Parrhesia

[spoiler=Update 3] Okay, lots to talk about! Up top, you'll see an ???. That's our clan name. There's six heads because six guys, none of whom are out on patrol (they'll be greyed out then). The 'clan talents' are bullshit gatekeepers to missions and you will always have way more than you need of the last two, I have no idea what dictates them but the first two especially our Aptitude will be pains in the arse. Goldsun is the month which dictates recruitment but not yet. We're stuck with these six guys (more or less) for quite a while. The rewards are money and resources - resources, in a tutorial I won't bore you with, become equipment. I mentioned 'JP' last update which was the FFT term and I meant 'Ability Points'. IIRC 30 is usual, 80 is for story missions. These dictate learning skills. Oh yeah, JP were a thing in FFTA1 - as in Judge Points, which you powered your nuclear mapstrikes with. Not anymore though. This is the map. Get used to it. Actually you probably won'tThe X is because the map is interconnected into little segments, of which this is one. Anyway, here's our daves- wait. you zombie motherfucker. Anyway, our daves. Our lizardfolk's another warrior, the moogle's a Thief - they are the same as you'd expect, they're quick and all their abilities steal things. They use knives and are okay with them. Humans can also make thieves - with pretty much the same stats, as it happens. The human is an Archer and that class has been ruthlessly fucked in FFTA2. It's not even a direct nerf - though their mediocre middling stats in FFTA1 have been reduced to now cunningly combine the speed of a soldier with the killing power of a thief - it's status. See, now, most attacks hit - base rate is 99%, evasion's usually like 0-15. The difference facing makes is that flank attacks deal more damage, backstabs even more. Status... faces resistances ranging between 30 and 70%. So it's roughly as accurate as before from the front but without benefiting from flanking, and with physical attacks being buffed. I tried to beat the game on normal using only archers and they quickly became incapable of more than single-digit scratching proper tank classes. I got bored and gave up like 60% of the way through. This guy will be noticeably the worst of our squad for a while, and it won't even really be his fault. But that's okay. I have plans. Cid gets to the bottom of this: Guinness is kind of a moron. But he has perspective, worrying about the thing I always worry about in any narrative of transportation like this. But Cid's a good lad. I clicked through the telling line ("While I'm stuck here, I may as well enjoy it, right?") but Guinness is just sort of gonna roll with what's going on while both of them strive to find him a way home. In the interim, he'll keep fighting with Clan... with... with Clan, um... I had genuinely been agonising over this for like the two hours since starting this. And this is how I treat you. A stupid fucking pun. I feel kind of guilty about not leaving the names up to a vote, really. But then I figured I'd have to sift through 500 suggestions that our hero should be Ramza of Clan Dongs. And I figured I didn't want to have to go there, you know? Didn't need that in my life. After all, 'what to name things' is always such a clan of worms. Moving on, then, we immediately reenter the pub which is still the hub for information, exposition and quests both side- and main. A nice touch is that there's dudes in the pub - possibly our own thief, an enemy archer, mage/fencer, the red guy is a master monk (a new class) and I think that's... just a generic seeq, the fat guy with a tail in the right? I'm actually going to be avoiding sidequests as much as possible - recruitment's gated until a certain point in the game, you see, so I'm going to break that gate first and foremost and then use the cool AP on my full squad. Our only choice for now is the next main quest, anyway. Simple work. Anyway, the other things the pub guy can d- GUINNESS I'M NOT FUCKING DONE TUTORIALISING The shop sells equipment, but her selection is terrible. The way to unlock new gear - as opposed to FFTA1, which would just sort of arbitrarily spit new stock in waves - is turning loot into new gear, which then gets sold. A few very specific items, that loot will only make one thing, but like... we hand the lead and the flower we just got into this chick and now she sells broadswords forever. Annoyingly a new addition to FFTA2 is the fact that she sells equipment that's not only shitty but doesn't teach abilities, so I can't start out customising guys as much as I want yet. This... I'm not gonna lie this is gonna be a massive pain in the arse when I'm trying to level like all 24 classes. It can get frustrating to be stuck in a logjam. I think they had the right idea but the execution could've been better. Anyway, back at the pub - Quest Roster is new quests to pick up, Current Quests is where those quests go (most non-story quests have a time limit, usually 20 days), Notices I don't remember what they are it's been a while but I think they're story-relevant, Rumours are basically more tutorial. And finally, before I go to fight the first mission... Spot the difference between a normal run of the intro and an LP run!

boring 'gotcha' answer in snivelly, nasal voice: Fabius Maximus actual answer you mean: fuck all dictators tbqh, i'm trying to think of one to ironically support and just keep thinking of all the various atrocities they've committed

Nah, you aren't alone - I'd quite possibly murder? for a third Ogre Battle. I'm also pretty sure (not quite 100%) that all classes are open to both genders and all three alignments, which... is a first on both counts for the series.

TU: LUCT is basically the game FFT wished it was, which is confusing since the original TU (that this is a remake of) was made first, by the same people. The earlygame is probably the roughest part, and may take some perseverance. A mechanics thing you should know that I didn't work out until like 80% through the game - range is not axiomatic. Archers will have their dotted, like, 3-7 range to fire at or whatever, but the Trajectory skill (which they should have) will sort of... trace the path their shot will take. If the target is outside of the highlighted tiles, but the tracer says the arrow will hit them, then the arrow will hit them. Good luck!

I will grit my teeth and use the special characters as squad players. Let's also not be too open about spoilers, though I wouldn't count the forced cameos as spoilers.

I think Luso looks worse considering how Marche looked pretty normal. And good class ideas, people - can't guarantee they'll all make it to the final cut but they're all under consideration, and there's a few I'm doing some proper phwoars at and licking my lips in anticipation for.

Jin's takes a few seconds to start properly, no worries

let's all do a big hearty lol at england for finally appointing the right man for the job and then immediately entrapping and sacking him

[spoiler=Update 2]Seconds earlier... Meet the squad. We'll get a chance to name the squad later. The squad is established as both broke and shitty. I'll break it to you now - the guy who looks like the guy from Ace Attorney Investigations (no spoilers in this chat just in case but y'all will know who I mean.) is one of this game's two Cids. So they charge and- There's a flash of light. Dumping a baby onto the ground. Who the fuck? A racist baby. Cid plays it cool; asks the stranger to be calm, offers his protection. Thanks to Deus ex Machina, he needs to join the clan to live - can't die if you're in a clan, you see, for... some... reason... ? Guinness is skeptical, asks why he should trust this strange man. Cid raises a compelling counterargument. So Guinness agrees, and Cid hurls a card in the sky... Klesta's just like, 'let's just see how this plays out'. Oh dear. Judge, what are you d- what. the. ffffffffffffffuuuuuck??? Guinness, symbolically, has turned his frown upside down. oh right the birds Cid: Ah, he's brought the little ones along to feed. Stand back, stranger, we'll handle this lot. Ready yourselves! Guinness: You're going to fight them? Cid: Once you stand back as I've told you, yes. Cid: Harrumph! Spoken like a true greenhorn! No, you will not die, but get a beak in your eye and you might wish you had. Guinness: Well, I didn't mean I'd go in first or anything. And I'm no fan of getting beaked... But I won't just stand here while you do all the hard work. C'mon, let me fight! Cid: Hrm... I did not intend to make you fight when I invited you to join us, however... You promise to do exactly as I say? Guinness: Promise! So we get into it. And you know what they fixed about A2? THE LAW. Being in a judged clan gives you a small bonus of your choice to stats. There is one law - the law is always the same in that mission no matter what it does not cycle. Upon map completion, you get a small 'Judge reward' which is a nice earlygame reward and totally fucking insignificant later on. What if you break the law? You don't get that stat bonus, you don't get the bonus and you can't resurrect people. It's a way better system. The laws, incidentally, I'm pretty sure don't affect the opposition. For another day, really. No archery? We have no archers. Let's just do this. Our staffdaves exposit to us. White magi are the same as they basically always are, healers and defensive support units. They have good stats. They aren't terribly interesting. Viera - like this chick - humans and weird dog boys can be them. Black magi are slow, powerful nukers. They learn fire, lightning and ice magic of three different levels and that's it, they're boring as sin. Humans, moogles and nu mou (like this guy) can be them, and they're slightly quicker/tankier/cleverer respectively. Up at the top screen - along with the objective and law - there's the turn order for the next few. You can cycle through it. This is what is called 'good top screen functionality.' None of this gimmick shit, just 'useful things to be aware of at a glance.' Sorry, bird. They improved magic in this game, too. You start with like, 10 MP and regenerate I think 5 per turn, so you need to build up to big magic... or use an ether, I guess. In A1 you just started from full and it was only very rarely an issue. Cid is mechanically treated as a bangaa, the Fight Race of lizardfolk, and his class for now is Warrior - Guinness (a human) is a human soldier. Functionally, the classes are nearly identical - slow, resilient and strong, they use swords and heavy armour and batter people into submission, with a skillset that reduces peoples' stats but are usually better off just hitting people. The main difference is a couple high-end skills. Cid explains the guest mechanic that is in basically all TRPGs. He's not under our control, but he'll hold his own. He can set himself on fire. Really, this is a pretty boring fight. It's pretty much a joke, besides, what's this tubby bird gonna do? She's just gonna sit there and look- -mad at us and OH SHIT And yeah, now Lawrn... that's his name, yes, anyway, he's nearly dead. On Hard Mode... I don't know if you have to commit to rushing down Klesta but fuck if I'm unironically going to lose this fight. See, he's nearly dead and Nofilia, the priest (their names are pulled from the random pool) can only heal 22, so... yeah, he's fucking dead next turn regardless lol. The birddaves are pretty insignificant, especially at level 1. So I'll ignore them and just have Guinness hit the... ... mama... bird... ? bye ??? I guess we won? Experience is pretty much entirely doled out at the end of missions now, and it's a flat 60 unless you're overlevelled (I don't think it can be more). JP, meanwhile, is a smaller number but, crucially, is doled out to all of your boyz. This means that if your weird hybrid build is caught between classes at the moment, they can kick their heels in the reserves while JP is acquired for them, and then they can emerge forth from the coccoon when fully formed! Just they'll be horribly underlevelled. The system works, anyway. Cid's a reasonably good lad. Each has questions for the other. How did Guinness end up in the sky? What is this strange place? Where-- Nevermind. That can wait. Guinness is busy being an anime. Fade to world map.

Yeah, you can plan around them and ignore them if need be. Unlike FFTA1 where if you weren't keeping constant track of them you'd be like "oh... damaging animals is forbidden... ok" Incidentally, I aim to use all 24 clan slots so if people have specific builds they'd like to see (ranging in viability from 'destroys everything in one turn' to 'please unironically try and use a bishop') feel free.

l e a v e i n a h e a r t b e a t (assuming that that universal disgust is, you know, founded in other factors, this being some kind of genie's wish kind of thing)

Four years ago... ... mistakes were made by me and by my dashing companion Eclipse. It is the dark days of spring 2016. I stride back into my Other Games folder only to find it isn't actually called that anymore and there's an LP subsection and anyway Dandra wanted me to do this and I'm kind of bored and sleep-deprived and it's break right now and who cares, let's just do this because IT'S TIME FOR A FUCKING SEQUEL, BITCHES STARRING... HUMAN LIZARD GARBAGE FURRY MARKETING PLOY and introducing... THE DEMON CHILD OF WARIO AND ROADHOG TAYLOR SWIFT IT IS TIME TO TACTIC! And I am your host, Parrhesia. I am not fucking around, as you can tell because I picked the Red setting and not the Blue setting for this cartoon game made for babies. Final Fantasy Tactics A2 - that's the full name, yes - is better than FFTA1 in Literally All Metrics. I liked FFTA1! A lot! Somehow. FFTA2, however, is objectively good. It's certainly better-written, however easy that may be, and like FFTA1 it details a golden Saturday-morning cartoon land where all is not remotely as idyllic as it seems. Like 1, it has 300 missions - this time, though, they're all playable in some capacity. It has a couple more races, like 10-15 more classes (and stripped back only one, the insanely stupid Morpher) and it also just plays better. It's also on DS so, you know, graphical improvements. And a much better artist, um... intermittently. But let's get to it. We're introduced to a monologue, fade to black. [spoiler=Update 1]Summer holidays are so close I can taste it. I'm out that door as soon as the teacher stops talking. Summer homework: keep a journal. That's not too bad. Better write my name on my notebook before I forget. The default name is Luso. I like this name. Which is why I will ditch it, and name our protagonist in tribute of the greatest character not only in Final Fantasy Tactics, but in all of fiction. Don't get me wrong, I'm not crazy about homework. Just, it could be worse. And I can already guess what my first entry's going to be: 'Summer holidays, day 1: Aunt chewed me out. Grounded for a week.' Maybe this journal thing's not such a great idea after all. Unlike weak, beta Marche, Josmer Maradona Guinness is a cool alpha who not only is dumb and bad at school (and is possibly illiterate?) but gets shouted at a lot. Also his parents are dead. Oh, we got another assignment, due today: "My Summer Holidays." We're supposed to write our goals for the holidays. Well, here goes... And we get a data entry segment. s multiple choice and kind of cute so I'm actually gonna play along with it. ... Maybe I can find a cat. Heh, all that sounds pretty convincing. Summer holidays, here I come! Not that I have any idea what I'm doing this summer. But, I guess not having any expectations isn't all bad. I mean, whatever ends up happening, it'll be a surprise! Guinness is likable enough. And then, class is dismissed. Except for us. "Sorry, but your vacation doesn't start quite yet. Your friends are going home, but you're going straight to the library, young man." The man asks us to think about why this might be. Guinness... has nothing. Guinness, it turns out, is late. A lot. I can relate. Either way, he's getting shoved into the library to clean up. This... is a good point. Guinness' Boys back him up, nodding a lot. Guinness, incidentally, is at the top of the flying wedge, mess of brunet hair. It's irrelevant. "Mr. Randell's waiting." Wait. Mr.. Randell... Guinness thinks back to the stories of his childhood. Of what his father told him, about that time he woke up and couldn't work out if he was a DJ dreaming he was a zombie, or a zombie dreaming he was a DJ. "Josmer," he said, leaning close... And Guinness Understood. There was no backing out. He had to get revenge. For his father. For... for his father, mostly, yeah. No matter how passive-aggressive he had to be. He Had To Do This. Only to be let down by the fact he's not even in this fucking dump. He looks around. Canny players note that Babus is watching guard, leaning on the counter. And he opens the music-box, which plays music I can't-. So he checks out the book. But it's blank. Wonder what it's about? The pictures are pretty cool. Swords... wizards... Huh? That's funny. The book just stops halfway through. The pages are all blank! Let's see what the last page with writing on it says... "One is fated to fill these barren pages. Know you his name?" "Know you his name"...? What's with all the backwards words? Well, I never pass up a chance to write in a library book! "... Josmer Maradona Guinness!" Tune in next time to find out... what the fuck happened?

m i l d l y l a t eshadowess marvels that this is not kpop, which, tbf, it isn't

i was about to say i'd praise the lord and marry her on the spot but then i remembered i have a stalker lol so yeah maybe not necessarily

We were at Adelaide, the Fringe Festival. We decided to see some other plays that were on - sussing out the professional competition, I guess. One of them was called 'Carnally'. In an aimless sort of way, it was about modern society. Or, definitely trying to be. There was a message in there somewhere. In reality it was two unlucky backup dancers in skintight glittery-grey latex bodysuits while the intense-looking woman in the posted shouted a lot and gave us such lines as "Tortoise upon tortoise, I am thinking" and looked really pissed off when that made half the audience laugh uncontrollably. It was the most modern art experience of our lives.

It's an aesthetic-sirenless Dijon Mustard today, who brings to us a message I will summarise as; 'fuck the Clash'. I don't even remember the Clash covering this song but I'm fond of this version! fittingly enough the most related video youtube claims is 'the top 106 quotes from the Wire' which, i mean...

I don't think so - certainly not Geocities itself.

well, yeah, it's too late for them, isn't it

as someone who watches online football streams, i kind of have to lol

okay now it's my turn ed kuepper's best-named song is undoubtedly 'also sprach the king of eurodisco' but i'm not a massive fan of it, unlike this, which is far more #aesthetic christ, he's 61 now?!

weirdly it seems they get better when they drop their fat garbageman with no good position edit:

chen is a very relevant figure in the world-renowned shitposting community of fftf and y'all need to show some respect anyway yeah sounds interesting and i trust you so if it goes on sale i might pick it up

step one: fuck step two: that

Finally, it's me again! GETTING TOO HYPE AND ALMOST SKIPPING MOIRA. Which was submitted without comment. Good thing I fucked up to give me something to talk about!

I would immediately, immediately subdue them. I would punch them in the jaw, rip their fucking arms off behind their back, smash them into the dirt, I would unhook my novelty 80-pack of tic-tacs and they (he) would scream, "No, Parrhesia, no!!!" and I would G O R G E H I M until his mouth BURNED AND FROTHED, he would be MINCE BETWEEN MY HADNS, AHAHAAHAHA, AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, FUCK YOU, TIM, FUCK YOU AND YOUR BAD BREATH AND MISSING TEETH AND GINGER NECKBEARD, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAH actually i probs wouldnt notice my sense of smells pretty bad