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Finally getting around to playing XII after all these years, I completely skipped the PS2 generation so the HD releases finally gave me a chance to check them out. So far I'm liking it a lot - I was a bit wary after hearing so much criticism about the battle system "playing itself" but it really works pretty well for me - I can get how it feels like you're less in control of the battle, but setting up gambits feels a bit like a puzzle for some bosses (in a good way) and it's kinda nice not having to waste time mashing X to autoattack everything for every random encounter like I do in every other FF. Ivalice is a cool setting and I dig the way they incorporated some of the aesthetic from both FFT and Vagrant Story into it. It also hits the mark writing-wise better than the other Ivalice games. It's still a little up its own rear end once in a while but for the most part it's surprisingly solid, and the localization seems like it had an absurd amount of effort put into it compared to every other voiced FF. Having played XIII recently for the first time, it's seriously shocking how much better the delivery in XII is, and how much more coherent it is. The only downside is it feels like most of the cast gets pushed off to the side while Balthier is busy chewing the scenery in every cutscene. So far the only thing that bugs me a bit is how much vestigal MMO stuff there is, which I'm guessing had something to do with it coming on the heels of XI? Was it meant to be another MMO at first or something? There's just a bizarre amount of pointless busywork - fetch quests with completely rear end rewards that seem to have zero purpose besides wasting your time, "side quests" like running around screaming about how you're Captain Basch or the weirdly tedious stuff when you get to Archades and have to chase NPCs around for clues and collect "chops" by literally running back and forth between 6 people that are all standing 5 feet away from each other, etc. It made me sorta miss the more traditional FF minigames - even if they were terrible more often than not, they had a sort of charm. Then again I don't even think I'm at the halfway mark yet so maybe some of that stuff shows up later. There have also been a few spots where the enemy distribution is just totally hosed up in a way that you'd never figure out except though trial and error. In the first zone, there's the big dinosaurs and it's obvious you aren't meant to attack them, but then you get to the Giza Plains and there are some totally normal looking enemies that just one-shot you. There's been a few other places where there's a random enemy in the mix that is insanely overpowered compared to all the other ones, and the game is inconsistent about whether they aggro you or not. The autosave system makes it not a big deal 90% of the time, but there have definitely been a couple times where I lost a good piece of loot because I was fighting a normal enemy and then a giant elemental or something shows up and nukes my entire party. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Mar 28, 2019 |
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Mar 28, 2019 05:02
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MarsDragon posted:Elementals aggro on magic. Ah, ok, thank you! I couldn't figure out why half the time they were totally docile and then the other half they'd rush me from offscreen to dump a firaga on my entire party, but that makes sense. Still a bit annoying since I'm usually paying attention to what I'm trying to fight and not checking to see if there's an elemental nearby, but I guess I should work on that.
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Mar 28, 2019 17:00
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Late to the party but I am super pumped about the VIII remaster, I know it's the most controversial game in the series but it will always hold a special place in my heart. Probably my second or third favorite FF soundtrack, too. Kina odd that there's no release date beyond "this year some time" though - it can't have that much of a turnaround time on it, and it seems improbable that they don't have a rough idea of when it's coming out, so I wonder why they didn't at least give us a window of a month when we already have a release date for the VII remake. Between VIII and Crystal Chronicles getting re-released this year, I'm definitely going to be spending a lot of time stuck in a nostalgia hole.
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Jun 14, 2019 22:39
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So what's the word on the Crystal Chronicles remaster that's coming out at the end of next month? Feels like I haven't heard anything at all about it - was kinda curious how they were reworking multiplayer and they were adding new dungeons or anything. I liked it a lot when it came out but nobody had the fancy Game Boy cables so I didn't really get a chance to actually play it like it was intended and I'd definitely be interested in checking out a good remaster.
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Jul 26, 2020 01:41
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Yeah I was just surprised how little info there is about it for something that is right around the corner and has been basically done for half a year. Figured they would have at least let some reviewers get their hands on it early to build hype.
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Jul 26, 2020 17:56
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That's a bummer. I love the art design and soundtrack and general fairy-tale aesthetic of CC and was looking forward to finally trying it out in multiplayer. I might still pick it up on sale just because I remember enjoying the single player quite a bit back in the day, but $30 for that is pretty steep. Why is like every single FF remaster / port such a trainwreck lol, it cannot seriously be that hard to make something that will both earn a shitload of nostalgia dollars and also not piss everyone off. I still can't believe that in 2020 the only way to play the SNES-era FFs without heinously ugly mobile phone graphics and menus is through illegal emulation or owning a working console that came out 30 years ago and paying out the nose for a cartridge.
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Aug 27, 2020 21:00
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Veib posted:6 is on Snes Classic (and 1 on NES Classic) Yeah, I'll probably eventually pick up a Classic if they ever come down in price and stop being sold out everywhere / getting scalped on eBay for $200. Still, only having one readily accessible FF game even on your special retro console is just garbage. Remaster the original SNES FFs, bundle them all together, give them a trophy list, and sell it for $60. Surely the amount of actual work involved would be minuscule compared to how much they'd make off of it.
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Aug 27, 2020 21:07
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I actually really liked CC as a single player game back when it came out, the art direction and atmosphere are excellent. It's a huge bummer that they hosed up multiplayer because that's the biggest part of the game's appeal but even solo it is definitely not even close to the worst FF spin-off.
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Aug 28, 2020 20:06
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MagusofStars posted:What *are* generally considered the worst FF spin-offs? There are a bunch of awful gacha-based / pay-to-win mobile spin-offs out there (All the Bravest, Mobius, Opera Omnia, Brave Exvius, New Empire off the top of my head, plus way more than never got a US release) But even discounting the mobile stuff there's also After Years, Dirge of Cerberus, Type-0, Chocobo's Dungeon, World of Final Fantasy, like 5 other Crystal Chronicles games including a couple that tower defense / city building sims for some reason, and probably a few others that are all easily worse than Crystal Chronicles.
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Aug 28, 2020 20:46
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The White Dragon posted:chocobo's dungeon is not a bad spinoff, it's one of the most hardcore roguelites available Sorry, was thinking of Chocobo's Dungeon 2, the extremely boring PS1 game. Haven't played any of the others or heard much about them but I think there's one on Wii and one on PS4? thetoughestbean posted:World of Final Fantasy kicks rear end, what the heck! I liked the art design and the early gameplay enough to push through it, but I found the writing / voice acting really grating and the gameplay became incredibly tedious about halfway through. The fights lost a lot of their puzzle elements that actually required any strategy and it got bogged down in repetitive and grindy fights. The concept of a pokemon-ish FF was great and I thought it was gonna pull it off at first but I ended up really disappointed by it. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 20:53
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The White Dragon posted:that is the most hardcore roguelite lol. the first few dungeons are easy, and then everything after ultros the kid gloves are off and the game is making you do 30+ floor runs with no checkpoints. Yeah, I remember it going from absurdly easy to just brutally difficult and just having an overall kinda drab look and repetitive gameplay that I bounced off of. Looking at the reviews for it, it seems like pretty much every outlet put it at around the low-to-mid 60s when it came out, which is probably where I would rank it. That being said, "harcore roguelikes" are not really my wheelhouse so I'll defer to people who enjoy them.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:33
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Leal posted:Hey so the whole thing with crystal chronicles lite is that you can play up to the final dungeon if playing with someone who has a full copy... but since only the host, gets the myrrh, how do the lite players progress their stories? They can only do the first 3 dungeons. My understanding is that a host with a full copy can invite you into the dungeon and you can play it regardless of story progression. Not sure if there's any scaling involved or what - if not I can't imagine endgame dungeons being much fun with starting gear. WaltherFeng posted:Yess after several hours of failing I beat the FFVIIR superboss VR trial. Hell yeah, that was a great feeling.Then I went on youtube and saw some mutants doing speedruns in like 4 minutes.
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Aug 29, 2020 23:10
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CC has a lot of charm and if you like the art style at all you'll probably enjoy it in single player. Combat isn't deep but if you're playing FF games that's nothing new - I would say the in-combat positioning / timing stuff makes it much more engaging than most FFs in spite of the simplicity. Less of an RPG feel - you raise stats by collecting artifacts at the end of each dungeon and from a relatively small pool of equipment upgrades. It's honestly probably one of the most challenging games in the series when you get into the later-game dungeons if you're playing solo - not frustratingly so (to me at least) since they were designed to be able to be cleared that way, but they are obviously a bit more tuned toward multiplayer. This is from playing the GC version - apparently there are new postgame dungeons too that are even harder, so not sure what those are like solo. It can also sorta depend on your character - I'm playing the trial version now and having a lot of fun with a Yuke caster, but joining multiplayer dungeons can be kind of annoying because people just rush to grab every item, which leads to a bunch of melee-focused characters fighting with me over magic. In that sense I actually prefer playing solo until I'm doing some artifact hunting or just relaxing without worrying about progress. It's worth noting that it's not super long if you're not interested in playing multiple characters to build up your town or replaying dungeons to get more artifacts / materials for crafting - you can push through the game solo in about 20 hours if your goal is just hitting the end (again, not factoring in the new postgame stuff that got added).
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Aug 31, 2020 00:09
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It's worth giving the free trial a spin - you'll definitely know by the third dungeon whether or not it's your cup of tea.
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Aug 31, 2020 01:15
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Someone a few posts up said they cleared it in 18 hours, which is definitely on the faster side for a first playthrough but nothing too crazy. The top glitchless speedruns are only 2 hours and they don't even bother with a third cycle; for all-cycle speedruns they are clocking in just under 5 and a half hours. That's obviously an incredibly higher skill ceiling / knowledge of the game than the average player but the game can definitely be on the shorter side if you're not worried about min-maxing stats. Also enemies get tougher in multiplayer, which might account for some of that - I soloed the original game and I was like 13 and definitely wasn't maxing out stats or playing anywhere near optimally.
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Aug 31, 2020 06:47
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man nurse posted:I pulled the trigger on CC, I kinda dig what it’s got going on so far. I profess to being let down that it has a really small trophy list though, lol Yeah, I was too. I know it's kinda silly but I really enjoy a well-done trophy list that gives you a little nod for doing challenging / unusual stuff. There are tons of times I've tried stuff out that I would have missed otherwise just because I saw a trophy related to it. Remasters seem to get lazy lists pretty often though - RE4 is the same way.
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Aug 31, 2020 21:56
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This is really cool, someone covered Dancing Mad on an actual church organ as it was meant to be played: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFavxCmZbjg Couple of years old but I'd never seen it before. Absolutely insane levels of talent, it's hard to describe how difficult of a piece this would be and he's note-perfect without even having sheet music to reference. Still probably Uematsu's most impressive composition.
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Dec 20, 2020 05:11
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Archenteron posted:8-Bit Music Theory did a pretty nice video analyzing Dancing Mad awhile ago, worth a watch if you're into that nitty-gritty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbeXHTDVX8c I am indeed, and this was really cool too, thank you!
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Dec 20, 2020 05:45
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I wonder if the additional content is gonna just be freely accessible from the main menu or something if you've already beaten the game - I enjoyed it a lot but honestly I don't think I've got another full replay of it in me just to see some new side content, as fun as Yuffie looks.
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Feb 26, 2021 18:48
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Schwartzcough posted:I mean, they've said that your PS4 saves will transfer over, and if you beat the game you have chapter select unlocked, so at most you'd be forced to play through a chapter again. But I'd be shocked if the DLC wasn't just selectable from the menu. Oh wow I completely forgot about chapter select lol.
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Feb 26, 2021 21:35
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Speaking of the VII Remake, does anyone remember off the top of their head what chapter it is where Aerith is talking about how she almost prefers seeing the bottom of the plates to seeing the actual sky? Trying to remember the exact quote, and I think she says something similar in Crisis Core?
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Mar 1, 2021 02:19
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Perfect, thanks guys!
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Mar 1, 2021 06:22
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Why does SE just refuse to port any of the classic FFs to console. Hell I'll even take the lovely Matrix versions so I can play on my couch with a big screen instead of sitting in front of my laptop with a PS3 controller plugged in because the KBM controls are borderline unplayably lovely. Like it would take virtually zero extra effort and result in massively more sales, is there some weird contractual agreement that forbids it or is it just the usual incompetence.
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Jun 13, 2021 23:44
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Tossup between Altissia and Luca for me probably.
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Aug 7, 2021 05:50
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Mideel seemed kinda cozy and had some pretty scenery to look at until it got blown to hell.
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Aug 7, 2021 06:00
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Yeah, I always kinda wondered if that whole sequence was originally meant to be more fleshed out / take place somewhere else entirely or what - I think the game definitely gets progressively less "lived in" as it goes on but I haven't read much about the development process - were they dealing with a time / resource crunch by the end?
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Aug 7, 2021 06:12
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Excalibur 2 isn't even really a big deal in the remaster. The real hell for completionists in FFIX is the jump rope minigame and the cup guessing minigame, which is borderline genuinely impossible.
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Aug 26, 2021 17:09
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Fister Roboto posted:You can at least set up an autohotkey script for jump rope (and hippo racing later). The cup game is sadistic though. You have a 1 in 19,683 chance of getting it per attempt. There's probably a way to abuse the RNG seed, but I'm not aware of any. The only way I ever saw anyone "cheat" it was to use recording software to slow the framerate down so much that you could visually track the cup, which is pretty silly. Even worse for the console players who have to do that + jump roping unassisted.
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Aug 26, 2021 18:04
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Schwartzcough posted:When was there a cup guessing minigame in IX? I remember the awful Hippaul Racing and Jump Rope, but I must've blocked out the cup minigame entirely... It's in Alexandria during your second visit, the Nero brothers do a cup shuffling game and there's an achievement for guessing it right 9 times in a row. It gets progressively faster each time and past like the 4th it's so fast that it's physically impossible to track it, meaning you need to get a lucky with a 1 in 3 choice 5 times in a row. It's...technically possible, if you don't mind wasting hundreds of hours of your life, I guess. In theory you could probably just film the screen with your phone and slow it down enough with some software to make it bearable, but back when it released I think it was pretty much impossible. The only prize for getting it all right is like 25,000 gil so it mostly seems like a cruel joke they put in there.
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Aug 26, 2021 18:28
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Zil posted:For bullshit achievements like that, I would suggest steam achievement manager. Can unlock individual achievements, 100% the game or even reset achievements to unearned if you want. I bought the remaster on console so I just have to live with that and the jump rope trophy taunting me forever  My favorite mainline FF game is the only one that even my horrible completionist urge will not overcome.
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Aug 26, 2021 19:19
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I want a remastered CC eventually but not as bad as I want a remastered Vagrant Story. Still easily on the most stylish, atmospheric, and well-written games on PS1. The intro cinematic is absolutely incredible in terms of what they were able to achieve with the tech they had. It's pretty much sitting with MGS1 in their own tier of technical achievement.
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Sep 1, 2021 16:21
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I mostly hope these sell well enough to get them to remaster some PS1-era titles so that I can play them on a modern console / PC without screwing around with emulators. Vagrant Story, Parasite Eve, Chrono Trigger, Front Mission. Tons of good stuff that deserves a re-release but is probably not popular enough to get on a full-on remake.
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Sep 8, 2021 15:51
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Augus posted:Vagrant Story had no FMVs besides a short 30-second intro, every cutscene was rendered in-engine. It used lower-poly models than the PS1 FFs. The sound was directly generated by the PS1 hardware instead of using samples. All that impressive lighting and crazy amount of detail was basically done with what amounts to extremely high-quality pixel art and clever camera placement. It’s crazy. Yeah it's amazing, nothing else on the PS1 even remotely touches it. And the crazy thing is they managed genuinely expressive facial animations, something not even MGS1 attempted, while having half the polygon count of FF7 characters. Look at the lighting and facial animations on this gif, absolutely insane 
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Sep 8, 2021 21:24
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Can somebody give me a brief rundown on how weapons / armor affect spellcasting in FF2? I know using a weapon / shield had a big hidden Int / Spirit penalty in the original version, as did wearing "heavy" armor, but I heard that the weapon and shield penalty got removed for the Origins release. Does the pixel remaster keep it that way, or is it faithful to the original? And what counts as "heavy" armor? Basically trying to figure out how to equip Maria and as near as I can tell basically everything other than being completely naked and weaponless incurs some sort of penalty that makes magic so weak that it's basically useless. I don't want to grind out stats just to make magic even passably useful, but it would feel weird not having a caster in the core party.
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Sep 13, 2021 20:23
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I'm only about a quarter of the way through FF2 so far but honestly I think a lot of the hate for it is a bit overblown. I'm actually enjoying it more than FF1 so far. I think part of it is that the FF1 characters felt too much like a blank slate - sometimes I'm in the mood for that, but one thing I've always liked about the FF games is how you get actual characters with personality, even when you're switching up their jobs and roles. And granted 2 is pretty slim on the personality part so far, but from the very beginning it feels like a pretty bold attempt to do a grand narrative that breaks away from the more generic DnD feeling of 1. There's a lot more of the connective tissue and general aesthetic landmarks that comes to define the series here, and especially the political struggles that always end up being the backdrop for the story feel more compelling than 1's storyline. I don't even really hate the leveling system so far, aside from how opaque the magic system is. It honestly seems like it was kinda ahead of its time in attempting to do a progression system similar to what the Elder Scrolls games ended up doing, and it does make sense - there's something satisfying about getting better at something by actually doing it rather than arbitrarily assigning skill points after a level up. Maybe I'll change my mind as I get deeper into the game, but so far I haven't felt like I really need to do any grinding or go out of my way to get stronger. If anything, it's neat being incentivized to use spells and stuff more proactively, since most FFs have conditioned me to save my magic for when I really need it (I never really need it). Especially coming from 1 where the MP limits were so severe that it felt like I could never afford to use spells to clear trash or top up after a fight. I dunno, I'm digging it well enough so far and I'm definitely glad the remasters are happening so I can play some games that I never really got to try, or only got to try with ugly as poo poo graphics and horrendous UI.
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Sep 14, 2021 03:10
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It's kinda funny how much trouble FF has had finding a good place for magic - you can obviously get a lot of use of out white magic, but for black magic it felt like outside of a few niche cases you were almost always better off just hitting stuff across most of the series. 5 is probably the first one where it's arguably worth having an offensive / utility caster around instead of just smashing everything (and even then you can choose not to without hampering yourself at all), and then it takes until, what, 9 and 10 for that to happen again - and there it's because the casters are basically locked into their roles and can't just deal more damage by smacking things.
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Sep 14, 2021 16:03
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Fister Roboto posted:Magic is also way better than physicals up until the endgame in FF7. Definitely guilty of that, but yeah by the time I felt like I was getting strong summons / spells like Ultima and stuff it was way faster to just quad cut everything to death. I actually had the opposite experience with 6 so that's interesting that overpowered magic is a common complaint - I felt like my strongest party was almost always physical. Edgar and Sabin just have incredibly strong special abilities and clear trash faster than magic users, and Locke can do insane single target DPS from the back row. I usually brought along a caster for support and healing but until the endgame where I could just spam double Ultimas and stuff they always felt like more effort for the same outcome. Srice posted:The subsequent ports added so much quality of life stuff to FF2. Playing it on NES can really get to be a drag what with how your characters can suffer from losing stat points (ie; raising physical stats means magic stats can fall) and other tedious stuff that has since been sanded over. Ah ok that makes a lot of sense, losing stats would piss me off too. I was under the impression that the remasters were pretty faithful to the originals outside of a graphical rehaul / better scripts but that doesn't seem to be the case. Grizzled Patriarch fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Sep 14, 2021 |
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Sep 14, 2021 16:31
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Hogama posted:Pedantically (I know you're talking about the Magic command) Sabin's specials are almost all magic-based except for Pummel and Suplex. He's a muscle wizard! I had actually forgotten how many of them were magic!
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Sep 14, 2021 18:08
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Waltzing Along posted:I just finished FF1 on my phone. I decided to get #2. Haven't played much, but I like it so far. Because of the way leveling appears to work I can see it either being easy to screw up or easy to get OP. Anything I need to remember to do so I don't gimp myself later in the game? This version of FF2 is much friendlier than the older versions, so you don't have to worry about losing stats or anything. I'm almost finished with the game and barring any enormous last-minute difficulty spike (which after FF1 honestly isn't impossible) I haven't found the need to grind stats out at all. I would say the most important things that the game doesn't tell you at all: - Agility is the best stat and you should put a shield on pretty much every single character immediately so that they start building it up early. - If you're going to have an offensive magic user, be very careful about what armors you put on them, because a lot of them have extremely harsh hidden penalties to magic that will basically make your spells useless even if you have a very high intelligence stat. Weapons have these penalities too, so your caster is basically stuck using daggers and staves (but not maces) and nothing else. Here's a table with the armor penalties listed: https://guides.gamercorner.net/ffii/armors/ Magic in general is really weird in this one. There are a few bosses that really suck rear end to fight without it, but for the most part you're better off just hitting stuff - especially because multitarget damage gets a huge penalty even if it's just two enemies. You can still melt a whole screen of enemies if you bother leveling magic enough and hit a weakness, but it's mostly mediocre throughout most of the game...until you get the Frog spell, which, when leveled up, instantly eliminates virtually every enemy in the game and even a lot of bosses.
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Oct 2, 2021 22:52
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I would 100% welcome a full-blown FFIX remake in the vein of FF7R, mostly because it's my favorite FF besides maybe XIV, but I can't imagine them doing that before they redid a much more popular one. Isn't IX one of the lowest-selling games in the series?
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Oct 4, 2021 00:31
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