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[R^2]

This requires two chunks of Adamantite Ore. I've got about a dozen.




Our packs are full, so we have to throw something out to make room for our new item.


Whatever will it be?






Your verbal tic is really annoying, kupo...




I forget to bring one of my better thieves with me -- R2 is a ninja with blue magic -- so I miss the Gunner's Longbarrel here like some sort of moron.




And by "Apologize to Nono" I mean "I'm leaving you here to die for real in the dirty streets of your backasswards slum."










I wonder if he handled the wormhole with his skypole hur hur












Having switched to sage, Gallahan's adventures in every field have led him to learn Giga Flare. It's powerful area-effect magic.

Sage is an advanced job for Nu Mou. It requires training in white and black magic to unlock. Sages are a great class, with superb growth in all areas... EXCEPT SPEED. Boo! Hiss!
Sages fight with maces.
Even despite the sage's poor speed growth and sluggish-for-a-Nu-Mou resistance, Sagacity Skill is great. Blind and Bio keep enemies suffering, Drain and Giga Flare provide HP damage, and Reflex and Weapon Def+ keep your Sage alive and kicking. He can even Raise fallen friends! And to top it all off, Sages get the Nu Mou Ultima ability, Ultima Blow.














The Sword Breaker teaches Steal:Weapon, finally allowing Ramses and Lini to learn how to do that. Of course, you can't get it here unless you already have one person who can steal weapons... otherwise you have to keep waiting.

Other than the Sword Breaker, the gear here isn't that appealing. But it's an enemy party full of moogles with abilities memorized, allowing Johanes to shortcut some of his mog knight training, and for Lini to pick up a couple more animist and juggler abilities.




Eldena, having practiced a bit as a fencer, white mage, and elementalist, unlocks her summoner job.

Summoner is an advanced Viera job. It requires training in white mage and elementalist. Summoners are the Viera specialist magicians. And that means everything you've come to expect -- exceptionally bad growth in HP, Weapon Defense, and Speed, with exceptional growth in MP, Magic Power and Resistance.
Summoners equip the same staves as white mages to learn their skills.
Summon Magic is like a wide-area combination of black and white magic. There's an elemental attack for each of fire, ice, thunder, and holy; as well as ways to heal HP and cause beneficial status effects like regen, reflect, and raise. Unlike in the previous game, summons are capable of friendly fire: attacks will hit allies, and beneficial effects will hit enemies. Combined with abilities learned from white and red magic, MP Turbo and Doublecast will leave your Summoner hurting for ethers and your enemies just plain hurting.

[R^2]

One letter shy, "No-good swindling cock-forger" is now my favorite insult.








There's some goods to be stolen, so our first goal is of course to KO Ritz and Shara before they do the same to our targets.

But first, MORE WORDS










































"It's totally not a stupid, trite reason!"

Anyway, we knock out the two girls and proceed to steal a Thor Rod (teaches black magic Thundaga, time magic Quicken, and some Illusionist spell who cares) before doing the steal/reequip dance with the Alchemist for a while. Before we stole Energy Maces to get a Morning Star. Now we're stealing this guy's Morning Star until...


That's the stuff. We're done here.






















R2 leaves, head hanging.






























Either because she realizes what a dumb reason it is, or perhaps because her own hair is a sterling white, Shara isn't buying a word of it.



















Speaking of...




Not really. It's pretty much business as usual, doing every job for every posting in the country, fighting in the clan wars... Clan Liness is not keeping a low profile, here.

[R^2]

Anyway, Zeus Mace. Teaches sages the Nu Mou Ultima ability, Ultima Blow. I know there's a dirty joke to be made here, I just can't come up with one. No idea what direction to go with this one, guys.


Waitaminute where did I get a Target Bow? 

Concentrate greatly boosts all abilities' accuracy in combat. It's a fantastic skill for Humans and Viera -- in no small part because it bumps up Last Breath's accuracy from around 50% from the front to around 70% from the front (as always, higher from the sides or behind).

I immediately change Ramses into an Archer so he can get started on it.


Does what you'd expect from having played any almost other game in the series. Little to no defensive bonus, but protects against all status ailments. Viera only, but that just makes your assassin even harder to stop.

[R^2]

Off to Muscadet. Which I didn't say before, but is the Viera hometown. You could probably guess that by process of elimination, though.














"Okay, you got me. We're just throwing all the moogles in jail. You guys are obnoxious as hell."
























We have a fight on our hands, of course.










Lucky grab. The Paladin has Carabini Mail, so we take that too.

























































































































































































Like Ultima, the goal here is to destroy all the Exodus Fruits. But the fruits can't defend themselves; they never move. Babus, however, will fight you one-on-one.

He's no Wiegraf, lemme tell ya. Babus has Counter and Magic Power+ as his reaction and support abilities, and a special skillset -- "Rune" -- for his NPC boss powers. Rune has four abilities: Quarter and Demi, which do the same as the time magic skills, shaving off 1/4 or 1/2 of my current HP. Stillness causes stop status. And Explosion makes Babus different from a normal time mage, doing powerful fire-elemental magic.

I have a Flame Shield equipped, so all he'll do to take away HP is the gravity magic. And for some reason, he sticks with Quarter.




















Babus has some new stuff to steal.
































With Babus defeated, nothing is stopping me from destroying the fruit.






















Again, in the Japanese it's obvious Cid is extra-super-drunk.




































































Vaguely evoking the Viera's in-touch-with-nature shaman-style magic, their Totema is a giant tree. Exodus is based off of the same-name-in-Japanese how-many-ways-can-we-translate-this Exdeath (or X-Death, or whatever) from Final Fantasy 5. In that game, a bunch of evil spirits were sealed in a magical tree, until they bonded together, gained sentience, and broke out of their prison. Exdeath's final boss fight in that game saw him revert into an arboreal form, so this Totema is less of a stretch from his former-game's-villain roots.

[R^2]

Mewt's last name is "Randell". Make sense now?

[R^2]

With another crystal gone, the palace has tightened the laws even more. Now there are three per battle, and they're often so sweeping you'll have to carefully consider what characters you bring with you to the fight. Forbidding Corner and Color Magic in the same fight cripples a big part of my general strategy (which is using red magic to put things to sleep before I use corner to kill them).


Kooloo-limpah! Before he was "Formalv Tenguille" in the retranslation, the villain of the first Final Fantasy Tactics was "Vormav Tingel". So here's a shout-out.






Dispatch missions are getting tougher. Characters volunteering to go out will jump up and down if they're likely to succeed, will walk if they have a moderate chance to succeed, and will slump over if they're likely to fail. This is the first time I've seen all my characters walking, with no one jumping around.


We succeed anyway.








Love freaks, everywhere!


Low on HP, high on defense, elemental weaknesses. This battle is a snap. I capture one of the ice flans while I'm here, rounding out my collection.




For a well-studied mage, the Heretic Rod foregoes teaching any skills but gives +20 to magic power.










There have been two missions on the board that call for Jerky for a good chunk of the game now. It's about damn time we're able to make some.








No "fight" command, and no "skill" commands. Ninjas, sages, alchemists, and illusionists can't use their ability sets.










You're right. You guys don't have a single thing worth stealing.




This battle was over before anyone in the enemy party got to move.




Our jerkycrafting finished, we can finally lure the fat kid out of his room.




Oops, didn't cap this one's setup. Somebody wanted to build a bridge over the bog, and we helped them.




Patrolling the highway to the danger zone.








Again, we have two or three missions cycling in and out of the mission list that call for Magic Cotton. It's about damn time we have a chance to harvest some.










We pick up via clan skill advancement the Longbarrel we could have stolen a little while back. One of the biggest reasons humans, viera, and moogles are so much better than nu mou and bangaa is because of this one ability (the other reasons being Double Sword, Corner skillset, Doublecast, Steal:Ability, Animist skillset, and decent speed growth overall).












Well, well. Look what we have here.




They have crazy-high defenses and good HP, and some devastating abilities. They can't be captured, but can be controlled.




I can tell from the way he walks he's a woman's murderer, no time to talk.


High natural evasion helps keep them stayin' alive, stayin' alive.


The Masterberry has boss immunities, too.


We win anyway. Ha, ha, ha, ha.






We pick up one of their chef knives on the way out.










This is one of the missions that demanded Magic Cotton.


Brint Set teaches no skills but is one of the better Clothes-type armors out there.


It'd be better to send a man to meet Sprohm anyway, I think.






Well conveniently enough I held off doing this mission until I got some Cyril Ice.




This is more or less the only way to get an Iceprism, a nice two-handed sword that we'll probably never use anyway.


It also autocompletes the mission.

[Beat Bandit]

[McDohl]

...ew.

[R^2]

Welcome to Forbidden: Damage to Animals, the most frustrating law in the game. Causing any HP damage or status ailment to any unit that is not human, viera, moogle, nu mou, or bangaa gets you cited. How can you win a battle with monsters in it if you get sent to jail for hurting them?

Well, you can just nullify the law with the appropriate antilaw cards. That's the most effective way to get around the rule, but if you're out of the right cards, you'll need other options.

A better option is to carefully select your Reaction-type abilities before you enter the battle. All Laws are unaffected by Reaction abilities. You can use Counter, Strikeback, Bonecrusher, and Return Magic as applicable to destroy monsters without any fear of retribution.

The best way I've found to work around the law is to take along a Beastmaster or two, and have your Beastmaster control monsters to make them attack each other! Control abilities don't trigger the Damage to Animal law.
When controlling a monster and commanding it to attack another, the beast under your control will get a Yellow Card for breaking the law. After the second offense, the controlled monster will get a Red Card and be swept off the battlefield to prison, never to be seen again.
If there's only one monster left, combine this strategy with the one above, forcing a monster to Fight one of your own characters equipped with Counter, Strikeback, or Bonecrusher.


We handle this the straightforward way this time.






Oops.

But doing so opens up more rumors...




Which in turn unlock new missions.





Level 14? Yeah. I should have done these missions a while ago, but I couldn't figure out how to take "Ship Needed" to continue the Clan Borzoi line. Turns out you can only take that job in Cyril, and I wasn't looking there.








So, thieves can't stab people, assassins can't assassinate, and red and blue magic is barred. There goes prrrrretty all my combat capabilities.








I'm liberating Cadoan from... two mog knights.










Falgabird was a town in Final Fantasy 3. Not sure why it's a group of monsters now.








She's not.



















They completely fail to Delta Attack me into submission. (Delta Attack is not even a thing they can do.)












I found out why these Mythril weapons are so rare! They're random drops from random encounters. I usually avoid random encounters, so I don't get very many.

Of course, even finding random encounters to farm for them, I end up with Mythril stuff I don't care about, like this spear.




Needless to say I have to fight for each sigil.




You nostalgia, you lose.






Splat.




Two, dumbass.






I like to think this line is delivered with overdramatic sarcasm.








This is not the first zombie you've seen since you've come to Ivalice, Ser .


I believe you are mistaken.








Of course, you can't just throw a bunch of sigils together and make a Spiritstone, in no small part because you can only take two items with you on each mission. So you take them two at a time to make Ceffyls, and then take the two Ceffyls and combine them to make a Spiritstone.

It takes three battles -- random encounters and turf defense, in my case -- to finish each mission.






I dunno who Bastra, Kespis, and Melmin are. You'd think they'd do another shoutout to a previous Final Fantasy game here, since the Spiritstone's so goshdarned important. Why not have Unne, Dorga, and Xande craft it for us?


I swapped Undine out of assassin and back to archer and fencer for a while. The result is her return to assassin with much better support and reaction abilities. Concentrate gives Last Breath about a 60%-70% chance to hit from the front -- 90% from the back.


Another random encounter nets me another Mythril weapon, this time a rapier that can teach combo skills to fencers, red mages, and elementalists.


Like hell it was, I've been wandering the map for weeks in-game looking for the four battles it took you to finish.








Bet you're not all immune to sleep.






Nope, he's not.




That Tulwar I grabbed before is one of the most powerful weapons I have, even better than all my two-handed greatswords, Ayvuir Blue... almost anything else I have. So R2 is a blue mage with fighter tech as his backup.






And so were the Redwings, the masterminds behind the criminals in Clan Borzoi, forever defeated and never to be seen again. Ever.

[R^2]

I don't even remember what Germinas Boots do in this game and I'm annoyed that I can't steal them.

Okay. So here's why I don't screencap battles much, and we jump from intro dialog to outtro dialog in a couple of shots.

R2 is a blue mage. He knows the spell "Night", which puts all units, friend and foe alike, to sleep. Everyone in my party is wearing a Ribbon or a Fortune Ring, so they're immune to sleep status. I take my first turn debilitating all my enemies.

If a target is asleep or stopped in time, all incoming attacks against them have 100% accuracy. Sleep lasts longer if the person is left alone, but they wake up as soon as they're hit. Stop only makes the target lose one turn, but until they come back into the proper flow of time naturally you can do anything to them you want.

I have an assassin and an alchemist in my party. My assassin knows Last Breath, and my alchemist Death. Both KO the target instantly. Both have 100% hit rate when the target is asleep.

Occasionally I run into someone who's immune to KO, mostly because they have a line of dialog at the end of the fight. In this case I Last Breath and Death all of their minions, and have the whole party join in one big ball of violence to finish off the boss-immune enemy at the end. The fighter ability Beatdown trades damage for accuracy, but it too has 100% hit rate against sleeping targets. One or two hits against the last guy is usually enough.

When every battle (that doesn't forbid color magic, corner, or alchemy) is a minor speedbump, I don't bother screencapping the same way I win every time. The only thing that slows this strategy is when an enemy has something I want to steal, in which case I send a thief over to that sleeping foe before the assassin.








Wouldn't it be great if one of the side effects of this fantasy world is that you grow ever more paranoid as your mind struggles to grasp things that, deep down, you know Should Not Be?

Sadly the plot goes nowhere near anything that interesting.










These give you Ignore Elevation, but you can't step in water wearing them.

[R^2]

Splat.


The battle does not end! We have to break the boxes, too.


Despite twitching and jumping throughout the fight, these boxes are clearly empty.












"I mean... nobody dies unless we fight in a Jagd, and even that's handwaved by us reviving our enemies and turning them in to the judges, so uh... not really your lives per se..."





















Actually... have we met before? You guys remind me of...






Celia, Lettie Redy, and totally-not-Elmdore are FAR less dangerous in this game. Far less dangerous than the original's far-less-dangerous transformations, even.


Nice gear, though.


I assume he holds his law-immune medal up with one hand and flips the judge off with the other.








One jagd and nine areas we haven't placed yet. We're as set as we can be right now.

They mist the stars, but they don't anymore.






We do.






What's this?


In this case a side mission unlocked a new map location.











Okay, we've had a mission called "Alba Cave" for ages. It required Jerky to complete, so I didn't bother until I got another hunk after "Come On Out" was done. But now I have one ("Jerky Days" reappears once a game-year), and just need a blue mage to complete it. R2 can't go, Ramses is only trained in martial classes, and no one else can be a blue mage. So to unlock blue mage (one white magic spell, one black magic spell memorized) I steal a few white spells from a random encounter and send Ramses on his next dispatch thus equipped:


Rod teaches a black mage Fire, Blizzard, and Thunder for 100 AP. Holding two doubles the amount of AP he gets, so one mission should be enough.


We also got the second of two Magic Medals needed for this one.








"Here" being "over the corpses of those monsters".










Teaches combos to animists and beastmasters.


Oops. I KOed someone with a forbidden technique (hit him with a knife), which is instant-prison.




The partywide penalty is that we get no money for that battle.


So we're off to Sprohm.






Chump change.




But that red card will be on his record until we throw him back in for a reprieve.










Let's roll.


Oh well.


So we're back in business. And we'll try Alba Cave again next year.

[Esperath]

COBRA-KAI

NEVER DIE

[Stush]

Isn't Ramses usually a dude? He looks like a lady in that last screenshot.

[R^2]

Humans and bangaa are all explicitly male in this game (females of both races show up in FF12). Viera are explicitly all female, as they culturally keep all males locked up in sex dungeons hidden away in their secret viera villages. Nu mou and moogles are not sexually dimorphous anyway so you can't tell if you're talking to Mister or Miss Gallahan, or if "Lini" is a boy's name or a girl's name.

But Ramses is a dude who happens to be wearing the fruity blue mage getup in that picture. Combine with the OMG SO BISHIE ^_____________^ art style and it's understandable you couldn't tell.

[Disposable Ninja]

I thought the humans/HUMES were specifically designed to look ambiguously gendered.

[R^2]

Well, let's have a look, shall we?





















Okay, so yeah. Prrrretty androgynous. Paladin and blue mage probably look the most like ladies (the earrings help, I guess), while fighter and white mage look like men. Soft, feminine men.

[R^2]

The "Snakes on a Plane" method of domestic terrorism.






Sure enough, that's a powerful monster, as monsters go. She's level 38, outleveling my clan by about fifteen. She has the whole Lamia skillset, too.


No boss immunities, though.




















A mission item needed for a task we've had on the board for a while now. We need two Zodiac Ore to make a Crusite Alloy, and that Alloy lets us go on the lingering mission.




You're jumping up and down. Make it happen, peon.




This one is Adamantoise, a similarly-overpowered Rockbeast.


Still no boss immunities.


nope.jpg








Ochu and Neochu are less powerful than their solo cousins.


To be fair, this makes battles faster but not significantly easier.


For example, the other one I mercilessly toy with. He's put to sleep, then stopped, then transformed into a frog before I cut him up.




Sword Breaker as a reward. This is how long you have to wait before you can steal weapons under normal circumstances.






That's what she said.


An an undead creature, the Dark Lord is immune to instant death moves.


But not sleep and stop.


Allowing us to beat on him freely.


And other terrible things.







That's four battles, so...


Good for you!


...baby.


Ramses goes back to his martial-style jobs.


If the rumor says it, it must be true.

[R^2]

So we put them all to sleep and tear into them. It's a bloodbath, like always.


Except this guy, who needs to whip out his staff before we beat him.


Hooray!
































Nice. These are hard to come by, offering defensive stat boosts and immunity to several status ailments.

[R^2]

Having captured all three kinds of dragons already, I just nab some blue magic from these guys. Ice dragons teach Mighty Guard (defenses boost), which I had already. Fire dragons teach Guard-Off (defenses decrease). Thunder dragons teach Dragon Force (attack and magic boost).




















That went about as well for you as expected. Ramses steals his Bone Plate and several archer abilities before we're done.


Chirijiraden is a regular sword in this game, not a katana.


Hey, it's the next mission inspired by the novel we found.




Thundrakes eventually go "extinct", in that they're only fought in non-repeatable missions and never show up in random encounters -- like Goblins. Whereas the problem with Goblins is that you might not have the abilities to capture them and learn their blue magic before they vanish, the problem with Thundrakes is that they're usually uncatchable boss-type monsters like this one.


We have one already, though, so it's not an issue for Clan Liness.






Having practiced and practiced, Gallahan now has mastery of all Beastmaster skills.




I could send Eldena or Gallahan, really.













X-Men (Arcade Game) - Welcome to Die








Undead villain, meet white mage. White mage, undead villain.








I think that's all for the Hero Gaol missions, since I have both of his swords now. Ayvuir Red has higher attack power than Ayvuir Blue, and gives +10 defense and +2 speed. Ayvuir Blue gives +10 resistance and +2 evade. They're not bad, but if you're going to double-sword there's better stuff to equip.







punch punch punch punch punch punch punch




"Not that we're returning it to its owner, we need it for another mission we're going on."




So we search a burned-out clock tower, find a dictionary, and use it to convince a boy pretending to be a monster to do his homework. Who writes this stuff?




Good job, Undine! You've mastered red mage! (Since you need the combo ability of a job to master it, I'm limited in what jobs I can get these little stars in by the randomly-determined Mythril gear I've randomly found after random battles.)




But I have the Mythril Rapier and the Mythril Bell, so I can get a few.

[Classic]

Does mastery actually convey advantages in the Tactics Advance games?