Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
HolyDragoon
Call Gespenst!
- Location
- Portugal
Congrats, you're going to hate the rest of the entries then. *laughs in V's final boss*
Also, with you penchant to facetank everything regardless of rows or mechanics, I'd jokingly advise you to run a #blame run in FFV. You'd hate it even more.
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- Location
- Spain
Use the Spoon, Edge!
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
Edge: "But... it's a spoon! And I already have shurikens!"
Rydia: "Do not try to throw the spoon. That's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth."
Edge: *freaked out* "Truth? What truth?"
Rydia: "There's no spoon."
*Edge looks down to spoon in his hand*
*there's no spoon, only the end tail of Rydia's Flame Whip*
*Edge becomes Ash*
Why do you hate Omicron so much? :_D
Yarp, but FFV allows you full configuration of your party's skills, so if something doesn't work, you're can go back and try different things.
Unless you're a coward and
learn the throw gil command to bury the boss under your loot.
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Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
All Final Fantasy entries after FFIV allow for that; FFIII did, too, for all that the choice was limited by the nature of Sage and Ninja being superior to all classes except for "Dragoon with Blood Lance". The fact that FFIV doesn't is by far the greatest mark against it and the one thing that makes it impossible to say "FFIV is superior to FFIII in every respect", since gameplay-wise it's not.
All of which means that, while all the yet to come final bosses in the series will have tricks, Zeromus holds a special place, as you can't adapt to the fight. Makes him a more unique challenge.
I mean, I'm perfectly fine with RPGs having static, less customizable party members with pre-defined classes. The problem in FFIV's case is that two of your party members end up as mostly dead weight because they're simple. Kain's entire moveset is "attack enemy" and "attack enemy but with a delay where you can't be targeted", and Edge tries but most of his spells just pale in comparison to having an actually competent spellcaster in Rydia and he's frail as all hell. Your other party members work fine because Rydia is a walking nuke, Rosa is a dedicated healer, and Cecil combines durability with the flexibility of being able to cover the party, having some basic white magic spells so he can contribute weaker buffs + out of combat healing resources, and still hits just as hard physically as Kain or Edge.
TLDR - Edge and Kain fail because they don't have proper variety going for them. A static party system works fine if you actually make each individual character carve out a proper niche, but Edge and Kain especially (lower stats than Cecil in everything but Speed) fail at that.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
- Golbez
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
laughing Sheev noises
Goooood. Gooood. Your hate has made you powerful, as it did he. Let it flow though you; strike him down and take Golbez's place at my side or something.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLs3CoxBvVc&ab_channel=MrGustavito1993
At least you get a bangin' final boss theme to listen to while he wrecks you.
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Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
Yup, possibly the best beat in the entire game. I also quite like the remix from OCR's album. Gotta crank up that ABSOLUTE HATE vibe to eleven:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lauLyQFaIGE
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lauLyQFaIGE
Final Fantasy IV, Part 18
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
The end is nigh, but not yet here.
The road has been long, nd it's reserving some of its toughest bumps for the very last stretch.
"Crystal platforms hanging over a spooky void' is starting to become a pattern for the ascent towards the final boss, but I don't mind, because this one looks especially cool - and for once it's not a vaguely defined otherworld, we are literally inside the moon's core.
But of course, we aren't the first ones to get here.
Two things:
First, I like that you can immediately tell that Zemus is evil because he doesn't have the LUXURIOUS LUNARIAN BEARD.
Second, they designed an actual full combat sprite for Golbez, which makes me suspect that it really was intended for him to join the party at some point.
Golbez and FuSoYa take turns attacking Zemus with powerful magics, with Golbez taking on the role of black mage, with spells of fire and ice, and FuSoYa that of white mage, with slowing and binding spells as well as Holy, to set up Zemus for a deadly combo attack:
DOUBLE METEOR.
I am actually kinda jealous they get that awesome tag team superspell that can't be used by the player.
In reality though that doesn't really matter - it's all 9,999 damage, which, hm, actually gives me some thoughts.
FFIV is the game with the Biggest Numbers so far. That is to say, as someone who didn't try to actively grind to get my character above the level I needed to beat the game, numbers in general have been increasing over the course of the series, but there's been a massive jump. FF1 ended with characters dealing around 1k to 2k damage with their most powerful attacks. FF3 had characters in the lv ~30 range, and they could, under special circumstances like with the Ninjas' most powerful throws or an optimized Dragoon hitting a flying enemy with Jump, hit within the 8k-9k range, which even in the final battle only happened once or twice.
Meanwhile, when I reached the Moon in FFIV, my characters were around lv 45. Unbuffed basic attacks hit for 2k to 3k damage, and anything else goes up. I can routinely hit 9,999 damage when Rydia uses Flare of Behemoth, and Edge's Throw can hit for 4k to 5k damage with Fuma Shurikens. The level numbers are bigger, the damage numbers are bigger, and as a result, for the first time, the maximum range kind of… loses its margin? It's hard to make further improvements impressive when we're running into Max Damage either way. For instance, as mentioned by Zerban earlier, at lv 60 Rydia unlocks Meteor; however, this is less impressive than it should, because Meteor has a long cast time and can only deal 9,999 damage, whereas both Flare has a shorter cast time, Bahamut… might have, I genuinely don't know, and both of them deal within the same 9k upper range of damage, so I'm never going to actually use Meteor.
I wonder if that's going to be an issue going forward, because I know that the games are going to keep the 9,999 damage as the maximum possible damage dealt by a single attack for a long while.
Anyway, Golbez and FuSoYa combined their power to deliver a deadly combo attack and, against all odds, it… works?
Holy shit, they actually killed him. His body, anyway, at least. It's obvious there's more waiting. Unfortunately, just like with Rubicante's first defeat speech, the characters prove completely oblivious to ominous speeches suggesting a character is not so dead as they seem, and immediately start celebrating.
Edge cracks a typical Edge comment by saying they were a little too late, as he was supposed to be the one to kill Zemus, but the mood is quickly made more somber by Golbez and Cecil meeting again. Golbez calls out "Cecil…" trying to reach out to his brother but unsure how to do so after so many years apart and overcome with hatred, and Cecil turns away, unable to deal with his own feelings and facing Golbez. Everyone turns to look at Cecil, as if in this moment, this chasm between brothers was the more important thing in the world. It's a moment that feels very in-line with FFIV's focus on character drama above all things.
And of course, that's the moment Zemus decides to crash the party.
Hmmm.
It's interesting comparing it to FF3. The Cloud of Darkness had some foreshadowing, even if very little, and while it felt like it came out of nowhere, we knew about the Dark World, and going there to fight the Darkness that had been empowering all the monsters since the start. Meanwhile, Zemus has been clearly established, we know his background, his goals, we've been working towards defeating him for the past few hours, and then he dies while strongly suggesting his spirit will survive his body and cause more trouble… But this manifests specifically as a manifestation of his "hatred" that appears and literally declares "I am evil." Like. There have been subtler developments!
Zeromus kicks things off by blasting the room, knocking out everyone except Golbez and FuSoYa.
How, though?!?
Unfortunately, all their devastating spells do is make Zeromus stronger. FuSoYa calls out to Golbez to "use the crystal," which Golbez does…
All heroes lie defeated. Zeromus is the victor. All seems lost…
Hatred, hm.
It seems to be what the game wants its main theme to be. Tellah's hatred drove him to an ultimately self-destructive course of action. Dark feelings are what threatened to overcome Cecil if he couldn't renounce the Dark Blade and become a Paladin. Kain's bitterness and jealousy made him easy prey for Golbez's evil. Golbez himself describes hatred as the driving emotion that had him in thrall the entire time he was under Zemus's control. And hatred is now how Zemus has overcome death… somehow. Golbez cannot defeat Zeromus using the Crystal, because unlike Cecil he has not renounced the dark path, but rather…
…I mean did he choose it, though? Like wasn't the hatred that consumed him Zemus's work?
This doesn't work.
There is definitely an attempt at connecting the whole thing together with an overarching theme at each character's individual level, but I don't think it comes together as well as it wants to, in part because some of these developments seem forced.
Like… Zemus has a Xande thing going, where he was 100% more interesting before he appeared on-screen, when it was suggested he was a Lunarian who wanted to provide a home for his people instead of them being consigned to endless slumber and who was willing to wipe out what he saw as an inferior species to do it; someone who might have had a conversation with FuSoYa, Golbez, and Cecil about the worth of lives, "evolution," and possibly trying to sway him to his side as "fellow Lunarians" before being told to fuck off. Instead all we get when we actually meet him is him dying, and then rising from the dead as a personification of pure hatred that literally says "I'm evil and I'm going to kill everyone."
It's a huge letdown. I arrive there and I'm like, "that's it?" There's nothing to this guy. No hint of villainous character depth is manifesting. His return from the dead is a half-baked, less cool version of the Palamecian Emperor's. This is not hype.
Anyway.
The reason I break the flow of the story to put this here is because, despite this lackluster development, things are about to pick up.
Our heroes lie defeated, Zeromus on the cusp of victory…
SPIRIT BOMB MOMENT.
Every character gathered in the Tower of Prayer - Edward, Yang, Cid, Palom and Porom, but also the Troian clerics, the Baron engineers, and King Giott and his daughter, serving as representatives of every polity we've visited so far - each take turns delivering a message of encouragement, before the Elder, Palom and Porom channel these messages to the moon.
But - and this is a bit I really like - even before these prayers reach them, someone is still standing, if only barely.
Man.
Screenshots struggle to convey what makes this scene work. The background you see here is, for the first time in the series, moving - stars flashing past as Cecil, crystal in hand, attempts a last stand against Zermous, and the music that plays over it is a beautiful, triumphant orchestral track, as if to signal even before anything else happens that this is no doomed last stand but a swelling upward motion.
Every party member, including Tellah's spirit, appears in turn, each one returning part of their strength to the party, until after Golbez and FuSoYa have returned Cecil back to full strength, they implore him to "give the holy power within him unto the Crystal."
The fight 'begins' here, but it's a trick. While Zeromus has no attack, the game repeats "Time Distortion - All magic has been nullified!" All attacks against Zeromus miss, and while it's possible to cast buffs, the next Time Distortion will nullify them. Instead, what has to be done is go into the Item menu, select the crystal, and use it against Zeromus, upon which…
…what the fuck is THAT.
No, I'm serious. I've looked at 3D models and they help, but holy shit this is one of the most unreadable 2D sprites I've ever seen. It's genuinely difficult to discern what shape this thing is supposed to have. It definitely looks spooky and Gigeresque, though. If it only made slightly more immediate visual sense, it'd probably be my favorite final boss design so far. As it stands, though, I still have to give it to Big Tiddy Dark Lady.
So.
Zeromus.
Let's rock.
Oh so shit's getting cosmic then.
Okay, okay, this is fine. He's dealing massive damage but - if you look at the numbers - it's below half of Cecil and Kain's health, doesn't quite one-shot Rydia, deals a little over half of Edge and Rosa's health, so it's hard, but survivable if Rosa is on the dot. Now, I know that in this screenshot above Rosa has so little HP that she's about to die to that amount of damage, but I'll just raise her and…
…
I ran out of Phoenix Downs on my way there and didn't notice.
Holy shit what an anticlimax.
I spent a few minutes staring at the above screen but there is literally nothing to do. Rosa is the only character with a raise spell. Rydia can summon Asura, but that only has a ⅓ chance of casting Life instead of Curaga or Protect, and the whole time party-wide healing is impossible. I can burn through as many Elixis and X-Potions as I want, it doesn't matter: this fight is unwinnable.
But it still has to be played through, because the game doesn't have a soft reset.
Whatever. I tab out and force-close the window.
Then I quit for the evening. It's not the most frustrating things to have happened in a Final Fantasy so far but it's pretty close, because it means that I can't just reload and try again.
I'm gonna have to leave the dungeon (you can't teleport out of the crystal area, btw, so that's three floors full of extra-dangerous encounters before I can port out), walk halfway across the moon, buy some Phoenix Downs and then do the whole trek back to here. Fuck doing that tonight.
…
This is why I'm doing an LP, you know?
Video game are a unique art form in their own right. And that means when you're judging a game's story in a vacuum you're judging a movie without the soundtrack. The soundtrack is a really important part of a movie, sometimes it elevates it to a whole new level, and sometimes you have to turn on the subtitles even if you're fluent in the movie's language because the sound mixing is fucking garbage and you can't hear any dialogue.
The story of Final Fantasy IV is one of heroes rising at the last minute with the prayers of all their allies to defeat the great evil, but the story I'm playing through is one in which I forgot to replenish my Phoenix Downs so I have to leave and spend half an hour doing errands before I can try again.
It sucks.
Good news though, the Hummingway home has everything I could want, including Elixirs. As for these 'Siren' items at the bottom, they can be used to automatically trigger a random encounter, which doesn't seem like it would have any purpose given those appear every five feet or so. Andthis, children, is a narrative device we call 'foreshadowing.'
Once that errand is done, though, we are truly ready for the final showdown.
Zeromus has a number of coded responses. If I use certain kinds of magic, he replies with Whirl, setting a random party member's HP to 1. If I use Bahamut, he responds by omnicasting Bio. If I cast Flare, he… responds with Flare? These are all reactions which don't take his turn. For his turn, Zeromus likes to get cosmic, with Big Bang inflicting massive damage and Black Hole turning off all party buffs, as well as a (thankfully pretty tamed) version of Meteor when he gets to low HP.
Now, what's a little annoying is that…
Every time I lose…
I have to play through this sequence again. It takes several long, long minutes. And it's not nearly as cool the third time as it is the first. I've had to reload Chaos and Cloud of Darkness a couple times, but this is the first time I am confronted with the trademark JRPG "unskippable ten minute cutscene before a really hard boss fight."
It is the exact opposite of hype. It actively undoes hype. Especially because…
…it is growing increasingly obvious that I am going to have a really hard time defeating Zeromus as things stand.
I could beat him, I think. It wouldn't be easy, but if my save was before the fight itself - if all I had to do was reload, immediately initiate the fight, try to refine my strategy, I'd give it a shot. I don't know if I would succeed - he is genuinely really hard - but I'd give it more than three tries. I would need to refer to the Wiki to understand exactly how he works (having looked it after the fact, he has complicated action strings where hitting him with the right move at the right time can cause a debuff that blunts the edge of his next Big Bang, and Reflect volleyball bypasses his counters).
Not if I have to go through this cutscene every time I do, though.
No way.
It's time to get grinding.
Next time: We're eating Flamby.
The road has been long, nd it's reserving some of its toughest bumps for the very last stretch.
"Crystal platforms hanging over a spooky void' is starting to become a pattern for the ascent towards the final boss, but I don't mind, because this one looks especially cool - and for once it's not a vaguely defined otherworld, we are literally inside the moon's core.
But of course, we aren't the first ones to get here.
Two things:
First, I like that you can immediately tell that Zemus is evil because he doesn't have the LUXURIOUS LUNARIAN BEARD.
Second, they designed an actual full combat sprite for Golbez, which makes me suspect that it really was intended for him to join the party at some point.
Golbez and FuSoYa take turns attacking Zemus with powerful magics, with Golbez taking on the role of black mage, with spells of fire and ice, and FuSoYa that of white mage, with slowing and binding spells as well as Holy, to set up Zemus for a deadly combo attack:
DOUBLE METEOR.
I am actually kinda jealous they get that awesome tag team superspell that can't be used by the player.
In reality though that doesn't really matter - it's all 9,999 damage, which, hm, actually gives me some thoughts.
FFIV is the game with the Biggest Numbers so far. That is to say, as someone who didn't try to actively grind to get my character above the level I needed to beat the game, numbers in general have been increasing over the course of the series, but there's been a massive jump. FF1 ended with characters dealing around 1k to 2k damage with their most powerful attacks. FF3 had characters in the lv ~30 range, and they could, under special circumstances like with the Ninjas' most powerful throws or an optimized Dragoon hitting a flying enemy with Jump, hit within the 8k-9k range, which even in the final battle only happened once or twice.
Meanwhile, when I reached the Moon in FFIV, my characters were around lv 45. Unbuffed basic attacks hit for 2k to 3k damage, and anything else goes up. I can routinely hit 9,999 damage when Rydia uses Flare of Behemoth, and Edge's Throw can hit for 4k to 5k damage with Fuma Shurikens. The level numbers are bigger, the damage numbers are bigger, and as a result, for the first time, the maximum range kind of… loses its margin? It's hard to make further improvements impressive when we're running into Max Damage either way. For instance, as mentioned by Zerban earlier, at lv 60 Rydia unlocks Meteor; however, this is less impressive than it should, because Meteor has a long cast time and can only deal 9,999 damage, whereas both Flare has a shorter cast time, Bahamut… might have, I genuinely don't know, and both of them deal within the same 9k upper range of damage, so I'm never going to actually use Meteor.
I wonder if that's going to be an issue going forward, because I know that the games are going to keep the 9,999 damage as the maximum possible damage dealt by a single attack for a long while.
Anyway, Golbez and FuSoYa combined their power to deliver a deadly combo attack and, against all odds, it… works?
Holy shit, they actually killed him. His body, anyway, at least. It's obvious there's more waiting. Unfortunately, just like with Rubicante's first defeat speech, the characters prove completely oblivious to ominous speeches suggesting a character is not so dead as they seem, and immediately start celebrating.
Edge cracks a typical Edge comment by saying they were a little too late, as he was supposed to be the one to kill Zemus, but the mood is quickly made more somber by Golbez and Cecil meeting again. Golbez calls out "Cecil…" trying to reach out to his brother but unsure how to do so after so many years apart and overcome with hatred, and Cecil turns away, unable to deal with his own feelings and facing Golbez. Everyone turns to look at Cecil, as if in this moment, this chasm between brothers was the more important thing in the world. It's a moment that feels very in-line with FFIV's focus on character drama above all things.
And of course, that's the moment Zemus decides to crash the party.
Hmmm.
It's interesting comparing it to FF3. The Cloud of Darkness had some foreshadowing, even if very little, and while it felt like it came out of nowhere, we knew about the Dark World, and going there to fight the Darkness that had been empowering all the monsters since the start. Meanwhile, Zemus has been clearly established, we know his background, his goals, we've been working towards defeating him for the past few hours, and then he dies while strongly suggesting his spirit will survive his body and cause more trouble… But this manifests specifically as a manifestation of his "hatred" that appears and literally declares "I am evil." Like. There have been subtler developments!
Zeromus kicks things off by blasting the room, knocking out everyone except Golbez and FuSoYa.
How, though?!?
Unfortunately, all their devastating spells do is make Zeromus stronger. FuSoYa calls out to Golbez to "use the crystal," which Golbez does…
All heroes lie defeated. Zeromus is the victor. All seems lost…
Hatred, hm.
It seems to be what the game wants its main theme to be. Tellah's hatred drove him to an ultimately self-destructive course of action. Dark feelings are what threatened to overcome Cecil if he couldn't renounce the Dark Blade and become a Paladin. Kain's bitterness and jealousy made him easy prey for Golbez's evil. Golbez himself describes hatred as the driving emotion that had him in thrall the entire time he was under Zemus's control. And hatred is now how Zemus has overcome death… somehow. Golbez cannot defeat Zeromus using the Crystal, because unlike Cecil he has not renounced the dark path, but rather…
…I mean did he choose it, though? Like wasn't the hatred that consumed him Zemus's work?
This doesn't work.
There is definitely an attempt at connecting the whole thing together with an overarching theme at each character's individual level, but I don't think it comes together as well as it wants to, in part because some of these developments seem forced.
Like… Zemus has a Xande thing going, where he was 100% more interesting before he appeared on-screen, when it was suggested he was a Lunarian who wanted to provide a home for his people instead of them being consigned to endless slumber and who was willing to wipe out what he saw as an inferior species to do it; someone who might have had a conversation with FuSoYa, Golbez, and Cecil about the worth of lives, "evolution," and possibly trying to sway him to his side as "fellow Lunarians" before being told to fuck off. Instead all we get when we actually meet him is him dying, and then rising from the dead as a personification of pure hatred that literally says "I'm evil and I'm going to kill everyone."
It's a huge letdown. I arrive there and I'm like, "that's it?" There's nothing to this guy. No hint of villainous character depth is manifesting. His return from the dead is a half-baked, less cool version of the Palamecian Emperor's. This is not hype.
Anyway.
The reason I break the flow of the story to put this here is because, despite this lackluster development, things are about to pick up.
Our heroes lie defeated, Zeromus on the cusp of victory…
SPIRIT BOMB MOMENT.
Every character gathered in the Tower of Prayer - Edward, Yang, Cid, Palom and Porom, but also the Troian clerics, the Baron engineers, and King Giott and his daughter, serving as representatives of every polity we've visited so far - each take turns delivering a message of encouragement, before the Elder, Palom and Porom channel these messages to the moon.
But - and this is a bit I really like - even before these prayers reach them, someone is still standing, if only barely.
Man.
Screenshots struggle to convey what makes this scene work. The background you see here is, for the first time in the series, moving - stars flashing past as Cecil, crystal in hand, attempts a last stand against Zermous, and the music that plays over it is a beautiful, triumphant orchestral track, as if to signal even before anything else happens that this is no doomed last stand but a swelling upward motion.
Every party member, including Tellah's spirit, appears in turn, each one returning part of their strength to the party, until after Golbez and FuSoYa have returned Cecil back to full strength, they implore him to "give the holy power within him unto the Crystal."
The fight 'begins' here, but it's a trick. While Zeromus has no attack, the game repeats "Time Distortion - All magic has been nullified!" All attacks against Zeromus miss, and while it's possible to cast buffs, the next Time Distortion will nullify them. Instead, what has to be done is go into the Item menu, select the crystal, and use it against Zeromus, upon which…
…what the fuck is THAT.
No, I'm serious. I've looked at 3D models and they help, but holy shit this is one of the most unreadable 2D sprites I've ever seen. It's genuinely difficult to discern what shape this thing is supposed to have. It definitely looks spooky and Gigeresque, though. If it only made slightly more immediate visual sense, it'd probably be my favorite final boss design so far. As it stands, though, I still have to give it to Big Tiddy Dark Lady.
So.
Zeromus.
Let's rock.
Oh so shit's getting cosmic then.
Okay, okay, this is fine. He's dealing massive damage but - if you look at the numbers - it's below half of Cecil and Kain's health, doesn't quite one-shot Rydia, deals a little over half of Edge and Rosa's health, so it's hard, but survivable if Rosa is on the dot. Now, I know that in this screenshot above Rosa has so little HP that she's about to die to that amount of damage, but I'll just raise her and…
…
I ran out of Phoenix Downs on my way there and didn't notice.
Holy shit what an anticlimax.
I spent a few minutes staring at the above screen but there is literally nothing to do. Rosa is the only character with a raise spell. Rydia can summon Asura, but that only has a ⅓ chance of casting Life instead of Curaga or Protect, and the whole time party-wide healing is impossible. I can burn through as many Elixis and X-Potions as I want, it doesn't matter: this fight is unwinnable.
But it still has to be played through, because the game doesn't have a soft reset.
Whatever. I tab out and force-close the window.
Then I quit for the evening. It's not the most frustrating things to have happened in a Final Fantasy so far but it's pretty close, because it means that I can't just reload and try again.
I'm gonna have to leave the dungeon (you can't teleport out of the crystal area, btw, so that's three floors full of extra-dangerous encounters before I can port out), walk halfway across the moon, buy some Phoenix Downs and then do the whole trek back to here. Fuck doing that tonight.
…
This is why I'm doing an LP, you know?
Video game are a unique art form in their own right. And that means when you're judging a game's story in a vacuum you're judging a movie without the soundtrack. The soundtrack is a really important part of a movie, sometimes it elevates it to a whole new level, and sometimes you have to turn on the subtitles even if you're fluent in the movie's language because the sound mixing is fucking garbage and you can't hear any dialogue.
The story of Final Fantasy IV is one of heroes rising at the last minute with the prayers of all their allies to defeat the great evil, but the story I'm playing through is one in which I forgot to replenish my Phoenix Downs so I have to leave and spend half an hour doing errands before I can try again.
It sucks.
Good news though, the Hummingway home has everything I could want, including Elixirs. As for these 'Siren' items at the bottom, they can be used to automatically trigger a random encounter, which doesn't seem like it would have any purpose given those appear every five feet or so. Andthis, children, is a narrative device we call 'foreshadowing.'
Once that errand is done, though, we are truly ready for the final showdown.
Zeromus has a number of coded responses. If I use certain kinds of magic, he replies with Whirl, setting a random party member's HP to 1. If I use Bahamut, he responds by omnicasting Bio. If I cast Flare, he… responds with Flare? These are all reactions which don't take his turn. For his turn, Zeromus likes to get cosmic, with Big Bang inflicting massive damage and Black Hole turning off all party buffs, as well as a (thankfully pretty tamed) version of Meteor when he gets to low HP.
Now, what's a little annoying is that…
Every time I lose…
I have to play through this sequence again. It takes several long, long minutes. And it's not nearly as cool the third time as it is the first. I've had to reload Chaos and Cloud of Darkness a couple times, but this is the first time I am confronted with the trademark JRPG "unskippable ten minute cutscene before a really hard boss fight."
It is the exact opposite of hype. It actively undoes hype. Especially because…
…it is growing increasingly obvious that I am going to have a really hard time defeating Zeromus as things stand.
I could beat him, I think. It wouldn't be easy, but if my save was before the fight itself - if all I had to do was reload, immediately initiate the fight, try to refine my strategy, I'd give it a shot. I don't know if I would succeed - he is genuinely really hard - but I'd give it more than three tries. I would need to refer to the Wiki to understand exactly how he works (having looked it after the fact, he has complicated action strings where hitting him with the right move at the right time can cause a debuff that blunts the edge of his next Big Bang, and Reflect volleyball bypasses his counters).
Not if I have to go through this cutscene every time I do, though.
No way.
It's time to get grinding.
Next time: We're eating Flamby.
dinomannitro6
all your gender is belong to us
- Location
- The Land Where The Sunflowers Bloom
Uh, I do not understand this reference. Could someone explain what flamby is and its meaning here?
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
Oof, yeah, I don't remember when I picked the routine (FFIX, probably, which was my second FF) but I always try to make sure in these games to stock up in healing items because if the game wants you to use them, you will use them and end up missing them when at the worst time. Once past the 10 hour mark of gameplay, never leave home without at least thirty phoenix downs and fifty potions, that's the baseline.
(I got weird looks in the FFXIV Novice Network for commenting that I had stacks of curing status items like antidote, because apparently NOBODY buys/craft them there. I could not compute. :_D )
(I got weird looks in the FFXIV Novice Network for commenting that I had stacks of curing status items like antidote, because apparently NOBODY buys/craft them there. I could not compute. :_D )
Yeah, sadly the plot flops (again) here, writing itself into a corner where the theme they were going for sabotages itself.
This is what old school Doom veterans call: "hmmm, this room has enough ammo to leave with my bags full, and enough armor and medkits to put me into double digits for each. Suspicious. Clearly next room has a monster army or a big bad boss".
Thankfully, they learned for later games. Not sure about FFV, but pretty sure that starting from FFVI there's a savepoint somewhat close to the last boss. I think FFIX even allows you to save in between the prefight scene/dialogue and the fight with the last boss.
It's a flan dessert. The best way to grind for XP in lategame FF4 is grinding Flan Princesses.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
Which, incidentally, might drop the elusive Pink Thang.
Not that I expect Omicron to get one in this timeline... Fucking drop rates... >_>
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Remember how I commented that Dissidia Opera Omnia, the mobile gacha game with absolutely everybody, waited until season 3 (a year after introducing Desch into the gacha) to bring in Xande? Because Xande just wasn't seen as interesting enough to be higher on the queue?
It still hasn't brought in Zemus.
It still hasn't brought in Zemus.
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ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
[squeaky pitch-shifted chipmunk voice] "BEHOLD, FOR I HAVE BECOME A SHITTY PNG, YOUR FEEBLE WEAPONS CANNOT HARM ME"
How, though?!?
what crystal thoUnfortunately, all their devastating spells do is make Zeromus stronger. FuSoYa calls out to Golbez to "use the crystal," which Golbez does…
what crystal tho
[puts lips directly up against the microphone] what crystal tho where did this come from were you going to mention this at any point fusoya
Like I get it 'The Crystal' is just a shorthand for Cecil having become a born-again Christian and turned his life around over the course of the game and 'overcome hatred' but my guy if you're gonna externalise that into a MacGuffin you can't introduce it in the very same scene you use it! Bad! Very bad!
hm what an oddly familiar scene i wonder where i've seen this beforeMan.
Screenshots struggle to convey what makes this scene work. The background you see here is, for the first time in the series, moving - stars flashing past as Cecil, crystal in hand, attempts a last stand against Zermous, and the music that plays over it is a beautiful, triumphant orchestral track, as if to signal even before anything else happens that this is no doomed last stand but a swelling upward motion.
Every party member, including Tellah's spirit, appears in turn, each one returning part of their strength to the party, until after Golbez and FuSoYa have returned Cecil back to full strength, they implore him to "give the holy power within him unto the Crystal."
probably nothing
Yeah I was significantly higher-level than you when I got here, having grinded to 70 chasing 100% achievement completion before even heading for Zemus, and even then I was like "whoah okay this man's got hands" and thought to myself "hey maybe there's a reason why if you're going to do a sequence like this you do it after the real fight is already over so you just get to floss on the baddie 'cause you're really playing with fire otherwise".Every time I lose…
I have to play through this sequence again. It takes several long, long minutes. And it's not nearly as cool the third time as it is the first. I've had to reload Chaos and Cloud of Darkness a couple times, but this is the first time I am confronted with the trademark JRPG "unskippable ten minute cutscene before a really hard boss fight."
It is the exact opposite of hype. It actively undoes hype. Especially because…
…it is growing increasingly obvious that I am going to have a really hard time defeating Zeromus as things stand.
Now just think. Pixel Remaster doubled the speed at which you levelled up. Can you even imagine trying to beat this game the way it was beforehand? Much like FF3 OG I definitely would've straight-up quit.
(Unsurprisingly as I found while googling to confirm the accelerated levelling there are psychopathic boomers out there who believed the Pixel Remaster ruined the game by making it at all sane for normal people to play so the CASUALS could get through it, shitting and pissing with rage because they unlocked Holy naturally before the final boss rather than having to stop and grind for it as GOD INTENDED.)
EDIT: It appears the xp bonus was nerfed in an update, because the complaints from a year ago, with one comparison showing a Pixel Remaster party being almost 10 levels higher than an SNES party with 4 hours less gametime, and then a thread dated only 3 months ago compared xp values and Pixel Remaster was only 40% higher. So I guess they did walk that back. Don't ask me how that works when PR also cut the encounter rate in half.
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- Location
- Alberta
So, Zeromus. My experience with Zeromus can be summed up like this:
When I first played FF4, it was on the GBA version, and I never had any trouble against Zeromus. Even on the first run I did I still wiped the floor with him. I did not know at the time that the GBA version has an extremely janky implementation of the ATB system that ends up giving you turns faster than it's meant to and the enemy turns slower than it's meant to, both of which meant that it was much easier to recover from Big Bang than it should've been.
So, years later along comes the PSP version of the game. In this version the ATB meters work more or less as intended, and by this point I knew about that bug. Still, I was sure it wouldn't change things too much.
PSP Zeromus handed my ass to me on a silver platter multiple times before I realized that no, you really do need significantly more levels when the battle system is working as intended.
When I first played FF4, it was on the GBA version, and I never had any trouble against Zeromus. Even on the first run I did I still wiped the floor with him. I did not know at the time that the GBA version has an extremely janky implementation of the ATB system that ends up giving you turns faster than it's meant to and the enemy turns slower than it's meant to, both of which meant that it was much easier to recover from Big Bang than it should've been.
So, years later along comes the PSP version of the game. In this version the ATB meters work more or less as intended, and by this point I knew about that bug. Still, I was sure it wouldn't change things too much.
PSP Zeromus handed my ass to me on a silver platter multiple times before I realized that no, you really do need significantly more levels when the battle system is working as intended.
- Location
- California
Never heard of her.
I did this for a few years actually. They were useful for the exploration content, since I could just clear whatever annoying status effect I got.
I'd need to dig out my old computer to know for sure but IIRC I beat FF4J Zeromus with an average party level somewhere in the early 50s on battle speed 1. You can do it a lot lower than that by exploiting the mechanic where you lower his Big Bang damage by casting on him at a specific time, but that's not worth the time spent learning to do it. You never need to grind in FF4, but that doesn't mean it won't kick you in the balls if you don't.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
A NFT with delusions. Figures.
Putting some light thought to this...
The Mysidia Elder, instead of going "Iunno anything anymore of nothing" once Cecil becomes a paladin, actually should have something to say. "From studying the rocks where you were tested, we learned a few things about [Crystals] [Ancients] [Something rotten in
When you meet Fusoya, have him talk about crystals in more detail. Just offtopic, as if it didn't matter at the time, but so you know they matter later.
After the giant, slow things down. Let's assume a scenario where Edge died and Golbez would join at this point. Have Fusoya recovery for a while and show he has one crystal that might help him fight Zemus. It won't give it to you because there are requisites for it.
We follow him to the Moon. We see him use Meteor, then the crystal. Nothing. Golbez joins him. They do Double Meteor, Fusoya has him use the crystal. Nothing. THEN Cecil gets the crystal, and things proceed as normal now, demonstrating how the requisites mentioned before apply to Cecil and not the others.
Just a thought.
Of course. Of course they did. These people can go to HELL if they like it so much, just leave the rest of us alone. >_>
So, Zeromus. If you try to use steal on him before he transforms, you will nab a Dark Matter. And it does absolutely nothing. In the 3D remake, if you carry it over to New Game + and use it on the face on the moon, it will summon the strongest boss in the game; Proto-Babil.
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FunkyEntropy
Occasionally insightful, possibly grumpy
- Location
- Los Angeles
Well, the psycho boomers are at least accurate in saying that the game certainly does feel different if you don't have to waste hours of your life grinding levels because they made the last boss stupid crazy hard. Even if the difference in feel is that you're no longer forced to rub your face with sandpaper and can now use a regular old towel.
Well, since we were discussing static characters VS customizable characters just a bit ago, I'll just say: adding in more customization does, in fact, do some work in fixing this. Like in FFIV about the one way you're going to break that damage cap is with a superbuffed Edge since he can dual-wield meaning he could theoretically break 9999 damage if both his attacks do 5000+ damage. You've mentioned playing FFVIII in the distant past, so I'll just point at multi-hit limit breaks being one of the potential newer ways to handle that (Zell in particular is ludicrously broken with his timed combos system if you know how to infinite-loop said punch combos).
Well, if you're looking for ways to improve your survivability, those Sirens are used to farm Pink Tails from a specific monster on the moon, which you can trade for the Adamant Armor.
finalfantasy.fandom.com
It's a really rare drop, though, so you might prefer just grinding.
Pink Tail
A mysterious pink tail. Highly treasured as a token of good luck—which is exactly what you need to come by one of these. Pink Tail (ピンクの尻尾 or ピンクのしっぽ, Pinku no Shippo?), also known as Pink and PinkTail, is a recurring item in the series. Pink Tail is an ultra rare drop from the Flan Princess...
finalfantasy.fandom.com