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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]

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Found something. The full thing might have an indefinite amount of spoilers but it's an interview of a former Squeenix translator talking about his job.

TS: The whole monotheism/polytheism thing is something I've seen a lot of people mention. The Church of Glabados is clearly modeled around Christianity, and the religion itself would seem to be a monotheistic one. Yet in the very opening scene of the game, Ovelia's prayer mentions "kami-gami" (gods, in the undeniable plural). Since the game's script had made it clear that followers of the world's religion spoke of more than one god, we retained that plurality in the English.
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DanZapman said:
Found something. The full thing might have an indefinite amount of spoilers but it's an interview of a former Squeenix translator talking about his job.
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That makes sense. In tactical games like this that put great emphasis on positioning, maneuvers and target selection, lonely big bosses tend to not work that well. Action economy really fucks them over, so they become just big pinatas. Or else they get overpowered and just frustrating to deal with. Ideally, to provide an engaging challenge, you want your enemies to field a diverse combat team similar to your own.

So, naturally, you want more than one god to kill.
 
Yeah I did a double take when I first saw people talking about archers being bad, but I realized that was from me playing TO more recently

Also the TO remaster has such a lovely quality of life feature in showing you the ballistic arc of firing a bow before confirming the attack
 
Mutton said:
Archer in FFT feels like an immediate overreaction to it in Matsuno's previous game, Tactics Ogre, where Canopus with a Bow could 1v1 God from the start.
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Turns out, in a game where elevation can massively increase archer range, giving you a named archer with wings at the very start of the game, that does piercing damage with his arrows when every armored unit is vulnerable to it, was a mistake.

You could just fly Canopus up to the top of a fortress wall and he could just sit there and kill literally anything on the map with functionally infinite range.
 
Having played through FFT multiple times with every Archer in the game having the ability to ignore heights and climb to the top of the map, I can say with confidence that, even with that change and with the Aim abilities coming out much faster, FFT archers are never anywhere near that strong. Being on top of elevated places does extends longbow range somewhat, but only to a point, and even then, the number of options that completely shut down archers in the game, from Shields to the Arrow Guard ability to rain, make it far from overpowered. So... clearly it was possible to make FFT Archers even with other classes, rather than overpowered; if the state the Archer class was left in vanilla FFT really was meant to keep it from being overpowered like it apparently is in Tactics Ogre, then it was one of the biggest overreactions ever.
 
Mutton said:
Archer in FFT feels like an immediate overreaction to it in Matsuno's previous game, Tactics Ogre, where Canopus with a Bow could 1v1 God from the start.
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The reason Canopus is OP is his flight, though, which allowed him to ignore the terrain and enemy positioning, which is like half the challenge normally. Combine it with the usual mission objective being killing the enemy leader and some leaders being very fragile, and, well.

Normal archers are far more modest. Useful, certainly, but not exactly godly.
 
acook10 said:
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: !!!!
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it's just... so much less intense... there's so much less impact... where is the sauce...

RubberBandMan said:
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?'.
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Gah, thank you. This function has been incredibly useful but I wasn't looking forward to going through the video tutorials again until they told me what I was supposed to do to access it.

Goddamn it, how could this happen? Who's job was it to guard the castle?



. .. *cough*. Must have been a traitor inside.
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HEY. THIS TIME DYCEDARG TOLD US TO GO. WE CAN'T BE BLAMED. SHOULD HAVE REASSIGNED MORE GUARDS FROM THE FRONT. NOT MY FAULT.

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.
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This is kind of a complicated question because FF7 and FF8 battles are way shorter and way much less intense as a rule. When you run into the average random encounter you just breeze through with attacks and if someone is KO it never matters unless you run into the rare and unexpected party wipe; they're games of attrition where the main threat is to your resources encounter-to-encounter (and that's been steadily diminishing over time with the introduction of mid-dungeon save points), you don't sit down to micromanage your blorbos for the next ten to twenty minutes.

Adloquium said:
I'm going to weep a little internally now.

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.
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Looking a little ahead at the gameplay I've been going through since, it looks like we're entering a phase where Ramza gets a lot more emotional in the EN script than he was previously - so I think this might be a case of his facade 'cracking,' as it were. Tough to tell without seeing the full scope of the story.

McFluffles said:
Zalbaag?

It's Zalbaag to blame and they know it, they just don't want to sell him out lmao
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Zalbaag is a pure and righteous knight who has never done anything wrong, and I can't believe this thread keeps trying to slander him like this. Shameful.

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.
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vividly picturing the bioware version of final fantasy tactics where it has a 'noble' gauge and a 'rebel' gauge that fill up over time and at the end you get one of three endings, 'ramza crushes the rebels without so much as a troubled conscience and everyone lives happily ever as the peasantry starves,' 'ramza joins the rebellion and exterminates all nobles in a blood bath plunging the entire country into chaos and further famine,' and the secret 'balanced' third option where ramza looks wistfully in the distance and says "things... are complicated..." before riding off into the sunset as a lone wandering hero never to be seen again, leaving the plot completely unresolved

Mizu said:
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.
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I mean I'm not surprised, I am genuinely kind of curious what kind of player could possibly look at the game so far and go 'yeah I'm with Argath, the nobles simply are a higher class of human being and those peasants deserve what's coming to them.' They probably wouldn't be a very pleasant person!

silentorphan said:
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."
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Realistically if someone in my friend group said "Blame yourself or God" to someone else in a very dramatic moment we would absolutely never let it go. We would be saying "Blame yourself or God" as an in-joke for the next several years. We would respond to a guy walking in and saying 'you guys ate all the pizza already!?' with 'You should have been here sooner, blame yourself or God.' So in my mind this is entirely realistic.

thamuzz said:
Oooh! Chance to share some interesting linguistic trivia!

Whelmed and overwhelmed are synonyms in the flammable inflammable mold.
Whelmed means to be flipped or turned over, and was used as we use overwhelmed. Overwhelmed evolved as an exaggerated version of whelmed, and underwhelmed later evolved as an antonym for overwhelmed after the original meaning of whelmed had faded.
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That's really interesting! I will fully confess to having picked the "I am whelmed" joke from Young Justice and never actually looked into the deeper lsemantics of it, shamefully given the brand I've established in these first few updates. Thanks for informing me!
Egleris said:
I don't have a problem with you not covering random encounters where nothing notable happens, but would you be willing to keep a running counter of how many you got into? I know it's a bother, but I would just like it as an indicator of how much grinding the game required.
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Sure thing; as of last update we've fought a total of 7 random encounters.

Speaking of which I've just run into Wiegraf in much the same war a car might run into a brick wall, and I'm currently wondering whether I'm just approaching things the wrong way and just need a change in tactics or whether going back to grind a bit may turn out to be necessary.
 
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Egleris said:
Having played through FFT multiple times with every Archer in the game having the ability to ignore heights and climb to the top of the map, I can say with confidence that, even with that change and with the Aim abilities coming out much faster, FFT archers are never anywhere near that strong. Being on top of elevated places does extends longbow range somewhat, but only to a point, and even then, the number of options that completely shut down archers in the game, from Shields to the Arrow Guard ability to rain, make it far from overpowered. So... clearly it was possible to make FFT Archers even with other classes, rather than overpowered; if the state the Archer class was left in vanilla FFT really was meant to keep it from being overpowered like it apparently is in Tactics Ogre, then it was one of the biggest overreactions ever.
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So the things that made Canopus powerful were twofold: Bows being absurdly powerful, and the map design.

First, bows hit absurdly hard - like, borderline oneshot hard - and you can target squares outside their supposed range. I don't think I can meaningfully express how overpowered archers were without you experiencing it firsthand.

Second, a lot of the time in Tactics Ogre the hardest fights involve you assaulting or defending fortresses, with maps that look like this:



A lotta flat, low ground, and some VERY tall walls. Canopus can just fly up there and start taking potshots because of the absolutely massive elevation gap between him and everyone else on the map. And noone else can reach him because there's no way up there, he's basically noclipped his way out of the level geometry and is shooting everyone.
 
Omicron said:
Speaking of which I've just run into Wiegraf in much the same war a car might run into a brick wall, and I'm currently wondering whether I'm just approaching things the wrong way and just need a change in tactics or whether going back to grind a bit may turn out to be necessary.
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You probably didn't appreciate just how auto-win the first battle in the prologue was by putting two different sword-magic users on your side.

Wiegraf will recontextualize that for you. And also your face.
 
Omicron said:
I've just run into Wiegraf in much the same war a car might run into a brick wall
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You're not alone in that; Wiegraf is famous for being a block people slam into. Just don't let yourself be discouraged, I'm sure you'll find a way through. Especially if you saved before spending whatever JP you gained in the last battle - that's a thing to keep in mind, by the way; saving after the battle but before the setup is better, since otherwise you lock yourself into a strategy. Whereas, if you save and then do the set up, if it works you won't feel the difference, but if it doesn't, you can revisit your strategy. A lot of people tend to save after the set up and then get stuck.

By the way, now that you've experienced him for yourself, how well do you think Delita, Algus and Ramza would have done against him back in Sand Rat, if Algus got his way and Delita let him attack the man? Hypothetically speaking?
 
Omicron said:
vividly picturing the bioware version of final fantasy tactics where it has a 'noble' gauge and a 'rebel' gauge that fill up over time and at the end you get one of three endings, 'ramza crushes the rebels without so much as a troubled conscience and everyone lives happily ever as the peasantry starves,' 'ramza joins the rebellion and exterminates all nobles in a blood bath plunging the entire country into chaos and further famine,' and the secret 'balanced' third option where ramza looks wistfully in the distance and says "things... are complicated..." before riding off into the sunset as a lone wandering hero never to be seen again, leaving the plot completely unresolved
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See that third option just has me picturing Bioshock Infinite with good ol' Booker Dewitt looking at a slave uprising and going "hmmmm actually you know, Both Sides Are The Same When You Think About It".
GilliamYaeger said:
So the things that made Canopus powerful were twofold: Bows being absurdly powerful, and the map design.

First, bows hit absurdly hard - like, borderline oneshot hard - and you can target squares outside their supposed range. I don't think I can meaningfully express how overpowered archers were without you experiencing it firsthand.

Second, a lot of the time in Tactics Ogre the hardest fights involve you assaulting or defending fortresses, with maps that look like this:
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I haven't played OG Tactics Ogre in its multiple forms as of yet, but I did play a lot of Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis back in the day when I was on an FFT/FFTA kick, and yeah that was approximately my experience with giving any Hawkman a bow. Turns out infinite flight + infinite ranged attack is in fact kinda good.
 
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together was great, best Law route in an RPG. Doesn't hold a candle to the wild amount of visible and invisible gauges in Ogre Battle where you had Law/Chaos on individual units that you wanted to match to each city you liberated along with a few invisible bars that tracked how well you were doing. Then TO added in a hidden Racism dial for your various Balkan ethnicities.
 
Omicron said:
it's just... so much less intense... there's so much less impact... where is the sauce...


Gah, thank you. This function has been incredibly useful but I wasn't looking forward to going through the video tutorials again until they told me what I was supposed to do to access it.


HEY. THIS TIME DYCEDARG TOLD US TO GO. WE CAN'T BE BLAMED. SHOULD HAVE REASSIGNED MORE GUARDS FROM THE FRONT. NOT MY FAULT.


This is kind of a complicated question because FF7 and FF8 battles are way shorter and way much less intense as a rule. When you run into the average random encounter you just breeze through with attacks and if someone is KO it never matters unless you run into the rare and unexpected party wipe; they're games of attrition where the main threat is to your resources encounter-to-encounter (and that's been steadily diminishing over time with the introduction of mid-dungeon save points), you don't sit down to micromanage your blorbos for the next ten to twenty minutes.


Looking a little ahead at the gameplay I've been going through since, it looks like we're entering a phase where Ramza gets a lot more emotional in the EN script than he was previously - so I think this might be a case of his facade 'cracking,' as it were. Tough to tell without seeing the full scope of the story.


Zalbaag is a pure and righteous knight who has never done anything wrong, and I can't believe this thread keeps trying to slander him like this. Shameful.



vividly picturing the bioware version of final fantasy tactics where it has a 'noble' gauge and a 'rebel' gauge that fill up over time and at the end you get one of three endings, 'ramza crushes the rebels without so much as a troubled conscience and everyone lives happily ever as the peasantry starves,' 'ramza joins the rebellion and exterminates all nobles in a blood bath plunging the entire country into chaos and further famine,' and the secret 'balanced' third option where ramza looks wistfully in the distance and says "things... are complicated..." before riding off into the sunset as a lone wandering hero never to be seen again, leaving the plot completely unresolved


I mean I'm not surprised, I am genuinely kind of curious what kind of player could possibly look at the game so far and go 'yeah I'm with Argath, the nobles simply are a higher class of human being and those peasants deserve what's coming to them.' They probably wouldn't be a very pleasant person!


Realistically if someone in my friend group said "Blame yourself or God" to someone else in a very dramatic moment we would absolutely never let it go. We would be saying "Blame yourself or God" as an in-joke for the next several years. We would respond to a guy walking in and saying 'you guys ate all the pizza already!?' with 'You should have been here sooner, blame yourself or God.' So in my mind this is entirely realistic.


That's really interesting! I will fully confess to having picked the "I am whelmed" joke from Young Justice and never actually looked into the deeper lsemantics of it, shamefully given the brand I've established in these first few updates. Thanks for informing me!

Sure thing; as of last update we've fought a total of 7 random encounters.

Speaking of which I've just run into Wiegraf in much the same war a car might run into a brick wall, and I'm currently wondering whether I'm just approaching things the wrong way and just need a change in tactics or whether going back to grind a bit may turn out to be necessary.
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I spend 10 Phoenix feathers on winning the fight and had to clutch it a bit at the end .
 
illhousen said:
Argath is a great orator. Just... not for his own team. If by chance he were a member of the Corpse Brigade (after losing even pretension of nobility, presumably), we'd see them as the greatest monsters in FF series so far.
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Argath is a fascinating character because his psychotically violent classism is motivated by his little privilege being imperiled - or almost nil. It's been mentioned already, but Argath's lineage has been dragged through the mud, and he's jockeying for any chance or favor to get it back. For all practical intents and purposes, there's really no difference between Argath and Delita, except that the former was sired by noble blood. Because that's all he has to elevate him in any way, he clings to it like a rabid dog, a drowning man clinging to driftwood.

The irony, of course, is that his nobility does not elevate Argath; it brings out the worst in him. Being born to the House of Thadalfus didn't gain him either wealth, power, or prestige; just a lifetime of desperate insecurity, beating down on those he could easily have become and serving those who hold him in contempt.

He can say all he wants about the parentage of the lowborn, but Argath Thadalfus was cursed from the moment of his conception.

Omicron said:
the secret 'balanced' third option where ramza looks wistfully in the distance and says "things... are complicated..." before riding off into the sunset as a lone wandering hero never to be seen again, leaving the plot completely unresolved
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I mean, fair tbh I wouldn't be up to solving all that either

Omicron said:
I mean I'm not surprised, I am genuinely kind of curious what kind of player could possibly look at the game so far and go 'yeah I'm with Argath, the nobles simply are a higher class of human being and those peasants deserve what's coming to them.' They probably wouldn't be a very pleasant person!
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I doubt you could find many people saying "the nobles are in the right", but you could definitely find a lot of people willing to say that the Corpse Brigade is in the wrong.
 
Time for another edition of The Rakes Of Final Fantasy Tactics.

Rake #11: Unlocking a new class does not, in fact, mean it comes with any abilities learned.
Status: Rake'd

Rake #12: Forgetting to spend JP to buy new abilities or check what abilities everyone has equipped.
Status: Rake'd

Rake #13: Something special involving the Class/Abilities Menu
Status: Seriously, just try pressing buttons Omi, but also: Rake'd

Rake #14: Rending stats instead of just hitting them when all you need to do is just kill people.
Status: Rake'd

Rake #15: Thinking Archer is a good class.
Status: It is not.

Rake #16: Not realizing the grinding potential of Steal Gil.
Status: It's actually pretty great NGL

Rake #17: Damn, Random Encounters got hands
Status: Just wait until you're grinding suboptimal classes.

Rake #18: Steal Heart is a terrifying ability to have used against you
Status: Dodged…for now.

Rake #19: Weather affects elemental spell damage.
Status:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2AC41dglnM

Oh, and Omicron? There's more to come.



h/t @dinomannitro6 for the wonderful menacing rake
 
Omicron said:
Speaking of which I've just run into Wiegraf in much the same war a car might run into a brick wall, and I'm currently wondering whether I'm just approaching things the wrong way and just need a change in tactics or whether going back to grind a bit may turn out to be necessary.
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Incidentally, Wiegraf is a Virgo. Since you set Ramza to Taurus, they have good compatibility to each other.
 
Mutton said:
Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together was great, best Law route in an RPG. Doesn't hold a candle to the wild amount of visible and invisible gauges in Ogre Battle where you had Law/Chaos on individual units that you wanted to match to each city you liberated along with a few invisible bars that tracked how well you were doing. Then TO added in a hidden Racism dial for your various Balkan ethnicities.
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And the Racism dial was only really relevant for the flavor of bad ending and the recruitment of a specific character in the Chaos route.


I should start playing Tactics Ogre again, it's a great game, but I stalled having to go through Palace of the Dead again for Coda.
 
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