Final Fantasy general

Yeah, but I don't remember having many issues getting an enemy to use a particular skill in X-2. Worst I recall was trying to learn... whatever Baralai teaches you, mostly because he was slaughtering me during the process.

Blue magic could have worked well in XII with the glut of enemy abilities.

Getting hit to get skills is classic Blue Mage, though. VII's most annoying aspect regarding Blue Mage was permanently missable skills like Trine or Pandora's Box.

But yeah, IX's method was frustrating, particularly for the Vices. Not to mention that Gravity attacks have horrible accuracy. Give me a method like Strago or Kimahri any day.

Edited by Hobgoblin on Feb 17th 2019 at 1:36:34 AM

Meanwhile Quistis is just in the corner fiddling with inventory items.

At least she doesn't steal them

-glares at Yuffie-

Finished FFVI.

I feel like to an extent VI is a "for its time thing", but it's held up well enough. I certainly enjoyed it more than I was expecting, and it really is apparent that Square was aiming for something very ambitious with this game. Every aspect of it, from its cast, the story, themes, music, etc makes that very transparent. There's a LOT of stuff in this game that stands out to me in some way, like Shadow's missable dream sequences, the Phantom Train, the opera house, ultros...

The World of Ruin is the big one though. I think the impact is a bit lost nowadays now that everyone knows about it, but at the time this must have been huge. Even now, the atmosphere when you step out into the overworld for the first time is pretty striking. The whole idea of a semi-open world where you go around recruiting your old party members is really cool as well. But more than that, it ends up tying into VI's main theme, which is trying to find a purpose in the world, a reason to be.

I think my two main complaints are that its large cast is both a blessing and a curse. The characterization is a lot less bland than FFIV, and I wouldn't say any of the characters are outright bad, but a lot of the character work does end up feeling a little simple, and I think the sheer amount of party members contributes to that. For example, Terra's character arc makes enough sense but it also makes her kind of a dull character for a good part of the game. I'm not really counting the optional characters like Mog, Umaro and Gogo since optional party members are almost always kind of underdeveloped by their nature, so I'm fine with them being thin.

The other problem is the gameplay. I've made it no secret that I'm not a huge fan of the ATB, but I can see there was some effort made to make the gameplay interesting. Every character having a special command is a neat idea, and some of them like Shadow's Throw, Sabin's Blitz, Edgar's Tools and Strago's Lores are pretty useful. However they aren't all winners; Gau's Rage mechanic just takes way too much effort to set up properly, so I just ignored him after I didn't need to use him anymore. Umaro is kind of a joke and only really usable in very specific scenarios. Cyan's Bushido is pretty useless after the early game, although you can at least make him moderately useful with the Espers.

Speaking of which, that's the bigger problem. When you get Espers, the whole game just breaks. The fact that every character can basically become a super mage with little effort and deal respectable damage means that in practice the end of the game is just the player spamming Ultima or Flare, with the occasional Osmose to restore MP (meaning even Ethers aren't necessary) or Curaga/Arise/Reraise. This also ends up making the end of the game kind of a joke, though that was partly my fault since I think I ended up overpreparing. Once I discovered that I needed three parties to go into Kefka's tower and that those three parties would all need to fight I spent a good amount of time prepping my units, and the Triad and Kefka all ended up being chumps.

So all in all, I wouldn't necessarily say it's one of my top favorite JRPG's, or even necessarily among my favorite FF's (well, maybe, I'd have to think about it and play a few more of the games to have a good idea of where I'd place it relative to the others). I can think of multiple other games with music, writing, and gameplay that I enjoy more, and even games where all of those aspects are better at the same time. But I still found VI to be pretty enjoyable and I think I finally understand what it is that makes people hold this game in such high regard, so I'm happy that I played it after all this time.

I find it funny that Yuffie won't actually steal all of your Materia if you have too much.

My biggest criticism for the World of Ruin is that after getting Cyan and Terra, I had no idea which order to get the other characters was best. I knew where each one was, but I was always afraid I would get killed by endgame enemies I had no chance against. Maybe I was worrying too much, though.

Get Mog early for the encounter rate nullifying item.

I didn't think the difficulty curve was all that bad in that respect, you could get everyone else after Cyan in almost any order and it wouldn't be an issue I think. Granted it wasn't long before I beat Deathgaze and got Bahamut, and after that everything was pretty easyt.

Yes it is but they gave you Manipulate to make up for that problem.

There is no manipulate in X-2.

X-2 gave you confused which you could use to get them to use their healing abilities on you and the job change made it easy to switch to them to get hit by it.

XIV's Blue Magic also has to have the enemy use the skill but then you gotta kill them afterwords and its only a CHANCE to learn it. This includes extreme (read 'highest') difficulty bosses that require you to get non-random 8 players to even do.

I would say XIV's Blue Magic is easily the worst implementation of learning Blue Magic.

Edited by Memers on Feb 17th 2019 at 2:29:18 AM

Once in you've gotten Cyan and Terra you should be strong enough to take on most of the World of Ruin, at least the parts with recruitable characters. That said, Gau is super easy to get since all you need to do is fight a couple battles in the Veldt, and Mog can be gotten to without really fighting anything. Then I'd say the enemies around Relm and Shadow a bit easier than the ones around Umaro and Gogo. Strago can be gotten immediately after Relm without fighting anything. I always save Locke for last though since for him you need to go through a fairly tough dungeon that requires two seperate teams.

I just remembered how awful Confuse is in X-2. Yeah, let's just throw buffing items on a fiend.

XI had even more RNG but XI had much better implementation of Blue Mages in general and was from a time when MMO's were much more obtuse

VI was the first time they did a game as open as it is in terms of customization and exploration since II and it's even more broken in that regard. The Genji Glove/Offering combo (or whatever the latter's new localized name is) is infamous since it lets you do up to 79992 damage in one turn at no cost and is trivial to set up. Nothing in the game but the Kaiser Dragon can stand up to that. As a casual experience it's a good time and a great game but put any sort of optimization or effort into building your characters and it's smashed to pieces.

Edited by Hashil on Feb 17th 2019 at 4:25:08 AM

I didn't know about Offering (it's probably translated differently in the GBA version, which is what I played), but honestly Ultima by itself breaks the game. I guess it does require you recruiting Locke, which mandates you going through a rather involved and lengthy dungeon, but it's not like I had much trouble before then either.

Edited by Draghinazzo on Feb 17th 2019 at 8:15:07 AM

The Master's Scroll is the non super nintendo translation.

I heard there will be novel apprently that covers the events set for the cancelled DLC. I think April is the release month.

That would be nice. It's a shame they couldn't justify making all the DLC but that would be some recompense.

Incoming blitzbomb level disaster!

I'm going to say that's a one-off. The other novelisations have been at least fine.

Do people even care about the XV characters enough for a X-2.5 tier fiasco to even happen?

The Tidus thing was hilarious. If they do that again with Noctis, it would probably be the most worthwhile product to come out of XV.

People like Noct and his friends. Yes.

Luna is a very important-

My favorite character from XV judging by the LP I watched was the dude who sounded like some Italian wiseguy and I think was interested in da diamonds.

Why are you in this fictional world without Italy mr. mobster?

Edited by Nikkolas on Feb 18th 2019 at 8:59:03 AM

Ah, Dino. He's about 2000 years ahead of time being Italian-American in a Latin world.