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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:
Sure but that's what planning is for: Figuring out which paths to go down for each character so I know which jobs I need them to advance. I will simply need to look up the way to unlock each job and then make a little sheet for each character laying out which specific job combination I want them to have.
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If you feel that's necessary, of course you should do that, it's your game.

That being said, expressing my personal opinion as a reader who isn't entitled to anything, I find it more fun when you stumble upon the various classes uninformed - compare your reaction to discovering the Orator to the reaction you'd have had had you known in advance that such a class existed. In addition, knowing unlock requirements and JP costs as I do, I firmly believe that, if you knew them as well, your ongoing choices would be absolutely predictable in advance for those of us who know, and the gameplay itself would become very one note very quickly, as following a predetermined path meant you would not be experimenting with quirky things. I'm not a fan of either of those things.

Again: I'm 100% not entitled to anything, you can freely ignore me. I'm just explaining why that doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
 
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Sa'kage said:
The fact that most of them were refered to as "the one who's name escape me", and "They don't have a name", doesn't exactly inspire confidence in it being an amazing story with greatly written characters :V
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Terrabrand said:
Like. If Marche concluded that the correct response here was to sit through literal years of bureaucracy or something, it just wouldn't have the same Oh Fuck You Marche note of Marche's plan is to take away the much less selfish fantasies of everyone else by acting out his own, explicit wish. But it does have that.
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For as minimalist and subpar in execution as Advance's story was, it really says something that A2's story was even shallower. At least Advance tries to have some depth to it...
 
Ryumancer said:
For as minimalist and subpar in execution as Advance's story was, it really says something that A2's story was even shallower. At least Advance tries to have some depth to it...
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I honestly don't remember A2 HAVING a story. I remember some mysterious thief girl with special powers showing up a few times and a final boss and that's it, the rest was cameos and very superficial dialogue.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
I honestly don't remember A2 HAVING a story. I remember some mysterious thief girl with special powers showing up a few times and a final boss and that's it, the rest was cameos and very superficial dialogue.
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Essentially, some mischievous kid gets to spend his summer vacation time traveling back to Ivalice's Golden Age... And he's technically stranded there until the Grimoire recharges, but it apparently recharges by recording the kid's adventures, and as far as I've heard, the villain's only goal is to acquire the Grimoire, which won't even work anyways because apparently the Grimoire chooses it's owner... And chose some random mischievous kid because Adventure:tm:

So there is technically a story, but that story is essentially following this kid around on his magical summer vacation adventure while the people he meets kinda just... Exist, and waiting for the Grimoire to recharge and send him back home.
 
Omicron said:
I'm going to need to obsessively plan my full team's final job set-up ahead of time before I can do anything else.
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Here's the unlock requirements of two melee classes that I considered 'core', but are unlikely to unlock by accident until you grind quite a lot more grinding, if ever, if you don't know the specific unlocks.

Prerequisites: Archer Lv. 4, Thief Lv. 5, and Geomancer Lv. 2

Prerequisites: Knight Lv. 4, Monk Lv. 5, and Dragoon Lv. 2

Archer goes into thief into Dragoon, but those three classes don't unlock anything by themselves. Likewise knight goes into monk into geomancer. So to unlock these two classes you need a character to essentially have all six classes unlocked, and then level three of them more then what's required to unlock one advanced class.

Hence why if you decide that Archer or Knight are stupid, and just use them to get the next class, you might never see these unlock.

While I offered spoiler bait, the classes you currently have unlocked can become invincible god-rulers upon the battlefield by just applying what they already have in their class actions/movement/reactions. But the Melee classes I spoiled are pretty core, and can show up as enemy units, often before you unlock/use them in a blind playthrough. (Much like you ran into thiefs and black mages before using them yourself.)
 
Yeah, okay, I looked at this spoiler box and I simply never would have found at least one of these because I would not have ever leveled Archer again. So I appreciate the hint.
 
The skills of the second one of those are MA based, not PA, despite being a melee class.

(I am just saying this so Omi doesn't get tripped by sexism again. Once was enough).
 
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Noxlux013 said:
Actually, how many levels does a class have anyways?
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Job Levels max out at 8, and are only used for JP gain calcs and job unlocks. It's the same for every class and has absolutely no relation to how much JP it takes to master a class.

Dragoon is like, thousands of JP more to master then knight for example, and I doubt is the biggest gap between generic classes.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
Much of the Marche haters come from the fact that to sell the development of those three properly they needed to more thoroughly explore how things were better for them and worse for everybody else, but they instead left the worse for everybody else thing to loose implication and subtext rather than text, leaving a lot of folks with the impression that Marche was forcing his brother to give up on having working legs for no real reason rather than trying to get his brother to realize working legs weren't worth dystopia.
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So my core problem with Marche is that he shoots almost immediately into Ivalice Is Bad And Must Be Destroyed - I think it would have easily been a much stronger story if Marche started out enjoying this new fantasy world just like his friends, only to then explicitly realize the human cost of the world to everyone but this core group, then tried to convince them to give it all up and fails, and is thus forced to end the harmful fantasy for the good of everybody else suffering. And that's honestly not that out there in terms of "escapism is bad" stories.

The thing is, he never really has that moment of enjoying the fantasy world, his almost immediate response is to tear it all down, seeming to assume the audience will already know that escapism is bad, but well, a lot of children in the game's target audience are probably wondering why he has such a problem with a cool fantasy world! As far as I remember, he barely even seems tempted by the world in front of him.

It's a weird thing where like, the outline of the story seems fine enough on paper, but the execution was just really phenomenally bad.
 
In addition to the two jobs mentioned above there are also the following jobs, listed by requirements alone:

White 5, Black 5, Time 4, Mystic 4.

Geomancer 5, Dragoon 5, female exclusive.

Summoner 5, Orator 5, male exclusive.

And then the three jobs you'll never get:

Squire and Chemist 8, Geomancer, Dragoon, Summoner, and Orator 5.

20 kills, Knight and Black mastered, Dragoon, Geomancer, and the two jobs the other guy mentioned at 8.

Squire and Chemist 6. Well okay you might get this one I guess, I'm keeping it in this section anyway because it's one that was added to WotL.

If you would like to have an elevator pitch for what the jobs do I'd be happy to give a single sentence description in the style of "Knights are physical attackers who get the strongest equipment and can break enemy equipment". Keep in mind that these are the advanced jobs that you're not expected to have for a while so you really shouldn't treat these as anything more than aspirational goals. Plenty of them don't even have weapons available for purchase yet.
 
To be fair to Marche its like the fourth or third story mission while he's only looking for his friends that he falls into basically a pocket dimension and runs into a guardian named Famfrit that defenses one of the crystals that keep the fake world running.

Famfrit that he's gonna kill Marche for falling into the portal and when he loses that the world is fake.

Everything after that you can argue but Marche didn't end up in a magic land and decided to burn it all like people like to joke.

Edited he attacks first then loses and reveals the world is fake. Mixed up the order of events.
 
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Omicron said:
If someone makes a strong argument for it I'll at least consider it, but it's not currently in my plans.

Tactics Advance's story has become a meme, but aside from the controversial premise of the plot, as a narrative I remember it being very light. There's an inciting event, Marche sets out a goal, then he spends thirty hours grinding jobs by taking random Clan missions, occasionally being interrupted by characters going "please reconsider your actions" and him saying "no" and beating them up, then he reaches the end of the game and achieves the goal he initially set out for himself. There are few to no twists, about five named characters with speaking lines, and no character arcs as such.

The fact that once you've completed the main story, you can save and access the post-game content with 300 missions to complete and spend another seventy hours in the game just doing fights with very light plot, even though this post-game cannot really take place within the continuity of the story, tells you what you need to know about the game - its narrative is primarily a very simple moral lesson (in a story clearly intended for children) as the skeleton of what is otherwise intended primarily as a gameplay experience you can keep playing almost indefinitely.

There wouldn't be much for me to say once we've all gotten the Was Marche Right Or Wrong out of our system in the first few updates.
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Okay, here's the biggest question: are you going to stick with your current roster of generics, or are you going to swap them out for named characters with unique abilities and mechanics as they join your party?

If the latter, none of what you do with your current party matters at all because there's way more than 4 recruitable named characters.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
I honestly don't remember A2 HAVING a story. I remember some mysterious thief girl with special powers showing up a few times and a final boss and that's it, the rest was cameos and very superficial dialogue.
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That's true regarding the main quest, the cool thief rival is the only part that sticks in my memory too, but the sidequests left slightly more of an impression.
I remember one that was like a dozen maps long about a foreign organization trying to invade your guild's turf and having to be beaten back.
 
SirKaid said:
Snip
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To clarify a little bit on one of those job requirements:

When that one says "20 kills" it means specifically taking out an enemy and then waiting out their timers until they crystallize. Given how often battles can end with characters just knocked out, you can wind up with surprisingly low actual kill counts.

(And unfortunately, this is the requirement for my favorite and possibly the sickest job in the game)
 
RubberBandMan said:
Dragoon is like, thousands of JP more to master then knight for example, and I doubt is the biggest gap between generic classes.
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The biggest gap between generic classes (using the vanilla PSX number - the gap is obviously larger in WotL since every ability there costs more) is between Squire (2290 JP to Master) and Summoner (9710 JP to Master). Second hardest class to Master is Time Mage (8320), and Black Mage comes in third (8150). The gap between any of these classes and Squire is, as can be seen, about six thousand JP or more; roughly half of the other classes have a lower Mastery threshold than six thousand, so it's entirely possible to have mastered two different low-JP classes before mastering Black Mage.

Just thought that was worth pointing out - chasing Mastery of the high-JP classes is a task that takes up most of the game.
 
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Zap Rowsdower said:
Much of the Marche haters come from the fact that to sell the development of those three properly they needed to more thoroughly explore how things were better for them and worse for everybody else, but they instead left the worse for everybody else thing to loose implication and subtext rather than text, leaving a lot of folks with the impression that Marche was forcing his brother to give up on having working legs for no real reason rather than trying to get his brother to realize working legs weren't worth dystopia.
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There is a problem with this though - while emphasising how the fantasy world has messed things up for everything else would work to justify the plot, it would also take away from the escapism "theme" they were going for. It's bad because they're hurting other people to fix their problems - nothing to do with escapism.

If you treat Ivalice as real, then them being transported there and their problems fixed is an entirely legitimate - albeit off the wall - solution. It's not ignoring the problems it's fixing them. To say otherwise would be like claiming that idk, if you get a broken leg you need to just learn to live with it and going to a doctor to have it fixed is escapism.

Probably a better solution would be to better emphasise Ivalice as a dream. It's not real, everyone in town is actually in magic coma, and if they don't break out of it everyone's going waste away and die or something. That at least highlights how Ivalice doesn't work as a real solution.
 
Erebeal said:
There is a problem with this though - while emphasising how the fantasy world has messed things up for everything else would work to justify the plot, it would also take away from the escapism "theme" they were going for. It's bad because they're hurting other people to fix their problems - nothing to do with escapism.

If you treat Ivalice as real, then them being transported there and their problems fixed is an entirely legitimate - albeit off the wall - solution. It's not ignoring the problems it's fixing them. To say otherwise would be like claiming that idk, if you get a broken leg you need to just learn to live with it and going to a doctor to have it fixed is escapism.

Probably a better solution would be to better emphasise Ivalice as a dream. It's not real, everyone in town is actually in magic coma, and if they don't break out of it everyone's going waste away and die or something. That at least highlights how Ivalice doesn't work as a real solution.
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The other option would have been to emphasize the way the kids were bullied in the real world and becoming bullies in the fantasy world, to emphasize how running away from your problems can make things worse for everybody and turn you into that which you hate. They kinda did it with Mewt with how corrupt with power he was getting with abusing the law system (note how nobody ever complains about dragging Mewt back into reality, just Doned and to a lesser extent Ritz), but majorly dropped the ball on it with the other three kids.
 
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Terrabrand said:
personally the big reason that I'm really down on Marche comes down to this: Ritz's fantasy is She Is Accepted, Doned's is Working Legs, and Mewt's is Instead Of My Family Being Broken And Gone, They Are There For Me And Love Me.

Marche's is I'm Bored And Want An Adventure.

Marche goes to... rip away his friends fantasies... by having a fantasy adventure. Hmm.

Okay wait, the genie gave them what they want- it's a death world full of cutthroat adventurer guilds and Marche Wanted An Adventure. Hmm.

Like. If Marche concluded that the correct response here was to sit through literal years of bureaucracy or something, it just wouldn't have the same Oh Fuck You Marche note of Marche's plan is to take away the much less selfish fantasies of everyone else by acting out his own, explicit wish. But it does have that.
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That part is not wholly accurate - Marche's trouble that the book is 'fixing' isn't that he's bored and wants an adventure, it's that he's 1) the 'new kid' at school in an unfamiliar environment filled with bullies (even if Mewt is the main target of the bullying, Marche gets some), and 2) he's a nerd who has always sucked at sports. So upon coming to Ivalice, he becomes a superpowered badass, ie he receives the Soldier Job and its abilities and is able to fight adult professional fighters immediately as if he'd trained all his life, and he is immediately taken in by a friendly Clan with a more experienced worldly figure (Montblanc) who can explain to him everything he needs to know about the world and is eager to put him in a leadership position.

Marche pretty much instantly dedicates these new martial skill and that group of loyal mercenaries to the destruction of the new universe which they call home, which all of them are completely fine with, so in a way the Book planted the seeds of Ivalice's own destructions. As @Revlid once pointed out, Marche is effectively an apocalyptic cult leader moving through the world like a Terminator, "a creature of uncompromising principle and sheer will," and is able to somehow get a small army of people born and raised in Ivalice to join him in his crusade to shatter the pillars of their reality.

Marche Radiuju, Extremely Normal 14-Year Old: "I am what I am. I am what I have done."
 
Omicron said:
Marche pretty much instantly dedicates these new martial skill and that group of loyal mercenaries to the destruction of the new universe which they call home, which all of them are completely fine with, so in a way the Book planted the seeds of Ivalice's own destructions. As @Revlid once pointed out, Marche is effectively an apocalyptic cult leader moving through the world like a Terminator, "a creature of uncompromising principle and sheer will," and is able to somehow get a small army of people born and raised in Ivalice to join him in his crusade to shatter the pillars of their reality.
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Listen, if I was living in your average fantasy adventure setting and there was a guy who said he could make it so
  • all the monsters that make travel between walled cities a hazard would vanish
  • the law-abusing nobility would vanish and be replaced by something at least resembling democracy, so I would be able to vote against the "wandering judges can just randomly declare that you'll be put in prison if you take a defensive stance against people attacking you in this general vicinity for the next hour" system
  • food would get so plentiful and varied that obesity would be more danger than starvation even for the poor instead of only nobles, adventurers and wealthy merchants being able to afford dietary variety and surety
  • war mostly happened in distant lands rather than happening at the doorstep of even the most well-established empire
  • bandits are largely a thing in history books and distant lands rather than something I actually had to worry about daily
  • I could travel hundreds of miles in a single day even as a peasant rather than being limited to foot speed unless I was wealthy enough to own a chocobo or airship
  • I'd even be able to watch no-death-actually-involved gladiatorial matches from the comfort of my own more-than-a-cot-in-the-guildhall home
and all it would cost me would be my memories of the world I was living in now, and I had reason to think he could actually do it, I'd be willing to die for him too
 
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Zap Rowsdower said:
Listen, if I was living in your average fantasy adventure setting and there was a guy who said he could make it so
  • all the monsters that make travel between walled cities a hazard would vanish
  • the law-abusing nobility would vanish and be replaced by something at least resembling democracy
  • food would get so plentiful and varied that obesity would be more danger than starvation even for the poor instead of only nobles, adventurers and wealthy merchants being able to afford dietary variety and surety
  • war mostly happened in distant lands rather than happening at the doorstep of even the most well-established empire
  • bandits are largely a thing in history books and distant lands rather than something I actually had to worry about daily
  • I could travel hundreds of miles in a single day even as a peasant rather than being limited to foot speed unless I was wealthy enough to own a chocobo or airship,
  • I'd even be able to watch no-death-actually-involved gladitorial matches from the comfort of my own more-than-a-cot-in-the-guildhall home
and all it would cost me would be my memories of the world I was living in now, and I had reason to think he could actually do it, I'd be willing to die for him too
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Not beating the cult allegations.
 
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