Overwhelming violence hath e'er been an efficacious last argument for many an ideologue.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Overwhelming violence hath e'er been an efficacious last argument for many an ideologue.
Dang, those multiple strikes plans must have been real successful offscreen if we're down to so few members of the Corpse Brigade left. Hell, between the next two fights, you killed what, 10 more of that less than 20? Ramza and company are a commoner blender apparently.
What? Nooooo, Dycedarg is totally legit and trustworthy! Just ask his best bro Larg!
Delita really does have quite the temper on him that he's been hiding for a while, huh? Granted, it's his sister's life on the line, so Ramza is totally understanding.
And here we see Omi's Totally Neutral Narration of Delita's actions.
No really, it says it right there in the game's script, "Delita decks the prick".
"You're not wrong Argath, you're just an asshole."
...I mean, on that singular point of most nobles not giving a singular shit about the commoners, at least. The rest of everything he has to say is his usual nonsense.
Very curious how the JP translation notes will pan out here, since it's the first instances we're getting of Ramza showing some real emotion in the first chapter.
In the PSX version, this is just an in-engine cutscene, but it's still pretty well framed from what I recall. Very nice establishing scene of the long time friendship between Ramza and Delita, but also the widening gap that might be showing up as they realize no matter if they're brothers in all but blood, the world will still treat them differently because of said blood. Also I'm totally predicting that grass whistle thing being relevant again later in the plot.
And these guys really are pretty Ride or Die, aren't they? Especially if they are still available post-flashback, meaning your entire knight trainee squad apparently shrugged their shoulders and went "alright merc work it is" and fucked off with Ramza.
The best thing Argath ever did: get kicked out so you can actually use your full party size (for one battle because fuck you I guess).
As for the wrong party members, not gonna lie I've been eying the tiny roster count and both of my excess starting recruits and heavily considering just dismissing them and being done with it myself. I'm gonna need those recruitment slots when actual named characters start showing up, after all. (and on that note, fun fact everyone has a bunch of different randomly chosen dismissal lines to make you feel awful! Take a look!)
Man, if they had just missed each other, think about how differently the story could have gone from this point on. Milleuda potentially living to be a thorn in your side in the future, sure... but also Wiegraf might not be nearly as dedicated to killing you in the Windmill.
Gotta be very careful about those cast times, that's for sure.
Yeah, something I noticed going through White Mage and Time Mage both, a lot of the weaker versions of buff spells have lackluster vertical range, even as low as "zero, no elevation differences allowed". Does give some actual use to the upgraded versions I guess, that you trade off longer cast time and higher MP cost for actually being able to cast on allies who didn't flatten out the ground in advance.
The mid-battle snippets really do make Final Fantasy Tactics. It's not like previous games haven't had some version or another of this, but FFT feels like it's the best it's ever been between the full exchanges given in between turns, and the fact that everyone involved is apparently a theater kid.
Yeah, realistically? Milleuda is 100% right, even if Ramza did somehow convince her to surrender and drag her back with promises of clemency or taking it easy on her, she'd be hanging from the gallows by the next morning. No way in hell any of the nobility, including his brothers, would let the younger sister of the Corpse Brigade's leader (and an active participant in said brigade) live, and that's if they didn't drag it out somehow to humiliate her/make an example out of her.
As for Delita... well hey, congrats on following your noble buddy! Turns out this requires betraying your entire class to climb the ranks! Not nearly as capable of just sitting back, arms crossed and ignoring it all when it's all thrown in his face and his sister's life is on the line, is he?
What? Nooooo there's no subtext here, it's just those silly commoners not being smart enough to figure out that Tietra is one of them, obviously. A noble would know at first sight that she's not really a Beoulve with their superior Nobility Senses.
Ahahaha
Yeah
"Hold you back"
Good lord this map is way smaller than I remember.
OH BOY
HOLY SWORD SKILLS TIME
Apparently it's just a unique name for the Holy Knight class that Agrias had in the prologue... but uh, a Holy Knight by another name is still a ridiculously powerful class, ain't it?
Monks, like Thieves (and probably some other highly athletic classes) have a higher base Jump then most classes, so by default without even extra movement abilities they can often traverse rough terrain better than you'd expect.
And then oh boy Shockwave, it was mentioned before that Monk is a very good class, and abilities like that? That's part of it. They already hit like a truck with those unarmed punches, but also they have a wild variety of abilities backing them up in combat, from Shockwave (an eight range straight line blast) to Chakra (a self-focused AoE heal).
There's better classes and combinations in the game, don't get me wrong, but if you want to Unga Bunga things with a physical character, you really can't go wrong training up a Monk.
Thief is a nice enough support class... but in a limited deployment fight like these where you have a guest? Yeah they're mostly just going to get murked and not accomplish a lot beyond being fast unless you get a Steal Heart off successfully.
Ah yes, the real fun part of Holy/White/Dark Knight attacks - not only is it "haha instead of Rend nonsense this Knight gets ranged AoE sword skills, also they all have status effect chances slapped on for extra bullshit". Stop and Death were the only ones that showed up in this fight, but I mean... come on do you even need much more than that already?
At that level? Yeah, probably, with the right tactics. One thing I didn't see you try that I probably would have was spreading out my party at the start and not advancing on Wiegraf, forcing his troops to come towards me... maybe send a tanky knight over near Delita to attract more of them down. Possibly, you could get Wiegraf coming out on his own to be swarmed and beaten to death by everything at once, though I guess that would also require surviving his Holy Blade nonsense (possibly a pre-queued cure spell if well timed?)
Well, we'll see how it goes when I get there myself I suppose, I only just finally got started on playing FFT so I'm busy at Dorter.
Summoner do be Summoner. Apparently it got some nerfs in the PSP version of the game (or more accurately, some buffs it got in the PSX localization were reverted, much like how some JP costs were lowered in the English version of FFT and then brought back up in the PSP version), but overall It probably still does what Summoners do best.
HOLY KNIGHTS
NOT EVEN ONCE
To be entirely fair, Wiegraf is well known for being one of the walls in Final Fantasy Tactics (even if back in the day I'm pretty sure I'd overleveled in chapter 1 and bulldozed over this particular fight). This and Dorter are the biggest stoppers of Chapter 1 iirc, but I wouldn't expect to run into "two dozen game overs" walls like this often enough that it gets old for the LP.
Ah yes
Thrown Item Trajectories, a classic.
Silly Chemists, should have learned Throw Item 2 where they angle it upwards and over terrain and obstacles.
Man, poor, still naive teenager Ramza. For all that he's seen plenty of evidence the nobility considers commoners little more than scum on their boots (Tietra's apparent treatment at school mentioned early on, the entirety of the Corpse Brigade's ideals, fucking Argath), he just doesn't want to believe that his brothers he loves dearly are like that. They wouldn't lie to him, when Delita and Tietra are like family, would they?
Hey, gotta set up that Future Rival character somehow, and "kicks your ass a dozen times before leaving without getting killed" is certainly one way!
A good question, a very good question.
And presumably, one that Ramza found his own answer to, considering his position as "just a sellsword" in the prologue.
A well executed "Prologue sets the scene, then fades into flashback chapters that set the stage for the tragedy we know is coming" is always great, not gonna lie. Might just be because I'm watching this while someone cosplays Guts in Dark Souls 3 on my other monitor (I know, I know, very original) but the first example that comes to mind is good Ol' Berserk and the Golden Age arc, which manages to be such a long flashback you almost forget "this has to end badly because Guts is absolutely fucked up in the opening chapters".
IIRC Shockwave (and most monk abilities) are slightly balanced out by having really cruddy vertical range,
Funny enough Phoenix Downs are absolutely the better option over the Raise spell, depending on your team setup and who's going next. Phoenix Downs will *always* work, and work instantly, where Raise has a cast time... and a fail chance. More healing granted, Raise apparently is a straight 50% HP resurrection while Phoenix Downs aren't nearly as effective (and cost money), but both options are valid.
FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Reminder: let's not all post our favorite strategies/combos so that Omi can figure out how they want to play the game on their own please. Let him figure out how to break the game over his knee on his own time.
In my own concurrent playthrough I used the special technique of using a REDACTED equipped with a REDACTED and REDACTED, which let me nuke Wiegraf from orbit as is right and proper for all the suffering he's caused me over the years.
That being said...the Windmill fight is a bitch and a half for new players as you all have just witnessed. Part of this is that @Omicron is a stubborn, sweaty tryhard who goes out of his way to grind as little as possible, part of this is that Wiegraf is a mean sunnova bitch and Holy Sword skill is OP.
How OP is it, you ask?
So, first off, every unit in the game has an evade stat. This is derived from your Class, your Equipment, and Your Skills. As an example, let's look at a Knight equipped with a Longsword and Buckler, a Small Mantle, and the Parry skill.
This knight has 10% (Class ie C-EV), 13% (Buckler ie S-EV) and 10% (Mantle ie A-EV), plus 10% (Longsword, via Parry. Shown in the weapon stat), giving them a total of 43% evade in their front arc (only mantles apply to back attacks). So with very basic early game gear our knight is blocking almost half of all incoming physical attacks. That's pretty great, and why Knights are viewed as a tank class.
Holy Sword skill simply does not give a shit about any of this.
Holy Sword skill has no cast time, has a chance of causing a negative status effect, and often comes in the form of AOE.
Holy Sword skill does physical damage, which scales with the users PA and equipped weapon, but completely ignores evasion.
And the devs throw this at you in the very first chapter as a majestic little 'fuck you thanks for playing' while you're still trying to get your bearings. And, to add salt to the wound, they give this asshole Counter as well so he can retaliate against anyone that tries to hit him in melee.
In my own concurrent playthrough I used the special technique of using a REDACTED equipped with a REDACTED and REDACTED, which let me nuke Wiegraf from orbit as is right and proper for all the suffering he's caused me over the years.
That being said...the Windmill fight is a bitch and a half for new players as you all have just witnessed. Part of this is that @Omicron is a stubborn, sweaty tryhard who goes out of his way to grind as little as possible, part of this is that Wiegraf is a mean sunnova bitch and Holy Sword skill is OP.
How OP is it, you ask?
So, first off, every unit in the game has an evade stat. This is derived from your Class, your Equipment, and Your Skills. As an example, let's look at a Knight equipped with a Longsword and Buckler, a Small Mantle, and the Parry skill.
This knight has 10% (Class ie C-EV), 13% (Buckler ie S-EV) and 10% (Mantle ie A-EV), plus 10% (Longsword, via Parry. Shown in the weapon stat), giving them a total of 43% evade in their front arc (only mantles apply to back attacks). So with very basic early game gear our knight is blocking almost half of all incoming physical attacks. That's pretty great, and why Knights are viewed as a tank class.
Holy Sword skill simply does not give a shit about any of this.
Holy Sword skill has no cast time, has a chance of causing a negative status effect, and often comes in the form of AOE.
Holy Sword skill does physical damage, which scales with the users PA and equipped weapon, but completely ignores evasion.
And the devs throw this at you in the very first chapter as a majestic little 'fuck you thanks for playing' while you're still trying to get your bearings. And, to add salt to the wound, they give this asshole Counter as well so he can retaliate against anyone that tries to hit him in melee.
Goddammit dreameater, I was holding onto that amazing fake quote for later. You rat bastard
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Ramza: "My brothers are just and noble in deed and character and beloved by all, if you surrender I'm sure I can convince them to be lenient for your murders."
Milleuda: "Oh god, my men and I are gonna die to a moron."
Milleuda: "Oh god, my men and I are gonna die to a moron."
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
FFT has a Teen rating, equivalent to a PG-13, meaning it should be allowed one F-bomb. Hence I suggest:
Milleuda: "Oh god, my men and I are gonna die to a fucking moron."
I think Milleuda deserves it.
I think that's slight too early. We haven't even gotten to the prologue with Mercenary Ramza and Kidnapping Delita. Any number of people could possibly deserve that f bomb by then.
- Location
- Texas
That's a good point, I'm really looking forward to how those wires got crossed. Also, how much time has passed between these events and the historian framing device we saw in the beginning? It feels weird for this unknown guy to be secretly the hero, and for the church to deem him a heretic. What heresy does Ramza espouse?
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Poor Ramza, wants to be a nice guy but he put all his build points into "mass murder" and none into "think"
daniel_gudman
KING (in land of blind)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Man this is a Final Fantasy game. The final boss is gonna be like the historian from the intro credits who used time compression to pretend to be god all along.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Eh, 'Random guy from early on turns out to be final boss' is more a Persona thing than a FF thing.
Also @Omicron would it be okay to threadmark the two drawings I've posted here?
- Pronouns
- She/They
I really love this scene. It's just… Beautiful, aesthetically, it's well-shot and composed and performed, the music is great, the lighting is gorgeous (the only issue I have is that Ramza's hands are like, enormous, what the hell is going on there), and most of all it's doing a wonderful job of showing us that Delita and Ramza are friends, almost brothers, they share memories of the same childhood with Ramza's father, and yet Delita is consumed by entirely understandable worries - about his place in the world, about his sister's safety, about the fact that…
It really is a gorgeous scene, all undercut by the tension of the fact we know that this can not last. Someone else mentioned Berserk, and that's definitely the case - we know that something bad happens, but we can see how close they are now, and there's a looming dread about what, precisely, leads us to that future.
We can definitely feel how the world feels at a tipping point, but there's no way to tell how soon it might all fall apart, only that it inevitably will.
They very much are, yes. The spoiler thread did have a conversation over whether or not we should warn you ahead of time, but you did pick up the idea.
There should be folks around to catch you up if you do skip a dialogue or two, so you shouldn't need to worry about it too much, but as a general rule if you make sure to keep named characters alive, and try not to alpha strike bosses down too fast, you should be able to avoid skipping them on your own. In general you can typically get a feel for if a fight is going to have dialogue in it by how important it is, and try and leave openings accordingly.
I've also unlocked a new class.
It's my boy summoner!
I won't go over the mechanics itself, but I definitely recommend giving it a try, I think you'll have fun.
Related though, I'm surprised you've kept with chemist this long, as opposed to going with white mage. It is a bit of a lateral move, gaining AoE and bypassing line-of-sight potion shenanigand in exchange for cast times and mana dependency, but I'm used to gunning right for them.
Yeah I never got it either, I always found IV kind of disappointing after hearing it talked up so much. It must be the kind of thing you needed to grow up with? Still so weird that it so regularly tops favorites lists.
God poor Delita; you can see how much heart he has, how much he cares, and it contrasts so hard with the cold hypocrite we see in the opening. It's genuinely heartbreaking to watch him go through all of this.
Honestly the particular events they chose to show in the prologue were a masterclass - just enough to get us interested, with just the right characters that it casts all of the events of this first chapter into a foreboding light. It's just. It's real good!
As someone who also got to FFIV late (I believe my first Final Fantasy experiences were FFVIII on the PS1, might have played a bit of FFVII and Tactics but that also might have come later), I can see how it would be absolutely stunning to console gamers at the time, especially in English since there's a lot of more story-heavy RPGs and the like which just didn't get translated back then...
...but also yeah, in comparison to most of what comes after, it's all fairly standard simple fantasy story game? It's like if you jump back to Mario 64 and compare it to modern 3D Mario gameplay, you can maybe see how revolutionary it was for the time as one of the first big forays into new uncharted territory and it doesn't hold up badly or anything, but by direct comparison once the nostalgia filter is off, I'd really rather be playing something like Mario Odyssey where I don't have to fight the literal cameraman whenever I want to do anything fancy.
Though that said I'll give that as we travel through the mainline FF games, I do miss that gameplay feeling FFIV gave of "every character has a pre-defined role that the game can be balanced around". Fun as all these class and customization systems can be to break wide open, they also mean game balance is often easily snapped in half from FFV onwards if you know what you're doing.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Wiki says 400 years, so imagine a historian talking about events in the early 1600s (or, given the subject matter, a historian in the mid-to-late 19th century talking about the War of the Roses)
In terms of 4... yeah, I think its a case of "you had to be there". There are games today that easily exceed FF7 in most areas it did well, even within Final Fantasy... but it still gets hailed as "best in series" because when you were playing it for the first time in 1997, you were seeing the things an RPG of that magnitude could do for the first time and it was amazing. Same general principle applies.
Doesn't really apply after that AFIK, since every console generation after the 5th has been more evolutionary in terms of how console improvements affect genre scope than revolutionary the way SNES and Playstation were with how much more dialogue each could store than the previous generation and how much more world and lore and character could be fit into the graphics (SNES introducing more than 3 colors+black and ability to have more than vague outlines of things, Playstation introducing high-res cutscenes and high fidelity music and pre-rendered backgrounds)
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This is the list of the most popular pages on the fandom Final Fantasy wiki (a non-fandom FF wiki exists but seems to be a smaller community, alas). I choose to assume Omi is directly responsible for a spike in people looking up FFT jobs.
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Guile
Having a really great time right now
History liked his hair better
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
Milleuda
'Tis but thy name that is my enemy;
Thou art thyself, though not a Beoulve.
What's Beoulve? It is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What's in a name? That which we call a rose,
By any other word would smell as sweet.
So Ramza would, were he not Ramza called,
Retain that dear perfection which he owes
Without that title. Ramza, doff thy name,
And for that name, which is no part of thee,
Take all myself.
Shatter the class divide and unlock the true romance route.
View: https://youtu.be/YgJ5ZEn67tk?si=Ju6upz3c3CLUL1kT
Really, though, "those who deal with us" is a bit of an understatement for "two retainers raised in the same household, one of whom is groomed to be my personal servant/bodyguard, the other of whom is a playmate/maid for my sister". It's not like the Corpse Brigade were stringing up the Amazon delivery guy on his way back from Beoulve Manor - Tietra lives there.
Admittedly, that wouldn't be an argument Ramza would want to make right now.
Yeah, the monsters are weird. Normally in a situation like this - fantastical kingdom falling into civil war, with structures and norms crumbling - you'd expect a truly apocalyptic outsider force to take advantage of the social decay and provide a suitable final boss fight that the survivors must unite to face. The Everchosen to the Sigmarite Empire, the White Walkers to the Seven Kingdoms, the Vord to the Aleran Empire, etc.
The goblins and floating eyes and such... don't seem to be that? They're a real mixed bag. The most functional, setting wise, are the fantastical animals that can be wild creatures, war beasts, or pets. After that you've got the clearly supernatural otherworldly beings like undead, who at least can be treated more like a supernatural phenomenon or fact of magical life than a real neighbour. Then you've got clearly sapient fantasy mob species like goblins, who are just... here, unremarked upon. Persisting in doing generic goblin things against the backdrop of this increasingly fraught brother-against-brother conflict.
It's like if the civil war in Game of Thrones was rolling on as normal, but every so often Jaime Lannister or Rob Stark had to go clear out a gnoll camp of no actual plot significance. It's odd.
Ramza: "Look at those adorable little clothes it has, It's like it thinks it people."
Goblin: "I WILL BATHE IN THE BLOOD OF YOUR FAMILY!"
- Location
- Malaysia
Something about pixelated characters getting into on screen brawl somehow ensured my very young head that 'yeah, man, we will never be friends after this' and I have never once upgrade Argath's weapons or skills after every playthrough since. I have never even saved him since too, because fighting the Brigade ensure that the battle won't be finished by Argath running into those Thieves lol.
Other character I can still consider helping out upgrade their stuff, but Argath? Never again.
This is also why FFTA and FFTA:2 never captured my interest. You have a complex story of politics and class struggle and whatnot in FFT's 1st chapter and then you got kids getting isekai'd in FFT: Advance? The introduction prowess between these games just don't compare at all. I was very disappointed hahah.
Other character I can still consider helping out upgrade their stuff, but Argath? Never again.
This is also why FFTA and FFTA:2 never captured my interest. You have a complex story of politics and class struggle and whatnot in FFT's 1st chapter and then you got kids getting isekai'd in FFT: Advance? The introduction prowess between these games just don't compare at all. I was very disappointed hahah.
One additional factor is that it received that fantastic broadly-localized DS port, with updated music and balancing and sidegraded graphics, which drastically extended the audience for whom it was the first. (III had received a similar port earlier, but with a small printing run that meant I, and presumably many others, never got to buy it as a child)
There is also a lot of merit to simplicity in a franchise like Final Fantasy, which would rather boldly shoot itself into the foot than play anything safe. FF pretty much doesn't have a Mario Odyssey-equivalent that's """just""" a new take on the classic formula with decades of hindsight and added experience. (At least unless you count Octopath lol)
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You shouldn't, given how aggressively against meaningful amounts of character interaction it is. 2 is better than 1, but the 8 adventurers still feel very much more like 8 solo heroes you play as at once than they do a party
FF4 literally feels more like a party of comrades than Octopath most of the time
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Gods, yeah. When someone talked a bit ago about the localisation 'watering down' the text with archaic language, I had to laugh to myself, because this stuff is fantastic.
That was large chunk of why I stopped playing Tactics back in the day, and why I'm always kind of leery of tactics games in general. It's just really annoying if you lose a battle after it's taken half an hour and you have to redo everything.
He's not playing the psx version where summoners are pretty nuts tho.
Laughs in thracia 776
