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

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Egleris said:
Trine is substantially weaker than Beta and Aqualung anyway, and it's not that easy to find enemies who resist both yet are weak to Trine. And trying to max up every Enemy Skill materia is... the very opposite of "not tedious", really. Quite incredibly frustrating, in fact.

Also, I suspect Omicron might not want to put Enemy Skill on every single character. You know, for the sake of diversifying builds, and all that.
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Well, sure, not saying he should go get Trine or anything now that it's been missed. Gaea's Cliff is a right hassle.

I kinda figured he would've nabbed Beta on the other E.Skills when he went back for Aerith's limit, though. :V That's a worthwhile pickup, y'know?
 
foamy said:
You... didn't go back to the Zolom at the first opportunity to get Beta on your other E.Skills? You have at this point unfortunately lost any further opportunities for Trine -- the only options are Godo, the Materia Keeper, and an enemy in Gaea's Cliff that you have to manipulate. Aqualung's still available, but only in a fairly specific set of encounters that I think you'd need to be pointed to to find at this point in the game.
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I have no intention to fill any of the other Enemy Skill Materias beyond the one on which I'm already learning spells. The game is already easy enough with only one character having access to Big Guard and Beta/Aqualung/Trine, and having mutually exclusive Materia choices is the only real way I have of making characters distinct from each other - Yuffie is my dedicated Enemy Skill user, while Cloud gets Cover/Counter Attack, and Tifa gets Sense, for instance.
 
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Omicron said:
I have no intention to fill any of the other Enemy Skill Materias beyond the one on which I'm already learning spells. The game is already easy enough with only one character having access to Big Guard and Beta/Aqualung/Trine, and having mutually exclusive Materia choices is one of the few ways I have of making characters distinct from each other - Yuffie is my dedicated Enemy Skill user, while Cloud gets Cover/Counter Attack, and Tifa gets Sense, for instance.
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Ah, okay, fair enough! I was offering it as a way to cut Summon tedium, but, yeah, E.Skill is a do-everything materia and more than one gets (even more) ridiculous and I can see why you'd steer in the direction of uniqueness.

Although, FWIW, some materia I think are worthwhile to have multiples of, even given that. Support materia obviously but also I really like having additional copies of Steal, Cover, and Restore. Cover stacks (as do a few others, e.g. Counter, Counter Attack, Pre-Emptive) so parking multiple copies of it on someone can get you to 100% proc rate way before you get to a fully leveled materia. It's how I turned Aerith into a nearly unkillable tank :D
 
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Omicron said:
The Sector 7 railway station, like we've seen it so many times before - welcoming us after the Mako Reactor #1 attack, disgorging travelers returned from the Wutai war as Elmyra waits in vain for her husband, having just deposited Aerith and Ifalna with the latter on the verge of death, waiting to maybe, perhaps take some last-second refugees away before the Plate collapses.

The Sector 7 train has always, in a strange way, been associated with death.
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…I tossed off a cheap joke the last time this came up, but at this point you're clearly into something here:
Omicron said:
What these ghosts are supposed to mean for the general metaphysics of the setting, or why they're haunting a train graveyard, I have no idea. Maybe they're train ghosts?

The train/ghost connection is interesting, though, because it's coming back from FFVI. Not in any way near as obvious as "train that literally carries the dead," but there's a train "graveyard" and it contains ghost, so it's clearly a theme that the series is angling for, and I'm not sure where it's coming from - there's no cultural association between trains and ghosts that I'm aware of in either Japan or the West, so this genuinely seems like a homemade idea. And that's cool! I like it.
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Wait… does this mean…

FFVII / Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows connection confirmed.
 
Trains are in general a pretty good metaphor for death and the afterlife (or the unknown as a whole), given their surety of direction; both in the sense of an inexorable yet potentially unknown destination and in the lack of control passengers have over it. They're inherently transitory and therefore liminal. Also, you can have neat, otherworldly views out the windows, encounters with other strange passengers and the slow realization of wait, this isn't a normal train as such things occur.

Fun stuff for writers, so no wonder it keeps cropping up.
 
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Omicron said:
That's the key factor that is being ignored in discussions about overlong summon animation: A summon animation takes more time to play than Beta or Firaga-All or five physical attacks... But all these require me to stay at my keyboard and watch the game and adapt to consequences. Summon animations take care of themselves while I do something else.

The most efficient approach to any random encounter in the game is to use physical attacks to kill everything, because enemies are too weak to threaten my characters and the damage they do inflict only builds up Limit which makes wiping the next encounter easier. My main approach to combat isn't based on effectiveness or efficiency, it's based on reducing tedium.
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So I actually thought of this before but couldn't find your comment that brought it up, but luckily you said something similar again so yay me. :V

And that is: I wonder if you weren't a bit spoiled by the Pixel Remasters and how that may affect you going forward with these games. Specifically, the Auto Battle feature.

Because the thing is, the general principle behind the random encounters in FF7 is no different than all of the previous games (most efficient way is to spam Attack, etc.), but there's no QOL update applied here like there was before, so you have to sit there and push a button rather than sit back and cruise through. And I do remember you really rolling on with Auto Battle because you'd bring it up, especially when you'd get wrecked on a "stronger than usual" encounter and had to actually pay attention again. :V

I don't know if the PC versions of FF VIII and beyond have any kind of Auto Battle system, but I'm afraid you're probably going to be stuck with the same annoyance you're finding here going forward, at least for the next few games until they switch away from the Random Encounter model and you'll either hate it worse or like it better. But at least it'll be different lol

It also helps contextualize, for me at least, why you're so annoyed at things like Gaea's Cliff when I didn't find it so bad for myself. But then, I played most heavily back when it first came out, and all I knew were the original SNES versions of (US numbering here) FF3 and to a lesser extent FF2 - as well as Earthbound. And as a general rule, so long as the encounter rate wasn't too annoying I was mostly fine with it. But this is the first game in this LP series - after the six you previously played - that is actually forcing you into interacting fully with the battle system every single battle so yeah, I can definitely see how that would get old and annoying pretty quick, especially if turn-based menu-action combat isn't your jam to begin with.
 
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Unfortunately I dont think autobattle is really a thing until 12, assuming no added QoL features here on out
 
RogueIce said:
So I actually thought of this before but couldn't find your comment that brought it up, but luckily you said something similar again so yay me. :V

And that is: I wonder if you weren't a bit spoiled by the Pixel Remasters and how that may affect you going forward with these games. Specifically, the Auto Battle feature.

Because the thing is, the general principle behind the random encounters in FF7 is no different than all of the previous games (most efficient way is to spam Attack, etc.), but there's no QOL update applied here like there was before, so you have to sit there and push a button rather than sit back and cruise through. And I do remember you really rolling on with Auto Battle because you'd bring it up, especially when you'd get wrecked on a "stronger than usual" encounter and had to actually pay attention again. :V

I don't know if the PC versions of FF VIII and beyond have any kind of Auto Battle system, but I'm afraid you're probably going to be stuck with the same annoyance you're finding here going forward, at least for the next few games until they switch away from the Random Encounter model and you'll either hate it worse or like it better. But at least it'll be different lol

It also helps contextualize, for me at least, why you're so annoyed at things like Gaea's Cliff when I didn't find it so bad for myself. But then, I played most heavily back when it first came out, and all I knew were the original SNES versions of (US numbering here) FF3 and to a lesser extent FF2 - as well as Earthbound. And as a general rule, so long as the encounter rate wasn't too annoying I was mostly fine with it. But this is the first game in this LP series - after the six you previously played - that is actually forcing you into interacting fully with the battle system every single battle so yeah, I can definitely see how that would get old and annoying pretty quick, especially if turn-based menu-action combat isn't your jam to begin with.
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I really wish that Square would do a Pixel Remaster style remake of 7. Actually, I tell a lie. I wish they'd do a FFIII/FFIV DS style remake, but those fell out of fashion when hardware improved.

Regardless, EverCrisis is the closest I'll get to that, and it's so loaded with monetization schemes that I doubt it will be worth it.
 
RogueIce said:
So I actually thought of this before but couldn't find your comment that brought it up, but luckily you said something similar again so yay me. :V

And that is: I wonder if you weren't a bit spoiled by the Pixel Remasters and how that may affect you going forward with these games. Specifically, the Auto Battle feature.

Because the thing is, the general principle behind the random encounters in FF7 is no different than all of the previous games (most efficient way is to spam Attack, etc.), but there's no QOL update applied here like there was before, so you have to sit there and push a button rather than sit back and cruise through. And I do remember you really rolling on with Auto Battle because you'd bring it up, especially when you'd get wrecked on a "stronger than usual" encounter and had to actually pay attention again. :V

I don't know if the PC versions of FF VIII and beyond have any kind of Auto Battle system, but I'm afraid you're probably going to be stuck with the same annoyance you're finding here going forward, at least for the next few games until they switch away from the Random Encounter model and you'll either hate it worse or like it better. But at least it'll be different lol

It also helps contextualize, for me at least, why you're so annoyed at things like Gaea's Cliff when I didn't find it so bad for myself. But then, I played most heavily back when it first came out, and all I knew were the original SNES versions of (US numbering here) FF3 and to a lesser extent FF2 - as well as Earthbound. And as a general rule, so long as the encounter rate wasn't too annoying I was mostly fine with it. But this is the first game in this LP series - after the six you previously played - that is actually forcing you into interacting fully with the battle system every single battle so yeah, I can definitely see how that would get old and annoying pretty quick, especially if turn-based menu-action combat isn't your jam to begin with.
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Yes, that is absolutely correct.

I just don't enjoy old-school random encounter-based gameplay. Which is not the same thing as saying I don't enjoy Final Fantasy gameplay; when the games are actually serving challenging encounters with interesting mechanics that force me to actually use my toolkit, I enjoy it a lot. But 99% of the game is instead spent deleting the same pointless random encounters, and that's a major reason why I spend most of my Final Fantasy playtime listening to podcasts. There's nothing there, it's just pushing buttons until it's over. The QoL features of the Pixel Remaster have been a huge boon to my experience of the game and I have been missing them since I started FF7. One of the reasons I was looking into emulating the game towards the start was because they have the option to accelerate the game, so dealing with all that stuff would have been a lot faster.

By contrast, while I never went very far into Persona 5, its combination of non-random encounters (enemies are entities on the map that you fight by running into) and complex gameplay where you want to actually care about which abilities you're using on which opponents because of elemental affinities and such made it a lot more fun to play through, as I remember it anyway.

Interestingly though, that's a change from where I was as a child/teenager. Younger me's standard approach to Pokémon gameplay, for instance, was to just grind forever until all my Pokémons were several levels above the next gym and then roll over the opposition with overwhelming power. I can't really do that anymore. @foamy talked about grinding his way to having all LBs unlocked before Junon and one-shotting Bottomswell and, meaning no offense, the very idea makes me die inside. I am already kind of regretting doing some backtracking earlier in this playthrough and incidentally pushing my characters a few levels up in the process because at this stage even the bosses are too easy.

The random encounters are at least more spread out than in previous games, separated by large chunks of pure plot; our last update consisted for the most part of a couple of fights early on where I tested Neo Bahamut, then Jenova-DEATH, then it's nothing but cutscenes for half an hour. This makes the pacing of the gameplay weird. It also means that between these long stretches of plot and the random encounters, FF7 is much, much longer than previous games by a pretty fair margin and is a rather chonky endeavour to play through. If the game's writing wasn't so compelling, I would maybe struggle with finishing this Let's Play! On the other hand, the sheer density of the writing is why every update is over 5,000 words individually and it's taking so much time and things would go faster if the game were less dense, so who knows.
 
Reduce FFVII to two dimensions with brand-new pixel art, give it a full re-translation with an actual team, call it a Pixel Remaster, swim around in your pools of new money.
 
Omicron said:
Interestingly though, that's a change from where I was as a child/teenager. Younger me's standard approach to Pokémon gameplay, for instance, was to just grind forever until all my Pokémons were several levels above the next gym and then roll over the opposition with overwhelming power. I can't really do that anymore. @foamy talked about grinding his way to having all LBs unlocked before Junon and one-shotting Bottomswell and, meaning no offense, the very idea makes me die inside.
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I grant I play video games in unusual ways; I don't think most people who play FF7 do that. It certainly isn't the intended play curve.
But I find walking in circles interspersed with dopamine hits whenever a I see a 'level up' bing on the battle results screen soothing.

Also, to be perfectly honest, I had extremely bad memories of the reception minigame and was avoiding it. Turned out not as bad as I recalled and the march was actually really simple compared to what I remembered too so that all went well.

Having Aerith's L3 unlocks up also allowed me to grind more or less indefinitely without needing to return to town so time kind of flew by on me :V
 
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Omicron said:
non-random encounters (enemies are entities on the map that you fight by running into)
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This makes such a huge difference.

Part of it is that it objectively makes the game easier when you're exploring or doing a puzzle: clearing the enemies once means you're free to wander around uninterrupted.

But another part is purely psychological: it just feels better to know in advance you're going to initiate battle now rather than anticipate its beginning in ten steps but not knowing for sure when exactly it's going to happen.

Making enemies present on the map improves RPGs in every way even if the rest of mechanics stay exactly the same.
 
Omicron said:
By contrast, while I never went very far into Persona 5, its combination of non-random encounters (enemies are entities on the map that you fight by running into) and complex gameplay where you want to actually care about which abilities you're using on which opponents because of elemental affinities and such made it a lot more fun to play through, as I remember it anyway.
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Chrono Trigger also has this feature! Sometimes they stay gone, more often they reset when you reload the area, but either way you see them first.

So it isn't like Square was unaware of doing things that way. They simply chose not to, for whatever reasons they had -- simplicity of design, resource use, who knows.
 
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One of the reasons I'm excited to get to FFX is that while it's still very far from perfect, it's battle system is probably my favourite of the turn-based/ATB games.

The other reason is Lulu.
 
For me, it depends on what kind of game I'm playing. SMT, I'm more likely to be somewhere in the middle, running from some fights and not others, dependent on a wide variety of circumstances. Wild Arms 1 and 2, I avoid many of the encounters and use the EXP multiplier tickets on boss fights (keeping the difficulty at a pretty good place the whole way through for 2; haven't finished my more recent playthrough of 1 yet). There are even some where I still fight pretty much every battle, though those are becoming less common for me (though if it's action-based rather than turn-based, it's more likely, I've found).

Chrono Trigger, I'm curious how I'd play now if I went back to it. My playstyle has changed rather significantly since I last gave it a go.
 
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Personally, I think that the "explore the world map" sequences work better with actually random encounters - I feel it adds a much bigger sense of traveling. That said, it is still possible to make visible world map encounter work without making the world feel too small (I like the way the DQVIII remake goes about it), and in general being able to control encounters in some way, either by them being visible or through abilities/items (like the mog amulet in FFVI) is probably the better design choice.

I mean, I think everybody can agree that FFVII, even with the world itself being small, does feel like a world-spanning adventure with lot of exploration and travel (I think @Omicron said as much in the "let's murder the Midgar Zolom" update?), and I don't think that would work within an environment that allowed the level of granularity necessary to include avoidable encounters.

Also, about this:

foamy said:
Chrono Trigger also has this feature! Sometimes they stay gone, more often they reset when you reload the area, but either way you see them first.
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I'll put my answer in spoilers, even if it's just minor game mechanics quibbles.

This was not my experience playing Chrono Trigger; sure, things are that way at the beginning, but further into the game the encounters aren't avoidable, they're mandatory whenever you go through one of the "encounter locations" that any given area happens to have, and are usually not visible upon entering an area. Unless I somehow completely missed an "avoid encounter" mechanic somewhere? I can't remember actually visibly avoidable encounters anywhere after entering the post-apocalypse time period.
 
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TWEWY doesn't strictly have random encounters since hollowsnoises can't interact with you unless you yourself are doing stuff on the spiritual plane, but it still has one twist on the formula that really rocks.

If you get caught during traversal, the game doesn't immediately launch into the battle. Instead it gives you an opportunity to kinda pick how loud you want to go. If you crave some hubris you can totally pre-escalate that single encounter into grueling gauntlet where you literally extinguish the entire monstrous population of the area in a single herculean stroke.
You wouldn't really be fighting less doing that than if you did old-fashioned single battles even if the TWEWY had traditional random encounters, but it's fun to get to pick your own pacing.
 
Egleris said:
I'll put my answer in spoilers, even if it's just minor game mechanics quibbles.

This was not my experience playing Chrono Trigger; sure, things are that way at the beginning, but further into the game the encounters aren't avoidable, they're mandatory whenever you go through one of the "encounter locations" that any given area happens to have, and are usually not visible upon entering an area. Unless I somehow completely missed an "avoid encounter" mechanic somewhere? I can't remember actually visibly avoidable encounters anywhere after entering the post-apocalypse time period.
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Every repeatable encounter as you go through the game is in fact visible on the map, and the vast majority (I want to say something like 93%?) are avoidable, with me personally finding doing so rather easy as someone who enjoys playing platformer games. However, they're frequently camouflaged later in the game, so you need to actually remember they're there on repeat visits to a screen, and doing so can require quite precise movement for the controls you're given, so I can easily see someone who isn't a fan of platformers thinking dodging them is impossible. I did find I often considered it less hassle to just kill them off.
 
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