I've been doing some poking around on the Speed Demos Archive and Speed Runs Live ever since the Awesome Games Done Quick marathon and came across a listing of all 955 games currently being tracked in the archive. I just had to search for my favourite game Final Fantasy IV. I wish I'd made a guess for what I thought the top time would be but I bet I would have been a lot higher than the actual times!
I just went and checked my post from when I played the game in my own marathon and apparently my game clock was only around 14 hours. For some reason I was thinking it was more like 20. Hmm. Maybe I would have gotten close to the current record with my guess if I'd known that? It turns out they track the game in 3 different categories. The fastest single segment run clocks in at 3:21. The fastest multiple segment run is only 3:05. And the fastest run that _really_ abuses glitches so badly it got its own category was 2:17. The version closest to the way I've played in the past would certainly be the middle one, so only about 21% of my time!
There are three main things that let someone speed things up beyond what I'd have done normally. They know the precise route to take (including what treasure chests are worth picking up), they don't read the text boxes (which makes me a little sad because reading the story is the best part of a Final Fantasy game for me), and they run from practically every fight. Oh, and all the glitches...
I sat down over the last couple days and watched the 3:05 run while eating. It starts out pretty standard with the only real differences being they run from every fight, skip almost every treasure, and have timed out the boss fights so they know what attacks to use when. It wasn't until right after the fight with Golbez in the dwarf castle that the glitches were busted out but there were three of them used that drastically change the game. I had read about them all before so it wasn't a huge surprise to me, and I'm a little sad there wasn't anything new to see.
Glitch 1: If you cast warp right after that fight with Golbez you get sent back into the crystal chamber from the throne room. There is still a dark crystal there, which you can pick up. Having this crystal in your inventory means you trigger the end of the sealed cave when you walk into it which means you get to skip a dungeon full of mandatory encounters!
Glitch 2: Any given action in combat can only proc one trigger. Presumably this is to stop counter attacks or reflect spells from chaining infinitely. What it means is that if you bounce an attack spell off of your own walled character the damage done to the enemy won't trigger any of the monster procedures. In particular this means you don't have to fight all four fiends in the Giant of Babel... If you kill off Milan with reflected spells the fight just ends. I think this gets used on the CPU core and on Zeromus at the end of the game as well.
Glitch 3: If you use a life potion on an enemy as the enemy is dying you get the experience and loot for 2 kills. The run I watched used this twice, right before the four fiends fight, in order to power level Rosa and Rydia. He got into a fight with one of the alarm monsters that summons in an enemy if it's attacked while alone. Then he got into a cycle where Rosa would attack the alarm for mediocre damage causing it to summon a dragon. FuSoYa would cast weak on it, knocking it to 1 health. Cecil would attack it, killing it. While that animation was playing both Edge and Rydia would enter in commands to use a life potion on the dragon. 3 dragons worth of experience per round of combat! He had it timed out so he knew how many cycles he needed to do in order to get Rosa to learn the white spell and to get Rydia to learn the nuke spell. The other 4 characters were killed off to focus the exact amount of experience into the two that needed it.
One other way the game changed when playing at such a low level and while skipping every random encounter is consumable items go way up in value. Casters also go way up in value since they'll always have mana to do their thing. (Well, not quite... Most of the treasures he looted were ethers to keep the casters going!) The melee characters were complete trash which is a big change from the 'real' game where autoattacking was awesome. He rarely got new weapons for anyone and never got armour for them.
4 hours actually seems like the sort of time that is entirely reasonable for one of their marathon things. Plenty of other games came in around that time. Maybe it's actually worth trying to get really good at speed running Final Fantasy IV...
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy IV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy IV. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Zeroedmus
Last night saw the conclusion of my Final Fantasy IV game. I cleared out most of the final dungeon (I don't know of any paths I skipped but I didn't get all the treasure so I must have missed something) with relative ease. I did almost die to the mini-boss which puts a 10 second Doom timer on the entire party but I barely took him out with 1 second left. Hurray for the Nuke spell!
Zeromus himself came close to winning once but ultimately the fact he has no physical attacks spelled doom for him. He was beating the tar out of Edge and Cecil with his spells but was barely hurting Rosa and Rydia and they're the ones with the healing spells. Cure4 wasn't good enough to keep up but Asura was a full heal. Edge didn't even run out of ninja stars to throw at him before he died and I didn't buy more of them so I just used what I found in chests over the course of the game. I would have been annoyed if I'd died since the save point was so far away but ultimately the fight wasn't all that hard.
I think the game clock in the game was around 14 hours when I finished. I died once to Bahamut but that means I couldn't have spent more than 15 hours total playing the game. 82 days to put in only 15 hours. That's a long time to plow through what I've always said is my favourite game. This time around I often found myself falling asleep while playing! I got frustrated with the ATB system multiple times as well. Did the game just not age well? Have I been spoiled by the iterations that came later?
I don't know. It's been around 8 years since I last played the SNES version but even then I'd played FFX and all previous games. Maybe I've been subconsciously comparing it to the DS version?
Maybe there's just nothing new to experience? There's no console RPG I've played anywhere close to as many times as I've played FFIV and there's not exactly a lot of deviation in how the game plays out. There are a few side quests that can be done but the characters are always the same and I mostly do everything in the same order.
That said the story is awesome. The music is awesome. I love the character and enemy designs. It was my first RPG as a kid and will always have a special place in my memory as a result. I'm slotting it in as #1 on my marathon page so far. But will it be able to hold that spot for long? Coming up shortly is a run of games featuring V, VI, VII, and Tactics which all could compete for the crown I'd just assumed would stay with IV when I started this up last year. But first we have Legend III and Mystic Quest!
Zeromus himself came close to winning once but ultimately the fact he has no physical attacks spelled doom for him. He was beating the tar out of Edge and Cecil with his spells but was barely hurting Rosa and Rydia and they're the ones with the healing spells. Cure4 wasn't good enough to keep up but Asura was a full heal. Edge didn't even run out of ninja stars to throw at him before he died and I didn't buy more of them so I just used what I found in chests over the course of the game. I would have been annoyed if I'd died since the save point was so far away but ultimately the fight wasn't all that hard.
I think the game clock in the game was around 14 hours when I finished. I died once to Bahamut but that means I couldn't have spent more than 15 hours total playing the game. 82 days to put in only 15 hours. That's a long time to plow through what I've always said is my favourite game. This time around I often found myself falling asleep while playing! I got frustrated with the ATB system multiple times as well. Did the game just not age well? Have I been spoiled by the iterations that came later?
I don't know. It's been around 8 years since I last played the SNES version but even then I'd played FFX and all previous games. Maybe I've been subconsciously comparing it to the DS version?
Maybe there's just nothing new to experience? There's no console RPG I've played anywhere close to as many times as I've played FFIV and there's not exactly a lot of deviation in how the game plays out. There are a few side quests that can be done but the characters are always the same and I mostly do everything in the same order.
That said the story is awesome. The music is awesome. I love the character and enemy designs. It was my first RPG as a kid and will always have a special place in my memory as a result. I'm slotting it in as #1 on my marathon page so far. But will it be able to hold that spot for long? Coming up shortly is a run of games featuring V, VI, VII, and Tactics which all could compete for the crown I'd just assumed would stay with IV when I started this up last year. But first we have Legend III and Mystic Quest!
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Bahamut
Yesterday I finally pulled off my first death in this playthrough of Final Fantasy IV. I remember Bahamut being a real jerk and having to collect all the loot from his dungeon and then leave coming back later to kill him after really twinking up in the final dungeon. Everything else that I remembered being hard has been easy this time around so I just walked up and started punching him like he was a joke. He did his countdown and then hit my whole team for two to four times their maximum health. KABOOM! I actually don't think I'm going to bother killing him at all. My current plan is just to enter the final dungeon and see if I can win.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
The Black Mages
A couple months ago I started on a bit of a Final Fantasy music binge. I'd search YouTube for random playlists of music from the games and listen to hours on end while doing other things on the computer. (Including Final Fantasy Legend II since the music quality from my emulator was giving me a headache.)
One thing I kept noticing every now and then were songs that were covers of iconic Final Fantasy music. Now, I hate covers in general. I find they often butcher the songs. Some of the covers popping up in these playlists were like that but I kept running into covers that were actually pretty awesome. I started paying attention to who was doing the covers I liked and it turned out they were all from the same band: The Black Mages. This prompted me to do some Googling about them...
It turns out one guy (Nobuo Uematsu) was the composer for practically every Final Fantasy game. Final Fantasy I, II, Legend, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and XIV seem to be solely done by him. He also had a hand in Legend II, X, XI, and XII. And a whole ton of other games on top of that. To put it mildly, he is the man.
Two other composers at Square-Enix got together to do the music for a wrestling game and decided to put a rock spin on it. They liked how the rock spin turned out and started experimenting with doing other things in a rocking way. The toyed around with redoing some of Nobuo's Final Fantasy stuff as rock songs and got his approval. They convinced him to join them in a rock concert of some of those songs and had a great time. They ended up forming a band (The Black Mages) which went on to release three albums full of redone Final Fantasy songs. And it's all awesome! I guess covers can be good when it's the original artist redoing them?
I just beat The Four Fiends in my Final Fantasy IV game and the music in that fight is fantastic. The redone music by The Black Mages is also pretty great. Both versions are linked below, check them out!
One thing I kept noticing every now and then were songs that were covers of iconic Final Fantasy music. Now, I hate covers in general. I find they often butcher the songs. Some of the covers popping up in these playlists were like that but I kept running into covers that were actually pretty awesome. I started paying attention to who was doing the covers I liked and it turned out they were all from the same band: The Black Mages. This prompted me to do some Googling about them...
It turns out one guy (Nobuo Uematsu) was the composer for practically every Final Fantasy game. Final Fantasy I, II, Legend, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, and XIV seem to be solely done by him. He also had a hand in Legend II, X, XI, and XII. And a whole ton of other games on top of that. To put it mildly, he is the man.
Two other composers at Square-Enix got together to do the music for a wrestling game and decided to put a rock spin on it. They liked how the rock spin turned out and started experimenting with doing other things in a rocking way. The toyed around with redoing some of Nobuo's Final Fantasy stuff as rock songs and got his approval. They convinced him to join them in a rock concert of some of those songs and had a great time. They ended up forming a band (The Black Mages) which went on to release three albums full of redone Final Fantasy songs. And it's all awesome! I guess covers can be good when it's the original artist redoing them?
I just beat The Four Fiends in my Final Fantasy IV game and the music in that fight is fantastic. The redone music by The Black Mages is also pretty great. Both versions are linked below, check them out!
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Mysidian Legend
One to be born
from a dragon
hoisting the light
and the dark
arises high up
in the sky to
the still land.
Veiling the moon with
the light of eternity,
it brings
another promise
to mother earth with
a bounty and mercy.
from a dragon
hoisting the light
and the dark
arises high up
in the sky to
the still land.
Veiling the moon with
the light of eternity,
it brings
another promise
to mother earth with
a bounty and mercy.
There are scenes in games/movies which really resonate with me. The one that takes place in Final Fantasy IV when the Mysidian elder recites the legend and then 'wishes' for the spaceship is one of those for me. The music that plays as the ship rises out of the ocean is truly epic (and is found in the video below). The music really encapsulates the idea that we're going to fly to THE MOON! And once there we're going to SAVE THE WORLD!
Thursday, February 09, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Land of the Summoned Monsters
I can remember having real trouble with both the Land of the Summoned Monsters and the Sylph Cave in previous playthroughs of Final Fantasy IV. Both dungeons have massive damage zones on the floors which can only be avoided with the float spell. If you're not high enough level for Rosa to know that spell you're in for a world of pain just walking through the dungeons. On top of that some of the monsters are actually pretty dangerous. Especially for a party that isn't high enough level to have float since they're hit by the double whammy of fewer maximum hitpoints and not being anywhere near that max because of the damage floors.
Both dungeons provide extra summoned monsters for Rydia to call in combat. The Sylph Cave has the Sylph spell but you need access to the overworld in order to get it. (You have to get a frying-pan from Bung's wife in Fabul so you can crack him over the head with it to convince him to stop being lazy...) The Land of the Summoned Monsters has both Asura and Leviathan in it (queen and king of the summoned monsters) but in the traditional manner of earning a summon you need to beat them up first.
Asura is a tricky one. The only actions she ever takes are to spam massive heals on herself. She never takes an offensive action unless you hit her first at which point she counterattacks for brutal damage. Ultimately she ends up being extremely trivial because of the wall spell. You cast it on her and then when she tries to heal herself she ends up healing you instead. Then it's a matter of controlling how frequently you attack so her heals will undo her counterattacks. Avenger turned out to be a real detriment here and I ended up just letting Cecil die so I wouldn't have to worry about it anymore and slowly killed her with jump.
I remember having real problems with Asura in the past because I'd get to her without having the wall spell. I don't think she's impossible without it but she's certainly a lot trickier. I'd imagine you'd need to be high enough level to know wall in order to be powerful enough to kill her! I know I'd gotten down to her and had to leave before because I didn't know wall. But I just looked up the levels where Rosa learns spells and she learns wall 2 levels after she learns float. How could I not have had wall? I guess I must have gone there first and run from most of the random encounters? Or possibly plowed through the dungeon without float? (That does sound like me...)
Anyway, I killed her easily last night. I saved and decided to give Leviathan a try. I remember him being really hard. I've always had to wait for FuSoYa to join my party and for Rydia to learn lit3. Then I'd use them both spamming lit3 to burn him down before he obliterated me. I didn't have FuSoYa and Rydia certainly doesn't have lit3 but I figured I'd give him a try anyway. Avenger may have been bad against Asura but it was a complete beating against Leviathan. And the Asura summon made Rydia better than just an off-healer... She was healing everyone for double or triple their maximum health! This left Rosa without much to do so she just cast fast on Cecil over and over to make him berserk more often. (It turns out fast doesn't really stack all that well and 2 applications gets you to max speed. Good to know!) He ended up dying without really being much of a worry at all. His big spell almost killed everyone for sure but Asura just undid all that damage.
I wonder if I can take out Odin with this plan or if I really need lit3 for him...
Both dungeons provide extra summoned monsters for Rydia to call in combat. The Sylph Cave has the Sylph spell but you need access to the overworld in order to get it. (You have to get a frying-pan from Bung's wife in Fabul so you can crack him over the head with it to convince him to stop being lazy...) The Land of the Summoned Monsters has both Asura and Leviathan in it (queen and king of the summoned monsters) but in the traditional manner of earning a summon you need to beat them up first.
Asura is a tricky one. The only actions she ever takes are to spam massive heals on herself. She never takes an offensive action unless you hit her first at which point she counterattacks for brutal damage. Ultimately she ends up being extremely trivial because of the wall spell. You cast it on her and then when she tries to heal herself she ends up healing you instead. Then it's a matter of controlling how frequently you attack so her heals will undo her counterattacks. Avenger turned out to be a real detriment here and I ended up just letting Cecil die so I wouldn't have to worry about it anymore and slowly killed her with jump.
I remember having real problems with Asura in the past because I'd get to her without having the wall spell. I don't think she's impossible without it but she's certainly a lot trickier. I'd imagine you'd need to be high enough level to know wall in order to be powerful enough to kill her! I know I'd gotten down to her and had to leave before because I didn't know wall. But I just looked up the levels where Rosa learns spells and she learns wall 2 levels after she learns float. How could I not have had wall? I guess I must have gone there first and run from most of the random encounters? Or possibly plowed through the dungeon without float? (That does sound like me...)
Anyway, I killed her easily last night. I saved and decided to give Leviathan a try. I remember him being really hard. I've always had to wait for FuSoYa to join my party and for Rydia to learn lit3. Then I'd use them both spamming lit3 to burn him down before he obliterated me. I didn't have FuSoYa and Rydia certainly doesn't have lit3 but I figured I'd give him a try anyway. Avenger may have been bad against Asura but it was a complete beating against Leviathan. And the Asura summon made Rydia better than just an off-healer... She was healing everyone for double or triple their maximum health! This left Rosa without much to do so she just cast fast on Cecil over and over to make him berserk more often. (It turns out fast doesn't really stack all that well and 2 applications gets you to max speed. Good to know!) He ended up dying without really being much of a worry at all. His big spell almost killed everyone for sure but Asura just undid all that damage.
I wonder if I can take out Odin with this plan or if I really need lit3 for him...
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Avenger!
One of the things I noticed when I was reading about bugs in Final Fantasy IV was how many bugs revolved around a weapon I'd never used. This weapon is the Avenger and the reason I know I'd never used it is it automatically berserks the person using it and I'd have remembered using a weapon with that ability! Other than getting a pink tail I'd thought I'd done pretty much everything there was to do in the game at some point so I had to find out where this weapon was found...
It turns out the weapon is in the Sylph Cave which I've certainly cleared out every time I've played long enough to learn the float spell so I was confused as to how I'd never had it before. Is it hidden in some obscure chest? I didn't dig any deeper and figured I'd just put a thorough searching into the dungeon once I reached it. Well, last night I'd finally silvered up the Falcon (I always loved how the airships in this game were named after Star Trek and Star Wars) but didn't yet have the float spell. I figured I'd clear out the sealed cave in order to level up and Rosa ended up learning float off of the very first trap door. That settled that! Off to find the Avenger!
It turned out the Avenger was just sitting in a treasure chest in the loot room of the Sylph Cave. It was guarded by monsters (as were the other 5 chests in the room) and I couldn't see how I could have missed it every time I'd played the game to this point. Then I went to equip it and saw that it was greyed out. That's odd. I tried to put it on anyway and got the cryptic error message 'to equip'. Which made me remember a bug fix in a future version of the game where they fixed that very error message related to Cid trying to equip his 2 handed hammer... Avenger must be two handed! I quickly took off Cecil's shield and lo! I was able to put on Avenger.
There's nothing I can find in the game that would indicate this weapon is 2-handed. The icon looks the same as the other swords Cecil can equip. The error message if I even try to put it on is nonsensical. If I hadn't read about the bugs I wouldn't have thought anything of it again on this playthrough. No wonder I'd missed it in the past!
At any rate, I tried it out on the next fight. In reading about the bug I knew the berserk effect doesn't kick in until you're 'supposed' to get a turn and therefore Cecil should be put in slot #1 (the middle one). I rearranged my team to put him there and opened the next trapped treasure chest. It was a fight with 6 ghost things. I'd fought them before and it was a little rough. They (like almost all enemies) kill Edge in 2 attacks. I actually doubt they could kill Rosa no matter what they did but the melee people take a lot of damage from their spells. But with Avenger the fight became trivial. By the time Kain had resolved his first action the berserked Cecil had killed 3 of the 6 enemies. The end result had Cecil killing 4, Kain killing 1, while Edge, Rosa, and Rydia had to team up to take down the 6th.
Losing control of my secondary healer bothers me a little, but when it comes right down to it his heals suck compared to Rosa's. I'm likely better off using Rydia and Sylph/Asura as a secondary healer and just have Cecil kill everything in sight with the berserk weapon. He gets to go so much more often by getting around the ATB system. Another option would be to give up on jumping with Kain and give Avenger to him. But since jump gets around the ATB a little too that seems worse. (And I worry that I'd forget to unequip it before Kain turns traitor again and lose it forever.)
It turns out the weapon is in the Sylph Cave which I've certainly cleared out every time I've played long enough to learn the float spell so I was confused as to how I'd never had it before. Is it hidden in some obscure chest? I didn't dig any deeper and figured I'd just put a thorough searching into the dungeon once I reached it. Well, last night I'd finally silvered up the Falcon (I always loved how the airships in this game were named after Star Trek and Star Wars) but didn't yet have the float spell. I figured I'd clear out the sealed cave in order to level up and Rosa ended up learning float off of the very first trap door. That settled that! Off to find the Avenger!
It turned out the Avenger was just sitting in a treasure chest in the loot room of the Sylph Cave. It was guarded by monsters (as were the other 5 chests in the room) and I couldn't see how I could have missed it every time I'd played the game to this point. Then I went to equip it and saw that it was greyed out. That's odd. I tried to put it on anyway and got the cryptic error message 'to equip'. Which made me remember a bug fix in a future version of the game where they fixed that very error message related to Cid trying to equip his 2 handed hammer... Avenger must be two handed! I quickly took off Cecil's shield and lo! I was able to put on Avenger.
There's nothing I can find in the game that would indicate this weapon is 2-handed. The icon looks the same as the other swords Cecil can equip. The error message if I even try to put it on is nonsensical. If I hadn't read about the bugs I wouldn't have thought anything of it again on this playthrough. No wonder I'd missed it in the past!
At any rate, I tried it out on the next fight. In reading about the bug I knew the berserk effect doesn't kick in until you're 'supposed' to get a turn and therefore Cecil should be put in slot #1 (the middle one). I rearranged my team to put him there and opened the next trapped treasure chest. It was a fight with 6 ghost things. I'd fought them before and it was a little rough. They (like almost all enemies) kill Edge in 2 attacks. I actually doubt they could kill Rosa no matter what they did but the melee people take a lot of damage from their spells. But with Avenger the fight became trivial. By the time Kain had resolved his first action the berserked Cecil had killed 3 of the 6 enemies. The end result had Cecil killing 4, Kain killing 1, while Edge, Rosa, and Rydia had to team up to take down the 6th.
Losing control of my secondary healer bothers me a little, but when it comes right down to it his heals suck compared to Rosa's. I'm likely better off using Rydia and Sylph/Asura as a secondary healer and just have Cecil kill everything in sight with the berserk weapon. He gets to go so much more often by getting around the ATB system. Another option would be to give up on jumping with Kain and give Avenger to him. But since jump gets around the ATB a little too that seems worse. (And I worry that I'd forget to unequip it before Kain turns traitor again and lose it forever.)
Saturday, February 04, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Difficulty
Final Fantasy IV was the first RPG I'd ever played. I can remember renting it from Midnight Video over and over again without completing it. Partly this was because we tended to rent games only on weekends, partly this was because my brother and I had to share the SNES (and refused to play off the same saved game), and partly this was because the game was hard. I can remember dying over and over to most of the boss fights. Mist Dragon. Mombomb. Milon Z. Kainazzo. The Magus Sisters (well, they rarely killed me, but I remember having to fight them for an awfully long time because they kept healing and rezzing). Valvalis. Golbez. Rubicant. The Wall. The Four Fiends. I'd include the AI thing after the four fiends but I practically never managed to beat the Four Fiends.
This time through I'm marveling at how easy it is. I just plowed through the underground stuff the first time you get there and was astonished at how easy Golbez was. The timing worked out in my favour (Kain was in the air when he paralyzed the party) so I got to have an extra character alive but I very quickly used life potions on the two dead people and healed to full while clocking him with my beaters. It definitely helps that I don't have to think about what actions I should be taking. I know the scripts in the fights (stop attacking Mist Dragon before he turns to mist to avoid his counter-attacks for example) and I know what spells actually do relevant things. But some fights are just dying before I even have to deal with the script. Kainazzo flat out died without withdrawing into his shell or casting his wave spell. The Magus Sisters didn't cast a raise spell. I expect The Four Fiends will be easy when I get to them because I know to level up enough to have the rank 3 damage spells. I know to chug ethers on FuSoYa so he can keep blasting.
Maybe I was just really bad when I was a kid. I hadn't honed my 'get ALL the treasures and level up like mad' senses enough? Apparently they did raise the difficulty on some of the fights in the DS version so I'm looking forward to that when I get around to playing the game there...
Friday, February 03, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Active Time Battle
Final Fantasy IV brought with it a brilliant innovation in terms of how and when characters got to take actions. In the previous games every player and every enemy got to take one action per round. Your speed stat, if you had one, determined when in the turn order you'd go but it wouldn't ever grant you extra actions. The fast guy gets to stab first and the slow guy gets to stab last but they each get to stab the same number of times. (Unless all the enemies die in the middle of the round I suppose.) The system used in FFIV - Active Time Battle - sought to change that paradigm. In an ATB system each unit on the map has a bar which counts up as time passes. When your bar fills up you get to take an action. This way if one character is much faster than another they get to take more turns. (Ideally this would be balanced by making their actions less powerful but that was rarely the case.) It's a pretty great idea for a system, and quite an improvement on the old one. Unfortunately I've been getting rather annoyed by it in this playthrough of FFIV. It was amazing at the time, don't get me wrong, but as they iterated on the system in future games it got a lot better.
The big problem that's annoying me is that bars keep filling as I'm entering in commands. So while I'm screwing around in the magic menu trying to find the right spell for Tellah to case everyone else's bar fills up. For the guys on my team this isn't terribly useful as they need to wait for me to find the right spell. For the enemies it's pure gold. Their turn comes up, they clock me, and they get right back into having their bar fill up. There is a setting to turn off time flowing while in a menu but that doesn't fix the whole problem. Even just mashing the button to select attack and then an enemy to hit seems to take too much time! I'll get into a first strike battle where ideally all my guys should get to go first. Instead I've found I can typically take 2 actions before the enemies have caught up completely and are all attacking me. These aren't complicated actions either. It's me telling Cecil to attack the first enemy and then me telling Yang to attack the first enemy. I try to tell Cid to attack the first enemy but by then the enemies have started swinging. It's very frustrating and has me longing for Final Fantasy X.
I decided to try to take advantage of the situation by making use of the berserk spell. I was hoping that my berserked characters would just start swinging as soon as their turns would come up even if I was futzing with someone else at the time. It turned out to work for me. Maybe too well. I tried it out on the Magus Sisters and it was by far the easiest go I've ever had with them. They didn't even get around to resurrecting themselves a single time. Yang and Cid just completely obliterated them!
The big problem that's annoying me is that bars keep filling as I'm entering in commands. So while I'm screwing around in the magic menu trying to find the right spell for Tellah to case everyone else's bar fills up. For the guys on my team this isn't terribly useful as they need to wait for me to find the right spell. For the enemies it's pure gold. Their turn comes up, they clock me, and they get right back into having their bar fill up. There is a setting to turn off time flowing while in a menu but that doesn't fix the whole problem. Even just mashing the button to select attack and then an enemy to hit seems to take too much time! I'll get into a first strike battle where ideally all my guys should get to go first. Instead I've found I can typically take 2 actions before the enemies have caught up completely and are all attacking me. These aren't complicated actions either. It's me telling Cecil to attack the first enemy and then me telling Yang to attack the first enemy. I try to tell Cid to attack the first enemy but by then the enemies have started swinging. It's very frustrating and has me longing for Final Fantasy X.
I decided to try to take advantage of the situation by making use of the berserk spell. I was hoping that my berserked characters would just start swinging as soon as their turns would come up even if I was futzing with someone else at the time. It turned out to work for me. Maybe too well. I tried it out on the Magus Sisters and it was by far the easiest go I've ever had with them. They didn't even get around to resurrecting themselves a single time. Yang and Cid just completely obliterated them!
Friday, January 27, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Bugs
One of the interesting things I've been learning as I've been playing through the Final Fantasy games is just how many weird bugs exist in the games. Final Fantasy had a lot of bad pointer related bugs. It had some local variable bugs. Final Fantasy II had a pretty brutal cancel bug. Final Fantasy III had a dupe bug for sure (though I played on the DS which seemed pretty decent). Did they get any better for Final Fantasy IV? Of course not!
Perhaps my favourite of the FFIV bugs has more to do with not enough edge case testing... Here's the situation:
In combat you can change which weapon/shield you have equipped in each hand. You go into your item menu, select a hand, and then choose what you want to put in that hand. But how are you, the player, to know what you could equip? Well, the system iterates over all items in your inventory when you pick a hand to swap. Anything you could equip gets highlighted. Anything you can't equip gets faded out. Then when you go to select a faded out item you get an error. This seems like a reasonable system, right?
When you select a highlighted item should it recheck if the item is a legal option? If you're coding robustly it probably should but then you're adding an extra check in which seems unnecessary. You already validated every item in your inventory seconds earlier. Why bother revalidating? We're talking about a game that had to have plot cut out to fit it onto the cartridge! Any extra checks are probably unwise...
Now, what if you wanted to unequip an item? Well, you'd 'equip' a blank slot in your inventory. This seems like a reasonable case to build in. Let's just flag the empty slots as valid equips. No sense treating them any differently, right?
How about when we derive our current stats? Should we validate our gear then? Seems wasteful. As long as we're robust in only allowing valid gear to be equipped in the first place this should never come up.
So, what's the bug? Well, it's a timing bug. Get into a fight with a monster which drops a weapon or a shield as its common drop. Have Edge input the steal command (which will steal the weapon or shield). Then quickly get to the person who can't legally equip that item. Have them go into the item menu and start switching items. This will cause a validation of your inventory as it stands when you start. While doing this the steal command will resolve and you'll get a new item. It will go into a blank slot in your inventory. A blank slot that has already been validated as a legal equip. Pick the new item! Huzzah! Rydia can put on a shield! Rosa can use a spear.
There's a similar timing bug which lets you use berserk while unequipping arrows which results in duplicating any item you can legally equip. You end up with 255 copies which is great for making cash or for throwing with Edge.
Berserk is also buggy with Edward and his auto-hide ability. Apparently you can set it up so he can't be attacked but is berserked and beating down.
A final timing bug revolves around the spell stop. It takes out all other timers on the person, completely. Have a temporary paralyze? If you get stopped it will never wear off. A virus? There forever. Unless you reapply it then the timer will get fixed. And if you screw with the timers on monsters with stop? The game will often freeze. (I'm glad I never used that spell!)
In the inexplicably weird category... The sylph spell is free if you put it in one spot (upper right hand corner) in the spell list.
In the mad cheats category... At one point you're in a fight in the dwarven castle underground. You fight some dolls and then you fight Golbez. He almost kills you when Rydia shows up and saves the day. Golbez still manages to run off with the crystal. A future plot point is to go get the last dark crystal from the sealed cave... If the first thing you do after Rydia joins your party is cast warp you'll get warped back to the dwarven crystal room. Complete with dark crystal for the taking. Which counts as the dark crystal from the sealed cave! So you can skip that dungeon!
Now for a bug I think I was hit by... The moon is circular and you can find a path to do a complete circuit. But your spaceship only exists exactly where you landed it. So if you do a full circle around the moon? You lose your spaceship. You need to go back the other way the exact number of times to get back to the precise spot you left your spaceship.
There are a bunch of fights with conditional triggers to do things. The biggest example of this is when you fight the 4 fiends in one fight. You beat up Milon for a while and then when he dies Rubicant steps up. They coded these triggers as counter attacks. So if you kill Milon off with attacks that don't trigger a counter attack, he won't tag in Rubicant. You'll just win. One way to do this is to cast wall on your team and then bounce attack spells off the wall and onto him. Cheats!
Finally there's a bug that certainly afflicted me on probably every playthrough but which I didn't really notice. Thinking about it in retrospect I can see it happening but I didn't notice at the time... Weapons have flags on them. Metallic, so they paralyze you in the magnetic cave. Back row, so you do full damage from the back row. And, for some reason, no-crit. These weapons simply can't get a critical strike. The metallic flag works fine but the other two are buggy. If they ever get set on your character they are never removed. So if you ever put on a whip, for example, you can never get a crit again for the rest of the game. And you do full damage from the back row with any weapon. Axes, whips, and the best paladin sword all have the no-crit flag.
That's not the only way to lose the ability to crit. Apparently if you ever start a fight dead you lose the ability to crit. And sometimes the game has battles which run without player input. Tellah vs Edward in the 'YOU SPOONY BARD!' scene. Tellah vs Golbez. FuSoYa and Golbez against Zemus. If in one of those fights the team on the left dies then everyone in your party which occupies an 'empty' slot for the right hand team loses the ability to crit. So after the FuSoYa and Golbez vs Zemus fight at most two of your characters can still crit. The other 3 will permanently lose their ability to crit if they somehow kept it up to that point!
How... Dumb.
Perhaps my favourite of the FFIV bugs has more to do with not enough edge case testing... Here's the situation:
In combat you can change which weapon/shield you have equipped in each hand. You go into your item menu, select a hand, and then choose what you want to put in that hand. But how are you, the player, to know what you could equip? Well, the system iterates over all items in your inventory when you pick a hand to swap. Anything you could equip gets highlighted. Anything you can't equip gets faded out. Then when you go to select a faded out item you get an error. This seems like a reasonable system, right?
When you select a highlighted item should it recheck if the item is a legal option? If you're coding robustly it probably should but then you're adding an extra check in which seems unnecessary. You already validated every item in your inventory seconds earlier. Why bother revalidating? We're talking about a game that had to have plot cut out to fit it onto the cartridge! Any extra checks are probably unwise...
Now, what if you wanted to unequip an item? Well, you'd 'equip' a blank slot in your inventory. This seems like a reasonable case to build in. Let's just flag the empty slots as valid equips. No sense treating them any differently, right?
How about when we derive our current stats? Should we validate our gear then? Seems wasteful. As long as we're robust in only allowing valid gear to be equipped in the first place this should never come up.
So, what's the bug? Well, it's a timing bug. Get into a fight with a monster which drops a weapon or a shield as its common drop. Have Edge input the steal command (which will steal the weapon or shield). Then quickly get to the person who can't legally equip that item. Have them go into the item menu and start switching items. This will cause a validation of your inventory as it stands when you start. While doing this the steal command will resolve and you'll get a new item. It will go into a blank slot in your inventory. A blank slot that has already been validated as a legal equip. Pick the new item! Huzzah! Rydia can put on a shield! Rosa can use a spear.
There's a similar timing bug which lets you use berserk while unequipping arrows which results in duplicating any item you can legally equip. You end up with 255 copies which is great for making cash or for throwing with Edge.
Berserk is also buggy with Edward and his auto-hide ability. Apparently you can set it up so he can't be attacked but is berserked and beating down.
A final timing bug revolves around the spell stop. It takes out all other timers on the person, completely. Have a temporary paralyze? If you get stopped it will never wear off. A virus? There forever. Unless you reapply it then the timer will get fixed. And if you screw with the timers on monsters with stop? The game will often freeze. (I'm glad I never used that spell!)
In the inexplicably weird category... The sylph spell is free if you put it in one spot (upper right hand corner) in the spell list.
In the mad cheats category... At one point you're in a fight in the dwarven castle underground. You fight some dolls and then you fight Golbez. He almost kills you when Rydia shows up and saves the day. Golbez still manages to run off with the crystal. A future plot point is to go get the last dark crystal from the sealed cave... If the first thing you do after Rydia joins your party is cast warp you'll get warped back to the dwarven crystal room. Complete with dark crystal for the taking. Which counts as the dark crystal from the sealed cave! So you can skip that dungeon!
Now for a bug I think I was hit by... The moon is circular and you can find a path to do a complete circuit. But your spaceship only exists exactly where you landed it. So if you do a full circle around the moon? You lose your spaceship. You need to go back the other way the exact number of times to get back to the precise spot you left your spaceship.
There are a bunch of fights with conditional triggers to do things. The biggest example of this is when you fight the 4 fiends in one fight. You beat up Milon for a while and then when he dies Rubicant steps up. They coded these triggers as counter attacks. So if you kill Milon off with attacks that don't trigger a counter attack, he won't tag in Rubicant. You'll just win. One way to do this is to cast wall on your team and then bounce attack spells off the wall and onto him. Cheats!
Finally there's a bug that certainly afflicted me on probably every playthrough but which I didn't really notice. Thinking about it in retrospect I can see it happening but I didn't notice at the time... Weapons have flags on them. Metallic, so they paralyze you in the magnetic cave. Back row, so you do full damage from the back row. And, for some reason, no-crit. These weapons simply can't get a critical strike. The metallic flag works fine but the other two are buggy. If they ever get set on your character they are never removed. So if you ever put on a whip, for example, you can never get a crit again for the rest of the game. And you do full damage from the back row with any weapon. Axes, whips, and the best paladin sword all have the no-crit flag.
That's not the only way to lose the ability to crit. Apparently if you ever start a fight dead you lose the ability to crit. And sometimes the game has battles which run without player input. Tellah vs Edward in the 'YOU SPOONY BARD!' scene. Tellah vs Golbez. FuSoYa and Golbez against Zemus. If in one of those fights the team on the left dies then everyone in your party which occupies an 'empty' slot for the right hand team loses the ability to crit. So after the FuSoYa and Golbez vs Zemus fight at most two of your characters can still crit. The other 3 will permanently lose their ability to crit if they somehow kept it up to that point!
How... Dumb.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Kainazzo Shocked!
I can remember playing Final Fantasy IV as a kid and having real troubles with the boss fights in Castle Baron. After you break in via the sewers you have to fight Baigan (and his respawing arms) and then immediately afterwards fight Kainazzo (the water fiend). I remember Kainazzo having these brutal AE water spells and having to try him over and over to kill him...
Here's how my fight last night went.
Cecil - attack
Yang - attack
Porom - cure2
Palom - lit2
Tellah - lit3
Cecil - attack
Yang - attack
Porom - cure2
At this point Tellah finally got around to resolving lit3 which killed Kainazzo. He put his water shield thing up once, immediately before Palom resolved lit2 which brought it down. He never got around to withdrawing into his shell. He never cast an AE spell. He didn't heal himself. Lit3 took him from probably around 60% life to dead in one attack. How was this ever hard? Did I not want to cast my best spells as a kid? Maybe I was using Tellah to heal and the twins to use their stupid twin attacks? I likely didn't know I could heal up between the fights and might have spent all Tellah's mana on Baigan? (To be fair it doesn't make a lot of sense that I can go to my old room in the castle and sleep between fights...)
At any rate Baigan is dead and I got to see one of the silliest cutscenes in any game. Kainazzo (like Milan before him) wants a second crack at killing the party. In this case he causes the walls of the hallway to move inward in order to crush the party like some sort of medieval trash compactor. Palom and Porom get the bright idea to turn themselves into stone in order to stop the walls from moving in any further. After the walls stop Tellah tries to remove the petrification but gets an error message. It can't be removed because it was inflicted of their own will.
There are all sorts of problems here! For one thing, neither of them can actually cast stone. Palom learns it at level 36 and we're not nearly that high. Next, why would stone statues of two little kids stop walls which are presumably able to crush human bones? It doesn't even get to the point of trying to crush them. The walls stop independently as if they're simply unable to push stone children. Finally, what sort of magical universe has the rule that a spell can't be undone if it was self inflicted? There's always absurdities revolving around death in games like this (why can I bring Rydia back to life over and over but Anna takes a couple arrows and is just dead) but this one really takes the cake. Under the logic used here if Tellah had turned them to stone (a spell he can actually cast) he could have then healed them of it after the doors open. But since they wanted to get stoned it can't be undone? Bah! Nevermind the fact it actually does get undone, later, by the head honcho of Mysidia...
Here's how my fight last night went.
Cecil - attack
Yang - attack
Porom - cure2
Palom - lit2
Tellah - lit3
Cecil - attack
Yang - attack
Porom - cure2
At this point Tellah finally got around to resolving lit3 which killed Kainazzo. He put his water shield thing up once, immediately before Palom resolved lit2 which brought it down. He never got around to withdrawing into his shell. He never cast an AE spell. He didn't heal himself. Lit3 took him from probably around 60% life to dead in one attack. How was this ever hard? Did I not want to cast my best spells as a kid? Maybe I was using Tellah to heal and the twins to use their stupid twin attacks? I likely didn't know I could heal up between the fights and might have spent all Tellah's mana on Baigan? (To be fair it doesn't make a lot of sense that I can go to my old room in the castle and sleep between fights...)
At any rate Baigan is dead and I got to see one of the silliest cutscenes in any game. Kainazzo (like Milan before him) wants a second crack at killing the party. In this case he causes the walls of the hallway to move inward in order to crush the party like some sort of medieval trash compactor. Palom and Porom get the bright idea to turn themselves into stone in order to stop the walls from moving in any further. After the walls stop Tellah tries to remove the petrification but gets an error message. It can't be removed because it was inflicted of their own will.
There are all sorts of problems here! For one thing, neither of them can actually cast stone. Palom learns it at level 36 and we're not nearly that high. Next, why would stone statues of two little kids stop walls which are presumably able to crush human bones? It doesn't even get to the point of trying to crush them. The walls stop independently as if they're simply unable to push stone children. Finally, what sort of magical universe has the rule that a spell can't be undone if it was self inflicted? There's always absurdities revolving around death in games like this (why can I bring Rydia back to life over and over but Anna takes a couple arrows and is just dead) but this one really takes the cake. Under the logic used here if Tellah had turned them to stone (a spell he can actually cast) he could have then healed them of it after the doors open. But since they wanted to get stoned it can't be undone? Bah! Nevermind the fact it actually does get undone, later, by the head honcho of Mysidia...
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Super Rare Drops
My brother commented on yesterday's post about the 'infinite' victory Game Genie code and said that the thing he most remembered about it was getting a large number of rolls on the enemy loot table. There are some stupidly rare drops in the game and this was the first time we'd ever seen one of them. (Mage, I think.)
I mentioned that Rydia learned almost all of her spells via leveling but that's only true of white and black magic spells. Her call spells are learned in a wide variety of ways. She starts the game with one. She learns five more when she rejoins the party after growing up in the land of the summoned monsters. Most of the rest she learns by having the party defeat a legendary monster. Find Odin at the bottom of Castle Baron and beat him up to learn the spell. Brave Bahamut's Cave on the moon to learn that spell. Hit Yang on the head with a frying pan to learn Sylph. There are a couple spells that you can only learn by getting a rare drop from a random encounter. I don't think I've ever had Mage myself. I got Imp once from a monster in the final dungeon on the moon. Are there any other super rare drops? Lets see what gamefaqs has to say on the topic...
First of all it looks like every monster has a 5 in 96 chance to drop an item at all after you kill them. (Dr Lugae's second form has a 100% chance to drop an item as the only exception.) After determining that they'll drop an item there are 4 things they could drop. The first item has a 32 in 64 chance. The next has a 20 in 64 chance. Then an 11 in 64 chance. Then a 1 in 64 chance. The mage monster, for example, has a cure2 potion as the first three items on the loot table and the mage spell for Rydia as the last item. Which means that if you kill a single mage your odds of each outcome are...
5824 in 6144 (~95%) - no drop
319 in 6144 (~5%) - cure2 potion
1 in 6144 (~.016%) - mage spell
What?!?
How is that a sensible game mechanic? You fight mages in one dungeon. (The magnetic cave.) I can't find random encounter tables but it's a pretty short dungeon and you're probably only fighting like 5 of these guys in a given game. With 5 shots at the item you're at a mere .081% chance to get the item. How many times would you have to play the game to have even a 50% chance at getting it? 852. If you played the game 852 times and killed 5 mages each time then you're barely more likely to see the mage spell than not. How can this make sense? Is it really worth spending developer time on something that will come up that rarely?
This isn't the only item in the game with this kind of rarity, either... Here's a list of all the items that only come up in the 1/64 slot of a loot table...
Bomb spell
Medusa sword
Dragoon spear
RuneAxe axe
Artemis bow
Lilith rod
Cursed ring (I didn't know there was a cursed ring in this game!)
Crystal ring
Zeus gloves
Glass helmet
Imp spell
Mage spell
Pink tail
I've tried to get the pink tail before but now that I actually see the numbers behind it I'm pretty sure it's off the charts crazy to try for it. Estimates placed getting into a fight with the monsters that drop it at 1 in 64. I think you get to fight 5 of them at a time but that's still in the neighbourhood of 54528 fights before you reach a 50% chance of getting a pink tail. Holy crazy drop rates Batman!
I mentioned that Rydia learned almost all of her spells via leveling but that's only true of white and black magic spells. Her call spells are learned in a wide variety of ways. She starts the game with one. She learns five more when she rejoins the party after growing up in the land of the summoned monsters. Most of the rest she learns by having the party defeat a legendary monster. Find Odin at the bottom of Castle Baron and beat him up to learn the spell. Brave Bahamut's Cave on the moon to learn that spell. Hit Yang on the head with a frying pan to learn Sylph. There are a couple spells that you can only learn by getting a rare drop from a random encounter. I don't think I've ever had Mage myself. I got Imp once from a monster in the final dungeon on the moon. Are there any other super rare drops? Lets see what gamefaqs has to say on the topic...
First of all it looks like every monster has a 5 in 96 chance to drop an item at all after you kill them. (Dr Lugae's second form has a 100% chance to drop an item as the only exception.) After determining that they'll drop an item there are 4 things they could drop. The first item has a 32 in 64 chance. The next has a 20 in 64 chance. Then an 11 in 64 chance. Then a 1 in 64 chance. The mage monster, for example, has a cure2 potion as the first three items on the loot table and the mage spell for Rydia as the last item. Which means that if you kill a single mage your odds of each outcome are...
5824 in 6144 (~95%) - no drop
319 in 6144 (~5%) - cure2 potion
1 in 6144 (~.016%) - mage spell
What?!?
How is that a sensible game mechanic? You fight mages in one dungeon. (The magnetic cave.) I can't find random encounter tables but it's a pretty short dungeon and you're probably only fighting like 5 of these guys in a given game. With 5 shots at the item you're at a mere .081% chance to get the item. How many times would you have to play the game to have even a 50% chance at getting it? 852. If you played the game 852 times and killed 5 mages each time then you're barely more likely to see the mage spell than not. How can this make sense? Is it really worth spending developer time on something that will come up that rarely?
This isn't the only item in the game with this kind of rarity, either... Here's a list of all the items that only come up in the 1/64 slot of a loot table...
Bomb spell
Medusa sword
Dragoon spear
RuneAxe axe
Artemis bow
Lilith rod
Cursed ring (I didn't know there was a cursed ring in this game!)
Crystal ring
Zeus gloves
Glass helmet
Imp spell
Mage spell
Pink tail
I've tried to get the pink tail before but now that I actually see the numbers behind it I'm pretty sure it's off the charts crazy to try for it. Estimates placed getting into a fight with the monsters that drop it at 1 in 64. I think you get to fight 5 of them at a time but that's still in the neighbourhood of 54528 fights before you reach a 50% chance of getting a pink tail. Holy crazy drop rates Batman!
Friday, January 13, 2012
Game Genie: Final Fantasy IV
My brother had a Gamie Genie for the SNES when we were kids. It came with a book of codes you could enter to modify how games worked. Infinite lives, access to all the guns at the start of the game... Things like that. I don't know how it worked (I am curious though) and I don't remember ever actually using it on any game. Any game, that is, except for Final Fantasy IV!
I remember there were codes you could enter to change how much experience you earned at the end of a fight. Make each monster worth 1 xp. Or 10 xp. Or 100 xp. And so on. There was an obvious pattern to the codes and we toyed around with making things bigger and bigger. Eventually we stumble on a code which seemed to break the game. A fight would end and your characters would stand around doing the victory dance but it wouldn't list how much experience/gold you'd earned for the fight. Eventually we turned off the Game Genie (it had an on/off switch) and suddenly earned a ludicrous amount of experience. It was like the game was stuck in an infinite loop while it was turned on and it was constantly adding on the experience for the monsters over and over. Hello tons of levels!
We figured this out in the antlion cave near the start of the game when your party is Cecil, Rydia, and Edward. Gaining a ton of levels at once had two interesting consequences...
First, Edward has an auto-hide ability where if he's at low health he runs away from the fight. In the Japanese version he has a healing ability which he can use while hidden (in order to get enough health to actually stick around and fight) but in the NA version he just screws around hidden. Gaining 80 some odd levels raised his maximum health a lot. So high, in fact, that I couldn't heal him out of low health. It might have been a problem if I didn't have a super high level dark knight!
Secondly, Rydia learns spells as she gains levels so when she gains a ton of levels she learns all the spells. All the spells, that is, except fir1. She learns that spell as a plot point at the start of the next dungeon (you need Rosa to convince her to get over her fear of fire and burn down the ice blocking the party from walking to Fabul) so it makes sense that she wouldn't learn it from just gaining levels. What doesn't make sense is she does learn fir2. And fir3. So the scene where she's too afraid to melt some ice with a fire spell doesn't real gel with the fact I've been exploding enemies with fir3!
I don't remember actually playing very long with the stupid amount of experience. Cheating just isn't very fun it turns out.
I remember there were codes you could enter to change how much experience you earned at the end of a fight. Make each monster worth 1 xp. Or 10 xp. Or 100 xp. And so on. There was an obvious pattern to the codes and we toyed around with making things bigger and bigger. Eventually we stumble on a code which seemed to break the game. A fight would end and your characters would stand around doing the victory dance but it wouldn't list how much experience/gold you'd earned for the fight. Eventually we turned off the Game Genie (it had an on/off switch) and suddenly earned a ludicrous amount of experience. It was like the game was stuck in an infinite loop while it was turned on and it was constantly adding on the experience for the monsters over and over. Hello tons of levels!
We figured this out in the antlion cave near the start of the game when your party is Cecil, Rydia, and Edward. Gaining a ton of levels at once had two interesting consequences...
First, Edward has an auto-hide ability where if he's at low health he runs away from the fight. In the Japanese version he has a healing ability which he can use while hidden (in order to get enough health to actually stick around and fight) but in the NA version he just screws around hidden. Gaining 80 some odd levels raised his maximum health a lot. So high, in fact, that I couldn't heal him out of low health. It might have been a problem if I didn't have a super high level dark knight!
Secondly, Rydia learns spells as she gains levels so when she gains a ton of levels she learns all the spells. All the spells, that is, except fir1. She learns that spell as a plot point at the start of the next dungeon (you need Rosa to convince her to get over her fear of fire and burn down the ice blocking the party from walking to Fabul) so it makes sense that she wouldn't learn it from just gaining levels. What doesn't make sense is she does learn fir2. And fir3. So the scene where she's too afraid to melt some ice with a fire spell doesn't real gel with the fact I've been exploding enemies with fir3!
I don't remember actually playing very long with the stupid amount of experience. Cheating just isn't very fun it turns out.
Saturday, January 07, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Golbez So Dumb
Often in a console RPG the bad guys will have a chance to finish off the player characters. Obviously they never do (or the game would end) but the justification for letting them go changes. Our first introduction to the character Golbez in Final Fantasy IV immediately marks him as an idiot for not killing off the players. Here's the scene...
Cecil, Edward, and Yang are desperately trying to defend Fabul's crystal which the Red Wings are here to steal. The party is running out of steam (the party had two healers but they were both girls and therefore hid during the assault) and has fallen back to the crystal itself. In walks Kain who become evil. He trivially takes out Cecil. Golbez then walks in and trivially takes out Edward and Yang. Kain wants to finish the party off but Golbez tells him to just get the crystal and leave. One solid blow to Cecil's head and the bad guys win! They also kidnap Rosa to advance the plot.
A little while later Cecil is climbing Mount Ordeals to become a paladin. Golbez suddenly decides that Cecil is a problem and sends one of his fiends (Milon) to take him out. Kain gets antsy and wants to go too. After all, he was able to take Cecil out with ease in Fabul. Golbez calls Kain incompetent and tells him to sit down and shut up. I'm calling Golbez incompetent. Milon and his zombies are all chumps. Kain alone would probably be a decent fight. Kain and Milon likely take the party out. Kain, Milon, and Golbez certainly do.
I wonder if this is a spot where the drastically reduced plot in the US version is hurting the story. We eventually learn that Golbez is actually a good guy being mind controlled so I could believe he went easy on Cecil in a passive-aggressive outburst against the true evil guy. But we're given no indication that this could be the case. As far as we know at this point in time Golbez is just stupid.
Cecil, Edward, and Yang are desperately trying to defend Fabul's crystal which the Red Wings are here to steal. The party is running out of steam (the party had two healers but they were both girls and therefore hid during the assault) and has fallen back to the crystal itself. In walks Kain who become evil. He trivially takes out Cecil. Golbez then walks in and trivially takes out Edward and Yang. Kain wants to finish the party off but Golbez tells him to just get the crystal and leave. One solid blow to Cecil's head and the bad guys win! They also kidnap Rosa to advance the plot.
A little while later Cecil is climbing Mount Ordeals to become a paladin. Golbez suddenly decides that Cecil is a problem and sends one of his fiends (Milon) to take him out. Kain gets antsy and wants to go too. After all, he was able to take Cecil out with ease in Fabul. Golbez calls Kain incompetent and tells him to sit down and shut up. I'm calling Golbez incompetent. Milon and his zombies are all chumps. Kain alone would probably be a decent fight. Kain and Milon likely take the party out. Kain, Milon, and Golbez certainly do.
I wonder if this is a spot where the drastically reduced plot in the US version is hurting the story. We eventually learn that Golbez is actually a good guy being mind controlled so I could believe he went easy on Cecil in a passive-aggressive outburst against the true evil guy. But we're given no indication that this could be the case. As far as we know at this point in time Golbez is just stupid.
Friday, January 06, 2012
Final Fantasy IV: Namingway
I've always changed the names of characters in games like this when given the chance. For years I didn't really even know the real names for the characters in Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI. It wasn't until I went to University and started living in Comfy Prime and needed to be able to talk to Sthenno and Byung about the games that I cared enough to really learn them. Even then, for most of the characters I don't initially think of them with their real names. It's not Cecil, it's Nick. It's not Rydia, it's Jo. It's really not Cid. That's definitely Barfy. No, I don't remember why I possibly used that name when I was 11. Freud would be happy to hear I used to name Rosa "Mom" until I played the game enough to actually figure out what was going on there with Cecil. Getting cozy indeed. Now Rosa gets to stay Rosa...
As far as the game goes I've done a few major plot points. I completed Mount Ordeals which turned Nick into a Paladin and taught Drew the Meteo spell. It's time to find Golbez and drop a meteor on his head!
Thursday, December 15, 2011
Final Fantasy IV
I'd been debating in my head which version of Final Fantasy IV to play when the time came and had not yet made a decision. Last night I finished Final Fantasy Adventure which put FFIV on the docket. I woke up early this morning and finally made a decision... I'm going to play the NA release of the game for the Super Nintendo. I'm also going to play the DS version as well to see the differences first hand, though I am going to play it through completely on the SNES first and likely only play the DS version on the TTC.
I ran into my first problem when my SNES wouldn't acknowledge that a game was plugged into it. I tried Final Fantasy IV, Gradius 3, and Final Fantasy VI with no luck. So I resorted to the old standby... I blew into it. I vaguely recall reading that blowing is actually a bad idea since you're likely to force the dust in deeper to the connectors but whatever. In retrospect I probably should have used the can of compressed air that was sitting on a nearby counter... At any rate, it loaded up a game after that, though nudging the cartridge sent it to a black screen. I gave it another quick blow and made sure to not bump it and it seemed to work fine. I don't have any working SNES controllers so I'm using a Super Famicom controller which ordinarily wouldn't be a problem but the cord is really short and I'm a little worried that I'll end up yanking on the console when I turn to get a drink or something and reset the game. Guess I need to save often!
I played through the game up to the end of the first dungeon before hitting the showers before work. Mist dragon died really fast and only got off one shot of her brutal counter-attack AE.
Perhaps the neatest thing is I changed the main character's name to Nick (of course) and got referred to as Nick, Captain of the Red Wings. Hmm...
I ran into my first problem when my SNES wouldn't acknowledge that a game was plugged into it. I tried Final Fantasy IV, Gradius 3, and Final Fantasy VI with no luck. So I resorted to the old standby... I blew into it. I vaguely recall reading that blowing is actually a bad idea since you're likely to force the dust in deeper to the connectors but whatever. In retrospect I probably should have used the can of compressed air that was sitting on a nearby counter... At any rate, it loaded up a game after that, though nudging the cartridge sent it to a black screen. I gave it another quick blow and made sure to not bump it and it seemed to work fine. I don't have any working SNES controllers so I'm using a Super Famicom controller which ordinarily wouldn't be a problem but the cord is really short and I'm a little worried that I'll end up yanking on the console when I turn to get a drink or something and reset the game. Guess I need to save often!
I played through the game up to the end of the first dungeon before hitting the showers before work. Mist dragon died really fast and only got off one shot of her brutal counter-attack AE.
Perhaps the neatest thing is I changed the main character's name to Nick (of course) and got referred to as Nick, Captain of the Red Wings. Hmm...
Thursday, December 08, 2011
Final Fantasy IV: Different Versions
Looking ahead to the next step in the marathon we have my all time favourite game: Final Fantasy IV. There have been many different versions of the game released and I need to decide which version I want to play this time around. I currently own 3 different versions of the game and would consider tracking down another one if it suited my fancy. So I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what actually changed between versions.
Original Game - This version is only available in Japanese for the Super Famicom. I'll use it as the base version and compare the other ones to it.
North American Release - This is the version that was released in English for the Super Nintendo under the title Final Fantasy II. (Actual II and III weren't released over here so in order to reduce confusion they renumbered this game. And now it creates confusion!) Many things were changed from the original version. A bunch of spells and abilities were removed to simplify combat somewhat. Most of the consumables in the game were removed. The status removers were consolidated into one item and the damage items were just taken out. Items were cheaper in stores. Weapons did more damage. A lot of violent/religious imagery was toned down or removed. A lot of the story was cut out due to space limitations on the cartridge. Also: YOU SPOONY BARD!
EasyType - The NA version was easier than the original and Square made another Japanese version based off of the easier NA one. It has almost all of the NA changes except the censorship. A lot of the gear got buffed which made the game even easier.
Playstation - This release was essentially the original with a couple minor tweaks like a run button and a memo save. The English versions of this release got a completely new and more complete translation.
WonderSwan Color - This was a Japanese only hand held system which got ports of the first few Final Fantasy games. The graphics were changed to account for the worse hardware and some bugs were fixed/added.
Game Boy Advance - This version is a remake of the WSC version. It got another new translated script but the big changes are the ability to change who's in your party and a couple of challenge dungeons.
Nintendo DS - Yet another new translated script. Cutscenes with voice overs. The airships can move in 8 directions instead of 4! Removal of limited inventory space. Some mini-games were added to buff a new summon added for Rydia. An augment system to make all your characters better was added. The difficulty was really ramped up by giving enemies more health, better abilities, and better AI. The loot changed. You can't change character names and Namingway is a sidequest instead of just a dude who changes names. There's a mini-map for dungeons. A lot of the abilities which were removed in the NA version are back but with different affects than in the original. Spells were rebalanced to be more useful. Two challenge bosses were added. And a New Game Plus, whatever that is.
Mobile Phone - This version sounds like the DS one except only in Japanese and on the phone. It readded the ability to swap party members and a bonus dungeon.
PlayStation Portable - Comes packaged with the sequel to the game and a mini-game to bridge the two. It went back to the script from the GBA. It keeps the party swapping and bonus dungeons from the GBA as well. Apparently it lets you choose to play the SNES or the DS versions of the music.
I currently have the original version, the SNES version, and the DS version. The reason I need to decide this now before I've even finished Final Fantasy Adventure is the PSP version is very tempting. I need to get a copy of the sequel at some point and this would come bundled with it. But I don't have a PSP and I have a feeling they'll drop in price when the Vita comes out... I'm leaning towards playing the SNES version since it's the one I grew up playing but I'm not sure...
Original Game - This version is only available in Japanese for the Super Famicom. I'll use it as the base version and compare the other ones to it.
North American Release - This is the version that was released in English for the Super Nintendo under the title Final Fantasy II. (Actual II and III weren't released over here so in order to reduce confusion they renumbered this game. And now it creates confusion!) Many things were changed from the original version. A bunch of spells and abilities were removed to simplify combat somewhat. Most of the consumables in the game were removed. The status removers were consolidated into one item and the damage items were just taken out. Items were cheaper in stores. Weapons did more damage. A lot of violent/religious imagery was toned down or removed. A lot of the story was cut out due to space limitations on the cartridge. Also: YOU SPOONY BARD!
EasyType - The NA version was easier than the original and Square made another Japanese version based off of the easier NA one. It has almost all of the NA changes except the censorship. A lot of the gear got buffed which made the game even easier.
Playstation - This release was essentially the original with a couple minor tweaks like a run button and a memo save. The English versions of this release got a completely new and more complete translation.
WonderSwan Color - This was a Japanese only hand held system which got ports of the first few Final Fantasy games. The graphics were changed to account for the worse hardware and some bugs were fixed/added.
Game Boy Advance - This version is a remake of the WSC version. It got another new translated script but the big changes are the ability to change who's in your party and a couple of challenge dungeons.
Nintendo DS - Yet another new translated script. Cutscenes with voice overs. The airships can move in 8 directions instead of 4! Removal of limited inventory space. Some mini-games were added to buff a new summon added for Rydia. An augment system to make all your characters better was added. The difficulty was really ramped up by giving enemies more health, better abilities, and better AI. The loot changed. You can't change character names and Namingway is a sidequest instead of just a dude who changes names. There's a mini-map for dungeons. A lot of the abilities which were removed in the NA version are back but with different affects than in the original. Spells were rebalanced to be more useful. Two challenge bosses were added. And a New Game Plus, whatever that is.
Mobile Phone - This version sounds like the DS one except only in Japanese and on the phone. It readded the ability to swap party members and a bonus dungeon.
PlayStation Portable - Comes packaged with the sequel to the game and a mini-game to bridge the two. It went back to the script from the GBA. It keeps the party swapping and bonus dungeons from the GBA as well. Apparently it lets you choose to play the SNES or the DS versions of the music.
I currently have the original version, the SNES version, and the DS version. The reason I need to decide this now before I've even finished Final Fantasy Adventure is the PSP version is very tempting. I need to get a copy of the sequel at some point and this would come bundled with it. But I don't have a PSP and I have a feeling they'll drop in price when the Vita comes out... I'm leaning towards playing the SNES version since it's the one I grew up playing but I'm not sure...
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