T w e n t y S i d e d
Our heroes escape the city through the power of cinematic editing, appearing in the forest outside the city.
Well, That Was Easy
There’s another conversation like the one under the lake, where characters process what’s happened, clarify their motivations, reaffirm their goals, and otherwise make sure everyone’s dramatic arcs are nice and clear.
For Yuna and Tidus, this takes place in a personal heart-to-heart. Yuna is tempted to give up the pilgrimage. She’s been branded a traitor. She’s alone with her crush. It would be easy to run off with her man and leave the whole “saving the world” thing to others, particularly since there are still other summoners on the path and the world is now against her. But instead she decides to set aside her love and march off to die for the people who have rejected her. It’s a hard road and she might not get any glory at the end, but she’s doing it because it’s the right thing to do.
This is the moment that makes her the hero of the story, even if she’s not the “main” character. She sacrifices the most, and her decisions drive the plot more than anyone else’s. Tidus is a catalyst for change and his actions often drive the story, but his investment is so much smaller than hers.
The next morning the party moves on to…
The Calm Lands
The Calm LandsCalled such because this nice big empty wilderness is a good place to battle Sin. Hence, this is where the Calm begins. is an unusual location in the game, inasmuch as it’s kind of a throwback to the days of FFVII where you could wander around in open areas. Your route through FFX has been very linear up until now. Not only must all areas be done in a particular order, but there’s usually just a narrow path for you to follow. Your only choice is to go forward, or… not go forward yet.
To put it another way, your only meaningful decision is to decide how long you want to grind in a particular spot before moving on. That’s still technically the case here, but now you’ve got a vast open expanse in front of you and multiple points of interest to discover. Far to the northwestThere’s no real compass when you’re on foot, so when I say “north” I just mean, “the way the camera tends to point”. there are a few people to talk to and some goodies to get. To the east is the passage to the Monster Arena. Right in the middle is a little outpost. To the northeast is the passage to the next area. And there’s a hidden temple to the southeast, although you can’t reach it right away.
It’s actually kind of daunting. The Calm Lands feel vast in a visual sense, and it can take a good long time to cross them if you’re fighting monstersIn the remastered version, there’s a hotkey to turn off random encounters, which makes crossing the Calm Lands take just a minute or so. In the original game this could only be accomplished by acquiring special items that only became available in the late game..
This is where the story puts on the brakes. We’ve just gone through some pretty serious story beats, and now the storyteller is cutting the player loose. “Okay. That’s enough story for now. Go level up, or play some blitzball or something.”
The big attraction here in the Calm Lands is…
Monster Arena
In the Calm Lands there’s a guy who runs some sort of crazy monster zoo. But all his monsters escaped. (Sad trombone.) If you catch them, he’ll open the zoo again. And then you can pay him money to fight various creatures. You can do this for XP, or for drops, or to work on different fighting strategies, or just for giggles. If you lose a fight here you don’t get a game over.
The real goal here is to complete “sets” of monsters. If you capture one of every type of flan in the world, he’ll let you fight the super-flan. If you catch one of every monster in AREA, then he’ll unlock a super-monster representative of AREA. Most of these bosses are more dangerous than any of the bosses you face in the game, and it’s pretty clear this whole thing is for ultra-completionists who want to break the leveling mechanics.
My problem is that there is a lot of fun to be had in the monster arena, but it’s all locked away behind hours and hours of tedious monster-collection.
To catch a monster, end the fight by dealing the killing blow with a special weapon with the “capture” property. Which means you can’t use Aeons, magic, overdrives, or items. You’ve got to use these weapons that don’t have any useful properties.
Fine, fine.
But by this point in the game we’ve already passed through Besaid Island, Kilika Island, Mi’ihen Highroad, Mushroom Rock Road, Djose Road, Thunder Plains, Macalania, Bikanel Island, and half of the Calm Lands.
Ahead we have the Fayth Cavern, Mt. Gagazet, Omega Dungeon, and Sin.
The vast majority of monsters are behind us, and the plot has taken us through several one-way doors. We can’t go back to those previous areas just yet. What we need to do is finish the pilgrimage. Once we’re ready for the final showdown with Sin we’ll regain access to the airship, and then instead of finishing the game we can fly around and work on completing the Monster Arena. This collection quest would be a fun project to work on while the game is progressing. But instead we have to get all the way to the end of the game, and then once we have the airship we visit each and every previous location and spend hours rounding up monsters that offer no challenge and are now worthless in terms of XP and loot.
This magnifies all the worst parts of the Final Fantasy X combat. Every combat begins with a little animation. The music begins. The camera sweeps in on the battlefield. The monsters are revealed. Then you spend a minute or two defeating them. Then you get the victory fanfare and a couple of loot screens.
This is tolerable when battles take a minute or two of interestingFor some. Tastes vary. It’s okay. combat and you get a little reward at the end for your trouble, but it becomes torture when monsters die in a single hit, there are no decisions for you to make, and you get no reward at the end. You spend most of your time watching the pre-fight animation, and that’s just no fun.
You can’t check your progress from out in the field, so if you’re wondering what your collection totals are and which monsters you need, then you’ll need to hike back to the save sphere, transport to the airship, take the airship to the Calm Lands, and then hike all the way across the calm lands to the Monster Arena.
And the whole time the story is perched on the threshold of the climax and you’re thinking, “I could go beat Sin right now. Why am I doing all this?”
This setup completely misses the point of a sidequest. Sidequest content is really good for when you start to get tired of the main story and are looking for a change of pace or something else to work on. It’s something you do in little one or two hour sessionsOr more. Let’s not talk about all the time you spent at the Golden Saucer. Yeah. I know about that. throughout the game, and then return to the main quest. But here we just binge on the main game, and then pause the main game to binge on Monster Arena stuff for six hours.
It would partly fix the problem if we could at least buy capture weapons early in the game. That would save us from needing to grind captures in the boring starting zones. Even better would be to make the monster arena something you could jump to at any save sphere, the way Blitzball is currently handled.
The power delta between a normal end-game party and a maxed-out party is at least an order of magnitude in terms of damage output and defense. The special bosses are fun and challenging puzzles that can engage the hardcore, without dropping a soul-crushingly difficult boss into the main quest to frustrate the people that aren’t trying to break the game.
The Monster Arena is fun and interesting… once you put in the time. But you can’t really enjoy that fun until you do a bunch of grinding, and you can’t begin that grind until the game is nearly over.
Mt. Gagazet
The party ascends Mt. Gagazet, which is the home of Kimahri’s people, the Ronso. His individual character arc has involved a longstanding feud with a couple of his brothers, and that arc is resolved here. His brothers always make fun of him for being a puny six and a half feet tall, which makes him about a head shorter than the average Ronso. They don’t want a weakling like him to cross the “sacred mountain” where they live.
I think there’s also some bad blood on account of Kimahri leaving to care for Yuna. The brothers talk about how he “forgot” his people and his mountain. Maybe there are some conversations with him to clear this up, but I never encountered them.
Thankfully, the brothers are level-scaled so that if (like me) you left Kimahri on the bench for most of the game, his brothers won’t be massively overpowered for him and you won’t have to grind levels for Kimahri for hours just to get through it.
Although, you get a Game Over screen if Kimahri loses. I think it would be an interesting design decision to let the game continue on without him. Either he dies, or maybe he just gets stomped by his brothers and has to yield, and the party has to continue on without him. The player would have to decide for themselves if they want to accept this outcome, or if they want to reset the game and try the fight again.
This would probably feel like a win for most players. If you really don’t care about him, you’re free to ditch him. If you do care about him, you get the satisfaction that you earned his victory. Since Kimahri is the redundant wildcard character, his absence wouldn’t really be much of a handicap to the player.
Stylistically, I think making Mt. Gagazet a snowy region is a surprising choice. The game has been running through the standard videogame biomes: Water level, crumbling ruins, jungle area, city area, rocky area, ice level, desert level, grassy region, and whatever the hell we want to say Macalania forest was made out of. And now we’re going for “snow”? I realize the white snow of Gagazet is distinct from the blue ice of Lake Macalania, but it still seems like a repeat. Both “cloud level” and “lava level” are still available, and both of those would work for a mountain top.
Sure, snow makes sense for the top of a mountain. If it were up to me I would have kept the snow here on Mt. Gagazet and changed Lake Macalania to some other motif. But whatever. It’s not bad or wrong. It’s just unexpected.
Footnotes:
[1] Called such because this nice big empty wilderness is a good place to battle Sin. Hence, this is where the Calm begins.
[2] There’s no real compass when you’re on foot, so when I say “north” I just mean, “the way the camera tends to point”.
[3] In the remastered version, there’s a hotkey to turn off random encounters, which makes crossing the Calm Lands take just a minute or so. In the original game this could only be accomplished by acquiring special items that only became available in the late game.
[4] For some. Tastes vary. It’s okay.
[5] Or more. Let’s not talk about all the time you spent at the Golden Saucer. Yeah. I know about that.
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Final Fantasy games have never been paced well for side quests, in a narrative sense. When your goal is to kill Satan before he brings the apocalypse, any deviation seems trivial.
And, as you pointend out, you’re generally locked into a straight line to keep things moving forward. The side quests might feel better at times when the stakes seem lower, but that’s usually early in the game. I imagine the developers don’t want you wandering off the beaten path until you’re comfortable in the system. It also prevents level 10 players from wandering into zones with level 50 monsters. (Although I recall that being possible in FF2, which was a rude surprise.)
A giant meteor is going to destroy the earth! There’s not a moment to lose! Step one of my plan: Race Chocobos! Step two: Breed Chocobos! Step three: Return to step one!
At least FF6 managed to get away with it during the final stretch since the villain had blown up the world anyway…
Also Chrono Trigger where you are travelling through time anyway and so deadlines are less significant.
(Chrono Trigger might well be the best JRPG ever though).
I wasn’t going to mention it because it’s not, technically, a Final Fantasy game, but yes. In fact, Chrono Trigger is fairly unusual in that what motivates the heroes is pure altruism towards people they’ll never know or live with.
I mean, think about it. Lavos is destined to awaken 999 years after the main characters’ current day. The main characters will live out the entire rest of their natural lifespan not having to know or care about it in the slightest, and leaving the quest once they’re back in the current era, or messing about for 40 years doing whatever, wouldn’t change things because the people they’re saving are, chronologically, either already dead in the 2300s or don’t exist yet. So these three merry-go-lucky teenagers decide to save a world they’ll never live in from a foe they’ll never have to encounter, for no other reason than it’s the right thing to do. That’s actually sort of rare as RPGs go. Stacked up towards that, the fact that they’re taking time off to help random people across different timelines and go hunt for rare loot to be more certain of victory becomes not just plausible but completely in-character. I mean, they can always just jump to the Day of Lavos and attempt to avert it. No matter how much time they spend on the way, it has always will have happened on that particular day anyway.
Terranigma gives you a reason to dick around a bit more as well. A very human one. I’ll put it in spoilers for everyone who hasn’t played the game, because you absolutely should.
The only reason to dick around is to say goodbye to everyone. The hero needs to die to save the world.Christ, Terranigma. I had almost forgotten. Where’s the fairness in the universe when Chrono Trigger and Earthbound for SNES were both US exclusive and what we got in return was Terranigma?
Not saying this because it’s bad, mind you, but spoilers:
That ending is the most soul-crushingly depressive ending I’ve ever played in my life. It’s like having the endings of Planescape: Torment, Metro 2033 (the bad one) and Spec Ops: The Line piled on you at the same time. Listening to the Crysta melody still makes me cry, almost 30 years later, just because of that ending.I played it for the first time when I was, what, 14? I cried more than once during the game.
Paying for the resurrection of humanity with the ability to understand and talk to animals was soul crushing. And if that wasn’t enough you later meet the once little now grown-up lion in the sewers of annihilated Tokyo and you can not understand your friend.God, I get sad again even thinking about all the awful thinks that happened to the main character – needed to happen to the main character. And, unlike Shepard, dying and getting resurrected had meaning and impact.
The gameplay was fun, the story had a great theme from the beginning to the end (and the writers were not in over their heads!). The characters were interesting if confusing at times. The twist was not that surprising but I did not see it coming all the way. And the ending … oh god, the ending. It was perfect.
It’s the best game I ever played. Period. Nothing comes close. And probably never will. Yep, I’m biased. Proudly so.
Terranigma and Chrono Trigger definitely don’t pull their punches when it comes to “the feels”.
Right down to both of them having some of the best credits songs.
(AGH, my heart! I gotta play these again.)
Terranigma is amazing. I loved the previous two games.
The ending’s bleak nature was refreshing for me when I beat it in my late teens. The idea that you sacrifice yourself for the sake of the world and you don’t get a huge reward is wonderful.Although the second half of FF6 wasn’t as fun to me as the first half, it did handle side quests pretty well. Most of them are about finding and re-recruiting the party members that went missing since the “end of the world” one year prior. The Big Bad has already done his big apocalyptic thing, so taking him on is more about getting a chance to set things right again than racing to stop him. So, putzing around everywhere to find more companions and get more powerful makes sense.
There was no meteor hovering over the Chocobo Racing track, what are you talking about?
Actually, relentlessly going to the track to bet on races day after day is a pretty understandable response to the end of the world. Less understandable is the racers who have no problems with maintaining their schedule in the face of this.
Honestly, RPGs in general seem to have a problem with sidequests. Since the stakes almost always are some manner or another of “your hero is really invested in this!/the world will be destroyed!” it makes little to no narrative sense, especially when the game insists on spacing the sidequests around evenly in the story even during a point where the main quest seems excessively high-stakes (looking at you, Borderlands Pre-Sequel and your “Doom Laser is about to blow moon up”).
I remember a mod in BG2 that actually penalized you morality-wise for delaying the main quest with side-quests if you had the means to advance the story. I mean, it wasn’t a very fun mod, but it sort of made sense. What kind of Paladin would be going around collecting golden body parts while the villain is massacring a city off-screen anyway?
Got to give Fallout 4 some credit here – I’m not at all invested in fighting the Institute or whatever the main quest is supposed to be at the moment. So doing side-quests seems like an excellent use of my time.
Well *you’re* not, but your character sure is if all the cries of “
CORAL!SHAWN!” are any judge.Yeah, but then you find Shaun, and at that point even if you’re trying to role-play, you can stop worrying about the new ‘which idiotic faction do you want to murder people for’ main storyline and focus on side-missions, or exploration, or upgrading weapons, or whatever it is you like.
God, how funny would it be if the main character kept forgetting their own kid’s name during the SRS DRAMA moments?
The one little thing I didn’t like about BG2 was that while the main quest was often, it’s pacing kind of got odd with the side quests mixed in. Basically all at the beginning and end, with only a little in the middle.
It does make sense from an ecosystem perspective, though. There just isn’t enough space or population on Brynnlaw or in the City of Caverns to support a bunch of sidequests, so they only got 1-2 each.
The Underdark does have several sidequests, since they’re totally optional, although you don’t have access to all of them at one time.
Aside from pacing, placement. Here’s the most powerful weapon in the game… after you’ve beaten all of the most powerful creatures in the game.
FF12 was amazing in that regard. You could visit almost all zones if you wanted. Survival was unlikely though.
All FFs up to 13 (stopped caring about and have no knowledge of what came after XIII-2) gave you the: Go questing and level up or have a bad time with the end boss – excuse.
It is not an in-game reason to wander off and do some random questing, but FF bosses have almost always been , well, “end bosses”. They were never push-overs and one would do well to grind a bit before facing them.
Unless you are a tad genre savvy and believe in our two lord and saviors: zombie & phoenix down.
Having just replayed FFV, it paces out the sidequests pretty well.
A lot of the quests are just ongoing activities filling out your spells. Blue Magic requires you to get hit by various monster attacks; Blue Mage is one of the earliest jobs you get, so builds up over time as you use it. Summons need to be located and beaten, and only a few of them are actually required. Bard songs are obtained either via super quick odd jobs in towns or by leveling up your piano playing skills by finding each town’s piano.
The end-game stuff follows a similar model. You’re free to follow the bad guy and stop his nefarious deeds, or you can reclaim the 12 legendary weapons that were used to seal him away before, and potentially grab the mightiest Time, Black, White, and Summon magic spells in the process. That ends up being a crucial distinction, in that there’s main-quest logic towards completing the side quests. You aren’t dodging lightning bolts and happening to get a weapon for it, you’re explicitly hunting for tools that could play key roles in beating the game.
Now if only grinding out ABP wasn’t a pain in about 55.328 asses.
Actually, that lets me raise a counter-point to Shamus’ complaint about hunting down weaker monsters for the Arena; the main way the other games rewarded you for fighting enemies that were so far below your level as to render the EXP pointless was to have a secondary type of XP, whether it be the ABP from V or AP from III (with the crystals, not Kefka), 7, 8, 9 (all implemented in similar ways but in different settings) and LP from 12. Even if an enemy gave you 0.01% of a level of XP when killed, you’d get 1 AP, which, for example, in FFIX still meant a good amount if your characters were learning abilities, which defined quite a bit more than your character level did (although both were useful). That made low-level fights less annoying, although usually higher-level fights were still worth more AP.
Essentially, the Final Fantasy games suffer when they only have one experience mechanic because that limits a lot of mechanical character growth and renders low-level fights almost entirely useless.
10 technically has another type of xp in the stat spheres, but their only real grind use is leveling up Aeons who are almost all outclassed once you get some ultimate weapons.
Pretty much. As I’ve said before in the comments on this series, I managed to one-shot Ultima Weapon with Anima, and that was without half of the ultimate weapons…though, if I’d had them, I might have been able to get the ability for Kimarhi in that fight. :<
VI actually made this reward more substantial. You want to keep levels down until you can get the best Espers, so lower XP encounters are actually far better for you. It’s actually good in VI to run away from every fight, try to beat bosses and unavoidable fights at as low of levels as you can swing, and get to the end game. What I do instead is give myself all the Espers early on and just force myself to have an incredibly low-level run. That way I don’t gimp my characters. It’s incredibly challenging.
“His bothers always make fun of him for being a puny six and a half feet tall”
Man, my bothers are always making fun of me too. They can be such a brother
I recently played FFX for the first time (and got stuck on the next Gagazet appearance of the asshole and ragequit) and I think I missed ALL of the side quests. Apart from te blitzball which I do not care for too much I was not aware of any of the sidequests. Hell I went through the calm lands and I missed the chocobo racing and the way to open that dungeon below silent lands.
Also, for the expirienced, while we were going from the blitzballstadium City towards the Operation M’hen area we went throguh a canyon. The canyon had a bunch of goodies on lodges that are not accessible to the player. How do you get them? Do you need an item? Chocobo that can jump?
That area (and others) is only accessible by airship. But you need the secret password. Which is written on the ground somewhere in the Calm Lands. Which you find by following unintuitive directions written on other rocks. Which you find because an ancient Al Bhed monument told you about them. It’s complicated.
EDIT: Whoops, I thought you were talking about the canyon going to the Mi’ihen headquarters. Yes, the ones you’re talking about are chocobo accessible.
If there’s a yellow feather on the ground, a Chocobo can get you there. If not you need the post-pilgrimage airship to warp to the save sphere.
Most of the sidequests in 10 need the airship. Also most of them are not fun. Don’t worry about missing them unless you want to power-level.
Oh my god, Hans and Franz is absolutely perfect for those two. They even have the same cadences in their voices.
Since we are talking about them having voices I suppose we are not talking about Heidi Klums boobs.
Google you have failed me.
Let me help you:
I’m Hanz
I’m Franz
And we’re here to pump *pause, CLAP* you up!
Considering googles insistence on Hans and Franz being german boobs. No, this does not help at all.
the following keywords might help google out
Dana Carvey Kevin Nealon Saturday Night Live
also, try searching youtube instead of all of google. look for the thumbnails which either mention SNL or show two guys in fake-muscle costumes
thought that may be overcomplicating it. I type “hans franz p” into google and it prompted me to complete as “hans franz pump you up” and the first 6 hits were all youtube videos with the correct content (various H&F sketches from different SNL episodes) and the 7th hit was a Wikipedia article about the skit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_and_Franz
Huh, I don’t get boobs in my results but here you go
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-GLO_PydqU
I wasn’t quite serious and meant “it doesn’t help the mental image burned into my brain”.
Thank you for the links, though. ;)
(I don’t know why it was one of the first things showing up. Maybe because I’m German and google thought “Hey, Heidi Klum is german too, right? And most people search for boobs. Here, have boobs. German boobs. You are welcome.”)
Sure. THAT’S the reason. Uh-huh.
I … no! NO that’s not it! NO!
Google you have failed me!!?
Damn you google!! *shakes fist*
(No kidding though, that topic was in the news for weeks. And it comes back almost every other year. It’s freaking weird.)
They are going to PUMP ::clap:: Khimari up!
“Kimahri is weak little GIRLY Ronso. Kimahri is flabby LOSER.”
HORN! HORN!
“Once we're ready for the final showdown with Sin we'll regain access to the airship, and then instead of finishing the game we can fly around and work on completing the Monster Arena.”
There’s something very similar but much worse in Tales of Symphonia where a bunch of sidequests don’t even unlock until you’ve beaten the boss that guards the door to the final showdown with the villain but there’s absolutely no indication that’s the case (as far as I can recall), so it’s both narrative-destroying and profoundly non-obvious and counter-intuitive. I suspect the thought-process behind the design is that the player will save just before the end of the game, beat the final boss and then reload to play the extra stuff as sort of extra post-credits content that doesn’t require the world to react to the player finishing the story.
In a broader sense I do have a real problem dealing with sidequests that don’t mesh well with the main-plot because it pits my desire to actually role-play against my desire to see content and get rewards. I more or less gave up on Human Revolution because I had a really hard time conceiving of a Jensen that would spend his time pissing around doing jobs for random people on the street or working for the Triads instead of progressing the main-quest. I think overall my favourite handling of the problem is in Baldur’s Gate 2 where there’s a very obvious “go do sidequests now, player” part of the story, although that too can have the problem where you can spend in-game months and months not saving a friend but I think that’s more to do with the narrative goofiness that the resting system in the game causes more than anything else.
Honestly I always felt bad about spending too much in chapter 2 because of BG1, since
leaving Imoen on Spellhold just didn’t sit right with me. Of course the only other time you can do those sidequests are in chapter 6when Irenicus is busy ascending to godhood and butchering a whole cityso it’s lose-lose either way. There really never is a ‘right’ time to ever go sidequesting in any of the BG games, narratively speaking.But I need to raise 20,000gp to get to chapter 3.
“Didn’t you just spend twice that on a magic ring?”
Shut up brain! I’m trying to enjoy my open ended game here.
What’s really more important, though? Saving one girl, or ending a planes-destroying demilich?
Considering *you* have to be the one to unleash said Demi-Lich in the first place…
I’ve always thought that the Tales of Symphonia stuff was done in error. Like, that point was meant to trip a flag to allow those side-quests to be done but that flag was ALSO meant to be carried into NG+. For ToS I don’t believe it was, but for all tales games that came after it certainly was so you could either not fight the final boss yet and instead just do some side-quests or just wait until NG+. Basically, they were positioned as NG+ side-quests that you could optionally do early rather than post-game quests that could only be done in that small and somewhat obnoxious window.
ToS was also exacerbated by the shortcut back to the entrance and from the entrance back to the final boss being an optional search and find with mini-game. As a kid I never knew about that and only discovered it upon playing the PS3 release.
Reminds me of Star Ocean 2, where you go through the entirety of a long and complicated final dungeon, hit and use the final save point before the final boss, aaaaand…. immediately run all the way back out again, because you just unlocked a bunch of sidequests.
It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if the final dungeon hadn’t felt like such a challenge to traverse, both from figuring out how to navigate it and the difficulty (and danger) of the encounters. So you get to that save point thinking “I made it!” but in the background the game is saying “Oh, by the way, if you want extra content you have to give up all that progress.”
Course, it also pretty much doesn’t tell you this so your average player may not even realize all the stuff that gets unlocked. I’m not sure if I’d call this better or worse.
And don’t even get me started on the bonus dungeon and some of its encounters, which could be absolute dicks sometimes. Tri-Ace really had a thing for punishing extra content….Ah, Star Ocean 2. My fraternity brothers and I got a few hundred hours out of that game during my senior year of college. I still remember having an entire house watching me fight the final battle, only to lose after something like an hour because I couldn’t keep up with the boss. I never did go back to try again, although I still have the save file (and a PS2 connected to my television).
On a crueler note:
we tricked my little brother into unshackling Indalecio for some reason or another. That may very well be the most evil thing I’ve ever done.All the Shadow Hearts games do this too. The sidequests to obtain each character’s ultimate weapons and attack skills are only available after you’ve gone into the final dungeon. So unless you decide to walk in and immediately turn around and revisit every town in the game, you’re going to miss all of them.
Ah, the monster arena. The place where you break the game over your knee… After you get the airship.
You can break the game over your knee with the Tonberry in the cave of the stolen fayth, as soon as you can kill it. 99 level ups for everyone, and then you actually have to grind spheres.
The arena version is slightly faster but also actually hard to kill.
I loathed the calm lands. They were way to vast and a pain to run through even with negated enemy encounters.
It was weird but still nice to see they realized and changed that for X-2. The enemy toggle in the remastered version sounds neat as well, though unlocking the option to avoid enemy encounters with an in-game item always felt like an accomplishment in and of itself.
Edit: Snowy Gagazet worked fine for me. At that point in the story something calm was needed. Everyone in the group had reached a point of self-reflection, a more colorful or lively environment would’ve taken away from that I think.
Macalania was a crystal forest I believe. I may remember it wrong, but this also had to do something with a past battle between summoners and Sin.
X-2 also kind of fixes the lacking the ‘cloud’ section by making so you climb up to the peak of the mountains, and is actually one of the earliest parts of the game, and it’s vastly different from the snow below.
Almost like they’re not connected, really, but you can come back and find you can climb a ledge somewhere and end up at the summit’s ascent where you (almost) started the game.
A game I’d argue did the Monster Arena concept incredibly well would be Dragon Quest 8. In that one, you set up three-monster teams by finding unique monsters walking in the overworld and kicking their butts after initiating the sidequest early in the game. You can come back to it at pretty much any point and try your hand with different teams assembled to go through ranked challenges that unlock more options and more teammates to go acquire, with progression locked primarily by your distance in the game but subtly by the protagonist’s level as well.
FFX gets close, though. Shame about turning it into an endgame grind, when its endgame was already full of some serious frustrations.
I rented DQVIII for the PS2 a long time back, and the Monster Arena in that game basically halted all forward progress on the main campaign. Part of the reason I loved it was it was basically an homage to Dragon Question Monsters, one of my all-time favorite RPGs.
Were they? Because I remember getting to this point in the original FFX and just getting stomped repeatedly until I loaded my save and went back to grind Kimahri for hours before I could get through it.
Their physical and magical attributes scale based on K’s. The easy way to curbstomp them is taking him through Rikku’s path.
I had the good fortune to have given Kimahri both Steal and Regen by this point, which made the fight ridiculously easy and landed me about nine Level 3 Key Spheres.
Kind of. Their HP is scaled by Kimahri’s Strength and Magic, and their Strength and Magic is scaled by Kimahri’s HP, but their Defense is always 30. So if you haven’t touched Kimahri and his Strength is still 16, you’re gonna have a much worse time fighting them than if Kimahri has been workin’ out and has a much higher strength. Also, they both have a low Magic Defense of 10, so if your Kimahri happens to know some magic, the fight will be much easier.
If you’ve literally done nothing with the poor kitty just spam lancet and bust out overdrives literally every other turn. They won’t do significant damage and you have overpowered effects on your side.
The linearity of FFX hurts the side questing, but it’s especially bad in the International version (and HD re-release). After certain points in the game, obscenely powerful Dark Aeons are sprinkled into the world, each of which is orders of magnitude stronger than the final boss. They even blow away the game’s original ultra boss, Omega Weapon.
But because the game is so linear, there aren’t a lot of places to tuck them away, so some of them are entirely unavoidable if you return to those areas. Want to pick up one of Auron’s spheres for his Limit Break quest? Best do it immediately when the quest unlocks, because you aren’t getting into Kilika without fighting Dark Valefor after the scene in today’s update. Want to travel along Mushroom Rock Road? The Dark Magus sisters are waiting to chase you down partway between the entrance and Djose Temple.
It’s atrocious design, frankly.
It would be better if they did the Kingdom Hearts thing and said “hey buddy… would you LIKE to get your ass beaten like a trash can at a Stomp concert?” and if you say yes the boss fight starts. An alternate way of doing the same thing is putting some odd object on the ground where the boss fight is going to be, and you have to examine it and say, touch it, to start the fight.
But KH Final Mixes mainly came after FFX International, so it was clearly a learning experience. Same reason you can now skip cutscenes and couldn’t in FFX.
Dark Ifrit and Dark Ixion do wait until you talk to their summoner. It’s strange why they decided that wasn’t good enough for the others. The Magus Sisters can just be run past, but not only did I miss the Destruction sphere in Besaid Temple, there’s post-game stuff in there you can only get after the Dark Aeons unlock. Dark Aeons blocking temples seems poorly thought out.
Were they seriously called “Marlboro monsters” or did Shamus have a brain fart of some sort? :D
They are seriously called ‘Marlboro’. They’ve been a staple of the series for a while. Their status effect attack is called ‘bad breath’. And they are the bane of every Final Fantasy game ever.
EDIT: Whoops, guess I made the same mistake as Shamus. The reference is so clear you really want that extra ‘r’…
Aw, don’t say that. In Tactics Advance (and presumably in other games of which I have no first-hand experience) you can send a Blue Mage to learn the Bad Breath ability–at which point you become the bane of monsters and NPCs everywhere. (Assuming you weren’t already using Concentration with Doom or Death and thus already the bane of monsters and NPCs.)
Meh. The problem was always that monsters had varied resistances to status effects. Most wouldn’t be affected by the statuses that really matter. Most mages? Immune to silence. Most bruisers? Immune to dark. Oh, vulnerable to poison? Yay. Now you can just wait 20 turns for it to kill them.
On the other hand, sometimes they put odd little vulnerabilities in there.
FFXIII’s optional superboss is vulenerable to poison, and poison does damage proportional to HP in that game so it utterly shreds it.
But yeah, very often the monsters are immune to the one effect you really [i]want[/i] to use on them.
According to Spoony, MOST of the bosses in that game are vunerable to Poison.
Probably because grinding in that game is a pain beyond all asses unless you start about 5 chapters before you really need to.
XIII’s a rare game in that poison affects everyone equally, it ticks everyone’s health down at a constant percentage of full (0.32%/s if you must know, so about five minutes to kill with poison alone). Unlike X’s poison of hitting your party for a quarter of their maximum per turn and enemies for whatever they feel like.
It’s even more useful in XIII-2 as poison will negate regen’s effect while active, on top of still doing its damage.
A lot of the optional bosses in XIII are in fact, not immune to Death, and the final stage of the final boss is super-susceptible to Death when it’s vulnerable (which is good, as it’s effectively a timed boss, if you didn’t just squish it flat anyway).
The game also does let you see what things are immune to (in a nice icon display!) if you either hit them with that thing, fight them for a while, or use a scanning item/use your scanning ability.
Speaking of odd vulnerabilities, I defeated all stages of the final boss conga in X with zombie, then using Yuna’s ridiculous heals to do far more damage by herself than anyone else could hope to.
I cheesed that one, (also with One MP Auto-Lifes) because I’m putting up with severe grinding walls like that as little as possible.
…Unless you’re like me and playing the PC version at a resolution above 720p, in which case the Tips/Trivia/whatever bit DOESN’T #$%@ING EXIST on the enemy screen.
I loved this in FFTA! The actual reason I quit FFTA2 was because I spent hours trying to get a Malboro to hit my blue mage with bad breath, and I’m pretty sure he actually didn’t learn it afterwards.
They’re even super-annoying in X|V if you get clipped by their telegraphed orange cone of doom as it cuts your max health by about half as well as making you super-slow, and weak, and vulnerable, which making escaping an issue.
It’s actually “Malboro”:
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Malboro_(Final_Fantasy_X)
Fixed in the OP. My brain will ALWAYS parse it as “Marlboro”, and my fingers will always want to type Marlboro. I can’t help it. Halfway through my brain does an “Did you mean MARLBORO?” auto-correct on it.
I’ve never been a huge fan of collection quests unless they take me somewhere interesting. Thankfully some games help, like Metroid Prime making the pickups make a noise you could hear through walls or MP3 actually giving you a map. You still had to find the secret entrance or walkway, but at least you knew the general area to look.
People may not “remember” Hanz and Franz, but they may actually know who they are thanks to State Farm and Aaron Rodgers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pa5mj6ifCz4
I looked up Hanz and Franz, and recognized them as the State Farm guys.
My generation approaches so many things from the opposite direction heh. Or maybe just those of us in Wisconsin :)
Yenke and Biran are here to PUMP…”clap”…YOU UP! I, too, am soo old, and remember watching Hanz & Franz. They are so funny to me (then & now). By the way, I have enjoyed your work for the past 4 years, and I have especially enjoyed your ME3 & Final Fantasy X breakdowns. Thank you, and keep up the great content.
Agreed that sidequests are best done during the game. It would probably be best if the whole capture weapon thing was possible from the start, like training a Blitzball team up is very quickly. However, there is something to be said for “endgame” materials. In other words, it’s so hard you’re not even meant to touch it until you’re done. It would sand some of the edge off if you could be 60% done with the Endgame before you even got to the free roam end section of the game.
The rewards simply for capturing all monsters in an area are very very large. I didn’t do much capturing outside of the Calm Lands, and I still was gifted a bunch of ‘three stars’, which can give my weapons the ‘One MP cost’ ability. Proceed with dualcast Ultimas for 2MP cost. Win game.
Also the first of such quests in the calmlands itself will give you enough farplane winds to put deathstrike on a weapon. Rikku’s capture weapon so you could get free items from mug with your deathblow and works in swimming sections. Also lots of normal enemies along the main path are susceptible to it making your journey to the airship a piece of tasty cake.
Oh dear. I was in high school. Taking German. Needed to pick a “German” name to use in class.
“Ich bin Franz!”
Yes, I had a friend in the class who took “Hans”. Yes we learned to do the basics of the skit in German.
Congratulations, you wrote about FFX and managed to embarrass me about 25 years ago.
I get a big kick out of the “Kihmari proves himself” fight against Hanz and Franz. The location, the music, the setup, I think it’s all great. And I used to watch old re-runs of SNL at like 2 in the morning, so I was familiar with the dated reference.
But I gotta say, I do also really like Shamus’ idea. It reminds me of how Final Fantasy VII had two optional characters, “Vincent” and “Yuffie”. I can understand why modern game devs would want to avoid the workload that would come from that, but I do miss having the option of a Non-Critical character in your team.
Or even a playable character just straight-up DYING. Something Final Fantasy also used to be known for…
Oh, thing about that fight too, not only do they scale, but you can also learn every single one of Khimari’s overdrives from them by repeatedly using Lancet to learn them until it stops giving you new things.
You’ll never use them, but still, you can get them all.
Most of them. I’m pretty sure you can’t get Nova.
Correct. Only stuff to give nova are omega weapon and nemesis.
I stand corrected then.
I never bothered with either of those bosses, or even knew they existed.
One’s an airship scanner location that’s obvious by simple fact that it’s a chain of islands that has no airship point on it.
The other is the final boss of the arena and the hardest enemy in non-international ffX.
The ruins? The place that is a terrible idea to walk in unprepared because the Malboros will just ambush you?
So I never went anywhere in there.
Eh. Ribbon aint that hard to make, aeons are immune to his nonsense, and you have access to the no random encounters shield just out to find once you have the airship.
Looks like nobody’s mentioned it yet.
So the Monster Arena guy says all of his monsters escaped. He offers no explanation as to how that happened or why it won’t happen again. So the heroes are helping this guy create monster abominations, some a hundred times more powerful than Sin, and he’s keeping them in a pen that proved ineffective at containing trash mobs.
But wait, the only evidence we have that they escaped is his word.
Far more likely he built the place and then ran out of money to actually get monsters. Fortunately there’s some protagonists here willing to work for basically free.
*puts scotch tape over the entrance*
“This oughta hold ’em!”
Shoulda used duct tape.
You know, my wife and I have started two separate playthroughs of Final Fantasy X over the years, and each one ended shortly after arriving at the Calm Lands. Given Auron’s line about this being the place where summoners often lose their way, that always felt . . . a bit spooky.
The worst part about the Calm Lands is how it reminds me of Cocoon in FFXIII.
Although, now that I think about it, I suppose that’s actually a new thing for me to hate XIII for: that Cocoon wasn’t even as good as the Calm Lands. Not even close.
This is why you try to keep your most talented and experienced developers instead of driving them away in-between installments of a franchise. That is assuming you’re smarter than most of the drooling idiots with MBAs who are in charge of large AAA game companies.
You mean Gran Pulse?
It’s definitely the worst part of XIII, as the previously-linear and finely-tuned difficulty curves dumps you in a field and says “go grind a bit, but we’re not telling you how much!”.
It’s so counter to the rest of its design.
No no. He meant cocoon. FFXIII is commonly reviled as the hallway simulator. You have literally just nothing but hallways. The fact that they put shops in the save points meant they didn’t even have reason for towns anymore. There is no left, no right, only the hallway. X at least TRIED to include some side paths and living spaces to distract you from the linear nature of it.
Except Gran Pulse is the part where you’re dropped in an open field (with pretty corridors branching off of it), much like the open expanse of the Calm Lands, which is what led me to that assumption.
XIII’s at its strongest when it’s not open, which sounds weird, but it clearly was designed with a tight progression in mind. Not that X is a lot different, as there’s either absolutely no reason to or no ability to backtrack for the vast majority of the game.
That last bit caused me to restart after running around Gran Pulse for a while, because you know what doesn’t drop from most enemies?
MONEY.
You know what you need to buy materials to upgrade your equipment when drops aren’t that common?
MONEY.
The best money-gathering spot is actually the lobby of the final dungeon, as the perfume dropped fairly frequently by the enemies there sells for a lot.
Although the upgrade system is incredibly stupid and obtuse and you don’t actually need it for anything really anyway.
It’s been over a day since the post came out, and there’s no Rocketeer novel in the comments section. Is he okay? Should we file a missing person report?
A novel of FFX:
“For Sale: Spirit Lance, never used.”
May as well get the first of its two upgrades done to uncap damage for an aeon right? I mean the item to do is easily obtained and everything.
I’m enjoying reading this series. Haven’t played FFX and don’t have time to, so it’s nice to know what I missed.
Typo nitpick: “Monster Area” in some places, “Arena” in others.
Now I’m mentally naming the brothers ‘Honso and Fronso Ronso.’
You say that combat is interesting for some but this honestly baffles me in the case of casual players of the game. For people who aren’t looking to play around with weird mechanics I don’t understand how they manage to shut their minds off and convince themselves that mashing confirm for two minutes is a good time. On my recent replay of the game where I stopped at Macalania Temple I’ve gotten thru every random encounter this way (I say this in complete honesty and with no exaggeration) and I haven’t even spent time grinding.