RPG Progress Report

[isiolia]

Final Fantasy XI - GRINDING FOREVER. I'm trying to level up the Ninja job since apparently it's a really good subjob to use for Red Mage when soloing. AND I'VE BEEN SOLOING MOST OF THE TIME. I can't wait until I beat the main story and PUT THIS GAME BACK ON THE SHELF... but I also want to keep leveling up my Cooking skill ALL THE WAY TO 100. I only need to gain two more levels as a Red Mage before I'll be able to take the mission to get Rank 4. And then it's only TWO MORE RANK-UPS to victory! I think.

Used to be, for high end soloing. Not especially the case anymore since most anything it'd be viable against you can just outlevel

You get rank 6 after the Shadow Lord fight, at which point you can branch off and do the Rise of the Zilart storyline. Meanwhile, the nation storylines diverge again and go to rank 10.

Technically, the Shadow Lord fight would be the original finale for the base game, but relative to what's there, it's a fairly small sliver of what you could consider the main story. I'd mostly consider that to be the base missions + RotZ + CoP through Apocalypse Nigh (which is a finale you can access after finishing both of those expansions). Dynamis ties in somewhat, particularly with CoP, but isn't exactly that story heavy.

ToAU has some ties back in, but is largely separate (though decent). SoA seems to be similar, but in SE fashion will probably not be "done" for 18-24 months.

WoTG has you go back in time to the Crystal War, and in turn has a lot of characters and things that show up in "present day" Vanadiel, but the actual plot involves preventing an alternate future.

Abyssea and Voidwatch have (relatively thin) storylines as well, but they serve more to justify the existence of the content than add much to the lore.
Some of the AF quests and things are fairly decent too though.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

I haven't been posting in this thread lately but I guess NOW'S AS
Final Fantasy Tactics - GRINDING WAY MORE THAN I PROBABLY SHOULD BE. It took me a while to figure this game out, but now I think I'm doing PRETTY OKAY. I don't really have a solid plan for what classes my troops should be, and I'm a bit annoyed that I can only use a handful of guys in battle at a time, but I like LEARNING SKILLZ.
I'm currently in Chapter 2, on my way to rescue a princess I think? I don't really get the storyline of this game!

I would recommend against grinding in FFT. You'll ruin the rest of the game if you get too strong! You'll be ridiculously powerful at the end without grinding, especially once you get the Holy Sword skills.

[Nemoide]

Grinding is like an ADDICTION in FFT though! *oh hey, maybe I should have this class mastered and then this other one as a back up... I mean more proficiencies can't hurt...*

Technically, the Shadow Lord fight would be the original finale for the base game, but relative to what's there, it's a fairly small sliver of what you could consider the main story...

**fingers in ears** LALALA-I'M NOT LISTENING, THE SHADOW LORD FIGHT IS THE END AND THEN I CAN SAY I'VE BEATEN THE GAME AND NOT HAVE TO KEEP PLAYING IT FOR MY STUPID SELF IMPOSED 'BEAT ALL THE MAIN FINAL FANTASY GAMES' GOAL.
...We'll see how I'm feeling about the game once I've reached that stage.

[Jmustang1968]

I haven't been posting in this thread lately but I guess NOW'S AS
Final Fantasy Tactics - GRINDING WAY MORE THAN I PROBABLY SHOULD BE. It took me a while to figure this game out, but now I think I'm doing PRETTY OKAY. I don't really have a solid plan for what classes my troops should be, and I'm a bit annoyed that I can only use a handful of guys in battle at a time, but I like LEARNING SKILLZ.
I'm currently in Chapter 2, on my way to rescue a princess I think? I don't really get the storyline of this game!

I would recommend against grinding in FFT. You'll ruin the rest of the game if you get too strong! You'll be ridiculously powerful at the end without grinding, especially once you get the Holy Sword skills.

You mean you get overpowered once you get Cid?

[pierrot]

I don't really want to bore people in the Summer Challenge thread, so I figured I'd mention here that Grandia is starting to annoy me. The pacing seemed to be going pretty well up to the Edge of the World, and I really felt a desire to see the story through to the next chapter, despite the number of NPCs, and the amount of text each one can throw at me, feeling deflating most of the time. The writing actually felt pretty good to me, aside from a couple hiccups.

During all of the towns full of NPCs I was going through in the very early game, I was just hoping for some back-to-back dungeon exploration to cut some of the monotony. At the point I'm at now, the game has gone to the extreme opposite by arbitrarily lengthening a gauntlet of dungeons/mountain paths/etc, though. Although, "gauntlet" might be a slight misnomer, as this game is piss easy, even without the extremely over-leveled, beast-mode character the game dropped into my lap. (Whom I almost exclusively set to defend.) If it weren't for the level of management that stat, magic, and weapon skill growth entails (which becomes monotonous as well) I would certainly just be setting every battle to auto, and collecting my loot.

I honestly don't know what the developers thought was going to happen to the player during the course of this game. I have reanimating potions out the yang, and have not even come close to needing to use one. I spend more time fumbling with the limited inventory than actually using anything the game throws at me. I haven't even used any items in battle (or really even out of battle) other than to get rid of something to clear up inventory space. I keep thinking that this game could have greatly benefited from multiple difficulties, but that's a bit unrealistic in an RPG of this era. The battle system has pretty much lost any ingenuity for me, in the game being too easy to actualize any of the mechanics meant to diversify the battles. What's left is roaming around talking to a bunch of NPCs, and a story that has largely stagnated on me. I'm now back on my way to something that has any merit toward the narrative, but I know that there are at least three or four areas in between where I'll have to search every corner for enemies and loot, or talk to every single NPC multiple times (I'm slightly OCD) which is a chore.

I'd like to see where the main story goes, but the game seems to be telling me right now to, "Strap in for some filler, guy," and I'm quickly losing interest in continuing.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

Agrias too. Put them both in your party and you will be invincible. They were both cool characters! I wish they got more lines.

My Agrias was a game ender. She had great equipment, ridiculous offense and defense stats from time spent as a Knight, Attack Boost, and Chakra commands. She's easy to train because Holy Sword, and once she's optimized she can wipe out several enemies at once from a distance since Holy Sword. I beat a few maps with her solo.

The class system is a lot of fun, but no reason to master all of them. Three or four super soldiers is enough for me!

[alienjesus]

Agrias too. Put them both in your party and you will be invincible. They were both cool characters! I wish they got more lines.

My Agrias was a game ender. She had great equipment, ridiculous offense and defense stats from time spent as a Knight, Attack Boost, and Chakra commands. She's easy to train because Holy Sword, and once she's optimized she can wipe out several enemies at once from a distance since Holy Sword. I beat a few maps with her solo.

The class system is a lot of fun, but no reason to master all of them. Three or four super soldiers is enough for me!

There was no reason to ever bother learning most of the abilities anyway. The special ability sets of all the storyline characters in the latter half was more than good enough, and their stats were so much hgiher than the generic units that there was no reason not to use them

Unless you did what I did and use none of the additional story characters. I went through with the main Character and 5 generics just because it was a lot more interesting to customise those characters than to just use cid and agrias' sword skills.

[Valkyrie-Favor]

I didn't use Cid very much, but Agrias won me over in the cutscenes.

[Soldier Blue]

Finished Albert Odyssey and moved on to Panzer Dragoon Saga. I just made it to the underground passage (dome area). Really loving the game so far. Great music, story, and battle system. And also some very cool level designs.

[TheSSNintendo]

Putting in a little more effort in Breath of Fire over the past week, and now I'm about to recruit Bleu.