Obviously keeping a noble fed and lodged while you wait for ransom is very expensive - you can't just treat them wharever. And negotiating a ransom can take a long time.
So the end result is that when common soldiers captured a noble they could sold their captive for quick cash to a noble on their side, who would then arrange the ransom for profit.
I remember being surprised by Argath's character, years ago when I first played this game. Even with the small character sprites, you can tell that this guy reeks of fear, anger, desperation. Like, up and asking for a hundred men to be lead by a simple squire??? Not surprised Dycedarg shot him down.
His aggression on the poor Corpse Brigade guy though, that was surprising. I was a kid back then, no way I understood that Argath's desperation comes from him realizing his nobility status (despite the tarnish) is utterly in jeopardy with Elmdore's kidnapping. I just thought he was a dick overstepping his bounds.
Also, he hates rats. His dialogue and character sprite turning incredulously towards Ramza when he mentioned Zeklaus' nickname is him literally going 'wait, what???' at our character lol.
You can fix the smudge texture of the JP points screen on the emulator by going into Game Settings. Highlight Texture Filtering and select 'Nearest'. This may also improve the character portraits too.
My own opinion on classes:
I found Archer to be too fiddly to be worth using; I blazed through it to get to the jobs it unlocks and never looked back.
Knight is extremely dominant at this stage thanks to its stats and heavy armor but I didn't like the abilities. Rend Weapon can be clutch occasionally.
Monk got a lot of play in my playthrough; they're cheap to field, do good damage, and have interesting skills. In particular, I have a very vivid memory of my Monk running rampant in the Sietch with Shockwave ("Earth's anger running through my arms! Earth Slash!")
I do like the mechanical storytelling of me fielding 2 Monks from my randos, wearing only clothes and wielding no weapons, so that I could afford to equip Ramza in Knight gear.
It turns out the game everyone said had great writing did in fact have great writing. Absolute shocker, I know. But God it's nice to be reading a Final Fantasy script that actually dives into class divides and social ills and political nuance. It's not necessarily that the series was missing those things, it didn't particularly need them for the kind of story it liked to tell, it's just that I, personally, like those stories.
Yep - archers are unfortunately rather fiddly with their range. Between that and being able to shoot your buddy in the back, trying to use an archer involves a fair bit of trying to intuit the firing angles the level geometry will allow. They're very powerful used correctly, but there is a nonzero mental strain involved with setting them up.
I… don't know which ones of these are good? It's genuinely hard to tell without prior game experience. I imagine the Rend [Gear] options are useless against monsters, but are they especially useful against human targets? I imagine they're likely to have a variable success rate, and if this ends up like typical 'status effects vs bosses' FF fashion that doesn't seem worth it, but on the other hand maybe Rend Weapon actually allows us to trivialize enemy melee class? I'd welcome some advice there.
So rending weapons is obviously good against human opponents, and stat rends have some good use cases, but ultimately I always found Knights to be kind of tedius and one note. It might just be me, but I always found the later physical classes to be more interesting to use.
You'll have to see what you'd like, but I would say maybe just try for one stat and one equipment rend at first, and maybe don't invest super hard into them until you've had a chance to try out a few other classes.
Barbaneth: "Your friend, Delita. He is a good boy. He is lowborn, but he can serve you well. I've made arrangements for him to enter the Akademy. *chuckle* You should have seen the look on the headmaster's face. In the years ahead you will need someone whom you can trust. You could do far worse than Delita."
This is why I think it's really interesting what the prologue showed us. Every interaction with Delita is sitting under the looming shadow of future events which we know a glimpse of, and it's not something we can really just ignore. I have to wonder how differently we would view things without that knowledge, if Delita would just slip under our notice or if we would be asking questions, especially with how the issue of lowborn versus higborn is shaping up to be a major theme here. Especially given...
It's really interesting to me how Ramza - our protagonist - is framed as slightly more noble than Argath in this interaction, but he only provides restrain, not an alternative. He lets Argath conduct the interrogation as he will, only stepping in to tell him to tone it down when he rises to a distasteful level of violence. Ramza doesn't ask his own questions of the Swordsman except once, he does not seek alternative ways of getting an answer like bribing him, promising him freedom, or threatening him with novel kinds of punishment, he's fine with everything Ramza is doing except specifically beating up a helpless prisoner.
Bear in mind that Argath is spewing all of this hatred and bile onto a lowborn swordsman, and Ramza is tacitly permitting it, all while Delita is standing rightthere. We don't know what's going on in Delita's head - maybe he's in full "fuck you got mine" mode? Maybe he's judging Ramza for what all be permits? Maybe he legitimately doesn't care? It's hard to tell, but given that class struggles seem to be something of a theme it's hard to just brush it all off.
Anyway, congratulations Omi! Dorter definitely has some infamy as an early-game difficulty spike, so well done on getting past it. I know I took something like half a dozen tries before I could muddle through. It doesn't help that it's probably when you're getting your first casters online, and figuring out spell charge times while also fighting your first really balanced enemy party can be a lot to deal with at once.
But noe that you're breaking past the squire/chemist stage of the game, you'll be able to pull out more options and tailor your approaches to coming fights. This is definitely where I feel the game starts to open up a fair bit.
Well, to start with, there's a guy called THE THUNDER GOD who is like fifty feet tall, wields like a dozen swords and can make a blade of light that explodes and destroys the entire arena
Sounds like he got upgraded into becoming a Discount!Ramuh except with swords and light show. He's already an old man surviving a young man's job with him living through the Fifty Years War, no need to turn him into an actual god.
They're just about to execute the last survivor when we arrive, which, oddly enough, prompts a dialogue choice: Ramza can either chose "Our first duty is to defeat the Brigade." or "We must rescue their captive!" Doing so changes the battle objective, either to defeat all enemies or to protect the soldier, known as Argath. This doesn't seem like it changes much - we need to kill all enemies regardless, but we can add ourselves an extra objective if we want to
Choosing to destroy enemies has a subtle mechanical effect that isn't worth worrying about (since your not doing a single class challenge) but also gives Deltia some characterization (at the expense if making Ramza an asshole). Since Deltia has otherwise acted like the background for all the nobles, it's interesting to see if someone can dig up the text of it. (Its like four lines?)
Wait a minute, you're telling me the Corpse Brigade aren't motivated by money, they're actual anarchists who are specifically targeting the nobility and trying to end its rule?
…
Why am I fighting against them? I want to join up.
This is what you get for playing a game centering an aristocratic protagonist, you end up having to work for the true villains without even knowing it
I can see the line between these two sections. It's as straight as a crossbow's trajectory.
No joke, I'm glad your getting into the swing of things for FFT, Dorter was well played for a first timer, and FFT has the most engaging battle system of any FF game you've reviewed. Its got that gooood crunch to play with.
God, this level. Talk about a wake-up call, both to how classes like archer and black mage are far more tactically varied than one would expect, but also to how this game, early on, can wreck you bad.
Man, everyone else commenting on the story and all I can focus on is that Ajora Glabados is such a blatantly villainous name they may as well have called the guy Satan McBeelzebub; they barely even bothered to remove a couple of letters from Glasya-Labolas for the guy's surname, even. I mean, the church being evil is hardly going to be surprising in a JRPG with actual political writing, but I'd have thought they'd have had a tiny bit more subtlety.
Or maybe it's all a big fakeout and the church is actually good in this one, as opposed to damn near every other JRPG that has both a church and politics involved in the story.
I do like that the characters are written as, you know, stupid impulsive teenagers with no real clear idea about what the fuck they're actually doing. Who thought it was a good idea to set a bunch of 16-year-olds loose to murder whoever they like?
I do like that the characters are written as, you know, stupid impulsive teenagers with no real clear idea about what the fuck they're actually doing. Who thought it was a good idea to set a bunch of 16-year-olds loose to murder whoever they like?
These are 'Arts of War,' and they're all in the form of 'Rend X.' Each one is a debuff that either destroys equipment or reduces an enemy resource: Break Helm, Armor, Shield or Weapon, Deplete MP, or directly reduce Speed, Power, or Magick.
I… don't know which ones of these are good? It's genuinely hard to tell without prior game experience. I imagine the Rend [Gear] options are useless against monsters, but are they especially useful against human targets? I imagine they're likely to have a variable success rate, and if this ends up like typical 'status effects vs bosses' FF fashion that doesn't seem worth it, but on the other hand maybe Rend Weapon actually allows us to trivialize enemy melee class? I'd welcome some advice there.
So The Rend Power and Magick are fantastic if you want to Grind. After a few uses an enemy's Physical or magic attacks will be reduced to 1 Damage. So you can just group around the only surviving enemy at the end of a battle and use them as an XP/JP Piñata. Just have someone who can heal both your guys and the enemy. From the Squire Tree, Accumulate is also absurdly good for leveling and use with Physical Jobs, you used it the opening, but a Permanent, for the battle, stacking plus 1 Attack gets nuts, more importantly it's guaranteed 10 XP and JP per turn.
Rend Equipment is... You're better unlocking Thief and stealing Equipment.
I do like that the characters are written as, you know, stupid impulsive teenagers with no real clear idea about what the fuck they're actually doing. Who thought it was a good idea to set a bunch of 16-year-olds loose to murder whoever they like?
I mean to be fair, we did have one character tell them to stay at home and not hare off into danger, it's just that between the cooler older brother and the chronic inability of teenagers to stay still, he may as well have asked the sun to not set in the evening.
I'm not saying the game is actually ripping off A Song of Ice and Fire, obviously, given that it originally came out only a year after the first book and in Japan, it's just. An extremely funny coincidence.
I mean, a bastard child of a noble is kind of an obvious protagonist for this kind of story. He's noble, so there is still a fantasy of participating in the Hight Game and indulging in luxuries and having angst over noble duty and so on, but he's not too noble, and so still has the cred of an approachable everyman.
A bastard child is basically a secret royal farmboy of gritty fantasy.
Elmdore, known as the Silver Prince for his bright armor and silver hair, is a hero of the latter days of the War, as well as a devour member of the Church of Glabados and an ordained inquisitor.
This is what you get for playing a game centering an aristocratic protagonist, you end up having to work for the true villains without even knowing it 😔
The two Black Mages have the first effective ranged AoEs in the game - their spells hit in a cross pattern, either a unit and the units adjacent to it, or a tile and the tile adjacent to it.
It turns out the game everyone said had great writing did in fact have great writing. Absolute shocker, I know. But God it's nice to be reading a Final Fantasy script that actually dives into class divides and social ills and political nuance. It's not necessarily that the series was missing those things, it didn't particularly need them for the kind of story it liked to tell, it's just that I, personally, like those stories.
"You thought the true villain of this game was the conflict and greed caused by the entrenched inequalities of an aristocratic society of warrior nobles, but it was I, Zeltimecideath, the racist alien tree mommy!"
"You thought the true villain of this game was the conflict and greed caused by the entrenched inequalities of an aristocratic society of warrior nobles, but it was I, Zeltimecideath, the racist alien tree mommy!"
Hear ye, hear ye. 'Tis the year of our lord 2024, and it has come to pass that Ramza of House Beoulve faced great defeat against that accursed opponent, the Bomb.
The Tavernmaster also identifies two Ivalician military orders of interest: The Order of the Northern Sky, led by Barbaneth Beoulve himself (which means that Ramza is actually the son to the previous head of the order; in that context it's genuinely surprising that he started out as an ordinary cadet instead of getting the Nepotism Push) and the Order of the Southern Sky, led by one Cidolfus Orlandeau, also known as the Thunder God.
With a title like that there is no way he doesn't show up in the story as an extra-hard boss with his own custom job and abilities. Also, this is our Cid namecheck for this game.
Cid? Naaaah doubt he's relevant. I mean, if he was fighting the whole 50 years war, he's gotta be old by now, and everyone knows old people in medieval times have like The Gout or something and can't fight anymore.
Turns out, Ramza Beoulve is a bastard son of Barbaneth Beoulve.
He's Jon Snow. We're playing as Jon Fucking Snow. Goddammit. HE EVEN JOINED A SPECIAL MILITARY ORDER AFTER HIS FATHER DIED!
I'm not saying the game is actually ripping off A Song of Ice and Fire, obviously, given that it originally came out only a year after the first book and in Japan, it's just. An extremely funny coincidence.
I mean, a bastard child of a noble is kind of an obvious protagonist for this kind of story. He's noble, so there is still a fantasy of participating in the Hight Game and indulging in luxuries and having angst over noble duty and so on, but he's not too noble, and so still has the cred of an approachable everyman.
A bastard child is basically a secret royal farmboy of gritty fantasy.
Pretty much what illhousen said, in a setting focusing on the nobility and the common people and the differences, a bastard of a high noble house is the perfect position to stick your protagonist. Enough influence and power that they aren't completely disregarded or killed the second they step out of line, but not enough that they're completely locked in and stuck in the system forevermore weighted down by their own noble title.
Barbaneth: "Hear me, Ramza. For generations, we Beoulves have stood foremost of those who serve the Crown. Ours is the soul of the knight. Become a knight worthy of your name. Tolerate no injustice. Stray not from the true path. You will know the path you must walk. A Beoulve can… can walk no other…." Ramza: "I will not fail you, father." Barbaneth: "Your friend, Delita. He is a good boy. He is lowborn, but he can serve you well. I've made arrangements for him to enter the Akademy. *chuckle* You should have seen the look on the headmaster's face. In the years ahead you will need someone whom you can trust. You could do far worse than Delita."
Being fair we only know how it ended up, not exactly how it got there. Plenty of room yet for the jump between "best buddies 5ever" and "By god he just kidnapped the princess".
I wonder to what extent the whole 'commonborn vs noble' angle will play into the game's plot; it seems to be deliberate set up for later narrative development or themes.
I'm sure it won't be of any importance whatsoever. Nope, no reason a story about a noble bastard and his commoner friend would somehow relate to the class system in a medieval setting that draws massive attention to its unfairness in the dialogue and background alike.
With this battle, we have enough JP to unlock JP Boost for Ramza. We could stay in Squire until we've learned additional abilities like Stone, Counter Tackle, or Equip Axes, but Squire is stupendously boring and so I have Ramza immediately swapped into Knight, a class with stronger stats and an Ability set which… We'll get to it.
Yeah there's not a lot of particularly useful abilities in Squire from what I recall. Sure, JP Up and Move+1 are good, and if you pick up any ability from it before leaving then Focus is a free attack buff during down turns, but it's very much designed as a skill set to be quickly replaced. Chemist is... probably meant to be similar, but items being items always have some use or another.
It's interesting that Dycedarg immediate reaction upon Ramza coming home is to have him assigned to a guard duty where he faces minimal risk. He says he's proud of his brother's deeds, but I think he'd rather his 16-year old brother, bastard though he may be, go trapsing around the countryside in the middle of a social collapse to end up murdered by some Corpse Brigade rogue.
Zalbaag is very warm towards both Ramza and Delita, praising them for their deeds in battle against the brigands, and he tells Ramza that he's now truly earned the right to call himself a Beoulve, which is nice. We really do seem to be angling towards the ASoIaF dynamic where Jon Snow's position in his family is kind of awkward but his relationship with his siblings is still fundamentally a mutual affection and support. It's a fascinating case of convergent development if so.
See, my take on reading this plus the earlier bits during their father's death puts me thinking that Dycedarg just doesn't particularly care for Ramza? In a Catelyn Stark sort of way (if less outright hostile), he would prefer the bastard boy just be set in a corner somewhere and not draw attention or have to deal with him.
Meanwhile, Zalbaag is clearly the fun older brother that cares deeply for Ramza, including wanting him to enjoy himself and get better opportunities.
Wait a minute, you're telling me the Corpse Brigade aren't motivated by money, they're actual anarchists who are specifically targeting the nobility and trying to end its rule?
…
Why am I fighting against them? I want to join up.
This is what you get for playing a game centering an aristocratic protagonist, you end up having to work for the true villains without even knowing it 😔
Well hey, Ramza's "just a mercenary" eventually, so I'm sure we got an interesting journey ahead of us. maybe by Chapter 7 you can join up with the Corpse Brigade.
Here, you can see a Squire use Stone, the basic thrown attack ability, which a few of the Squires came packaged with and which allows me to attack at range for low damage rather than being stuck Waiting out turns when I don't reach an enemy.
Honestly I'm not sure it's that worth using Stone? If you wait after moving instead of using an action, you get your next turn faster than you would otherwise, so might be better trading off that potential 5-10 damage for moving again sooner.
Ramza is subject to the same death countdown as all non-Guest characters. And because the story can't continue without him, his timer running down means a Game Over.
RIP Ramza. This has absolutely killed me multiple times back when I first played, things like overextending with Ramza and getting him killed then the timer ticking down too quickly.
Usually because I stacked speed boosts on him so I had far less than 3 turns to revive him, but I digress.
A messy win is still a win; everyone got some JP out of this, though not quite enough to level up. Our next battle occurs on the Mandelia Plain and is considerably easier, plus it has us see our first Chocobo!
Esther's equipment doesn't actually really matter, because we're only allowed 4 characters in the next battle so she'll be benched, but it's a matter of principle.
Always worth keeping the backup units up to par, just in case. I'm sure Delita and Argus will be out of the roster soon enough, seeing as they weren't there in the prologue (...or I mean, not in the party.)
Also I'm about to make a very mean discovery. Do you remember how the Archer on that hill had an insanely wide attack range firing down?
In this picture, you can see Osric, our Archer, attempt to shoot the enemy Knight while Ramza is on the tile in front of him.
The attack hits Ramza instead. Because arrows have trajectories and travel in straight lines so you will end up firing at your own allies if they're in the way.
That wasn't even on my radar as a possibility, what the hell.
Which leads us to Targeting: Spells have an AoE. Because of this, they can be cast either at a unit or at a tile. If you select a unit, say that Archer to the left of the screen, then when the Black Mage (Blage?) casts Fire, it will center on that archer and hit adjacent tiles, thus likely striking the Black Mage next to him too. However, if the Archer moves before the spell is cast, then the spell will move with him. That will likely take the enemy Black Mage out of targeting; more dangerously, if the Archer for whatever reason decides to come into melee with Ramza, then Ramza will get hit by the spell. There's no friendly fire settings! For this reason, it might be preferable to target a tile - if the enemy moves out of range, the spell might whiff, but at least you're not risking a danger close scenario. Alternatively, you might want to cast a tile because even though the tile is empty, there are enemies in adjacent positions to it; or because you anticipate an enemy moving there. It's complex!
Alternatively-alternatively, when you inevitably get elemental absorbing equipment you could probably pull some nonsense like "target Ramza with Thundaga, have him run into a crowd of enemies and explode regaining HP while they all drop dead".
IT CANNOT FIRE IN CLOSE RANGE BECAUSE HE'S TOO HIGH UP and can't see straight down.
This is. A little infuriating. It's not like the game gives me a forecast of what my range will end up being on the next tile I move to, and once you have confirmed a move, you can't go back, so I just have to guess.
More points piling up for "why Archer isn't that great just progress to another class", I guess. I mean in the right map with elevation they can do some cool sniping, don't get me wrong, but overall it feels like you're better off just leveling Archer enough to unlock something else and moving on.
And that concludes the Battle of the Dorter Slums.
This was significantly more interesting than previous battles, now that we have a full roster of individual jobs that can support one another and each have a particular battle plan.
Nice job on clearing Dorter! it's absolutely the first big wall of the game, and a well known one at that, so the fact that you cleared it without too much difficulty once you got your party properly settled is great. Can't wait to see what routes you take all your characters down as the class system opens up more and more.
These are 'Arts of War,' and they're all in the form of 'Rend X.' Each one is a debuff that either destroys equipment or reduces an enemy resource: Break Helm, Armor, Shield or Weapon, Deplete MP, or directly reduce Speed, Power, or Magick.
I… don't know which ones of these are good? It's genuinely hard to tell without prior game experience. I imagine the Rend [Gear] options are useless against monsters, but are they especially useful against human targets? I imagine they're likely to have a variable success rate, and if this ends up like typical 'status effects vs bosses' FF fashion that doesn't seem worth it, but on the other hand maybe Rend Weapon actually allows us to trivialize enemy melee class? I'd welcome some advice there.
As for Reaction and Support Abilities, Knights can learn Parry, which grants a chance to block physical attacks with the weapon (separate from the already existing chance to block with a shield), that seems fairly decent. They can also learn to Equip Heavy Armor, Shields or Swords; these are all of course available to the Knight by default, the point is that by learning them permanently, we could then make Ramza into, say, a Black Mage wearing heavy armor.
So yeah, basically I have choice paralysis because there are so many options and a limited pool of JP to spend. I expect this'll be a regular occurrence. Still, even without these Arts of War, just being a Knight is a huge boost in power and survivability and Ramza has been doing pretty well for himself.
So, personally I don't vibe too much with the knight skillset, since rending equipment usually just leaves me going "yeah but I could have stolen that instead", and rending stats often goes "yeah but I could just focus on killing them outright instead". That said if you do decide to learn any of them, I'd say Rend Weapon is the obvious equipment choice since you can slap most physical fighters with it and completely cripple their offensive capabilities, and... probably Rend Speed depending on how effective it is? In a tactical game like this with how CT functions, speed can be king, I've had scenarios set up that go "cool your party gets 3 moves for every 1 move the enemy gets" before with the right buffs/debuffs and it's hilariously silly. Also, I'm fairly certain Rend/Steal equipment works on most major enemies and bosses, though there's probably a few with an ability or accessory or whatnot protecting their equipment.
As for support abilities, probably Equip Shield over Swords or Heavy Armor - I figure most classes are already going to have their own weapons and armor that's optimal for them anyways that they can equip, but I doubt everyone is capable of slapping on a shield, so it's a free slot defense boost.
"Summarily discharged without compensation."
"The atrocities committed by the Order, such as the mass killing of enemy soldiers and the sacking of villages."
Luv it when I go to the pub and ask the barman for a pint and the news, and he pulls out Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and starts to monologue.
I'm not saying the game is actually ripping off A Song of Ice and Fire, obviously, given that it originally came out only a year after the first book and in Japan
I like to think that GRRM took a trip to Japan sometime in the mid 90's, and as part of a wild night of barhopping in Shibuya, met a young Matsuno. Awakening in a mental fog induced by 2 for 1 Oolong Highball specials and all-night karaoke joints, they both departed with a fervent desire to write about a fantastical late-medieval realm based on European history torn apart by internecine politics, but with no clear idea where they got the idea to begin with...
"Focus" is the one Squire skill I found to be quite useful, since instead of just wasting a turn only moving or waiting in position for an enemy to come in range, you're spending that otherwise wasted action to buff your attack. Early game Razma with Focus is a genuine menace and can sweep the board with proper support.
It's impressive how much expression they fit into these little guys. Leaning, sitting, throwing rocks, and various ready poses...I love FFTA, but the hardware dictated a serious downgrade and, despite the similar style left the character sprites there looking and animating more akin to fat toddlers with lower back pan waddling around in Halloween costumes.
Argath: "Hmph." [He lets go.] "Listen well. A great host, with the Order at its van, prepares a sweeping campaign that will bring to book your turncloak Brigade. You will die. You will be hunted down to the last and slaughtered like the swine you are, for such is brigandry's reward. But you, pig, are a lucky one. Tell us what we wish to know, and you may yet keep your bacon.
I think Argath has had that particular rant in his back pocket for a while now, and was looking for any opportunity to bust it out. Very big George Costanza "jerk store" energy coming from this kid.
Swordsman: "In… in the Sand Rat's Sietch."
(...) Delita: "You are not of Gallionne - small wonder you've not heard of them. Sand rats are unique to the Zeklaus Desert, north of Dorter."
It's literally Muad'dib (the mouse, not the man). Much like how Zemus was the true sinister power behind Golbez in IV, Frank Herbert has struck down GRRM and proven to be the secret final boss of "baroque medieval analogue fantasy politicking".
