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Mega64 posted:Honestly you could probably say the same for all the Mana games, SD3's probably the closest to good gameplay the series gets, and even then it's probably got its issues. The Mana games' strengths rely more on their story-telling, world-building, and aesthetics. That and having several of the few multiplayer RPGs of that era. SD3 has a really amazing class and party building system, but the minute-to-minute gameplay isn’t much different from Secret of Mana. In some ways, it even feels worse. Magic isn’t completely broken, but the game is still trivially easy barring certain bosses with nasty counters since recovery magic and items are effectively unlimited and extremely powerful. Techs are better, but still have major balance issues and no longer require the player to make decisions about how and when to use them. I also feel like Secret of Mana’s combat controls better, has the player make more decisions about when to attack, when to charge a tech and how to position enemies and looks much better, too, since it has multiple attack and dodge animations. Even the class system in SD3 has the glaring flaw that you only reach the final tier of classes with less than 10% of the game to go, so you barely get to interact with the most interesting aspect of the game. I’m coming off as really harsh on SD3 here, which maybe isn’t justified, since it was still a great game for it’s time. It could be improved so much by a thoughtful remake, but I doubt we’ll ever see one that carefully addresses the game’s issues.
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May 20, 2019 06:35
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One specific minor issue turns me off of A New Threat, even though I’ve never played it. Back when I was 12, or whatever, I thought it was a cool bit of storytelling that Cloud’s stats are in general all super good and he has no real weaknesses compared to the other characters. The story presents him as a really powerful fighter and he is. If I recall, A New Threat makes all the characters have the same average stat distribution. It’s a small issue, and understandable from the perspective of wanting to give players a reason to not take Cloud, but it does disservice to the story. Why wouldn’t people just scoff at Cloud if he tells them he’s ex-SOLDIER if he’s no better at fighting than they are? I’d be worried that sort of insensitivity would seep into other aspects of the mods design.
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Jun 6, 2019 14:49
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Paperhouse posted:Seems a bit like splitting hairs when Cloud starts the game at level 5 or whatever anyway. He's not some super soldier from the get go in battle terms because the game wouldn't work that way. The whole point is that Cloud is not actually a trained super soldier. He’s lying about that. But he is a supernaturally powerful fighter anyway. His stats just being higher than everyone else’s reinforces that. As I said, it’s a minor point, but I don’t think it would have ruined the balance of the mod to make Cloud’s lowest stats average instead of low in keeping with the original game, either.
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Jun 6, 2019 16:34
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MonsieurChoc posted:Give me the SaGa and Last Remnant races in FFXIV Square. I wanna play as a Sovani or a NotVampire/Mystic. I’ve never played FFXIV and I likely never will, but I love the races in SaGa Frontier so much. Even though they have serious balance issues (mystics and monsters mostly suck, humans are very good and mechs are brokenly strong), each race is so unique and builds completely differently from the other races. If they had balanced the numbers a little better and attached more clear advantages and disadvantages to equipping skills, or types of skills, it would have been a really brilliant system.
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Jul 28, 2019 05:45
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Chaos back in FF1 would fully heal himself if you took too long to end the fight. He only had 2000 HP, though, so if you went in with a healthy, well equipped, high level party, it was pretty unlikely that he would last long enough to do it. If you got to him after having your rear end thoroughly kicked by the final dungeon with only a couple people left standing, though, being unable to damage him enough before he could heal to full was a very real possibility.
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Sep 15, 2019 05:34
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Fister Roboto posted:FF4 Behemoths, which were forced encounters in Bahamut's cave, countered magic with Meteor and physical attacks with Tornado, iirc. I don’t think they used Meteo; it was too plot important a spell. If I recall, it was big wave. Anyway, they used dangerous magic in 4, too, aside from hitting like trucks.
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Oct 7, 2019 01:52
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I haven’t played the vanilla game in a long time and the mods I’ve played tend to buff the earlier named characters to make them more competitive with TG Cid. But if I recall, my generics were better than most all the early named characters in vanilla. If you’re just going to play the game without doing optional stuff, I think only TG Cid really outshines generics. My overall favorite vanilla unit is a female oracle with two-hands, white magic and MA boosting gear. She can buff, debuff, heal, nuke with holy and deal really strong melee damage with a reaching weapon. Low HP is easily mitigated with bladegrasp. Sure, I could have Rafa ditch her crappy job and do the same, but why bother when my generic is already there. TG Cid, of course, is as good as some of the broken things you can do with the base classes. And, if you grind and do the optional secret quests and plan to complete the deep dungeon and all, the late game named characters have really strong stat growth in their base classes that gives them an edge over generic characters even using skills available to everyone.
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Oct 13, 2019 07:00
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morallyobjected posted:Agrias has like all the holy sword techniques wtf She has the best sword techniques, but those all scale off of physical attack (PA, if I recall?) and her base class has mediocre growth in that stat. Combined with the fact that she’s a lady, thus has lower PA by default, she falls off pretty hard by the mid-late game. If you’re playing for the first time and not trying to min-max, she’s better than your generics when you get her and remains decent for quite a while. But if you know what you’re doing, she just doesn’t have the damage to compete even when she first joins the party.
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Oct 14, 2019 05:07
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FF6 largely breaks itself, you don't have to go too far out of your way to trivialize it. Edgar's tools easily handle most of the world of balance, though start to fall off in the world of ruin. Magic is stupidly powerful, especially on someone with a high magic stat and some earrings equipped. Terra, once she can morph, can take off huge chunks of a boss's HP with a single spell. Probably the main thing to realize that makes the game extremely easy up until you have access to late game strategies is that Sabin's blitzes are magic attacks. Give him a pair of earrings and boost his magic stat and his damage will go through the roof. By the world of ruin it's not hard to pick up bum rush as your first thing after you get the airship, then have a free attack that does guaranteed 9,999 damage. From there you can pick up the offering, ragnarok/ illumina, dragon horn or whatever other broken endgame stuff you want. If you pick up all the best gear, Sabin falls off hard compared to everyone doing tens of thousands of damage per turn, but Kefka only has 60,000 or so HP, so all that stuff is mostly pointless and just useful to see how far you can push the system. Of course even with one broken combo it's not hard to kill Kefka before he even completes his intro dialogue in the final fight. Other things to keep in mind are that evade is bugged, magic evade blocks both spells and normal attacks. It's possible to get a setup that gives someone over 128 magic evade, which means they evade every attack that can be dodged. Also, you can stack enough defense to reduce every physical hit to 0 damage if you get Mog a snow muffler and a good hat and put him in the back row (he'll still do full damage with jump).
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Mar 20, 2020 14:03
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Chrono Trigger’s characters are thin like cardboard, but the cardboard is beautifully painted and perfectly cut. What characterization they are given, at least for about half the cast, is masterfully executed. Most of Chrono Cross’s characters are clip art printed out and pasted on cardboard. I haven’t played either game in years and have no real desire to play either again, though I still love them both. But I would still rate Chrono Trigger as one of the best games ever made, taken in the context of its time, but I could never do that for Chrono Cross.
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Jun 25, 2020 14:52
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ManSedan posted:What the hell are chops supposed to be? Do people here just carry around blocks of wood? A personal seal used to stamp things, acting like a signature — traditionally very important in East Asia. It’s a weird translation.
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Jun 28, 2020 06:02
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Sakurazuka posted:That's how I ended buying Saga Frontier 1 as my next RPG after FF7 SaGa Frontier was great! 
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Oct 9, 2020 11:24
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Are there any mods people really like for the snes era Final Fantasies? I’m 20+ hours into Brave New World 2.0 and am really enjoying it. I don’t like a lot of the script changes, but the balance, gameplay and difficulty changes make the game a lot more fun than vanilla. I’ve played Free Enterprise and love it in principle, but I’m not in the least bit interested in competitive play, and I think time pressure is what the mod needs to keep it interesting past one or two runs. I’ve read about an ff4 mod called The Darkness Within. Is that one any good?
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Dec 25, 2020 13:38
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Bleck posted:That's fair, yes, but the widespread choice to interpret "Cloud has PTSD and is dealing with it poorly and that is the point of the story" as "it's emo" is dumb. “Cloud is emo” is a stupid criticism of Final Fantasy 7 at any point, but that doesn’t make Advent Children good. It makes sense and is reasonable that Cloud, after overcoming enormous tragedy and really serious mental fuckery, would still be left struggling with depression. But was that a story that really needed to be told? I don’t think Advent Children needed to be made in the first place, and the story it did tell ended up being an empty rehash of the basic arch of the original game (Cloud overcomes PTSD to defeat Sephiroth.) What’s more, none of the character development points in Advent Children are particularly well handled or really build on the characters in interesting ways (the only one I can really even remember is Cloud’s phone sinking into the water, which was not too bad a scene.) It’s unreasonable to criticize Cloud in Advent Children on the grounds of “He’s emo,” or maybe even that his outfit is silly (though it is.) But it is reasonable to say that the movie reduced the character to a one-dimensional sketch of the original that was far less interesting. Cloud is a great video game protagonist because the story fundamentally revolves around his weakness, which he covers up with a cool detached persona that is in reality even weaker than the inner self he’s using it to hide. Advent Children only shows the aloof facade with none of the context of the self-doubting goober hiding behind it, which makes the Cloud it portrays really generic and boring.
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Dec 31, 2020 12:11
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I know some people don’t like it, but the Brave New World mod is really good if you enjoy planning builds and like learning RPG systems. Characters are all really versatile but have distinct roles and all their abilities are relevant. It succeeds at making pretty much every character feel really powerful, unique and badass while still keeping the game a challenge. It does get unfair at a few points when you don’t have a full party, but those are very short and the balance is solid otherwise.
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Apr 3, 2021 09:13
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multijoe posted:Have you heard the good word of Brave New World? BNW takes the ff6 skills and makes them all really shine. Every character can feel like a huge badass while retaining a unique, but versatile role in the party. Enemies are challenging, but the game still gives you the tools to be really powerful too. There are rough patches, especially some points where you don’t have a full party, but those are quite short and generally the balance is extremely good. I don’t play final fantasy in general any more, but I really enjoyed going through BNW a few months ago.
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Jun 25, 2021 07:27
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multijoe posted:I haven't got it yet but there's a respec option later in the game, but really it's stuff like 'don't level Locke's magic and vigor or he'll end up a under-powered generalist'. So far I've found as long as you commit your character to a role you can't really gently caress up too much I did a generalist build (mostly speed, vigor, hp/mp) with Locke and he was awesome, but I think it’s actually hard to make a bad character in BNW; you just need to gear and play your characters well according to their build. The game is harder than ff6, but it never felt unfair and I never had to grind. The mod author has a very clear intended curve that assumes you’ll fight most random encounters and be a the intended level. The only wtf boss for me was dadaluma, who I beat with 1 hp remaining on every party member and no potions, mp, elixirs, ethers, phoenix downs, or anything else left at all. But that was actually really cool. I used the mod’s original script, which is full of unnecessary, but not terribly obnoxious changes. There is a more vanilla option available which I would recommend.
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Jun 26, 2021 07:18
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What kind of ideas do people have about balance in FF1? Personally, I’d switch white magic from fighter to black belt, give pre class-change access to magic up to lvl 2/3 to thief and black belt, then maybe expand black belts post class change spell list to level 5, slightly nerf fighter’s hit rate and give white mage heavy armor (maybe with some limitations.) That should make a fighterless party more viable, and make other martial classes attractive earlier and overall more useful throughout the game.
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Aug 1, 2021 13:38
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PneumonicBook posted:There was a mod I played a lot for 6 that rebalanced a lot of the game and made it so very few characters could learn magic and equip espers. I think it let Terra, Celes, Relm, and Strago use them and that was it. It was neat enough to play through a few times. Brave New World does that and makes a bunch of other balance changes as well. It has rough patches (almost any time you have 2 or fewer characters) but overall is an excellent balance overhaul that makes all of the characters very versatile, powerful and distinct.
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Aug 21, 2021 09:15
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