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

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Omicron said:
this first reference to the Order of the Eastern Sky.
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I forgot there are another two Knight Orders out there lol. Tbf the PSX versions call the Orders Nanten and Hokuten, and while I remember that there is another major Knight Order southwest of the map, I don't remember what they were called.


Reading this reminds me that Argath's grandpa backstabbed his comrades to save himself. And here is Argath, backstabbed his newfound allies to save himself.

I guess apples really don't fall far from their trees huh. He could have not shot Gragoroth and Tietra, or even spook Gragoroth by mistargeting his face- pretty sure Zalbaag will take that miss since the two were on top of a small bridge and any small movement risked Gragoroth's death anyway, but the man's own spite towards Ramza and Delita fueled that shot.

I prefer the in-game sprite cutscene of the PSX version tbh, of the explosion. The CGI feels less impactful.
 
Guile said:
Dycedarg: "Also, he fucking stabbed me! Zalbaag, I'm gonna need you to do Big Bro a solid, here"
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Actually, yeah, he attacked their castle and stabbed one of them and got away, making them look like fools. That's definitely grounds for a grudge.

That's a grudge on top of the desire to make sure no one in the Corpse Brigade survives to tell of their crimes. They really had plenty of (terrible) reasons to want him dead.
 
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Marla said:
I'm pretty sure no one survived the Ziekden battle first try. even overleveled units will have trouble just to reach the mission target if placed wrong.
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It's been a while, but I vaguely remember that this was not one of the things that gave me trouble.

Write Delita off as a loss, fall back and use the choke points to funnel the enemies to you piecemeal. Kite as necessary.

Marla said:
I prefer the in-game sprite cutscene of the PSX version tbh, of the explosion. The CGI feels less impactful.
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100% this. The way they made the fort blow up using in game graphics is dope.
 
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Do Argath's lines about using and being used by nobility change slightly depending on whether Ramza prioritized his rescue or the mission when they met? The script site I'm looking at has the variations, but it's for the PS1 version.
 
Omicron said:
Oh that's so fucking cool.

Summons are incredibly high production value, with lavish custom sprites for the summoned entity taking up a chunk of the screen in the sky, and everything shaking and the camera panning around as Ramuh unleashes lightning in a much wider area, and with much higher damage, than any of our previous spells. Summoning seems to beat Black Magick for damage handily, with a correspondingly lower Speed and MP cost - and perhaps even more importantly, it does not affect friendly targets. I can blast the enemy with Judgment Bolt while Ramza is in melee range and he won't take any damage. It's perfect. I never want to use anything else.
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See, I really thought you'd enjoy summoner - massive blasts of magic, beautiful spritework, and all friendly fire safe? They're pocket nukes, and I don't think summons ever left my party after I first unlocked them.

Omicron said:
Argath: "And where do you presume to go, Delita?"
Delita: "You whoreson dog!"
Argath: "It is to be a fight, then? I'm only too happy to oblige!"
Ramza: "Zalbaag… Dycedarg… How could you?"
Argath: "Come! I will show you that common blood makes naught but a common man!"
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Man, if Tactics does get a remake, I kind of hope it winds up with voice acting, if for no other reason than the confrontation at Ziekden. The only way you could make Argath more unlikeable here would be to have him calm, collected, utterly unfazed by what he did, all while Ramza struggles to find his voice, and Delita's sorrow crackles into fury.

This map right here is burned into my memory, because god does it go hard.

Omicron said:
It's a little… jarring, how we timeskip ahead by one full year and are given no explanation of who the Princess is (she was not mentioned in prior Rumor or Chronicle entries), how she's connected to the royal family, how we came to work with her, what she was doing at Orbonne Monastery and what her plans are, how Ramza came to work with Gaffgarion…
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I think that's an intentional narrative choice here. With Ramza walking out dazed into the snow, and with him talking about walking away from his life as everything fell apart, I think after Ziekden he just... stopped caring. Odds are he walked the past year largely in a daze, not caring at all what goes on in the wider world, just going day by day. I think if you asked Ramza what he did the previous year, he'd struggle to answer anything beyond the most general details.

We jump right into the fight at Orbonne because, after seeing Delita, who by all rights should be buried under tons of rock and snow, this is the first time he's truly felt present since walking away from that killing field.

And just in general, I have to admire how much work Tactics does with the characters given how little time it spends with them. If you think about it, we only see them immediately before and after battles, with the occasional mid-battle dialogue and rare cutscene between them, but already we have such a good sense of Ramza, Delita, and Argath - even Agrias and Gaffgarion, for how little we've seen of them, we already have such a strong sense of their party dynamics.

It feels like they realized they needed to make every line of dialogue with these characters count, and the writers put their goddamn all into making it so.
 
Kuja said:
"Tommy, why does this guy keep calling me "Osric?" It's starting to weird me out."

"I don't know, I guess he's got a thing about some friends he lost. I've seen war veterans with weirder habits."

"Hey, I'll be all the Gillian he needs as long as the coin keeps coming."
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Bob, the seven-foot tall knight built like a small brickhouse sighs. "Why do I get called Hester?"

Clarice, the shapely woman in thief's clothes nudges him with her shoulder in commiseration. "I know. The boss calls me Hadrian so much that I accidently introduced myself like that when flirting with that cute guy at the tavern. He just gave me a weird look and left."

Martha, who was lucky enough to be 'renamed' Gillian shrugs, bag of coins tied to her waist making a heavy clinking sound. "That's not the boss's fault at all though? You can only blame yourself or God."

Jokes aside, I actually believe that Ramza was so charismatic that his friends from the Akademy did defect alongside him after the incident and have followed him after all this time. It's also usually the track most fanfiction goes with.
 
Omicron said:
This time again, it's Hadrian, the Thief, who deals the killing blow. Argath collapses to the ground, then finds the strength to rise to his knees again, groaning that he will not die at the hands of 'milksop rabble'... Then falls again.
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What an end for Argath. All the posturing in the world couldn't save him from the daggers of a simple thief, and so he dies without a single friend to weep for him, just like his grandfather.
 
StormyEyed said:
I think that's an intentional narrative choice here. With Ramza walking out dazed into the snow, and with him talking about walking away from his life as everything fell apart, I think after Ziekden he just... stopped caring. Odds are he walked the past year largely in a daze, not caring at all what goes on in the wider world, just going day by day. I think if you asked Ramza what he did the previous year, he'd struggle to answer anything beyond the most general details.
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Is it bad that I think that his abandoning of Alma--his full-blooded sister, as opposed to his half-brothers--makes him a dick?
 
McFluffles said:
Argath really do be a great villain, especially considering he originally joined you as some guy you saved from getting murdered and teamed up with to save his boss. In most any other story that tends to be some unifying, bros forever moment where Argath becomes your ride or die friend...
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What gets me is Argath actually is pretty ride or die for a while there, or at least it feels like it. He's perfectly happy to work by your side and slaughter your enemies, and it's only when Delita starts doing things like talking or having opinions that he starts objecting.

Even at Ziekden, yeah, there's the sense that before he really starts losing, he would've been perfectly happy to get back to it once that silly commonor boy was out of the way.

You almost wonder if he thought he was doing Ramza a favor there - hell, maybe so did his brothers!

Ramza really is the odd one out by actually caring about a couple commoners, and the thought seems to never cross the other nobles' minds that he might actually see this as the betrayal it is.
 
If I recall the dialogue between Ramza and Argath was suppose to change a little depending on weather or not you prioritized saving Argath or not at Mandalia Plain.

Also the choice ends up having an impact on Ramza's Brave Score.
 
silentorphan said:
Is it bad that I think that his abandoning of Alma--his full-blooded sister, as opposed to his half-brothers--makes him a dick?
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I think he has an excuse with the trauma he just went through, but it's definitely something that could be criticized.

But also... what would he do? Walk home, say nothing to his brothers, take her and leave? Break in and steal her away? And what after, have her be a camp follower for Gaffgarion's mercenaries? Drop her in a city somewhere?

Maybe he thought leaving her to her schooling would be a better fate for her. Or maybe he never thought that deeply about it at all. We haven't gotten deep enough into his head at this point to really make a call on that, I don't think.
 
Omicron said:
Okay, Denamda IV was the previous King of Ivalice, noted for his prowess in battle and managing to turn Ivalician defeats into a stalemate. He was struck by malady and succeeded by Ondoria III.
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If anyone didn't catch it, Denam/Denim (depending on the version) is the name of the protagonist of Matsuno's previous game and FFT's predecessor, Tactics Ogre. Small reference for tactics fans.
 
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Omicron said:
In Dorter, another mandatory battle awaits us. That battle will involve enemies of higher level than us. Without Agrias and Gaffgarion's special skills, it would be entirely possible to have just softlocked ourselves by showing up with a group not strong enough to take on the next encounter and having absolutely no recourse than to reload whatever our most recent save from before the Ziekden Fortress battle was. That would feel really bad!

Thankfully, we have these two powerhouses with us, and we'll see them in action next time, when we deal with the Dorter 2 battle.
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i do find it notable that with the two guests and Ramza, the next battle lets you slot in three more characters, and it just gave you three new characters.

They may not have many skills, but are appropriately leveled and geared, so they can take hits and do actual damage with their attacks.

So if you ended up having some of your main party perma die (and didn't reset like you should) you do have a set of very solid tools to get through the next battle.

(as for the 'story wise, did these nobles stick around with Ramza after the fort?' I laugh. I kicked out all the nobles on January 1st and picked up a bunch of nobody generics and turned them into perfected killing machines.)
 
StormyEyed said:
What gets me is Argath actually is pretty ride or die for a while there, or at least it feels like it. He's perfectly happy to work by your side and slaughter your enemies, and it's only when Delita starts doing things like talking or having opinions that he starts objecting.

Even at Ziekden, yeah, there's the sense that before he really starts losing, he would've been perfectly happy to get back to it once that silly commonor boy was out of the way.

You almost wonder if he thought he was doing Ramza a favor there - hell, maybe so did his brothers!

Ramza really is the odd one out by actually caring about a couple commoners, and the thought seems to never cross the other nobles' minds that he might actually see this as the betrayal it is.
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Rewatch all the cutscenes with Argath and you will notice that Argath has never afforded Delita any respect as a fellow squire. At all. Not a one. When Delita speaks, he turn to Delita only when Ramza did it. He dismissed Delita at every opportunity he had. Any judgement, he deferred directly to Ramza, even if the idea comes directly from Delita.

I'm pretty sure Delita noticed (he had always been the sharper tool in Ramza's deck), but he kept quiet until Argath started talking shit about the peasantry.

If the kidnapping of Tietra doesn't happen, I doubt Argath's relationship with Ramza will go any further than this temporary alliance, because Ramza will find out about Argath's behavior. He's a bit slow but he's not stupid.
 
Also, if you hadn't noticed Argath has an inherently cowardly ai when he is on your side, its then fitting that he wields a crossbow in the showdown with him(additionally if you may recall I cheekily suggested making Argath an archer lol).
 
Omicron said:

In case you're wondering, yes. Tietra's body will remain up on that bridge the entire battle, a silent testament to the tragedy unfolding.
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On a side note, I like that this particular FF game has managed to dodge the ludonarrative dissonance of "Why don't they just use a Phoenix Down on Aerith" by making it clear that there's a difference between dead and only mostly dead.

... Though if I were the one to make the game, I absolutely would've scripted some kind of scene for anyone who tried casting Raise on Tietra, I'm sure they had the technology back then.
 
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