Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[TA]

Auction House is pretty bad, but ... Veldt.

[Thad]

Ah, you sniped me in the middle of an edit.  I was just in the process of adding:

The Veldt is bullshit too, but at least it's easy to get good-enough rages without having to fuck around all day.  And it's got the Veldt Theme going for it.

[Brentai]

The Auction House gets worse on subsequent playthroughs.  The first couple times around, it's one of the most charming things in a game that is, let's be honest, a much better narrative than an actual game.

Now, The Veldt is pretty much the Auction House without the charm, with more wandering in circles and getting into random battles, and Gau's rages are mostly useless anyway.

[Thad]

The difference is definitely scale, and that cuts both ways.  If you're looking for something specific at the Auction House, it doesn't take quite as long to find it, and once you're done there's not really any reason to go back.

Whereas with the Veldt, there's a whole lot more noise.  On the plus side, you CAN at least feel like you're accomplishing something by leaping on enemies that weren't the ones you expected, and you rack up AP.  OTOH, if you're looking for something in particular, it takes a lot longer to find it.  And you're right -- most of the rages suck.  Largely due to the fact that it's an "act like a monster" skill in a game where the monsters have absolutely no AI and all their behavior is either completely scripted or completely random.

Veldt's also at least theoretically useful for learning Blue Magic, but in practice Blue Magic in FF6 is a lot like Rage -- there are a handful of good ones that you might want to use if you ever bother putting him in your party, but the majority are just going to sit there.



EDIT TO ADD: I poked around Romhacking and found that a guy going by HatZen08 has a patch for Gau to learn rages automatically, in every battle and another that gives him (and Relm's Sketch) the full range of moves for each monster instead of just two.

Interesting.  Maybe next playthrough.

[Thad]

The discussion of TAY got me thinking, once again, about what a GOOD sequel to a classic FF would look like.

tl;dr I'd like to play Galuf's band of Dawn Warriors, live the War of the Magi, or ESPECIALLY play the Dark Warriors referenced in FF3's backstory.

(Yes, all prequels.  Because setting a story after the ending of most FF games is stupid.)

[A˛]

Final Fantasy Dimensions (iOS, Android) features a party of Light Warriors & a party of Dark Warriors sharing the protagonist spotlight. No idea as to it's quality or how well it pulls it off, but I imagine in this day and age if it was absolutely terrible, we'd have heard that about it by now.

[Mothra]

I... got Dimensions when it was super-on-sale a while back. It is not good. It's maybe good ENOUGH that you MIGHT like some of it, if you really really try, but the plot is non-existent, the graphics are nightmarishly ugly, and the gameplay is just kind of tedious. Don't get it unless you're crazy desperate.

[Mothra]

TA Plays: Final Fantasy Dimensions - Brad, Eli, Nissa, and Jared Go On an Adventure

Turn off the sound, skip to the middle. It is literally a shitty RPG Maker game.

[Friday]

I solved the Veldt problem by never ever using Gau because are you fucking serious

I just replace him with Gogo or Umaro for Kefka's tower

He literally never has to be in your party past the Serpent Trench (iirc)

sometimes I never even recruit him in WoR

[Roger]

Cat Scratch is pretty broken though.

[Friday]

oh, fun fact about ff6 some of you might not know: if you do the "Wolf guy steals gold hairpin in Narshe" event and decline to save Mog, leaving him to plummet to his death, you can still recruit him as normal in WoR.

I know because I did that on my very first playthrough, and then was confused by this random moogle forcing his way into my party, acting like he knew me already somehow.

Cat Scratch is pretty broken though.

oh, sure, I'm not saying Gau is a bad character. He's great if you know how to break him. I just don't fucking bother.

[Thad]

Well sure but you don't need Zona Seeker or Golem either.  I think everything we've listed as a travesty is optional.

(Coliseum.)

I'm actually making a concerted effort to use characters on this playthrough who I generally don't use.  Floating Continent was a pretty different experience with Locke, Strago, and Relm (and Shadow); had to play a lot more defensively.


Anyway, despite my being much more likely to use a Gold Hairpin than Mog, I still always save Mog and run him around a bit.  Partly because you can only grab the Water dance in the WoB (though that's no longer true in FF6A; the fight with Leviathan gives you one last shot at it).

And, y'know, if you're going to fill up your final parties, you have to have at least ONE of Mog, Umaro, or Gau.  That's just math.

(Specifically, the pigeonhole principle!  I remember that from college!)

[Mothra]

I dunno, I used him on my latest playthrough, alongside Relm, just for the challenge. He's a hard character to have fun with, that's for sure.

[R^2]

Floating Continent was a pretty different experience with Strago

As someone who usually likes blue magic and blue mages, taking Strago to the Floating Condiment gets you so much magic. I mean it's stuff like Level-X spells and 1000 Needles and stuff -- not the best spells -- but there's a lot to be learned.

Oh, and L5Death instantly wipes the Gigantos, or whatever they renamed that first monster-in-a-box.

[Bongo Bill]

Final Fantasy Dimensions has good combat and character systems, somewhat padded and cheaply-produced dungeon design, and poor writing. It's worth checking out despite the low production values.

[Disposable Ninja]

oh, fun fact about ff6 some of you might not know: if you do the "Wolf guy steals gold hairpin in Narshe" event and decline to save Mog, leaving him to plummet to his death, you can still recruit him as normal in WoR.

no but that reminds me of a fun fact I know about FFVII that almost no one else seems to know: you can do the Wutai/Yuffie sidequests while playing as Tifa or Cid on disc two. Totally worth doing.

[R^2]

Gau can be hilariously broken -- Magic Urn is a "party can never die" sort of win button -- but so many abilities in the game kill monsters more quickly he's just outclassed. The ability to hack something apart with a chainsaw or huck a longspear through a monster's eye socket at fifty paces just doesn't compare to pretending to be a cat.

[Zaratustra]

Thing is, Gau is broken, but so many things in FF6 are incredibly mind-bogglingly broken that he kind of requires an effort by comparison.

[Classic]

I never really figured out which monsters it was worth it for Gau to be.
Like...
Most of them were such non-issue roadbumps that I would never have thought to have him use cat scratch.
The monsters that were impressive, like Intangir, Gau never seemed to live up to.

EDIT:
I liked Mog because he was a moogle and he was described as SLAM DANCING.

[R^2]

Intangir is another good defensive Rage, giving him scads of immunities, but requires you to have Muted him first. Otherwise he'll uses Pep Up/Fusion/whatever and self-sacrifice.