Just because we had to walk uphill both ways in the snow to play Let Us Cling Together doesn’t mean other people should.
War of the Lions is whatever, I don’t really care about it much because it doesn’t change much, but LUCT is an infinitely more appetizing and accessible experience on just about every level. Being able to play different story branches is great. UI improvements are amazing. Chariot Tarot is great for newer players. Script is significantly more legible.
I’ve played both and I love SRPGs and I love original presentation but my god the PSP port is just infinitely more palatable.
i won’t spoil things by getting into specifics but you’ll eventually get a few characters with unique jobs that are just absolute powerhouses, so don’t sweat too much if you lose a generic unit early on. you can technically make a generic unit better than the unique ones but it requires job min/maxing and a bunch of grinding
as you fight battles you’ll earn job points you can use to buy abilities like that rock toss. each job is locked into its own set of skills but you can assign skills from other jobs as a secondary ability set, and mix and match any passives you’ve unlocked. as you open up more jobs you can do absolutely ridiculous shit by combining different jobs and it’s why party building in this is so fun imo. it’s generally worth having units spend time in a few different jobs.
iirc the game barely explains brave & faith. they’re secondary stats that affect physical & magical ability. you can manipulate these later but for the most part you’re stuck with them, so try not to make a low brave high faith unit into a physical fighter. having low brave is generally bad but having low faith can actually make a unit’s magic defense higher because they literally can’t believe a guy in a silly hat is hurling a fireball at them, so it helps if your physical units all blame themselves instead of god. once you can manipulate these, you also don’t want too much faith on a unit or they’ll embrace religious pacifism and quit your party. i love this videogame.
knowing that on any given subject I am always only a hair’s breadth away from felix’ energy in this thread is why I must never leave my self-imposed one-post-per-season jail, even if that means ceding a post to the subcriteria that I cast one vote for a non-vanilla version of fft (and luct) before withering out of frame
anyway fft is good because it welcomes 5000 different approaches to satisfyingly navigate expectations of the player’s ability to exploit its structures. my inclination in this case is to lean away from prescriptivist tips until you actually hit a road block, but what you’ve heard so far does a pretty good job of simulating the “I figured this out fine when i was 10 but also i skimmed a guide” experience
note, however, that the game is designed in a way that you will almost certainly hit a roadblock. likely multiple. and the most pronounced roadblock comes in the middle of a series of battles that you cannot escape. if you save in the middle of the series and find yourself unable to beat the fight in question, you are essentially fucked.
I enjoyed remake LUCT a bit more because of all the bells and whistles and because the original had huge flaws to begin with
Original LUCT had levels matter too much; it was something absurd like a 3 level difference meaning dealing half and receiving double damage. There’s some weird level scaling involved too which made the whole thing annoying : bring your highest level guy and now suddendly every enemy has one more level and the map is hell for everyone else
Class balance is weird and one early class absolutely dominates with no effort
Archer
Rescue missions were even worse in this one than Rafa on the rooftop in FFT. Fucking Haborym
The shared exp system in the remake is very weird but somewhat works if you see it as a way to get new recruits to catch up more quickly, and don’t game the system by using too many units from the same class
One thing about PSP LUCT that really stands out to me is that the shared job XP ensures that your units won’t fall behind ~completely~, but they also aren’t… good. It functions like a unit’s “potential”; yeah, your guy is level 15 after just switching jobs, but he has no skills and no levels in that job’s support skills, so he’s still useless, just marginally less useless since he can hold a sword correctly.
(Having a leveled weapon skill for physical units and a leveled elemental skill for magic units is totally important to winning most mid and late game battles)
There’s also way too many classes to keep them all leveled, so you have to pick and choose the classes you want to compose your party of and stick with them until you’re in the last chapter or you quickly start operating at a significant disadvantage.
Using too many units of the same class can be a bit of a trap too, because enemies have a minimum level but no max level, so power grinding a class can actually make your game nigh unwinnable, on top of denying you some gear you can only get if you do certain fights within certain level ranges.
I love the remake to pieces, every time you think you’ve gamed the system it smacks your wrist with a ruler
LUCT has the awesome Alexander O Smith translation. WoTL on the other hand seems to be trying its hand at Medieval dialogue and it falls flat in comparison, idk I’m not a linguist.
i actually like how FFT gives you a couple unbalanced units that can single-handedly wipe the board because hey, if you don’t want to build a perfect team it shouldn’t stop you from seeing the story, and if you want a challenge you can just stick to generic units, or if you want to do some galaxy brain nonsense you can field a team of calculators and go wild
tho speaking of balance, someone’s been running a saltybet-esque FFT mod on twitch. it generates teams of 4 human & monster units with randomized skills & gear and has them fight in a single elim tournament that spectators can bet on. watching a calculator with Pig Skills run up on a ninja only to wave a knife around and cast Toot while some beastmode orator is shooting & yelling the whole other team dead is weirdly entertaining
Ground to a halt emulating SNES LUCT after maybe I wanna say 10 hours of progress. I’m not sure what I was doing wrong if anything it just became nearly unwinnable if I made any tactical mistakes. I ended up doing a lot of range baiting to attract enemy units into a position so someone wouldn’t get dog-piled into the earth. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used training to get new abilities earlier in the game?
I’ve beaten Tactics like 3 times and maybe only ever felt powerless early in my first run.
WotL translation is bad. Tastes vary and not going to say there’s no reason to play WotL (the original script can be quite bad in places!), but as far as WotL goes it:
Sounds like what Americans think Shakespeare sounds like
Murders every single good one liner from the original game
Eliminates the weird but great in-battle dialogue that your units will say sometimes
Adds a bunch of memes (hahaha a character said “spoony bard” oh ho they mentioned “a game of thrones” how clever)
Every character’s name is mutilated for no reason (Golagros (an actual Arthurian name!) becomes Gragoroth, for example)
They eliminate a bunch of ambiguity that was present in the original japanese. Chapter 1 in particular is a lot more clear cut. They decide not to mention some war crimes and change a character from definitely being an absolute cretin to being a falsely accused victim of politics. A lot of the darker stuff is either omitted or absolutely smothered beneath the incredibly purple prose.
I know I keep mentioning the prose, but it’s just goofy in the least fun sort of way. It’s just a slog to read. The one time they actually manage a decently evocative line it’s followed up with “Your envenomed words succor me, for when at last you yield - as you must - their poison will consume you!”
The last chapter was named after a Queen song to describe a major character’s state of mind and they changed it because the translators have no taste whatsoever
Nitpick: characters say “Gods” instead of “God”, making the fake catholicism polytheistic I guess?
Probably a million other things because they felt the need to screw around with absolutely everything for no discernible reason
OG FFT tried to do a very literal translation of the original text and ended up with something that was sometimes confusing and oftentimes baffling. WotL irons out a lot of the translation to sound a lot more consistent, but also eliminates a lot of subtlety and charm and adds a bunch of useless things. Part of this is maybe that Japanese can be kind of terse and ambiguous, and the original by virtue of being so literal manages to maintain that tone and energy at the cost of sounding super weird.
