Lurker > KanzarisKelshen

And one more!

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/rico-rodriguez

This just leaves Death, who's coming very soon. Only fitting, really. What begins with War(time)...ends with Death. Look forward to it.

What, you thought we were gonna keep you waiting that long for the next set of build? Oh, you sweet summer child.

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/magician-type-0
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/nemesis
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/proto-man
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/glory
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/prophet
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/the-fledgling

Last few builds very, very soon...and then...it's Time.

And here's the next set!

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/lady-alcina-dimitrescu
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/hades
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/nathan-spencer
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/talion
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/terra-branford

Last one should cover the remainder. Get excited, everyone!

greengravy294 posted...

If I won id have picked a baldr sky character consider yourself lucky nerds

Bold words thinking Kou Kadokura is not a mortal lock

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/agent-47
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/arthur
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/cao-cao
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/gruntilda-winkybunion
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/howard-buckshot-holmes-and-kreese-kreely
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/morte
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/ekko

The first set of builds arrive! The day of launch grows closer and closer...!

Yeah we can't justifiably give a gameplay advantage to anyone for winning the TR, but we wanted to honour Mewtwo's victory in a way that was a little more definitive than just the auto-in the winner always (deservingly) earns

An excellent choice honestly. Expect Ashton as an additional release for week 1-5. May he fare better in this run than he did in his last appearance!

notdave posted...

wait what is this and is it good

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1637730/Crystal_Project/

tl;dr: FF5 meets Dark Souls type storytelling (ie exploratory and environmental and oblique). It has a lot of exploration, an extremely versatile job system with very distinct classes and tricks you can pull off, and it launched mod support like, last week and people are already salivating at the prospect of making their own classes. I have a friend who's in gamedev who wouldn't stop raving about it and when I tried it I was not let down. It's not a 100% perfect game but it is a true blue successor to FF5 in all the ways that really count.

redrocket posted...

Largely because a ton of classes are straight up nonfunctional. Imagine thinking 'oh I should get a few ranged attackers, I know! I'll train archers and black mages! :D' and then your team is just trash for a very long time

Archers and Black Mages are not nonfunctional they just require more finesse than team McMonk. Which yes, new players may lack, but thats a matter of simple experience much more than having a masters level understanding of battle mechanics.

Archers have a totally nonfunctional skill kit. Tell me Charge X is good with a straight face. Or that Black Mage doesn't legitimately just get weaker over time as you unlock rank 3 and 4 spells thinking they'll be good when they end up being terrible.

Like...can these be made to work? Absolutely. But not in any way that a newbie player would think to try, is the thing (like how Owl was talking about sticking with rank 2s and then subbing them out for only Flare. That's...not how a new player is going to think about things at all). They're highly unintuitive classes that will just make your team weaker if you try to use them 'as intended'.

The exception to that is that Tidus can steal Wakka's niche with a bit of Luck + Acc grinding

But then again, crossmixing Tidus and Wakka is just, easy and common sense because it makes both of them just way more powerful, so no reason not to do it given they will be your damage dealers in endgame anyways.

FFT is very easy with a battle mechanics guide and fucking obtuse without one, IMO

Largely because a ton of classes are straight up nonfunctional. Imagine thinking 'oh I should get a few ranged attackers, I know! I'll train archers and black mages! :D' and then your team is just trash for a very long time

Meanwhile Johnny Monkstack facerolls the game because five monks punching the shit out of things will get results every single time, since Monk is a versatile and reliable class and at most they might need to put Item on the Monks for insurance. It's very imbalanced so you can have a very easy time or a very shitty one and it just depends on how you choose to play the game.

To this day, I still dont think Ive found a strategy RPG that I like better than this game. Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Jeanne dArc came close, but they still werent quite there.

This is where I bang the drum of 'PLAY FELL SEAL' extremely loudly

The New '20s have been absolutely phenomenal for gaming because even though AAA is getting very very safe, the people who played the same exact games we did as children are now grown up and making more games like them. What FF5 was once upon a time, Crystal Project is now for a new generation. What FFT was to our childhoods, Fell Seal can be to young kids. It's Final Fantasy Tactics 4 by another name, and while the aesthetic polish is not Square level (because it is, y'know, a literal smol indie company game), the gameplay takes the promise FFT offered and actually delivers on it wonderfully. Every class useful? Yup. Millions of combos to play with? Yup. Extreme distinctiveness of every toolkit so the endgame isn't just 'mash face with ninjas or dualwielding monks for infinite damage'? You betcha (though of course that's pretty good still). Just a wonderful, wonderful game top to bottom that all FFT fans should experience IMO.

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/phoenix-wright
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/marie-poppo
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/kratos-atreus

And that's the last of the builds of this set! Next (and last) set of pre-launch letters coming soon!

Surprise birthday present, everybody. Enjoy!

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/fox-mccloud
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/jak-and-daxter
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/the-knight-hollow-knight
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/commander-shepard

Also @SirChris ping because I think we can brighten his day with this particular set, big time.

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/lucas
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/captain-falcon
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/hero-dqv
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/fou-lu

Builds hot off the presses! Try not to have too much fun with these ones.

AriaOfBolo posted...

I'd just change the one ( ) to | | to communicate absolute value, if it was me (that's how you do that, right? been a minute)

If this doesn't screw with wiki formatting I think this might be the play

Big brain bolo strats to the rescue here <3

Lopen posted...

1d100% - 1% per the difference in Magus and his target's minbid.

That would bar Magus from ever scoring KOs without someone else helping tilt the numbers in his favor, which isn't quite the idea. It should more or less have guaranteed moderate damage, good chance of high damage, and a low but not tiny chance of KO. If anyone has an easier way of getting where we do rn tho, I'm all ears. It took some tinkering to get the formula to produce the range of results we were looking for!

^ What Trdl said. Resolved by changing it to 1d100+(His Minimum Bid + (Magus' Minimum Bid - his target's Minimum Bid))% on the wiki already. Small whoops in how it was expressed there.

AriaOfBolo posted...

does that simplify to 1d100+targetminbid or am I losin it

I...don't think so? Say the target's min bid is 70.

1d100 + 54 - (54-70 = -16)

It technically should take the absolute of Magus' and his target's min bid result so as to always produce a number to subtract from 54 but given that 4/weeks by and large have higher minbids we can probably just make this work clean by changing the minus before the parenthesis into a plus -- the intent here is you end up with 1d100 + 54 - 16 = 1d100 + 38, so Magus has about a 38% chance to KO this particular paydown and is guaranteed to inflict at least 39% max hp damage to them even with the worst possible roll.

AriaOfBolo posted...

who is the "his" in
?

Magus', to be clear. So the roll will be (1d100+(54-(54-TargetMinBid))). It wasn't written that way because it would look odd if the number was just stated plainly.

Been a hot minute since builds saw the light of day. Let's remedy that.

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/jc-denton
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/magus
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/princess-peach
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/fio-germi

More to come very soon!

UshiromiyaEva posted...

I think the patch content for Heavensward is better than the 2.0 content. I love the 2.0 villain aesthetically but not so much in prescence. Obviously a part of this is that we're spoiled for memorable villains after this by banger after banger.

Gaius is a lot better in 1.0 content, fwiw. He gets a few truly remarkable moments there which I'm still shocked were never rescued in any way.

https://youtu.be/CqV84_rKfxU?t=313

Talk about making a remarkable entrance!

And the last of this set:

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/gene
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/parappa-the-rapper
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/ryu-hayabusa
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/dracula
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/nahobino

With this, the launch of the game is one step closer. Soon...!

pjbasis posted...

Like what? You get more exp/ap? Enemies are weaker?

I have to look it up but I know they rebalanced the exp growth curve in particular. So enemies give the same amount of EXP but you level faster anyways. It's very noticeable in FF4 and FF5 where level is all and having a couple levels more really makes you much stronger due to the game math.

REsident Evil: Code REronica time

Because of 'the pit' jokes? If so no, but I wish we could take credit cuz it's A++

Isquen posted...

Every Final Fantasy has some way to break it in half. FF5 has more than some, and that's what I love about it.

Absolutely, yeah. When I say PR tightens up the systems I don't mean that it makes FF5 less broken so much as less grindy and reliant on stopping for a while to power up. It's one of the big charm points of the PR releases IMO. There was a lot of work done under the hood to ensure that just playing the game normally would actually leave you adequately powered up for everything.

Whiskey_Nick posted...

Just finished FF3 Pixel. Got the plat. Honestly better than I remember. The DS version was awful and played the NES one like 2 decades ago in a bad translation.

Pixel Remasters are 3/3 so far on best version of the game.

Doubt it will be better for 4/5/6 as the GBA version had more stuff but we'll see. Also the PSP version of 4

4 and 5 have legit arguments for being the best versions IMO, for different reasons. 4 is much more thematically cohesive (getting the lost party members back is fun gameplaywise, but it really doesn't fit the story), and 5's musical upgrade is incredible, and the gameplay tweaks help eliminate a lot of bad grinding and general wonkiness of the systems. The lost content isn't great but given that the games have modding support, it's a matter of time until someone ports the GBA content into them. I think 6 is the only one that has true arguments to make for going with its GBA version, since its endgame content is very lacking without those additions in a way that 5's isn't.

Concur on that death being very moving. FF5 gud game

Also yeah, it's legitimately hard, particularly on max ATB speed! Bosses really don't fuck around. The game gives you all the tools you could ever want to be OP, but it also like, expects you to use em. Dark Spark for example can make every boss much easier to beat, but you have to, like, land it. It's like the one FF game from its era (meaning 'every nintendo system FF') where you can say you actually get gud at it as you go and it's worth doing so. All the other ones mostly solve themselves overall.

Yeah I think I can see some arguments in norms for saying Omega>Eden. I don't agree, because I think concluding the story of the relevant characters and the sheer impact it has on the world is more valuable than a tournament arc that was super full of filler to the point they actively said 'we won't be doing this again' in response, but the payoff for Omega is worthy and it does lead into some extra MSQ quests that are super valuable. I almost feel Omega is more important for what it sets up after than for itself, really.

And Omega is definitely better than Nomura's Queerbait Emporium.

Strongly disagree on this point. The first tier of Omega is atrocious at the savage level (just a total pile of bad gimmicks save for Halicarnassus, and then an outrageously lopsided fight in terms of responsibilities for NED), the second tier is good but Eden's is equally solid, has Shiva which might be the greatest Savage fight of all time and has actual plot significance, and then third tier has Omega absolutely beat storywise and while they're evenly matched in gameplay up until the final savage fight, E12sp2 blows the doors off Final Omega in every way. Music, story, gameplay, challenge, just flat superior tbqh.

MacArrowny posted...

That's a scam too - if you played ARR in the past and want to go back to your old account, you can't use the the free trial, so Tangy would have to subscribe for all of Heavensward, despite it being free for new players.

Yeah it is IMO, no disagreements there. At least paying for Heavensward is 100% worth it.

Like the game is 60 bucks, plus the expansions, plus the 12.99 a month. Then on top of that the game has really slow pacing to drag out those subscriptions. I shouldn't have to dread purchasing a game I enjoy playing.

The slow parts are free these days. Like, pay absolutely nothing, not one red cent free. I concur that paying for ARR is a scam but thankfully it's not necessary anymore.

More builds? More builds.

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/ike
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/lara-croft
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/pit
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/sub-zero
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/terry-bogard

MacArrowny posted...

FFX is the last soundtrack with multiple great Uematsu songs.

XIV 1.0 would like a word. Desert Moon Defied, Quicksand, Tempest, Twilight Over Thanalan, Imperial Will...XIV 1.0 was Uematsu's last truly top tier soundtrack, and possibly his second peak after FF8 IMO. This doesn't count Answers and Dragonsong since they were loose tracks made for given expacs of XIV 2.0, but 1.0 was mostly him and it showed with how sick the music was.

pjbasis posted...

I think it's just different because he was experimenting. I would probably say that's a "low tier" FFX song but I still vibe with it.

Yeah that's a fair take I think. It was a very experimental period for Uematsu and some of it backfired or didn't work out as well as it could I think. Notably I think he got the hang of whatever it is he was trying to do just a few years later, as his output became his usual masterclass level performances once again soon after.

pjbasis posted...

FFX ost doesn't have chaff, the field themes and characters themes and battle themes all slap

Hard disagree. Like take this for an example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJe7olfEcRs

This is very weak compared to even FF9's climax battle themes. Not even fit to be in the same room as Dark Messenger or Beatrix's combat theme, it never goes anywhere. And it plays during some of the most major fights! Same for Challenge (the normal boss theme IIRC?). And you have things like the Al Bhed stronghold theme which is just irritating, too. I could go on. FFX still has a ton of bangers too, of course -- Auron's Theme, Suteki da Ne, Otherworld, Seymour Battle, every To Zanarkand variant, etc., but you can tell Nobuo Uematsu was exhausted and not quite at his top level for this game. Masashi Hamauzu and Junya Nakano were not up to the task of covering for him either, I'm not even sure if they have a single standout great track between them. It's all Uematsu carrying the show.

X-2 has two issues imo

A) The sheer amount of missables is fuckin stupid. The game is pain to 100% and really demands a walkthrough. Shit's bad yo

B) The music is trash outside 1000 Words and a couple other tracks. FFX baseline had a very spotty soundtrack (the major tracks are great! And then it has a loooooot of chaff), but X-2 is just, completely substandard for what FF delivers normally. It really makes it show its B-team sequel colors which is a crying shame. Really tanks the experience for me. :(

KamikazePotato posted...

Red seems really good if used correctly, but I'm not sure what the respect for random Pokemon is

With Red commanding them, it really should be decent, or so we hope. If the best trainer of all time can't buy some respect, Pokemon is truly doomed outside Mewtwo.

http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/bartz-klauser
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/crash-bandicoot
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/jon-irenicus
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/king-dedede
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/miss-fortune
http://mercs5wiki.wikidot.com/pokemon-trainer-red

First batch from this set is out. Feast your eyes on these beauties.

And then you go on about your own view, which is not what the general players think, and even admit at the end that Tellah's still is the one that people remember out of FFIV.

You're free to have your own personal takes but don't go conflating it with what the community thinks.

Yes, the scenes with the twins, Cid, and Yang are all shocker moments, but the impact is lessened when they all live in the end. I doubt people are gonna immediately think about the "sacrifices" they made when they think about the character. Much like in the real world where people aren't quick to remember the sacrifices you made in life as long as you're alive.

???

'The one that sticks' doesn't mean 'the one that sticks with you', it means 'the one that lasts to the end of the game'. But when I think of FF4 what I remember most is the absolutely phenomenal sequence at the end where the Main Theme plays as the world unites behind you (which of course features all the survivors specifically praying for you) and not Tellah's death. If people remembered Tellah's death moreso than that moment I'd be absolutely shocked, considering how masterfully executed it is. Tellah's death is an afterthought compared to that lynchpin moment the entire game has been leading up to.

WhiteLens posted...

How in the world did you think of the twins before Tellah?

By caring way more about their deaths because they didn't have ten billion death flags around them from the start? Because they're little kids and an old man dying out of revenge hits less hard than two children sacrificing their lives so adults may live? Because you can actually try to depetrify them with a gold needle and the game accounts for that and says 'no, they're too far gone'? There's a lot of reasons their death scene hits harder than Tellah's and Cid's (which I'd also argue hits harder than Tellah's, fwiw, if only because you've known him for longer by the time he disappears and he's a more enjoyable character to begin with). Tellah's death isn't even the meanest one in his own game at all, even if it's the one that sticks.

UltimaterializerX posted...

Dude I like FF5 but if you're trying to tell me Galuf's plot twist is a top 2 iconic thing in this series you're spouting nonsense. Like there are real tangible numbers here from representative samples, not "Ulti is talking shit lol". If the game was treated like 4 and 6 were on the SNES we'd have a discussion here, but it wasn't.

Name a death more remembered when people think about the game it's from among the numbered FFs then. I can think of one in FF7, and that's it (Zack's death is super iconic...as seen in Crisis Core, which isn't a mainline game, it's a spinoff). I guess you could make an argument for Palom and Porom in FF4, maaaaaybe? But arguing for FF9 here's like, c'mon now. FF9 is a great game, but what's remembered from it is its ruminations about death and purpose, not anyone dying. If FF2 was more well liked you could argue for something from there, too, but it's not.

UltimaterializerX posted...

Your opinion is not an objective fact and we have actual measurable data on which games and which characters people care about the most.

But hey if youre playing the America sucks card, heres a poll from Japan from 2021: https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/03/japan_voted_on_final_fantasys_best_games_and_characters_-_do_you_agree_with_the_ranking

Galuf does not register.

Heres a poll from 2023 answered by only the most hardcore JRPG fans, because no one else is going to know or care what rpgsite is: https://www.rpgsite.net/feature/13827-the-best-final-fantasy-games-revealed-as-ranked-by-thousands-of-fans

Galuf again does not register. He quite literally got lost in translation.

IDK why you'd use a top 10 poll for evaluating this. There's a lot that renders it irrelevant (it's a popularity poll, not people picking out their most memorable moments, which would produce much different results, for one), but what we're talking about is overall impact on the people who did play a given game. Ask people how much Tellah's death resonated with them vs Galuf's and you'll get a completely different level of response. Same for Vivi's, which I guarantee doesn't even get remarked upon unless you ask people about what they thought of it (a lot of other Vivi moments would be ranked higher in people's minds for sure). Now if we talked about say...Zack's death? Yeah sure, that's more comparable in importance relative to its own game's narrative. It'd be a better example to use.

Most FF fans in America have terrible tastes, tbqh. I played all of those games and objectively speaking, only Aerith had a more shocking and devastating death. The fact it looks like you won and then it turns out Galuf is permanently dead is a massive gut punch that turns the plot way more personal than Tellah's 'I MUST AVENGE!!' or Vivi's death-by-omission in FF9's ending. Tidus' death is arguable, sure, but even in FFX itself it's heavily implied he actually reincarnated so it doesn't have the same kind of impact as a true final death. You can even see it in how the rest of the world reacts to it. Where's the reaction to Tellah's passing, compared to Galuf's? His friends mourn him, Gilgamesh gets very quiet when he finds out the old geezer is gone, and in general, it's a lot more 'real' than the other instances, bar again Aerith who did much the same thing but even harsher.

UltimaterializerX posted...

The gameplay is A+ for sure, but it legitimately has no plot.

Nah it has a perfectly good plot. You can't say that the game with one of the two most iconic deaths in FF and probably its most famous face turn has no plot IMO

TomNook7 posted...

Bruh. Rangers rapid fire + ninjas dual wield = 8 fucking attacks

FF5 is so good

Now mix it in with Spellblade Flare to achieve Bartz's canonical limit break

A combo so potent it got canonized as his trump card in Dissidia

I'd consider the original TR an actual game, since it was a scope crept-nightmare that went for full game length

The current TR is an actual system betatest though. It was advertised as a way to finetune M5's systems, it has been used as such and we're getting a full game soon.

(Also, Merx is missing Draftmerx, the followup game done after in a shorter format as a way to keep interest going and let people cool down for fun. Idk if it counts as a full game, but it at least has more of an argument than the new test run)

Xiahou_Shake posted...

Yuffie is so great to play I have to wonder how much they're going to be boosting up the rest of the party in Rebirth. As they are now, none of them come close to scratching how fun she is.

This is the important thing. In particular, I suspect they noticed that the element tax was kinda shit in an ARPG and every character is going to get some way to flex higher amounts of pressure because man, Yuffie's ninjutsus were night and fuckin day compared to everyone else's shit in terms of materia efficiency.

DeathChicken posted...

Ha, you got a functioning Irenicus build going? I remember arguments for trying to get that one rolling in prior Mercs and it never got past "How do you make a D&D mage work, especially one with his kind of instadeath bullshit"

We believe he can work now that the Broken Rule has been abolished and we took the time to go over his spell list carefully. He does have some rancid nonsense that's gonna be cut (hi Maze), but it's a lot less than you'd think at first glance, thankfully. A lot of his value comes from being an incredible magical artillerist who can't be stopped by getting in on him, so even if some of the middle finger spells go away, he's still capable of doing very unique things no other mages in mercs can boast.