Schwartzcough posted:

I imagine you're giving everyone White Magic secondary, and having your White Mage spam healing while the rest put up Shell, followed by Protect (probably ignoring the character with Condemned since they're a goner anyway)? But yeah, that fight's a bitch.

So it's sort of interesting using the Job Fair values to give a numerical ranking to teams. My previous team of Blue Mage/Red Mage/Geomancer/Dancer ranks in at $11, while my current team of Knight/Mystic Knight/Berserker/Thief gets a rather middling $9...

Lessail posted:

Since I've been playing IX with no guide, does that involve those random encounters where the monster wants you to give it ore? I've run into three or four of them, but I have no clue what to do about saying hi to whatever monster they mention.

Cake Attack posted:

Some of us played Baten Kaitos and learned what truly bad audio is.

ImpAtom posted:

Well, a Chrono Trigger 2 is not inherently a super-exciting thing. Chrono Trigger was the result of a literal dream team of developers working together. Chrono Cross is a pretty good example of why "more Chrono" isn't inherently a positive thing.

ImpAtom posted:

I said it before but the combat system is sounding more and more like Lightning Returns which really was not a bad combat system, although one which could have used a bit of polish. IF they're adjusting that then it could end up being something pretty enjoyable.

Pesky Splinter posted:

I think he already did:

Varance posted:

FF4 could easily be summarized as "Life shits on Cecil, Cecil figures out a way to deal with it and moves on."

Cecil is apart from all other FF lead protagonists in that the guy is already a mature leader with plenty of responsibility and a large number of people who would trust him with their lives before the game even begins.

Basch would have been the second, but he didn't focus test well so Vaaaaaaan.

Onmi posted:

At least the cast of FFXII actually achieved poo poo, either their own personal issues, or indeed actually making a difference in the world... and this is the game that's all ABOUT the guys that history never focuses on and follows because that's the theme of Ivalice games in general. Actually gonna bring up a different game series, you can indulge me for a moment since it happens all the time in this thread.

In Tales of Phantasia, the game starts off with you not succeeding until you get shot to the past, and then from there, you start succeeding, you set out to do things and it works, and it's not a secret "HAHA THE VILLAIN HAS BEATEN YOU" win, it's just a win. It's good.

Never, in video games, have "Protect the X" where the X is Crystals, Pillars, maidens, seals. Because in that case, you MUST lose so they can be destroyed to lead to the end game. Making the PC incompetent. I don't need a PC that always succeeds, but if I just spent 20 hours trying to save a seal, and then after I'm done it gets blown up... I feel like my 20 hours just got wasted, why should I care? In fact, if my mentality should be "It's got to happen so the end-game can happen" why should I care about anything outside of the end-game, my success has no value except to move the story and the story is pointless because I will always fail, unless the game is going to actually observe the failure affecting the protagonists, I shouldn't both paying any attention.

Terper posted:

Heran Bago posted:

There are people out there who have done no-Crystarium runs. The answer is never grind.

Varance posted:

You missed the part where Bhunivelze stripped her of her emotions, making her twice the cold-hearted bitch. She literally doesn't have any emotions... which also allows her to gently caress over Bhunivelze without a second thought.

ImpAtom posted:

The way it basically works is this:

At some point, the universe was created. It was not created by Bhunivelze. It is divided into Life and Afterlife.

Bhunivelze's mom was the one in charge of the Life part of the world. Bhunivelze murdered her rear end and took over. However, murdering her meant she was still chilling in the afterlife. So he decided he was going to find a way into the afterlife to murder his mom for reals this time. He couldn't get there himself in any way which didn't involve dying. He didn't want to die, so he wanted to find a way to bust the door to the afterlife open.

He created two God-Robots to find a way into the afterlife. He also created a third God-Robot called Etro but decided she was kinda lovely (he was right) and refused to have anything more to do with her. She killed herself. Keeping in mind that "kill yourself" means you go to the Afterlife. Etro accidentally ended up ruler of the afterlife. The other God-Robots ended up creating humanity out of her corpse/blood/whatever. Because of those two factors, humanity ended up outside of the God-Robot cycle because Etro started shaping Chaos into souls and shoving it into humans. Etro did this because she is so overly and absurdly sympathetic that she will do harmful dangerous things basically on a whim. (See also: Yuel, saving the protagonists, literally the entire plot of FFXIII-2.) Etro is also a giant fuckup so this always goes wrong 100% of the time.

The two remaining God-Robots began to try to figure out ways into the afterlife. Humanity played a central role in that. So they ended up creating lesser God-Robots to basically treat humanity like cattle and keep them growing and raising them. Then the two great God Robots hosed off to go try out things to get into the afterlife. The lesser God-Robots (The Fal'Cie) did this for a long time until some of them got frankly sick of what amounted to being abandoned and began trying to find a way to force their masters to come back by killing an insane shitload of humans. Either this breaks open Etro's Gate and their bosses come back and are like "great job, guys" or it killed an absurd number of humans and their bosses come back and are like "you motherfuckers." Either way they win because they're not stuck being the immortal nursemaids for a bunch of humans anymore.

The Fal'Cie are robots who have to follow the exact letter of their programming. They can not deviate from it. However they can exploit the poo poo out of loopholes. Barthandalus is basically exploiting a giant loophole where his job was to find a way to get to the Afterlife and boy, killing a lot of humans sure might work. They also have a loophole where they can create l'cie and give them Focuses. They can exploit the loophole of the Focus to get the L'cie to do poo poo they can't do themselves.

That is where FFXIII starts.

Fister Roboto posted:

Make weapons with Triple AP, Triple Overdrive, and Overdrive->AP. Set everyone's overdrive mode to Ally. Make armor with Auto-Phoenix. Start a fight with Don Tonberry. Every time you attack him, he'll counter with Everyone's Grudge, which will do a ton of damage based on how many monsters that character has killed. That damage then gets turned into overdrive for the other two characters, then tripled, then converted to AP and tripled again. Keep doing this over and over until it's dead or you run out of Phoenix Downs and you'll rack up a ton of AP very quickly, even if you escape the battle.

bloodychill posted:

4 and 5 combined losing to 8 is a travesty on par with the Armenian genocide.

Fister Roboto posted:

Well maybe it should.

Fister Roboto posted:

The actual hot and cold part of it sucks, but getting ultimate or near-ultimate equipment right at the start of disc 3 owns bones and is well worth the effort.