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

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I forgot how charming the Magus Sisters were in this game. The FF14 version just isn't the same. Apparently they're an inexplicably bug-themed summon in FFX as well.

Omicron said:
Rosa, you minx. You reached for the first place that came to your mind to teleport out of a collapsing tower, and your first thought was Cecil's bedroom? Girl, I get that you had this whole 'woe is me I am the Dark Knight and cannot love' thing going and then he turned into a literal knight in shining armor who also revealed himself to be a total twink, but, like, contain your thirst.
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I forgot about this scene as well. I never before made the connection between this and Gunnerkrigg Court. I wonder if there's any prior art for bedroom teleportation?

Strong disagree on the need for grinding in this game! Dungeon encounters provided all the XP I needed for most of FF4.
 
Omicron said:
This could pose something of a diplomatic problem, but thankfully the clerics are understanding and allow us to borrow the crystal for a while as thanks for saving the city, which… Lady, honestly, that's a bad plan. Also as thanks, they allow us entrance into that prison-turned-treasure-vault I mentioned earlier, which is full of goodies:

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Fun fact, you can try to get into this treasure vault beforehand if you're just hunting for treasure chest completion. The guard outside asks if you've been given permission by the council, you can go "u-uh... sure...?" to which she's obviously like "no you didn't, get the fuck out".
Omicron said:
Well, they put up none. What happens next isn't clear; we get an outside shot of both ships just going very far up into the sky, and then we appear there:

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Did we teleport? Did we just skip the rest of the trip? I assume teleportation is at play here, considering that Cecil now has no idea where Kain is, demanding aloud to know where he is, and Kain answers - but only to act as MC and hand the mic to Golbez:
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Weird that they call it the Tower of Zot when by all indications it's the standard sci-fi flying fortress and not, in fact, a tower but I guess FF14 fixed that :V. The weirdest part is that you can actually just... leave. If you walk back onto that teleporter pad you can warp back to ground level, and then return by climbing back into the airship. "Yeah bro I know you're holding my girlfriend hostage but I forgot to do some shopping in Troia gimme a sec".
Omicron said:

Alongside the monsters, there are a number of soldier/knights/wizard packs, including the first female human opponents in the series (as opposed to classically female monsters like the lamia or gorgon). I wonder how this fits into Golbez's army being made up 'entirely of monsters.'
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Goblez: "I hold dominion over the greatest monsters of all - women."
Kain (Redpilled): "Very based, milord."
Omicron said:
…puzzlingly, looking at walkthrough footage of the 3D port of FFIV, it looks like that version made a decision similar to that of the FF1 Floating Fortress in post-NES port and made it… a brown stone temple? That's absolutely baffling to me. Were the devs worried about the aesthetic clashing with that of the rest of the game? The aesthetic clash is the point. It's the appeal. And this game already has airships!
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Well thank god they didn't change that in the pixel remaster like they did the FF1 air temple. We cannot cave to cringe revisionists claiming that there was literally ever a time in the history of Final Fantasy that it was just knights and castles without Weird Shit.
Omicron said:
Well, nothing for it, then. The 'Delta Attack' is a simple pattern the sisters are using on every turn: First, Sandy (the small one) casts Reflect on Cindy (the middle one), then Mindy (the tall one) casts an offensive spell on Cindy, which bounces off the reflect and lands on one of my own characters.

Functionally the effect is almost the same as just casting the spell at me, but that's just… a really cool and flavorful way to do it? They're playing magical volley ball! It's called 'Delta Attack' because they form a triangle bouncing spells of each other and onto my characters! I love it!

Since this pattern repeats every turn, this means that Sandy's Reflect soon starts bouncing off Cindy and landing on my characters as well, which poses the usual problem with healing… But also means I can play volley ball right back at them by doing my own Delta Attacks.

I love this fight.

My first instinct, naturally, is that since Cindy is passive (only reflecting spells), I should concentrate my attacks on Sandy and Mindy, who actually cast spells. And indeed, I soon have them destroyed - which proves a mistake; Cindy knows a version of Full Life that can affect both sisters, immediately resetting all my efforts. Instead, the smart play is to target Cindy first; as soon as she's down, Mindy's spell goes haywire, still targeting her own side - but a random character on that side who doesn't have reflect, causing her to friendly fire at Sandy, making the battle that much easier. The two remaining sisters shift to low level offensive spells, but at this point they are easily dealt with, and victory is ours.
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Very cringe of you to attack anyone but Cindy first when any real FF14 gamer would know that's the one you kill first to switch off Delta Attack and make the other two Magus Sisters easier to take down.

Also oh my god you buffoon fix your party order why is Cecil having to THROW his damn sword to reach anybody
Omicron said:
Oh yeah baby. This is it. I've been waiting days for this. We're doing it. The Meteor Showdown. Tellah does just as he always said he would - step forward without anyone else to back him, going all out for one final act of revenge. Golbez's sprite stands tall, imposing - is he a Dark Knight himself, I wonder? Something close to it, perhaps; Tellah is before him, small. We don't control him - the entire fight happens as a cutscene, Tellah unleashing his mightiest spells one by one. Bio, Firaga, Thundaga… All do over a thousand damage, yet Golbez shrugs them off easily.



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In his arrogance, Golbez does not strike back, merely allowing the frail old sage to cast spell after spell to glory in his own invincibility. This nearly proves his undoing.







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Fuck the hell yes.
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Golbez: "Oh? You're approaching me? Instead of running away, you come right to me?"
Tellah: "I can't Meteor the shit out of you without getting closer."

Not to mention if you take into account all the -ga tier spells he throws at Golbez back to back beforehand, Tellah didn't just exceed his limits by casting Meteor, he did it on what was already less than an empty tank of MP. What a Chad.
 
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Well, I don't think there's any prizes for calling Tellah's death. Man accumulated enough death flags for a full golf course.
 
Omicron said:
Rosa, you minx. You reached for the first place that came to your mind to teleport out of a collapsing tower, and your first thought was Cecil's bedroom? Girl, I get that you had this whole 'woe is me I am the Dark Knight and cannot love' thing going and then he turned into a literal knight in shining armor who also revealed himself to be a total twink, but, like, contain your thirst.
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I have no useful suggestions to add or anything, but I wanted to call this out. It's little comments like this that have kept me coming back to read about someone playing 4 games I've never touched, @Omicron . Never change.
 
At least Barbariccia got a cool redesign in FFXIV, while still keeping the base horny design :p

Also, I thought you'd know the gimmick to the magus sisters because of XIV, lol
 
Glad I decided to play ahead before continuing to read your let's play, because it's been so long that I had forgotten most of the events.

Also, you're not kidding about the dungeons being incredibly samey. I'm a good bit ahead of you, and it doesn't get much better. The characters and story more than make up for it though.
 
The 3D Barbaricca fight wasn't much different, but it was tougher. She has physical attacks that can silence and a lightning attack she does hits everyone and can be a bit tough for Rosa to deal with.
 
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Omicron said:
Rosa, you minx. You reached for the first place that came to your mind to teleport out of a collapsing tower, and your first thought was Cecil's bedroom? Girl, I get that you had this whole 'woe is me I am the Dark Knight and cannot love' thing going and then he turned into a literal knight in shining armor who also revealed himself to be a total twink, but, like, contain your thirst.
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Look man, give a girl a break. She has been carrying that torch for so long that now that she got a look under the metal the torch suffered spontaneous combustion: she wants that poontang and she wants it NOW.

Too bad Cecil is as skilled in reading her mood as Cid's wooden mallet.

McFluffles said:
Well, it certainly depends on which JRPG, but yeah SNES-age ones tend to be pretty bad about keeping the game balance at an even "you can just sort of play straight through" and expect either hours of grinding, doing every single sidequest, or just never ever skipping a single fight to keep on par. FFIV in particular can be an issue because it lacks the party customization that takes off in FFV onwards meaning you can't just go "yeah I'm underleveled buuuut what if I gave all my characters the option to attack 8 times a turn though".
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And in VI it's not even a challenge to reach the later half of the game with only the xp from forced fights, even with the mostly settled roles each character have. Granted you do it for the minmaxing, and knowing the game helps, but it's not that hard to do.
 
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Connelly said:
And in VI it's not even a challenge to reach the later half of the game with only the xp from forced fights, even with the mostly settled roles each character have. Granted you do it for the minmaxing, and knowing the game helps, but it's not that hard to do.
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Most forced fights in VI don't actually grant you XP at all, and it's fairly trivial to gain fewer than, say, ten levels across the whole party before the second half of the game.

And yes, you absolutely do it for the minmaxing.
 
Omicron said:
we don't even know where it is on the map.
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We do though? It's the giant cylindrical metal structure raising from the hole in the ground between the mountains. It's not like there's any other spot on the map that you haven't already visited, or any other thing which looks like it might be entirely build out of circuit-printed metal.

ZerbanDaGreat said:
it's the standard sci-fi flying fortress and not, in fact, a tower
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No, it's in fact a tower, as pointed out above.
 
Egleris said:
We do though? It's the giant cylindrical metal structure raising from the hole in the ground between the mountains. It's not like there's any other spot on the map that you haven't already visited, or any other thing which looks like it might be entirely build out of circuit-printed metal
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Later plot developments will show that's not the Tower of Zot. It's the Tower of Babil.
 
Yeah, the Tower of Zot is just this...weird, kind of infamous part of the game that doesn't actually exist anywhere. If I remember right, you can even leave the place to rest and refresh, and when you get back on the airship you get a prompt to 'return to the Tower of Zot?' and it just repeats the flying to the top of the screen animation.

Maybe it got overlooked during development, or maybe it was intended to be that location you mention, or part of that location, and things just didn't come together. One theory is that it's an airborne location like the Floating Fortress, a tower in the clouds would be pretty cool...but we never see it again so who knows.

It's interesting that the DS version retools its appearance, something I had no idea they did-





I wonder if the intention was to differentiate it visually from the location you mention. As I look at it, I actually think this appearance fits with the types of enemies you meet here - lots of fantasy-inspired knights, sorceresses, frost- and flame-beasts...

...actually now that I think about it, there's the sorceresses, the female warriors, the Magus Sisters, Barbariccia - lots of female enemies and their ferocious pets. I wonder if the Tower of Zot was originally going to be part of Troia, possibly their castle, taken over by Golbez? And that this idea was scrapped at some point in development.
 
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So in light of recent events, I'd like to call back to Egleris's earlier explanation of the fiend names to point out;

Egleris said:
I don't know that I can convey how funny I always have found this.

The group of devils referenced here appear in just a handful of verses across three Chants of the Inferno, with a very bit part and no importance; this is made even more obvious by the fact that Dante straight up invented these creatures, whereas the actual important figures in the Inferno (the wardens of the various layers of Hell) are invariably mythological figures of some sort, from Cerberus to Minos to Gerion. They're basically the prototype of the "mook devil with horns, tail and trident who works for the big D Devil", each one complete with a hook-pole of their own. Correspondingly, their names are incredibly low brow and meaningless; "Scarmiglione" is an archaic version of "Scarmigliato", which means disheveled, "Rubicante" is a similar archaic variant of "Rubicondo", which means red faced, "Cagnazzo" literally means bad dog, and most funny of all, "Barbariccia" is beard (Barba) + curly (Riccia), so curly beard. They're so very clearly meant to be throwaway names for throwaway characters.

Even the first time I played through the game, taking them seriously was a challenge, and really only one of them managed to actually get me to respect them, barely.
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I now find it incredibly funny to see that the terrible fiend, Curly Beard is in fact a woman and not of the even slightly bearded variety.

And now you all maybe notice this fact!
 
Also, interestingly(?), the Four Fiends don't seem to be following Standard Four Symbols Imagery(TM) but don't follow it in a really perplexing way. Cagnazzo is water and is also a turtle as would be expected, but is not black. Scarmiglione as earth doesn't really have an animal (maybe a dragon) and just looks like a weird bone dude and is not the traditional yellow. Barbariccia is not azure and isn't a dragon.

Like, you'd expect some form of theming after seeing Cagnazzo but they just... didn't, really.
 
Honestly it was probably just the writers/devs taking names from a translation of the Divine Comedy that sounded cool.

Then Woolsey either didn't know about the Divine Comedy or didn't get the reference or wasn't allowed to use them due to character limit and/or Nintendo censorship, so it became Milon, Kainazzo, Valvalis, and Rubicant.

Also, yeah, Omi, I'm starting to get the eye-twitch from you leaving Cecil in the back row all this time. I can get fighting the Dark Elf that way since I've done it myself (not remembering to change the row before attacking) but all this time? Also, hope you made sure to grab the weapons in the Tower, Icebrand (or was it Flametongue?) is a great sword for Cecil at this point and IIRC Yang gets his first or second non-elemental claw in the tower.

For that matter, Cecil already had a viable upgrade from the Mythgraven/Legend sword, the Mythril-made swords you can buy in that village of transformed people. Cid also has an upgrade with a mythril hammer, though it couldn't be used in the magnetic cave unlike his standard wooden hammer.
 
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McFluffles said:
Well, it certainly depends on which JRPG, but yeah SNES-age ones tend to be pretty bad about keeping the game balance at an even "you can just sort of play straight through" and expect either hours of grinding, doing every single sidequest
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I disagree, that's the NES. The SNES is when RPGs stopped doing that regularly and I don't feel like FF has ever done this unless you count FFXI. The only SNES RPGs I can think of where I needed to grind were Mask of the Sun, which was unforgivable because it was 2 hours of forced grinding in the literal final dungeon of a game that was 10 hours long, and Romancing SaGa 3, but that had nothing to do with the game's difficulty and everything to do with quest triggers being tied to max HP totals so I was literally locked out of content I was fully capable of doing.
 
Now that Tellah has bit the dust, I should let you know that the 3-D version of this game has new game plus, and that you can carry over soma drops from your last save to it. Soma drops increase your Max MP by five.

Yeah, you can increase Tellah's max MP to 100 (or more if you want) and get to use meteor really, really early.

Oh, and the dark elf? If you don't get the Twin harp from Edward before you fight him, he won't use magic. He will just call you fools and immediately start beating everyone over the head for 9999 damage.
 
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Steve said:
Honestly it was probably just the writers/devs taking names from a translation of the Divine Comedy that sounded cool.

Then Woolsey either didn't know about the Divine Comedy or didn't get the reference or wasn't allowed to use them due to character limit and/or Nintendo censorship, so it became Milon, Kainazzo, Valvalis, and Rubicant.
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TBF it's not like this is unique to FFIV, Aria of Sorrow features enemies called Skull Millione (Scarmiglione) and Lubicant (Rubicante). There's also a Cagnazzo, but that one is named correctly. This is a 2003 game, so more likely they're mistranslations rather than censorship.
 
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