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About Integrity
- Birthday 08/16/1991
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always have high high hopes
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Favorite Fire Emblem Game
Fates: Revelation
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i feel vaguely owned but i'm not entirely sure why
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colder take than mine but go off
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you're going to be sickened because i think vaan rules lol
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he's wrong in that it's super inflammatory for absolutely no reason, but he's not wrong in that people leap quickly and often to "x character got done dirty" in the only piece of fiction they have ever existed in, because it's such a silly thing to say - a missed opportunity compared to the other version of the character you concocted? it's a weirdly prevalent criticism for how baseless it is on the flip side that's a really silly opinion to hold, tons of competently written games have interesting protagonists, and holding the games that deliberately don't have them like every single nintendo game and just cause in the calculus that leads to "almost never" is just disingenuous e: i guess this is your unpopular game opinion and you're actually postin' correctly. damn.
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yeah wesnoth thrives on chaos and adaptation far more than fire emblem ever has. it's a fantastic game and i adore it to pieces despite itself, but it's very much not fire emblem in any fundamental way and agreed on the high hit chance hexes - the quite good zachtronics strategy game möbius front '83 is hex-based with high hit rates and short times to kill if you have an appropriate weapon (being based on late cold war tech). the counterpunch and sweep is, appropriately, obscenely prioritized compared to any kind of defensive play, which generally exists to let you have a screening force die to alert you to an enemy push or to take an extra turn dying so as to provide vision afterwards. that's also a really fun form of strategy! it's not at all fire emblem.
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this is actually a great point that i didn't touch on - a huge strength of the fire emblem formula is its relative predictability in addition to relatively lower mobility. the actual combat mechanics of fire emblem really take a backseat to that, and adding intrigue to it (like via hexes) dilutes that strength and goes back to the question of why the mechanical base is fire emblem instead of something else, imo
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alright, gomenasai for the delay (work! work!!) but badges are working on skins again and the calendar issue should be solved direct any complaints to me thank you much love
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i used to be strongly hexpilled but i've cooled on them recently. they have their place, absolutely, but there was a time when everyone would scream about how hexes were simply better (i was among them ofc) and i think that's a pretty poor way to look at it zapp's pretty much got the right of it that hexes both increase mobility (depending on the diagonal movement rules you use) and decrease any ability to set up a front, which generally leads to less defensive play and more ability to create and execute a sweep. mechanics can change this, for sure, but it's a loose generalization. i think for fire emblem style combat - e.g. generally fast times to kill, simple mathematics, positioning fairly agnostic - it's a pretty bad idea unless you've got a really solid reason to be going for hexes. by the time you've strapped enough mechanics onto the combat to make using hexes a good idea, i think you're necessarily going to move away from "fire emblem type combat", if that makes sense. battle brothers is a fantastic use of hexes that would not work with squares, for instance, but plays nothing like fire emblem outside of the very top-level "it is a tactical role playing game" sense. e: for a concrete example of that, zone of control mechanics are all-but-mandatory to have a functional hex system, whereas they're far less needed (but sometimes appreciated) in a square system
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ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 150. final fantasy vi)
Integrity replied to Integrity's topic in General Gaming
this actually made me think long past my bedtime kefka, as a character, is really two elements of guy: a representative of the empire and the genocide clown who blows up the world. ff6's core issue is, then, twofold: that the empire doesn't really exist outside of as an enabler of kefka's omnicide, and there is absolutely no real handoff between those two versions of kefka. if the guy who shows up at figaro and the guy who poisons doma had been two different, non-kefka, guys, the plot of ff6 would have almost exactly the same weight that it does. he doesn't really exist within the power structures of the empire, because the empire doesn't really exist. it's only gestahl, leo, and plot-convenient invincible goons to shuffle you to the right parts of the world and not the wrong ones. there's no real oppression to it, and as such he's just a guy who suddenly becomes a god and blows everything up. so this goes into him "winning" - winning what? i'm not disagreeing with you that it gets held up as kefka winning, because people absolutely do, but he isn't a character as of when he wins. he's just a natural disaster in the SimCity vein. the empire's gone, the clown's gone, his personality's gone, he just regresses to JRPG Nihilism Villain standards. he's no deeper than medeus now, but because you saw him before he became medeus, people hold him up as so nuanced. but the problem is that nothing about him before this led to him blowing up the world; he wanted to become the most powerful, sure, and there's a real point to be made about unintended consequences, but that's a point that needs to be followed up on and it never is. he's just the funny clown who you kick the ass of, and then he becomes impossibly powerful, and then he blows up the world, and then he stops being a character at all. what i'm saying by all this is that kefka is nothing more than a silly elemental evil, which is fine, but ff6bros tend to degrade the story of ff5 for not having a proper villain. who is exdeath, an elemental evil. what is actually the difference between exdeath and kefka? exdeath wins too, he literally collides the worlds and destroys a bunch of both. he gets three montages to a sweet electric guitar of him removing cities you've been to. kefka does an entire fucking biblical flood and most (all?) of the towns you've been to are still there, and why? what did he win? his intention was never communicated as blowing up the world at any point in the entire game before this. he accomplished something big, absolutely, and that is not the same as him achieving his goals. there's a point to be made about this all happening out of pure spite because of the blow celes deals him in the sequence where he blows up the world. the problem with that, for me, is that sabin literally has to kick the shit out him repeatedly before this, and celes is never portrayed as either narratively or mechanically particularly stronger than anyone else in the party. when kefka is fully powered up, celes deals him such a blow that he tilts into blowing the entire world up out of spite. how is the person who does that the same guy who survived having his ass kicked by sabin three times, while sabin let him walk away every time (a different issue, to be sure)? there is no contiguity between the kefka of figaro/doma and the kefka who blows up the world. there is no kefka who blows up the world. he's lesser than exdeath, a cartoon villain. i have brought myself around to a new mode of thinking during this freeform writing exercise at one in the morning: kefka actually sucks shit. he's actually a terrible villain. the only reason he's well-regarded is because a ton of people online grew up with him, because he came out in that crucial 1994-1999 period where all the GOAT games suspiciously come from, and people don't critically examine media. i have become radicalized. -
ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 150. final fantasy vi)
Integrity replied to Integrity's topic in General Gaming
ah, honey, you're games early. the whole PS1 trilogy (7-8-9) are ATB at its peak, then 10 finally shoots it in the skull, then 10-2 brings it back from the dead for a fun last rodeo. THEN it will be dead. -
ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 150. final fantasy vi)
Integrity replied to Integrity's topic in General Gaming
FINAL FANTASY VI (SQUARE, 1994) Finished: 13/3/24. Playtime: 34.7 hours. Final Fantasy 6 is a weird beast, reputationally. Time once was, twenty-odd years ago, that the only two opinions one could have about the franchise were that 6 was the best or that 7 was the best, with the occasional weirdo who insisted on 4 or 10. Final Fantasy 7 kind of had a popular backlash due to its absolute prominence, and "not getting" 7 would become kinda vogue for a little while, before the remakes catapulted it back into the public eye. 6, though, never really had a backlash. It's still fairly uncontroversial except among the absolute dweebiest echelons of RPG fans to think it's one of the best JRPGS ever, possibly even the best. Ike, you say, it's always alarming when you begin a post like this! Yeah. Cards on the table: I still liked Final Fantasy 6, but it was largely despite itself, and I still haven't quite broken down all of why it didn't really work for me. Let's get started with the single most uncontroversial take of all: the graphical leap from 5 to 6, even with the relatively-normalized Pixel Remaster graphics, is frankly gobsmacking. Final Fantasy 6's environmental spriting is an obscene step forward from the previous SNES games, and is still capable of looking quite pretty. Not always, mind - there's more than enough of the same mountain cave tileset to go around - but the highs are lofty and the lows are only forgettable. Your guys emote more and better and the game uses its environmental interactions and canned animations to accomplish so much more than was done even in 5, which was itself a quantum leap above all four games before it. Onto the plot, then, and probably my most controversial to balance that out: I don't think it's good. I made a comment in the 4 recap that its story needed to be "more serious and coherent, like 6's" and what I've learned in the last few days is that I was kind of wrong. 6's plot wanders from tonal extreme to tonal extreme like a damn coin flipping in the air. Actual depictions of murdered children are followed immediately, as in a minute later by slapstick physical comedy. You go through a pretty unremarkable dungeon punctuated by another fight against Ultros (I now have a blood feud with 6 for inventing Ultros) to go straight into an active genocide happening. You unleash the Espers on the world, destroying the imperial capital and causing them to sue for peace (it is a ruse, you fool), and when you arrive you're greeted by a time attack minigame to run all around the palace talking to all the soldiers and kicking some of their asses. The World of Ruin keeps its tone more consistent, but that's only the back third of the game. At no point in the World of Balance does Final Fantasy 6 have any idea what to show and what voice to use, so it simply uses all of its voices constantly to holler everything - except for when it doesn't show you your controllable party doing cool things off camera, for some reason. Hell, this tonal inconsistently holds to the end of the entire game, where you're treated to consecutive scenes of all of the magic fading from the world and the party speculating if Terra will simply wither and expire for real, and then Cyan having a senior moment where he cannot figure out how to press a button. A big chunk of the blame lies on good old Kefka and the Empire in general. I found Kefka to be an utterly uncompelling villain and the game completely fumbled the ball in all of its attempts to set him up as a threat. There is no establishing moment between "funny clown guy who Sabin kicks the shit out of repeatedly" and "everyone quakes at the Kefka Laugh." The Empire, similarly, is represented as such a background entity that when it needs to be an immediate and present threat, like during Gestahl's betrayal, I was never left satisfied feeling like I'd underestimated them or that this was the logical process of events. Even 4, my beloathed, did a better job of setting up its Empire as oppressive and threatening. Even 3 did, and it hardly had one. Then Kefka betrays everyone and blows up the world, but also excises himself from the plot until you take your airship up to fight him in 8-12 hours. The World of Ruin does have a generally-higher standard behind it, honestly. I liked it quite a bit more. Its problem is more that it's utterly unreactive. Outside of recruiting party members, the world is completely static and you're under absolutely no narrative or actual pressure to get on with it and fight Kefka. The world's in this steady state where Kefka might be destroying it, but he hasn't got about it for the last year, and he shows no signs of it. It's a post-apocalyptic, putting-society-back-together world, but you're neither putting society back together nor scavenging through the ashes, nor is there any opposing force trying to stop you. It's just sort of on you to go out and find all your guys and solve their little crises so that you can get a squad together to go kill Kefka. It almost feels like a bonus epilogue rather than the final third of the game. One major culprit for all of this is absolutely 6's cast. The non-bonus cast comes in at a whopping 12, and with optionals 14, a figure I'm fairly certain is completely unmatched in the main numbered Final Fantasies. Balancing screentime to any meaningful degree for 12 characters is a massive undertaking at the best of times, let alone writing it onto a Super Famicom cartridge, and Final Fantasy 6 absolutely does not manage it. It doesn't really try, to its credit; there's a core core cast of probably seven guys who constitute 70% of the screentime. The Final Fantasy 4 problem then also rears its head, but worse, in the World of Balance, as you're tugged between characters and groups of characters doing various things before the game has really had a chance to find its footing. 6's pacing would be massively improved in every imaginable way by simply excising Sabin's part of the tri-split, including all the fallout that comes from removing Cyan and Gau from the game. Of course, that part of the story is the only part that does any meaningful Kefka setup at all. The World of Ruin doesn't fall into this trap, but goes whole hog Fire Emblem - any given character is only relevant to the bit where you get them, and for most a bonus scene or two, and for some relevance to recruiting another character. Since you can nominally go challenge Kefka with only Celes, Sabin, Edger, and Setzer, the game very rarely conditionally assumes that any of the rest of the cast is around, leaving them to get generic lines, just to be aboard your boat, or in some cases (Terra's recruitment) to simply not even show up in cutscenes. In the first world, nobody really gets time to breathe because there's too much scene changing and tonal tugging-around; in the second world, nobody really gets time to breathe because almost everybody is "optional". It's such a maddening own goal, and it would have been so easy to simply not commit it. This carries over into character balance, as well. I'll talk about the gameplay in a moment, but the customization and progression slots in better here. One of 6's most-touted features, and the one I've come around to liking less and less, is the Magicite system. Essentially, in a prototype for what would become Materia and Guardian Forces later, you equip your summons directly to your guys, hot swap at any time, one per guy. Each Magicite confers three things: a once-per-battle summon, a bonus to some growth, and permanently learnable magic based on the Magicite equipped. What this means, in practice, is that everybody you use semi-heavily is continually converging on becoming interchangeable omniwizards. Once you have Ultima, every single member of your party is 20-50 random battles away from being able to cast Ultima, only rate-limited by one person being able to learn it at a time. It's not like you're stopped from teaching the other party members Holy and Flare at the same time, though, those are on other Magicite. By the time you get to the ends of each world, if you've used a semi-consistent party, all of them are able to cast your best- or second-best white and black magics and a whole bevy of support spells. And, since magic is quite strong, and Magicite itself can confer +MAG growths on your less wizardly, this means you're always converging on the point where everyone you've used contributes exactly the same but to a degree impacted only by how much you've used them. Identity washes away in a much shorter long term than it does in the job-based games. Where does that identity come from, then? Each character is defined by an in-combat gimmick ability (or ability menu). These are absolutely raucously unbalanced. Of your first four guys you pick up, you get nothing (later a super-form), regular old Steal, the ability to put in directional commands for extra physical damage, and the ability to do roughly spell damage to all enemies for free every single turn. The balance only devolves from there, with the game tossing you two different flavors of Blue Mage where one is defined by making everything far more of a pain to learn and being far more unreliable at using the abilities he's gotten, and one of the optional party members having the "bonus" of always being berzerk. Some of these, it should be noted, age far worse than others - Edgar's Tools start out oppressively strong but taper off as you get more options to become merely competitive and then to wash away, but by the time they're washing away, he's become the same omniwizard as everybody else. At every point in the game before the convergence happens, there are incredibly obvious haves and have-nots, lending more credence to the thought that 6 could have benefited deeply from a trimmed-down and more fleshed-out cast. Let's take that opportunity to move into talking about the mechanical changes 6 makes. I'm still unpacking the systemic ramifications of this, but suffice to say I'm down on the change: ATB bars do not pause while animations are executing anymore. This sounds like a relatively small change, but in context I think it works out to making the game more enjoyable on account of 6 being fairly easy, but a hell of a lot worse fundamentally. The effect on game speed is instant and obvious: instead of playing like a shitty turn-based game, someone's bar is nearly always full and ready to go. Fights more consistently have something happening, be it you selecting options or animations playing out, and that does address one of the issues with ATB I'd complained about in earlier posts. This, however, introduces one major new problem: an action queue. In the playcalling games, you called out 1-4 actions and the AI did the same with its 1-9 dudes, the order of them was determined based on agility and some noise, and then the 2-13 actions played out in sequence. Straightforward. In 4 and 5, someone's bar filled up, you selected an action to execute, and it executed either immediately (in many cases) or at the end of the current playing animation (in the case of the AI getting a turn between your turn coming up and you selecting an action, or you having multiple actions in a row). This is also pretty straightforward, but a little more complex - you could feasibly "buffer" actions, like if Bartz and Lenna's actions came up together, you could cast Raise with Bartz, swap control to Lenna while the animation is playing and time is frozen, and cast Cura with her on the dead guy knowing that the dead guy would come up and be immediately healed by Lenna before time resumed. In 6, time no longer freezes. Between Raise's animation beginning and you navigating down to Magic on the second guy, the AI may or may not have had a turn come up and may or may not have queued an action. In the best case, everything goes off like it would have in 5. In the worst case, invisibly to you, the AI's turn coincided with Lenna's and it queued a target-all Fira, which is now queued for after Bartz's Raise but before Lenna's Cura that you just confirmed, and you've just removed your ability to respond to it because you cannot cancel Lenna's Cura. This isn't a subtle issue that you really have to dig deep to find, either; it can manifest as early as the tutorial boss of the game. It's a fixed fight, with you and two goons in mecha suits with colored lasers to shoot, and the boss is a giant snail whose shell is targetable and absorbs lasers and dishes out big counterattacks when hit. As Final Fantasy tutorial bosses are weirdly wont to do, it periodically retracts into its shell to go into counter stance and you have to hold your fire until it comes back out. Makes sense, yeah? So here's the situation: you see your ATB bars, you do not see the enemy's. Terra's, Biggs', and Wedge's turns all come up relatively close to one another. You fire the laser with Terra, she begins the animation, and control swaps to Biggs. Logic dictates: boss is out of his shell, fire the second laser! In actuality, at any point after Terra's laser began, and time did not freeze for the animation, the snail's turn may have come up and he may have selected to retract into his shell. If you press the laser button with Biggs now and the boss has not acted, you will get an extra shot of the laser on the boss. If you press the laser button with Biggs now and the boss has acted, the laser command will go into the action queue after the boss retracts into his shell, causing you to eat tremendous shit. If you do nothing with Biggs, and let the laser animation play out, you concede action economy to the boss, because his ATB bar is charging the whole time and yours are not. If you simply queue all lasers as fast as you can and inshallah, and you go fast enough, you'll probably get them all into the queue in a row, but there's going to be that chance that the boss slid into the middle and you're going to eat some tremendous shit. I'm not speaking hypotheticals, I'm just reciting how my fight went here: in my case, the boss came up between Terra and Biggs, and the resulting counters killed Terra and nearly Wedge while my hands were off the keyboard. The problem, in my opinion, only compounds in magnitude because there is a way to avoid both of those situations I outlined in the tutorial boss snail fight: you can simply freeze the fight. If, on Biggs' turn with ATB Wait mode on, you select the laser target but hover it instead of confirming, time will be stopped. You can watch Terra's whole laser animation play out, wait to see the next action resolve or not happen because the snail's turn did not come up, and then decide whether to throw out the laser or cancel the order. Essentially, as long as you have a guy ready to act, you can crowbar the game into sort-of working like it used to, slow the game down and let things resolve before deciding how to act. My issue comes up here in that this change to ATB, which serves primarily to speed up fights to make them more interesting to watch, goes further in the direction of destroying tactical depth unless you deliberately take very videogamey actions to slow the game right back down and undo as much of its impact as you can. It's a fix designed exclusively to patch a hole introduced by a system change that already doesn't do enough to earn its own keep. It is, in a word, bad. It gets worse as the game goes on, too. Remember that whole converging-on-omniwizards thing? Let's say you've got a typical lategame setup of 3-4 guys slinging Ultima/Flare/Holy every turn. If you're on Normal battle speed (or higher, but higher speed does not equate faster animations), any two of those animations will be longer than it takes for your slowest party member's ATB bar to refill from nothing. Speed no longer matters beyond who acts first; we've converged right back to the playcalling days by near-complete accident. Add in late bosses having their own spell lists as well (fuckin' Southern Cross, yipes) with sometimes-long animations, and add in Haste, and you can have a guy's action reliably coming back up before the next guy's action finishes resolving. It becomes action economy gridlock, where battles all play out in turnbased mode, a wizard throwing a spell every action, or where you tacticall reserve a fourth guy to freeze the timer with a dummy action while all your Ultimas resolve, and then unfreeze it while the boss attacks, so you're gaining action economy by slowing the whole system down in a really silly way. I think this aspect of the game would gain a lot more flak from people if not for the simple fact that Final Fantasy 6 is absurdly easy to break open, even by accident, and is a generally (1-3 dungeons aside) really easy entry in the franchise. The cracks don't show if you're not predisposed to look for them. Weirdly, I still enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy 6 for the most part. It's the worst of the good ones so far, underneath all the odd numbers, but it's still a whole echelon above the other evens. I can't call it a good game or call it a bad game because there's too much game to make a singular judgment call on and not enough cohesion between all its constituent parts. It's a game that I can see being exceptionally impressive in 1994, and I think that there's a reasonable argument that this was the first Most Game that would later spawn Yakuza 5, Resident Evil 6, and Dave the Diver, but looking back on it 15 years later with a relative freshness has really just shown me how tenuously held together the genuinely impressive package is. Melancholic, for sure. I wish I'd liked Final Fantasy 6 more, or I wish I were more confident in exactly why it didn't land as it ought to have, and maybe someday I'll really unpack it. For now, though, oh well. Onto the other half, shall we. Everything said about previous Final Fantasies holds, but more things are even more missable now. There are single-visit dungeons with treasure and bestiary entries to be missed in both the World of Balance and in the World of Ruin, and clearly a bunch of shit becomes missed if you don't have it when Kefka blows up the world. You can't even be meticulous about it yourself, though, because some shared locations like Figaro have item/treasure entries that are not accessible until the World of Ruin (a problem 5 had, but to a lesser degree), so it's not enough to max places out as you go. As with 5, several of these are in timed sequences you really should have no business dithering around in, including the famous "wait at the end of the world for the timer to run out to save Shadow" nonsense. The get-alls now include not only Magicite (which is a pain in the ass and is super missable), but include filling out the lists of commands for your command-based guys: Edgar's Tools, Sabin's Blitzes, and Cyan's Bushido. None of these are difficult, and I don't think any of the Tools are missable. The Blitzes are simple (get Sabin to level 42, he's already one of your best guys) and the Bushido just involves doing Cyan's Dreamscape in the World of Ruin, which already has bestiary entries and treasure you need to get anyway. Easy. For your traditional Blue Mage, you have to acquire any 20 of the 26ish Blue Magics in the game, which is not a particularly onerous feat, particularly since he only has to be in the party and to see the spell cast in order to learn it, no longer having to be targeted by it like in 5. For your other Blue Mage, Gau, the worst, let's talk about the Veldt. Most non-boss enemies that you meet in the game, upon being first defeated, begin to spawn in the Veldt, an island on the world map. Fighting in the Veldt does not give you any experience and is the only way for Gau to learn new abilities. When you get into a random encounter, only on the Veldt, Gau can use Leap to end the fight instantly and leave the party. He'll come back after you fight 1-4 battles without him on the Veldt and rejoin you if you don't kill him because you left autobattle on, and he'll rejoin with the abilities of whatever monsters were present in the fight he ended when he left. Your instant inclination may be to note that this is a huge pain in the ass, particularly because most of them are shit and you cannot rig random encounters to be something he doesn't have; you are correct. The non-Pixel Remaster had an achievement for gathering all two hundred and fifty-three of them, in groups of 1-3, not even being guaranteed to get a fight that has one he needs. The Pixel Remaster, blessedly, only requires getting 50. It's still about 45 too many. One other thing to highlight that's not particularly long but is absolutely the worst is the Coliseum. The Coliseum is a place you go in the World of Ruin, wager pieces of gear, and there's a table that gets referenced to see what you fight and what the item turns into after the fight. You choose one guy to do the fighting, and the AI takes over until you or the enemy have died. Remember how the convergence is on interchangeable omniwizards? Your guys' scripts are completely randomized. Get ready to enjoy watching Celes cast Reflect on herself, and then Reflect on herself again, Reflecting Reflect to the enemy, and then casting Thundaga on the enemy, Reflecting it back onto herself. Then she'll use Runic, her spell-nullifying ability, four consecutive times against a physical attacker. It's no fun, it sucks even when you're prepared for it, and you have to win any ten battles in it for an achievement. On top of that, there's a bestiary entry you can only access through the Coliseum. If you have the right flavor of hubris, you can also fight a fair number of rare-spawn enemies here if you don't feel like grinding spawn RNG and would rather try grinding action RNG. I did for a few. Always nice to vary the flavor of crap you eat, right? Speaking of randomness, Setzer! Setzer's unique action in the game is Slots, which... spins slots. The slots are, of course, rigged against you. There is an achievement for getting 7-7-7 on them, killing the enemy party instantly. In previous versions of this game, there have existed various RNG rigs and input pause buffer strats to semi-reliably (with 15-20 minutes of drilling yourself) get to 7-7-7. They do not appear to work in Pixel Remaster by my experience. However, if at all intend to do this game in my footsteps, heed one piece of advice I got from some random Redditor: get this as soon as you leave Vector, the imperial capital, for the first time after escaping the Magitek Research Facility. Make a party of only Setzer and talk to the robot guarding the entrance. He is invincible and will counter all attacks made against him, but Slots is not an attack. Do Slots and press autobattle. The only two outcomes that will stop Setzer from doing the slots over and over again are the one that kills the enemy party and the one that kills your party. I died about twelve times over the course of an hour spamming this. It's fire-and-forget, and if you move too far into the game after it, there's nowhere close to as convenient a way to do it ever again. Finally, as always, there's the level achievement. They've all had 'em, whether they be reasonable (1) or postgame exp boost grinds (4). This one is far in the camp of the latter. The achievement is for all fourteen party members to hit level 50 (hope you didn't let Shadow die, lol). I finished the game with Edgar, Sabin, and Celes at 46-48, two or three others in the 38-42 range, and most of the rest in the middling to low 30s, with a special shoutout to Gau at 22 after I'd already dragged him through some levels while walking around the overworld. He was 12 when I started the World of Ruin, and does not scale up on his own. With 4x EXP and the Growth Egg (an equippable which itself doubles experience earned), hunting for the last bestiary entry in the Dinosaur Forest with Edgar carrying dualcast Ultima, it only took an hour or so to grind everyone up and for the Brachiosaur to not spawn. After going back to my main team, I had to level Edgar all the way up to the 80s before the bastard spawned, marking the last thing I needed to ice the game. Whew. And 7 is bigger! I'm in danger. -
this used to be possible many (like 10) years ago, to save on bandwidth for the user, but the options been long deprecated and no legacy of it remains in the ip.board backend that i could dig up sorry to report
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ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 150. final fantasy vi)
Integrity replied to Integrity's topic in General Gaming
it's not remotely similar because the "skills" are far more impactful than those and they're hotswappable for situations and situations are designed to reward you for having/choosing them and they fundamentally modify how your guys work and a bunch of other things. you could make a really lame argument that it's similar on a very superficial level, but in every single way that matters it's completely different i have accomplished my truest goal -
ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 150. final fantasy vi)
Integrity replied to Integrity's topic in General Gaming
yeah this was VERY much an issue with ff3 - there's literally no reason to be a black mage after magus is unlocked, or arguably any wizard at all besides sage after sage is unlocked, and having been a black mage for those first 45 levels doesn't make you much or any better at being a magus after you get it. it's very frictionless in a way that i think works for ff3 rudimentary systems but is absolutely superseded by the ff5 take on it later this is standard for the pixel remasters! all six games have had sprinting and diagonal movement added by default, and all six also have the ability to turn encounters on and off at will and adjust how much gil and xp you get from 0x to 4x. 5 also has the ability to adjust ap gain in the same range. i haven't been using the options except for the postgame achievement grinds, but it's great that they're there - i know wyatt's been playing ff5 for the first time with at least some level of ap boost on because he wants to play around with classes more without grinding too much e: i just started 6 and it also has the same ap boost option as 5 ftr -
ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 150. final fantasy vi)
Integrity replied to Integrity's topic in General Gaming
MEGA MAN 11 (CAPCOM, 2018) Finished: 8/3/24. Playtime: 30.8 hours. Good heavens! Mega Man actually does get good only a hundred hours in! After a long series of 8-bit games, an ill-fated sojourn into the unbelievable future of 1997, and a return to just making games in the vein of the 8-bit games again, the Islamic state of Crapcom finally felt brave enough to take an actual step forward and make a new Mega Man, with new controls and new aesthetics for a modern era. We're all 3D now, and everything controls smooth as butter. Mega Man's got a new toy, the Gear System, letting him activate bullet time or pump more juice into his guns on a shared cooldown timer. The slide and both Rush abilities have dedicated buttons. Biggest of all, your weapons are all accessible via an FPS-style weapon wheel bound to the right stick. It all combines to make a game that's actually, for the first time in all these games, fantastic. Having an actual set of buttons does so much of the heavy lifting. Hotswapping weapons (now with Mega Man getting entirely new fits rather than just recolors) feels great, and besides one dud, the set of weapons feels good to wield. They erred further towards "boss weapons obliterate trash enemies" rather than the typical "each enemy has a weakness / use the metal saw" from previous games, and it combines for some genuinely thrilling gameplay flow once you get your head around even a few standby weapons and the Gear System, let alone when you're wielding the full arsenal plus both Rush movement abilities. Mega Man 11, played competently, feels like an incredible thunder run in ways that none of the previous games came close to matching. The stages don't even slouch! There's two proper duds in the set of eight, but the rest generally sit fairly high up in a hypothetical ranking of all the robot master stages of all the Mega Men. Wily 1 has a bit of an insane difficulty spike to it compared to everything before, but it's not a bad stage, just one that expects significantly more mastery of 11's peculiarities than anything before it did at any point. Wily himself is actually a reasonably fun fight, by Wily's standards, and not even the return of the Yellow Devil (again) can really drag the game down. It's just... fun. For most of these Mega Men, I didn't really have fun playing them so much as I found inspecting their designs to be interesting, I gained some satisfaction from getting good at them, and I gained moral superiority from having played them and generating a Take to have Online. Mega Man 11 was actually really very fun. And it's a good job it was! While previous Mega Men have demanded a single playthrough to clear, my time through Mega Man 11 involved beating the game, root menu to credits, four times in addition to some extracurriculars I'll get into momentarily. First up was, of course, the regular initial clear on Normal, which is actually the third difficulty from four. Second up was a run on Casual, which is the second difficulty, combining a buster-only run of the robot master stages with an achievement to beat the game without using consumables or the shop at all. The difficulties are actually quite interestingly done, with Casual not just adjusting enemy health and damage (it does that too though) but also adding pickups to stages and increasing the number of checkpoints in stages, as well as making your weapon energy refill on death. It's a good look, and it was a fun run. Third up was a complete bastard to do, but in a very aesthetic way. The Blue Flash requires that the game be beaten in under an hour, but it tracks file time. You can waste a few seconds saving after every stage and create, essentially, a segmented speedrun of the game. My "55 minute" run took me a whole week to put together on its own, drilling stages for hours and planning out my store stops to waste as little time as possible. There's another achievement, relatedly, for beating the game without getting a game over, which may as well be a freebie along with the speedrun. If you die four times, I have no idea how you're making the one hour timer. Finally, there was a run on Superhero, the fourth difficulty from four. Superhero is a complete motherfucker, making a slew of changes that amount to making it a proper hard mode. Compared to Normal, chaff mobs have doubled health from 1 to 2 but larger enemies (and minibosses) are unchanged, which amounts to not making the game a particular slog to get through while demanding more precision - or higher mastery of the weapons and systems - from you the player. Bosses hit harder and have new attacks, but aren't any chunkier. The biggest change, however, is that enemies will never drop ammo or health, and all static pickups on levels have been removed. Enemies do, however, still drop bolts that you can use at the shop, meaning that your ability to resupply is completely dependent on how many E-, W-, and M-tanks you're willing to buy. I abused the hell out of the shop. I have no regrets. There's a few challenge achievements that can be done at any point, including in a postgame file that's already beaten Wily. Each stage, including Wily 1 and Wily 2, has a challenge achievement associated with it, which I guess means that I basically played the game through five times. Most of these aren't too bad, like Torch Man's essentially just demanding you one-cycle the stage's miniboss, which I did completely by accident, or Block Man's telling you about the secret use of the Chain Blast to circumvent whole platforming sections. The one outlier is Impact Man's asking you to not get hit by a single instance of the stage's hazard (mini, invincible Impact Men charging at you) before getting to the boss. This one sucked ass. In addition to those, there's a handful of easy ones like breaking 30 enemy guards with charged shots and then killing them that are, for some reason, flagged as (1st Play Only), which means they can't be done in a postgame file. I have no idea why. I cleaned these up with the Casual run. Finally, after all of this, is the challenge mode. In the vein of previous Men, you have a big series of time attack challenges to pick from, but this time you don't have to interact with it too much. The biggest achievement is for getting five gold medals, which you can do by just picking five bosses or minibosses to dome in under a minute each. The final challenge, Dr. Light's Trial, has an achievement all to itself, and it's a complete motherfucker to slug through. Dr. Light's Trial is a 30-screen gauntlet where 25 of the screens were invented for the trial rather than being pulled from the game as in previous mixes. Screens 10, 20, and 30 are the Yellow Devil, the other boss from Wily 2, and Wily himself, respectively. There are no drops from enemies, there's some brutal platforming, you get zero checkpoints, and your health and weapon energy is carried over from screen to screen with no refills. Screens 11 and 21 are freebies with a large and small health and weapon energy and an extra life each, but the baseline to even be able to tackle this challenge is being able to flawlessly one-cycle the Yellow Devil without taking damage, and that's only getting your foot in the door. You know what, though? I fuckin' went and did it. I think I can claim to be pretty good at Mega Man by now.