"Blame yourself or God" has been firmly stuck in my head since the late 90s and is one of the all-time lines, in my opinion. The WotL translation is much better overall, but still, damn.
Also those attack quotes are cool as shit and it is absolutely tragic that WotL didn't include translations. I think there's a mod out there that does, though.
Glad to see this game getting the Omicron treatment!
But I believe in us. I believe that we're smart enough that we can use JP Boost sometimes, like if we're grinding (if that ends up being a thing we need to do), and taking it off when we want to thoroughly engage with particular combat encounters. Besides, for now, we don't have a Support Ability that this would take the place of.
Omi, are you deliberately going to put yourself in the menu hell of "I forgot to do X" again?
Now, that crystals from the enemy system, along with the various skill ups from doing stuff mid mission, is giving me strong "why the new X-COM games disappointed E.I.G." vibes.
It sounds like their creators were more fans of this style of tactics game than the original x-com games, because that sound solidly like the modern games.
... still, should be interesting to see how Final Fantasy translates to the tactics game medium.
Also, since the translation will certainly keep coming up, @Adloquium, do you think you could check for us the japanese script and say which of the two translations is more accurate to the spirit of the original? It seems like an important thing to know once we get to the heavily changed characterization late in the game, although obviously also knowing whether "Don't blame us, blame yourself or God" is correct or not would be quite nice.
I am going to repeat this, because @Omicron it is VERY important that you (and anyone else playing this game for the 1st time) internalize this when playing this game:
#1 rule of FFT: Have multiple saves, in separate slots.
In particular: if the game asks you in the menus post-battle if you want to save, DEFINITELY USE A DIFFERENT SLOT.
Me and the other people that are vets of this game will be yelling at you to remember to do this, because there's a point in this game where a lot of people have gotten soft-locked and I would very much like you to avoid this common pitfall.
Again, I cannot stress this enough. Have multiple saves, in separate slots.
Ooooh! FFT!
Sweet! Admittedly I was a dumb kid when my brother played through this game on the PlayStation but I am familiar with the original! As for the story see the dumb kid comment. So this will be enlightening!
I guess this is where I feel compelled to show my ass, because my unpopular video game opinion is that "blame yourself or God" has just never gone that hard for me. It always rung to my ear like someone scrambling for a one-liner: "Don't blame me. Blame yourself." (Wait that's not punchy enough I need a stinger.) "...or God." It always sounded like bet-hedging, and I think the replacement line "Forgive me. 'Tis your birth and faith that wrong you, not I." just...flows better. It's not as punchy but it comes off significantly more callous and indifferent. "Eh. Deus Vult and all that."
Of course neither is nearly as metal as Fire Emblem's famous crit line "Pick a god and pray."
...but then if FFT was the kind of story that up and murdered the princess in the first five minutes we'd probably be playing a very different game.
I think this is probably the optimal way to play the game. War of Lions is improved on many fronts, including, often, turns of phrase.
The original will still have some lines ("blame yourself or God" is, of course, one of the very best) that slap harder than an invitation to duel at high noon, but I'm confident us FFT-loving nerds will properly note them for you as necessary.
Omicron said:
Gafgarion has a chant when using Shadowblade.
This rules, I do not understand why you would ever cut this from the new translation.
Let's take this UI in order: Move: Every turn, we can move a number of squares equal to our move speed. We also have a Jump height that establishes how far up we can go when facing heights. There are no diagonal moves, so all movement patterns look like a diamond broken up by whatever environmental obstacles exist. We can only move once; there's no moving 3 tiles, attacking, then 'finishing' our movement with our last 2 tiles. Move before or after. Act: Every turn, we can take one action. The most basic action available to everyone is 'Attack', which allows a character to attack another within their attack range. For Marche Ramza, that's one square to his front, left, right and back (again, no diagonals). Attacks can hit or miss, but so far they seem to have deterministic damage; the game will tell you how much damage you'll deal if you hit ahead of time, and it does not have a random range like in most FF games. There are other actions, which are based on characters' Jobs; Ramza's is "Mettle," more on this later. Wait: You pick this if you just want to end your turn without acting, like if there is nobody within your move and attack range. Status: You can always check your full character sheet at no cost. AI: You can set a character to autobattle, if the game bores you I guess.
Below this, HP is familiar to us by now, MP will be used if any character has spells (this is not the case of Ramza at this time), and CT is… Charge Time appears to be the closest this game has to a take on ATB, or rather on a mechanic which existed in other entries as a 'hidden stat' determining how long it takes between an input and a character actually completing an action; this time it's visible as a gauge on the screen and I have no idea how it works and the game has not really explained it yet in those Tutorials I did read after playing to the end of this update. So I have no idea what it's about. Bravery and Faith are also two stats that are entirely novel, and if I find out what they do, I'll tell you. Also, Ramza's astrological sign is in that little status page?
Yeah, I have no idea what that's about either.
And finally, name and Job - Ramza is a Squire. More on this later.
For now, it's time to take our first combat actions.
Here we can see an early pitfall of the system: Ramza has a limited range of movement and no ranged attacks, and he rolled second place in initiative. Which means all he can do on his turn is advance to the furthest extent of his move stat (5 tiles) and stop, and from there I can't attack anyone. This leaves him in perfect range for one of the guys acting next to come over and smack him first. Whereas, if they had acted first, they would have tried moving first and stopped, and I would have hit them.
I'm sure an experienced player has the tactical awareness to know what to do with these situations, like deliberately waiting to let the guys come to you first, but I'm a meathead, so I just rush in regardless. Fortunately, Ramza has a command called Focus, which allows him to to increase his Attack by 1, so his turn isn't wasted.
As a long-time Disgaea player, this is weirdly familiar. Learning when to charge and when to bait the other guys to charge is a big deal there, too. But not just that, the diamond movement patterns, the changing scenery elevation that primarily exists as a Jump stat check, it's all the same. Disgaea even has a job/class system, though a different one. The main thing that's missing is the ability to pick up and throw your fellows instead of attacking.
I don't mind it; in fact I find it aesthetically pleasing. But this is broadcasting the style that the entire game is probably going to have, make no mistake.
And this right here is one of the main reasons I so prefer WotL to the original release - this dialogue style is just catnip to me. I think part of it is how it so firmly lends a sense of place to everything, with everyone using this style of dialogue, it feels like everyone is from the same place and time, one which is different from the real world. I love every game that can pull off this style and maintain a consistent grammar, and this is one of those games.
another knight (also a woman; I'll stop commenting on this soon because it becomes unremarkable, which I appreciate in this context - the game just seems to have perfectly mix-gender armies on all sides) staggers through.
Gaffgarion: "Kill them all! Leave no man standing!" Agrias: "You would have us slaughter them? Are you mad? Kill them here and you'll have played into Duke Goltanna's hands! We need only put them to rout!" Gaffgarion: "I find dead men rout more easily."
Gaffgarion, you funny motherfucker. This guy is actually genuinely pretty hilarious.
I'm sure an experienced player has the tactical awareness to know what to do with these situations, like deliberately waiting to let the guys come to you first, but I'm a meathead, so I just rush in regardless. Fortunately, Ramza has a command called Focus, which allows him to to increase his Attack by 1, so his turn isn't wasted.
Yeah, it's worth mentioning that you get a CP "refund" for each action (move or Action) that you do not take, so waiting does bring your next turn up sooner, and it's modified by speed - you don't need the gritty details right now, but you have a bit of control over the initiative order in that way.
I don't know, Ramza. Have you considered what could be the reasons that lead someone to banditry? How about that Fifty Year War we just heard about that ravaged the country and left countless knights penniless and without occupation?
Look he's just said he's a noble apparently, boy doesn't understand how money works. He just thinks all these ex-soldiers will be fine if they pull themselves up by their bootstraps you know.
You should, because frankly some of the class unlocks are just needlessly obtuse, with multiple prereqs. It adds nothing and you'd be better off just grabbing a chart.
Yeah so my overall feeling of the PSX translation is that it has a few absolutely banger lines, see above, but the rest of the experience is just a dripless slog. Playing the PSX version would result in spending a lot of time picking apart the translation, why they made the choices they did, what the script conveys, what it's trying to convey - and I think that's just going to get tiresome while WotL would let us largely just get on with it.
I've seen some folks call the WotL translation excessive or trying too hard, but I think it parses fine and serves perfectly well to convey information, most of the time much better than the vanilla flavor.
I'm glad to see you getting into FFT though! I think it strikes a good balance between story and chunks of gameplay where you can just jump in and get to playing and having fun with it, and there are some very fun things you can do with it. The lack of towns is iffy, but if nothing else it lends to a bit of a more focused story, I feel.
Tactics is probably the biggest FF game which I'm least familiar with, so this is going to be a fun learning experience, I think!
Though, that doesn't say much. I'm the sort of person who's played Final Fantasy II to completion and never touched Final Fantasy VII, my level of familiarity with something is completely unpredictable.
Definitely interested in seeing where this goes. 3 I'd played until the end of the floating continent, 8 I'd played two thirds, and 7 I'd absorbed most of through let's plays, fanfics, and discussions, but this one I'm almost completely blind outside of Big Endgame Stuff that gets discussed in context of XII, but very little clue about most of thr context of that Big Endgame Stuff (though I also know factoids about the PSX version's trainwreck of a translation, because I find bad translation hilarious). Like, Ramza being a forgotten hero and why I mostly know from XIV rather than my usual pop culture osmosis sources, to give you an idea of how little I know of the plot of 90% of this game.
I regularly say "I'll not be much longer" (or "I shan't be much longer", depending on what exactly I'm responding to), so... this feels a little bit of an attack
It's not archaic! It's just... slightly poncy British!
I picked up a copy of FFT after 10, played half of it, and then came back a year later to play it more seriously.
And there was a good dramatic irony --
But what a fascinating premise that is. Right off the gate, the first thing the game is telling us is that our deeds were forgotten, our hero expunged from history's weave, not merely by accident but through active obfuscation by some evil Church, his name dragged through the mud in favor of Some Asshole. That definitely sounds like a game with, if not a Bad End, at the very least a bittersweet 'you saved the world but no one will remember you and some asshole will get all the credit'. That's a pretty bleak outset from the opening monologue!
In my serious playthrough, Faceless Mook Chemist #1 had by far the strongest mechanical identity in my party, hands down, and could colorably have been interpreted as the secret mastermind of the party, as ridiculous as that was.
Gotta love the Dragon Quest III style character recruitment. Go to the mercenary's guild and say to the receptionist, "I'm looking for a female sellsword named Buttface who is a chemist by trade" and no matter what name, gender, and job combo you ask for, the guild has somebody by that description desperate enough for work that they'll join your crew just for a presumed offscreen cut of your winnings, loyally enough to be willing to die for your cause.
It's an efficient system, I'll give them that, though I'd hate to see how crowded the backroom at the guild is.
"Hey guys we got a request for some warm bodies coming in! Need a chemist, a swordsman, two archers and a black mage!"
Robinhood the Archer: Yo!
Fullmetal the Chemist: Pick me!
Sephiroth the Swordsman: k
2ndarcher the Archer: Finally, I'm in.
GandalfJr the Black Mage: u hav my staff lol
I find it kinda weird that Ivalice uses the Earth zodiac despite obviously not being Earth, but I can understand why from a non-diegetic point of view, since it's quicker for the player to understand than a made-up zodiac chart would be.
Did the same thing when I was writing Fool Bloom, in that I used Earth flowers for convenience's sake even though they're all alien in origin
I am going to repeat this, because @Omicron it is VERY important that you (and anyone else playing this game for the 1st time) internalize this when playing this game:
#1 rule of FFT: Have multiple saves, in separate slots.
In particular: if the game asks you in the menus post-battle if you want to save, DEFINITELY USE A DIFFERENT SLOT.
Me and the other people that are vets of this game will be yelling at you to remember to do this, because there's a point in this game where a lot of people have gotten soft-locked and I would very much like you to avoid this common pitfall.
Again, I cannot stress this enough. Have multiple saves, in separate slots.
My standard procedure with emulated games like this is that I keep as many saves as I have literal save slots in the game, plus an extra set of saves in the emulator's own native save function
Baldur's Gate 3 is the best video game because if you throw a potion a someone, they first take damage from being brained over the head by a glass bottle and then recieve the magic(k)al effects.
(Anecdotally, when I told my younger sister, who played even more FFTA than I did after I passed the GBA down to her and considers it the best FF game, that its story was controversial, she stared at me and said: 'FFTA had a story?')
Being fair, you can totally just ignore the plot in FFTA and go play clan wars and building up your army for 50+ hours if you really want to. What else are you gonna do, have the five millionth internet debate on whether or not Marche was right?
I've waved around the question of 'should I play the PSX emulated version of the game, or WotL' a few times, enough to gather some data points. My overall conclusion from this, having mulled it over, is that while we have at least one very strong defender for the PSX's version's merits (with WotL localization modded in if need be), by weight of numbers both in this thread and in Discord conversations there seemed to be a strong consensus around the PSP version. So I downloaded a PSP emulator.
Hmm, you know part of me was really leaning the PSX version for the LP because of some general things about the WotL version I'm not as big on (the lack of spell incantations, and the apparent sound issues and slowdown at times)... but yeah thinking objectively the PSP version is probably a better choice just because of the much clearer translation. Yeah, we'll lose out on cool incantations, and maybe a few classic lines, but otherwise... well, within the first five minutes of booting up the PSX version I was going "boy howdy this sure is a localization of some kind alright". This way at worst we just have to parse some some archaic Ye Ol English.
Alright so I totally might have had this game as a kid and only played it for 20 minutes if that... is this the samurai fighting game where contrary to other fighting games, getting chopped with a sword just instantly kills you and stuff?
As to why the game is asking for our birth date, uh, I don't know? Given that this is the 'Zodiac Brave Story,' perhaps it will have an impact on some kind of Zodiac related mechanic?
At this moment, a (female) Knight speaks up; we learn almost immediately that her name is Agrias. At least judging from the opening battles of the games, it looks like the game is interestingly gender-equal in terms of having male and female models for all classes and mixing them in every group you run into, which is neat.
Yeah FFT is very nicely gender balanced in that way, plenty of prominent characters of both genders and generics can be either or. There are some minor gameplay differences between male and female characters, but frankly it's not enough to care about unless you're super min-maxing, considering 12 year old me still managed to bash their head through the game.
CT is… Charge Time appears to be the closest this game has to a take on ATB, or rather on a mechanic which existed in other entries as a 'hidden stat' determining how long it takes between an input and a character actually completing an action; this time it's visible as a gauge on the screen and I have no idea how it works and the game has not really explained it yet in those Tutorials I did read after playing to the end of this update. So I have no idea what it's about. Bravery and Faith are also two stats that are entirely novel, and if I find out what they do, I'll tell you. Also, Ramza's astrological sign is in that little status page?
Omi skipping the tutorials quickly coming back to haunt him, who could have seen this coming? Well, I'm sure someone will get to the relevance of Faith, Bravery, and all that eventually.
We are offered the option to save there, and then we are dumped to this odd menu:
How strange! We are of course provided no explanation and at this point I am refusing to check out the tutorial out of sheer stubborn pique, I want to play the game. We can check Ramza's status, and we can delete him from this tile and move him to another tile. From my memories of FFTA, we're looking at a deployment screen where we decide in what formation to deploy our troops, except in FFTA we get to see what the battlefield will look like while deploying, whereas here we're just deciding based on guesswork, and also we only have one character anyway. So let's start!
Okay, so, when you're in the menu, there are no other visible party members. Nor is there any obvious way to make party members appear. Turns out, you have to open the Status menu, which opens on a page listing Ramza's traits, and then click L1 or R1 so that the page will turn to the next member in our group, which we have, apparently. Then we tab out of the Status menu and we now have that character's sprite hovering above one of the tiles.
In this fashion, we can load up to five characters before the fight.
Genuinely, I have no words, this is some top comedic material and you know it's going to haunt you (or more accurately we'll haunt you with it) for the entire rest of the playthrough, right?
Ramza: "Honest work would see them die old in bed, yet they choose instead this early grave. Why persist in such folly?"
I don't know, Ramza. Have you considered what could be the reasons that lead someone to banditry? How about that Fifty Year War we just heard about that ravaged the country and left countless knights penniless and without occupation?
Bah! Knights and soldiers should have just pulled them up by their bootstraps like Ramza did! Why, his family only paid for all his equipment, hired a squad of loyal knights to fight for him, and funded his entire dorm in the Royal Knight's Academy!
Earlier, I talked about how the game's screens work, and how every screen is constructed like a battle screen, and this expands to what was, for me as a child playing Tactics Advance, the weirdest and most off-putting conceit about the game:
There are no 'town' areas, or 'civilian' areas, or 'no-combat' areas. If the game is anything like FFTA, we will never control Ramza's movements directly outside the context of a battle. Everything in the game that isn't combat is a menu. When we saw that cutscene with the Knight giving out orders? We did not control characters during that bit, they moved entirely on their own. Here in the shop, we don't move Ramza to enter or leave; we select the shop in the menu, dialogue with the shopkeeper opens, and once we click Exit, we are dumped back on the world map. We can't visit Gariland as a town, we can't just walk around anywhere. This game is three things: Menus, dialogue cutscenes, and combat.
It's a very… Pared down experience. But FFT is supposed to have a great story, so I'm holding hope that it doesn't negatively impact the narrative.
Yeaaaaah, Final Fantasy Tactics is, as the name suggests... a Tactical RPG instead of the usual JRPG. I mean it's still a JRPG, being an RPG from Japan and all that, but in the vein of things like Disgaea or Fire Emblem it's a lot of just navigating menus rather than say, visiting a town and walking around to admire the environments and chat up all the townsfolk.
Much like in V, Jobs can mix and match abilities to some extent; they have access to various Commands as well as Reaction Abilities (which are this game's categorization for stuff like Counterattack), Support Abilities, and Movement Abilities; so a Black Mage could keep the Item command from Chemist. This seems like a system with a lot of potential depth - as much or more as V's job system, potentially - which will take a while to fully come into its own, as there are job level requirements to unlock new jobs. Still, it's easy enough getting into the first advanced jobs; even now after only one battle, I have several characters with job lv 2 who could become Advanced Jobs right away.
The big thing is that… The game doesn't tell us about any jobs beyond Knight/Archer/Black Mage/White Mage. In fact, the tutorial even tells us that "there are many other jobs available to units as well, but you will have to discover their requirements on your own." Which I don't… want to do? I don't want to waste ages blindly leveling Jobs trying to figure out the level gate that will unlock Summoner or whatever. So I'll probably end up looking that up, though I haven't yet. I value blindness in this playthrough but not that highly.
A lot of the early jobs aren't that bad, really, just stuff like "get 2 or 3 levels in previous job in this tree". Eventually though they get more complicated, even if it's slightly alleviated by a side system where you can gain progress in jobs you haven't actually entered by watching other characters use that job (for example: Ramza probably has some Chemist job experience and JP from watching your party's actual chemists chuck glass at people). Obviously Ramza in particular will get plenty of experience that way, since... main character, how often is he ever not deployed?
"Don't blame us. Blame yourself or God." Absolutely brutal. It comes across a lot less as Delita being a hypocrite and more about him just being an indifferent asshole. It's a subtly different characterization! It's also a very good line, granted.
So yeah, that one line from Delita and the chants/incantations as a whole? That's some of the awesome stuff from the original script. The chants in particular annoy the hell out of me because apparently they're in the WotL code somewhere, but just... don't' happen? Why would you get rid of that? At least make it a menu toggle if you think it'll annoy some players.
Genuinely, I had no idea why people were meming those words earlier in the thread because I was too lazy to look it up and was never deep in the FFT sauce over the years, but now it's just hilarious.
When we claim a crystal, we are given the option to either restore HP and MP completely, or learn an Ability that the enemy knew. This allows us to side-step the Job learning system. Here, Squire Rienhart learned Antidote, one of the Chemist's Item Abilities. From a fallen Squire, my Chemist learned Dash.
I wasn't expecting this to be how the 'memories etched into stone' part of the intro manifests. Every enemy is essentially a skill pinata that you have to kill to get at the juicy Abilities inside.
That's fascinating! And a little grim. I'm not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, this is a really cool reward system. On the other hand, it incentivizes weird behavior, like here, where I ended the fight cornering the poor enemy Chemist and just walling him for two turns so that his friends could dissolve into sweet, sweet Ability juice. This seems like the 'optimal' strategy to pursue would often be to stall the fight as much as possible in order to maximize item and crystal gain, but that could easily make the gameplay more tedious and less fun?
From what I remember of my first playthrough, this is one of those things that totally seemed worth doing in parts of the first chapter, but I just stopped caring about being tedious with it the farther the game went on. Plus, eventually who cares about going "oh boy my high level spellcaster can learn Throw Stone!" when you happen to kill a random squire?
Yeah, it's not important super often... but when it comes up, oh boy does it come up, I'm pretty sure I had to pull some serious cheese strats to break out of a specific softlock which I'm sure every Tactics player is familiar with.
Heavily considering if I'll do that for my play-along, myself. Might be worth sticking with the OG translation just for comparison... but at the same time I suspect multiple members of the thread are already interested in comparing the two anyways.
There is also, in fact, a second movie that will play if you let the game continue to run on the title screen which introduces all the classes and some monsters. And yet another fantastic music track to accompany it (even if it gets a little repetitive. The melody is great and the orchestration is outstanding)
In my serious playthrough, Faceless Mook Chemist #1 had by far the strongest mechanical identity in my party, hands down, and could colorably have been interpreted as the secret mastermind of the party, as ridiculous as that was.
