Last night I reloaded an older save state near a town and filled my inventory with elixirs. Then I headed back up to Ashura trying my best to turn into a pudding or a sandworm on the way up. I didn't turn into a sandworm but I did get a pudding and I figured I'd give the fight a shot with one pudding along with the rest of my team.
I don't know the math behind it, but melt seemed to do around 5 times as much damage as a normal attack and more than twice as much as the best attacks I could find. It has no damage type and isn't a melee attack so it can't be halved or negated by any resistances so on Ashura it would do about 10 times as much damage as some of my other characters and 4 times as much as my best attacks. Couple that with the fact the pudding has 20% more health and takes half damage itself from any melee attack and you can start to see how a team of puddings could win. But one pudding? How did that happen? I mean, he needs to attack probably 6 times to kill Ashura and likely dies in 3 swings. A couple of his attacks do nothing so I could maybe see getting lucky but this seems worse than some of the solo thief fights.
Wait, what's that? Melt heals the pudding for an amount equal to the damage done? So not only does he do 10 times as much damage as some of my damage dealers he also heals for 180% of what my healer can do? Oh. Ok, yeah, I can see how the pudding can trivially solo Ashura.
It's like I was playing vanilla World of Warcraft with a party of 3 fury warriors and a ret paladin healing between fights. And then a death knight showed up and was bigger, tougher, did way more damage, and had a silly amount of self healing. He was going into the dungeon to solo some bosses and decided to let some of the other people tag along for achievements.
I then plowed through the final dungeon leveling each of my guys up to tier 14. (The level designer apparently went on strike during the creation of the final dungeon since it consisted of the exact same floor repeated over and over.) I ended up just fooling around and got stomped by the final boss since it turns out he hits the team for about 400 damage every round. So I had to reload a little earlier and build some tier 14 monsters that had melt which made him trivial.
Overall I was not a big fan of this game, but I think the problem is more with how I chose to play the game than it is with the game itself. Random encounters that can't help you progress in any conceivable way are annoying and the 4 monster party is pretty much set up to play the whole game that way. I didn't want to wander around in dungeons to look for treasure because I couldn't use the treasure and it only hurt to get into fights... And if you're not going to look for treasure and kill stuff why are you even playing a jRPG?
Monster balance is atrocious. Melt in particular is a real problem. It was rare to find a random encounter that was not either trivial or dangerous which isn't terribly fun, but with consumables the dangerous ones weren't so bad. If there was a reason to fight them it might have been ok.
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy Legend. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy Legend. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Monday, October 17, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend: Ashura
I plowed away last night getting up quite high in the tower. I discovered that one of my characters actually had a healing spell which meant I could actually fight the guys that hit for a quarter of my health each swing without too much trouble. (I also had to burn an elixir I found to get to the boss. It turns out elixirs restore ability points and have 3 charges so I could get an extra 30 healing spells out of my Titan.)
I got into a fight with the boss and his first action was to attack for more than my maximum possible health in one swing. Meanwhile I was trying out different abilities and she seemed to be immune to almost everything. When I did attack her for damage it would be for around 40 damage. She has 2000 health. So I need to get in around 50 swings when she likely kills one character each round. In short, I have no chance with my current party.
What I need to do is figure out if he can be hit with any spells and otherwise I need to figure out if I can find a monster that either does a lot of damage or can possibly survive her attacks. Fortunately someone reverse engineered the stats for every creature in the game and posted it on gamefaqs!
The bottom row that starts with r indicates what stuff she is resistant to. In this case she is resistant to Fire, Ice, Electricity, Poison, Stone, Paralyze, and Weapon. Being resistant to the first 6 means being completely immune to spells of those types. Being resistant to weapon means taking half damage from all physical attacks. The only resistance she doesn't have is to Quake, so maybe I should try to find some monsters with quake attacks?
The stuff on the right is her ability list. oDAMAGE and oCHANGE are the things which add on all those resistances. Beyond that we can see how she can attack. 6ARMS attacks 6 times with an attack multiplier of 4. 3HEADS attacks 3 times with an attack multiplier of 12. Both of these seemed to do around 600+ damage to my characters who have maximum health around 600. GAZE seems to have multiple entries. I'm not sure if that means one cast of the spell does 5 things or if there are 5 different spells all named GAZE. They all inflict various negative status conditions. I vaguely recall getting cursed by her and not any of the others so I'm going to assume the spell she has is just a curse. What does curse do? I don't know! It seemed to decrease the damage I did. FLARE is a massive AE spell. It is a mana power 8 attack and seemed to do around 200 damage to each of my characters. It also seems to be non-elemental damage which means I can't defend against it but also means she can't defend against it either so if I can find a monster that can cast flare I may have a way to hurt her reliably. BLIND unsurprisingly tries to blind someone. It halves the damage done and is of spell type Paralyze so I can't hit her with it. HEAL seemed to heal her for around 250 or so and pretty much meant I couldn't plausibly win.
So, it seems most of her damage can't be negated and she's pretty much immune to everything except maybe Quake and FLARE. Huh. I know the monster transformation FAQ I read earlier to work out how meat worked said she could be beaten by a single monster (pudding type) so there has to be something going on here. What does pudding have going for it?
MELT is a generic physical attack and seems to have nothing special going for it. It doesn't have a stat associated with it which seems a little strange. BOTHER looks to be an agility reducing spell. P-SKIN is a self-buff which paralyzes people that attack you, but she's immune to paralyze so I can't see this doing anything. GAS is a poison attack spell which will do nothing to her. STEALTH gives you a chance of getting a surprise round at the start of combat. The two o abilities give resistance to paralyze, weapon, and quake. Curse and blind are both paralyze element and weapon should cut the damage she does in half so this monster does seem well suited to being tough against her. But unless MELT does something pretty spectacular I don't see how it wins.
What about getting a quake element attack? Well, there's only one of those, the QUAKE spell. And of all the possible tier 13 monsters only the Sandworm can cast it. I've been avoiding that monster as he is weak to ice but since Ashura doesn't seem to have ice attacks this seems ok. I may die on the way up which would be unfortunate but I probably need to stock up on revives and elixirs anyway.
I do know this has been done before but I'm having a hard time understanding how a single pudding can kill Ashura. Something weird has to be going on with MELT (or maybe reducing her agility somehow completely ruins her ability to do damage?) but I figure I should give it a try and see what happens. I probably need to leave the tower and stock up first. I'm thinking my party should probably end up as Pudding, Pudding, Sandworm, Titan.
I got into a fight with the boss and his first action was to attack for more than my maximum possible health in one swing. Meanwhile I was trying out different abilities and she seemed to be immune to almost everything. When I did attack her for damage it would be for around 40 damage. She has 2000 health. So I need to get in around 50 swings when she likely kills one character each round. In short, I have no chance with my current party.
What I need to do is figure out if he can be hit with any spells and otherwise I need to figure out if I can find a monster that either does a lot of damage or can possibly survive her attacks. Fortunately someone reverse engineered the stats for every creature in the game and posted it on gamefaqs!
ASHURA [c6]
Undead
hp 2000 6ARMS 5
3HEADS 10
str. 90 GAZE 10
def. 90 FLARE 3
agi. 90 BLIND 10
mana 90 HEAL 10
oDAMAGE -
au 9999 oCHANGE -
rFIEPSPW- w-------- The bottom row that starts with r indicates what stuff she is resistant to. In this case she is resistant to Fire, Ice, Electricity, Poison, Stone, Paralyze, and Weapon. Being resistant to the first 6 means being completely immune to spells of those types. Being resistant to weapon means taking half damage from all physical attacks. The only resistance she doesn't have is to Quake, so maybe I should try to find some monsters with quake attacks?
The stuff on the right is her ability list. oDAMAGE and oCHANGE are the things which add on all those resistances. Beyond that we can see how she can attack. 6ARMS attacks 6 times with an attack multiplier of 4. 3HEADS attacks 3 times with an attack multiplier of 12. Both of these seemed to do around 600+ damage to my characters who have maximum health around 600. GAZE seems to have multiple entries. I'm not sure if that means one cast of the spell does 5 things or if there are 5 different spells all named GAZE. They all inflict various negative status conditions. I vaguely recall getting cursed by her and not any of the others so I'm going to assume the spell she has is just a curse. What does curse do? I don't know! It seemed to decrease the damage I did. FLARE is a massive AE spell. It is a mana power 8 attack and seemed to do around 200 damage to each of my characters. It also seems to be non-elemental damage which means I can't defend against it but also means she can't defend against it either so if I can find a monster that can cast flare I may have a way to hurt her reliably. BLIND unsurprisingly tries to blind someone. It halves the damage done and is of spell type Paralyze so I can't hit her with it. HEAL seemed to heal her for around 250 or so and pretty much meant I couldn't plausibly win.
So, it seems most of her damage can't be negated and she's pretty much immune to everything except maybe Quake and FLARE. Huh. I know the monster transformation FAQ I read earlier to work out how meat worked said she could be beaten by a single monster (pudding type) so there has to be something going on here. What does pudding have going for it?
PUDDING [6a]
hp 729 MELT 10
BOTHER 10
str. 57 P-SKIN 25
def. 56 GAS 10
agi. 55 STEALTH -
mana 94 oPAR/WP -
oQUAKE -
au 2400
r-----PWQ w--------
MELT is a generic physical attack and seems to have nothing special going for it. It doesn't have a stat associated with it which seems a little strange. BOTHER looks to be an agility reducing spell. P-SKIN is a self-buff which paralyzes people that attack you, but she's immune to paralyze so I can't see this doing anything. GAS is a poison attack spell which will do nothing to her. STEALTH gives you a chance of getting a surprise round at the start of combat. The two o abilities give resistance to paralyze, weapon, and quake. Curse and blind are both paralyze element and weapon should cut the damage she does in half so this monster does seem well suited to being tough against her. But unless MELT does something pretty spectacular I don't see how it wins.
What about getting a quake element attack? Well, there's only one of those, the QUAKE spell. And of all the possible tier 13 monsters only the Sandworm can cast it. I've been avoiding that monster as he is weak to ice but since Ashura doesn't seem to have ice attacks this seems ok. I may die on the way up which would be unfortunate but I probably need to stock up on revives and elixirs anyway.
I do know this has been done before but I'm having a hard time understanding how a single pudding can kill Ashura. Something weird has to be going on with MELT (or maybe reducing her agility somehow completely ruins her ability to do damage?) but I figure I should give it a try and see what happens. I probably need to leave the tower and stock up first. I'm thinking my party should probably end up as Pudding, Pudding, Sandworm, Titan.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend: Power Curve
So my party is 4 tier-13 monsters. I can't get more power until I eat meat from the powerful end bosses. The monsters on the first world couldn't hurt me. The ones on the second world couldn't hurt me once I figured out to pick races which couldn't be crit for instantly dead. The ones on the third world practically couldn't hurt me, sometimes swinging for 1. The monsters in the current world are swinging for over 100. It feels like there should be more of a curve in monster difficulty. Where are the monsters swinging for 20?
My max health is around 600 so I'm in a bit of trouble in terms of staying alive with current random encounters. I've had to eat some meat to heal to full and transition to races I may not want to be, but that's ok. It's certainly not a big deal right now. My worry is if there are more worlds to come... On the current curve the next world's monsters will be cracking for a really worrying amount. Like, probably enough to one-shot my dudes...
My max health is around 600 so I'm in a bit of trouble in terms of staying alive with current random encounters. I've had to eat some meat to heal to full and transition to races I may not want to be, but that's ok. It's certainly not a big deal right now. My worry is if there are more worlds to come... On the current curve the next world's monsters will be cracking for a really worrying amount. Like, probably enough to one-shot my dudes...
Saturday, October 15, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend: Crits
Ok, it turns out I haven't been able to find specifics on how crits work in the game. The best I can tell is most people simply can't be crit. The only way you can be crit is if you're weak to a type of damage and you get attacked by a melee attack which has that damage type. Then there's a very high chance of a crit which instantly kills you.
Yes, kills. A crit is a one-shot kill, as I discovered earlier this week when my invincible team had someone die. It turns out bakus are weak to ice and a phantom attacked with an ice based attack. So my main character lost a heart... Frowns!
I teleported back to town and it turned out I had enough money to buy the heart back and also buy a revive which will bring someone back to life without costing a heart which should come in handy.
One final thing I found in my search... Here's a Minecraft video that made me really want to finish up and get on to FFVI:
Yes, kills. A crit is a one-shot kill, as I discovered earlier this week when my invincible team had someone die. It turns out bakus are weak to ice and a phantom attacked with an ice based attack. So my main character lost a heart... Frowns!
I teleported back to town and it turned out I had enough money to buy the heart back and also buy a revive which will bring someone back to life without costing a heart which should come in handy.
One final thing I found in my search... Here's a Minecraft video that made me really want to finish up and get on to FFVI:
Friday, October 14, 2011
Crazy Final Fantasy Legend Bug
Final Fantasy Legend has less of a following than Final Fantasy does, at least in terms of availability of information about exactly how things work. I'm trying to find information about how critical strikes work since they seem really brutal and have come up blank so far. I'm going to keep surfing the web since I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but I did stumble across an awesome bug that I wanted to share...
Humans can use a bunch of different types of weapons and they coded them all differently. There are weapons based on strength, some based on agility, and some based on mana. Some do fixed damage, some scale with your stats. All weapons have limited uses just like my monster skills and you need to go buy new ones when the old ones run out of uses.
One type, martial arts, has two weird components to the amount of damage it does. First of all, you subtract the number of uses left on the item from the damage. As such, the more you use an item the more damage it does. I guess this is supposed to simulate getting better at punching? The second part is that on the attack that lowers your uses to 0 you do triple damage. Ka-pow! I've mastered punching and go out with a bang!
The bug comes in with how the game determines the number of uses left in your item... It doesn't store the uses in the item when you first use it. Instead it iterates over your inventory to find the item again and looks up the number of uses that way. (The programmer apparently started with swords and made the rest of the damage routines based on the sword one. Swords don't care about uses left so it wasn't stored?) Ok, that seems dumb, but what does it do? Well, the look-up is based on the name of the item and you can actually have multiple items with the same name in your inventory. So it checks the number of uses left in the top item in your inventory even if you actually used one lower down. Since uses left is subtracted from damage done you can do extra damage by leaving a punch with 1 use at the top of your inventory and actually attacking with another one.
Ok, we can do an extra few damage per attack this way... But what about that triple damage? It turns out you can get that too. When you fully use an item it disappears from your inventory but they didn't actually delete it from your inventory. They actually wrote in code to hide empty items from view in the menu! They're still there until you put something new in the empty slot. And the iteration to find the used martial arts item? It knows the spent item is there. Welcome to triple damage!
Humans can use a bunch of different types of weapons and they coded them all differently. There are weapons based on strength, some based on agility, and some based on mana. Some do fixed damage, some scale with your stats. All weapons have limited uses just like my monster skills and you need to go buy new ones when the old ones run out of uses.
One type, martial arts, has two weird components to the amount of damage it does. First of all, you subtract the number of uses left on the item from the damage. As such, the more you use an item the more damage it does. I guess this is supposed to simulate getting better at punching? The second part is that on the attack that lowers your uses to 0 you do triple damage. Ka-pow! I've mastered punching and go out with a bang!
The bug comes in with how the game determines the number of uses left in your item... It doesn't store the uses in the item when you first use it. Instead it iterates over your inventory to find the item again and looks up the number of uses that way. (The programmer apparently started with swords and made the rest of the damage routines based on the sword one. Swords don't care about uses left so it wasn't stored?) Ok, that seems dumb, but what does it do? Well, the look-up is based on the name of the item and you can actually have multiple items with the same name in your inventory. So it checks the number of uses left in the top item in your inventory even if you actually used one lower down. Since uses left is subtracted from damage done you can do extra damage by leaving a punch with 1 use at the top of your inventory and actually attacking with another one.
Ok, we can do an extra few damage per attack this way... But what about that triple damage? It turns out you can get that too. When you fully use an item it disappears from your inventory but they didn't actually delete it from your inventory. They actually wrote in code to hide empty items from view in the menu! They're still there until you put something new in the empty slot. And the iteration to find the used martial arts item? It knows the spent item is there. Welcome to triple damage!
Friday, October 07, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend Monsters: Not Fun?
I've done a little bit of playing recently and have maxxed out one of my 4 monsters at tier 13. There are tier 14 monsters but the only way to get to them is to eat the meat from some of the final bosses so for all intents and purposes that character is done getting better. He can still eat meat and if he transforms he's guaranteed to stay at tier 13 so he can't really get worse, either. Presumably the abilities at tier 13 are different and powerful so figuring out which tier 13 monsters to use will be a thing but by and large that character is simply done getting better. I found some non-random encounters (talk to a guard and get an instant fight) which spawn monsters frequently used to get to tier 13 so the remaining 3 characters will likely get maxxed out in an hour or two whenever I get around to putting that time in.
And then? There will be no possible way to get better. It will be a matter of muddling my way through the 'plot' until I either beat the game or reach a point where I need to find the right mix of top tier monsters to beat a hard fight. Money has practically no use to me either (I can pay to stay at an inn but since I can just eat practically any meat for full health and abilities I'm not sure that's going to matter) so there's really going to be no reason at all to fight. Running from fights can fail so I guess just holding down the attack button might well be faster in the long run. At this point I'm either going to win, or not, and there's not a lot I can do about it. (And since other people have won with 4 monsters I have to believe I'll be able to do it, too.)
Working out how the mechanic worked was interesting and fun. Writing the Java program was fun. Even wandering around and figuring out the path to tier 13 was fun. But I'm really dreading actually playing the game now. Part of the reason RPGs are so compelling to me is the ability to make numbers get bigger. Another is the story/cutscenes. A third is to get challenged. I'm pretty much done the first part and really don't have high hopes for story or cutscenes. Since there's no way to really get better challenge is pretty much out the window too at this point. I win or I don't. I'm going to plow my way through this, honest, but I don't know that I'm going to enjoy it much...
Is the problem with monsters themselves, or with a party of all monsters, or just with the way I've approached it? Maybe a party with a single monster could be interesting since you could still level up the other characters in more standard ways and just feed the monster when it made sense to do so. But then it feels like either you make a plan for the monster and probably make him awesome compared to your party for most of the game or you don't make a plan and he constantly languishes at low tier since there are way more transitions backwards down the chain than there are ones forward.
It's a little like the Dynasty Hockey Facebook game. It was fun while doing random matches was actually progressing my team, but I reached the point where I had to do a bunch of trivial matches for basically no reward except paying the upkeep on my buffs. Grinding out stuff when I can make progress is fun. Grinding out stuff for no reason is just tedious. I stopped playing that game as a result and have pretty much lost interesting in playing The Final Fantasy Legend in the same way. But maybe the plot will get better after I rebuild the statue...
And then? There will be no possible way to get better. It will be a matter of muddling my way through the 'plot' until I either beat the game or reach a point where I need to find the right mix of top tier monsters to beat a hard fight. Money has practically no use to me either (I can pay to stay at an inn but since I can just eat practically any meat for full health and abilities I'm not sure that's going to matter) so there's really going to be no reason at all to fight. Running from fights can fail so I guess just holding down the attack button might well be faster in the long run. At this point I'm either going to win, or not, and there's not a lot I can do about it. (And since other people have won with 4 monsters I have to believe I'll be able to do it, too.)
Working out how the mechanic worked was interesting and fun. Writing the Java program was fun. Even wandering around and figuring out the path to tier 13 was fun. But I'm really dreading actually playing the game now. Part of the reason RPGs are so compelling to me is the ability to make numbers get bigger. Another is the story/cutscenes. A third is to get challenged. I'm pretty much done the first part and really don't have high hopes for story or cutscenes. Since there's no way to really get better challenge is pretty much out the window too at this point. I win or I don't. I'm going to plow my way through this, honest, but I don't know that I'm going to enjoy it much...
Is the problem with monsters themselves, or with a party of all monsters, or just with the way I've approached it? Maybe a party with a single monster could be interesting since you could still level up the other characters in more standard ways and just feed the monster when it made sense to do so. But then it feels like either you make a plan for the monster and probably make him awesome compared to your party for most of the game or you don't make a plan and he constantly languishes at low tier since there are way more transitions backwards down the chain than there are ones forward.
It's a little like the Dynasty Hockey Facebook game. It was fun while doing random matches was actually progressing my team, but I reached the point where I had to do a bunch of trivial matches for basically no reward except paying the upkeep on my buffs. Grinding out stuff when I can make progress is fun. Grinding out stuff for no reason is just tedious. I stopped playing that game as a result and have pretty much lost interesting in playing The Final Fantasy Legend in the same way. But maybe the plot will get better after I rebuild the statue...
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend: Kill Things and Eat Them!
Armed with my Java transformation program I set off last night in search of power and tasty things to eat. The going was very rough at the start. I had a sequence of meat I wanted to eat in order to turn my starting goblins into higher level monsters but the problem is the monsters I wanted to eat were only found in the hardest dungeon I have access to, and themselves are substantially stronger than goblins are. My red bull was good enough to take them out but he could only attack 10 times before having to run back to the inn. Also, his progression path involved moving to a substantially worse level 1 monster before I could jump to level 2. And the first thing the goblins turned into at level 2 was actually worse than a goblin!
I made substantial use of save states and knowledge that the random number generator isn't random at all to learn how many rounds it would take to run from each fight. I also would go to a different level of the castle if I wasn't getting any good fights since there are different fights on each level. After several runs back to town (I remade the Bung character 3 times as he kept dying while other monsters were powering up) I eventually got to the point where all my characters were leveled up above 20 maximum health. Above and beyond remaking the Bung character I suffered two other deaths to leveled up monsters. (If any character dies three time they're gone for good.) One was even on my main character which is unfortunate.
On the plus side once I got my team up to level 3 I became essentially invincible. Most monsters attack me for 0 damage and my team tends to have 50+ actions they can take between trips to an inn instead of 10 like my red bull started with. They also kill enemies in 1 attack total instead of needing 5 or 6 attacks from my team. So while it started off rather painfully it's actually become a lot easier to level up as I've gotten better.
I was thinking earlier that I wanted to level a little bit and then would probably get bored of grinding and work on the plot. Having worked at it a little bit now I'm pretty sure I now want to just twink up as high as I can possibly get and then move on. Unlike leveling in most games it's actually getting easier and faster to level up on low level monsters than it would be on appropriate level monsters. Until I reach a point where I can't level on the trash in this castle I'm probably going to stay there... When I stopped playing last night my levels were 10, 6, 6, 4!
One interesting thing was that at level 6 I turned into a mosquito and it was an unbelievable beating compared to anything I'd been previously. Clearly whoever was in charge of monster design at Square has visited Riverview!
I made substantial use of save states and knowledge that the random number generator isn't random at all to learn how many rounds it would take to run from each fight. I also would go to a different level of the castle if I wasn't getting any good fights since there are different fights on each level. After several runs back to town (I remade the Bung character 3 times as he kept dying while other monsters were powering up) I eventually got to the point where all my characters were leveled up above 20 maximum health. Above and beyond remaking the Bung character I suffered two other deaths to leveled up monsters. (If any character dies three time they're gone for good.) One was even on my main character which is unfortunate.
On the plus side once I got my team up to level 3 I became essentially invincible. Most monsters attack me for 0 damage and my team tends to have 50+ actions they can take between trips to an inn instead of 10 like my red bull started with. They also kill enemies in 1 attack total instead of needing 5 or 6 attacks from my team. So while it started off rather painfully it's actually become a lot easier to level up as I've gotten better.
I was thinking earlier that I wanted to level a little bit and then would probably get bored of grinding and work on the plot. Having worked at it a little bit now I'm pretty sure I now want to just twink up as high as I can possibly get and then move on. Unlike leveling in most games it's actually getting easier and faster to level up on low level monsters than it would be on appropriate level monsters. Until I reach a point where I can't level on the trash in this castle I'm probably going to stay there... When I stopped playing last night my levels were 10, 6, 6, 4!
One interesting thing was that at level 6 I turned into a mosquito and it was an unbelievable beating compared to anything I'd been previously. Clearly whoever was in charge of monster design at Square has visited Riverview!
Sunday, September 18, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend: Monster Program
After several nights of putting in a couple hours work I finally have a working Java program to determine monster transitions. There's no UI at the moment and everything ends up hardcoded but I start with two sets of monsters: my party and the monsters I can run into in random encounters before the 3rd boss fight. I then do a couple nested loops where I try to eat everything with all of my monsters and then try to eat everything with everything that I turned into in the first step. Repeat until I run out of things to turn to.
You may recall I'd found a couple ways to turn into a level 2 monster (but that wasn't enough to beat the 3rd boss) and I was hoping to find a way to get a little higher so I could beat him up. It turns out that shouldn't be a problem since it seems like I can actually get all the way to level 13 just on the random junk I can fight at the start of the game. (Max level is 14!) This sounds like the equivalent of punching myself in the face for 50 hours before moving beyond the first zone in Final Fantasy II... Who knows if I'll actually try to get that high or if I'll settle for being good enough to beat the 3rd boss...
I'm a little annoyed it took me this long to get the program done. I ended up pretty much having to write all my classes twice because I'm terrible. I wrote all my race classes before testing anything so when it turned out Java doesn't handle overloaded functions like I thought it would I had to start over from scratch. (Java chooses which overloaded function to use at compile time instead of at run time so my plan of having each monster family with a transform function for each family of meat didn't work. I ended up having to run a huge if-else section with instanceof checks.) But if I'd done any proof of concept testing (or wrote tests first) I'd have caught the issue right off the hop and saved several hours. Oh well!
You may recall I'd found a couple ways to turn into a level 2 monster (but that wasn't enough to beat the 3rd boss) and I was hoping to find a way to get a little higher so I could beat him up. It turns out that shouldn't be a problem since it seems like I can actually get all the way to level 13 just on the random junk I can fight at the start of the game. (Max level is 14!) This sounds like the equivalent of punching myself in the face for 50 hours before moving beyond the first zone in Final Fantasy II... Who knows if I'll actually try to get that high or if I'll settle for being good enough to beat the 3rd boss...
I'm a little annoyed it took me this long to get the program done. I ended up pretty much having to write all my classes twice because I'm terrible. I wrote all my race classes before testing anything so when it turned out Java doesn't handle overloaded functions like I thought it would I had to start over from scratch. (Java chooses which overloaded function to use at compile time instead of at run time so my plan of having each monster family with a transform function for each family of meat didn't work. I ended up having to run a huge if-else section with instanceof checks.) But if I'd done any proof of concept testing (or wrote tests first) I'd have caught the issue right off the hop and saved several hours. Oh well!
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
Third Boss: Time To Scum
I spent a good chunk of yesterday turning what I learned about the monster leveling system into an Excel spreadsheet that would help me know what to eat. I built all the transitions and monster stats into the sheet and set it up so I could input my current four monster races and the meat I could possibly eat. It then spits out what race the monsters would turn into, what tier of monsters those would be, and the change in stats. I figured this would be good enough and started wandering around fighting things and trying to do the early plot.
I made it to the first boss, a p-frog, and managed to beat him with only two deaths. Fortunately for me one of the surviving members of my party was able to eat his meat and turn into a tier 2 monster. (An oni, I believe.) The oni is substantially stronger and tougher than the rest of my party. (My red bull hits about as hard but only has 10 uses of his only attack before I have to rest in an inn which is a bit of a problem when you're killing everything you run into to see if it'll drop meat.)
I made it to the second boss, a human something, and managed to beat him with two more deaths. (If a character dies 3 times they're permanently dead which is an interesting mechanic. Interesting in that I should probably immediately re-roll those characters. Only I can't because one was my main character and it's simply game over if he dies twice... I can farm up a lot of gold to buy extra hearts, I guess, though restarting from scratch is probably faster.) He was tough, but having an oni meant I could pull it off.
I did the third castle and it didn't really have a boss. I returned to the town to cash in my quest items from each castle for what I was hoping would be a big reward. My reward turned out to be a boss fight, and I hadn't thought to rest in the inn or even save before starting the fight... I did save in the fight so I could try it a few times. The results of my tries were that he one-shots most of my team (everyone but the oni who dies in 2 or 3 hits) and my whole team combined did about 10% of his health in a round. Yeah, there's no way that math ever adds up to a kill.
I was hoping to get a chance to wander around and fool around a bit before the game decided to get hard but clearly that isn't the case. I did learn some things from yesterday's adventures though. Monsters can make no use of loot and little use of money. I can buy and use healing potions which is nice if I'm not constantly transforming. If I fought a bunch my tier 1 dudes would end up running out of attacks, especially my red bull. This makes me think I should start checking if I want to eat the meat before fighting any fights and run away if I wouldn't. This goes against my typical RPG plan of killing everything in sight but when fighting only hurts me and can't have any benefit... Probably not right to fight.
I also need to build up my guys to the highest tier I can ASAP. My spreadsheet as currently configured is only looking ahead one step each time... What am I, what will I turn into after this fight. Instead I think I need to plot out chains of progressions based off of the enemies I can currently run into in random encounters. On one try I did manage to make a slime which is tier 2 but I got wiped out shortly thereafter by an unexpected boss fight. So clearly there is a way to get to tier 2 with the random encounters that exist, I just need to figure out what that is and then farm for it.
I'm thinking a spreadsheet may be the wrong way to go. Possibly I should just write a java program to do it...
I made it to the first boss, a p-frog, and managed to beat him with only two deaths. Fortunately for me one of the surviving members of my party was able to eat his meat and turn into a tier 2 monster. (An oni, I believe.) The oni is substantially stronger and tougher than the rest of my party. (My red bull hits about as hard but only has 10 uses of his only attack before I have to rest in an inn which is a bit of a problem when you're killing everything you run into to see if it'll drop meat.)
I made it to the second boss, a human something, and managed to beat him with two more deaths. (If a character dies 3 times they're permanently dead which is an interesting mechanic. Interesting in that I should probably immediately re-roll those characters. Only I can't because one was my main character and it's simply game over if he dies twice... I can farm up a lot of gold to buy extra hearts, I guess, though restarting from scratch is probably faster.) He was tough, but having an oni meant I could pull it off.
I did the third castle and it didn't really have a boss. I returned to the town to cash in my quest items from each castle for what I was hoping would be a big reward. My reward turned out to be a boss fight, and I hadn't thought to rest in the inn or even save before starting the fight... I did save in the fight so I could try it a few times. The results of my tries were that he one-shots most of my team (everyone but the oni who dies in 2 or 3 hits) and my whole team combined did about 10% of his health in a round. Yeah, there's no way that math ever adds up to a kill.
I was hoping to get a chance to wander around and fool around a bit before the game decided to get hard but clearly that isn't the case. I did learn some things from yesterday's adventures though. Monsters can make no use of loot and little use of money. I can buy and use healing potions which is nice if I'm not constantly transforming. If I fought a bunch my tier 1 dudes would end up running out of attacks, especially my red bull. This makes me think I should start checking if I want to eat the meat before fighting any fights and run away if I wouldn't. This goes against my typical RPG plan of killing everything in sight but when fighting only hurts me and can't have any benefit... Probably not right to fight.
I also need to build up my guys to the highest tier I can ASAP. My spreadsheet as currently configured is only looking ahead one step each time... What am I, what will I turn into after this fight. Instead I think I need to plot out chains of progressions based off of the enemies I can currently run into in random encounters. On one try I did manage to make a slime which is tier 2 but I got wiped out shortly thereafter by an unexpected boss fight. So clearly there is a way to get to tier 2 with the random encounters that exist, I just need to figure out what that is and then farm for it.
I'm thinking a spreadsheet may be the wrong way to go. Possibly I should just write a java program to do it...
Sunday, September 04, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend: Level Systems!
After reading Sthenno's comment to my previous post about this game I decided to actually do a little research into the level system of the game. Part of me feels like I've lost my gamer nerve to be doing so instead of just plowing in and mapping it all out as I go, but so be it... One interesting thing I discovered is this game was apparently the first game Square put out which sold over a million copies which is pretty cool.
As far as the leveling system goes it turns out there are actually three pretty distinct leveling systems! One for humans, one for mutants, and one for monsters.
Humans level up pretty much solely by spending money on potions for permanent stat boosts. They can also put on up to 8 pieces of gear. Actually doing combats does nothing for them, except maybe earn some cash to use on stat boosts in town. Humans are apparently the easiest to twink out and therefore make for the easiest playthrough.
Mutants level up randomly at the end of every fight. They can gain or lose stats or abilities. The guide I found even went so far as to suggest saving after every single fight since if you randomly lost a critical ability you were in a lot of trouble. This sort of works like FFII in that you're more likely to gain stats by taking actions which use that stat. Mutants can also wear 4 pieces of gear. Mutants are random but tend to trend upwards and have a reasonable time beating the game.
Monsters have one stat that matters: their current race. That determines their stats and their abilities. They can't use gear. They can't power up in any way. One goblin is the same as every other goblin. The way you level up is by killing enemy monsters and eating them. There's a huge transformation table based on a few simple rules and I think I may just make a spreadsheet to track the possible changes. Monsters have a finite cap on power and are therefore the hardest race.
Part of me wants to fire some of my dudes and hire one of each type to experience all the leveling systems. But part of me acknowledges that I'm unlikely to play again, and that I want to do the hard thing, and that I already randomly chose the four monster party anyway. So I'm going to stick it out and see if I can't play through the plot with four monsters and find out how hard it really is. I was a little disappointed at how easy FFII actually was once I'd twinked out, so maybe being unable to actually twink out will be a good thing!
As far as the leveling system goes it turns out there are actually three pretty distinct leveling systems! One for humans, one for mutants, and one for monsters.
Humans level up pretty much solely by spending money on potions for permanent stat boosts. They can also put on up to 8 pieces of gear. Actually doing combats does nothing for them, except maybe earn some cash to use on stat boosts in town. Humans are apparently the easiest to twink out and therefore make for the easiest playthrough.
Mutants level up randomly at the end of every fight. They can gain or lose stats or abilities. The guide I found even went so far as to suggest saving after every single fight since if you randomly lost a critical ability you were in a lot of trouble. This sort of works like FFII in that you're more likely to gain stats by taking actions which use that stat. Mutants can also wear 4 pieces of gear. Mutants are random but tend to trend upwards and have a reasonable time beating the game.
Monsters have one stat that matters: their current race. That determines their stats and their abilities. They can't use gear. They can't power up in any way. One goblin is the same as every other goblin. The way you level up is by killing enemy monsters and eating them. There's a huge transformation table based on a few simple rules and I think I may just make a spreadsheet to track the possible changes. Monsters have a finite cap on power and are therefore the hardest race.
Part of me wants to fire some of my dudes and hire one of each type to experience all the leveling systems. But part of me acknowledges that I'm unlikely to play again, and that I want to do the hard thing, and that I already randomly chose the four monster party anyway. So I'm going to stick it out and see if I can't play through the plot with four monsters and find out how hard it really is. I was a little disappointed at how easy FFII actually was once I'd twinked out, so maybe being unable to actually twink out will be a good thing!
Sunday, August 14, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend: Level System?
I failed to take my laptop power cord with me to WBC so I was unable to play any Final Fantasy at all while I was down there. I did play a little bit before I left and discovered a little bit about the level up system, as it were. After a couple of fights the enemy I killed (a lizard) dropped meat and I was presented with the silliest question ever. Do you want to eat meat of lizard? DO I?!? Kill things, eat them, take their stuff! Most game leave out the eat them part but here was finally a game where I could eat my enemies.
Now, what do you think eating meat of lizard would do for you? I was thinking it would restore health, possibly damage health. Maybe it would even give a stat up. Lizards are agile, right? Eating meat of lizard could totally give extra agility. I can envision a game where different races get different boosts from eating different kinds of meat... Maybe I could even build such a system! I say that because that's unfortunately not the system in Final Fantasy Legend.
It turns out that when my albatross eats meat of lizard he gets polymorphed into a goblin. Permanently. He did get set to full health which was nice, and since goblins have a different base attack than albatrosses do he also got all of his action points restored. They both have the same max health and similar total stats so it was mostly a sidegrade but with the full health and action points and the slightly better stat split (who wants agility, really?) it wasn't a bad deal. Of course now his name makes absolutely no sense but I'll get over it.
I continued along, following the 'plot', and got some meat of goblin. I tried feeding it to one of my goblins and nothing happened. Frowns. Next I got meat of zombie. My redbull was getting a little low on health so I fed it to him. Since nothing was a possibility I imagined it couldn't hurt. Possibly it would make him better, possibly it would sidegrade, probably it would do nothing. Unfortunately that analysis was wrong. He turned into a skeleton. With 67% less maximum health and substantially worse stats. He went from attacking for 17 to attacking for 2.
This seemed terrible but I was near a boss fight so I pressed on. The boss had an aura so that when you hurt him you became poisoned. On the plus side my skeleton attacked for 0 so he never got poisoned. On the minus side he attacked for 0 (as did another of my characters) and therefore I couldn't possibly win.
I hadn't saved (why would I with my best character getting ruined) so when I play again I need to start over. Part of me wants to make a huge chart showing all possible race/meat combinations. (I'm playing on an emulator so I can use save states to make that a little less daunting.) Or I can give it on playing it pure and look for said chart on the internet since I'm sure someone has to have made one by now. I'm leaning towards the internet at this point but don't intend on playing again until after Magic Nationals so I have some time to mull it over in my head.
Now, what do you think eating meat of lizard would do for you? I was thinking it would restore health, possibly damage health. Maybe it would even give a stat up. Lizards are agile, right? Eating meat of lizard could totally give extra agility. I can envision a game where different races get different boosts from eating different kinds of meat... Maybe I could even build such a system! I say that because that's unfortunately not the system in Final Fantasy Legend.
It turns out that when my albatross eats meat of lizard he gets polymorphed into a goblin. Permanently. He did get set to full health which was nice, and since goblins have a different base attack than albatrosses do he also got all of his action points restored. They both have the same max health and similar total stats so it was mostly a sidegrade but with the full health and action points and the slightly better stat split (who wants agility, really?) it wasn't a bad deal. Of course now his name makes absolutely no sense but I'll get over it.
I continued along, following the 'plot', and got some meat of goblin. I tried feeding it to one of my goblins and nothing happened. Frowns. Next I got meat of zombie. My redbull was getting a little low on health so I fed it to him. Since nothing was a possibility I imagined it couldn't hurt. Possibly it would make him better, possibly it would sidegrade, probably it would do nothing. Unfortunately that analysis was wrong. He turned into a skeleton. With 67% less maximum health and substantially worse stats. He went from attacking for 17 to attacking for 2.
This seemed terrible but I was near a boss fight so I pressed on. The boss had an aura so that when you hurt him you became poisoned. On the plus side my skeleton attacked for 0 so he never got poisoned. On the minus side he attacked for 0 (as did another of my characters) and therefore I couldn't possibly win.
I hadn't saved (why would I with my best character getting ruined) so when I play again I need to start over. Part of me wants to make a huge chart showing all possible race/meat combinations. (I'm playing on an emulator so I can use save states to make that a little less daunting.) Or I can give it on playing it pure and look for said chart on the internet since I'm sure someone has to have made one by now. I'm leaning towards the internet at this point but don't intend on playing again until after Magic Nationals so I have some time to mull it over in my head.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
The Final Fantasy Legend
I sadly have not yet found the inclination to finish Final Fantasy II, and I am leaving for WBC very shortly. As such I will be away from my PS2 (and therefore my FFII saved game) for 9 days. Probably I'm going to be spending all of my time playing board games but I decided to download the ROMs for the Game Boy Final Fantasy Legend games and will by giving them a spin. Probably in the car ride if I can figure out how to get power from Pounder's car but we'll see. I'm also taking along Final Fantasy III for my DS and may get started on that too. I'm so close to being done FFII and it feels like cheating to move on before I finish but I promise I'll plow through it when I get back. Honest!
I booted up the ROM and it looks like I'm going on a one man adventure to paradise. The first thing I get to do is pick my race. I've decided since I've never played this game before I'm going to try to raw dog it as much as I can without information so I have no basis for making this decision at all. I can be human (male or female), mutant (male or female), clipper, redbull, wererat, or zombie. I'd like to get some wings, so I'm going with redbull. I only get 4 characters for my name, so I'm Nick instead of Ziggyny in this game.
The first NPC I find tells me I should go to the guild and recruit more members to my party. I have different race options for this guy. The humans and mutants remain but now I can have a lizard, a skeleton, an albatross, or a goblin. There's clearly a right choice here... I'm going to name him Sam. It seems I can get a total of 4 characters and the last 3 have the same race choices. I add on a goblin named Bung and a lizard named Tom. Bung has higher stats but has half the health Tom does. Nick has the most stats and thrice the health, I'm guessing because he was my main guy. Or maybe redbulls are just awesome. Sam seems bad as his only high stat is agility and that never does anything in old games but we'll see.
Next up, ye olde item shoppe. It turns out I start with no money so this little side trip isn't much use, but there is an intriguing item on the list... I always thought money couldn't buy me love but it looks like I was wrong...
Combat seems to function in a Pokemonesque fashion. All of my characters have an ability they can use and a number beside it which counts down when I use it. I'd guess that's how many times I can use the ability before needing to rest. Nick only has a 10 on horn which doesn't bode well for grinding up levels. (I don't know if I need to grind up levels or not but it seems to be the thing to do in Final Fantasy in general so it feels like a safe assumption.)
I booted up the ROM and it looks like I'm going on a one man adventure to paradise. The first thing I get to do is pick my race. I've decided since I've never played this game before I'm going to try to raw dog it as much as I can without information so I have no basis for making this decision at all. I can be human (male or female), mutant (male or female), clipper, redbull, wererat, or zombie. I'd like to get some wings, so I'm going with redbull. I only get 4 characters for my name, so I'm Nick instead of Ziggyny in this game.The first NPC I find tells me I should go to the guild and recruit more members to my party. I have different race options for this guy. The humans and mutants remain but now I can have a lizard, a skeleton, an albatross, or a goblin. There's clearly a right choice here... I'm going to name him Sam. It seems I can get a total of 4 characters and the last 3 have the same race choices. I add on a goblin named Bung and a lizard named Tom. Bung has higher stats but has half the health Tom does. Nick has the most stats and thrice the health, I'm guessing because he was my main guy. Or maybe redbulls are just awesome. Sam seems bad as his only high stat is agility and that never does anything in old games but we'll see.
Next up, ye olde item shoppe. It turns out I start with no money so this little side trip isn't much use, but there is an intriguing item on the list... I always thought money couldn't buy me love but it looks like I was wrong...Combat seems to function in a Pokemonesque fashion. All of my characters have an ability they can use and a number beside it which counts down when I use it. I'd guess that's how many times I can use the ability before needing to rest. Nick only has a 10 on horn which doesn't bode well for grinding up levels. (I don't know if I need to grind up levels or not but it seems to be the thing to do in Final Fantasy in general so it feels like a safe assumption.)
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