Insane Difficulty: Augestein - Viewing Profile - Insane Difficulty

Seriously, this game annoys the hell out of me with how the fights go back and forth...I love it.

The Extra Battles-- Which I started calling "Hunts" thank you Final Fantasy XII, are the best part of this game. They are hellish trials far beyond the difficulty of a standard battle and take a massive dump on you... Until you win. But that's not all, the game dangles these super powerful items in front of you so if you win, you get some amazing items.

Monsters are... Interesting. They all of a ton of passives and they have a ton of abilities instead of just having the lame "lol 3 abilities and 4 with Monster Skill." Recruiting a monsters if fun and easy on the account that randoms have set monsters for you to recruit and ... IT'S IN THEIR DESCRIPTIONS. Speaking of descriptions, they are everywhere in this game. Skills have formula descriptions, monsters tell you what they resist and what they have innately. It adds for a surprising amount of depth.

Emmy, I'm moving right now, but I swear to you that I'll start posting videos soon enough (And probably be on Discord as well, but I have to get a constant internet connection where I'm not typing on my phone)! I've done 33 battles, and get this, I'm not even close to Chapter 4. It's crazy how many battles have been added to this game.

I'll post up something more detailed later, but seriously, this game needs more love. It's still actively being worked on, and it can only get better at this point.

This is where I absolutely draw the line for this mod and I'm going to be straight up honest. I don't want to play it anymore, so that's it. My "Let's Suck" Playthrough is going to stop at Altima. It's just not fun, and I'm sick of messing with the AI, watching some TV while playing and editing the hell out of my videos so I don't sound bored as fuck, because it's actually not really fun at this point. Anyway, let's talk about the battle.

This is one of the most shoddily designed, unfair, luck based monstrosities I've ever had the misfortune of playing. I'm actually going to start from the beginning so I can just setup how awful this is. I'll start by saying that my Ramza started this battle at level 68. It's pretty significant.

1) The new Vormav 1v1.

Realistically, this sounds exciting, and honestly, everyone that played this game beforehand did want this. I can't even lie and say no one didn't. It's the final confrontation from what is the the penultimate boss. Altima may be the final boss but there's more at stake against Vormav than Altima. Altima is just a force-- a big bad that's hyped up by the villains and the text. Sure, Altima may have more mystique than everyone else, but Vormav has been the scumbag you've been after the entire time and is indirectly responsible for the death of your entire family sans Alma. You've been wanting this: Ramza deserves to beat that dastard into the ground from the moment Vormav arrives on the scene. However...

The battle itself is terrible. Let's begin. For starters, Vormav is the same trash you've been tolerating on every single assassination mission at this point. He's a final stretch baddie that can spam equipment breaks on your characters. While this may have been sort of present in the original, this was not nearly as common of a thing to deal with in Vanilla. Equipment breaks aren't extra difficulty at this point: it's an extra reset when you have good gear on-- or even gear that you can't duplicate because you know, it's the final stretch, so even if you had millions of gold, it wouldn't even matter because you can't buy equipment? So why, on why are you adding MORE equipment breaks here? It just adds an additional aspect to a climactic fight that just shouldn't be there. Plus, if you don't have equip change, this literally means you have to go through 3 extra fights with broken equipment. That's... Stupid. That wasn't a problem in vanilla, it shouldn't be one here. Now in my case, what did I do? I broke his shit. And you know what happens? He starts using skills like "Dimensional Sword" without having a sword. Really? I mean Really? And my favorite part is how it's not able to be dodged. Well whatever, I ended up nerfing his stats to the ground leaving him to flail at me like an infant (might I add that it was like... 6 Power Ruins? I mean is this really necessary to have his PA this high? A Twist Headband / Power Sleave Ninja doesn't quite get PA like that, and he has to wear outdated wimpy gear). It's time I mentioned this, as 1.3 is excessive with this: enemy growths and multipliers are absurd. People that say that you really don't need to worry about levels are wrong. It's a huge problem by endgame because enemies have multipliers so high that they can essentially have whatever gear that want and by around 60ish, rock 999 hp and around 100-300 MP while STILL having around 12-14 speed. These stats don't even feel like there was any real thought or effort put into them, and just seem to be randomly jammed in the patcher as the stats don't even feel proportionate or anything just "let's make their multipliers higher than the players." It's almost offensive to see a KNIGHT class have more mp than a wizard. I don't care if it's a boss, this is horrid balance and reminds me of a games like this:



If you're wondering what's the point of this video, it's to show that the balance in this game is similar to 1.3, where defense hardly even matters, and the only thing that matters are whether you get a miss or a hit because the damage is too much.

Zodiac battle: And a problem begins immediately. Any status buffing equipment is bugged here. Meaning that if you walk in with your nice Save the Queen or Ragnarok, it doesn't work. How could you let something like this get by? If you're going to add extra aspects to the game, that's fine, but make sure it works first. I especially love the part where Vormav turns into a zodiac beast and he literally transforms into the words "Vormav" and a bunch of Japanese text or even just a bunch of floating arms before he actually transforms. You think I'm kidding?



It's like it was made in such a way that no one was expected to actually reach here... Either way, the Vormav battle is a chore and just as much garbage. Huge massive AoEs that inflict status effects on your character and hit pretty damn hard. Wouldn't be such a problem if you know, I wasn't spending a shit ton of time healing units and running around. Also, I must add that I only used 4 party members here instead of 5, and not through choice either. Reis didn't have Move +3 so she barely got to DO anything in this fight. Yes, that's right, this fight is pretty much balanced around the notion of your character having like 6 move. Filthy 5 move walkers can go to hell, because this game doesn't tolerate Move + 2 unless you have the speed of a god. Which, I assure you, you won't, because almost godspeed is still average speed in the land of 1.3. The fight even assures this by giving the boss CT Save to ensure that it goes on longer. Sure, she got to punch him for the final blow, but it meant very little as my Jav II guy could have done this. My favorite part is how this fight took about 53:37 with me frameskipping faster to speed it up, and about 40 minutes of the fight are nothing but the zodiac fight. This isn't fun. You get him in a loop where he acts like a dumbass and it's literally you punching, stabbing, nuking to kill this beast. Specials aren't anymore useful than a generic at this point, as punching him in the face is more cost efficient than anything else. Also, why was I given a Ragnarok as a War Trophy? Even the Onion Knight doesn't want the shitty Ragnarok because Knight Swords are force 2-hands and she'd rather use a shield or dual wield, of which case, is an option REMOVED for some stupid reason in 1.3. It didn't add balance, it just made them weapons that I don't use outside of very specific circumstances (in other words, they suck in almost all instances where evasion is an option).

And finally, we get to Altima. The final boss that we all haven't been waiting for. And it's terrible. The enemy is way too fast (as usual), as 15 speed Bard still manages to be slower than her, which means that any slow class is going to be a punching bag. But that's not even what made me hit the "fuck it" button. Oh no, let's take a look at the patcher instead:



I am NOT dealing with all of that hp. And 175 Multiplier of speed with 70 speed growth? MP growth is too high as well. Want to hit her with slow? Oh no, that's flagged for immunity now. Want to hit her with Don't Act to give yourself a couple of extra turns to swing the fight in your favor or even stop her from doing anything in her first form? Can't do that either. 35 Class Evade instead of 11? The only question that comes to mind is "why?" She already has THE best durability in the game, was there really anything else that needed to make her more durable? Well I'm glad you asked, and the answer is "YES!" Apparently, Arch thought that this class ALSO needed Magic Barrier, which means that every turn that you don't hit her, she recovers 999 hp in addition to being able to reduce damage from having Protect and Shell on, AND haste serves to make an already stupidly fast class go even faster to recover hp. The enemies on the field are of course flagged with immortal, and she can decide to revive them at any moment, which means that even if you wipe them, you might have to do it 2, 3, or 4 more times! Oh joy, what fun. I especially love the part where I'm expected to find any of this enjoyable. I can't plan worth shit because the AI can literally do anything it wants and has the durability to not need to worry about healing-- but has plenty of power to do so. I also love the Rafa style moveset "? Angelic Holy" Which can literally fuck over 1 person, or everyone or even no one.

But wait, suppose I manipulate the fight in my favor by having Altima think she should try to Double Sword my Hamedo Bard for way too long! The next form is even worse! This one would be more interesting if it weren't so poorly designed. You might be asking how it could be more interesting? And that's easy, it has 0 PA multiplier. Which IS more interesting as this essentially means that it's always going to cast spells. Interesting you think, until you realize that it's JUST as durable as the first form AND it has Mag.Def Up and Defense Up ensuring that this fight is even MORE boring somehow, AND it has no charge. So kiss any chance of casting a spell ever again goodbye. 190 speed multiplier + 70 growth is so stupid that I can't even begin to fathom how someone could ever have even let this thought cross their mind, let alone put it in a patch and released it for public play.

I think this might be quite literally the worst designed set of fights I've ever seen in my life. So once I get to that video being uploaded, I'm done, and I'm moving on to something else, like a good mod, like this:



A mod that feels like it had more time, effort, and thought put into it. I'm sorry, and I know I'm going to get a ton of dislikes for this, but I think people need to know, 1.3 fizzles out towards the end, and it drops off hard. You spend all of that time learning new tricks, getting better at the game, only for the last fight to remove almost every ounce of strategy and make almost every endgame class useless. Which is something even Vanilla never did. Sure, your Math Skill-- I don't give a damn what class it is because Math Skill shreds the game in two, unit was overpowered, but at least when it got down to it, you could USE a Squire with Math Skill and have fun with it even if it wasn't the most effective combo around, in 1.3, there are less fun combos to make because of how endgame is designed. It doesn't want you to think of clever things, it doesn't want you to have fun using Squire with Planar Magic.

Instead, it wants to show off how "hard" it is, and instead ends up being a glorified mess of a game-- not really worth playing after Chapter 3. There's a lot of little things about 1.3 that gets really lazy towards the end, and it's almost sad -- at the risk of sounding kind of off-putting, I apologize-- that this mod's scope claims to be a more "balanced" and challenging version when the changes don't actually unlock the AIs true potential, it just makes it a broken mess. And before a counter argument is made, let me start by saying that most of the battles are in Chapter 4, story + sidequest (ignoring deep dungeon because those are still "random" encounters at heart and that would actually total more which would help my comparison but make things look worse) total to about 60 (if you include the prologue fight). Which means the marking of the 33rd (and that's still being nice because some of them in Chapter 3 like Wiegraf 2 are pretty lousy) battle you do is rather imbalanced and a wonky mess to play. Because 28ish battles are absolutely not fun IMO (Germinas Peak manages to sort of be an exception for instance), that means about half of Final Fantasy Tactics 1.3 is not fun to play. Which sadly means... half of 1.3 isn't fun to play. And when half of a game isn't fun, that means...

I'd rather play something else. This shouldn't be happening for a mod IMO. If you managed to get here, I thank you for taking the time to read it.

That doesn't mean that I'm going to call this mod a piece of shit or anything, as it shows that it's a product of its time, and was something that was needed to be a bridge to even get a site like this into existence, and I appreciate what it's done for getting me to meet new people, but at the end of the day, if 1.3 was an actual game and not Vanilla, I'd absolutely not even have listed Final Fantasy Tactics in my top 10 favorite games to play. Which is a shame, because I LOVE the original game.

Seriously, I don't know, I know he sucked in Vanilla, what do you guys think of him? I'm wrapping up most of the recordings before I hit up Igros castle and finish the rest of the game, but I never bothered getting / using Cloud in 1.3.

Is he good?

P.S. Worker 7 is shit. Beowulf is okay, but there's too many fucking enemies that just have straight up immunity to a lot of stuff for him to really be super good.