- Location
- The Middle of the Howling Wilderness
Building on that, if you're fusing SpyXFamily and FF8, then Anya is clearly a nascent Sorceress.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Building on that, if you're fusing SpyXFamily and FF8, then Anya is clearly a nascent Sorceress.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Oh, it was less that I was fusing and more that I was wondering if there was a tangential inspiration.
- Pronouns
- She/They
With VIII in mind, I wonder if Ramza's Generic Politeness is an intentional affect? Considering how much emphasis is placed on him living up to the family name and such, I wonder if he figures his position is a precarious one, and he's doing everything in his power to avoid drawing attention to himself or upsetting anyone?
Which, thinking of, would explain his (in)action to Argath's interrogation earlier - if he pushes back too hard against his violence, he could be accused of sympathizing with the Corpse Brigade, or of abandoning his duties even. It would color his actions from "noble but not too noble" to intentionally trying to toe the line for his own sake.
Without seeing into his head like Squall it's hard to tell, and I'm curious if his Generic Politeness will change over time, especially after we catch up to time in the prologue (of which I'm guessing he doesn't get enough dialogue to really get a handle on his speaking style there?) I'm certainly curious how that will get developed/addressed later on.
- Location
- Portugal
Wow the context of the story is getting... dense already, with the spotlight of political and social complications. Seeing the circumstances of Ramza's family more closely is interesting, but that really was a surprisingly brutal interrogation. Argath's desperation takes a pretty dire shape in light of all the information, and a bit ironic for how wretchedly he treats the target of his ire.
Comparing Ramza to the earliest Final Fantasy protagonist that started in a very dubiously heroic position, Cecil, is interesting, because while Ramza at this point in the story is not as deeply complicit in the atrocities or callousness of the side he's affiliated with (seeing as given his age and the length of the war he can't be said to have had any meaningful influence on the troubled status of the world he's making his way through now), his situation and its various factors are just so much more complex than those of the kingdom Cecil hailed from.
Somehow I did not expect line of sight to be a factor in friendly fire in this game for ranged characters, though the different targeting modes for spells that hit tiles and the tactical applications are neat.
Comparing Ramza to the earliest Final Fantasy protagonist that started in a very dubiously heroic position, Cecil, is interesting, because while Ramza at this point in the story is not as deeply complicit in the atrocities or callousness of the side he's affiliated with (seeing as given his age and the length of the war he can't be said to have had any meaningful influence on the troubled status of the world he's making his way through now), his situation and its various factors are just so much more complex than those of the kingdom Cecil hailed from.
Somehow I did not expect line of sight to be a factor in friendly fire in this game for ranged characters, though the different targeting modes for spells that hit tiles and the tactical applications are neat.
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FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
It's a nice way to give both bows and crossbows their own unique niche.
Bows require both hands, benefit from height, and can fire over peoples heads to hit the proper target.
Crossbows leave a hand free so you can wield a shield (which boosts your %chance to evade), but makes the trade off of being a linear projectile which hits the first thing in its path.
Recalls units being in the way of the unit I want to chuck potions at...
Ramza is just a grunt, but like at the same time a fair few of the corpse brigade aren't like noble heroes but glorified bandits.Reminds me a bit of that brotherhood without banners where not all of the groups in the riverlands affiliated with them lived up to the Robin hood mantra. Argaths just a insecure prick tho which show why the corpse brigade exists.
Crossbows arguably also benefit from being equipable in other classes with equip crossbow too.
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Final Fantasy Tactics, Part 3.A: Sand Rat's Zietch & Brigand's Den
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hear ye, hear ye! 'Tis the year of our lord 2024, and it has come to pass that Ramza of House Beoulve did indeed hunt the loathsome Corpse Brigade to the ends of the desert.
Since the game is front loading a lot of politics and history, and this playthrough is likely to last a few months and we could easily start losing track of stuff, I figure I'll add some basic summary at the start of each update. Like this:
The Story So Far: The Kingdom of Ivalice is fresh off the Fifty Years War, a bloody conflict that ended in a stalemate and left it broken, swept by plague, poverty, and discontent among both common people and nobles. The King is dying, a succession crisis is in the making, and in this picture Ramza of House Beoulve, a knight apprentice in the esteemed Order of the Southern Sky, is trying to keep up the honor of his family by following in the footsteps of his famous and respected older brothers. He, his lowborn friend Delita, and a down-on-his-luck noble scion named Argath, have disobeyed orders to follow up a tenuous lead to find the Marquis of Elmrose, abducted by the infamous Corpse Brigade.
Last time, we defeated a small detachment of the Corpse Brigade, learned about internal dissent within their ranks, and figured out the location of the marquis. Now, they must enter the Zeklaus Desert and find the Sand Rat's Zietch, where the rebellious Corpse Brigade members are hiding.
Before we head in, though, let's finally check out these Miscellany Tutorials that have 43 entries.
Oh god, astrology is real.
Okay, so, apparently, the Zodiac system is like… There are twelve constellations. Every character is assigned one constellation. Each of these constellations has compatibility with various other constellations. This is how the game presents these compatibilities:
Note: Examples of signs with poor compatibility. The game actually just gives it as an exercise to the reader to draw squares and triangles in various configurations to figure out the pattern of compatibilities between all signs.
I'm sure if I was still a teen, this would be very exciting for me to doodle and work out myself and figure out how to get the maximum astrology compatibility arrangement for my team. Well I'm not doing that. I am an adult with ADHD and several writing projects and like nine more of these games to play. We are leaving the astrology system in the drawer.
(Mechanically, compatibility increases damage and magic success chance by 25% for 'good' compatibility and by 50% for 'great' compatibility, while reducing it by the same for 'poor' and 'extremely poor' compatibility. This seems like a factor that could make some battles a little harder or a little easier, but likely won't risk stalling the playthrough.)
The Tutorial tabs also introduces far ahead of time a specific magic system we haven't unlocked yet that's, huh…
I'll explain 'Arithmeticks' when we get a character who can use it. If you don't know what it is, don't look it up. Don't spoil yourself the surprise.
Now, let's move on with the plot.
I. The Sand Rat's Zietch
This time, our units are spread into two squads, each of one can only have one character; they enter from two separate directions on the screen.
One notable thing about the Cutscene/Menu/Combat structure of the game is that we don't really get to like… Spend time with Ramza and his allies as they search the desert looking for the outlaws' hidden lair. There's not really any time spent building an atmosphere. We know the Corpse Brigade are hiding in the Zeklaus Desert, so we move to the Zeklaus Desert dot, and this initiates a brief cutscene and then combat.
Also notably: The game is doing a lot of compartmentalization of information between the viewer and the characters. Just like when we saw Wiegraf interrogate the Swordsman at sword-point, but Ramza and the others only caught the end of that conversation, here we see the outlaws discuss their next move before our allies arrive on the scene.
This will become plot-relevant in a little while.
Knight: "Then you've heard? About the Order? They mean to strike us for true."
Archer: "Aye, I've heard. So… what's to become of us?"
Knight: "I say we forget this business and run. There's naught for it."
Other Knight: "Agreed. If we follow Wiegraf, he will lead us only to our graves."
Knight: "Aye, that much is plain. Gods be good, Gustav's ransom of the marquis will fatten our purses enough that we can quit this life for good and all."
Watchman: "The Order… They're here!"
Ramza: "We must silence this watch before they can raise the alarm!"
Interesting that there's clear dissent among the ranks and it seems to be framed in terms of the higher class members - if we go by their label as Knights (including one whose in-game job is Monk) wanting to duck out of Wiegraf's personal ideological crusade to just make a bunch of money and retire from banditry, slipping back into the civilian life?
Yeah, you can't count on nobles to share an interest with the working class. Even landless knights will drop you at the first opportunity to return to the fold with wealth and social prestige.
It's interesting that our characters don't perceive any of that; they just find a watchpost and go 'we need to kill everyone before they can raise the alarm,' all of this is lost on them. And they wouldn't be likely to care, but it's interesting that we see it and they don't.
Anyway I immediately reload a previous save upon realizing that I didn't properly spend JP or check my command menus with all the characters, then go through a couple of random encounters circling back and forth through the basic circuit to grab some gear for everyone and tweak my class setup.
Ramza now knows Parry and Rend Speed, allowing him to tank enemy action rate, in theory. Hadrian is still an Archer but now has Item equipped (he can only use Potions but it could come in handy in a pinch), as does Ramza, Osric is a Black Mage who has White Magicks equipped (he knows Cure and Protect), and Gillian the Chemist has… Arts of War?
Command ability setup is just really weird. You unlock a job's command as soon as you have unlocked that job. So, Gillian started the game as a lv 2 Squire (I think?) and I swapped her into Chemist for reasons of fiddling with my party set-up in weird ways. So she always had Knight as an available Job. She never leveled into Knight, but because Knight is available to her at all, she can equip Arts of War, the Knight's Command. However, she doesn't have any actual Arts of War Abilities, so the Command is entirely useless to her. But just from some kind of… JP Bleedover effect, I guess, she has 205 Knight JP. So even though she never fought as a Knight, she could unlock Parry. The least expensive Arts of War Ability, however, costs 250 JP, so she can't unlock any of them.
I would have been better off equipping her with Black or White Magick, which she also has available thanks to unlocking the Black/White Mage Jobs, with a decent starting JP of 167 and 207 respectively. I could just give her Fire, or Cure, even as a Chemist.
This is probably the most headache-inducing aspect of the game for me so far, because even though it's all entirely beneficial (every character has a wider available move pool that they seem to have intuitively, offering greater flexibility), 'the Knight just unlocked a bunch of potential Chemist Ability even though they never leveled Chemist, have you considered giving him the Item Command, he can actually afford Phoenix Down' is very counter-intuitive to me - I keep thinking of these jobs in terms of like…
Final Fantasy V, right. It's the main Job system I played before in this Let's Play, so I'm still working off my assumptions from that game; you level Knight and then if you have and you switch to Monk, you can give Monk some Knight Abilities, and everyone follows a very continuous path like this.
I need to adjust my thinking and it'll take me a little time.
So, the battle for the Sand Rat's Zietch.
Our enemies start out in this little ruined house. This could be a strong defensible position with limited entrances; however, because they are mainly close range classes, they make the mistake of instead coming out to face us. This turns what could have been a brutal siege grind into an encirclement; here, two Knights and an Archer attempt to walk out through a single-tile door, but only one of them can go through, leaving them adjacent in a single file so that Osric can blast them with Fire.
Unfortunately I had to overextend Black Mage Osric, so the Knight punishes him with a fierce stab… But that also leaves him in range of Ramza.
It's a huge whiff. I didn't think to move Ramza behind the enemy to maximize hit chances, which is something I really need to think about going forward but it's just, like, having characters constantly circle around each other to get at each other's back feels a little silly and so it's not an ingrained reflex yet. Whiffing this attack feels bad, though - I really need that Knight dead and spending turns trying random shit isn't going to cut it. We'll just focus on DPS for the rest of this fight.
Thankfully, Gillain is on that promontory up above, from which there are only limited paths for the enemy to attack her while she has full range to chuck potions at Ramza, Osric and Argath, which she'll spend most of this fight doing.
Unfortunately, the other side of the battle is going less well. All I have on this side are Delita and Archer Adrian, and Delita just went down.
You can see above how weird Hadrian's range is. In Dorter, I'd mistakenly thought that was a result of firing lines from heights and obstacles, but no; his crossbow just can't target 2 tiles from him; he's the only character who is limited in not being able to hit up close. And the trade off I get for this is… 12-damage attacks?
Yeah, I'm not sold on Archer.
(It is, funnily enough, still possible to fire in those squares we can't target; we just need to position Hadrian so that he is firing at a distant target but with another character in the way - the friendly fire can also be used to hit closer than our minimum range. That's what happened with the Ramza friendly fire accident, but it's actually possible to leverage this to our advantage with careful positioning!)
Here, you can see a typical spellcasting sequence: the enemy Knight is in close quarter combat with Argath, so if I center my Fire on him, it will hurt Argath, which I can't afford. So instead, I target the square next to the Knight, making a guess that he won't move. The Knight's turn comes immediately, and he stabs Argath… But since Argath isn't dead, he decides to stick to the same tile; skipping his Move will make the next turn come faster, and he's likely planning to finish Argath off. Unfortunately, that leaves him still in the same spot on the next turn, when Fire triggers and hits him for 23 damage. Not enough to kill him, unfortunately.
This is what makes magic so tricky. There are a lot of calls to make and it requires a lot of awareness not just of the shape of the battlefield, but also of the specific speeds and turn order. There is an option to check when a spell will fire in the turn order in the menu, but the inputs to access it it was buried in a playable tutorial that I will have to replay to find again, it's very annoying. Even with good awareness, you have to make calls and guesses, and being wrong results in wasting an important turn.
The reward can be substantial, though - every time I hit more than one enemy at once, it feels great. It feels really early to unlock AoEs in a game like this, which makes the guesswork and trade-offs feel great when they pay off. So I'm not sure yet where I sit on Blage as a Job.
Also, look at these two funny motherfuckers in the screenshot above. Seems like the AI is smart enough to take cover behind walls and lie in ambush so that anyone who tries to enter gets bushwhacked Goodfellas-style. That's good! But the Knight is still a little too excitable and ends up coming out anyway to beat up on Argath, which leaves us with this scenario:
Three enemy Knights out. Two have cornered Argath, who is at critical HP. One is squaring off against Ramza 1v1. And Osric and Gillian, my strongest assets, the healer and the AoE offensive mage sitting up there out of the melee. It's a good position…
…which is good, because as you can see on the other side of the battlefield, the two Monks ganged up on Delita and just beat him to death. I really wish I could control his actions in battle, but ultimately this is my fault for not supporting him enough. Now that leaves my Archer facing two Monks soon to be in close range, which will be bad. I still haven't taken out any enemy!
Thankfully, Gillian can lob a potion at Argath's skull, he stands up, and kills the Knight to his left. Then the Knight fighting Ramza decides our own Knight is a little too tough and Osric is a juicier target, so he leaves Ramza to go stab my Black Mage. That was almost shrewd - unfortunately his damage is just short of killing Osric, and his back is now fully exposed to Ramza. Score.
Wait, what's that over in the Monk corner?
Oh. Oh fuck.
…
Okay, so remember what I said about the depth and complexity of Job combinations? It turns out this isn't FFV where we got to hog that all for ourselves, the enemy is doing it too. This Monk - a hard hitting, physically resilient class - can use Potions on himself, erasing any progress Delita made towards taking him out before falling in battle.
Earlier, one of these Knights? Used the Aim Command. Aim is an Archer Command which delays firing in order to increase damage; however, unlike Magic, Aim does not appear to lock onto the target, so it will just miss if they move before you act. In any case, I'd assumed Aim was bow/crossbow-dependent, but no - that Knight was using Aim to effectively charge up its sword attack and deal higher damage.
The fact that the enemies are using the same hodge-podge combos of abilities from multiple jobs as we are, including combos I wouldn't have thought of with my current game knowledge like Aim Knight, certainly makes the game more tactically complex and interesting, and also a lot less predictable. Any enemy I leave alone for too long might use a Potion on themselves or some similar nonsense. So that's something to be dealing with going forward.
Hadrian ends up in a fighting retreat from both Monks, firing and walking back to try to drag them back towards the main group. Meanwhile, the last enemy Archer withdraws back into the ruined house, from which he starts shooting at a pursuing Argath, who unfortunately ends up blocking the doorway so Ramza can't follow, and in the confusion the last enemy Knight starts attacking Gillian.
That's his mistake. A Chemist and a Black Mage can seem like the ideal type of units to corner, but numbers are still numbers, and that Knight is already weakened while Gillian and Osric spent the whole fight up to now safely on their little hill.
Osric blasts him with fire, then Gillian moves to his back, granting her next attack a 100% hit chance. She's only a Chemist, but she has our one Mithril Knife, so her damage is still enough to finish him off.
The monks keep pursuing Hadrian, who keeps retreating towards the wooden hill while firing down arrows, but his damage is just not enough. Thankfully, that gets them close enough for Ramza to move in and start flanking them. I bring in Gillian up close so she can both toss a Potion at Hadrian and draw away some fire from him to spread out the hurt, which ends up being a huge mistake - I lost track of variables and didn't pay attention to how much HP Gillian actually had, I only saw that her sprite was not in critical status.
One of the Monks knocks her out cold, starting the race against the countdown, as she was my only character who could use Phoenix Down and so I can't raise her. No choice but to win the battle before she dies. Thankfully, Argath healed himself up and Ramza is a powerhouse, and while they corner the Monks, Hadrian can go heal himself up by grabbing the crystal dropped by the first knight to fall.
Which leaves us with the last, stupidest battle of this whole endeavour:
Osric vs Enemy Archer, set to Yakety Sax.
You see, after being MVP for much of the fight, Osric ran out of MP. And I do not have the Ether command, so I can't heal MP. So now Osric is just a bag of HP with a rod he can use to bonk people on the head with. So I decide to send him chasing after that last Archer, who is so low on HP a single hit should be enough.
Except… Osric's movement range isn't enough. So these two jobbers end up just running in circles inside the house, Osric flailing behind with his useless staff while the Archer fires arrows at him with his puny-ass damage, still eventually managing to bring him down.
Just looking at this ridiculous display fills me with a deep sense of embarrassment. This is not tactics. This is slapsticks.
So this is our final setup:
All enemies are dead except one Archer in Critical HP. Everyone is pretty far from that enemy, who keeps fleeing from combat. Gillian and Osric are on a countdown towards death. The only question is, can I run down and kill the Archer before either of them dies?
The answer turns out to be yes. Hadrian does end up saving the day after all, with a quick crossbow shot that finishes off the last enemy. You can see two Treasure Chests behind him (one is half-hidden behind the wall); I was not able to retrieve those before ending the fight simply because time was too much of a pressure. It was the chests or Gillian, and obviously I chose the character I've been training up this whole time.
This concludes the battle.
Phew! That was a lot.
I went into much more comprehensive detail of the progressive evolution of this battle, the detailed blow-by-blow, than I did in previous updates, I think - tell me if this works for you? I don't want to get the Let's Play bogged down into overly detailed mechanical stuff that goes over people's heads if they don't enjoy that, but the battles are the core of Tactics and I enjoy breaking them down into little narratives, trying to see what went wrong and what I did right. Give me your thoughts.
Ramza's line here amounts to 'damn it took a lot of time killing all these dudes', which is kind of impressively cold for someone his age and so fresh to combat to be delivering. I wonder if it's just a quirk of the translation or if it ties more broadly into the very flat, neutral way of speaking he's been displaying until now and if there's more going on than we can see with our little guy.
Next, we break into the hideout, where, as before, we (the player) are witness to much of a scene proceeding before we (the characters) actually enter the scene.
The thief and squire on the ground suggests Wiegraf just killed Gustav's last henchmen to get to him.
Wiegraf: "You've taken leave of your senses, Gustav."
Gustav: "Have I? What hope does your fool revolution hold? Dreams do not fill a man's stomach or make soft the packed earth on which he beds!"
Wiegraf: "You see naught beyond the end of your own nose. The Crown strays, Gustav. It must be led back onto the path."
Gustav: "And you think yourself the man to do this? More the fool you, Wiegraf."
Wiegraf: "You have spoken your fill? Then we are done?"
At this point, the game plays out a very brief exchange of blows that is also genuinely really impressive; each of the sprite has a sword that's part of its actual model, and Wiegraf and Gustav each take a different fencing stance, then Gustav strikes first, Wiegraf dodges out of the way, and runs Gustav through before he can correct himself.
It's very Correct Fencing and I really like it.
Wiegraf pulls his sword out of Gustav's body, letting him fall on the ground, and as he does Ramza, Delita and Argath barge in.
They immediately spot the Marquis, captive at the back of the room, and what follows is a tense stand-off.
Ramza: "Wiegraf!"
Argath: "The marquis!"
Wiegraf: [He bars the way with his sword.] "No further!"
Argath: "How dare you threaten me!"
Delita: "Stay yourself, Argath."
Wiegraf: "The marquis is unharmed. You are free to return him to Eagrose."
Ramza: "Why release him?"
Wiegraf: "The marquis' abduction was ill done. Such craven methods serve not our ends. Let me walk free, and I will release the marquis to your care. A fair bargain."
Argath: "You mock us! You are in no position to bargain!"
Delita: "Enough, Argath! He speaks the truth."
At this point, the two parties play out the stand-off dance of circling around one another with weapons pointed towards one another, neither side trusting the other until Wiegraf can see a clear line to the exit.
When the marquis starts stirring awake, Wiegraf makes his escape while Ramza goes to check on the marquis; Argath instantly turns around to pursue Wiegraf now that their charge is in their custody, forcing Delita to step forward and bar his path.
Delita: "Let him go, Argath!"
Argath: "Why do you stay me?"
Delita: "The Corpse Brigade is finished in any case. There is naught to be gained by a quarrel here."
Argath: "..."
Ramza: "The marquis is well. He is weak, but he seems unharmed."
Delita: "We must see him back to Eagrose."
[We return to the world map.]
…
Honestly, I'm not sure about Wiegraf's behavior. He seems to hold himself to a special kind of standard of behavior, above common bandits - but he also leads a group notorious for attacking merchants and nobles, so what gives? His mention that the Crown 'strays' suggests that he's an actual believer in the righteousness of the monarchy, a righteousness it has merely lost and needs to be brought back to; this is actually pretty standard for pretty much every popular uprising until the late stages of the French Revolution (the king is being misled by his wicked advisors!), so that doesn't surprise me, but it's no wonder he's been having loyalty issues among his men if his standards around what kind of behavior is befitting of the Corpse Brigade are unclear. He seems, above all, idealistic but kind of naive. Abiding by a higher standard of behavior will do absolutely nothing to prevent the Order from wiping them out to the last man; their very existence offends the aristocracy.
Argath being this aggro is funny. Like, maybe our full party could beat Wiegraf but like, he's probably some lv 30 Super Knight or something, dude, you'll just get turned into mince meat trying to chase him solo, you should thank Delita for saving your life.
Alright, back at Castle Eagrose.
Dycedarg is, predictably, upset that the boys left their posts and wandered off into the desert.
Ramza: "..."
Dycedarg: "Silence is not the answer I seek. Speak, and be quick with it."
Delita: "'Twas I forced Ramza to go."
Dycedarg: "Was that the way of it, Ramza? Delita led your better judgment astray?"
Ramza: "No… I went of my own choosing. The fault lies not with him."
Delita: "'Tis Ramza's noble disposition that guides his tongue, my lord. It is not as he-"
Ramza: "You needn't be false on my behalf, Delita. It was I who chose to disregard orders."
I love this. The fact that Delita immediately steps forward to take the blame upon himself showcases both that he and Ramza are genuinely friends (which wasn't super apparent so far given Ramza's very low-emotion dialogue), and that they operate on an inherently fucked up dynamic where lowborn Delita being Ramza's friend naturally means stepping forward to take the blame for his noble friend. And Delita, being a heroic character, actually rejects that so they get into a brief fight over who gets the blame, which is endearing.
…notably, it's not actually clear who is to blame here. The dialogue back at Eagrose when we left went: Ramza asks where the spy was last seen, Zalbaag makes a comment about how guarding castles sure is boring, then Delita tells his sister they must leave sooner than planned. My read on this is that there is no specific person to blame, or rather, they're both to blame; Ramza and Delita made the simultaneous, agreed upon decision to track down the Marquis, no one pushed the other to do it.
Dycedarg takes this opportunity to have a Teachable Moment that gives us an idea of what it means, to him, to be a knight.
Dycedarg: "Might I pose a question, Ramza? What purpose do laws serve when even those who would enforce them choose not to pay them heed? Adherence to the rule of law is a knight's solemn duty. It falls upon us, as Beoulves, to bear the burden of example. Is your intent to live up to your name - or to drag it with you through the mire?"
Ramza: "...Forgive me, lord brother."
This is a good insight into what makes the Beoulves who they are, and how Dycedarg sees knighthood: A noble is set to a higher standard than his peers. Nobility does not free you from the law, but instead binds you more tightly to it, that you represent an ideal for all below you to strive to follow.
That makes him pretty enlightened for his era and social class! A lot of nobles would laugh at the presumption! It's also going to be… Interesting, in a few moments.
There's a voice at the door; it's time for one of the highest-ranking characters in our little drama to step in, a man who had a spot all to himself in the PSX cinematic.
Man's Voice: "I believe the point is made, isn't it, Dycedarg?"
A neat little bit of silent characterization here is that Argath has to actually look around at the other two in brief confusion before following their lead and kneeling; as established before, he is not from Gallione, and so is unlikely to know the Duke from sight.
Larg, or some say Largo, the White Lion. Let's turn to our history tab:
Small wonder the Beoulves are aligned with Larg; Bestrald Larg is in fact the lord of Gallione, governing over the whole province. He's also brother to the queen, and from a splinter branch of the king's family by blood besides - vaguely incestuous in the way all these European monarchies tended to be. He also has final authority over the Order of the Northern Sky, over even Zalbaag. This is the man whose side we were presumably on in the opening, and he immediately casts a figure as a temperate, good-natured man, who has come to honor our party's deeds even though they were rooted in some minor disobedience; the carrot to Dycedarg's stick, as it were.
Duke Larg: "You must not let the how of it steal your eyes away from the what. Their rescue of the marquis was no small feat. It is the way of young men to be impetuous in their haste to do great things. We were not unlike them once."
Dycedarg: "To coddle them is to do them disservice, Your Grace. They need to learn integrity."
Duke Larg: [To Ramza] "So, you are Lord Dycedarg's younger brother. Rise, son of Gallionne." [Ramza rises.] "Indeed, you are the very ghost of Barbaneth. His fire burns in your eyes, I can see it. Such strength and vitality would be wasted atop castle walls."
[Dycedarg lowers his head and closes his eyes, in the manner of a man who has been defeated and resigns himself to doing things the Duke's way.]
Dycedarg: "Our campaign against the Corpse Brigade draws near its end. I will permit you to join in the final stage. Coordinated strikes are to be made on a number of their dens ere long. You will lead one of those assaults."
Ramza: "Very well, Lord Brother."
[All rise, and bow to Dycedarg and the Duke. They leave the room.]
So far, so traditional. A higher figure of authority, possessed of some greater wisdom, steps in as the youth are being scolded to point out their achievements and say they could be trusted for greater things. I feel like I have seen that beat a thousand times in any SFF media aimed at a teenage or YA audience. Which isn't a criticism! It's a good beat.
Especially given what comes next. Dycedarg turns around, and heads to look out the window thoughtfully. "My apologies, Your Grace," Dycedarg says, though it's unclear what he's apologizing for.
Duke Larg: "It was not of your doing, Dycedarg. In truth, it serves only to show the caliber of man we were dealing with in Gustav. A change in plan was inevitable, once the fool went and staged the kidnapping within our very borders."
Duke Larg: "And let us not forget - they did save the marquis' life. He will now be honor-bound to acquiesce. In the end, your brothers' deeds have placed us in quite the favorable position."
Dycedarg: "The king's life hangs by a thread. We must move quickly now."
Duke Larg: "Indeed, my dear friend. I trust you will not fail me."
[Fade back to the world map.]
DUN-DUN-DUUUUNNN!!
Can you hear the scare chords as the Duke casually drops that the whole abduction plan was seemingly their design, only messed up by Gustav being reckless and acting too early? This is what I meant about all these little conversations we (the reader) saw but our characters did not earlier being set up; it's set up for this, when it's revealed that Duke Larg and Ramza's brother Lord Dycedarg are plotting some kind of treason, and have been behind the events of the early game, but it is revealed to us, and Ramza still has absolutely no clue. This is intriguing! This story's layer of information differences are kind of fascinating - by now, we know more about both Wiegraf, Dycedarg, Duke Larg, and Delita and Ramza's future than any of the characters themselves do, but we are still left with a lot of question marks - indeed, even more question marks than we had before. What is Larg and Dycedarg's plan? What do they need the marquis for? Tantalizing!
Back on the map, a new node has opened:
The Brigand's Den. Before we head there, though, let's check in our Party Roster:
We've unlocked a few new classes - Monk was unlocked earlier, and I decide to swap Ramza into it now to see what its abilities are like; Monk fights unarmed and seems unable to wear headgear, plus it only wears clothing rather than armor, so hopefully its native combat capability will make up for it. Unfortunately, Ramza doesn't yet have enough JP to unlock any of Monk's Abilities, so he'll just be punching stuff for a bit.
Ramza's Ability menu, making me sad.
Archer Hadrian has reached Archer lv 3 and unlocked Thief. I've been pretty whelmed with Archer so far (as have been a few of my readers in their own play, from their accounts), so I decide to swap him immediately. This incarnation of Thief, it turns out, isn't like our usual 'steal a random item drop' from an enemy; instead Steal is split into a ton of abilities like Steal Gil, Steal Heart, Steal Helm, Steal Armor, Steal Weapon, Steal EXP… It's a little overwhelming and Hadrian's starting JP isn't enough to unlock anything other than Steal Gil anyway, so we'll stick to that for now.
Osric has leveled Black Mage to lv 3, unlocking Time Mage. In FFV, Time Mage was a status-focused class using spells like Haste, Slow, and Stop; it still has those here, along with spells of which I can't remember if they were in Time Mage previously, like Float, Reflect, and Immobilize. Time Mage Movement Abilities include the ability to teleport and passively levitate, which seems pretty good! For now, we'll just unlock Haste and leave Black Magicks in the second slot, which I think will still end up most of what Osric does in the next fights.
Gillian is staying a Chemist for now - I'd really like to unlock her other Item Abilities. And Hester sadly hasn't had a chance to take the field because the game keeps restricting us to 4 slots instead of 5. The women in the team are being left behind and we must fix this somehow.
Also now we'll need to backtrack to get some better equipment again; all the shops have updated with new items like Iron Swords, Bronze Armor and actual mage robes which boost MP count, which sure would have been nice during our last fight.
On the way we get into a brief random encounter I won't cover, save to point to two discoveries I made during it: One, it turns out Haste (and thus most likely all buff spells) has a chance to miss, marking the first time your buffs cast on your own allies can just miss. That feels awful, and I hate it. There is no reason to design things this way. The latter is that Thief is, huh…
Look at this. Look at this menu. Look at the effect it predicts.
Hadrian's Steal Gil Command steals 24 Gil. For the record, a single potion costs 50 Gil, and is the least expensive item in the game; it would take more than two (successful!) Steals to afford one. Meanwhile every piece of equipment at this stage of the game costs 500+ Gil and would require several dozen Steal attempts to pay for them. So yeah, it's worthless. We'll still be keeping Hadrian on Thief, at the very least to see what if anything it unlocks at lv 3, and to see if those other Steal commands actually have any role, but Steal Gil is worthless, at least at this stage of the game. Which is a shame; money is fairly tight and I could have used a way to afford more gear.
Also, this battle is another example of a random encounter nearly turning into a total rout in which I barely manage to win without a permadeath by the skin of my teeth (in this case, thanks to Osric's backup Black Magicks ability killing two Goblins in one fell swoop just before Gillian can bite the bucket).
You basically need to save before every single move you make on the world map. It is entirely possible to permanently lose a party member to random encounters. When testing out new party configuration, there's no way to practice in 'easy mode' or anything. The monsters are coming for your ass.
Cut for image count.
Since the game is front loading a lot of politics and history, and this playthrough is likely to last a few months and we could easily start losing track of stuff, I figure I'll add some basic summary at the start of each update. Like this:
The Story So Far: The Kingdom of Ivalice is fresh off the Fifty Years War, a bloody conflict that ended in a stalemate and left it broken, swept by plague, poverty, and discontent among both common people and nobles. The King is dying, a succession crisis is in the making, and in this picture Ramza of House Beoulve, a knight apprentice in the esteemed Order of the Southern Sky, is trying to keep up the honor of his family by following in the footsteps of his famous and respected older brothers. He, his lowborn friend Delita, and a down-on-his-luck noble scion named Argath, have disobeyed orders to follow up a tenuous lead to find the Marquis of Elmrose, abducted by the infamous Corpse Brigade.
Last time, we defeated a small detachment of the Corpse Brigade, learned about internal dissent within their ranks, and figured out the location of the marquis. Now, they must enter the Zeklaus Desert and find the Sand Rat's Zietch, where the rebellious Corpse Brigade members are hiding.
Before we head in, though, let's finally check out these Miscellany Tutorials that have 43 entries.
Oh god, astrology is real.
Okay, so, apparently, the Zodiac system is like… There are twelve constellations. Every character is assigned one constellation. Each of these constellations has compatibility with various other constellations. This is how the game presents these compatibilities:
Note: Examples of signs with poor compatibility. The game actually just gives it as an exercise to the reader to draw squares and triangles in various configurations to figure out the pattern of compatibilities between all signs.
I'm sure if I was still a teen, this would be very exciting for me to doodle and work out myself and figure out how to get the maximum astrology compatibility arrangement for my team. Well I'm not doing that. I am an adult with ADHD and several writing projects and like nine more of these games to play. We are leaving the astrology system in the drawer.
(Mechanically, compatibility increases damage and magic success chance by 25% for 'good' compatibility and by 50% for 'great' compatibility, while reducing it by the same for 'poor' and 'extremely poor' compatibility. This seems like a factor that could make some battles a little harder or a little easier, but likely won't risk stalling the playthrough.)
The Tutorial tabs also introduces far ahead of time a specific magic system we haven't unlocked yet that's, huh…
I'll explain 'Arithmeticks' when we get a character who can use it. If you don't know what it is, don't look it up. Don't spoil yourself the surprise.
Now, let's move on with the plot.
I. The Sand Rat's Zietch
This time, our units are spread into two squads, each of one can only have one character; they enter from two separate directions on the screen.
One notable thing about the Cutscene/Menu/Combat structure of the game is that we don't really get to like… Spend time with Ramza and his allies as they search the desert looking for the outlaws' hidden lair. There's not really any time spent building an atmosphere. We know the Corpse Brigade are hiding in the Zeklaus Desert, so we move to the Zeklaus Desert dot, and this initiates a brief cutscene and then combat.
Also notably: The game is doing a lot of compartmentalization of information between the viewer and the characters. Just like when we saw Wiegraf interrogate the Swordsman at sword-point, but Ramza and the others only caught the end of that conversation, here we see the outlaws discuss their next move before our allies arrive on the scene.
This will become plot-relevant in a little while.
Knight: "Then you've heard? About the Order? They mean to strike us for true."
Archer: "Aye, I've heard. So… what's to become of us?"
Knight: "I say we forget this business and run. There's naught for it."
Other Knight: "Agreed. If we follow Wiegraf, he will lead us only to our graves."
Knight: "Aye, that much is plain. Gods be good, Gustav's ransom of the marquis will fatten our purses enough that we can quit this life for good and all."
Watchman: "The Order… They're here!"
Ramza: "We must silence this watch before they can raise the alarm!"
Interesting that there's clear dissent among the ranks and it seems to be framed in terms of the higher class members - if we go by their label as Knights (including one whose in-game job is Monk) wanting to duck out of Wiegraf's personal ideological crusade to just make a bunch of money and retire from banditry, slipping back into the civilian life?
Yeah, you can't count on nobles to share an interest with the working class. Even landless knights will drop you at the first opportunity to return to the fold with wealth and social prestige.
It's interesting that our characters don't perceive any of that; they just find a watchpost and go 'we need to kill everyone before they can raise the alarm,' all of this is lost on them. And they wouldn't be likely to care, but it's interesting that we see it and they don't.
Anyway I immediately reload a previous save upon realizing that I didn't properly spend JP or check my command menus with all the characters, then go through a couple of random encounters circling back and forth through the basic circuit to grab some gear for everyone and tweak my class setup.
Ramza now knows Parry and Rend Speed, allowing him to tank enemy action rate, in theory. Hadrian is still an Archer but now has Item equipped (he can only use Potions but it could come in handy in a pinch), as does Ramza, Osric is a Black Mage who has White Magicks equipped (he knows Cure and Protect), and Gillian the Chemist has… Arts of War?
Command ability setup is just really weird. You unlock a job's command as soon as you have unlocked that job. So, Gillian started the game as a lv 2 Squire (I think?) and I swapped her into Chemist for reasons of fiddling with my party set-up in weird ways. So she always had Knight as an available Job. She never leveled into Knight, but because Knight is available to her at all, she can equip Arts of War, the Knight's Command. However, she doesn't have any actual Arts of War Abilities, so the Command is entirely useless to her. But just from some kind of… JP Bleedover effect, I guess, she has 205 Knight JP. So even though she never fought as a Knight, she could unlock Parry. The least expensive Arts of War Ability, however, costs 250 JP, so she can't unlock any of them.
I would have been better off equipping her with Black or White Magick, which she also has available thanks to unlocking the Black/White Mage Jobs, with a decent starting JP of 167 and 207 respectively. I could just give her Fire, or Cure, even as a Chemist.
This is probably the most headache-inducing aspect of the game for me so far, because even though it's all entirely beneficial (every character has a wider available move pool that they seem to have intuitively, offering greater flexibility), 'the Knight just unlocked a bunch of potential Chemist Ability even though they never leveled Chemist, have you considered giving him the Item Command, he can actually afford Phoenix Down' is very counter-intuitive to me - I keep thinking of these jobs in terms of like…
Final Fantasy V, right. It's the main Job system I played before in this Let's Play, so I'm still working off my assumptions from that game; you level Knight and then if you have and you switch to Monk, you can give Monk some Knight Abilities, and everyone follows a very continuous path like this.
I need to adjust my thinking and it'll take me a little time.
So, the battle for the Sand Rat's Zietch.
Our enemies start out in this little ruined house. This could be a strong defensible position with limited entrances; however, because they are mainly close range classes, they make the mistake of instead coming out to face us. This turns what could have been a brutal siege grind into an encirclement; here, two Knights and an Archer attempt to walk out through a single-tile door, but only one of them can go through, leaving them adjacent in a single file so that Osric can blast them with Fire.
Unfortunately I had to overextend Black Mage Osric, so the Knight punishes him with a fierce stab… But that also leaves him in range of Ramza.
It's a huge whiff. I didn't think to move Ramza behind the enemy to maximize hit chances, which is something I really need to think about going forward but it's just, like, having characters constantly circle around each other to get at each other's back feels a little silly and so it's not an ingrained reflex yet. Whiffing this attack feels bad, though - I really need that Knight dead and spending turns trying random shit isn't going to cut it. We'll just focus on DPS for the rest of this fight.
Thankfully, Gillain is on that promontory up above, from which there are only limited paths for the enemy to attack her while she has full range to chuck potions at Ramza, Osric and Argath, which she'll spend most of this fight doing.
Unfortunately, the other side of the battle is going less well. All I have on this side are Delita and Archer Adrian, and Delita just went down.
You can see above how weird Hadrian's range is. In Dorter, I'd mistakenly thought that was a result of firing lines from heights and obstacles, but no; his crossbow just can't target 2 tiles from him; he's the only character who is limited in not being able to hit up close. And the trade off I get for this is… 12-damage attacks?
Yeah, I'm not sold on Archer.
(It is, funnily enough, still possible to fire in those squares we can't target; we just need to position Hadrian so that he is firing at a distant target but with another character in the way - the friendly fire can also be used to hit closer than our minimum range. That's what happened with the Ramza friendly fire accident, but it's actually possible to leverage this to our advantage with careful positioning!)
Here, you can see a typical spellcasting sequence: the enemy Knight is in close quarter combat with Argath, so if I center my Fire on him, it will hurt Argath, which I can't afford. So instead, I target the square next to the Knight, making a guess that he won't move. The Knight's turn comes immediately, and he stabs Argath… But since Argath isn't dead, he decides to stick to the same tile; skipping his Move will make the next turn come faster, and he's likely planning to finish Argath off. Unfortunately, that leaves him still in the same spot on the next turn, when Fire triggers and hits him for 23 damage. Not enough to kill him, unfortunately.
This is what makes magic so tricky. There are a lot of calls to make and it requires a lot of awareness not just of the shape of the battlefield, but also of the specific speeds and turn order. There is an option to check when a spell will fire in the turn order in the menu, but the inputs to access it it was buried in a playable tutorial that I will have to replay to find again, it's very annoying. Even with good awareness, you have to make calls and guesses, and being wrong results in wasting an important turn.
The reward can be substantial, though - every time I hit more than one enemy at once, it feels great. It feels really early to unlock AoEs in a game like this, which makes the guesswork and trade-offs feel great when they pay off. So I'm not sure yet where I sit on Blage as a Job.
Also, look at these two funny motherfuckers in the screenshot above. Seems like the AI is smart enough to take cover behind walls and lie in ambush so that anyone who tries to enter gets bushwhacked Goodfellas-style. That's good! But the Knight is still a little too excitable and ends up coming out anyway to beat up on Argath, which leaves us with this scenario:
Three enemy Knights out. Two have cornered Argath, who is at critical HP. One is squaring off against Ramza 1v1. And Osric and Gillian, my strongest assets, the healer and the AoE offensive mage sitting up there out of the melee. It's a good position…
…which is good, because as you can see on the other side of the battlefield, the two Monks ganged up on Delita and just beat him to death. I really wish I could control his actions in battle, but ultimately this is my fault for not supporting him enough. Now that leaves my Archer facing two Monks soon to be in close range, which will be bad. I still haven't taken out any enemy!
Thankfully, Gillian can lob a potion at Argath's skull, he stands up, and kills the Knight to his left. Then the Knight fighting Ramza decides our own Knight is a little too tough and Osric is a juicier target, so he leaves Ramza to go stab my Black Mage. That was almost shrewd - unfortunately his damage is just short of killing Osric, and his back is now fully exposed to Ramza. Score.
Wait, what's that over in the Monk corner?
Oh. Oh fuck.
…
Okay, so remember what I said about the depth and complexity of Job combinations? It turns out this isn't FFV where we got to hog that all for ourselves, the enemy is doing it too. This Monk - a hard hitting, physically resilient class - can use Potions on himself, erasing any progress Delita made towards taking him out before falling in battle.
Earlier, one of these Knights? Used the Aim Command. Aim is an Archer Command which delays firing in order to increase damage; however, unlike Magic, Aim does not appear to lock onto the target, so it will just miss if they move before you act. In any case, I'd assumed Aim was bow/crossbow-dependent, but no - that Knight was using Aim to effectively charge up its sword attack and deal higher damage.
The fact that the enemies are using the same hodge-podge combos of abilities from multiple jobs as we are, including combos I wouldn't have thought of with my current game knowledge like Aim Knight, certainly makes the game more tactically complex and interesting, and also a lot less predictable. Any enemy I leave alone for too long might use a Potion on themselves or some similar nonsense. So that's something to be dealing with going forward.
Hadrian ends up in a fighting retreat from both Monks, firing and walking back to try to drag them back towards the main group. Meanwhile, the last enemy Archer withdraws back into the ruined house, from which he starts shooting at a pursuing Argath, who unfortunately ends up blocking the doorway so Ramza can't follow, and in the confusion the last enemy Knight starts attacking Gillian.
That's his mistake. A Chemist and a Black Mage can seem like the ideal type of units to corner, but numbers are still numbers, and that Knight is already weakened while Gillian and Osric spent the whole fight up to now safely on their little hill.
Osric blasts him with fire, then Gillian moves to his back, granting her next attack a 100% hit chance. She's only a Chemist, but she has our one Mithril Knife, so her damage is still enough to finish him off.
The monks keep pursuing Hadrian, who keeps retreating towards the wooden hill while firing down arrows, but his damage is just not enough. Thankfully, that gets them close enough for Ramza to move in and start flanking them. I bring in Gillian up close so she can both toss a Potion at Hadrian and draw away some fire from him to spread out the hurt, which ends up being a huge mistake - I lost track of variables and didn't pay attention to how much HP Gillian actually had, I only saw that her sprite was not in critical status.
One of the Monks knocks her out cold, starting the race against the countdown, as she was my only character who could use Phoenix Down and so I can't raise her. No choice but to win the battle before she dies. Thankfully, Argath healed himself up and Ramza is a powerhouse, and while they corner the Monks, Hadrian can go heal himself up by grabbing the crystal dropped by the first knight to fall.
Which leaves us with the last, stupidest battle of this whole endeavour:
Osric vs Enemy Archer, set to Yakety Sax.
You see, after being MVP for much of the fight, Osric ran out of MP. And I do not have the Ether command, so I can't heal MP. So now Osric is just a bag of HP with a rod he can use to bonk people on the head with. So I decide to send him chasing after that last Archer, who is so low on HP a single hit should be enough.
Except… Osric's movement range isn't enough. So these two jobbers end up just running in circles inside the house, Osric flailing behind with his useless staff while the Archer fires arrows at him with his puny-ass damage, still eventually managing to bring him down.
Just looking at this ridiculous display fills me with a deep sense of embarrassment. This is not tactics. This is slapsticks.
So this is our final setup:
All enemies are dead except one Archer in Critical HP. Everyone is pretty far from that enemy, who keeps fleeing from combat. Gillian and Osric are on a countdown towards death. The only question is, can I run down and kill the Archer before either of them dies?
The answer turns out to be yes. Hadrian does end up saving the day after all, with a quick crossbow shot that finishes off the last enemy. You can see two Treasure Chests behind him (one is half-hidden behind the wall); I was not able to retrieve those before ending the fight simply because time was too much of a pressure. It was the chests or Gillian, and obviously I chose the character I've been training up this whole time.
This concludes the battle.
Phew! That was a lot.
I went into much more comprehensive detail of the progressive evolution of this battle, the detailed blow-by-blow, than I did in previous updates, I think - tell me if this works for you? I don't want to get the Let's Play bogged down into overly detailed mechanical stuff that goes over people's heads if they don't enjoy that, but the battles are the core of Tactics and I enjoy breaking them down into little narratives, trying to see what went wrong and what I did right. Give me your thoughts.
Ramza's line here amounts to 'damn it took a lot of time killing all these dudes', which is kind of impressively cold for someone his age and so fresh to combat to be delivering. I wonder if it's just a quirk of the translation or if it ties more broadly into the very flat, neutral way of speaking he's been displaying until now and if there's more going on than we can see with our little guy.
Next, we break into the hideout, where, as before, we (the player) are witness to much of a scene proceeding before we (the characters) actually enter the scene.
The thief and squire on the ground suggests Wiegraf just killed Gustav's last henchmen to get to him.
Wiegraf: "You've taken leave of your senses, Gustav."
Gustav: "Have I? What hope does your fool revolution hold? Dreams do not fill a man's stomach or make soft the packed earth on which he beds!"
Wiegraf: "You see naught beyond the end of your own nose. The Crown strays, Gustav. It must be led back onto the path."
Gustav: "And you think yourself the man to do this? More the fool you, Wiegraf."
Wiegraf: "You have spoken your fill? Then we are done?"
At this point, the game plays out a very brief exchange of blows that is also genuinely really impressive; each of the sprite has a sword that's part of its actual model, and Wiegraf and Gustav each take a different fencing stance, then Gustav strikes first, Wiegraf dodges out of the way, and runs Gustav through before he can correct himself.
It's very Correct Fencing and I really like it.
Wiegraf pulls his sword out of Gustav's body, letting him fall on the ground, and as he does Ramza, Delita and Argath barge in.
They immediately spot the Marquis, captive at the back of the room, and what follows is a tense stand-off.
Ramza: "Wiegraf!"
Argath: "The marquis!"
Wiegraf: [He bars the way with his sword.] "No further!"
Argath: "How dare you threaten me!"
Delita: "Stay yourself, Argath."
Wiegraf: "The marquis is unharmed. You are free to return him to Eagrose."
Ramza: "Why release him?"
Wiegraf: "The marquis' abduction was ill done. Such craven methods serve not our ends. Let me walk free, and I will release the marquis to your care. A fair bargain."
Argath: "You mock us! You are in no position to bargain!"
Delita: "Enough, Argath! He speaks the truth."
At this point, the two parties play out the stand-off dance of circling around one another with weapons pointed towards one another, neither side trusting the other until Wiegraf can see a clear line to the exit.
When the marquis starts stirring awake, Wiegraf makes his escape while Ramza goes to check on the marquis; Argath instantly turns around to pursue Wiegraf now that their charge is in their custody, forcing Delita to step forward and bar his path.
Delita: "Let him go, Argath!"
Argath: "Why do you stay me?"
Delita: "The Corpse Brigade is finished in any case. There is naught to be gained by a quarrel here."
Argath: "..."
Ramza: "The marquis is well. He is weak, but he seems unharmed."
Delita: "We must see him back to Eagrose."
[We return to the world map.]
…
Honestly, I'm not sure about Wiegraf's behavior. He seems to hold himself to a special kind of standard of behavior, above common bandits - but he also leads a group notorious for attacking merchants and nobles, so what gives? His mention that the Crown 'strays' suggests that he's an actual believer in the righteousness of the monarchy, a righteousness it has merely lost and needs to be brought back to; this is actually pretty standard for pretty much every popular uprising until the late stages of the French Revolution (the king is being misled by his wicked advisors!), so that doesn't surprise me, but it's no wonder he's been having loyalty issues among his men if his standards around what kind of behavior is befitting of the Corpse Brigade are unclear. He seems, above all, idealistic but kind of naive. Abiding by a higher standard of behavior will do absolutely nothing to prevent the Order from wiping them out to the last man; their very existence offends the aristocracy.
Argath being this aggro is funny. Like, maybe our full party could beat Wiegraf but like, he's probably some lv 30 Super Knight or something, dude, you'll just get turned into mince meat trying to chase him solo, you should thank Delita for saving your life.
Alright, back at Castle Eagrose.
Dycedarg is, predictably, upset that the boys left their posts and wandered off into the desert.
Ramza: "..."
Dycedarg: "Silence is not the answer I seek. Speak, and be quick with it."
Delita: "'Twas I forced Ramza to go."
Dycedarg: "Was that the way of it, Ramza? Delita led your better judgment astray?"
Ramza: "No… I went of my own choosing. The fault lies not with him."
Delita: "'Tis Ramza's noble disposition that guides his tongue, my lord. It is not as he-"
Ramza: "You needn't be false on my behalf, Delita. It was I who chose to disregard orders."
I love this. The fact that Delita immediately steps forward to take the blame upon himself showcases both that he and Ramza are genuinely friends (which wasn't super apparent so far given Ramza's very low-emotion dialogue), and that they operate on an inherently fucked up dynamic where lowborn Delita being Ramza's friend naturally means stepping forward to take the blame for his noble friend. And Delita, being a heroic character, actually rejects that so they get into a brief fight over who gets the blame, which is endearing.
…notably, it's not actually clear who is to blame here. The dialogue back at Eagrose when we left went: Ramza asks where the spy was last seen, Zalbaag makes a comment about how guarding castles sure is boring, then Delita tells his sister they must leave sooner than planned. My read on this is that there is no specific person to blame, or rather, they're both to blame; Ramza and Delita made the simultaneous, agreed upon decision to track down the Marquis, no one pushed the other to do it.
Dycedarg takes this opportunity to have a Teachable Moment that gives us an idea of what it means, to him, to be a knight.
Dycedarg: "Might I pose a question, Ramza? What purpose do laws serve when even those who would enforce them choose not to pay them heed? Adherence to the rule of law is a knight's solemn duty. It falls upon us, as Beoulves, to bear the burden of example. Is your intent to live up to your name - or to drag it with you through the mire?"
Ramza: "...Forgive me, lord brother."
This is a good insight into what makes the Beoulves who they are, and how Dycedarg sees knighthood: A noble is set to a higher standard than his peers. Nobility does not free you from the law, but instead binds you more tightly to it, that you represent an ideal for all below you to strive to follow.
That makes him pretty enlightened for his era and social class! A lot of nobles would laugh at the presumption! It's also going to be… Interesting, in a few moments.
There's a voice at the door; it's time for one of the highest-ranking characters in our little drama to step in, a man who had a spot all to himself in the PSX cinematic.
Man's Voice: "I believe the point is made, isn't it, Dycedarg?"
A neat little bit of silent characterization here is that Argath has to actually look around at the other two in brief confusion before following their lead and kneeling; as established before, he is not from Gallione, and so is unlikely to know the Duke from sight.
Larg, or some say Largo, the White Lion. Let's turn to our history tab:
Small wonder the Beoulves are aligned with Larg; Bestrald Larg is in fact the lord of Gallione, governing over the whole province. He's also brother to the queen, and from a splinter branch of the king's family by blood besides - vaguely incestuous in the way all these European monarchies tended to be. He also has final authority over the Order of the Northern Sky, over even Zalbaag. This is the man whose side we were presumably on in the opening, and he immediately casts a figure as a temperate, good-natured man, who has come to honor our party's deeds even though they were rooted in some minor disobedience; the carrot to Dycedarg's stick, as it were.
Duke Larg: "You must not let the how of it steal your eyes away from the what. Their rescue of the marquis was no small feat. It is the way of young men to be impetuous in their haste to do great things. We were not unlike them once."
Dycedarg: "To coddle them is to do them disservice, Your Grace. They need to learn integrity."
Duke Larg: [To Ramza] "So, you are Lord Dycedarg's younger brother. Rise, son of Gallionne." [Ramza rises.] "Indeed, you are the very ghost of Barbaneth. His fire burns in your eyes, I can see it. Such strength and vitality would be wasted atop castle walls."
[Dycedarg lowers his head and closes his eyes, in the manner of a man who has been defeated and resigns himself to doing things the Duke's way.]
Dycedarg: "Our campaign against the Corpse Brigade draws near its end. I will permit you to join in the final stage. Coordinated strikes are to be made on a number of their dens ere long. You will lead one of those assaults."
Ramza: "Very well, Lord Brother."
[All rise, and bow to Dycedarg and the Duke. They leave the room.]
So far, so traditional. A higher figure of authority, possessed of some greater wisdom, steps in as the youth are being scolded to point out their achievements and say they could be trusted for greater things. I feel like I have seen that beat a thousand times in any SFF media aimed at a teenage or YA audience. Which isn't a criticism! It's a good beat.
Especially given what comes next. Dycedarg turns around, and heads to look out the window thoughtfully. "My apologies, Your Grace," Dycedarg says, though it's unclear what he's apologizing for.
Duke Larg: "It was not of your doing, Dycedarg. In truth, it serves only to show the caliber of man we were dealing with in Gustav. A change in plan was inevitable, once the fool went and staged the kidnapping within our very borders."
Duke Larg: "And let us not forget - they did save the marquis' life. He will now be honor-bound to acquiesce. In the end, your brothers' deeds have placed us in quite the favorable position."
Dycedarg: "The king's life hangs by a thread. We must move quickly now."
Duke Larg: "Indeed, my dear friend. I trust you will not fail me."
[Fade back to the world map.]
DUN-DUN-DUUUUNNN!!
Can you hear the scare chords as the Duke casually drops that the whole abduction plan was seemingly their design, only messed up by Gustav being reckless and acting too early? This is what I meant about all these little conversations we (the reader) saw but our characters did not earlier being set up; it's set up for this, when it's revealed that Duke Larg and Ramza's brother Lord Dycedarg are plotting some kind of treason, and have been behind the events of the early game, but it is revealed to us, and Ramza still has absolutely no clue. This is intriguing! This story's layer of information differences are kind of fascinating - by now, we know more about both Wiegraf, Dycedarg, Duke Larg, and Delita and Ramza's future than any of the characters themselves do, but we are still left with a lot of question marks - indeed, even more question marks than we had before. What is Larg and Dycedarg's plan? What do they need the marquis for? Tantalizing!
Back on the map, a new node has opened:
The Brigand's Den. Before we head there, though, let's check in our Party Roster:
We've unlocked a few new classes - Monk was unlocked earlier, and I decide to swap Ramza into it now to see what its abilities are like; Monk fights unarmed and seems unable to wear headgear, plus it only wears clothing rather than armor, so hopefully its native combat capability will make up for it. Unfortunately, Ramza doesn't yet have enough JP to unlock any of Monk's Abilities, so he'll just be punching stuff for a bit.
Ramza's Ability menu, making me sad.
Archer Hadrian has reached Archer lv 3 and unlocked Thief. I've been pretty whelmed with Archer so far (as have been a few of my readers in their own play, from their accounts), so I decide to swap him immediately. This incarnation of Thief, it turns out, isn't like our usual 'steal a random item drop' from an enemy; instead Steal is split into a ton of abilities like Steal Gil, Steal Heart, Steal Helm, Steal Armor, Steal Weapon, Steal EXP… It's a little overwhelming and Hadrian's starting JP isn't enough to unlock anything other than Steal Gil anyway, so we'll stick to that for now.
Osric has leveled Black Mage to lv 3, unlocking Time Mage. In FFV, Time Mage was a status-focused class using spells like Haste, Slow, and Stop; it still has those here, along with spells of which I can't remember if they were in Time Mage previously, like Float, Reflect, and Immobilize. Time Mage Movement Abilities include the ability to teleport and passively levitate, which seems pretty good! For now, we'll just unlock Haste and leave Black Magicks in the second slot, which I think will still end up most of what Osric does in the next fights.
Gillian is staying a Chemist for now - I'd really like to unlock her other Item Abilities. And Hester sadly hasn't had a chance to take the field because the game keeps restricting us to 4 slots instead of 5. The women in the team are being left behind and we must fix this somehow.
Also now we'll need to backtrack to get some better equipment again; all the shops have updated with new items like Iron Swords, Bronze Armor and actual mage robes which boost MP count, which sure would have been nice during our last fight.
On the way we get into a brief random encounter I won't cover, save to point to two discoveries I made during it: One, it turns out Haste (and thus most likely all buff spells) has a chance to miss, marking the first time your buffs cast on your own allies can just miss. That feels awful, and I hate it. There is no reason to design things this way. The latter is that Thief is, huh…
Look at this. Look at this menu. Look at the effect it predicts.
Hadrian's Steal Gil Command steals 24 Gil. For the record, a single potion costs 50 Gil, and is the least expensive item in the game; it would take more than two (successful!) Steals to afford one. Meanwhile every piece of equipment at this stage of the game costs 500+ Gil and would require several dozen Steal attempts to pay for them. So yeah, it's worthless. We'll still be keeping Hadrian on Thief, at the very least to see what if anything it unlocks at lv 3, and to see if those other Steal commands actually have any role, but Steal Gil is worthless, at least at this stage of the game. Which is a shame; money is fairly tight and I could have used a way to afford more gear.
Also, this battle is another example of a random encounter nearly turning into a total rout in which I barely manage to win without a permadeath by the skin of my teeth (in this case, thanks to Osric's backup Black Magicks ability killing two Goblins in one fell swoop just before Gillian can bite the bucket).
You basically need to save before every single move you make on the world map. It is entirely possible to permanently lose a party member to random encounters. When testing out new party configuration, there's no way to practice in 'easy mode' or anything. The monsters are coming for your ass.
Cut for image count.
Final Fantasy Tactics, Part 3.A: Sand Rat's Zietch & Brigand's Den
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
II. Brigand's Den
Alright, let's advance to Brigand's Den, and make Duke Larg and the Lord Brother proud.
We're benching Osric to give Hester some needed experience.
Milleuda: "Our contact with the Brigade is lost. And I fear we may be lost as well."
White Mage: "How could you say such a thing? The battle is not yet even thought!"
White Mage: "We mustn't give in to despair! Not until the nobles answer for all they've wrought!"
Milleuda: "It ought not have been like this. My brother was too soft. Too indecisive."
Lookout: "The enemy!"
It looks like we've found a group of Wiegraf's true believers - indeed, true believers in his cause to the extent that their leader Milleuda actually thinks him too weak in his revolutionary fervor. If Gustav's faction was of the 'who cares about the revolution, let's abduct nobles for money' variety, it looks like Milleuda's faction is of the 'who cares about standards and honorable behavior, let's murder these fucks in their beds' kind. The chronicle tab will inform us that this is, as implied by her dialogue, Milleuda Folles, Wiegraf's younger sister; she was his lieutenant in the Dead Men, and rose up with him against their lords after the War.
Argath: "I owe you a debt of gratitude for rescuing the marquis. I pray I am able to repay it - even a little - by aiding you in this!"
This is a frontal assault against a fortified position. Our group is coming in all gathered up at the front gate. The central road leaves us exposed to the castle with a large impassable cliff to our left, though the elevated position on the right actually can be climbed.
This is also, notably, the first time our objective is to eliminate an enemy leader, rather than protect all troops or protect Argath. It may end up that we still have to kill everyone before we can take Milleuda down, but this offers at least the possibility of a more direct path to victory.
This White Mage immediately leaves the fort and advances towards us, then starts aiming a spell at Gillian. This is highly suspicious, and - yeah, wouldn't you know it; there's incoming damage indicated in the window above. This is a White Mage equipped with Black Magicks, capable of equally healing her side and harming us, and firing a nuke in the middle of our packed formation could do some serious harm; in the forecast just 1 HP short of immediately taking out Gillian. Given that Gillian is my only character capable of using Phoenix Downs, this would be a quick trip to reloadsville. Not only that, but while the enemy White Mage (Whage?) starts charging, their Thief immediately covers half the map to come in front of her, stabbing Argath and taking up space to protect her.
Unfortunately, this aggressive push, while it could have proved highly rewarding if my party was just a little slower, comes just after I swapped Hadrian to Thief and Ramza to Monk.
They execute a pincer movement, taking out the White Mage before she finished charging up her spell. (Ramza's 60 damage would actually have sufficed on its own, but it's not like I knew that before he took his turn and aimed). With the enemy's most versatile mage disabled, it's time to start the counter-offensive.
I've equipped Gillian with Black Magicks, and I have her target an area where I'm pretty sure the Thief will still be even if he acts before she casts; in any event he doesn't and her cast comes immediately. Rather than give her a comprehensive load out of first tier spells, I straight up spent all her Blage JP on Fira to start with, as a backup nuke when Items aren't what's needed.
It's well I did. Gillian's Fira does a pathetic 12 damage. Our girl may have the Black Magicks Ability, but she doesn't have the Magic stat to back it up. Her damage is simply too low. It's still better than nothing, but it's not much better.
Milleuda is next, coming out of the gate and positioning herself on top of the left-side blockhaus and using the flanking and elevation to give herself a 100% hit rate while making herself unapproachable from the front and left. She hits Hadrian for more than half his HP in one blow - dangerous, but as long as she's the only one hitting that hard, manageable.
The remaining White Mage approaches covered by her two Thief allies, casting Cure on the wounded Thief buried behind my lines. Cure, it turns out, is also an AoE, so she heals Hester as well, though Hester was at max HP so it doesn't really matter.
The way the game works is very interesting because, in the moment, controlling characters turn-by-turn as they take their turns between each other, everything feels chaotic and like you and they are just making ad hoc responses from one turn to the next without a clear pattern of battle. Yet, looking at isolated screenshots, it's very clear that such patterns exist: Here, the White Mage advanced to within range of her stranded ally to heal him, the two Thieves are up close to her so they can shield her partially and stab any who come through, while Milleuda has taken an advantageous position to flank the 'central melee' in the central corridor, while Ramza and Gillian are using the right-side elevations to escape that melee and avoid being boxed in. Delita and Argath, meanwhile, are just completely lost. I don't know to what extent the AI is capable of 'planning' such things, but it's clearly well-designed enough that they happen organically with the parameters set up for the game.
It's a fairly interesting battle on a tactical level but what leaves me both relieved and disappointed is that ultimately the enemy commits a critical mistake that I myself earlier on committed in the Zietch battle: gambling on fun powers with cool, high-variance effects that could turn the tide of battle and have a miss chance, instead of reliable damage-dealing.
Namely, two Thieves use Steal Heart, a move which, if it worked, could convert Hester, a Knight, to their side with the Charm status effect. However, it fails both times, so they waste their turn, allowing me to punish them freely.
Hadrian sneaks up on Milleuda for a backstab. One of our item rewards for the Sand Rat's Zietch was the Blind Knife, so he also inflicts Blind, crippling her accuracy, which is pretty bad for a physical job.
Also, this is when I realize that I can actually use the Status menu to check my opponents' character sheets as early as Turn 1. I am used to this ability being locked behind the opportunity cost of Scan, having to spend a turn specifically studying an enemy to get that level of detail, but no, I can just use the free roam cursor to page over any character and get their page:
This lists all their Abilities, their equipment, and their individual stats. The game is remarkably transparent. Milleuda is an Aim Knight, which is the second time this move set is showing up so I'm assuming it's sort of a 'default build' the game is suggesting to me.
The real powerhouse in this fight, though, is Ramza. His punch damage is insane. I assume this is because barehanded damage is tied to Bravery and Ramza's Bravery, at 70, is higher than any other member of my party.
It's only now that Delita and Argath, who have just been kind of idling around in a way that suggests their pathfinding AI got confused by the level architecture, start climbing up to join the fight. This proves fortunate, as a quick Potion throw from Argath saves Hadrian from the next attacks coming his way.
This is where the fight briefly pauses, before Milleuda takes her next action, for a bit of dialogue that's, hm.
It's a lot.
Milleuda: "How can you nobles live as you do and yet hold your heads so high?"
Milleuda: "We are not chattel! We are humans, no less than you!"
Milleuda: "What flaw do you hold there to be in us? That we were born between a different set of walls?"
Milleuda: "Do you know what it means to hunger? To sup for months on broth of bean? Why must we be made to starve that you might grow fat? You call us thieves, but it is you who steal from us the right to live!"
A pretty cogent and heartfelt speech, making some very good points about the suffering of the lower class, the arrogance of nobility, and the inherent absurdity of drawing lines between people based on one's birth. Anyone got a counterargument? Anyone?
…Argath?
Argath: "You, no less human than we? Ha! Now there's a beastly thought."
Argath: "You've been less than we from the moment your baseborn father fell upon your mother in whatever gutter saw you sired!"
Argath: "You've been chattel since you came into this world drenched in common blood!"
Milleuda: "By whose decree!? Who decides such foul and absurd things?"
Argath: "'Tis heaven's will!"
Milleuda: "Heaven's will? You would pin your bigotry on the gods? No god would fain forgive such sin, much less embrace it! All men are equal in the eyes of the gods!"
Argath: "Men, yes. But the gods have no eyes for chattel."
Milleuda: "You speak of devils, not gods!"
Holy shit, Argath. Tell us how you really feel, huh? I don't know if he was always that much of a bigot, or if it's the process I described last time - the feeling of his own nobility growing increasingly more tenuous and needing to affirm it through violence to the underclass, combined with the fact that a commoner allegedly killed his traitor grandfather - that's driven him to such heights of hatred, but this is genuinely some of the most hateful speech ever espoused by a Final Fantasy character, and one who's nominally on our side, too. 'In whatever gutter saw you sired'? 'The gods have no eyes for chattel'? Fuck off, dude.
As a matter of fact, Delita, who has just been quiet so far in almost every scene featuring Argath being an asshole to commoners, merely keeping him from chasing Wiegraf to his certain doom, even chimes in:
Yeah, no, I am 100% with Delita here.
Unfortunately this is not the kind of game that gives us an option to immediately turn on Argath and become Corpse-pilled, so we have to carry this battle to its conclusion.
You know what's hilarious, though? I have no idea if this is scripted or if it was just pure luck of the draw, but upon this dialogue ending, Milleuda's immediate move is:
To get down from her perch, beeline for Argath, and stab him so hard he instantly goes down.
Peak gameplay-storytelling integration, I love her, he deserved every point of that damage.
At this stage, though, our objective is in sight. The enemy is still strong - we've only lost Argath, but they've only lost one White Mage, they have three Thieves, but our objective is Milleuda and she's still inside Hadrian and Ramza's move range.
Both pursue her, flank her again, and attack her, running down her HP and bringing the battle to a close.
We could have tried maxing out the JP/EXP payout of this fight by bringing down every other enemy before we took out Milleuda, but it seems like unnecessary and dangerous busywork, and isn't even particularly narratively satisfying; I don't particularly want to follow up on that dialogue by slowly grinding down every single one of her soldiers into dust before taking her captive as the only survivor only once she watched us kill them all, you know?
This concludes the battle of Brigands' Den. We earn a hefty 3,300 "Bonus Coin"; I still haven't worked out what this mechanic is, it seems partially randomized? Regardless I'm glad for the money, our funds are running low constantly swapping jobs.
Now it's time to confront our VIP.
Throughout this next dialogue, you should be picturing lightning flashing in the background as rain falls.
Milleuda: "I'm no more than chattel to you, am I? So have my head and be done with it!"
Ramza: "Do you truly hold us to be so foul?"
Argath: "Do it, Ramza! She fights as a Corpse. Let her become one for true! She's a foe and a traitor - an enemy of House Beoulve! The world has no place for such wretches. Her claim to life is forfeit! Spare her now, and you place your seal on the warrants for our own deaths! It's her or us, Ramza! Strike her down!"
Delita: "Try as I might, Ramza, I cannot think this woman our enemy."
Argath: "Have you lost your wits?"
Delita: [He turns to Argath] "This woman is no more chattel than you or I."
Argath: "You would turn against our cause, Delita? I ought have suspected as much!"
Milleuda: [She slowly rises to her feet.] "You deny me even the mercy of an honorable death. A pox on you and your pity! So long as you bear the name Beoulve, you will remain an enemy to me. You'd do well to remember that."
[Milleuda turns around and, a hand clutching her arm, and, limping, hops down the wall and leaves the scene.]
Ramza: "Delita… What have we done?"
Delita: [He looks at Ramza, then closes his eyes and shakes his head.]
Argath: [He crosses his arms and looks away from the others.] "Hmph. A pox on your pity indeed."
[The camera pans up, and we leave the scene.]
Well.
'What have we done,' Ramza? Well, you've done the worst thing you could in a situation of civil war like this: Showed indecision. Neither killing your enemy who hates you, nor making any specific statement with your mercy, merely allowing her to leave without stopping her or saying a word. You looked weak.
But I mean, who wouldn't? It's… difficult at this stage to fully piece together a picture of Ramza's character, because of how much he keeps to himself, how much he presents a polite exterior of deference without ever really explaining himself or looking like he feels strongly about anything (a point remarked on by his own brother), and then doing shit like this. How much is actually going on behind this emotionless facade? It's a fairly straightforward read here that Ramza just kinda, can't bring himself to execute a captured prisoner, but also having one of his friends cosplay Palpatine from Revenge of the Sith yelling "KILL HER! DO IT NOOOOOWWWW" is clearly rattling him in ways he isn't able to just shrug off with a casual 'no.'
Man, Argath, though. Imagine being such a psycho turboracist that you manage to awaken Delita's class consciousness, a man who has been entirely happy to go "me and my aristo BFF ride or die, ten million dead corpse brigade #suckstosucks #hatersgonnahate" up to this point.
God. What a prick.
Let's just look ahead briefly to the next cutscene before we close for today.
Welp, fuck.
God, how did the Corpse Brigade manage to break into the Beoulve estate? Because that's what just happened: These are three Corpse Brigade chocobo riders who broke in, took out the Knights on watch, and abducted first Tietra, and then, shortly after, Alma.
That last one doesn't go quite as well for them, though. Zalbaag comes rushing out of the manse, pulling Amla out of harm's way, and cuts down the Thief that was grabbing her with one blow of his golden sword.
This man is Gragoroth Levigne - though the Chronicle has no information on him beyond his name, the fact that his a knight of a Corpse Brigade, and his involvement in the manse raid. He turns around and flees on his chocobo, Zalbaag unable to pursue on foot. Instead, the older brother turns to Alma.
Zalbaag: "Alma, are you unhurt?"
Alma: "Yes, I'm fine. But Tietra-!"
Zalbaag: "Yes, I know."
[A visibly wounded Dycedarg emerges, limping and clutching his arm, much like Milleuda in the previous cutscene; he falls to his knees as he approaches Zalbaag and Alma rushes to his side.]
Zalbaag: "Lord Brother!"
Dycedarg: "W-worry not, I am fine. Alma, are… are you all right?"
Alma: "They did not harm me. But you - you're bleeding badly!"
Dycedarg: "In no fevered dream would I have thought the Brigade so bold to strike us here… They must have come for me."
Zalbaag: "Five among our numbers are slain, and Tietra taken."
Dycedarg: "Find them… Search every den and dovecote if you must."
Alma: "Please, brother, you mustn't speak!"
Dycedarg: "Bloody… rebels…"
[He passes out.]
Alma: "Dycedarg!"
Zalbaag: "Someone! Anyone!"
Welp!
It's genuinely kind of sweet that given Dycedarg's stern demeanor towards Ramza, his first concern in this scene is to make sure Alma, his much younger half-sister, is alright - as is Zalbaag's, too. They really do care. Whatever conspiracy Dycedarg is hatching (it's unclear if Zalbaag would be on it; he's very close to Dycedarg on the one hand, but on the other hand he could be considered too pious/righteous to trust with such morally compromising details), they really are family men. The question, of course, is whether they're going to extend the same concern for lowborn Tietra, who is now a Corpse Brigade hostage. Would Wiegraf hesitate to kill a child if the threat might make us balk? That's unclear. Frankly, seizing two children hostage sits poorly with the lofty principles he claims to have, so I'm wondering if this is yet another action by a splinter faction - perhaps Milleuda's own.
What an effective raid, though. A mere handful of men struck at the heart of the Beoulve estate, killed five knights, injured the head of the family, and made off with a hostage. What a slap in the face! Could they have had inside information, I wonder? Maybe Gragoroth is just That Good.
We will have to find out later. That'll do us for now. No big changes in class layout at this time, job unlocks or anything, though Ramza can finally unlock a Monk Ability (just one, thought). His fists have been doing plenty of work, though.
I've been trying to stick to at least two main story battles per update so far, which I feel is a good compromise of moving through the plot with actual stuff happening every update without drowning everyone in new historical facts, names to remember, and tactical details. I'm satisfied with it so far, though this guarantees pretty much every update will be a double update, but tell me if you're liking the pacing we've got. I'll work to set up a Dramatis Personae of my own for when people need to reference who the fuck is Largo Wynch III five weeks for now; it may end up being that I just post the pictures from the Dramatis Personae tab of the game in an Informational update, which seems like it might be the most efficient option. Not today, but soon.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: On Tietra's tail!
Alright, let's advance to Brigand's Den, and make Duke Larg and the Lord Brother proud.
We're benching Osric to give Hester some needed experience.
Milleuda: "Our contact with the Brigade is lost. And I fear we may be lost as well."
White Mage: "How could you say such a thing? The battle is not yet even thought!"
White Mage: "We mustn't give in to despair! Not until the nobles answer for all they've wrought!"
Milleuda: "It ought not have been like this. My brother was too soft. Too indecisive."
Lookout: "The enemy!"
It looks like we've found a group of Wiegraf's true believers - indeed, true believers in his cause to the extent that their leader Milleuda actually thinks him too weak in his revolutionary fervor. If Gustav's faction was of the 'who cares about the revolution, let's abduct nobles for money' variety, it looks like Milleuda's faction is of the 'who cares about standards and honorable behavior, let's murder these fucks in their beds' kind. The chronicle tab will inform us that this is, as implied by her dialogue, Milleuda Folles, Wiegraf's younger sister; she was his lieutenant in the Dead Men, and rose up with him against their lords after the War.
Argath: "I owe you a debt of gratitude for rescuing the marquis. I pray I am able to repay it - even a little - by aiding you in this!"
This is a frontal assault against a fortified position. Our group is coming in all gathered up at the front gate. The central road leaves us exposed to the castle with a large impassable cliff to our left, though the elevated position on the right actually can be climbed.
This is also, notably, the first time our objective is to eliminate an enemy leader, rather than protect all troops or protect Argath. It may end up that we still have to kill everyone before we can take Milleuda down, but this offers at least the possibility of a more direct path to victory.
This White Mage immediately leaves the fort and advances towards us, then starts aiming a spell at Gillian. This is highly suspicious, and - yeah, wouldn't you know it; there's incoming damage indicated in the window above. This is a White Mage equipped with Black Magicks, capable of equally healing her side and harming us, and firing a nuke in the middle of our packed formation could do some serious harm; in the forecast just 1 HP short of immediately taking out Gillian. Given that Gillian is my only character capable of using Phoenix Downs, this would be a quick trip to reloadsville. Not only that, but while the enemy White Mage (Whage?) starts charging, their Thief immediately covers half the map to come in front of her, stabbing Argath and taking up space to protect her.
Unfortunately, this aggressive push, while it could have proved highly rewarding if my party was just a little slower, comes just after I swapped Hadrian to Thief and Ramza to Monk.
They execute a pincer movement, taking out the White Mage before she finished charging up her spell. (Ramza's 60 damage would actually have sufficed on its own, but it's not like I knew that before he took his turn and aimed). With the enemy's most versatile mage disabled, it's time to start the counter-offensive.
I've equipped Gillian with Black Magicks, and I have her target an area where I'm pretty sure the Thief will still be even if he acts before she casts; in any event he doesn't and her cast comes immediately. Rather than give her a comprehensive load out of first tier spells, I straight up spent all her Blage JP on Fira to start with, as a backup nuke when Items aren't what's needed.
It's well I did. Gillian's Fira does a pathetic 12 damage. Our girl may have the Black Magicks Ability, but she doesn't have the Magic stat to back it up. Her damage is simply too low. It's still better than nothing, but it's not much better.
Milleuda is next, coming out of the gate and positioning herself on top of the left-side blockhaus and using the flanking and elevation to give herself a 100% hit rate while making herself unapproachable from the front and left. She hits Hadrian for more than half his HP in one blow - dangerous, but as long as she's the only one hitting that hard, manageable.
The remaining White Mage approaches covered by her two Thief allies, casting Cure on the wounded Thief buried behind my lines. Cure, it turns out, is also an AoE, so she heals Hester as well, though Hester was at max HP so it doesn't really matter.
The way the game works is very interesting because, in the moment, controlling characters turn-by-turn as they take their turns between each other, everything feels chaotic and like you and they are just making ad hoc responses from one turn to the next without a clear pattern of battle. Yet, looking at isolated screenshots, it's very clear that such patterns exist: Here, the White Mage advanced to within range of her stranded ally to heal him, the two Thieves are up close to her so they can shield her partially and stab any who come through, while Milleuda has taken an advantageous position to flank the 'central melee' in the central corridor, while Ramza and Gillian are using the right-side elevations to escape that melee and avoid being boxed in. Delita and Argath, meanwhile, are just completely lost. I don't know to what extent the AI is capable of 'planning' such things, but it's clearly well-designed enough that they happen organically with the parameters set up for the game.
It's a fairly interesting battle on a tactical level but what leaves me both relieved and disappointed is that ultimately the enemy commits a critical mistake that I myself earlier on committed in the Zietch battle: gambling on fun powers with cool, high-variance effects that could turn the tide of battle and have a miss chance, instead of reliable damage-dealing.
Namely, two Thieves use Steal Heart, a move which, if it worked, could convert Hester, a Knight, to their side with the Charm status effect. However, it fails both times, so they waste their turn, allowing me to punish them freely.
Hadrian sneaks up on Milleuda for a backstab. One of our item rewards for the Sand Rat's Zietch was the Blind Knife, so he also inflicts Blind, crippling her accuracy, which is pretty bad for a physical job.
Also, this is when I realize that I can actually use the Status menu to check my opponents' character sheets as early as Turn 1. I am used to this ability being locked behind the opportunity cost of Scan, having to spend a turn specifically studying an enemy to get that level of detail, but no, I can just use the free roam cursor to page over any character and get their page:
This lists all their Abilities, their equipment, and their individual stats. The game is remarkably transparent. Milleuda is an Aim Knight, which is the second time this move set is showing up so I'm assuming it's sort of a 'default build' the game is suggesting to me.
The real powerhouse in this fight, though, is Ramza. His punch damage is insane. I assume this is because barehanded damage is tied to Bravery and Ramza's Bravery, at 70, is higher than any other member of my party.
It's only now that Delita and Argath, who have just been kind of idling around in a way that suggests their pathfinding AI got confused by the level architecture, start climbing up to join the fight. This proves fortunate, as a quick Potion throw from Argath saves Hadrian from the next attacks coming his way.
This is where the fight briefly pauses, before Milleuda takes her next action, for a bit of dialogue that's, hm.
It's a lot.
Milleuda: "How can you nobles live as you do and yet hold your heads so high?"
Milleuda: "We are not chattel! We are humans, no less than you!"
Milleuda: "What flaw do you hold there to be in us? That we were born between a different set of walls?"
Milleuda: "Do you know what it means to hunger? To sup for months on broth of bean? Why must we be made to starve that you might grow fat? You call us thieves, but it is you who steal from us the right to live!"
A pretty cogent and heartfelt speech, making some very good points about the suffering of the lower class, the arrogance of nobility, and the inherent absurdity of drawing lines between people based on one's birth. Anyone got a counterargument? Anyone?
…Argath?
Argath: "You, no less human than we? Ha! Now there's a beastly thought."
Argath: "You've been less than we from the moment your baseborn father fell upon your mother in whatever gutter saw you sired!"
Argath: "You've been chattel since you came into this world drenched in common blood!"
Milleuda: "By whose decree!? Who decides such foul and absurd things?"
Argath: "'Tis heaven's will!"
Milleuda: "Heaven's will? You would pin your bigotry on the gods? No god would fain forgive such sin, much less embrace it! All men are equal in the eyes of the gods!"
Argath: "Men, yes. But the gods have no eyes for chattel."
Milleuda: "You speak of devils, not gods!"
Holy shit, Argath. Tell us how you really feel, huh? I don't know if he was always that much of a bigot, or if it's the process I described last time - the feeling of his own nobility growing increasingly more tenuous and needing to affirm it through violence to the underclass, combined with the fact that a commoner allegedly killed his traitor grandfather - that's driven him to such heights of hatred, but this is genuinely some of the most hateful speech ever espoused by a Final Fantasy character, and one who's nominally on our side, too. 'In whatever gutter saw you sired'? 'The gods have no eyes for chattel'? Fuck off, dude.
As a matter of fact, Delita, who has just been quiet so far in almost every scene featuring Argath being an asshole to commoners, merely keeping him from chasing Wiegraf to his certain doom, even chimes in:
Yeah, no, I am 100% with Delita here.
Unfortunately this is not the kind of game that gives us an option to immediately turn on Argath and become Corpse-pilled, so we have to carry this battle to its conclusion.
You know what's hilarious, though? I have no idea if this is scripted or if it was just pure luck of the draw, but upon this dialogue ending, Milleuda's immediate move is:
To get down from her perch, beeline for Argath, and stab him so hard he instantly goes down.
Peak gameplay-storytelling integration, I love her, he deserved every point of that damage.
At this stage, though, our objective is in sight. The enemy is still strong - we've only lost Argath, but they've only lost one White Mage, they have three Thieves, but our objective is Milleuda and she's still inside Hadrian and Ramza's move range.
Both pursue her, flank her again, and attack her, running down her HP and bringing the battle to a close.
We could have tried maxing out the JP/EXP payout of this fight by bringing down every other enemy before we took out Milleuda, but it seems like unnecessary and dangerous busywork, and isn't even particularly narratively satisfying; I don't particularly want to follow up on that dialogue by slowly grinding down every single one of her soldiers into dust before taking her captive as the only survivor only once she watched us kill them all, you know?
This concludes the battle of Brigands' Den. We earn a hefty 3,300 "Bonus Coin"; I still haven't worked out what this mechanic is, it seems partially randomized? Regardless I'm glad for the money, our funds are running low constantly swapping jobs.
Now it's time to confront our VIP.
Throughout this next dialogue, you should be picturing lightning flashing in the background as rain falls.
Milleuda: "I'm no more than chattel to you, am I? So have my head and be done with it!"
Ramza: "Do you truly hold us to be so foul?"
Argath: "Do it, Ramza! She fights as a Corpse. Let her become one for true! She's a foe and a traitor - an enemy of House Beoulve! The world has no place for such wretches. Her claim to life is forfeit! Spare her now, and you place your seal on the warrants for our own deaths! It's her or us, Ramza! Strike her down!"
Delita: "Try as I might, Ramza, I cannot think this woman our enemy."
Argath: "Have you lost your wits?"
Delita: [He turns to Argath] "This woman is no more chattel than you or I."
Argath: "You would turn against our cause, Delita? I ought have suspected as much!"
Milleuda: [She slowly rises to her feet.] "You deny me even the mercy of an honorable death. A pox on you and your pity! So long as you bear the name Beoulve, you will remain an enemy to me. You'd do well to remember that."
[Milleuda turns around and, a hand clutching her arm, and, limping, hops down the wall and leaves the scene.]
Ramza: "Delita… What have we done?"
Delita: [He looks at Ramza, then closes his eyes and shakes his head.]
Argath: [He crosses his arms and looks away from the others.] "Hmph. A pox on your pity indeed."
[The camera pans up, and we leave the scene.]
Well.
'What have we done,' Ramza? Well, you've done the worst thing you could in a situation of civil war like this: Showed indecision. Neither killing your enemy who hates you, nor making any specific statement with your mercy, merely allowing her to leave without stopping her or saying a word. You looked weak.
But I mean, who wouldn't? It's… difficult at this stage to fully piece together a picture of Ramza's character, because of how much he keeps to himself, how much he presents a polite exterior of deference without ever really explaining himself or looking like he feels strongly about anything (a point remarked on by his own brother), and then doing shit like this. How much is actually going on behind this emotionless facade? It's a fairly straightforward read here that Ramza just kinda, can't bring himself to execute a captured prisoner, but also having one of his friends cosplay Palpatine from Revenge of the Sith yelling "KILL HER! DO IT NOOOOOWWWW" is clearly rattling him in ways he isn't able to just shrug off with a casual 'no.'
Man, Argath, though. Imagine being such a psycho turboracist that you manage to awaken Delita's class consciousness, a man who has been entirely happy to go "me and my aristo BFF ride or die, ten million dead corpse brigade #suckstosucks #hatersgonnahate" up to this point.
God. What a prick.
Let's just look ahead briefly to the next cutscene before we close for today.
Welp, fuck.
God, how did the Corpse Brigade manage to break into the Beoulve estate? Because that's what just happened: These are three Corpse Brigade chocobo riders who broke in, took out the Knights on watch, and abducted first Tietra, and then, shortly after, Alma.
That last one doesn't go quite as well for them, though. Zalbaag comes rushing out of the manse, pulling Amla out of harm's way, and cuts down the Thief that was grabbing her with one blow of his golden sword.
This man is Gragoroth Levigne - though the Chronicle has no information on him beyond his name, the fact that his a knight of a Corpse Brigade, and his involvement in the manse raid. He turns around and flees on his chocobo, Zalbaag unable to pursue on foot. Instead, the older brother turns to Alma.
Zalbaag: "Alma, are you unhurt?"
Alma: "Yes, I'm fine. But Tietra-!"
Zalbaag: "Yes, I know."
[A visibly wounded Dycedarg emerges, limping and clutching his arm, much like Milleuda in the previous cutscene; he falls to his knees as he approaches Zalbaag and Alma rushes to his side.]
Zalbaag: "Lord Brother!"
Dycedarg: "W-worry not, I am fine. Alma, are… are you all right?"
Alma: "They did not harm me. But you - you're bleeding badly!"
Dycedarg: "In no fevered dream would I have thought the Brigade so bold to strike us here… They must have come for me."
Zalbaag: "Five among our numbers are slain, and Tietra taken."
Dycedarg: "Find them… Search every den and dovecote if you must."
Alma: "Please, brother, you mustn't speak!"
Dycedarg: "Bloody… rebels…"
[He passes out.]
Alma: "Dycedarg!"
Zalbaag: "Someone! Anyone!"
Welp!
It's genuinely kind of sweet that given Dycedarg's stern demeanor towards Ramza, his first concern in this scene is to make sure Alma, his much younger half-sister, is alright - as is Zalbaag's, too. They really do care. Whatever conspiracy Dycedarg is hatching (it's unclear if Zalbaag would be on it; he's very close to Dycedarg on the one hand, but on the other hand he could be considered too pious/righteous to trust with such morally compromising details), they really are family men. The question, of course, is whether they're going to extend the same concern for lowborn Tietra, who is now a Corpse Brigade hostage. Would Wiegraf hesitate to kill a child if the threat might make us balk? That's unclear. Frankly, seizing two children hostage sits poorly with the lofty principles he claims to have, so I'm wondering if this is yet another action by a splinter faction - perhaps Milleuda's own.
What an effective raid, though. A mere handful of men struck at the heart of the Beoulve estate, killed five knights, injured the head of the family, and made off with a hostage. What a slap in the face! Could they have had inside information, I wonder? Maybe Gragoroth is just That Good.
We will have to find out later. That'll do us for now. No big changes in class layout at this time, job unlocks or anything, though Ramza can finally unlock a Monk Ability (just one, thought). His fists have been doing plenty of work, though.
I've been trying to stick to at least two main story battles per update so far, which I feel is a good compromise of moving through the plot with actual stuff happening every update without drowning everyone in new historical facts, names to remember, and tactical details. I'm satisfied with it so far, though this guarantees pretty much every update will be a double update, but tell me if you're liking the pacing we've got. I'll work to set up a Dramatis Personae of my own for when people need to reference who the fuck is Largo Wynch III five weeks for now; it may end up being that I just post the pictures from the Dramatis Personae tab of the game in an Informational update, which seems like it might be the most efficient option. Not today, but soon.
Thank you for reading.
Next Time: On Tietra's tail!
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- Location
- Singapore
- Pronouns
- Singular They
It's honestly difficult to tell, because I should probably clarify that when I say "Generic Politeness", the primary emphasis is on "Generic". The politeness is just because characters are polite by default, and being impolite (Gaffgarion, Argath) means characterization.
I brought up the comparison to Squall, but on further thought a better comparison would be the player party dialogue in FFIII. (The Pixel Remaster version played in this thread, rather than the 3D one which gives the player party actual characters.) Emotions can be expressed, and declarations can be shouted, but it's all just... there. Word choice and speech patterns are just lines on a script, and I can't find any obvious characterization points.
Which has to be deliberate, because as mentioned, everyone else has their own characterization in their speech, and in-setting Zalbaag even comments on Ramza being "as usual". So it's definitely intentional, but I'm not quite sure what that intent might be.
Ramza wanting to avoid drawing attention and fade into the background sounds possible, but it does kind of clash with the (thus far only informed rather than shown) motivation in his profile, where Ramza feels inferior to his older brothers due to their accomplishments. Still, people are complicated and can have contradictory actions, so it's as good an explanation as any so far.
- Location
- Canada
Man I love the sprite work in this game. It's an entirely excessive amount of work that was done compared to like 99% of sprite animations in video games, but it pays off.
The speech from the original FFT, for comparison:
Algus: Human? Hmph, ridiculous! From the minute you were born you had to obey us! From the second you were born you were our animals!!
Miluda: Says who!? That's nonsense! Who decided all this?!
Algus: It's the Will of Heaven!
Miluda: Heaven? God would never say such things! In his eyes, all are equal! He'd never let this happen! Never!
Algus: Animals have no God!!
Miluda: !!!!
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
FFT's plot and characterization go so hard. "This guy you rescued right at the start of the game? The starting point for a million different tropes? Yeah, he's actually a total piece of shit. Deal with it."
OkayishGatsby
This Titan is Fine
Dycedarg was a lot more on the money than he knew. They really did need Ramza and co. on guard duty, what with the bulk of their forces busy chasing down the Corpse Brigade.
Omicron would you like to see the chants for the spells you have?
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
You know what's hilarious, though? I have no idea if this is scripted or if it was just pure luck of the draw, but upon this dialogue ending, Milleuda's immediate move is:
To get down from her perch, beeline for Argath, and stab him so hard he instantly goes down.
Peak gameplay-storytelling integration, I love her, he deserved every point of that damage.
Okay I gotta admit, I laughed uproariously at this. Milleuda really said
View: https://x.com/TwilightNK/status/1836349420981412114
Thozmp
Gets my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
Ah, the ludo narrative dissonance that is leaving your post for like 2 months to wander around and kill things.
So, since you never answered whether or not you want me to post the psx chants, I figure I might as well.
Cure: "Life's refreshing breeze, blow in energy! Cure!"
Protect: "Precious light, be our armor to protect us! Protect!"
Fire: "Destruction of nature, gather in flame! Fire!"
Fire2/Fira: "Out of the ground, raze all greenery with flame! Fire2!"
Ice: "Scatter your chilly sharp blades! Ice!"
Bolt: "Strip away the ground with glistening blades! Bolt!"
Haste: "Layer upon layer make your mark now...Haste!"
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
@Omicron I like your battle summaries, keep them up! Not sure if two battles per update will be "enough" to get this done in anything less than a year, though. You may or may not have to just settle on more if we're ever to see FFIX. But others more familiar with the game would have better commentary on such pacing.
EDIT: Also, not sure if you'd consider this a mechanical spoiler, so I'll hide it (regarding your Blage's seeming ineffectiveness earlier): Weather can affect Elemental Magic. So in that case, rain makes Fire Magic weaker, but would make Thunder Magic more effective.
EDIT: Also, not sure if you'd consider this a mechanical spoiler, so I'll hide it (regarding your Blage's seeming ineffectiveness earlier): Weather can affect Elemental Magic. So in that case, rain makes Fire Magic weaker, but would make Thunder Magic more effective.
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- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Oh yeah, sorry, I meant to say yes but your post fell out of my Insert Quotes list.
Those are fun, although some of them do seem like they could maybe do with a retranslation. Real shame they didn't include it in WotL.
- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
You know, there's a certain critically acclaimed MMORPG whose job codes would seem really useful here...
- Pronouns
- Him/He
Excellent to see. FFT doesn't take very long to throw you in the shit and expect you to figure it out. Neither of these fights are real power spikes, but each of them can really fuck you up if you get careless
If you have the menu open for any charged abilities (Like spells or items) you can press left on the D-pad, which will bring up the turn/action list, and will show all actions, including the timing of the action you had highlighted when you pressed left. This is what you commonly use in the middle of battle to check 'will this person move before the spell fires?' and 'Will my next character get a turn before this enemy spell goes off?'.
Or if you deselect a unit that has it's turn up (X. Or O if you've rebound perhaps) you can then bring up options (Which includes things like 'turn off XP/JP notifications', which will make battles go faster, and won't turn off the level up/job level up notifications) and the turn list. This is sometimes useful when you're trying to figure out the turn order but don't have any sub-commands
Interesting. The original translation uses 'revolution' a lot more and doesn't mention the Crown at all. It's much easier to read as a literal 'fuck the monarchy' revolution. But I suppose even the Magna Carta sought accommodation with the King rather then just removing them entirely.
It is pretty impressive quality, while full 3D was the major platform mandated fad, the PS1 tech is still being used to expand what they can do. I don't think FF7, with it's 3-D models, and FMVs, could ever manage anything as dynamic as a sword fight like this. FF8 is the one that made that happen with the opening FMV and basically no where else.
You can't see it in this screen shot, but you can see Larg in the background (through the window right under where Dycedarg's face is) the entire time before he makes his entrance. He's obscured a bit by the fancy window, but it's a great moment of craft, that you can see him listening before he decides to cut in, while Ramza and Co probably can't see him. (or aren't supposed to in universe anyways)
Notably, neither throws Zalbaag under the bus, who pretty transparently told them to go. How else do you expect Delita to act, when he sees that Ramza taking the blame for what he was told to do by his older brother, who commands the entier Knight Order? Taking the fall for those above you is what's being demonstrated.
Once again, it's interesting that Zalbaag both dropped the hint about the spy, and gave the squad an excuse. Did he not know of the plot? Was he, as implied by others, trying to get Ramza killed on a wild goose chase that accidentally payed off?
I think this might, already, be some of the most extensive and complicated plotting of any FF game reviewed so far. Having protagonist further enemy plots is common, but having them complicate and speed up plots is rare. Them having a plan and then having to adapt it on-the-fly is the sort of thing rarely seen. I suppose the bit with NORG reacting to things is a bit like that, but it took half the game to get to that point.
The PSX version of this line is something like 'I'm with Ramza until the end!', and then the entire fight makes you question if you want him anywhere near you. It's kinda funny.
Goddamn it, how could this happen? Who's job was it to guard the castle?
. .. *cough*. Must have been a traitor inside.
Once again, this is a custom sprite, you can't just slap on a different head ontop of another 'stagger and fall' sprite, Dycedarg has robes and sht, and has to be grabbed by Alma. FFT has good production values, even for it's time.
They aren't really doing much for me (other then triggering my advice-giving sub-routine I'm shutting up), but I'm an experienced player. I think it's important to show non-players how an actual battle is. This is a completely new system and style, and lots of basic interactions are novel and new, and interacting with other novel stuff.
I expect that eventually there will be less interest, on both sides of the update, to go over the battles in such minute detail, but no need to rush it.
Something I've been thinking about is, how many battles do you do in FF7, or FF8, do you go through for the same amount of 'plot'? FF8 had a very slow start, but the fire cavern had something like three or four fights probably, the Number 1 Mako reactor probably had at least five or six? And those were the introductionary dungeons where you have to try and die. I know you're skipping the random encounters here, but the number of 'plot relevant' battles, or even 'interesting battles', is a much higher density.
For such a bespoke game, so far it's the plot (dense) and the battles (dense), without anything else. Everything is about the battles, and the out-of-battle menus that are entirely about the battles. It's pretty different from the typical FF game, where 'vibing' typically had a lot of focus or space devoted to it, to live in the world as much as the technology allowed.
If you have the menu open for any charged abilities (Like spells or items) you can press left on the D-pad, which will bring up the turn/action list, and will show all actions, including the timing of the action you had highlighted when you pressed left. This is what you commonly use in the middle of battle to check 'will this person move before the spell fires?' and 'Will my next character get a turn before this enemy spell goes off?'.
Or if you deselect a unit that has it's turn up (X. Or O if you've rebound perhaps) you can then bring up options (Which includes things like 'turn off XP/JP notifications', which will make battles go faster, and won't turn off the level up/job level up notifications) and the turn list. This is sometimes useful when you're trying to figure out the turn order but don't have any sub-commands
Interesting. The original translation uses 'revolution' a lot more and doesn't mention the Crown at all. It's much easier to read as a literal 'fuck the monarchy' revolution. But I suppose even the Magna Carta sought accommodation with the King rather then just removing them entirely.
It is pretty impressive quality, while full 3D was the major platform mandated fad, the PS1 tech is still being used to expand what they can do. I don't think FF7, with it's 3-D models, and FMVs, could ever manage anything as dynamic as a sword fight like this. FF8 is the one that made that happen with the opening FMV and basically no where else.
You can't see it in this screen shot, but you can see Larg in the background (through the window right under where Dycedarg's face is) the entire time before he makes his entrance. He's obscured a bit by the fancy window, but it's a great moment of craft, that you can see him listening before he decides to cut in, while Ramza and Co probably can't see him. (or aren't supposed to in universe anyways)
Notably, neither throws Zalbaag under the bus, who pretty transparently told them to go. How else do you expect Delita to act, when he sees that Ramza taking the blame for what he was told to do by his older brother, who commands the entier Knight Order? Taking the fall for those above you is what's being demonstrated.
Once again, it's interesting that Zalbaag both dropped the hint about the spy, and gave the squad an excuse. Did he not know of the plot? Was he, as implied by others, trying to get Ramza killed on a wild goose chase that accidentally payed off?
I think this might, already, be some of the most extensive and complicated plotting of any FF game reviewed so far. Having protagonist further enemy plots is common, but having them complicate and speed up plots is rare. Them having a plan and then having to adapt it on-the-fly is the sort of thing rarely seen. I suppose the bit with NORG reacting to things is a bit like that, but it took half the game to get to that point.
The PSX version of this line is something like 'I'm with Ramza until the end!', and then the entire fight makes you question if you want him anywhere near you. It's kinda funny.
Goddamn it, how could this happen? Who's job was it to guard the castle?
Omicron from the very first update said:
. .. *cough*. Must have been a traitor inside.
Once again, this is a custom sprite, you can't just slap on a different head ontop of another 'stagger and fall' sprite, Dycedarg has robes and sht, and has to be grabbed by Alma. FFT has good production values, even for it's time.
They aren't really doing much for me (other then triggering my advice-giving sub-routine I'm shutting up), but I'm an experienced player. I think it's important to show non-players how an actual battle is. This is a completely new system and style, and lots of basic interactions are novel and new, and interacting with other novel stuff.
I expect that eventually there will be less interest, on both sides of the update, to go over the battles in such minute detail, but no need to rush it.
Something I've been thinking about is, how many battles do you do in FF7, or FF8, do you go through for the same amount of 'plot'? FF8 had a very slow start, but the fire cavern had something like three or four fights probably, the Number 1 Mako reactor probably had at least five or six? And those were the introductionary dungeons where you have to try and die. I know you're skipping the random encounters here, but the number of 'plot relevant' battles, or even 'interesting battles', is a much higher density.
For such a bespoke game, so far it's the plot (dense) and the battles (dense), without anything else. Everything is about the battles, and the out-of-battle menus that are entirely about the battles. It's pretty different from the typical FF game, where 'vibing' typically had a lot of focus or space devoted to it, to live in the world as much as the technology allowed.
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- Location
- PA
Hrrrm…
Hey Oni, you familiar with the trope of two warriors circling around each other?
Off the top of my head only quick characters have the 5 MOV you need to instantly go behind someone in melee, so in practice melee is more a series of circling to the side…
And yep. Both of us never got to try out the Multiplayer side of FFTA. I'm pretty sure about that on my end, and guessing by your reaction.
Hey Oni, you familiar with the trope of two warriors circling around each other?
Off the top of my head only quick characters have the 5 MOV you need to instantly go behind someone in melee, so in practice melee is more a series of circling to the side…
And yep. Both of us never got to try out the Multiplayer side of FFTA. I'm pretty sure about that on my end, and guessing by your reaction.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Or maybe they're all living in the shadow of their awesome but completely background zero characterization anime dad?
I'm so glad you've figured these little tricks out. It's not immediately obvious, but it's very rewarding once you get a handle on it.
Love this exchange. "Silence is not the answer I seek" is such a baller line.
Monk is preeeeeetty great NGL.
TBH he kind of feels designed to be hated. But then they gave him a really interesting backstory so while it doesn't excuse his pure Dude WTF-ness, his anxiety over losing what little privilege he has does make it understandable.
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- Location
- Spain
Her stats aren't quite the only problem here!
You can't expect a fire mage to perform under rain!
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- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
the fuck do you mean 'weather affects elemental damage' fuck you this is bullshit
- Pronouns
- Him/He
Also thunder 2 is 10 MP instead of 12 MP like it's fire and ice counterpart.
That one still perplexes me to this day.