Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
...man, with that perfect combination of "unearthly science-fantasy beauty" and "complete architectural nightmare" you could plop Esthar down in FF14 with absolutely no changes and it would fit right in.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Weird that Edea's base Strength is higher than her base Magic.
Alsatian?
...Which'd just raise further questions over Earth parallels.
"Zome thingz vill newer change!"
Alsatian?
...Which'd just raise further questions over Earth parallels.
"Zome thingz vill newer change!"
WE RETURN WITH MORE CHILDREN'S CARD GAMES
Honestly I assumed the game did too, but here they are I guess.
Probably refines into something or other decent. Either that, or it's good for completionists sake - because obviously Omi is going to try and collect every card in the game, right?
Right?
Ah yes, an RPG classic. "Whoops we forgot to give clear enough directions to the player, time for them to scour the map for hours on end".
I'll give FFVIII this, I do enjoy the plot much more than I did back in the day, and especially Squall's character development over the course of the game.
And being fair to Edea, if there's anywhere she would be safest in the event of more possessions while still alive, traveling with the party that just proved they could kick her ass and get rid of said possession is a pretty good place to be.
Looking back through the last few games of party member homogenization, I feel like FFVIII definitely stands out as one of the worst in that category, where most characters just feel like identical bricks you plug skills into. FFVII Limit Breaks felt more varied and predictable with the Limit Bar + weapons had some variety with long range capacity and different materia slots, FFVI at least gave every character a unique command even if lategame they all get All The Magics, and FFV let you develop each character down their own build if you wanted even if it eventually just becomes "if Melee then Freelancer, if Magic then Mimic".
Yeah, I don't know if you have Status-Defense-Junction x4 yet (let alone 3 copies on different GFs for the entire party to get coverage), but it's basically a vital skill for shutting down the more dangerous status effects like Confuse, Sleep, Petrify, and so on which completely demolish your party. There's some spells like Esuna and I think Ultima that can also give decent status resistance (Ultima iirc gives 100% resistance to all elements, not sure on status, but... also has better places to be), but that's not always 100% coverage.…or not.
Remember Marlboro? It's a classic. Well, I just ran into it for the first time in this game, and, uh…
…yeah.
Bad Breath is absolutely brutal in this game, because status effects are brutal. If all my characters are hit with Confuse, then I get to just sit out the rest of the fight and watch the battle auto-resolve (this can take upwards of five minutes during which I am not able to enter any inputs). Now, this normally wouldn't be that problematic, because my group hits really hard and Squall is supposed to have 100 Confuse junctioned to Status Defense and be immune, so he can cast Esuna on everyone. He does not, however, have immunity to Silence (which makes him unable to cast Esuna) or Berserk (which also takes away control of the character), so in this case I just spend three minutes watching both Squall, Edea and Zell attack each other randomly while the Marlboro pings them down, until eventually Edea gets petrified.
...Well that's certainly A Design Decision, to make the zombie boss specifically weak to healing items but not all healing spells.
The farther we get into Omi's griping over the Junction System, the more certain I am that:
A) FFVIII is easily going to be his worst rated Final Fantasy game yet (or at least bottom 3) in terms of gameplay, and
B) Juggling this system is half the reason updates have slowed down so much.
Reminder for everyone that this isn't even normal slavery, this is like... enslaving the elderly folks who have brain problems of all things. Kind of wild and far more than kind of fucked up.
And yet for some reason, this is the guy Edea wants to go see in the present.
Yup, you did it, random magazine in a back alley from decades ago (that will now somehow transfer to your future inventory) just happens to have the designs for your ultimate weapons.
Ha, take a look at DIS guy, not even getting the items for a Disk 1 Lionheart!
No seriously, you can make Lionheart as early as Disk 1. It involves a bunch of card games and refining, of course, but you can get it that soon... where it proceeds to not make a huge difference tbh, because FFVIII weapons are mostly just small attack boosts (or in Squall's case, add more secondary Limit Breaks so I guess he benefits the most from it).
somewhatLazy
Serial Procrastinator
- Location
- lurking
"You know, Hojo really was a great antagonist in 7. I'm thinking we should really have him again in 8."
"Good idea, sir. But how are we going to differentiate him? Make him the main antagonist?"
"No, don't be ridiculous, he's not dommy mommy eno—I mean, cough cough, he just doesn't have the gravitas we need, this game is going to be sorceresses all the way down!"
"Make the party member with him in their backstory essential to really drill in the emotional strength of just how awful Hojo is?"
"Of course not, we're making a high school love story, that's not grounded enough!"
"Didn't you just say 'sor—'"
"What if we gave him a ridiculous clown outfit. Just the frilliest doorway-hitting lizard-threat-display thing possible."
"…A brilliant idea, sir."
"As ever, I am a genius! Now, go call Nomura, have him begin the clownening!"
"Good idea, sir. But how are we going to differentiate him? Make him the main antagonist?"
"No, don't be ridiculous, he's not dommy mommy eno—I mean, cough cough, he just doesn't have the gravitas we need, this game is going to be sorceresses all the way down!"
"Make the party member with him in their backstory essential to really drill in the emotional strength of just how awful Hojo is?"
"Of course not, we're making a high school love story, that's not grounded enough!"
"Didn't you just say 'sor—'"
"What if we gave him a ridiculous clown outfit. Just the frilliest doorway-hitting lizard-threat-display thing possible."
"…A brilliant idea, sir."
"As ever, I am a genius! Now, go call Nomura, have him begin the clownening!"
- Location
- Spain
Well her basic attack is actually an spell, so her "Strenght" stat is the strenght of her magic.
Her magic stat is the strenght of her para-magic, so It makes sense than it's lower than her innate magic.
Or something like that.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
So now, I want you to take a wild guess: What happens when Squall reaches the end of the bridge, the shore of the Esthar continent on the other side?
…
EVERYONE IS ALREADY THERE WAITING FOR HIM, OF COURSE.
And gently ribbing into him for being 'late' because this is meant to be the emotional moment where Squall finds out his friends had anticipated his ridiculous behavior and taken it with good-natured acceptance and let him get the whole savior complex out of his system by sweating a bit on the journey there before revealing that they were already at his destination, waiting for him, there to make light fun of him and tell him he can't escape his friends..
The problem is I am fully not bought into this moment. Squall went on a straight line across a single bridge that literally has no room to hide on either side, how the hell did everyone even get ahead of Squall? Did they took one of the Garden's smaller boats and simply sail along the side of the bridge? Couldn't Squall have done that instead of bodily carrying Rinoa on his back all the way?
Yeah but this is funny.
Maybe he couldn't find a boat, maybe there were too many people around, maybe he didn't think he'd find a landing point on the far side, maybe he just wanted to get as far away as possible before being detected, maybe maybe maybe. For me, I don't care about silly/illogical/melodramatic/whatever actions so long as they don't have serious story consequences. Squall's escape attempt being as poorly thought out as the average 'preteen runs away from home, will be back in two hours max' didn't result in him getting cornered by Galbadian soldiers and kicked in the balls while they kidnapped Rinoa, it was just some nice visuals and a character development scene, so it's fine. Water off a duck's back.
This is a shame, because I thought she was like Seifer and had unique Limit Break behaviour, but I doublechecked the wiki and as far as I can tell she uses the same rules as everyone else (presumably because you're allowed to set her GFs and Junctions as opposed to Seifer).
We reload and thankfully don't run into another Marlboro and just head into the rocky, fossilized wastes ahead. And I do mean 'fossilized.'
Oh my god, he really IS going to carry her on his back this entire time!
Plenty of colossal beasts are scattered around the place, rendered to petrified skeletons. It's really remarkable, and makes me wonder if we're looking at the fallout of a disaster of some kind; the whole area is geologically similar, all salt rock for miles on end, and all of it is filled with skeletons.
Before you ask, no, I didn't find the path to this Draw point before I stumbled onto the next plot beat and completely forgot about it.
Could be a meteorite impact. Could be an 'elephant graveyard' of sorts. Could be moon-related. Could be both, frankly. I could say something about 'the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs' but those aren't dinosaurs exclusively. Most are fully skeletonized, but some seem actually petrified whole, skin and all, such as that Midgardsormr-looking snake in the background above. There are also an unusual number of visual glitches in this area, more than I'm used to even with the inherent shakiness of emulating the PSX, though I wasn't able to capture them in screenshots. Eventually, we reach a broad ridge with a save point, overlooking what looks like dozens of miles more of barren salty desert.
We could be spending weeks crossing through that.
This may be a "guy that has only played FF14" moment but this reminds me a lot of The Burn. Not much else to add, just all I can think about looking at the eerie blue-white wasteland full of bones.
The important thing is that, using the transitive property, we can determine that Zack carrying Cloud almost clear across the world to Midgar was Doomed Yaoi.
You can set GFs and Junctions on Seifer, actually! It's even one of the ways you "optimize" early GF leveling and AP gain while maxing your initial SeeD rank, by killing off Squall and Zell and making Seifer do all the leveling up. GF's gain EXP/AP, you get the 70 or so kills needed for maximum combat rank, and Seifer won't effect the overall party level for level scaling since he leaves shortly after.
...Which I guess begs the question of why only Seifer gets the unique mechanics behind making his limit break happen more often, and not Edea. I guess he's Just That Hot Blooded that he fires it off easy.
cB557
voOOP
I like that even the codex entry for time compression is like "yeah man idgi either".
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
"Surely using something called the Pandora as a weapon would never backfire on us!"
I stopped playing somewhere around the the orphanage reveal back in the day, so I only know the vaguest of outlines and a few big spoilers at this point but I really, really hope the name Pandora has different mythological connotations in their world because otherwise the idea of weaponizing it sounds... interesting. In a 'I wish to view the effects from another continent at minimum' sense.
I stopped playing somewhere around the the orphanage reveal back in the day, so I only know the vaguest of outlines and a few big spoilers at this point but I really, really hope the name Pandora has different mythological connotations in their world because otherwise the idea of weaponizing it sounds... interesting. In a 'I wish to view the effects from another continent at minimum' sense.
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ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
wait but then what who why in the
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
oh my gods they are literally pokemon potions that's hilarious.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
...pokemon came out in Japan in 1996. FF8 was 1999.
They knew.
They knew.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Esthar, to a lesser extent, also reminds me of the city shown in the video for Blur's 'The Universal', even if it's a lot whiter. It came out 1995ish:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrbxWOMpwfs
Edit: Well, more like how I remembered it looking
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrbxWOMpwfs
Edit: Well, more like how I remembered it looking
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GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
The way she keeps giving the kids under her care military training honestly makes me wonder if Edea, before she started up her orphanage, was a soldier of some sort, and just keeps falling back on established habits when it comes to raising children.
Dybbukpossesed
Falling Somewhere
- Location
- California
Edea was always the kids favorite because whenever Cid left she'd teach them how to kill soldiers with whatever weapons were on hand. This is my new headcanon.
Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
Sometimes I wonder about just how much the game mechanics are diegetic. Like, if you don't have Item equipped, do the characters just forget how to use potions or something?
Entropy Judge
Recurring Bouts of Misanthropy
Probably because it's so early in the game that you don't have reliable junctions to just have someone in easy Crisis mode, you don't have easy/safe revival abilities, and so new players can (ideally) actually see his Limit Break, whereas by the time you get Edea, you should have a better idea of how to control Limit Breaks without risking an easy TPK.
Man, but this update really shows the limits of FFVIII mechanics. Former villain joining the party is always cool, in part because you get to play around with edgy villainous powers, even if they're habitually nerfed in your party compared to the boss fight. Edea being just another character who has to use junctioning like the rest of this sorry bunch is just lame.
How mighty have fallen.
At least her limit break is cheeky, I guess.
Turns out dynosaurs can't survive falling from the moon. Hyne has not sent any more of them since the first splash.
Could just be a general sorceress thing. A signature power of theirs. I guess we'll see with Adel.
Suddenly the game took a turn.
They should've commited to the concept all the way and made custom battle animations for Squall doing battle with Rinoa still on his back.
Omicron: Dommy mommy Edea could still return! I want to believe!
How mighty have fallen.
At least her limit break is cheeky, I guess.
Turns out dynosaurs can't survive falling from the moon. Hyne has not sent any more of them since the first splash.
Could just be a general sorceress thing. A signature power of theirs. I guess we'll see with Adel.
Suddenly the game took a turn.
They should've commited to the concept all the way and made custom battle animations for Squall doing battle with Rinoa still on his back.
Omicron: Dommy mommy Edea could still return! I want to believe!
- Pronouns
- He/Him
- Pronouns
- Him/He
It's a little sad that the mechanics are causing Omi trouble, because I think this stretch of the game is good plot wise, but having to sit and pause and sort out all these junctioning is flow interrupting, and begging for fridge logic while you assign support abilities to go 'wait, how did they get there before Squall? If they passed him on the bridge wouldn't they have picked him up?'. But these grand dramatic gestures rarely play better with everyone explaining things, and Omi seemed to imply the translation was falling down in some places for this stretch.
I think it's highly interesting that Squall choose to just fucking, walk out without telling anyone.
In a way, it might have been Cid's final lesson on leadership, taught by example: When it gets too hard (emotionally), then just fucking leave. Walk out! Let someone else figure deal with it.
For all his life experiences, Cid has no better response to things like NORG selling out his dream for profits, or the love of his life being taken from him then what Squall does.
Squall never wanted the job of being in charge. Given how Edea came up with the military academy, and seemed to keep raising kids to be soldiers, that might have been true for Cid as well.
Squall also having successfully 'done leadership' in the G-garden battle, but being unable to ask for help for his own sake is also revealing. He's taking a selfish action for his own reasons, and while he's been able to delegate, manage, and even inspire others for agreed on goals, and (arguably) set himself to help others with their problems (Balamb for Zell, Selphie's home) he can't imagine the others helping him for his own sake. Having so neglected his own needs and wants, he probably doesn't even know how to ask for something that he wants or needs.
So of course his friends just show up (unasked) just like the last time he was at FH, but at least this time their materially helping him rather then throwing him a party.
I think it's highly interesting that Squall choose to just fucking, walk out without telling anyone.
In a way, it might have been Cid's final lesson on leadership, taught by example: When it gets too hard (emotionally), then just fucking leave. Walk out! Let someone else figure deal with it.
For all his life experiences, Cid has no better response to things like NORG selling out his dream for profits, or the love of his life being taken from him then what Squall does.
Squall never wanted the job of being in charge. Given how Edea came up with the military academy, and seemed to keep raising kids to be soldiers, that might have been true for Cid as well.
Squall also having successfully 'done leadership' in the G-garden battle, but being unable to ask for help for his own sake is also revealing. He's taking a selfish action for his own reasons, and while he's been able to delegate, manage, and even inspire others for agreed on goals, and (arguably) set himself to help others with their problems (Balamb for Zell, Selphie's home) he can't imagine the others helping him for his own sake. Having so neglected his own needs and wants, he probably doesn't even know how to ask for something that he wants or needs.
So of course his friends just show up (unasked) just like the last time he was at FH, but at least this time their materially helping him rather then throwing him a party.
- Location
- USA
If Squaresoft had gone the other way--made both Rinoa and Squall unusable in battle even if Squall is still walking around on the map--I would've respected that decision too.
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
I've honestly got this mental image of them passing him in a car at some point, one of them going "oh hey there they are, let's pick them up!" and someone else going "no, let him be. He needs his alone time. We'll meet him on the other side of the bridge, it's not that far."
And Squall, his head buried deep in teen angst/his own ass, doesn't notice the car because he's too busy brooding.
And Squall, his head buried deep in teen angst/his own ass, doesn't notice the car because he's too busy brooding.
- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
I like this because it also implies that, for the rest of the team, the trip to Esther was, like, a wholesome family bonding road trip.
- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Otoh, having gone back to check how big the Garden cars are, maybe they just didn't want to have to suggest lying Rinoa on the floor the whole way or being squished into the six passenger seats.