GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
It's also because most bosses are completely immune to debuffs and the fights where those debuffs do work - ie random encounters - aren't hard enough to bother.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Final Fantasy III, Part 5
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Desch is dead. The path to the dwarven island is open.
The very first thing we fight at sea, a Sea Serpent, uses a palette-swapped model of the Nepto Dragon who killed us the first time we sailed, which I find very funny. It dies quickly.
If you'll recall, in the first game the mermaids were friendly NPCs to rescue. Not so much here. I guess Atlantis came under new management.
The dwarven island is a largely mountainous landmass with two caves. One of them is the Molten Cave, likely location of the Fire Crystal, which I can't currently access:
The other is the home of the dwarves:
They greet us with a 'Lali-oh," which appears to be the standard dwarven greeting since FFI, and I wonder where it came from.
There is also a Chocobo Forest tile, whose chocobos are useless given how small the island is, but who has this odd prompt.
Dwarves are interesting because I just… didn't associate them with Final Fantasy, at all, yet they're actually right there in I and III as a core part of the plot?
It feels to me like, over time, as part of distancing itself from its D&D/Wizardry roots, Final Fantasy has made a conscious effort to abandon the race spread of the early game. In FFXIV, the Elezen are very obviously some kind of elf, but the Lalafell, the resident "small people" race, are more like… weird halflings/gnomes than they are dwarves, and when one of the later expansions introduces a distant region in which the lalafell are called dwarves, there's significant work going into changing their aesthetic. And that's FFXIV; from my recollection, in FFVII and FFVIII there are only humans and human-looking people, and in FFIX there's… the protagonist is a Saiyan and then a bunch of Weird Stuff like Freya being a… fox lady? Rat person?
The point is, finding a bunch of bearded dwarves who live in caves and spend their lives digging and crafting precious metals was a swerve I did not expect.
Immediately upon entering, the dwarves tell me they have a problem:
You can see one of the Ice Horns up above; the pedestal is protected by a force field, which repels me when I try to approach.
A thief stole a precious artifact of theirs and hid with it in an underwater cave. Unfortunately dwarves don't float, which I find a hilarious detail to throw in, and so they can't chase after him. But that can't stop TOAD GANG!
Once past the initial watery passage, we enter the dungeon proper and detoadify. We enter the Subterranean Lake, which puts rather more emphasis on 'subterranean' than 'lake':
Enemies here include the Bomb, back from FF2 and this time having its fire-colored version be the first in its hierarchy rather than the last, the Merman, the Stalagmite, the 'Sea Devil' which is actually just a fish, and the 'Ruinous Wave,' an enemy who looks like some kind of whirlpool-shaped water elemental, and who, uh… Has the Bad Breath ability, what the shit.
In this picture, you can see that Quaver has been poisoned, silenced, blinded, miniaturized, and frogified. By a single attack from a low-level random mob. What the shit. Thank God I had a healing item for each of these ailments or I would have had to either leave the cave, or kill Quaver.
I mean, so I could raise him without the status. Obviously.
And eventually, we find the mysterious thief, Gutsco:
Gutsco is a simple opponent. He can inflict Mini, but Tsugumi can heal it. Otherwise, he just attacks, dealing heavy damage but only to one character, meaning Tsugumi can keep everyone alive while they beat him up. Eventually, he is defeated.
Enemy vanquished, Horn of Ice got, I warp out of the cave and head back to the dwarven hollows.
There's just one weird thing though…
There's this white line in the air that follows me wherever I go. It's got an interact prompt, but it doesn't do or say anything.
Eh, I'm sure it's nothing to worry about.
Huh.
That's actually a clever plan. I was wondering what he was planning to do, just huddling with his Horn in a cave forever, but no. His actual goal was the power of the Fire Crystal. However he did it the first time around, he could only get his hands on one Horn, which wasn't enough to open the path to the Molten Cave - so just waited for the dwarves to send someone after him, let himself be defeated, and then use stealth magic to get himself smuggled past the force field and take both horns.
It's not very complicated, but it's clever and effective. It definitely beats "you thought this was a tournament, but I already knew you were a rebel and it was actually a trap!" from FF2, which just kind of… happened.
The dwarves don't seem to really care about the Fire Crystal, their concerns are the Horns, although I'm unclear on what their purpose is to them:
Well, nothing for it: we gotta track him down. And thankfully, opening the way for himself also means the way is opened to us.
Actually though, before we do - look at those two dwarves I'm not talking to here. Notice how they're caught mid-walking animation?
Okay, so, it's something I can't catch in a screenshot, and I don't even know if it applies to these two specific dwarves, but there's something odd in FF3 Pixel Remaster:
It uses 'standing walk' animations for some NPCs.
In case you've never played an older, lesser-budgeted isometric 2D games before, a standing walk is when an NPC who is standing still in one spot is instead in a walking animation cycle. They're perpetually walking while staying in place. In FF3 it's only used for some NPC models, but for instance, Pokémon TCG on the Game Boy Color is an egregious example where it's happening to everyone:
Now, why would you animate your characters like that? Well, my understanding is that it's a work-/space-saving endeavour: characters who are stand walking allow you to skip building (and taking place in the system) the four 'standing still' sprites they would need otherwise, which adds up, at the cost of making your characters look kind of silly.
Now, as much as I love Pokémon TCG, it's clearly a cheap spinoff running on the limited hardware of the GBC, so cost-/space-saving measures make sense. Pixel Remaster has access to the hardware of a modern computer though, it could do whatever the fuck it wants. My best guess is that they're doing this out of faithfulness to the original? Which is interesting, because FFI and FFII, to the best of my recollection, didn't have standing walks. Perhaps they were introduced in FFIII? As the last NES Final Fantasy game, an incredible expansion in scope from FFI, it would make sense for them to be running out of space and resorting to cutting some corners that wouldn't be missed. Which is the correct choice… but I have no idea if that's actually what happened. If you got insight into early Final Fantasy development, hit me up.
Anyway.
We head back into the molten cave, which as you might have guessed, is filled with lava corridors we need to wade through. And which…
Huh…
Doesn't… deal… damage?
One might say this is the power of the Horns of Ice, but that should have turned the lava to cool rock, not funky water. Looking up the wiki, the lava in Molten Cave is supposed to be dealing damage. But I've spent ten minutes wading through lava, and it doesn't hurt at all. You know what does hurt? When I pass under a lava waterfall. My characters are just chadstriding through boiling rock, we are officially superhuman.
My best guess is, the reason for this is because I equipped Quaver with Flame Armor, which is especially resistant to fire damage. It's a bit weird because it's only Quaver and he's not even my front character, but if it is the reason, then I like that it rewards the players for approaching environmental hazards as solvable this way. This is a good addition.
We face some foes we're well-used to by now, Adamantoise, Balloons, Red Marhmallows, and unlike in FFI's Mt Gulg this time I do not miss the Freezing Blade mid-dungeon.
So this whole affair should be a piece of cake.
Wait.
Oh my god.
He's Fiending.
We literally raced him to the crystal, and stopped him just short of doing the same thing as the Four Fiends. He was going to plug into the crystal, feed on its power, and turn into a superpowered elemental demon-thing. But we caught up too him too quickly, so he's only partway through the process - he's a half-Fiend, and so when he comes at us, it is still with the form of an elemental monster, but a lesser one:
A salamander is like a lamer dragon. This should be no trouble at all.
Okay so here's the thing. He has two moves, a physical attack that hits any party member for over half their HP… And a Blaze attack that hits everyone for 110-220 damage. And he loves that Blaze attack. I forgot to heal up before the fight and didn't foresee how hard he would hit, so my strategy of just going for maximum Ice damage fails.
I reload, heal everyone, set up thing for Tsugumi to be healing everybody to blunt the effects of his Blaze, and-
…
I can't do this. His damage is too high, my damage is too low, he simply Wins every time.
The fault lies with me. I was complacent. It's not that I didn't grind enough; it's that I thought I could just rely on dungeon chests and loot drops to keep my gear up to par and save money, and I was wrong. Only Rushanaq has Blizarra; Tsugumi doesn't even know Cura because lv 3 spells felt too expensive; I am just too weak.
This is the first time since FFI that I have to leave a dungeon to refresh and resupply. This is the first time, ever, that I encounter a boss that can't be defeated by just reloading, healing up, shuffling some gear and doing different actions in a different order.
Salamander Gutsco, of all people, is the first boss in the franchise to actually beat me.
Not for long, though. His victory was my weakness, not his strength. I was lazy and overconfident. One Teleport takes me out of the dungeon. I take my ship, and I go a-sailing to the Village of the Ancients, ensuring Mimi and Tsugumi have spells of the highest available tier. Then I buy some weapons and armor, making sure everyone is in top shape.
Then I go back, rushing through the entire dungeon back to Gutsco, topping everyone up, and it's on.
Tsugumi can cast Cura, her lv 3 healing spell, a total of 4 times. Each time she does it, she heals everyone by as much damage as Salamander is able to heal. If I can kill it in four turns, I'm home free. Which means everyone else is hitting as hard as they can as fast as they can - Mimi and Rushanaq can both cast Blizarra, hitting Salamander in its Ice Weakness for massive damage. Quaver attacks with the Freezing Blade for extra ice damage and some other weapon, dual wielding for massive offense.
By the end of Turn 4…
Salamander is down.
Damn, that was bracing. I actually had to go back and readjust. My initial intent was to switch Mimi to Black Mage but honestly, I wasn't going to do that for one boss before getting new jobs. And Red Mage did well enough in the end. I just wasn't expecting to have to actually activate my neurons playing FFIII - this was nice. I enjoyed it.
And now, of course, our promised reward.
New jobs!
Ranger appears to be a bow-focused attacker with high agility. Its special ability, 'Barrage,' allows it to use a bow to attack every enemy on screen, for reduced individual damage. Thief can steal stuff from enemies. Knight has some kind of 'guard' ability and I am not clear on how it works in Pixel Remaster because it appears to have changed a lot between the NES original, the DS port and PR? And Scholar has an ability to scan enemy HP and weaknesses and to improve the effectiveness of items, but I have been warned by friends that it has a secret downside in having a very low HP progression that can saddle a character with a long-term issue.
After some thinking, here's a snapshot of our new lineup:
Quaver going Warrior->Knight and Mimi going RDM->Ranger might feel more normal, but I want to beef up Mimi's damage and tanking stats and Quaver was an Archer/Bard main in ARR, so.
There's a little more happening between these changes and me closing the game, but we'll integrate those in the next update. For now, here's our new party!
The very first thing we fight at sea, a Sea Serpent, uses a palette-swapped model of the Nepto Dragon who killed us the first time we sailed, which I find very funny. It dies quickly.
If you'll recall, in the first game the mermaids were friendly NPCs to rescue. Not so much here. I guess Atlantis came under new management.
The dwarven island is a largely mountainous landmass with two caves. One of them is the Molten Cave, likely location of the Fire Crystal, which I can't currently access:
The other is the home of the dwarves:
They greet us with a 'Lali-oh," which appears to be the standard dwarven greeting since FFI, and I wonder where it came from.
There is also a Chocobo Forest tile, whose chocobos are useless given how small the island is, but who has this odd prompt.
Dwarves are interesting because I just… didn't associate them with Final Fantasy, at all, yet they're actually right there in I and III as a core part of the plot?
It feels to me like, over time, as part of distancing itself from its D&D/Wizardry roots, Final Fantasy has made a conscious effort to abandon the race spread of the early game. In FFXIV, the Elezen are very obviously some kind of elf, but the Lalafell, the resident "small people" race, are more like… weird halflings/gnomes than they are dwarves, and when one of the later expansions introduces a distant region in which the lalafell are called dwarves, there's significant work going into changing their aesthetic. And that's FFXIV; from my recollection, in FFVII and FFVIII there are only humans and human-looking people, and in FFIX there's… the protagonist is a Saiyan and then a bunch of Weird Stuff like Freya being a… fox lady? Rat person?
The point is, finding a bunch of bearded dwarves who live in caves and spend their lives digging and crafting precious metals was a swerve I did not expect.
Immediately upon entering, the dwarves tell me they have a problem:
You can see one of the Ice Horns up above; the pedestal is protected by a force field, which repels me when I try to approach.
A thief stole a precious artifact of theirs and hid with it in an underwater cave. Unfortunately dwarves don't float, which I find a hilarious detail to throw in, and so they can't chase after him. But that can't stop TOAD GANG!
Once past the initial watery passage, we enter the dungeon proper and detoadify. We enter the Subterranean Lake, which puts rather more emphasis on 'subterranean' than 'lake':
Enemies here include the Bomb, back from FF2 and this time having its fire-colored version be the first in its hierarchy rather than the last, the Merman, the Stalagmite, the 'Sea Devil' which is actually just a fish, and the 'Ruinous Wave,' an enemy who looks like some kind of whirlpool-shaped water elemental, and who, uh… Has the Bad Breath ability, what the shit.
In this picture, you can see that Quaver has been poisoned, silenced, blinded, miniaturized, and frogified. By a single attack from a low-level random mob. What the shit. Thank God I had a healing item for each of these ailments or I would have had to either leave the cave, or kill Quaver.
I mean, so I could raise him without the status. Obviously.
And eventually, we find the mysterious thief, Gutsco:
Gutsco is a simple opponent. He can inflict Mini, but Tsugumi can heal it. Otherwise, he just attacks, dealing heavy damage but only to one character, meaning Tsugumi can keep everyone alive while they beat him up. Eventually, he is defeated.
Enemy vanquished, Horn of Ice got, I warp out of the cave and head back to the dwarven hollows.
There's just one weird thing though…
There's this white line in the air that follows me wherever I go. It's got an interact prompt, but it doesn't do or say anything.
Eh, I'm sure it's nothing to worry about.
Huh.
That's actually a clever plan. I was wondering what he was planning to do, just huddling with his Horn in a cave forever, but no. His actual goal was the power of the Fire Crystal. However he did it the first time around, he could only get his hands on one Horn, which wasn't enough to open the path to the Molten Cave - so just waited for the dwarves to send someone after him, let himself be defeated, and then use stealth magic to get himself smuggled past the force field and take both horns.
It's not very complicated, but it's clever and effective. It definitely beats "you thought this was a tournament, but I already knew you were a rebel and it was actually a trap!" from FF2, which just kind of… happened.
The dwarves don't seem to really care about the Fire Crystal, their concerns are the Horns, although I'm unclear on what their purpose is to them:
Well, nothing for it: we gotta track him down. And thankfully, opening the way for himself also means the way is opened to us.
Actually though, before we do - look at those two dwarves I'm not talking to here. Notice how they're caught mid-walking animation?
Okay, so, it's something I can't catch in a screenshot, and I don't even know if it applies to these two specific dwarves, but there's something odd in FF3 Pixel Remaster:
It uses 'standing walk' animations for some NPCs.
In case you've never played an older, lesser-budgeted isometric 2D games before, a standing walk is when an NPC who is standing still in one spot is instead in a walking animation cycle. They're perpetually walking while staying in place. In FF3 it's only used for some NPC models, but for instance, Pokémon TCG on the Game Boy Color is an egregious example where it's happening to everyone:
Now, why would you animate your characters like that? Well, my understanding is that it's a work-/space-saving endeavour: characters who are stand walking allow you to skip building (and taking place in the system) the four 'standing still' sprites they would need otherwise, which adds up, at the cost of making your characters look kind of silly.
Now, as much as I love Pokémon TCG, it's clearly a cheap spinoff running on the limited hardware of the GBC, so cost-/space-saving measures make sense. Pixel Remaster has access to the hardware of a modern computer though, it could do whatever the fuck it wants. My best guess is that they're doing this out of faithfulness to the original? Which is interesting, because FFI and FFII, to the best of my recollection, didn't have standing walks. Perhaps they were introduced in FFIII? As the last NES Final Fantasy game, an incredible expansion in scope from FFI, it would make sense for them to be running out of space and resorting to cutting some corners that wouldn't be missed. Which is the correct choice… but I have no idea if that's actually what happened. If you got insight into early Final Fantasy development, hit me up.
Anyway.
We head back into the molten cave, which as you might have guessed, is filled with lava corridors we need to wade through. And which…
Huh…
One might say this is the power of the Horns of Ice, but that should have turned the lava to cool rock, not funky water. Looking up the wiki, the lava in Molten Cave is supposed to be dealing damage. But I've spent ten minutes wading through lava, and it doesn't hurt at all. You know what does hurt? When I pass under a lava waterfall. My characters are just chadstriding through boiling rock, we are officially superhuman.
My best guess is, the reason for this is because I equipped Quaver with Flame Armor, which is especially resistant to fire damage. It's a bit weird because it's only Quaver and he's not even my front character, but if it is the reason, then I like that it rewards the players for approaching environmental hazards as solvable this way. This is a good addition.
We face some foes we're well-used to by now, Adamantoise, Balloons, Red Marhmallows, and unlike in FFI's Mt Gulg this time I do not miss the Freezing Blade mid-dungeon.
So this whole affair should be a piece of cake.
Wait.
Oh my god.
He's Fiending.
We literally raced him to the crystal, and stopped him just short of doing the same thing as the Four Fiends. He was going to plug into the crystal, feed on its power, and turn into a superpowered elemental demon-thing. But we caught up too him too quickly, so he's only partway through the process - he's a half-Fiend, and so when he comes at us, it is still with the form of an elemental monster, but a lesser one:
A salamander is like a lamer dragon. This should be no trouble at all.
Okay so here's the thing. He has two moves, a physical attack that hits any party member for over half their HP… And a Blaze attack that hits everyone for 110-220 damage. And he loves that Blaze attack. I forgot to heal up before the fight and didn't foresee how hard he would hit, so my strategy of just going for maximum Ice damage fails.
I reload, heal everyone, set up thing for Tsugumi to be healing everybody to blunt the effects of his Blaze, and-
…
I can't do this. His damage is too high, my damage is too low, he simply Wins every time.
The fault lies with me. I was complacent. It's not that I didn't grind enough; it's that I thought I could just rely on dungeon chests and loot drops to keep my gear up to par and save money, and I was wrong. Only Rushanaq has Blizarra; Tsugumi doesn't even know Cura because lv 3 spells felt too expensive; I am just too weak.
This is the first time since FFI that I have to leave a dungeon to refresh and resupply. This is the first time, ever, that I encounter a boss that can't be defeated by just reloading, healing up, shuffling some gear and doing different actions in a different order.
Salamander Gutsco, of all people, is the first boss in the franchise to actually beat me.
Not for long, though. His victory was my weakness, not his strength. I was lazy and overconfident. One Teleport takes me out of the dungeon. I take my ship, and I go a-sailing to the Village of the Ancients, ensuring Mimi and Tsugumi have spells of the highest available tier. Then I buy some weapons and armor, making sure everyone is in top shape.
Then I go back, rushing through the entire dungeon back to Gutsco, topping everyone up, and it's on.
Tsugumi can cast Cura, her lv 3 healing spell, a total of 4 times. Each time she does it, she heals everyone by as much damage as Salamander is able to heal. If I can kill it in four turns, I'm home free. Which means everyone else is hitting as hard as they can as fast as they can - Mimi and Rushanaq can both cast Blizarra, hitting Salamander in its Ice Weakness for massive damage. Quaver attacks with the Freezing Blade for extra ice damage and some other weapon, dual wielding for massive offense.
By the end of Turn 4…
Salamander is down.
Damn, that was bracing. I actually had to go back and readjust. My initial intent was to switch Mimi to Black Mage but honestly, I wasn't going to do that for one boss before getting new jobs. And Red Mage did well enough in the end. I just wasn't expecting to have to actually activate my neurons playing FFIII - this was nice. I enjoyed it.
And now, of course, our promised reward.
New jobs!
Ranger appears to be a bow-focused attacker with high agility. Its special ability, 'Barrage,' allows it to use a bow to attack every enemy on screen, for reduced individual damage. Thief can steal stuff from enemies. Knight has some kind of 'guard' ability and I am not clear on how it works in Pixel Remaster because it appears to have changed a lot between the NES original, the DS port and PR? And Scholar has an ability to scan enemy HP and weaknesses and to improve the effectiveness of items, but I have been warned by friends that it has a secret downside in having a very low HP progression that can saddle a character with a long-term issue.
After some thinking, here's a snapshot of our new lineup:
Quaver going Warrior->Knight and Mimi going RDM->Ranger might feel more normal, but I want to beef up Mimi's damage and tanking stats and Quaver was an Archer/Bard main in ARR, so.
There's a little more happening between these changes and me closing the game, but we'll integrate those in the next update. For now, here's our new party!
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VI and it's a combination of factors at play there, but the games going forward from there carried on with most of them. Resource management took a backseat on more than one level, random encounters dropped in difficulty and your tools to deal with them were overall stronger and more spammable, and bosses were mostly blanket immune.
- Location
- United States
- Pronouns
- He/Him
All abilities that survived into Octopath as well!
-Warrior has the ability to defend low-hp teammates (and you can still dodge the attack which is a really funny mental image)
-The Scholar job can analyze enemy weaknesses and hp, however the item-enhancing move was moved to Apothecary as the ultimate skill
- Steal is still around, along with a mana and health steal ability
- Hunter can fire a barrage of arrows with low accuracy and random targets
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
And here we see the introduction of class abilities that give characters new commands and give non-casters options other than basic attacks, which apart from anything else lets classes other than the basic ones mean something.
One of the big advantages FF had over Dragon Quest, back in the day. FF introduced it here, with 3 in '90 at the tail end of the NES, Dragon Quest didn't bring non-spell abilities in until Dragon Quest 6 in '95 at the tail end of the SNES.
One of the big advantages FF had over Dragon Quest, back in the day. FF introduced it here, with 3 in '90 at the tail end of the NES, Dragon Quest didn't bring non-spell abilities in until Dragon Quest 6 in '95 at the tail end of the SNES.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
I'm not immediately finding info on the pixel remaster but in both the NES and DS games it is differently effective versions of 'the Knight takes a lot less damage'.
It's unclear from some wiki diving whether it also adds 'the knight protects critically injured allies by tanking hits' (critically injured meaning below 1/16th of max hp) or whether that's completely passive without needing to Guard. I know that in the next final fantasy game with a Knight class that's a separate passive, but in that game Guard just full hard stops physical attacks but does nothing to magical which is apparently not how it works in 3.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Usually the "automatically defend characters with HP in the critical range" skill is called Cover, AFIK
edit: as for Lali-Ho, I'm pretty sure it's Engrish - "Rally-Ho!" makes far more sense as an exclamation in keeping with the ISO-standard Dwarf personality. They just keep it Lali for tradition's sake (except that one time the translators missed all the continuity references).
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ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
Knights passively step in front of allies in red health to take physical attacks in their place. Cover is like a much stronger variant of the Defend action (which I'm not sure was even in the original game as a default command), and I believe its damage reduction increases with job level. A very funny setup for if you're fighting enemies that only use physical attacks is to let your party drop to critical hp except for the Knight who just spams Guard and blocks everything.
IV DS is hilarious because it somehow retroactively became one of my biggest gaming achievements. As a kid I just played it unaware of any history and I have no memory of ever struggling, but whenever I see it brought up these days people immediately start to talk about how damn hard it is.
Traditional dwarves do not match what JRPG developers expect their audience to want to bang, while a race that looks like pre-schoolers all their life unfortunately does. Though I admit that does not explain the in-between parts.
Lali-ho!
It's a shame the dwarves don't show up more in Final Fantasy, 4 was the game I started with and Cid was awesome
Edit: I meant 4 not 5
It's a shame the dwarves don't show up more in Final Fantasy, 4 was the game I started with and Cid was awesome
Edit: I meant 4 not 5
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Which was a goddamn mistake because they did it wrong the first time and continued to do it wrong after. Handing literally everything but sometimes party buffing off to the skill system was a terrible idea. No, I'm not mad about how utterly miserable playing a full magic party in DQIX was, why do you ask?
AKuz
Been Better
- Location
- A Rising Tide of Horrors
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Location
- Alberta
Thinking about it, I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that it never did and the belief that it did comes from people who didn't want to engage with those systems just grinding until they could numberslam everything.
Which, incidentally, is the source of a lot of claims about JRPGs being mindless grindfests. Dragon Quest in particular gets that a lot from people who never even think to engage with the debuffs the games expect you to be using because they've had "JRPG debuffs bad" drilled into their heads for so long they don't question it.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
While it does take debuffs seriously, post-8 Dragon Quest games DO make buffs basically pointless; every boss has a "wipe out all your buffs" move they use pretty much every turn if they can thanks to DQ bosses getting multiple moves per turn, and there are lower-mp options to make them lose a move.
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- Location
- Alberta
See I can tell you're a series veteran because you actually bring up Disruptive Wave. Though I disagree with the assertion that it makes buffs pointless because DQ AI isn't reactive and thus has to wait until the game randomly lets them use it.
deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
With FF it's a bad balancing thing. As a rule bosses have total immunity to all status effects with very rare exceptions, and with mobs debuffs are mostly just not worth it since they're so easy.
Drilling down into finer detail;
Take something like poison, you generally have one of two practical outcomes.
1. The poison does something like 1/8 of the damage you'd do by just attacking, so it takes 8 rounds just to break even compared to using attack instead, and combat against random encounters generally peaks at 3/4 rounds.
2. The poison effect is powerful, but expires so quickly you'd again do more damage just by attacking.
For 'mitigation' debuffs the effect is generally just minimal, and by killing the enemy you already mitigate 100% of their damage.
For insta-kill statuses they again fit into two categories:
1. Works on a flat rng, and a 1/10 chance of instakilling is bad action economy.
2. Works on only specific enemies. Great against them, but rare, and since you're not in the habit of using useless spells you're unlikely to discover the effectiveness in the first place.
Buffs in FF have a much stronger history, but do still have some of the common problems of being too minor or too short lived to be worth the action. Haste is great in most FF games, Berserk...can be, depending on the specifics. Protect/Shell can be quite good tactically (against certain bosses).
All in all it just comes down to the brutal efficiency of action economy in turn based games.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
Basically, what's said above is true. To elaborate a bit:
In general, where Final Fantasy is concerned, there's two types of debuff: debilitating and one-hit-kills. The debilitating set (poison, zombie, slow and so on) will generally work even on bosses (even if maybe not all on each boss), but only be enough to win you the fight by themselves if you're packing an extremely defensive setup; otherwise, they help but still need you to have some proper damage output. The OHK, naturally, almost never work against boss encounters; they are generally actually fully effective against random encounters, but often times random encounters are not threatening enough to warrant that use of resources instead of attacks. The more threatening random encounters are, the more use debuffs see; unsurprisingly, Final Fantasy Tactics is the game where debuffs live their best lives, since you have to face a lot of mandatory mooks which don't enjoy the bosses resistance/immunity. Level 5 Death in that game was a map cleaner.
Buffs are almost always highly effective (especially Haste), since even bosses rarely have Dispel and, even when they do, it's nowhere near as effective as Disruptive Wave is in DQ, but which specific buffs are most useful varies from game to game in the series. This means that in every Final Fantasy, you must re-learn which buffs are effective and which ones aren't - Berserk is the best buff in FFII, but it's really not all that useful in FFVII; and in FFVIII, putting Silence and Blind on Squall is actually beneficial due to the game's unusual mechanics.
What this all sums up to is that debuffs requires you to build to benefit from them and generally only in random encounters, while buffs require you to truly understand the game's mechanics to know which to use and how; whereas just damage magic and attacks require no special builds and work equally well on bosses and random encounters, and will generally have ways to break the game if you know the mechanics well enough to know which buffs to use.
Basically, it's the "Dominant Strategy" problem - it's not that buffs and debuffs are useless, but rather that attacks are more effective and easier to use, so they edge buffs and debuffs out, so that when a battle comes up where buffs and debuffs would help, people who aren't used to taking advantage of them will just resort to making the damaging abilities more powerful however they can, thus preserving the belief that grinding is the solution, rather than taking advantage of the alternative options the system offers.
In general, where Final Fantasy is concerned, there's two types of debuff: debilitating and one-hit-kills. The debilitating set (poison, zombie, slow and so on) will generally work even on bosses (even if maybe not all on each boss), but only be enough to win you the fight by themselves if you're packing an extremely defensive setup; otherwise, they help but still need you to have some proper damage output. The OHK, naturally, almost never work against boss encounters; they are generally actually fully effective against random encounters, but often times random encounters are not threatening enough to warrant that use of resources instead of attacks. The more threatening random encounters are, the more use debuffs see; unsurprisingly, Final Fantasy Tactics is the game where debuffs live their best lives, since you have to face a lot of mandatory mooks which don't enjoy the bosses resistance/immunity. Level 5 Death in that game was a map cleaner.
Buffs are almost always highly effective (especially Haste), since even bosses rarely have Dispel and, even when they do, it's nowhere near as effective as Disruptive Wave is in DQ, but which specific buffs are most useful varies from game to game in the series. This means that in every Final Fantasy, you must re-learn which buffs are effective and which ones aren't - Berserk is the best buff in FFII, but it's really not all that useful in FFVII; and in FFVIII, putting Silence and Blind on Squall is actually beneficial due to the game's unusual mechanics.
What this all sums up to is that debuffs requires you to build to benefit from them and generally only in random encounters, while buffs require you to truly understand the game's mechanics to know which to use and how; whereas just damage magic and attacks require no special builds and work equally well on bosses and random encounters, and will generally have ways to break the game if you know the mechanics well enough to know which buffs to use.
Basically, it's the "Dominant Strategy" problem - it's not that buffs and debuffs are useless, but rather that attacks are more effective and easier to use, so they edge buffs and debuffs out, so that when a battle comes up where buffs and debuffs would help, people who aren't used to taking advantage of them will just resort to making the damaging abilities more powerful however they can, thus preserving the belief that grinding is the solution, rather than taking advantage of the alternative options the system offers.
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Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
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There's also the buffs/debuffs vs. status effects thing. FF usually codes its buffs and debuffs as positive and negative status effects, haste and slow being classic examples. Other games like DQ and SMT track them more separately, you have your status effects like poison and then your buffs/debuffs that either don't get a little icon or get a separate type of icon to mark which stat is altered and by how much.
The FF method is easier to code and easier for the player to keep track of, but it also makes it a lot less likely that any status effect immune bosses will be vulnerable to debuffs.
The FF method is easier to code and easier for the player to keep track of, but it also makes it a lot less likely that any status effect immune bosses will be vulnerable to debuffs.
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- Location
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Funny you should mention action economy, considering what major change to FF battle systems is gonna happen in the next game...
But we'll take ten turns to that bridge's one when we get to it.
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Buffs in my FFI and FFII playthroughs were genuinely important against challenging opponents, largely because the most threatening foes (Warmech, Chaos, Emperor) all have some means of healing, and the way defenses work means the difference between hitting for 200 damage and hitting for 2000. Trying to go without buffs and just hitting for max damage just seems like setting yourself up for your progress being cancelled by regen or Curaja. Your goal is to only have to punch twice.
So far my only debuff in FFIII is Poison; I gave it to Mimi and had her cast it in boss fights, but while the damage portion of the spell works, it never successfully inflicted the status effect.
Historically I've definitely been guilty of the "overgrinding for pure attack" strategy; Child Me was seemingly incapable of being bored by repetitive gameplay and didn't like to be challenged, so I always tackled every Pokémon gym with a team fully 5 levels above the Champion's to crush them utterly.
So far my only debuff in FFIII is Poison; I gave it to Mimi and had her cast it in boss fights, but while the damage portion of the spell works, it never successfully inflicted the status effect.
Historically I've definitely been guilty of the "overgrinding for pure attack" strategy; Child Me was seemingly incapable of being bored by repetitive gameplay and didn't like to be challenged, so I always tackled every Pokémon gym with a team fully 5 levels above the Champion's to crush them utterly.
I don't know when it shows up, but I have distinctive memories of my childhood self struggling to understand how the ATB system worked.
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I must travel over the next few days, and so updates are unlikely for about a week.
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False. Level 5 death originated several years earlier, inFinal Fantasy 5.
Of course, there it ignores instant death immunity and kills everyone who matches the level. So. Very strong.
But honestly as far as I can tell the series has never had a problem with buffs and debuffs being useless, it's often had a problem with one side or the other of the equation being useless (eg ff1 having debuffs largely worthless since your options for status/instant kill were inferior to Just Cast Flare or whatever to win rando encounters and bosses were largely immune in general) but not both ends at once, and honestly I learned years back at this point the simple fact that in a lot of the final fantasies it's not that debuffs are useless.
It's that their utility is completely opaque. In later games there's powerful bosses that can be slept to cost them their entire ability to act, 100% reliably, or silenced when they're a mage with weak physical attacks...
But there's basically no way to learn what bosses have what status vulnerabilities to know what to do without consulting a guide or just throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks.
Reading your latest exploits has had an added element of fun for me, because the DS version of Final Fantasy III is in fact the only one of the mainline titles I have played*. It must be something like fifteen years ago now, and it actually took me a while to be sure, especially as the graphics of the pixel remaster are different from the 3D, vaguely chibi-esque sprites of the DS version. But the plot was just vaguely familiar enough to evoke flickers of nostalgia, which is now in full force as we get deeper into the plot and I recognise more and more plot beats. Having Bahamut thrown at you relatively early on and needing to flee, in particular, is a moment which stuck in my memory because it was so dramatic and surprising.
This thread has clearly achieved its purpose, as I am now debating buying the pixel remaster on Steam, and also, more acutely aware than ever of my own impending mortality! 😅
*(The only other FF game period is another DS title which heavily used the stylus, was much more tactics oriented, and Google is telling me was Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. It had sky pirates ahoy, and I remember having a blast, despite the stylus being slightly cumbersome at times.)
This thread has clearly achieved its purpose, as I am now debating buying the pixel remaster on Steam, and also, more acutely aware than ever of my own impending mortality! 😅
*(The only other FF game period is another DS title which heavily used the stylus, was much more tactics oriented, and Google is telling me was Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. It had sky pirates ahoy, and I remember having a blast, despite the stylus being slightly cumbersome at times.)