Together Retro: Final Fantasy Spin-Offs

[noiseredux]

I love FFT, but I have to say I was pleased with my pick for the month. My grievances aside, I look back on Type-0 fondly.

[Exhuminator]

In Tactics Ogre you pretty much always get 10 so it really feels like I'm controlling an army and have a lot more options.

In the PSP remake you get to have your total army raised from 30 to 50, not even counting guests. The PSP version often lets you have more than 10 units on the field at once, I remember controlling 15 units one time! 12 units at once isn't rare either. Of course the enemy gets to have just as many units, if not more sometimes.

[marurun]

I am on track to finish Final Fantasy Legend II by the end of February. I am in the last area. I was being overpowered but an influx of gear and having to fall back on some new tactics has helped to make my team more effective.

[nullPointer]

Here I am bringing up the rear as we draw near the closing of the month for Final Fantasy Spin-Offs! I finally made it to the last chapter in FF Tactics: War of the Lions. Riovanes Castle had some tricky segments, but at this point my party is fairly OP (just the way I like it, lol) so most of the story line battles are fairly straight forward. The one-on-one battle with Belias could have been tricky, but I boosted my speed with Tailwind until I could dance circles around him (4 of my turns to every 1 of his), then I boosted my attack with Focus for quite a while. By the time I finally descended on him, I felled him in one shot for 999 damage in round one, then I single handedly eliminated his minions in round two and delivered the killing blow in the span of two turns.

The subsequent battle in which you have to keep Rapha alive on the roof of the castle … is sort of BS though, primarily thanks to the fact that Rapha's AI is incredibly aggressive, and she doesn't have the good sense to keep herself alive, despite the fact that each of the three opponents can easily one-shot her. I had to replay that battle at least a couple of times due to the fact that Rapha was dying before my party could do anything whatsoever. Powerful status effects, insta-kill spells, dual wielding enemies with strong weapons and Rapha's apparent desire for quick death make that battle not so much fun.

Now that I'm in Chapter 4, I'm super close to meeting the requirements for turning Ramza into a dark knight. I'm hoping that will provide some nice benefits as I forge ahead. Although I wasn't looking forward to having Ramza master all the black mage skills at this late stage in the game, I actually did it all in one battle thanks to some of the tricks you guys have shared, lol. I got into a random battle with two archers, a goblin, and … a white mage. I knew upon entering the battle that I needed to make that white mage my mark. So after felling all the other opponents, I backed off and started having Ramza (as well as Luso) use Shout, Tailwind, and Focus every round. This went on for a long time. It turned out that our white mage friend also had black magick as a secondary ability, but thankfully she didn't know any super-powerful spells and was spamming Fire incessantly. At some point I had my dragoon-thief strip her of her weapon, armor, and helm. Then she eventually just ran out of MP altogether. And still I was grinding for JP. Finally I maxed out all the applicable attributes and there was no more JP to be had, at which point I finally gave that poor white mage an honorable death. After the battle Ramza was at max level for black mage and had enough JP to master every skill in that tree. Yay! Now I just need to have him reach max level on Geomancer and I'll finally be able to change his job to dark knight (assuming he meets the applicable kill requirements I guess). I'll probably look for a battle in which the steps above are easily repeatable.

[Ack]

Awesome, null! Now you're cooking with gas.

Geomancer is an...interesting class. I've never been a huge fan of it, but it can do some unusual things in the right setting. The biggest problem is that some of its abilities get used in only a couple of battles, so if you can't clear it all in one go, try to plan ahead for what you take to make sure you're not nabbing worthless skills until you have to.

[laurenhiya21]

Wah this month did not go at all well for me! I was super excited to play the games for this month too, but school was just rough this month and I've been feeling super drained the past few weeks.

I did start Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon though! (even if I haven't gotten far yet and there's no way I can finish it this month) It started out fairly easy, as I expected it might, but the first big dungeon (a fire dungeon) was surprisingly much more difficult! I had to be pretty careful as I made my way though it, since a number of the enemies hit quite hard. I unfortunately died at the boss like a dummy (I had 2 teleport wings so I could have left!), but I wasn't frustrated about it since I was super exhausted at the time and was bound to make a dumb mistake or two. Although apparently I was under leveled anyway so I accidentally made it a bit harder on myself haha.

Even if I did derp up a bit, I am liking the game so far! I might have to put the game down for a bit until I'm not so brain dead 24/7, but I definitely want to go back to it and play some more.

Oh and I did drop My Life as a King as I thought I might. I unlocked a new building (I think it was a pub?) but you don't really do anything with it, so it didn't add anything for me to do in the day. Too bad this game was so boring since the concept is neat!

[marurun]

I'm still determined to finish Saga 2 by the end of the month. That means I have tonight and tomorrow night. Fingers crossed that I can make this work!

[pierrot]

Wah this month did not go at all well for me! I was super excited to play the games for this month too, but school was just rough this month and I've been feeling super drained the past few weeks.

It's been that kind of month. I'm starting to feel like I have things under control for a while, but it's probably a false sense of security.

I'm still determined to finish Saga 2 by the end of the month. That means I have tonight and tomorrow night. Fingers crossed that I can make this work!

You can do it, maru! You don't get to sleep anymore, anyway, right? Plenty of time.

--

I finished the story missions for the Wings of the Goddess expansion for FFXI, finally. It basically ended up just taking a complete dump on the continuity of the greater FFXI story, which kind of sucks. It makes me think of the Suikoden series, in a way; That is, in that the first three 'chapters' of the stories in the Suikoden series, and FFXI, establish a pretty well conceived, continuous narrative, that is almost completely undone by later entries, under different stewardship.

The upside is that I can now summon a bipedal, demi-deity, cat-thing, and a demonic vacuum. The former is good for "mewing," and the latter is good for dispelling--and by, "good," I mean that they both have limited utility, but at least I actually have those capabilities for my Summoner, now. Even better, I finally got my Moonshade Earring, with TP bonus augment. Now, at ~1000 TP, I can actually push 10k damage on unstacked Rudra's Storm (against piercing weak mobs, with attack boosting food, and Chaos Roll attack boost)! I realize most people couldn't care less about any of this gibberish, but at some point, someone is going to find it intriguing enough to play it-- or not. For anyone into number crunching, though, it's a must. Endgame builds are just straight number crunching, and spreadsheets exist for most jobs, as well. I think FFXI makes Pathfinder look like paint by numbers. (Not that I like Pathfinder, anyway.)

[Exhuminator]

I'm still determined to finish Saga 2 by the end of the month. That means I have tonight and tomorrow night. Fingers crossed that I can make this work!

You can do it man. All you have to do is give up on life for two days!

I did start Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon though!

Aww, I'm glad to see poor ol' Chocobo got some love after all in this thread.

[isiolia]

I finished the story missions for the Wings of the Goddess expansion for FFXI, finally. It basically ended up just taking a complete dump on the continuity of the greater FFXI story, which kind of sucks. It makes me think of the Suikoden series, in a way; That is, in that the first three 'chapters' of the stories in the Suikoden series, and FFXI, establish a pretty well conceived, continuous narrative, that is almost completely undone by later entries, under different stewardship.

Not sure if it really undoes much. I agree that the base game plus RoTZ and CoP are pretty well integrated, and the later expansions really go all over the place. WoTG does do a decent job of fleshing out nation storyline backgrounds, even if the primary storyline is basically pulled out of nowhere. Objectively, it's simply a matter of "needing" to keep adding to a subscription based game instead of ending at a logical point and moving on.
Additionally, there was a stretch there where the ability to add additional zones/data was limited via the PS2. FFXI ran up against the storage allowed on the PS2 HDD, which is when it saw a particularly large amount of asset reuse - mini expansions, Abyssea, WoTG, Voidwatch, etc. When that got changed, allowing a larger size on disk, we wound up with almost all new assets across the board in SoA.
So, to a point, you could look at WoTG as kind of trying to do the most under limitations.

Grats on finishing it regardless. Unless they've changed something recently, Mewing Lullaby gets abused quite a bit in a few fights. I figure I'll turn my accounts back on sometime to at least do more of the anniversary content.



All I succeeded in doing for this Together Retro is buying a Mystic Quest cart that I didn't end up playing.