Insane Difficulty: My Monster Tactics Datalog: The Misadventures of Oersted - Insane Difficulty

Good Day/Evening/Night everyone. The name's Ronlyn and I invite you across this lovely game called.............................


Made by Emmy, this mod can claim to be called "original and fresh" in all the extend of those words: New monsters, classes, skills and items will make your experience across this twisted Ivalice a rather fun diversion. But before that, some notes:

- THIS IS NOT MY FIRST TIME ON MONSTER TACTICS BY ANY STRETCH. I beat it waaaaaaaaaaay back at version 2.29 and I'm very aware of how it works (Of course, Emmy made sure that 2.49 had A LOT of shining new stuff to keep me on my toes)

- I will mostly put my thoughts and analysis of each battle: Augustein it's doing wonders when it comes to LP this game, so I will focus on details like monsters performance on each chapter, enemy composition and difficulty ranking of each battle from my point of view

- I hope I can do at the very least three update per week, so I apologize in advance if I can't keep this at a reasonable pace

With all that said:



Born at January 13th (because my birthday kinda sucks in Ivalice)

Entry 1 - Orbonne Intro

Rankings:
1/10 (first time playing FFT)
0.5/10 (You have played FFT, FFT 1.3 or some FFT mod)
0.1/10 (2nd Playthough)

The Prelude to the strange yet possible world of Monster Tactics. We starts off with our typical party of Oersted, Agrias, Gafgarion and..................three chocobos.............against another three chocobos, a bomb and finally their boss, a baatezu. Sounds about right in my book

Nothing too worrysome, just play with the new mechanics and you should be fine. The difficulty come when you actively avoid tooltip something and end up prolonging this battle (not more than ten minutes thanks god).

Nice. Another playthrough.

Entry 2 - Gariland

Rankings:
1/10 (First timer)
0.8/10 (Normal Player)
0.2/10 (2nd Playthough)

Entry 3 - Mandalia

Rankings:
2/10 (First timer)
1/10 (Normal Player)
0.5/10 (2nd Playthough)

Guess who didn't know that epsxe has an screenshot function (F8)

Entry 4 - Igros Castle

Rankings:
3.5/10 (First timer)
1.5/10 (Normal Player)
1/10 (2nd Playthough)

Entry 5 - Sweegy Woods

Rankings:
3.5/10 (First timer)
1.8/10 (Normal Player)
1.5/10 (2nd Playthough)

Well, it is time to deal with that one map........

Entry 6 - Dorter Trade City

Rankings:
4/10 (First timer)
2/10 (Normal Player)
2/10 (2nd Playthough)

Entry 7 - Sand Rats

Rankings:
3/10 (First timer)
1.5/10 (Normal Player)
1.5/10 (2nd Playthough)

Our first real assassination attempt ever!!!

Entry 8 - Miluda I

Rankings:
1.5/10 (First timer)
0.5/10 (Normal Player)
0.2/10 (2nd Playthough)

Entry 9 - Mandalia II

Rankings:
4/10 (First timer)
3.5/10 (Normal Player)
3/10 (2nd Playthough)

Cutscenes incoming, please skip if you're wanna go straight into the gameplay



Gameplay:

Entry 10 - Random Battle #01 (Pudding), Miluda II

Rankings:
1/10 (First timer)
0.8/10 (Normal Player)
0.5/10 (2nd Playthough)

Removed your duplicate post.

Keep them coming, this playthrough is fun

Entry 11 - Wiegraf

Rankings:
0.7/10 (First timer)
0.5/10 (Normal Player)
0.3/10 (2nd Playthough)

Entry 12 - Random Battle #02 (Dragon), Algus

Rankings:
2.5/10 (First timer)
2/10 (Normal Player)
1.7/10 (2nd Playthough)

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It is not bugged. This is actually the default AI flags from vanilla. I decided to keep them so that an observant player has a minor way to manipulate the ai here. With thenewest version of Patcher, these flags are cleanly labeled. This image shows where they are (minor spoilers):

The style that this is done in reminds me of those old LP archives. It's funny.

Interlude: Review and Analysis of CH1

Heya everyone, I'm here to input my thoughts and impressions of what it is to me the wildest and well-craft mod on the Final Fantasy mod in this forum (Before you ask: BNW doesn't count because I made clear the fact that at this point, BNW it's the oficial FFVI release and vanilla/advance versions are just some kind of watered down version of it)

Let's start with some words from the very creator of this mod:

"The idea I had with the creation of this mod was because the two things that every mod out there doesn't do so well is monsters and bosses"

Since the start of FFT modding waaaaay back at 2005, the one objective every person who set aim to change this humble gem of the psx was the same: Enhance all the mechanics and fix bugs/glitches/problems with the original game to make the experience more enjoyable. Several mods and patches were made across the years (FFT Tournament and 1.3 being the most prominent out there), but on June 6th of 2015, the first female modder ever since the foundations of ID share a modified FFT mod with the name "Monster Tactics", shaking the foundations of the common knowledge about FFT modding in general.

"A mod about monsters?"
"That's so crazy"
"It must be a joke or something"

But it wasn't: As the days passes and new versions become available, the mod was seen as less of a joke and more as an stand-alone game: 1.3 was on hot wheels until mid 2016, but Monster Tactics keep growing into the mod that I would come back every three months or so to have some fun (and even if that wasn't a good enough reason, a really good updates schedule from Emmy will always make sure to lure you into play to try out those new changes)

Now with the real juice of the game:

"If you had only a word to describe you mod, what would be?"

"Chocolate"

MT does make sure to establish himself as a standalone mod out there: New and completely reliable monsters, revamped jobs and brand new maps ensure that the experience you will get of it will completely differ from any other mod out there. The only problem with playing this mod it's the fact that at first everyone will expect a FFT experience and that's just a wrong assumption: Monster Tactics can be grabbed, put into stream, and could perfectly pass as some kind of weird cousin of FFT.

Going into the gameplay (the part I'm pretty sure attracts the 80% of players out there) I must say...............It's good enough: Monsters having differents reactions/innates/Inmunities/weakness between families make sure that you always have a favorite setup to play with while the game tries his best to not punish you for playing one way or another (something I always complain about 1.3). My only call-out would be that sometimes monsters seems a little too much overpowered since they can basically do almost everything while have nice perks that makes them more appealing that even most of human jobs in the regular game.

Putting my lens on CH1, I can clearly discern his concept: It's a tutorial to get accustom to this crazy alternate reality to the old and classic game from 1997, which works fine to me because I ended up this chapter fighting a flying one eyed monster that was my former companion (my HUMAN companion now that we're at it). The story while in general unchanged, does make sure to establish the monster as the primary moving force in the world of Ivalice: They can live in cities, have works like us, hell they even hold important charges and that's quite bizarre yet awesome since I can already tell by experience that an chocobo that can attack, run and think by himself it's a huge asset to an army for example.

Going back into the gameplay, new skills means new situations to deal with, and MT doesn't come short to show how easily can change the dynamic per battle: In one you can see yourself tanking all the hits and avoid splinting up your party members since that would otherwise being destroyed and impossible to revive and being forced into a loop of revive units until death comes eventually, and the next you can find yourself running like a mad dog to kill all the enemies to avoid unpleasant situation that can rend the encounter imposible to beat.

With this premise explained, here it is the averages from all kind of players about CH1 difficulty:

2.3/10 (First timer)
1.4/10 (Normal Player)
1/10 (2nd Playthough)

Ch 1 Average: 2.1

Something to make crystal clear: Even thought several playthoughts can shatter the game's difficulty, a good/patient new player can achieve the same results as me, and the same can be said about veterans getting stuck on some parts because of how the RNG works at times, so I can't get mad at the game getting unfair at times (althought half of them were my fault, but details).

Since this is a tutorial, you will get what you expect: battles with a clear objective and ways to procede on it, a pretty balanced party to get accustomed, a lot of patterns and AI quirks to learn for the future and finally, a real challenge from the game. My only complaint would be that at times it's fells......slow, but that's something superficial since I will eat my words as soon CH2 becomes a thing.

Without anything else to say, I bid my farewell for now: This is my first time doing this so I kinda expecting several errors here and there so make me aware of them if you can. Thank you so much for reading this, I hope you guys are enjoying this and if you have any suggestions please let me know of them.

EDIT: CH2 starts at monday

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Definitely am not the first, or only female modder. Xifanie, who has made the Snowflakes and Propositions hack, among other things I use, is a female and has been doing this since long before I came on the scene. There's several other females around as well. In any case, I don't think that detail about myself is important/relevant here.

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Part of the problem is you can't exactly have it both ways. The playstyle punishing aspect of 1.3 is one of my least favorite attributes of that mod. As such, moves that are able to revive, heal, cure status, deal damage, deal status, etc. have high distribution since those are considered basics. If I were too limiting in what monsters can do, battles such as ch 4 end sequence, ch 5, dd, extra battles will pigeonhole the player into using whatever limited options I gave them for such basic things. Because the mod has no assassinations past ch 1 and frequent boss fights, this'll make revival and status curing king. And players will feel like I intended for them to use Ramza + 4 trees if that were the only species capable of both revival and status curing. This will lead to an extremely stale metagame compared to what I'm seeing out of players now.

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This is the intent. Encounters are varied in terms of things such as number/power of enemies, synergy between them, damage/status/support, etc. Keep the player guessing.

Let's get into business, shall we?

Entry 13: Dorter 2

Rankings:
2/10 (First timer)
1.5/10 (Normal Player)
1.2/10 (2nd Playthough)

Entry 14: Araguay Woods

Rankings:
1.5/10 (First timer)
1/10 (Normal Player)
0.5/10 (2nd Playthough)