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

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CeBrudras said:
That feeling of surprise is interesting given this is a sequel to a game that had varying party sites as a big innovative thing. It makes sense due to us having the future knowledge that the entire genre dropped the concept pretty quickly, but I wonder how contemporary reactions were.
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See, that's an interesting point, because it gets to a fundamental shift in the narrative-gameplay relationship between IV and V.

In FFIV, each character can only have one skillset. As the game takes characters in and out of your party, it knows exactly what tools it is taking out and putting in your toolbox. It knows if you're going to tackle a particular story section without a white mage, and when you'll have access to a Dragoon's Jumps, and when you have a full roster of 5 or are down to 3 or 4 character. Everything can be balanced accordingly to which character it's taking away.

FFV can't know that. It is, in a very real sense, incapable of knowing my party composition; it is blind to my setup. When it's taking characters in and out of my party, it is doing so based on narrative concerns, but it has no idea what these characters mean to me mechanically. Lenna is leaving my party whether she's a secondary attacker with some tanking function, my main support, or whether I spent 1500 ABP on her mastering Dualcast.

Here, losing Lenna isn't too much of a problem; as a Samurai, I am mainly using her as a decent physical attacker who can equip Thief utility skills and who can spam Zeninage to cheat my way out of encounters. If, instead, the game had taken away Faris or Krile - or, rather, if the skillset I ended up equipping on Faris/Krile had been Lenna's instead, I would be having a real rough time, because suddenly a cornerstone of my team strat just fell and I need to swap someone into White Mage with no training and a poorly suited secondary skillset that doesn't mesh, or I lose Dualcast entirely.

It might turn this twist into a genuine gameplay wall that makes me give up on the game for a while. It just doesn't fit the mechanical approach of the job system, not with such highly customizable characters that fit together into a party of your personal design.
 
Yeah, working entirely without Lenna for this upcoming dungeon was... well, like you she wasn't necessarily a vital part of my party, she'd mastered the thief job and was otherwise working on a random mix of things from Beastmaster to Bard to whatever else seemed useful at any given time. But even then, you do feel that hole from having one less party member to work with, and it pretty much resulted in me giving up exploring partway through the pyramid and skipping all the loot and fighting to come back later, whenever I again had a full party.
 
Omicron said:
Fuck, that's so good. Faking his own death and turning himself into a splinter and hitching a ride on one of the characters is probably one of the smartest plans devised by a Final Fantasy villain so far! Also it's just inherently funny, the Big Bad just turning into a tiny bit of wood and sticking himself in a kid's thumb as part of his master plan. I love it.
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Well it makes complete sense that he'd disguise himself as a splinter. He is/was a tree after all.

Omicron said:
And so we head to the Pyramid…
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If you didn't, you may want to go to the top floor of the library and speak to the scholar on the right for a Bard song before heading to the Pyramid. It's one of those extremely limited time rewards the series loves to sprinkle in to screw with 100% completion.

And speaking of Bard, this is one of three areas in the game that they are a powerhouse in with the Requiem song.
 
Yeah, it's traditional to give your least critical or cheapest-to-master jobs to Lenna, since she leaves the party. Anything you want for the Pyramid better be on one of the others. And anything you want for the Antlion better not be on either of the Tycoons.

Taking party members away can be handled elegantly like it is in FF4, but I still just don't like it. I quit one of the Dragon Quest games because they just wouldn't stop taking away my party members and it drove me nuts.

Fortunately, Lenna's death is eventually solved when Lenna joins your party.
 
Warclam said:
Yeah, it's traditional to give your least critical or cheapest-to-master jobs to Lenna, since she leaves the party. Anything you want for the Pyramid better be on one of the others. And anything you want for the Antlion better not be on either of the Tycoons.
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I mean to be fair, I didn't even remotely plan for it, it just sort of happened :V

Having a Thief in the party was just almost always somewhat useful, so Lenna stuck as that for a good chunk of the game... and by that point everyone else was already starting to settle into defined roles like Bartz being my Omnimage, Faris mastering the Big Physical Combo jobs with a side of White Magic when needed, and Galuf was my other physical heavy hitter with things like Monk and Samurai... so Lenna just got ping-ponged between extra classes as they were useful, meaning she wasn't really vital to my team setup.

Though honestly even if Faris or Lenna was super vital... it's not particularly hard to just swap someone else for a bit to cover the holes in your party. The Antilon in particular isn't really a hard boss or anything, and once you're back up to three party members, that tends to be enough for the time being. Sure you won't be as strong as you would be if someone had some particularly good abilities mastered like Rapid Fire or Dualcast, but a lot of jobs can still carry their own weight just fine. In particular, considering Omi has ten bajillion Gil... just throwing money at everything in the pyramid is a viable strat.
 
BLARGHER said:
If you didn't, you may want to go to the top floor of the library and speak to the scholar on the right for a Bard song before heading to the Pyramid. It's one of those extremely limited time rewards the series loves to sprinkle in to screw with 100% completion.
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wait, i-

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK

Warclam said:
Taking party members away can be handled elegantly like it is in FF4, but I still just don't like it.
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Bro the way FF4 handles it is the literal opposite of elegant. FF4 will take away party members by having them say "I'm sorry my friend but there's something I must do" and jump into a wheat thresher (they are revealed to be alive and uninjured an hour later)
 
I mean, turtle vs tree, shellamon had a type advantage, omnivore vs plant. XD should just be glad ghido didn't roll them up and smoke 'em.
 
Frumple said:
I mean, turtle vs tree, shellamon had a type advantage, omnivore vs plant. XD should just be glad ghido didn't roll them up and smoke 'em.
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Bartz: "guys i've got it exdeath is a tree right so we just have to smoke him guys he's weed we have to smoke weed we have to roll exdeath into the fattest backwoods imaginable and imbibe the evil nefarious void sorcerer shit, we have to smoke like unhinged villains, this is the shit that shot tupac and we have to toke it all"
Krile: "I don't like my grandpa's new friends."
Lenna: *has already eaten dubious mushrooms she found in the woods and is now foaming at the mouth*
 
Omicron said:
LMAO???

This is such a funny twist and my favorite part is that, like, Koko isn't described as a 'mate' or a 'partner,' no, she's his wife. Did they get a chocobo wedding??? Are they chocobo married by civil law or religious??? WHAT IS THE LEGAL STATUS OF BOKO'S LIFE PARTNER
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This is a family game! You can't just have birbs having sex outside of wedlock, what will the children think Omi!

Omicron said:
The airship is right there! We can't access it (it may look like we can access that peninsula, but the tile between the mountain and the sea is actually too small for us to pass through).
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For the record, I am keeping a transportation casualty list for this game and it is hilarious.

Omicron said:
No, seriously. I couldn't capture that in screenshot because it's a very fast moving scene, but they have a flash step battle. They zoom around the room while everyone else is knocked out, trading blow like i those animation cost-cutting DBZ scenes that gave us "zwee fighting." This game is really wearing its anime inspiration on its sleeve.
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It's such a good scene and probably the best example of how FFV shamelessly rips off anime. The 2nd best example is, of course, the scene where Bartz and Galuf stumble on Faris while they're sleeping and are immediately smitten.

Omicron said:
See, that's an interesting point, because it gets to a fundamental shift in the narrative-gameplay relationship between IV and V.

In FFIV, each character can only have one skillset. As the game takes characters in and out of your party, it knows exactly what tools it is taking out and putting in your toolbox. It knows if you're going to tackle a particular story section without a white mage, and when you'll have access to a Dragoon's Jumps, and when you have a full roster of 5 or are down to 3 or 4 character. Everything can be balanced accordingly to which character it's taking away.

FFV can't know that. It is, in a very real sense, incapable of knowing my party composition; it is blind to my setup. When it's taking characters in and out of my party, it is doing so based on narrative concerns, but it has no idea what these characters mean to me mechanically. Lenna is leaving my party whether she's a secondary attacker with some tanking function, my main support, or whether I spent 1500 ABP on her mastering Dualcast.

Here, losing Lenna isn't too much of a problem; as a Samurai, I am mainly using her as a decent physical attacker who can equip Thief utility skills and who can spam Zeninage to cheat my way out of encounters. If, instead, the game had taken away Faris or Krile - or, rather, if the skillset I ended up equipping on Faris/Krile had been Lenna's instead, I would be having a real rough time, because suddenly a cornerstone of my team strat just fell and I need to swap someone into White Mage with no training and a poorly suited secondary skillset that doesn't mesh, or I lose Dualcast entirely.

It might turn this twist into a genuine gameplay wall that makes me give up on the game for a while. It just doesn't fit the mechanical approach of the job system, not with such highly customizable characters that fit together into a party of your personal design.
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I think what the game is trying to get you to do is realize that, with the exception of doom combos (or dualcast) that let you flex on encounters with utter impunity, characters and jobs are completely interchangeable. If you need someone to be a healer just make them a white mage and they'll do just fine in that role even if this is literally the first time that character has touched that class.

Of course, that's not at all the way most players actually interact with games lol.
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
Bro the way FF4 handles it is the literal opposite of elegant. FF4 will take away party members by having them say "I'm sorry my friend but there's something I must do" and jump into a wheat thresher (they are revealed to be alive and uninjured an hour later)
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I believe the argument is that it's more elegant mechanically.

Storywise, not so much.
 
Avernus said:
I believe the argument is that it's more elegant mechanically.

Storywise, not so much.
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Yeah, it's more that FF4's rotating cast means the game knows exactly what the player has to work with at any given moment in the story, so it can tailor encounters to fit that (or counter that in some cases like how Dark Knight Cecil has troubles on Mount Ordeals, or the Dark Elf Cave all but cripples anyone who relies on metal equipment.) Compared to like... if you came to rely on your fourth party member for a specific role in FF2 and then they run off and die (unlikely granted since Minwu is basically the only one who actually brings anything substantial to the party), Or the current portion of FF5 expects you to run a full dungeon while potentially down a vital party member.

Of course, as mentioned you can just class swap the remaining characters anyways and lose barely anything, since jobs have specific base stat bonuses and formulas are generally affected by character level instead of job level. It's not FF3 where if say your Devout got kicked out of the party for a dungeon or two, you're potentially down someone with dozens of job levels and subbing in someone else still means lower recovery values, or losing your main fighter means whoever subs in is only getting 2 hits per turn instead of 8.
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
Bartz: "guys i've got it exdeath is a tree right so we just have to smoke him guys he's weed we have to smoke weed we have to roll exdeath into the fattest backwoods imaginable and imbibe the evil nefarious void sorcerer shit, we have to smoke like unhinged villains, this is the shit that shot tupac and we have to toke it all"
Krile: "I don't like my grandpa's new friends."
Lenna: *has already eaten dubious mushrooms she found in the woods and is now foaming at the mouth*
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Faris: "But where's all the rum gone?! Oh wait, I drank it..." *faceplants*

Hey, she is a pirate captain.
 
Alright, if you plan to do any future stealing, pay attention. In the dephs of the Pyramid, on one floor only, you will find Sekhmet. You kill him, he's gone for good. He can be refought by running away however and his rare steal is the Thief's glove. This is the only real opportunity you will have to get a full set, so if you want some, Seal, then use the Return Spell to restart the fight until you get the rare steal, then run away and refight him until you get a full set. Then you can kill him.
 
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Its interesting that Ghido thinks of the unified world as a legend - the divide was only 300 years old when he was young. The chaos in its aftermath must have been insane for records to be lost that quickly.
 
Eeehhh, is it, though? Even pastland had wild magitech shenanigans, and there's clearly stuff that lives long enough they would have been alive at the time. It's at least a little surprising the records were bad enough it'd be considered a legend when the event should still be in living memory.

Easy explanation is the splitting process borked up stuff's memory, though, maybe even intentionally-ish by the process that caused the split.
 
I think people in the modern world underestimate how much knowledge can be lost in shockingly short periods of time, especially when massive disasters or systems collapse takes place. I don't think this sort of problem is "in the past" either, I think we're only slightly less vulnerable to it than we were before.
 
Do we know how Ronka fell at this point in the game? I forget if we do (listen it's been four months), but if we don't, I could see the split of the two worlds causing the collapse of the Ronkan Empire, which feels very plausible to me as the source point for a social cataclysm leading to massive loss of knowledge.
 
I mean, we know Enuo existed and used the Void to do... unspecified bad things, as far as I recall... so maybe he had something to do with the fall of Ronka and the worlds being split just exacerbated the issue.

Though given how little we've been given on Ronka other than "was an empire" and "used lots of magitek" for all we know it could have been the Moogles that did it.
 
The Pyramid of Moore is pain and if I were playing this game casually with other games I want to play right now, it might have killed this run. Please remember you can sponsor my suffering on Ko-Fi.
 
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