroic swordsman from a prior generation splits from the party to go disable a generator during an infiltration mission" is a plot beat that can't possibly go wrong, especially given Final Fantasy's favorite movie franchise of all time.
An early submarine, launched from a wooden sailship… Fuck, we're in some serious niche historical territory here. We're squarely within the American Civil War era in terms of technology and tactics.
"Badass heroic swordsman from a prior generation splits from the party to go disable a generator during an infiltration mission" is a plot beat that can't possibly go wrong, especially given Final Fantasy's favorite movie franchise of all time.
The Bone Mail was hiding, quite literally, under a pile of bones. It is the strongest armor in the game, which is crazy to get at that level, and carries with it immunity to instant death, poison, darkness, old, confuse and berserk, while absorbing poison and halving ice-elemental attacks. Crazy, uh?
However, this is because the wearer effectively "becomes undead," with all the benefits and drawbacks thereof. That means weakness to fire and holy, and the character cannot be revived in battle. Which is pretty onerous! We'll see if I find a use case for it as we go.
Aren't the undead healed by some actions which'd normally inflict damage? Or am I misremembering how Final Fantasy handles 'em? Healing = damage is an easy one to remember, but I think there's a few extra mechanics around undead beyond that.
Aren't the undead healed by some actions which'd normally inflict damage? Or am I misremembering how Final Fantasy handles 'em? Healing = damage is an easy one to remember, but I think there's a few extra mechanics around undead beyond that.
Undead can get healed from like, instant death spells if I recall it right, but the problem is that this is only a very partial fix; while the bone mail is incredibly powerful, especially when it first shows up (it's defense is high enough to zero out damage outright from a lot of enemies around this point in the game), it causes awkward problems when you want to mass heal- you can cast a cure spell on one guy, or the entire party. You can't choose to heal a specific two or three.
Furthermore, by wearing the bone mail you become impossible to resurrect with Life or a phoenix down... and gain no alternate way to be rezzed, unless I'm badly misremembering things.
Yeah, Golem is a really useful utility summon that gives you a (20+level)*50 physical shield for the whole party. At your current level it'll eat about 2500 damage, which isn't anything to sneeze at. It does eat up a turn to cast, but !Dualcast mitigates that drawback.
It'll unfortunately scale poorly with level, eating 4000 damage at level 60 where your party will average 6000 HP, but it's still handy to keep in mind.
Golem is one of the keys, along with Spellblade Blizzara and Float, to take down Gill Turtle. Earthen Wall does wonders in staving off the monster's hard-hitting attacks.
Golem is one of the keys, along with Spellblade Blizzara and Float to take down Gill Turtle. Earthen Wall does wonders in staving off the monsters hard-hitting attacks.
Both his standard attacks and counter attacks too, as well as the status effects. As for damage, the turtle is Undead (why though? FFV is weird), so Requiem does ok damage, as does the one of the Blue Magic spells coming up. Spellblade is still No. 1 though due to the Defense piercing.
I've found it and it's honestly kind of a shame, "your party member is now undead on a permanent basis with all the advantages and drawbacks thereof" is honestly my jam, I would love to go "Galuf is a lich now," but *wow* that seems painful in the context of an FF game and how healing and party targeting work and how regularly you have to revive chars.
You actually have a couple of ways to heal a Bone Mail user already! White Wind is fully capable of healing the undead in most, if not all games it appears in. Additionally, unless I'm mistaken Drain effects work just fine when used by the undead, so the Dancing Dirk and Vampire Blue magic can heal as well. Bone Mail + Blue Magic is one of my personal favourite combinations at this stage of the game.
It'll unfortunately scale poorly with level, eating 4000 damage at level 60 where your party will average 6000 HP, but it's still handy to keep in mind.
I mean. It absolutely has poor level scaling. Things can remain useful even while scaling poorly, but literally, in a game where you gain power largely linearly or better than linearly with level (better due to gaining gear, spells, etc) a spell that has a flat +20 added before then scaling with level scales poorly.
Like, for a level 1 party it would give 1050 damage blocking to cast. For a level 10 party, where you 'expect' to be close to ten times as strong... it only gives 1500 a cast, less than half again. It's doubled where it starts by level 22. It's doubled from there around 63.
Bonus round: since it always blocks one full hit at minimum, but needs to actually be able to tank the damage for further hits, it has a lot of minimum value while it's hard to make it actually really strong.
But mainly? yeah, getting a less than 5% of the base (in practice) improvement per level is poor scaling. Again, poor scaling doesn't mean useless. It just means it doesn't gain lots of strength over time.
(the thing that you'll expect to push it out of being all that useful isn't the scaling but rather the gain in other options and, relatedly, the increase in how fearsome your average monster is which is well. Accompanied by a general though not absolute trend in FF5 of enemies slanting more towards magic over physical)
Yeah, right now Omi's getting 2500 HP out of Golem with a party of dudes with like, 800 hp (for 3200 HP all up). Golem basically has as much HP as the entire party combined. At level 60, that ends up as merely 2/3rds of someone's health pool.
And yeah, a lot of the more dangerous attacks in the lategame being magical rather than physical is by far the biggest detriment to Golem's usefulness as time goes on rather than the relatively poor scaling.
I mean. It absolutely has poor level scaling. Things can remain useful even while scaling poorly, but literally, in a game where you gain power largely linearly or better than linearly with level (better due to gaining gear, spells, etc) a spell that has a flat +20 added before then scaling with level scales poorly.
While I'm not 100% certain it works this way, I believe the damage Golem takes is calculated based on your party member's defenses. This makes Golem scale a lot better with the Protect status, effectively doubling his ability to take hits. Still not great later into the game, but hey, he scales better than most midgame spells.
It adds an extra 1/7 to party HP in the scenario proposed, not 2/3. The wall HP is for the whole party collectively, not for each individual party member.
Scaling isn't as important as functionality, and measuring the total extra HP that Golem grants against total HP of the party isn't a good way to judge how strong of an ability it is. As a buff, it should be compared to other buffs which do similar things, which in this case would be Protect, and see if it's better or not, which is done by comparing the duration, time wasted on application, and effect (damage reduction, for these spells). If one does that, Golem comes substantially ahead, even at the higher levels when it's comparatively less effective (because Protect has better scaling), meaning it's a great spell regardless.
Of course, it's totally outclassed when compared with Shell, but then, that'd be like comparing Shell itself with Haste; it makes no sense, because the two effects have nothing to do with each other. Golem isn't an all-purpose protection spell, but those are rare anyway in Final Fantasy, and for what it actually does, I'm not sure there's anything better, short of actual invincibility.
Time to tackle the Barrier Tower and hopefully bring down Exdeath's magical shield!
First thing I want to note: the enemy types here are… interesting.
This Reflect Knight is, as its title implies, passively protected by Reflect; I cast Slow at him to test it out without risking backfire from an actual damage spell, since the trap is pretty obvious.
'Neon', like… just the gas?
Alternate backgrounds for inside and outside the tower.
…oh hey, these little guys also show up in the Omega Raids from FFXIV.
So, between that witch called 'Traveler' and floating on a Dreamworks moon, those 'Gravitator' dudes whose design is strongly reminiscent of some classic alien archetypes the 'Level Checkers' being machines and both 'Neons' and 'Magnetites' having a sciency vibe in their setting, I'm betting these monsters aren't a random hodgepodge - they're aliens. Specifically, they're aliens from wherever Exdeath is from, because I'm going to go out on a limb and say he ain't from this world.
Something that's been bugging me about the backstory is that Exdeath was sealed on Bartz's world thirty years ago. That's nothing. It is, literally, within one lifetime, and we meet and hang out with the heroes of the previous generation who did the sealing. That's not very Final Fantasy. We're up to the fifth game in this series, and at this point it's a pretty consistent trend that there is an evil in this time and in another; Garland today and in the past, Xande acting today on a grudge centuries old by contacting a world long fallen to darkness, Golbez in this age enacting Zemus's spite from long ago… The Emperor is the closest to an entirely contemporary threat, and even then he's allying with Literally Hell.
So I'm going to guess that Exdeath comes from another, third world that has long succumbed to his/some other kind of evil, and that he brought all the Barrier Tower's aliens, machines and monsters with him.
Those Level Checkers also carry some pretty good Blue Magic, but I'm the wrong level for Level 4 Graviga and I don't feel like grinding and playing Beastmaster games for it and the other spells they might carry. Sorry, BLU fans!
The interior of the tower is just some dungeon, but the exterior vistas are genuinely pretty impressive. Also, note the visual trick the game is using to show our character when an object is standing 'in front of' the screen; it looks weird and kind of cool!
The tower is also home to not one, but two chest monster fights of relative difficulty for their grade, each one hiding a highly valuable item.
The [Color] Dragon line has been a staple of the game and I enjoy seeing how each game iterates on their visual design. This one's pretty good!
Interesting choice to make them hydras, but I think the red dragon looks cooler.
Neither of these special encounters prove too much trouble for my not-overpowered-at-all party. Dualcasting Bio for 2,000+ damage while multi-hitting for 1,000-2,000 with Galuf flexibly casting Slowga, Haste, Golem or Titan is definitely the appropriate amount of damage and doesn't turn either of these encounters into tiny gibblets within a couple turns.
The Red Dragon apparently can have the Fire Ring stolen from it, which would be a pretty neat find, but unfortunately I didn't get it despite Lenna using the Thieve's Gloves and mugging twice per turn, and I didn't bother reloading for it. The unique gear is very, very interesting, though: the Red Dragon is guarding the Blood Sword, that old staple of broken synergies with its life-draining ability, fondly remembered from FF2; the Yellow Dragon are instead guarding the Golden Hairpin, which…
…holy shit.
Faris can now Dualcast for the cost of a normal casting. Hahahahaha.
Hahahahahahhahahahahahahaha-
Ahem.
Yeah I think that's pretty solid.
Midway up the tower, we get an incoming message from Xezat.
A monster almost gets the drop on Xezat, but Xezat quickly hides in a corner and blasts the monster with lightning while its back is turned!
The fact that the magical whisperweed is operating as Literally Just A Radio and Xezat is using actual radio comms procedure, but Galuf has never seen it and has no idea what the lingo is about but tries to awkwardly repeat it, is just comedic genius.
The higher levels of the tower have encounters with tougher Ziggurat Gigas enemies, but it's honestly still nothing to stop us, and we quickly reach the top levels of the tower and a second save room where we rest.
Before going on to face whatever boss awaits us, though, a fun strategy comes to mind.
You see, the Blood Sword can only be equipped by the Knight and the Freelancer, so right now I can't use it. But that's the beauty of the job system! Why not try something else? For instance, if Bartz swaps to Knight and Lenna to Ninja, I can equip the Blood Sword on Bartz and boost its power with Two-Handed or Spellblade, while Lenna is now wielding two Twin Lances as a Ninja, meaning my damage output doesn't meaningfully suffer while my survivability increases considerably thanks to the healing from the sword! Now that's thinking with jobs.
Lenna looks pretty dashing with that ninja scarf.
Unfortunately that doesn't work. First off, the Blood Sword lacks the 'can be enchanted' property, meaning no Spellblade combo. Furthermore, I think its damage might key off the Magic stat? I say this because the Blood Sword has a minor boost to Bartz's Magic stat, which does not have any obvious purpose, and because it does not appear to have increased damage from Two-Handed once I swap out Spellblade for it. Meaning whatever game I play with the tools at my disposal, Bartz is only hitting as a normal Knight of his level with no extra skill wielding a level-appropriate sword.
And to make things worse, the Blood Sword's accuracy is terrible. This is the main problem; I ran a couple battles with everyone in Defend mode and only Bartz attacking every turn, and he misses, on average, at least 50% of his shots. Meaning his damage is actually terrible and his survivability isn't even increased that much, since he doesn't heal if he doesn't hurt something.
So the Blood Sword goes back on the shelf for now, and the group returns to their previous jobs.
It was worth experimenting! But it didn't work. Good thing I took time to try it on random mobs rather than blithefully heading into the boss fight with it, though.
Without further ado, we head for the top of the tower, and the antenna Xezat has instructed us to destroy.
In the tower's deeper levels, Xezat turns off the power for that electrified barrier, which quickly goes down and exposes the spooky red obelisk of doom. Unfortunately (though predictably) this was not the antenna's only defense…
Oooooh Atomos! Another franchise staple, here rendered in chilling grandeur. Really, that yawning maw/portal of doom, adorned with smoke-spouting twisted faces, giving onto some terrible darkness with him pulsing with the light of some malevolent star… This is one of the coolest boss sprites so far.
It also hints as to Atomos's mechanics, as well.
Atomos opens the fight by casting Comet, instantly killing two characters with an attack that deals over 1,000 damage.
Then, while these characters are down, it starts pulling them towards it. Their KO sprites start sliding across the ground and towards it. The effect is very striking in motion, although harder to render with screenshots, but a look at later in the fight should make it visible enough:
It's pretty obvious that, should these characters reach Atomos's maw, they will be permanently removed from the fight. And the thing is, Raising them isn't a solution in itself; Atomos instantly casts Comet again, killing two more characters. The only way to avoid Comet is to leave at least one character KO, which means there is always someone being pulled towards it, effectively putting a timer on the fight.
You can control who is being pulled, though. Aside from Comet, Atomos attacks with percentage-based attacks like Slowga or Gravity, meaning it can't kill you unless you let it. By tactically raising characters and allowing others to be KO'd, you can shift who is getting pulled during the fight if someone gets too close, and everyone else is safe-ish and free to unload damage on Atomos. End result…
It wasn't pretty or clean, but we got that win. And check this out!
Lenna has mastered Thief!
Samurai time, bby. Well, as soon as we resume play. Right now it's cutscene time, and…
…it's not going out quietly.
Xezat tells Galuf that things are getting hot down there, and he needs to escape quickly; the energy feed has gone into a 'recursive loop' and the whole tower will soon explode. Lenna calls to the wind drake to come bail out the group at the top of the tower, and Galuf says they'll come down to get Xezat - but Xezat tells them to just wait for him in the sub, and he'll join them later after escaping on his own. It's definitely a lie, and Galuf sees through it, and announces that he's not going to let his friend die; Bartz tells him that it's too dangerous, but Galuf doesn't care.
Oof.
Yeah, Bartz is probably right, trying to rescue Xezat is probably suicidal. But at the same time… It's kinda rough that three out of our four heroes go "yeah, dude's dead, no point risking ourselves," right? Like it really gets across that there is a huge gap in the relationships of these characters. To Bartz, Faris and Lenna, Xezat is some cool dude they met literally yesterday. To Galuf, he's his friend of over thirty years, alongside whom he saved the world. Of course Galuf would be willing to do anything and risk his own life to rescue him, while the others are more willing to take his sacrifice in stride. And Bartz values Galuf's life - his friend - far more than that of this one guy, and is doing his best to keep him from throwing it away.
"Four new warriors have been chosen by the crystals," Xezat muses - which makes me wonder; this world doesn't seem to have crystals, so what does he know about our world and its crystals? Was he, along with Galuf, Dorgann and Kegler, chosen by some force Galuf has yet to mention?
Either way, Xezat believes we "must be the ones to fight Exdeath." He deliberately chose the part of the plan with the least chance of survival, knowing he might die, so as to give us a chance to go on and fight the warlock. "The rest," he says, "is up to you."
With the screen flashing to white, Xezat disappears.
RIP, Xezat. You were simply too cool to live.
Galuf, of course, doesn't see this, and isn't stopping in his attempts to get past Bartz and save him, even though without the wind drake his chances are even more abysmal than they previously were. Leaving Bartz with only one choice…
…knocking the old guy out.
Bartz grabs an unconscious Galuf and leaps off the tower onto the drake. As the group escapes the collapsing tower, Galuf , still half-knocked out, makes one request.
Man, that's strong.
Xezat's request for Galuf to wait for him in the sub was always a pretense - he knew he was going to die, and he was trying to get his friend to stay safe rather than risk his life in a futile attempt to save him, and Galuf knew it. But now that Xezat is gone, Galuf is echoing that pretense, asking to stay and "wait for him" in the sub, fully knowing it's futile, as a way of honoring his promise to his dead friend.
FFV is a pretty light-hearted game, but in terms of the internal logic of heroic deaths and how people react to it, we're miles ahead of most of FFIV's 'character deaths.' Xezat only appeared very recently, and his death is kind of trope-y and telegraphed (as Etranger pointed out, he's very much doing an Obi-Wan), but it's still sold with far more panache than Yang or Cid's fake-out deaths. We're solidly in the territory of Tellah finding Edward with his dying daughter here.
And with him goes the tower, and with it the barrier protecting Castle Exdeath.
There is little mood for joy or celebration at this victory, however. The path is open to the villain's lair, but the cost was steep.
It's like…
I can spoil Logan, right? That movie came out like, five years ago or something.
Okay, so, a moment that has always stuck with me from Logan is the funeral at the end. Logan died saving the mutant children, and they bury him before moving on. Laura, who has spent the entire movie with him, who actually does care about him as a person, says a eulogy and lingers a little while, but all the other children just… move on. Because to them, he's Some Dude who showed up at the eleventh hour to help them. They're grateful, and on some level kinda sad he's dead, but also he doesn't really mean anything to them. Only Laura can say words that mean anything over his grave, because only she knew him, and only Laura cares enough to linger while all the others are more concerned by their immediate safety from the mercs that are probably still looking for them.
That's Galuf and Xezat. Only Galuf really knew Xezat, and only he is grieving enough to fulfill that empty promise to wait for him at the sub, knowing he's dead. It's not like the other three are callous or heartless, or that they don't care that Xezat is dead; but he sacrificed himself willingly to secure a great victory, and now the path to Exdeath's castle is open, and they have the opportunity to make that count. But for Galuf, right now, the death of his friend matters more. These are distinct characters, with different life experiences, and this is hitting Galuf in a different way.
Anyway, it's good.
Back in the submarine, the three younger characters convene; Bartz asks how Galuf is doing, and Lenna tells him that he'll be alright but needs some rest.
Then, in a swerve I didn't expect, Faris suggests that now that we have a submarine, we might go for… Ghido's sunken cave?
Huh. I guess this is the game indicating that on the "was Ghido's message real but Exdeath took advantage of it, or was the whole thing at trick" question, the answer is the former, when I had been leaning towards the former, and also that either Ghido's cave was underwater this entire time and nobody bothered to mention it, or everyone is just assuming his now-sunken cave was waterproof anyway or something. I guess it also means we are not raiding Exdeath's castle immediately now that the barrier is down. Seems unwise to me, but on the other hand finding decrepit old sages hiding in caves has had a pretty high rate of success in helping Final Fantasy adventurers so far, so why not?
We've hit the image limit, so next time: we find Ghido's cave, and then we head for definitely totally the final dungeon!
Its actually kinda fascinating how they have destroying one of the four towers be enough. Even by the early 1990s "thing sealed/protected by x plot coupons, go collect/destroy all of them because apparently one would have been enough but the villain or precursor was being extra" was a trope so going the more realistic route and saying "no, theres more than one for a reason so destroying one is enough to break the circuit" feels clever, even if they were just doing it to avoid repetitive dungeons
Unfortunately that doesn't work. First off, the Blood Sword lacks the 'can be enchanted' property, meaning no Spellblade combo. Furthermore, I think its damage might key off the Magic stat?
Yeah its damage is based on the magic formula. Which means that it ignores row modifiers. It's a pretty nice weapon except for the minor issue of having a base accuracy of 25%.
Aim (Ranger), Jump (Dragoon), Sword Dance (Dancer), and Rapidfire (Ranger) will all ignore the accuracy calculation, so it's pretty good if you have either Rapidfire or equipment that boosts Sword Dance. With Jump you're only hitting every other turn, and not getting the dragoon bonus. Aim and unboosted Sword Dance are still decent, with the former being more reliable and the latter having secondary benefits from the drain and osmose effects. Rapidfire is the tops, as usual.
