screenshot Let's Play Final Fantasy Tactics (WOTL): The Nadir of Videogames

[euklyd]

9 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

I'd just like to say that I fucking love the hurt chocobo sprite

also that strat was, dare I say, fully sick

[Integrity]

this game is well regarded

[maybe]

surprisingly, yes

[Parrhesia]

Update 21
In Which Mercurio Rocks On

Spoiler

 

Down at the falls, there's trouble in paradise.

Ssso, Delita's cut Ovelia loose. Good to see that taunting the prisoner you need backfired literally immediately.

She makes a run for it, but then someone shoots something.

Wait what

We don't see a lot of Northern Sky in this game. I can't remember seeing the teal and orange archer ever, but I'm distracted enough that I miss the chance to screenshot their mage doing Six (6) damage to Ovelia.

See, these three guys are level eight.

Delita isn't. This is a cutscene. WOTL exclusive.

Poor Ovelia.

So we earned a few JP last fight.

So we enter Chateau du Badman, expecting trouble.

Third Faction's recruiting drive for guys who don't quite fit into the Actual War of the Lions (which hasn't started yet, don't worry) continues.

Mercurio's basically defined by his short-termism. I like that about him. Everyone else wants power tomorrow, or a better world tomorrow. Mercurio just does what he considers to be the right thing at every path. I think it's intentional.

... Huh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZIISfOm3dI

Alright, so.

Fuck Cuchulainn.

Cuchulainn is a frankly bizarre choice of name. I'm borderline offended. But whatever, let's kill the Wolf of Ulster, forty years after retirement and thoroughly gone to seed.

HOW CAN YOU NOT MAKE THAT

We can't see his stats or anything - including HP, at any time. We just have to beat on him.

You only know he's down when he sticks in the wounded pose.

Alright. We have... a rock.

Well, Delita's found his way to the Black Lion, Goltanna. It's official - between us, the Church, and both Skies, he's completed a FACTION GRAND SLAM.

Delita does some lies.

Infantryman #164: "'Twas."

"So yeah I wouldn't like, LOVE to or anything, you know, I wouldn't fuckin' relish the whole betrayal thing, it wouldn't be like, great, "

hey hey guys guess who it's gonna be

"new chancellor who dis"

Well, Delita. You sure just did that.

And thus, Delita basically talks Goltanna into kicking off the actual titular War of the Lions, halfway through the game.

And thus ends Chapter Two.

KILL COUNTER RECAP

Remember clean lines and negative space?

Yeah, I don't.

 

 

[Laura]

1 hour ago, Parrhesia said:

Cuchulainn.

that name is from a hero from the norse mythology. He was pretty badass, you can read more about him there:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cú_Chulainn

[Parrhesia]

Yeah, I'm familiar with the figure - it's why I joked about being offended. It's not the name that's bizarre, but the placement - on this weird demonic lard-condom man.

[Radiant Dragon]

I always wondered whether Glevanne actually had anything to do with the kidnapping or if Delita simply used him as a stool pigeon. All signs point to him being involved here, but I remember it being less clear in the original.

[Laura]

17 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

Yeah, I'm familiar with the figure - it's why I joked about being offended. It's not the name that's bizarre, but the placement - on this weird demonic lard-condom man.

ye perhaps putting his name on like a troll about burst wasnt a good placement

[Parrhesia]

Update 22
In Which It All Kicks Off

Spoiler

 

Plot twist - both these sides are INCREDIBLY BAD AT WARFARE. It's been the first few months of the war and they've lost 20,000 guys each. For reference, the English Civil War - which lasted NINE YEARS - saw roughly 84,000 casualties (combatants, anyway) across its ENTIRE duration. I'm not even going to touch 'two hundred thousand wounded'.

So this is Limberry, finally, the dude we saved in Chapter 1 - Argath's liege. He doesn't care that they've run out of dudes.

Cidolfus Orlandeau - insistently referred to in the PS1 translation as 'T. G. Cid' at all times - is the parallel to Barbaneth Beowulf. He's the last bastion of chivalry in, basically, the world.

El Cid is the big-picture guy. He's the one to realise, 'oh, yeah, guys, this is OUR country, we sort of have to run the place after we win'.

It's okay, because Goltanna has a plan to keep the people content and prosperous.

, I lied, because of course he doesn't, because look at his fucking head.

To be fair, the best time to treat for peace is when they suffer and you DON'T. But Tony Abbott isn't having it.

Predictably, Orlandeau stands alone as the Bastion of Decency here.

cumber.

Typical snowflake general, can give 'em out but can't take 'em.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epb5HCZNBZQ

Welcome to Chapter 3! It's a chapter about nothing!

So Mercurio's back in the game. This chapter, I guess, he's going to try and stop the war or whatever. I don't know if he really gets very far with that. The second half of FFT (the templar plotline especially) is generally agreed to be where the story falls off the rails, even by people who think the story was on some kind of rails in the first place. I think it's been batshit from the start, so we'll see where this hazy, incoherent mess leads.

There's a new thing in town called the 'Poacher's Den' ahahaha look at his fucking head ahahahaha

Okay, yeah, the game quadruples down on its earlier dumb bid. 400,000 casualties in three months.

Yet again; career progression is really quick in Ivalice.

hmm

Shit's bad.

Shit's also bad for this guy - but wait. Is that...

ENEMY VARIETY. Too bad this mission fucking sucks! Also I like how this orator, who is An Orator, the sole orator we fight all game as far as I can think of, is like, the least well-spoken dude in the whole game.

Ace Detective Mercurio 'Ramza' 'Mercurio Lugria' Beowulf sees a dude chased onto a roof and is like 'wow that's weird'

That's how you get by as a criminal. Just fucking kill everyone you see.

Orran decides that instead of winning the fight instantly he will read a book at the enemy and walk forward into danger.

This map introduces enemy gunners - specifically, the chemists, but not the orator. Their guns are better than ours. I covet them.

We successfully recruit a jujitsu gi with a criminal inside it. She's six levels ahead of Agrias and Thurio.

Oh, nevermind, the map's over, Orran's started casting. He only knows one spell. 'What does it do, Parrhesia?' you ask.

This.

And yeah he's just gonna cast it repeatedly now.

Thanks for the hat, Concessa.

Just cleaning up the house now.

First Mythril Gun, no!

Thank you Concessa, but that won't be necessary.

ORRAN I WANT HIS GUN STEP THE FUCK BACK

ughhh well he dodged like twenty fucking 37%s, I guess he didn't want to live.

I got this guy at least, shoutout to him lacking the hat that Concessa stole. Also to his full HP bar at... 16/126.

I've never been so happy to see the line 'Are you hurt' before. Anyway this little dipshit introduces himself as Orran Durai. We've seen him before - in Goltanna's court, next to El Cid.

Orran's sort of going to shadow us over the next couple of books, but one key fact undercuts everything he will do: nobody likes or cares about Orran Durai. He's Mustadio-tier.

The worst part of this fight is that the guys who made FFTA thought that they'd recreate it. There's a level with a lot of enemy variety (admittedly in a game where enemy variety isn't a huge problem) where a guy just trivialises it by sleeping the entire enemy team every turn.

Riveting stuff. Chapter 3 is when the game finally stops hurling guests at you every mission (well, technically that was late chapter 2), but when there ARE guests... hoo boi.

KILL COUNTER

I'm not counting this lovely enemy variety in the main of the graph because we did not get to fight them. Orran got to fight them. We picked up the pieces. I did however forget yet another fucking knight, archer and black mage as hacked to pieces by Delita.

 

 

[Mage Knight 404]

I missed a bit, clearly. Even the fight with Oogie Boogie! DX

Man, Cid's just being that one guy surrounded by an entire world of assholes who are more than content with their giant body count in this fast war. Does he drink? He must drink. How else is he able to quell all this depression? (aside from being... you know, fucking Thunder God Cid)

(also I like Orran... Not as much as Mustadio but--)

 

 

(I-I like the loser underdogs okay)

[Parrhesia]

Spoilers; we will later be informed that basically every noble sides with Cid, despite the fact that every onstage noble has been in opposition to Cid.

[Mage Knight 404]

The best faux pas.

[Augestein]

Man I am blown away by how bad the dialogue is in the PSP version. I mean the original version was kinda rough, but at least it wasn't... Stupid. 

[Integrity]

12 minutes ago, Augestein said:

Man I am blown away by how bad the dialogue is in the PSP version. I mean the original version was kinda rough, but at least it wasn't... Stupid. 

no, my dude, it was also bad in the original, just a different flavor of bad

[Parrhesia]

I got a good feeling!

[Augestein]

Yeah, the translation of the original had some problems, but it wasn't "soft, speak sweet nothings of I don't actually understand what truly I'm saying" PSP version. 

[Integrity]

"some problems" is greatly understating the hackjob that was the original fft script imo

Edited April 17, 2017 by Integrity

[Parrhesia]

The "one nerd in a basement somewhere doing very literal translations" version and the "people who don't understand Shakespeare and have never listened to Shakespeare trying to imitate Shakespeare" version are both bad scripts of the bad story they were given.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Both translations are bad in different ways. It's really rather impressive; you wouldn't think this would be possible.

On 2017-04-14 at 9:31 PM, Parrhesia said:

Some people have completed the game using only math boys with no spells, just hitting people with sticks. They spend literal hours grinding at the job centre until they find guys with exactly 70 bravery and exactly 40 faith with exactly one starsign, ignoring the fact that they will unlock orator in the process of grinding to arithmetician and can, you know, fix their fucking bravery/faith to those limits.

Single Class Challenges explicitly ban using skills from other classes, which includes brave/faith modification. It's really quite sensible as far as challenge rules go, but of course challenge rules are arbitrary.

Fly costing 5000 JP is a horrible joke; the skill is actually worse than Teleport in every way (except preventing fall damage). The NA version of FFT original rebalanced JP costs which involved, among other things, Fly getting its cost cut by over 75%. However, the PSP port just lazily went back to the original JP values, and they didn't change it when they brought the game over this time. In case you needed to respect WotL's localisation job less.

NA PSX also has lower Job Level prereqs for job unlocks in many cases. For instance, Dancer/Bard need only JL4 instead of JL5, and Calculator similarly had all its reqs lowered by one. Most other jobs are similar. I definitely think NA made the right choice there; it takes long enough to unlock the jobs you want as is, especially if you don't use Gained JP Up for whatever reason.

Since I know you enjoy hearing about ways FFT screwed up: Mime, despite having a lot of unique coding that obviously got some love, is actually really, really, REALLY bad. Their raw base stats are decent, but

(a) they can't equip anything, and by the time you get one, you have loads of cool equipment with sweet properties
(b) they can't set any abilities, and by the time you get one you have loads of great reactions, support, and movement abilities
(c) they require careful positioning to actually mime things properly; you can easily end up hurting your allies by mistake if you aren't careful. Additionally, the game is sometimes ambiguous about how their positioning will work, if they mime a PC who is attacking someone along an exact diagonal away from them.

The result is a character who requires to be positioned in very specific places to be effective, but has bad effective stats and durability. And of course it literally takes more JP to unlock one than you will get in a typical playthrough of the game, unless you stop and grind.

Edited April 17, 2017 by Dark Holy Elf

[Parrhesia]

Right, but instead of grinding for six hours to get four guys with 70 brave and 40 faith, they could instead, without cheating, get their guys to 70 brave and 40 faith on the class paths they're progressing along anyway in like. Twenty minutes.

What is even different between Fly and the Dragoon's Ignore Elevation (700 JP)?

[Augestein]

10 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

Right, but instead of grinding for six hours to get four guys with 70 brave and 40 faith, they could instead, without cheating, get their guys to 70 brave and 40 faith on the class paths they're progressing along anyway in like. Twenty minutes.

What is even different between Fly and the Dragoon's Ignore Elevation (700 JP)?

Fly allows you go go over obstacles that you can't jump on like trees and the like. It's just flat out better than Ignore Elevation. But definitely NOT worth that cost. 

[grandjackal]

Man, I remember when I did a no grind straight through playthrough of this game (so no side quests, no bar jobs, etc). Never doing that ever again. 

It's funny how this game is very highly acclaimed, but it's actually not that great. Half the struggle is with the camera, JP expectancy is absurd so most classes are useless for like 4 maps (in my playthrough, I got used to wizards and learned to love The Bomb), most classes suck anyways (Lancer requires a billion JP to do exactly one thing competently), and none of that shit matters because the game throws holy knights at you that already have all you need (bullshit abilities that explode people). Hell, you make fun of Mustadio. In a no-bullshit playthrough, he's still great because he's basically a better Chemist. 

Speaking of Chemist and bad balancing, there's basically no point in playing a white mage. Similar to how Orators can just tell people to die/betray as opposed to actually trying (and they both also use guns!). Starsign interactions was really bad for strategy (enemies randomly do less or more damage to you, etc), faith and brave generally have no real function outside of pinpointing weird cases like Malak since everyone generally had the same deal going. some fights are legit nonsense, I could go on.

Still, I play it every now and then because it's an Ivalice tactics game that isn't cutesy. Story is bad, but the atmosphere it gives is still different from the later games. Would be cool to have an Ivalice that returns to more underhanded political stuff than magical disney wonderment, but keeps the tribes like Bangaa for some cultural differences in the politics game. Story can be bad and hilariously stupid, I just want the feel back. 

Fun reading your playthrough. You are an entertainer, good sir. 

[Dark Holy Elf]

In addition to going over obstacles, Fly also lets you go over enemy units, which is actually quite important since units with both Fly and Ignore Height will by nature have relatively low move. A 3 move unit with Ignore Height can't even walk behind an enemy who just attacked him or her, while one with Fly or Teleport can.

Teleport also lets you go through obstacles and enemies, like Fly, but additionally lets you move farther than your normal limit with a % chance to fail. Since you'll always succeed on Teleports inside your movement range, though, this is strictly positive.

 

@grandjackal I'm not really sure how Mustadio is a "better" chemist? I agree that chemist is a natural fit for him because Snipe is best-used on a ranged job, but it's not like Snipe is the clear best secondary for a Chemist in general: Time Magic (Haste/Slow/Demi), Yin Yang Magic (Drain / various status), Charge (better damage), and even Battle Skill (worse debuffing than Snipe vs. randoms, but better against bosses) are all decent choices for a chemist's secondary, among others. Since JP is at a premium in this game I find the being able to build skills starting in Chapter 1 instead of mid Chapter 2 a large advantage for generics over Mustadio. Not that you can't use Mustadio if you like, but I wouldn't call him better than your starting team (especially if you customise their brave/faith to get the values you want).

[Parrhesia]

Update 23
In Which We Get to Have Significant Agency in a Battle

Spoiler

 

We officially find a... a...
We find something, that's for sure.

FINALLY. JESUS.

A decision that War of the Lions made, wrongly or more wrongly, was to make it so that instead of having advanced classes be accessible within 20 hours of you starting the game, that it would instead not do that. Amazing. They took something that was Not Broken about FFT, and then broke it. To get to Samurai, Thurio needed level 2 squire (okay, who gives a shit), level 4 knight (a big commitment to a bad class, though he got it mostly over and done with in earlygame), level 5 monk (great class, poor synergy)... and on paper it says level 2 dragoon, which needs in itself 3 archer (not a great class, decent commitment) and level 3 thief (pretty bad class for actual fighting).

I'm starting to come around to the idea that the PS1 version is legitimately better. Some of WotL's other added content is, uh... special. But we'll get into that later.

Anyway the deal with samurai - we haven't faced them yet, we haven't seen them yet, in fact I think we only fight two in the whole game in the, like, third-to-last map - 

ugh shut up bran

bran chill

Oh yeah, you can talk to your guys through Help-select-whatevering their names, but it's rarely enlightening. Even Mercurio talks about game mechanics.

Anyway, want to see the dramatic return of Mercurio, Uncloaked, to the capital city?

Yeah he just walks in and it's fine.

Zalbaag, last seen ambiguously giving the order to kill Mercurio after definitely giving the order to kill Tietra, prominently not last seen giving a fuck about Mercurio in any way. Turning pages.

Zalbaag scribbles something down.

Is that it, then? From Mercurio? Just; 'look, please stop the war'?

It's like fucking Groundhog Day. It's like Ziekden never fucking happened.

So now Mercurio just bursts in telling Zalbaag that Bush planned 9/11.

"Look I'm just saying there is TOTALLY an Illuminati. I dunno what it does or who's in it but there so is, bro!"

White Lion guy moves to obstruct Black Lion, grass green, sky blue.

yep

Responses that might be appropriate here: "Remember how you killed basically my sister right after saying you would do everything in your power to save her?"

"Yeah I wonder who would have given me trust issues around my family"

I miss a line, but Zalbaag then says "What have you ever done to inspire my trust?"

GOD
DAMN

They both stare at each other for a bit.

It might be charitable, but I do interpret the silence as shock from Mercurio and a little regret from Zalbaag like "haha wow i sure said that out loud huh"

aaaawkwaaaard

And then he just walks out. And, yeah, I guess we have our orders - chill at Eagrose. We try to leave...

And immediately we're in a fight. Man I wish I knew what this column was doing. Also you can't change guys' configurations at all on the deployment screen. This is the worst deployment screen in SRPG history, to be perfectly honest.

hey guys remember alma our surviving sister

"but haha man zal's was
zal's was sure a goodbye, is
what it was"

Yeah.

For some reason we get front-row seats to Mercurio explaining the whole plot.

You aren't really making the illuminati sound that evil, honestly. "Why, those scoundrels stopped the princess from being murdered!"

Wow I totally brain-freeze and forget to screenshot the next quote but it's Mercurio admitting that he's sure Dyce had his reasons but fuck if he knows.

Being an anime woman, Alma immediately starts crying.

So yeah, Alma's somehow learning for the FIRST TIME, A YEAR (ish) AFTER THE FACT, that Tietra's dead. She's pretty willing to accept that Dyce is kind of the badsman of the family. Delita's the wild card.

And Mercurio? Mercurio's the crusader.

Alma's a fan.

... Wait, she's pregnant?

no seriously idgi that line, that specific phrasing

I swear to God that 'loud breeze' is, like, The Alma Theme by this point.

Toot toot, it's the Illuminati brute squad!

Enemy variety! And knights.

I don't know why I bothered screenshotting Alma. She's an Ovelia, despite her level, and will immediately pour buffs on herself and run. She knows mass dispel and, like Mercurio and Delita, Chant. She will never need to use them.

For some reason the class for Zalmour, the High Inquisitor, is not, say, 'High Inquisitor', or 'Inquisitor'. It's the guy who conducts your fucking weddings.

With nothing better to do, I can at least make Thurio completely immune to magic.

haha oh god alma nailed the 20% Aegis on Mercurio.

Mercurio rushes in and geomancies everything. His knife does piss-weak damage anyway. Also one of their rude bitch knights beats down Alma, who ran into the thick of combat because ???

Zalmour decides to get murdered while charging a hugely-long spell.

HA
HA
IT HAPPENED TO SOMEONE ELSE.

It totally is too late. I mean, dude, you think we killed the Pope.

Which we did.

well he could have said that we neither killed delacroix nor took the auracite, as we did both

I'll be honest, the distinction is lost on me.

He then tries to revive the same dude.

It goes poorly for him.

Well we did it guys we killed the high inquisitor an

sigh.

We aren't even made to rout. I want to rout almost every mission, but I hate being made to hold back and just let Zalmour revive all their dudes - I mean, with no bonus for killing anyone, what's the point?

I mean, in the context of 'auracite isn't real', yeah.

This is a good point. Tucked into our entourage is legitimately the safest place for Alma right now.

!!! GOOD LINE ALERT !!!

There is, by now, absolutely no faith in Dycedarg being anything remotely useful.

Zalbaag, the Zalbaag who murdered Tietra and has shown to have opinions more or less monolithically aligned with Dycedarg (aside from agreeing to see Mercurio to shout at him and tell him to fuck off) to this point, and the Church, which your entire point is that it's corrupt from the inside out, because this game is all about edgily scoring points against the Catholics.

I guess this line's the most direct proof that the Zodiac Braves are named for- well, named the starsigns after them.

you are stupid

Alma we have just established that you, also, are a heretic.

The right decision for the wrong reasons.

Like Ovelia earlier - which I forgot to mention - Alma is in our party but never actually fights. So take her gear. Helpfully, she comes with the basic ribbon, the only headslot item monks can wear.

stop trying to fucking guilt me, game

you too, bran!
god i swear the help is so fucking needy these days

MAKE UP YOUR MIND BRAN

KILL COUNTER

positives: three men who are not knights
negatives: three knights

 

 

[Mage Knight 404]

I didn't even know WOTL reverted Job cost changes the original NA release made. That's... not great I admit. Reminds me that I too did a story only run, but of FFTA recently. Not the best time even in a game as easy as that one, friendo.

Naturally Alma shares Mercurio's good sense in chivalry, virtue, and jihad. Like any good anime imouto. Also Mercurio really is a heretic if he's beating up celebrants - is this some dark anti-marriage side of him!?