yeah the original game was gated by how many points it took to get all the way across from e.g. high level black magic to high level swords and that basically worked fine, if you wanted to grind it all out you could I guess but the curve was plenty functional
The only thing I didnât like about the IZJS was that choosing a job for a character is permanent, which sent me on a three-day-long rabbit hole of obsessively weighing the pros and cons for each character and each job.
There were spreadsheets.
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Selectbutton
A mix of characters with 0, 1 and 2 jobs
I get the compulsion to do this but, really, at the end of the day, this actually doesnât matter that much!
Save for a few key spells you may want to have, the biggest impact in your characters performance is equipment, and there are only like four categories of that.
I mean, the canonical in-game and in-cutscene weapons for Balthier are guns but it turns out heâs the worst gunner in the game! Even if you make Balthier a gunner, you will be totally fine. The difference in speed/skill is ultimately insignificant.
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Yes, they could learn any skill. and by the back half of the game, youâd covered enough of the board that overlap would happen.
But, for the first half of the game, you really should restrict your characters to specific goals (offensive magic, defensive magic, healing, special skills, regular attack and item usage. Pick a complimentary armor class. one or two weapons focus). You donât have to. But youâll be spread thin and lack power and usefulness.
So I would prefer a system which restricts you to one job, from the start, but also accounts for late game and keeps things from overlapping too much. Maybe thatâs the case with the remaster? I am probably misunderstanding.
So basically the sphere grid?
I donât really know. I only ever played like 1/8 of FF10, right after release. I donât like that game, at all.
I cant help but wonder if that is just a side effect of being a âperformerâ and not wanting to spend hours and hours in menus for the audience. Probably still do.
Having played this for almost twenty hours now I can say Iâm switching up my party more than I remember doing for my other couple playthroughs. You donât have many means for dealing with large aerial foes besides magic (most of the offensive spells you can buy are not that great until a while later) and the few projectile weapons, and Balthier is the only person who can use the latter, so I have him pop out when thereâs a big bird nearby. And Ashe is the one, excepting occasional temporary party members, with the best curative abilities by a long shot. So I guess the downside is that itâs probably possible to make the game harder for yourself if you keep your classes too similar; the upside is that you can maintain some discrete integrity for your party for a longer time.
Itâs harder to understand systems when talking to an audience, definitely, but based on playtest and telemetry data Iâve seen for other big games Iâd guess only 20% of players properly exploited the gambits and maybe 30% never set them up at all. The vast majority probably poked their heads in once or twice and when it didnât make sense immediately just left it super-basic, like, âattackâ.
they arenât very clear about this in game but iirc spears can hit flying enemies too
yeah, that was an IZJS change i believe.
I know that this was the case for FFX, anyway! I think in part to further emphasize Kimahriâs role as a substitute for whomever you were missing.
The longer I play this the absurder the Star Wars comparisons read â I donât know how anyone whoâs seen the whole game can seriously entertain the idea and grow it into an entire characterization â and the more thinly stretched the plot itself becomes, with a handful of scenario repeats (held in a judge-helmed airship and escaping, for example) and the general narrative being one of sussing out legendary deux ex machinas that generally donât even solve the problems at hand. Lots of âHm, that didnât go well; letâs try this other location.â In my opinion, it manages to get by on the strengths of the translation, voice acting (Iâve had Japanese on usually for the sake of hearing how it differs; itâs also good), music, and settings â the low points unfortunately tend to involve Ashe, who mostly gasps and wonders Whether Power is Too Much Power â but I understand why people who were used to previous FF stories, or even relative newcomers with less solidified expectations, mightâve not been wild about this one.
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To me, the only blatant âStar Warsâ Thing about it, are the helms of the Judges. Their face areas remind me of Storm Troopers and Darth Vader. *actually its only one judge. And its also very Samurai. Which was probably inspiration for Star Wars stuff. So Star Wars copied Japan.
Otherwise, its all kinda like what civilization might have looked like, 50 years before FF8. Final Fantasy 12 is 1970âs FF8.
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This got me to look up the crumhorn and wow, what an instrument. Iâm trying to think of game music that could use a nice crumhorn, but all I could come up with is this:
I wondered if that was the case at first, but he kept using gambits as a slower version of the command menu, pausing after almost every single encounter to manually enable or disable them instead of arranging a proper setup that would work for the area he was in, the way the game is set up to work.
He also kept the main character with gambits off because he felt he needed to be pressing buttons to feel engaged. Ok, thatâs a personal preference and the game accomodates that, but he was failing to understand how the priorities and trigger conditions actually worked for the other two characters. He did some off-screen grinding and cut parts of time spent in menus from the video where he felt they wouldnât be useful or entertaining to watch, so intâs not like he didnât have some offline time to figure it out without the pressure of performing.
http://forums.selectbutton.net/viewtopic.php?p=1244916#1244916
Also remembered this little snippet from FFCC composer Hidenori Iwasaki:
The music of the first Crystal Chronicles game, which was released in 2003, featured ancient instruments, and its freshness and unique worldview, in combination with Tanioka-sanâs impressionistic melodies, won much admiration. It was a gamble that paid off. Although I was primarily involved as a synthesizer operator, I remember that at the beginning we werenât using ancient instruments, and her compositions sounded like cute mondo music [Editorâs Note: A catch-all term for off-beat music, from novelty songs to lounge], along the lines of Perry and Kingsley. And then we chanced to meet the ancient music experts at Roba House. To me a crumhorn was something on a Moog synthesizer, and hearing the cute sound of a live one was only one of many surprises I experienced. It was truly a lesson from the past. Completing the first Crystal Chronicles gameâs music with Tanioka left a deep impression on me.
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The first Crystal Chronicles soundtrack is incredible.
Yeah I mostly bought and played it for this