Oh, people notice that, alright, and it's usually complained about.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
- Location
- Lost in Hell
Okay, wait, no - this is… this is a good point? One that makes me angrier about the King?
Unless the voice Cecil heard was the King's ghost or something, why did they make the King and the Man-Turtle into separate characters? Wouldn't it be way more effective if the King had become Cagnazzo to symbolically represent his fall, and make him responsible for his actions?
- Location
- Phoenix
An interesting tidbit about Cagnazzo, if you use a lightning spell on him when he has the torrents of water up for Tsunami you'll break them and prevent him from using the move.
I'm just kind of, picturing a scene where Cecil confronts the king and is faced with a deranged, ranting shell of a man that barely understands what is going on around him, with golbez having usurped all authority and left him to rot in an empty castle, maybe with a 'fight' where the king ineffectually punches Cecil for 1 damage. Maybe lean into his seeming earlier fascination with the crystals and have him rant about how they were stolen from him and imply they were what drove him crazy? Hm. Feels like something interesting could have been done with that.
On another note, I'm kinda curious what Cid meant by Golbez 'wrecking' his airships? Like, Kain clearly showed up in one. So is he complaining about them getting turned into bombers and ruining them by turning them into brutal tools of war? Or what?
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HolyDragoon
Call Gespenst!
- Location
- Portugal
As you can see from these numbers, I hardly even broke a sweat.
"Next up, Cagnazzo!
Tsunami, tsunami,
Cagnazzo the Tsunami,
Turtle Man.
Get jealous of my blue body,
Commander Dessler.
My indecent head, sparkling,
Today it's wet with water too.
Ah, it's wet, that it is."
Yeah I got nothin'. As the song progresses you'll understand why my reaction to FFXIV's current story was laughing.
Also, at the risk of spoiling you slighty... explore the castle. There's something interesting there that will be somewhat relevant to tie up some details later. Otherwise there isn't much to comment on that hasn't been done so already.
... actually, there is. Reflect bouncing is and will remain a thing. Learn to exploit it.
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Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Ha ha ha ... yes!!
Welcome to Volleyspell, a recurring staple of the series whenever you run into an enemy who spams Reflect. I love Volleyspell, it's simultaneously the dumbest thing imaginable, hucking death at your own party to bounce it over to the enemy and sometimes (depending on the game) watching the bad guy forget who has a reflect on them and bouncing one of their own spells back into their face, and yet I always find it weirdly engaging as an added layer of complexity to watch who can bounce spells and keeping track of when the individual Reflects will run out.
Huh. I wonder if this version nerfed Cagnazzo some, or if you're a bit overleveled, because I remember him being a pain in the ass. His gimmick is that you're supposed to use lightning spells to break his tsunami barrier before he unleashes it, getting walloped was supposed to be bad news.
"Hey Cecil, remember that time my buddy handed you that ring that was clearly a cursed item, and we told you to take it to that village, and you did and it blew up and napalmed everything? Ahhh, good times."
Cecil: 9999
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
Yeah this never made any sense. I suspect it was a last minute addition because they realized the map or something else didn't allow for this part of the plot. A similar element happens in FFVI (not a spoiler, don't worry), which is a lot more outlandish but not in such a headscratching way like here.
But my man! It was just there once you leave the castle! You can see the town tiles! You can even get in there by accident with how close to them you spawn! x_D
Yeah, people in Baron at the start are suspicious, but not in this subdued panic you arrive at now.
Pretty sure by now at least Tellah should have Mini, which also acts a a reversal for itself.
Translation weirdness? From what I remember of the text in older versions, it's about the older airships being reworked to Golbez's needs, not destroyed.
I think even some games even make reflected spells gain more power. It gets to the point where you yourself reflect the enemy so you can bounce heals on them so they land on you through your own reflects. :_D
It's interesting that they went with straight up impersonation for the king. I went back and checked, Cecil gave the king the Water Crystal, which clearly fascinated him. He could have fiended! 'While Cecil was away finding redemption the king turned into a literal monster' was an option that would have totally worked for this boss fight. Of course, since unless I missed something important in the update beating Cagnazzo didn't recover the water crystal, the fiend comparison breaks down quickly.
I can guess why they didn't go this route though. They wanted the earth elemental lord to fight Cecil on Mt Ordeals for thematic reasons, and the earth crystal is something Golbez doesn't have.
(They probably could have put it in Damcyan, and made it work, but I'd probably want to commit to named characters fiending into boss monsters and you can see how that's already getting tangled up, there's plenty of character turnover already on the party side! But in another timeline, maybe Anna or someone could have turned into Scarmiglione, is what I'm saying.)
I can guess why they didn't go this route though. They wanted the earth elemental lord to fight Cecil on Mt Ordeals for thematic reasons, and the earth crystal is something Golbez doesn't have.
(They probably could have put it in Damcyan, and made it work, but I'd probably want to commit to named characters fiending into boss monsters and you can see how that's already getting tangled up, there's plenty of character turnover already on the party side! But in another timeline, maybe Anna or someone could have turned into Scarmiglione, is what I'm saying.)
Yeah, there are exceptions but the thing has become rare enough that VIIs most famous thing thing is doing it once.
Mhh, Fire Emblem has some of that. 'Stone that turns you into a Dragon' as a weapon class next to swords and spells are a franchise staple and 9 and 10 had entire mostly heroic nations who eschewed weapons and preferred to apply violence by turning into huge animals. Those two games also made these characters mechanically distinct in fun ways.
Funnily, that one disgaea-inspired DS Bleach RPG also treats Bankais as Monster Forms in terms of mechanics iirc. Once all the fancy special effects start up the Reaper becomes 2x2 sized and no longer fits into narrow paths.
At least Palom died right after having their favorite day ever
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
FFIX will eventually push the Reflex mechanics to the fullest, but that's a good way away yet. Still, Reflex is always fun, and also a type of spell that I think is fairly Final Fantasy unique - a lot of RPG have "magical immunity" as a buff, but bouncing spells around is much rarer, I believe.
Also, chiming in with my opinion, I quite like the way the king issue was handled - it makes much more sense to me that Cecil grew up to be a respectable person because he was raised by a just man. There's more left to learn about Baron's king, although I believe it's all optional, and I think that will shed some light on why that particular person would think that Dark Knight was a right path for his pupil to take.
Then again, apparently the king also raised Kain, which is my least liked playable character in all of Final Fantasy history (and there's some serious competition there, especially when Tactics and FFVII are taken into account), so, you know, maybe I'm just interpreting things the way I like. I do agree that Kain really drags down the inherent coolness of dragoons and it's a shame that he's the most famous incarnation of the class in the series.
There are ways to justify a weaker protagonist surviving an elite opponent without needing constant escalation, it's just that most storytellers are too lazy to actually put in the effort needed to do that. Cheap escalation is bad, and hating it is only a sign of good taste, in my opinion.
Also, chiming in with my opinion, I quite like the way the king issue was handled - it makes much more sense to me that Cecil grew up to be a respectable person because he was raised by a just man. There's more left to learn about Baron's king, although I believe it's all optional, and I think that will shed some light on why that particular person would think that Dark Knight was a right path for his pupil to take.
Then again, apparently the king also raised Kain, which is my least liked playable character in all of Final Fantasy history (and there's some serious competition there, especially when Tactics and FFVII are taken into account), so, you know, maybe I'm just interpreting things the way I like. I do agree that Kain really drags down the inherent coolness of dragoons and it's a shame that he's the most famous incarnation of the class in the series.
Don't worry, it's not only you; I was annoyed enough by it that I wrote a full 1 million word fanfic just to make Bleach's power scaling make sense, and the trope is just as annoying every time it shows up in any medium.
There are ways to justify a weaker protagonist surviving an elite opponent without needing constant escalation, it's just that most storytellers are too lazy to actually put in the effort needed to do that. Cheap escalation is bad, and hating it is only a sign of good taste, in my opinion.
DRK: I don't want to get better. I want to get worse.
Which is to say, do it. Nothing stands between you and your dreams except, I guess, a bunch of other writing projects you have on a back-burner, but you won't let that stop you, would you?
- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
Dovahkiin, Dovahkiin, naal ok zin los vahriin.
Back in Easy Type, Yang's special action Kick was kept in while Brace and Focus were removed, which meant all the walkthroughs and the "proper strategy" said Yang should just be on Kick duty the entire battle.
Later remakes have varied that up a bit, due to the return of Focus, but it's always amusing to imagine Baigan presenting his magic arms and Yang going "MY LEGS ARE SUPERIOR".
- Location
- California
@Omicron with all the clear IV inspirations going on in Endwalker, a lot of players were absolutely convinced that our twins were gonna be spending time doing statue impersonations of their own.
Of course instead they were just the last entrants into the "Lets give the player emotional trauma through meaningful sacrifice" list in Ultima Thule.
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- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
Cecil's true power is not his connection to light or dark, but his immense Dad Energy.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
(some of these are a couple days old because I forgot my quote log)
Like the games developed for that console are a shadow of themselves, so to speak. Like they're laboring under tremendous technical limitations that force them to compromise their vision at every turn. There's no reason why that would be more the case than with any other older hardware, in a material sense, but stuff like limited character count for names, limited dialogue boxes, the constant use of default black screen everywhere, the sheer limitation of the color palette... The SNES obviously has plenty of limitations of its own and plenty of tricks played to make the most of what it does give you, but it feels like SNES games are more "themselves" than NES games are. That they have room to have such simple things as "a background," "a sky," "a world map," "character models with more than four colors."
It's genuinely a tremendous leap in capability. I think it's hard today, with the iterative improvement in graphics fidelity and processing power, to grasp the monumental jump in capability that is the NES to the SNES or the SNES to the PSOne.
It's a classic bit.
Imagine - leaning hard into the FFXIV conceit of a given character having multiple jobs by having each job expressed as a Disco Elysium-style inner voice with a given personality, with influence weighted based on how high a level you have in this specific job.
Look at his record on kids surviving his care!
As far as he's aware right now, he's batting 3 for 3 on dead children!
Yeah, actually, I should have noted that - I think it's actually one of the things that's unique to Roman mythology rather than drawn directly from Greek sources? In Greek myth Poseidon, the "Earthshaker," has been dissociated from some of his chtonic Mycenean origins, but they haven't been acquired by Hades yet, so he's the lord of the Underworld but not the master of the earth/underground yet.
I was going to say that if Yang wanted to be counted he should have been on screen longer than five minutes but what do you know, now he has
Having checked out NES footage of the FF games to compare them to my own playthrough, and having played NES ports on the old GBA (there was a whole series of "NES Classics" like the original Legend of Zelda), the NES really feels like...
Like the games developed for that console are a shadow of themselves, so to speak. Like they're laboring under tremendous technical limitations that force them to compromise their vision at every turn. There's no reason why that would be more the case than with any other older hardware, in a material sense, but stuff like limited character count for names, limited dialogue boxes, the constant use of default black screen everywhere, the sheer limitation of the color palette... The SNES obviously has plenty of limitations of its own and plenty of tricks played to make the most of what it does give you, but it feels like SNES games are more "themselves" than NES games are. That they have room to have such simple things as "a background," "a sky," "a world map," "character models with more than four colors."
It's genuinely a tremendous leap in capability. I think it's hard today, with the iterative improvement in graphics fidelity and processing power, to grasp the monumental jump in capability that is the NES to the SNES or the SNES to the PSOne.
I am 90% sure he's not gonna make it past a dramatic fight with Golbez in which he sacrifices his life to use Meteor, which has dramatic effects but fails to actually kill his foe.
It's a classic bit.
See, that is very funny, and I totally missed it because I was being experimental; I saw that bosses Hasted themselves and so I wondered if Slow would work, and while Cagnazzo appears immune to some of the stronger debuffs like Stop, Slow does seem to work. How effective it actually is I'm not sure, but the bottom line is that Cagnazzo and Tellah spent much of the fight just casting Haste/Slow and averaging to default speed.
That's pretty much canon. Basically everyone who wouldn't have reason to be personally familiar enough with Cecil to know his face or voice is completely oblivious to who this shiny Paladin guy is, which includes most of Baron and the soldiers.
Yeah, I like these ideas, actually. They remind me of Sword of Mana kinda (a game I've been thinking about recently for different reasons), where at some point there is a plot point of characters being affected by monster influence into turning into monsters themselves which is framed as a tragic development.
Twinsies
Okay but thaat's really good.
Imagine - leaning hard into the FFXIV conceit of a given character having multiple jobs by having each job expressed as a Disco Elysium-style inner voice with a given personality, with influence weighted based on how high a level you have in this specific job.
And yet!
Look at his record on kids surviving his care!
As far as he's aware right now, he's batting 3 for 3 on dead children!
I'm not hugely familiar with FFXIV. Are the multiple jobs thing a purely gameplay concept, or is there some lore attached to it? If the latter, perhaps you can play on it?
In any case, you probably want to carefully curate the available jobs to make them distinct both personality-wise and mechanically. Like, there is a bunch of different mage jobs, and they probably all can act as Encyclopedia when it comes to arcane matters, so you need something to make each truly unique and minimize the overlap.
(As an alternative, you can always lean into Dark Knight's tendency to cast shadows representing aspects of their psyche.)
- Location
- California
Considering the number of disembodied voices, spirits, and all-powerful dragon demigods that exist inside the WoL if they do all the content in XIV, this should 100% be a thing. I want Fray arguing with Ardbert about the usefulness of our recent heroics, while the Inner Beast and our Voidsent try to convince us to eat someone.
Sounds like some Peak Comedy to me.
Sightedjt
Everlasting Flames
Each Job has enough lore attached to it that you can differentiate them that way.
Dragoon voice differs from Samurai voice as Dragoon is an iconic Ishgardian job, so expect general trend of "fuck dragons" "I miss when our country wasn't buried under ice", while Samurai is Hingashi so has more not-Japan attitudes.
Likewise, Red mage, being a nearly extinct art, is solemn and composed. Meanwhile Summoner is an unhinged maniac having to be visibly restrained from obliterating any and all wildlife within range via Bahamut blasts
Also Mechanist is like a hyperactive child as we are the first one , and created the job crystal.
Guile
Having a really great time right now
I don't know if this is implying Cecil just took 9999 emotional damage or dealt the king 9999 physical damage
Or first one and then the other
- Location
- Alabama
Always fun to play with reflect strats on bosses. Where they work anyway. (Looking at you FFX zombie medusa)
... We did neither of those things. Those were both done by Stephanivien, an entirely separate character.
Granted, MCH has the entirely separate issue of having its questlines all revolve around "guns... cool" despite half the job being about managing your turret / robot.
There is that marvel fanfic by Stewart on SB (Development heaven I think?) which does have something vaguely similar to this (or at least I remember so, Stewart's posting habits are not kind to my memory).
...Oh my god. I really shouldn't laugh, but that's downright hilarious.
I mean, it's also one of the few Final Fantasy games where that works out fine because Cecil and Kain start as fully kited out warriors who can easily bull their way all the way through Mist Cavern rather than a group of plucky teenagers with cloth clothes, 3 daggers and attitude, but still.
You know, I honestly could have sworn it was totally mind control used on Yang? But I guess that's what decade-plus old memories of the last time I played FFIV in any capacity does for you.
A couple people have already brought it it up (yay for sleeping through a page and a half of posts!) but yeah thunder attacks counter Cagnazzo's tsunami phases, which I do distinctly remember being more of a threat? But also again the last time I played was forever ago and was the DS version which generally jacks the difficulty up to 11 compared to the others.
Fair, his original tenure with the party really is just "joins for boss fight and some story battles" before he jumps off a ship rather than travel with you.
Oh yeah, even though some of those jumps were technically before my time (born in 1992 so by the time I was getting into gaming N64/PS1 were starting to release), I actually only had an NES at first back in the day, followed by an SNES. So that jump in graphical quality (and overall game quality) was nuts to kid me back then.
Sadly, the only Final Fantasy I had before FFVIII was Mystic Quest, which I'm not particularly expecting to be played in this thread. Would be a fun interlude of sorts though since iirc it's a pretty short game, and it's fun seeing Square going "okay so Americans are like... really dumb, we gotta make a easy baby Action RPG game specifically for them right?"
Plus the soundtrack goes way harder than it has any right to at times.
Zerban out here reminding me that there's totally multiple SNES RPG with a straight up "let's just cuck the player lmao" to the point that old Japanese forums apparently had a listing of "the three worst most eviliest women in Square RPGs" because they kept getting cucked. Which you know, on one hand kinda incel shit, but on the other, kinda hilarious that it happened multiple times. One in particular I guarantee you was even 110% the writer's fetish with how hard it goes.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
I feel like discussing mind control is potentially spoiler territory, so I'll put it under spoiler, although I don't think anything I'm saying here is actually a spoiler. I just want to be on the safe side.
As far as I can remember (and I might easily be misremembering, so don't take my word for it), there's exactly only one person in the entire game who claims that Golbez was using mind control on them. I would also point to Rosa, Cid, the need to replace the king with a fake, the choice of "create an army and use it to invade everywhere" as the means of obtaining the crystals rather than "just mind control people into handing them over", and many more contextual cues yet to come, as reason why the "mind control" theory, at this point in the game and without any spoilers, appears suspect. Especially when we had the perfect chance for it to be employed here, with Yang, only for the game to go "nope, no mind control here, that was a silly supposition".
So... just saying... I have my doubts about the mind control theory. Maybe the game will prove me wrong; my memory is known (to me) to be weak and I might just not be remembering a specific scene that made it fully unambiguous, outside of that one character. But from what I remember, no mind control was involved at any point in all of FFIV, and the likelihood that the character who claimed it was would be lying is so huge, I always took that as a given. After all, as we just saw last update: Cecil will believe anything, if it comes from somebody they have the tiniest reason to trust, and he's especially prone to seeing the best in people who really don't deserve the benefit of doubt.
So... just saying... I have my doubts about the mind control theory. Maybe the game will prove me wrong; my memory is known (to me) to be weak and I might just not be remembering a specific scene that made it fully unambiguous, outside of that one character. But from what I remember, no mind control was involved at any point in all of FFIV, and the likelihood that the character who claimed it was would be lying is so huge, I always took that as a given. After all, as we just saw last update: Cecil will believe anything, if it comes from somebody they have the tiniest reason to trust, and he's especially prone to seeing the best in people who really don't deserve the benefit of doubt.