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conchobhar

What's Shenmue?
The mobile graphics have some of the same problems that her newer sprites do but I don't really think they're nearly as awful as their reputation, either. My biggest issue is the way their arms hang in the neutral poses; they're far too long and it make everyone look like they have terrible posture. I've played around with adjusting them before and I think they would actually look pretty good if the arms didn't extend beyond mid-thigh and the palette hewed more closely to the SNES version. Here's an example:

SKzYRFN.jpg

It's amazing what a few small tweaks do. I agree that looks pretty good!

I've always thought the biggest problem with the new sprites is the light blur filter applied to them in-game, which has the effect of making them look disconnected from their environments. An article from several years ago made this same point, so here's their comparison image:

ffvi_poorly.png


So fix the arms, keep the old palette, present them as raw pixels… and I bet the mobile/steam version would look fine. Not better than the original, but not bad at all.
 
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Purple

(She/Her)
It's definitely more than just collecting a paycheck.
Oh I wasn't trying to be cynical there or anything. I'm just saying, the ideal for me would be to just keep the original spritework, but if you're making a big deal of remaking things, obviously you need to do new art.
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
I don't think this is true. The font in the English screenshots is definitely a Helvetica variant. Possibly Helvetica Condensed or an older Helvetica Narrow version. Or maybe just Helvetica scaled horizontally. The roman characters in the Japanese font are not Helvetica.
There are Japanese fonts that use separate typefaces for standard width and double width Latin characters. I mean it's just the same font file.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
FFX got really tough, really fast. The hallway before you fight Super Seymour is full of those awful robots that can one shot some party members. Super Seymour himself is also very hard. Any advice?
 
is this the second seymour fight? nul- spells help, though i don't remember if the elements follow a pattern in this fight. I think seymour is vulnerable to poison, which is great, especially if you are attacking the mortibody to get it to sap from seymour, and also you can play around with putting reflect on some/all party members as well as seymour and negate a lot of his attacks and heals.

As for the robots, aeons always work for a cheap way of avoiding the eject. They also won't do the move if they're provoked. Kimahri can learn the kick fwiw (I don't remember it being that valuable, though)
 

Octopus Prime

Mysterious Contraption
(He/Him)
And, as noted, most robots don’t work as well when you take stuff out of them.

IIRC, the best strategy for that fight (and a lot of the bosses, past a certain point) is to get every Aeons Overdrive bar filled, then just explode the ever loving garbage out of him right from the jump
 
I'm pretty sure the ones in the hall can't get disassembled. They're "mechs" but not "machina"

and a note about aeons is if you're going to use them, then definitely get the overdrive filled because seymour will dispel them on his turn
 

nosimpleway

(he/him)
Yeah, you can't disassemble these guys with steal. IIRC Provoke will prevent the mechs from doing thrust kick for the eject. II also RC they just kind of stand there and waste turns if you summon Valefor? There was some trick like that.

I don't think the elemental spells follow a pattern, but he should start with a little one and then -ra the same element twice, so if you can get a turn in to cast a Nul spell between the announcement and the follow-through you'll know which one to pick. All those spells can be reflected and Seymour respects Provoke, so you can also just designate his target for him and put them under a protective spell that will keep them almost completely safe.

Seymour is vulnerable to poison, which won't trigger his phase changes or counters or anything as it ticks his HP away.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
That is a lot of advice. I will use it.

Regarding the Kung-fu robots: I scanned them and it says they won’t Galactic Punt your guys as long as there are other enemies around.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
IIRC, the best strategy for that fight (and a lot of the bosses, past a certain point) is to get every Aeons Overdrive bar filled, then just explode the ever loving garbage out of him right from the jump
That sure worked! I think maybe allowing you to bank Overdrives for both party members and summons was not the most balanced decision.

In other news, I can play Blitzball again. The question is, should I try now or wait to get a Jecht shot before I really try to tackle this bizarre math soccer?
 

nosimpleway

(he/him)
I mean, at least summon overdrives aren't all magic attacks, with the summons' stats tied to the stat growth of a dedicated caster character or anything

OH WAIT
 

ThricebornPhoenix

target for faraway laughter
(he/him)
The question is, should I try now or wait to get a Jecht shot before I really try to tackle this bizarre math soccer?
Jecht Shot is great at times (IIRC its high cost can make it hard to use effectively at very low levels), but I think the most important thing is to recruit a good goalie.
 

Bongo

excused from moderation duty
(he/him)
Staff member
The best goalie in Spira plays for another team, but you can grab him after his contract expires.
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
OTOH, you can also train Keepa (geddit?) and give him Super Goalie, and by the time the "good" freelancers or opposing players are available, the Aurochs themselves will steamroll all over everyone, even the Goers.

Did any of the post-PS2 releases fix the AI blindspot where you could grab the ball, then swim behind your own goalie and run out the clock?

Jecht Shot and Jecht Shot 2 are very good for "last-two-minutes of the game" scores, since they take out two and three players (goalie included) if Tidus has a decent enough Shot stat. But they're also highly situational and the animation takes so long the clock may run out on you if you try for a last-second win, which balances them out. Especially JS2.
 
The best goalie in Spira plays for another team, but you can grab him after his contract expires.
this is true, but it's worth mentioning that the only way to guarantee he is available is saving and reloading a bunch. It seems to happen every time i play, but idk, it's not really all that worth it. If you're going to play enough to get players to lvl 99 or so (i'm not sure who would) you'll probably get him eventually, but wedge also turns into a really good keeper (though it's way late, like lvl 50 or something. He's a very good defender up to that point). If you're only going to play up to get Wakka's stuff, Yuma Guado is a very good early goalie you can recruit for free. Can get super goalie and grip gloves as well as a bunch of anti- skills.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
I played an exhibition match against a Ronso team. I surprisingly remembered most of how the game works and tied 2 - 2. I wish my boys were stronger, and that I didn’t flub my one chance to get that Jecht Shot a couple hours into the game.

I’ve mostly been poking around the Calming Lands, which is the first time in the game so far that you can do side activities other than Blitzball. I finally beat the wandering summoner lady and got the item that allows you to upgrade Aeons. I also got my Chocobo license.

Finding all the fiends to capture for the arena owner is testing my patience, however.
 

Lokii

(He/Him)
Staff member
Moderator
Finding all the fiends to capture for the arena owner is testing my patience, however.

You absolutely don't have to do this unless you're interested in fighting some super encounters, if you want to save your sanity.
 

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
I really enjoyed the arena, but it's definitely a YMMV situation. I wouldn't bother unless you think you'd enjoy stretching the battle system to its limits.
 

Purple

(She/Her)
OTOH, you can also train Keepa (geddit?) and give him Super Goalie, and by the time the "good" freelancers or opposing players are available, the Aurochs themselves will steamroll all over everyone, even the Goers.
I still can't believe that's the team name. All I can ever think is
 

Positronic Brain

Out Of Warranty
(He/him)
I really enjoyed the arena, but it's definitely a YMMV situation. I wouldn't bother unless you think you'd enjoy stretching the battle system to its limits.
This, so don't worry.

That said, my unlimited levels exploit depends on you having unlocked an Arena encounter. For the record, it involves a Tonberry, Overdrives set to "teammate damage" and three people wielding weapons with autophoenix and Overtdrive to XP. Once you have the engine going, you accumulate levels so fast your only concern is finding enough spheres to keep up with them.
 

Zef

Find Your Reason
(He/Him)
I really enjoyed the arena, but it's definitely a YMMV situation. I wouldn't bother unless you think you'd enjoy stretching the battle system to its limits.

I... don't know how well the battle strategies have been refined since 2001, and I was traumatized enough I swore never to go back there, but back then, all Arena superboss fights were summarized thus on GameFAQs:

"Get Break Damage Limit weapons,then use Cindy's Passado or Wakka's Reels."
 

Mogri

Round and round I go
(he)
Staff member
Moderator
I never got Wakka's good Reels, and I hardly ever used Aeons (or even Overdrives in general outside of, say, Mix versus Nemesis), so I can confirm that there are other working strategies against Arena bosses.

GameFAQs authors have never been known for their nuance, though.
 

nosimpleway

(he/him)
stretching the battle system to its limits.
Penance was added in rereleases more or less specifically for the people who would grind enough to wipe the Sphere Grid of all the puny low-level nodes, manually replace them with [stat]+4 nodes dropped by the arena bosses, then walk all the characters around and activate all of them with everybody.

It's a task even teenage me, who sort of mindlessly ground away at dumb self-imposed challenges like that to pass the time, would balk at.

Once you have the engine going, you accumulate levels so fast your only concern is finding enough spheres to keep up with them.
A couple of the Arena bosses drop items in groups of twenty, and the Arena itself sells Distillers that let you turn whatever a monster normally dropped into node-activating spheres. So you can throw a Speed Distiller at Fafnir, beat it, and pick up 20 Speed Spheres instead of the 20 Light Curtains it normally drops. What's funny is that with the King Cactuar or Don Tonberry damage-to-XP setups, you still had to do that a whole damn lot to have enough spheres to spend.

Sometimes you get only one distilled Sphere, in which case Fafnir was trying to drop a Dark Matter instead of Light Curtains. Whoops!

(I wanna say there was an enemy that dropped 50 of something that could be distilled but I can't find which one that is. Maybe I'm just thinking of Overkill-ing Fafnir, which doubled its drops to 40 of a thing...)
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
You absolutely don't have to do this unless you're interested in fighting some super encounters, if you want to save your sanity.

I only have two left, the Malboro and Brain Chimera. I’d already beaten one of each, but I hadn’t found the arena yet. They were both very difficult fights, especially the Malboro Man.
 
Judging by those, I think I-III are looking pretty great, although I'd like to see more extended full-sized videos instead of multiple tiny videos running simultaneously.

Generally, I think the unified style they're going for in this series works really well for I-III and for V, while IV and VI come across as a bit too flat compared to the old sprites.
 

4-So

Spicy
FF3 Pixel Remaster is mighty tempting. It's the only one I haven't played (which is to say I played the DS version but I haven't yet touched the original.)
 
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