Welcome to Let's Play Final Fantasy Tactics! This topic for the discussion the events in Chapter 1. I'll be creating new topics for subsequent chapters.

As of this post, I'm still uploading the episode and it is taking unusually long to get it to YouTube. I don't have work today, so I'll keep an eye on it. If necessary, I will reupload the episode.

Have fun!

Boobies.

Just kidding.

So what sort of names are you going to use for characters?

I'm still thinking about it. I will at least be using Chrona and Taku.

Do you prefer males or females in your party? With my experience, getting soliders from the shop, females have the best combined stats and don't take 10-15mins to get either.

Males have better PA growth, while females have better MA growth, so I choose my soldiers based on that and their zodiac compatibility.

Must take a long time for the video to upload and process, at least the LP episode. It's been at it for near an hour and fifteen minutes.

Yeah, the total load time was estimated at 90 minutes. Usually, it's 1/3 that amount.

Is the size of the video different due to a different recording process?

No. I'm using the same compression method as I did for FF13 with the .m2ts files, except the file size is smaller, due to a much lower resolution.

I know you said you like to get abilities first, but do you hold off on the low level ones, so you could possibly get them from human enemies once they turn into a crystal? Adds to the battles, but pays off early on, I think.

I've done 7hrs of work on chap. 1, 19 battles, and I have core abilities I want. HP Restore, Move+2, JP Boost. Figure do it early, so even a drunken monkey could win battles.


If this type of rpg works for you, I would look into Phantom Brave, used for sure. Story line... ehhh not bad, battle mechanics, unusal but fun, insane number of char. classes to choose from and titles to earn. PS2 and Wii are the systems they are on.

I found Phantom Brave pretty horrible, namely the part where you can only use characters for like 5 turns per a battle. I wouldn't call 5 different upgrades of the same ~20 jobs an insane amount of jobs though, its still ~20.

I'd like to see Arrow Guard get some use in this LP, there are a lot of enemy archers, plus its fairly cheap and its like the only archer skill worth using. Even better if it was used in Dorter.
Just one of those abilities you never see much but is actually really neat.

I believe Phantom Brave is on the Psp too

Dear God, Phantom Brave was depressing. Sure, it was interesting because you didn't have the grid and you could move anywhere in your circle, along with the timer on how long your allies stuck around... but its waaay too deep with the mechanics. Disgaea was complicated enough, but PB makes Disgaea look like a FF game.

I prefer Speed Save for the Archer. A number of damage formulas use Speed, namely Longbows (not Crossbows) and Knives.

I thought using a char. for only 5 turns made you level up other chars. as well. You couldn't have an all powerful one, running around killing everything. I know I got caught up in the dungeons getting different titles for my chars. and it was very hard. Right now I have 33 different races I can pick from. You gain them from defeating thing in a dungeon.

I didn't even bother with doing much with archer. I leveled everything I needed to unlock ninja for dual weild and once Samurai is unlocked, that will be the end of lvling up classes to unlock others. Dancer, bard, calculator, mime, just don't do it for me, unless I feel like move+3.

Problem I ran into is that my Marona was really fast and could pretty much double/triple turn any of my other team members, meaning that I either had to skip turns with her or she ended up killing everything. I found the limit turns for each of your characters rather tedious as well. I don't need encouragement build more characters; I would be doing that anyway.

All in all I think its a decent game with some interesting ideas, but I found myself losing interest in the game fairly quickly.

Sounds like there was a jump during the cliffhanger of the episode.

Ya, Marona was strong. I just looked an my file, she was 140, others were 70. I need to finish that up and put it on the shelf for another time.

OH MY GOD!
the battle in today's episode felt like it was in fast forward
i knew the psp/iphone leg was bad but i didn't expect it to be this much

Yeah, it's that bad. I tried to bite my tongue during the videos as much as possible, to focus on the positives.

i got so much used to the war of the lions slow speed that i really felt like you made the battle go in fast forward
if the music wasn't there i would have asked you why you did that

I remember the first time I played FFT, the very first completely controlled battle the recruits go into - I failed miserably. The reason was that I went in with just Delita and Ramza. I didn't realize I had access to other members. Luckily I saved right before that and felt pretty foolish for making such a stupid mistake.

same thing happened to me

Anyone who said they didn't fail that first time, is lieing. I was gun-ho my first time after the enemies and found myself on the wrong side of a beat down.

we're not lying considering that the game doesn't tell you how to select units for the battle and that made me think im only allowed to control ramza and delita in that battle

I think I might have lost the Gariland battle before but it was NOT because I only used Ramza. I never made that mistake, I dunno how so many people do, it's rediculous, almost everyone. Doesn't ANYONE (besides me) look around the screen to figure out the controls? I mean I more or less found my other team members by sheer merit of not knowing the controls and seeing what all the buttons did.

"Doesnt tell you how to select other party members"

Actually it kinda does, right in the upper corners of the screen it says L1/R1.

Ah, now begins the longest flashback in video game history! (Well technically the whole game is a flashback...)

So far loving the commentary, your pronunciation of Agrias surprised me, but I'll get used to it. One thing you might want to mention is the Absurd change from Duke (in the intro) to "Prince", lest the viewers become confused, probably best to affirm that Duke Larg/Goltana are the same people as Prince Larg/Goltana.

(Really the prince title makes no sense, especially considering where they stand on the ladder of nobility, Duke makes infinitely more sense).

Also I forgot to mention that the parliament is mentioned later in one of the Rumors.

Apparently a large number of people didn't. I was surprised the first time I heard of someone missing the fact that those other units were there, I was REALLY surprised as over the years I've heard the same complaint many times. I mean, why bring up the character select screen otherwise?

Happened with me, too.

Also, HC, a thought occurred to me when that knight broke your helmet: did you have problems with losing your equipment in test runs? And would you restart if a knight broke precious equipment, or would you just keep going?

The LP is looking good so far, HC.

Maybe I can get him or some of the other forumers to play Shining Force I if it goes well :P

@PlainOlJoe, that first battle it to give you an idea of the gameplay. None of the items carry over to other battles. The intro battle is a win no matter what. You can't do enough damage to your members to lose it.

He's LPed the game before, he was just curious to know what HCBailly will do in the future, as for losing the intro fight...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOewqwA1Wto

Actually you can, but its really hard. Main problem is Gaffgarrion.

Hey HC, I have a question. If this LP turns out well, would you consider LPing other SRPGs like Bahamut Lagoon and such? I realize it'd be a FAR way off, but still, I'm curious.

he said in the past that he never played bahamut lagoon so that's out of the question

I was just using it as an example. I really just mean any Tactical RPG.

I may consider other tactical RPGs, if FFT works out well.

As for equipment breaks, unless it's something unique, I'll probably just continue as normal. I may decide to buy backups of end-game equipment for this purpose. That is the drawback of recording this from the console, as I cannot simply undo problems like that.

Well, technically it was a "Playthrough," not an LP. Heh.

And yeah, I was referring to the rest of the game because knights remain a constant problem. Nothing like a low-level grunt knight breaking your precious Genji armor.

Honestly I couldn't get into Bahamut Dragoon, but maybe I'll give it another whirl one of these days.

I think HC would love Shining Force I though, it has tanking (Which I know he loves), ways of being absurdly powerful (*CoughDomingoCough*), FF4-style where each character has their own class, and depending on how you want to play the game, a small degree of planning as well (IE, 10/20 run or a 20/20 run? Depends if you want to do a bit of grinding or not, and it changes what characters you'd want to use depending on which style you want to play with).