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

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You go to Thamasa after the Veldt Cave because in the event you didn't wait for Shadow you'll find Relm there.

It's an interesting bit of scripting for the game, if I'm remembering it right. With Shadow dead, you have to find Relm in the Veldt Cave, which takes you to Thamasa, where she hikes off anyway and ends up doing the painting.

However, if Shadow lives, Relm goes right to the house to paint and Shadow gets his story started in the Veldt Cave instead.

... and for the dragons Storm Dragon makes the second - you found one at the Opera House, remember?
 
Omicron said:
Same old crime town full of liars, with exactly one guy telling the truth and telling us how to get to the part we actually care about - the mountain behind the city (the one where they found the Hill Gigas they enslaved to build the city, yes I am still completely serious about that theory).
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I kind of have my own twist on that theory: the Hill Gigas were enslaved, but not by the current locals: instead, they were enslaved by the Jidoor elite. Before this became a dumping ground for the poor, Jidoor was trying to built some sort of second city, a "Neo Jidoor" - whether as a mountainside vacation retreat, a site for business conferences, a replacement for their old city, or something else. You know how Jidoorans love to throw money at over-the-top extravagances, this is exactly the sort of shit they'd try to pull. To handle the mass labor, they "recruited" the Hill Gigas...only the giants revolted and moved into the unfinished metropolis. Struggling to find a way to make some use of the failed second city project, Jidoor's elites decided to start sending the poor there, assuming they'd die at the hands of the Gigas. Instead, the thieves and giants, both holding a grudge against Jidoor, formed a coexistence of sorts.

Yet another theory I've heard comes from an FF5 novelization fic called Test of Time. In it, we're told that the Gigas tribes made a deal with Zozo a century ago: they can come and go as they please in the city but won't harm the locals. It has worked out quite well for both parties. The ogres raid and plunder each other and travelers, and the Zozans profit by buying the plunder and selling it back to merchant caravans.

Omicron said:
Let me just quickly reload an old save. Like, "before the cataclysm" old. Luckily I still have a save from the Floating Continent with Shadow on the team. I just want to check his equipment… Okay, he can equip 'ninja' item, normal stuff… Let's check the relics…

​
He's the only person other than Relm who can equip the Memento Ring.

HE WAS RELM'S DAD THIS ENTIRE TIME!

I knew the game was going to do something with Shadow's true identity, but… Relm's dad specifically?? This is such a weird swerve??? Like, was there any foreshadowing of this?
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Actually, you get more flashback scenes about Shadow's past if you slept at inns during his previous appearances. Don't feel bad, though; I ended up completely missing those when playing the game, too.

And there's also an extra, alternate flashback in place of the one you just saw, if Shadow gets left behind at the Floating Continent and dies. Rather than Relm immediately appearing at Owzer's mansion, she's the one you have to rescue in the cave.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Se_LWNmGL2s

Omicron said:
This is the Storm Dragon, the first of the eight legendary dragons that we've found, and appropriately to its title, it's a tough customer.
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Well, the first you've successfully beaten.
 
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Omicron said:
One really interesting thing about this series to me has been watching the evolution of the 'ambient townsfolk' concept. Like, FF1 is incredibly barebones - none of its cities has a building you can enter that isn't either a shop/inn, or directly relevant to the game's plot like a royal palace. Then each game steadily increases the number of people who are just there to add texture to the setting, until in FFVI you have NPCs playing out little vignettes of their own life and giving each town a different flavor and a minimal sense of a culture - but it's still all relatively primitive at this stage.
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It pretty much hits its zenith in the Trails of the Sky trilogy. Presumably Trails of Cold Steel as well, but I haven't gotten to that point in my backlog yet. :V

Omicron said:
We drop by the auction house, but all we get are gag items that are bought by the rich father at his kid's insistence for a million gil.
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McFluffles said:
IIRC there's only one new (limited) item added to the auction house rotation in the World of Ruin, which isn't even something super amazing like new magicite - just a Hero Ring. Which granted, buffing up damage stats isn't bad or anything, but compared to how many other relics you probably have available at this point, well.
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So, one of the gag items in the rotation is a 1/64 scale model airship, that uses the Blackjack's sprite to represent it (specifically, the one from the Floating Continent, where you have the option to go back). Now, back in the SNES version, it was simply called "1/64 airship" which, I now know, is a valid way to specify a model kit, but child me didn't know that. I thought, for the longest time, that the Blackjack had been shattered into 64 parts, and whoa, wouldn't that mean if I could win all those auctions I could get a second airship?!? Child-me spent more time than I care to admit looking for ways to possibly win the gag auctions. >.<

McFluffles said:
HP, Speed, maybe a bit of MP...
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He doesn't have the espers that boost speed yet.

McFluffles said:
Yup, Gau can be one of the first characters you pick up in the World of Ruin, no dungeon running or anything required. Just hit up the Veldt with a 3 person party and he shows up same as ever.
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Okay, now the spoilers back in this post are safe.

McFluffles said:
Luckily, pretty much every party member gets a story beat somewhere in the World of Ruin when you look around enough, so Gau isn't... entirely devoid of content. I'll leave finding anything for Gau up to you though.
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For Gau's story beat, it is actually one of the few scenes that doesn't have required characters, yet does have distinct character dialogue. Fortunately, there's a specific party composition that lets you see all of it. Spoilered so Omicron can choose to check it:

If you want the full scene for the Gau's sequence make your team Gau/Sabin/Edgar/Locke, and be sure to have recruited Terra and Cyan. Terra, Cyan and Celes will NOT say their added dialog during this sequence if they are in your team, while Locke and Edgar will only say their dialog if they are BOTH in the team.

McFluffles said:
Oh, more than just the Ultimate Technique that is Bum Rush. Normally, Sabin learns a total of 8 blitzes up until when he learns that at level 70, but this little scene just unlocks all of them at once no matter his level.

You'll probably just be using Bum Rush 99% of the time though since it's Big Boy Single Target Magic Damage That Ignores Defense.
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I'm pretty sure Sabin's scene skips him straight to the last blitz without unlocking the others. The other power up like this does work the way you describe, though.

Anyway, one of the little things I wish worked a bit differently is that it'd be great if Phantom Rush scaling on both magic and physical stats. Sabin's blitzes otherwise have a relatively even spread of physical and magical-keyed moves, so the fact that his ultimate move only really serves as a capstone to the magic side is a bit feelsbad.

Zimmerwald1915 said:
Likewise, it didn't change Jidoor because it couldn't get any worse :V
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The music changed. :V

Edit: Oh! Speaking of music, the cultist tower theme was one of the big improvements from SNES to Pixel Remaster. God bless 'em for trying, but the SNES voice samples really grate on me. I actually turned off the music in literally just this one dungeon a few times back when I was a kid. Giving the backing french horns more to do and the "psycho stabs" on the strings with the tams splashing in the background add a lot of needed interest to what was an originally very repetitive track.
 
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SerGregness said:
He doesn't have the espers that boost speed yet.
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Oh yeah, that's right. The Speed espers are surprisingly late in the game compared to every other stat. Though IIRC
Didn't they actually patch the Pixel Remaster so an Esper that previously didn't give any speed does? Due to the fact that there's only one Esper in the original game that gives speed, and you can actually lose said Esper by upgrading it?

I mean, GBA version also had Giga Cactar or whatever but Remasters don't have the GBA content.
SerGregness said:
I'm pretty sure Sabin's scene skips him straight to the last blitz without unlocking the others. The other power up like this does work the way you describe, though.

Anyway, one of the little things I wish worked a bit differently is that it'd be great if Phantom Rush scaling on both magic and physical stats. Sabin's blitzes otherwise have a relatively even spread of physical and magical-keyed moves, so the fact that his ultimate move only really serves as a capstone to the magic side is a bit feelsbad.
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Silly thing is, Sabin's physical side is finished off... pretty much immediately. The only physically scaling blitzes are Raging Fist (which he starts with) and Meteor Strike (which is cool but also kind of trash because any actually strong enemy is probably immune.) Then it's all magical stuff like Phoenix Dance or Chakra or of course, Phantom Rush. Split stat scaling, or just scaling off the highest stat probably would have been better, especially since at base Sabin is one of the highest strength lowest magic characters in the game.

Ah well, that's FFVI character design for you, there's a lot of "swing and a miss" goofball characters. At the least, Sabin is still fairly usable in his unique abilities compared to say pre-Remaster Cyan, or Relm's Sketch ability.
 
I admit ever since the previous update, I had been trying very hard to recall the name of a story (a play, I eventually remembered) about the titular protagonist writing letters on behalf of another person, pretending that they were that other person (since that other person was not as articulate or gifted with words).

I could not remember the name, up until about ten minutes ago, when I finally worked out that it was "Cyrano de Bergerac". This was after an entire morning and most of an afternoon of thinking "Cyril Bergamot" and knowing that it was wrong, but wasn't sure how wrong.

Cyan's situation here isn't that similar, but it reminded me of that story just enough to poke my memory.

Omicron said:
Anyway, good on him for coming clean. Cyan himself is just beyond that cave, on the peak of Mt Zozo, sending another letter through a carrier pigeon and reflecting poetically on the apocalypse.
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This is one of the parts where I think tech limitations of the time meant a choice of presentation that leads to an unintentionally unfortunate result.

The letter where Cyan confesses his deception was on his desk, using an envelope sprite, so we know it's a completed letter intended to be sent, rather than a rough draft.

Immediately after finding and reading the letter, the party goes outside to find Cyan attaching a letter to a carrier pigeon, presumably to Lola. Given this is just outside Cyan's cave, we can infer that the letter being attached to the carrier pigeon is a different letter to the confession.

Then Cyan spots the party, and goes through the attempt at hiding his flowers and letters, before finally coming clean and joining the party again.

Which means the confession letter never gets sent, and is instead hidden among Cyan's belongings in that cave.

I think the most charitable speculation is Cyan wrote two confession letters, and decided to use the one he felt was better-written, and that was the letter we see him attaching to the carrier pigeon.
 
Alright, lets talk. First things first. If you let Shadow die, Relm would have been in the cave of the Veldt. And your would have had to save her from Behemoth King before doing your thing with the mansion and the painting. Also, the Dream you would have gotten would have been different. This means you need two playthroughs, one letting Shadow die, to get his full backstory. Or just look it up on youtube.

The Behemoth Suits you got from the Fights with Behemoth King are Relm and Strago's Best armour. Also, Behemoth King is the second boss you can refight in the Veldt. And yes, you still fight both of them at once. If you want another pair of Behemoth suits, you will have to find him again. And you probably will want another pair for reasons I will explain later.

Speaking of Strago, I advise you to return to the island where Cid is. Not only is there something for you at the beach, but the Peeper and the Land Ray have two powerful Blue Spells for Strago. The Peeper gives White Wind, and The Land Ray gives Mighty Guard which is Shell and Protect for the entire party. Very well worth it. However... Both enemies have 0MP, so you will need Relm to Sketch them so she will copy the spells instead. And she will only get the spells 25% of the time. She will use their physical attack the other 75%. However, it's still very worth it just for Mighty Guard.

Mt. Zozo. Woolie's reaction to the Mugbear was absolutely priceless.
 
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McFluffles said:
Oh yeah, that's right. The Speed espers are surprisingly late in the game compared to every other stat. Though IIRC
Didn't they actually patch the Pixel Remaster so an Esper that previously didn't give any speed does? Due to the fact that there's only one Esper in the original game that gives speed, and you can actually lose said Esper by upgrading it?

I mean, GBA version also had Giga Cactar or whatever but Remasters don't have the GBA content.
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Yeah, Quetzalli (formerly Palidor) was actually patched post release to give +1 speed on level up. And yeah, upgrading the other esper definitely takes it the old bonus out of circulation, to the point that many old guides actually suggest waiting until as late as possible to upgrade him, then just grind the new spells on anyone you want to have them.
 
csjorm said:
That's from Brave New World, not the original game. You can use Rippler to transfer Interceptor around, however, so it's a moot point.
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finalfantasy.fandom.com

Interceptor (Final Fantasy VI)

Interceptor is a character in Final Fantasy VI. He is Shadow's loyal dog, and does not leave his side. Yoshitaka Amano artwork and Interceptor's game sprite suggest he is most likely a Doberman Pinscher, Beauceron, or a mix of the two. He may also be related to the Vector Hound enemies due to a...
finalfantasy.fandom.com finalfantasy.fandom.com

Shadow does not have the Interceptor status aboard the Floating Continent. If he is left behind on the Floating Continent, the Interceptor status will be given to Relm instead.
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No, it's from the original game.
 
If you take Cyan to Doma Castle and rest in the barracks, you get a Fun Surprise.

EDIT: By which I mean this isn't a bit or a gag, you absolutely should go do this because it's more of VI's favorite thing: Easily Missable Side Content.
 
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Kuja said:
Little by little, the World of Ruin falls apart for me.

The game starts off on the right foot with the gruesome monsters, altered color palatte, the death of Cid, ruined towns...

...but slowly it starts to seem like the Apocalypse is more of an Apocalittle. Various places are still hanging in there. The auction house is still running. The opera house is still running, albeit currently fighting off a case of earth dragon. People are still hanging out. Kefka is a threat but for so many people it seems like "eh, he's all the way over there." Granted, it's been a year since Kefka pulled the trigger...but at the same time, it's bene a year. You'd think even if ol' clownface rolled over and nuked a village every couple of weeks for giggles, by the time we rejoined Celes there'd be nothing left.

It might seem like a weird thing to take issue with. I don't necessarily want the game to revel in suffering. But when I picture the World of Ruin, I picture The Road Warrior. I picture the final levels of Drakengard. Hell, I picture the rampages of the Emperor's cyclone wiping entire towns off the map in FF2. Not...Zozo just keeping on keeping on, or Duncan's cabin. Partly it's stretched out by the amount of optional content and hunting party members but...I dunno, maybe the mid-game twist should have been a late-game one. I'll grant you I don't know what I would have done to further stretch out the plot before the world change, but ultimately it feels like the mood just kind of peters out. Like the nukes fell and the sea levels rose and the world reversed its magnetic poles, and yet we smashcut to Shadow saying "I got work tomorrow."
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Ah, I gotcha. So it's a case of (to quote TV Tropes) a "cozy catastrophe". It's literally been the apocalypse, but rather than something like Fallout or Mad Max in the aftermath, even with the geography literally altered beyond recognition, it feels same old, same old at times. Kind of takes one out of the immersion.
Cypocryphy said:
If you take Cyan to Doma Castle and rest in the barracks, you get a Fun Surprise.

EDIT: By which I mean this isn't a bit or a gag, you absolutely should go do this because it's more of VI's favorite thing: Easily Missable Side Content.
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Just... if you do, get ready. I mean it.
 
SerGregness said:
Oh, incidentally we're not quite far enough along that it's safe to post this outside spoiler boxes but an... 'interesting' mechanical optimization for Gau is that:

The 'get level boosted to the party average' mechanic doesn't apply to him when he rejoins from the Veldt. Normally this is just functional in case you decide to leave him there for whatever reason after Leaping, but Gau's 'On the Veldt' status persists through the warring triad apocalypse. So, just before you go to the floating continent, you drop Gau off with a pack of monsters, and then when you re-recruit him in the World of Ruin, he'll be at the same level you left him. If he's in your normal roster on the other hand, he gets boosted like anyone else would.
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Well, whether that was an intentional PR fix or a bug or something (I'm pretty sure I didn't accidentally forgot Gau in the Veldt ten updates ago), here this happened regardless of whether I dropped him into the Veldt or not. I only noticed that after posting, but Gau is the only character in the group who was still at lv 16 when everyone rejoined at lv 27-29.

The downside is that he spent the last hour being completely useless in every way, dying in one hit from anything and dealing no damage whatsoever.

The upside is that thanks to Bism
arck, now that he's nearly caught up, he has Strength 93.

Not... sure what I can use it for, but hey, Big Number!
 
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Omicron said:
Well, whether that was an intentional PR fix or a bug or something (I'm pretty sure I didn't accidentally forgot Gau in the Veldt ten updates ago), here this happened regardless of whether I dropped him into the Veldt or not. I only noticed that after posting, but Gau is the only character in the group who was still at lv 16 when everyone rejoined at lv 27-29.

The downside is that he spent the last hour being completely useless in every way, dying in one hit from anything and dealing no damage whatsoever.

The upside is that thanks to Bism
arck, now that he's nearly caught up, he has Strength 93.

Not... sure what I can use it for, but hey, Big Number!
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I am also not sure how many of his rages use Magic instead of Strengh, but at least he can now at least Do something.
 
Scia said:
I am also not sure how many of his rages use Magic instead of Strengh, but at least he can now at least Do something.
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This is one of those "technically yes and technically no" things. Out of Gau's 253 Rages, 20 are physical, and the rest are magic.

It's just that all his Rages work by either doing the special move of the Rage, or doing a standard attack based on Gau's regular attack stats; ie the attack animation is different, but the mechanical effect is like if Gau had the default Attack command and used it. The chances of either happening is a flat 50%.

Physical Rages make the special attack the same as the "regular" attack, but multiplied in power. Hence why Stray Cat is considered to be so good: it's a 4x multiplier to Gau's regular attack at a 50% chance of happening.

But even with other Rages, there's always the chance that Gau will use the regular attack anyway at that 50% chance, so raising Strength is still useful even for a magic Rage Gau.

Also while in numbers only 20/253 Rages are physical, one of them (the aforementioned Stray Cat) is the one most recommended for a Gau build of "I refuse to engage with the Veldt, just give me something".
 
Omicron said:
The upside is that thanks to Bism
arck, now that he's nearly caught up, he has Strength 93.

Not... sure what I can use it for, but hey, Big Number!
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It's as good a time as any to say that attributes are capped at 128 points (including equipment bonuses, so you may want to disarm your characters occasionally to check their raw stats). If you hit the limit, make sure to switch to a different stat.
 
csjorm said:
That's from Brave New World, not the original game. You can use Rippler to transfer Interceptor around, however, so it's a moot point.
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Huh, forgot that! It had been a while since I played the original, and it seemed natural enough that I think I assumed it was in both.
 
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Mister Bad Guy said:
Huh, forgot that! It had been a while since I played the original, and it seemed natural enough that I think I assumed it was in both.
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On searching, the internet goes back and forth on it. The official wiki for Final Fantasy says Relm gets Interceptor, a few other discussion threads waffle about on it, and reddit looks like it has more definite answers but the Final Fantasy Subreddit is one of the ones that has decided to go 100% dark and just say "join our Discord!" which frankly I'd rather Celes' Backyard Cliff Adventures than do so because Discord is abysmal for information retention like that.

So, can't really directly confirm one way or another. Point is kind of moot anyways beyond a Fun Fact because it's not like Omi is about to go back and kill off Shadow and replay hours of the World of Ruin just to check.
 
Saint_007 said:
So it's a case of (to quote TV Tropes) a "cozy catastrophe". It's literally been the apocalypse, but rather than something like Fallout or Mad Max in the aftermath, even with the geography literally altered beyond recognition, it feels same old, same old at times. Kind of takes one out of the immersion.
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I always associated the term Cozy Catastrophe more with stuff like Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko, which takes a more gentle and calmer view of humanity's last days. But I went and checked the TV Tropes page again, yeah, it does list examples closing to what you're talking about, where the apocalypse isn't written as really affecting much.

I'd surmise the difference between YKK and other cozy catastrophes is that series was intentionally written that way, rather than the result of the writers not putting enough thought into a post-apocalypse setting.
 
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