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

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To play devil's advocate because I personally don't care about it enough and I found a mod to reinstate the original starting XP and XP curve in under a minute of Googling , I understand where they're coming from with complaints about the PR having a different XP curve and it's not necessarily the lack of self-inflicted ball torture. One of the benefits of being on rails and having the game control your party at all times was that FF4 was a very tightly balanced game and part of that balancing was the original XP curve. To give an example of what that does off of the top of my head, compare Omicron's Plague fight to mine the last time I played through FF4. Due to being lower, my party's damage was nowhere near high enough to bumrush and kill Plague before the death sentence timer ended, so I had to intentionally kill party members in the middle of the fight to desynch the death sentence timers and play ping-pong with revival while getting in hits whenever I had time to spare. It being easier isn't a bad thing, but it's clearly different.
 
Omicron said:
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.

It's time to get grinding.
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Yeah, my guess is that in the development cycle of FF4 the plan was for Fusoya and Golbez to be in your party, and they needed to get Rosa and Rydia out because of the 5 person party limit, but then something happened along the way and they either couldn't get Golbez done in time, or they ran into an issue of the two being much weaker than Rosa and Rydia. The in game mechanical reason for them being gone was removed, but they decided to keep the scene and just have the two stow away aboard the Lunar Whale.

And yeah, one recurring problem that I've seen in FF games is that the final boss represents a huge difficulty spike, to the point where you can steamroller the entire game and get stomped on by the final boss. Generally FF expects you to be about 50-55 when facing it, what level are your party members at?
 
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csjorm said:
I don't remember FF4 having a difficulty drop at any point. Maybe I could argue post-Mt. Ordeals counts, but other than that, I'm coming up with nothing.
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It's been two months since I beat the game myself so I can't provide you an annotated list of every wild change in difficulty but I can sure tell you from memory that it would spike sporadically with seemingly little rhyme or reason before just as suddenly flattening out to being quite easy. These spikes in difficulty normally coincided with any time the game added a caster who wasn't Rydia to the team and normally levelled out whenever Cecil wasn't the only competent physical attacker on the team ('what about edge?' what about edge) but there were others too. I remarked more than once that the jumps were so random and temporary that I had no way of knowing if it was me doing something wrong or the game being unreasonable, especially since I was shooting for 100% bestiary completion so I did extra grinding and was further along the power curve than I would be if I was just beelining.
 
That seems more like a byproduct of the newer XP system rocketing you ahead, to be honest, because that doesn't describe what I played at all.
 
Project 501D13R said:
And yeah, one recurring problem that I've seen in FF games is that the final boss represents a huge difficulty spike
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Well... yeah. Why would the big evil guy only be a few levels above his generals? Maybe Rubicante would stay loyal, but do you believe for one second that the other fiends wouldn't betray him in a second, to steal his position, if they thought they stood any chance against him?
 
Connelly said:
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.
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But if you don't have stacks of 99 of every consumable item in the game, none of which you will ever use because it would destroy the majesty of having 99 of every consumable item in the game, are you really playing a JRPG though.
 
For me, Zeromus was not a problem conceptually. Like, comparing him to the Cloud of Darkness feels a bit unfair, in that the final boss is still the same guy you were planning to fight a minute ago; a different name and a different sprite doesn't really change that. Boss has second form, welcome to boss design 201, with boss design 101 being "health bars". Similarly, Zemus does also miss out on Dissidia like Xande, but that's a bit different in that Xande functioned as the front man for the Cloud of Darkness, while Zemus is the Man behind Golbez. The fact that Golbez got the nod over Zemus is, IMO, more of a testament to the impact Golbez had than the particular weakness of Zemus.

Zemus is not exactly the greatest FF villain we've ever seen, so far I'd give that to Golbez and then probably the Emperor, but he's...fine. Eh. Average.

Speaking of Zeromus, the other major remake of FFIV, the GBA/PSP one, has a Zeromus EG superboss, as well as a different, harder dragon superboss, in a postgame dungeon on the moon called the Lunar Ruins. So if you're having trouble with Zeromus, just remember this is the easy version.
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
(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.)
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Those are probably Gen X'ers.
 
csjorm said:
That seems more like a byproduct of the newer XP system rocketing you ahead, to be honest, because that doesn't describe what I played at all.
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As I edited into my previous post, the new XP system was nerfed by the time Omi and I played the game; you only gain 40% more xp than usual, and the encounter rate is halved compared to the SNES version (noticeable because the Patented FF2 Monster Closets aren't guaranteed to get you before you can return to the door). It's smoother but it's actually not an instant win button and it's still the game's fault whenever it abruptly turned around and started throwing haymakers out of the blue.

Also, again, I would like to reiterate my problems mostly came from the game saddling me with bad party members (such as any caster not named Rosa and Rydia, or guys named Edge) whom the ATB system and restrictive row system make babysitting a pain in the ass.
 
NotYourParents said:
Speaking of Zeromus, the other major remake of FFIV, the GBA/PSP one, has a Zeromus EG superboss, as well as a different, harder dragon superboss, in a postgame dungeon on the moon called the Lunar Ruins. So if you're having trouble with Zeromus, just remember this is the easy version.
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Unless of course you get Kain the spear that casts Tornado on the enemy, get a proc on the first hit, then two shot the dragon boss.
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
Also, again, I would like to reiterate my problems mostly came from the game saddling me with bad party members (such as any caster not named Rosa and Rydia, or guys named Edge) whom the ATB system and restrictive row system make babysitting a pain in the ass.
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Now that I can at least get behind, but I also think the only character who's terrible to the point where you're worse off for having them is Edge because he's a glass cannon with no cannon unless you chuck rare items and sometimes he doesn't even live long enough to do that.
 
Also, It's unfortunate you weren't able to beat Zeromus. The fact that he used Meteor on you is a sign he was on death's door. I don't know why that spell is so weak when he uses it on you, but trust me, it's easily his hardest hitting move in the 3D version. Basically his last ditch attack.

Also, if you want, since his first form doesn't do anything, you can just buff up with haste. It will help at the start, before he Black Holes.
 
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If you're not opposed to taking advantage of broken code, Zeromus in the PS1 (and earlier) version of FF4 is made slightly easier by an item duplication glitch that you can abuse to give yourself 99 copies of Cecil's Excalibur.

What do you do with 99 copies of Excalibur?

Give them to Edge to throw for about 6-7k damage a pop.

 
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Omicron said:
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.
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It was 55003 damage (if the online number converter is to be believed. :V ). It's a shame Captain SNES's update schedule went the way of so many other comics.

FFVI suffers from this quite a bit if you're optimizing. I recently finished my Pixel Remaster playthrough of it, and by the end Relm/Celes in the low 50's had their magic stats juiced enough that they'd cap the damage meter with second tier spells if they hit a weakness. Terra could do it with second tier spells without a weakness if she was tranced. And I was just doing the 'normal' optimizing of trying to make sure they got the +2 stat every level up. There's that whole next level of optimizing where you try not to gain levels until you have the right espers. Nothing like killing god in traditional JRPG fashion with spells you got 35% of the way through.

It's sort of self-defeating that I also had the urge to make all the 'magic-y' characters grind to learn all the spells when they barely matter once dualcast-quick-ultimaX4 becomes an option. I've heard FFVI described as an 'easy' game, but I think that's mostly because the cast has absurd power levels by the endgame if you've done everything. The first... 80% of the game (?) has a pretty reasonable curve.
 
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FFVI suffers from this quite a bit if you're optimizing. I recently finished my Pixel Remaster playthrough of it, and by the end Relm/Celes in the low 50's had their magic stats juiced enough that they'd cap the damage meter with second tier spells if they hit a weakness. Terra could do it with second tier spells without a weakness if she was tranced. And I was just doing the 'normal' optimizing of trying to make sure they got the +2 stat every level up. There's that whole next level of optimizing where you try not to gain levels until you have the right espers. Nothing like killing god in traditional JRPG fashion with spells you got 35% of the way through.

It's sort of self-defeating that I also had the urge to make all the 'magic-y' characters grind to learn all the spells when they barely matter once dualcast-quick-ultimaX4 becomes an option. I've heard FFVI described as an 'easy' game, but I think that's mostly because the cast has absurd power levels by the endgame if you've done everything. The first... 80% of the game (?) has a pretty reasonable curve.
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FFVI was pretty broken, particularly the SNES version. It really pushed the boundaries of what a SNES can do, which is why it's considered "the best" SNES FF game in the West, but it also had a lot of coding oversights that ended up making a joke of the system and were easily abuseable. Magic Evasion was useless, since it was all status effects were accidentally coded against Evasion instead, so any item that enhanced Evasion automatically made spell status effects a lot easier to avoid, several characters were glitched out the ass (Cyan and I think Gau) so killing and reviving them would send them on a rampage that would kill everything on screen before anyone else could get a turn in, and then there's Relm's Sketch, which I never used because I read it would crash or destroy the game entirely.

Oddly enough, though the ability for X-casting and X-attacking were actually nerfed compared to the previous entry, FFV. If you leveled up your classes properly in FFV, you'd end up with uber-powered badasses who could attack eight times per turn and cast spells twice. Instead of tying those abilities to classes, FFVI attached them to artifacts/equipment, which really limits how many characters can use them - unless you grind at the Coliseum.
 
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Saint_007 said:
FFVI was pretty broken, particularly the SNES version. It really pushed the boundaries of what a SNES can do, which is why it's considered "the best" SNES FF game in the West, but it also had a lot of coding oversights that ended up making a joke of the system and were easily abuseable. Magic Evasion was useless, since it was all status effects were accidentally coded against Evasion instead, so any item that enhanced Evasion automatically made spell status effects a lot easier to avoid, several characters were glitched out the ass (Cyan and I think Gau) so killing and reviving them would send them on a rampage that would kill everything on screen before anyone else could get a turn in, and then there's Relm's Sketch, which I never used because I read it would crash or destroy the game entirely.
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I think it's actually the reverse. Magic evade was king in the SNES version. The joke was that "The goggles do nothing" since the Blind status didn't work.

The Relm sketch bug happened to me though, and captain SNES had its own gag for it.
 
Nah, then we just start spoiler-box posting about all the spinoff games you haven't played yet. Mystic Quest, Tactics/Advance/A2, Crisis Core, Dirge of Cerberus, FFIV After Years is already all over the thread...

Wait can we go full "technically a Final Fantasy series" and make Omni play all the Secret of Mana games?
 
Would that cover the FFVII Remake, or just the original? If the latter, don't get the PC/Steam version; the sound mixing is awful, from what I've heard, and they've never really fixed it.
 
If Omi decides to continue past FF6 he should play 7 and Remake simultaneously and alternate between updates while refusing to acknowledge the discrepency.
 
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