This is a place of honor. Many higly esteemed deeds are commemorated here. Much valued is here.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
This is a place of honor. Many higly esteemed deeds are commemorated here. Much valued is here.
ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
Squall after breaking open the funny blue light looking for goodies:
deadcrystal
Slaaneshi Cultist
- Location
- The Warp
Well, actually...
Because you did the steam puzzle wrong
IIRC when you were in the ruin area there was steam seeping out of cracks in the floor. This is a sign you did the puzzle wrong by cheating with Zell, and thus you get the fixed encounters.
- Location
- Pennsylvania
What's funny with that CRT filter is that while CRTs were definitely the lowest common denominator, LCDs were starting to appear for consumers by the time of FF8's PC release. There's a good chance that a few gamers of the time didn't even play some of these ports on a CRT and saw raw pixels for the first time.
I'm also not really a fan of scanline filters but I understand why people like them; the filter replicates how people originally played them.
I'm also not really a fan of scanline filters but I understand why people like them; the filter replicates how people originally played them.
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- Location
- Land of the Midday Sun
Since you got Bahamut, I'll expand upon what the Rare Item ability does, because it's not immediate.
So, each enemy has a % chance to drop something after being defeated if they're not Mugged during the fight. What can be dropped depends on the enemy and on the level of the enemy. The drops are organized in 4 (slots 0, 1, 2, 3 internally) slots, each with a fixed % chance of being selected: Slot 0 has a 69.53% (178/256) chance, Slot 1 is 19.92% (51/256), Slot 2 is 5.85% (15/256) and Slot 3 is 4.68% (12/256). This is the distribution without Rare Items in the mix. Often the rare items are in slot 2-3, and sometimes the only difference is that higher slots have more of an item to drop.
What Rare Items does and why the name is misleading is altering the chances for every slot, setting them to: Slot 0 to 50% (128/256), Slot 1 to 44.53% (114/256), Slot 2 to 5.46% (14/256) and Slot 3 to 0% (0/256).
As example, let's use a enemy you know well: the Malboro.
Level 30+ Malboros drop items 99% of the time when defeated, and the slots are organized like this:
| Drop Table, normal | |
|---|---|
| Slot 0 (69.53%) | Malboro Tentacle x8 |
| Slot 1 (19.92%) | Curse Spike x10 |
| Slot 2 (5.85%) | Hypnocrown x1 |
| Slot 3 (4.68%) | Hypnocrown x2 |
With Rare Items equipped the drop table changes to this:
| Drop Table, with Rare Items | |
|---|---|
| Slot 0 (50%) | Malboro Tentacle x8 |
| Slot 1 (44.53%) | Curse Spike x10 |
| Slot 2 (5.46%) | Hypnocrown x1 |
| Slot 3 (0%) | Hypnocrown x2 |
What come out is that the ability works well if you need "rare" (slot 1) drops from enemies, at the cost of the actual rare drops in slot 2 and 3.
Now, sometimes this can be useful, @Egleris has posted some examples before, and from the example here Malboros become a somewhat realiable way to farm Curse Spikes, though not the best.
Mugging works off similar mechanics: when you Mug an enemy you have a % chance to get an item, and if you get an item the game chooses from one of 4 slots with the same weights as the drop table. Each enemy has its own Mug slots, which can be the same items dropped or could be different.
To use the Malboro (Mug chance 25%) again as example:
| Mug Table, normal | |
|---|---|
| Slot 0 (69.53%) | Malboro Tentacle x2 |
| Slot 1 (19.92%) | Malboro Tentacle x2 |
| Slot 2 (5.85%) | Malboro Tentacle x4 |
| Slot 3 (4.68%) | Malboro Tentacle x4 |
Rare Items does also alter the Mug tables, with the same altered chances. So for Malboros the Mug table becomes:
| Mug Table, with Rare Items | |
|---|---|
| Slot 0 (50%) | Malboro Tentacle x2 |
| Slot 1 (44.53%) | Malboro Tentacle x2 |
| Slot 2 (5.46%) | Malboro Tentacle x4 |
| Slot 3 (0%) | Malboro Tentacle x4 |
In general, due to how Mug slots are set, Rare Items has less on an impact on Mug than it does on drops: a lot of enemis have the same item in the whole Mug table, only differing in quantitiy, and some have just the same exact entry for the whole Mug table.
The biggest case where you don't want Rare Items is if you want to Mug Blitzes for a Power Generator, since it's a Slot 3 Mug and Rare Items makes so yu'll never see it. You shouldn't care about this case, you already got one from the Lunatic Pandora and it refines in items you can get more easily in other ways.
This came out a lot longer than I tought. Still the ability is misleading and it touches mechanics that aren't explained in the slightest, so it's needed. Mug works among smilar lines, so at this point an explanation was in order. And hey, Bahamut has Mug too.
Revlid
blob of bugs
- Location
- England
My feelings toward CRT are ambivalent, but I think this image was the best illustration of the argument for me:
(source: RetroTINK5x)
I don't know which of these I actually prefer, and I think it would depend on the game, but it definitely demonstrates that there is a meaningful difference between them as mediums that isn't just pining for old games. I'm not going to go so far as to compare it to playing Simpsons episodes at the wrong aspect ratio or "fixing" the colour grading on old films, but there's definitely an effect that some of these older games (probably the better looking ones) were deliberately aiming for, and lose when the original medium is "corrected".
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- Location
- Columbus, OH
That Eden GF reminded me - I've been playing the Pathfinder 2e RPG lately, and last session I was one-shot by a spell called Phantasmal Calamity. Mechanically it's just Mental Prison from D&D, but it's described as, "A vision of apocalyptic destruction fills the mind of each creature in the area." The campaign I'm playing has to do with the dungeons underneath a fortress-lighthouse called the Gauntlight. The vision that left me foaming from the mouth on the ground from full health was of the Gauntlight shooting some kind of laser at the capital city which partly blew it up but mostly left behind a bunch of monsters. Anyway it was the most high-level Final Fantasy thing to ever happen to me in another game.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
we touched briefly on Magic the Gathering in an earlier discussion in this thread so i just wanna say that if Wizards of the Coast released a new kind of booster pack labeled "Rare Boosters" and what was actually going on was that these booster packs had twice as many uncommons but half as many rares and no mythic rares, their executives would be crucified in the public square by a rabid mob tomorrow
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
That's absolutely fair, but in defense of FFVIII, most of the times the rarest thing in the drop list is superfluous, and the second slot holds the one item that you would want to make a more frequent drop, unless you wanted the common drop in the first place, in which case you'd never equip the ability at all, whether it was called "Rare Drops" or "Uncommon Drops" or anything else similar.
To remain in the example of the Marlboro, HypnoCrown can be bought at the Esthar Pet Shop once you unlock Tomberri's "Familiar" ability; however, no way exists to buy Curse Spikes, and they're the important item (the one that refines into Pain spell and can be refined into Dark Matter once you have 100 of them), which is made easier to obtain. Meanwhile, the Ruby Dragon's common drop is 2x Fury Fragment, while the rarest of drops is ...4x Fury Fragment; sacrificing that to increase the 2x Energy Crystal drop rate from 19% to 45% is a clear win, in my eyes, but even if it wasn't, that just mean you want more of the common drop, so wouldn't be equipping something called "Rare Items" in the first place.
Now, of course all of this only makes sense if you already have encyclopedic knowledge of everything the monsters will be dropping, so I can see the argument for a random player "screwing themselves over" by equipping the ability and removing the chance to get certain items, but in this hypotetic scenario, the player doesn't know that certain monster drop certain things and isn't farming for item, so does it even matter? Any player that is aiming for specific items will look it up and know how "Rare Items" can benefit them, if at all, and just leave it off when it'd be detrimental.
Given this, I think the ability isn't really that bad - it's just the knee-jerk reaction to an explanation of its functioning that make people dismiss it.
Wiadi
Uncompromising Radical Leftist
- Location
- Something Clever
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I mean, that might work well enough now, but at the time of the game's original release that would've been much less of a thing - you could easily have a player concluding that a particular drop is "rare" just based on infrequently seeing it while killing a monster a bunch, while not realizing it's the wrong kind of rare for that ability to help.
somewhatLazy
Serial Procrastinator
- Location
- lurking
There's a hidden save point that you can use if you have Siren's move-find ability equipped. Other than that, no bueno.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
From what I've heard, how much old games actually took advantage of how CRT scanlines affected pixel art depends on the game. Some did, some didn't. Edit: There's a video I watched that went more into this, but I'm having trouble finding it
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Dybbukpossesed
Falling Somewhere
- Location
- California
... They hid a save point. Something for the express purpose of reducing player frustration. Behind an optional ability the player may not have... Who the hell thought that was a good idea?
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
An immense amount of stuff in FF8 seems to be driven by the desire to have hidden content for the sake of having hidden content.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
It's hardly even in the top twenty most important hidden things in FFVIII; and at this point there have been so many hidden Save Points in the game this one barely register, to be honest.
Note also how the save point is actually visible in Omicron's screenshot of the area - that's because at this point keeping the reveal ability always on is second nature for most players, since it also shows hidden Draw Points.
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- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Though notably the hidden draw points are still usable if you know where they are. The hidden save points, however, are not.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You basically need to remember that Move-Find needs to be always on at all times and if you think you've found a clever Ability combo that's worth not having Move-Find on for like one boss fight, no you don't, first of all that's a lie, second of all you'll forget to put Move-Find back on once that fight is done, you plug in Move-Find once, when you get it, and then you never touch it again.
The problem isn't that it's technically easy to catch, it's the fact that someone seriously went "yeah just put an invisible save point that requires a potentially missable ability (remember you only get Move-Find from Siren, which was an optional Draw from a boss 30 hours ago and that's it) right at the end of a high level endgame dungeon next to an optional superboss". It's some pretty ass game design even for the year 1999, let alone being played in 2024, there's really not much defending it.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Very much so, yeah. The thing was that it was the end of the 90s, and while we knew better, the Internet wasn't much of a thing yet, but games were starting to hit a stride of public acceptance and market penetration. We didn't have DLC and abusive microtransactions yet, but there was still a feeling like game makers should be able to extract extra money from dedicated fans. Various levels of "get the expensive guidebook or flail around" were experimented with.
The weird part is that there was a cohort who thought that this was charming, that they felt that they were enjoying the game more and better because it came with whole make-work classes for documenting and decoding these sorts of gameplay decisions, with or without the book. Myst and Riven may be one of the most famous ones for making people learn whole conlangs from scraps as they went, but they weren't unique, just the 'winners'. Rather than just play the game, people would either get the guides (preferably more than one guide, because an awful lot of them weren't comprehensive and/or reliable) or they'd have a notebook with complicated and silly notes about understanding underdocumented game elements.
It's not that they didn't know better. It's that there was a heady thing in the air where it felt like we should experiment and maybe we can make a super cool something by doing enough bad things in the right order that they cancel out to make an amazing experience. And it did work a fair amount for a fair amount of people—just look at how many of us here have played some amount of FF8, with some people talking about multiple playthroughs.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
so let me tell you about obel lake
- Pronouns
- Him/He
I am very excited for Obel Lake!
Even after 'mastering' the game as I knew it several times, this thread has still informed me of stuff I just flat out didn't know, like the super hard fights being optional based on if you cheated with Zell, or other interactions. It'd be interesting to see if there was something else I missed.
Speaking of missing stuff, why not go back to Dollet and check out the communication tower? There's not really a mechanical reward, but it might be a good pallet cleanser.
Even after 'mastering' the game as I knew it several times, this thread has still informed me of stuff I just flat out didn't know, like the super hard fights being optional based on if you cheated with Zell, or other interactions. It'd be interesting to see if there was something else I missed.
Speaking of missing stuff, why not go back to Dollet and check out the communication tower? There's not really a mechanical reward, but it might be a good pallet cleanser.
Eden primary use is that its animation is so long you can easily Boost its damage to the maximum.
On another note, did anyone else here basically use nothing but summons to fight from start to finish ? I remember I barely engaged with Junctioning because I'd just attack with GFs every turns the first time I played the game.
On another note, did anyone else here basically use nothing but summons to fight from start to finish ? I remember I barely engaged with Junctioning because I'd just attack with GFs every turns the first time I played the game.
- Location
- SV's Only Complete Persona Quest
- Pronouns
- She/Her
From memory, spamming summons was how I first played the game. Then I got to grips with Junctioning and felt I mostly didn't need summons in-battle anymore, aside from maybe the really strong ones.
I've heard overusing summons can lower your SeeD Rank and thus income, but I can't remember seeing that for myself
- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Tbf SeeD rank is pretty pointless past the early game, you don't spend that much money unless you're grinding out stat boost items, and by that point you have the infinite money trick available.