I think you meant the later here.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Don't forget to use the access to the submarine to explore underwater. There's optional stuff laying around that might be interesting to check out.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
I always loved that Magnetite sprite. Just a smol imp boi with a magnet going "I want ta help too!"
Ah, so fun to see a newcomer's glee at realizing how many fundamental laws of reality they are breaking. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
We knew you had it in you, Omi. We're so proud. :_D
But -
Yeah. If nothing else, with Rapid Fire you should get a reasonably balanced drainage assault.
Honestly. I love it that the comical story in V can do drama just as well or better than IV's viri sirius epic. In particular with one particular moment that should be coming in the near future...
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Bartz blinked his eyes. "There's...something different about you."
"She's-" Reina started.
"Sh, sh-sh-sh," Faris shushed her sister. "Let 'im figger it out."
Bartz tapped his chin and finally pointed a finger in realization. "You've got your hair up."
"Y'see? 'E ain't the fastest ship in the fleet, but 'e gets there. Aye," she confirmed, turning her head so Bartz could see the golden hairpin gleaming from where it held her normally-wild mane in place.
"I didn't figure you'd go for that level of fuss."
"Eh. 'Tis worth it fer the enchantment. But the best part is, 'tis long enough t'shank with if need be."
Galuf shook his head. "So violent."
"Pirate."
"She's-" Reina started.
"Sh, sh-sh-sh," Faris shushed her sister. "Let 'im figger it out."
Bartz tapped his chin and finally pointed a finger in realization. "You've got your hair up."
"Y'see? 'E ain't the fastest ship in the fleet, but 'e gets there. Aye," she confirmed, turning her head so Bartz could see the golden hairpin gleaming from where it held her normally-wild mane in place.
"I didn't figure you'd go for that level of fuss."
"Eh. 'Tis worth it fer the enchantment. But the best part is, 'tis long enough t'shank with if need be."
Galuf shook his head. "So violent."
"Pirate."
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... 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.
Heh. Now I'm really looking forward to your play of FF VI.
When you get the Celestriad / Economizer (depending on which the remaster choose to use) you reaction is going to be epic.
Emy
Artificial Defender
There's also an understated benefit to using the Blood Sword with Rapid Fire, which is that with most swords against many mob packs, Rapid Fire's random targeting will result in hits that deal less damage due to row modifiers. Not caring about rows means that the Blood Sword doesn't suffer from this problem.
Yeah, there'll be better opportunities to get Fire Rings anyways. Pretty sure Red Dragons can show up as random encounters later in the game, and you'll eventually get the Return time magic spell (if you haven't already can't recall if it's 4th or 5th tier off the top of my head) so you can just savescum stealing attempts by resetting the fight every time it doesn't work out.
And yes, while the Blood Sword might need setup to get decent work out of, the Golden Hairpin?
Thine casters are now even more Destroyers of Worlds.
A few others have mentioned it already, but yeah the Blood Sword works best paired with a class ability that gives you better accuracy - most noticeably Ranger's !Aim or !Rapid Fire. Even then, it's nowhere near the level of power you could get from say, FFII's Blood Sword.
Well, I guess THAT could possibly go wrong. RIP Xezat, he was a real one.
All else aside, while FFV is a super lighthearted game at times, as you say? It does get character death and sacrifice done a lot better than any previous Final Fantasy game. I mean, compare FFIV's rotating cast of "OH NO TIME TO FAKE SACRIFICE MYSELF" to this, and it feels leagues apart. And Xezat isn't even an actual party member, just some dude you met half an hour ago. Game really sells the connection between him and Galuf.
I mean, if you want to you can go check out Exdeath's castle here and now, the barrier is down.
Heck, before you head to the next obvious destination, there's at least two more places the sub can access, and... I'm now realizing nobody mentioned it before but you can head to Xexat's Castle before he bites the bullet. I think all you missed out on not going early is some minor dialogue changes though, swapping over to "oh no king man is ded" now.
Just imagine them doing the Barrier Tower in one of the NES titles - I guarantee you'd have to do four near identical dungeons.
I am like 95% sure Aim does in fact have a delay, since I was using a ranger for a good part of my recent playthrough. Nowhere near the delay of something like Jump or the Monk's Focus, but there is still a slight "taking aim please wait".
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Atomos is absolutely fascinating but I always got stuck on the part of 'what even is he'. He just kinda unceremoniously jumps you, but he talks to you so he's apparently sentient? But there's no answer, no mention of 'it's Exdeath's familiar, Atomos' or whatever.
Fun fact there is a way to get through this with the whole party in one piece. Your analysis of the mechanics is on point- in fact, if Comet fails to kill something Atomos just immediately recasts it, as I recall he'll cast it about three to five times before you get a turn if you manage to be tanky enough for that to need it. And then just. Keep casting.
But! This is a place where Spellblade shines. You see, Atomos is susceptible to sleep. With Sleepblade, a Mystic Knight will put Atomos to sleep, every time, without fail, while also lowering his HP.
So long story short, you have your Mystic Knight cast sleepblade, put Atomos to sleep, and have someone else ressurect whoever went down in the meantime. Then your Mystic Knight just keeps going ham on him while everyone else twiddles their fingers.
(you could make this even more reliable/safe by running multiple mystic knights with like, white as a backup plan, but one already humiliates him enough)
- Location
- Canada, probably
I… hm. There is a small real-time delay when it pops up the little spell card thingy. I'm pretty sure everything pauses though, so you're not getting any closer to the next turn of either the enemies or the warriors. I think.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
beta male behaviour
if you simply played the game at a normal pace you would naturally be in roughly the right level range to learn level 4 graviga
skill issue, difference in skill
Everyone else got here first but dammit I had to look it up myself because this confounded me too. Deals magic damage that ignores Two-Handed and can even be used from the back row, and I had no idea about Aim and Rapid Fire (that's what the glacial pace of job advancement gets me). Not as plainly useful as its FF2 counterpart but maybe there'll be something there if I eventually get back to the game (I am currently busy playing Harvestella which is in many ways just like FF5 except it's not as funny and the presentation cheap as hell).
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.
Might not be an intentional part of the scene but I think it's worth mentioning that A) they are at the apex of a rather tall tower and B) Bartz is canonically terrified of heights, but he grabs Galuf and leaps straight off onto the Wind Drake to get him to safety.
Just went and tested, just in case; having Faris use !Aim and then the rest of the party enter their attack commands immediately after, she goes after the rest of them. It's not a long delay by any means, but there is a slight delay and a bit of ATB time in between entering the command and it actually going off.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
There's two things I can think of that are worth picking up there if you take the time to explore.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
Yeah, Atomos here has a bit of a case of Space Flea. Thankfully they revisited the concept for later games and made it so much better and unique, if still demonic eldritch thingie as fug. For the longest time, Mini-Me couldn't just not think about IX's Atomos when after watching that one cinematic.
Did the party use the same jobs, or did any use one that made them significantly slower than the others? Not that I don't buy Aim having a delay, it makes sense.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Just goes to show though that important to story and iconic are different things - both the GBA version of 1 and the 2d version of IV The After Years used Atomos for their "four most iconic bosses from V" fights. No points for guessing who the other three they picked were.
I just slapped !Aim on Faris since she's already long mastered Ranger, but she was a Ninja, Bartz is a Red Mage, Lenna is a Samurai, and Galuf is a Time Mage currently. So even in the speed department, she'd easily win out.
Though again, it's not like it's a very big delay; everyone else got off their attacks and had like... 1/8th of a bar filled by the time she got to attack. You want the real "holy shit when will you move" attacks in ATB it's still going to be Focus and Jump. Tried using a Dragoon earlier this playthrough but especially since FFV doesn't have the general "spells have casting time" thing FFIV had I'd sometimes get 2 or even 3 turns while they were off playing hackysack with the clouds or whatever Dragoons do in the sky.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
If you have two characters queue up !Attack and !Aim, the !Attack will go first even if you queue up !Aim first. This has happened to me multiple times when I was using Rangers to deal with birds and their stupid high evasion.
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
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.
I'm too used to the FFXIV (and now that I've played it, FFXI) and their depiction of Atomos, which is a singular creature with a singular face, and the big gaping maw is in fact their mouth.
So my immediate imagination had the Atomos here go "You think it will be that easyAAAAAAAA Think agaAAAAAAAAAA Now you will paAAAAAAA with your blAAAAAAAAAAAd" because it needs to keep its mouth open but speak at the same time.
At least FFV's sprite has faces on the side of the maw, so presumably those are the ones speaking.
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!
The Red Dragon joins Gil Turtle in the "This thing is Undead for no discernable reason" group. None of the other coloured dragons are Undead either. It is also the first source of the powerful Blue Magic Level 3 Flare. Fairly obviously, it hits all appropriately levelled enemies with the Flare spell (with no reduction for multi-target either!). Niche, but Flare is really good in this game as it calculates the enemies MDef as 1/32 of its normal value.
Fun Flare Fact: Flare is the Capture/Release effect of the weakest enemy in the game, the Goblins from near Tycoon/Tule. Devs probably had fun with that one.
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.
Continuing with my random Solo Game facts, this bastard is near impossible. Outside of a few specific Job options (Black Mage and Mystic Knight's Sleep, Blue Mage's Dark Shock + Level 5 Death combo, Chemist stacking defenses, or Bard's ability to Hide for 2 hours while Atomos wastes his 20,000 MP) the only way to beat Atomos is extreme overlevelling to the point that the rest of the game is a joke (Level 50-70 depending on Job), or ignoring the Solo Game aspect for this one fight.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
So far, I've found Ghido's Cave (and left) and an Underwater Cave that leads up to a lake that's otherwise inaccessible and a Chocobo Forest, though I didn't find anything I could use there. I also found Surgate Castle and some cool stuff inside. Haven't finished exploring, though.
My theory is that Atomos's role as a guardian is secondary to its actual purpose, which is revealed by the way it tries to kill you, and linked to my theory about the nature of the monsters of the tower: it's a living portal. Exdeath created/summoned Atomos in the first place to draw the Travelers/Gravitators/Magnetites aliens into this world to protect the tower. It's also why its signature attack is Comet: it's literally pulling asteroids from the space of another world to drop on you. It can use Gravity, Slow and Old because it's generally messing with relativistic physics in order to create its wormhole-style effect, and it tries to kill the party by doing the exact opposite it's normally doing: pulling them in to dump them into outer space.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
The forest next to the chocobo forest actually has one interesting random encounter - you should know what it is once you meet it.
MagicMan333
Post-apocalyptic Gonzo Journalist
- Location
- Washington
The funny thing about the Blood Sword was that it managed to trick me into thinking it was a better weapon than it was through sheer RNG. Almost the whole first dungeon I had it equipped it always hit until the boss. The boss didn't last long anyway (Monk with Rapid Fire FTW!) so I didn't question it but it took an embarrassingly long time for me to check out its accuracy and figure out why Bartz was hitting jack and shit for almost 2 hours.
DragonUnitOmega
Akechi/Fem!Akira gives me life
- Location
- Inaba
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Etc
Phew. FINALLY...I caught up.
What? The entire thread?
Aw hell no.
That's like...fifty to seventy (or probably more) pages of catch up. I ain't doin' that when I got other things on my plate! I just read the updates/threadmarks.
Maybe some other time.
Speaking of threadmarks though...
Part 9 A is labelled in the threadmarks as Part 8 A. I noticed it all the way back when it came out and I got the notification, but I didn't say anything since, 1, I didn't feel up to reading the update at the time, and 2, I thought it'd be fix by the time I do, but nope. Still says "Part 8 A" after "Part 8".
Why is the image posted twice? Well, okay, one has the dialogue arrow and one doesn't, but otherwise it's the same. I'm assuming this is also an error.
Er, shouldn't that be concealed? Or am I derping?
Anyways. That's all I got.
Except maybe that wow, FFV has been real fun to see Omi play through. Almost a shame I didn't try it out blind myself...but like. At the same time I'm perfectly content with just reading through for now. I'll play it in my own time whenever I feel like it.
What? The entire thread?
Aw hell no.
That's like...fifty to seventy (or probably more) pages of catch up. I ain't doin' that when I got other things on my plate! I just read the updates/threadmarks.
Maybe some other time.
Speaking of threadmarks though...
Part 9 A is labelled in the threadmarks as Part 8 A. I noticed it all the way back when it came out and I got the notification, but I didn't say anything since, 1, I didn't feel up to reading the update at the time, and 2, I thought it'd be fix by the time I do, but nope. Still says "Part 8 A" after "Part 8".
Why is the image posted twice? Well, okay, one has the dialogue arrow and one doesn't, but otherwise it's the same. I'm assuming this is also an error.
Er, shouldn't that be concealed? Or am I derping?
Anyways. That's all I got.
Except maybe that wow, FFV has been real fun to see Omi play through. Almost a shame I didn't try it out blind myself...but like. At the same time I'm perfectly content with just reading through for now. I'll play it in my own time whenever I feel like it.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Sorry about the long delay between updates, it turns out trying to do two writing projects in parallel makes each individual project slower than just half of the speed it used to have instead of just evenly dividing my time between the two, who would have thought 🤔 Still excited to continue this though!
- Location
- Netherlands
I was doing my LOTRO LP and started a Wild Arms LP, now they're both slow. Should have read this beforehand, huh? Shows what I know!