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I haven't played the first two but Persona 3 and 4 are not that grindy at all. Unless you play on the hardest setting, you shouldn't have to actually go to the dungeons more than 4 or 5 times a month. When you do go, you're going to be there for a few hours, but you get a substantial reward every time you level up so it never gets tedious. Even then when I play those games I spend way more time on school stuff and social links and whatnot than I do fighting monsters.
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Aug 12, 2013 04:33
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alcharagia posted:Are you kidding me In terms of enemy design and atmosphere, SH3 is darker than Covenant (which I've always found pretty mediocre). SH1 is still one of the darkest jRPGs out there.
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Aug 12, 2013 05:07
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CmdrKing posted:Hell, most Shadow Hearts fans I run into denounce the second game for 'betraying the horror roots' or some nonsense like that I don't see what you mean.  This is also the game where your party member is a vampire wrestler with a superhero alter ego he can transform into by using viagra. (Nah but Shadow Hearts Covenant is rad and you should play it) Azure_Horizon posted:In terms of enemy design and atmosphere, SH3 is darker than Covenant (which I've always found pretty mediocre). SH1 is still one of the darkest jRPGs out there. The enemy designs are delightfully hosed up in SH. A couple from the first game:     And plenty more. Even the music tracks have names like "Coffin Fetish", "But-Dad-Dead-Bed" and "Sicking loving". And Brain Hopper is one of my favorite normal battle themes in gaming, even though some people dislike it. Also I'm a sucker for all sorts lore snippets so everything from healing items to enemies having a description was great.  Oh, and Suikoden II is one of the best JRPGs ever made as well. If you haven't played that game then go do it now. But play SH after. Kanfy fucked around with this message at 13:06 on Aug 12, 2013 |
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Aug 12, 2013 12:59
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Kanfy posted:I don't see what you mean. It's certainly in line with Japanese horror... 
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Aug 12, 2013 13:32
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Azure_Horizon posted:In terms of enemy design and atmosphere, SH3 is darker than Covenant (which I've always found pretty mediocre). SH1 is still one of the darkest jRPGs out there. "One of the darkest JRPGs" is the most meaningless use of superlative ever. Granted SH did understand something a lot of JRPGs don't get, which is conveying the mood through aesthetics. Its darker moments didn't come with huge mood whiplashes and were easier to take seriously. In SH2 you constantly keep forgetting the backdrop of the story is supposed to be a world war. The overall tone of the game doesn't really convince you that the world is a really hosed up place right now. FFX had that problem too. Even more so since practically everything about the story ties into Spira being a horrible place to live, when the song they actually called "Scenery of Spira" sounds like this. And don't try to tell me Square's writers have ever even heard the words "intentional cognitive dissonance". Them probably working in a different building from everyone else is old news however.
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Aug 12, 2013 14:16
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Yes Shadow Hearts ONE is dark as gently caress and is totally awesome. Covenant has some pretty hosed-up moments but balances it out with some real silly poo poo. Still the first one remains one of my favourite games ever and my god I love those wonderfully hosed up enemy designs. what did you do WHAT DID YOU DO
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Aug 12, 2013 14:32
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Chapter 82 - Capitulo de Chocobo So we had acquired a Blue Chocobo last time. Now we're playing with him a bit.  Besides not being slowed down by the water part of the Chocobo Racing, the Blue Chocobo has a materia-related cave too, in this archipelago. It's possible to glitch the Highwind at the intersection of this cliff to get to the cave, but we're nice.    So we basically go back way down south and cross this river maze...  And voila. [Quadra Magic]. [Quadra Magic] is a very, very powerful support materia. As the name implies, it casts the linked magic four times in the same turn, while reducing its damage by half. This usually means twice the damage but you can deal up to four times the damage if you're over the cap of 9999. Hooray!  Farewell my friend. You were too greato for this world.  Now we race our new friends some more. We'll be breeding them soon.  Sometimes we get lucky. I can never say no to a [Counter Attack] materia.  The parents had 96km/h speed while Greena has 99, but her Stamina is much larger (643 vs 446).  This increase of 200 in Stamina is enough for us to beat Teioh in Class A instead of getting beaten horribly.    S Rank is the last rank. It's considerably harder.  It's where we can get the best rewards. Sometimes you get a crappy Fire Veil but for the most part they're really good.  It's also where we can't progress any further. Notice how the Chocobo Speeds were 150km/h? Our 99 is nothing compared to that. And since Teioh scales with our own stats that means that even his improved stats are not enough to do jack poo poo here. Unfortunately this is as far as Greena can go, and no amount of training arcs can save her.  Insert Tifa-is-friendzoned joke here.  I might have mentioned it, but sometimes Tifa and Cid will ask to play minigames instead of you if they are in the party. The reason they can play minigames is probably a sanity check in case you try to access a minigame without Cloud in the party (since there are times where Tifa and Cid get to be Party leaders) so this is a clever way to add an otherwise useless feature into the game.  It's worth mentioning that even though there's another blue-ish Chocobo (although with a different hue) he doesn't get any speed bonus in the water area. All enemy Chocobos with the exception of Teioh count as normal yellow Chocobos.  I really like these environments. Granted, they're outdated as hell but it's amusing to see what they were trying to do with real-time polygons back then.  I have mentioned it in the past but for the most part, FF7 real-time models don't have any textures. This is especially true of background models (except for the World Map). As you can see here everything is vertex-colored, they're color gradients based on the color of each triangle vertex.  Die.  Alright, now's the time. We give them the [Carob Nut] we got from the freaky Icicle Inn monsters as the Chocobo Sage told us to, and...  Hoozah! We get the black-furred version of our favorite mascot.  Oh.  Real mature, Cloud.  Aeris is not amused.  And on to the materia cave that was previously inaccessible. Prepare yourself for the fantaaaastic -  Oh cmon.  I'm sure there's a clever use to reducing our HP by a factor of 10 but you won't see any in this chapter.  Anyway, we're trying to get the last Chocobo hinted by the Chocobo Sage.  To sum it up - we need a Chocobo from the icy continent and we have to find an island with crazy Goblins.   Sweet Lord this is one miserable creature. He needs some therapy ASAP.  Let's try this again.  Wonderful. Now we need some Goblin nuts. But first let's race our Chocobos, see how well they'll fare.  Holy poo poo.  Look at the map. In case you don't know that swirly area is the beginning. On to waiting two minutes for these bozos. Zack is fast.  It's easy to find the island where the Goblins live. It's called Goblin Island when you open the menu.  They also hit you with an Enemy Skill called Goblin Punch, which is pretty worthless. It deals big-ish damage if the enemy has the same level as the caster, otherwise it's fairly mediocre.  It's time!  And there you go, we've got ourselves a Gold Chocobo!  Hooray! But, this is not enough.  For the most extreme levels of autism-inducing nerdiness we can't just have a Chocobo. We need to have a well-bred, min-maxed Chocobo. Because their stats can keep going up each generation, we'll keep breeding until we have a perfect Chocobo.  Let's start with a pair.  Feed their offspring with a load of extremely expensive crap. You see, the thing with Chocobos is...  What you see here really is the sprint speed you get when you boost the Chocobo during the race, not the normal run speed. So you can have a poorly-bred Chocobo showing 150km/h that in reality is slow as hell. Normally the run speed is much lower than the boosted speed, but you can't see it in game.  All you can do is filter which Chocobo sucks less by asking Chole, so you can keep breeding the Chocobos with the best stats and building up their normal speed.  I actually had one of those during the process. A Chocobo with very high sprint speed (like 130 or so) that was sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow. We're talking snail pace here. Anyway, on to our last breeding:  code: They see me rollin'  They hatin'  So yeah. The thing with speed is that it just makes you finish it faster. Joe can never keep up with you, as the proper stat to deal with him is Stamina (because of his AI you can outrun him by sprinting in the right times) and that's easy to max. Once you have enough stamina Teioh can't catch you, and once you have enough speed no one else can either.  [Sneak Attack] is a support materia that casts the linked materia automatically as soon as the battle starts.  By the way, the reason you see the Chocobo in a weird color during these screenshots is because the Gold Chocobo is so flashy its color blinks constantly.  Once you win some matches you get some nice accessories and a [Counter Attack].  There's this thing plus [Sprint Shoes] which puts you on auto-haste and [Choco Feather] which increases dexterity by 10.  More importantly, this is a random S Rank reward. [Magic Counter] is a support materia that counters with the linked magic or summon. We're done here!  And finally, the purpose of this entire crazy sidetrack.  Knights of the Round. Oh man. Knights of the Round is, to put it in the most blunt way possible, something that shouldn't be in the game. I'm pretty sure the only reason it is in, as well as the very convoluted process to get it, is to make help lines have a reason to exist, plus a way to get everyone to beat the game. Essentially, KOTR is the ultimate Summon materia. It takes some 2 minutes to watch and it's a multiple hit, high damage summon that will deal a shitload of damage, guaranteed, no questions asked. We're talking at least 50k here, all the way up to 130k since it deals 13 hits. Each hit deals damage to every enemy. It's almost a guaranteed one shot to the rest of the storyline bosses, possibly including the final boss depending on your stats. Naturally you won't get all that power for nothing. While cool at first, it gets boring as hell to watch by the tenth or so time, and it is the only summon that cannot be paired with Quadra Magic. It also takes a (rightfully so) shitload of time to level up. It's incredibly infamous for all the multitude of guides that recommended you to solve your problems by "casting Knights of the Round" or making KOTR Materia combos. No poo poo, Sherlock! We'll see it eventually. I don't want to spoil the next bosses of the game by using KOTR, especially since right now we can kill every single one of them with Sneak Attack + KOTR before they even have the slightest chance to breathe. Next time: Suspense! Mystery! Sidequests that are relevant to the plot! 
Elentor fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Aug 12, 2013 |
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Aug 12, 2013 14:35
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Elentor posted:
I also love the insane 3D rainbow worlds housed in the Gold Saucer. Both Speed and Chocobo Square make me extremely nostalgic for late 90s videogames.
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Aug 12, 2013 14:47
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Man, Knights of the Round. Is there anything more ridiculous in any Final Fantasy game barring complete instant winners like Zanmato or The End? But at least you can't say that they don't reward your efforts. This whole business also reminded me of this ancient VGcats comic (holy crap it's from 10 years ago) 
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Aug 12, 2013 14:58
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I seem to remember something about the last boss getting more HP if you use KOTR on the second-to-last one. That a thing or a legend?
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Aug 12, 2013 15:06
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Nuramor posted:I seem to remember something about the last boss getting more HP if you use KOTR on the second-to-last one. That a thing or a legend? The final bosses do have KOTR-triggered scripts. code: It sets a variable and the later bosses refer to this variable to make the fights harder and more complicated.It falls a bit short, though. KOTR is essentially 13 consecutive Neo Bahamuts, same piercing 5x times base magic damage and all. The most recent shot of Cloud's level shows him at 44, and for the sake of convenience I'll assume 90 magic. So, KOTR will deal about 52,260 damage, or enough to one-shot literally every boss but the final one and bonus bosses. And some of those are two-shot.
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Aug 12, 2013 15:45
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Oh god you can W-Summon KOTR? And then Mimic W-Summon KOTR?
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Aug 12, 2013 15:50
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OatmealRaisin posted:Oh god you can W-Summon KOTR? And then Mimic W-Summon KOTR?
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Aug 12, 2013 15:55
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OatmealRaisin posted:Oh god you can W-Summon KOTR? And then Mimic W-Summon KOTR? Mime instead of Mimic, but yes. The game is quite broken in ways.
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Aug 12, 2013 15:58
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KOTR is even more broken than the instant kill summons. Those usually don't work and if they do, it's like a 1% chance. KOTR is getting off every single time and anything it touches will die.
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Aug 12, 2013 16:16
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It's also where RPG-playing nerds got the free time to make themselves sandwiches. Skipping summons wasn't, to my knowledge, a thing that happened until, like, FF9 or FF10. Sure, you arguably could in FF8, but nobody uses summons in that anyway, and even in FF9, the game tried to incentiveize buttonmashing through the whole goddamn thing.
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Aug 12, 2013 16:27
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Edit: Ignore this, I was going on about a use of HP <-> MP but I realized that it needed a Materia I don't think we have yet.
Galick fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Aug 12, 2013 |
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Aug 12, 2013 16:33
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KataraniSword posted:Sure, you arguably could in FF8, but nobody uses summons in that anyway, and even in FF9, the game tried to incentiveize buttonmashing through the whole goddamn thing. You've got those backwards. FF8 has Boost which gave you extra damage in return for button mashing, whereas 9 was the first to have short animations. But having the shorter animations makes you deal less damage because Square hates you saving time.
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Aug 12, 2013 16:36
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I'm uh, fairly certain the speeds are supposed to be km/hr, not km/s. 150 km/s is over 400 times the speed of sound.
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Aug 12, 2013 16:49
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Fister Roboto posted:I'm uh, fairly certain the speeds are supposed to be km/hr, not km/s. 150 km/s is over 400 times the speed of sound. How else do you think that you get around the world so quickly on those things? 
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Aug 12, 2013 16:59
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Fister Roboto posted:I'm uh, fairly certain the speeds are supposed to be km/hr, not km/s. 150 km/s is over 400 times the speed of sound. Have you seen Teioh race? Dudes pretty fast.
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Aug 12, 2013 17:00
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Isn't there also a boss that scales with your level and/or gets massive bonuses for having characters at level 99? I seem to remember reading that.
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Aug 12, 2013 17:20
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Elentor posted:
I hope you show off some of the combos you can build with this and linked materia. It's probably one of my favorite things about FF7's mechanics once I discovered it. For some reason it wasn't mentioned in any of the strategy guides I had.
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Aug 12, 2013 17:23
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Now that I think about it, it strikes me as weird that OFS isn't doing his chocobo stuff right now either. Getting Sneak Attack and pairing it with Exit seems like a natural and obvious thing to do for a low level challenge.
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Aug 12, 2013 17:32
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Elentor posted:
Ahahahaha And here I was thinking you'd never top the Beat It jokes from Chapter 3.
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Aug 12, 2013 17:43
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SpookyLizard posted:Isn't there also a boss that scales with your level and/or gets massive bonuses for having characters at level 99? I seem to remember reading that. As I recall, this was also part of one of the final bosses, I think it's the same one(s) as the KOTR checks?
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Aug 12, 2013 17:52
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KOTR isn't even close to the most broken thing. I can't wait for elentor to show what is. Zainiest final fantasy secret ever!
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Aug 12, 2013 17:58
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Dragonatrix posted:Now that I think about it, it strikes me as weird that OFS isn't doing his chocobo stuff right now either. Getting Sneak Attack and pairing it with Exit seems like a natural and obvious thing to do for a low level challenge. The concern is money. I don't have the money to do racing unless I steal a lot of ethers. And if I steal that many Ethers I should probably just remove myself from all electronics forever.
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Aug 12, 2013 18:43
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We're only lacking one summon materia now, if I'm not misremembering? The one that I think a lot of people miss on their first playthrough. Also thanks for all the JRPG tips. Will check most of them out. Quick followup question: If I'm looking at Suikoden 2, should I just read a plot summary of 1 or should I play it if I really want to appreciate 2?
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Aug 12, 2013 19:12
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Elentor posted: seriously, glad we got this out of the way and you've successfully earned your gamebreaking right. Now I just can't wait to see all these sidequests again which we pretty much can do any-goddamn-where now.Foxhound posted:We're only lacking one summon materia now, if I'm not misremembering? The one that I think a lot of people miss on their first playthrough. 
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Aug 12, 2013 19:15
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Man, I've never seen continuing to breed even after you get your first gold chocobo; it always seemed so good that further improvements would be a luxury not justified by the trouble of doing the whole process again.
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Aug 12, 2013 19:27
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Foxhound posted:We're only lacking one summon materia now, if I'm not misremembering? The one that I think a lot of people miss on their first playthrough. Actually I believe there's 3 left. The one you're talking about, plus two others hidden in optional areas.
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Aug 12, 2013 19:50
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Foxhound posted:We're only lacking one summon materia now, if I'm not misremembering? The one that I think a lot of people miss on their first playthrough. Suikoden 1 is in a few ways better than its sequel, and worth playing for the backstory as well as the fact that multiple characters return in II.
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Aug 12, 2013 20:59
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Fister Roboto posted:I'm uh, fairly certain the speeds are supposed to be km/hr, not km/s. 150 km/s is over 400 times the speed of sound. Yea sorry, I've been writing too many functions normalized to second lately and didn't even think this through.
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Aug 12, 2013 22:59
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Azure_Horizon posted:Suikoden 1 is in a few ways better than its sequel, and worth playing for the backstory as well as the fact that multiple characters return in II. This, and you can load your save file from 1 for some goodies in 2.
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Aug 12, 2013 23:08
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Haha yeah 150 km/s is twice as fast as the fastest spacecraft we have ever built. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_(spacecraft) Screw the Shrina rocket, all Cid needed was an inbred gold chocobo.
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Aug 13, 2013 01:43
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waah posted:Haha yeah 150 km/s is twice as fast as the fastest spacecraft we have ever built. There's no forests on the moon. He can't land the bird.
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Aug 13, 2013 02:03
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Sorry if I missed it or I just didn't comprehend your post, but what was the final top speed for Dirty? Or does it max out at 174 km?
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Aug 13, 2013 06:30
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Tupperwarez posted:Oh yes indeed. In fact, it's one of the more popular ways to handle the optional bosses, if I remember correctly.
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Aug 13, 2013 06:39
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I'm not cheesing bosses with KOTR, maybe once just to show newcomers it's possible but I'm not gonna go full retard on all of them.Carbolic Smokeball posted:Sorry if I missed it or I just didn't comprehend your post, but what was the final top speed for Dirty? Or does it max out at 174 km? 176, but like I said, that's the sprint speed, the actual run speed isn't shown. I have no idea how fast the Chocobo is unless I look directly into the memory, but there's very little difference from Dirty's normal speed to his sprint, which is what makes him so insanely fast.
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Aug 13, 2013 07:13
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