Parrhesia

27,000!

I suppose that's true! I did not know there were One Piece films.

I have never seen an episode or read an issue of One Piece in my life.

Shamble! Shamble!

Moved to Site Content. We'll get on it. Thanks for the catch.

Yeah MW5 Clans is 'optimised' in the same way that having running shoes makes me an 'athlete'. I imagine it'll run smoother down the line, though - just another victim of the industry encouraging games to come out before they're ready. But hey, a great game and very much worth getting. I absolutely adored MW5: Mercs (after its expansions) and this is a great streamlined, linear campaign version of that experience.

War happened some years ago and gutted both major countries. Impetuous prince looks to prove himself, winds up causing problems for everyone. Antagonists spend as much time trying to outmanouevre each other in search of their Big Rituals as they do against you. Meanwhile, one man thinks all other solutions pale compared to firebombing Wal-marts, and is prepared to firebomb a Wal-mart.

I've recently beaten Fire Emblem: Shackled Power, a GBAFE custom campaign by Sphealnuke, released complete in 2022. As custom campaigns go, I'd say it's relatively straightforward in terms of added mechanics, though there's a new weapon type in the form of bombs (2-range locked, hit Res) that are really strong, though not as overpowered as they might be due to the FE10ish statspreads (aka, enemies being pretty balanced). It takes awhile to get going, both in story and particularly in chapter design, but by the end I was completely on-board. Enemies are tough and hit hard, and the overlaps in attack range can be punishing. But you have plenty of options of your own, both in the aforementioned bombs and in a lot of unique melee weapons that can push the odds back in your favour, while the cast is pretty capable without any unit feeling overly centralising (except Darrel. You probably want to train Darrel. SP is very much a Thief Game, though you get plenty of money.) Chapters generally have fairly straightforward objectives, but sometimes there's a gimmick thrown in (one chapter, for instance, allows you to stand on designated floor tiles to shift around the walls in the map). They're on the larger and longer end, with small-to-medium deployment - most commonly 12. The story is interesting, with kind of a sense that the world is in a Dark Age, very much character-driven with a lot of alliances of convenience. The secondary cast often stay relevant and have their arcs integrated into the main plot. The dialogue style is charmingly abrupt, with a distinct character. There's almost a Trixie Slaughteraxe vibe to it at times. It's not afraid to do Big Moves, and some of them were genuinely spectacular, not just rug-pulls for their own sake. It has a few 'default SkillSys' trappings (growth colours...) and predated some of the nice QoL patches that have come in since, like dead units bouncing their inventory to convoy. For that and a few other reasons, I don't think it's a good candidate for an Ironman run. I really didn't care for the music, for the most part, which borrows extensively from another couple of GBA titles. The cutscene music is often, distractingly, vanilla FE8 tracks, and the map music, though custom, often falls into the area of being fun for a couple minutes but really teeth-grinding to listen to for long stretches. This is a minority opinion, though. A lot of people really love the map music and were incredulous that I disabled it. Difficulty-wise, I played on Normal, and it was tough, mostly fair, but sometimes - particularly early on and in the very lategame - some element would just slow pacing down to a crawl, especially siege. I'm told that at least some of that siege is Normal-exclusive, so I would probably play on Easy unless you're a difficulty fiend. It's good, and you should play it, and if you can persist with it at least to the halfway mark you'll gladly see the rest through.

As far as custom campaigns go, it's pretty simple. Finish Homecoming by FEE3 2025, and have enough of Days of Reckoning done that FEE3 2026 is a realistic aim. I also really do want to play other custom campaigns; the only issue is that the work needed to playtest my own doesn't leave a huge lot of 'yes, I feel like playing FE' nights for anything else. Nothing in particular other than that, but I'd like to gun through a couple of meatier games that might not be good fits for after-work. Rogue Trader's got to be next but there's a few things I need to finish off before then - Our Adventuring Guild and Skyrim, in the main, as well as the new AoE2 campaign (which has been good so far) and Roze's A Vestrian Tale FE custom campaign. I can't remember the last time I had four games on the spin, so this probably says something about how scattered I've been these past couple months. Selaco is on deck, probably.

Currently juggling a few games, but my 'I just got back from work stalwart' has switched from GW2 (thoughts on the new expac: mixed, but better than SOTO) to something about building an adventuring guild. It's called Our Adventuring Guild. In it, you have an adventuring guild, and it is yours. I have waited my entire life for, basically, This. And this isn't quite the form I want it to be in, but it's close enough. The gameplay loop is simple. Hire shitty little adventurers, train them up, send them out on jobs. Manage resources and a pretty straightforward economy. The thing you're preparing your guild for is tile-based combat that goes pretty quickly and pretty breezily, with skills that start nice and simple and get pleasantly more complex without - at least as far as the early midgame (my guys are level 9-12, endgame seems to be 20-24) - becoming overly so. The key element that's very much present here and is like crack to me is that roster management is very much a factor. You're encouraged to build set parties - though you can and situationally should deviate from them, particularly earlygame when it's kind of all hands on deck - and it's absolutely a factor to promote or demote guys depending on what works and what doesn't, or to replenish losses after casualties, and to keep a strong, deep pile of Dudes. Party size goes from 4-6 over the course of the earlygame, so there's scope to see what's missing over time, and you'll definitely have your parties play differently to each other. And you don't really need to micromanage. The only equipment I ever bother shuffling around is the XP boost guides. Which are, admittedly, annoying to shuffle around. (If you imagine a version of Darkest Dungeon that actually has generous progression and doesn't hate you, you aren't a million miles off. But that comparison only goes as far as the gameplay. If Darkest Dungeon's aesthetics and writing played like Our Adventuring Guild, it would be my favourite game of all time.) Caveats are that the boss fights have been hit and miss. A couple have honestly been pretty hype; there's one where you have to fight basically a layered defence in depth that holds its ground and must be assaulted, which unironically owns. The troll king fight sucked ass, on the other hand; the action economy, his massive regen and his ability to eat his adds for a massive health restore made it torture. Now for the bad things, of which there are a couple. First up, the writing is really bad and cringe lol. Well, much of it is. Anything involving a floating head and a, like, 'character' is bad. The premise is fine enough. But it's anime fan amateur hour nonsense. I click really fast and skim to have the slightest idea what's going on, I don't really want any more than that. Ambient dialogue when it's your goons running around the map is largely readably okay. Though one big enemy guy does unironically go 'Kukuku' which I guess is like some new advanced form of weeb laugh. More contentious is the graphics. Your little goons are basically modular little AdventureQuest guys. Like, late-2000s Flash games are clearly what they went for. I don't know why. But they did. Now, I played AdventureQuest and DragonFable and a million little flash games on ArmorGames (weirdly Kongregate never caught on for me despite seeming like the sturdier site), so I'm kind of used to the aesthetic, but it certainly isn't good and maybe it's a complete turnoff without that lick of nostalgia. What is objective truth, sadly, is that the UI is pretty bad. Not unusable, but not good. I do think the 'miniatures' look pretty good, though, and more importantly they're very readable, pretty modular and decently customisable. I don't know the exact length, but I feel like it could be 60 hours for a playthrough. I'm 22 hours in, I think I'm about a third in, but I also dragged my feet a bit in the intro stages. I would recommend you more aggressively pick and heal a couple squads of A-listers early on, because you will quickly unlock training that will get backup adventurers up to scratch, and the levels are generous. There felt like a powerspike entering the early midgame, and that feels healthy and good; your guys are pretty simple and the game is pretty easy in the earlygame. I think play on Normal. Time to kill feels correct, there, and the difficulties are just percentage sliders, which don't tend to play well. It's pretty ironmannable, though I'm not; I might for a second run. You're definitely meant to at least try and play through deaths, though, and I think an actual failstate would be difficult to reach. I recommend it on the whole. Particularly if you have exactly my brainworms.

A little late on the draw, but FEE3 2024 has kicked off! For those who aren't in the know, it's: It's been going since 2012, and actually originated in this very parish, before the zoomers over at FEU bogarted it for themselves. Expect a good mix of trailers, gameplay footage, graphical showcases and even LTC runs. So far we've seen five videos from an expected field of 66, with one more released every six hours. Keep up by following the FEU Youtube channel! And if you're wondering how much things have changed since the days of TLP and RtR, here's a list of complete custom campaigns for your perusal.

Nu-XCOM is one of my favourite games of all time. As is X-hyphen-COM! I've logged 120 hours in nu-COM myself but am no-fucking-where near full completion, and I suspect it'll never happen. I do massively agree with the rec to go play the original X-COM using OpenXCOM, and I want to put a caveat on that: there's a patch to force psionics to use line of sight. Enable this immediately. Vanilla X-COM's midgame consists of being mind controlled seven ways to Sunday, and then you get psionics, and the game is simply over then because there is no counterplay. It's a pity, because the actual firing-squad mechanics are fantastic to play with. So slam that on. There's also an option to have accuracy fall off at range for non-aimed shots, which encourages tactics other than 'auto shot from max range', which is probably healthy. And a shitload of QoL, of course. Now I kind of want to play OpenXCOM again...

I won't dig it up but I did also 100% FFTA1 several years back - this is substantially less legwork than 100%ing FFTA2 because the vast majority are dispatches. My takeaway is basically that it doesn't hold up nearly as well, there's just a lot more pain-in-the-ass stuff (it even has its own needlessly hard-to-beat lategame dispatch!), the Law system and low accuracy and high time-to-kill and taking Ages just to play makes the core gameplay experience kind of a chore. It's pretty and it's charming, and I prefer it a lot to TO: Knights of Lodis which always felt bizarrely soulless to me. I'm still really fond of it and it'll always have a place close to my heart. It was a Forever Game that could actually keep my attention when I was a hyperactive kid, before epilepsy medication made me permanently mellow out. But I couldn't recommend it. Though I guess having 100%ed both FFTAs and completed FFT and Fell Seal, and got like to the 3/4 mark of both Tactics Ogres... do I need to go back and clear those, now? Reborn fixed most of the issues with TO Original at least, it seems. Sure as hell won't be 100%ing them, though. Reborn seems to have serious Forever Game aspirations.

So the challenge was recently posed to me, by Ike, to go revisit an old fave, 100% it, and see how it holds up. And the answer, in Final Fantasy Tactics A2's case, is a resounding sort of. My receipt. FFTA2 is a TBS RPG in the Tactics Ogre isometric mould, the third and last of the FFTs. It's for the DS but the stylus and in-built microphone basically never come up, making it unique; the second screen is generally used pretty well to store info. The usual gameplay loop is that you run around the map. There are 300 unique (well, basically unique) quests to complete, many of them are (usually 6v6) skirmishes, but there's a good bit of variety. Final save file count was 76 hours; call it an 80 if you factor in time lost to resets and the fact that the final mission and the true final mission don't get saved to it. I think playing it normally is a 20-30 hour endeavour, depending on how much side shit you feel inclined to get. FFTA2, being a DS game, doesn't have achievements, but it does give you a pretty star for clearing all 300 quests and unlocks a mission literally called The Final Quest. There's also three dungeons, the Brightmoon Tor; I only did two of them, because late-stage FFTA2 isn't that interesting. I guess you can also say that you don't have to Gameplay A significant issue in the super-lategame (that, again, I don't think a normal, sane player should reach) is that it becomes pure rocket tag. By the time my status guys got set up, (This XP system isn't picked up by Fell Seal, which otherwise generally knows to cherry-pick the best aspects of each FFT entry. I don't know why. It's far better than 'do action to get XP'.) FFTA2 has a far better approach to facing than FFT (basically never matters) and FFTA (tied to accuracy). Instead, backstabbing does more damage and frontstabbing does less; a backstab's worth two frontstabs. But accuracy doesn't shift. There's an inexplicably Kagapilled 99% cap, and evasion rarely goes higher than 5% or especially over 10%, basically just if you're stacking it past that point; FFTA2 would have benefited from a thresholding system where over 90% accuracy just Was 100%. As it stands, the misses are really, really annoying. But it's still way better than the terrible hit rates and massive time-to-kill of FFTA1. Status accuracy is thornier. Unfortunately, it tends to hover around the 35-60% accuracy range. And unfortunately, it winds up not really being a useful use of a turn, most of the time. At least, not on its own; abilities that do full damage and might inflict a status are some of the second- or third-best in the game (we'll get to the best later). They made the intelligent decision to ramp up 10 mana a turn from a base of zero; it's one of those systems that makes the game better, but also makes circumventing it a high priority. The laws are a shitload less asinine than FFTA; it's just per-mission, just One Thing To Not Do, sometimes it's annoying (a law against knockback, when crits knock back) but it's just 'you lose your clan buff and can't revive anyone if you break it', so it's fine. Unit customisation is at a good level. Five item slots, four skill slots - whatever job you're in, one sub-class, a reaction skill (think counterattacks, or 'evades all magic') and a passive buff. Along with half your active skills, job dictates your stat growths, movement and equipment lists, which tend to be fairly rigid. It doesn't get too complicated and it leads to different units feeling, well, different. A significant issue is that the difference between skill utility is... um... massive. There will end up some you basically just never use, some that are very situational, and then you'll often end up with one super-skill for a given unit they use 95% of the time. There's good combination potential I don't have the capacity to get into. Skills are tied to weapons, and different jobs. This means that sometimes your unit will basically be crippled while learning something they need to get to the place they have to go, but helpfully, in a fantastic design decision, while only attending units get XP, everyone gets AP (ability points). If you need a physical unit to learn some magic for a bit for Reasons, and so they don't really function and you don't want them to grow in that class, you can bench them for awhile. For this and for a few reasons, I recommend a party size of a rotating 12-18... 12, if you want to 100%, which you shouldn't. So long as everyone's around the level of your protagonist, level doesn't really matter because of scaling, until the super-endgame. It's not all gravy. AI is really bad, and that's a frustrating thing. Enemies will seemingly just use things at random, to the point where challenge maps generally have enemies with very limited skillsets, to ensure they're using the right stuff. Often they'll attack when there's 0% chance of success due to abilities, or otherwise just do dumb shit which doesn't really make it feel too adversarial; dumb AI can be a positive, but when it's generally 6v6 and there's no permadeath, they should be on a more level footing in terms of decision-making. Guests are, somehow, even dumber, and will more than happily attack using elements that their enemies will absorb, or whatever. Also, there's a really stupid decision to put traps around. If you step in a trap, your move ends and you lose half your HP or get charmed or Something. It's stupid and adds quite literally nothing, and I did lose a lot of progress at one point to having complacently not saved in a while, and then in a story mission, a guest stepped into a trap and got eviscerated, then finished off by an enemy backstab, before I could reasonably do anything. Still, the game's good. But it can be annoying, sometimes. The Bazaar I was something like 260 missions into the game before I unlocked Firaga. That should be enough, right? I don't even need to describe the bazaar. Just the result. But I will, anyway. FFTA1 and 2 tie skill acquisition to carrying the right equipment, usually weapon, as the right class. If you have Dave pick up the Nirvana staff while a White Mage, he can use Curaga; if he acquires 300 AP (10 missions), he can now use Curaga permanently, so long as White Magic is slotted in. I didn't think this was that bad, and I'm not sure why, but having now re-experienced the shitness of the Bazaar I'm finally ready to concede that FFT was right on this point, at least; just have skills be a thing you can buy through a second type of experience (though FFT was very wrong on the pace of skill acquisition). This is basically alright in FFTA1 at least, but in 2, you are reliant on the Bazaar for new skills and it sucks ass. So you get a dropdown list of vague descriptions, with potential entries A through E. Sometimes it's obvious what these will be ('Lethal Knives' are all daggers!), sometimes it's not ('Grab Bag'.) There'll be two different entries under a single description and you just kinda have to vibe out which. You get item icons, but only names if you already have one. Oh, and rare items and accessories, you only unlock one copy. Which you can buy and then have to unlock again at the bazaar. This is fine, if you have a photographic memory, which I do not. The concept of the bazaar is actually quite good. It makes for a more organic way of growing your armoury than FFTA1 had (which was just, after X amount of missions you get more stuff). But in practice, there's so much loot, and so many different items, and, critically, some items are just hugely significant for a build. My bangaa's ranged options all suffered because I was really late to unlock the Godhand and thus Aurablast, an absolutely pivotal ability for them, an ability which I'd unlocked for humans through the right blade dozens of hours ago. And fucking Firaga because it turned out I needed fucking Fire Sigils which I could've got all along from a mission called Bug Hunt which I put off for ages because it was a largely flavourless mission that needed three individual missions. Only after clearing Bug Hunt did I start getting a shitload of Fire Sigils off loot. It's also a fucking pain to navigate, and it really didn't have to be! There's so much loot and you have to scan through the full lists of every type of the three that make up the potential thing. Dozens each, we're talking. No reason that, at minimum, it couldn't have just cut all the ineligible ones off the list. But nooo. It also, obviously, is one of the few mechanics to discourage building wide instead of tall. For my part, there were entire weapon categories I cut out of my composition just so I could safely ignore, like, the Firearms and Sabres categories. Now go back and imagine basically having to go through the Bazaar between every few missions, and testing out the same fucking combinations again because you don't remember exactly what they are, and knowing that maybe the one B Pole that doesn't matter because you have no Geomancer is not the same as the other which is really important to your Monk... and again, the swinginess of how pivotal these can be, because they're linked to skills! All this and I'm still confident I'm not doing justice to how bad and, moreover, annoying the Bazaar is. It's a serious detriment. Writing In my head, I always had FFTA2 down as having those weird kind of compellingly melancholy vibes under the surface. And now, on the revisit... ... yeah, I don't actually know where that came from. It isn't really present, outside of flickers here and there in sidequests that largely have relatively palatable young adult resolutions. And, I mean, it's literally an isekai. I didn't know isekai was like, a whole thing until relatively recently. And it's palatable young adult writing, in general. What I had slept on was that the core cast members play off each other really well. You get your cheerful idiot kid who knows he's a cheerful idiot kid and is happy to lean into it and charge into problems, and your jaded veteran and your sad-clown Wandering Anime Jew who clearly need a rocket up them that This Kid provides. They just have a nice chemistry with each other. It's fun. Also, when missions start, you generally get a few lines of banter with whoever's first in the party, and actually, there's a lot of variety in the lines (though there's a limit to how much they can really change, given the same outcome). The highlight is easily Generic Viera, who responds to often absurd stimuli with a gravity and an occasional dry wit that's just a really nice contrast. And, you know, the blurbs to missions are cute. It's just nice. The standard of moment-to-moment dialogue is pretty high. The plot is extremely whatever, with a lot of campaign missions taken up by filler. There's basically a mafia, and Cid was a part of it, but now he's not, and they've got a Scheme, and you have to stop it. It actually does have a couple of moments that legitimately do go hard. There's a guy with a unique face who shoots Cid and menaces you in a glacier and then, when he's a side goon after you meet the real boss, and you murder him (easily, because he has a million move and terrible durability), he pleads for his boss to save him and just gets stonewalled. RIP! But ultimately it's just not a Khamja story consistently enough, I'd say. But the campaign doesn't hugely matter, either. The actual real storylines aren't Khamja (though there's also sidestories expanding on them). I think the Duelhorn storyline is pretty whatever, too; it's actually a significantly longer single thread than the campaign. It's a foreign mafia. But really, that story's a little tawdry and a little Whatever and you're best off saying 'fuck it, this is about Vibing with the Boys'. It's a very good Vibing with the Boys game. Your core cast are solid, as mentioned, but Adelle and Cid also have their own sidequest chains. But mostly it's the continuity of the dozen or so other clans that keep cropping up, or little chains that are little stories, or finishing out the logs of the world's shittest journalist and... look, it's just nice. There's no hidden melancholy. But isn't it just as valuable to sit down after a long day at work (or, let's be realistic about the target audience, high school) and vibe for an hour and a half with a persistent ensemble cast? Sometimes given excuses to go beat them up? I do think it is the best written of the three FFTs, and that it isn't particularly close. FFT is a shitshow. FFTA1 is a subversive masterpiece if you are 15 and have just discovered TVTropes and have made this everyone's problem. FFTA2's just a chill time with the lads. In summary, I think most TBS enthusiasts should play FFTA2, but, you know, normally. Gun through the campaign with a revolving cast of 12-18, do whatever sidequests seem interesting, get to credits, call it a day. The Final Grind The true final boss isn't the Neukhia or whatever. It's this asshole. The Earnest whatever quests have a simple concept. Some asshole, Marnot, has double-booked a date, so you have to find and entertain the woman he's standing up. This becomes triple-, quadruple- and finally quintuple-booking. For the last two, as you mathematically cannot hit up all the different spots in six days, you Must send off goons to handle the ladies that your brave leader cannot. A significant issue with the lategame grind is that you do eventually get access to proper rocket tag abilities and combinations, and ultimately, other units just feel like handicaps. I'd been playing on Hard, which makes enemies tougher and hit harder, and overall I don't regret it. Absolutely I recommend it for if you're playing it yourself, and not 100%ing it, which you shouldn't. But it wildly ramps up the required level to clear dispatches, where you send out goons to do missions for you, to a point that makes them all but pointless. And here's one you have to do... It took me ages to clear the mainline campaign since I knew I was angling for 100%, but a normal playthrough using 12-18 units (this feels the right amount, rotation is good) probably finishes up the campaign around level 25-30. By the time I dropped a few units, they were level 40; by the time I dropped all but my final six, they were level 47-50. If your units are not level 77 when they dispatch on An Earnest Delight, they will fail. You get 60 XP for finishing a mission, if you aren't overlevelled, and there are only so many missions that scale up so far. Generic road encounters, most obviously, but why put yourself through that? Just go run dispatches over and over again, in order to clear this one dispatch. You have ways of skipping time, at least, but it's still really annoying. The issue is that at this point, since you have the super-abilities, anyone who doesn't feels like they're just getting in the way. If you don't have a way to deal like 4x or 5x regular damage, or offer great support, you're probably left behind. And it's less interesting, in gameplay terms, when you have five units who all just want to use the Big Thing and a sixth who spent 65 hours being a cool versatile mage with a varied skillset you used to use a lot of and is now basically here because she can revive all fallen units in one action. In general with 300 missions there's a few conditionals which are just kind of annoying, but you know, that's probably inevitable. This was the only real ball-breaker of the final run, though. There's some, though, which do at least have you face level 99 enemies, instead of the usual (which seems to be 'protagonist's level UP TO a by-mission cap'). Brightmoon Tor, notably; then Cinqueleur, which is just fighting five level 99 enemies with gimmicky but effective skillsets and gear, one of each colour of mage; Red, Blue, Green, Black, White. Hilariously, because enemy faction colours are mirrored red-blue and green-purple, in practice the Red King wears blue, the Blue King wears red... Anyway, fighting a souped-up version of this is the first of the five back-to-back battles that make up The Final Quest. This took me two tries. In a clever move, you level up between rounds; this means you actually get a fair bit out of it if you fail (losing a non-story mission just fails it and you can retry; you only Game Over if you lose a story mission), but also a levelup means that your HP goes back to full and your MP goes back to empty, meaning you don't have to like fully prime up after each fight, after you've almost won. The first three are just strong level 99 enemies with cool compositions, and it does feel like a proper challenge. They're fun fights, they feel like proper challenges, there's an ebb and flow, at least if you go in badly underlevelled as you probably should. Then there's the fourth. The fourth is two tonberries who have juiced movement on a tiny arena - movement being the only thing that stops them, usually - and three support units, one of whom has Haste and Quicken. They have insane overkill speed so they just flex all over you in the opening turns. Angel Rings all around are necessary; this was the difference for me between my first run, which just got aced, and my second, where action economy meant we could barely cling to life long enough for Orinella to revive five people in one action. Which felt like pretty great value, at least. The fifth and final set of enemies, the last foes I will ever kill in FFTA2, are the easiest of the lot. Pay some attention to the weirdly shrimpy gladiator in the crowd, who has like half the frames of anyone else and looks like the 'at home' version of the real deal, in the green on the field. I love that guy, especially when he deos his janky little cheer. But I'm still glad I did. The reward for beating The Final Quest is that the camera pans into the sky and blacks out, and then you get bumped to credits. It really is just bragging rights. But that's okay. Fuck, what else? Music's pretty good. Salikawood remix is weirdly fantastic. I'm sure there's more I'm missing and probably sentences I've forgotten to expand on but I've been posting this for an hour and I want to hit send. I used to love FFTA2. I think I still do. But it isn't quite as good as I thought. You should still play it, though! But don't 100% it. It becomes a forever game, and it just isn't quite robust enough. Final Squad:

Leaving this up since there's been a reply, but seriously, there's no need for anyone bar the thread creator to revive a thread that's been inactive for two years.