My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Live Reactions & Discussion)

My one and only issue with that arc is how Nightmare Rarity is less "Evil Rarity" and more "Nightmare Moon in Rarity's body". I think having Rarity get brainwashed into being evil would be interesting, especially if her personality wasn't too much different then her normal one. Other then that, I love the arc. Yeah it had problems, but so do the two-parters, and most people ignore the issues with those anyway because they find those episodes to be entertaining, which is exactly what I do with the Nightmare Rarity arc. I especially love how, instead of retreating and running away, the citzens of ponyvile actually help out against the bad guys, even the minor characters. That moment had far more impact for me then the stuff with the Equal Four did {Since those guys were just random ponies we met in that episode, whereas the characters in the Nightmare Rarity arc are ones you already know}.

edited 27th Oct '15 6:17:47 PM by marston

In semi-related news, I just watched the latest episode of Gravity Falls. Not going to give any spoilers, but I will say that Bill and Discord should never ever ever ever be allowed to meet.

I'd love to see what would happen if Bill possessed Discord. So much shit would go down.

I've thought of some of the worst case scenarios involving Bill possessing someone. So far, they are Discord(A guy crazy as Bill in the body of someone like Discord could cause some serious hell), Max Caufield(Him fucking around with her rewind powers and causing so pain to her body with all the nosebleeds she'll get from rewinding so much), Star Butterfly(The wand and the dimension scissors could lead to bad shit happening across many worlds), any saiyan(Obvious why), any of the Buus(Similar to Discord), the guy from Handlebars(He himself could end the world in a holocaust, with Bill's help he could possibly do so much worse), any siren from Borderlands(Esp. if he managed to get more then 6 together since that seems to lead to bad shit), and Johnny Gat(The boss became a bad ass by the end of 4, but he/she was mostly powerful due to the virtual world. Gat's got them devil powers from hell and is already a major force to be reckoned with.).

On the subject of dogs and cats, I also have a dog named Lily and she's barky too! In my Lily's case, it's mainly because she's a timid, rather nervous dog and she tends to be on high alert to her surroundings, so she's kind of like an oversensitive alert system (kind of similar to Lily Valley of the panicky Flower Trio). She can also be calm and sweet, too, and she is VERY loyal and rather clingy to me.

One thing that's interesting about my dogs is that while they're both Pomeranians and they're both very good friends with each other, they have some noticeable ways in which they are complete opposites. The main way is that Luna is as confident as Lily is skittish, and is probably the most relaxed and confident dog I've had despite being the tiniest. She can get perky and excited (and rather mischievous at times) but probably the majority of the time, she is pretty calm and relaxed, in a way that would surprise people who expect small dogs to be jittery and nervous.

edited 27th Oct '15 8:00:31 PM by Rainbow

I think there was a point where Ginger beat you to that.

Ginger was the most active in this thread by a huge margin (seriously, it was ridiculous), but it's still possible for Meta Four to be most active in the forums overall. That would be kind of insane though.

Ginger probably still has the highest number of posts in this thread.

Nope. I passed him a while back (somewhere in late 2013 IIRC). But it's pretty darn impressive that it took over a year for anyone to reach his post count considering that he was only even here for a little under a year. Of course, the main reason for that is that the thread activity fell off a cliff after he left, so there were far fewer posts to go around.

so like nobody noticed that i came back

Oh hi Brahian! Welcome back!

So many Halloween avatars in this thread now. I need to jump on this bandwagon.

Do you like my Halloween avatar? It's about trees. They're all about trees.

If there was a story involving the mane 6 actually meeting they're evil counterparts from another dimension

Sort of like Friendship Games?

I wouldn't say Lily's a bitch, more like she's not the smartest dog around.

At first I thought you were Rainbow, because she's always talking about her dogs and I think one is named Lily.

I don't know if it's ironic or just plain funny that I actually did post about my dogs right before yours mentioned me talking about my dogs! Although I guess it would be more ironic if my post DIDN'T mention my dogs, so probably just more of a funny coincidence.

On a different pet-related subject that is also relevant to My Little Pony, I was thinking about who has cats on the show (since cats got mentioned earlier on the thread too) and I thought, what would happen if Rarity met Goldie Delicious? The obvious answer is that Rarity would be absolutely horrified by how messy Goldie Delicious's house is, but I thought it was interesting to note that the two notable cat lovers in the show are complete opposites when it comes to cleanliness.

edited 27th Oct '15 7:59:34 PM by Rainbow

I don't know if I'd necessarily peg Rarity as "cat lover"; she likes Opal well enough, but it's not like she's a huge fangirl for cats or anything.

Give her time.....

Though Pinkie did think she could end up becoming a Crazy Cat Lady somewhere along the line.

EDIT: I think I got 'd...

edited 27th Oct '15 8:10:23 PM by DeathsApprentice

Me vs. Ginger: My reign as the most prolific poster began and ended well before Ginger ever joined. Years before MLP:FIM was even a thing, really.

Dunno who Ginger is.

Going to sleep. Stood up way too late tonight.

Seraphem: You should know by now I can NOT tell the difference.

Oh boy, do I ever. Your level of literalness is leagues beyond my own.

Edit: And I love you for it.

edited 27th Oct '15 8:21:27 PM by God_of_Awesome

He was a very, very particular member of the fandom.

Then he got banned for throwing one too many shitfits.

Jynx! You owe me a soda.

Yeah, but that's true of every single character except Gogo and Umero. I mean, my Sabin was a better mage than anyone.

Final Fantasy 6: One thing I still don't understand is what was up with Duncan? I'm pretty sure that Vargas claimed to have killed him, but then he comes back without even mentioning that.

By the way the final levels before the Kefka fight were Sabin 84, Umaro 73, Celes 67. Everyone else is pretty much the same as before, though Relm and Strago did gain a couple levels on the outing to Ebot's Rock.

Sabin ended up at 49% on Quick. I'm curious what would have happened if he had learned it and I had decided to make him my caster instead of Celes. Can you get infinite actions by Dualcasting Quick?

The start menu before the final battle shows a Time of 38:38, 129k steps, and 907k gil. I guess I never got a chance to see if money maxes out at 999999

I still don't understand what the deal with Sigfried was. He fights you on the train then runs off, then he shows up when going through the caves of Narshe, and then he's randomly at the collosseum saying there's an imposter. There's no explanation or payoff to the subplot.

I forgot to mentioned, but when I went to Thamasa early and saw what I thought were two future P Cs, I was only half right. I was right about Strago, but Relm doesn't actually show up until later. The other person was the boy in front of the mansion, who's just a random NPC.

I never did get around to trying to save the critters on Solitary Island. I wanted to test whether you could prevent them from self destructing after the first round by casting heal spells, but I forgot.

I find pinwheels amusing because to me the word means a toy made of thing foil with a stick that spins around. It's hard to immagine anyone being hurt by a thrown pinwheel. I think the localization team dropped the ball on that one. They should have called it a razor shruiken or something.

Also I was wrong about Super Ball being a type pf pokeball. There's just Pokeball, Great Ball, Ultra Ball, and Master Ball. It really does sound like a type of pokeball though.

Speaking of throwing stuff, I read that the Berserker Ring is supposed to cause Umaro to randomly throw teammates at the enemy. But he never did this despite having the ring equipped for the entire fight with Kefka. I'm not sure why.

I also don't really get the Elixers in clocks thing. Is this a running gag of some kind?

I only used one of the 11 X-Potions I found over the corse of the game, on Umaro before oen of the fights in the tower near the end. I never used any Elixers or Megaelixers. Partly, it's because I never needed to (I didn't really need that xpotion either) and partly it's because I was too scared to use irreplacible items. You never know when you're going to need them more in the future. It's ironic how rare consumables like that end up never getting used, at least if this is your first time playing and you don't know when you might need them. That's a common problem in videogames in general.

Overall the game still holds up well. Most of the oddities can be explained by technical limitations. Of course, what they did to Zozo is inexcusable. And to add insult to injury, it's the only place that didn't change at all after the calamity. It's almost like they were deliberately trying to highlight how bad it is.

There was also one really weird event flag. Locke steals the merchant's clothes without prompting, but if he tries to steal the Imperial cadet's clothes, it will always fail unless he happened to talk to a particular NPC first. It makes no sense, and just seems like sloppy programming.

Anyway, enough random thoughts. Time to read some walkthroughs.

Final Fantasy 6: So things I missed:

If Terra refused Banon three times, you get a different cutscene and a Genji Glove instead of a Gauntlet

Shadow has a chance of leaving after every battle after the Imperial Camp. I guess I got lucky that he never left. Seems weird that they'd have a specific scripted line for him after the Phantom Train fight if there's a chance he'll have already left.

There were some friendly ghosts on the train that I missed, including an item shop. I stopped trying to talk to ghosts after the first few all attacked me. I assumed that the one in the last car was the only friendly one.

When Locke first meets Celes, there's a cutscene of her getting beat up by the guards that was removed for the GBA version.

The walkthrough I'm reading said that they fought 3 battles on the rafters on the way to Ultros and ended up with 5 seconds left. Which is odd because I deliberately did everything wrong, flipped all the wrong switches, and I'm pretty sure I fought a lot more than 3 battles. And I still ended up with well over a minute left. I think it must be because they decided to use such a weak, large party. Seriously, you should be one shotting everything with Sabin by this point.

Apparently Ultros will randomly move around every 2-4 turns, which also gives him a new health meter. I can't remember if he did this during my fight, but I probably killed him too fast for that.

There's a surprising amount of complexity to the bosses that I missed. For example, the Cranes have some sort of charge mechanic.

Apparently, there's actually two espers sold at the Jidoor Auction house. In addition to Golem, it can also sell Zona, but I never saw that one. Perhaps that would explain the empty spot on my esper list.

The mysterious empty island doesn't just have Leaf Bunnies pre-calamity. It also has a rare and really powerful monster called Intangier. Guess I should have tried walking around it more. I gave up when I saw it only had leaf bunnies.

Mog is recruitable early if you avoid talking to Lone Wolf during the cliff scene.

Wow, apparently most of the imperial palance is explorable. When I looked around, the only place I could find that was accessible was the entrance hall and the stairs outside, which had maybe 6-8 guards. But apparently there's multiple floors and 24 guards total. You can even visit Kefka's jail cell. Well that was a pretty big thing to miss.

Looks like I got either 27 or 30 points at dinner. You need 50 to get the next tier, which is Doma being unoccupied.

If Celes isn't in your party at the Floating Contient, she joins at the end after Shadow leaves. I guess that explains why they had scripted content for her. I figured that that part just didn't happen if you didn't bring her.

Shadow doesn't use his dog attack on the Floating Continent because he left his dog at home. That's a nice touch.

Obviously you can save Shadow here by waiting, but I already knew that.

There are two kinds of fish. You actually can heal Cid, not that it does much good.

The Relm sidequest seems to be fairly different in this walkthrough since they saved Shadow. You don't find her in the Cave on the Veldt at all. Instead you just go straight to Jidoor to do the huanted mansion thing.

When getting Mog back, the walkthrough tells you to bring only 3 characters so Mog will join the party directly. Im pretty sure I had 3 characters or less, but Mog went to the airship anyway, (causing me to waste a trip to through the yeti cave and moogleville). Maybe it's different if you already had Mog pre calamity.

You can get Molulu's charm by examining the wall where Mog is, which prevents all random encounters. That would have been nice to know. Of course, it probably requires lugging the useless Mog around, and by this point you have the airship which makes random encounters mostly irrelevant. It would have mainly been helpful inplaces like Zozo and Kefka's Tower.

I'm amused that this walkthrough is constantly recommending which esper abilities to use in battle, while not mentioning the stat boosts at all and barely talking about the spells taught. I never did use any esper abilities, except in my doomed first fight against Flame Eater, where I used Terra's esper (Siren) at the end in desperation just to see if it might help (it did nothing).

In general, it's ironic that while I was playing, people kept warning me about using only 1 or 2 characters, and yet it's a far more powerful strategy than playing the game "normally". I was able to brute force nearly everything without much trouble. I can't immagine how much longer it would have taken if I did play "normally". Would I still be here playing, two months later?

One thing I've noticed is that this walkthrough often recommends the "cheap trick" of casting Confuse or Berserk on certain bosses to trivialize them. I never tried using status effects, partly because I could kill enemies faster most of the time just by attacking normally, and partly because due to Useless Useful Spell, I just automatically assume that status effects won't work on bosses and don't even bother trying.

Although later on the walkthrough switches to telling you to just Ultima everything. I never did bother learning Ultima, since it takes 100AP and I was already strong enough to defeat everything. I wonder what it's like.

Apparently, I missed not 1, not 2, but 4 different Espers. I already knew about Deathwing and the Giant Cactuar, I just couldn't find the stupid things. But I didn't know about Levithian or Gilgamesh at all. I think an NPC probably mentioned Levithian at some point, but I just mentally filed it into "random NPC chatter about scary monsters" along with Deathwing and Humbaba and prompty forgot about it. At any rate, there's no reason to take the ship when you have the airship. Which is why they hid it there, I guess.

As for Gilgamesh, I missed out on Excalipoor due to unfortunate timing with my finances. But even if I had gotten it, there's no way I would have guessed that you're suppossed to gamble it at the Collosseum. I probably should have just gambled every unqiue sounding item there at some point just to see what would happen. I considered it, but decided that it would take too long and didn't bother trying.

Apparently the cursed shield becomes a powerful shield once you've used it long enough. Of course, I only gave it to Sabin at the start of Kefka's tower, so I didn't use it anywhere near long enough. Would have been kind of funny though, since I was using it as a deliberate handicap.

So there apparently is a cutscene if you reunite Gau with his father after all. I'm not sure why I wasn't able to trigger it despite repeated efforts. Perhaps you need Gau and someone else in your party.

The walkthrough I looked at listed Dragon's Den after Kefka's Tower. I'm not really sure if it's possible to play after beating Kefka though. At least when I did it, it just went through all the cutscenes, then the credits, then more cutscenes, and then it ended on a black screen that just said THE END. So there's no way to go back and do Dragon's Den. Did I miss something? I'm not sure if you're supposed to leave the tower after defeating the last two dragons or what. I am somewhat tempted to try the den, but on the other hand, I've already wasted too much time playing this game and I'd probably just power through it like I did with Kefka's tower. I'm not sure it has anything to offer that Kefka doesn't.

Also, someone called Umaro useless. :( :( :(

Alright, time for me to go to bed.

Goodnight everypony. Remember, love, and tolerate.

I don't think you can Quick within Quick at all. Quad-casting is already pretty ludicrous, though (and really expensive, since you're technically casting 6 spells; barring having the Economizer, anyway).

It was originally called "Tack Star" in the SNES version. I don't know why they re-translated to something like that.

Well, considering you were complaining about so many "cheap" abilities and fights that were only really that way because you had one easily crowd-controllable character... Really, a pretty big reason it even went fast at all is because you had save states and fast forward so you could get out of jail for free with that stuff. If you want to see what a full party working together can actually do, find a speed run.

I did tell you about this, although I had it behind spoilers, so if you didn't check those, that would be why.

I'm not entirely sure how the Dragon's Den works, since I only played the SNES version, but if you want to play after beating the final boss, you're supposed to reset the cart and load a save from the main menu. If you have a save state that's still in the tower before the last boss, you can also go to that and warp out of the tower (or walk all the way back to the cables, I guess).

That's because he's not very good when not super over-leveled like that. He's also a berserker with no flexibility turn flexibility in a game where the party typically works as a team. Any other characters with as much over-leveling as you gave him would have wrecked just as hard (yes, even Locke...).

Well, considering you were complaining about so many "cheap" abilities and fights that were only really that way because you had one easily crowd-controllable character...

It only seems that way because I didn't say anything about the 90+% of fights that I curbstomped.

Any other characters with as much over-leveling as you gave him would have wrecked just as hard (yes, even Locke...).

Can Locke walk into the magic tower and punch all the magic to death? No? I rest my case.

He's also a berserker with no flexibility turn flexibility in a game where the party typically works as a team.

If I wanted to mindlessly curbstomp everything I'd just use Sabin. Umaro makes things more interesting.

Really, a pretty big reason it even went fast at all is because you had save states and fast forward so you could get out of jail for free with that stuff.

The vast majority of (non-boss) fights were ended with a single blitz. Fast forward just speeds up all the battle animations.

@Story: OOC: If you are having trouble getting out of Kefka's Tower, just use the warp spell... then again, since you are playing the GBA port, you should have been prompted to save your game after the credits. Doing that would boot you out of the tower.

Also, would you be interested in seeing (or reading) how I do the final fight with my team? I have a save file just before the fight. Hell, I'll even put Locke and Mog as the first fighters. What do you say?

Edit: Also, don't expect me to respond anytime soon. I'm off to bed now.

edited 27th Oct '15 9:34:58 PM by OrionAurora

Hey there guys. How are y'all doin' now?

Yes, but those are the ones that don't matter, since a team of appropriately leveled characters properly working together could do without being 40 levels over-leveled. You were getting stuck on the rare actually difficult random encounter and many of the key crowd control bosses.

With self-berserk, he could have stabbed his way through, which is close enough. Aside from that, that's exactly one dungeon.

Which is fair enough for your save, but others typically aren't going to have grossly over-leveled characters and will do just fine without. As I said before, a team of level 30s who utilize their abilities and Espers to their fullest can finish the game without much issue. Speed runners can finish closer to 20 and people who really know what they're doing can go even lower.

I'm not talking about the trash random battles. I'm talking about the ones where your log detailed constantly reloading to dissect the bosses or more difficult random battles.

Look, I know over-leveling works, as it pretty much does in almost every JRPG and sometimes yes, it can make a significant difference in time and/or effort. FF6 is not one of those games. I've enough experience with the different playstyles with which the game can be played to know that a full party with basic effort put into it wouldn't have been that far behind. The game is simply built in such a lenient way that extreme over-leveled just has exponentially diminishing returns. There's very little difference between absurd overkill and just plain overkill. So seriously, don't knock it until you've tried it (abandoning it 1/4 of the way through the game doesn't count).

Turns out the math problem in the movie wasn't just random numbers to look cool. It seems to be an actually rather difficult equation.

Reminds me how Twilight's equations in "It's About Time" were actual time dilation formulas.

Science!

Oh, and I just realized that derpi is back.

edited 28th Oct '15 6:40:05 AM by edvedd