Tactical Disadvantage: Golgorand Execution Site

Over the last couple months, I’ve been slowly playing through Final Fantasy Tactics. The original PS1 version, at that. I’ve never managed to finish this version of the game, and working my way through it, it’s not overly difficult to see why.

What is overly difficult is getting past a few choice battles. The first is near the end of Chapter 2, and places you in a battle that can seem unwinnable for a new player. Up until now, you’ve been in mostly fair fights. You’ll have seen all of the basic classes, and had mostly fair fights. In this fight, you’re pitted against a squad of eight to your five characters, which features three knights, two archers, and two of a new enemy: time mages. There’s also a special “boss” character, but let’s look at the normal guys first.

The archers are going to be fairly benign. Or at least, they’ll seem that way compared to the danger the rest of the enemies pose. They don’t have much in the way of attack power yet, and arrows are generally easier to evade than physical attacks if you’re equipped properly. At least it seems that way to me. They can use some weaker charge attacks, but that charge time gives you an opening to close in on them and attack or prep a healing spell before they actually hit you. You can also cancel the charge attacks by knocking the archers with Dash or Throw Stone, making them even less threatening.

The knights are probably the biggest direct threat. They do huge damage, and have a lot of HP, which generally means that you’re going to have to use a few turns to knock each of them out. That is, assuming that they don’t block your attacks. I find that these knights are especially fond of trying to break your equipment, so be wary of that. Black magic is a decent way to both carve off huge chunks of their HP and circumvent those pesky shields, but if they get close to your mage, he/she is pretty boned.

Compounding this issue are the time mages. While not immediately dangerous, the two time mages here sling Haste and Slow like there’s no tomorrow. Haste is less of an issue, because it only affects one enemy, but when they start Slowing your guys, that means anyone affected will probably take twice as many hits before getting to act. At that rate, they might not even get a chance. The worst part is that the time mages are up on an archway, so you’ve got to climb up there if you’re not targeting them with magic, basically guaranteeing them time to inflict Slow on you. That and they aren’t nearly as squishy as they should be.

The biggest hurdle in this battle, however, is Gafgarion. A Dark Knight, he’s got a tidy bundle of HP and high attack power. More importantly, he’s got a special attack called Shadowblade that hits hard and actually heals him for as much damage as he caused. This is a huge problem, as it’s hard to deal enough damage to him to overcome the healing he gets from it each turn.

Taking out Gafgarion should always be first priority. The other units are numerous and troublesome, but none of them can heal themselves as efficiently as Gafgarion. My personal favourite strategy is to have a white mage with Regenerator as a reaction ability and Holy. Stick her under the arch, and right off the bat cast Holy on Gafgarion, which should be able to go off before anyone can hit her. Holy will take down Gafgarion in one hit, but the white mage’s MP will likely be drained, so I keep a Monk next to her to use Chakra and recover some MP ASAP.

Of course, FFT offers an endless variety of ways to tackle any battle, but that’s my favourite way to start this one off. Summons would probably have a similar effect, but who even uses summoners anyway?

The rest of the battle will be tricky, but not quite as difficult once the main damage-dealer is gone. I would recommend trying to take out the knights as quickly as possible. If you’re rocking a knight yourself, Weapon Break + Concentrate is a fairly good strategy, as breaking their swords will make them mostly useless. I think they can still use their Break skills with their swords broken, but at the very least, they won’t be doing much in the way of damage anymore. They might even decide to retreat instead of engaging your troops with their bare hands.

The archers should probably be your next priority, but you can ignore them until the end, because they’re dumb and weak. I generally save the time mages for last, despite their buffs being one of the biggest threats in the fight. Really, if they’ve got no teammates to Haste, they aren’t going to be much danger to your well-being.

Agrias is a great teammate to bring into this battle, having just recruited her as a full party member after the previous battle. If you take a little time to earn her another Holy Sword skill or two before you enter this battle, all the better. Saving up the 500 JP for Crush Punch is the best bet, as it has an added benefit of possibly killing the target instantly, but her default Stasis Sword skill has a chance to inflict Stop. It’s not quite as good in the long run, but keeping even one enemy from doing anything for a couple turns amounts to a lot of breathing room in this particular fight. The bonus effects don’t stick often enough to be reliable, but all of her Holy Sword skills do pretty great damage for this point in the game.

It’s worth noting that since Agrias is not a real party member and Mustadio has gone off to do his own thing, this is the first battle where you don’t have a guest character to bump up your number of guys on the field. They’re not always very smart, but at least it’s nice to have that extra lump of HP eating hits, and without the threat of having him/her vanish forever if you take too long to revive them. You can really feel the lack of a guest here.

I also like having a geomancer for this fight. Elemental skills don’t do a ot of damage, but they still aren’t pathetically weak yet. There is a lot of stone here, and that gives you the Carve Model effect, which may petrify an opponent. It may be a little more efficient to just bring an oracle instead and cast the Petrify spell, but oracle is one of those classes that I never really bother to use.

I also always try to have Ramza unlock the ninja class by this point, as the speed boost and innate Two Swords ability are super handy tricks to have up your sleeve. You won’t be able to buy any actual ninja swords yet, which kind of undermines its usefulness, but it’s always a good idea to earn ninja for one or two units ASAP.

Again, FFT lets you play pretty much any way you want, but I always stick to the same patterns when I play it, and the above thoughts describe the way I always try to tackle this fight. Some people have fun doing it in different ways each time, but I’m a creature of habit.

I’ll post some thoughts on other tough battles in the future. Think of Tactical Disadvantage as my own sort of rip-off of Parish’s Anatomy of a Game series, just not quite as in-depth.

(Remember, this is written with the original FFT in mind! There may be some things that don’t align properly if you’re applying it to The War of The Lions port on PSP or iOS!)

Chocolate boos

There isn’t nearly enough Halloween going on here, so have this: a fun picture of spooky chocolate bars. Also pictured: 7-11’s most demanding slogan.

Really, outside of the punny names, they’re nothing special. Even then it’s a 50/50 split. Kit Kat didn’t change at all, it just has a picture of a cat on it. And Scaries doesn’t sound enough like Smarties to constitue as even somewhat clever. Coffin Crisp and scAero are pretty damn great though. I wish they were called that all year long.

I didn’t actually buy any of these, hence the picture taken in 7-11. I don’t really care for Nestle chocolate bars, and I think the only one that’s changed at all are Scaries, which are coloured orange and brown insted of rainbow.

Seriously, how great is scAero? There are very few words that allow you to put a capital letter in the middle of them, and that’s something I really respect. And no, products with a lowercase “i” or “e” tacked on the front of their names do not count.

On Pop-Tarts and sock puppets

I was going to start this post with an “if you’ve been reading this blog for a while” intro, but I feel like I do that a lot. Maybe even too much? Or maybe I don’t and just think that I do? I have no idea!

Anyway, there’s no doubt in my mind that as a person who has spend much of his life being perceived by others as “creative,” I am not nearly creative enough. Oh sure, now and then a spark will ignite and I’ll pop out something that shows a little thought, but mostly I just coast on doing the same thing that the people I see as inspirations do, but with my own half-assed twist.

I thought my Pop-Tarts Review videos were pretty creative, even if there are a dearth of people with the same idea on YouTube. The whole project started because I just needed an outlet for my silliness (God help you if you take those videos seriously), because I find it hard to express directly to other people. I don’t even really like talking to people about the Pop-Tarts videos, because it makes me feel embarassed and weird.

Of course, as time dragged on, I got kind of bored with the whole idea, and felt like it needed a shot in the arm. That’s when I developed Sockstopher.

 
Sockstopher is… not the grand slam I was hoping he’d be. Oh, people like him alright, and that was always the goal, but his video is one of the less popular in the series, as far as the view counter goes. Whether this is because I’m a bad puppeteer or because people are just getting tired of the whole Pop-Tarts Review schtick, I don’t know.

I really like Sockstopher though. I think he’s a fun character to have around, and I’ve been desperately trying to find a way to work him into more stuff. I just haven’t been able to find a good fit for him yet. I do have one plan for him, but it requires a box of Pop-Tarts that I don’t have.

On the whole, the production side of the Pop-Tarts Review series has come to a stall because I have run out of flavours and so far the few people who have claimed that they’d bring me some when they take a trip down to the States have flaked. I’m not offended or anything because I’m asking for handouts here, but I’d be eternally grateful if someone actually followed through.

I do have a few more episodes that just need to be uploaded, if you’re into that sort of thing. Problem is, my internet speed has been unfairly chopped down to a fraction of what it once was, and those 5ish-minute videos now take like two hours each to upload. It’s pretty ridiculous. Hooray for capitalism!

Something about momentum

Last weekend was delicious Thanksgiving long weekend for us Canadians, but the awesome dinners I got three days in a row are actually the least incredible things that happened over the weekend.

Not to downplay those dinners, of course. Many people worked hard to prepare them, and I appreciate all that effort. In fact, you might even say that I give them my thanks for stuffing me so full that I literally rolled out of bed on Tuesday morning.

The big news, as you might be aware, was that Pokémon X and Y launched on Saturday. I was so damn excited about them, in fact, that my youngest brother and I decided to attend the midnight launch at our local used games store. Wifey tagged along for the ride too, but I was not able to convince her to start her own journey with Pokémon. Some day…

We figured it’d be a pretty low-key thing, because I guess neither of us know many Pokémon players in the city. Also, like I said, it’s a little local place. But the turnout was pretty amazing! I’d say that there were at least 60 or 70 people there. Which is low-key compared to the official Nintendo launch event in Toronto, but still way more than we’d expected. There wasn’t much more to the evening than waiting in line for half an hour and then merrily skipping out of the store with games in hand, but it was still a pretty fun experience.

And so that’s what I did all weekend when I wasn’t out Thanksgiving binging.

Except for Monday night, which was just wonderful enough to outshine a new Pokémon game as the best part of my long weekend. Yes, you read that right. And that totally awesome thing was the opportunity to go see Joe Satriani.

I first heard that he would be playing here back in the summer, but there was no way that I could justify dropping enough cash for tickets. I so desperately wanted to go, as I’ve been a Satch fan since the very first time I heard “Surfing With the Alien” and he was easily on my top 5 list of concerts to see. (The rest: Matt Good again, Tom Petty, Tonight Alive, and Go Radio)

A miracle happened though, and my in-laws bought me tickets for my birthday. It was way more than they should have spent, but it is quite possibly the best birthday gift I’ve ever received. At the very least it’s neck-and-neck with Life and an NES.

It doesn’t really need saying, but the concert was fantastic. I didn’t recognise a lot of the songs because I don’t have the new record (Unstoppable Momentum), but maybe that’s even better, as I got to experience a bunch of material for the first time live. “Satch Boogie” and “Surfing With the Alien” were in the set, and that’s all I could really ask for. And the encore… oh, the encore. Let’s just say that even my wedding day may not have been as emotional a day as the day I was actually in the damn crowd for “Crowd Chant.”

I don’t go to very many concerts, but the ones I go to are so damn good. And now that that’s all said, I have to get back to work. And by “work”, I mean “Pokémon.” Because I totally don’t type these things out at work.

Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

You’re going to have to bear with me, internet. I want to talk about Monster Hunter again.

Let’s begin with the basics. The Monster Hunter series is all about fighting giant beasts, and is pretty much a game built around hectic, exciting boss battles. Yes, it includes some smaller enemies too, but they’re like the basil on the tomato soup that is the rest of the game: they add a little flavour, but aren’t what you came for. You’re there to bring down huge, fearsome beasts and then turn them into pants. It’s even more fun when you’re doing it with your friends, so much so that it’s the only video game that I actually have a desire to play with people online.

Victory in Monster Hunter requires what I call the Three P’s: preparation, patience, and practice. It’s not a game for people who can’t be arsed to earn their victory. There is no coasting in Monster Hunter, and there is no easy mode. If you’re going to win, you need to make sure you know what you’re doing. Triple-checking your supplies before you head out on a hunt isn’t just helpful, it’s nearly required. You need to study your enemy’s movement and attack patterns to find weaknesses and openings. Familiarity with the terrain in each map is just as important as being familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of your chosen weapon. Long story short: Monster Hunter requires a huge investment of time and effort on the player’s part, and that’s what I love most about it.

Most games, especially those of the current generation, you can just turn on and play if you’ve got even a basic knowledge of video games. Monster Hunter is not at all like that. If you boot up a Monster Hunter game and expect to get just another action game, you’ll be eating a healthy serving of humble pie in no time. These are complicated games, and you need to take the time to learn them before you’ll get anywhere. Each game starts with a rather lengthy tutorial in your basic survival skills like item gathering, meat cooking, and small monster slaughter before you even get a whiff of a real hunt. While these might seem like boring little subsystems that aren’t so important that they need to be forced on you, it turns out that they are absolutely essential.

Continue reading Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate

4 Crazy Chip Flavours!

I guess it’s a Canadian thing, so if you’re a foreign reader you may not have heard of it, but Lay’s currently has a contest running. It is, unsurprisingly, a contest to create a new flavour of chips for them to produce. At current, we’re about a month away from the end of the contest, and the four finalist flavours have been in stores for a while now. Since July, I guess?

Fact of the matter is that since I shun any social media that doesn’t involve me and I don’t spend any time in the chips aisle anymore, I didn’t notice these new flavours until a couple weeks ago. I just happened to randomly stumble upon one of them while out with the wife getting faux Slurpees. I used to be really crazy about trying each and every new potato chip flavour, and since that compulsion still exists deep inside of me, I went absolutely nuts just seeing the first one sitting there by its lonesome.

Now after all that embellishment, try to imagine how I felt when I looked at the back of the bag and saw that there were three more new flavours to hunt down. Suffice to say, I needed a change of pants. It’s not often that I get to enjoy the thrill of the junk food hunt like I used to, and knowing that those flavours were out there somewhere made me feel like my life had a real purpose  At the very least, it took me back to a time when hunting down article fodder was half the fun.

So I guess you’re all writhing in your seat there, wondering which of the new flavours I found first. You don’t care for the anecdotes; you just want the cold, hard, facts. Well tough. The anecdotes are important to my process and to the total word count. They’re never going to go away, so you might as well just learn to enjoy them.

Continue reading 4 Crazy Chip Flavours!

Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: September 2013

Welcome, good reader, to a new thing that I want to be doing each month. I’m calling it Monthend Video Game Wrap-up, and it’s basically just going to be a snapshot of what I’ve been up to in the world of video games over the course of each month. Why? I dunno. Same reason that I put anything on this blog, I guess: to keep a cheap record of stuff I do and think.

Okay fine, I’ll admit it. This is all just a big excuse for me to make a banner. It’s one of those odd little things that I really love doing, and I can’t really be bothered to make them for common blog posts. Also I guess since it’s going to be a big thing I’ll make a section for it on the Features page.

~ Now Playing ~

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD (Wii U) – I played through WW only twice on Gamecube, but it’s still one of my favourite Zeldas. People seem to be pretty split on the graphical changes, and I am firmly in the “I love them” camp. The swift sail changes the pace of the game from “pretty slow” to “not as slow” which is nice, but what really I appreciate is the improved Picto Box. It’s making completing the Nintendo Gallery seem less like the most horrible, tedious task ever and more like something that’s actually pretty fun! I’m about halfway through the game, just entering the Earth Temple.

Continue reading Monthend Video Game Wrap-up: September 2013

And Ryan said “Let there be content”

I was poking around the site today, just lookin’ at stuff, and noticed that the Features page is full of content, but there aren’t any actual links to that content. So I went and made all the Steve Articles and GameFAQs submissions available to read. and I do recommend that you check out those Steve Articles. They’re pretty surreal, and a nice reminder of an age long ago when other people would occasionally contribute to the site.

I was going to go ahead and link all the Chat Radios, but they’re stuck in some really ugly pages. I’m not too sure if I want to leave them as-is or go through the trouble of converting them into a nicer template. If you want to read them as they are, just follow this link. They’re also recommended reads, as they’re pretty funny.

As for the CD Archive? Well, I refuse to give up on it, but I’m certainly not going to bother updating it anytime soon. I haven’t linked in the pages that exist yet, but I guess I could go do that now. It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

That’s it for today. Just admin stuff. Tomorrow I’ll make a post about video games! But I’ll warn you now, it’s gonna be more of a diary entry for me than anything else.

Insidious: Chapter 2

There isn’t any easy way to say this: I was a little disappointed with Insidious: Chapter 2.

It’s not that I thought the movie was outright bad. No, it was decent enough; it certainly held my attention for the duration. What I have a problem with is that it’s not the movie that I was expecting/hoping that it would be. Which I suppose is kind of a petty gripe, because as a sequel it’s actually quite good, so take that as you will.

Insidious 2 begins right where we left off at the end of the first movie, so there’s really no way to describe the plot of the flick without letting slip at least some minor spoilers for the first one. So I guess you’re gonna have to deal with me being all vague and mysterious. This will not go well.

The story picks up with the family dealing with the fallout of the events from the first film. Everyone’s all shaken up, and while they thought that their biggest problem (being haunted) was solved, it quickly becomes apparent that it was not. Well, it was, but it wasn’t. Now they’re being haunted by different spooks. And when the identity of one of those spooks was revealed, I slapped my head so hard because OF COURSE. DUH.

The promotional materials for the movie (like the poster above) will lead you to believe that the movie is about the baby being haunted or possessed or something, but really that’s all a lie. There are a few baby-related scenes, but really the baby has absolutely nothing to do with the actual plot. And if she was supposed to, they certainly did not get that point across very well, because I have no idea why they even bothered with the baby scenes.

All in all, Insidious 2 is more of a murder mystery than your typical paranormal horror flick. I think that the best way to describe it would be Scooby-Doo meets The Shining. Only it’s less dumb than the former, and not nearly as scary as the latter. But it’s a pretty apt description, and the more I think about it, the more fitting it seems. What disappoints me about this is that the movie spends almost all of its time figuring out who the antagonist is and what their motivation is instead of providing us with more of the dreamland shenanigans that I loved so much in the first movie.

In fact, when it comes to the otherworld at all, it’s used even less than it was in the first movie. Again, it only really comes around in the third act, and this time it’s not as full of creepy, surreal imagery. Now it’s… complicated. I won’t get into it in detail, but the story ends up folding in on itself and interweaving with a few scenes in the first film, which is all really cool for a while. And then you realize how weird it is that somehow being in the otherworld allows the characters to actually affect the past. What? Yeah, it’s… it’s not great, especially since they don’t make any effort to describe how this is even remotely plausible or ties into the rest of the established lore.

I want to say that I’m being unnecessarily critical here, because I wanted to just turn off my brain and enjoy the ride, but man, I’m sure that there’s a better way they could have resolved the scenario here than shoehorning in some time-travelling bunkus. I can easily gloss over a minor plot hole or inconsistency here and there, but this one just made no damn sense. Fans seem to be trying to make a case that there is no “sense of time” in the otherworld, but it still seems like a bunch of malarkey to me.

Another thing that stuck out to me is that while the first movie was straight up dramatic horror, part two here has a rather generous helping of comedy relief. I’m not sure it was necessary, but most of the jokes are pretty good so I’ll let it slide. Also, like the first film, this one’s mostly devoid of glaring special effects, except for one scene near the end. In contrast to the rest of the movie, where everything looks very natural, this one bit really stands out. It’s short and fairly inconsequential, but I figured it was worth mentioning.

In conclusion, I did like Insidious: Chapter 2. It wasn’t as good as the first one, and that whole time-travelling bit was annoying, but overall it satisfied. The atmosphere was pretty much what I’m looking for in a horror film, and while it was a bit too big for its britches, I thought the story was pretty good. I just preferred the relative simplicity of the first one. A third film is confirmed to be in the works, and while I’ve got my fingers crossed that they’ll go back to the unsettling distorted reality theme of the first movie, I’ll make sure not to go into it expecting that.