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.
This game laid it out rather simply- probably because they are dealing with the limited power of the Playstation, but the enemies outside of special characters and Monsters are basically a flipped colour of playable units, with similar limitations.
Since this is early game, you see an enemy unit using Items? Their tinctures are as limited as yours. In line with these people being brigands lacking funds, usually their Potions run out after two to three uses. The only difference than your units are the fact that they probably have more variety of items than yours.
I don't suggest using the tactic of running out their items though going forward, because you will be fighting mostly well-equipped people instead of poor brigands post-time skip the nearer you are to the Lions War.
After the first time I met Algus, I have never once try to save him in Mandalia. He's too much of a coward asshole that I'd rather not waste time saving his ass. Even that first time I had to replay the Mandalia battle multiple times because he got killed far too quickly.
Since this is early game, you see an enemy unit using Items? Their tinctures are as limited as yours. In line with these people being brigands lacking funds, usually their Potions run out after two to three uses. The only difference than your units are the fact that they probably have more variety of items than yours.
Really? I always thought it was unlimited. I know guest party members draw from your own item stocks if they have Item equipped (good way to run out of potions early game) but enemies always seem to have as many potions as they have turns to use them.
Specifically, the very first battle in chapter 1, you can kill everyone else and punch the chemist for ages. You can get Delita potion, high potion, Auto potion, move +1, gain JP up, focus, throw stone, and counter tackle just by beating on this one chemist but letting him heal up. The only real limit is your HP... and good positioning, AI exploitation, and chaining Wishes lets you stretch that out forever if need be.
You do in the PS1 version, Delita has it as well, and will use it on lower HP characters. Him and Ramza using it on each other creates net positive HP.
Really? I always thought it was unlimited. I know guest party members draw from your own item stocks if they have Item equipped (good way to run out of potions early game) but enemies always seem to have as many potions as they have turns to use them.
Specifically, the very first battle in chapter 1, you can kill everyone else and punch the chemist for ages. You can get Delita potion, high potion, Auto potion, move +1, gain JP up, focus, throw stone, and counter tackle just by beating on this one chemist but letting him heal up. The only real limit is your HP... and good positioning, AI exploitation, and chaining Wishes lets you stretch that out forever if need be.
Because you are fighting a Chemist. Chemist's job is to throw items around in the first place. A Monk with Item skill has a far more limited stash.
I know this because I have done it lol. In this same location even. Got into the 'chasing that guy except he's on the other side of the wall' sequence, par his HP down little by little, he used Potions once, twice, and then keep on running after that without even reaching for any Potions. Only one possible reason for that- he runs out of them.
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.
An interesting and perhaps unintended consequence of the astrological system used in FFT is making it more difficult for the Japanese audience to instinctively grasp, because it uses the Greek Zodiac.
Meanwhile, a lot of the population of East Asia can recite the Chinese Zodiac system from memory. (One common joke is how young people can generally remember only half of the Zodiac, getting stuck at Snake at number six.) Apart from being taught as part of "heritage culture", it also used to be a polite way of asking someone's age, without being too direct about it: ask their zodiac sign, and you've narrowed it down to possible entries every 12 years.
So if you can remember the exact sequence of the twelve Zodiac signs, you just need to remember them in steps of three, four, or six (for Bad, Good, and Max/Min). But it's remembering that sequence in the first place which is the obstacle.
Since FFT is set in a faux-European fantasy setting that is basically the War of the Roses, it makes sense to use "western" ideas like the Greek Zodiac, rather than the Chinese Zodiac. But it does mean having to memorize a completely different (and essentially arbitrary) list of twelve symbols.
After all that commentary and speculation about the Generic-ness of Ramza's lines, suddenly now he expresses some individuality. It's literally just a "よし" exclamation, which would translate into "good" or "we've done it", but it's the first instance where Ramza is doing anything beyond sounding like he's reading from a script. In this case, Ramza is enthusiastic and focused on completing the mission, so we can add that to his characterization.
I have no idea why the script chooses now to give Ramza characterization, or whether it means anything. For all I know, it could just be the game writers going "hey, who is Ramza as a character anyway" at this moment.
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?
I'm curious about this as well. One of the Knights is indeed labelled as "Corpse Brigade Knight" (骸旅団騎士), while the other is "Corpse Brigade Warrior" (骸旅団戦士). And the Archer is "Corpse Brigade Archer" (骸旅団弓使い).
Which would have made me think these are the game-mechanical Jobs of these units, rather than their diegetic occupations. But the Watchman is "Corpse Brigade Lookout" (骸旅団見張り), and I don't think "Watchman" is a Job in the same way as Squire or Knight.
So it does feel like FFT is flipping back and forth between "these titles are their game-mechanics Jobs" and "these titles are their actual rank and position within the society of the setting", depending on whichever is more convenient, and with no indication to the player.
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.
The Japanese text is "That took longer than expected. It seems like it wasn't noticed, though." Which is a case where the usual Japanese language reliance on implication and context makes it seem more innocent than it is, because Ramza is effectively saying "it took longer than expected to kill these people". The WotL translation seems to be using more poetic imagery than usual, which makes Ramza sound even more cruel.
And Ramza is also back to Generic neutrality in Japanese.
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?"
This is one exchange where I think the flattening of tone in the translations are hurting the dialogue. Gustav is furious, perhaps desperately so, using direct speech and explicit grievances to yell at Wiegraf. Meanwhile, Wiegraf is being high-and-mighty as he talks down to Gustav about Principles and Vision, carefully choosing words like he's giving a political speech.
In other words, Wiegraf's lines in the WotL translation are accurate to his tone, while Gustav needs to be written like a guy holding the politician at gunpoint, not because of any difference in ideals, but simply because he wants the politician's wallet.
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.
While I think at least a part of it is the sheer difficulty in keeping a group of actual outlaws focused on a high ideal, the description of the Corpse Brigade given by Zalbaag previously might also be relevant: according to him, the Corpse Brigade targets nobles and those who serve them.
I don't know how deeply to read into it, since it's just a character giving quick exposition offhand about the Corpse Brigade, but the term used is 仕える者, which is a generic term for "employee" (or "servant", ie "someone who serves"). Thus, not only are the Corpse Brigade targeting nobles, they are also targeting people who work for the nobles. Not merely "is in league with the nobility", but also merchants with noble patrons and scullery maids.
It's a common development in many stories for the allegedly noble Robin Hood outlaws to turn into "rob the rich to give to me". The Corpse Brigade sounds like another example.
As for "the Crown strays", this is the translation extrapolating from other sources. Wiegraf's line there is "The important thing is to correct (the problem) at the root." "Correct" here is 正す, which is used in the sense of "make right/righteous". From everything else we've read about the Corpse Brigade, we can guess the problem to be corrected is the royalty and nobility, but how they are to be corrected, or what precisely the problem is, are not mentioned. For all we know, the "correction" could be anything from "wipe out the aristocracy entirely" to "force the aristocracy to acknowledge and pay us, then we leave".
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?"
With the caveat that I know next to nothing about FFT's story, and certainly nothing about class politics in FFT, I'm a little curious if something will come of Dycedarg's speech about the law.
Because he doesn't just talk about laws, he talks about Laws, or rather "Law" (法) with quotation marks for emphasis. It sounds like he's talking about Laws like they're handed down via divine revelation, or woven within the fabric of the universe. Maybe he just really respects laws, or maybe he's the stereotypical Lawful Neutral who follows the letter of the law, no matter how degenerate the situation.
This could turn out to be nothing, of course. My noting this is entirely because I've read enough other stories with this sort of character rhetoric before. Quite often (especially given the later revelation of Dycedarg's participation in the conspiracy) this sort of character places a Law that they believe more worthy (eg "survival of the fittest") over the "flawed laws" made by humans.
I found it amusing Omicron read this as "Milleuda's faction wants to murder the aristocracy, no quarter", which is a valid interpretation, while the Japanese text is the much softer "We will continue to fight until the nobles give their apology".
As usual, implied context means this "apology" can range from a verbal apology to monetary restitution to public guillotine.
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.
This exchange is very dramatic. It's the equivalent of a Shakespearean argument between orators, like the famous Shylock speech in Merchant Of Venice, against the anti-Shylock speech. The characters are performing to the audience as much as to each other, with soaring rhetoric and poetic metaphors. The style of the WotL translation fits perfectly here.
Also as a very minor point of trivia, Argath's line "The gods have no eyes for chattel" is, in Japanese, "Chattel have no gods": "家畜に神はいない".
This is exactly the line Argath says in his boss fight, when he does the meteor soak mechanic. I play with Japanese voices in FFXIV, so I recognized the Japanese line, but not the English one, which probably says something about how much more I remember sound effects than the literal subtitles on the screen.
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!"
For more "tell us how you really feel, Argath" points, in Japanese he keeps repeating Ramza's name, "do it", and "kill". The net effect is of a partygoer going "CHUG CHUG CHUG" at a stranger unprompted.
Even without the previous racist screed, Argath here is so suspiciously enthusiastic I'm going "are you trying to hide something".
I am often reminded of how good we have it now with translations, where the translation team has an open and frequent communication with the writing team.
Because I can imagine a translator seeing the katakana ゴラグロス・ラヴェイン, and muttering "wtf is this supposed to be", whereas today the translator can march down the hall and pin the writer to the wall, screaming "WTF IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE".
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.
Really like it tbh. It definitely gives me a good picture of what's happening, at least. I could practically see the slow BLM unable to close into melee with the archer continually just fleeing and taking potshots. Definitely not because similar happened to me before. No.
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.
Weather! Gotta love it. Or hate it. One of the two.
I guess there's a reason to not just rush one element on BLM.
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.
I think it would've previewed the hit chance for a sec, right? Do you remember if you thought there was a genuine chance that would work, or were they just gambling on *really* low odds? I don't remember how the AI feels about how likely something has to be to make that high effect worth it.
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.
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.
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.
I think this early in the game the blow by blow helps showcase how different the gameplay is from what this LP is used to and coveys the surprise and frustration and scramble to stay one step ahead. I imagine that as we get deeper into the game some of it will naturally fall by the wayside as mechanics repeat and you accustom yourself to the system.
That said if anything as dumb as that Osric Scooby Doo chase happens you are expected to highlight it.
Maybe that's why Ramza sounds so tired at the end. He just had to watch a screaming archer flee in circles from a likewise screaming blackmage desperately trying to get one good swing in with his staff.
"Osric, with the help of Hadrian, heroically subdued the last of the foes." (The Durai Papers)
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.
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.)
Yeah, I said it before when the Zodiac came up in the thread, but it's honestly something you can ignore in a casual playthrough. Yeah sure, it effects some things, but unless you're doing a challenge run like single classes or no grinding, or playing a modded version of the game that makes things more difficult so little differences matter, you're never going to care about the Zodiac system. Hell, even if you end up in "Omega Final Dungeon starring Ruby, Emerald and Ultima Weapon Triple Threat" or something, it's still unlikely to matter because by that point you could fall back on "I make my entire party Cheese Mages with the Secondary ability set of Inflicting Lactose Intolerance" or something and cheese your way through the boss.
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.
Yup, FFT is open to some crazy amounts of customization compared to FFV, which mostly limited you to two skillsets max (or less if you wanted a passive ability and weren't a Freelancer/Mime). Plus, the whole JP bleedover thing makes taking some minor cross-class contamination a viable strat, whether it be nabbing a few useful item commands from Chemist, or a support ability or movement ability from somewhere else.
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.
One of the reasons I'm not too sold on the Knight's ability set, even if the base class frame itself isn't all that bad. When they hit, destroying equipment or crippling stats is great, but when you miss it can feel even more like a wasted turn then a missed attack outright.
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?
Nobody is sold on vanilla Archer, I'm pretty sure it's the first class in line for rebalancing and adjustments whenever someone makes an FFT mod. Honestly, the best strat tends to be to beline through Archer as fast as you can to unlock something more useful.
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.
...And learned Ether, apparently. The ever-present downside of Item, the fact that you actually need to learn every individual item, because I guess there's different tossing angles necessary for the standard Potion, X-Potion, Ether, and so on bottles if you want the full effect.
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.
I think it's a fair amount of detail for story missions at this point in the playthrough. Maybe once the party starts locking in on more finalized builds and you get more story battles that go "and then I rolled over the entire enemy team in two turns", they can be skimmed over a bit more.
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."
Argath got no chill, damn. Barely even a moment to check on the Marquis he supposedly came to rescue, just wants to charge headlong into an experienced knight captain and get shanked.
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.
It's very possible that it's just a situation where while the topmost troops directly under Wiegraf and Wiegraf himself are in this for the honorable cause, the Corpse Brigade is so widespread that they can't really police every action that's done in their name. So, while Wiegraf is trying to pull off "defeat the bad nobles and secure the rewards and pay due to us", other groups like Team Gustav are more in it for the personal benefits like fortune, or even just want to make the nobility bleed (Milleuda falls here).
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.
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.
Ah, Monk. I don't think it's the outright strongest of the physical class tree, there's probably better options, but if you want a stupidly versatile character that doesn't want new equipment all the time, it's hard to go wrong with "Punch Good, also here's a bunch of wild abilities with cool effects". Think I kept Ramza as a Monk most of Chapters 1 and 2 my first playthrough.
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.
Yeah, Archer is... probably one of the worst classes in the game, unfortunately. It's not that bows specifically are bad, long range attacks and height advantages have their uses, but their skillset is just boring even when it is effective (which isn't often).
Thief, on the other hand? Well, who wouldn't have fun swiping equipment right off of your opponents and stuffing it in your bag for later use or sale? Steal Gil is unfortunately not particularly useful at your current level (though it is stupid cheap in JP cost), but steal just strikes me as "Rend Equipment But Better" because your opponent loses their equipment and you gain it, and that's before getting into some silly things like Steal Heart, or the fact that they have Move/Jump+2 if those interest you.
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.
Ah, Time Mage. It has some good support abilities, but Haste in particular? Well, after so long dealing with ATB system games, I can say it's real fun to play with a game where buffing up someone's speed has a super noticeable effect. Sure, ATB lets you get effectively 2 turns for every 1 turn of others, but I feel like it's just so much more efficient in something like FFT where you also get to factor in positioning.
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.
No reason you can't start rotating characters in and out of the main party for story missions, to try and get everyone more equal amounts of experience (which as it turns out is exactly what you did later).
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.
Wiegraf's lieutenant, huh? Well, at the least FFT continues to show some great gender equality, I'm pretty sure if we were playing in the actual War of the Roses, or Game of Thrones land, there would be a tad more pushback against letting that happen.
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.
You know, for some reason I have very distinct memories of this map in particular from Chapter 1? This, Dorter, and one or two other maps I remember better than the rest, and I've no idea why in this one's case, at least Dorter has the fact that it's the initial difficulty spike and newbie filter mission.
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).
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.
I do wonder how much it's an AI thing, and how much it's just a starting battle squads and battlefield design thing. The enemies might not really need particularly cooperative AI if the devs just know in advance where they'll stick said enemies, and what order they'll go in because of their starting speed stats, then by the time that falls apart the fight is already halfway over anyways.
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.
...Oh, this is probably why I remember this fight, I very distinctly recall some thief shenanigans dragging on the fight for ages (on both sides since I had a thief of my own by this point with a few abilities under their belt).
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.
Might not even be a "default build" so much as an easy access one, really. Any character that has unlocked Knight has also unlocked Archer, thread has already mentioned you get a handful of JP for free just unlocking a class, and Aim is an easy and obvious secondary option for the Knight anyways since it lets you swap between "I want to rend equipment/stats" and "I want to hit that guy really, really hard with my big sword".
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: "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:
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.
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?
I think there might be more character dialogue if the battle drags on longer? At least, a lot of boss/important character fights will have at least a few lines of dialogue across multiple characters turns, so it's often worth not instantly murking said boss if you can manage it.
Then again, nobody else in the thread mentioned missing anything important as of yet including the guy with the entire JP script on hand, so I could be wrong.
'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.
Damn Ramza, quit fence sitting so hard, it's a simple Light/Dark Side choice, come on. If you don't pick one or the other, Kreia's gonna burst in screaming some nonsense about how "Apathy is Death" and then we all have problems.
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.
I think about 2 story battles per update currently is a fair enough rate. Unless Omi really slows down in updating, it's more than enough to clear the game in... probably a few months, and I suspect as the entire party comes together into more finalized builds instead of "everyone is multi-class-drifting as I figure out what I like and don't like" there'll be less need to explore every beat of the fights, especially if Omi stumbles into some OP combo and starts destroying the story battles.
Aim Knight is interesting, that completely flew by me mechanically. Or the fact Aim boosts damage in general, actually, as I decided to let the AI handle archer vs use it myself when leveling up the class for JP. I'll have to see about implementing it in my squad next time I play.
And eesh, the class divide is blatant here. I'm also on the side of the peasants, heh.
A word about crossbow's. It IS in fact possible to use them in close range but it's unintuitive.
What you have to do is select an attack panel that's behind your target you wish to damage. It's possible to fire at empty panels. The crossbow fires in a straight line so when that happens the first living body that's between you and the panel that you're aiming at will be struck (or dodged/blocked depending on hit chance).
Mind you if you hit someone at melee range with a crossbow you'll be subject to potential counter attack.
A word about crossbow's. It IS in fact possible to use them in close range but it's unintuitive.
What you have to do is select an attack panel that's behind your target you wish to damage. It's possible to fire at empty panels. The crossbow fires in a straight line so when that happens the first living body that's between you and the panel that you're aiming at will be struck (or dodged/blocked depending on hit chance).
Mind you if you hit someone at melee range with a crossbow you'll be subject to potential counter attack.
"I did not shoot a crossbow at you. I merely felt the desire to shoot a crossbow at a completely empty location; it was your misfortune to have intercepted the bolt partway."
"Neither did I attack you in retaliation. I merely detected damage to my person, and responded with a counter towards the source. Coincidentally, that source was you."
An interesting and perhaps unintended consequence of the astrological system used in FFT is making it more difficult for the Japanese audience to instinctively grasp, because it uses the Greek Zodiac.
"I did not shoot a crossbow at you. I merely felt the desire to shoot a crossbow at a completely empty location; it was your misfortune to have intercepted the bolt partway."
"Neither did I attack you in retaliation. I merely detected damage to my person, and responded with a counter towards the source. Coincidentally, that source was you."
Ramza (completely fed up with this passive-aggressiveness): "Yes. That is why neither of you should blame the other for their actions. Blame yourselves or God. Dammit, Delita, now I can't stop saying it."
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!"
Cure: Mostly accurate, but "blow in energy" is "失いし力とならん", and I admit I'm not sure how to read it. "Lost power negated"?
Protect: "Flickering light, become invisible armour. Protect our small lives!" Don't ask me what "small lives" (小さき命) is supposed to mean.
Fire: "Crush rocks, destroy corpses, those who lie hidden in the earth. Gather and become a red flame!" I can see where "destruction of nature" can come from the first part, which is admittedly lengthy. Maybe the first bits should be "Rock-crushers" etc, depending on grammar.
Fira: "Awaken the power of fire that sleeps in the sands of the earth. Become the red tongue that licks the green!" While "the red tongue that licks the green" is more poetic than "raze all greenery with flame", I admit it also sounds more unhygienic.
Ice: "From the breath of ghosts born in darkness. Scatter on blades of freezing wind!" Much cooler, pun unintended.
Bolt: "With blades formed of dazzling splendour. The earth shall be rent asunder!" Close enough.
Haste: "Come fluttering over and over. Carve into this body!" I have no idea what this has to do with haste.
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.
Yeah, the Japanese text doesn't mention the Crown either, but it also only says "revolution" (革命) once, roughly where it is in Gustav's rant. So Gustav is bringing up the "revolution" only to say he doesn't care about it, and Wiegraf doesn't explain any details of what he's fighting for other than "the problem must be corrected from the root".
It's interesting how the original translation and the WotL translation appear to extrapolate further than the Japanese text, but in different directions.
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.
Hilariously, in Japanese Argath first credits Ramza's group for saving the Marquis Elmdore, then says "I shall assist you until the mission's end". Where "mission" is 作戦, and can be read (possibly correctly, given what happens here) as only this single battle.
So he's not wrong here. Argath helps you for this mission, and then leaves, just as he says. His alienating everyone else in the group and getting vote-kicked out of the party is entirely a coincidence, and need not be listed on his resume.
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.
Could it be the dreadful power of astrology? Perhaps the default cast chance is 100%, but it'd decreased because of Ramza and mage's signs not being compatible.
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!"
Milleuda: Just kill me. That's the best you can do unless you fancy some torture.
Ramza: Do you think we're that bad?
Argath: Yes, we are! Stab her in the heart!
That;s what you get for trying to use dissident elements of the Corpse Brigade in your plans. Now a significant portion of the Brigade has the "kidnap noble, get paid, retire to raise chickens" on their mind, and presumably not all of them were wiped out in internal purge.
With this name, he had two choices in life: master the darkest most potent magicks the world has to offer or suffer neverending wedgies from bullies, even as an adult. He's made his choice.
"I did not shoot a crossbow at you. I merely felt the desire to shoot a crossbow at a completely empty location; it was your misfortune to have intercepted the bolt partway."