Missions

Two of the games I've been trying to play recently have both featured a mechanic where you send off party members on missions. In World of Warcraft the sole purpose of most followers is to go on these missions; in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance it's something you do with characters you can use in your actual fighting party. In both cases it works pretty much the same way. You get given a description of the mission and the rewards for succeeding and have to pick a number of characters to send away. After an amount of time (real life time in WoW, world map movements in FFTA) the characters come back and tell you if they succeeded or not.

In FFTA the odds of succeeding on a mission are based on the level and jobs of the characters you send. You're supposed to use the description to figure out who to send. (Fighter type characters should probably go work in a mine while a mage should go help a librarian.) It's really not an exact science though, and I haven't read up about it but I feel like you need to use the mission system to get the really good items. It may even gate beating the game in some way? In WoW it tells you straight up what your chances of succeeding will be for any given combination of characters. It also tells you explicitly which abilities are going to help increase your odds.

I like the WoW system more than the FFTA system because it actually gives me the information I need to make informed decisions. Maybe that word should be in air quotes though... When you know exactly what you need to maximize your odds you should just do that and move on with your life. It can be a little interesting to make sure you have the right mix of followers with a spread of abilities to always have access to what you need, but once you finish that stage of the process it's just doing the obvious best thing.

In short... The system is pretty cool to explore in the short term but becomes a tedious grind in the long term.

It's even worse in FFTA where I'm pretty sure the grind really is the long term. Chains of missions, no idea what will let you succeed, and limited time when the missions are available. Maybe I would have found it interesting to work out what was best for each mission by playing the game over and over and trying different things. But actually, I bought this game the day it was released and started playing it right away... But I didn't end up playing it enough to beat the game once, let alone play it many times to work out who I want to send on what missions.

I'm not really sure what to do with FFTA. I'm not terribly interested in playing it. I am at least a little interested in moving my marathon along, especially if I can play a game I can stream. Like, say, Final Fantasy XII which I believe is next among the games I actually own. I'll dig into more when I get to that point to see if I can easily acquire things like Kingdom Hearts 2.

But for now, I should really give FFTA more of a chance. But I don't want to worry about the stupid mission system. So I think I'm going to do some reading about missions to see what ones I actually need to worry about and see what I can do about doing just those ones. 

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance

I can remember going out and buying this game at Radio Shack of all places right when it first came out. I don't think I'd even played the original Final Fantasy Tactics at the time, but I had heard myths about how rare and awesome a game it was from Josh. I remember it had a job system with the jobs available based on what race your character was. Job systems are awesome, so this game had to be pretty good... But I don't remember liking it very much. I never beat it, or even came close. I remember being particularly frustrated by the law system where the rules of the game would change each fight, but you'd have to go look them up or get arrested. I like the idea that the rules can change, but I think I would have preferred something where you couldn't do things rather than getting in trouble for doing them? Maybe?

Now, I was thinking I was disappointed with this game the first time around, but I went and took a look at my cartridge today and it turns out I'd played it for around 30 hours last time. 30 hours is actually a pretty long time for a console game let alone for a handheld game, so that's actually a pretty good deal. And I didn't even come close to finishing it!

I was disappointed to find out the 3DS doesn't have a GBA port, so I couldn't actually play this game on my handheld. But then my sister came to the rescue with her original GBA! She was sad that she couldn't find the charger cable for it, but then I flipped it over and pointed out that it actually takes AA batteries. That's how old we're talking here! It also doesn't have a backlit screen, which I remember being a pain back in the day. But I'm sure I can find a place to sit that has a good light behind it... Or at least, I hope I can!

As far as a plan for the game goes, I don't really have one. I'd like to beat the game this time around, which I suspect means I need to keep myself from getting too distracted by side quests. That may well be easier said than done. Time will tell I guess...

I am a little sad with the intro to the game. It starts with a bunch of kids talking about how cool it would be if a video game came to life, and one of the kids says his favourite game is 'Final Fantasy'. And then the main character gets teleported to a world where 'Final Fantasy' came to life. Except it's actually nothing like the original Final Fantasy. It has Bhangas and Moogles and those weren't things in the original game at all. I guess they're just using Final Fantasy as a shorthand for some fantasy RPG game in their universe but that title has real meaning to me and I'm annoyed that they misused it. Bah! Bah I say!

Final Fantasy X-2 Conclusions

A variety of events have conspired to cause my playthrough of Final Fantasy X-2 to come to a bit of a premature conclusion. I no longer have a PS3 (or access to my saved game even if I had one) so my second play capped out at 63% completion. That's not the 100% needed to see the final special cutscene. Which means it's probably time to wrap up that little segment of my marathon and look ahead to the next game, whatever that happens to be...

I was really looking forward to playing FFX-2 when I started this marathon up 3 years ago. (Uh... Jeez, I sure have been taking my time, huh?) But it didn't really pull me in. I think part of it is being jaded with the RTB system. I really liked the updates they did to it the first time I played (I can still remember the first time I used a megaphoenix, had my last character die while the item was in the air, and DIDN'T LOSE because the system let the megaphoenix resolve and bring the character that used it back to life) but I guess they didn't hold up so well. The big thing I think is how terrible anything that isn't an autoattack ended up being because attacking has a higher priority than using an ability or casting a spell. So you could get juggled out of doing your thing by enemies that attacked fast enough. Or if you were the one attacking, you could juggle them out of their things.

Just mashing attack is a thing I used to like doing a lot in RTB games. But somewhere along the way I wanted to do other things. I can remember being similarly jaded with FFIV in this marathon for similar reasons. I think there's a problem when the thing I most want to have happen is to have my characters get berserked so I stop having to input the only relevant command. If all I'm going to do is attack then the game might as well do that for me, right? But then you get into a state like I got into in FFX-2 here where I never actually played the game after I got the catnip. Rikku went first and killed one enemy guaranteed, and by the time someone else got an action and I could input a command she'd kill a second one. So really I could play the game, or I could not play the game, and the same thing would happen. Rikku would kill everything with no input.

The game remains incredibly pretty. I still like the concept of live swapping in what class your characters are on demand in the fights. I like the wide variety of abilities you can access. I really like the costumes and the character combat chat. But going to a RTB system meant most of that stuff was just a terrible waste of time. Sticking with the FFX system or tweaking it a little could have been really, really cool.

I often like minigames and this game is in a very real sense entirely minigames. The actual core plot is nowhere near as detailed or as epic as a normal Final Fantasy game, which I think has to count against it. Minigames are a great diversion from an epic plot, especially when they come with ways to become more powerful. Here it mostly felt like you were doing things just to have something to do. A way to raise that counter up to 100% to get the good ending. Which I didn't get.

I still do want to get that, and it's certainly an idea running around in the back of my mind to just do a run on the PS2 version now that I've looked up what it takes. There's a route to do it in one playthrough. I'm thinking that may be a thing I could do as a start to streaming if the internet here ends up being fast enough.

It feels like I'm pretty down on the game, but I think a bunch of things sort of conspired to make it feel worse than it really is. Taking 3 weeks off to go to WBC this year instead of 1 week put a big gap in my playing that made it hard to get back into things. Then hurting my wrist so I couldn't play at all for a couple weeks (and only sporadically after that) was not the fault of the game. And then needing to return the console/move across the country... None of those things should actually lower my rating here. And while going back to a RTB system makes me sad, it's mostly being compared to other RTB systems, and it wouldn't really be fair to ding this one more than those ones.

The character design is great, but that's leeching from the characters of FFX. Should that count against this one? The one new character (Paine) is actually pretty interesting. The new comedic villain on the other hand is just annoying. I think the real big strike against it has to be the lack of an epic feel. I get that the world is recovering from the actual epic evil from the first game but it does lead to a bit of a let down feeling when it's 'just' a single super weapon that is pretty easily destroyed that's threatening the world this time around.

All told, I think this game fits in around Kingdom Hearts on the rating scale. Awesome graphics and characters, but not really original ones. Fun enough gameplay, but not as good as it probably should have been. And I definitely enjoyed Kingdom Hearts more this time around, so it's going to get the edge here. FFX-2 will get slotted in at slot #9, just ahead of FFIX.

Next up is supposed to be FFXI, but with the World of Warcraft expansion hitting soon there's no way I'm going to be playing a different MMO. Which means I should probably be playing the handheld game Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, which I actually just found in my move. I wonder if I can remember where I packed it...

Final Fantasy X-2: Round One Done!

Today I went and took my new catnip item out for a spin on the hard boss in the desert, Angra Mainyu. Rikku wasted some time berserk attacking the arm that was immune to physical damage but when she went after the actual boss she did silly damage to him. Yuna was able to use the dark knight ability darkness to keep the arms mostly dead which cleared the path for Rikku to obliterate the boss. Paine made herself invincible and stood ready to throw a phoenix down at Rikku if she died. I wouldn't say the fight was trivial but it was definitely easy. Catnip may have been nerfed but it's still pretty darn good.

With that boss down I figured it was a fine time to go finish the game. The end boss was actually a joke thanks to the catnip. It's a series of fights that presumably have hard components to them but since Rikku goes first and attacks for 19998 before the enemy can react... Splitting the fight up into lots of small fights where she gets to strike first over and over again bodes very poorly for the enemies.

I got a completion score of 55%, which is far short of 100%. It turns out I did a pretty terrible job of avoiding the plot which is what you need to do to get 100% in one playthrough. You have to do every side quest possible and often doing some of the plot will advance the state of the world such that you miss something. Assuming my wrist holds up I may try to burn through a second playthrough focusing on sidequests and see where that gets me. I'll still have that catnip so actual encounters won't take too long I wouldn't think.

Final Fantasy X-2: Catnip

I'm still not feeling like I can use a mouse in my right hand but I decided to give using a PS3 controller a shot for a while this afternoon. My right hand doesn't make a lot of moves when playing FFX-2... I'm mostly just mashing the attack button. I was able to play for a reasonable amount of time before needing to take a break. I needed that break because both my hands were going numb instead of my right hand being in pain which is a strange turn of events.

Anyway, it's been a while since I'd played FFX-2 because of Path of Exile and then being hurt. When I last played I was diving down into the dungeon under Bevelle. Today I got down to the 40th floor, killed the boss on that floor in two tries, and earned the most broken item in the game: catnip! This is an accessory that gives you the 'SOS: ??????' effect. The SOS part means it only works when you're low on health. What do the question marks mean? Well, any time you would deal damage or heal someone the amount is set to 9999 instead of whatever it would be. Considering Rikku is often attacking for 500 or so, that's quite a significant boost. Consider that you can use attacks that hit more than once... Each hit will then be for 9999! Gunners can attack something like 15 times in an action (the damage is normally drastically reduced and the attack is mostly used for getting a big chain multiplier running) and each of those attacks will be for 9999. It's absurdly powerful and is the way I remember beating all of the hard fights when I played this game back in the day. I hooked Rikku up and switched her to a gunner and went off to murder things...

It turns out that the HD remake has some changes from the original game and one of the things changed was catnip. Similar to how quick attack in FFX was nerfed in the HD remake I guess Square decided things were unbalanced as initially released and fixed things up. Anyway, the change to catnip is that in addition to making all your hits do 9999 you also get slowed and berserked. The berserk part is a real problem because it negates the ability to use any of the abilities that hit a silly number of times. Being slowed sucks too. I had a ribbon on but it didn't prevent them, which made me sad.

I decided I still wanted to use the item if I could and went looking for ways to use it. Rikku had been leveling thief and they attack twice when they auto-attack. Seemed like I should give that a spin. I also got an accessory that granted auto-haste from the same boss fight. Let's try auto-haste with auto-slow and see what happens! Turns out haste wins, which is amazing. It also turns out Rikku had learned the ability to always go first when she's a thief. And because she's berserked I don't have to mash any buttons to input an attack command. So now she goes first and hits for 19998 damage. And then is hasted so she probably gets to attack a second time before I can input commands to Yuna and Paine.

It remains to be seen if the catnip is still viable for boss fights. Permanently losing control of 1/3rd of my party is a real danger. I guess if I ever heal Rikku out of SOS status she loses the berserk and I can probably make use of that. My other two characters get to wear ribbons now, so I do have that advantage in boss fights. And I have 99 phoenix downs, which bring Rikku back to life at low health... She may be able to get in there for 19998 damage before the boss gets a chance to kill her again?

Even if it isn't good for boss fights it's awesome for random encounters. I don't even need to hit buttons anymore. Now, when I'm happy that I get to ignore a major part of the game it does send up some warning flags... But it is what it is. It's not like I get to make meaningful decisions in most random encounters anyway.

I'm not sure if I want to finish off the rest of this dungeon now or if I want to finish the game and then restart with my items and pick up all the stuff I missed on new game+. Hopefully I can spend more time playing without losing feeling in my hands soon!

Final Fantasy X-2: Angra Mainyu

I've made my way to near the end of the game in my first playthrough of the HD remake of Final Fantasy X-2 for my marathon. I could go underground and try to beat the game, or I could do some of the sidequests that popped up at the start of this chapter. FFX-2 could be called Final Fantasy: Side Quests so I clearly had to go do some side quests. The first one I went to was in the desert where I was sent to explore the world to rescue the 10 cactuar gatekeeper dudes. This was very similar to a sidequest in FFX, actually. It took me a few hours but I finally found them all. Doing so rewarded me with a challenge boss fight. I was not prepared...

I ended up fighting the boss for probably close to two hours. He reminded me a lot of the final challenge boss in FFX in that he has two adds and he spams full life on them to bring them back up shortly after killing them off. Every now and then if both adds were alive he'd bust out a brutally powerful attack. Not as powerful as what Penance was doing, but it was still pretty painful. One of the adds would also cast a mass confuse spell. I mostly kept that one dead but every now and then it would get that attack off and problems would arise. Paine is wearing a ribbon so it wasn't guaranteed game over if it resolved but it took a lot of resources to recover. Eventually I ran out of megaphoenixes and megalixirs and died. The boss was also sometimes healing itself and I wasn't actually sure if I was making any progress at all or not. I decided to take a look at the stats for the boss online to see if it was worth trying again or if I needed to level up some more...

It turns out the boss has 333444 health and I was doing maybe 2000 damage per cycle. So even if it wasn't healing it would still take me more than 160 cycles to kill it off. Considering I come close to dying every 5 or 6 cycles... Probably not going to happen with my current setup!

There are things I could do to make things easier though. I probably have access to some accessories to negate confuse on my other two characters. That would make it so I didn't need to burn out the mass confuse add. I'd still need to deal with the brutal AE damage from the boss but theoretically I could just spend all my attacks on the boss instead of on adds at all.

It also turns out the boss has an AI pattern that can be abused. If it runs low on mana it spends all of its turns trying to steal your mana instead of casting the brutal attack. So one option would be to take abilities to burn down the mana pool and then win. The wiki suggested using a bunch of jobs I don't have but I have at least a couple abilities to attack mana so I could give it a try and see at the very least. This would have to be combined with getting immunity to confuse.

One thing I am wondering is how much it matters... Do I need to kill this boss at all? Is this part of getting 100%? I said I wasn't going to look into that stuff until my second playthrough but if this guy needs to die I really want to do it this time around. Doing the long cactuar sidequest again is not something I really want to do.

Survey says... Yes. I do need to beat this boss. Duly noted.

Final Fantasy X-2: Female Protagonists

All of the Final Fantasy games that had a solid cast of characters (from the SNES age onward) have had exactly three female playable characters. The number of male characters varied between games but they strangely all had three female characters. Final Fantasy X-2 only has three playable characters so, of course, they are all female.

The character advancement system in the game is a job based system. Each of the characters earns points towards whatever job they're in when they take an action and those points get spent to unlock new abilities in that job. Unlike most of the other job system games you can't use abilities from one job while you're in a different job. (FFV and Tactics in particular had some pretty neat combos you could build up by combining a support ability from one job with another job.) The twist in FFX-2 is you can change between jobs in the middle of a fight. So you don't need your fighter to be able to cast white magic spells... If you need a white magic spell right now you can just turn into a white mage!

The different jobs are contained within spheres and the way you assign these spheres to the different characters is by adding them to a 'garment grid'. I can remember hearing about people being a little thrown off by this when the game first came out. Your job is tied to the clothes you wear? And you swap clothes in the middle of combat using a Sailor Moonesque transition scene? Some people just didn't like that. I didn't mind it at all, but I guess I've always played the female characters in games anyway and have a really easy time just seeing things as numbers and stats. I might find it interesting if the gambler job outfit looks the best on Rikku, but if my plan calls for Yuna to be the gambler and Rikku to be the white mage then that's just what's going to happen!

Many (most?) of the outfits are on the revealing side. In my playthrough this time I'm actually a little thrown off by the poses Rikku has taken in the black mage outfit. She sure likes to stick her butt out in ways that just don't look right. But on the plus side she's also throwing out Schwarzeneggeresque puns with each spell! (What's wrong, cold feet?  You're... fired!)

Some time ago I posted about trying out an MMORPG where every character was female and you could buy an item in the cash shop to remove your underwear. It felt weird, and it was pointed to me that agency would be a big part of it. Why are these women taking off their clothes? It turns out in the game you played as a male controller who issued commands to female robots so it was very much a case of them just doing what they were told by men and it really was as creepy as it felt. I think FFX-2 is very different from Scarlet Blade in this regard. The game is set on a series of tropical islands and skimpy clothes make a lot of sense for anyone to be wearing. (I went through the art book that came with the collector's edition and one of the things they talked about was how in FFX they made Yuna's outfit be a traditional reserved priestess style outfit while also having slits cut in the right spots for air flow because of the tropical climate.) Also, Yuna, Rikku and Paine are very much doing the things they do for their own reasons. Part of it is treasure hunting for the sake of treasure hunting. Part of it is trying to find clues in the search for Tidus. Part of it is doing what the leader of the Gullwings wants them to do (Brother, who I believe is Rikku's brother, but he's incompetent and seems to delegates all decisions to Yuna so far anyway.) But they are very much in control of their own actions. I guess the garment grid system isn't described in too much detail so it's possible the clothes they end up wearing were chosen by someone else? But since they're using the same spheres and grids but getting different outfits it probably has something to do with their own thoughts?

The bottom line is it feels like this is a game with all female main characters where they're actually the ones making decisions and being awesome. Hurray! I don't feel like I should feel bad for playing this game, that's for sure.

Final Fantasy X-2: Plan!

I played Final Fantasy X-2 once, shortly after it came out back in 2003. (Or at least, shortly after I got it in 2003!) I played it a whole lot at the time, and I remember some things about the game but not all that much. I know it has a job system so right away it's awesome. It lets you tag in jobs on the fly sort of like how you tag in different characters in FFX. It went back to the ATB system but it was a little weird in that I remember being able to use a megaphoenix and then having my party get killed off but the megaphoenix would still resolve and bring everyone back to life. The game has a ton of sidequests and one short plot but you can play through the game multiple times while keeping a lot (all?) of your stuff between plays.

I also remember it has a completion percentage tracker and that something cool supposedly happens in the ending if you get up to 100%. I'm pretty sure I only got into the high 90s because I was trying to do it all without looking at the internet and I'm sure I was just missing something obscure. I eventually got bored or distracted or something and never did get around to finishing it off.

So what should my plan be this time? I definitely think my ultimate goal is to hit that 100% mark, but I don't think I need to ignore the internet to get there this time. I do want to see what I can do on my own though... So I think I'll probably end up playing through several times. The first time will be 'blind' and then after that I'll see how I feel about using the internet to find stuff I've missed.

I am also curious about what may have been added in the HD version. I started up a game yesterday and right away I got into a tutorial about a monster catching system that seemed completely new to me. I don't remember being able to use anyone other than Yuna, Rikku, or Paine in my party when I played last decade but I've already recruited Brother into my party as an uncontrollable monster. So either my memory is bad or I completely ignored this aspect or they added it in for the HD version. I'm expecting it's the latter, but I'm going to playthrough the game once before I go check.

Final Fantasy X: Eternal Calm

The HD remake of Final Fantasy X and X-2 came on one disk with a game select menu that pops up when you launch the disk. This menu had 4 options on it instead of the 2 I expected, so when I first started playing I had to check out what was going on. It turned out the other 2 were extra cutscene videos and I declined to read much after that. I knew I wasn't going to want to pick Eternal Calm until I'd finished off FFX and that was good enough for me at the time. But now I have finished FFX and it's time to watch the extra video that comes between FFX and FFX-2.

I did some more reading and I thought this video was made to help explain the story between FFX and FFX-2 but it sounds like it was actually just bonus content they made to include in the FFX International edition. And it was the enthusiastic response to the video that caused them to make FFX-2, not the other way around. I find that to be pretty interesting.

Anyway, the video takes place 2 years after the end of FFX and is trying to show what life is like for the characters in your party now that they're no longer on a grand adventure to save the world. This is something I've always wondered about for games like this... At the end of FFX Rikku and Yuna were, for all intents and purposes, gods. With the way the numbers shake out I wouldn't be surprised if Rikku could kill everyone in the world without fear for her own safety. Especially if you let her cast spells! (I mused about the ending of FFII, actually, and how the 4th character in that game tried to conquer the world in the middle and then at the end he just wanders off to do his own thing and no one seems to care. By that point he really was strong enough to conquer the world!)

What would super powerful people do in a world where they don't need to fight evil? Well, in FFX, it would seem that Kimahri becomes a father figure and teacher for his race. Most of the adult Ronso were killed off by Seymour because he's a big jerk. That makes sense. Kimahri is a nice guy and trying to get what's left of his people back on their feet seems like a great thing to do. Wakka and Lulu settle down and make babies. I can see how that would happen too. Rikku goes off adventuring trying to find long lost machina and teach people to use them. This is basically the same thing she was doing at the start of FFX and I'd imagine all those levels I ground up for her can only help with that plan. Auron isn't even mentioned, presumably he stayed dead this time. Tidus is alluded to, but also isn't really mentioned. That leaves Yuna who is the focus of the video. While the rest of the party was there to help out it really was Yuna that saved the world and the people treat her as such. Everyone wants her to join their teams and solve their problems and listen to them whine. Yuna seems to be bored out of her mind and spends all her time trying to drown herself. (Ok, not really, but she's trying to increase how long she can hold her breath underwater. Turns out Blitzball players are just really good at holding their breath.)

Rikku shows up in the video with a sphere that has someone who sounds a lot like Tidus trapped in a jail cell. This makes Yuna want to go on an adventure to find out what's going on in the sphere. Wakka thinks that's crazy and wants her to keep at her boring life. So as soon as Wakka wanders off (to talk to Lulu) Yuna says screw it and leaves with Rikku to go on an adventure. Before they go Rikku muses about how Yuna's too much of a celebrity and they're going to need a disguise for her...

Which is apparently why Final Fantasy X-2 exists at all, and has the garment grid. Because people wanted to know more about this adventure Yuna was going on with Rikku and because Yuna was going to need a disguise.

Final Fantasy X: Conclusions

On the weekend I went in and took out Jecht and Yu Yevon inside Sin. I don't know if those fights are ever hard; my party didn't get attacked in any of the stages. It was actually pretty tedious having to summon in all of my aeons one after the other, watch the animations, and then have them die in one attack from Rikku. Over and over, 8 times. All told my saved game ended up with something like 94 hours played on it. In some senses this is less than my previous plays which is weird since I actually filled the sphere grid and killed extra challenge bosses this time. But it doesn't track time spent in deaths and I sure died a lot in long fights or by getting surprised by unknown challenge bosses. I do think I played a lot less blitzball than it previous games, and I didn't get Lulu's ultimate weapon which takes forever. But this playthrough was definitely well over 100 hours of actual time spent playing, which is really good for a single player console game!

Kimahri was in my party for most of the game, right up until I started really grinding out stats. Then the fact I focused him on magic first made him terrible. His ultimate weapon, which I got, doesn't have 1 mp cost on it and spells cost a lot of mana. I would definitely make Kimahri into a beater next time (or maybe a thief) and probably ignore magic entirely. It just scales so terribly!

Eventually you are going to get max stats on everyone, so the real differences between characters are their ultimate weapons and their overdrives. Yuna is the only one who can summon, which is a thing, and Tidus/Rikku/Wakka are required to use in some fights, including one of the harder arena fights. Tidus and Wakka have the multi-hit physical overdrives so they're the best. So for end game stuff I feel like you should be using 3 of Tidus/Rikku/Wakka/Yuna. Rikku's overdrive does some awesome things but it costs consumables and I hate using those even when it makes sense to do so. Lulu is terrible because her ultimate weapon is stupidly hard to get. Kimahri has bad mods on his weapon, but the counterattack stuff is actually useful on Penance so he's not a terrible option. Auron has the only ultimate weapon with first strike and he has a powerful overdrive (inflicts armour break with 100% chance on anything that isn't immune) so you can't really go wrong with him either. He definitely helps to grind stats.

I didn't like a lot of what changed in the international edition. I hate the way they implemented the dark aeons. They were often put into positions that blocked useful items and there was rarely any indication they existed. Dark Yojimbo was fine because you could run away once he spawned if you didn't want to fight him, but most of the others were game overs with no warning. I lost a lot of capture progress by bumbling into some of the dark aeons and that frustrated me. I did like that they added in really hard fights that took some planning to beat. I like ribbons.

I still like the story in this game. I guess I don't really understand why Yu Yevon wants Spira to be such a disastrous world. I guess he has everyone living in fear and worshipping him as a god so that's something. Praise Be To Yevon!

The combat system is really where this game shines. It is the best. The hot tag to bring in the right character at the right time is a really good twist. No real time element is awesome. You get to see the turn order, you get to make a plan, you get time to think.

The music is also very good. I don't think it's the best sound track of the series but it's very good. I was actually sad how fast I killed Jecht because his battle music is incredible. So much so that I'm going to link it here so you can take a listen.


I'm a little sad that the ending really seems to be the same as the last two games. The main character and the female love interest get separated right after the final boss fight... Will they ever see each other again? Then you get a normal ending cutscene where you see the cities and the other characters and stuff. Then it looks over... But wait! There's the main character after all! Hurray! You beat the game so you get handed the princess! It isn't quite the same here since Tidus doesn't reunite with Yuna. But he was supposed to disappear entirely and they do show him being alive at the very end.

The graphics in the original game were a big step up as the first game in the series on the PS2. The remade HD version, on the PS3, also has graphics that are a big step up. This game is gorgeous.

As far as mini-games go there are a ton of them in FFX. Some of them are really annoying, like chocobo racing and lightning dodging. Some of them are awesome, like catching monsters to build challenge bosses and blitzball. I still think the card game in FFVIII is the best mini-game they've ever done but FFX might well have the second and third best ones. There's a reason I keep playing this game and always end up with over 100 hours played, and it's the mini-games. And the combat system, which plays a big role in the monster catching mini-game.

I am sad that I didn't get all of the PS3 achievements for the game. I didn't dodge 200 lightning strikes. I didn't get 5 treasures in the chocobo race. I didn't play enough blitzball to get all of Wakka's overdrives. I didn't find all of the Al Bhed primers (some can be skipped if you don't find them in Home before it gets destroyed). I didn't fill the sphere grid on all 7 characters. And I haven't watched the video that bridges the plot between FFX and FFX-2. I will do that last one, but the rest get left behind for now. Maybe Byung will want to finish up the other tropheys? It is his PS3, after all!

Where should this game go on my list? Well, I know for sure it's going above everything except maybe Final Fantasy VIII. VIII has the better story, the better characters, the better music, and the better mini-game. X has the better combat system, the better leveling system, the better graphics, and has more gameplay depth with the two awesome mini-games. And it's not like each game is really bad at anything the other is best at... (Except maybe the draw system in FFVIII.) So I guess really it's going to come down to if I want to give the edge to the combat system or to the story. It turns out I just identify so much with Squall that I have to go with VIII as the top game. So Final Fantasy X gets to slot in at #2. I can't imagine it gets knocked out of that spot ever, but who knows!

Next up... Final Fantasy X-2! It's a little out of order, but I want to play it on the PS3 and keeping it extra time without using it just to play a GBA game seems pretty stupid.

Final Fantasy X: Penance!

It turns out that Dark Yojimbo hides one of his 5 fights down a dead-end. I checked that dead-end this time through the sealed fayth cave and was able to unlock Penance. I saved and went to give him a shot to see what I was up against. I got obliterated! Penance fired off an attack that hit me for ~80% of my health on all 3 characters and slowed Rikku. He also has 2 arms that do their own attacks, one of which attacked everyone for ~70% of their max health. I hadn't had a chance to heal up yet, so I was dead.

Ok, try again, this time without wasting time hasting Rikku. I used some defensive stuff and decided to try to burn down an arm by using a bunch of overdrives. It worked! Woo! But the other arm and Penance himself burned down the Magus Sisters that I'd busted out to overdrive. And then the arm I killed came back. I threw everything I had at it, and it came right back!

Clearly I was not strong enough to win this fight. Rikku getting slowed is too big of an issue. With the arm respawning so quickly after death this fight is going to be a DPS race and not having 3 hasted characters is game losing. So I'm going to need to build her a different suit of armour that has auto-haste on it. Oh, and none of my people could even hit any of the arms. So now that I've killed almost all of the challenge bosses that require high luck I should probably grind up a bunch of luck. Because I don't think I have time to bust out 15 uses of stat buffs in order to start killing arms.

Killing all those dark aeons actually got me a lot of master spheres which can be use to activate luck nodes. So I mostly just needed to grind up luck spheres, not luck spheres and fortune spheres. I was so close to a full sphere grid achievements so I just went and finished that off. Mostly with luck, but also with some more health. I bribed up the materials to add auto-haste to a suit of armour for Rikku (I ended up going with break hp limit, auto-haste, and auto-phoenix which was not optimal). I also looked up a list of Rikku mixes so I could actually use her limit break effectively. (One of the mixes actually gives 5 uses of aim and cheer! So for the time it would take to put up 3 buffs I could do 10.) Another mix restored everyone to max health which unfortunately isn't the case for a normal elixir. Elixirs only restore 9999 health which isn't nearly close to max when I have 620000 max health!

I also finally used some of the consumable buff items. In particular I used one that doubles my max health and one that made all my spells and abilities cost 0 mana. The second one was particularly relevant because Penance has a second form that drains all of your mana with every attack.

I did a little bit of reading on the fight and the wiki said every 19 times Penance attacks or that you attack Penance he'll cast an attack that is guaranteed to kill your party. But it doesn't dispel auto-life, so I can just put that up and hope to recover with some Rikku mixes. I did the fight a couple times learning the patterns of things and found it wasn't so bad. With 5 stacks of aim on and the luck I grinded I could reliably hit the arms all the time with Tidus and Yuna and most of the time with Rikku. It only took 6 quick hits to kill each arm and if I killed the arms right away I would have enough time for 3 actions before they respawned. Mostly that could be attacking Penance, sometimes it would have to be healing up from his attack. I have plenty of megalixirs to burn so healing up from his phase 1 attack wasn't so bad.

Note that Penance has 12 million health and I attack for 100k per attack. So if I average 2 hits per cycle I need to pull off 60 cycles to kill him. That's a long time, but it's at least plausible.

Then I hit phase 2 which had him change what attack he uses. Now instead of hitting my team for 7k each he'd hit one person for 10k and inflict a bunch of breaks on them. These breaks meant that the next time he hit the person they'd be killed. Dying is bad because I need those aim and cheer stacks and even if I had infinite overdrive power I wouldn't do any damage if I had to mix those buffs up every 2 rounds. You can remove the breaks by casting dispel on your own character, which is good. But that also takes out protect, which is bad. Without protect his attack hits for 20k and suddenly I'm stuck taking 3 actions per cycle to counter his attack. I only have 3 free actions per cycle and can no longer make progress.

Ok... I can actually generate more time per cycle if I delay killing off the arms. Final Fantasy X gives you the exact turn order for each actor in a fight. I can save the 6th hit on an arm for immediately before it would get to attack! Since it seemed to take the same amount of time to respawn the longer I can keep it alive (without letting it attack since its actions were brutal) the longer it will take to respawn. This let me stretch things out such that I'd get more like 7 free actions per cycle that weren't dedicated to killing arms. It did mean the boss would get more actions per cycle too, but it was a net gain for me. Especially since if I could set up a situation where all of my party was injured I could condense some of my healing actions together by using megalixir or Rikku's full party heal mix. I don't know if there's a window to recover from that super attack thing, but on my attempt after the one where I figured out to build longer cycles I decided to count out every single attack so I could time it out...

As an aside, this fight really reminded me of raiding in World of Warcraft. A fight that initially seemed insane but once you got the gear to overcome the DPS check and a timer to time out the powerful abilities you could work out a strategy and then try to implement it perfectly. I do miss that.

Anyway, fight away... I wasn't sure what was going to count as an attack or not so I counted things out separately. I hit Penance 32 times before he changed form, and then I hit him 47 times before he used his super move. In that time he'd used his immolation ability 23 times, I'd counter attacked him 7 times, and I'd used one purifying salt on him to dispel his haste. That seems like a lot more than the 19 I was promised! But considering I'd done more than 8 million damage it would probably be ok, assuming I could recover from all my characters being dead. It was truly terrible timing for me too, since his second arm had just respawned. Dying and coming back to life with auto-life seems to add a delay to your characters too, so his arms got to do their things right after my party died. On the plus side they used single target attacks on Yuna but she got right back up thanks to the auto-phoenix ability on my armour. It was tense to work out how to recover (I had to pop 2 megalixirs and let everything live another round in order to have the health to survive a combo arm AE attack + immolate, but the other arm wouldn't go until I got to go again and finish it off), but I did it! One of the great things about the FFX combat system is you can actually take the time to think through a plan given the turn order. I managed to stabilize and get back to hurting the boss.

And then it all came crashing down. I hit him 13 times, he hit me 12 times, I countered him 5 times. He was now under 2M health left. But he used his kill everyone ability, again with terrible timing right after the second arm had respawned, and this time I couldn't recover. Because the arm didn't autoattack Yuna, it autoattacked Rikku, and apparently it has a petrify component to it. Tidus and Yuna have ribbons on so they can't get stoned but Rikku could. And in this game if an attack both stones and kills you then you're permanently removed from the fight. In a DPS race situation, losing one member permanently is the end of it. I decided to try to burn the boss down because there was no other chance but it turns out Anima's overdrive does less damage than an autoattack. I'm sure I got him under a million and it's possible if I'd stopped attacking arms entirely that the extra 700k damage I wasted on them at the end was the difference.

Blerg. The fight lasted an hour and thirteen minutes! And I didn't win!

Ok, do I need to farm Rikku a ribbon? And what's the deal with that ultimate ability anyway? I tried summoning out an aeon to block it when I hit a 19 count near the end of the fight but he didn't use it and it just wasted time to bring it out. If I could get an actual counter on when it would happen then I could survive it easily. But even with a ribbon on Rikku it's no guarantee that I'd be able to recover from a single use of the ability. I had to get lucky to not have an arm use an area attack and kill me off instantly as it was!

So I turned to the internet to see if I could find a timer or something. And found someone who posted that he only uses the super powerful attack if the counter is at least 19 AND both his arms are alive. So it wasn't bad timing that caused him to use it twice when both arms were alive... It was a game mechanic. If I could have just kept going without him getting a turn with 2 arms alive I would have won. And since it turns out the amount of time it takes for an arm to get an action is exactly the same as the amount of time it takes for a dead arm to respawn I could manipulate the setup such that every time I killed one arm the other would respawn. I could make it so, if I didn't make a mistake, the entire fight would eventually take place with exactly one arm alive.

I went to sleep, got up, and got to work. I changed how my overdrive was charging just in case I needed to use extra mixes (I was on 'charge when you take damage' and switched to 'charge when you deal damage') and set to work. I screwed up counting a little at the start because I was still a little sleepy but once I got into the groove of things it was 'easy'. Just play perfectly for a little over an hour! No problem!

So that pretty much puts a cap on that. Time to beat the game I guess.

Final Fantasy X: Home Stretch

Byung reminded me yesterday that I'm not actually playing FFX on my own console. It's a loaner, so maybe I should pick up the pace a little bit. That was all the prompting I needed to put my nose to the grindstone and finish off catching all the monsters. This unlocked Nemesis who was the hardest fight in the original game. I killed him on my first try. I killed Omega Weapon, the second hardest fight in the original game, without him getting a turn. So, yeah, I'm pretty powerful.

I assumed that power level was going to be enough to kill off the rest of the dark aeons. I was wrong. I started by trying Dark Bahamut because I really want to get Tidus' ultimate weapon. But then Dark Bahamut shattered Yuna and I was no longer able to win. So I needed to build a better suit of armour for her. Ok, fine... Long grind, here I come. I decided to at least try the rest of the dark aeons to figure out what else I'd need to put on the armour. The first one I fought was Dark Ixion, who was trivial, and he actually dropped a ring for Yuna that already had ribbon, break hp limit, and two more slots for customization. Thanks Dark Ixion! You may well have saved me 20 hours of grinding!

The reason it's so important to have armour for Yuna is that most of the dark aeons have limit breaks that are guaranteed wipes. They do max damage and dispel auto-life so there's actually no way to avoid dying to them except to summon an aeon of your own to take the blow for you. It's a pretty silly mechanic, but it is what it is. Theoretically I could use 3 other characters and just tag Yuna in right before they overdrive but in that strategy she still needs to be hasted and have max agility... If I'm doing that then she might as well be one of the people actually fighting, too.

With my new armour in hand (I added on auto-haste and deathproof) I went around and killed off the rest of the dark aeons. Some of them were pretty annoying but ultimately having auto-life/auto-phoenix on my party and summoning in an aeon to take the kill shot was good enough to win. I got punished for not maxing my luck stat and as a result had to spam aim and luck in some of the fights in order to actually hit the enemy. You need to use each one 5 times and dying resets your buff count so some of the fights went rather long. I was never really in danger of running out of aeons so I guess they didn't go long enough for the enemies!

Supposedly there's one more challenge boss that I can access now that I killed all the dark aeons but I didn't see it. I think I only killed Dark Yojimbo 4 times and you're supposed to need to kill him 5 times. I'm not sure where the 5th fight would be, but my next step is to go back there and see if I can figure that out. Then I just need to see if I can kill Penance and then maybe I'll be able to take out Sin. Do you think I'll be strong enough to bring him down?

Final Fantasy X: Dark Shiva Down!

I've had a lack of motivation to play Final Fantasy X lately. I was at the point where Tidus had 99 levels to spend but I didn't think I had any other useful spheres to farm up for him. He had max strength, agility, magic, defense, and magic defense. Because I couldn't get his ultimate weapon thanks to Dark Bahamut I had to spend a bunch of hard to get crafting materials on his weapon. This meant I didn't have them available to make a good piece of armour so I was mostly grinding easy to kill arena bosses for cash and a chance at dark matter drops. But when he stopped earning experience because the game only lets you store 99 levels up I got a little depressed and moved on to other things I guess.

Today I finally turned the game back on. It had been over a month since I'd last played which is sad. Final Fantasy X is such a good game, why would I leave it for so long? Anyway, instead of farming arena bosses when I turned the game back on I decided to go catch some more monsters in order to unlock the boss that drops hp spheres. Eventually I'd break the limit on his max health and having useful spheres to plug into the grid would be useful. I did so, and it turned out that boss counterattacked with a big damage attack (even into my max defense) and I realized I'd ignored evasion. Farming up some evasion spheres would give me something to fill in the grid with too, so I went to get those. Turns out evasion sphere guy is hard to hit and I'd also ignored accuracy. So I killed accuracy guy a bunch and then evasion guy a bunch and filled in a good chunk of the grid with those two types of nodes. Along the way I finally hit 99 dark matters (every arena boss has a 1 in 8 chance of dropping 2 of them) and was able to put ribbon on a piece of armour. That was the motivation I needed to finally sell off all the weapons I'd found and bribe a few marlboros to break my max hp limit and finish off my good armour. Ribbon/break hp limit/auto-haste/auto-phoenix. Woo!

I plowed through all the arena bosses I had unlocked and that ended up filling Tidus back up to max level again. My other characters managed to spend their banked levels down because they either gain tons of experience or do tons of damage. Tidus does both at the same time, so on 'real' fights he still gains levels while everyone else doesn't. All I have left in the arena is the guy who unlocks for catching 10 of everything I think, so I headed off to do that. One of the monsters could only be caught right outside where Dark Shiva hangs out so I decided to pay her a visit. Tidus now has max strength, agility, magic, defense, magic defense, accuracy, evasion, over 20k max health, and ribbon. So I should be good to go, right?

Wrong! Dark Shiva blew me up over and over again. Each time I'd learn something new about the fight. Eventually I made an actual plan to win and took her out. I tried lots of ways to mitigate her limit break (which hit my whole team for 80k) and eventually decided that couldn't be done and just summoned an aeon of my own for her to kill when her limit break bar filled up.

After she died I took a look at the things she can drop... For me she dropped armour for Tidus that breaks the hp limit. A little late for that, Shiva! It also only had 3 ability slots instead of 4 so it's bad. But it looks like she can drop 4 slot items with ribbon and break hp limit for all characters, or a weapon with break damage limit. Either of those things could be really useful for building up other characters. I can't fight her again unless I reload the old save... Is that worth doing?

Considering how long it took to build the items for Tidus I absolutely believe it is worth scumming Dark Shiva for drops. If I want to play with other characters. At this point I've decided the reason I got burned out was my assertion to get all of the achievements. A couple of them look to be really, really hard (possibly not even possible for me with my tv) so my motivation fell off the charts. I think I'm just going to throw that aside. Beat the challenge bosses, maybe max out just Tidus' grid so I can finally say I've done that, and beat the game. Now that I've killed one dark aeon I'm probably strong enough that with good play I can beat the rest, right? Right?

Final Fantasy X: Damage Scaling

Last week I talked a bit about agility in Final Fantasy X and how if I spent 18 levels worth of stats on Rikku that I could get her to take 33% more actions in the same span of time. I mused a bit about how I could probably take 18 levels worth of strength and probably do more than 33% more damage for the level investment. So I went to look up the damage formulas to see how true that was going to be. Just as a gut feeling Rikku seemed terrible for the longest time (except at killing robots and getting me the stealing achievement) even though she got to take the most actions. Even black mage Kimahri was significantly outdamaging her!

Anyway, it turns out that there's a bunch of complicated calculations in how much damage is done on a given physical attack but strength only factors in one spot so it's pretty easy to compare the damage done with X strength and the damage done with X+Y strength as a relative matter. The damage formula cubes your strength. CUBES! In the original Final Fantasy your strength was a linear factor in terms of damage done. Cubing is... Insane? It explains why Wakka seemed to be so much worse than Tidus and Auron despite only having a little bit less strength than they had. If Wakka has 20 strength and Tidus has 25 strength then Tidus will do twice as much damage. Not 25% more. Not less than that, which would be expected if weapons had any game effect.

So what happens if we give Rikku 72 bonus strength? Well, it depends on her current strength but it's always going to be _way_ more than 33% more damage. If she started at 10 strength then she'd do 552 times as much damage. If she started at 50 strength then she'd do 15 times as much damage. Even if she started at 183 (the highest she could have and still get benefit from 72 bonus strength) she'd just do 2.7 times as much damage.

This formula is completely ridiculous, and it goes to explain why my damage always seems to get out of control in a real hurry. You go through most of the game doing reasonable damage, but then around the time you unlock the ultimate weapons you find yourself starting to run into the 9999 barrier. Break that limit with a weapon and it isn't much longer before you're doing 99999 damage. It feels like a big difference and like there should be a more gradual growth between the two but there really isn't.

Magic damage works similarly, except your magic stat is only squared, not cubed. It's divided by a smaller number too so it works out pretty comparable at lower levels, but the insane scaling at higher stat values isn't quite as insane. Still pretty insane, but not as off the charts. Magic is also gated by having the magic sphere boss be significantly harder than the strength sphere boss. (Mostly because he's immune to physical damage entirely which shuts off being able to use the magic break skill while the strength guy can be hit with the armour break skill.)

I've reached the point where I've gone off the rails in terms of power. I farmed the strength sphere boss until I was able to hit 255 strength with Tidus and Rikku. I'm struggling with coming up with a way to max my magic without it taking forever and I think I've settled on just power leveling Yuna and letting her get all the magic on the real grid first. Kimahri does way more damage because he's already done most of that but he doesn't have 1MP cost on his ultimate weapon so he's actually a terrible caster. His spells cost 90 times as much mana so he runs in 4 or 5 rounds while Yuna can double cast ultimas all day long. So what I'm doing right now is farming a fast boss for money and dark matter. One-Eye dies in two attacks, so I can have Yuna wait and still kill the boss before he takes an action. This lets her score up a silly amount of experience since I built her a triple AP, triple overdrive, overdrive->AP weapon. (One-Eye drops 2 or 3 socket weapons with triple AP so it's easy to build an experience gaining weapon as long as you don't need it to break the damage limit.)

Final Fantasy X: Crafting Weapons

Final Fantasy X actually has an equipment crafting system where you can spend items (mostly stolen or bribed by Rikku) to add abilities onto your gear. Each character can equip one weapon and one piece of armour and each of those can have up to 4 abilities on them. The abilities range from the mundane (do 3% more damage) to the absolutely incredible (break the damage cap so you can deal 99999 damage per hit instead of 9999). Of course the incredible stuff is really hard to come by, but with enough farming you can totally get it done.

Normally I'll craft some armour because there is no other way to get really good armour, but I don't think I've ever tried to craft a really good weapon. The reason for this is each character has an ultimate weapon that can be earned in the world by obtaining three items and combining them at a quest globe thing. These ultimate weapons come with 4 really good abilities on them and also let you ignore enemy armour. So while they may not be perfect, they're really strong and you don't need to worry about making enough money to bribe up a ton of crafting materials. The pieces for the ultimate weapons also tend to involve doing some side quests or mini games and we all know how much I love to do those, so I'm probably going to end up with the weapons anyway. Especially since there's an achievement for getting them all!

Anyway, yesterday I complained about the really powerful dark aeons that were added in this version of the game which keep showing up in random spots and ruining me. I looked up where they all were so I could avoid them going forward, which is fine. What isn't fine is that I didn't pick up a piece for Tidus' ultimate weapon when I first had the chance to pick it up. (You need to backtrack right after killing Yunalesca.) That shouldn't be a problem since I can just go back in and pick it up now. Except Dark Bahamut lives there. So I can't go get the piece to make Tidus' ultimate weapon until I'm strong enough to beat one of the hardest fights in the game. My whole plan this playthrough was to kill the hard stuff with Tidus! I'd sent him down the tree to get quick hit and he's the only character I have right now who could hit for more than 9999 damage if he had his ultimate weapon.

I've even done the hard part of getting his weapon! I got super lucky and beat the chocobo racing minigame! Now I just need to go pick something up off the ground. But I can't.

I was lamenting this fact on Facebook. What can I do now? I could power someone else up, someone who I could get their ultimate weapon. I already have Yuna's ultimate weapon, and I have all the pieces for Kimahri's. Realistically I think I could get them all right now except for Lulu's. (Dodging 200 lightning bolts... *shudder*) So I could do that. Also apparently Yojimbo's top attack will one shot the dark aeons. That seems cheesy and stupid, but if doing so lets me play the game the way I want to then it may be a reasonable thing to do. Last night while sleeping I came up with a third option... I could actually craft Tidus a weapon! It'd be worse since it wouldn't have the armour ignoring aspect but maybe I could choose 4 abilities that really make it close enough? It certainly seems like I should look up what it would take to do, anyway.

As an aside, it turns out the quick hit plan wasn't as good as it used to be. It turns out they nerfed it pretty badly in this version! The mana cost tripled (from 12 to 36) and it now has a base speed of 2 instead of 1. This means that in the old version you could use quick attack 3 times in the span of a normal attack. Now you can use it 1.5 times. That's a pretty big difference and maybe means building a caster with double cast and ultima is a fine plan. Or having Yuna murder things with a really twinked out Magus Sisters summon or something?

Anyway... What can I add on to a weapon that would be really, really good?

First Strike - go first in a fight
Deathstrike - insta kill any enemy that isn't immune
Strength +20% - 20% more damage
Strength +10% - 10% more damage
Strength +5% - 5% more damage
Evade & Counter - lets you dodge attacks and hit them back
One MP Cost - lets me actually use quick attack without running out of mana
Triple AP - tons of experience
Overdrive -> AP - Tons of experience
Triple Overdrive - TONS of experience
Break Damage Limit - do 99999 damage max instead of 9999

What would Tidus' ultimate weapon have on it? Break damage limit, triple overdrive, evade & counter, and magic counter. That actually doesn't seem like a terribly interesting list of abilities. Magic counter means you counter attack when they hit you with a spell so I guess this weapon means you just keep hurting the enemy on their turn if they try to hurt you. That could be really good. But many of the other ultimate weapons have double AP on them, which would let the user level up quicker instead of counterattacking which is probably good for everything until you're really super twinky.

So maybe it's actually for the best that I can't go get the item from under Dark Bahamut? The counter attack weapon feels really end game. I'm only at mid-end game... Maybe I should look into building the ultimate leveling weapon? I'd need break damage limit so that I can do good damage but beyond that using the 3 leveling abilities might be a really good idea. I think if I was going full on damage I'd probably want break damage limit, one MP cost, strength +20%, and evade & counter? I guess it probably depends on if I'm hitting the 99999 damage cap or not with max strength? If I am then strength +20% and strength +10% are bad. If I'm not then they're pretty good. Though One MP Cost could well be seen as '50% more damage' if it lets me use quick hit.

One crucial thing to point out is break damage limit costs 60 dark matter and this version of the game added ribbon back in for armour. It costs 99 dark matter and is something I really want on everyone's armour! How would I go about getting me some dark matter...

Turns out you get given 99 dark matter after catching 5 of every monster in the game. Beyond that you can get more rarely from blitzball tournaments, or as a rare drop from killing the challenge bosses in the arena, or as a drop from killing the dark aeons. So realistically I can make one weapon, or I can make one ribbon armour, but I can't do both until I'm strong enough to farm some of the bosses in the arena. It sure seems like a good weapon for Tidus would go a long way to making that happen though... But I shouldn't be planning on making a leveling weapon and a damage weapon since that amount of dark matter just isn't going to come up. His ultimate weapon is a fine damage weapon though... So leveling weapon it is!

What do I need to add on triple AP, triple overdrive, and overdrive-> AP? Triple AP takes 50 wings to discovery. Triple overdrive takes 30 winning formula. Overdrive -> AP takes 10 doors to tomorrow. Two of those seem to have no other good use, so that's fine. 30 wings to discovery are needed to add break HP limit to armour which seems like it's really important eventually, but right now no one is even close to that cap anyway.

Unfortunately it looks like while most of that stuff is trivial to get a starting number of, wings to discovery you can only get 30 from a quest. Getting the last 20 is hard. It's a drop from one of the challenge bosses I can't beat. Or you can bribe them from a monster in the world for an amount of money I can't possibly fathom at this point, but I can see farming it up if I really need to.

Well, the bottom line is it's going to take a bunch of work to build a really good weapon, but it seems feasible. Probably more feasible than killing Dark Bahamut, anyway, and I don't really want to give up on using Tidus, so it's what I've got to work with. The first step is going to be capturing at least 5 of every monster in the game to get my free dark matter. I was going to want to do that anyway, so no worries!

Final Fantasy X: Frustrating 'Game Over's

The HD version of Final Fantasy X is a remake of the international version of the game, so it included a bunch of content that never made it to North America the first time around. I knew some of the new stuff revolved around new even more challenging challenge fights but I didn't know what they were going to be and intentionally kept myself from looking it up so I could work it out on my own. I was expecting something like a new challenge dungeon or something like that. At the very least I was expecting some kind of warning that I was about to get obliterated...

I got the airship yesterday and decided the first thing I was going to do was go back and capture the monsters from the starting areas. I'd go through the zones pretty carefully to make sure I hadn't missed any Al Bhed primers or other stuff since I didn't want to look that stuff up either. So I went back to Besaid and killed everything on the way back to town. I actually hadn't even talked to everyone in town at the start of the game so it's entirely possible I missed something in there. So I walked into town and was immediately thrown into an encounter with a scary looking version of the first aeon, Valefor. He went first and attacked someone for 9999 damage. I tried to run, realized I couldn't, and tagged in Yuna to cast life on the dead person. Valefor then killed my whole party with one attack. Game over, man. I actually hadn't saved in quite a while (why would I save when I was just going to the starting town to capture enemies that can't kill me?) and I had a lot of cutscenes to get through before I could even get back to flying around on the airship again. At least I'd saved right after the Yunalesca boss fight since that thing took a long time!

Ok, fine... So the challenge bosses are twinky versions of the aeons? The guy who brought Valefor out made it clear he was from the temple (which is inside the town of Besaid) and they were out to get me for being a traitor. Ok, makes sense. I can see making twinky versions of the aeons. I probably would have put the fight in the temple itself to let me go back to the town of Besaid but I can live with this. I was annoyed I hadn't saved in a while but it's time to move on. Later I found a second twinky aeon, inside a temple this time, and I'd saved right before I went in. Shiva also blew me up, but I was expecting it and had saved so it was all good.

Then I ran into a third one... This one was on the thunder plains, and it was triggered by just walking up (and maybe talking to) a guy standing under a lightning tower. I wasn't anywhere near a temple. There was no indication that this was going to be a challenge fight (except maybe that the guy was dressed up like a temple monk I guess). I exploded. I once again hadn't saved in a while. Why would I save when I was just running around the thunder plains catching monsters? I'm really annoyed because I'd caught a full 10 cactuars.

I then found a fourth one, this time just on a road at the end of the Mi'hen Highroad. I had thankfully just saved so I didn't lose any progress this time, but it was still a little frustrating. This time it was a twinky version of an aeon I don't even have myself! It was the Magus Sisters, and one of their attacks hit poor Rikku for 599994 damage. She has around 2500 health, so I was overkilled by a factor of 240. I don't think you needed to be quite that twinky, Magus Sisters!

Anyway... While the hard fights were in a challenge dungeon I was fine with not looking them up. If they were contained in the temples I could accept losing progress once and then avoiding them. But if they're just going to stick them on a road, or in the middle of a zone I need to play in, I have to know what to avoid. So instead of playing the game right now I'm going to go look up the changes in the international edition. That makes me sad, but what else can I do?

Final Fantasy X: Count Time Battle

For a long time (6 games in a row, going from FFIV to FFIX) the Final Fantasy games used a combat system called ATB (Active Time Battle) where characters and enemies would charge up a meter in real time and could then take actions when their meter filled up. While that action was going on, or while you were thinking about what to do with that action, or while you were manually entering the commands to take the action everyone else's meters would keep charging up. In theory this was a system that was designed to make character speed matter (the older games gave each character exactly one action per round and speed only determined order in the round if anything at all) but in practice everyone's bars would just fill up while you were entering in commands anyway. Unless you played on a slow speed I guess, or are really fast at entering commands, or cheesed the system out by pretending to use an item since the ATB bars would pause when using an item in some games. I liked the idea of the ATB system, and liked it when I was a kid, but when you really dig into how it works it gets a little disappointing.

Final Fantasy X switched it up and went to a system more like Final Fantasy Tactics. In FFX the game pauses when it's someone's turn to take an action. You can use all the time you want to think about what you want to do, or to enter the command in, or to doze off. That happened to me the other day and in an ATB game it would have meant game over. Here the game just assumed I was thinking really hard about what to do with Kimahri. (What am I going to do with Kimahri?!?) When I woke up I was able to finish the fight, meander to a save point, and go to bed. Perfect!

But I digress... The system works by assigning every action in the game a number from 1 to 8 indicating how fast it is. Then you multiply that number by a value determined by your agility. That's how many ticks will pass before you get your next action. Monsters work the same way. The game has a nice list ordering all of the upcoming turns so you can see who is going to go next and what the ordering will be assuming everyone takes a standard speed action. I'd assumed agility was going to be a linear relationship with how often you get to go but it's really, really not. Early on the steps are in increments of 1 or 2 agility but the later steps are huge. There's no difference between 44 agility and 61 agility, but that 62nd agility gives you 20% more actions! The 98th agility is worth 25% more actions and the 170th agility is worth 33% more actions! But is it really worth spending all the levels to go from 98 to 170? Even if every node was a 4 agility node that would be 18 levels worth of agility, and they're not all going to be 4 agility nodes until you've reached the point where you're destroying the monster arena. Aiming for 44 or 62 seems pretty reasonable but if Rikku has hit those breakpoints she really needs to teleport out of her agility area and go find some strength or something! She can probably spend 18 levels on strength and end up doing more than 33% more damage per action...

There's one other aspect to the CTB system used in FFX, and that's the ability to tag in characters from the bench. Any time it's your action you can swap out the current character for one of the four characters not currently on the field. They come in and get to immediately take an action. Anyone who participated in the fight gets full experience too, so there's an incentive to tag in characters to do something, anything, in order to keep leveling up. This also let the game design monsters that are really hard to deal with, with one critical weakness, since you're guaranteed to have that tool in your toolbox. There are robots that are pretty tough, except if Rikku steals from them they instantly die. If this was a normal Final Fantasy game and there was a chance Rikku wasn't in your party this would be a bad design, but here it's awesome. It always feels like there's a reason to use each person, which makes you use your whole team for the whole game, which is a really different change of pace.

Everyone except Kimahri. All 6 other characters have something they do best. (Tidus hits evasive ground monsters, Auron pierces heavily armoured monsters, Rikku kills robots, Wakka hit evasive flying monsters, Lulu casts elemental spells on super tough monsters, and Yuna is the healer and can summon in aeons to deal with tricky fights.) Kimahri has no niche. He's the jack of all trades in a game where you can make the hot tag to the expert in every situation. He's the second best at piercing armour, sure... But when Auron one shots the enemy why do we need the second best one? I frequently send him down the black mage area since he starts with an ability that restores his mana, but then he's strictly worse than Lulu for pretty much the entire game. Maybe you make him into a healer? He's terrible compared to Yuna though, and do you really need two healers in a three person group? (It actually can help to have a second person with the life spell, but eventually you get some white magic spheres so that person could be anyone!)

I still use Kimahri. He needs experience because he never gets tagged in to do anything and I feel bad for the guy. And in a normal system he'd probably be the best character! He can do a little bit of everything so he'd be able to deal with the huge variety of problems the random encounters can throw at you. But the tag in system obsoletes the jack of all trades and that makes Kimahri sad. Don't worry Kimahri. I'll still use you.

Final Fantasy X: Calm Lands

Sometimes people complain that the later Final Fantasy games are too much 'on rails' meaning that you don't really have any choice in the matter on where to go or what to do. The story tells you to do something, NPCs block the way to walk in any other direction, and you go do it. FFX has definitely been like that this far, but I've never really understood the complaints. For the most part Final Fantasy IV was every bit as 'on rails' as this game, it just also gave you the option of meandering around aimlessly accomplishing nothing until you found the right way to go. Sure, when you unlocked the hovercraft you could go towards Fabul, but you'd get stuck behind a wall of ice until you went back, saved Rosa, and had her give Rydia a pep talk to learn fire and melt the ice. (Hilariously, if you use a game genie and gain max levels Rydia will naturally learn fire 2 and fire 3 but won't use those to melt the ice!)

The way I see it, as long as the plot is interesting you shouldn't mind being 'on rails'. And if the plot isn't interesting in an RPG maybe you should put it down and find some other way to spend your time... I understand the allure of a good side quest, don't get me wrong, and having some 'open world'ness going on can be pretty good. But to this day I still don't know what was going on in Oblivion because why would I bother trying to do the main plot when I could become The Grey Fox and the head of the assassins guild?

Anyway... Yuna has finally visited all of the temples (that we know of) on her pilgrimage and it's time to head to Zanarkand. Along the way we need to pass through the Calm Lands and Auron makes an ominous remark about how so many summoners lose their way here even though it just seems like a nice peaceful reminder of a previous battle with Sin. I don't know if they threw that line in as a warning to people who get trapped doing side quests or not... But that's what always happens here! The Calm Lands has the chocobo riding side quest to get a piece of Tidus' ultimate weapon, and it has the extra temple with the Magus Sisters summon, and it has the extra temple with the Yojimbo summon, and it has the monster arena. Oh, the monster arena! I think this may be the greatest side quest of all time. Why don't you go to every zone in the entire game and grind random encounters over and over until you catch 10 of every single monster that can spawn? If you do we'll unlock challenge bosses you can fight... Challenge bosses that are the only way to really, really twink out your stats... I know you like challenge bosses. I know you like maxing out your stats. I know you like collecting things...

Big battle to save the world from evil? Screw that! I want to collect some things and kill some hard dudes and max out some stats. Sin can wait.

The game was on rails, but now it's not (well, as soon as I go through another zone or two and get my airship, anyway), and the very interesting plot is now a thing of the past. So I don't know... Part of me thinks it's fine that a game is on rails, but as soon as there's a way off of them I'm grabbing my capture sword and jumping clear. I'll be back, rails. Promise. But first I need to catch all of the things. Oh, and maybe play some more blitzball...

Final Fantasy X: Achievements

One of things you can count on being added to a remade version of an old game is achievements. Everyone loves achievements, right? Little things to give you some added direction on what you could be doing. I took a look at them to see if there was something I should be doing and they mostly seemed like things I was going to do anyway. Collect all the ultimate weapons, beat the new challenge bosses, follow the plot...

There are two, however, that seem both easy and like things I was not going to do. Steal 200 times, and bribe for a large amount of money. These are both things that center around using Rikku and are the ways to get lots of items to power up her awesome but spreadsheet heavy limit break. Now, I normally like stealing things, and I really like Rikku as a character, but I've never really used her in this game. I think it's probably because she's abysmally bad at doing damage when she joins up and I'm dragging the distinctly mediocre Kimahri around because he wants experience. Well, I must do any achievement that's even vaguely feasible so I'm now stealing from all the fights on top of using Kimahri. I've reached the point where by feeding him all the experience and basically ignoring Lulu entirely that they do about the same amount of damage. That's something, right? Anyway, I don't like rotating everyone in on every fight so I pretty much only level a few people at a time. Now that Rikku's in the rotation I'm using a rotating 4 person party with Tidus and Yuna. Auron is the big loser here, since normally I use him because he's pretty awesome too.

As far as bribing goes I decided to go read a guide about it and it sounds like I can get the achievement in one fight if I want to since you can bribe any amount of cash at once? So I just need to have a ton of money and learn the bribe skill? I guess Rikku can use all these levels I'm generating and try to head towards bribe. I feel like it should be somewhere in her section of the expert sphere grid. Apparently you can bribe up some level 3 and level 4 keys, too, so maybe bribing is something I should be doing anyway. But if not for the achievement I probably wouldn't have known. Hurray achievements!

Final Fantasy X: Blitzball

Blitzball is the primary mini-game in the Final Fantasy X universe, replacing the card games from FFXIII and FFIX. It's essentially an underwater soccer game where you have a team management aspect, a leveling aspect, and a game playing aspect. You can wander the world recruiting players for your team. As players play games they can earn experience and level up to get better stats. They can
also learn abilities by playing against opponents who use those abilities in a game. The games themselves are longer than a card game from the previous games but still reasonably short and it's not hard to start playing, lose track of time, and have played through a full tournament.

As an aside, I don't think they ever explain the physics of the game. You've got a bunch humanoids who walk on land and breath air who suddenly get completely submerged in a crazy magical sphere of water. Do humans in Spira have gills or something?

Anyway, I've been playing some blitzball. I lost the first story game, barely, 4-3 in overtime. I lose because I forgot how that first game worked and turned the ball over in the first half when I went up for to score and didn't realize you can't actually equip any abilities until the second half. If I'd played safer I would have won easily. So I reset and did it again and won 4-1. Woo!

I know the first time I played the game I didn't learn Tidus' best shot because I failed the quick time event on the boat and didn't know I needed to succeed. I still played a ton of blitzball in that playthrough and had a lot of fun. This time I beat the quick time event (first try!) and as such learned the Sublimely Magnificent Jecht Shot Mark III. It's stupidly powerful. Most people with good strategy can score against one defender, maybe two if they get lucky. With Jecht Shot you can trivially score against two defenders without any thinking at all. Scoring on three defenders is pretty easy, and four is entirely plausible. Considering you play 5 on 5 and the AI likes to actually cover the rest of the team too... Every time I get the ball I'm basically guaranteed to score.

When I first started out my team was so bad the AI was basically guaranteed to score whenever it wanted to as well. But sometimes the AI decided it didn't want to score. Instead of swimming the ball up right beside my net and scoring they'd shoot from mid field through a defender or something stupid and give me the ball. So I'd still win, because I score every time I get the ball, they score only some of the time they get the ball, and you alternate possession after someone scores.

And then my guys started leveling up, because it turns out you earn more experience when your team is doing things. So even though my team started with a bunch of losers (and a ringer) it's become a ridiculous ringer and a bunch of pretty ok dudes. I can expect to pass the ball through one defender now so I don't need to abuse the AI in order to score with Tidus. And sometimes I even force a turnover on the opponent because my defenders have gained 9 levels and their scorers have only gained 3.

In short... The game has become pretty trivial. There isn't actually anything anyone can do. I don't need to play perfectly to win. Not terrible is good enough. I thought I was going to play a ton of blitzball this time playing the game but I'm starting to feel like I'll probably just look up what exactly I need to do to get Wakka's ultimate weapon and do just that.

For now I actually can't play anyway. My worst player had his contract expire and I gave him the boot so I could go get someone new. But now I don't have enough players on my team, so I can't play any games. I need to find someone, anyone, to sign to a contract before I can play again. Oh well.