Remove ads

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

Reader mode
Shadow: Because of the sin that I committed...

Shadow: I must hide my face from the world...

Shadow: Fight, only for the highest bidder...

Shadow: To wash away the weakness of the man that I once was...

Shadow: Until nothing remains but the purity found in the blade.

Umaro: RROWR! *ENRAGED WOOKIEE NOISES*

Shadow: What the fuck?!

Umaro:
 
Ah, The coliseum, home of the most hype moment in Woolie's lets play.


View: https://youtu.be/3sjsTZPZ8C4

Time to talk about the Collesuem. Betting that Megaelixir will have you fight Sigfried. The real one. Not an easy fight.
Betting the Behemoth suit gives you the snow scarf, the best armour in the game that only Mog and Gau can learn.Betting an Impartisan earns you the cat ear hood, Relm's best Headgear. Betting Ragnorok gets you Lightbringer, the best weapon in the game. Betting the Rename Card earns you the Miracle Shoes, the Best relic in the game.

The Holy Dragon is the weakest dragon. It only knows Holy and can be silenced. It's also the 3rd boss that can be found in the Veldt. Why one of the Dragons can be found there is a mystery.

The Cult of Kefka's tower has a secret room holding a tool for Edgar.

And now, I finally talk about the stuff the Advance game put in. I'll talk about the Bonus Dungeon later. There are three Bosses added to the game that give magicite.
Taking the ship between South Firago and Nikeah after talking to a man in South Firago will have you fight Leviathan. He nets you the Leviathan Magicite. It gives +2 Stamina, uses Tidal Wave, and teaches Flood at x2, an Advance exclusive spell that deals heavy Water Damage.
Talking to a Woman in front of the Auction house allows you to bid 50 000 Gill to gain the Excalipoor. Betting it in the colosseum nets you a fight with Gilgamesh. (A normal fight thankfully) Winning it nets you Gilgamesh Magicite. It gives +2 strength, uses either Excalipoor, which does tiny damage, Excalibur/Masamune that does heavy damage, or Endiku which does REALLY heavy damage. It teaches Quick at x1 and Valor at x5. Valor is another exclusive spell. it makes every characters next physical attack deal double damage.
I'll save the last one for later. I advise you checking out the Desert near Miranda. There is a special enemy there. An iconic one.
 
Last edited:
Honestly the more I see of VI the less impressed with it I am? I know we're in the standard end ~25% of the game and so the devs have all knocked off early to go for a pint, but VI just feels less and less like a game I'd want to play as this LP goes on. I mean, the whole weird shitty level up mechanic already had me looking askance at the game, but the story really doesn't elevate it in any way that I can see. I'm honestly confused so many people hold it as their favourite Final Fantasy.
 
I suspect a lot of that comes down to it being much more impressive by the standards of twenty-nine years ago than it is in 2023, when there's any number of more polished ensemble cast games out there even restricting ourselves to quasi-realtime JRPGs.
 
I'm wondering if Raiden can just one-shot the boss given a possible lore connection. Probobly not though.
Dualcast-Quick seems like a silly combo though.
 
As with any FF game that lets you reach a damage cap, I'm assuming the optimal build centres around getting as many hits in as possible per attack, 'cos one times 9,999 is not as good as say eight times 9,999. So combo the dualcast with quick, or combine the Genji Gloves with... whatever it was that gave you Rapidfire? On a strength-built character.

Of course, as you've got to field three teams of four, and AIUI you don't have more than one of each item, you'd want to split your big hitters so you can have one on each team.

(The grinding to get everyone geared and filled up with the right spells for the endgame seems like it would be deeply unfun, TBH.)
 
Unrelated, in the category of "things I noticed a long time ago but every time I'm reminded of it I have forgotten by the time I write the next update so I never end up writing about it," I'm going through previous game updates for some quick comparisons and it's really fucking me up how FF1-5 use different in- and out-of-combat sprites for all characters including the main party and 6 doesn't, so in 6 the characters' appearances are consistent between all parts of the narrative whereas now every time I look at a screenshot of the IV or V protagonists hanging out in a town of dungeon they look like incredibly squashed midgets. Like, seriously:


 
Last edited:
Omicron said:
With this disappointing conclusion to the Solitary Island saga, I have a new objective: chasing Deathgaze, the monster roaming the high skies. Now, you might ask, how do we find Deathgaze?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Deathgaze is one of those things that sorta work in the context of playground rumors. Like, hearing from your buddy how they were ambushed on the airship by a monster that then ran away and then maybe encountering Deathgaze yourself is cool. Adds to the idea that the game is full of secrets you may never see and such.

In an era of internet guides, it's just busywork.

Omicron said:
The key here is that if we win an astounding 256 battles with the Cursed Shield, it turns into the Paladin's Shield, the best shield in the game - but it can only be equipped by the character who wore it for these 256 battles.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You can pass the shield around freely, actually. I'm not entirely sure, but I think at least in PR version you only need to win 256 battles total with the shield equipped by any character, not with the same character.

Since you'd want to do a grinding session anyway to bring up the rear, may as well use the shield.

Ribbon protects you from most status effects inflicted by it except Doom. Being immune to instant death (Memento Ring, some Rages) protects you from Doom, being undead (Lich Ring, undead Rages) makes it heal you completely.

Omicron said:
The Coliseum.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Yeah, I share your sentiment. Arenas in RPGs are cool, especially when you can talk to prospective fighters before and after, and it's really hard to fuck up. Usually, at worst you just get a boring battle. It's impressive how FFVI has managed to miss the mark, and just how pointless it is. There is no particular reason to take control away from you other than create a fake difficulty.

Fortunately, there are very few unique awards the Coliseum offers. It's basically just Shadow and name cards. Otherwise, it's mostly a way to multiply unique relics and equipment. For example, betting Falchions (which you can just buy in some shop) gets you Flame Shields, as many as you like. You can also get a second Dragon Horn, which is good if you want both Mog and Edgar to be dragoons. And so on.

Personally, I only bothered with the Coliseum for two things:

1) You can bet Royal Gown (which is outclassed by Behemoth Suit anyway), which would give you Minerva Bruiser, the ultimate armor for Terra and Celes that nullifies some elements and provides great stat bonuses. The fight is easily won by just equipping a Reflect Ring and attempting to run away by holding down 2+3. You can't actually run away from Coliseum battles, but it prevents characters from acting, so the enemy would eventually just kill itself.

2) This one is more elaborate. You need Gogo with three Steal commands equipped, Brigand Glove to turn Steal into Mug and Safety Bit, a relic granting protection from instant death that anyone can equip. IDK if you have it. Gogo should have about 2k HP and best available armor and weapon (which isn't much, they top at, like, Magus Robe, Red Cap and Magus Rod) to survive the fight consistently.

Then bet either Holy lance or the katana you found in the Doma castle. They form a loop: betting one and winning gets you another and vice versa. One of the enemies you fight in this loop is a bird that has really, really great rare Steal. Unfortunately, it also has a common Steal, so you'd have to fight it a lot to get the good stuff, but it's actually worth it.

You can encounter that bird in Phoenix Cave, but it's a rare encounter, so the Coliseum is actually easier to do here.

Omicron said:
Barring a couple of spots that I might have missed and which I'm sure the thread will be quick to point out (this is your cue to say that you can now point me to stuff I've missed), I think we're ready to tackle Kefka's Tower and the endgame.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You want to bring Relm and Strago both to their home town. There was a hint of a quest about the surfacing rock to the north, if you remember.

Also, a minor point: on the northern continent right above Veldt there is a forest area where you can encounter dinosaurs. T-Rexes, mostly, but also Brachiosaurus as a rare encounter. It's the best spot to grind your party if you need it, dinos give out a loooot of exp. I've done the cursed shield quest there and went up over 10 levels on everyone. Brachiosaurus also has a rare drop, the same relic you can get from the Coliseum I've talked about above.
 
Kadmus said:
Honestly the more I see of VI the less impressed with it I am? I know we're in the standard end ~25% of the game and so the devs have all knocked off early to go for a pint, but VI just feels less and less like a game I'd want to play as this LP goes on. I mean, the whole weird shitty level up mechanic already had me looking askance at the game, but the story really doesn't elevate it in any way that I can see. I'm honestly confused so many people hold it as their favourite Final Fantasy.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

To put it bluntly, what you seem to have a problem with is mind goblins. The thread has more than covered the fact that yeah, the level up boosts could be improved, but you're not locked out of anything if you don't use them. Take your complaint here:

Kadmus said:
(The grinding to get everyone geared and filled up with the right spells for the endgame seems like it would be deeply unfun, TBH.)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Not every character needs every spell. In my last playthrough, I think I had... 4 characters I actively grinded out high level magic on? Others I just grabbed opportunistically on other characters while I was doing something else. Even just using your strength characters as backup healers, you only really need basic cure and raise for that. Basic cure is actually better for out of combat healing, because Cura costs 5x the mana and doesn't heal 5x the hp.

And the dinosaur forest and the AP farm desert make the unnecessary grinding go relatively fast anyway.

And I also think Omicron missed an item that means you don't actually have to boost everyone up equally. People have pointed it out in-thread, but it seems like the kind of thing he'd highlight and he hasn't said anything about it. Might as well try again though: Omicron, go check the moogle cave wall where Mog was standing.

And as for the story, no accounting for taste, I guess. If you don't get what's cool about the split scenario arc, the opera, the magitek factory, the no-shit on screen apocalypse and Solitary Island arc, or the whole putting the band back together open world sandbox, then I don't know what I can say here. There are lots of details that could be improved about all of that, but if you aren't digging it on, like, a fundamental level I can't change that. Omicron's also been more down on this half of the game, and so you're getting it double-filtered by his perspective and yours.
 
It was said before that FFVI is less than the sum of its parts. There are great, outstanding moments that leave everything from the previous five games in the dust, but what's holding them together is not great. The gameplay is at best OK but kinda frustrating (Omicron has already talked about the ATB system in general and FFVI specific implementation of it), characters routinely drop out of focus when they probably shouldn't, there is a bunch of experimental elements that don't quite work, like a lot of characters personal abilities, etc.

Overall, FFVI was very, very impressive for its time, but by now it barely holds up. It's still worthwhile to play, I'd say, for those great moments everyone remembers (because they are, I shall reiterate, great), but games have moved on since then and for the better.
 
Also, funny thing about the Coliseum. When a character gets KO'd in the Coliseum, they stay KO'd. Even if they are the only one in the party. And if you run to a random encounter after that happens, you instantly lose.
 
illhousen said:
It was said before that FFVI is less than the sum of its parts. There are great, outstanding moments that leave everything from the previous five games in the dust, but what's holding them together is not great. The gameplay is at best OK but kinda frustrating (Omicron has already talked about the ATB system in general and FFVI specific implementation of it), characters routinely drop out of focus when they probably shouldn't, there is a bunch of experimental elements that don't quite work, like a lot of characters personal abilities, etc.

Overall, FFVI was very, very impressive for its time, but by now it barely holds up. It's still worthwhile to play, I'd say, for those great moments everyone remembers (because they are, I shall reiterate, great), but games have moved on since then and for the better.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
"Less than the sum of its parts" is probably a good descriptor for FFVI at the end of things, yeah. It has a lot of great ideas that are executed to varying levels of good, but when you put it all together in the World of Ruin some of the cracks start to show. I might not necessarily agree with "barely holds up", I still think FFVI is a pretty great game and best of the Remasters outside of FFV, but the fact that it stumbles so heavily in the late to end game instead of mostly just the endgame the way some other Final Fantasies do makes it more evident that there's issues.

Part of me really wants to push Omi to play Chrono Trigger next though, to see how it compares to FFVI as one of the other major darling RPGs of the SNES era. I mean, at a minimum the ATB stops when anyone's taking an action so that's already an improvement :V
crankers said:
Also, funny thing about the Coliseum. When a character gets KO'd in the Coliseum, they stay KO'd. Even if they are the only one in the party. And if you run to a random encounter after that happens, you instantly lose.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
At this point, I almost want to search out methods in every Final Fantasy game to get "your entire party is dead out of battle, so if you run into an encounter it's an instant game over" considering we have it in FFV and FFVI both.
 
Last edited:
Omicron said:
This is a single use of a Magicite Shard randomly summoning Alexander and blasting the enemy with Divine Judgement. And as you can see, Terra's ATB gauge is filling up the entire time.

This means a few things. For one, animations are no longer cosmetic. In fact, because I use a lot of magic, animations are now the defining factor of battle pacing. For the most part, when I input a character's Command, by the time they finish performing that action, everyone's ATB gauges are full. Also, the same is happening to the enemy. So speed of input in menus is more important than it's ever been, and at the same time, everything feels clumsy and chaotic. FFV at least gave me a sense of the battle pacing itself according to individual character speed and with a clearly legible character flow where I could chart out my next actions. This is just noise. It's ironically returned to something closer to a true turn-by-turn (since all actions are queued up because all ATB gauges are full by the time an action finishes performing), but worse in every way.

Also it means the Speed stat is probably worthless. There's no point trying to make a fast character who can take 'more actions per turn' than the others because it all grinds down in animation speed.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
I'm glad you caught this. It's mostly correct and it's why VI's implementation of ATB sucks. Speed isn't useful for getting more turns, it's useful for the initial ATB bar and it's useful if you're abusing Wait to gain more turns than intended by pausing the ATB meter in a menu during your turn while letting it run during enemy animations.
 
Talking about how and how much FF6 has aged has reminded me that, if they say comedy is the genre that ages fastest (and that goes double for romcoms), then videogames may be the medium that ages fastest. Naturally you don't have to worry about gameplay mechanics in books, movies, etc., and you can always house-rule away the problems with older tabletop games (to an extent anyway) whereas not all video games will support mods.

And speaking of ATB, I remember being told the reason you don't see anything like it in non-Square RPGs of the time is due to Square patenting the system. I always saw that as your usual corporate douchebaggery at first, but with the issues people have been raising about ATB here, I now have to wonder if that patent was a blessing in disguise.
Though you could argue that if they hadn't patented ATB, other devs would've had the opportunity to iron out its flaws or experiment with it on their own
 
McFluffles said:
Part of me really wants to push Omi to play Chrono Trigger next though, to see how it compares to FFVI as one of the other major darling RPGs of the SNES era. I mean, at a minimum the ATB stops when anyone's taking an action so that's already an improvement :V
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

CT would be an excellent play between this and VII, but last I saw @Omicron was talking about potentially doing both at the same time, which would be the act of a madman.

PSIV would also be solid, but it would feel somewhat dated esp. relative to the remastered version of VI.
 
foamy said:
CT would be an excellent play between this and VII, but last I saw @Omicron was talking about potentially doing both at the same time, which would be the act of a madman.

PSIV would also be solid, but it would feel somewhat dated esp. relative to the remastered version of VI.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
PSIV? Phantasy Star IV? Oh man, that'd be really interesting, but you're right that it'd be hella dated.
 
And also, uh, not even vaguely related to the Final Fantasy series, AFAIK, and so not qualifying for this thread in any way so I'm not sure why it's being mentioned? It might draw mechanical/narrative inspiration from the Final Fantasy series (I don't know, but I'm assuming that's why it was mentioned), but it wasn't made or published by Square.

Chrono Trigger was both, and was made by the some of the team that did Final Fantasy, which sorta makes it an 'honorary Final Fantasy' in some respects and so it might qualify for this thread. It's also an 'honorary Dragon Quest', to be fair.
 
Yeah, Phantasy Star kind of seems even farther off the beaten track than me jokingly going "Secret of Mana series started as Final Fantasy Adventure/Gaiden, Omi has to play them all" because at least those were made by the same company.

Not any kind of judgement of quality on Phantasy Star, mind you, I haven't played the series, just that at some point the suggestions are going so far off the rails we'll have to rename the thread "Let's Play Every JRPG In Somewhat Release Order", at which point Omi should probably just hard-shill his Patreon every single post until this is a full time job's worth of pay with how much time that would take.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top