Laggy Fantasy Tactics: playthrough with screenshots

[Regdren]

Hey all. I bought Final Fantasy tactics when it came out and have enjoyed it off and on since then. I had two main playthroughs: one where I broke the game the usual ways, which is to say Blade Grasp, Calculator, and later Orlandu. The second time I went with Ramza and four generics and used things like Martial Arts Ninja and Two Hands with knight swords instead. Better, but it still felt kinda meh towards the end.

Recently I found out about the mod scene and two mods really stood out. One is the 1.3 Insane Difficulty mod, which I like a great deal but can be a bit of a headache at times. the other is Laggy Fantasy Tactics, a more relaxing version which is what I will cover here. I'll try to keep it entertaining and running smoothly, hopefully you all enjoy it.

Onward into the strangely unfamiliar world of LFT!

In the very first battle, Ramza learned nothing except Wish for his active abilities. I was a bit unlucky in that regard.





Not that Ramza needs to do much of anything.



Ooh, that’s a player-type build there. Has Laggy been teaching you a few tricks?



Agrias saves the day with a double hit, killing one archer and landing Stop on the other. Ramza’s face is in the mud because the knight and a charge +5 put him down. Luckily they didn’t target anyone important. The battle didn't last long after that.

I’ve heard of this fight referred to as the Tutorial battle but I’m not sure what it’s supposed to teach There’s pretty much nothing the player can do, so one can’t really try things out.

To move on with the story, we must TRAVEL BACK IN TIME. Fasten your seatbelts as we achieve the impossible and journey back to last-year-land!

[Regdren]

The introduction battle was a bit too quick and automated for my taste so I'm gonna tell you about the first battle that I got to control.



I appreciate not having to sift through low brave/faith values early on. I prefer high faith over low because it makes buffing and reviving allies easier. My hitting power will be a bit low in this battle but good luck killing anyone on my team.



I check the enemy setups and don’t see any crossbows, so it’s safe to send everyone along the left side of the river. The plan is to kill the “wee moppets” squire quickly, then the chemist is likely to rush forward and their team’s only healing will soon be gone before the squires on the other side of the river can do anything.



Delita, I don’t think the academy taught you to run away like that after taking a small scrape. Looks like I’ve got to make one of my Chemists throw him some liquid courage.



They’re crossing the river faster than I expected. I’ve got enough supplies to take plenty of hits though.



With the chemist down in two quick shots, the rest is really just cleanup.



Kind of a messy cleanup though. It might not be a good idea to drink the water for a little while.



This fight is not much different from vanilla, but that's mostly because there hasn't been time for any changes to show up yet. Next time I'm going to take a look at some of the new skills and take on the Rescue Argath fight. Later!

[Regdren]

Welcome back. Now that I have a Formation menu I can take a look at the new squire skill list.



I guess everyone is going to be a squire for a little while. Ramza’s list is a bit weaker than the others but I will still want Yell and Heal at minimum. Why no Accumulate? Because I’m going to make him a spellcaster, that’s why.

Everyone else could use Heal. My warriors will want Accumulate and Reinforce while my spellcasters get Replenish, no question about it. Reraise is an amazing buff, and MP restoration is pretty tricky to do in most cases. I appreciate the effort to make Basic skill something that isn’t ignored for the entire game.



Mission Starto! I chose to save this guy mostly so he won’t have anything to throw back at me at Zeakden. The last thing I want to do is give him a legitimate arguing point.



The beginning shows exceptional luck as Argath gets through the first enemy moves essentially unharmed. I’ve had games where he was Counter Tackled and died before I even get a turn.



I line up towards the right for two reasons: it allows me to assist Argh more easily, and it puts some distance between me and the panther. Now that it has Steal Heart and can move next to any enemy squire for Cat Kick, that thing is by far the most dangerous enemy on this map.



Of course, the problem with Algus being unharmed is that he stays near the enemy and gets surrounded. The good news is that these squires just put themselves in killing distance of my own characters.



I approve of this. The more kills Delita gets, the longer he’ll be useful on the team.



I was going to get the reset button ready when Argath walked up to the Panther, but then I remembered that it has Catch instead of Counter now. His attack opened up an opportunity to score a quick kill. Unfortunately one of my own people took a crossbow bolt before I could heal her, putting a time limit on the rest of the battle.



At least, that’s what I thought until I remembered that Wish revives people now. Delita was shivved but I can’t bring myself to care.



A few more hits bring an end to the fight.

Igros Castle brings some interesting changes. Lots of things are available earlier than normal. I didn’t expect Power Wrist and Magic Ring to be available so early. I also like the availability of the longbow to set Archers apart, now that Squires can use crossbows. That flail looks interesting to try while the stakes are low. Maybe adding Charge +2 will reduce the risk a little. Also: phoenix down is at 1000 gil each. Granted, it's instant, 100% success revival with the only limit being your cash reserve. I guess I can understand why it was nerfed a little.

No one has all the skills they need to move out of Squire yet, so I'm bringing essentially the same team into the woods. We'll see how that turns out in the next installment of this playthrough.

[Fenrir]

Definitely cool stuff.

[Captain K.]

Laggy?  Never heard of him.

[superaielman]

Flails are very neat in LFT, one of my favorite weapon type changes.

[Regdren]

Coming up is the game's official introduction of monsters. In vanilla the message is clear: "These enemies are here to build up your XP and JP." One of the stated goals of LFT is to fix this.



The opposition. Reraise on bombs, huh. Looks like a good reason to bring Secret Hunt, or maybe some kind of dispel skill. Right now I’ll just have to leave the bombs for last.



A black goblin moves forward to show off the new Turn Punch/Spin fist…only to get sworded by that guy. We have recovery skills but they don’t, except Spark which hardly counts. I don’t expect that advantage to last forever though.



Healing Argath doesn’t feel quite right, but it’s what separates us from the monsters after all. Except Chocobos. And walking trees. And maybe a few others.



No matter how I angle the camera, a tree gets in the way. Stupid forest. Also, The enemy rushes in. A couple of them manage to get themselves surrounded without me having to do anything. So, thanks?

My guests decide it’s a good idea to defuse Bombs by hitting them. One of them gets back up with Reraise and



...uses Spark. This might be a problem with adding the new monster skills. An explosion would have been devastating to my party, but the Bomb just wanted to heal itself. 18+3 isn’t enough though, one more sword hit finishes it off.

Edit: my apologies for this screencap, I made a mistake with the copy/paste.



The rest is easy. Ramza finishes the fight with a heroic backstab.

Overall this wasn't much more than a bump on the road. I noticed that with the new Shield Break effects of flails they effectively attack twice. This does help make their damage a little more dependable. Maybe later on I'll try equipping a ninja with flails to see if I get quad strikes. That could be fun.

[Regdren]

Dorter! For new player, this is a battle that tells you that some strategy might be needed to win. More directly, it says that you can’t succeed just by bringing a bunch of squires into every fight. What I say in response is CROSSBOWS.

(links only to avoid flooding the post with stat screens)

http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a638/regdren1/Bowofcross1_zps5040b60c.png
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a638/regdren1/Bowofcross2_zps14a9aa71.png
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a638/regdren1/Bowofcross3_zpse220f70e.png
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a638/regdren1/Bowofcross4_zps8ae93748.png
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a638/regdren1/Bowofcross6_zpsb2e4d161.png
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a638/regdren1/Bowofcross7_zps02d575c8.png
http://i1287.photobucket.com/albums/a638/regdren1/Bowofcross5_zps86683c37.png

Nothing can beat a team of squires with crossbows. Ramza wasn’t paying attention in Squire school so he never learned to pull a trigger. As punishment, in this battle he will yell until his lungs collapse. Delita wasn’t paying attention either so I had to cheat a little and make him an archer. Algus equips it with no problem though. He’s always ready to shoot people.

My strategy is to steadily move my people up to the high ground. RARCOMMONERS and Delita will draw the initial attacks while I get into position to shoot them down, one at a time.



Overall I like the new translation better, but there are some things I miss.





Hey you up there! You might have a bow, but is it a CROSSbow? I didn’t think so!



This was Fire2. I’m not too scared of the wizards on this map. They’re male, have lowish faith, and cast fire spells while it’s raining.



That clears out the top of the building. The one on the ground is the archer who forgot to bring his bow. The other one got reduced to critical and ran away, so he's not really a problem anymore.



That's about it for the wizards. The trick is to avoid standing on the edge of the high ground. Instead, hand back a bit so the enemy moves further forward. Then you can advance and have lots of people shoot at one enemy to get kills quickly.



That was the knight’s shield. I don’t want his life to be saved by dumb luck.



I’ve gotta remember that this isn’t 1.3, crystals are not that reliable for learning abilities. In other news, the knight has charged in finally. I would have had a tougher time if he had climbed up to meet us as soon as he could rather than wasting his time with Throw Stone. As it is, he’s surrounded and goes down without dealing too much damage. After that I just need to chase down an archer who was hiding in a corner.



The first 20 levels or so are the most important for building up characters. Going up to level 4 as squires is not what most people would consider optimal, I bet...oh well. Dorter slums is finished. This just about gets my party the JP that's needed, so next time I'll be able to diversify my party a bit. See you then!

[superaielman]

LFT is generally scaled to make every class some scale of competent. Squires are very competent, they have a strong draw on weapons.  Also, feel free to direct link as many images as you want- it's definitely cool to see your character setups before the battles. Am enjoying reading someone's take on LFT while they go into it blind.

[Dark Holy Elf]

For what it's worth Dorter Slums rain isn't strong enough to dampen fire / boost lightning. The enemy Wizards still not amazing due to being male but they can be pretty scary if they roll high on faith (at least I assume their faith is still random in LFT, don't recall 100% for sure).

[Regdren]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll include full screenshots of my team setups from now on. Speaking of which...

After a quick random encounter to even out the levels a bit, it’s job-change time for my team. They’ve learned most of the abilities I’m aiming for, and sadly mass-crossbows will only go so far. I’ve got Ramza as a wizard, Akintude the awesomely-named archer, knightly Norris, Pamela as priest, and…Penelope the masked secret weapon.











Yep, Laggy Fantasy Tactics has Mime as an easily available class. I’ve wanted to try one out for a long time but in vanilla the requirements are kind of absurd. Just looking at how the mime works makes it sound like having one on your team gives you an entirely new way of looking at the game.

Looking at the upcoming battle I see three enemy knights. This worries me a great deal because they are now incredibly tough. I'd like to disable them rather than taking them on in a brawl but I don't have the tools for that yet.



The mime goes before anyone else and already I’m thinking differently. Where will my spellcasters be able to move, and where is the enemy likely to walk first? Do I want to position Penelope primarily for healing, offensive spells, or melee? Given that the enemy is mostly melee, I think keeping her a reasonable distance from the enemy would be a good start.





A monk unwisely walks out alone. Things like this are very easy to do with a mime, the tricky part will be when all of the other enemies walk out and things get messy.





Argath didn’t last very long, but I had to pick one guest to support. Delita is a childhood friend while Argath thinks folks who aren’t nobles are animals to be slaughtered at will, so there you go. This positioning worked pretty well. With proper aim Penelope can attack with both magic and physical mimics. Healing is kinda tricky though, I should have moved Pamela further back so that she could heal the front line and the mimic heal would go so far back it wouldn’t connect with any enemies.



This kill happened completely by accident. Delita used a charged bow attack on someone inside the fort and this here knight got an arrow in the back. Even with the nerfs, standing in front of a mime is very dangerous.



Things aren’t looking so great. Even with the hitting power I’ve got, the knights were able to walk past and KO the only people who could recover my party before I could bring them down. Knights are real juggernauts in this mod. On top of this, the remaining enemy is an archer hiding in the back of the fort. My solution: have Norris execute a charged swing into empty air.





It’s no fun without some tension, right?

I really enjoy having a mime in my party. It adds a new dimension to the game. It helps that mimes are really powerful, of course. Because they act so many times and tend to score a lot of kills, they tend to gain experience really fast. Penelope was a level below everyone at the start of the fight and by the end had more experience than anyone else on my team. I like to keep my team more or less even on experience, so I'll have to use her carefully to avoid letting things get out of hand.

Thanks for reading everyone. I'll be back tomorrow with Thieves Fort.

[Laggy]

i heartily approve of any and all forms of mimepremacy

please do not neglect to document the inevitably hilarious backfires it causes

[Regdren]

I'm trying to be very careful about where I aim my mime. If/when I do get a mime backfire, I will surely show it to everyone.

My setup is roughly the same, but doe to Penelope's experience gains I'm keeping her power in reserve for now. Akintude will take her place.



This fight starts off very well, with an enemy thief overextending just to hit some shmuck I’ve never seen before.



Very nice. One of the white mages hangs back and does something useful for her team. In fact she plays good support through the entire battle. I should give her a medal when the battle is over.



Someone just ate a weapon break. My knight doesn’t need a mantle, I said. Enemies don’t target tanky units, I said. Serves me right.



Two can play at that game though. Norris is so manly he can break armor bare-handed without even being a monk. Actually this did more effective damage than a sword attack would, and it can’t be recovered by healing.



The battle’s been going pretty slow. The white mage with a silk robe has been using its mp boost to fuel lots of Cure 3 spells. This is where I discovered cure 3 has a bigger AoE now. Miluda also broke Norris’s helmet, meaning this battle will probably not be too profitable for me.



Fortunately this is an assassination mission, not an all-enemies mission.



They are not paying me nearly enough for this.

The next battle is the first in the main story to allow 5 characters. Which means that we are going to re-deploy The Secret Weapon. See you then!

[Regdren]

For Miluda's last stand, I decide to change things up a bit.



Ramza is roughly the same. He has light armor instead of a robe because his spells don't cost much and I want to keep him alive. I've taken advantage of the changed JP costs to teach him Frog. Now we finally have a tool that can quickly deal with enemy knights.



Akintude needs him some knight skills so I switched him over.



Norris already has some important break skills so I made him an archer to let him do that at range. I gave him a bow gun for a few reasons. First off I'll be fighting uphill. This reduces the range of longbows but not crossbows. Second he'll need all the evasion he can get. Third, the weapon power doesn't really matter because he'll mostly be breaking gear anyway.



Pamela is pretty much unchanged. Because of my late change to classes other than Squire, she only has the most basic white magic available.



Penelope seems to be stable so far. It's tough to tell where mimicry ends and her own will begins. I've seen her mimic the movements of bugs while completely ignoring people nearby. When I asked her how she was doing, she just repeated the question back to me.

My full team of 5 is allowed into the battle at last.





After this I’m not going to put up a twin screenshot every time Penelope does something. Unless I think it’s particularly stylish or significant of course. This is a pretty basic though helpful double cast.



Although a mime can heal the enemy if you don’t cast carefully, double healing is also useful. This one centered on the caster works out pretty well. Mimes tend to have more powerful healing than white mages, too.



Delita deals with the last enemy Wizard. The knight behind him has been trying to heal her allies with potions. I prefer that over her walking up and breaking my gear. Towards the back, Ramza charges a Frog spell one panel ahead of him.



Frog's long charge time works in my favor. This enemy knight moved forward, then Penelope had a turn right before Frog finished casting. Sir knight with Item doesn’t know Maiden’s Kiss, so they have no way of restoring her. This might as well be instant death.



With most of the serious opposition gone and the item knight in a slap fight with knight Delita, it’s time to work on Miluda. My first step is to get rid of some of that pesky evasion. I kinda wish I had Steal Accessory to remove the mantle, but it’s a bit late to fix that.



The Time Mage casts Stop before getting killed, but the revamped Heal fixes it without a problem. It used to be that nothing could remove Stop, so this is a welcome addition. Norris probably would have been killed by Miluda without all that evasion I put on him; he dodged two strikes in a row from her.



Not much left to go. I wish I could steal all of this nifty gear instead of just breaking it. It’s nothing that can’t be bought later though.



A double fire finishes the battle. Akintude was also caught in the fire spell when Penelope mimicked it but, y'know, acceptable collateral damage.



Overall I am definitely fighting differently than I would in Vanilla. The new resilience of knights means that status and gear removal are more important, which is a change I appreciate. 1.3 also solves this problem by giving enemies more and better ways to recover, making the permanent stat loss of gear breaks more significant. Maybe this also happens later on in LFT, I guess I'll have to find out.

[superaielman]

Mimes+status magic with large charge times is a favorite tactic of mine, so this update is 100% approved!

[Regdren]

A couple of things I noticed when taking a look at the Wiegraf fight:

The White Knight class now has innate Maintenance, in addition to the expected Defense UPs.

Wiegraf likes to move forward right at the start. And if I remember correctly, he gives up at around 25% health.

Mimes are fearsome assassins.

With these things in mind, I threw defense aside in my planning.
I will have to hit very hard, especially because Penelope has bad compat with Wiegraf. Pamela has good compat with him though, so at least that will work in my favor.

My character setups themselves are mostly unchanged except for this:



She began the game knowing Fire2. That should be good enough.



The damage from Crush Punch doesn’t matter. If Akintude was killed by the instant death proc I would have less room for lucky evades, but winning would still be possible.













Yeah you'd BETTER recognize, Wiegraf.

[Regdren]

I've been looking forward to Fort Zeakden. Everyone loves stabbing some Algus.

Taking a quick look at the battle: Algus is tougher now, I approve of that. Most importantly he has a crossbow a lot more powerful than what I have. I also notice he doesn't have maintenance. I WANT THAT BOWGUN.

So. I go into a random battle and start a secret training session. I'll need everyone to be in top form because after Zeakden I'll need to take on Dorter 2 with no chance to buy gear or fight any more randoms. So here's what I've got at the end of training:











My strategy for For Zeakden: I will need to get rid of the entire enemy team except for Argath. Then I will probably need several tries to steal that crossbow; Norris is the only one on my team with thief skills and he has worst compat with Algus. Penelope merely has bad compat.

Because the battle is going to last a while, I will need to make my team as survivable as possible. I stacked every kind of evasion I could find. Hopefully arrow guard on my spellcasters will keep them fairly safe from Algus, and it should be helpful in Dorter2 as well. Delita is a knight so he should be able to take a few hits as well. He learned Shield Break and Armor Break, just in case he manages to get close to Argath.



Step 1: Reinforce on everyone. I'm having my thief do this because of his speed, and it's risky to toss him into battle right at the start.



Delita stops a wizard from casting something pretty nasty right at the start. No useless guests allowed on my team, no sir. This made Penelope take a swing at Norris, but with his monstrous front evade plus Defend it was no big deal.





A very lucky Frog double cast. I kinda wish this didn't happen because it gives the impression I won only because of luck. I hope you'll take my word for it that I'm certain I could survive long enough to deal with a couple of missed Frog attempts.



With the two nearest knights removed from the fights, I take down wizard number two pretty fast. Argath and Delita seem content to fight each other, which is fine by me. Delita even managed to break Argath's shield, which should make stealing a bit easier.



I was going to have Ramza aim at the knight along with Penelope for a double chance of Frog. Just in time I remembered that I might just remove the status I had added. That would be pretty embarassing.



One (1) crossbow added to my inventory. Hooray! I was initially worried that Charged punches might still hurt but I looked at the guy's Brave and never mind.



It takes a bit of time because of innate defenses and Autopotion, but since Argath can't fight back I finish the battle with no problems.



Delita picks Argath's pockets and then teabags him as shown in this picture.

That wraps up chapter 1! I'm going to take a quick break from updating because I have an exam to work on this weekend, but I will pick up at Chapter 2 on Monday. I hope you're all enjoying this playthrough so far.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Nice. Going to put the crossbow to use? I forget how relatively good it is at the time on the LFT scale.

[Regdren]

Yep, I plan to switch my thief back to archer for the next battle. He needs Concentrate before I can rely on him to steal evasion gear. As for when the crossbow I stole becomes available in shops, I'm not really sure. I haven't played through this mod before.

[superaielman]

Poaching and move find item is your best bet for finding gear more advanced than what is in the shops, outside of Elmdor.

[Regdren]

I took a quick look at move-find item and it still uses the reverse-Brave formula. I'm probably just going to skip it for most of the game. Poaching is another matter though, we're going to see plenty of that once it becomes available.

[Grefter]

I thought Move-Find Item had been made so finds were equal regardless of success or am I mixing up formula?

[superaielman]

DD was changed so that there is only one item  in each MFI spot, making brave irrelevant. Almost everywhere else uses the old FFT formula.

MFI is definitely worth it with an non brave reliant reaction and a class that has high move. I did it in every battle for the first two chapters and got some definite shinies.

[Regdren]

I think Grefter might be confusing move-find with Poach, which IIRC has been consolidated into one kind of item rather than common-rare in LFT.

The reaction abilities that ignore Brave are Weapon Guard and Abandon. That's it. Having lots of evade is nice, I'll admit. However, a lot of the nastier enemies in this game have 100% hit moves as their core skillset. Maybe I'll try using Rafa to dig up some gear at some point. It's enough trouble to arrange that I won't really bother unless there's something not sold in stores at all though.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Rafa starts with something like 70 brave now, her previous brave has been given to her gutless brother instead. <_<

If you want to do move-find later in the game, then there's an armour which immunes chicken (Carabini I think), so you can actually get your brave all the way down to 0 in-battle (though it rises to 1 at the start of your turn) and have 99% reliable MFI. You'll want to have Ramza as the one doing this, though, since anyone else will leave if their permanent brave falls too low.