Oracle, o desespoir

Yes. I can’t stress enough how unimpressive Disable is though: it really only lasts one round most of the time. Most of the time I use it to make an enemy go away for a short while.

FFT has a weird way to handle speed: Clockticks.
Every character has an invisible counter that rises from 0 to 100.
When that counter gets to 100, the character gets a turn and the counter goes back to 0.

Each clocktick, the counter of any character raises by any character’s speed number. A character with 5 speed will have his counter go 5, 10, 15, etc. A character with 4 speed will have his counter go 4, 8, 12, etc.
By the time 5 speed guy´s counter goes to 100/100 and he gets a turn, 4 speed guy’s counter will be at 80/100.

Status spells have a duration in clockticks. Disable lasts 25 clockticks, for example. (IIRC)
At the beginning of the game, every character has shit speed, so they all take a lot of clockticks to get a turn.
This means that status effects both negative and positive, all last a lot less longer at the beginning. And hesitation is bad.

Oracle physical attacks aren’t -that- terrible right now, but they are not getting any better:

The only weapon upgrade the fucking merchant is selling me right now is a staff with literally the same stats as the old one, except it costs 7x as more and it can remove: Doom.
I don’t even know how you’d remove Doom with the staff (whack an ally with it?) and like almost no enemy casts Doom anyway

It will all get better though.

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White Staff: The beatings will continue until morale improves…

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III: Brigand’s den

For the first time, the objective is to finish the boss.

For the select buttoners who know nothing about the game: FFT has a weird death system. When someone’s HP reaches 0, they don’t die immediately. Instead they get KOed and an invinsible counter appears above their head. If they aren’t revived in 3 turns, they die permanently and get turned into a chest or crystal.
If the battle is over before that happens, they survive. Guests can’t permanently die, making them useful as bait.

Of course, oracles can’t revive or even heal. So any time one gets KOed, it’s a mad dash to finish the battle ASAP before anyone permadies.

If the mission objective is defeat : leader, you just need to get their HP to 0 to end the battle.
This does make this kind of mission easier as just fully focusing on damaging the boss works well.

Well it usually works well. We oracles do still have shit offense (for now)

New enemies:

Thieves are garbage units. Their only trick (and most don’t have it) is being able to confuse an unit of the opposite gender only by stealing their heart. Not awesome gender politics but good joke TBH

White mages: silence them before they heal anyone

Miluda is nothing to worry about, just a regular knight with slightly better stats

We get tontry our fancy two new tricks, Repose and Delirium.

Repose puts enemies to sleep. The status is dispelled either after a while or when they get hit by something. It lasts long, like 3 times longer than Hesitation.

Delirium confuses one enemy, making them do random shit until they also get hit by something. I don’t know how long it lasts.

Confused people do this hilarious goofy dance

Here’s the problem. I put two enemies to sleep, silence one and confuses another.

Algus immediately attacks a sleeping thief, waking him up. A silenced enemy mage attacks his sleeping ally with his weak staff. Then Miluda throws a stone at her confused ally, unconfusing him.

Disable will still see a lot of use, because it can’t as easily be dispelled by the enemies.

This is still a pretty easy battle with an easy objective and enemies. Ramza gets KOed, but Miluda falls pretty easily with 3 oracles homing on her. Notice the thief hiding in the water on the right.

No resets!

Algus is in love with us but acting like a jerk. I steal all his clothes while he’s sleeping and ask him to leave.

IV: Lenalian plateau

We spared Miluda, and now tragically have to fight her to the death the next battle.

This battle has some scary knights and one time mage.

Time mages haste themselves and their allies.

The solution is, as always, to silence them.

Miluda got a pretty massive stat boost here.

Look at her equipment. I know you have no context, but still. Mythril sword. Barbut. Fucking shoulder cape. Oh god.

She can kill our oracles in 2-3 hits tops, they can kill her in… like 10? She also counters hits and has good evasion / blocking abilities. Oracles, of course, don’t counter and have no evasion / blocking.

The battlefield this time is small, both sides begin right newt to each other. Before we can even do anything there’s literally a black mage trying to throw a Fira on us.

The appropriate answer is to go all out and charge 5 spells at them.
Quiescence has a shorter casting time than Fira, so we manage the hugely satisfying task of silencing a mage mid-enchantment.

It’s really tempting to follow the objective and go after Miluda like in the last battle, but our oracles are so puny in comparison that the plan is unconcievable.

Instead, we have to finish her slowly by

  1. keeping her away with hesitation
  2. beat up all other enemies
  3. bait and disable her
  4. circle her to prevent her escape then beat her up.

Disable stops an enemy from acting, but it also stops any reaction ability, including counter. It is completely necessary.

The plan is risky, and I got about 10 resets trying to navigate through phase 1 of the battle.

Up next, the end of chapter 1. I’m scared.

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V: Fovoham Windflats

This is the mission with the cool big windmill. During the battle, the windmill’s blades are doing this very nice early PSX game rotation.

The objective is to beat Miluda’s grieving brother, Wiegraf.

Wiegraf has a special job unavailable to generic units! This is what Wiegraf does:

This is his equipment:

Wiegraf has all the qualities of a knight, archer and black mage rolled into one: he does huge, long range, multitarget, unsilenceable damage and has knight-like evasion and durability. He has 2x more HP than our oracles.

Mr Fucking Perfect also counters for heavy damage and has a bunch of status immunities!

The only oracle spells that we have a d can hit him are Hesitation, and Invigorate, our new spell.

Invigorate steals 1/4th of an enemy’s max HP. Its ranged damage, plus healing, and we had neither of those!
Unfortunately, it’s still a spell (with a charge time) and the accuracy isn’t as good as I’d like.

The battle also introduces chocobos with Wiegraf’s.
Chocobos have lackluster physical stats (oracle-like) but they do have great movement, counters, and an annoying healing skill that targets themselves and surrounding units.

Something even FFT veterans might not have noticed:
Like guests, this chocobo cannot permanently die. (Upon defeat, little stars, instead of a counter, appear above his feathers)
This will all make sense later!

God chapter 1 still makes me feel bad after all these years.

Anyway.
We’re up against Wiegraf, Boco, two female monks and one female knight. The three women have learned fancy skills: One of the monks knows cure negative status effects, the other monk has learned to attack from a distance with aurablast, the knight has learned how to break equipment.

This is another very difficult battle for oracles! It becomes apparent very fast that:

  1. Wiegraf is a monster. After his initial hit on Delita, he must not be allowed to act at any point
  2. Boco must be taken care of soon as possible, or he may run around and heal Wiegraf
  3. the monks and knight are not too dangerous (women do lower physical damage than men) but must not be underestimated
  4. We have never been as weak as of right now

Our only advantage is vast MP pools thanks to a recent gear upgrade. Everybody can throw 5 Hesitations before running out.

Ramza has pretty good zodiac compatibility with Wiegraf, his Hesitation has a 90% hit rate on him. This means that he gets to be Hesitation-boy, spending every turn of the battle running at Wiegraf and refreshing Disable on him.

Boco can be taken care of by whacking him with two oracles then letting Delita finish the job. Guests love murdering more than anything and will always finish off a target if they can.

The rest is improvisation. MP pools are not infinite so we cannot really go out of our way and take the time to beat the monks and knight. We can however, sleep/disable/confuse and lure them to Delita while eveyone else follows Wiegraf and tries to get free hits.

Under confusion, the knight breaks Wiegraf’s armor

Eventually we surround Wiegraf and get him to low HP.

Then it’s time for the classic :
Ramza: Wait!!
Enemy: anime teleports

Fun fact, In Tactics Ogre, any enemy who teleported in that manner had a teleport stone in their inventory. Unfortunately Matsuno didn’t even try to justify this in FFT

VI: Ziekden Fortress

Tragedy happened and we have to defeat Algus / Argath.

He’s a knight with a crossbow. He’s good, but no Wiegraf. Auto potion is a potentially incredible ability, but his low bravery prevents him from using it that often.

Delita’s AI script is slightly different in this battle. He’ll always attack Albus. Good!

Albus comes with two black mages and three knights, who are all over the place. Very poor strategy against oracles, honestly.

Silence the mages.

Disable the knights.

Whack Albus with a stick

Do it again

With that, chapter 1 ends.

We get new recruits and turn them all down

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Are you an Oracle? No? Back the fuck off

So what is the plan with the one on one battles? Are they even beatable with Ramza as an Oracle?

Good question!

I believe there are only two solo/soloish battles in the original game (the remake might have added others. I hope not)

The first one is the battle with Ramza vs a dark knight on one side of the battlefield, oracles on the other. This one will go well because one of the oracle spells I haven’t shown yet will completely shut down the dark knight.

The second one is the infamous Riovanes battle against Wiegraf.
On paper, we should be fine: As an oracle, Ramza can negate Wiegraf’s holy sword skills with a chameleon robe. He’ll also have learned Defense Up by this point, further lowering Wiegraf’s damage.
I think Ramza can win a slugfest by equipping HP oriented gear and casting Invigorate (HP steal) every turn. We’ll see!

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Quick update with a few easy battles.

CHAPTER 2

Back to the present, one year after our last battle We have two guests helping in battle:

Agrias is a Holy Knight, like Wiegraf. Her stats are maybe a little lower, but she’s still very powerful.

Gafgarion has a new class, Fell knight. Think Holy Knight, with the big long range sword attacks and all, except instead of doing multitarget damage he absorbs HP. He’s an unkillable monster.

Both have 200+ HP while our oracles have 70-80.

As long as they’re with us we can’t lose!!

In the one year between chapter 1 and 2, Ramza bought some purple gear.

Chapter 1 Ramza:

Chapter 2 Ramza:

Nice.

VII: Dorter

Upon seeing Gafgarion, the thief does a feather hat throwing animation that’s totally avatar material. I unfortunately haven’t been able to find an animated gif on the internet (why?)

Agrias and Gaff basically don’t even care about being ambushed.

Two thieves, two arches, two black mages.

Agrias and Gafgarion do all the damage. Oracles only cast negative status spells at this point, because their own attacks are beyond awful

The battle is so easy that I didn’t even bother to cancel an Hesitation that targeted one of my oracles

After the battle, we go to the nearest bar and do a few extra sidejobs for money and job points.

I think that my oracles talk about god more than regular units would, because they have high faith?
The kind of little touches I love in FFT

VIII: Araguay Woods

“War of the Lions reads like a Shakespearean drama”

We get a choice here: Care about the chocobo or not.
Against all odds, we actually choose to, because IIRC we suffer a hidden brave stat decrease if E don’t? Nothing big, it doesn’t really matter much.

Protect missions are brutal: we have to kill everybdoy and if the ally gets to 0 HP at any point, we immediately lose. There’s no death counter. Phoenix downs won’t help.

Of course, this doesn’t really matter much here, as we’re up against 6 goblins.

Red goblins are garbage.
They have oracle worthy physical stats, a spin punch that targets all adjacent units. They can also counter. That’s it.

There’s a fancy blue goblin in here too. It’s… pretty much the same thing as a red goblin honestly.

The chocobo easily runs away (… he didn’t really need us to outrun crappy goblins) and Agrias stays at his side.

The chocobo wants to join us. Wait! It’s Boco, Wiegraf’s chocobo! That’s why it could not die earlier! Setup and payoff, guys!

We do not accept it in the team.

Hey guys. Honestly, the game has become too easy and boring lately.

Why not make Gafgarion a white mage with no spells learned, then remove all his equipment, in order to add a little challenge.

What do you think?

** IX: Zeirchele falls**

Delita and the princess are here. Bunch of knights arr attacking them. Delita has already killed 2, and there are 5 others remaining.

Oh no.
Betrayal!!

The mission is to protect the princess.

Ovelia is super badass, she can easily take care of herself. She has a super spell that casts Haste, Protect, Shell, Regen, Reraise on herself.

She also doesn’t hesitate to directly jump into the waterfall right away.

Delita joins as a guest. Another strong unkillable holy knight.

Gafgarion is now working against us. But we made him a white mage with no armor and he’s still one. Wow

So long, sucker

Otherwise it’s just two holy knights, one unkillable princess and four oracles against five regular knights. What a joke.

Delita and Gafgarion are gone. Ovelia stays with us, but, as a princes, she won’t participate in battle and Agrias will stay with her.

We’re straight out of overpowered guests from now on.

Don’t worry guys, because:

We can buy cypress poles now!!

Poles are a kind of weapon exclusive to oracles, that deal physical attacks based on magic power, up to two square away. They are both a massive damage boost and a new way to ignore enemy counterattacks.

Wow

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I’ve always loved the framing of that dorter battle as “the mercenaries made a really bad deal”

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Did you dig up an archaeological assault rifle?

A magic archeological assault rifle

That apparently causes cancer, so it’s a magic radioactive archeological assault rifle. :V

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I’d forgotten until literally right now that there are guns in this game.

Still, they never seemed like detachable magazine fed assault rifles? I dunno it just makes me feel like it’s some creepy Dying Earth stuff.

yeah I was actually never aware of that assault rifle because I’ve pretty much ignored all of the bar jobs you can send party members away on every time I’ve played the game and I have to say its inclusion seems like a bad call

the explanation for mustadio’s gun has always been that there’s a lost civilization under goug, yadda yadda yadda, but his gun is so shitty and unreliable that it mostly works in the context of lost-civilization technology. they never found assault rifles on laputa.

I think it’s better to think of it as PSX-era Square art maximalism than some kind of affront to a consistent worldbuilding project.

there is a Robot

there are multiple Robots

nothing of the lost civilization is more outrageous than what the empire had going on in FFVI

Go read the treasures/artefacts list and then go back to the script edit topic

What I find curious is that the description of the magic pistol (another treasure) mentions special magic bullets, with some eventually being developed that could summon monsters. This wasn’t in any Final Fantasy at the time of FFT…but was a key concept in the FF Unlimited anime that came out in 2001. Makes me wonder if Unlimited was scraped together using leftover ideas for other FF games.

yeah but the thing is “a robot with unreliable guns” still isn’t as prosaically destructive as an assault rifle

Yeah Ivalice seems to actually be built upon the ruins of all other Final Fantasies because the lost civilisations you stumble upon during propositions all have items and places from FF1-7

For example this from FF6

And this from FF3. I think

I could actually list them all later as I got them in another save

FFT starts with a this relatively grounded fantasy medieval setting but then starts including more and more outlandish things. By the end of the game your team is Ramza as a ninja/mime, a mathematician with a mohawk, a robot, Cloud from FF7, and a dancer attacking with cashmere, all fighting in a room called “Napalm”

Keeping a coherent setting is not something FF cares about much, and somehow Tactics doesn’t suffer from it too much

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X: The castled city of Zaland

Quick reminder: We have poles. And Defense Up. Our once puny oracles can beat enemy knights in 1vs1 physical combzt. They’ve never been as good as this, and they probably won’t ever be that good again.

Mustadio, the last important guest, is introduced, and he’s in trouble becaus of course he is.

I was wrong about Agrias: She’s still helping as a guest for a short bit.

Protect Mustadio or not?



Mustadio is a machinist. He has a gun! He also has poor defense, poor offense, and a generally unimpressive skillset.
The AI, of course, isn’t really smart enough to take advantage from the gun, making protecting Mustadio here much harder than it had any right to be.

Choosing to kill all enemies and not protect Mustadio lowers team brave a little, and changes nothing else.

Oracles barely care about brave.

In short, we left Mustadio to rot

I remember having trouble with this battle, as I was a stubborn perfectionist who absolutely had to protect the guy. Without bothering, the battle is easy.

Battles have been easy and we can choose to spend JP frivolously on obscure oracle spells.
Ramza has bought Corruption.

Corruption turns someone into an undead. It sounds like a big deal and it absolutely isn’t. Being undead does two things:

  • Make the character vulnerable to healing
  • Add a 50/50 chance to not permanently die and revive instead when the dead counter reaches 0

One unimpressive negative effect + one unimpressive positive effect rolled up in a low accuracy, almost completely useless spell

Mustadio joins as a guest and gets us into trouble immediately.

XI: Balias Tor

Oh jeez, summoners

Summoners do huge magic damage to a large area of effect.

We could silence them, but, that’s not as easy as you’d expect. Thanks to their superior range, summoners are harder to bait than any other kind of mage.

Fortunately we can now turn our oracles into St Ajora-hating atheists with Disbelief.

Obviously atheists don’t believe in magic and will dominate any summoner in a duel, even if they can’t cast any spell.

How oracles live with casting spells on themselves to temporaly not believe spells work anymore, is beyond me

The battle could have lasted a while, as there’s a knight there who’s entire job is destroying our poles. You have no idea how bad oracles are with no weapons.

Agrias saved the day, one last time.
Mustadio barely contributed and died halfway through.

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Dycedarg is my favourite FFT character and I just realized he’s always wearing a night gown

XII: Tchigolith Fenlands

Zigolis Swamp in regular FFT

There are three new kind of monsters you haven’t seen, and they are all bad. I won’t list what they do because it doesnt matter.

Ghosts and Skellies are undead, ahrimans aren’t.

It’s Mustadio’s only time to shine: He has learnt a new, topical skill that petrifies undead enemies.

The floor is poison so we just sit there and let enemies approach while Mustadio petrifies everything.

We could turn arhimans undead with Corruption so Mustadio could also turn them into stone statues, but honestly they die so fast to regular attacks

Much like Mustadio, one of the oracles can petrify enemies, with a new, costly spell: Induration

Induration has two major drawbacks; it takes ages to use and has the lowest accuracy out of any Oracle spell.

Still, this is the only direct offense spell we have beyond Invigorate, so I’m sure it will see a ton of use.

Here, we’re just using it to complete our creepy stone statue collection

Next: The game becomes hard again

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Bonus screenshot

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Hello new avatar

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