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

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And the images are fixed, I guess we just accidentally ddosed them for a sec?

Well, anyway, the point is, congratulations on bagging Omega Weapon! I could never be assed to do so, but I was also a young scrub who barely understood the game system and just relied on Lionheart and Zell's Armageddon Fist Tactic to win.

(If you're not familiar, there's a lot of digital ink spilled on it, but Zell's LB can theoretically outdamage Lionheart, but only if you're an insane madlad who can punch Beat Rush and Booyah in tenth of a second or less timeframes. It doesn't do a lot of damage, but sheer volume of attacks does account for potentially making up the difference. It's really not worth mastering honestly, since it mostly exists as a meme to make your damage numbers as big as possible)
 
Congrats on the Omega Weapon kill. And don't worry about it being clean or not. I half suspect everything was designed so that you'd need to involve yourself with the cards games so you end up getting a Holy War to survive his Total Murder phase. Didn't bother to play Paradox-Billiards-Vostroyan-Roulette-Fourth-Dimensional-Hypercube-Chess-Strip Poker? No monster killing bragging rights for you.
 
Omicron said:
Can't help but notice that we're just… Not going to the moon though, huh. And that the final dungeon is entirely unrelated to the Lunar Cry that happened a few hours ago and was subsequently never noticed by anyone else on the planet, a Lunar Cry that is in fact wholly separate from and unrelated to the other apocalypse currently happening. Or that those legends about Hyne never materialized into anything main plot related. And that NORG never came back. And that the last time we saw Seifer was him handing Rinoa to Adel, then presumably running off screen while we were fighting her and just… Never appearing again. Not going to be a final miniboss, but not going to actually see the errors of his way or be forced to acknowledge his defeat on-screen, huh. 'Ultimecia possessing Adel in the past' was mentioned by Rinoa but we just, never actually saw that. Also, four out of those nine bosses were reskins of previous enemies, huh?
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Okay yeah, putting everything together like that and yeah, now I definitely feel like that weird feeling of "wait, what do you mean we're already at the end?" was fully justified.

Final Fantasy VIII might have been the most ambitious game in the series so far, but as a result the cutting room floor wound up with a pile of clippings waist-deep. I think the big question I have now is whether I should more celebrate the ambition and all that they did create, or mourn everything they tried to bring up that just wound up dropped as deadlines loomed.
 
Omicron said:
Gilgamesh can appear at any point during the battle. He lands amidst a circle of four blades - Excalipoor, Excalibur, Masamune, and Zantetsuken. Excalipur is the 'joke option,' dealing only one damage; the others are supposed to be useful.

There's just one problem: the Zantetsuken option isn't disabled against bosses. Nor does it bypass instant death immunity. Which means Gilgamesh can just show up, use Zantetsuken, whiff, and leave, having accomplished nothing. As happens here.

It's not ideal.
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You say that like it's not perfectly in character for Greg to show up, fumble immediately, then leave.

Omicron said:

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The boss waiting for us in the armory is composed of Vysage and its hands, Lefty and Righty. I don't know if I've ever brought it up before, but this is a random encounter, which raises my eyebrow a little; some of the bosses we've run into in the castle have been reskins of random encounters, but this one literally just is a random encounter, which feels underwhelming. Where the devs really just that out of time and/or ideas?

Well… No. Vysage is one of the funniest gags in the game. The fight starts off as normal - Vysage is a status effect attacker, he inflicts Doom which puts a timer at the end of which Rinoa will be KO, we deploy multi-hitting spells, blast it with Holy and Bahamut, and then, as its HP is exhausted…



​
It pulls itself out of the ground, revealing that the Vysage which we saw this before was but three appendages of a single, gargantuan mummy that laid buried underground, and who immediately starts blasting us with its Evil Eye attack, inflicting Slow and Curse on everyone.
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Okay that is pretty great, and FF has used that specific kind of monster before so many times I would surely shit my pants if I saw one lock in and stand up in front of me.

Omicron said:
Now, the solution is plainly obvious. You just load Party A into the left-hand lift, then swap control over to Party B, have Party B climb into the right-hand lift, and they will go down, causing Party A to go up and reach the balcony. Obvious, right?

Well, no.

​

Here, you can see both parties just standing around like idiots as the lifts fail to budge at all. The problem has, somehow, become worse; Irvine's party can't even get down.

So what's the solution?

Well, I'm going to let you think about it for a bit. Really ponder it. Just think of the most sensible way for this puzzle to work. Really just, take a minute.

Okay?

…

Boys are heavier than girls.

No, really, that's it.

Each party member has a hidden weight variable. In the picture above, the lifts are stuck because the party made up of Squall (boy), Zell (boy) and Rinoa (girl) is heavier than the party composed of Irvine (boy), Quistis (girl), and Selphie (girl), so the left-hand lift is stuck to the ground.

The solution to the puzzle is to invert the parties, so that Quistis/Selphie/Irvine are in the left-handed lift, and the heavier Squall/Zell/Rinoa party gets on the right-handed lift, causing it to go down and raise the lighter party up to the balcony.

I feel like every FF8 developer should go to jail?
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Correlation doesn't imply causation, based on the facts presented to us my hypothesis is that Irvine has hollow bones like a bird, making him weigh about 35kg. If Quistis, the larger of the two, simply ate him I think that would solve all of your problems.

Omicron said:
The floodgate key is used in the dungeons as part of an entirely separate puzzle that doesn't lead to a boss. This puzzle instead requires us to first use the floodgate key to drain the water level in a separate part of the underground. Then, we need to head to the chapel and play the church organ.

​
For a brief moment there I have a traumatic flashback to the piano minigames in FF7 and FF7 Rebirth. This, however, is wholly different. We are not being asked to play anything good. No, you see, there is no immediate result for playing anything on the organ. However, unbeknownst to us, there is another screen which has a grate with eight bars. Whichever key we played last before ending the 'concert' corresponds to a given bar, which will be lowered when we next visit. But the grate only 'remembers' a single concert at a time.

Which means, we need to press every single key at once in order to lower all the bars and move through. Let me tell you, pressing all the face buttons and all the trigger and shoulder buttons on a Playstation controller at the same time is annoying as hell. Still, after I've contorted my fingers in the requisite way, we access the formerly flooded section of the castle.
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How perfectly appropriate for you, Himbomi, that the solution to this 'puzzle' is in fact for Squall to mash every single key simultaneously with his big monkey fists.

Omicron said:


Gil, you stupid piece of shit, stop using Zantetsuken against bosses-
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Gilgamesh: "MY WORK HERE IS DONE"
Squall: "You didn't do anything."
Gilgamesh: "FOR GILGAMESH, IT'S MORPHIN' TIME" *flees*

Omicron said:
Squall's Limit Break, Renzokuken, hits four to eight times, then after the final hit, has a chance to play a 'finishing move' that deals extra damage. This is Squall's Lion Heart, his ultimate finishing move.

It hits seventeen times.

That's a total of 21 to 25 hits. With Str 255 and Vit 0, each hit deals 9,999 damage.

That's a total of about 210,000 to 250,000 damage.
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Something deeply amuses me about the fact that the target crashing back down to the ground itself counts as a hit. Like yeah it'd hurt to fall on your head from like 10ft in the air but it doesn't feel like that should rate compared to being hit by every level 100 Gunbreaker ability at once.
 
daniel_gudman said:
No I mean it was formally improper then, too, not that it wasn't done, it doesn't match how you'd do it on like an abacus to actually perform the calculation.

Like the Arabic Numerals were the particular symbology that "won" the conversion to positional notation, but the transition from "non-positional" to "positional" look literally millenia, and these sortof half-way conventions around subtractive notation made the numbers harder to use when they were meanwhile on an extreme premium for character count because they were getting carved in stone.
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Do you have an actual cite for this? Because they did in fact use subtractive ordering when carving in stone, and we know this because there are surviving examples of them doing so.
 
Omicron said:
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…

I'm just…

I don't understand what this game considers 'essential content.'

There is an incredibly obviously signposted point of no return. Except it's not actually, you can come back to the present day even after going through an apocalyptic nightmare trip through space and time fighting witches from beyond time! Well, you can't use that to visit the Shumi Tribe or get any glimpse of how any normal human being is reacting to the ongoing collapse of reality, and you definitely can't visit Garden. You can go and get Odin and Tonberry if you missed them, though, and the Deep Sea Base is obviously important to have available for as long as possible, that part's normal. Oh, yeah, and obviously also essential is the children's card game sidequest. Couldn't risk missing out on that.

Xu wanted to play some cards with Squall, so she and the CC just, left Garden, traveled across half the world, found the Ragnarok wherever it was dumped by the time compression, got onboard, and only then realized anything was weird?

Xu: "Oh, am I glad to see you! I wanted Squall to play cards with the CC group members. And when I got here… no one was around. Then all that ruckus started outside. What on earth is going on? Is this all because of that Sorceress Ultimecia?"
Squall: "Yeah, time compression is starting. We have to kill Ultimecia before she begins compressing time in this world."
Xu: "Hmmm… Sounds serious. Go kick some butt!!!!"
Xu: "Oh, Squall. Since the CC members are all here… Why don't you play a hand with us? We all learned rules from around the world. And Quistis… I mean, Cardmaster King will play in the airlock."
Xu: "Go defeat Ultimecia! I'm behind you 100%."

These guys have a one-track mind and I kind of respect it. Play cards until the end of the world, sure, why not.
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That's not the end of card shenanigans, either - you can use Ragnarok to scour the time compressed overworld and meet the strongest player, the Queen of Cards; though admittedly, my guidebook doesn't say whether or not you need to have started her sidequest already. In the previous disc, she moved between locations around the world between matches, and while she doesn't have any rare cards (then), losing certain cards to her will inspire her father to design new unique cards that you can subsequently win from her. In the endgame disc, she's living by the crash site near Esthar, and you can get any of her special cards that you didn't get during her sidequest.

Omicron said:
These aren't merely combat abilities being disabled. I cannot use items; I cannot use spells; I cannot use Abilities, including any refining abilities. I cannot save the game.
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Well, the lock only applies within the mansion, so you're able to save and heal if you leave. That said, they probably should have made that more evident to players. I think they could've fixed that confusion with the sphinx boss. It basically acts as the first gatekeeper to the final dungeon, so what they should have done is if you lose to that boss, rather than entering a game over, the sphinx banishes you from the mansion. That way, you're teleported out and can find out firsthand that the lock doesn't affect you outside. And since many players will likely stumble in that battle under the lock, that scenario is likely to happen.

Omicron said:
A while back in the thread, someone asked what people's favorite final dungeons in the franchise were. A pretty consistent response, I've found, was 'VI or VIII.' So I was really curious and excited to get to VIII's final dungeon. So verdict?

Yeah, this might be the best final dungeon in Final Fantasy.

I complained in VII that the last dungeon was kind of nothing and didn't even have any cool bosses. Well, this one had a unique mechanic and nine bosses. Perhaps be careful what you wish for… But mostly I wished for exactly this?

A good final dungeon tests you on your mastery of all the mechanics you've learned during the game. Thanks to its initially annoying sealing gimmick, that is exactly what Ultimecia's Castle does: It brings you down to the bare essentials, and then asks you to pick your own abilities based on your understanding of the mechanics and how to best leverage each component of the system, and then it gives you a series of bosses in varying degrees of toughness to challenge in almost any order. Plus, it does so with a killer aesthetic; 'gothic castle that has a fucked up 19th mansion inside it' is just top tier. It's channeling Spencer Mansion, definitely; I am actually wondering if Bloodborne's Cainhurst Castle wasn't directly inspired by Ultimecia's Castle. The puzzles are… Annoyingly obtuse, but they have the merit of existing, and Enc-None means that we only have to deal with random encounters as much as we want to.

I thought of this is actually fun, rather than a chore, even if I did curse the devs' name a couple of times at baffling bits of design.
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I agree, it definitely sounds like one of the more engaging designs for a final dungeon. It seems like it has more of a compact feel, in that all the areas are connected together organically as part of the larger mansion, rather than being largely a one-way trek. You interact with the different areas of the mansion, and they keep connecting with each other.

And you make a great point on how final dungeons should be a test of how well you've mastered the game's mechanics, and how the unique approach here works well in that regard. It certainly gives me a new perspective on final dungeon design...

Omicron said:
I want to see the end.

​
It's time for the grand finale.

Thank you for reading.

Next Time: The end of time.
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This is as far as my guidebook gets me; at this point, it basically just wishes me good luck in the final battle and offers no more details on what comes next.
 
I'd like to also make sure people are aware that this is the music for the castle:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAepj6cKllE
IIRC, Omicron said a while back that the games' music wasn't a big thing for him, but for those of us for whom it is, well, the music here didn't exactly hurt the castle's final dungeon ranking. :D

(And IIRC, in-game, the start of the music is synchronized with the first time the player opens the castle's front door; I might be misremembering that, though.)
 
Omicron said:
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We approach the gates, and they part, releasing mist into the night (extremely Addams Family core). Then there's a flash of light, and a message I, uh, wasn't expecting.

"The parties' powers have been sealed by Ultimecia's servants. The following powers have been sealed: Item, Magic, GF, Draw, Command Ability, Limit Break, Resurrection, Save."

Which is, uh, hm.

Everything?

The game just disabled its entire gameplay.
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So this is where I finally got hard-walled on my childhood playthrough of the game. My dumb ass had spent the entire game relying on GFs to progress - and I had no idea how the hell junctions worked - so I was basically shit out of luck because I had no idea what I was doing. Whoops!

Omicron said:
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Gilgamesh can appear at any point during the battle. He lands amidst a circle of four blades - Excalipoor, Excalibur, Masamune, and Zantetsuken. Excalipur is the 'joke option,' dealing only one damage; the others are supposed to be useful.

There's just one problem: the Zantetsuken option isn't disabled against bosses. Nor does it bypass instant death immunity. Which means Gilgamesh can just show up, use Zantetsuken, whiff, and leave, having accomplished nothing. As happens here.

It's not ideal.
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...aww, Zerban beat me to it.

Also one fun fact about 8 Gilgamesh is that he seems to have lost three of his eight arms at some point, going by the shitty cardboard cutout arms he's wearing on one shoulder. Just the perfect amount of doofiness for his most badass look in the franchise.
 
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Speaking of FF and CT music, I was surprised to find out that Uematsu also composed for Ah My Goddess (specifically the 2000 movie, and possibly other entries). While that series was huge in Japan back in the day, it's definitely not the sort of thing I would've expected him to be involved in.

'The Castle' track also reminds me of 'Dancing Mad' in that it's intricate, has heavy classical influence, and is multi-part, though is obviously more restrained since it's for a dungeon instead of a boss
 
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So, some of this is probably ninja'd, but ~whatever~
Omicron said:
Oh, yeah, and obviously also essential is the children's card game sidequest. Couldn't risk missing out on that.
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So, first - this is specifically a reward for completing the Card Club quest; you don't finish the quest, and I think Joker shows up, but no one else. Second, the Card Members (or, possibly, just Left Diamond) use the power of Time Compression to resurrect cards: if a card has been modded, you can get it again. If you never got a card (because you didn't do the Card Queen sidequest), you can still get those cards. Very handy.
Omicron said:
These aren't merely combat abilities being disabled. I cannot use items; I cannot use spells; I cannot use Abilities, including any refining abilities. I cannot save the game.
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... Inside the castle. If you just walk out the door, you can do things again!

Omicron said:
Next up, we investigate the left wing further, passing through a chapel, to a rickety bridge - when we cross it, our footsteps cause it to shake, and an item that was resting on it to fall off the edge. Oops!
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I am ... like, 70% sure that this is one of the two or three places in the game where specifically using the Walk control to walk instead of run has an effect. Not a particularly useful effect, but if you walk IIRC then the key doesn't fall of the bridge.
Omicron said:
If we survive, she just starts charging Dark Flare again. Dark Flare does considerable damage - I waited it out just to see and the results weren't pretty:
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Dark Flare is Fire Elemental. Once you learn that, Tiamat is even more trivial than you thought.
Omicron said:
Our reward for this is a Three Stars and 250 AP, enough to instantly learn any GF Ability, but quite frankly at this point neither of those matter; the actual reward is the victory itself. It's not a clean victory, I did use one Holy War at the start, but frankly I am not doing this a fifth time just now, and I did play fairly for most of it.
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Did you check out the Proof of Omega? I think it's in the same area as the battle stats in the Menu, but it's just a little screen basically going, "Congratulations!" It's cute.
 
Omicron said:
The room is filled with save points, and all of them are non-functional. It's trippy, confusing, and it's breaking the fourth wall - save points have never had an in-game reality, they're purely a gameplay contrivance, so what does it mean that the game is playing tricks on us with them? Ultimately nothing save that the game is about to start messing with our UI and gameplay capabilities, and that it wants us destabilized.
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I think the implication might be that the save points are actually a kind of time magic in and of itself? Like, when using a save-point, you are looking at a timeline and going "No, that one's no good" and discarding it. Which then starts acting oddly once all moments in time start melding together.

Probably overthinking it, but it would kinda be fitting for a game that is as designed around reloading/replaying as FVIII is.

Omicron said:
These guys have a one-track mind and I kind of respect it. Play cards until the end of the world, sure, why not.
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Balamb Garden truly is the Duel Academy of 1999.
 
Entropy Judge said:
I am ... like, 70% sure that this is one of the two or three places in the game where specifically using the Walk control to walk instead of run has an effect. Not a particularly useful effect, but if you walk IIRC then the key doesn't fall of the bridge.
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This and a bunch of other stuff in the final dungeon suggests that the developers were running out of time, knew how few people ever made it to the end of a long game and decided that they needed content now, never mind if it was thought through to make sense or be fun.
 
OK, so the initial time compression FMV and the sequence with the sorcresses from beyond were really, really cool and trippy. They effectively communicate tha the world is coming undone, that time itself is dying, and to its corpse maggots come to feast.

The gothic castle, on the other hand, I'm more ambivalent towards. It's a strong aesthetic executed well, but I'm not sure it's the right aesthetic for the battle at the end of time. It's not quite surreal enough, not quite mind-bending... Personally, I would've gone for locations we've encountered before but twisted in various ways, with the sorcresses replacing various familiar NPCs, or something of the sort.

Omicron said:
It is surrounded by a circle of light.

The same is true of all the towns on the map. Rather than radically change the world map, the devs placed a 'shield' around every town so we can't enter. Which is… Okay, I guess.
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Should've just had a message "Everyone is gone" as you attempt to enter a town said by one of the party members. More ominous, less obviously gameplay consideration.

Omicron said:
'Used to be a GF' - a fascinating statement, but one without much more for us to go on.
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An ex-GF, you may say.

Omicron said:
Can't help but notice that we're just… Not going to the moon though, huh. And that the final dungeon is entirely unrelated to the Lunar Cry that happened a few hours ago and was subsequently never noticed by anyone else on the planet, a Lunar Cry that is in fact wholly separate from and unrelated to the other apocalypse currently happening. Or that those legends about Hyne never materialized into anything main plot related.
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Wait, seriously, no fight on the moon against the moon? That's seriously lame. Why would you ever turn a moon into a giant angry eyeball and not have it shoot lasers at your party or something? I think I'm fundamentally disconnected from FFVIII as a human being.
 
So like, now that we know that witches can eat each other for power, and Adel was gathering potential witches to eat them, was Ultimecia trying to do that on a grander scale?

Like, eating every other witch that ever existed or would have existed through out all of time and becoming the Most Powerful Witch Ever? Screw Time Paradoxes Because I'm God Now?
 
illhousen said:
Wait, seriously, no fight on the moon against the moon? That's seriously lame. Why would you ever turn a moon into a giant angry eyeball and not have it shoot lasers at your party or something? I think I'm fundamentally disconnected from FFVIII as a human being.
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I have been genuinely struggling not to run my mouth about Fear & Hunger for the entire duration of the FF8 LP. Because I don't want to be annoying. But it is. Astounding. How Funger just mogs on everything this game wanted to be.

-missable content for replays. In spades. Everything from hidden shortcuts and RNG based item placement to secret character beats. The counterbalance being that Funger expects you to fail and reload the game many, many times and a full playthrough - once you know what you're doing - can take you a few hours instead of the 40+ you get from a JRPG.
-traumatized characters. In spades. Funger is so willing to go there, to showcase content that frankly you just can't get from a AAA game. Child soldiers? PTSD? Impossibly powerful sorcerers deciding it's time for some body-horror human grafting?
-methods to counteract overleveling. Instead of enemies that level up or the junction system, Funger just does away with RPG leveling and makes you gear-dependent and gives you skill points, which ties in to the RNG and missable stuff to keep the game challenging. And then add in complex enemies with the game's implementation of attackable limbs and coin tosses.
-evil moon. yep.

Granted, Funger has a twenty year advantage on having seen the videogame landscape grow, change, and grapple with implementation of mechanics and writing; and this LP has been a lesson that I didn't give FF8 enough credit for a lot of things when I was younger, but it has still been a shock to the brain to think about these two RPGs in context of one another.
 
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