So far my little Four Job Fiesta party has monk and red mage as the available classes. As I was saying yesterday both are pretty strong early on but are either uninteresting or bad as the game progresses. I was thinking I might need to grind a bunch of levels to get the monks up to a point where they could win the game for me since the red mage sure wasn't going to. Red mages have a great ability but it doesn't do anything good on its own and needs to combo with something else. Something else that I wasn't going to have, since I'd already missed my chances for (I think) all the spell casting jobs. Red mages have terrible stats and I was going to be stuck with one regardless of what else I rolled up. So I either need a good stat transfer ability (I already have max strength from monk if I want it, to be fair) or I need a good ability that doesn't care about stats.
I cleared out all the Karnak stuff and got the next slate of jobs. What was Gilgabot going to hand me? Something to enhance my already awesome early game? Or something to pull me through to the end of the game? The answer? Bard.
In my conclusion post for my Final Fantasy V playthrough in my marathon I actually called out bard as a job I hadn't used but that I wanted to play again right away in order to try it out. So I don't have bard experience, but I wanted to play with a bard, so right off the bat this is an awesome selection. Thank you, Gilgabot! But what do bards do? I did some reading and it turns out bards are weak early but transition into late game monsters. Just what I want! They eventually have access to 8 songs they can sing which vary in uses from stopping all the enemies to charming an enemy to continuously buffing one of your stats. Agility so you get all the turns, or strength so you do more damage, or magic power so you do more damage... Or level! One of the options is level! I wanted to grind levels to turn my monk into a killing machine? Well, I can just sing this song to level them up in fights that matter!
But wait! There's more! When you max out the bard class you get the ability to transfer the sing command to any other job. Almost all of the songs completely ignore the stats of the caster... So that's something my red mage can do with her life. Heal up out of combat, sing up a storm in combat. I can imagine setting up my bard and red mage to singing up my agility and level and watching my monk destroy things. I won't learn those songs until near the end of the game, but it's something to look forward to!
Bards are also awesome for random encounters it turns out. I'm actually running into enemies that take a few rounds to kill because monks have started falling off. (Enemies are gaining armour faster than I'm gaining levels so I'm actually doing less damage as I progress!) But the bard can just sing a song that hits all enemies for a 99% chance to stop them. Then I can just punch away to my heart's content. I even set brawl up as the bard's secondary ability to get the max strength transfer from the monk. So my bard does more damage than the monks do! (He's allowed to use a weapon.)
On the downside he has garbage vitality so he has a lot fewer hitpoints than the monks do. Oh well!
Now the question remains... What will I get from the last crystal? There's only 4 options possible... Samurai, dragoon, dancer, or chemist. Two beaters and two more weird jobs I've never used before... If I don't get a beater I'm really going to be all in on buffing up a monk to win all the fights. Could be fun!
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy V. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy V. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
Monday, June 16, 2014
Final Fantasy V: Four Job Fiesta Start
The Four Job Fiesta event started up this weekend. I'm giving it a shot because I'll take any excuse to play a really good game! The idea is you get assigned one job from each of the four crystals and then have to play the game using only those jobs and keeping at least one of each job in your party at any given time. You can swap around who is which job in order to mix and match abilities and such but you need to keep all the jobs active.
I'm playing the fan translated version of the Super Famicom version on emulator. I think that may end up being a mistake since it doesn't have a run button. It also doesn't have bad loading lag like the PSX version so maybe it all shakes out in the wash? On the plus side I can watch LCS on my tv while playing FFV on the emulator and that pushes this format over the top for me I think.
I got to the wind crystal in short order and tweeted to the bot to get my first job: Monk! Monks tend to fit my style of play in a Final Fantasy job system game quite well. They have a lot of hit points and they're good at physically attacking things. They also have a support ability which transfers the highest strength boost in the game which may or may not come in handy when I get later jobs. It doesn't really lend itself to fun combos that I know of, but it's an autoattacker that does lots of damage and scales well with levels so I should be able to beat things by grinding if I need to.
It is also, it turns out, awesome in the early game. I've watched a few streams of people starting out as a thief or a white mage and they spend so much time healing up (often by drinking potions) that I'd just sort of assumed that was the way things worked. I did one early boss fight where the boss attacked for 3 potions worth of health. So I spend a few rounds using items with 3 of my 4 monks and attacking with the 4th one. Then I realized that the people I was watching were attacking for 12 and I can attack for 200. So I stopped healing and just punched the enemy to death. Pretty sure I could have just damage raced the boss right from the start. The next boss has a phase change where she turns undead and becomes immune to physical damage but you can hurt her with potions. I killed her before she changed phase. Thieves have to fight her for many phase transitions! Monks just murder her.
I let my strength go to my head and tried to kill Shiva before unlocking my second job. Turns out she can cast a spell which hits my party for 60% of their max health, and she has 3 friends with so much health it takes a full round for me to kill one of them. And I'm dead in 2 spells? Yeah, not going to happen at this level. Oh well!
Off to the water tower where I got my next job: Red Mage! Red mages get to cast white and black magic spells, and they get to wear armour and use swords and stuff. They also have one of the most powerful abilities in the game when you max out their job level as they get to cast two spells per turn instead of one. On the downside they can only cast the first three levels of spells. So while they're awesome early on they're really bad in the end game. If I had black mage instead of monk they'd be awesome since I could give them the black magic ability and then they could double cast high level spells, but I don't. In fact I think every other class that could combo with a red mage is from the first two crystals so I don't think I'll ever have a good combo for them.
On the plus side I now have a healer, and I have someone who can equip (and therefore break) rods. So my team is really awesome now. Punch things for big damage, use my healer to heal up. I may well fall off in the late game? Maybe just buying all the rods and having my red mage break them will be good enough? And who knows what I'll be getting from the next two crystals...
I'm playing the fan translated version of the Super Famicom version on emulator. I think that may end up being a mistake since it doesn't have a run button. It also doesn't have bad loading lag like the PSX version so maybe it all shakes out in the wash? On the plus side I can watch LCS on my tv while playing FFV on the emulator and that pushes this format over the top for me I think.
I got to the wind crystal in short order and tweeted to the bot to get my first job: Monk! Monks tend to fit my style of play in a Final Fantasy job system game quite well. They have a lot of hit points and they're good at physically attacking things. They also have a support ability which transfers the highest strength boost in the game which may or may not come in handy when I get later jobs. It doesn't really lend itself to fun combos that I know of, but it's an autoattacker that does lots of damage and scales well with levels so I should be able to beat things by grinding if I need to.
It is also, it turns out, awesome in the early game. I've watched a few streams of people starting out as a thief or a white mage and they spend so much time healing up (often by drinking potions) that I'd just sort of assumed that was the way things worked. I did one early boss fight where the boss attacked for 3 potions worth of health. So I spend a few rounds using items with 3 of my 4 monks and attacking with the 4th one. Then I realized that the people I was watching were attacking for 12 and I can attack for 200. So I stopped healing and just punched the enemy to death. Pretty sure I could have just damage raced the boss right from the start. The next boss has a phase change where she turns undead and becomes immune to physical damage but you can hurt her with potions. I killed her before she changed phase. Thieves have to fight her for many phase transitions! Monks just murder her.
I let my strength go to my head and tried to kill Shiva before unlocking my second job. Turns out she can cast a spell which hits my party for 60% of their max health, and she has 3 friends with so much health it takes a full round for me to kill one of them. And I'm dead in 2 spells? Yeah, not going to happen at this level. Oh well!
Off to the water tower where I got my next job: Red Mage! Red mages get to cast white and black magic spells, and they get to wear armour and use swords and stuff. They also have one of the most powerful abilities in the game when you max out their job level as they get to cast two spells per turn instead of one. On the downside they can only cast the first three levels of spells. So while they're awesome early on they're really bad in the end game. If I had black mage instead of monk they'd be awesome since I could give them the black magic ability and then they could double cast high level spells, but I don't. In fact I think every other class that could combo with a red mage is from the first two crystals so I don't think I'll ever have a good combo for them.
On the plus side I now have a healer, and I have someone who can equip (and therefore break) rods. So my team is really awesome now. Punch things for big damage, use my healer to heal up. I may well fall off in the late game? Maybe just buying all the rods and having my red mage break them will be good enough? And who knows what I'll be getting from the next two crystals...
Monday, June 02, 2014
Final Fantasy V: Four Job Fiesta
I've recently heard a couple of streamers I watch talk about an upcoming 'event' of sorts called Four Job Fiesta. It basically seems to be a yearly excuse for people to play Final Fantasy V with a bit of structure and some charity fundraising mixed in. They're donating towards Child's Play. Anyway, the idea is you sign up to play by tweeting a message at a specific account and then a bot generates four jobs (one from each crystal) for you. The goal is then to beat Final Fantasy V using only those jobs. There are some other modifiers you can throw in to make things harder like signing up to get a chance at being given extra copies of the berserker job instead of a random one. (Berserkers being annoying and bad!) One of the things they do to raise money is let people pay to assign out even more copies of berserker to people who take the berserker risk.
They're also going to be running a race of sorts between two streamers who will be playing the game using community voted jobs instead of random ones. And by voted I mean paid for through donations. It should be interesting to watch. 11am on June 14th!
I like the idea of using something like this to get more people to play an excellent game. I like that it only happens once a year so it keeps some mystique around it. I like that the guy who runs it crunches some numbers each time to make pretty infographics. Chemist is apparently the best job, berserker is the worst. I like that there's a whole community of people who play FFV each year with crazy jobs. I wish I was a part of such a community.
Maybe this year I will be, now that I know it exists. I'll need to figure out this newfangled Twitter thing, but how hard can that be?
They're also going to be running a race of sorts between two streamers who will be playing the game using community voted jobs instead of random ones. And by voted I mean paid for through donations. It should be interesting to watch. 11am on June 14th!
I like the idea of using something like this to get more people to play an excellent game. I like that it only happens once a year so it keeps some mystique around it. I like that the guy who runs it crunches some numbers each time to make pretty infographics. Chemist is apparently the best job, berserker is the worst. I like that there's a whole community of people who play FFV each year with crazy jobs. I wish I was a part of such a community.
Maybe this year I will be, now that I know it exists. I'll need to figure out this newfangled Twitter thing, but how hard can that be?
Friday, February 14, 2014
Job System Speedruns
Today I caught speedruns for a couple of games that seemed like they'd be very interesting to plan out. Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy Tactics are two gameplay heavy games using the Final Fantasy job system to change what each character can do on the fly. I found the runs really interesting and it had me waxing nostalgic for my time in University. That's a little weird since a lot of my current lifestyle is very similar to my lifestyle back then... The big difference is that I now live alone and play video games by myself instead of living in a little house with a half dozen other gamers. If speed running had been a thing back in 2000, or if I'd known about it back then, I can imagine sitting down and spending stupid amounts of time with James, Josh, Byung, Tom, and a whole slew of other people who would drop into Comfy Prime while working out how to puzzle out each of the boss fights in FFV properly. I miss watching people play video games and talking about them. But people had to go and move away, and have kids, and be responsible.
Anyway, Final Fantasy V seemed particularly interesting because each of the boss fights in the game can be 'trivialized' with the right combination of job abilities on the different characters. Things like having one person wear a shield, have cover, and use defense while the other people sit at low health and can't be damaged. A bunch of the later fights were won by the interesting combination of casting level 2 old on the enemy (old slowly decreases the enemy level, level 2 old only works on an enemy with a level divisible by 2), waiting a set amount of time, and then casting level 5 death. Any even leveled boss can be killed like this if you have the timing down to hit the level 5 death when their level falls the right amount!
But it's not just a matter of figuring out the right combination of abilities... You need to earn enough job points across different characters to have access to the right abilities at the right time. I really liked how the guy I was watching had two copies of an accessory that granted auto haste and he switched what character got to wear the shoes based on which job abilities were crucial for a given fight. The thief would wear them for random encounters so they could flee faster! He also made use of the mix command to get powerful buffs for some fights, and the catch command to save up one shot attacks, and consumable rods that could be used to do high level spells without needing to actually level up black mage.
Final Fantasy Tactics was a little less interesting to watch, probably because I tuned in halfway through and the guy was at the point of winning every fight with his first action. But planning out the route to know how to win each fight right away would have been a very interesting thing to do back in the day. Things like how on some fights the only way to kill all the enemies on your first turn was to also kill yourself (you'd be using the math command and the only thing they had in common was something you'd have in common like level or height) and the solution was to bring along a second person who would live. Ramza commits suicide and random jobber stands around to collect the loot!
The guy running FFT had a counter built into his timing program to track how many times he had to reset by getting a random encounter (which you can't pre-math out and which are wastes of time even if you could one shot everything) and a second counter tracking how many times his math plan didn't one shot a fight (enemies can spawn with random health totals, random magic resist values, and a random zodiac sign which all modify how much damage they take). That's a level of detail and tracking I can get behind!
Anyway, Final Fantasy V seemed particularly interesting because each of the boss fights in the game can be 'trivialized' with the right combination of job abilities on the different characters. Things like having one person wear a shield, have cover, and use defense while the other people sit at low health and can't be damaged. A bunch of the later fights were won by the interesting combination of casting level 2 old on the enemy (old slowly decreases the enemy level, level 2 old only works on an enemy with a level divisible by 2), waiting a set amount of time, and then casting level 5 death. Any even leveled boss can be killed like this if you have the timing down to hit the level 5 death when their level falls the right amount!
But it's not just a matter of figuring out the right combination of abilities... You need to earn enough job points across different characters to have access to the right abilities at the right time. I really liked how the guy I was watching had two copies of an accessory that granted auto haste and he switched what character got to wear the shoes based on which job abilities were crucial for a given fight. The thief would wear them for random encounters so they could flee faster! He also made use of the mix command to get powerful buffs for some fights, and the catch command to save up one shot attacks, and consumable rods that could be used to do high level spells without needing to actually level up black mage.
Final Fantasy Tactics was a little less interesting to watch, probably because I tuned in halfway through and the guy was at the point of winning every fight with his first action. But planning out the route to know how to win each fight right away would have been a very interesting thing to do back in the day. Things like how on some fights the only way to kill all the enemies on your first turn was to also kill yourself (you'd be using the math command and the only thing they had in common was something you'd have in common like level or height) and the solution was to bring along a second person who would live. Ramza commits suicide and random jobber stands around to collect the loot!
The guy running FFT had a counter built into his timing program to track how many times he had to reset by getting a random encounter (which you can't pre-math out and which are wastes of time even if you could one shot everything) and a second counter tracking how many times his math plan didn't one shot a fight (enemies can spawn with random health totals, random magic resist values, and a random zodiac sign which all modify how much damage they take). That's a level of detail and tracking I can get behind!
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Final Fantasy V: Conclusions
I finished up Final Fantasy V on the bus yesterday. X-Death was a complete joke. I'm not sure but I think he got to take one action across both of his phases. Maybe he autoattacked and I just ignored it? I don't know, but all I remember is one petrification attack. Having a cutscene with a phase change but letting me keep my buffs was a little silly. It meant each of my characters got to attack twice before he got to go in phase 2 which was very bad for him. Double Bahamut, mimic the double Bahamut, and two people with flare enchanted weapons attacking 4 or 8 times. Kaboom!
The game was fun. I don't know if the original game was as campy as the PSOne translation but there was some really cute/silly moments. Faris talking like a pirate the whole time was an odd but nice touch. The sprites had some good animations (similar to Mystic Quest, actually) especially in the scene where Butz and Krile leave Faris behind in a princess outfit. She catches up to them and they try to pass the blame off on each other solely with finger pointing and head shaking. I liked it.
As far as the plot goes it was decent but not spectacular. There's a pretty constant big bad, he has a pretty reasonable take on being evil, and he isn't excessively stupid with letting the party live. The first part of the game has him waking up from a 30 year sleep/prison sentence and I can convince myself it took him some time to power up and he couldn't have just murdered us at level 20. The whole two worlds become one thing was interesting but again, not mind blowing.
The music was great but it doesn't quite stay with me as much as the music from FFIV or FFVI. I'm not sure if that's a nostalgia thing with me having played those games a lot as a kid or what. Way better than Mystic Quest, though!
Gameplaywise this is hands-down better than FFIV. They tweaked the ATB system enough to make it really great. Job systems in general are awesome and they really improved upon FFIII's take. Being able to mix and match abilities from different jobs, especially in end game, is really powerful and really fun.
Not being able to pick up sidequests you missed in the end game is annoying. I couldn't summon Shiva because I didn't learn the spell on the first world and that castle just didn't exist in the third world, for example. I'd forgotten that some of the cities were going to get sucked into the void or I probably would have done something about that before I left for the second world.
The important question is, where does this game fit in on my ranking scheme? I enjoyed myself more playing FFV this time around than I did FFIV. I had no immediate desire to replay FFIV when I finished it but I want to play FFV again for a couple of different reasons. I'd like to play a mage-centric party and maybe use some of the jobs I skipped this time like dancer and bard. I'd like to play again at level 2. I liked the game system more in FFV, but I really liked the music, plot, and characters more in FFIV. The characters in FFIV actually developed over the course of the game. Cecil went from the hand of evil to a pure paladin. His relationships with Rosa, Kain, and Rydia evolved as the game went on. Even Edge had some character growth moments and he joined the party pretty late. By contrast, Butz started the game as a free spirit on a chocobo. He ended the game as a high level free spirit on a chocobo.
I'm going to have to give the edge to FFIV I think. It's a worse spreadsheet game and I honestly may have played it too many times to really love playing it anymore, but the fact I played it so many times does say a lot. And it's not like the game system in FFIV was bad or anything. It's actually pretty good and was a huge evolution at the time. FFV definitely gets to slot in at #2 thus far. I fear it's going to see that position tumble in the coming games though...
Next up: Final Fantasy VI!
The game was fun. I don't know if the original game was as campy as the PSOne translation but there was some really cute/silly moments. Faris talking like a pirate the whole time was an odd but nice touch. The sprites had some good animations (similar to Mystic Quest, actually) especially in the scene where Butz and Krile leave Faris behind in a princess outfit. She catches up to them and they try to pass the blame off on each other solely with finger pointing and head shaking. I liked it.
As far as the plot goes it was decent but not spectacular. There's a pretty constant big bad, he has a pretty reasonable take on being evil, and he isn't excessively stupid with letting the party live. The first part of the game has him waking up from a 30 year sleep/prison sentence and I can convince myself it took him some time to power up and he couldn't have just murdered us at level 20. The whole two worlds become one thing was interesting but again, not mind blowing.
The music was great but it doesn't quite stay with me as much as the music from FFIV or FFVI. I'm not sure if that's a nostalgia thing with me having played those games a lot as a kid or what. Way better than Mystic Quest, though!
Gameplaywise this is hands-down better than FFIV. They tweaked the ATB system enough to make it really great. Job systems in general are awesome and they really improved upon FFIII's take. Being able to mix and match abilities from different jobs, especially in end game, is really powerful and really fun.
Not being able to pick up sidequests you missed in the end game is annoying. I couldn't summon Shiva because I didn't learn the spell on the first world and that castle just didn't exist in the third world, for example. I'd forgotten that some of the cities were going to get sucked into the void or I probably would have done something about that before I left for the second world.
The important question is, where does this game fit in on my ranking scheme? I enjoyed myself more playing FFV this time around than I did FFIV. I had no immediate desire to replay FFIV when I finished it but I want to play FFV again for a couple of different reasons. I'd like to play a mage-centric party and maybe use some of the jobs I skipped this time like dancer and bard. I'd like to play again at level 2. I liked the game system more in FFV, but I really liked the music, plot, and characters more in FFIV. The characters in FFIV actually developed over the course of the game. Cecil went from the hand of evil to a pure paladin. His relationships with Rosa, Kain, and Rydia evolved as the game went on. Even Edge had some character growth moments and he joined the party pretty late. By contrast, Butz started the game as a free spirit on a chocobo. He ended the game as a high level free spirit on a chocobo.
I'm going to have to give the edge to FFIV I think. It's a worse spreadsheet game and I honestly may have played it too many times to really love playing it anymore, but the fact I played it so many times does say a lot. And it's not like the game system in FFIV was bad or anything. It's actually pretty good and was a huge evolution at the time. FFV definitely gets to slot in at #2 thus far. I fear it's going to see that position tumble in the coming games though...
Next up: Final Fantasy VI!
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Final Fantasy V: Omega
Final Fantasy V has two challenge bosses. Shinryu, who I beat on Friday, and Omega. They're both brutally powerful with a multitude of actions to wipe out your entire party. They're annoying because unlike most challenge bosses which are hard to find these guys are hard to avoid. Omega is wandering around on a 3x3 grid of the dungeon and if you end up adjacent to him you have to fight him. Thankfully there's a save point right before him, but I'm pretty sure he wipes out every single person who makes it to the final dungeon and doesn't know to do everything possible to avoid him. Shinryu is inside a treasure chest that looks like any other. There's a save point right after that chest, and I'm pretty sure almost everyone dies to Shinryu as well.
At any rate, it was time to give Omega a spin. He started off with an attack that hit my team for a little over 2k. Most of my characters had a little under 2k health and died, but one survived and got everyone back up. Omega had a few things he could do that were rough but the worst was a 2-step combo. First he hit everyone for half their health plus a constant health drain. Then he knocked everyone to single digit health. The dot killed them off before I got another action. I tried a few different times and he only pulled that combo off once so it wasn't all that likely to happen but it sure put a timer on the fight since at any point he could just decide to win in 2 actions.
Another issue is I had a hard time finding a way to actually hurt him. He had up a reflect shield so I couldn't hit him with very many spells. I tried meteo but it hit for about 800 damage total. My melee members did an ok job with flare enchanted weapons (Nick would hit for about 8k and Lena for about 16k) but another problem quickly arose... Any time he took damage he'd counter-attack three times. With brutal spells. It seemed like he'd chose one of three spells for each counter and could choose the same one multiple times. They were a single target attack for 3k (guaranteed death), a single target attack for 50% current health + confusion (not so bad, I can just esuna it away), and a single target attack for permanent removal from the fight. Gone for good, no way to bring them back! This is an actual timer on the fight since there was a pretty good chance he'd just take out one of my damage dealers every time he took damage. Also with fewer people around it was harder and harder to keep a rezzer alive to come back from his brutal normal attacks.
Eventually I gave up and decided I really needed to level up a little bit. One of his often used attacks hit everyone for a little more than their current max health and I figured a couple levels might give them enough health to survive a hit. Also, Nick hadn't mastered monk (just knight) so he could get some more health from that. And maybe summoner could actually do big damage to him without proccing his counter attacks? So I went off to an area worth both xp and ap (but low amounts of both, sadly) and killed things for a while. It was pretty boring (defend, defend, defend, summon leviathan to kill everything).
Then something clicked in my mind on the bus home yesterday... Omega is a giant robot... He's probably weak to lightning! Maybe I could do more damage by enchanting bolt3 on my weapon instead of flare? Also, maybe I should at least cast some summons at him before going through all the effort of mastering the job to see if it is helpful. So I saved up and gave him another shot.
Turns out the giant robot is vulnerable to lightning so Nick was hitting for 16k and Lena was hitting for 32k. Turns out he takes hardly any damage from Bahamut (maybe 1600 total from a double casted Bahamut). Turns out he still counter-attacks three times if you hit him with summons. Turns out getting a little more health helped a lot when it came to surviving. Eventually I decided hitting for 16k wasn't good enough and only had Lena ever attack him to minimize the number of times he counter-attacked. Everyone else just used phoenix downs or cast healing/arise spells and desperately tried to survive while Lena killed him off. It worked! Looking now the internet claims he only has 55k health. Maybe Lena killed him in 2 hits? (I play on a PSP and got home partway through the fight. So this morning when I turned it on I was in the middle of the fight and didn't know how many times I'd hit him.) I feel like it took more than that but I may be crazy. 55k sure doesn't sound like much, though.
Next step, X-Death and the end of the game!
At any rate, it was time to give Omega a spin. He started off with an attack that hit my team for a little over 2k. Most of my characters had a little under 2k health and died, but one survived and got everyone back up. Omega had a few things he could do that were rough but the worst was a 2-step combo. First he hit everyone for half their health plus a constant health drain. Then he knocked everyone to single digit health. The dot killed them off before I got another action. I tried a few different times and he only pulled that combo off once so it wasn't all that likely to happen but it sure put a timer on the fight since at any point he could just decide to win in 2 actions.
Another issue is I had a hard time finding a way to actually hurt him. He had up a reflect shield so I couldn't hit him with very many spells. I tried meteo but it hit for about 800 damage total. My melee members did an ok job with flare enchanted weapons (Nick would hit for about 8k and Lena for about 16k) but another problem quickly arose... Any time he took damage he'd counter-attack three times. With brutal spells. It seemed like he'd chose one of three spells for each counter and could choose the same one multiple times. They were a single target attack for 3k (guaranteed death), a single target attack for 50% current health + confusion (not so bad, I can just esuna it away), and a single target attack for permanent removal from the fight. Gone for good, no way to bring them back! This is an actual timer on the fight since there was a pretty good chance he'd just take out one of my damage dealers every time he took damage. Also with fewer people around it was harder and harder to keep a rezzer alive to come back from his brutal normal attacks.
Eventually I gave up and decided I really needed to level up a little bit. One of his often used attacks hit everyone for a little more than their current max health and I figured a couple levels might give them enough health to survive a hit. Also, Nick hadn't mastered monk (just knight) so he could get some more health from that. And maybe summoner could actually do big damage to him without proccing his counter attacks? So I went off to an area worth both xp and ap (but low amounts of both, sadly) and killed things for a while. It was pretty boring (defend, defend, defend, summon leviathan to kill everything).
Then something clicked in my mind on the bus home yesterday... Omega is a giant robot... He's probably weak to lightning! Maybe I could do more damage by enchanting bolt3 on my weapon instead of flare? Also, maybe I should at least cast some summons at him before going through all the effort of mastering the job to see if it is helpful. So I saved up and gave him another shot.
Turns out the giant robot is vulnerable to lightning so Nick was hitting for 16k and Lena was hitting for 32k. Turns out he takes hardly any damage from Bahamut (maybe 1600 total from a double casted Bahamut). Turns out he still counter-attacks three times if you hit him with summons. Turns out getting a little more health helped a lot when it came to surviving. Eventually I decided hitting for 16k wasn't good enough and only had Lena ever attack him to minimize the number of times he counter-attacked. Everyone else just used phoenix downs or cast healing/arise spells and desperately tried to survive while Lena killed him off. It worked! Looking now the internet claims he only has 55k health. Maybe Lena killed him in 2 hits? (I play on a PSP and got home partway through the fight. So this morning when I turned it on I was in the middle of the fight and didn't know how many times I'd hit him.) I feel like it took more than that but I may be crazy. 55k sure doesn't sound like much, though.
Next step, X-Death and the end of the game!
Monday, July 16, 2012
Final Fantasy V: Shinryu
Friday on the way home from work I got a little bored of grinding up AP without getting XP (it turns out the final stage of the final dungeon gives tons of AP but no XP at all). So I decided to go give Shinryu a shot to see what was going on there. Nick and Lena were capped out and ready to roll (though it turns out 'magic sword' capable weapons are few and far between and I wanted 3 of them so Lena had to use a pretty mediocre weapon), Krile was only missing monk, and Feris was missing pretty much everything. I made her a bare class with white magic and 2-handed.
At any rate, Shinryu's first action was to hit my whole team for ~7400. My largest max health was 1999. This seems like a bit of a problem... Fortunately Krile was wearing an aegis shield (33% chance to block a spell) and it procced. She promptly quicked out an arise on Nick and a haste2. Shinryu seemed to either do an AE spell that one-shot my team or two melee attacks that almost killed the target. Or would cast a terrible spell for low damage. My physical avoidance was pretty high so the melee attacks weren't really a problem.
The fight progresses and it became pretty clear that only Lena was going to do relevant damage. Nick and Feris existed pretty much just to get rezzed and take hits. At one point I ended up with everyone but Krile dead, and Krile very low on mana. Mimes don't get the item ability so I couldn't even use an elixir. I barely had enough for one raise spell, so I cast that on Lena. And then she got killed and I had no mana at all. Fortunately mimes can just copy the last action (raise on Lena) so I did that. And Shinryu killed her. Repeat over and over and over. Eventually Lena survived a round with Krile at very low health. Pop off an elixir! Quick out an arise on Feris and a haste2! Stabilize and go back to the slow beatdown with Lena.
Several times Shinryu cast a spell to kill everyone, and every single time Krile blocked it with the aegis shield. Yay, 33% chance! He ended up going down like a ton of bricks on my first try. Woo!
Next up, Omega!
At any rate, Shinryu's first action was to hit my whole team for ~7400. My largest max health was 1999. This seems like a bit of a problem... Fortunately Krile was wearing an aegis shield (33% chance to block a spell) and it procced. She promptly quicked out an arise on Nick and a haste2. Shinryu seemed to either do an AE spell that one-shot my team or two melee attacks that almost killed the target. Or would cast a terrible spell for low damage. My physical avoidance was pretty high so the melee attacks weren't really a problem.
The fight progresses and it became pretty clear that only Lena was going to do relevant damage. Nick and Feris existed pretty much just to get rezzed and take hits. At one point I ended up with everyone but Krile dead, and Krile very low on mana. Mimes don't get the item ability so I couldn't even use an elixir. I barely had enough for one raise spell, so I cast that on Lena. And then she got killed and I had no mana at all. Fortunately mimes can just copy the last action (raise on Lena) so I did that. And Shinryu killed her. Repeat over and over and over. Eventually Lena survived a round with Krile at very low health. Pop off an elixir! Quick out an arise on Feris and a haste2! Stabilize and go back to the slow beatdown with Lena.
Several times Shinryu cast a spell to kill everyone, and every single time Krile blocked it with the aegis shield. Yay, 33% chance! He ended up going down like a ton of bricks on my first try. Woo!
Next up, Omega!
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Final Fantasy V Progress
I've made it into the final dungeon in Final Fantasy V and am closing in on the end of sane job builds. I say sane because they're the sort of things you'd take to beat the final boss but there are two brutal challenge bosses which likely need crazy builds.
Krile has mastered black mage, white mage, and time mage. That means as far as abilities go I'm set. She's going to turn into a mime and slot all three types of magic in as her abilities. The problem is mime gets its stats from the jobs you've mastered and those three jobs have terrible stats. I can gain 14 agility if I master thief. I can get 26 strength if I master monk. I can gain 26 vit if I master monk. I can get 2 magic power if I master summoner. Thief and monk seem reasonable so I can act faster and have more health. Currently Krile is a really terrible thief in an attempt to get that extra 14 agility.
The trick here is that I'm used to playing with 2 schools of magic available. None of my other characters were really magic users at all... In order to actually have access to haste2 and healing spells I'd need to switch someone else into a magic role at least temporarily. Both Nick and Lena are deep into their own builds but Feris was just kind of taking random things. She'd mastered monk, thief, and knight. Other than knight those actually look like magical jobs since they're the two I want to pick up on Krile... So I switched Feris to white mage and will likely follow that up with summoner and red mage.
Nick has sorcerer and samurai mastered and is very close to mastering knight. His plan is to swing a giant flare enchanted 2-handed sword while being tough. I'm considering possibly picking up ninja or hunter or both to dual-wield and attack 8 times... But his agility will be mediocre unless he gets one of ninja, hunter, or worthless thief.
Speaking of that, it's Lena's plan. She'd mastered monk, ninja, and is working on hunter. Maybe she'll pick up sorcerer to also swing with a flare enchanted weapon?
As far as challenge bosses go I stumbled into Omega today. Good thing there's a save point right before him! His first action, before I got to go, was to hit everyone in my party for more than their maximum health. Guess I have some work to do before I can think about brawling him!
Krile has mastered black mage, white mage, and time mage. That means as far as abilities go I'm set. She's going to turn into a mime and slot all three types of magic in as her abilities. The problem is mime gets its stats from the jobs you've mastered and those three jobs have terrible stats. I can gain 14 agility if I master thief. I can get 26 strength if I master monk. I can gain 26 vit if I master monk. I can get 2 magic power if I master summoner. Thief and monk seem reasonable so I can act faster and have more health. Currently Krile is a really terrible thief in an attempt to get that extra 14 agility.
The trick here is that I'm used to playing with 2 schools of magic available. None of my other characters were really magic users at all... In order to actually have access to haste2 and healing spells I'd need to switch someone else into a magic role at least temporarily. Both Nick and Lena are deep into their own builds but Feris was just kind of taking random things. She'd mastered monk, thief, and knight. Other than knight those actually look like magical jobs since they're the two I want to pick up on Krile... So I switched Feris to white mage and will likely follow that up with summoner and red mage.
Nick has sorcerer and samurai mastered and is very close to mastering knight. His plan is to swing a giant flare enchanted 2-handed sword while being tough. I'm considering possibly picking up ninja or hunter or both to dual-wield and attack 8 times... But his agility will be mediocre unless he gets one of ninja, hunter, or worthless thief.
Speaking of that, it's Lena's plan. She'd mastered monk, ninja, and is working on hunter. Maybe she'll pick up sorcerer to also swing with a flare enchanted weapon?
As far as challenge bosses go I stumbled into Omega today. Good thing there's a save point right before him! His first action, before I got to go, was to hit everyone in my party for more than their maximum health. Guess I have some work to do before I can think about brawling him!
Friday, June 29, 2012
Final Fantasy V: Accessory Choice
I just got my first guard ring in Final Fantasy V which means I now have 5 excellent defensive accessory slot items. I only have 4 characters which means one of the items has to hit the bench. The question I have is which one? I have 3 different choices: gengi glove, guard ring, or elf cloak. (I have 3 copies of elf cloak to bring the total up to 5.)
Elf cloak gives 1 agility, 1 magic power, 3 magic defense, 5% magic evade, 1 weight, and causes the wearer to dodge 33% of all physical attacks.
Genji glove gives 12 defense, 1 magic defense, 6 weight, and provides immunity to toad and paralyze
Guard ring gives 10 defense, 10 magic defense, 10% magic evade, 1 weight, 5 vitality, and automatically casts regen on the wearer.
Weight is used in determining how often you get to act. Every 8 weight on your gear costs you 1 tick each time you take an action. Essentially 8 weight is offset by 1 agility. The faster you are the more actions you get to take... Must go faster!
Vitality+5 sounds good, but it turns out it's actually mostly useless. Vitality does two things in the game: determine your maximum health and determine the amount of healing done by regen. Bonus vitality from gera is not taken into account when determining your maximum health so all Vit+5 accomplishes is making your regen ticks marginally bigger. Fortunately this is the item that grants regen otherwise it would be totally worthless. (Regen is not a spell I consider casting normally.)
Agility is pretty much only good for going faster. It should make some weapons do more damage but it's bugged.
Magic power impacts your maximum mana but like with vitality doesn't apply from gear. It also impacts how many times your attack spells hit which at high levels seems like it could be really powerful.
What do the defense stats do? They're flat out subtracted from the damage done from an attack for each hit. It looks like a typical mob (looked up gargoyle stats) attacks 9 times for 62 damage per swing. My samurai has 39 defense, so he'll actually take 23 damage from 9 swings or 207 total. (Ignoring misses for now.) With the genji glove on he'll take 11 damage from 9 swings or 99 total. That's a pretty substantial reduction. The 33% evade from elf cloak would only knock that 207 down to 138.
On the other hand my ninja only has 22 defense. She'd be taking 40 damage from 9 swings for 360 total. Genji glove knocks that down to 252 while elf cloak knocks it down to 240.
So it would seem a heavily armored dude might want to stack on even more armor but any squishies would rather have the dodge from the elf cloak. Elf cloak also has better other stats (go faster, cast better, have magic defense) so I like sticking with it. Guard ring is a little worse than genji glove when it comes to physical attacks but it's substantially better when it comes to magic attacks. It also weighs less and the free regen, while not great, is still something.
Gargoyles are reasonably tough enemies (they guard the entrance to the lithograph dungeons) but bosses and the like are going to hit even harder. As the damage number gets bigger the extra evade will get better and better. I'm pretty sure I'm going to stick with 3 elf capes and the guard ring. Makes me sad that I went to all the effort to steal the genji glove only to leave it in my bag, but thems the breaks I guess.
Elf cloak gives 1 agility, 1 magic power, 3 magic defense, 5% magic evade, 1 weight, and causes the wearer to dodge 33% of all physical attacks.
Genji glove gives 12 defense, 1 magic defense, 6 weight, and provides immunity to toad and paralyze
Guard ring gives 10 defense, 10 magic defense, 10% magic evade, 1 weight, 5 vitality, and automatically casts regen on the wearer.
Weight is used in determining how often you get to act. Every 8 weight on your gear costs you 1 tick each time you take an action. Essentially 8 weight is offset by 1 agility. The faster you are the more actions you get to take... Must go faster!
Vitality+5 sounds good, but it turns out it's actually mostly useless. Vitality does two things in the game: determine your maximum health and determine the amount of healing done by regen. Bonus vitality from gera is not taken into account when determining your maximum health so all Vit+5 accomplishes is making your regen ticks marginally bigger. Fortunately this is the item that grants regen otherwise it would be totally worthless. (Regen is not a spell I consider casting normally.)
Agility is pretty much only good for going faster. It should make some weapons do more damage but it's bugged.
Magic power impacts your maximum mana but like with vitality doesn't apply from gear. It also impacts how many times your attack spells hit which at high levels seems like it could be really powerful.
What do the defense stats do? They're flat out subtracted from the damage done from an attack for each hit. It looks like a typical mob (looked up gargoyle stats) attacks 9 times for 62 damage per swing. My samurai has 39 defense, so he'll actually take 23 damage from 9 swings or 207 total. (Ignoring misses for now.) With the genji glove on he'll take 11 damage from 9 swings or 99 total. That's a pretty substantial reduction. The 33% evade from elf cloak would only knock that 207 down to 138.
On the other hand my ninja only has 22 defense. She'd be taking 40 damage from 9 swings for 360 total. Genji glove knocks that down to 252 while elf cloak knocks it down to 240.
So it would seem a heavily armored dude might want to stack on even more armor but any squishies would rather have the dodge from the elf cloak. Elf cloak also has better other stats (go faster, cast better, have magic defense) so I like sticking with it. Guard ring is a little worse than genji glove when it comes to physical attacks but it's substantially better when it comes to magic attacks. It also weighs less and the free regen, while not great, is still something.
Gargoyles are reasonably tough enemies (they guard the entrance to the lithograph dungeons) but bosses and the like are going to hit even harder. As the damage number gets bigger the extra evade will get better and better. I'm pretty sure I'm going to stick with 3 elf capes and the guard ring. Makes me sad that I went to all the effort to steal the genji glove only to leave it in my bag, but thems the breaks I guess.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Final Fantasy V: Move Over, Galuf
I'm most of the way through the second world in Final Fantasy V and hit a major plot point. X-Death somehow tricked us into unsealing 4 more crystals that were holding him back. Essentially we had to do a tough boss fight (turns out when you're fighting 4 monsters with brutal low health attacks you shouldn't cast berserk on your best guy... He ends up spreading out the damage!) and then hand them over to him. X-Death is about to use the crystals to kill off the party when Krile (Galuf's granddaughter) comes to the rescue! She manages to knock X-Death out with a single spell. Then she does what all stupid good-guys do... She didn't hit him with a coup-de-grace. Instead she turned her back on him and came to help out the party. Obviously he then stood up and destroyed her. Galuf got bitter and went all Tellah on X-Death. He got dazed enough to run off with the crystals and left us alone, but Galuf died.
This seems odd. If I hadn't played the game before I'd be concerned. I've spent hours farming AP for Galuf and he's almost mastered both white mage and time mage. I don't want to start over! It turns out Krile joins your party in his place and absorbs all his accumulated xp and AP. Woo! She is slightly different in that she has different base stats. She seems to have about 8% less maximum health than Galuf did but she gets her turn a little faster. Which was a little annoying in that it changed up the turn order (from Faris, Nick, Lena, Galuf to Faris, Nick, Krile, Lena) and Galuf/Krile have the healing staff so I want to be attacking my own team with them. I once made Lena attack someone who was low by force of habit and she sure killed them. Oops!
I've also mastered my first two jobs. Lena mastered monk and Faris mastered thief. I'm not sure what to do with them now! I switched Lena to a ninja with the counter sub ability thinking that could do a lot of damage. I switched Faris to a knight with the mug ability so I can keep stealing things while being tanky. Nick remains a sorcerer and Krile is going to keep leveling white/time mages.
This seems odd. If I hadn't played the game before I'd be concerned. I've spent hours farming AP for Galuf and he's almost mastered both white mage and time mage. I don't want to start over! It turns out Krile joins your party in his place and absorbs all his accumulated xp and AP. Woo! She is slightly different in that she has different base stats. She seems to have about 8% less maximum health than Galuf did but she gets her turn a little faster. Which was a little annoying in that it changed up the turn order (from Faris, Nick, Lena, Galuf to Faris, Nick, Krile, Lena) and Galuf/Krile have the healing staff so I want to be attacking my own team with them. I once made Lena attack someone who was low by force of habit and she sure killed them. Oops!
I've also mastered my first two jobs. Lena mastered monk and Faris mastered thief. I'm not sure what to do with them now! I switched Lena to a ninja with the counter sub ability thinking that could do a lot of damage. I switched Faris to a knight with the mug ability so I can keep stealing things while being tanky. Nick remains a sorcerer and Krile is going to keep leveling white/time mages.
Monday, June 18, 2012
Final Fantasy V: Stupid Idea
Over the weekend I watched the fourth crystal get shattered. On the plus side this gave me the rest of the jobs (except Mimic). On the minus side this released the big bad (X-Death) from his prison. On the plus side he didn't seem terribly interested in my planet and made a beeline for his home world. On the minus side his home world is also Galuf's home world and Galuf wants to go stop X-Death from doing evil things there. There's only enough power left in our meteorites to warp between worlds one more time so Galuf heads back leaving the other three members of my party behind.
WHY!??!??!?!
Clearly my party has no idea of the concept 'Never Split The Party'. If we'd all just gone together we probably could have stopped X-Death right away before he powered up again. Of course, it seems like it would have worked out this way, too. Galuf mustered an army and was in a great position to take X-Death down...
Unfortunately for him the rest of the party had other ideas. Without Galuf around we turned to Cid and Mid and got them to power up the meteorites for 'just one more' warp in order to send ourselves to Galuf's planet. (If we'd just gone in the first place then Cid could have brought us back and everything would be fantastic.) So of course we end up getting captured by X-Death and he uses us as hostages to buy enough time to power up his super shield and survive. So many stupid ideas from the characters.
Maybe a stupid idea, maybe just a way to make the game hard, but with Galuf gone from the party you don't run into any random encounters but you do have to fight three different and difficult boss fights. Galuf also took all his gear with him, so if you'd loaded him up with unique items you're just down those items for the boss fights. (He had my healing staff and one of my elf cloaks.) He was also the character I had leveling white and time mage which meant he was pretty much all of my utility. I was left with a sorcerer with 2-handed, a monk with +10% hp, and a thief with flee. Not the best for winning a long fight...
First boss fight is against 6 bombs. They sometimes explode for 3 times my max health. When you kill one, if any other ones are dead, it brings them back to life. There are, I think, 4 ways to win this fight. You can run them out of mana so they can't cast arise, you can hope they all explode without ever casting arise (and you rez up between explodes), you can use the trainer control action to make them explode each other, or you can kill them all at the same time. The no-healing, all single target damage party? Not able to win. I came back a second time with everyone as a fresh black mage and just nuked them all down with ice2 over and over. They all died at the same time (thankfully I burned them out before they started exploding) and I won.
Second boss fight has a death attack which does 500 damage to everyone. Most of my people have less than 500 max health. Fortunately I switched Lena back into a monk with +10% hp so I won this fight without having to try a second time.
Third boss fight is against a boss with two massive AE attacks and a pathetic melee attack. I had a white mage and a red mage for this fight and that wasn't enough healing so I died. I came back in the second time with two white mages and beat him up.
WHY!??!??!?!
Clearly my party has no idea of the concept 'Never Split The Party'. If we'd all just gone together we probably could have stopped X-Death right away before he powered up again. Of course, it seems like it would have worked out this way, too. Galuf mustered an army and was in a great position to take X-Death down...
Unfortunately for him the rest of the party had other ideas. Without Galuf around we turned to Cid and Mid and got them to power up the meteorites for 'just one more' warp in order to send ourselves to Galuf's planet. (If we'd just gone in the first place then Cid could have brought us back and everything would be fantastic.) So of course we end up getting captured by X-Death and he uses us as hostages to buy enough time to power up his super shield and survive. So many stupid ideas from the characters.
Maybe a stupid idea, maybe just a way to make the game hard, but with Galuf gone from the party you don't run into any random encounters but you do have to fight three different and difficult boss fights. Galuf also took all his gear with him, so if you'd loaded him up with unique items you're just down those items for the boss fights. (He had my healing staff and one of my elf cloaks.) He was also the character I had leveling white and time mage which meant he was pretty much all of my utility. I was left with a sorcerer with 2-handed, a monk with +10% hp, and a thief with flee. Not the best for winning a long fight...
First boss fight is against 6 bombs. They sometimes explode for 3 times my max health. When you kill one, if any other ones are dead, it brings them back to life. There are, I think, 4 ways to win this fight. You can run them out of mana so they can't cast arise, you can hope they all explode without ever casting arise (and you rez up between explodes), you can use the trainer control action to make them explode each other, or you can kill them all at the same time. The no-healing, all single target damage party? Not able to win. I came back a second time with everyone as a fresh black mage and just nuked them all down with ice2 over and over. They all died at the same time (thankfully I burned them out before they started exploding) and I won.
Second boss fight has a death attack which does 500 damage to everyone. Most of my people have less than 500 max health. Fortunately I switched Lena back into a monk with +10% hp so I won this fight without having to try a second time.
Third boss fight is against a boss with two massive AE attacks and a pathetic melee attack. I had a white mage and a red mage for this fight and that wasn't enough healing so I died. I came back in the second time with two white mages and beat him up.
Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Final Fantasy V: Stealing
One of the first 6 jobs earned in Final Fantasy V is the thief job. I've always been drawn to thieves in games. Even when they're absolute garbage like in the original Final Fantasy or early D&D I still want to play a thief. Maybe I like being sneaky? Maybe I hate leaving treasure behind? (It could be in a locked chest I can't open or on a monster I can't steal from.) Maybe it's the one fantasy role I could actually see myself doing? I donno. For whatever reason, I made Faris into a thief and she hasn't changed yet.
I vaguely remembered from a previous playthrough that there was a good item that could be stolen in an early dungeon (the mountain where you save the dragon) but I didn't remember from who. So I stole from everyone in sight! It turned out to be a set of glasses off of a tombstone monster and wasn't actually that good. It's pretty much the worst item for the accessory slot but you can steal it before obtaining any other accessories so it is a strict upgrade if you bother farming up 4 of them. (I didn't, this time.)
It has me thinking though... You can clearly steal useful gear from monsters. Is there anything else I should be trying to steal? Is there anything I absolutely need to steal? (Final Fantasy III had the best dragoon weapon available only by stealing it, for example.) I decided to go through the list of all monsters and make note of any that drop particularly interesting stuff for future reference. Note that when you steal you have a 40% chance to get something and then have a 10 in 256 chance of stealing a rare item and a 246 in 256 chance of stealing the normal item. Note the glasses were a 'normal' item so it isn't necessarily bad. You can only steal one item per monster and can raise your success chance to 80% by equipping the thief gloves (which also give 4 defense and 2 agility so you want to equip them anyway).
Note I don't really know when these enemies appear so it's possible this stuff is actually obsolete by the time you can steal them?
I vaguely remembered from a previous playthrough that there was a good item that could be stolen in an early dungeon (the mountain where you save the dragon) but I didn't remember from who. So I stole from everyone in sight! It turned out to be a set of glasses off of a tombstone monster and wasn't actually that good. It's pretty much the worst item for the accessory slot but you can steal it before obtaining any other accessories so it is a strict upgrade if you bother farming up 4 of them. (I didn't, this time.)
It has me thinking though... You can clearly steal useful gear from monsters. Is there anything else I should be trying to steal? Is there anything I absolutely need to steal? (Final Fantasy III had the best dragoon weapon available only by stealing it, for example.) I decided to go through the list of all monsters and make note of any that drop particularly interesting stuff for future reference. Note that when you steal you have a 40% chance to get something and then have a 10 in 256 chance of stealing a rare item and a 246 in 256 chance of stealing the normal item. Note the glasses were a 'normal' item so it isn't necessarily bad. You can only steal one item per monster and can raise your success chance to 80% by equipping the thief gloves (which also give 4 defense and 2 agility so you want to equip them anyway).
Note I don't really know when these enemies appear so it's possible this stuff is actually obsolete by the time you can steal them?
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Final Fantasy V: True Colours
I had a thought while playing Final Fantasy V last week that really shows the way I approach games... I'd just reached the second castle after the first crystal had shattered. We were on our way to warn the king that his crystal was going to shatter as well and terrible things would happen. We show up and start talking to him and he blows out concerns off. "Just because your crystal blew up doesn't mean mine is going to! My people like the power they gain by abusing the crystal." My party tries to talk some sense into him when suddenly a meteor crashes into the ground near the tower in which they store the crystal. The ominous sense of urgency music starts playing. A guard runs in and tells the king what happened. The kings freaks out, tells all his guards to come with him, and runs off to the tower. It's clear from the music and the story that I'm expected to rush after him too. Maybe if I get there in time I can save the crystal from the meteor!
Instead I think to myself "The king and all the guards are gone? Time to ransack this place!" and run off to scour every inch of his castle for fat loots. Must get all of the stuffs! (And I thought I might be unique, but in order to get the right sound clip I found a "Let's Play" for the game at this spot and the voice over from the guy playing it also immediately mentions looting the castle after the king runs off.)
A little further on you get stuck in an exploding castle. You have 10 minutes to get out but there are tons of monster-in-a-box treasures to get. I ended up playing through 3 times on the bus this morning to make sure I got all the relevant loot (skipping some elixirs). I only would have done it twice but the game actually locked up on me after my second try. (I had learned a hard to learn blue mage spell in that run as well so I'm a little bitter the game froze.)
Instead I think to myself "The king and all the guards are gone? Time to ransack this place!" and run off to scour every inch of his castle for fat loots. Must get all of the stuffs! (And I thought I might be unique, but in order to get the right sound clip I found a "Let's Play" for the game at this spot and the voice over from the guy playing it also immediately mentions looting the castle after the king runs off.)
A little further on you get stuck in an exploding castle. You have 10 minutes to get out but there are tons of monster-in-a-box treasures to get. I ended up playing through 3 times on the bus this morning to make sure I got all the relevant loot (skipping some elixirs). I only would have done it twice but the game actually locked up on me after my second try. (I had learned a hard to learn blue mage spell in that run as well so I'm a little bitter the game froze.)
Monday, June 11, 2012
Final Fantasy V: Job System
Final Fantasy V uses an evolved version of the job system that started in the original Final Fantasy and was refined in Final Fantasy III. It has significant changes over the old systems which I feel are vast improvements. Here's how things changed...
In FFI you could pick a job at the start of the game and then make no other decisions. This meant you had lots of different potential parties you could play with, but couldn't adapt on the fly to interesting challenges. You could evolve all of your characters at once with a sidequest most of the way through the game but there wasn't really a choice there. The upgrades were all strictly superior (well, except for a stupid monk bug) and locked in. A white mage became a white wizard, never a black wizard.
In FFIII you could change your job at any time you weren't in combat. You acquired jobs at different times so often you'd want to change jobs to try new things out or to set up for specific challenges. Unfortunately they built in two mechanics that punished changing jobs. There was an overt punishment where you sucked for a number of fights after changing jobs, and there was a subtle punishment where how good you were at a job was directly related to how many levels you had in the job. Switching around to try different things out was just a bad idea. You also got no benefit for spending time in another job (unless that job had high vitality) after switching out.
In FFV they fixed all of that. Now there's no penalty at all to switching jobs. You might need to juggle a lot of gear sets, I guess, but you don't get a big stat penalty for switching. And there's a benefit to switching jobs! Each job has a blank ability slot which can be filled in with an ability learned by leveling any job. Maybe it's from your current job. Maybe it's from some other job. Want to be a fighter who can heal? Add white magic as your secondary ability. Want to be a white mage who can steal? Level up thief a little, learn the steal skill, then switch to white mage and set steal as your secondary ability. There are tons of different abilities you can learn along the way. As an end game bonus if you've mastered a bunch of jobs you can switch to the bare or mimic job and get the benefits of every mastered job.
The really awesome abilities are all learned after mastering a job, so there's still an incentive to stick with one job. A reason to specialize and a reason to diversify? Sweet!
In FFI you could pick a job at the start of the game and then make no other decisions. This meant you had lots of different potential parties you could play with, but couldn't adapt on the fly to interesting challenges. You could evolve all of your characters at once with a sidequest most of the way through the game but there wasn't really a choice there. The upgrades were all strictly superior (well, except for a stupid monk bug) and locked in. A white mage became a white wizard, never a black wizard.
In FFIII you could change your job at any time you weren't in combat. You acquired jobs at different times so often you'd want to change jobs to try new things out or to set up for specific challenges. Unfortunately they built in two mechanics that punished changing jobs. There was an overt punishment where you sucked for a number of fights after changing jobs, and there was a subtle punishment where how good you were at a job was directly related to how many levels you had in the job. Switching around to try different things out was just a bad idea. You also got no benefit for spending time in another job (unless that job had high vitality) after switching out.
In FFV they fixed all of that. Now there's no penalty at all to switching jobs. You might need to juggle a lot of gear sets, I guess, but you don't get a big stat penalty for switching. And there's a benefit to switching jobs! Each job has a blank ability slot which can be filled in with an ability learned by leveling any job. Maybe it's from your current job. Maybe it's from some other job. Want to be a fighter who can heal? Add white magic as your secondary ability. Want to be a white mage who can steal? Level up thief a little, learn the steal skill, then switch to white mage and set steal as your secondary ability. There are tons of different abilities you can learn along the way. As an end game bonus if you've mastered a bunch of jobs you can switch to the bare or mimic job and get the benefits of every mastered job.
The really awesome abilities are all learned after mastering a job, so there's still an incentive to stick with one job. A reason to specialize and a reason to diversify? Sweet!
Wednesday, June 06, 2012
Final Fantasy V
Final Fantasy V was the last of the core series to be Japan only for its initial release. (Joining FFII and FFIII.) Square didn't think the US gamer could handle the complexities of the job system in FFV and sent us Mystic Quest instead (which has certainly never been accused of complexity). It took seven years for the game to eventually get an English port when it was released in a Playstation bundle along with FFVI. The first time I played the game was on an emulator using a translation mod for the original game. The first (and only) time I've beat the game is in Japanese on my Super Famicom. Using the internet to direct my every move, of course, since I don't speak Japanese. I remember making little notes of what the symbols meant for commonly used things like !White and Yes.
The game is pretty universally reviewed as having an awesome combat/leveling system and subpar plot/character development. Which actually made it sort of ideal for playing in a foreign language. When I was considering how to play the game for this marathon I had to decide if I wanted to do that again. The only copy of FFV I own is the Japanese one, see, and I'd need to quickly find another way to play if I didn't want to muddle through it again. Ultimately I decided not to muddle around and instead went out and got a PSP. It turns out you can actually download and play a ludicrous number of PSOne games on the PSP and has the huge advantage of being portable so I can spend my almost 2 hours of transit time per day playing FFV. And as an added bonus I'd need a PSP for some of the later games (Dissidia in particular) anyway.
So now I have a copy of the game. The next question is what is my plan going to be? I could just play it through normally since I haven't actually done that in English. I could try for a low level game. I could try for a no job game. That last one seems terrible since the job system is the shining jewel of FFV. I started a level 2 game once upon a time but someone ended up saving over top of it. Level 2 with 50+ hours played... Down the drain... That can't happen this time since no one else can play my copy of the game! It can also get a little boring waiting for Galuda to run away but if I'm doing it in small chunks on the bus that doesn't seem so bad. Also apparently there are better ways to level your jobs than just that...
I haven't done anything truly crazy in a while. I think it may just be crazy time...
The game is pretty universally reviewed as having an awesome combat/leveling system and subpar plot/character development. Which actually made it sort of ideal for playing in a foreign language. When I was considering how to play the game for this marathon I had to decide if I wanted to do that again. The only copy of FFV I own is the Japanese one, see, and I'd need to quickly find another way to play if I didn't want to muddle through it again. Ultimately I decided not to muddle around and instead went out and got a PSP. It turns out you can actually download and play a ludicrous number of PSOne games on the PSP and has the huge advantage of being portable so I can spend my almost 2 hours of transit time per day playing FFV. And as an added bonus I'd need a PSP for some of the later games (Dissidia in particular) anyway.
So now I have a copy of the game. The next question is what is my plan going to be? I could just play it through normally since I haven't actually done that in English. I could try for a low level game. I could try for a no job game. That last one seems terrible since the job system is the shining jewel of FFV. I started a level 2 game once upon a time but someone ended up saving over top of it. Level 2 with 50+ hours played... Down the drain... That can't happen this time since no one else can play my copy of the game! It can also get a little boring waiting for Galuda to run away but if I'm doing it in small chunks on the bus that doesn't seem so bad. Also apparently there are better ways to level your jobs than just that...
I haven't done anything truly crazy in a while. I think it may just be crazy time...
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