More Final Fantasy

[Sullla]

T-Hawk and I continue to go back and forth with our FF reports. This was largely inspired by his recent efforts. I call this team, "Living Off the Land."

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/FF/LOTL1.html

[Deceptus]

You are obviously crazy. The time commitment to do these wacky things seems quite a challenge to overcome. Not to mention that you could continue on with Skulla...

But the report as always on a highest level. I laughed out loud when I saw this little dreadful pun on the part of the game: "Da party perished".

EDIT: Oh, and did you notice that the Lich in this game looks really like the "I'm going to get you, Caesar" (that those shameless Americans later exploited for their own propaganda...). Just look at this little blue hat thingy he has on himself...

[Sullla]

There's another new FF report on my website, covering a low-level challenge. T-Hawk mentioned doing one before in the past, and I'd be interested in comparing notes on how the attempts differed.

http://www.garath.net/Sullla/FF/LL1.html

[T-hawk]

Wow, somehow I completely missed this thread when you posted it. Good thing you came back with another report. Hey, I did play another FF variant myself a few weeks ago, but haven't gotten around to the report. Guess I need to now. 8)

My low-level run was several years ago, and wasn't all that low, finished at level 18 or 19. I don't remember many details, except that the party was of course the uber Fighter-Fighter-Red-Red combo and definitely leveled enough for the LIFE spell. Yours was certainly much more impressive!

And I didn't realize that a true low level challenge also effectively meant a low-gold challenge, at least for the first part of the game. Well done on budgeting for Marsh Cave. As I mentioned in my reports, Marsh Cave really is just a grind of attrition. Enough potions will get through it, while the Short and Silver Swords and Iron Armor really can be skipped.

The game can handle the situation where a low-level Warrior gains two levels in one fight. The warrior ends up with a negative number for exp needed, which displays as 65000+ as overflow from 2^16. Then when you win the *next* fight, the game checks again and awards the missing level. I always wanted to somehow get a level-1 character to beat WarMech all by himself to gain 10+ levels in one shot. That's actually possible with save-state abuse, run from everything else and hit the 1/201 shot with the Bane Sword.

Re running from ZomBulls -- the key point is that unrunnability (I made a word :D ) depends on the entire encounter _group_ package, not just the type of enemy. The ZomBull package in Castle Ordeal prevents running, since it's used as the boss of the dungeon. Other ZomBull packages, like the ZB/Troll encounter on the Peninsula of Power, do permit running. Finally, just for even more confusion, the Zombull/Troll package can be encountered with zero Trolls, which looks identical to the ZomBull package in Ordeal but IS runnable! (BTW, someone recently posted to the FF Formulas thread on Gamefaqs with the full list of nonrunnable encounters.)

The Dragon Armor has elemental resistances? I've always used the Ben Siron guide (on Gamefaqs and a billion other sites) which doesn't mention that...? I see now that some other guides do mention it. However, newer sources can be unreliable about the NES version; many authors have only played from the PSX or DS remakes of the game. Those have some drastically different mechanics, especially in the department of combat damage modifiers like race and element.

Thirteen attempts at the Temple of Fiends? I know you've stubbornly done far more than that, but I get bored and start loading up Civ instead after about four tries. Kudos for the persistence!

BTW, your page header "Low-Level Chellenge" has a typo

I don't have much to add on the LOTL variant. I was trying to think of a way to play the game Diablo Ironman style without town trips, but you're right that there just isn't enough healing until the Heal Staff halfway through the game. Maybe D2 Ironman style, with only one trip allowed to each town, though that makes for some really tough cash farming before Elfland or you lose FAST forever...

Hey, if you want to do variantism with one of the SNES FFs, it's gotta be Final Fantasy V. "Final Fantasy V's story is retarded." "WHAT WAS THAT? I'M SORRY, I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER ALL THIS JOB SYSTEM."

[Sullla]

Wow, wish I'd known about how the game handles the negative XP issue while playing. That would have saved me some agony at a couple points...

I know that the game sets the running flag by encounter mob, not enemy type. Just for another example, you can run from a GrShark/Wizard Sahag pairing, but not a Wizard/Red Sahag pairing. In each case, when I talked about these unrunnable fights in my report, I really meant individual encounters, not specific monsters types. That probably could have been clearer.

The Dragon Armor definitely has elemental resistances. I know because my fighter successfully resisted a whole bunch of fire and lightning attacks while wearing one, and not having a Ribbon or anything else. The Ben Siron guide is simply wrong on this one.

One of the problems with this kind of game is that so much often depends on luck. As in: does it really amount to skill when you need to play a dungeon 13 times to win? Where does a challenge just become grinding through tedium and hoping to get lucky? I'll readily admit that I probably would have created a savestate the next time I got past Lich and just played from there, had I failed a few more times. Winning or losing wasn't coming about as a result of my actions, just what dice rolls the AI programming chose to make. That's a major reason why I've stayed away from the stupidly hard challenges, like solo thief. So I'm not sure how much praise I really deserve for this particular idea...

I played through FF5 on an emulator a long time ago, back in about 2001. It's a fun game but very, very, very hard. Hardest FF by a very wide margin. I'm not sure it's the best game for variantism, but I'd be interested in hearing about anything you came up with.

[T-hawk]

OK, no more chucking the Dragon Armor then. And it's a natural fit for the Ribbonless character, of course.

Final Fantasy V is hard only in the same way that FF1 or Diablo 2 are hard: if you don't know what you're doing or intentionally playing a variant. The job system has loads of highly powerful combos: combine the Red Mage's Dualcast with the Time Magic spell Quick, and that mage can cast five spells in one turn! To get completely disgusting, stack up the Mystic Knight's Spellblade chargeup (4x damage on targets weak to that element) and the Hunter's Rapid Fire command (4 half-strength attacks) on a dual-wielding Ninja, and that's 16x total damage per round.

Problem is, the game is balanced for that kind of optimal play, and The Gap is huge between that and normal/uninformed/variant play. Sirian wrote extensively of that phenomenon in Diablo 2. And of course the nuances of the job system aren't described at all in-game, so you really do need outside references for it (much of which probably didn't exist around 2001.) But if you haven't played FFV that way, it's like playing a Firebolt sorcie and never seeing what a maxed-out Frozen Orb spammer can do.

[Sullla]

Final Fantasy V is hard only in the same way that FF1 or Diablo 2 are hard: if you don't know what you're doing or intentionally playing a variant. The job system has loads of highly powerful combos: combine the Red Mage's Dualcast with the Time Magic spell Quick, and that mage can cast five spells in one turn! To get completely disgusting, stack up the Mystic Knight's Spellblade chargeup (4x damage on targets weak to that element) and the Hunter's Rapid Fire command (4 half-strength attacks) on a dual-wielding Ninja, and that's 16x total damage per round.

That was a vintage T-Hawk paragraph right there.

At the very least, it's a game I'll keep in mind while killing time over the next year(s) waiting for Diablo 3. Of course, I'd need to learn the "right" way to play first of all just to find out where the variant material exists. Fortunately, there's vastly more documentation available now (as you predicted) than there was 7 or 8 years ago, when there was little more than a translation guide out there.

[Deceptus]

The FFIV report is entertaining even if I haven't ever played the game. Must try it, though. The lifesaver were remarks about everybody turning emo as means to make deep characters... Yeah, that seriously itches.

As for anime storylines and graphics... well, if you have something against the storylines, you haven't watched the right animes. (I propose Elfen Lied or Hotaru no haka... and such. But no, I'm not an anime fan. I just watch one from time to time.) But yeah, graphics are retarded nowadays. And people mimic them with those goddamn Cosplays. I mean, that Cloud's sword looking like a wet dream of some Dungeons&Dragons illustrator? Who can take this seriously?!?

BTW. I think I've asked this question several times to you and never got the answer: you never found any interest in Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Fallouts, etc.? All of them have beautiful storyline, great dialogue, atmosphere, potential for variants (Pacifist in Fallout who never kills. A solo jester run through Baldur's Gate 2 [yes, someone DID that. On Insane level.])... and you once said that you find most of the modern (well, let's say that Baldur's Gate and Betrayal at Krondor are like Mars and Venus... though I don't speak negatively about BtK, no sir.) RPGs unappealing. Why?

And yes, I'm writing all that because I became addicted to your website, visiting it every day.

[Sullla]

Balder's Gate was a really good game, I bought and played that when it came in the late 1990s. I didn't like it so much that I was anxious to buy the sequels though (Balder's Gate 2, Icewind Dale, etc.) I'm not a huge D&D person either, although I did play once a long time ago, back when 2nd edition was still relatively new (which give you an idea of how long ago that was!)

I liked the look of some of the more modern Western RPGs a lot, I just never seem to get around to trying them for one reason or another. Oblivion looked awesome, for example, but the bizarro leveling system was a major turnoff. We'll see if Fallout (literally Oblivion with guns!) turns out to be good.

Everyone who's into anime always says, "if you watch ____ obscure show, you'll really like it!" Sorry, not buying it. I've seen enough by now to know that it's not something that appeals to me. (There are a lot of other elements of Japanese culture that I really like though, and the country is on my short list of most desired places to visit. I don't want to give the wrong impression here!)

You really don't have to check my website every day, as I usually only do updates once every 3-4 weeks. I appreciate it though.

[Deceptus]

Everyone who's into anime always says, "if you watch ____ obscure show, you'll really like it!" Sorry, not buying it. I've seen enough by now to know that it's not something that appeals to me.

Oh, I'm also not a big anime fan; as I said, cosplays and such drive me mad. But some of those I watch either from:
-sentiment from my childhood (in Poland you couldn't really watch anything good in TV if it wasn't anime, at least about 10 years ago... [I'm 14]... and now, I get fits whenever I see a child channel with horrible poop-centered jokes and sick plots). Example: Slayers or Captain Tsubasa.
-or from the fact that they just had some interesting plots that didn't drag on and on for 910910 episodes (example: Elfen Lied. It has only 13 episodes of good storyline actually. I don't feel obliged to watch all the new episodes as they come by, so that was okay. Anime writers just don't know how to continue a story that has to drag for hours and hours, and that reflects itself in many retarded "plot twists".).
-or Hotaru no Haka, which was not an anime series but just a film. And it was actually one of the finest documents about the tragedy of II World War that I have ever seen (two children are off on their own in Japan, where bombs rain on their heads and they're vilified even by their relatives for no other reason than just lack of food for everyone).

Other than some of the real excellent pieces, I'm not much into anime. Mostly because most of them nowadays are retarded like Power Rangers, only in some way other kind of way. (In Power Rangers, we have braindead children [why, oh WHY everytime they fight those funny ninjas they have to shout: "AIM FOR THE Z!" They can't remember such a simple thing?] fighting even more braindead villains. In Naruto, we have a crying emo [Sasuke] who basically steals the spotlight of almost everyone else and his "emoness" makes him cool. And I actually judged that from only about 14 episodes I watched, just to check out why is this anime so praised.) Oh, and some of the artwork also gives me fits:
http://img166.imageshack.us/img166/2051/...ee1ac1.jpg

As for BG2... It's never too late to give it a shot. No, really.

We'll see if Fallout (literally Oblivion with guns!) turns out to be good.

I don't really know about Oblivion - the atmosphere is great and such, but the dialogue system... Or it's lack, I should say...

Fallout 1 and 2 is basically a big sandbox where you can play while solving whatever you wish. Storyline is a bit poor and serves more as a background to the game, and it serves this role perfectly. Especially because in this game you can wander pretty much whenever you can (although this fact may be a flaw as well - I don't have enough fingers to count the 'masters' of this game who go to the more advanced location in the game and exploit all the bugs just to get uber-stuff with which they own the rest of the game.) and it won't ruin any plot continuity. Just remember that sooner or later you will have to advance the storyline (but it's more in the case of Fallout 1).

I liked the look of some of the more modern Western RPGs a lot,

I recommend The Witcher. (if only because of the fact it's one of the few decent games that came from Poland) Very adult storyline and many great choices that effect your game. You can't create your character, but that's okay because the one you play as is interesting enough (and no, he's not emo) and you can develop him in various ways as you progress.

As for visiting your website like crazy, I remember that you have once posted a huge part of your Diablo 2 adventures and you didn't bother to notify about them on the website... Since then, I got obsessed. Nice marketing approach here. :neenernee