HolyDragoon
Call Gespenst!
- Location
- Portugal
> Gains access to Fira
> Can buy rods
> Goes to fire ship instead.
Never change.
EDIT: Granted, rods also work for the fire ship, but it's still hilarious.
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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
> Gains access to Fira
> Can buy rods
> Goes to fire ship instead.
Never change.
EDIT: Granted, rods also work for the fire ship, but it's still hilarious.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
I always did Shiva right after hitting Karnak honestly. She's really not that out of depth.
And Ifreet and Ramuh both have better damage than her, and Ifreet is really not that far off from here, so Shiva is really obviously meant to be fought reasonably quickly if you want.
Yeah, you are going to want to buy and use the rods. Using a spell when you have the same elemental rod equipped gives you a nice meaty 1.5 damage multiplier. I'm pretty sure you can swap equipment in battle as well. An Ara-tier spell with a rod equipped hits quite hard.
Also, that Flash is a blue mage spell, so if you want to pick that up, you can.
Also, that Flash is a blue mage spell, so if you want to pick that up, you can.
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- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Also I must admit I don't entirely buy the idea that Shiva, the ice summon, available to fight before the Fire Crystal Dungeon, when you've just gained access to the Summoner class...
Well, I just don't buy the idea that you're not supposed to have at least as a reasonable option getting a strong, new ice attack to go with your strong, new attacking mage class that has jack and shit if you don't do this for actually putting in work.
Like. It's so perfectly lined up. Fire enemies tend to be ice vulnerable in final fantasy, though not without exception, and here they give you the chance and it's just that Shiva is both a little hidden and not a complete pushover. But the very same reason you'd want Shiva applies for handling Shiva; pick on those elemental weaknesses, yo.
Well, I just don't buy the idea that you're not supposed to have at least as a reasonable option getting a strong, new ice attack to go with your strong, new attacking mage class that has jack and shit if you don't do this for actually putting in work.
Like. It's so perfectly lined up. Fire enemies tend to be ice vulnerable in final fantasy, though not without exception, and here they give you the chance and it's just that Shiva is both a little hidden and not a complete pushover. But the very same reason you'd want Shiva applies for handling Shiva; pick on those elemental weaknesses, yo.
Not to mention: if you ever want an emergency option (or you're doing a single class/character challenge of some kind) then you can shatter the rods in battle to cast a -Ga tier spell out of them. Expensive for this point in the game, sure, but an option.
kairuf
(Verified Kaiger) (Not the Siberian)
- Location
- The land of Potatoes
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Well, I'm not sure how I was supposed to know that!
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
This is definitely one of the weaknesses of FF5; a lot more in the way of equipment and such has interesting mechanics, but then how does mechanics work or even that they exist is often not actually explicated by the game.
So while it's intuitive in a general sense that the elemental rods are for supporting their element... the fact they actually do that is still something you'd have to stumble into or hear about from sources outside the game, as far as I recall. I dunno, maybe there's a random townie or a tutorial NPC I'm forgetting who tells you, but I know this is a broader trend with the game.
So while it's intuitive in a general sense that the elemental rods are for supporting their element... the fact they actually do that is still something you'd have to stumble into or hear about from sources outside the game, as far as I recall. I dunno, maybe there's a random townie or a tutorial NPC I'm forgetting who tells you, but I know this is a broader trend with the game.
SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Oh, so it's like the first time I played Dark Souls. The original, bad PC port, where I wasn't even able to find all my status screens without a guide.
I mean, the tutorial hallways in Dark Souls do tend to write down all the controls on the way to the first boss, and each menu screen itself has the menu controls written at the bottom of the menu. Unless you mean you were playing it with keyboard controls, in which case... yeah for some reason it all defaults to controller prompts which is absolutely stupid.
As for FFV, yeah it's still from that earlier age of JRPGs where there's a lot of obscure mechanics hidden behind being an SNES game. Things like stats being exclusively determined by your class instead of levels like in previous games, or the weight stat existing but not really telling you what it does (pretty sure it's just directly subtracted from your speed stat), the fact that actually one of your most important stats is your level because it's used in a ton of different calculations, and a lot of little equipment effects that aren't well explained. Also iirc this is the first FF game with an open "accessories" slot that has a bunch of different useful equipment you can slot in that can change things up entirely, ranging from "oh these spectacles make you immune to blind" to "when in doubt slap on elven cloaks for a 33% evasion chance".
I just figured it out. I guess I'm just the kind of guy who likes using ice weapons when I'm using ice spells, so it wasn't long before I noticed a difference.
- Location
- Canada, probably
Yeah, the game, as much as I love all the crunchy mechanics, is very Guide Dang It on how to actually use those mechanics.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I definitely did notice the difference once I was looking for it in a test today. The damage situation in my party right now is... Interesting.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Part of it at least, I suspect, is that that was the heyday of inbox game manuals with details about mechanics, weapons/items, and enemies. Not as much as the NES days, obviously, but still way more than even a decade later. Some, though not all, of the stuff left unexplained in game was because the manual was literally packaged with the game and so they didn't see a need for diegetic tutorials if they could stuff it in the manual without spoilers or running over page limits.
Even the GBA in-box manual, for instance, made once manuals had started to shrink a fair bit, gave a list of all the non-bonus dungeon jobs and what the first three job abilities learned do
Even the GBA in-box manual, for instance, made once manuals had started to shrink a fair bit, gave a list of all the non-bonus dungeon jobs and what the first three job abilities learned do
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SolipsistSerpent
Endlessly Devouring
Yes, Keyboard controls. Hence the problems. Some things I couldn't even tell what they were doing because the screens that told me what they did were completely unintuitive buttons to bring up.
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Yeah, more than fair then. I actually went and booted up DS1 before initially replying because I could have sworn it at least swapped out the prompts, but nope the keyboard controls don't actually show up on screen and damn if a bunch of them aren't incredibly unintuitive, who binds the pause menu to the End key?
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
Ah, the Karnak boat. A hellhole for newcomers, and even for veterans. It's just so... tiring.
Omi, I think you get to save without savepoints? Not quite an spoiler and not absolutely required at all, but after the next boss, immediately when you regain control, you might want to save. In case you want to... practice.
For those who already played or aren't/won't: the next section after the boss is a timed escape scene. You get 10 minutes to get to safety, time enough if you go straight to the exit. Thing is, there are plenty of chests with some goodies, but you keep finding random battles and chest ambushes. An interesting thing to do is steal from the wizard enemies a particular knife that inflicts Silence with almost 90% success. But the real prize though comes during the boss fight, which can tech you a very powerful Blue spell long before you find random enemies who also do it (about the second half of the game, and there's still a loooong way until that).
You can already imagine that trying to get everything there can be tight. And, at least in the GBA version that I can remember, you can't use the Thief sprint!
Omi, I think you get to save without savepoints? Not quite an spoiler and not absolutely required at all, but after the next boss, immediately when you regain control, you might want to save. In case you want to... practice.
For those who already played or aren't/won't: the next section after the boss is a timed escape scene. You get 10 minutes to get to safety, time enough if you go straight to the exit. Thing is, there are plenty of chests with some goodies, but you keep finding random battles and chest ambushes. An interesting thing to do is steal from the wizard enemies a particular knife that inflicts Silence with almost 90% success. But the real prize though comes during the boss fight, which can tech you a very powerful Blue spell long before you find random enemies who also do it (about the second half of the game, and there's still a loooong way until that).
You can already imagine that trying to get everything there can be tight. And, at least in the GBA version that I can remember, you can't use the Thief sprint!
Forego shields, elven bullfighter lifestyle 4ever.
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Luckily, some 80% of the treasure in the next section is just Elixirs guarded by time-wasting Gigases. So if you know where you're going, you can just beeline for the best loot like Main Gauche and Esuna and then bail on the castle.
Nah, the real fun is that each evasion chance is separate, so you stack the cloak with a shield and a couple other evasion boosters and suddenly you never have to worry about physical attacks ever again.
Cloak alone is still pretty great though, I tend to throw it on basically any class that doesn't have shield access or some specific accessory they want at the moment and it's saved my behind quite a few times.
- Location
- East Coast
It's the Tower of Druaga principle.
Right, video game history--Tower of Druaga is a Japanese Action-RPG that debuted in Japanese arcades in the 1980s, that was... well, very odd. This was a game where winning required you to do frequently random shit throughout the game so you got the right power-ups that let you beat the boss. And I mean random shit--utterly counter-intuitive stuff that you would only stumble on by trying literally everything on multiple playthroughs. It was an arcade hit, because in the 1980s Japanese arcade scene hanging out and swapping secrets was part of the point, and here was this thing where the entire point was to figure things out and pass them on. It was a massive success in Japan and essentially, the idea that a player would be part of a mass fandom that would be swapping secrets to figure out optimal playing strategies was part of Japanese video game culture for decades afterwards.
- Location
- Not your place of residence
That actually explains a few things…isn't that how the original Legend of Zelda was supposed to work? As in, a collaborative effort between a bunch of different people to figure out all the stuff the game only hinted at?
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Hard to say on an English-speaking forum, because for a lot of us which things the ingame hints are supposed to be openly clear on and which they're supposed to be vague gestures towards has always been opaque to us due to that pretty much being the first Japanese video game with meaningful amounts of text needing translation to English, with translation quality to match
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- Location
- East Coast
Would it astonish you that Druaga is a clear inspiration for Zelda right down to large amounts of the playstyle?
Morganite
Happiness is a large book.
- Location
- Dynamis - Firefly Alley
I like that they don't just have separate beds, but that there's more beds than there are party members. It makes the world feel more real when things don't always line up exactly with party convenience.
I think I can guess where this is going, and it's some bullshit. At least in the similar quest in Exit Fate, there's actually "training with different people to learn more things" involved, not some magical effect of playing on different pianos instead of spending more time on the same one.
... Wait, these pianos are in public, right? Maybe the point is that you can't get enough practice time on one piano before the townspeople recognize you and threaten to run you out if you keep trying to play, so that's why you need different pianos.
If wanting the random encounter screenshots is wrong, I don't want to be right.
Looks like a possible source of inspiration for FFXI's 'Gasponia Flower', which do much the same thing, except it's much less clear how close you can go without getting poisoned.
Oh, and those environmental hazard enemies in the Seekers of Adoulin expansion, which have the distinction of being enemies you can attack and kill. (It's just not usually worth it to do so.)
Hmmm. I don't remember, had that come up before in the series? Because that's one of the distinguishing traits of "actually a proper martial artist" classes in FFXI, that their hand to hand attacks hit twice, and now I'm wondering if it started here.
I'm not entirely sold on this. It doesn't feel like a lot of the spells time magic is getting have a very strong thematic connection to 'time'.
Invisible waist high fence! *shakes fist*
Seriously, it does not look like there should be anything in the environment stopping you from just grabbing it.
Ooookay, I could buy her not having seen Faris climbing up or something, but now the game is having us on. o.o
As the enemy in question was a tombstone, I choose to believe that's where Doomed come from.
I refuse to believe that a dragon is not an upgrade from an airship.
Shouldn't have called her a strumpet.
Huh. I thought this reveal was still further down the line.
Oooor... Lone Wolf *is* the Queen of Karnak turned into a monster by magic?
I don't think I even knew what vore *was* when I first saw this scene.
Those were good days.
-Morgan.
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Not exactly; higher levels meant more attacks due to I think increased attack stats 'rolling over' to extra attacks in earlier games (I, at least) and the martial artist class in that got a better scaling for extra attacks so you could be looking at 8 or 16 hits per attack in the endgame for them when your other guys are doing like 2 to 6.
Barely related, but I'm suddenly reminded of Wild Arms 3 where the airship equivalent is in fact a dragon. A giant mechanical dragon you have to fight for the right to fly around in, in fact.
Wild Arms 3 was great, I gotta replay it sometime.