The Final Fantasy Thread

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Almost wrapped up another playthrough of V. I’ve handicapped myself by not touching Spellblade.

I figured Omega was gonna be the one to make me tap out, but I limped to victory with rapid-fire and Enhancers.
Not exactly limiting yourself that much if you were permitting Rapid Fire. In fact, it's almost certainly the more busted ability over Spellblade, even if Ranger is a more mediocre job than Magic Fencer (or whatever we're calling it, localizers can't decide).
 
I don’t believe in handicapping myself in rpgs where the whole appeal is building up a dude.

Turn-based or ATB based maybe I could get into it but never ever for arpgs where it devolves to the simplest playstyle to maximize the low investment.
 
Final Fantasy V

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GAMEPLAY: I'm using a SNES ROM with that 1998 RPGe fan translation. It’s pretty good, though, it keeps the jokes. But half the equipment and abilities have completely different names from the versions everyone actually knows. The translation calls Freelancer “Jobless.” I can relate to Bartz. We're both sad and underemployed. Turns out Ghido’s actually a chill dude in this version. The GBA one made him into a miserable old cunt.

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The intro is pretty long if you just wanna boot up and start learning. After like 30 minutes they hit you with the first crystal and a bunch of jobs, most of them straight out of the original Final Fantasy for NES.:lol:

(Red Mage should've been a Wind Crystal job though, come on.)

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They give you Blue Mage right away. First in the series. You get to learn enemy skills immediately. The beginner's house even gives you Goblin Punch. "Here’s how !Blue works" [Goblin punches me in the nuts.]

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Tule is a great 'first town'. Faris isn’t even in the party yet and she just runs into the shop like “equip me, bitch.” That’s how my ex did it. The game’s like “she’s with us, put it on the credit card.”

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Any combination of jobs will carry you through to the end. The first world is stingy with AP. This is done on purpose so you can't master anything. By the third world you are drowning in AP. To the game's credit I managed to master Mime and learn Doublecast without doing much. I just completed all the side quests.

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This is the "boss game," by the way. So many bosses, and most of them have unique field and battle sprites. Half the fun is trying to figure out job combos that kill them in two turns. A few jobs are almost mandatory, obviously: Geomancer saves the day in the false floor caves. Bard is piss-easy to master (only three levels) and their Requiem song trivializes chunks of the game. Thief is complete dogshit. Steal is the worst mechanic in the series. You get a Reset spell so you can reload the fight if you mug the wrong item, but you’re still sitting there for twenty minutes trying to steal one Coral Ring and failing. Locke in VI was the same. Is Rikku the only competent thief?:stress:

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The difficulty in the game is all over the place, but I wouldn't say it's overly hard or overly easy. Certain enemies will kick your teeth in because you won't see them coming and they have nasty surprises up their sleeves. Some bosses change their movelist mid-fight. The SNES hardware wasn't quite up to the task so the game script will replace them with an entirely new enemy to pretend they're 'evolving' or teleporting.

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V's other gimmick is the two different worlds merging into one, like maps superimposed over each other. Bartz's world is easy to navigate because Tycoon Castle is sitting in the middle like Midgar or Corneria. Galuf's world is a pain in the ass because there is no airship to fly over mountains. I do like that Bartz's atlas automatically changes when his world collides with Galuf's world, though. The map is telepathic I guess. The third world looks like my apartment when I don't clean it. The landmarks are completely fucked up because the old locations have become unglued by the Void. You need to use a combination of the airship and gold and black chocobos to reach everything. It's supposed to be confusing and it delivers.

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Neo Exdeath is a bunch of bosses testing you on every job like a final exam. You gotta kill this sleep paralysis demon quick before he does Grand Cross and causes a party wipe. It’s tense. 9/10

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STORY: The plot of V is paper thin, as you probably know. They front-loaded the budget into the job system and enemies having weird counters for every autistic thing you can do. The lore's whatever. It’s fine. Each character gets their little moment. Bartz is the hot-headed oaf, Lenna keeps eating grass and making herself sick (happens twice). Galuf’s the lovable scoundrel, Faris is the tomboy princess. My only real complaint is that everybody’s a little too angsty, but at least they’ve got actual reasons. I’m glad some loved ones stay dead instead of like Final Fantasy IV where every other death scene is meaningless because no one's ever really gone. 1000142918.png

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The concept of Exdeath (should’ve kept the name Exodus, that was better) is pretty interesting. It’s a spin on the sealed evil warlord who immediately starts wrecking shit again. The logistics are fuzzy, though. A team of twelve warriors fought this demon lord back in the day. You can even go to the Sealed Castle and grab all their iconic weapons. The crystals get jammed into the plot pretty arbitrarily like always. They’re soul prisons, they seal Exdeath, there’s two sets of crystals because... reasons. He could’ve just smashed the crystals on Galuf's world the first time but I guess he forgot. Then he possesses random assholes to break the crystals on Bartz's world. And we never even get to see the actual prison. It’s supposedly in some forest north of Tule but you can’t go there. It’s just a generic forest. So basically the whole first act is one big fetch quest where Exdeath gets released, all the crystals get smashed, and not much happens until Krile crash lands in a meteor, fixes Galuf’s amnesia, and Cid starts handing out better ships.

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Speaking of meteors...Galuf rides one to get to Bartz’s world, but at the end of the first act he just gets beamed back like it’s Star Trek. Then three more meteors fall near the other crystals, a werewolf shows up, some soldier from Castle Bal shows up… did they all ride separate meteors? Was Krile on the Jachol meteor? It’s convenient as hell that four different meteors all land right when the crystals break and every single one of them fails at their job.:blart: I think they just put a meteor in the opening because it looked cool and raised a question they never bothered answering.

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That said, I actually like Exdeath’s goal. He doesn’t want to rule anything, he built a castle because it makes collecting the crystals easier. Galuf’s world is great. His old crew, the Dawn Warriors, all show up and die one by one trying to subdue Exdeath. Xezat’s death is a rough watch. Then Galuf himself perishes and the dialog window bluntly says “Galuf has died”. No “X has left the party”. Hits different.(:_(It’s clearly riffing on Tellah’s sacrifice in FF4, but where Tellah does it out of pure hate, Galuf does it out of love. Nice touch.

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The game ends on a pretty upbeat note. The surviving crew keeps adventuring together, they roll a little montage of all the funny and sad moments, and roll credits. 6/10

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GRAPHICS: V is basically a victory lap for everything Square did in the 8-bit and early 16-bit games. This is the last time we see a town called Crescent, two types of chocobos show up (you’ll be forgiven for forgetting VI even had them), and they even squeeze in a cameo from the dwarves. The ending has a Mode 7 flying sequence in preparation for VI. I first played the Anthology version so I was surprised the SNES original also does that cool zoom-in on each character when it lists all the abilities they mastered and the EXP tally.

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Amano’s influence is starting to creep into the monster designs, especially the humanoid ones. VI will go in a more baroque direction, but here it’s mostly contained to ninjas and slutty sirens. Some of the boss designs are very elaborate and I’m glad they didn’t rely too heavily on palette swaps.

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The job system is a double-edged sword because every job needs to be readable, so the four main heroes have to stay super generic, which means Amano’s character designs are wasted on them. It's a shame because I really like Faris’s blonde look, which feels like a prototype for Setzer. But in my head she’ll always be that purple-haired chick in the green scarf. King Tycoon’s cape and winged helmet are excellent, and Exdeath looks like a warlock who can suplex you.

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Environments are hit or miss. They do some creative stuff with the Wind Shrine tileset to turn it into an Egyptian-style pyramid covered in vines. But if you do the full Sealed Castle sidequest you’re gonna get real sick of that same Wind Shrine background. The Fork Tower is a big letdown not just because it looks bland but the “split the party into magic users and physical attackers” gimmick is pointless. Enemies only become dangerous when they mix both types. Fanatics Tower and Phoenix Cave did this a lot better.

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I’m pretty sure Square made the Void the final dungeon just so they could asset-flip a bunch of old locations, but at least they rearrange them in this surreal, disorienting way (kind of like Cyan’s nightmare in Doma Castle). Castles in the sky and all that.

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Town design is pretty uninspired overall. Karnak is the exception, that place is literally on fire and melting. I couldn't tell the other towns apart without the text box reading me the name. The water wheel looks neat, at least.

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I do like that all of the castles have secrets that even people living there don’t know about: hidden passages, libraries with books you have to rearrange, that kind of thing. Very FFIV. And Square was clearly proud of the Wind Drake sprite and sound effect because they reuse it constantly. 8/10

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SOUND
: The town theme in V is one of the best in the series, man. I love everything about it, especially those first few lute notes when you walk in. The main battle theme is super enthusiastic without driving you insane (unless you’re farming items, then it becomes torture.)

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Lenna’s theme is this melancholy remix of “Ahead on Our Way,” the main title theme. They do a bunch of different variations of that melody throughout the game and I like all of them. Bartz’s world theme is very can-do and optimistic, that rolling rum-tum drumbeat makes it feel like your party is marching forward with purpose. Galuf’s world feels like actual uncharted wilderness, and paired with the darker color palette, it really sells the idea that this place is still recovering from Exdeath’s rampage. When you get dropped back at Tycoon Castle in the third world it starts playing the normal first world theme again, so at first you don’t really register how scrambled everything is. Then Exdeath starts swallowing entire towns with that cheap hexagonal Void effect and the music switches to something closer to “Searching for Friends” from VI.

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The Sealed Castle, where all the ultimate weapons are stashed, has this creepy, almost Sephiroth-adjacent theme that lets you know right away you shouldn’t be there.

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The final dungeon theme is proper encouraging, and the Neo Exdeath fight has similar energy to the Zeromus battle, complete with the psychedelic tunnel background. 10/10
 
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Amano’s influence is starting to creep into the monster designs, especially the humanoid ones. VI will go in a more baroque direction, but here it’s mostly contained to ninjas and slutty sirens. Some of the boss designs are very elaborate though, and I’m glad they didn’t rely too heavily on palette swaps.
Starting? Amano designed most of the enemies in the really early FFs. Actually, it was V where Nomura's influence started creeping in because he was charge of drawing the battle sprites and he designed a lot of monsters. In fact, that boss you posted, Mellusine, has her final sprite closer to Nomura's take on her than Amano's.

Amano's concept art for her.
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Nomura's concept art.
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I don’t believe in handicapping myself in rpgs where the whole appeal is building up a dude.
I knew I couldn't fuck with a Four Job Fiesta or whatever if I wanted 100% completion.

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I did the full Knight grind for Equip Sword (which took forever because mastering Knight is actual hell, those swords hit like trucks, though), plus Rapid Fire and Dual Wield so I could delete shit. Then I thought "one Summoner and one Blue Mage, they'll cover everything." That was a mistake. I made Faris a dedicated support bitch, which was another mistake. You cannot concentrate support abilities in one character, you just waste slots and turns like a chump.
 
Final Fantasy VI

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GAMEPLAY: I played the Ted Woolsey Uncensored Mod. It revises the script and uncensored some sprites or whatever. Terra is now Tina again, Kefka is Cefka, the dream Stooges aren’t Larry, Curly, and Moe anymore. The Warring Triad are back to their Japanese names even though Megami still means “goddess” in kanji. I guess there's an audience for this shit...but I never had a bone to pick with Ted the way some of these weebs do.

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The translation gets way too cute in spots. Edgar hosting To Catch a Predator but the suspect is himself was… a choice. :lossmanjack: Multiple characters scream "SHIT!" like it's Goodfellas. Then it goes and changes all the equipment names to the Japanese versions. I’m in Spreadsheet Hell trying to remember what trades for what in the Coliseum.


VI is the Final Fantasy game I’ve played the most. I’ve beaten this thing ten times and I still find new stuff in every playthrough. Hidden chests, enemy weaknesses, cutscenes I somehow missed.

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I can’t think of another Final Fantasy that’s this packed. It’s also one of the most exhausting entries because there are fourteen characters and you’re constantly juggling their equipment and Esper loadouts. There’s a feature where you can strip everyone naked, but that just makes things worse, so I end up clicking through menus for 3 minutes per character.

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The plot is about ancient magic, so magic is the name of the game. There is almost no reason to put anyone in the front row. Even Tools and Blitzes fall off in the World of Ruin. Slugging it out with enemies is a terrible idea. WoR enemies spam status effects and OHKOs, but those can be countered with your own.

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The Relic system allows for two accessories instead of one. It really does feel like they took every job from V and tried to Frankenstein them into unique characters. They couldn’t fit in a Dragoon or Samurai, so VI just staples those skills onto a relic. Gau and Strago are blue mages, and grinding their magic is insufferable. I usually just half-ass their spellbooks.

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Cyan was such a bum in the original that they had to buff him in the remasters. In the SNES version, you ditch Mr. Thou immediately after Nikeah. Zero value. Just like my wife. 1000145937.png

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The structure of the game is not too different from V. The first half is this tight, linear A-to-B, then the World of Ruin opens up and it’s Sidequest City. The story constantly splits up the party, forcing you to train everyone. The Moogle rescue sequence in Narshe is a preview for what's coming.

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In the second half, the party is scattered. Finding them involves talking to every NPC. The dialog is actually pretty good and the clue-hunting is fun. Locke’s side quest in particular made me feel like Stanley searching for Livingstone. (Locke trolls the party by raiding every chest in the cave apart from the one holding the Ribbon. Cheeky Squaresoft.)

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Speaking of magic, the Esper systems allows any character to learn magic, although late-game characters like Strago still get fucked by the slow growth rates.

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Dungeon design in the mid-90s was off the chain. You get to the Phantom Train and it's literally a haunted train. Like actual train cars, laid out horizontally, and you're walking from the caboose all the way up to the engine to hit the emergency brake before it drags your dumb ass straight to the afterlife. There's no canoe and no submarine, but there is a white water rafting sequence. Fanatics' Tower is a vertical needle with a hundred floors. Melee attacks are banned, so enemies and party members only use magic. Phoenix Cave and Kefka's Tower force you to split the party into groups to flip switches so the others can actually progress. 8/10

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STORY: The execution is perfect, but the framework is standard for a '90s console JRPG. Ancient superweapon, evil empire trying to activate it against all common sense. Terra is the waif being hunted by the empire since she's the key. Celes is the imperial knight gone rogue. The spotlight just sort of shifts between them. Kefka is introduced as the shit-for-brains minion, and instead of Kefka getting tossed aside when he's no longer useful, he takes the throne and kills everybody. It's foreshadowed with the Emperor looking like an angry St. Bernard and Kefka not giving a solitary fuck about casualties on their side.

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Later games repeat this twist, and Squaresoft plagiarized their own shit in Xenogears with Krelian killing off the Ministry.

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Most of the cast get proper side quests and scenes that actually wrap up their arcs. And at the risk of sounding like a VI fanboy, they even put in a 'cute' character who everyone likes! The Dance skill is still trash, don't get too excited, but at least he's not grating. 10/10

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GRAPHICS: The characters in V had better animation, more emoting. VI builds on that and goes further with bigger sprites. Considering it’s an SNES cart, they did a good job adapting Amano's character designs into tiny pixels. Kefka's design is just too busy, you can’t tell what the hell he’s supposed to be until you see his battle sprite up close.

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Mode 7 overworld was cool for the time. The oblique view makes the world feel bigger. Narshe is the first town and it sets the steampunk vibe. It’s a rebel base, dungeon, and tutorial all in one. There is a gunfight in the prologue, then Narshe is completely roped off for a while, then a big battle vs. Kefka, then in the World of Ruin it’s just a monster-infested ghost town. Constant “we’re not safe here” atmosphere, even in the starting town. Most towns are already under the imperial boot. Figaro’s more chill, but then Kefka burns it down and occupies it. Locke sneaks around it like he’s in the French Resistance. I’d occupy Celes if you know what I'm sayin. :smug:

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Zozo’s a rooftop slum right next to rich Jidoor. At first it looks like a normal town with inn and item shop signs... but no shopkeepers, just enemies. :story:

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World of Ruin palette swaps everything to show time passed. Some towns got BTFO by Kefka's light.

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Magic animations are top tier, the -ga spells actually look like they crackle and hit hard. Espers are once-per-battle summons. Bahamut finally got a glow-up! 🤗 9/10

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SOUND: The music in VI is even better than the sumptuous visuals. When they roll the cast credits, it hits you that every single character has a theme. It's nuts. Imagine giving this many characters not just their own theme but a whole evolving motif in the finale. Of all of them, Locke's heroic theme might be the best. Celes' theme bleeds right into Locke's after he pulls her back from a collapsing bridge. It's funny how sentimental this pair makes me even though they never actually hint at a romance. Cyan's theme and Doma Castle are pure faded nobility. He's a fallen knight from some lost era.

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The World of Balance theme is very good: starts with this bard-style lute, then hardens into a military march that makes the world feel like it's teetering on disaster. World of Ruin theme is all dissonant and scary at first. The planet's been blasted to bits. It gets replaced by that more hopeful "Searching for Friends" as you pull the party back together.

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The regular battle theme isn't my favorite, but the boss themes are excellent. "Fierce Battle" befits those screen-filling monstrosities.

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Other standouts? 🤔 I like the suspenseful, finger-snapping Narshe/mine theme. It promises big terrible revelations later on. Devil's Lab is a toe-tapper. Kefka's Tower mixes crunchy Sega Genesis-style bass with brass instruments. All of the empire's old crazy electronic junk got melted down into a giant laser so Kefka could burn townsfolk like a kid torturing insects.

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I'd be remiss not to mention the Opera sequence and the final battle theme, "Dancing Mad." I don't really have much to add, but I like how it starts as a fairly standard boss track before turning into this whimsical organ piece as you climb heavenward. It sounds like I'm approaching lunacy to closer I get to Kefka. 9/10
 
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The translation gets way too cute in spots. Edgar hosting To Catch a Predator but the suspect is himself was… a choice. :lossmanjack:
I'm guessing the patch you played was closer to the original line than the screenshot you used? I'm not sure any translation, official or fan-made, was as blunt as Edgar's original Japanese line that was effectively "...No, that would be a crime. Better not."
There is almost no reason to put anyone in the front row. Even Tools and Blitzes fall off in the World of Ruin. Slugging it out with enemies is a terrible idea.
Well, Rapid Fire + Dual Wield still exists with the right accessory combo, so that technically makes physical attacks the best DPS in the game... but only for that one character you put those accessories on. Yeah, most characters will end up being best off just spamming Ultima most of the time.
His "Dance" skill is still trash, don't get too excited, but at least he's not grating.
Luckily, he doesn't need it. Just give him the Dragoon accessories and have him Jump away for 19,998 ~ 39,996 damage every time he lands.
 
Well, Rapid Fire + Dual Wield still exists with the right accessory combo, so that technically makes physical attacks the best DPS in the game... but only for that one character
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Alright you beautiful degenerate, here's your loaded dice. Go roll triple 6s on God.
 
Gau and Strago are blue mages, and grinding their magic is insufferable. I usually just half-ass their spellbooks.
The last time I played through FF6, I tried to get all of the Blue Magic for Gau (because even though he does nothing and has no personality, crazy kid raised by wolves is a character archetype I enjoy), and it is batshit insane. The Veldt cycles through 64 encounter sets, all of which have 8 possible enemy configurations, and a configuration only shows up if you've encountered all of the enemies present in it. So early on, it only goes through like 2 or 3 sets before starting over at 1, but after just a bit in the game, you're talking about 15-20 encounters before you reset. And there are enemies on just a few screens that are permanently missable (happened to me with enemies in the Magitech factory). Gau learns a Blue Magic spell if he Dives on an encounter with an enemy that has the unlearned spell. So even if you don't miss any enemies, you may be grinding through encounters because when you got to encounter set 17 of 30, you didn't get the 1 out of 8 chance to get the only enemy that teaches Missile Launch. And if you get a desired encounter set before Gau has returned from his dive? You're just SOL.

Absolutely batshit insane. I gave up halfway through and just boxed Gau for the rest of the game.
 
The last time I played through FF6, I tried to get all of the Blue Magic for Gau (because even though he does nothing and has no personality, crazy kid raised by wolves is a character archetype I enjoy), and it is batshit insane.
The Veldt seems specifically designed to make me quit gaming and just watch documentaries instead.




There’s that patch which just gives you all the Rages automatically as you progress, which sounds great until you open the menu. :stress:

The “solution” is to just ignore most of them. Fire2/ice2/bolt2/stray cat/tyrannosaur.
 
My impression of Gau is that he's potentially the broken thing in the game, but his mechanics are too much trouble to make it worth the hassle when VI already has half a dozen other ways you can break the games difficulty over your knee that are quicker and simpler.
 
My impression of Gau is that he's potentially the broken thing in the game, but his mechanics are too much trouble to make it worth the hassle when VI already has half a dozen other ways you can break the games difficulty over your knee that are quicker and simpler.
You don’t get an airship until the WoB is basically over. So you gotta climb Mt. Koltz, then take the Lethe River like it’s a Spirit Airlines connection, then dive off Baren Falls, then wash up in Serpent Trench, then take a ferry back to Nikeah to learn Water Rondo and Magnitude 8. :lossmanjack:

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Yeah it’s “worth it” the way doing my own taxes is worth it. Technically correct.
 
I liked giving Shadow the accessories that let him use two Lightbringers.

“But anyone can do that.”

Yes. But Shadow can reach 100% Defend/Dodge chance.

“But you can only get Lightbringers by robbing Kefka then going to the Arena. The game is over.”

Yes. But I played the gba release way more than the snes.

Any more obstinate questions?
 
Gau is the most powerful character in the game due to the Rafflesia Rage. It charms enemies and even works on bosses. It's literally an instant win ability.
Is that something only present in the original SNES version? The only playthroughs of 6 I've completed were on GBA and PSP. And that sounds a bit like the old X-Zone trick they patched out of all subsequent releases.
 
Is that something only present in the original SNES version?
It still works in the GBA version. I have not tested it in the remasters.
I liked giving Shadow the accessories that let him use two Lightbringers.

“But anyone can do that.”

Yes. But Shadow can reach 100% Defend/Dodge chance.

“But you can only get Lightbringers by robbing Kefka then going to the Arena. The game is over.”

Yes. But I played the gba release way more than the snes.

Any more obstinate questions?
Final Fantasy is one of those topics that instantly summons like twelve guys who tell you it's "easy to exploit". The discourse is always around FF vs. SMT (which is not really that “hard”).

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