(comes in manor, holding small bag) Hello boys. (takes something out of bag....a severed head, puts it on table, sits on couch)

Should I ask where he got it, or does one of you want to do that?

Title Cards!

• The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows
• The One Where Everyone Happens
• The One Where The Journal Is Important
• The One Where Tattoos Get Removed
• The One Where The Pests Are Shockingly Abundant
• The One Where She's Not Angry
• The One Where The Roles Are Reversed
• The One Where The Antidote Is Out Of Sight
• The One Where The Truth Hurts
• The One Where Some Stay Dry
• The One Where She Smiles
• The One Where The Princess Gives Tours
• The One Where Everyone Leaves Disappointed
• The One Where Legends Are Made
• The One Where Nobody Has Money
• The One Where Everyone's Feeling Drained
• The One Where Things Get Wibbly-Wobbly
• The One Where The Results Are Contested
• The One Where The Jokes Are Toxic
• The One Where Things Get Really Cheesy
• The One Where Vermin Sucks

Post of the Day #1260

OMG Derpibooru is finally back up! Huzzah!

here we have Carnifex doing adorable art again

edited 28th Oct '15 7:35:41 AM by Blissey1

I finally did it. (points at bloodied head) I killed The Good Son.

Marble Mac for the win.

You killed Macaulay Culkin?

@Ed Well, I killed his character from The Good Son, which I wanted to keep a silent death but he kept putting his hands on his cheeks and screaming so I slit his throat before cutting his head off!

That makes sense.

You see? Death gets me! Even if I blew up twice. (sees chunks of body parts from my bodies) So, what's up, Death?

Nothing much. Just sitting in a class that I'm not in. Also, fretting about the fact that my Twilight Sparkle wig hasn't arrived yet, and Halloween is in 3 days...

That's cool. I like your avatar, btw.

Thanks! I figured I might as well change it for Halloween. I like your avatar, too.

They would if they didn't use so many characters all the time.

And I can beat Pokemon Red/Blue in under 3 hours and solo the Elite Four with a level 50 Lapras. That doesn't mean it has any resemblance to the way a kid picking it up for the first time would play the game. Speedrunning is something you do when you've already played the game a bunch normally and understand all the mechanics and strategies and want an extra challenge. To pick a random example, sure Wrexsoul can be beaten by using Banish or Flare or whatever to permanently kill the Soul Savers due to a bug, but how many normal players are going to guess that?

Almost all the difficulties I ran into were due to using Umaro. If I had picked a normal character as my third, I would have had a lot less trouble. And I picked solo Umaro partly because I thought it would make things more interesting.

The only case I can recall where that happened without Umaro was the Yojimbo. And they are blatantly unfair. Even if you have multiple characters in your party, you're still going to have to rez them constantly. Unavoidable instant death from a trash mob is just bad design. Another thing is that the only reason I ever died was due to not using any strategy or really understanding the mechanics. Sure a level 30 party can win with the right strategy, but if I knew what strategy to use, I would have crushed everything even more than I already did.

Hey, I did use a normal party during the segment where the game forces you to just have Locke, and Celes. And I didn't really like it.

Hey, I believe you. I mean obviously people normally beat the fight with 12 low leveled characters. Maybe it would be more interesting to record videos of the fight and compare how long it takes, since Kuroi seems to think that having high leveled characters slows things down. I also have a savestate right before the battle, so I'd be up for it, assuming I can figure out the video record feature of the emulator.

I tried it again. There's no explicit prompt, but I figured out that if you press L on the THE END screen, it gives you the option to save. It's a little odd because you go back to the Falcon and still have espers and all like the closing sequence didn't happen.

Final Fantasy 6: Anyway, decided to try getting the Gau cutscene again, this time with him being chaperoned.

Still nothing with just Umaro and Gau. Time to add Gogo.

Even with a full party, still nothing happens. I don't get it.

I switched back to Sabin, Celes, Umaro, and Gau, and this time something is happened. I guess the game just doesn't like Mog, Gogo, and Umaro. Either that or it requires specific party members (Sabin perhaps?).

The reason I guessed that it might require Sabin is that he's the one who made a comment about the man perhaps being Gau's father earlier. And once again he's doing all the talking here.

Suddenly everyone is in Jidoor. Though where, I'm not quite sure. Maybe the inn? It has the speakeasy music from occupied Albrook.

The gang occupies a store of some sort.

Gogo and Mog aren't here. Umaro is, but that's probably because he was in my party at the start.

Gau gets a differnet set of sprites with a new outfit.

Wow, Gau even has his hair in a ponytale.

Well that meeting went better than I expected, given the way the old man was acting. It's a shame Gau doesn't keep his sprite. On the one hand, that would be more work, but they already made the sprites, right? They could have just set a flag in the game somewhere and switched his outfit permenantly.

Off to Solitary to try to cure the critters. Unfortunately, it won't let me cast Poisona or Esuna on enemies. I don't understand why, since it lets you cast damaging spells on allies just fine.

I tried giving Celes a reflect ring, but unfortunately those spells are not reflected.

Decided to fight the Levithian for the heck of it. I'm just using Celes, still in her tower getup.

Opening with Libra and Reraise, naturally. I figure I might as well use this to show I can win fights on the first try when I'm actually trying.

Celes ended the fight with 2317. I didn't even need to do any healing or actually use the reraise. I just put it up in case this boss has any BS instant death attacks, since otherwise people would be like see, you can't really win fights solo.

Celes says "Is everyone all right!?". The ship is completely empty except for her...

And now except for her and a magacite.

Stamina +2. Yawn.

Well that's it for now. Still not sure if I should try to track down Deathgaze or attempt Dragon's Den or just quit.

Thanks! Haven't changed my avatar in 10 months, I figured, "Why the Hell not?"

(looks at severed head)

And I got a Halloween decoration for the manor.

Huh, that's true. Severed heads do make for great Halloween decorations. I should plan my murders closer to Halloween next year.

Yep. Next time, join me and Irish Zombie and we can make Halloween decorations together!

we can make Halloween decorations together!

Do you mean make as in manufacture or make as in comprise? Because I'm sure Irish Zombie would make a great Halloween decoration.

I meant cloning The Good Son and cut off his head. Or whatever Death or Irish wants to do.

I'm gonna go to sleep soon. G'night everypony.

Good night, Block!

Except as a kid, that's exactly what I did. With a team of level 30s. And my tactics mostly consisted of "Spam specials." (Sabin, Cyan, Shadow) or "Scan. Drop relevant level 3 spell on them." (anyone else, who learned Magic and wasn't carrying the Offering/Genji Glove combo). And from hanging around the GameFAQs board for years, I can tell you with certainty that this is the typical way a casual plays. I mentioned the level 20 and lower because it's still possible for a savvy casual gamer to find a way to break the game at those levels (I didn't, but something like Bum Rush really was that easy to stumble upon with the 90s JRPG exploration mindset). Also, my kid self figured out to use X-Zone on Wrexsoul without looking anything up. It was purely by accident, mind, but it was one of my favourite spells (because of how cool it looked) I kept casting it on every boss because I hoped it would work at some point.

Oh, and to turn that whole point around on you...

Yes, and very few casual players are going to do this, because, guess what? Most people don't murder their own characters. Or choose a single character party. So if we're talking about a kid doing this for the first time, you really can't bring this statement into the argument and have it stand.

It's also worth noting that speed running uses a lot of really basic tactics that a lot of people would have picked up on in casual play too, in part because it's one of very few options at the time. Much of the rest is still pretty similar (with about a half-dozen key abuses that mostly save time over being necessary to survive in sketchless any%; a bit more in any% with sketch), just execution has to be tighter because player numbers are lower.

What about your complaining about getting frozen? Or the stuff still instant killing Sabin? Or the Yojimbos? You also seemed to have gotten lucky enough not to run into the ninja who throw 7000-8000-damage undodgeable weapons.

That's my point, though. There is little difference between overkill and absurd overkill and you were well into the absurd side of things. Level 30s with even universal half-assed strategies could still win with little difficulty.

That's... very little of the game.

Hey, stop putting words in my mouth. My claim is that it wouldn't be that much faster because of the way the game difficulty curve works. Keep in mind that I have personal experience comparing the two, as one of my runs involved getting several characters above 80 (and Sabin to 99), where they all damage-capped 30+ levels ago and where enemy HP distribution didn't demand more than 5000-6000-damage hits most of the time (again, little gap between overkill and absurd overkill). Huge numbers are fun at all, but all it takes is a cursory Scan/Libra to realize a good chunk of it is grossly unnecessary. And yes, I'm still talking about my kid self's tactics, since I haven't even played a full run since glut of runs I did back in the day.

I want Toph from Avatar to meet Maud Pie.

...

MUD PIE.

OH MY GOSH

You know what we should do? Play a video game and discuss our progress with it.