I thought the duration was fine, though I really should stop doing these in a single sitting… I think I took maybe 3 hours? I wasn’t paying close enough attention to when I started. Though I also walked to the next destination and grinded for 15-20 minutes at the end.
Spoilers
Yeah I considered that too, hence why I did a bit of grinding on the way back down. I think Cecil’s back to level 13 or 14 already. I also have 25k gil and it costs 14k to get all the new light equipment for Cecil, so I might just do that next week.
Tip if anyone gets stuck on the boss this week: Since you get back-attacked in phase two, your party is flipped, and assuming you have your mages in the back row that’s bad. But (at least on the pixel remaster) you can use a turn to flip them back to the normal position using left arrow and then the Change command.
I didn’t realize this until afterward, but oh well.
[quote=“seanblue, post:19, topic:75043”]I didn’t realize how powerful Rosa’s pray command was. 100+ HP restored for all members is crazy.
[/quote]
Unfortunately it doesn’t scale very well and has a decently high chance to fail.
Yeah I regretted not buying up his stuff on my playthrough. I actually left for the next area without upgrading his stuff.
Palom in particular. He uses おいら. I always wondered if あんちゃん is like he’s calling Cecil “big bro” but also 暗 + ちゃん?
If there’s anyone playing on PC, make sure you grab the mod BepInEx. It lets you run on the world map, skip the intro and logo screens, increase run speed and battle speed, remove the 60 fps frame cap and lots of other stuff.
I think there’s cosmetic mods but I haven’t used those.
One thing I just found was the option to have it instantly pause when your characters turn comes up. No more selecting たたかう to force it to pause! Or, you can speed up the ATB for everyone super fast and combine it with pause on turn, and the game basically becomes pseudo-turn based, instantly swapping to the next characters turn.
My guess would be that this is the outcome of worlds colliding: on one hand you have the western Dungeons & Dragons monks which are a strong influence on FF’s モンク class, on the other hand you have the real life Buddhism as perceived by Japanese people which is also clearly an influence on Fabul’s design.
This may be an attempt to reconcile the two. Using only the English term would probably sounds strange in pseudo-Buddhist dialogue, but dropping it would obfuscate the RPG class being used.
My interpretation is to differentiate between “monk” the videogame archetype (“martial artist expert that fights by using chi controlled with meditation/all that stuff”) and the actual “priest” noun as a religious figure which is his actual role.
Basically, it’s specifying he’s not simply a monk that just knows how to punch stuff but also not just a random priest, he’s a warrior priest specifically.
By the way I find that these meaning choices are extremely interesting to notice in these games since they’re usually completely lost in translation. There are a few interesting cases in upcoming games.
A relevant example from previous games was 騎士・ナイト・剣士 which all usually end up translated as “knight” even though there’s a clear distinction in the way the original terms are used.
Shame that we lost ギルバート just as he was coming into his own as a party member. I maintain that he was actually quite useful - being able to confuse enemies, having cheap party-wide healing, and he didn’t do bad damage after his sahuagin encounter. Losing リディア is also a shame. The scene with her reluctant to cast fire due to the trauma of her village being burned was cool. Again, really remarkable what a leap this is
I’ve got mixed feelings on セシル becoming a paladin. Personally I quite like the aesthetics of the 暗黒騎士 and I always enjoy when stories subvert the traditional light = good, dark = bad trope. But as a character moment for セシル it’s cool - seeing him get to face himself, literally, and begin to atone for the hurt he caused under the king of バロン is very nice. Ultimately I do like it as a moment, I just don’t love paladins unless they’re the cool train-themed ones from my favourite TTRPG (Heart: The City Beneath)
Cool little setpiece with defending the castle and the fights there weren’t too hard. But I did have quite a few party members die this week, and had to revive them. Fortunately フェニックスの尾s are quite cheap, and レイズ is already in the white mages’ repertoire
The fight against スカミリョネ or however you spell his name was a little tough, though the two kids were able to do メテオ and フレア spells with their combo command which chunked through a lot of damage
“The robbers broke in through the window, so I guess there’s no point locking the doors going forwards”
I see your point but it’s more like “the thieves broke through the window let’s add a lock on the door”.
But generally I agree that it makes sense for them to cut ties with Baron in a literal way, it’s mainly the way it’s explained by one of the mages that I found backwards. IIRC they say something like “we are blocking the Devil’s Path in order to prevent this from happening again” and I think “well that won’t help much, that being said you don’t have a Crystal to steal anymore so you’re probably safe…”
Thank you for the answers @simias and @Sisthra! I’m sure the intent was a mix of all those thoughts; I particularly liked your interpretation regarding the “priest” role, Sisthra.
I interpreted it as there having been a friendly relationship, or even an alliance, between Baron and Mysidia . The Devil’s Road was used (every since some spoilery stuff I won’t bring up) as a path for trade and relations between the kingdoms. Not only does closing the road make it harder for future incursions, more importantly it formally breaks ties between these formerly-allied powers.
When I played it, I assumed that maybe そう was used as a suffix or honorific for priests, but I didn’t find examples of it outside this game, so I guess not.
I think your explanation makes sense, but I don’t recall seeing a single example of him being a そう; literally all he does is train and fight. I don’t remember them mentioning anything regarding religion, ceremony or spiritualism. Which isn’t to say he ISN’T a priest; this wouldn’t be the first old game to gloss over its world-building.
In the end I think it’s like Simias said; “Monk” is a foreign word that a player might not be familiar with, so they threw in a word the reader would know to make the connection. It’s like how they use both the word 技能 and アビリティ and FF6; アビリティ is the “official” name, while 技能 is used in tutorials and explanations. Or, how they apparently didn’t consider calling a ring the “Bomb” ring was a spoiler for a young japanese audience in the 90s…
Pretty insignificant complaint but I noticed items don’t auto stack on the SFC version; I have to move them around. At first I thought inventory limits were becoming a pain but it’s just because I had a bunch of single stacks.
Also I noticed when you’re casting from the outside battle menu (for cure or something) the game says 誰に？！ and it’s so randomly aggressive.
This game really cycles the party members! A lot are kinda interchangeable so that’s not a big deal to keep getting used to, but I miss Gilbert and Lydia tbh. This has that same fast pacing where we go through a ton of mini arc adventures but with an actual coherent through line this time. I’m enjoying it well enough. The castle attack was a nice bit of framing to make for an action setpiece and a lot of drama with the dragoon.
I went through the story event where everyone is being very serious and grave about Cecil needing to confront his past with him as a pig, which I enjoyed a lot, but it was more of a pain when I realized I couldn’t un-pig easily and now having the spell cast again made the two kids into pigs while turning him normal haha. Had to heal that off eventually.
I like Cecil getting stuck babysitting these two kids. Also the moment I stepped into the mountain we got back attacked and they both got oneshot so lol, there’s my difficulty I asked for I guess. After that nothing was too tough but the damage numbers are definitely set more to keep us awake now than in the previous weeks so that’s good.
So the class change is the big event here. I have a lot of feelings about it so far – in concept, changing how the character works in battle to mirror story growth is cool! I also think he looks WAY more visually interesting and more like a character I want to be than a knight NPC in blue armor. But I had already intended to say that the ratio of magic casters to other kinds of characters has felt shockingly high in this game, which isn’t a HUGE deal so far but kinda weird. Taking away Cecil’s HP-spending attack-all which was maybe a little too simple but very cool, and replacing it with white magic is really boring. He’s, I think, the 5th person to know white magic already? Meanwhile かばう is great for story resonance but not exactly something I’m excited to spend turns on. We’ll see, I stopped when I had finished the week’s stuff without climbing back down or anything so I’ve done like literally one fight with him, so let’s give it time. They also seem to have cranked his numbers high to make sure you wouldn’t feel too bad about the transformation, heh.
Use the せいとん option at the very bottom of the inventory, next to the trash. It will restack everything for you. Can’t have all the modern QoL all at once!
Even in pixel remaster I have to do せいとん manually anytime I get something new. I would have preferred it to auto-sort based on my setting, but have a separate section for new items/spells so they are still easy to find.
Me taking notes during this week’s assignment: Well it didn’t take too long to have a full party, nice! Well, minus Rosa I guess.. Alright I’m alone again Yay we are 3 and have mages in the party again!
Oh, Tera is back in human form too!
I wasn’t expecting such a big turn over in our party!
Was a nice surprise to get thrown back to ミシディア.
It’s funny to (re?)play this game more than 20 years after my first playthrough on the DS. I don’t remember much from that playthrough and don’t even remember even I’ve beaten the game, so sometimes I feel like I’m playing blind and this is a whole new game for me, and sometimes I do remember a few things (I knew that Cecil would change to a Paladin but definitely wasn’t expecting it to be so soon).
Anyways. Back when we were a party of 5, I had a fun combat against the bombo boss in the mountain.
When it exploded, Yan was okay, Rydia and Cecil were in bad shape and the other two were dead. I wanted to resurrect Rosa but kept mistaking her for Rydia (I think because in my head Rosa is more a kid name than Rydia) so I wasted a couple of turns and of phoenix down, which led to everybody dying but Yan xD
I thought that I would get wiped but someone managed anyway to resurrect everyone before the end of the fight, so all was good! Apart from that, nothing really noteworthy / that wasn’t said before for this week.
Nope (at least not in my version). I get where they’re coming from though, I’m not mad! Also it was a bit funny to remove the ポーカー effect with ダイエットフード
I didn’t use a guide but I did have to type the sentence and translate it to get what was going on. Considered letting the dark night suicide itself while using the dark attacks but the fight ended before either of us got to 0 HP (and glad I didn’t try, when I read how much HP it maybe had!)
Nice! So colorful though. In my version of the 試験の山, the colors are so much tuned down that I wondered for a moment if I had accidentally activated Night Mode on my phone (which hides all notifications and makes the screen go black and white). I really like the colorless theme, it fits both with the undead theme and with dark knight → light paladin.
According to How Long To Beat, the game is about 24 hours long, which (if my pace is typical) means we’re about 20-25% done the game already. So it makes some sense to me.
I’m only one week ahead in my filthy preplay this time so I don’t have the full picture but I’m vaguely aiming for 10ish weeks based on the table of contents of a random walkthrough I found.
in human form too!
