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I don't remember AC very well, but maybe a puddle of goo was all that was left of Jenova after Cloud & Co. cast Knights of the Round on her a few times.
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Apr 22, 2014 18:14
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Two Finger posted:Is it worth mentioning that Jenova also has a lot of parallels with Stephen King's IT? Missed opportunity in Advent Children to have Jenova played by Tim Curry.
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May 1, 2014 04:56
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Silegna posted:Okay, I was wrong, the grunts are NOT infused with Mako, but I learned something interesting, ALL SOLDIERs, are infused with a cocktail of Mako, and Jenova Cells, which makes me question why the 1st Class SOLDIERs that you face are so weak. I think all SOLDIERs getting Jenova cells was a retcon in Advent Children, as far as I can tell. I think in the base game, SOLDIERs were all exposed to Mako, but only very few had Jenova cells (i.e. Sephiroth, and later Zack and Cloud. Maybe a few other 1st Class SOLDIERs). Because yeah, it frankly doesn't make a whole lot of sense for every SOLDIER to have them- pretty sure we run into SOLDIERs during and after the reunion, so they all would've been "called" up to the Northern Crater, possibly as shambling hooded and numbered test subjects.
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May 3, 2014 20:38
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Two Finger posted:Yeah, that way of looking at it makes sense, but to me the way he says first 'NORMAL members of Soldier...' always gave me the impression that he's saying 'you are different from normal members of Soldier.' I got the impression he was saying "Normal" to differentiate other members of SOLDIER from, well, himself. I think at that point he already suspected he was different, and perhaps not altogether human. Or perhaps, "normal" is meant to differentiate most members of SOLDIER from the 1st Class types, which are more likely to get additional "treatment" (which they probably don't fully understand; I doubt 1st Class SOLDIERs knew they were getting infused with alien cells).
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May 4, 2014 01:51
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Hmm, looks like I was totally wrong on the SOLDIER/Jenova thing! But I thought the whole idea of the Sephiroth "clones" is Hojo was looking for a way to mass-produce soldiers with power similar to Sephiroth's, without that whole "needing a willing pregnant lady and waiting for the child to be born and grow up" thing. So he was just grabbing random test subjects and shooting them up with cells. But if that's the case, what is the difference between the "clones" and every single member of SOLDIER? It sounds like they already had a pretty reliable method to buff up their soldiers if every member of SOLDIER has gone through the same process.
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May 4, 2014 19:39
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Well considering the best offense for the majority of the game is the Enemy Skill materia, which is magic, that makes Vincent pretty good. Also, Enemy skill doesn't lower Strength, so it doesn't lower his effectiveness with Deathblow either. He's really quite good. Also, I think RPG gamers tend to exaggerate how easy it is to hit the damage cap near the end of the game. You really don't start bumping your head on the damage cap (short of something like Knights of the Round) until very late game (like, final dungeon late) unless you've been doing excessive grinding.
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May 4, 2014 22:00
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CmdrKing posted:3) Wutai (Optional. Also Vincent is not top three material without materia about.) At the very least I disagree with this. If you do Wutai as soon as you get the Tiny Bronco, the enemies hit like trucks. It is a complete lifesaver to have a character who can do full damage from the back row. So that's Barret and Vincent. Besides, if you're smart you'll probably take on the worst enemies using offensive items, which if I recall are either stat-independent or run on magic (either way, Vincent is doing OK). Also, his limit is pretty great in that area- doubling HP and getting party-wide attacks when you have no materia is really nice. Also, I never found Tifa that great. I guess if you're all about the Power Soul and putting statuses on her she's good, but I never found it worth the bother to jump through the hoops. Plus, I tend to suck at slots in games, so her limit breaks would suck.
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May 5, 2014 03:11
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Barudak posted:Adds challenge? The new classes in IZJS are so insanely more powerful than their ilk in vanilla and there is no damage cap. I killed the final boss before his first paling even went into effect and I didn't have a single non-plot Esper. Heh, the "I didn't have a single non-plot Esper" may have contributed to him dying easily. The Final Boss apparently scales in power to how many Espers you've unlocked, so if you just got the mandatory ones he'd be at his weakest. XII really does seem to be a love-or-hate it entry. I'd say the battle system is my favorite in the entire series. For trash mobs the battles go extremely quickly, so just telling my leader to steal tends to distract me until the enemies are all dead while I explore the huge environments, with seamless fighting and exploration. Marks and bosses, if you take them on early enough, go through behavior changes that can make the fights pretty frantic, even with a good gambit setup. I spent a lot of time personally controlling the actions of different party members when, at the moment, you want to skip healing or buffing and concentrate on damage, or vice versa. Your strategy can change with the flow of hard battles. But I can see it becoming very boring if you're leveled enough where you don't have to do any of that. But HEY, this is a FF7 thread! So why DIDN'T Cloud get a number if he was one of Hojo's test subjects? Seems like Hojo's tests would get muddled if he only tattooed SOME of the dudes he was injecting with Jenova cells.
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May 5, 2014 17:42
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idonotlikepeas posted:Because each fight should present unique challenges, so writing a script capable of handling every fight would have to allow you to say something like this: I don't understand these sort of arguments from menu-based RPG fans. People say they'd rather put in every command themselves than have anything automated, but if it can be automated it's too boring to include at all. So... you wish RPGs just didn't have any battles? Those are called visual novels. And with almost every RPG, you're going to have some simple command priority structure you use, even if it's just "Revive dead characters. If doing nothing else, then attack." XII lets you automate as much or as little as you like. There's really no difference between using "Wait" mode to freeze battles and input commands than there is with the older FF games where you wait for turns to come up to enter commands. And FFXII is actually designed so you can't coast along on a few sets of gambits. You run into enemies that use different attacks and are vulnerable to different things, forcing you to change up your gambits if you want to do them efficiently. This is especially true of bosses and marks. It's clear that's what they were going for with the physical and magical invincibility barriers (which don't actually come up in that many fights, despite the endless whining people do about them), so you couldn't JUST rely on physical attacks or JUST rely on spells, or so that you're forced to switch from offense to defense, etc. But people complain if battles can be handled by a few gambit routines, and complain even harder if they have to adjust their strategy apparently. At any rate, the game has a stronger focus on uninterrupted gaming than the other entries. You get to explore big environments and decide how to approach battles. The battles begin and end very quickly, with no transitions and victory screens. The strategy lies more in selecting a good set of general-purpose gambits for an area and then being able to play uninterrupted than the "strategy" of going "Oh, a goblin! I'm going to use Ice!" for every single goblin in the area. Schwartzcough fucked around with this message at 01:07 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 01:04
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idonotlikepeas posted:Yeah, I disagree with this stuff. I think it's mostly a matter of more recent Final Fantasies, which genuinely do have this problem, obscuring the older ones. Final Fantasy IV didn't dick around with enemies, especially if you played the non-easytype version. Conditions were a huge help. FFVI had some genuinely hard parts until you noticed the bugs and exploitable stuff. (See also: offering + genji glove combo.) In general, if you can get through an RPG by just mashing the X button to fight, it's badly balanced or else you spent a lot of time up front grinding. Using FFVI as an example of "hard" is really stretching. That game is easy even without using any of the bugs or "exploitable stuff" (unless you count "blitzes" and "magic" as exploitable stuff). Also, how is this resource argument any different for XII? You can eventually unlock augments to get some MP back for various things, but it almost never evens out with how much MP you're spending in real fights. Almost all serious bosses and marks end up with at least one or two characters struggling for MP. idonotlikepeas posted:With enough resources, any game can be automated. Take a look at all the things people do with "tool-assisted" speedruns. The type of game doesn't even matter. People have raised automating things like Super Mario to an art form. Er, tool-assisted speed runs aren't "automated." They allow a player to advance the game frame-by-frame to make split-second perfect moves and responses. It's not like a computer is just playing it on its own. (Edit- ok, I concede that sometimes programs are used to get computers to simply try all button presses looking for an optimal result, but those are relatively rare). And similarly here, it's not like you turn the game on and watch it go- YOU have to specifically direct your team what to do. How well or poorly you do is based on your own planning and coordination. There's typically plenty for you to do manually during harder fights, and even easier fights tend to have things for you to do manually. You could say that was an advantage of having gambits slowly doled out- it makes you do some things manually. But personally I (and it seems most people, based on how people don't like the gambits being parceled out in the vanilla game) actually enjoy setting up good strategies and having things go pretty smoothly without having to cast spells all the time yourself. idonotlikepeas posted:There are a couple of very important differences. First, the game is designed around the idea that you're using gambits, so the majority of the battles are boring as hell. The game doesn't expect you to actually play them, so why spend the effort making them interesting? And you have to do a ton of them, too, assuming you want to do any of the "collect ten foozle pelt" things you're continually peppered with. There are only a handful of genuinely interesting fights. Second, you can only control one character at a time and their actions never, ever synch up exactly, even when using wait mode. If you don't set up at least some basic gambits, whoever you're not controlling sits around with their thumb up their rear end with a cactus man shooting needles into them until you switch over and tell them to hit him, which makes the already-boring battles draw out unmercifully. The game is pretty clear with you that they want you to use gambits and if you aren't, you're doing it wrong. Which makes it a false choice; if you hate gambits, you're just not going to have a lot of fun playing twelve. But there aren't any "collect 10 foozle pelt" quests? There's the bazaar, which has completely optional things that by and large don't take a lot of grinding- it's designed so that you can get good stuff really early if you know where to hunt for rare materials, or those materials will be readily available later on when the equipment isn't as impressive. It has some late-game items that can be harder to get, but that's not really any different from collecting pink tails or economizers or whatever in previous games. And see, you say "it's designed around gambits, so the battles are boring as hell. You're not expected to play them", but honestly, what really separates inputting commands for the characters for each battle from battles in previous FF games? I don't think the average monster takes any more attacks to kill. You can only control one character at a time, true- but how is that different from previous games? You could only input commands for one character at a time. ATB bars filling up didn't conveniently time themselves to "synch up exactly" in previous games- if somebody's bar filled when you where controlling another character, they just had to sit and wait for you to get to them. I think gambits just show you how fast battles CAN go if you pre-program your battle plan ahead of time, and suddenly controlling one character at a time, command by command (like the old games!) feels slow and awkward. Because they WERE. I think I had more fun with the battles in XII than any other game in the series, so I guess tastes just differ. Schwartzcough fucked around with this message at 08:19 on May 6, 2014 |
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May 6, 2014 07:55
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I would definitely recommend people set the battle speed to max in XII, or it can feel slow. And again, it feels slower in the beginning when you only have one or two characters at their lowest speeds, but things start feeling much faster pretty soon.idonotlikepeas posted:What really separates them is that in the older final fantasies, desynchronization isn't generally working against you. How about this: in a turn-based game, the turns are happening sequentially and you're controlling them sequentially. In a real-time game, the turns are happening simultaneously but you can't control them simultaneously. It is physically impossible to do that. It is totally different because of basic facts about human physiology and the nature of controllers. That's what necessitates things like the gambit system, because you need to have something telling party members B and C what to do while your attention is devoted to A, otherwise they aren't contributing to the fight at all. In a turn-based game, they are always contributing to the fight to the maximum extent that they can, because they only have the option of doing so when it's their turn, and everything is balanced around that. They could partially solve this by making attacks take so long that effectively you're never in a position to give orders to more than one person at a time (which is a pretty common solution to that problem, and there are certain occasions where it felt that way in FF12, for sure), but even then the monsters aren't playing by those rules; they'll just attack you whenever they feel like it, sometimes all at the same time. If you want to boil the difference down to one word, it's simultaneity. I have yet to see anyone solve this problem for tactical team-based combat in a reasonable way, although I'd be very interested to see it done. FF hasn't been "turn based" since the NES. Ever since the advent of the ATB system, action bars are constantly filling for everyone, and they may not synchronize, and three people may get their turns at the same time. Using "Wait" makes the bars pause while you're in menus, but otherwise that's how it works. "Wait" in FFXII means everything pauses when you pull up the menu; it's even more lenient than Wait in previous games, since you can stop everything at any point. You can give commands to each of your party members in a fraction of a "real time" second. In fact, XII is the most accommodating in the series on entering commands, since you can pull up the menus at any time, and even even interrupt a charging action to start a new action. Or you can give them their next command while they're performing their current attack animation. But I'm sure everyone is sick of hearing about FFXII, so I'll leave it at that.
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May 6, 2014 18:32
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suicidesteve posted:I got really close in 12. I had gotten that stupid spear and everything. I got right to the end of the game and decided to go the side quests. So I went to start one of the last hunts, but it wouldn't let me start because I needed some number of item X (I think it was like, a red feather or something? - it was dropped by an earlier mark, a wurm or something in the desert, and wasn't something you could get more of.) I can't think of any mark that you can get locked out of, and the only semi-useful quest item you can sell is to just get a slightly better quest reward in a mid/early game quest (a snakeskin). I guess that may bother you if you are trying to get a "perfect" game file, but it's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.
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May 7, 2014 17:31
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Dr Pepper posted:Anyone who thinks this is bad at RPGs. These are the two most gameplay common complaints: "FFXII is boring because the battles play themselves. Also, it's too hard so I had to grind for hours." Maybe, just maybe, it's "hard" because people are just sitting there watching while their team dies instead of learning to play. Not pointing fingers at anyone in particular.
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May 7, 2014 22:53
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Weird BIAS posted:Yiazmat also restores HP over time when not in the arena. Just because IZJS made it better doesn't change how godawful Yiazmat was for the majority of people playing the game. Eh, he only casts regen when you hang out on the same screen as him while staying out of his range for too long. But if you don't do that, you can leave the fight and come back 10 hours later and he won't have regained a single HP.
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May 8, 2014 01:13
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Hedera Helix posted:It's even worse if you're playing on an emulator, constantly loading and reloading state to see if the spot you're in will have an item at that fraction of a second, or the next. If you're using the features of an emulator to make a game less fun, you have no one to blame but yourself.
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May 8, 2014 18:25
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That was an awesome update, Elentor. Things like this separate the great LPs from the also-rans. And I'd forgotten you hadn't gotten Yuffie yet, OFS. It seems like getting optional characters (whose level is determined by the rest of your team's level) early in a LLG would be the way to go, so they could soak up EXP throughout the game instead of coming in at a higher level anyway without having contributed to the cause. But verifying this would take research and math, so meh. TravelLog posted:Wait you beat Ozma at level 1? How? Doesn't he have high probabilities of just straight up murdering the party regardless of level due to the way his AI script works in conjunction with the battle animation ATB poo poo? I imagine it would be a lot of "Have Freya spam Dragon's Crest. Have everyone else healing statuses and reviving."
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May 15, 2014 03:55
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On the other hand, XII did some nice stuff with language and accent usage. Obviously people from the Empire sounded "British" to greater or lesser extents, and people from Bhujerba were all Indian. But there was also class distinction apparent in the language usage- commoners like Vaan and Penelo basically spoke in modern English, while nobles and higher-class people tended to speak with more archaic or "eloquent" speech patterns.
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May 16, 2014 06:46
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Yeah, people give CC a lot of poo poo for the accent generator, like that was ALL the development every character was given. But most characters had their own unique story bit as part of recruiting them, and an additional sidequest. Which is, honestly, all most characters got in RPGs, even with much smaller casts. Take FFVI- a lot of characters had their own bit where they joined, a sidequest later on for some extra development, and otherwise they were just reciting generic lines. If they were lucky, each character was given their own unique lines to say the exact same thing as another character would've said, just phrased slightly differently. CC was undoubtedly bloated with too many characters, but the "accent generator" actually did make the characters seem more distinct than a lot of RPGs of the time.
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May 16, 2014 20:27
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It's not RNG shenanigans that turns me away from LLGs so much as "spend hours stealing poo poo and running away from random battles to earn money." Because man does that sound fun.
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May 17, 2014 08:05
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Yeah, there's always going to be some characters that have slightly more lines or scenes and some that have less (even excluding main characters like Serge, Kidd, Harle, and Lynx). In Crono Cross there were a lot of scenes with characters like Fargo, Nikki, Karsh, Riddel, Radius, Korcha, etc. Sure, there were plenty of characters only slightly above Gogo or Umaro, but it's not like the entire cast just walks on screen and says "Can I join?" in a silly accent, and then are never heard from again. Edit: I guess my point is that the game gives you a bunch of options of "characters" to play with. Instead of thinking of them as characters, you could think of them as "Jobs" or something- a look and an associated couples of skills or attributes. The game just happened to give a bunch of them accents as well. I don't see why people get their panties in such a twist because they gave you so many options when there are still a bunch of more "core" characters that are focused on pretty much just as well as most games out there at the time. Schwartzcough fucked around with this message at 19:14 on May 17, 2014 |
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May 17, 2014 19:10
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MartianAgitator posted:See, but you're making my secondary point for me. Why do Fargo, Nikki, Karsh, Riddel, Korcha, et al, want to join with Serge? What are their motivations? Why do they drop what they are doing to hang out with a scrubby gutter punk and his pink dog? Those are the characters who have more development but they still entirely lack reasons for being in your party. Contrast with FF6. Ah, c'mon. Why does Gau join? Because you gave him beef jerky. Why does Setzer join? Because it'd be fun, I guess? Vague dislike for the Empire maybe? Why does Shadow join? Only good at stabbing things, so it may as well be with you guys. Why does Mog join? Because an old man told him to. Why does Umaro join? Because Mog told him to. Why does Gogo join? Because he was bored. Half your team doesn't even have a real reason for joining. Most of the CC crew does the traditional "I see you're trying to get back home/save the World. I think by following you I can [achieve or learn some personal goal]. I want to help you."
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May 17, 2014 19:54
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Grump posted:Yo. I have a quick question about something that happen a while back. I'm asking because I just started play FFVII for a 3rd or 4th time and I noticed something odd. Early in the game we hear Sephiroth speak about his mother being some random person who died giving birth; however, when 16 y/o Cloud and Sephiroth get to the Mt. Nibel Mako reactor, we see this... I got the impression that Hojo, in his magical way, told Sephiroth that his "mother" was Jenova, and that she had died (which, I guess, he thought was true). Then Sephiroth sees this 'thing' labeled "Jenova" creating mutants. He thinks about how he is different from normal humans, and though "heeey... was I made like these things?" Then he went back to the mansion's library and started researching Jenova. He found out Jenova was an alien that tried to take over the planet, and that Sephiroth was made from Jenova's cells. He freaks out when he realizes he's some alien mutant clone and decides he better take over the world too, just like 'Ma would've wanted.
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Jun 9, 2014 23:44
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I'd say But this would make a good send-off shot:  End of a long road, looking out over the horizon.
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Jun 10, 2014 06:39
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Silegna posted:God drat it. No. Anyhow, did you guys hear about the Cell Phone game for G Bike from the Golden Saucer? They said if it sells well, they might remake FF7 dependent on it. Yeah, that sounds like bullshit to me. Just a tactic to sell more copies (or get more downloads. I think it's supposed to be a free-to-play microtransaction game). Considering how many times they've said "remaking FFVII would take at least TWENTY YEARS SRSLY GUYS" and "we won't remake FF7 until we've made a new game that surpasses it," seems pretty clear they have no intention of remaking the game any time soon, and certainly not because of some cash-in phone app.
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Jun 13, 2014 02:22
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I'm pretty sure he finished that one, so it probably just didn't get archived.
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Jul 3, 2014 21:26
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SMERSH Mouth posted:Thanks for helping me build my list of RPGs with futuristic/high tech cities. I guess the "future" in CC is basically a long "dungeon," (certainly more than a few screens) but there's a lot of plot and poo poo crammed in there. On the other hand, the place is ruined and not really a "living city" to explore.
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Jul 24, 2014 05:17
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I really love these Weapon vs. Shinra scenes. I also love how Shinra is sucking the life out of the planet to kill the defense mechanism created BY the planet. Take that, nature!
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Jul 28, 2014 04:26
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Zeikier posted:Wasn't there still an explosion, though? If that wasn't the bomb, what exploded? Airbuster again? Edit: Derp, read the post wrong at first. Yes, I think the only thing that exploded at the second reactor was Airbuster, sending Cloud plummeting gently to the ground hundreds of feet below.
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Jul 28, 2014 08:05
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Vil posted:In many (all?) of the SNES/PS1 FF games, it shows up during the ending credits. Making "Prelude" quite the misnomer.
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Jul 30, 2014 20:48
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I always wondered if Cait Sith #1 (that "dies" in the Temple of the Ancients) was not supposed to have an accent, and Cait Sith #2 was, in order to show it was a "new" Cait Sith. The first one had talked about how even if another Cait Sith showed up, he was still his own unique being. I don't think the original really had accented lines, while accented lines seemed to start showing up with the new one. One of the difficulties of the medium, I guess.
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Aug 4, 2014 17:24
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Vil posted:Fixed that for you. They used basically the exact same gimmick in 4 (Mist Dragon), 5 (Wing Raptor), 6 (Whelk), and 7 (Poor Wording Boss) to teach about timing things in the ATB. You know, for a game that's a love letter to the earlier games in the series, I'm really surprised 9 didn't have a first boss with that gimmick.
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Aug 8, 2014 19:44
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Tengames posted:9's first "boss" was too busy giving you four theives with the steal command, and an enemy with multiple items to steal to teach you "never stop stealing". Yeah, it's how they introduced you to Final Fantasy's ABS system- Always Be Stealing. Silegna posted:Yeah, I had that happen too. God drat it, Gilgamesh, using Zantesuken when I DON'T NEED IT. Then using Exaclipoor every other FREAKING TIME. Was it possible to obtain Odin after the Lunatic Pandora stuff went down? Because Gilgamesh was worthless in that game.
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Aug 9, 2014 18:32
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Silegna posted:Then again, you do realize that the whole Assassination thing was a setup? NORG (Who is stupid as hell, and why is his name in all caps?) tells you that Martine came up with the idea, not Balamb. You were just scapegoats. Eh, maybe I'm looking to far into it. But still. General Caraway is a neat character. So much so, I gave him a prominent role in my FFD20 Campaign. Actually, I believe NORG was trying to screw over Martine by instructing HIS garden to do the assassination, and then Martine dumps the job in your lap when you show up to put the blame back on Balamb. But then Martine sent one of his own students anyway, because ????. Also, Martine's best sniper is someone who is incapable of sniping because he always chokes. FF8 tries to bury the fact that none of it makes sense by dumping a bunch of extraneous details on the audience. The problem is all of those details contradict each other and just make the plot an even bigger mess.
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Aug 15, 2014 23:17
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The White Dragon posted:I thought he outright says, "I can't do it. This always happens," or is he just bullshitting? He says exactly that. Which basically means he would have had to think up an excuse on the spot to make himself look incompetent rather than say "I can't do it- I know that woman." Irvine is too much the braggart to make himself look like a fool on purpose for no reason. He also never says, at any point then or later, that he couldn't take the short because he recognized "matron." This is what I mean about FF8- it would've been EASY to make that scene make sense. Even if he just said "I can't do it, I just can't", you could explain it away. Instead they put actual dialog of him going "nope, every time I try to shoot someone I choke. I'm no good under pressure!" and suddenly the logical explanation is thrown out the window.
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Aug 16, 2014 00:52
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Irvine should not have been the one to keep his memory, it should've been Selphie. The whole assassination mission with Irvine makes no drat sense because he knew who she was, but apparently it wasn't an issue at all and he felt no need to mention it. Selphie, on the other hand, was always kind of an ADD spaz, and it would be much more in character for her to have not mentioned an important detail like "remember how we all know each other and isn't it weird how we're trying to kill our 'mom'"? Really, FF8 has more plot holes than it has plot between them. The whole thing would have to be totally rewritten to make it not a flaming wreck.
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Aug 17, 2014 02:10
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habeasdorkus posted:Hey, the AV Club is making GBS threads all over FFVII like a hipster from 2005. Ugh, that article is so wrong! Clearly the best Final Fantasy death scene is in FFV. 
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Aug 22, 2014 04:26
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Well the author's logic didn't make a lot of sense either. First they establish how, in the meta-context of game rules, there was no reason to assume that selecting "Jump" when you first got to the airship would have any impact whatsoever on Shadow's story. Then later on, they base their argument on how "The death of Shadow had an impact because it said something about me. Specifically, it said that I was a coward." Uh, no it didn't? It said you didn't have a FAQ open telling you to select "Wait" when you had no other reason to.
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Aug 22, 2014 23:49
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swamp waste posted:He's talking about not knowing how to "game" the situation and reacting based on fear, and getting results that he thought were shockingly appropriate. Every narrative contrivance is gonna seem trite if you go to gamefaqs to figure out how to play to the results you want in advance/ Except he said he felt no guilt on his first playthrough because he had no idea Shadow could survive or that his actions had any impact on it. By his own admission there was no connection between his actions and the outcome; hell, he didn't even know Shadow had died! The only reason the death had any impact on him at all was specifically from reading a strategy guide long after the game was over. That does not make for a powerful death scene. Hell, I'd argue Shadow's last scene if you DO save him is far more powerful. Even if you're not a "coward" or reacting from "fear," you have no reason to select 'wait' when you get to the end of that section. It doesn't really say anything about the player, and trying to give your choice to "Jump!" or "wait" some deep moral meaning doesn't make any sense. Now if it said "Jump!" or "Wait for Shadow" the first time, and you get cold feet and jump at the 7 second point, that'd be one thing. But it doesn't.
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Aug 23, 2014 03:08
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MagusofStars posted:Being deliberate doesn't really make sense since it's pretty much the only weapon that ignores Morph's penalty. If "ignores reduced damage from Morph" was an intentional trait (say, like how some of Vincent's stuff ignores the Deathblow to-hit penalty), it would likely be on something else such as other people's ultimate weapons. I don't think any of Vincent's weapons "ignore" the to-hit penalty, they just have such a high base hit rate that cutting them in half (or however it works) still leaves you with a really good to-hit chance. He's got 2 or 3 weapons with a 255 hit rate, which even cut in half give you pretty much perfect accuracy.
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Sep 23, 2014 05:02
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LJN92 posted:But the thing is that they introduce these plot threads like they're supposed to mean something, and then they just poof somewhere along the line. Like Reks. Who remembers Reks? You play as him at the start of the game, you learn he's Vaan's brother and stuff. Then there's this thing where Rasler (anyone remember him? Ashe's lover who got killed in the conflict) kinda looks like him, and Vaan sees the ghost of Rasler at the same time Ashe does. Then you find out the ghost was made by the Occuria and Vaan can't see it now for some reason. It seems like they're building up to something, and maybe you can vaguely interpret the events to mean something, but it just seems like something that leads to nothing significant. I've heard theories that it's because Vaan wasn't out for revenge so the Occuria didn't need him to have a ghost guide but it still seems like a waste of time to me. Eh, the thing with Vaan seeing phantoms isn't really "theory"- it's just that XII is generally more subtle with its storytelling. There's a lot more stuff that goes unsaid, and you just sort of have to pick up. It's actually one of the reasons I like Vaan more than most people- he goes through a realistic character arc and ends up reaching mature character growth much faster than Ashe. FFXII spoilers: The Occuria were looking for someone to use the nethicite to destroy the Empire, and so were guiding candidates who also wanted to destroy the Empire. They were showing a ghost of Rasler to Ashe, and a ghost of Reks to Vaan. But Vaan learns to accept his losses and look for new meaning in his life instead of focusing on his drive for revenge relatively early on, which means he loses his appeal as an agent of destruction for the Occuria. At that point he stops seeing the ghosts. Meanwhile Ashe is going through the same general character growth, but takes much longer to put aside her revenge fantasies- which is why she continues to see the ghosts and is the one the Occuria choose to take the nethicite. The point of the whole thing is that Vaan is acting as a foil to Ashe; we get to compare how his coming to terms with his loss changes his path as compared to Ashe, who hasn't let go.
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Oct 2, 2014 06:33
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