Remove ads

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

Reader mode
FuSoYa is interesting in two ways. First, his name - calling him that actually calls back to the pre-GBA translations, as the GBA, DS, and PSP translations all dropped the capitals, Fusoya. Not sure what it is about the katakana in his name that some translators think the first Roman character of each kana equivalent needs capitals, and others don't.

Second, is that his sprite and portrait are significantly toned down from his concept art.

BEARD
 
Project 501D13R said:
Yeah, one of the biggest problems that FF4 had with its story was that it kept setting the Armageddon clock back.
Golbez got the four crystals he needed? There's 8.
Golbez already has two of them, quick defend the last two!
Golbez got them? He needs to get into the moon to actualize his plan!
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I like the original FF because it's a straight up D&D game - you pick four classes, you start at the starter town and get your first quest and follow the whole campaign from there.

I like FF4 because it has much the same feeling, only upgraded - party members coming and going as they swap out characters, change classes, pursue the story......only FF4 feels like a D&D campaign where the party caught up to the DMs preplanning somewhere around the return to Baron and now he's sprinting and frantically improving the course of the story he hadn't fully charted yet.

Uh, uh, a dark elf appears, it has magnetic powers. Uh, shit, where's my Tower of Zot maps? Fuck it, you go there. Uh, okay, dwarves. Underground. The hell do you mean Michelle wants to play again? Where was Rydia's notes, fuck. Just redo it. Right. Tower. Josh get back here and play your fucking monk otherwise everyone's gonna think he died in that cannon room. Shit, uh, ok you find the airship that can take you to the moon.

It genuinely makes it feel like all this shit that the main characters didn't know about is all boiling to the surface and their world has suddenly become very huge, very quickly. I find it fun for that.

Omicron said:
It's a plausible reading of the text and I considered mentioning it, but the problem with it beyond being purely speculative (since neither Golbez nor Kain make any indication of that being the case, at least so far), is that it makes Tellah's fight with Golbez, the one that heroic death in the game that actually, unambiguously works narratively and emotionally (I hesitate to call it a 'sacrifice' since it's something he head into fully cognizant of and actively rejecting attempts to keep him from doing it), into a sucker move that Golbez took clever advantage of to fuck the protagonists over. Which, I could see that being the intent, what with Golbez being the all-powerful antagonist and so on, but I think Tellah deserves that win, partial though it may be, and twisting it into a Just As Planned by Golbez leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

I think we all know the real reason Golbez let the party grab the crystal.

"OK, I think it's about time to go get the last...cave? Mystic cave? Nope, nope, nope, fuck that noise, not falling for that one twice. Kain get your ass down th-...oh right I lost Kain. ...fuck it he'll swing by eventually."

Zap Rowsdower said:
FuSoYa is interesting in two ways. First, his name - calling him that actually calls back to the pre-GBA translations, as the GBA, DS, and PSP translations all dropped the capitals, Fusoya. Not sure what it is about the katakana in his name that some translators think the first Roman character of each kana equivalent needs capitals, and others don't.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

It was mistranslated because his name is actually Chinese-derived. Fu/shou are good health/longevity, ya is a naming suffix.
 
Last edited:
The king of Fabul gave you the sword of some dark knight, capable of instakill.
The king of Baron trained Cecil as a dark knight.
He's now Odin, a FF character known for his instakill skill.

Hmm. Hmmmm. hmmmmmmmmmm
 
Connelly said:
The king of Fabul gave you the sword of some dark knight, capable of instakill.
The king of Baron trained Cecil as a dark knight.
He's now Odin, a FF character known for his instakill skill.

Hmm. Hmmmm. hmmmmmmmmmm
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Hm. On the one hand, given the bit where Dark Knight armor is fused to its wearer, this would go a ways to explaining why the King of Baron, despite being ruler of the surface world's sole military superpower, has no biological children, leaving Cecil as presumptive heir. On the other, the King of Baron does not appear to be wearing any more armor than, well, the King of Fabul... unless it's concealed by that fur coat, I suppose.
 
Interestingly, in the 2D releases of FFIV, Meteor is actually a Holy-element spell, while in the 3D release it is non-elemental. In return, the Mist Dragon becomes a Holy spell in the 3D version. Still, I always found Rydia was better off spamming summons so it never found much use.
 
Omicron said:

​

Odin's normal attack deals around a thousand damage, which is onerous but which Rosa could keep up on her own, but that doesn't really matter. What matters is this: after one or two attacks, Odin's sprite raises his sword. This signals an extremely short time window; once that window has passed, Odin uses Zantetsuken, hitting the entire party for the kind of damage you can see above, easily killing everyone in a single move.

I try casting Protect. I try having everyone use the Defend command to brace for it. Nothing helps. If Odin uses Zantetsuken, it's a party wipe.

This means that, in order to win, I have to kill Odin before he gets to use that move. Which, again, he uses on Round 2, Round 3 at the very latest and I don't like relying on luck. Now, luckily, I know Odin has a lightning weakness - and thanks to my consumable Bestiary items, I know he has 20,000 HP.

So.

Rydia is lv… 44, I think, at that point. Recently, she learned Blizzaga (the Tier 3 Ice spell, for those who struggle with the naming convention), and even more recently, Firaga. Which means that I am pretty sure she's at most one level away from learning Thundaga. And as it happens, the Sylph Cave still has some loot that I haven't bothered getting yet because it involves more hidden wall games.

Well, the game just gave me a reason to head back.
​
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

So, remember way back when I said to remember that in the 3D version that defend cuts all damage in half?

Yeah, it does that to Zantatsuken as well, effectively crippling any threat Odin poses as a boss.

Probably a good thing too, since Edge can steal something very unique from him (Steal works a lot better in this version), so you will need the extra time.

It's the Darkness Augment.

That's right. This game gives you back Cecils Dark Knight attack and lets you use it on anyone.

Also, Just in case you haven't been using it, Slow is VERY useful against bosses. If one of your characters can't do anything important, try using a Spider's Silk.
 
Last edited:
A few thoughts in no particular order:

The asteroids originally being a planet is an idea that's popped up a lot in sci-fi over the years, I presume that's where the FF team got the idea.

I've actually seen the "advanced race will sleep until the younger race(s) are ready" idea a time or two before, such as the old Koontz novel Starblood, and arguably the Brin short story The Crystal Spheres. It is rare, though.

"FuSoYa?...'FU SO YA!'...Damn, I thought that was a Dragon Shout for a moment there, but wrong franchise."

Etranger said:
Yang's wife's frying pan can restore memories, her kitchen knife is a god-slaying implement of ultimate destruction... Why don't we just recruit her?
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
You're underleveled for her. She's obviously a PC in another, much higher leveled game than the one you're playing.
 
Omicron said:
+255 is the highest Attack bonus I've ever seen in these games. Someone can correct me if I'm mistaken, but I'm pretty sure it's one of these, '256 values cause messy things to happen because of byte numbers in older software, so +255 is the maximum practical value for any stat' things
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Close. There are 256 distinct 8-bit strings, one of which is zero.
 
Grandalt said:
Behold, the only character in Final Fantasy who can outbeard Ramuh. Seriously, he's a walking, spell casting, beard. His knocked out spite is nothing but a beard puddle on the ground.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
20 years ago I downloaded a .rar that I expected to be full of the copyrighted things we were all downloading from sharing services back then. Instead it contained a single image file: OldManPudding.gif.

EDIT: Moments after I posted that, I watched Stephen Colbert call Mitch McConnell a "Clinically Depressed Pudding." That doesn't really have any relevance to anything, it was just so weird I had to share it.
 
Last edited:
Omicron said:
Lv 50 is very respectable (my highest main character is Cecil at lv 48, everyone else is below), and would be even moreso if I'd headed to the moon faster than I did and had been a few levels behind. FuSoYa is effectively a Sage like Tellah, with complete lists of White and Black Magic both, plus a 'Regen' command whose purpose is mysterious to me.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
according to the wiki this is a fairly anemic 'FuSoYa stops doing stuff for awhile while the party heals' effect. Like. The wiki says 10 hp at a time at set intervals, so.

Probably best just to ignore this particular special command, really.
 
Regarding the Eucariot
Omicron said:

Love that background.​

The Abyss Worms are a recurring foe and the kind of thing I would expect on the moon. The giant, hostile single-cell organisms? That's pretty wild. But interesting; it gives the moon a… sciency vibe, but not just that; it makes it looks like much of its wildlife is 'basal', extremely simple forms of life blown up to enormous size, almost as if the moon were some kind of primordial basin.

Interestingly, these enemy types are testament to when the game was released. Today, we use the three-domain system to classify biological life, wherein the three domains of life are archaea, bacteria and eukarya. However, that domain was only introduced in 1990, and FFIV was released in 1991; the devs of the game would have been familiar with the earlier "two-empire" system, in which archaea and bacteria were grouped together and categorized as prokaryotes. The game doesn't have an Archaea or Bacteria enemy, but it does have Eukaryote and Prokaryote, representing the two basic domains encompassing all of life.

I just think that's neat.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Ironically, I'm pretty sure nowadays the prevailing theory is that Eukarya and Archaea are more closely related to each other than to Bacteria (with the original grouping being more based on appearance than on genetics)
I remember reading that one prevailing theory is that the first Eukaryotes might have been Archaea that ate a bacteria but didn't digest it - resulting in the Mitochondria of eukayotes (and its separate DNA from the rest of the cell)
 
Apropos of nothing, my FFIV screenshot folder is now as large as all three previous games' folders put together, for roughly as many hours played as FF3 alone. A lot happens in this game.
 
Omicron said:
Apropos of nothing, my FFIV screenshot folder is now as large as all three previous games' folders put together, for roughly as many hours played as FF3 alone. A lot happens in this game.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Be curious to see how large your folder is gonna end up being once you're done with XV. Or XVI, if it's out by the time you get there.
 
Reader mode
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top