Tag: final fantasy

How to break Final Fantasy Tactics

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

The following was accomplished on Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions for iPad, but is capable of working for all other iterations and platforms of FFT.

Final Fantasy Tactics is pretty much one my favorite games ever. It’s challenging, has a fantastic story to those invested into the game enough to decipher it all out, and is a long, rewarding journey of a role-player. When they released it for the iOS, I purchased it immediately, and it has been my go-to way of killing time on my iPad when I don’t have wifi, and don’t feel like/ are out of books to read on Kindle. I would be Tom Cruise on Oprah or Nintendo 64-kid levels of ecstatic if Square would go on and re-release FFT Advance and FFT Advance A2 for the iOS in the future as well.

Anyway, the game mechanics allow for the player to grind levels from the very start of the game. Due to the fact that all enemies scale with you throughout the duration of the game, there’s never the disparity of exceeding your opposition and being incapable of efficiently leveling. A popular belief is that if you grind yourself to way too high of levels too early in the game, you basically screw yourself, because some of the boss characters become unbeatably overpowered once their levels and abilities are scaled to match your own.

Such is true to some degree, but in the end, no enemy with a finite amount of hit points is unbeatable, and as long as they’re controlled by a fairly predictable AI, they’re still dog food on legs. Personally, aside from my very first foray in playing FFT, I have never had any difficulty in overcoming the game, no matter how much I have maxed out my characters as early as the first chapter.

Once you break FFT, the rest of the game is a breeze. No boss or any particular fight is necessarily difficult once you create at least three or four completely maxed out characters, because you will be able to run roughshod through anyone if you play your cards right.

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Reconsideration of Final Fantasy rankings

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s widely perceived that Final Fantasy III/VI (which I will refer to as “6” from here on out) is the most popular Final Fantasy in the series. In fact, although I can’t find the source off the top of my head, but it was widely shared over the span of last year, that 6 won a fan-vote tournament of which FF was the most popular of the series.

Me, being the contrarian type that typically pushes the brakes and tends to lean away from things that are popular after over-analysis and trite reasoning sometimes, kind of scoffed at the notion. It was kind of a no-brainer, since it really was going to be either 6 or 7, but for what it’s worth, I’m simply glad that 7 didn’t win. Personally, my favorite has always been 4, with my rationale being a level of challenge that seemed to be missing in every FF afterward, and the fact that it really was one the first FF I ever had, when it was released for the SNES as Final Fantasy II.

For whatever reason, I was having an emo-ey morning where I was thinking about how much of a loner I am, and then I began to hear the theme of Shadow from 6 in my head, because he’s also a loner, and well the spaghetti-western style of his theme ruled. From there, I began to think about Shadow’s character, and then the mental snowball began rolling and now I have seven Final Fantasy Wikia tabs open in my browser reminiscing about 6 outright.

But it got me thinking about a lot of little things about the story of 6, and then I began to conclude that the story itself really wasn’t that deep, but when it came to the myriad of individuals available in the game, 6 really had a wealth of quality in character development. Suddenly, I’m prioritizing mentally, if 6 really might be the best Final Fantasy of them all.

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RPG logic in real life

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A funny thing happened while I was out in New York once.  My friend and I went out to the small town of Auburn, to try and catch the last of the minor league games we had planned to see, but several hours prior to the game, it began raining, and raining steadily.  At this point, it really began to look like the game was in jeopardy, but since we had come such a long way, we wanted to wait as long as possible, or for the team to officially cancel it before we made our next move.

There was a little bit of frustration as the rain continued to come, and make it look obvious, but not being from the area, we still weren’t completely sure on whether or not to get the hell out of dodge yet, or wait on.  But at this point, we needed a place to kill some time and not putter around out in the rain and waste gas.  So we went to a nearby bar.

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RPG logic lol

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

For some reason, I was thinking about the original Final Fantasy, the super difficult original one on the NES when you didn’t recruit four black belts and spam your way through the game. The game was so difficult, that while trying to grind out levels and gold in one of the many ogre/creep forests, I got to a point where I was LITRALLY. Going back to town and using the inn after every single battle.

By this logic, at least three years worth of in-game days were consumed just so I could buy Steel Armor and CUR3 and FIR3, while Garland was probably getting tired of waiting for the Warriors of Light to just fucking show up already so he could begin his time cycle of destrucity.

RPG logic is funny like that; your characters are already supposedly the “chosen ones” or “destined soldiers” or at least the most skilled and qualified persons to be going on all these world-saving quests. You’d think that they should kind of _come_ with all the experience and gear they needed to do their job, but instead we as the players have to spend endless hours and countless in-game days to develop our characters as if they were newborn babies. Figure that.

Yes, this was an update to my facebook at one point, but I liked it enough to brog it.  Deal.

Final Fantasy really is going downhill, fast

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Earlier in the week, I was reading this article about the supposed slow dying of the Final Fantasy franchise, and it made me think about my own fandom in the series as I was growing up.  For the most part, I agree that the franchise as a whole is a shell of its former self, and I’m not going to pretend like I was nearly a vested fan to care so much about the writers, producers, directors, or whatever positions people held that made the old games great that when they left or moved on, yeah I guess I should have been concerned about the direction of the future games, but I didn’t.

If I were asked to pinpoint the precise spot where the series began its gradual turn downhill, I would say it was from the moment that Final Fantasy X-2 was conceived.  It was at this point did the series break a two-decade old tradition of never making a direct sequel to any one particular game, despite the potential that any one of them may have had.  Not only did FFX2 break the tradition, it ended up being a pretty shitty game by all popularly reviewed standards.  This commenter seems to have nailed how I thought about it:

But FFX-2 was where it became clear to me that Final Fantasy was dead. It was an insipid, grindy package of fan-service that not only insulted fans of the classic Final Fantasy games, but also fans of the original FFX, completely undercutting the original story by bastardizing its own characters and ruining the (ostensibly) tragic sacrifice of Tidus at the end of FFX. That’s when I really woke up and realized that the series I had fallen in love with was gone, turned into a shambling, undead mockery of itself.

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A Holiday Tradition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Two years ago saw the weekend of Thanksgiving completely rendered lazy and nerdy, as Jen and I spent the entire weekend doing absolutely nothing but play Left 4 Dead.  Last year saw the weekend of Thanksgiving completely useless and lazy as just about all the time was spent playing Left 4 Dead 2.  Needless to say, it’s kind of been tradition to more or less do absolutely nothing but sit around and play video games during the weekend after Thanksgiving, in our house.

Seeing as how there was no Left 4 Dead 3, this year Jen and I were forced to go our separate ways.  Since we don’t really have any good co-op games, and I just didn’t really feel much like playing a shooter or anything that required that much thought, Jen opted to finish out the original BioShock, and I decided to seek, find, and blow the dust off of an old copy of the original Final Fantasy Tactics, and go down memory lane with that one.  The fact that there’s only one television in the living room was irrelevant, because the old 27″ tube and Piss1 fit fine in the other corner of the room.  And I didn’t feel like I was getting short-changed by not getting the 50″ plasma, because quite frankly, playing FFT on anything but a 3:4 tube television, and getting frustrated at enemy Chocobos, just doesn’t seem fitting.

More ambitious villain: Chaos or Reapers?

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Seriously, I don’t know how ideas like this pop into my head sometimes.  But I got to thinking about video game bad guys, and wondering simply who was the most ambitious?  Most of the time, video game antagonists really aren’t that ambitious if you were to stop and think about it; often times, they want to “take over the world,” or “kill Chris Redfield,” or something unoriginal like that.  And in the end, I’ve deduced my comparison down to two evil entities, who are similar, but not quite the same in their motives – Chaos (or Garland) from the original NES Final Fantasy, and The Reapers from Mass Effect.

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