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[Thad]

I'll probably drop all this into a blog post into the next few days, but more thoughts:

On the question of whether Gau, Umaro, and Mog should be changed to AI-based strategy or just be controllable: why not both?  Have them run on AI naturally, but introduce a Relic somewhere late in the WoB or early in the WoR that works similarly to the Fake Mustache and ALLOWS you to control them.

On the Auction House:

FF9 had an Auction House that actually behaved like an auction house; do it like that.  Make players bid; place them up against simple AI behavior from townspeople; reward good betting strategies while keeping the results somewhat unpredictable.  Maybe even have an online component to it, let players trade items -- you can put restrictions on it (like one purchase a day) if you really want to, but I wouldn't worry that much about people gaming it, really.

The joke events could still happen I guess, but limit them to once each.

And keep a high probability that the important items -- the two Espers and, provided we keep Gilgamesh, Excalipoor as well, shouldn't be too hard to get ahold of.  It's okay to have some rare stuff in there -- maybe a very low probability of super-powerful, super-rare items like Economizers and Offerings showing up -- but I don't think any UNIQUE items should be such a bastard to get.

And while we're talking about rare items, having the Excalibur and other high-end equipment not show up until the very end of the game is dumb.  It should be obtainable earlier.

(Making the player choose between Ragnarok the Esper and Ragnarok the Sword, while still allowing you to steal the sword from one of the Goddesses, is okay by me, though.  ...but maybe make it not such a pain in the ass to get rare steals.  Maybe do like the more recent games have done and allow monsters to carry multiple items so if you keep stealing for long enough you'll eventually get the rare one?)

[Sharkey]

I guess I'd better cover all of this stuff when I do an LP of it.

If I don't get to be Setzer I will shit in your living heart. Or end the game instantly. Whatever.

[Disposable Ninja]

I bought Final Fantasy VII on Steam because why the hell not. Playing on a keyboard is less than ideal, but I've managed to make it so much more bearable by binding what I guess you'd call the "face buttons" to WASD.

I... I just wanted to brag about binding the buttons to WASD. Doing that made me feel clever.

[Thad]

So somebody saw my old blog post about the aborted Kurt Busiek/Mike Mignola/Dell Barras FF4 comic and linked me to a photo of the original cover art for issue #4.

I'm not precisely sure what's going on here, but I like it.

[TA]

Oh goody!  This is out now.

[Mothra]

[Smiler]

[Mothra]

 

[Brentai]

They made this game only to annoy people, didn't they?

[A²]

Apparently there's an achievement for getting all of Gau's rages, and Cyan's Bushido will let you select which one you want, and then charge up in the background without you needing to babysit the meter.

So you win some you lose some. Or most. You lose most.

[R^2]

Apparently there's an achievement for getting all of Gau's rages

[Friday]

holy jesus CHRIST those images

I mean I know this is a worthless post that just repeats what everyone else is saying but FUCKING CHRIST

so anyway in an effort to bring this post some actual content, I'm eating subway right now, with garden salsa chips, it's pretty good, it's a sweet onion chicken teriyaki on sourdough, which i was surprised to see on their 5 dollar footlong all january menu, cause i don't think it was included last year? I may be misremembering

and for some reason when I unlocked my computer today it was in the very lowest resolution setting and I had to manually change it back

oh and I had a dream that I was hiking with a friend and we were caught in a volcano eruption and we surfed down the lava wave on rocks to a lake to escape

p. cool

[Lottel]

Had Subway for the first time in years yesterday. Their five dollar menu is far more interesting than any Final Fantasy game

[Mothra]

Friday please do not cast your virgin eyes upon Celes and Locke's in-game portait pictures

I beg of you

[TA]

You can't say that and not offer pics, I'm sure as shit not buying this thing.

edit: found Locke!

[Niku]

[Esperath]

espierath

[Roger]

Apparently there's an achievement for getting all of Gau's rages, and Cyan's Bushido will let you select which one you want, and then charge up in the background without you needing to babysit the meter.

So you win some you lose some. Or most. You lose most.

When you say "all his rages", do you mean "all the ones you CAN get" or "hahahahahahahaha bad programming"

[Thad]

I initially balked at the images of FF5 but have found it to be surprisingly not-so-bad.  There's a really jarring kind of mismatch going on between the people sprites and the background and creature sprites, vaguely like that Dragonlance movie where the draconians were CG and everything else was cel-animated (and the Amano portraits add a third, even less similar art style).  But on the whole it hasn't been nearly as bad as it looked in screenshots on a PC monitor.

But FF6 looks quite a lot worse than 5 did.



OTOH:
That redrawn background in the Narshe battle looks pretty keen.
I actually don't hate that portrait of Locke; it's pretty similar to the original in-game version and at least it doesn't create the kind of jarring Amano mismatch I mentioned above.
AND
while it was initially pretty weird to see that they redid Figaro's graphic, it's actually pretty cool that it now looks like a miniturized version of the Figaro layout instead of Generic Castle Sprite.


But mainly it doesn't make me want to play 6 on my phone so much as pick Advance back up.

(And when I say "back up" I mean "backup", as my most current save was on my stolen PSP.  Still, my most recent backup's not TOO far earlier than that -- I think it's right after I got the Falcon, whereas my PSP save I'd gotten a little bit farther and recruited Gau and Cyan.

And beaten the Wind Dragon early by raging Intangir, which I won't fucking be doing again.  Tedious as hell even when holding the Fast Forward button.)



EDIT: Oh also it looks like they've rearranged the menus compared to 5 and actually made them worse.

(Big problem in 5 was that they stuck the menu in a single column on the far right of the screen and you have to scroll to actually see all the commands.  6 has fewer commands so I thought it wouldn't be an issue, but -- nope, stuck at the bottom of the screen with scrollbars.)

[Thad]

Apparently someone's translated and rebalanced the bootleg Chinese NES remake of FF7.

Oh and also the fan retranslation of FF7PC is done, though from skimming the thread it looks like you might want to wait until release 2 for the initial issues to get worked out.