Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
That would actually be pretty great, not gonna lie.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
cB557
voOOP
If I remember correctly, the original version actually has an ability that has a small chance to corrupt your save every time you use it.
Yup. Was patched past the SNES version (and even just in later SNES copies), but there is in fact an ability that could do everything from cause graphical glitches to straight up brick your save files. Granted, it could also fill your inventory to the brim with endgame equipment, so tradeoffs.
Welp, all these spoilers are pretty minor in the grand scheme:
The goggles do something!
There is at least one more for you to grab eventually, so you won't miss out.
The goggles do something!
Yeah, this is the infamous "sketch glitch". One of the playable characters later has their unique ability be to use 'sketch' on a monster to summon a phantom version of whatever you used it on, which then makes one attack and disappears. The sketch glitch could happen a variety of ways, but by far the most reliable way to cause it was when you tried to sketch an invisible monster.
Hi there, Ghido.
Best Turtle. Just sayin'.
May I recommend the Piano Collections? Most of those I see on YT have a simple image for the whole playtime. Plus, some of them are just beautifully done.
I think this is the first time in the progression of FF games that they had individual themes to go with each character. And they're great, even when they're still the old originals from the SNES cartridge.
...I'm not quite sure how to take this. In the SNES release the first Blitz attacks were called Pummel, Aurabolt, and Suplex. I don't know, just feels like the game took a slight step away from my nostalgia. I'll get over it.
Meep.
Spoiler? What's that? Does it go better with sushi or steak?
FF6 was my first ever Final Fantasy. At this point, I was in your exact shoes and had not the foggiest what it was all about.
On a meta level... it feeds, I feel, into how we're playing the game. We're basically following Terra through her discovery of the world, and nothing about this makes any more sense to her than it does to someone who'd never played FF before and this was their first introduction to it.
It also plays into what I think might be Terra's headspace - having no more clue than we do, where everyone else seems fully read in on it to the point it apparently should be obvious what they're talking about, nervous about the many new people and places she's being dragged into...
...yeah, her staying quiet and just kinda "I'll listen and maybe someone will actually include details that I might be able to parse and figure out what they're talking about" made sense to me then and it still does now.
The sad thing is, from what we've seen, I'd think most of the world is just about really early 1800's tech.
In comparison, Magitek armor would seem more in line with, oh, modern main battle tanks. They're such a huge force multiplier that, as seen at the beginning, three people can slice right through everything in their way without breaking stride.
I get not wanting to escalate the situation, but as you point out later, well...
Yeah. And I can see why Edgar's having such a problem - he wants to do right by his people but he also doesn't want to fall into the same trap as the Empire evidently did, and using the same tactics and weapons... it is a slippery slope.
... The River. Oi.
FFIV had a number of character themes, though I'm not sure if every single character had one and I couldn't really name them all off the top of my head. Plus, a lot of them double up, like Cecil's theme also being the theme of Baron.
Then of course there's just the aptly named "Rydia's Theme".
FourthWall
Love & Destroy
- Location
- Chiraq
Now that's just harassment
You're not alone there. Personally I thought I had to hit A to close the Blitz menu and then input which obviously was never going to work.
Except when Rippler exists and you have to be careful not to lose him permanently.
I was thinking that young me have to share of "how I fuck up Blitz the first time I met it", (specially after that Omicron is saying "hey, this thing seems super-duper easy !"), but as there are already people saying that their young them have stumbled hard with Blitz, I prefer to say :
I understand your grief and share your pain, my friends. Blitz is related to suffering. But it's OK now, we have mastered it. It cannot harm us again.
More than 25 years later, I still remember how mad I was at that time because this thing.... ABSOLUTELY DIDN'T WANT TO WORK. ! AND YOU HAD A TIME COUNTER ! AND POTIONS WERE SCARCE !! SO MUCH STRESS EVERYWHERE !!!
AND EVERY TIME I FAILED, I HAD TO DO THE LONG WALK TO THE BOSS AGAIN !!!
AND DIE.
AGAIN.
*run and cry in the corner of his playing room*
I understand your grief and share your pain, my friends. Blitz is related to suffering. But it's OK now, we have mastered it. It cannot harm us again.
More than 25 years later, I still remember how mad I was at that time because this thing.... ABSOLUTELY DIDN'T WANT TO WORK. ! AND YOU HAD A TIME COUNTER ! AND POTIONS WERE SCARCE !! SO MUCH STRESS EVERYWHERE !!!
AND EVERY TIME I FAILED, I HAD TO DO THE LONG WALK TO THE BOSS AGAIN !!!
AND DIE.
AGAIN.
*run and cry in the corner of his playing room*
- Location
- Florida USA
I was always bad at Street Fighter, so I too struggled with the Blitz stuff. Even the Pummel. I kept losing that fight when I was an adolescent. So I feel your pain.
Also, Omi, if you had kept refusing Banon, you get a Genji Glove instead of the Gauntlet, which lets you do dual-wielding. You won't get another chance at it for... uh... quite a while.
Also you get an alternate cutscene of Terra expressing her uncertainty and doubts.
Also, Omi, if you had kept refusing Banon, you get a Genji Glove instead of the Gauntlet, which lets you do dual-wielding. You won't get another chance at it for... uh... quite a while.
Also you get an alternate cutscene of Terra expressing her uncertainty and doubts.
I don't know if somebody else replied to you, I'm not reading 2 pages, but I assume it's the news that Imgur are banning nsfw content, like Tumblr before them.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
At long last I managed to find some time to finish things up, so heres my final notes on The Music of Final Fantasy, FFV edition!
There's only a couple more tracks to really cover - some good, some...lackluster, sadly.
Lets start of with the music for the penultimate zone: Prelude to the Void. Original. PR. Pretty similar to the original with upgraded samples but some really great decisionmaking on what to emphasize. This tune is not particularly memorable but it's really grown on me once I gave it a deep listen. Low key strings, a descending tinkling synth, some light background horn, and a solitary trumpet heroically standing against the very sparse textures. I particularly like the B secion of this piece where the PR really leans into the brass tone clusters. Really great colors, and they do so without just shoving, HERE'S SOME SPICY CHORDS in your face. Fantastic use of brass here. This track does a good job of convincing you that you're truly out of synch with the world.
Next we have the music for the final zone, In Search of Light. Original. PR. I...don't really care for this tune in either iteration. PR gets the usual upgraded samples and attention to background textures. It's just a very genericly peppy adventure tune. Strings and trumpet plus an incredibly boring bass part. Bit of dud IMO.
Before we fight Exdeaths final form we are once again treated to the absolutely fantastic Decisive Battle. Unfortunately this sets us up for disappointment because the final boss music is significantly less interesting in comparison.
So, final boss. The Final Battle. Original. PR. It's not that this track is bad, it's just a bit underwhelming. I dunno, it just doesn't feel like the music is taking the fight particularly serious if that makes sense? The trumpet is once again earning their paycheck, carrying the melody for part A. The B section goes in a...let's call it "interesting"direction having the melody going into offbeats for some strange reason. I heard this wrong, it's eighths and quarter rests. Doesn't really work IMO. Anyway, tldr: not the best final boss music, sadly. Apparently it's embarrasing enough that the "complete" soundtrack vid I'm using for the rest of this post didn't even bother to list this track
So, Exdeath has been vanquished and are heroes are trapped in the void! This gives us another very interesting track to listen to, with intelligent use of sparse instrumentation to convey the empty void our heroes currently occupy. Original. PR. It starts out with a solo harp, and to be honest I miss what the original did. Basically the original has the notes being echoed, creating a really interesting shimmering texture and I guess they couldn't figure out how to pull that off in the remaster? But that's the only thing the original has going over the remaster. Despite the very sparse instrumentation (just harp and a solitary woodwind), the remix definitely feels fuller. Once we're out of the sparse A section we are treated to some lovely lush strings. Nothing too exciting, but that's not what's going on in the cutscene so the music is doing exactly what it needs to be doing. And things continue to swell and grow as the cutscene progresses and the crystals are restored to the world. Really dig the flute/reed hybrid tone they've got going at the end, it's very nice.
And, at long last, the ending cutscene and credits. We start off with a very tasteful reimagining of Home, Sweet Home theme with solo guitar. This version is called Dear Friends. Not a whole lot going on at the moment but it does create a very wonderful sense of meloncholy. Eventually our solitary guitar is joined by some very lovely flutes and assorted woodwinds (there's an oboe hidden at the very low end of the mix for just a little bit of extra color. Really good mixing.)
When we get to Krille reminiscing at the tree we get a truly fantastic verion of The Final Fantasy Theme, my all time favorite Uematsu melody. Just a wonderful sweeping melody and solo horn with background strings is a great way to sell the tune. Very bare bones, but honestly it doesn't need to be fancy. The repeat has the flute take over so the horn gets a chop break, which is a nice change in texture. Great voice leading in the strings, by the way - crank up the sound a bit to make it easier to pick out while the flutes playing. I really like the harp arpeggios closing out the piece, it's a great callback to the prelude.
Last but certainly not least, we get sent home on a very heroic rendition of the wyvern theme Spreading Grand Wings. Fantastic orchestration here - glorious brass (trumpet solo, background horn, and a tradeoff to trombone carrying the melody), with strings adding warmth. The B section is a lot more subdued, with harp, flute, and some particularly lovely background clarinet and basson providing harmony. Listening again, I want to say they're doing non-resolving suspensions? I never had the best ear for that stuff so take that with a grain of salt. We then have a quirky transition with some brass stabs and falls. Strange, but it works well enough to add energy so the return to the heroic FFV main theme with trumpet belting out the melody makes sense. There's a couple repeats where we trade off between brass main theme and a more subdued woodwind interlude before we get the big finish. Plenty of bombast, it's not very sophisticated but its fun and sounds good so who cares? Anyway, it's a better ending than anything Sibelius ever did
And that's the music of FFV!
Of note for the Pixel remaster: some of the tracks used real musicians! They even get their names in the credits, which is actually a nice surprise. Musicians have been fighting for a place in the credits for a long time and its nice to see that happening more frequently these days.
There's only a couple more tracks to really cover - some good, some...lackluster, sadly.
Lets start of with the music for the penultimate zone: Prelude to the Void. Original. PR. Pretty similar to the original with upgraded samples but some really great decisionmaking on what to emphasize. This tune is not particularly memorable but it's really grown on me once I gave it a deep listen. Low key strings, a descending tinkling synth, some light background horn, and a solitary trumpet heroically standing against the very sparse textures. I particularly like the B secion of this piece where the PR really leans into the brass tone clusters. Really great colors, and they do so without just shoving, HERE'S SOME SPICY CHORDS in your face. Fantastic use of brass here. This track does a good job of convincing you that you're truly out of synch with the world.
Next we have the music for the final zone, In Search of Light. Original. PR. I...don't really care for this tune in either iteration. PR gets the usual upgraded samples and attention to background textures. It's just a very genericly peppy adventure tune. Strings and trumpet plus an incredibly boring bass part. Bit of dud IMO.
Before we fight Exdeaths final form we are once again treated to the absolutely fantastic Decisive Battle. Unfortunately this sets us up for disappointment because the final boss music is significantly less interesting in comparison.
So, final boss. The Final Battle. Original. PR. It's not that this track is bad, it's just a bit underwhelming. I dunno, it just doesn't feel like the music is taking the fight particularly serious if that makes sense? The trumpet is once again earning their paycheck, carrying the melody for part A. The B section goes in a...let's call it "interesting"
So, Exdeath has been vanquished and are heroes are trapped in the void! This gives us another very interesting track to listen to, with intelligent use of sparse instrumentation to convey the empty void our heroes currently occupy. Original. PR. It starts out with a solo harp, and to be honest I miss what the original did. Basically the original has the notes being echoed, creating a really interesting shimmering texture and I guess they couldn't figure out how to pull that off in the remaster? But that's the only thing the original has going over the remaster. Despite the very sparse instrumentation (just harp and a solitary woodwind), the remix definitely feels fuller. Once we're out of the sparse A section we are treated to some lovely lush strings. Nothing too exciting, but that's not what's going on in the cutscene so the music is doing exactly what it needs to be doing. And things continue to swell and grow as the cutscene progresses and the crystals are restored to the world. Really dig the flute/reed hybrid tone they've got going at the end, it's very nice.
And, at long last, the ending cutscene and credits. We start off with a very tasteful reimagining of Home, Sweet Home theme with solo guitar. This version is called Dear Friends. Not a whole lot going on at the moment but it does create a very wonderful sense of meloncholy. Eventually our solitary guitar is joined by some very lovely flutes and assorted woodwinds (there's an oboe hidden at the very low end of the mix for just a little bit of extra color. Really good mixing.)
When we get to Krille reminiscing at the tree we get a truly fantastic verion of The Final Fantasy Theme, my all time favorite Uematsu melody. Just a wonderful sweeping melody and solo horn with background strings is a great way to sell the tune. Very bare bones, but honestly it doesn't need to be fancy. The repeat has the flute take over so the horn gets a chop break, which is a nice change in texture. Great voice leading in the strings, by the way - crank up the sound a bit to make it easier to pick out while the flutes playing. I really like the harp arpeggios closing out the piece, it's a great callback to the prelude.
Last but certainly not least, we get sent home on a very heroic rendition of the wyvern theme Spreading Grand Wings. Fantastic orchestration here - glorious brass (trumpet solo, background horn, and a tradeoff to trombone carrying the melody), with strings adding warmth. The B section is a lot more subdued, with harp, flute, and some particularly lovely background clarinet and basson providing harmony. Listening again, I want to say they're doing non-resolving suspensions? I never had the best ear for that stuff so take that with a grain of salt. We then have a quirky transition with some brass stabs and falls. Strange, but it works well enough to add energy so the return to the heroic FFV main theme with trumpet belting out the melody makes sense. There's a couple repeats where we trade off between brass main theme and a more subdued woodwind interlude before we get the big finish. Plenty of bombast, it's not very sophisticated but its fun and sounds good so who cares? Anyway, it's a better ending than anything Sibelius ever did
And that's the music of FFV!
Of note for the Pixel remaster: some of the tracks used real musicians! They even get their names in the credits, which is actually a nice surprise. Musicians have been fighting for a place in the credits for a long time and its nice to see that happening more frequently these days.
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So, final boss. The Final Battle. Original. PR. It's not that this track is bad, it's just a bit underwhelming. I dunno, it just doesn't feel like the music is taking the fight particularly serious if that makes sense? The trumpet is once again earning their paycheck, carrying the melody for part A. The B section goes in a...let's call it "interesting" direction having the melody going into offbeats for some strange reason. Doesn't really work IMO. Anyway, tldr: not the best final boss music, sadly. Apparently it's embarrasing enough that the "complete" soundtrack vid I'm using for the rest of this post didn't even bother to include this track
That's not strictly offbeats there in the B section. It's alternating on and off every 3 eighth notes. Every fourth note there that's long takes up the same amount of space as the staccato notes. Anyway, I think I hear what you're talking about with the track not taking the fight seriously, I'm not sure I'd actually call it 'not serious' but it does have a certain tropeyness about it. This is the game with the saturday morning cartoon villain so I'm not actually surprised by that.
If I had to guess what was going on with this, it'd be that the SNES sound chip couldn't really do a decrescendo, and so the next best thing was "repeat this note softer a bunch of times". You get this a lot with timpani parts on some SNES games (we'll get to that more with the VI soundtrack), but with a real instrument they didn't feel the need to fake it. It's not quite the same though, you're right.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The 'thing I fiured out' is that I have to first publish my gdoc, and then copy the version that is published and paste it into the reply box. It took like four people two hours to work this out because every other possible venue kept being shut down, it was ridiculous.
As for Imgur, they're planning on some removing large amounts of public content. A whole bunch of images are about to become dead links all over the Internet.
Yeah, that also caused me some confusion.
Like... If you'd had told me "esper" was this game's name for summoners... I would get it. And indeed for a while back before I had really heard about the game, I'd assumed that's what was going on. But no, they called their summoned monsters 'psychics' this time around.
That's my problem though.
If Destiny's lore was just stupid I could simply ignore the game and be free. But no, no. This is the game that goes "This character was first presented to you as one cast member of an epic sprawling millions of years written as a novel in poetic epic form by Seth J. Dickinson featuring the grand tragedy and horror of history's greatest monsters, a broken family of immortal gods guided by a philosophy as compelling as it is abhorrent, the final antagonists of all life who have been killing the universe for a thousand thousand years, favored soldiers of the Winnower in his endless, bitter argument over the nature and value of existance. Though they have died a hundred times, they always come back from the universe their soul has carved outside of our own through its sheer gravity."
"Here he is before you in the form of an angry bug man with a big sword spouting such iconic lines as 'Now die!' and 'You're finished!' and 'Impossible!' Take this gun and shoot him to death."
Sigh.
At least we'll always have The Witch-Queen.*
*Disclaimer; 'always' is a figure of speech. Destiny routinely deletes its own content as part of its patch cycle, including major story arcs, entire stretches of character development, vital events that will go unexplained in later expansions, and entire DLCs.
No such thing, that NPC is right there! I didn't mention it because there's a lot of content to go through in these updates so some details fall off the wayside, but that tutorial happens, dude crashes into a wall, and it's funny.
Somehow, I had completely failed to notice. Good to know!
It's still no small amount of effort remembering them and I often go 'oh right, I meant to talk about this' midway through reloading the game to catch extra screenshots after completely forgetting on my first draft, but like. There are some of these pieces that I could actually imagine just listening for fun as part of my daily playlists, which is something I previously could only have said for... Say, Clash on the Big Bridge and Pixel Remaster's version of Pandaemonium.
This is stupid, and I am here and there making an executive decision to simply ignore it going forward, otherwise it's going to be a constant irritation.
Except for maybe the missable Ribbon though. Ribbons are good.
Oh, I didn't wipe on the river. No, not exactly. It was more irritating than that.
Does that mean Raging Fist/Meteor Strike benefit from Strength-boosting gear like the Hyper Wrist?
Yes. As you may have noticed in the update itself, I did in fact get the Genji Glove
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But if you defeat river sequence with the electric guitar and the power of prayer, that would make you a Christian rocker.
I would just jump into the river at that point.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Oh you're right, this tune is using triplets not duples. I wasn't paying too much attention to the tune due to lack of care and enjoyment.
I can think of two other ways this might have happened: they didn't want to spend the time figuring out how to make a repeater pedal do exactly what they wanted, or figured it would take way too much time in post.
- Location
- Lost in Hell
I, uh, don't know how to admit this, but I noticed the girl with bunny ears before the literal fucking ninja. I locked eyes with them and went "Oh, neat, is this the game where Viera or Proto-Viera come into things?".
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Viera beyond that they exist. I'm just curious about when things start trending that way.
I stopped played Destiny 2 entirely because the shift from an already terribly business model I can live with to an MMO where you have to pay for expansions twice a year that you can lose on a whim and that doesn't even make a coherent game anymore. I adore the story, I adore the lore, but all I'm saying is that Genshin Impact should not be more reliably putting out permanent content than Destiny.
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
Interesting. He was definitely not there in my current playthrough, on Switch. So my guess is either the console versions removed him for some unknown reason, or my talking to the Relic tutorial NPC in Narshe's beginner hall checked a flag that removed that South Figaro NPC from the game.
If it helps, none of the "upgraded" items are one-off uniques that cannot be obtained any other way. In fact, some of them are less useful than the stuff you'd get now.
So in other circumstances, it would indeed be a proper choice, to get a useful item now when you probably need it, or get a potentially more useful item later when you may or may not need it.
But I agree that FFVI's way of doing it is stupid, because there's no indication in-game that this is a thing, and trying to explain it would run into spoilers (specifically "you'll return here again").
Yes, they do. You'll want to compare damage before and after to see how much it improves.
I have a little bit of sympathy for you on this, but I'd have a whole lot more of the game hadn't been very explicit right from the jump that 'there was an esper frozen in ice' and then when you find it it's a colorful bird monster, and not a human psychic in there. Game's not trying to give you the runaround on this one.
And just as another note, you mentioned the Hyper Wrist boosting strength by 15, which it probably is right now, but it's actually percentage-based.
I suppose this will inform the taste of certain cast members next update then.
No, it's still duples. Just syncopated. It's a two-bar repeating rhythm. Downbeat of 1, offbeat of 2, downbeat of 3, legato note on the offbeat of 1 of the second measure, downbeats on 3 and 4.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I literally said that was before I actually started playing the game
deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
I very fondly remember the game Magicka, the co-op little wizard game where upon encountering a dragon you are told to sneak around it, or to calmly wake it up or somesuch, but all you can do is attack and kill it, because you are playing a video game, and the only buttons you have are kill.
It was a highly comedic exploration of the fact that your actions are constrained by the mechanics of the game you are playing. In the case of D2, it is an fps, your tools are 'move' and 'shoot', which heavily constrains your ability to act and the kinds of interaction that the developers are able to deliver.
The lorebooks deliver nuanced psychologies and esoteric powers that you cannot contest simply...but the game can only deliver you saturday-morning cartoon villain bug man, whose every strategy can be opposed with 'shoot guns at specific thing, 'stand in specific place', and 'press the only button prompt'
It can be agonising at times.
At their best video games can use their mechanics to deliver more of the story to the players, as we've seen multiple times in Final Fantasy, what with specific character abilities and boss mechanics actually adding to the story.
Or they can get very much in the way of the storytelling.
I'd not played D2 for over a year, after being heavily burned out on the whole experience. Witch Queen was a surprise and a delight, and then I went immediately into Lightfall, which...yeah.
The FOMO and constant grind were very much why I elected to stop playing. When I picked it back up the complete wall of stuff I had no understanding of that blasted into me on start-up was genuinely distressing.
I literally said that was before I actually started playing the game
In hindsight, I should definitely have said "y'all" instead of "you". >.<
Even so it's fascinating being on the other side of this, because FFVI was the first place I encountered the term "esper", whereas in whatever other books I read it was always "psychic", "Psionic", or "telepath" or what have you. Hell, I even encountered WH40k's "Psyker" before I ever saw "esper" used to describe a human. I think the first time I saw it used that way might actually have been the raildex animes.
*nods sagely* Like FFV great mimic Gogo. Truly, the most mechanically elegant sequence.