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

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Omicron said:
Well, I can't accuse the game of not having challenge to still be found in place, goddamn. This ate a solid chunk of our time, and the rewards are… Abysmal. 0xp, 1 AP, and a Chef's Knife item that we can refine into Deaths. This was Not worth it.
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The Chef's Knife also refines to AP Ammo, used for Irvine's Limit Break. It's a very easy way to kill Tomberries, because this ammo ignores Vigor and Tomberries drop the very item used to refine the ammo.
Basically just keep Irvine at yellow hp and refine AP Ammo, maybe add Initiative/Spd-J, Str-J (and look, Pandemona gives both!) and some decent spells.
 
FF8's junction hell makes me appreciate the simplicity and elegance of 'every character has a fixed moveset, that they learn at reasonably fixed times' systems, like Chrono Trigger and Phantasy Star's.

It also allows for sickass combo moves, something still missing from the Final Fantasy series to this point in the LP. :(
 
foamy said:
FF8's junction hell makes me appreciate the simplicity and elegance of 'every character has a fixed moveset, that they learn at reasonably fixed times' systems, like Chrono Trigger and Phantasy Star's.

It also allows for sickass combo moves, something still missing from the Final Fantasy series to this point in the LP. :(
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Junctioning would be fine on the main character alone*. Fiddling with the system once and doing minor updates when you get new cool magic or whatever is fine for one character. It's repetition and constant switches that fuck shit up.

*Though GFs would need to be changed in how they work if only three are allowed to be equipped. There should either be a direct progression where you simply discard older GFs in favor of new ones, or maybe you could fuse old ones together to upgrade them...
 
It'd also work better if it wasn't fiddly and obtusely arranged. A modern remake could even have, like, a drop-down so you could select stat priority and so on and it would auto-junction stuff for you.

Of course, the better pick would be 'don't do this insanely fiddly very strange system when you need to swap characters so often'. But then it wouldn't be an FF game if it didn't have an exceptionally poorly-thought-out mechanic somewhere vital.
 
Omicron said:
Okay, not spreadsheets as such, but I opened a gdoc so I could finally write out the various traits of all the GFs in one easily-referenced format so that I could try and craft something resembling actual builds. Not optimizing my characters as such, just trying to figure out how to do some combos.

Basically: Brothers grants Cover, a passive ability that lets a character take hits for his teammates. Carbuncle grants Counter, a passive ability that lets a character retaliate when taking a physical hit. Previously, I had Carbuncle on Rinoa, who was otherwise specced as a mage, but that meant her Counter was comically weak. If I want to take full advantage of it, I need Brothers and Carbuncle on the same character so I can combine Cover + Counter and Junction a strong spell to Strength so they hit as hard as possible.

Meanwhile, Diablos grants Darkside, as mentioned before, which hits really hard but costs 10% HP; however, if I had a GF with Status Attack Junction, I can junction 100 Drains to Attack, and Darkside will drain as much HP as it costs to use. However, the only two GFs with ST-Atk-J I have are Carbuncle and Siren. Seeing as Carbuncle is already going on whoever has the Brothers, that means Siren is the only other option. And given that neither Diablos nor Siren have Strength Junction, that means Darkside will be comically weak unless I also junction one of the GFs with Str-J: Shiva, Ifrit, or Pandemona (Brothers also have Str-J, but they're going on the Carbuncle team). Seeing as I have 9 GFs and three characters, so everyone gets three GFs, that means one character will specifically have Diablos/Siren/Shiva, Diablos/Siren/Ifrit, or Diablos/Siren/Pandemona. With me so far?
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...Why not just put Diablos on the Brothers/Carbuncle team so they can recover HP on counterattacks then use Darkness on their own turn?

Omicron said:
…we are able to take this fight down to the wire, carefully taking wide chunks of Odin's HP until he's in OHK range then Drawing Triple and Death, then finishing him off with 45 seconds on the counter and a fat stack of 100 Triples for Quistis.


The benefits to Junctioning are, uh, kind of out of proportion with almost everything else we got.​
And that's Odin dealt with. A new GF has joined our roster.
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Funny that you've put this onto Quistis of all people, since the biggest game-breaking tactic of FF8 (and I figure telling you this now is harmless since you've already got a full stack of them) is to immediately go and win the Quistis card from the school cafeteria and refine it into 180 Triples. Triple is, by the way, near universally the second or third strongest Junction spell for any given stat. This is basically like getting Cloud's Ragnarok sword in Sector 7 immediately after the bombing mission. It's fucking insane how fast and hard this game can be shattered over your knees if you know what you're doing.
 
Wild of them to not only bring back what's effectively the fighting minigame from 7, but make it a mandatory life-or-death sequence.

Also, what do you MEAN you don't know what a lion is Rinoa? And yet you know what a Moomba is, which is *just* a cutesy, mascot-ified lion? ...All this time...did Rinoa just think Squall was going around wearing jewelry based on an edgy version of a kid's cartoon character? IS RINOA IN LOVE WITH A GUY WEARING THE IN-UNIVERSE EQUIVALENT OF THOSE BOOTLEG BART SIMPSON T-SHIRTS FROM THE 90'S?!
 
Surfacing from Dawntrail to give quick context on one of the weirder parts of this sequence:

Omicron said:
Squall: "It's not a monster. It's a lion. Lions are known for their strength and pride."
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The translation is missing some significant bits. Squall says it is 想像上の動物, which translates as "imaginary animal". He also doesn't just say "Lions are known for their strength and pride" calmly; he says "It's really strong. And proud... and strong."

In other words, lions do not exist in this setting. So Squall took a completely imaginary or fictional animal, decided it was "strong" enough to win any playground challenges, and commissioned accessories and a gunblade case based on it, while also naming his personal "lion".

I can't decide if it's more fitting for Squall to have come up with the "lion" on his own, going "my imaginary animal can beat up your imaginary animal", or if he picked up the idea of lions from his known canonical collection of shounen battle manga, and his Griever Collection is just his being attached to merch from those series.
 
Adloquium said:
Surfacing from Dawntrail to give quick context on one of the weirder parts of this sequence:



The translation is missing some significant bits. Squall says it is 想像上の動物, which translates as "imaginary animal". He also doesn't just say "Lions are known for their strength and pride" calmly; he says "It's really strong. And proud... and strong."

In other words, lions do not exist in this setting. So Squall took a completely imaginary or fictional animal, decided it was "strong" enough to win any playground challenges, and commissioned accessories and a gunblade case based on it, while also naming his personal "lion".

I can't decide if it's more fitting for Squall to have come up with the "lion" on his own, going "my imaginary animal can beat up your imaginary animal", or if he picked up the idea of lions from his known canonical collection of shounen battle manga, and his Griever Collection is just his being attached to merch from those series.
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wait wait


You're telling me, in the world of FF8, lions are fictional?




... You know, that makes more sense than I want to give it credit for. If dragons or whatnot are real, of course real animals can be fictional.
 
illhousen said:
Junctioning would be fine on the main character alone*. Fiddling with the system once and doing minor updates when you get new cool magic or whatever is fine for one character. It's repetition and constant switches that fuck shit up.

*Though GFs would need to be changed in how they work if only three are allowed to be equipped. There should either be a direct progression where you simply discard older GFs in favor of new ones, or maybe you could fuse old ones together to upgrade them...
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Kadmus said:
Of course, the better pick would be 'don't do this insanely fiddly very strange system when you need to swap characters so often'.
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I still hold that, if the game enforced a limited number of junctioned GF per character, never un-junctioned anybody, and made the Affinity mechanic more high-impact in what it affected, thus encouraging the player to equip a specific GF to a specific character and keeping it equipped to them at all times, a lot of the annoyance would be reduced. A perfect fix would also require adjusting the way magic is stored/organized and how the auto-junction works, but that's not as hard as getting players in the mentality of keeping GF and characters paired, which is the main thing.

GilliamYaeger said:
Funny that you've put this onto Quistis of all people, since the biggest game-breaking tactic of FF8 (and I figure telling you this now is harmless since you've already got a full stack of them) is to immediately go and win the Quistis card from the school cafeteria and refine it into 180 Triples.
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I mean, technically you need Diablos, with his Space-Time Refine, to do that, but yes. There's reasons Card Mod is considered essential to breaking the game, and this is one of the main ones.

Of course, this would be much less of an issue if the Soul of Thamasa either refined in something else - 15 Meteor would be my pick, since you can't refine that until you get Refine Forbidden Magic, and Meteor refining items are missing a "more than 5 spells" option, making it a reasonable prize for a rank 10 card - or delay the GF that hands you over Space-Time Refine in its absurd overpowered glory (in addition to Triple, which is there in that list of "contenders for the spot of best spell in the game", it also provides Demi, Double, Haste and Stop, all of whom are individually useful in battle and extremely powerful for junction in different ways), or best of all, both. Changing what the Quistis card refines into, and moving the Souls of Thamasa to a different character card, would also have worked fine for limiting this particular problem.

Overall, it's things like these that make me say that they didn't really playtest for balance (even if they playtested for other things, which was pointed out to me they definitely did, considering the lack of bugs in FFVIII compared to, say, FFVI), since these are all things that'd be trivial to fix. But they're not fixed, and FFVIII is thus shattered, in gameplay terms, with extreme ease.
 
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foamy said:
wait wait


You're telling me, in the world of FF8, lions are fictional?




... You know, that makes more sense than I want to give it credit for. If dragons or whatnot are real, of course real animals can be fictional.
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This dialogue indeed states outright that lions are fictional in FFVIII's setting. No indication on whether it's fictional like dragons are fictional in RL (ie the general concept is commonly known and essentially public domain), or if it's specific to a piece of media that Squall likes (eg Moogles or Tonberries), or if Squall came up with it all on his own, and is effectively going "original Griever do not steal".

With how FFVIII has been going, I would also be entirely unsurprised if a random encounter somewhere had lions, or critters using lion models, and nobody ever comments on this.
 
Omicron said:
3. Junction Schmunction
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So, I like this section a whole lot, because it shows off the unrealized potential of the Junction system.

Which is let down by three things:
1. The sources of magic and GFs to enable the system are poorly and awkwardly balanced, so it is easy to get a basic and blunt overpowered setup if you deliberately break them, but tricky to get all the right stuff if you just play casually.
2. The cast is constantly shifting. This relates to 1 because it is part of why getting magic is awkward, but it adds the new wrinkle that you never really know who needs to have what magic. Honestly makes you wonder if a fixed cast of only a few characters would have worked better with the system in my eyes.

3. The menus of this game are a grey and white nested hellscape. I am not sure if casual readers of this LP understand just how bad these are to get through. To give one example, to junction a status effect onto your attack you might need to:
- Open the junction menu.
- Select the character you want to use.
- Navigate to and select the option to manually junction spells.
- Page over twice in order to get to the screen with status junctions.
- Discover that you do not have a GF junctioned with that junction.
- Back out to the GF junction part and move one of those GFs from whoever currently has them.
- Navigate to and select the option to manually junction spells.
- Page over twice in order to get to the screen with status junctions.
- Select the slot for an attack junction.
- Discover that the character does not have the spell in question.
- Back out of the junction menu entirely.
- Open the magic menu.
- Select the character you want to use.
- Select the menu options to move spells.
- Hunt through the other characters to find who has that spell.
- Transfer the spell to your intended character.
- Back out of the magic menu entirely.
- Open the junction menu.
- Select the character you want to use.
- Navigate to and select the option to manually junction spells.
- Page over twice in order to get to the screen with status junctions.
- Select the slot for an attack junction.
- Select the spell.
 
illhousen said:
Junctioning would be fine on the main character alone*. Fiddling with the system once and doing minor updates when you get new cool magic or whatever is fine for one character. It's repetition and constant switches that fuck shit up.
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Thus, Persona. I doubt that's an intentional part of the design of those games, but there's some definite similarities between the concept of GFs and the Wild Card's ability to switch personas.
 
Omicron said:
We know people raise chocobos. We know people have cats and dogs. We know Moombas are used as pseudo-animal labor. But we haven't seen any livestock, have we? Farm animals?

Like, in retrospect, 'sometimes moonbeams turn your cows into superpowered hornbeasts' would be an issue for farming. And furthermore, 'the minotaurs are interfertile with your cows, so even if you keep your cattle safe from the Lunar Cry sometimes they pass through your field and ten months later you have a brood of Catoblepas on your hands' would make it even more difficult.

(Fun story: My aunt raises organic, free-range pigs for a living. They had one sow that was always kind of temperamental, physically a little different from the others, not so much the runt of the litter as the aggressive delinquent pig of the family. When came the time to do the dirty deed, they brought her to a professional as they do all their pigs, who told them 'yeah, I can't take that one, that's a boar-pig hybrid, hygiene rules won't let us.' That's the kind of thing we deal with in that business, I suppose.)

FF8 has the same kind of empty world as FF7, with vast stretches of plains and wilderness and unoccupied places between human settlements, and I'm getting the impression that part of the reason for that, on top of the monsters just being monsters, is that their existence makes raising livestock impossible? Dogs and cats are small and have a personal relationship with you, and chocobos are kind of basically already monsters, just friendly ones, but sheep, cows, horses? I'd wager that perhaps the only animal you can raise for food in this world might be, like, chickens
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illhousen said:
That's what Garden students who couldn't graduate as SeeDs do for a living.

They're still strong enough to take down a couple of monsters now and then, after all.

If not for Edea, that would've been Seifer's fate as well.
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This is why we don't see a bunch of dropouts turned to banditry. You either pass, and become a SeeD, gaining fame and fortune on the frontlines, or you wash out and are gifted a nice plot of land and access to NORG backed farming subsidies. The Gardens have been Ag schools the whole time.
 
Adloquium said:
Surfacing from Dawntrail to give quick context on one of the weirder parts of this sequence:



The translation is missing some significant bits. Squall says it is 想像上の動物, which translates as "imaginary animal". He also doesn't just say "Lions are known for their strength and pride" calmly; he says "It's really strong. And proud... and strong."

In other words, lions do not exist in this setting. So Squall took a completely imaginary or fictional animal, decided it was "strong" enough to win any playground challenges, and commissioned accessories and a gunblade case based on it, while also naming his personal "lion".

I can't decide if it's more fitting for Squall to have come up with the "lion" on his own, going "my imaginary animal can beat up your imaginary animal", or if he picked up the idea of lions from his known canonical collection of shounen battle manga, and his Griever Collection is just his being attached to merch from those series.
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Nothing could have possibly prepared me for this piece of knowledge. This is incredible. Squall is truly one of the characters of all time, FF8 is doing it like no one else would.
 
Wow Omi you should go and kill like, twenty of those tonberries for no particular reason. On another note, Squall has a lot more going on than I remember, and it makes me like him more. Benefit of being older and having someone point it out to me I guess.
 
illhousen said:
Though GFs would need to be changed in how they work if only three are allowed to be equipped. There should either be a direct progression where you simply discard older GFs in favor of new ones, or maybe you could fuse old ones together to upgrade them...
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My favored method is the FF7 remake weapon system.

Each new GF would share LV and a max skill point after which you can customize it your liking, ideally with an auto allocate feature existing if you want to not fiddle with the menus.
 
illhousen said:
Junctioning would be fine on the main character alone*. Fiddling with the system once and doing minor updates when you get new cool magic or whatever is fine for one character. It's repetition and constant switches that fuck shit up.

*Though GFs would need to be changed in how they work if only three are allowed to be equipped. There should either be a direct progression where you simply discard older GFs in favor of new ones, or maybe you could fuse old ones together to upgrade them...
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Rpg players tend to be squirrelly about even player controlled and player enemy different rulesets, player protagonist and player party different rulesets (besides, a special ability), one of them being significantly simpler would make a certain kind of rpg player howl. It occasionally happens in jrpgs (persona 3 for example) and almost every time people complain a lot (persona 3 psp remake\port added a fully controllable party mode and made it the default because of those complaints for example).
 
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I wonder how learning magic works with the gameplay mechanics. Can you only use magic you drew/refined/etc if you know how? Or is that kid casting Firaga all on his own? Are the elite SEEDs actually just idiots desperately reliant on external help? The worldbuilding so far doesn't suggest so.
 
Considering magic (or para-magic) seems a lot like grenades/bullets/one-use items, it could even be that someone gave this kid a firaga and told him to have fun.
 
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