daniel_gudman
KING (in land of blind)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
the Dycebarg Beoulve you knew never existed to begin with
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
I don't know, Cid feels much less defensive of the status quo than Yamamoto - he just joined the heretics, after all.
Speaking of, @Omicron, do you feel that FFT manages to get the "best Cid" (so far) award? It's been a recurring theme that, since FFVI, we've not exactly had great Cid representation, so I guess it's easy to have him beating out those three, but it'd be interesting to hear how you think he compares to the more benign representations of Cid we found in FFII, FFIII, FFIV and FFV.
Speaking of, @Omicron, do you feel that FFT manages to get the "best Cid" (so far) award? It's been a recurring theme that, since FFVI, we've not exactly had great Cid representation, so I guess it's easy to have him beating out those three, but it'd be interesting to hear how you think he compares to the more benign representations of Cid we found in FFII, FFIII, FFIV and FFV.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
he's putting up a good show but unfortunately for him he doesn't have an airship
daniel_gudman
KING (in land of blind)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
honestly Besrudio fits the general "Airship Coot" typology of "Final Fantasy Cids" better than this Sword Guy does
- Pronouns
- She/They
Well hey now, if we can find someone else with an airship he can single-handedly commandeer it, surely that's worth something
Besrudio, who keeps repairing random machinery with no particular plan besides "Let's turn this on and see what happens lmao"
Edit:
Also,
"Tactics? I am here. Can there be any greater tactic than that?"
Last edited:
As bleakly hilarious as it is for Ramza to cheerfully accept a guy having a major mental breakdown into his guerilla wetworks squad, I think I'd rather have all these cameo characters be guest bosses instead of winding up gathering dust in the back of the party roster. At least then you'd have some memorable gameplay interaction with them.
Obviously he's strong enough to just throw his sword in the air and surf it, Tao Pai Pai style.
Obviously he's strong enough to just throw his sword in the air and surf it, Tao Pai Pai style.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
There are two kinds of players:
"This guy is so cool, I want him in my party!"
and
"This guy is so cool, I want to fight him!"
Tragically, my decade-long addiction to FromSoft game marks me as the latter, while Tactics' cameos are geared towards the former.
There's a reason why fighting the cool guy so the cool guy then joins your party is such a staple, and that is because it is peak.
The Luffy vs. Goku mentality. But where's the Gon mentality these days? smh
I think it's also just more fun to fight them because then the devs can go all out on encounter design instead of having to shackle them to existing party parity. Not that FFT cares too much about that, but still.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I've never seen a volcano map in the game! Which is actually kind funny because "Lava Walking" is a Geomancer movement ability I noticed a while ago and I have never actually seen a lava tile to justify its existence. Perhaps I simply happened to never roll a random encounter while walking over the volcano node, but I don't know which node it even is!
Oh yeah - I was warned about axes and flails having randomized damage that makes their indicative damage number actually a filthy lie very early on, and so I ended up never buying them, but because it was so early and I never used them, I didn't even think to ever mention it in the LP proper. I've seen axes and flails upgrade progressively in shops throughout the game, but my eyes just glaze over knowing they're not worth using...
...except, as it turns out, with the Ninja's Throw function. I have recently purchased a few flails and axes to use with Throw, since Throw ignores the randomized factor and provides damage as a direct multiplicator to the base damage of the weapon; however, because Hester's Dual Wield + Attack Boost combo deals so much melee damage and she has Dance as a backup option when no enemy is in range, I have yet to actually use my flails and axes as thrown weapons.
you are so right for saying this
See, that's a thing that gets me!
So far, the setting of Ivalice is populated exclusively by humans and "monsters." Now, some of these monsters are some measure of sapient; we know goblins can speak a kind of goblin-speak. And we've seen in Errands mentions of a village of liliputians and whatnot. But so far, we have not seen any hint of any kind of elf/dwarf-styled "humanoids with quirky traits who interact with humans in a non-hostile fashion" species. No Viera, no Bangaa, no Nu Mou. Not only that, but nobody has ever talked about them. From the evidence provided to us by Final Fantasy Tactics, this world, or at least this continent, is populated entirely by humans and they have never encountered a non-human civilization.
Now, I'm aware that Ivalice is a setting that the Final Fantasy series has revisited after FFT, and in later versions, it seems to have expanded its world to include new non-human species. But the thing is... The next Final Fantasy game to be set in Ivalice is Tactics Advance. And FFTA: 1) Adds in several playable non-human species, 2) is explicitly a fictional version of Ivalice based on a child's fondness for the video game Final Fantasy Tactics. Which means these races were introduced in a dubiously canonical dreamworld version of Ivalice, and then simply... Integrated into Ivalice canon when XII came out three years later, as if they had never been out of place?
It's possible that the answer is found in Vagrant Story, which Wikipedia tells me is a non-FF game set in Ivalice. But looking up Viera, Nu Mou and Bangaa on the FF wiki, it does appear that all these races, which are now mainstays of the franchise, one of which is a highly popular player character option in XIV... Were introduced in Tactics Advance, an otherwise narratively unremarkable spinoff that's got one big controversial idea and is otherwise a very straightforward and limited story, released on a handheld console and which has never received a port or remake ever since its original release.
I had no idea. That's absolutely wild.
The idea of "Rapha/Marach fans" who really value their inclusion into the game is kind of amusing given how kinda Nothing they are (though I'll make the obligatory caveat that they're also the only people of color in the whole game, so if you care about them because they're a small shred of representation more power to you), but also it's really like...
Imagine if Marach had any character exploration at all. Imagine if we got to talk to him about how fucked up it was how he treated his sister, and him genuinely having to come to terms with that and somehow atone. Imagine if we got to talk to Rapha about her relationship to her brother and the complex feelings that went into wanting to save his life even though he'd personally victimized her, because family is messy and complicated that way. Imagine if we got to talk to them both about how it feels to be foreign-born children adopted into Ivalician society and the strangeness of being at once alienated from others by your visible heritage, yet raised as children of the nobility and thus thoroughly infused with Ivalician education and identity. Imagine talking to them about the low ache of never really knowing your family or your people, yet feeling like you'd be giving something up by searching for a way to connect to that heritage when you spent your entire life as an elite of this realm, raised in wealth and power. Imagine talking to them about what it's like to search and struggle for an identity of your own after years spent merely being tools of killing serving the ambition of one man.
Imagine.
There's so little to Rapha and Marach as they are in the game and it's a shame because they could genuinely be some of its deepest and most compelling characters.
It's something I touched upon briefly in an earlier post - in a way, permadeath modes are valuable even when you reload every time a unit dies, because they force you to play differently. "Losing a unit means game over" means you have to play a lot more carefully and have a much deeper awareness of all the complex interconnecting factors of gameplay, because you can't afford to lose anyone. Sure, you're never going to play through a unit loss and keep going, so the way the mode advertises itself is kind of a lie, but it still leads to a very different play experience from if you could just power through any losses. And as long as devs are aware that's how people will approach it, that's fine! Where it gets frustrating is when they don't grasp that and put a bunch of bars in the way of that experience by making it harder to simply quit and reload when you hit a permadeath.
I have looked this up, and you are correct: Mustadio being alive is a requirement for any side quest that starts off a cutscene about visiting his dad and triggering a new technomagical doodad. If Mustadio dies before Chapter 4, the entire Beowulf/Reis/Construct 8/Cloud quest line is permanently cut off.
I have criticized the game a lot for the way characters vanish into the Oblivion Hole when they join your party and this is a wild way to find out they're coded as necessary for some content.
Article: A god is not a person. It is a thing.
I was thinking about this writing the update. It's like... Six months after the original game? What a crazy fast flanderization!
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
NGL gamedev being what it is I fully believe that Matsuno got a back-of-the-napkin description of Aerith/a scene to copy in The Time She Met Cloud and went "yeah that's fine" and filled in the perceived blanks and then never went back and retouched it because everything needed to be Locked In for the home stretch so despite being released after FF7 it was not written after and was not a response to or distortion of the finished product of FF7. We have an implication of the exact moment in the timeline Cloud was pulled from, but also he has amnesia so they never have to write him acting in any specific way at any specific point in his character arc, he's just A Guy.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Also dev cycles were shorter then
I mean, they weren't "code up a new sidequest in a week", but they weren't "it's normal for a game to take a minimum of five years to make" like it is today either
I mean, they weren't "code up a new sidequest in a week", but they weren't "it's normal for a game to take a minimum of five years to make" like it is today either
daniel_gudman
KING (in land of blind)
- Pronouns
- He/Him
RE: Bangaa et al
I'm gonna be honest I just kinda assumed that The Ivalice Timeline was FF12 then Tactics, on the premise that the Civilization-Collapse Apocolypse involved a lot of genocide, and thats why there are only Humans (still) around in Tactics.
I'm gonna be honest I just kinda assumed that The Ivalice Timeline was FF12 then Tactics, on the premise that the Civilization-Collapse Apocolypse involved a lot of genocide, and thats why there are only Humans (still) around in Tactics.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Quoth the description for the Siedge Weald
So, the answer is simple - the rest of the nonhumans in the area died when the moogles did (and their skeletons are still around, judging from all the skeletons with nonhuman skulls on human looking bodies)
- Pronouns
- Him/He
This is all from googling so insert 'reported' and 'supposedly', but..
FF:TA came out in 2003, and FF12, the first game in the main series to have Viera and Bangaa and Nu Mou, came out in 2006. Seems plausible that FF:TA influenced the developers of FF12.
But FF12 started development in 2001, and FF:TA started in 2002. So it seems more likely that someone around 2000 was really really into bunny girls, and got them to be part of games that were being developed, and the light-weight spinoff for the handhelds just got finished before the big Star-Wars-themed development hell of a main series game got it's shit sorted out.
- Pronouns
- She/They
That was about my read on it too - a slightly less grim take could be that it was a more localized apocalypse for the nonhumans, and that they persist elsewhere, but Ivalice the country is basically human-only.
Which, given the whole ruins of airships and lost technology, I feel like it adds to the whole idea of a better and grander past being lost into the mists of time. It's not so much an explicit theme but feels like it fits with the overall tone of Tactics.
It's not just a FFT vs the rest situation, though. 12 has a bunch of races that didn't exist in FFTA. FFTA2 has a race that wasn't in 12 or FFTA. Even Revenant Wings introduces a new race, though it does bother to justify why you never encountered them in 12.
There likely was just some artist at Square at the time who really liked coming up with new nonhuman designs.
There likely was just some artist at Square at the time who really liked coming up with new nonhuman designs.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yeah. That did belatedly occur to me after I wrote the post and given the choice I'd rather not actually write out pretty much the only two people who aren't some variation of dry english whitebread. But yeah. The cutoff to their story is just absurd.
- Location
- Malaysia
Adding all of this into the story means the devs need to open sidequests where Ramza can have these little chats with them. Unfortunately, unlike Mustadio and Agrias we have actually never seen Ramza developing some manner of friendship with the two outside of escorting Rafa to Riovanes and the whole Lucavi shebang went down. Which means more extra scenes and sidequests.
Which means double disk space required. I have actually never heard a grid game being shipped as a two-disk game. Not even Vagrant Story iirc.
That's probably the main reason why the sidequests are so sparse outside of Mustadio's. The main plot is already too big to contain in one disk.
Obsessed with the concept of whatever the in-universe Ivalice equivalent of the Romeaboo S.Q.P.R. geek would be. I'm imagining someone with a marble bust of Mewt Randell endlessly RETVRN-posting about bunny-women and how Judge Laws were the high water mark of civilization.
- Location
- USA
Weren't the Command & Conquer games grid-based and multi-disk? They were real-time rather than turn-based, but I could've sworn they all involve moving on a grid map.
...How is this anywhere related to Final Fantasy? I...have no idea.
- Location
- Malaysia
Not even the same company hahaha. Honestly doubt Squaresoft back then bothered to put extra money to a spin-off game, and an extra disk sounds like extra funding to me.Weren't the Command & Conquer games grid-based and multi-disk? They were real-time rather than turn-based, but I could've sworn they all involve moving on a grid map.
...How is this anywhere related to Final Fantasy? I...have no idea.
- Location
- Italy
So, I once did a long ass post about the entire timeline of the Ivalice games, so when Omicron finally reaches FF12 in the 41st millennium, I'll be sure to dig it up and post it here as well if Omi doesn't mind.