Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
- Location
- NC
I'd never thought of it before, but it is suddenly my firm headcanon that Texas is Final Fantasy fiction. Having a saloon/bar called Texas Cowboy is like having a club with Oz or Wonderland in the title. Little FF girls dress up as cowgirls instead of fairy princesses. Texas and the Wild West are their Narnia or Middle Earth or whatever.
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- He/Him
Yeah, Tifa's full slots is amazingly devastating if you can nail the timings. I usually blew the last one IIRC but it was still good.
@Omicron: With respect to materia, different ones give different stat penalties and bonuses, and different equipment can have differing slot counts, including 0. The upshot is that while you're unlikely to intentionally have characters with absolutely nothing slotted, you may very well choose to skimp on the materia in order to avoid overspecialization and/or in order to use more physically powerful gear.
Essentially, as your materia and gear selection improve, you can make almost anyone do almost anything, but their stats will be appropriate to the archetype you built them to. It's a good system; VI's magicite is a kind of prototype for it.
Three Seagrass is mine, not Omi's.
Fuck, that's right. Uh, whoops?
- Location
- England, unfortunately.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Eh, depends on the kind of player.
I never really get the mentality of wanting to make any character do anything. It's good for kicks (Look at the swole guy do magic!), but I always need at least some level of specialisation to make me have that sense of gameplay and story integration, otherwise haraters just kind of bleed together to me. I never really felt like I was being encouraged to push certain characters into certain playstyles outside of aesthetics, and whilst that might be an incentive for some, for me I just end up asking why I should mechanically give a shit about any character I'm not emotionally invested in, which is why the first 5 party members were probably the ones I used the most overall since I was with them the longest.
I'd like to stress - This isn't a bad system! Hell, I think it's super solid and I did end up doing some builds, albeit basic ones. But I just feel that it's more meant to work in tandem with something else than it is meant to be the entire system. One of the things that actually interests me about remake is the fact that characters fight in very different ways,
7 tries to give some of that with limit breaks, but... I'll get to my gripes there when it comes up.
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- He/Him
I can see that, but making Barret my healbot and turning the intended support mage into a punch wizard always makes me smile.
- Location
- Texas
Texas is a multi-versal constant in all settings except those where California has finally fallen off the continent into the ocean. In those timelines, Texas has conquered the western United States and transformed into its ultimate form, Texlaska.
Were there any SOLDIERs there in the Remake? Might point to the Shinra False Flag angle being a constant between the two versions.
Though I vaguely remember…nah, I'll dump that thought into the other thread when I get the chance.
Once more, the D&D influences are obvious.
Maybe it's just VII NPCs having so much more character, but I can vividly imagine the lowest-bidder Contractor ordering the wrong size vent and just shrugging, the minimum pay security guard originally assigned there seeing the vent and just shrugging, the techs installing the new security system (and thus making the security guard redundant and let go) seeing the vent and shrugging…
Just a collective "not my job, not my problem" mood combined with "let's not tell the higher-ups their fancy new security system is useless".
MiskWisk
Hoot
- Location
- Somewhere devoid of wit
- Pronouns
- He
It's definitely something. The side games that got released kind of address this but they also came out after the game so it's hard to say whether the stuff in them was cut backstory that they then fleshed out, or came up with after the fact to try and justify things.
I'll hold off saying anything for now until a later point in the game though
Final Fantasy 7 has three characters with unique limit break systems. Tifa is the first. It'll be fairly self explanatory but for now just focus on getting "Yeah!" for the damage boost.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
7 does do that under the hood.
For example- some characters hypothetically max out at 100 Strength, others max out at 85, one maxes out at 78. A 20% (ish) increase in attack stats is pretty significant.
Not that the game is so hard that you need to make use of that; Barrett can definitely be your healbot if you want.
- Location
- England, unfortunately.
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- She/They
You have simultaneously missed the point of what annoys me about it as well as immediately proving your point irrelevant.
My issue isn't stats, mostly because I end up very much not feeling them, and because as you mention, it's not actually that important to focus on unless I end up doing stuff in the postgame, and I have no interest in the Superbosses thank you.
My problem is that mechanically, outside of numbers, Barret and Cloud with the same materia barely play any differently. About the biggest thing separating them is weapon reach and how much damage they do from the backrow... neither of which actually impacts how using these characters feels to me, especially with certain materia/equipment combos.
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
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- He/Him
I mean, SOLDIERs might just be not deployed within Midgar? You don't need your supersoldiers running around in your centre of power unless things have gone extremely wrong, you should have enough mook skullbreakers to do the job as-is. We see militarised police in the first Mako reactor, and a bunch of like, experiments and monsters and robots? In the second one, so it's implied there that the reactors are just, well, guarded by Not Supersoldiers. Which makes sense, given the reactors are supposed to be in the city Shinra runs as its private fief. You want your military pointed outwards, normally.
Plus it's sort of implied they aren't exactly, uh, reliable, given we've seen one confirmed traitor (Cloud) and a dude who murdered someone in the Mako reactor scene with TIfa and who President Shinra describes as 'too brilliant', so that's 2 for 2 on 'maybe not people you want near your headquarters'.
Plus it's sort of implied they aren't exactly, uh, reliable, given we've seen one confirmed traitor (Cloud) and a dude who murdered someone in the Mako reactor scene with TIfa and who President Shinra describes as 'too brilliant', so that's 2 for 2 on 'maybe not people you want near your headquarters'.
Tifa Lockhart is italian according to the memes 
Geckonator
Saint of Awe
Yeah, "magic is equipment" sounds cool as a way to sell the game's themes of modernity, technology, capitalism literally draining the magic from the world to make a usable product...
But it means that you kind of have to "make your own fun" if you want characters to have any kind of mechanical distinction beyond Limit Breaks and the vague suggestion of magic versus physical prowess. It's useful in that it means reconfiguring your party, or being forced into certain parties for story reasons, is low-cost and adaptable, but there's definitely a more advanced version of FF7 out there where maybe party members have different compatibility with Materia or ability to use them to nudge you into more role-playing.
But it means that you kind of have to "make your own fun" if you want characters to have any kind of mechanical distinction beyond Limit Breaks and the vague suggestion of magic versus physical prowess. It's useful in that it means reconfiguring your party, or being forced into certain parties for story reasons, is low-cost and adaptable, but there's definitely a more advanced version of FF7 out there where maybe party members have different compatibility with Materia or ability to use them to nudge you into more role-playing.
- Location
- Not the asylum anymore
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- She/Her
Spaghetti westerns.Tifa Lockhart is italian according to the memes
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
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- He/Him
Not by birth, but by senatorial appointment.Tifa Lockhart is italian according to the memes
Guile
Having a really great time right now
Look, you can't just deploy Roche, Speed Demon, after the first little minor setback/reactor explosion.
You have to work up to using SOLDIER.
You start with base security.
Then giant robots, science mutants. Land fish. Whatever your bloated R&D budget has handy.
THEN you can bring in SOLDIER.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
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- He/Him
The simplest solution is just to make materia like equipment is prior games, each having a subset of the cast who can use it, with a handwave about compatibility.
A more likely/better fit to the compatibility narrative compromise solution would be for each character have an AP multiplier for each materia, so that, say, Cloud could get to higher skills on physical materia twice as fast as [redacted] but be close to base AP gain on spell materia, while [redacted] has the other way around, and do something similar for size of stat modifiers. You'd have to cut the AP drops from monsters to avoid breaking the game, of course.
It'd never happen outside mods, of course, and I've nowhere near the under the hood knowlege to say how ambitious such a mod would be.
Geckonator
Saint of Awe
Cloud's actually got the second highest magic stat in the game, I learned from the wiki. According to some dummied out content found over the years the party members have job titles and Cloud's was "Mystic Knight", which matches him coming equipped with Thunder Materia. He probably best fits as a "glass cannon" who equips a lot of damaging elemental Materia but not as many support skills.
There actually is a mod for this kind of thing, I found while browsing around, but it's also a basically whole-game rebalance and redesign around this principle, which is basically getting into turning FFVII into a completely different game mechanically just built into the story of the original.
Cae's FF7 Mods - Coates
This project began as a completely self-imposed class challenge for Final Fantasy VII within the vanilla framework of The Reunion -- a player would simply consult a document which specified what characters could and could not do in the game, but the game files themselves remained as in vanilla
sites.google.com
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- Location
- England, unfortunately.
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- She/They
Okay, so the only ask I have is if I can keep PS1 overworld Cloud. Because I actually like that model more than realistically proportioned Cloud.Cloud's actually got the second highest magic stat in the game, I learned from the wiki; according to some dummied out content found over the years the party members have job titles and Cloud's was "Mystic Knight", which matches him coming equipped with Thunder Materia. He probably best fits as a "glass cannon" who equips a lot of damaging elemental Materia but not as many support skills.
There actually is a mod for this kind of thing, I found while browsing around, but it's also a basically whole-game rebalance and redesign around this principle.
Cae's FF7 Mods - Coates
This project began as a completely self-imposed class challenge for Final Fantasy VII within the vanilla framework of The Reunion -- a player would simply consult a document which specified what characters could and could not do in the game, but the game files themselves remained as in vanilla
Because if so, you might just have incentivised me to play FF7 again. Something I wasn't sure I'd ever do.
Geckonator
Saint of Awe
Yes, the author is just playing with, like, all the graphical mods (I actually decided against using any after looking up some more footage of Satsuki Yatoshi and finding some of the upscales they don't use for the main advertising actually look really bad in action).
You do also have to use Reunion for it, though.
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- Location
- England, unfortunately.
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- She/They
Given the stuff you've been posting about the translation, I'm more than down for that.
Might need a few days though given I've got an upcoming interview. And maybe finally get a replacement USB controller to replace my busted one.
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- He/Him
I always figured he got Bolt (and Ice) because his name is Cloud.
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- Location
- Spain
Trails From The Sky definetively exists, yes.
- Location
- Florida USA
You are the second person I have seen using the term "Glup Shitto".
Anyway.... reads Omi's remarks about Tifa... once again I see our LPer is a man of taste and refinement. Then again, he is French, I suppose it's to be expected.
I know this is one of the first games to have a huge shipping war involved but I just never felt it, I was always pro-Tifa on that regard, even before I knew what "shipping" was. Then spent years mocking the idea of shipping and plotting torpedo attacks upon them for sport before the Korrasami shippers made my heart grow three sizes one day, but that's another story.