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

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crankers said:
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 to 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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You know, when I was a young scrub and emulating this, I actually somehow never found out about the Twinharp, so I thought the game was bugged.

So I brute forced max levels on my party and maxed out everything, and through eventually getting good RNG I managed to brute force the Dark Elf down. Things went back to normal and I was happy.

And then I got to the Magus Sisters as my first battle that didn't get facerolled before the enemies could move and found out everything was doing max damage to my party. So apparently the flag that makes the Dark Elf do 9999 damage if you don't have the Twinharp doesn't go away if you somehow kill him anyway. So you just forevermore get facewrecked by everything.
 
cosmicspear said:
Incidentally, that guillotine was replaced with a giant steel ball in the English SNES version because Nintendo at the time was extremely squeamish about allowing "realistic" violence on their systems. It's not as noticeable as, say, SNES Mortal Kombat, but it's still an interesting example of the policy in action.
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You know, I get the reasoning here, but honestly if anything being crushed to death under a giant steel ball seems like an even worse fate than the guillotine.

Compellor said:
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.
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Interestingly though, while relatively dissimilar to their in-game sprites, the FFXIV magus sisters fairly closely adhere to Amano's concept art, with the addition of masks:



Athas said:
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
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Barbariccia's design is kind of incredible in its lazziness, honestly. Scarmiglione is some kind of fucked up zombie-looking dude with spikes budding off his body, Cagnazzo is a hideous turtle with a human face, and Barbariccia is A Chick. Her visual design begins and ends at "woman in bikini."

Which FFXIV uses in an interesting way, actually, as you say. Because - non-story related spoilers for the sake of non-players, you can't keep me from talking about FFXIV, it's my thread -

the game plays a trick where at the start of the fight Barbariccia looks exactly as uninspired as in the original game, being literally just a woman in a bikini with a huge sword and noticeably long hair:



But then you hit Phase 2 of her fight and, you know how as mentioned by Egleris, 'Barbariccia' means 'Scraggly Beard'? Obviously she doesn't have a beard, but she does have hair, and so when she gets pissed enough during the course of the fight, she turns her own hair into body armor that can expand like super-muscle, causing her to now look like this:



And to do this move:



Instantly causing half the players in the trial to be struck speechless in front of their screen only to be instantly destroyed by her United States of Smash.

Powerful stuff.

Kuja said:
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 or 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...
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One thing I find interesting is that FFXIV's take on the Tower of Zot does preserve an "out-there-ness" that the SNES version has, looking deliberately out of place for its setting. The thing is, in FFIV that otherness could be conveyed by making the place look technological in a mostly magical setting, but FFXIV already has both a current-day magitek empire with modern-looking technology and an established ancient empire with weird super-advanced scifi technology, so its own version of the Tower of Zot needs a different approach. So what does it elect to go for instead?

Well, it goes for "Gigeresque nightmare of teeth and claw, monumental tubing, impossible dimensions, and disturbingly organic aspects:




I think it works pretty well.

...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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You know what, I think you might actually have it here. I think this theory explains the enemy spread in the Tower, and why they don't really seem to match the building they're in.

Steve said:
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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You people will suffer Back Row Cecil until I remember to actually switch rows while playing the game. I do not know how long this will take. You are here at my sufferance, and will abide by my rules.

Flare said:
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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Damn, Aria of Sorrow. There's a blast from the past. One of my favorite GBA games as a teen.

Alectai said:
You know, when I was a young scrub and emulating this, I actually somehow never found out about the Twinharp, so I thought the game was bugged.

So I brute forced max levels on my party and maxed out everything, and through eventually getting good RNG I managed to brute force the Dark Elf down. Things went back to normal and I was happy.

And then I got to the Magus Sisters as my first battle that didn't get facerolled before the enemies could move and found out everything was doing max damage to my party. So apparently the flag that makes the Dark Elf do 9999 damage if you don't have the Twinharp doesn't go away if you somehow kill him anyway. So you just forevermore get facewrecked by everything.
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This is extremely funny.
 
It bears mentioning that not only is the Tower of Zot completely MIA from the world map, it even has its own dot on the world map revealed in grey by the Sight spell which will otherwise confuse and confound you until you realise what's going on - or open the world map to check your treasure chest completion rate during the dungeon. The stranger part is that after the dungeion it goes back to being grey for 'undiscovered', which I'm fairly sure is not the case for the other one-time dungeons but I can't immediately check. Completely bizarre behaviour.

Omicron said:
You people will suffer Back Row Cecil until I remember to actually switch rows while playing the game. I do not know how long this will take. You are here at my sufferance, and will abide by my rules.
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Alectai said:
You know, when I was a young scrub and emulating this, I actually somehow never found out about the Twinharp, so I thought the game was bugged.

So I brute forced max levels on my party and maxed out everything, and through eventually getting good RNG I managed to brute force the Dark Elf down. Things went back to normal and I was happy.

And then I got to the Magus Sisters as my first battle that didn't get facerolled before the enemies could move and found out everything was doing max damage to my party. So apparently the flag that makes the Dark Elf do 9999 damage if you don't have the Twinharp doesn't go away if you somehow kill him anyway. So you just forevermore get facewrecked by everything.
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Funnily enough I think this happened to me but instead of grinding I just ragequit and never finished the game past the Dark Elf, making IV the only Final Fantasy I started playing and didn't finish. I even finished 13 and I really didn't like that game by the end.

So now we're in all new content as far as I'm concerned. As far as IV goes, anyway, I didn't play 2 or 3 so those were new to me, too.
(I played I, IV, VI, VII, IX, and XIII and finished the others).
 
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Omicron said:
You know, I get the reasoning here, but honestly if anything being crushed to death under a giant steel ball seems like an even worse fate than the guillotine.
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So what you're saying is that this is the 4Kids Shadow Dimension school of censorship. Yeah, I can see it. Wasn't the guillotine supposedly designed to cause a "painless" death to the victim?
 
Omicron said:
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"Barbariccia!

Tornado, tornado,
The woman that calls storms
Totally naked.

Lovin' girls, lovin' girls,
Interest in guys is a NO NO.

Cindy, Mindy, Sandy,
What kind of girls am I up against today?"

... yeah I haven't the foggiest. Maybe it's because of the tower's denizens.


Anyway, Kain's mind whammy. I reckon it's similar to the influence the Horcruxes in the Harry Potter series had, namely the diary and that scene with Ron in the movies: try to exploit issues that linger in their minds to influence or outright achieve control.

Another example would be, IIRC, the effect of the Rings given to the Dwarves in LOTR, that despite being strong enough to avoid the fats of the Nine, were still tormented by the urge to amass more wealth, with ruinous results.
 
The FF4 fanfiction scene has reckoned Barbie a lesbian for a loooooooong time, I think based off a pre-internet rumor that she would not attack female members of the party.
 
Kuja said:
The FF4 fanfiction scene has reckoned Barbie a lesbian for a loooooooong time, I think based off a pre-internet rumor that she would not attack female members of the party.
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To which my last experience of replaying the game having her killing Rosa twice in the same fight will call dirty, big, and dry BULLSHIT. :V
 
Omicron said:
Which FFXIV uses in an interesting way, actually, as you say. Because - non-story related spoilers for the sake of non-players, you can't keep me from talking about FFXIV, it's my thread -
the game plays a trick where at the start of the fight Barbariccia looks exactly as uninspired as in the original game, being literally just a woman in a bikini with a huge sword and noticeably long hair:



But then you hit Phase 2 of her fight and, you know how as mentioned by Egleris, 'Barbariccia' means 'Scraggly Beard'? Obviously she doesn't have a beard, but she does have hair, and so when she gets pissed enough during the course of the fight, she turns her own hair into body armor that can expand like super-muscle, causing her to now look like this:



And to do this move:



Instantly causing half the players in the trial to be struck speechless in front of their screen only to be instantly destroyed by her United States of Smash.

Powerful stuff.
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I do love that FF14 made Barbie a JoJo. Her Japanese voice actress even gives her an ORAORAORAORA.
 
Steve said:
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.
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SolipsistSerpent said:
Speaking of taking names from other sources, those two weapons are straight out of the AD&D 2nd edition.
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First edition, actually; those names go back to when it was just "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", no edition number.

Omicron said:
Barbariccia's design is kind of incredible in its lazziness, honestly. Scarmiglione is some kind of fucked up zombie-looking dude with spikes budding off his body, Cagnazzo is a hideous turtle with a human face, and Barbariccia is A Chick. Her visual design begins and ends at "woman in bikini."
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I suspect it may have in part been a matter of "it looked better in my head", caused in part by graphics limitations. A woman with wind powers and really long hair sounds like it could be really cool looking...if you can animate the hair properly. Or even in a sufficiently detailed and well drawn still picture. As it is though:



Unanimated low-resolution pixelated hair just isn't good enough for the right look. Which negates the most visually interesting thing about her.
 
For a wind based enemy, they could have easily fluffed up the look by giving her multiple pairs of wings in uncommon body parts; wouldn't have compromised the "scantily clad" look they apparently wanted to go for, while making the design more visually interesting and original, and I don't think would have taken that much more time to draw. I'm disinclined to give them a pass on this one, although it's interesting to hear how FFXIV managed to turn it around, in a way; the more I hear and see about the game, the more I have to agree that it seems really inspired.
 
I think the best part of her design is the way her hair seems to swirl and almost glow, so I suggest removing everything other than her hair below the chin and just fighting a flying head. Like a less gory penanggalan.
 
The BGM for the Tower of Zot is another version of Golbez's theme, sped-up and made more exciting for dungeon BGM purposes. I don't know if this is significant, or if the FF series hadn't started using leitmotifs in story-relevant ways yet.

Omicron said:
Interestingly though, while relatively dissimilar to their in-game sprites, the FFXIV magus sisters fairly closely adhere to Amano's concept art, with the addition of masks:

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It's hilariously serendipitous how closely FFXIV can manage to emulate the Amano artwork entirely from existing character models. We basically have a Lalafell, a Large Lalafell (ie a Lalafell model sized up, which was also used for the plus-sized Mystel in Shadowbringers), and an Elezen.

I also love that FFXIV added setting-specific lore for the Magus Sisters, porting them into the South Asian-themed area and renaming them Cinduruva, Minduruva, and Sanduruva. So not only are the Sisters a reference to an older Final Fantasy game, they're also a key part of the setting.

Omicron said:
Which FFXIV uses in an interesting way, actually, as you say. Because - non-story related spoilers for the sake of non-players, you can't keep me from talking about FFXIV, it's my thread -

the game plays a trick where at the start of the fight Barbariccia looks exactly as uninspired as in the original game, being literally just a woman in a bikini with a huge sword and noticeably long hair:


But then you hit Phase 2 of her fight and, you know how as mentioned by Egleris, 'Barbariccia' means 'Scraggly Beard'? Obviously she doesn't have a beard, but she does have hair, and so when she gets pissed enough during the course of the fight, she turns her own hair into body armor that can expand like super-muscle, causing her to now look like this:


And to do this move:



Instantly causing half the players in the trial to be struck speechless in front of their screen only to be instantly destroyed by her United States of Smash.

Powerful stuff.
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Also the arena you fight her in is covered with hair, and lots of her mechanics have hair puns ("hair raid").

I can't help but call her Barber-iccia ever since. Or Bayonetta-ccia.

Omicron said:
Well, it goes for "Gigeresque nightmare of teeth and claw, monumental tubing, impossible dimensions, and disturbingly organic aspects:




I think it works pretty well.
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From a Twitter post I saw way back when the Tower of Zot was revealed in the marketing lead-up to Endwalker:

Warrior of Light: "Hey uh I have a question"
Tower of Zot creator: "Shoot."
WoL: "Why does your tower have doorways made of teeth"
ToZC: "To protect the tongue."
WoL: "Cool cool okay cool hey I have another question"

Egleris said:
For a wind based enemy, they could have easily fluffed up the look by giving her multiple pairs of wings in uncommon body parts; wouldn't have compromised the "scantily clad" look they apparently wanted to go for, while making the design more visually interesting and original, and I don't think would have taken that much more time to draw. I'm disinclined to give them a pass on this one, although it's interesting to hear how FFXIV managed to turn it around, in a way; the more I hear and see about the game, the more I have to agree that it seems really inspired.
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Amusingly, FFXIV also did the "multiple pairs of wings" for a scantily-clad wind-elemental boss, in the Garuda boss fight(s). So it would have been fascinating to see how FFXIV would differentiate that from Barbariccia if FFIV had also gone for that same concept.
 
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HolyDragoon said:
"Barbariccia!

Tornado, tornado,
The woman that calls storms
Totally naked.

Lovin' girls, lovin' girls,
Interest in guys is a NO NO.

Cindy, Mindy, Sandy,
What kind of girls am I up against today?"
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[Irene] the fact that it took this long for this song to be quoted at length is a testament to our heroic collective self-restraint. well done everybody.
 
Congratulations Omicron only one more elemental fiend to go, as a reward have some fanart of a very lonely and unhappy Barbariccia

www.pixiv.net

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www.pixiv.net www.pixiv.net
 
Wateryblue said:
Congratulations Omicron only one more elemental fiend to go, as a reward have some fanart of a very lonely and unhappy Barbariccia

www.pixiv.net

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www.pixiv.net www.pixiv.net
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She looks like her bikini blew off and she's searching for it using her tornado to maintain modesty.
 
Noxlux013 said:
You joke, but a final boss that's scaled to your combat success throughout the game, thus opening the door to sandbagging, sounds like an interesting gimmick.
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I have a game for you : The Last Remnant. The only game I know where the final boss scales with the number of side quest you do in the game. Add a system of battle rank which, depending of your success/failures in battle, will affect the xp you will earn and the strenght of the ennemies ; stats and skills which increase depending of what you do in battle with a speck of random chance for learning skills, and we have an original gameplay system. And I didn't speak about the real gameplay where you use squad and not only one hero.

When the game was out, it was a mess, because depending how you play, the difficulty can rise so fast that you can become stuck mid-game by the difficulty.
The last versions have made things smoother, so you can almost play how you want now. Almost, because if you are playing like me, the final boss will be an insurmoutable wall if you didn't want to grind for dozen of hours. But I am not mad about it, because, for once, the final boss, whatever the way you play, will be the strongest being you will confront in this game. Meaning that, if you have take your time and beat optionnal superboss, the final boss will become stronger than this same superboss. And I like this idea.

If you wanna do and finish this game, I STRONGLY advise you to read a guide beforehand, to learn and understand how the system works. Like this, you will not have a bad surprise/experience when doing it.

Hard to master, hard to understand, not very friendly but very interesting and original.
 
Noxlux013 said:
You joke, but a final boss that's scaled to your combat success throughout the game, thus opening the door to sandbagging, sounds like an interesting gimmick.
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At least he next game has the Chicken Knife vs Brave Sword meta choice. Not quite the same, but already a nod in that direction.

Corti said:
I have a game for you : The Last Remnant.
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Now that one is a doozy. I didn't get far because holy hell my indecision anxiety is screaming and I couldn't tell if things are getting better or harder. But you could tell it was full of ideas and it deserves more love.
 
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