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I still think FF4 DS is a halfassed attempt to modernize and change an SNES game that itself was basically an NES game at heart in regards to gameplay. Most of the enemies do the same stuff they did before, but they hit harder ans since it's so simplistic there's no real way to reduce the damage you take.
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Jul 31, 2012 18:29
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The White Dragon posted:Otherwise, just pretty much never attack with Zidane, and only have him steal, even from regular monsters. It's the only way you'll bearably get Thievery to do max damage. I am absolutely loathe to toot my own horn but you can trust me with FF9 poo poo, I did the spergin' ultracompletionist LP of it Or you could just ignore Thievery. I mean, 9999 for basically no MP from the back row is cool and all, but MP Attack and the right Killer ability do so much damage anyway in the endgame that grinding those steals up has never been worthwhile, IMO.
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Aug 30, 2012 07:42
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The White Dragon posted:Well I mean it was supposed to be a %damage attack, that's pretty worthless anyway in a game where the highest HP total is about 65,000. I think how it's supposed to work is that Thunder Slash is supposed to be a 190% damage attack. But since it's glitched, it does 19% of the enemy's HP, and has 0% accuracy since it was supposed to be a weapon-based skill, and those use the weapon's hit rate. Which would have actually been pretty nice, since IIRC Stiener's only other single-target moves are Darkside and Shock, which takes 40 MP. At least that's what I've heard from people who hack the game or whatever.
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May 15, 2013 00:51
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To be honest, I kind of feel like FF4 DS's difficulty is unfair at a lot of points because FF4 SNES's gameplay has less depth and customization than its predecessors at a lot of points, and the DS version really did nothing to change that. It kind of takes options away from the player compared to the original, since White Magic status spells besides Slow and Berserk are unreliable because they use Intellect for their success rate now, Edge can't use the claws, and reequiping uses up a turn. And giving enemies that had an attack based off of Max HP more HP and speed without playtesting it is pretty terrible design for a game made in, what, 2008? And even ignoring gameplay, FF4 DS doesn't really do much for the story, since it still comes across as the clumsy gap between FF1/2/3's NES-era presentation and 6/7/8's story-driven stuff. So it's kind of hard to call the best.
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Jun 4, 2013 03:03
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1st AD posted:I played this for about 5 minutes, got murdered in a random battle outside of town after doing the intro, then promptly uninstalled and got my refund. gently caress that. I don't care much for the DS version, but I'm pretty sure if you die right after the game let you start playing then it's all on you.
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Aug 2, 2013 00:23
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Zombies' Downfall posted:One of you is Gogo, I just can't be sure who. (the possess thing owns) You can't really raise stats much in the World of Balance anyway, can you? You get pretty bad espers until the Magitek lab, and one dungeon after that before the Thamasa stuff where your party's chosen for you. Even ignoring that, Relm gets like +14 from her endgame equipment, so she kind of has a lead on most of 2/3 of the party anyway. But yeah, you can coast through FF6 even without knowing jack poo poo about anything close to the "optimal" setups.
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Aug 20, 2013 04:16
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LAY-ZX posted:Be sure to get Level ? Holy before you enter the final dungeon, too. The ? is the ones digit of your gil, so whenever you have a 1 at the end of your gil total you just nuke the whole other side of the field, and, wow, everything in Kefka's Tower drops gil in multiples of 10! They both ignore defense. I think someone just dropped the ball, since Quazar would be nice if you could bait something in the World of Balance into using it, but as it it's just a worse version of a skill that's harder to learn. Zombies' Downfall posted:Some actual Cyan tips to make him a little less derpy: early on, give him a Gauntlet so he can double-grip his katana and spam Dispatch, the 1st Bushido for heavy single-target damage. Bushido ignores your weapon and your row. And most of them are either magic-based or pierce defense, like the other special commands, so there's never not a reason to sit in the back with a weapon that boosts evade or whatever and use Fang/Dispatch over the attack command.
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Aug 28, 2013 09:39
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Mega64 posted:It's either way too hard or way too easy, depending entirely on whether you know the intricacies of the game's mechanics, which you really won't unless you bother looking at the game's mechanics. It's obvious that stats grow depending on how often you use them (Attacking gives Strength, losing HP increases max HP, and so on), but it's not obvious that evasion is the most important stat in the game, that heavy armor is completely useless compared to light armor, that most equipment gives penalties to spell casting, and so on. Not knowing any of that makes the game that much harder, as you'll constantly be hit with nasty attacks that add horrible status effects. Yet if you know all this, then it's crazy easy to breeze through the game with an evasive tank up front and two spellcasters in the back. To be fair, the GBA port eliminates the hidden casting penalty and fixes a lot of the other egregiously broken stuff. I mean, the dungeons still aren't great and the random encounter rates are somewhat numbing, but it's worth playing just so you can say you played a JRPG where the final boss killed Satan and becomes the new ruler of Hell. Plus, the soundtrack is criminally underrated.
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Aug 29, 2013 04:32
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BioMe posted:The GBA version of FF2 is fine despite the game having reputation as unfixably broken. You still kind of have to look up some gameplay mechanics on Gamefaqs though. Nostalgia? People have posted plenty of reasons why they don't care for the DS version of FF4. It's not really a very polished game on its own merits, and not terribly experimental aside from bosses. Personally I think it had fantastic ideas but really wasn't playtested as much as it needed to be. I don't really give a poo poo that Flame was a thing in the original, it's much worse on the DS version, which someone should have caught.
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Aug 29, 2013 10:46
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Most action JRPGs have pretty unremarkable stories, and that's a best-case scenerio. I loved Ys 7 and Oath in Felghana, but I sure as hell wasn't playing for the story. I mean, it helps and all if the story's good, since Tales of Graces would be the best JRPG ever if its writing were better and the plot was unobstrusive to gameplay, but thinking of most of the JRPGs I've played, plot was never a major draw even when it wasn't terrible.
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Oct 1, 2013 10:01
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Mega64 posted:I can't believe it took SE thirteen FF games to implement a feature that was around in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. It's pretty believable if you think about how Chrono Trigger and Earthbound eliminated random encounters, then every JRPG developer since deciding that they needed to still be a thing until well into the PS2 era.
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Oct 2, 2013 14:53
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Dunno if it was posted in the thread a while ago, but someone posted this interview with Tom Slattery (translator guy for FF4DS, FF6 Advance, Chrono Trigger DS) in the FF6 Brave New World LP. http://www.rpgamer.com/features/insidegaming/tslatteryint.html It kind of seems like FF13's questionable localization was at least partially because of the clusterfuck that results from localizing the game while they kept changing poo poo on the Japanese half.
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Nov 8, 2013 04:37
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The White Dragon posted:By playing FF6, or even a SaGa game, because they were made by people who actually understand balance and don't just want to shove their LOOK AT HOW GRATUITOUSLY DIFFICULT I CAN MAKE THINGS dicks down your throat. But then you just get a super easy JRPG that's still imbalanced, just in the player's favor?
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Nov 11, 2013 01:00
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Kanpachi posted:
To be fair, they did this in the vanilla FF6. Something like a 1/3 shot there, but still.
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Nov 12, 2013 09:31
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Sex_Ferguson posted:The biggest problem with 9's combat are it being slow (As previously stated), Trance activating automatically, and the whole weapons and armor thing really only being a way to get skills. Like, it's the same problem with 6's development, in that you effectively just keep certain objects to learn abilities then throw them away until you get the next best thing. So characters sort of just fill into their own niches and that's it. 7 falls more into what 5 does, where not only do you get a myriad of tools to mess with (Jobs, Materia) but it opens up when you max it out to give you more options to mess with and approach situations in a myriad of different ways and this also combines with the equipment you have to manage throughout the game which will at times limit you and test you to try different combinations of Materia and Wutai which also makes you strategize with just attacks, limits, and items. Learning abilities from FF9 is the best part of the gameplay though? It's really cool to go to a town and see what new pieces of equipment you can pick up since it means more abilities, and doing sidequests feels legit rewarding since you can get good skills like AP UP and MP Attack really early, at least IMO. I don't really have a problem with the FF5/7/8 style of characters essentially being skins for your job/matera/junction setups, but it's really more of an apples and oranges thing as opposed to one game doing it flat out better than the other like FF5's job system compared to FF3. I guess the whole Trance activating automatically is stupid, but frankly, it seems silly to consider it even a minor complaint since it would be completely gamebreaking if it had manual input. On another note, am I the only one who thinks FF5's ability system is pretty bad? I don't mean jobs, the job system itself is pretty fantastic even among current JRPGs for being able to make so many party combinations at any time, and have nearly all of them, within reason, be viable. The actual ability system kinda...sucks though. Compared to something like Final Fantasy Tactics, where you can equip a secondary command, a support ability, a counter skill and a movement skill, Final Fantasy 5 feels lacking in that regard. Hell, most non-mages don't have a skillset to equip, just a command you probably never touch in the actual job itself. It never feels like you're customizing and building up a unit like in Tactics, because you're just giving a Black Mage !White or a melee job like Samurai Two-Handed. Which is still cool in its own way, it just feels like it could work better if you could replace the Attack command with stuff like !Mug or !Aim, and had a slot dedicated to the Equip X skills.
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Dec 24, 2013 08:09
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NikkolasKing posted:I'm absolutely serious. I'd rather play II than VIII or XIII. I'd rather play 2 than 7 or 8, but that's because the latter two are longass games. FF2's remakes more less fixed its most egregious problems, which just leaves an oldschool JRPG with some weird but cool mechanics and a great OST. I dunno about it being better than any game besides 1, but at this point it's more a matter of the other games being better at what 2 tried rather than it being a broken pile like some people think.
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Dec 25, 2013 07:01
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Sex_Ferguson posted:The problem with 2's gameplay is it's a loving slog. I cannot play 2 for long stretches of time because of the stupid experience mechanic and how awful just trying to make it through certain areas without grinding was. The story is whatever, it was an NES FF, but the gameplay is really bad and slow even for a recently created JRPG genre. To say it's better than any game other than loving 1 is ridiculous, like even if you enjoy 2 you have to realize its flaws and why everyone calls it a bad game. But you don't have to grind though. I don't know about the NES or PS1 versions, but I played through the GBA version without doing anything special beyond MP grinding a little with Swap, and I honestly didn't even need to do that. Getting through the game easily requires knowing to equip light armor and boost your evasion, but it's really not the terrible slog you're saying it is, and even evasion boosting's fairly intuitive. Fister Roboto posted:It's actually very possible to do well in FF2 without any grinding, but it requires an in depth knowledge of things that the game will never, ever tell you. Things like "equipping any armor or weapons will kill your magic ability" or "pretty much everything is vulnerable to toad" or "don't have more than one person in the front row if you want to beat the game". Those things aren't in the GBA/PSP versions. Well, the Toad thing is, but it's honestly pretty intuitive to try using a low MP multi-target instant death spell at least once.
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Dec 25, 2013 09:13
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That loving Sned posted:The Final Fantasy X|X-2 HD Collection launched in Japan yesterday. It has more loading screens than the PS2 version, and cutscenes are still unskippable Ha ha, holy poo poo. Though, this isn't really surprising from the company that let War of the Lions with its hardcoded lag ship.
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Dec 27, 2013 15:42
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I just started replaying Final Fantasy 9. It's pretty amazing just how charming it is and how much effort they put into giving it a soul, at least up until the story goes into Generic JRPG mode in Disk 3. I thought it was amazing back in the day as my first "conventional" JRPG, and it's still great. Kinda wish it had stayed a side game so they didn't have to "keep up" with FF8 and sacrifice gameplay speed for aesthetics, but eh. Just wanted to weigh in since we're talking about FF9.
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Jan 2, 2014 09:32
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Playing FF9, in that card tournament in Disk 3. Who the gently caress thought Tetra Master was a good idea? Specifically the part where you can arbitrarily lose the little "battles" even if you understand the rules and do everything right?
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Jan 14, 2014 16:04
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Xavier434 posted:The hidden and randomized hp is my only issue with the FFIX card game. Otherwise, I enjoy it quite a bit. I would like it more if the rest of the rules were more clearly explained and easily referenced mid game. I would also like it if there was a more robust system of progression coupled with rewards for playing. However, it really is just the hp thing that makes it weird. I think complaints about the card game are overblown since the remaining foundation is pretty solid. To be honest, my usual experience with Tetra Master is to play on and off until I get a "perfect" loss due to those random factors mentioned. It has the potential for a fun game, but losing most of your best cards because the invisible RNG decided to screw you over really sours the experience.
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Jan 15, 2014 00:23
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Schwartzcough posted:Does SquareEnix even do anything in-house anymore, beyond loving up production of their console titles? It seems like all these remakes and ports and such are being farmed out to no-name little development houses. Square letting people half-rear end ports of their games is nothing new, sadly. Just look at War of the Lions. And FF1 GBA/PSP's difficulty.
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Jan 16, 2014 06:08
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Evil Fluffy posted:Yeah The ice spells I mentioned were far worse than what they were replaced with. Who needs spells like Ice Spears or Firebane when we can have Kakrack and Frizzle. That's some quality writing right there. I don't think you've played a Dragon Quest in years if you think the spell names are ill-fitting in the context of using them to attack cute little teardrops, demons with pitchforks that are actual forks wearing little booties, and other enemies that are drawn by a man that does children's gag comic books for a living.
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Jan 16, 2014 06:51
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Evil Fluffy posted:Setting cursor to memory and cleaning house with a character like Edgar is cheating. I dunno, the fact that glitches like FF6's Magic Evasion bug and FF7's Magic Defense not existing (or something like that, not quite sure how it works) that would be pretty serious in, say, Dragon Quest are barely noticed kinda goes to show how easy the games are.
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Jan 17, 2014 09:55
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Cannot Find Server posted:The thing that really baffles me about this FF6 port is that the graphics on the original look fine on my 20" SDTV. Why is the holy hell did they feel the need to ""improve"" (all the quotation marks in the world wouldn't be enough) the graphics for a tiny little phone screen? Since it looks new, they can trick people into thinking it changes a lot. Seriously though, kinda have to wonder how well Square's doing, at least on the Japanese side. Final Fantasy 13 and its sequels is the only new thing they've done in a while, besides the Dragon Quest 3DS remakes and Bravely Default. I mean, are they more or less giving up on JRPGs that don't literally print money because of the name?
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Jan 19, 2014 12:26
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fronz posted:When I first played FFT I didn't like the fantasy part of it because it seemed like the game was going 'yeah all this cool politics haha gently caress that we're gonna fight demons', but it actually meshes really well with the overall themes of the story. The PSP version was pretty unfun IMO, so maybe do a trip report on the SNES version?
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Jan 24, 2014 08:47
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Aurain posted:I played it without cheating on my PSP too. The chance of failing a craft is just so arbitrary and easily save scummed that you may as well save yourself time by just getting rid of it if you can. I would say its the only thing you should definitely cheat away because it serves no purpose but to annoy the player. Grinding is just a personal choice thing, so if you don't like it, why bother with it is all. What? Grinding in TO is totally not a choice, at least in the conventional sense. Every class comes at level 1, and because equipment is tied to levels, if you want to try a new unit out you have to grind to make them halfway decent. This is true even for the unique classes tied to units that join in Chapter 3 and 4.
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Jan 24, 2014 12:35
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Tempo 119 posted:Looking at some of these PS+ deals, I want to get either FF5 or FF Tactics: War of the Lions... I know one of these is considered a bad port but I've completely forgotten which one. Help? If you're on a PSP and not a Vita, you can use custom firmware to patch out FFT's slowdown, but otherwise just stick with FF5. It's laggy, but not crazy about it like WotL is whenever anything but the Attack command is used.
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Jan 29, 2014 02:30
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Excels posted:You can pin lazy poo poo like the wax-dummy character models and lack of cutscene skip on Virtuos Games, since it was outsourced to them by Square. They have a bad habit of outsourcing remakes, like FF3 DS, but isn't it common for HD ports to be worked on by a side company? I don't think most of the PS2 Greatest Hits HD ports were redone by their companies, at least. I mean, the companies that Square uses for ports are often lackluster, but that's partly Square's fault for letting stuff like War of the Lion's slowdown out of the gate, IMO.
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Mar 19, 2014 06:26
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NightConqueror posted:I don't know what it is about Japanese games in general to totally jump the shark 3/4 through the game. Honestly, I prefer a straightforward, simple story with a compelling plot and characters rather than some insane act 3 twist. Honestly, I suspect the shark-jumping is at least partly them not thinking the story through too well. Or coming up with a complex story in all the wrong ways. Final Fantasy 9 was pretty simple and well told, so it made something that would have been totally insane without context like Terra and Trance Kuja work out despite being silly if you explained them to an outsider.
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Apr 2, 2014 16:42
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Switched.on posted:I'm starting the series from the beginning, using the GBA version for 1 & 2. I'm nearly done with 1 and was wondering how it compared to 2 and 3 in terms of length, slog, and tedium. I tried 3 before on the DS and remember not being able to finish it. Just curious what I'm in for before I get to the good games. Also, is there a version of 3 that minimizes any of the negatives? Already have the DS version, but I'm willing to try a different system. 2 GBA is pretty good as far as oldass JRPG ports go, and has the additional benefit of a fantastic OST. The GBA fixes most of the egregious issues from the game, so all you really need to keep in mind is to make your evasion as high as possible, since evade/agility only goes up by dodging, which requires having good evade. You don't need to min/max it, just remember that dual wielding and heavy armor aren't great options until your agility's super high. Also, Frog owns. Frog everything.
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Apr 16, 2014 01:22
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BottledBodhisvata posted:gently caress those loving sheep. You can't grind off them, you just can't. They are harder than motherfucking Ozma, I swear to christ. At least Ozma has a chance for the luck roulette to favor YOU--those sheep will just murder you or mock you, win or lose, and victory has such high costs you just wouldn't...it just isn't worth it. It's easy to forget since status ailments are so worthless in FF9 (because everything dies so fast) but Yans are vulnerable to Sleep, and Quina gets a super-accurate sleep move that hits everything onscreen. Hell, I don't think you're meant to fight them without Night since they Snort away your party as a counter to anything targeting them. I mean, it still makes Yans a crappy leveling source since you need Quina and someone good with magic when Quina can just one-shot Grand Dragons, but they're consistently beatable.
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Apr 16, 2014 16:00
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ImpAtom posted:Other than exactly one enemy in the game (the Blaze Dogs), I can't think of a single enemy in the game where it goes "they went first and you died" and I did a low-level run of FF4DS. The Blaze Dogs are legitimately dumb design but they're an exception. Aren't there multiple enemies with that stupid attack that does damage based of the enemy's max HP though? Anyway, I didn't especially care for FF4DS because they didn't really try to change it being such a fundamentally simple game. I'd probably agree with people who say "well you just have to play the game smarter!", except that its enemies have less status ailment vulnerabilities than the vanilla FF4, and a chunk of those ailments are white magic, which aren't reliable since they use the black magic stat for their hit rates. FF2 hasn't ages super well, but the GBA version fixed a lot of its worst issues and you're still left with a JRPG with a fantastic soundtrack where the main villian tops Kefka by conquering Hell.
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May 1, 2014 02:01
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Am I the only one who tries to mix up their party once you get the option in Disk 3? Sticking with one party always seems so boring in a game with multiple jobs.
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May 1, 2014 09:13
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ozza posted:I'm coming towards the end of my FFIX replay at the moment. It's such a sweet little game. The storyline is really tight, the characters are strong, and the soundtrack is among the best in the series. I can't understand how it didn't spawn spin-offs and sequels/prequels ala FFVII - it's the kind of cartoony, fun world that makes sense to revisit for multiple games. Something like FFVII on the other hand strikes me as a much more stand-alone story that has been progressively poo poo over and devalued by each subsequent release. I dunno, I always felt that the cooldown at the start of Disk 3 was pretty great as the calm before the storm. At least for me, I enjoyed it even more on my replay because you know everything is going to go to poo poo after Treno.
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Jun 5, 2014 10:17
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General Morden posted:Has the original Final Fantasy Tactics aged well? I've been thinking of picking up the War of the Lions version, but I'm not sure how it holds up to the more recent titles. If you're thinking of picking up War of the Lions, you should know that the PSP version has some pretty egregious hardcoded lag, but there's a patch you can apply via homebrew to fix it, but being homebrew it only works on a PSP, not a Vita. If you're looking at the iOS version they fixed it altogether, so no worries.
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Jul 9, 2014 07:12
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Calculators have pretty terrible magic too, along with everything else, so they were probably balancing Math Skill around the class using it being terrible. Just like Draw Out is balanced around the user having mediocre magic and few ways to boost it.
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Jul 9, 2014 17:06
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Something that's not immediately super obvious about Necron is that he's a Demon and Aerial-type enemy, so equipping one of those two Killer abilities along with MP Attack means your normal attacks nearly break 9999 damage with decent weapons. Necron's easily the nastiest FF boss in the series offensively between his normal attacks and Grand Cross slowing you down to heal all the time, but 66,000 HP is pretty terrible when you're doing 10,000 damage an attack.
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Aug 14, 2014 08:30
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ManOfTheYear posted:FF9 ending drives me nuts in a way, mainly because the timeline seemes to have warped: The rat prince is still a kid, Eiko is still a kid, but Vivi has somehow managed to have 7 loving kids. He's like 9, how much time has passed? Who did he gently caress? Did the black mages even have genders, aren't they like golems? I know what they went after but it would have been much more satisfying having them taking care about Zidanes' tribe and the forest and each other before passing away and the Zidane tribe taking their place and having a statue for the black mages or something. It's a lot more sad, but Vivi becoming a father all of a sudden is very very jarring. Even though Vivi's supposed to "look nine" he's probably only like two or three years old. I just always assumed Kuja designed his prototype to asexually reproduce so he wouldn't have to make another one before working out the kinks on the mass-produced models.
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Aug 19, 2014 11:46
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bloodychill posted:Dark Knight using that chain-attack move was my go-to. It was the only consistent way to get huge damage. I think it was also broken in the original release so you could do something stupid like equip a blood sword and chain indefinitely. Or something. Apparently the Rage move where they attack five times or until they don't have enough HP to cast it didn't have the "five times" limit, which made it an infinite combo on everything.
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Sep 13, 2014 15:16
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