What Games are you playing 2015?

[Reiska]

To be honest I find all the core additions to EOU terrible: The story mode is the worst, the grimoire system is needlessly convoluted, instant shortcuts between levels are stupid, and I cannot possibly roll my eyes enough at the addition of the maid. "NOTICE ME SENPAI!!" Jesus. And stop giving me dumb Medicas.

EOU1's story mode is pretty forgettable, yes.  I don't hate it but it's very much excuse plot.  I do dislike that there's a bit of game content exclusive to it (one of the few things EOU2 improved on).  The two unique-class PCs in EOU1 story mode aren't nearly as broken either, relatively speaking (although they are IMO clearly the two best PCs on the story mode team, they don't render the rest irrelevant).

The Grimoire system only exists in the first place because of the fact that you're not allowed to change the story mode PCs' classes, so it's there to give them access to other skills.  I haven't played classic mode, but I strongly suspect that outside of aftergame the system is completely ignorable in classic.  That said, I think the system is terrible and a massive step down from the subclassing system seen in EO3/4.

Instant shortcuts between levels... on the one hand, they make you not have to wander through multiple floors of irrelevant combats every time you return to town from the last floor of a stratum.  This is clearly good.  On the other hand, they also strongly diminish the inherent risk of pushing your exploration further, which is possibly bad, because that gameplay of taking calculated risks was one of the franchise's strengths IMO.

As for high base prices: Sure, high base prices on games are not a new thing.  Atlus marking it up to $50 when even Nintendo's big first-party titles like SSB4 are $40 is not, in and of itself, a dealbreaker to me, although it does make me vaguely unhappy.  What makes me angry is when they mark the game up to $50 and then also load it with a further $22.50 in DLC.  To make matters worse, they did that thing where like half the DLC will be free for the first week it's out, so fuck you for not being an early adopter, asshole.

[Sierra]

Final Fantasy 3 Dual Play of Dualness...duality: Just beat Garuda.  And yes, I totally played this song both times I fought him.

It's pretty excellent noise. I stumbled upon it through random YouTube linkage weekend before last looking for background music while working on something and wound up listening through the whole collection of boss tracks. Shiva's first theme is one of the better ones but then it shifts to J-rock for some reason and it's completely jarring tonally and I don't know what somebody was thinking there.

Anyway I finally got around to trying the Arkham Knight pre-order bonus DLC. Well, some of it, didn't touch the Scarecrow missions, likely not going to, but the episodes for Harley and Red Hood. Super short in either case, nothing really inventive about either except I guess some minor style points when you activate Harley's detective mode analogue. Which doesn't make up for her awful, awful voice. And Red Hood has personal problems (beyond pacifism, he's very fragile). I already knew I wasn't going to shell out for the $40 get-all-forthcoming-DLC season pass and this hasn't done anything to change my mind.

Also after a couple months of ignoring it I finally sat down and finished Shovel Knight. It's hard to pin down why, but I rather lost interest in this midway through the game. The retro aesthetic is just the best thing it has going for it (the spritework really is quite nice). I liked half the idea of the final boss, not so much fond of instadeath pits in a final boss fight. And yeah I am an idiot for not finding the equip-change button until now. I tried everything on the world map! I did not try everything in a level.

[Reiska]

It's pretty excellent noise. I stumbled upon it through random YouTube linkage weekend before last looking for background music while working on something and wound up listening through the whole collection of boss tracks. Shiva's first theme is one of the better ones but then it shifts to J-rock for some reason and it's completely jarring tonally and I don't know what somebody was thinking there.

Probably weird Frozen fanboyism.  (No, seriously.  The in-game achievement for defeating Shiva EX is "Let It Go".)

[jsh357]

Fiesta:
Third run complete. (Natural Knight/Monk/Monk/Red Mage)  Hardest bosses were Exdeath and Neo Exdeath, both of which I had to gain levels for. Never knew you could cheese Catastrophe with Old status, but turns out that's a pretty rad deal. I had to get up to level 40 for this one, basically just to ensure the Knight survived Almagest. In a somewhat risky maneuver, I ended up with only the front Neo part alive (at near full HP) and him doing his Meteor/Vacuum spam.  Fortunately, Dualcast Raise was able to keep me barely going long enough to take him out.  Brave Blade was a huge boon here, and I probably would have had to level up considerably more if I'd gone for the Chicken Knife Red Mage plan. As usual, Monks were awesome until somewhere around the Crystals, while Red Mage was mediocre but had some nice status and Dualcasting to make him not terrible.  Maybe for run 4 I can get a real humdinger going.

[Fenrir]

To be honest I find all the core additions to EOU terrible: The story mode is the worst, the grimoire system is needlessly convoluted, instant shortcuts between levels are stupid, and I cannot possibly roll my eyes enough at the addition of the maid. "NOTICE ME SENPAI!!" Jesus. And stop giving me dumb Medicas.

EOU1's story mode is pretty forgettable, yes.  I don't hate it but it's very much excuse plot.  I do dislike that there's a bit of game content exclusive to it (one of the few things EOU2 improved on).  The two unique-class PCs in EOU1 story mode aren't nearly as broken either, relatively speaking (although they are IMO clearly the two best PCs on the story mode team, they don't render the rest irrelevant).

The Grimoire system only exists in the first place because of the fact that you're not allowed to change the story mode PCs' classes, so it's there to give them access to other skills.  I haven't played classic mode, but I strongly suspect that outside of aftergame the system is completely ignorable in classic.  That said, I think the system is terrible and a massive step down from the subclassing system seen in EO3/4.

Instant shortcuts between levels... on the one hand, they make you not have to wander through multiple floors of irrelevant combats every time you return to town from the last floor of a stratum.  This is clearly good.  On the other hand, they also strongly diminish the inherent risk of pushing your exploration further, which is possibly bad, because that gameplay of taking calculated risks was one of the franchise's strengths IMO.

As for high base prices: Sure, high base prices on games are not a new thing.  Atlus marking it up to $50 when even Nintendo's big first-party titles like SSB4 are $40 is not, in and of itself, a dealbreaker to me, although it does make me vaguely unhappy.  What makes me angry is when they mark the game up to $50 and then also load it with a further $22.50 in DLC.  To make matters worse, they did that thing where like half the DLC will be free for the first week it's out, so fuck you for not being an early adopter, asshole.

Yeah I was initially very disappointed to find out that I couldn't play with the new classes! Not disappointed enough to play Story instead of Classic though.

The pricing is very different in Europe, Atlus Europe doesn't exist and their games are less popular. So they never got time to get greedy. Nintendo games are 45€ and Atlus games less (SMT4 is 20€ for some reason when I could have given 80€ for it)

So far I haven't managed to get a high level bard skill on a grimoire. Either grimoires are really bad or I haven't fully grasped the Grimoire system. But I don't really care about transfering skills to other classes in a SCC, and enemy skills just look crappy. I have tested one enemy skill and it was bad. I never liked Gau in FF6, so I'm not going to bother to dig for the two potentially game breaking enemy skills.

I mostly use the plot grimoires as they give invaluable advantages. One allows one of my bards to equip axes, one has CPR, one has all the gathering skills, etc. All the ones I make myself are useless.

instant shortcuts between levels are stupid

Most of what you're saying I agree with, kinda, but what?  Shortcuts are bad?  What?

EO1 has 6 stratums, each with 5 floors. 1st stratum goes from Floor 1 to 5, 2nd stratum goes from Floor 6 to 10, etc. (I'm still not really sure whether you go down and down as the game goes on, or just go deeper into the forest)
There's a big boss on the last floor of each stratum (Fenrir on Floor 5) but you can only teleport to the beginning of a stratum (Floor 1, 6, 11, etc) To fight against the boss, you have to teleport to the beginning of a stratum then walk through 5 floors. Fortunately the game has added shortcuts through each floor that you have to look out for.

EOU (the remake) is the same except you can now instantly teleport to any stairs of any floor you've mapped. In game shortcuts still exist but now don't have any purpose, exploration is less interesting due to lower risk/rewards.


I beat the second stratum boss. He wouldn't be too threatening but he likes to summon back row healer allies. He's a damage test, and bards have terrible damage. His damage was low enough that I could focus on the damage buffs, but I'm getting a bit scared of the 3rds tratum boss.

[Fenrir]

RK: Aren't you guys sick of the RK talk

Anyway my lvl 43 freelancer stat loser Tyro is a better black mage than my lvl 65 Vivi for this new event. Praise Tyro. Cloud/Squall/Tyro/Quistis/Selphie will probably have a real easy time.
Quistis is weird, she'll probably fill a strange niche at some point but she doesn't look too awesome. Selphie looks like my next Diara damage god.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Final Fantasy: Are you there RNG, it's me, Autobattle: (What? I've been enjoying Snow's quips)
Picked up Quistis and Selphie, neither of whom look like main staples in my party unless the RNG decides to give me their Soul Break weapons. Still... at least I -like- them so it's fun to add them to my collectible FF Hero cards. It'd be cool if I could get a Whip at some point... Even Rydia isn't the -worst- option among the FF4 cast.

LoZ ALttP: Picked this up and replayed it for the first time in a long number of years. It's still a masterpiece and I really ought to play its direct sequel at some point but I'm in Japan so it's hard to get ahold of. The big highlight of this playthrough was that I finally played around with some of the hidden stuff like the swamp ghosts and Chris Houlihan's secret room.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

RK: Aren't you guys sick of the RK talk

srry

Anyhow!

Final Fantasy You Made Me Autobattle - Cleared Quistis/Selphie event's wussy version. So, I mentioned yesterday I -might- be able to max Firaga and R4 Thundara Sword via black power grindans, but I wouldn't count on it. NEVERMIND, the event hands you a bunch of Lightning and Black orbs throughout it, so now I have R5 Firaga and R4 Thundara Sword, thus regaining lost ground on Fenrir in our Final Fantasy Civilization Autobattle match. The event also drops a bunch of Greater Dark Orbs, so I'll only need those two Greater Earth Orbs remaining for Quake R3. Life is funny.

As for Quistis/Selphie... yeah, I dunno what's up with them. Quistis probably fills the breakdown mage grasped by Terra off lower Black Magic levels and worse equips, though getting a Memory Crystal -does- give her a considerable leg up. Selphie, on the other hand, is yet another healer/black mage hybrid, like Vanille, with lower Black Magic levels (i.e. can't use the -jas, which frankly sucks) and a useless backup (CELERITY 3 ON A MAGE) instead of something useful (Support 2 sounds menial, but that's all you need to be a Boost bot, and that's vital for Reta-meta prostrats). I'll swap Yuna out for Selphie for this event and pull up Wakka for further break support, anyhow.

Also, sounds like we'll get Edgar/Sabin event next week. Edgar'll make a fine replacement for Balthier in the short term, especially considering his -amazing- equipment options (can equip pretty much -any- armor, along with being able to use both swords and spears). Combat 5/Support 3/KNIGHT 5 isn't exactly wowing me as far as skillset goes, but whatever, I'm using Balthy mostly for status and low-level breaks anyway. Sabin, though, is just bad. COMBAT/MONK 5 with worse equip options than Josef, get the hell out.

[Fenrir]

Maybe we should have another topic just for that game. This would have only the three of us talking, with the occasional Captain K / hinode post, and Zenny saying we're terrible people once in a while

thus regaining lost ground on Fenrir in our Final Fantasy Civilization Autobattle match.

Nooo
I'm going on a trip to Europe next week so I'll probably only be able to barely do events. Maybe I shouldn't go. (I am just joking guys don't worry)
At least I now have respectable max Timebux (109)  and am about done with the classics dungeons. Also? 111 mithril. Saving for long term.

As for Quistis/Selphie... yeah, I dunno what's up with them. Quistis probably fills the breakdown mage grasped by Terra off lower Black Magic levels and worse equips, though getting a Memory Crystal -does- give her a considerable leg up. Selphie, on the other hand, is yet another healer/black mage hybrid, like Vanille, with a useless backup (CELERITY 3 ON A MAGE) instead of something useful (Support 2 sounds menial, but that's all you need to be a Boost bot, and that's vital for Reta-meta prostrats). I'll swap Yuna out for Selphie for this event and pull up Wakka for further break support, anyhow.

Selphie has the highest mind stat right now and respectable HP, so she's still good as a pure white mage.
It still feels like a waste to put a breakdown on a mage unless you've got their super special weapon.

Also, sounds like we'll get Edgar/Sabin event next week. Edgar'll make a fine replacement for Balthier in the short term, especially considering his -amazing- equipment options (can equip pretty much -any- armor, along with being able to use both swords and spears). Combat 5/Support 3/KNIGHT 5 isn't exactly wowing me as far as skillset goes, but whatever, I'm using Balthy mostly for status and low-level breaks anyway. Sabin, though, is just bad. COMBAT/MONK 5 with worse equip options than Josef, get the hell out.

Oh great, other regular fighters, and I'm sure we'll have to level both for the boss rush
Aaaaaargh
At one point I was thinking that it was time to level Cyan for this event, but I am 100% sure a level 65 Cloud with no realm bonus is better than a level 65 Cyan with realm bonus

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Maybe we should have another topic just for that game. This would have only the three of us talking, with the occasional Captain K / hinode post, and Zenny saying we're terrible people once in a while

That actually sounds like a plan if people are getting annoyed by our back-and-forth.

Nooo
I'm going on a trip to Europe next week so I'll probably only be able to barely do events. Maybe I shouldn't go. (I am just joking guys don't worry)
At least I now have respectable max Timebux (109)  and am about done with the classics dungeons. Also? 111 mithril. Saving for long term.

111 Mythril? Man, that's a nice haul to save for either Lightning/Sazh or the next Soul Break celebration. I'm considering a single 11x pull for Sazh/Lightning (or Eiko/Steiner), then just saving up for the next SB celebration. They'll also up the 5* drop rate on the gatcha system after that along with bringing more equips per banner, which should make amassing rare equips considerably easier.

Selphie has the highest mind stat right now and respectable HP, so she's still respectable as a pure white mage.
It still feels like a waste to put a breakdown on a mage unless you've got their super special weapon.

In terms of offense, I -do- agree. It's another source of status, though, which may find its uses here and there, and busters are already behind Breakdowns for damage -and- have more powerful effects when they work. Support 4 is honestly a versatile enough skillset niche. Mostly depends on what you -seriously- need to pack for a given fight.

Oh great, other regular fighters, and I'm sure we'll have to level both for the boss rush
Aaaaaargh
At one point I was thinking that it was time to level Cyan for this event, but I am 100% sure a level 65 Cloud with no realm bonus is better than a level 65 Cyan with realm bonus

Cyan, always the worst. And yes, the boss rush requires both Sabin and Edgar. I'm so giving that the finger, though, Sabin is terribad.

[Cotigo]

FF6 - So I left off in Odin's castle because I got too drunk to play. Figured out things were weak to ID, and X-Zone/Banish and Break wiped up basically everything. At the end, Terra learned Ultima and now she's benched til endgame because there's no real reason to learn other spells with her, and I think having support spells on my meatheads will be nice.

Well, she's benched after I wipe up Leviathan (GBA only Esper). Not terribly hard, his El Nino counter is mean but luckily I set up Mighty Guard beforehand so only my cursed shield bearer fell to the spell. Admittedly it was an OHKO, but with Shell up nobody else really cared.  I bench Edgar again, too, since he has basically all the utility spells.

I realize I'm missing some low hanging fruit and throw together a scrub party to get Cactuar and build up my heal/status batteries. Beat Gigantaur with a Mog/Locke/Shadow/Sabin party... and another reset here because I didn't have anything to counter its repeated use of 1000 needles as a death counter. Try to redo the fight and apparently the Cactuar counter resets so I'll do this later and come back when someone has Reraise. If it weren't for Frameskip I don't think I'd even be bothering with this Magicite. Yeah sure Cactaurs are 10AP so it is good for building up characters you haven't been using, but this would have taken like an hour instead of 10 minutes without frameskip. Lousy design there.

Actually, looking at the skillsets of the GBA only magicite... wow all of them suck. Leviathan gets Flood, which gives everyone access to the Water Element!!!!! wow so good. Cactuar... makes sure you have Teleport in 5 battles I guess? And teaches Hastega faster than Birdicite. Gilgamesh and Diabolos are a bit cooler, teaching Quick and Valor, and the gravity spells respectively... but one costs an absurd amount of Gil and the other is at the end of the optional new super dungeon so it literally matters less than Leviathan. Whatever.

Next, Cyan's dream. This place walled me the first time I got this far in the game and now I'm irrationally afraid of it, so I take Relm, Celes, and Strago since they all have a bit of catching up to do to get Terra-tier but not so much catching up to do that they'd be a liability. Fortunately this just ends up being everyone casting Firaga on everything and winning. The dream stooges are EZ once you figure out weaknesses. I only got walled here, I'm pretty sure, because it's a dungeon you can't get out of until you beat it, and I went in and saved over my only save slot with a party characters I hadn't been building up. Kinda frustrating, but I could have gotten by easily with just WoB magicite had I known what I was doing.  Celes also gets Ultima in this dungeon, and since I have two Gold Hairpins I guess she's done worrying about things too.

Take out the Earth dragon with Relm/Strago and people who need to be better heal batteries, and quit for the night. That just leaves... collecting the GBA magicite, Hidon, Fanatic's Tower, the GBA dungeon, and then the final dungeon I think. 

[Fenrir]

Yeah I'm waiting until the % rate for 5* improves. I want a cool shiny 5* gun way way more than Sazh's or Lightning's no matter how overpowered they can get.

Looks like this will be the first boss rush in a while that will be impossible for me without mithril recovery, those HP values are nuts. I'll still try to get Thundaga R4 just in case.

Support 4 on Quistis/Terra could be useful if you really really need an uneven number of breakdowns for one fight; you can give them that breakdown + a R4/5 black mage spell and they'll be decent. This is still pretty hard to justify for me as long as defense breakdowns have much less hones than breaks and are much less widely available.

[Meeplelard]

Zenny: Cactuar's big thing is actually +2 Speed, being the only Esper who grants that, making the Odin vs. Raiden decision trivial...especially since Gilgamesh teaches Quick, making the decision REALLY not matter.

Leviathan is pretty disappointing if not grabbed ASAP, which basically requires Terra, Gau or Imp Gear (Terra w/ Minerva and Trance can weather a lot of the damage, Gau can use a Water Absorbing Rage, Imp Gear naturally does that), as it is basically Water Scroll anyone can use, but yeah, it's not a terribly impressive spell considering the Agas are stronger, Quake exists, etc.  I guess it does give one more option to make your spellcaster's damage more up to date over Aras, but really hard to care.  Honestly, the biggest contribution Flood did to FF6 is being one of Terra's HP Attacks in Dissidia <_<;

Diabolos would be cool because Gravija is basically Ultima that cannot kill (works on EVERYTHING, no exceptions), and it gives +100% HP (meaning you can max out HP at level 99 with one less optimal level usage than Bahamut, whoo?), but you're absolutely right about how the "post super boss in aftergame dungeon" thing kills any potential worth it has.

FF6a honestly was the most laziest of the ports, in terms of additional PC content.  The new bosses are actually decent, but you covered the new Espers, and the new weapons are a huge case of "we didn't do our homework, we just stereotyped the characters and came up with OBVIOUSLY useful things!"  Like Sabin getting a pure physical weapon with no physical augmenting properties (save Holy elemental) because he's a Monk, Setzer getting an Auto Crit weapon when his best weapon uses the relic that shuts off Crits, Locke getting a Dagger because "He's a thief!" rather than, a Hawkeye/Sniper or Boomerang, which would have been significantly more useful.  This isn't even touching upon the obvious lack of playtesting with Longinus and Gungnir.

[Scar]

So are we still posting about rk in here?

I'm almost finished with classic selptis event. I really don't want to waste eggs on these bimbos, but I might have to eventually.

[Reiska]

Yeah I was initially very disappointed to find out that I couldn't play with the new classes! Not disappointed enough to play Story instead of Classic though.

The pricing is very different in Europe, Atlus Europe doesn't exist and their games are less popular. So they never got time to get greedy. Nintendo games are 45€ and Atlus games less (SMT4 is 20€ for some reason when I could have given 80€ for it)

So far I haven't managed to get a high level bard skill on a grimoire. Either grimoires are really bad or I haven't fully grasped the Grimoire system. But I don't really care about transfering skills to other classes in a SCC, and enemy skills just look crappy. I have tested one enemy skill and it was bad. I never liked Gau in FF6, so I'm not going to bother to dig for the two potentially game breaking enemy skills.

I mostly use the plot grimoires as they give invaluable advantages. One allows one of my bards to equip axes, one has CPR, one has all the gathering skills, etc. All the ones I make myself are useless.

Getting good grimoires is an exercise in lots and lots and lots of grinding, and most enemy skills ARE crappy.  Boss skills tend to be decent IIRC?  I don't remember, it's dumb.

[hinode]

Is it bad of me that the number 1 reason I am looking forward to the Edgar/Sabin event in RK is seeing how many people's heads explode on reddit when I explain to them that Bum Rush is magical and Sabin is basically a mage in FF6?

[Scar]

Wut?

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

Is it bad of me that the number 1 reason I am looking forward to the Edgar/Sabin event in RK is seeing how many people's heads explode on reddit when I explain to them that Bum Rush is magical and Sabin is basically a mage in FF6?

I want screenshots. I'd love to see his equipment SB run off his MAG just for the trolling nod.

Wut?

The vast majority of Sabin's Blitzes run off his M. Attack in FF6. It's one of the big reasons why his damage doesn't utterly suck in spite of the subpar magic stat because loooooooooool ff6 physicals.

[Meeplelard]

Actually, the big reason Sabin's damage doesn't suck in FF6 despite being magical is his spell power.  Generally speaking, Spell Power can be correlated directly to damage, as in double spell power generally means double damage (or close enough.)

IOWs, let's put some numbers to demonstrate this:

Aura Bolt: 68
Fire Dance: 42 but ignores split damage
Air Blade: 78, ignores split damage
Bum Rush: 128, ignores defense (so this is roughly double as strong in practice)

For reference, Fire is 21 power, Fire 2 is 60 power, Fire 3 is 121 power, Flare is 60 w/ defense ignoring, and Ultima is 150 w/ defense ignoring.   When you look at these numbers, this is why Sabin's Aura Bolt out-damage's Terra's Fire hitting weakness despite the huge Magic Power difference.

So Sabin, despite having a stats of your typical Final Fantasy Monk, is actually best suited as a Mage.  In truth, beyond some very specific boss fights (like Ultros 2 thanks to Fire Knuckles, or Phunbaba thanks to Dual Poison Claws), Sabin's actually one of the worst physical fighters in the game, and is way more effective if you focus entirely on boosting Magic Power.  It's why I cringe when people go "lol Sabin w/ GG + Off = Brok'd!" because Sabin's possibly one of the worst users of that combo (though pretty sure he at least beats out Straog and Relm with this combo), and realistically that combo is actually not all that good in FF6 despite the infamy.

[Sierra]

Maybe we should have another topic just for that game. This would have only the three of us talking, with the occasional Captain K / hinode post, and Zenny saying we're terrible people once in a while

That actually sounds like a plan if people are getting annoyed by our back-and-forth.

I was here for the DL's original love affair with FE7, you three ain't got shit.

[Captain K]

We should get another topic for RK talk because I get really confused when I see people posting about FF3/5/6.  Not actually joking.

[Excal]

That is one thing that FE7 never did.  It never involved the same cast of characters as a completely different set of games that routinely get played around here.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I don't see much point in separating things myself. It is a game, people are playing it, therefore it is on topic. If people really hate reading about it (or about other games...) they can scroll past it.


Metroid Fusion - Played this again twice, once a (bad) speedrun attempt and once for 100%.

Final Fantasy Dimensions - Parties have met up. Using Alba (Ninja, Dark Knight, Warrior), Sol (Dragoon, Bard), Sarah (Dragoon, Monk, Paladin), Glaive (Black Mage, Summoner), and Dusk (White Mage, Black Mage). Currently collecting the summons I missed; the job seems notably better now that I have access to both sets of summons and have picked the ones I missed up.

[Meeplelard]

Honestly, I've seen way worse offenders than Record Keeper discussion in this topic.  At least the posts for Record Keeper aren't being too disruptive and if you're not interested, easy to just not read the rest.

[Dhyerwolf]

Seems no like no one actually minds it taking up most of the topic, so keep it here.