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I wish I still had my old FFXIII save. I'd love to just jump back into the post-game and have fun fighting all the optional bosses again. I tried to play it on PC but I'm getting a weird bug where my controller works fine in anything except contextual menus. The normal menus, battle menus, all of those are fine, but if I use a save point, that menu won't recognize my controller, and I have to get up and unplug it and plug it back in and it works until I hit one of those menus again. It's baffling.
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Jun 26, 2016 02:20
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Harrow posted:(which you can't do at an altar but can do by losing the easy Minion fights) i don't know what you're talking about, amethyst minion ruined my poo poo over and over until i got lucky Schwartzcough posted:I'm 80% sure that the final boss of XII does the same thing, and gets tougher at least based on the number of Espers you found. I feel like maybe you read it, but the person who posted it was misinformed. I got all the espers and honestly the final boss was a huge pushover and a lot easier than some of the mid-game bosses, mostly because he doesn't really do Paling. Fur20 fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Jun 26, 2016 |
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Jun 26, 2016 02:45
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The final boss absolutely has a paling and it's really annoying.
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Jun 26, 2016 02:49
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I always liked that word choice, paling. Like a magical fence. Hadn't heard it like that before FF12.
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Jun 26, 2016 02:59
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Electromax posted:I always liked that word choice, paling. Like a magical fence. Hadn't heard it like that before FF12. I love a lot of FFXII's word choices. I've gotten into more than a few arguments defending its, uh... "colorful" translation. I dunno, I think it has charm and flavor and I like it. It's no FF9, but it's nice. Maybe could've done with fewer extra k's on the end of words. I'm on board with "magick" but "technick" is maybe a bit much. The White Dragon posted:i don't know what you're talking about, amethyst minion ruined my poo poo over and over until i got lucky It's possible I remember those guys being easier than they are. There are definitely some bosses I remember getting stomped by but it was never the minions. But I also haven't played since like 10 years ago, so... Every time I want to play Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song again I remember about the weird mechanic where time passes based on how many random encounters you fight and you can miss out on side quests because of it. Back in college I was patient enough to manipulate that system but I think I'd just find it annoying now.
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Jun 26, 2016 03:12
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I'm very lukewarm on XII in general but I'll defend that localization to kingdom come. I just fuckin' love that there's an area called Stilshrine of Miriam and that one of the rooms, the name of which you'll only see if you pause to look at your map, is called Hall of Velitation. There is a ton of color to that translation and it's a joy to look at.
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Jun 26, 2016 03:22
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Hamsterlady posted:What's with the iPhone and Steam ports of the old FF games, anyway? The monsters look immaculately beautiful and then all the other art looks like it was done by an intern's 13 year old kid I never noticed the old Exdeath blue armor form poking out of the top of this form until seeing this sprite just now.
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Jun 26, 2016 03:35
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FFXII's place names are glorious. The Ridorana Cataract, the Necrohol of Nabudis, Stilshrine of Miriam, all of it just screams ~*~fantasy~*~ and it's great. As for my thoughts on the rest of the game: it's one of my top three Final Fantasies and I probably can't defend a lot of it eloquently, though I've tried (and thrown out more than one post where I thought better of posting my weak arguments). Though I will say the vanilla version is full of some awful gameplay decisions and any time I replay it it's International Zodiac Job System version or bust. (Which is why I'm really excited for the HD remaster.) At this point, any time I want to defend FFXII's story, I should probably just link to BrainWeasel's LP of the IZJS version, which is top notch.
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Jun 26, 2016 03:36
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The Final Fantasy of Megathreads.
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Jun 26, 2016 03:46
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there's basically nothing good about ff12
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Jun 26, 2016 04:17
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Harrow posted:I wish I still had my old FFXIII save. I'd love to just jump back into the post-game and have fun fighting all the optional bosses again. This is a known bug. It's caused by Square Enix using a custom driver for the controller instead of microsoft's standard driver, which while they fixed in FFXIII-2 and 3, they never did for 13. If you rapidly tap the right trigger when entering a save or tutorial menu it should swap the control to that menu (although it will require another set of squeezes once you exit the save or tutorial menu to regain control). By the end of my PC run of FFXIII I was quickly squeezing out the 6 or so pulls to make the thing reset itself in the new menu screen with ease. This is a stupid as gently caress problem, and I'm not defending it.
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Jun 26, 2016 04:20
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Barudak posted:This is a known bug. It's caused by Square Enix using a custom driver for the controller instead of microsoft's standard driver, which while they fixed in FFXIII-2 and 3, they never did for 13. If you rapidly tap the right trigger when entering a save or tutorial menu it should swap the control to that menu (although it will require another set of squeezes once you exit the save or tutorial menu to regain control). By the end of my PC run of FFXIII I was quickly squeezing out the 6 or so pulls to make the thing reset itself in the new menu screen with ease. Hah, fantastic. Now that I have a few Final Fantasies on PC I'm just kind of amused at the inconsistency of the port quality. Like, with FF9, I can't use my wireless Xbox One controller with it unless I turn it on after I start the game, which kinda dampens the joy of playing it on my couch but I'm dealing with it. Lightning Returns works great with my controller, but unless I'm missing something, there's no way to actually quit out of the program without a mouse, which is a problem FF9 doesn't have. None of it is gamebreaking, it's all just really amusing.
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Jun 26, 2016 04:27
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Harrow posted:Hah, fantastic. Much like each game in the franchise is different characters and worlds, each port has different issues and boneheaded mistakes.
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Jun 26, 2016 04:30
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corn in the bible posted:there's basically nothing good about Lightning Returns I agree
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Jun 26, 2016 05:04
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holy poo poo you're kirby You have no business criticizing a stale franchise 
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Jun 26, 2016 06:01
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corn in the bible posted:there's basically nothing good about ff12 Historically this is pretty much my opinion. The story was derivative and boring to me, music was not to my taste at all, and the combat system was my least favourite thing in any FF. I gave the game a good 20-30 hours or so but it seemed like basically any brain-dead gambit setup could defeat enemies without me having to do anything, so I sort of disengaged from the game and lost interest. But I kind of want to give it another shot now that Zodiac Age is coming out, since I never played through IZJS. Do the license board changes and other stuff make the combat more interesting? Obviously the music/story will still suck for me, but if the combat/levelling stuff is more engaging and challenging then I might give the game another go.
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Jun 26, 2016 06:18
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thorsilver posted:Historically this is pretty much my opinion. The story was derivative and boring to me, music was not to my taste at all, and the combat system was my least favourite thing in any FF. I gave the game a good 20-30 hours or so but it seemed like basically any brain-dead gambit setup could defeat enemies without me having to do anything, so I sort of disengaged from the game and lost interest. No. They give you a fast forward button because the combat's slow as hell and if you're using gambits and you're not a moron your moment to moment input doesn't matter at all. The class system doesn't really introduce anything new or exciting it just limits what each character can have and if you're doing any side quests you'll get 1-2 of the LP up accessories and you'll hit the up limits of a character's power fairly quickly.
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Jun 26, 2016 06:22
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in fact zodiac age adds an even better speed up option because izjs was also too slow
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Jun 26, 2016 06:24
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thorsilver posted:Historically this is pretty much my opinion. The story was derivative and boring to me, music was not to my taste at all, and the combat system was my least favourite thing in any FF. I gave the game a good 20-30 hours or so but it seemed like basically any brain-dead gambit setup could defeat enemies without me having to do anything, so I sort of disengaged from the game and lost interest. Disclaimer: I actually like the story and characters, so I'm coming at FFXII from a more positive position right off the bat. IZJS has a few improvements (it gives you all the gambits very early on rather than making you wait for arbitrary ones, it doesn't tie your MP total to how many quickenings you've unlocked, it lets you control guest characters and summoned espers manually, that kind of thing). The job system is sort of... all it really does is force specializations on your characters. It's not a full Final Fantasy job system, but I like it because it makes it somewhat less likely that you'll just set up one Uber-Gambit that you can just leave on for the whole game. At least when I played through IZJS, I found myself changing my gambit setups and party setups reasonably often, which kept things engaging the whole way through. It's definitely a game more about preparation than execution, and that hasn't changed. If you just baseline hated the gambit system or the combat system, though, IZJS isn't going to even come close to changing your mind. It improves on what was there in every way, but there are no drastic changes that would really turn it around if the whole game just wasn't your thing.
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Jun 26, 2016 06:29
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FFXII is insanely good
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Jun 26, 2016 06:31
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When I first played FFXII right when it came out, I really didn't like it, and that's a feat, because I've been a huge Ivalice fan for a long time. I came back to it like a year later and loved it, though, and I don't really know what changed for me, so it's hard for me to tell people who didn't like it the first time to give it another shot because I can't really tell them why. I think part of the reason I came around on the story was realizing that Vaan wasn't supposed to be the protagonist--the protagonist is Ashe, and Vaan's there as a point-of-view character and a foil to her. That, and Balthier really isn't lying when he says he's the leading man, which is good, because Balthier is great (and Gideon Emery really needs to voice more main characters and fewer Skyrim guards). Then I played IZJS and it was even better, and now XII is in a three-way tie for my favorite (main series) Final Fantasy with VI and IX.
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Jun 26, 2016 06:37
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Harrow is being very generous of course because while you won't have the monolithic uber gambit you're still going to quickly just make slightly different gambits per character that nullifies any issues you might run across. And the story is still 4 plot lines that that connect only at the middle and end and you only see maybe 6 mins of the parts not focused on Ashe's quest of kind of just faffing about until she decides "Hey let's break out chains from our godkings and go fight the villain who we've never met and who's only really villainous move is killing a bunch of nameless senators and threatening to go to war to do that thing we were going to do w/r/t the godkings". Nothing anyone does in the plot is important or has any personal worth save maybe 5 mins where Fran or Balthier get to cry about being exiles from.home.
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Jun 26, 2016 06:40
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:holy poo poo you're kirby But Kirby is the franchise Nintendo uses to dump all their weird ideas that would sell better as "Kirby: This Time There's 10 of Him" than an new IP? Like, of all Nintendo's franchises, Kirby is the last one you can say is stale.
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Jun 26, 2016 06:49
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ZenMasterBullshit posted:And the story is still 4 plot lines that that connect only at the middle and end and you only see maybe 6 mins of the parts not focused on Ashe's quest of kind of just faffing about until she decides "Hey let's break out chains from our godkings and go fight the villain who we've never met and who's only really villainous move is killing a bunch of nameless senators and threatening to go to war to do that thing we were going to do w/r/t the godkings". Nothing anyone does in the plot is important or has any personal worth save maybe 5 mins where Fran or Balthier get to cry about being exiles from.home. Vayne is the antagonist because he's the leader (eventually, after his coup d'etat) of the Empire that conquered Dalmasca, and freeing Dalmasca is like Ashe's entire motivation. Sure, he's not plotting to destroy the world or anything, he's not even a particularly bad ruler of Dalmasca, and the final battle is hilariously overblown (I suspect there was some "but the final boss has to have multiple forms" meddling going on there), but going to fight him at the end makes perfect sense. As for nothing having any importance or personal worth--I have no idea what games we each played but I don't think they were the same ones. While it's undoubtedly a less personal story than, say, FFX, plenty happens and plenty of it has personal stakes. If nothing else, Ashe's whole arc has her struggling to let go of her grief and anger (Vaan helps in this, which is the whole reason he manages to be important) and, in so doing, disrupts the Occuria's attempt to use her conflict with Vayne as a proxy war to shut down Venat's whole "free humanity" plan. What brings the party into conflict with Vayne and Venat actually isn't the big, world-changing metaplot--ultimately, they both get what they want out of that--but a political conflict over Dalmasca. But like I said, I'm a sucker for Ivalice stuff and thought Final Fantasy Tactics was more interesting when it was dwelling on the moral conflict between Ramza and Delita (and the war of succession that Delita manipulates in his favor) than when it turned to the church using magic stones to resurrect an evil god, so, 
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Jun 26, 2016 07:00
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Harrow posted:the final battle is hilariously overblown (I suspect there was some "but the final boss has to have multiple forms" meddling going on there), That's pretty unlikely. The director has done the same thing in basically everything he's done.
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Jun 26, 2016 07:01
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ImpAtom posted:That's pretty unlikely. The director has done the same thing in basically everything he's done. Which director? Matsuno was out a while before the game was completed (though, given the game's delays, the story was probably set in stone by the time he left). But, then again, yeah, that's sort of what he does, isn't it? I mean, poo poo, look at the entire last chapter of FFT. Harrow fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Jun 26, 2016 |
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Jun 26, 2016 07:07
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I'm really enjoying V so far, it's charming as gently caress.
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Jun 26, 2016 07:09
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Harrow posted:Which director? Matsuno was out long before the game was completed. Matsuno was out before the game was completed but the game still bears a ton of his marks and that's one of 'em, yeah. I mean Vagrant Story's final boss is like: 
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Jun 26, 2016 07:09
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Ah, OK, so it's basically the same but with just some tweaks and the different license boards (and the fast-forward button). That definitely doesn't sound like it'd be enough to change my feelings on the game. It's a shame, really, because the idea of the combat system intrigued me at first -- setting up gambits to take on different situations, then letting it play it and seeing how your prep and strategy works out. It's kind of a programming challenge. But then in actual play there was very little I couldn't accomplish with extremely simplistic setups, so just watching the same routines play out over and over and over kinda burned me out. Also the game looks loving gorgeous -- it always did, but the vids from Zodiac Age really impressed me. And I love the moogles in XII, they're cute as hell.
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Jun 26, 2016 07:10
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ImpAtom posted:Matsuno was out before the game was completed but the game still bears a ton of his marks and that's one of 'em, yeah. I mean Vagrant Story's final boss is like: Somehow I found that less jarring in Vagrant Story than in the others. I actually never finished Tactics Ogre. Did that go full JRPG final boss, too? thorsilver posted:Also the game looks loving gorgeous -- it always did, but the vids from Zodiac Age really impressed me. And I love the moogles in XII, they're cute as hell. They probably don't have to do much to make FFXII look gorgeous. Even if you just use PCSX2 and upscale everything to 1080p, it already looks very good (except for Vaan's abs). The UI's blurry as hell, but that's about it. I might be too generous on the gambit system, but the last time I played, I found myself changing gambits more the further into the game I got, which seems kind of backwards because that's when you have a shitload of gambit slots and a ton of abilities. Maybe it's just because all the optional esper fights are gimmick bosses and you almost always have to adapt to them screwing over one (or more) of your usual tactics. Also FFXII's greatest sin was not giving us another playable moogle. Would've been a golden opportunity. Harrow fucked around with this message at 07:15 on Jun 26, 2016 |
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Jun 26, 2016 07:13
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Harrow posted:When I first played FFXII right when it came out, I really didn't like it, and that's a feat, because I've been a huge Ivalice fan for a long time. You have good opinions. But yeah, every final fantasy is the worst, etc etc, but I've heard a lot of people that ended up completely changing their minds on XII when giving it a second (or third) chance. I haven't really heard that about other games in the series. Obviously it'll never win everyone over, but it has a certain something that eventually clicks with a lot of people.
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Jun 26, 2016 07:18
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The problem with XII's story is that we get very little story beats for such a long game. Ashe and Vaan get a 3 - minute cutscene where they talk about letting go off their anger and such. This would be fine in a movie, but in the game the payoff off this scene comes many hours later even if you don't do sidequests. There's a lot more space between story beats than other FFs which made it hard for me to keep track of it. Reasonably clever stuff like Ashe's ghost husband is lost to many since it comes up so little with so many hours in between. Renoistic fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Jun 26, 2016 |
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Jun 26, 2016 07:19
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Harrow posted:Somehow I found that less jarring in Vagrant Story than in the others. Yeah, though it doesn't happen until the very end: You chase Lanselot Tartaros and his goons up the ruins of the Hanging Gardens and confront them as they open a portal to Hell, whereupon you jump in and fight the demonic form of the old King Dorgalua to prevent him from returning through the portal and transforming the continent into hell on earth. Suddenly jumping to overblown fantasy nonsense from an intricate plot of politics and human struggle is kind of Matsuno's thing. The only thing that separates the games he's worked on is exactly how far into the story it happens. CeallaSo fucked around with this message at 17:40 on Jun 26, 2016 |
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Jun 26, 2016 07:26
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CeallaSo posted:Yeah, though it doesn't happen until the very end: You chase Lanselot Tartaros and his goons up the ruins of the Hanging Gardens and confront them as they open a portal to Hell, whereupon you jump in and fight the demonic form of the old King Dorgalua to prevent him from returning through the portal and transforming the continent into hell on earth. FTFY. There was something clever about Ashe's dead husband?
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Jun 26, 2016 07:30
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Pyroxene Stigma posted:FTFY. Since people might be playing it for the first time soonish, it wasn't her dead husband at all. It was the Occuria trying to emotionally manipulate Ashe into getting nethicite and nuking the Empire. That's why Vaan thought he was seeing his brother Rassler, while Ashe thought she was seeing her husband. When Vaan let go of his anger and resentment over his brother's death, he stopped seeing the ghosts because he was no longer a good candidate to be the Occuria's new "King Raithwall" replacement.
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Jun 26, 2016 07:35
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Renoistic posted:The problem with XII's story is that we get very little story beats for such a long game. Ashe and Vaan get a 3 - minute cutscene where they talk about letting go off their anger and such. This would be fine in a movie, but in the game the payoff off this scene comes many hours later even if you don't do sidequests. There's a lot more space between story beats than other FFs which made it hard for me to keep track of it. Yeah, the pacing is weird for sure. It's like... a bunch of stuff happens in the first third, then you spend the next third learning about history and the setting, then the last third picks up where the first left off. And that's assuming you don't take dozens of hours to do side quests in there. I love the plot but it definitely takes a vacation there in the mid game.
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Jun 26, 2016 07:36
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Leper Residue posted:http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=683802394 Oh that's neat. Honestly I think that's how the game should have done it, because tagging in characters who would be useless for a given fight just to defend for a round isn't particularly fun.
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Jun 26, 2016 07:53
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Schwartzcough posted:Since people might be playing it for the first time soonish, it wasn't her dead husband at all. It was the Occuria trying to emotionally manipulate Ashe into getting nethicite and nuking the Empire. That's why Vaan thought he was seeing his brother Rassler, while Ashe thought she was seeing her husband. When Vaan let go of his anger and resentment over his brother's death, he stopped seeing the ghosts because he was no longer a good candidate to be the Occuria's new "King Raithwall" replacement. And just to make it clear, the game never beats the player over the head with explaining this, which I enjoyed a lot.
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Jun 26, 2016 07:58
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I have two complaints about XII's story: 1. The pacing is awful. Characters fall in and out of focus with audible thuds and only Ashe remains important .Which leads to 2. Only Ashe and maybe Balthier are really important. Everyone else has moments but they are very few and far between. Poor Basch could have vanished for 90% of the game and you'd lose nothing since he only does something in the last two dungeons. It's kinda weird when you think about the fact Basch's evil twin gets more focus and development than Basch ever does. On the other hand, Gabranth is my favorite character in the game.
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Jun 26, 2016 08:02
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Schwartzcough posted:But yeah, every final fantasy is the worst, etc etc, but I've heard a lot of people that ended up completely changing their minds on XII when giving it a second (or third) chance. I haven't really heard that about other games in the series. I tried to start FF8 half a dozen times since it was brand new, and hated it every time until I played it earlier this year to completion and actually liked it a whole lot. I dunno what changed, I just thought it was violently boring and horrible every time I tried to play it before 2016.
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Jun 26, 2016 08:13
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