Yeah I don’t really understand machinists either at the moment. I went with Balthier/machinist because Balthier had a gun and machinists use guns so it seemed like it fit. Apparently guns don’t do that much damage but the potion/remedy lores come in handy later on.
Probably going to make Ashe a white mage because I’ve been playing it straight so far with most everyone else outside of Vaan and Penelo.
yeah guns ignore defense, but they have lower attack values than any other weapon type to kind of make up for it.
ironically i think balthier is one of the slowest characters so it takes him longer to fire a gun than all the others! i made him a machinist and a white mage and i’m not feeling him in either role.
this game wasn’t really made for a job system, but it’s kind of workable now that you can pick two. the characters feel boring and restricted with just one job, but when you get to pick the second they start to feel a bit more interesting. Feels a bit like FFT where you get to use your learned skills from other job classes.
magicks being in chests is fine, i’m just mad because i need blind for some of these harder hunts i’m doing and there’s no way for me to get it right now (i’m also mad that missed it somehow)
whoever designed the system that makes enemies flinch did an amazing job, they bounce and bob almost rhythmically as each hit connects
machinist is best as a secondary for white mage so they can do some damage and get hastega later on, plus steal is on that grid for characters who don’t start with it
iirc machinist is good on weak mode, where the lack of damage scaling works to your favor.
i’m not at my 2nd job yet but this is the plan so far
vaan: shikari/breaker
balthier: knight/time mage
fran: uhlan/white mage
basch: bushi/monk
ashe: red mage/archer
penelo: monk/black mage
i decided to mostly front load melee jobs since magic isn’t super practical til you get more MP, and monk seemed like the most useful to double up on so i could avoid machinist
tho yeah the game is easy enough you could probably beat it with a full white mage party so don’t stress about optimizing
Yeah after thinking a bit about it, I believe I like it too. It gives back a bit of significance to treasure, since most other chests are just randomized gil and consumables.
I thought they would just do the asshole thing like with the ultimate weapons and have a 1/5000 chance of spawning but all those chests are guaranteed to spawn at fixed locations and always contain the spells/skills, so you can just check a FAQ if you miss any.
Apparently, in a weird decision, Balthier is the party member with the slowest attack cycle for guns, making him the least indicated for the machinist job. Kinda baffling, considering he’s carrying a gun in his portrait art, but eh.
Current lineup is:
vaan: knight/breaker
balthier: machinist/monk
fran: archer/uhlan
basch: bushi/shikari
ashe: red mage/black mage
penelo: white mage/time mage
So this means that most of my magic is isolated on two people, which is probably a bad move, but it does have the affect of making one of them a BUFF MONSTER, and the other one just really good at handing out damage. Right now the only limited use person I have is Balthier, who is going to take awhile before machinist becomes worthwhile, but can at least hand out damage well enough as a monk. Basch is so glass cannon, but also a hell of a cannon when he gets Haste-d and just starts multihitting; I supposed i could dagger/shield with him to buff his armor but AT WHAT COST?!? Vaan is tanky as shit.
So in playing this again, I am still amused by how much hatred Vaan gets on the internet. He seems so harmless to me, and certainly isn’t whiny or whatever, but is just an audience surrogate for getting swept up in the plot around him, even though he isn’t central to it at all. I guess this is probably a big difference for people coming off of ffx (which I never played, but from what I understand the main character was HELL OF INVOLVED in the plot), but I like it.
Interesting enough, it is one of the things in the game that breaks with Star Wars, in which a giant universe always comes back to focusing on one family of like 5 people, no matter how many planets or whatever get involved. Everything is always just about the Skywalkers and this just ruins the idea of the universe sometimes for me. It isn’t even like Dune or any number of other things where like a Messaiah character shows up and focuses the universe on them; nope, in Star Wars literally ANYTHING that happens in the universe is connected to the Skywalkers somehow, no matter if they know it or not. So basically, this is me saying I appreciate how much Vaan in this game is just like “nah, I got no reason to be here, but fuck it, what else was I gonna do? go back to being a street orphan? fuck that,” and goes along with it.
The Vaan hate is undeserved, for sure. The audience surrogate role is well played in the first act, but around the time you get to Bhujerba and especially after you break Ashe out of imprisonment, he starts doing a lot of “clueless kid” stuff. Again, that’s perfectly in line with his characterization, but I can see how it would elicit a “shut up kid, the adults are trying to save the world” kind of reaction
Yeah, there’s one scene I can think of where he starts doing that, and it is pretty funny because the adults then just talk about shit while he and Penelo wander off in the background, and I just laughed. For the most part, he keeps it pretty minimal, so I don’t mind it at all really, and it isn’t like the other characters get pushed out by him (more often, it’s the opposite, and that works pretty well).
Vaan and Penelo are lot less bothersome in Japanese, there’s an annoying smugness to english Vaan’s delivery and that coupled with the stuffy vocal recording quality makes him unpleasant to listen to. He’s a bit more chill in Japanese, still brash, but sounds a lot less like a nasally plump-cheeked rube.
Oh yeah, I switch to JP audio like right away, as soon as I realized the dub had that weird, compressed/shitty mic thing that Persona 5 had.
I figured since I’d never played the whole game with the JP track I’d give it a go, but this is one of the few games where I actually prefer the English in some cases. The English script really feels like it’s own thing rather than a translation of something, which is damn impressive.
There’s a trophy for completing the bestiary and I’ve never read all the entries, really tempted to try and do it.
Here’s a useful FAQ (when’s the last time you looked at one of those?) on where to find all the specific skills/spells in IZJS.
The Ascii table formatting really takes me back.
pretty sure when I played the original game I ran with the equivalent of
vaan: monk / time mage
ashe: bushi / bmag
fran: archer / wmag
and just ignored the others
The only thing I don’t really like about Vaan is the nasally sound his voice actor gives him. Like he’s always speaking through his nose. At least that’s he sounds in English. I haven’t heard his Japanese VO.
Is anyone taking screenshots of this? Is there some dumb watermark that ruins every photo?
Yeah, I think there is one like the Sega one that showed up on the Yakuza 0 ones.
yeah, I’m pretty mad about the watermark. it has actually dampened my enthusiasm for taking screen shots, but I also feel like anything I snap has probably been seen before? It’s too bad they didn’t include a way to disable the hud.
There’s no good definitive album out there, at least not one that I know about, that documents the game’s finer environmental details, so I guess that is a project which will have to be left to people emulating it on PC. I’ll never understand the corporate mindset that prompts a watermarked screenshot feature. You are actively getting in the way of your own handiwork.
Japanese publishers do their best to personify the sweaty nervous conservative salaryman stereotype