The Ultimate Final Fantasy Thread: This Guy Are Knock You All Down

[Kazin]

Welp.

First game of the year beat is Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion (as it's apparently called). I, er, had a lot of fun with it:

That includes the superboss, who was the final mission I beat (as you could imagine). She's mainly an HP sponge with ridiculous stats - surviving long enough considering she basically one shots you to deplete her 10,000,000 HP is tough. You can steal 99 Phoenix Downs from her (or whatever number to make your count hit 99), so you can keep yourself with basically permanent Raise status, but she has a really quick physical attack that kept killing me before I could reuse a Phoenix Down. I probably tried her a dozen times, maybe more. I had fun with her, though - it's easily the most challenging fight in the game by a long shot, and requires you to actually learn her mechanics, which is not something I'd done since the first half of the game, since I got so addicted to the missions that Zack was an absolute powerhouse by the end (the final boss took two hits from one of my more weak attacks lol).

I really love maxing characters out in the Final Fantasy series. Something about breaking the HP and damage limits and maxing out my stats is really fun. I wouldn't mind another game in Crisis Core's mold - it's a very simple button masher, for the most part, though I'm sure hard mode makes things more difficult to breeze through. I'm tempted to go back to my playthrough of FF7R, and probably will... I think I left off at a big section with Aerith in the slums, coincidentally, which is probably a decent point to pick it back up at considering what I just played lol.

 

[Issun]

Looks like June 22 is the official release date for XVI.

 

[Daikaiju]

Looks like June 22 is the official release date for XVI.

Or VI.XXII.MMXXIII

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

Or VI.XXII.MMXXIII

This is all wrong and I hate it lol

 

[Torzelbaum]

This is all wrong and I hate it lol

So does that mean that you would prefer
XXII.VI.MMXXIII instead?

 

[Purple]

I believe for a more proper date format we'd need to know how long the current emperor has been in power.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

So does that mean that you would prefer
XXII.VI.MMXXIII instead?

Marginally better but still bad. Romans would have counted dates day-month-year. But they wouldn't have often counted months by numbers alone, especially during the Republican Era where every third year or so, they included a 13th month in between February and March. So some years, June would have been the 7th month. In an even older version of the Roman calendar, there were only 10 months, and June was the 4th month of that calendar system. So they would have used abbreviations. "Iun".

And they didn't count days in sequence from beginning to the end of the month either. They counted backwards from one of three fixed points in the month. The Nones, the Ides, and the Kalends. So you wouldn't have said "22nd of June" - it was more like "10 days before the Kalends (1st) of July". So abbreviating "22 June" would have been more like "X Kal. Iul. Iun"

I believe for a more proper date format we'd need to know how long the current emperor has been in power.

Again, depends on the era. Before the Julian Calendar, in the Republican Era, they named years after the Consuls - which changed every year since it was a one year job. Deeper into the Imperial Era, they began adopting all sorts of Christian methods of counting the years based on things like Diocletian's persecutions, the estimated biblical age of the world, and of course Christ's birth. But I'm fond of the method that counting back starting at the founding of Rome (though IIRC that was never all that popular). So via that last method, this year would be 2,776 AUC or years after the founding of Rome. So that would have been more like MMDCCLXXVI AUC. (And that number isn't set in stone either; Rome's founding was mythical and Roman scholars of the time debated exactly how long it was since its founding.)

 

[Issun]

I mean, this is a Final Fantasy thread. But I guess you guys can talk about Rome, if you want to.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

This thread is over 50 pages/1500 posts long, on the third incarnation of the forums, about a topic that we've all discussed to death at this point from almost every conceivable angle. A mild, brief tangent into Roman numerals isn't the worst thing in the world.

 

[Torzelbaum]

This thread is over 50 pages/1500 posts long, on the third incarnation of the forums, about a topic that we've all discussed to death at this point from almost every conceivable angle.

I have conceived a few other angles for discussion but even I think those are getting rather esoteric.

 

[Exposition Owl]

Rome, if you want to

Rome around the world
—The B-LIIs

 

[Sprite]

You know if Square Enix had their druthers they’d call the release date something like 173/Thor’s Days

 

[estragon]

I'm excited for Stranger of Paradise to leave Epic so I can play it, seems to continue the Dissidia tradition of being the good kind of fanservice.

Spoiler: FF Stranger of Paradise DLC Cameo

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1616227834456059905

 

[YangusKhan]

Yeah I wish I had enough drive to keep playing that game's DLC after I finished it. The latest stuff even adds jobs I always thought would integrate very awkwardly into its combat engine (ranged weapons, in this case guns) so I'm very curious to see how those feel to play.

 

[SpoonyBard]

Is...

Is that Maurice LaMarche? Sure sounds like him.

"Gee Emperor, what are we gonna do tonight?"
"The same thing we do every night, Leon, try to take over the world!"

 

[Peklo]

It's Christopher Corey Smith, who has voiced the Emperor in every English-language appearance the character's had. Those being basically exclusively from Dissidia, and given Team Ninja's experience with that series, this combination of the two is really delightful. The moves he uses in the full trailer are directly adapted from his playable appearances there. It's fan service that's so squarely targeted at me that I'm more frustrated than ever that I don't really have the hardware to play this game on right now.

 

[YangusKhan]

So that trailer actually got me motivated to pick up the Stranger of Paradise DLC again. I finished Trials of the Dragon and started the Rift Wanderer. So far my impression has been that you'd really want to squeeze more out of the game's combat and loot system to justify getting the DLC, because the story bits so far have been paltry at best. I'm hoping Jack has some entertaining interactions with Gilgamesh because he's not really the type of character that has been in this game so far, so I don't know how Jack will respond to him. I will say though their inclusion of the "Extra Mode" for the DLC difficulty is pretty nice as far as a "I just want to see the story" difficulty modifier: it puts you in permanent Chaosbringer status, which means you have unlimited Soul Shields and MP, and you inflict stronger break damage. I used it for the final Dragon Trial fight just to learn the boss' attacks and it really did make it much easier while still making me engage with the combat system itself.

Anyway, once you get into the DLC the game really does force you to engage with its RPG mechanics, because even having much higher item levels compared to the mission level doesn't mean you're indestructible; I was routinely getting fucked up by bosses 50-80+ levels lower than my item level before I finally just looked at Reddit to see what other people do about this.

 

[balder the brave]

Just geared up to do some FF X postgame content, caught some monsters, travelled to Remium Temple, and realized I missed all but one of the Destruction sphere prizes in the Cloisters.

Do I have to do the Cloister puzzles all over again? Or will I find that my solution is already in place and I just need to grab a Destruction Sphere and pop it into a hole?

I have no issues with puzzles in general, but I found the Cloister puzzles to be mostly trial-and-error and I kind of hated them.

 

[Mogri]

The puzzles stay completed. If you're in International/HD, you may have other problems with accessing the cloisters...

 

[YangusKhan]

I thought there was one temple in particular where it becomes impossible to put the destruction sphere in place after you've solved the whole thing...

 

[balder the brave]

The puzzles stay completed. If you're in International/HD, you may have other problems with accessing the cloisters...

Hm. I know what you mean. I got wrecked by a mega boss just walking around an old area. I didn't think about how that might impact my access to the cloisters.

Should I just ... not bother with it all? Kind of a shame because I love playing Blitzball and I like a good boss challenge. I just don't see a way to appropriately grind up. Seems like there's a huge gap between the difficulty and AP rewards of the enemies in the areas, and mega bosses that do 100,000 damage. How do I bridge the gap?

 

[Cadenza]

Hm. I know what you mean. I got wrecked by a mega boss just walking around an old area. I didn't think about how that might impact my access to the cloisters.

Should I just ... not bother with it all? Kind of a shame because I love playing Blitzball and I like a good boss challenge. I just don't see a way to appropriately grind up. Seems like there's a huge gap between the difficulty and AP rewards of the enemies in the areas, and mega bosses that do 100,000 damage. How do I bridge the gap?

If you really want to level-grind, the monster arena can help you here. You can use this guide to get started, but essentially you'll need to customize some weapons for your party that let you gain a ton of AP anytime you take damage and then let the Don Tonberry arena monster kill you over and over again. It's tedious and takes a while - because nearly everything about FFX's postgame content is tedious and takes a while - but it'll power you up enough to take on the Dark Aeons, and it's the best method I know of.

 

[Mogri]

Alternatively, HD has a cheat that clears the entire sphere grid for everyone or something like that. It's overkill, and there's no "cheat maybe just a little."

 

[balder the brave]

That’s wild. Did the developers assume you’d find an AP exploit like that, or did they intend for you to grind 1,000 AP at a time for days from the fiends in Zanarkand?

 

[Cadenza]

Alternatively, HD has a cheat that clears the entire sphere grid for everyone or something like that. It's overkill, and there's no "cheat maybe just a little."

Y'know, I had entirely forgotten about that, because the PS3 version of the remaster doesn't have those cheats, and that's the copy that I have. Whoops! 😅

That’s wild. Did the developers assume you’d find an AP exploit like that, or did they intend for you to grind 1,000 AP at a time for days from the fiends in Zanarkand?

It's hard to say. There are at least more powerful (and dangerous) monsters in the Omega Ruins that give more AP, and the Triple AP ability would still help there, it would just take a lot longer.

 

[Beowulf]

That’s wild. Did the developers assume you’d find an AP exploit like that, or did they intend for you to grind 1,000 AP at a time for days from the fiends in Zanarkand?

I'm going to guess that they didn't expect you to ever reach those levels (and the original game never required it), but then they players figuring out exploits and wanting big superbosses to try them on, so they added such things to later versions of the game.

But hey, they also expected you to play 200 games of blitzball, dodge 100 lightning bolts and finish a chocobo race in negative time. So maybe they did expect you to grind for 100 hours, too!

 

[Mogri]

I think they knew what they did.

 

[Daikaiju]

But hey, they also expected you to play 200 games of blitzball, dodge 100 lightning bolts and finish a chocobo race in negative time. So maybe they did expect you to grind for 100 hours, too!

So much nope.

 

[estragon]

I ranked FFX #1 in my recent list thread, and that's definitely in spite of the post-game content, not because of it. It's a postgame designed for middle schoolers who get one or two games a year and have nothing else to do, not something like FFXII:TZA where you can just naturally finish it as an extension of a normal playthrough.

 

[balder the brave]

Normally, I'm happy to simply nope out of postgame content. But the sphere grid itself is tied to the possibility of customizing characters by moving beyond their own areas in the grid. And the base game doesn't give you a lot of opportunity to do it. I am finishing each character's sphere grids and moving into other character's grid only at the final area of the game.

It draws me into the postgame, but the postgame has all these barriers that shut down the fun.

- The destruction spheres is my biggest gripe. I don't want to go back into the cloisters, but even if I did, they're blocked by mega bosses.
- I tried grinding up in Omega Dungeon for a little while to be able to clear out the mega bosses, but the enemies there can do a combination poison / confuse / silence attack that is just brutal, even with carefully-selected armor sets with the right resistances.
- I never had any intent to dodge the lightning bolts, but I guess that deserves a spot on the list
- Are you really supposed to blindly search X, Y coordinates on the map to find those secret areas?
- Blitzball is really fun at first, but gets way too easy. I even made the deliberate decision to not equip Jecht shot, but it's still too easy. And the intermediate awards aren't there. And some of the agents I would like to recruit are stuck in towns guarded by mega bosses!