Lurker > NeoElfboy

Yeah people do get salty over the Smash roster too so I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I am disappointed. <_<

NeoElfboy posted...

Innate Res Ploy may be one of the least tempting +Eff refines I've ever seen (even if you want to Ploy with her, you're better off refining her weapon for Res and stuffing a ploy in another slot), but that's not a major loss.

Whoops, looks like I'd misread and it's Res Tactic instead. Well that's better though since I more or less exclusively run mine on cavalry teams, still isn't actually of any interest to me.
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I'm scratching my head at the salt for Awakening/Fates continuing to get more alts. This is selling out as much as Smash is for having more characters from Mario than other series. I agree that it was a bit much when they were the only games getting alts but we've long since moved past that. Having four out of the eight summer characters is right in line with the results from CYL for the relative pull of those two games.

I like Camilla, I can always use more flying mages (best unit type in the game IMO), and I badly need a third Hone Fliers, so my way is extremely clear this time. Interesting how giving her an innate Hone Fliers soft-discourages using a bladetome on her. Don't care about SD characters. Takumi... maybe. Colourless is the obvious backup choice anyway.

Really psyched about Titania's weapon upgrade. I was already running her with an Emerald Axe so this is gonna be a free +4 atk, +5 HP, and a further stat boost (not sure which I'll choose). Should really help her green and colourless matchups. Innate Res Ploy may be one of the least tempting +Eff refines I've ever seen (even if you want to Ploy with her, you're better off refining her weapon for Res and stuffing a ploy in another slot), but that's not a major loss.
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~8% isn't atypical for the most important case-specific character. 5-4 just isn't that long.
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Natwaf_akidna posted...

FFV final boss is totally not prepared for Maxed/strong Freelancers and mimics

In Four Job Fiesta hes fun though. But Ive had more problems from his Almagest (Strong Holy attack) than his Grand Cross (Random status), because I keep lucking out with which status effect is landing.

The random status attack just isn't that great honestly. Hermes Sandals block a bunch of it, and a number of its statuses are easily dealt with on top of that (blind, silence, poison, etc.). It can screw you over especially if it procs petrify/zombie on multiple people but generally fiestas only prioritise killing it if they can easily mitigate Almagest, which is generally more dangerous since it one-shots classes with lower HP if you don't have Shell (and only three jobs easily access Shell in Fiesta, without Wonder Wand shenanigans or obscure Releases).
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As someone who personally found the final boss of FFX easy, I can certainly see how he might pose problems. The big thing he has is kinda subtle, it's the fact that his multitarget physical in form 2 causes delay to the entire party, allowing him to overwhelm your healing especially if your PCs are pretty slow. If you don't immune petrify, his Beam attack will also both waste your turns healing it and constantly remove your buffs (and FFX buffs are insanely strong). Flipside if you both realise buffs are good and block petrify (and you get several Stoneproof accessories throughout the game in addition to any that you get as random drops or make yourself) he's got nothin'.

I have so much harder times with V or IX's bosses, because they offer crazy status effect mechanics that prove VERY problematic no matter what party setup.

IX's Grand Cross can't be shut down, but V very much can. Ribbon and Hermes Sandals stop everything except Zombie and those are respectively the best helmet in the game and the best accessory in the game even before their statusblocking properties are considered. Zombie is admittedly a nasty status to sneak through but at only a 5% chance it's not that worrying, especially with how rarely the move is used.
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The woman on the right looks too skinny to be Camilla (both the arm and the torso) unless there's been a significant artstyle shift or something about the silhouette is really throwing me (both possible).
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Cosmos is pretty great. I dunno that I'd call him a total subversion; AA has had plenty of characters whom the game tries to paint as maybe the killer only to reveal a different reason for their lies (Adrian Andrews being one of the earlier clearcut cases of such). But his lies are still fun to untangle and the guy is just legit hilarious.
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This is not the first time my favourite character in a gauntlet won it. It has the first time he or she has done it while being a massive underdog (albeit not in the finals, to be fair). Pretty fun feeling.

Also,

please be azura and camilla

We need to be able to build like, 3 full distinct teams entirely out of great Fates flying units. My body is ready.
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LeonhartFour posted...

I think I've lost to Necron once ever, and I've fought him many, many times. That's a very manageable fight.

Well without knowing how you fought him this statement may not have much meaning. It's a Final Fantasy game so it goes without saying that if you got all the good stuff then you're gonna run over things. My first file of FF9 was pretty non-gamebreaking in that I didn't have any of the ultimate weapons or high-damage moves (Shock, built-up Frog Drop/Dragon Crest/etc.; pretty much only Eiko and Garnet could deal high damage and they were needed for healing) or good support skills (e.g. Auto-Haste) and Necron did take a few tries, precisely because if he survives to use Grand Cross like 3-4 times you're almost certainly going to get screwed over at least once. Even my relatively wussy party had kinda curbstomped the lategame up to that point (the last previous boss who had posed a significant difficulty was Ark) so Necron kinda stood out to me. And in hindsight I tend to agree the diceroll design of Grand Cross isn't very good.

(FF5's Grand Cross is far less egregious because it can only apply one status per unit and is used only very rarely, while FFT's hits only a relatively small radius, limiting its potential to devastate your team.)
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WazzupGenius00 posted...

You also dont have to do 5 other difficult bosses before the final one with no chance to return and heal up in 1, 2 and 4

(Technically in 1 you refight the fiends, but all but 1 of them should be a total joke by that point in the game)

Yeah that's kinda my point. In FF1-2 those final dungeon bosses (and the final in FF2's case) are easy-peasy while FF3's is not, so it's a bigger problem in FF3 despite the core design principles being the same.

I actually liked FF3's final dungeon better because it had teeth but I 100% get why one wouldn't.

Grand Kirby posted...

You CAN'T in FF3's remake. That's kind of a special kind of awfulness. They had the chance to improve it and they didn't.

Yeah this is very fair. The PSX versions of FF1-2 are actually good remakes which improve the games in a few ways while being faithful to them. DS FF3 is kind of a mess and I'm not going to defend it.
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Skill is only +1 hit per point in this game, so it's a very impotent stat; you can mostly ignore it. (I mean, skill is always a bad stat, but it's worse in this game than usual!).

Grand Kirby posted...

If you want to see every chapter for completionists sake then it's pretty bad.

The way I look at it is that it's meant to be a balancing act for people who suck too much. So if you lose too many characters can you unlock an extra chapter that gives you more powerful characters to make up for it. That's the best way to justify it. I always just ignore them, they weren't in the original game anyway

My problem with that is that the side chapters (like Horace's in particular) have some of the only remotely interesting writing in the game (probably because whoever wrote the original FE1 was incompetent). But yeah if you just care about gameplay you can probably just ignore them. (The units you get are often pretty solid, but hardly essential or the best.)
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Characters are bland and unmemorable. So's the story though at least that's pretty normal for FE.

You need to kill off characters to get the optional side chapters.

Gameplay removes mechnics from the previous games like shove, rescue, skills, etc. Evasion is mostly non-functional as a build now (spd and luck's effect on evade are halved), which pretty much leaves everything as simple atk/hit/spd checks.

Normal mode is way too easy. Every other difficulty mode has reinforcements that act as soon as they appear.

It's not an awful game or anything but it's pretty clearly the worst game in the series that we got in North America.
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LeonhartFour posted...

Mobilezoid posted...

FFIX

Unless you can negate every single status ailment, whether or not you win comes down to chance.

I mean bosses that depend on status ailments to beat you generally suck but FFIX's last boss is pretty tame because he's really slow so it's pretty easy to deal with them as long as you've got the right ailments guarded against

I'm pretty sure there were several status ailments, including instant death, that you can't guard against in FF9, which makes every fight with the FF9 final boss a real roll of the dice. It's worse because if you lose you have to fight the second-to-last boss again, and likely the third-to-last too if you didn't realise you could save after him.

On the note of status ailments, Shadow Hearts 1's final should definitely be mentioned. Generally a tame fight, but he has 100% multitarget petrify. No petrify-blockers equipped? Congrats, you just lost, enjoy fighting the second-to-last boss again as well.

A recent one my wife just played is Final Fantasy Type-0. The final boss is two stages, both plot fights. First, one where you are forcibly killed off. Then, one where you can't possibly lose. Final bosses in RPGs often have overly long plot segments and these are bad in general (seriously, devs, let the gameplay speak for itself) but that really takes the cake.

Vandal Hearts also comes to mind. The final boss is an utterly unremarkable opponent (think Miluda in FFT, just a straight-up fighter with slightly better stats) in an unremarkable battle. After you beat him he pulls out his one-winged-angel form but it's still just an ordinary opponent with normal opponent HP; I can't even imagine him getting a turn since you start with him surrounded.
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LapisLazuli posted...

Basically. Any RPG that has a section that long that you can't save during is a a bad game. The final dungeon alone retroacticely kills any chance FF3 had of being even kinda good. Even if it was easy it would still be bad.

I mean it's not like you can save in the final dungeons of FF1 or FF2 either, and FF4 has a really long stretch after the last save point too. FF3 just gets flak because unlike those games, the final dungeon/boss is hard on top of that (and I can't really fault people for having that opinion, for all that I was just young enough when I played FF3 that the idea of redoing the final dungeon a few times didn't bother me).
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Probably Fire Emblem Fates (Conquest) for me.
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It's funny to think that the #1, #2, and #3 cases in DD by chronological order are likely going to finish #1, #2, and #3 in lines in that order. Nothing like any other game!

I'm kinda surprised by Fulbright's relatively low line count; ~3% of the lines of the game so far compared to Gumshoe averaging ~5% of the original trilogy. I thought he made quite a big impact relative to his time, i guess. He does testify less though, I imagine is a big part.
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IfGodCouldDie posted...

I assume building a team for defence and offense in arena is probably a good idea too?

You want a dedicated three-person core for arena offence for sure. Defence I wouldn't worry about too much, I used to try building them but these days I just use my arena offence team for laziness reasons and it works pretty well.
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It's good to have a wide array of characters/teams available. Unless your one team is amazingly good, it's really helpful to be able to substitute in different parts for specific tough Grand Hero Battles (and other similar one-shot infernal fights). And then Arena Assault/Chain Challenge/Squad Assault all directly call for lots of PCs.

Of course that can be a pretty long-term project overall.
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Scizor easily. Steel Bug >>>>> yet another Flying Bug, both in gameplay and design.
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I feel like +Spd would still be a general positive for him (because preventing doubles probably gives him more matchups he can survive than do 3-4 points of HP/Def/Res) but would have to run the numbers to be sure.

I think part of the problem with +Atk/-HP and +Atk/-Spd is he honestly doesn't need Atk that much. You're building him to take a hit and respond with Radiant Aether, which will already defeat most opponents (that aren't, like, blues I guess, but many of those will KO him first, especially with a non-Atk bane). More Atk doesn't give you enough more KOs to care. It helps more if you use him as a player phase unit more I suppose, but his standard breath/QR build is very enemy phase-focused.
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Virtual Boy is obvious if included but I understand why it isn't.

Otherwise, I'm pretty sure it's the N64.

-Cartridge format really held back the type of games it could get at the time
-Absolutely anemic third-party support even by post-SNES Nintendo console standards
-Almost entirely reliant on first-party games, but many major first-party Nintendo series from the NES/SNES aren't represented: no Metroid, no Mother, no Fire Emblem. There's also no 2D Mario.
-Goldeneye, one of the system's few marquee titles, hasn't aged very well (I'm told. Haven't played it in years). I'd argue Mario 64 hasn't either, but I know a lot of people disagree. That basically leaves Zelda. I personally love F-Zero X but it obviously wasn't a major release.

I think it's fair to say the Wii set the stage for the Wii U's financial failure, but the N64 honestly did the same for the GameCube, which sold only marginally better. (In both cases, I feel the worse-selling system was a significantly better one than its predecessor, but so it goes.) I personally put the Wii above the N64 because I'm a Mario and Fire Emblem fan.
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Weakupedia posted...

How's the music? I'm not expecting to love it like the first game's, but is it at least decent?

Fairly average, so yeah obviously a downgrade. It has some good tracks (like the new asterisk boss theme which is... different, but very good) but overall isn't too special.

Character-wise, I think Yew is a pretty big upgrade over Tiz (though Tiz is still around) but otherwise meh. I wanna like Magnolia since she's cool but they don't do that much with her, and Edea is a pale shadow of the neat character she was in BD. Hope you like her talking about food.
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I think the general opinion is that the writing is worse than Default (although it does avoid BD's big missteps in chapters 5-8) and the gameplay is similar but overall better, though not by much. Which game you prefer varies to taste though I'd guess BD is slightly preferred.

Fundamentally, if you liked the first game and don't mind the idea of more of it, then Bravely Second is for you.
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Bane_Of_Despair posted...

Back to present day, I just finished up DMC1. Fun times! Super janky in a lot of spots but it was 2001 so I give it quite a bit a leeway with that. The story.....not much to it actually, I was surprised how little to the story there was. And Vergil got sandbagged super hard! I didn't know he was in the game like that, and Dante kind of just forgets about him after beating him the final time. But the game itself is nifty. Having double jump with Alastor helped me out a TON. I didn't really end up using Ifrit because I was having too much fun with Alastor. And I dunno how common it is to do, but I ended up using the shotgun like 95% of the time. I really enjoyed the shotgun.

Shotgun's a good time but the handguns are really useful for mobility and getting quick hits in to build DT, and the grenade launcher hits like a truck. Did you know/discover about how you can use rolls or jumps to reduce its recovery time?

Also, you didn't even use Ifrit against Frosts?

DMC doesn't have as many weapon options as some of the later games but I really liked how they all had their clear niche.

After playing DMC3 I kinda wish Vergil would have stayed with his total lack of personality as in DMC1. I'll take that over the "too cool for school" shonen anime rival he became..

DMC2's not a very good game though I'm glad you discovered some of the movement tricks. Honestly it's one of the most fun DMC games just to move around in. Too bad it's the worst in most other ways.
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Pearl's DD design (and personality, honestly) borders on being cowardly, like they didn't want to offend the people who liked her as an 8-year old so they hardly changed her at all despite 8 -> 17 (or whatever) being a ridiculous transition. I thought they did a much better job aging Maya convincingly (and this is coming from someone who likes Pearl more than Maya and DD more than SoJ).

Was Means trying to frame Hugh as framing Juniper? 5-3 is a case I'm weirdly hazy on specifics for. Definitely a bit of a weak spot in an otherwise stellar game for case construction.
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I definitely think we need a break from Khu'rain, if we do indeed ever go back. But I generally am not a big fan of that setting regardless, so take my thoughts with a grain of salt.

Athena's definitely the lawyer with the most growing to do so I hope the next game follows her (and/or someone new?).
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Kenri posted...

barreldragon88 posted...

Seems like they like to make Summer units have rather underwhelming weapons compared to non-seasonals, which is interesting since you'd think they'd make seasonals OP to entice players to draw on the banners as much as possible

Seasonal weapons are generally inheritable and they're very careful about not making inheritable weapons OP (for whatever reason).

This kinda makes all the new inheritable tomes bad, since there's already an inheritable OP tome for them to compete with. The logic makes a bit more sense for physical weapons.

I got Tana and Innes, both +somethinguseless -Atk. But y'know what that's okay, they're both gonna be 30 atk/36-37 speed. My +Def -Atk Tana in particular is... basically just a sliiightly better red Summer Corrin, and her offence is more than good enough to wreck everything in her path.
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I don't really get the fascination with GameCube controllers.

I'm also kinda surprised people still use wired controllers in 2018. That was one of those "it's so hard to go back" transitions for me.
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Awful winner, but thank you for running the contest; it was fun.
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LeonhartFour posted...

Note to self: I should do combined line stats for the OT, the AAI games, and the NT once all this is over.

well I guess I could go ahead and do them for the OT and the AAI games but it was an idea I just had and I wanted to make a note of it

I can see why you'd group the NT together, kind of a process of elimination thing (you can also call it the "Apollo trilogy" but Dual Destinies makes me squint at that), but it's kinda weird seeing as there's a big release date gap and a writer switch in the middle of it.
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I was basically convinced Crab was the culprit until the last scene of investigation day 2 totally reframes him.

Re Fulbright I don't think his confusion is entirely faked; it's just not for the reasons the players necessarily assume. Wearing multiple identities has messed him up on a deep level.
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Unless her stats suck I'm definitely going to try to get Tana, red tome is the only one I don't have yet for fliers. An important step towards a third flying AA team.

Also obligatory "Noire's art was always bad". Definitely an interesting skill though, certainly an improvement over Infantry Pulse.
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"See you in my dreams" tilts this one to Clown Man for me, I think. Good robot master set though; I'm sure a lot of it's the goofy-as-hell voice acting but they are almost all quite individually memorable to me.
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Marisa
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I suppose I'm one of your dissenters since I thought Order of Ecclesia was the best, and I'd put Portrait of Ruin, at minimum, above SotN as well. SotN's gameplay is too clunky. But then Castlevania's atmosphere does nothing for me so SotN's supposed advantages there don't really mean anything to me.
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Hmm, okay.

Trading for Soren. Save Soren now and you get my word that I will neither save Soren nor encourage others to save Soren (e.g. by trades) in a Soren/Marisa final.
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What's the format of the final round?
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Soren.

Will trade Soren for Marisa in an hour if anyone's actually still interested who hasn't made that deal yet.
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Paratroopa1 posted...

the best back to back cases are 6-4 and 6-5

...

...oh, you thought I was kidding? no, that's really my answer

Perfectly fair answer! I honestly considered that one too, along with 1-3/1-4. Speaking chronologically of course, I thought that was clear by the fact that 5-2/5-DLC is what brought this up.

Leon, random question: what platform did you play the various games on for this playthrough set?
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I kinda assume from the setup that we're assuming that this is alternate reality Hillary who is a citizen of and highly experienced in the politics of our country instead of the US.

Too many variables to answer though. Like Hillary is pretty right-wing for a Canadian politician, so am I assuming she's running as a Conservative with her current views? A Liberal with her current views? Or am I assuming that like the real Hillary she ended up in a centre-left party and adjusted her views slightly to match (e.g. a less hawkish foreign policy)? I don't even know.

I respect her well enough on a personal level that I'm pretty sure I'd be fine with her as a leader, but voting would depend on the above specifics and her opponent.
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Oh man I forgot 5-2 and 5-DLC were back-to-back, nice. Probably my second favourite back-to-back pair after 2-3/2-4. (Phoenix doesn't actually appear behind the bench in 5-3 so it's easy to forget the relative order of it and 5-DLC.)
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Hector winning feels inevitable now, as the only one of the Actually Popular Characters to make it this far. Which is the worst result I can imagine but oh well.

Needless to say I'm all for TRE's idea. I'd much prefer Soren to win but I'm cool with him losing to Marisa in the final if that's what it comes to.
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Marisa
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I can save Marisa in ~20 minutes in exchange for a Soren save.
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Cordelia
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Trading Soren auto. For either Cordelia or Marisa.
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5-2 has one of my favourite takedowns, the white hair in the mask is just so perfect. The smarm/satisaction as Apollo delivers "A DNA test is all we need to prove it, and we both know we'll get a match!" is great.

Interesting to see that 5-2 doesn't rack up a high line count despite its great length time-wise; I imagine this will hold true for the rest of DD/SoJ (well 6-5 will still be huge) but we'll see.
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