Argath: "You, no less human than we? Ha! Now there's a beastly thought." Argath: "You've been less than we from the moment your baseborn father fell upon your mother in whatever gutter saw you sired!" Argath: "You've been chattel since you came into this world drenched in common blood!" Milleuda: "By whose decree!? Who decides such foul and absurd things?" Argath: "'Tis heaven's will!" Milleuda: "Heaven's will? You would pin your bigotry on the gods? No god would fain forgive such sin, much less embrace it! All men are equal in the eyes of the gods!" Argath: "Men, yes. But the gods have no eyes for chattel." Milleuda: "You speak of devils, not gods!"
Actually, is this where Delita picked up his "blame God"? Like, it's the same attitude: Argath here justifies the accident of birth as divine order, and Delita follows with "and therefore your downfall is also divinely ordained".
Is Argath such a piece of shit that he's kickstarted what I assume would be the main emotional conflict of the game?
I feel it tracks: we should blame Argath for everything.
So he's not wrong here. Argath helps you for this mission, and then leaves, just as he says. His alienating everyone else in the group and getting vote-kicked out of the party is entirely a coincidence, and need not be listed on his resume.
I went into much more comprehensive detail of the progressive evolution of this battle, the detailed blow-by-blow, than I did in previous updates, I think - tell me if this works for you?
The actual nitty gritty I don't particularly care for, but your thoughts about why you're doing X are great. On balance, I like it!
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Argath really is an asshole. I've beaten this game like six or seven times and yet it somehow always catches me a little off guard how much of a dickhead that blonde putz is.
Oooh! Chance to share some interesting linguistic trivia!
Whelmed and overwhelmed are synonyms in the flammable inflammable mold.
Whelmed means to be flipped or turned over, and was used as we use overwhelmed. Overwhelmed evolved as an exaggerated version of whelmed, and underwhelmed later evolved as an antonym for overwhelmed after the original meaning of whelmed had faded.
Oooh! Chance to share some interesting linguistic trivia!
Whelmed and overwhelmed are synonyms in the flammable inflammable mold.
Whelmed means to be flipped or turned over, and was used as we use overwhelmed. Overwhelmed evolved as an exaggerated version of whelmed, and underwhelmed later evolved as an antonym for overwhelmed after the original meaning of whelmed had faded.
Less 'flipped' and more 'covered over or cast upon'. Waves splashing over the deck of your boat are 'whelms'. To be 'overwhelmed' then is to be swamped by such waves.
I went into much more comprehensive detail of the progressive evolution of this battle, the detailed blow-by-blow, than I did in previous updates, I think - tell me if this works for you? I don't want to get the Let's Play bogged down into overly detailed mechanical stuff that goes over people's heads if they don't enjoy that, but the battles are the core of Tactics and I enjoy breaking them down into little narratives, trying to see what went wrong and what I did right. Give me your thoughts.
I liked it! Tactics is, structurally, a very different game from the other Final Fantasies we've played so far, and battles are much more central and in depth - I think it makes a lot of sense to dive into them a bit more than we might fights from other games. Especially without overworld scenes or peasants to talk to, by necessity the fights will take up more narrative space. Plus, I also enjoy picking apart fights after the fact.
Like this one - I find that it always looks like it'll go a lot smoother than it does. Enemies in a house with chokepoints you can funnel them through, but it can very quickly become much more chaotic, with them breaking through a frontline and fights turning into a scrum in the fields outside.
It also features one of my greatest weaknesses - parties are pretty small in this game, and so it makes sense to specialize roles for them, especially early on when you don't have a ton of jobs available to glue together. As such, I usually wind up with a primary healer, and when the game splits up parties like this I'm forced to make decisions like "who actually gets the guy that can heal?" Or who gets a Blage, who gets my best frontline fighters, and so on. Without some redundancy it can get me in some awkward situations.
Milleuda: "How can you nobles live as you do and yet hold your heads so high?" Milleuda: "We are not chattel! We are humans, no less than you!" Milleuda: "What flaw do you hold there to be in us? That we were born between a different set of walls?" Milleuda: "Do you know what it means to hunger? To sup for months on broth of bean? Why must we be made to starve that you might grow fat? You call us thieves, but it is you who steal from us the right to live!"
I deeply love these mid-fight conversations, there's a tone you get to them, with the participants yelling at each other over the sound of the rain and the din of battle, thar you just don't quite get with a post-battle conversation.
It also makes me thing that some of Argath's vitriol here is coming from the adrenaline of the fight, sapping away what little self-control he might have. Because like, his previous statements were bad, but what he pulled during the fight was something else.
Genuinely funny that Milleuda followed it up by immediately running him through though.
Man, Argath, though. Imagine being such a psycho turboracist that you manage to awaken Delita's class consciousness, a man who has been entirely happy to go "me and my aristo BFF ride or die, ten million dead corpse brigade #suckstosucks #hatersgonnahate" up to this point.
Argath - secret hero of the revolution by being a walking advertisement for why the nobility deserve to be stabbed? Because yeah Delita has been ride or die with Ramza, but between Milleuda's calls for action, Argath's response, and Ramza's inaction, he might be thinking about what exactly his place in things here is?
What an effective raid, though. A mere handful of men struck at the heart of the Beoulve estate, killed five knights, injured the head of the family, and made off with a hostage. What a slap in the face!
What gets me about this is that it's basically the kind of raid the party would do! A handful of men fighting five or so guys at a fortified location, before accomplishing their objective and getting the heck out of dodge.
It might just be me, but it helps make them feel as threatening and proactive as our party - they aren't just waiting to die, but are fully capable of making the same kind of raids we're doing right now, and succeeding.
It also does cast doubt upon the Northern Sky's military readiness in the wake of the war - they've made a show of systematically hunting the Corpse Brigade down up until now, but either the Brigade's numbers and skill are greater than they anticipated, or the knights' numbers are less than they'd like to appear. And after all, it certainly would be strange to have a fully staffed knightly order when the game opens with such widespread societal breakdown.
If nothing else, it gives the sense of a region at a tipping point, where something big will be happening soon, even without sinister plotting behind closed doors.
Question for the history buffs - Argath's views on the lower class were not the norms of the equivalent historical period, yeah? Like, even if they're serfs, they are still human, not animals?
...Are they serfs, or free peasants? Do the game talk about this?
Question for the history buffs - Argath's views on the lower class were not the norms of the equivalent historical period, yeah? Like, even if they're serfs, they are still human, not animals?
...Are they serfs, or free peasants? Do the game talk about this?
TBF, I don't think it's his position, either. He's flinging insults here. His actual position is probably closer to "it's right and proper for commoners to be subservient to their betters, otherwise they wouldn't be born commoners, so how dare she talk about equality and fairness? If anything, it's not fair that I'm in position to interact with her instead of having people to do that for me. I shall inform her of that by calling her an animal."
That's a lot more in line with IRL noble attitudes.
Question for the history buffs - Argath's views on the lower class were not the norms of the equivalent historical period, yeah? Like, even if they're serfs, they are still human, not animals?
...Are they serfs, or free peasants? Do the game talk about this?
Based on what little I know, Argath's views are like how centrists will be embarrassed of the uncle who gets mask off about minorities at family dinners once he has a drink but never actually do anything beyond ask him not to say it out loud. So... no, he's just a lot louder about the status quo than his peers would like. Conditions for serfs varied across places and times but the general trend was for the aristocracy to erode the legal protections afforded to serfs whenever they could as time went on, so it was quite normal for aristocrats to take a dim view of the fundamental rights of serfs.
Yeah, Argath seems to be suffering from a severe case of saying the quiet part out loud. The other nobles might not necessarily disagree with him, but he's being so improper about it.
Also, let's not forget, the Christian church was very vocal about every soul that prayed to them being a right and proper human deserving of the grace of God (everybody who did not, of course, being heathen sinners deserving only of death), since the more people followed the Church, the more power it had, and it was very easy for the Church to cause a lot of problems for the nobles by inciting the commoners to action. So, trying to exclude people from the Church's protection, while certainly something many nobles would do gladly whenever they could get away with it, wasn't really something to ever say out loud - that's the road to making the Church your enemy, and nobody wanted that.
So, yeah, overall Algus is being extremely mask off about something that would not have been said so openly; you can see how Dycedarg is all about "being an example to our subordinates", which does implies that the nobles are superior. Plus, there's nobles like Ramza who actually do believe in the "our being nobles doesn't mean treating people badly", and you don't want to alienate those, either. Algus is over the line in that, while most nobles would agree with him in private, they'd not say that out loud. Of course, Algus has his own complex - he needs to say it out loud to prove to everybody (but mostly to himself) that he is, in fact, part of the nobility in how he views the world.
Question for the history buffs - Argath's views on the lower class were not the norms of the equivalent historical period, yeah? Like, even if they're serfs, they are still human, not animals?
...Are they serfs, or free peasants? Do the game talk about this?
Ah, Milleuda. Here's a character I'm not going to forget anytime soon, not with how she handed me first defeat in both FFT way back in the days and more recently in FF14.
Pro tip for anyone who want to start playing FF14, trying to do the Adventures in Throat Slitting FATE quest with level 15 gears and no chocobo back up is a death sentence, even as a Tank.
As others have said 'it is the will of God that you were born a peasant, and I a noble, and that means you are innately and deservingly my lesser and I am innately and deservingly better than you' was very literally the principal worldview for most European nobles, historically. And they genuinely believed it, remember, not merely gave it lip-service to secure their own power; this is likely part of why things like the Magna Carta didn't depose the King, despite them having him by the balls. They genuinely believed he was chosen by God to rule over the country - and them - and so they pushed for concessions but didn't actually get rid of him.
Also I don't think I've ever played a TRPG where the low-probability cool effects were worth using over the boring but certain 'kill a motherfucker' attacks.
Also also was this raid on the Beoulves a) a Dycedarg plot, b) a Larg plot, or c) actually a totally organic move? Could go any way, so far as I can tell. Though the home castle of one of a war-torn nation's most prominent warrior-aristocrats being punked by a handful of starving peasants - they shouldn't have even made it to the gatehouse - doesn't make it seem like c is particularly likely.
I went into much more comprehensive detail of the progressive evolution of this battle, the detailed blow-by-blow, than I did in previous updates, I think - tell me if this works for you? I don't want to get the Let's Play bogged down into overly detailed mechanical stuff that goes over people's heads if they don't enjoy that, but the battles are the core of Tactics and I enjoy breaking them down into little narratives, trying to see what went wrong and what I did right. Give me your thoughts.
I think the level of blow by blow works quite well. You don't get bogged down in relaying literally every move per se, but you do give a good sense of the actual events. From experience it's a bit easy to sorta find yourself going 'I move here and then attack like this' and taking a gazillion words and screenshots to convey like, two seconds of gameplay/player decisions, but what you're doing works fine.
Richard II speech to the Peasants at Waltham said:
You wretches detestable on land and sea: you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were, and rustics you are still; you will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as we live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal. Choose now which course you want to follow.
Also I don't think I've ever played a TRPG where the low-probability cool effects were worth using over the boring but certain 'kill a motherfucker' attacks.
Sleep and Charm are worth using in Tactics Ogre... because it has a mechanic that allows you to turn back time to any given turn and try different things. So if a spell whiffed, you could simply go back and have the mage cast a damage spell instead (you can't turn a failure into a success, though: if a spell failed on a given turn, it will always fail unless you go back farther still and change some other stuff).
Probably more like "Regain your strength!", but I'm no translator. I have seen 力 translated as strength before though.
As to the format, I'm enjoying the battle descriptions so far, but I have a feeling they'll get a little tedious toward the middle. I quit this game pretty early because I didn't like the facing system and I stepped on too many rakes, but anything with this many battles is likely to have some pacing issues.
Despite never playing FFT itself, I've read a few fanfics in that setting, and it's becoming steadily stranger to me how many of those just had "put down the Corpse Brigade rebellion more cleanly/quickly" as an unalloyed good, almost a side-note in their fixfic narrative. These people are the real heroes, and have thus far done literally nothing wrong. Milleuda best girl.
Despite never playing FFT itself, I've read a few fanfics in that setting, and it's becoming steadily stranger to me how many of those just had "put down the Corpse Brigade rebellion more cleanly/quickly" as an unalloyed good, almost a side-note in their fixfic narrative. These people are the real heroes, and have thus far done literally nothing wrong.
The fanfics I read made it pretty clear that kidnapping random aristocrats for ransom (with, apparently, the idea to leave with the cash and abandon the rest of the Brigade) is not supposed to be a good thing.
