Lockirby2

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About Lockirby2

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  1. I made it to the end of the game! I see that the fancy text in the credits that references the names of the original characters is unchanged. I know that C-Dude managed to change those names in his hack, so maybe you could ask him how to do it. The endgame was a much smoother experience than it used to be. In the older versions of ROTDS that I played, it felt like all attacks that were defense-piercing and non-elemental just wiped the party instantly and the other enemy attacks did nothing meaningful. It was mostly a game of figuring out how to use a combination of ReRaise and Flammie to avoid dying to those moves. Now that you end up at a higher level (and the bosses were nerfed, even on Insane mode), every attack is survivable at the appropriate level as long as you use HP-boosting equipment. Also, because Evade/M.Evade were rebalanced, other attacks can actually connect. So the game plays more like it was intended to. I also love all the new content that was added (I was a fan of that in older versions, but it's been turned up to 11 in this one). There's a cool secret around every corner if you bother to look for it, whether it's a hidden item, an extra cutscene, or simply turning an obscure part of vanilla FF6 into something that is more meaningful to the gameplay. The new sprites, portraits, and other graphical work are also top-notch. One change that I was disappointed in is Eiko's Summons. She's unable to use almost every Esper that actually provides an interesting effect. Instead, Summon just gives her more options to be a magical beatstick, which she could already do regardless. And there's no need to encourage this strategy in general since it's the most natural option for nearly every character to begin with. I can understand disallowing Fenrir and Soul Calibur, but I would have found her more fun to play if she could summon Vysage, Carbuncle, Search Ghost, and Ark. None of those options are broken, but they allow her to do some cool things that nobody else can do multiple times. As it is, Sylph, Yu Yevon, and Unicorn are generally the only effects worth using unless you haven't learned a good attacking spell yet (Sylph being the most exciting of the three IMO). Also, while the design of each random enemy makes sense in a vacuum, I feel the enemies and formations aren't designed with the player's capabilities in mind. Some examples: Serin can instantly shut down nearly every encounter he fights in the WoB with either a single Psycho Blade or Cosmic Fang, while I found basically zero useful targets for Nightsever and few for Catastrophe (it doesn't outdamage Psycho Blade on average unless an enemy is weak to instant death, even if that enemy is alone). I think that WoB encounters should have more Berserk resistance on average, and slightly more Confuse resistance too. Tifa has to deal with everything and the kitchen sink during her solo section in the WoR, despite only having two Relic slots. She also can't deal enough damage to fight encounters in the Collapsing House (unless you break rods) now that you can't learn Quake with her. I know that you encouraged running away from these enemies, but I think it would be better if they were more appropriate for her and gave far less EXP to compensate. It's not like you'll be fighting them with any other parties anyways! The enemies in the Phantom Forest are able to use lots of dangerous spells like Acid Rain, but you don't have enough healing to keep up. Holy Waters are too expensive to spam at that point in the game, and the enemies are too bulky to kill quickly. That was a pretty huge difficulty spike; good thing that dungeon is short, at least. Most encounters in the bulk of the WoR can't deal more than scratch damage to you once you start picking up decent armour, even on Insane mode. I wish that the statues gave 100 Magic Points instead of 10. As it is, you don't have a chance to learn Meteo unless you grind for it. This would make a lot of thematic sense too. In the early to midgame, I think that they heavy armour should have slightly more defense than it does now. It would still be worse than robes and light armour since those have more useful effects (and this is fine because the dedicated heavy armour users are already quite good at this part of the game), but at least the heavy armour would technically be better at the thing it's supposed to do. Overall though, it's been a blast to play through this again after so long. Thanks for putting in the work to add another layer of polish onto the game!
  2. I haven't done the tower yet, so I don't know the answer yet.
  3. I'm pretty sure that the frozen FuSoYa is the Ice King from Adventure Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ7-XPR_vLk. Other than that I don't know if he does anything.
  4. It's not. I recommend trying it just for kicks and giggles.
  5. Since Drakkazul is an optional boss with nothing super important gated behind him I don't really mind if he's a bit harder than average. It doesn't end up being luck-reliant, which is the important bit. As for that hint, you've definitely seen this NPC somewhere, and it is also very clearly in character for them.
  6. When I dropped the weight off the rafters in the Opera house before killing the dragon, the cutscene worked as intended. After killing the dragon, when I pushed the weight it turned into an antlion briefly as it was falling.
  7. I really, really don't see this. I didn't find maximizing damage output to be important here, as he's got too much HP to overpower before dying if your defensive strategy isn't consistent. Unless you break Lunar Rods on him, of course. They will probably hit the damage cap, and it's not really a bad move to throw them here because it's a tricky boss fight that isn't near a save point. You can get more Lunar Rods later, and there is no other important use for them before you get the airship. Even if you don't want to throw your Lunar Rods, you have options. I used the Ghoul Medal with Tifa and poisoned her with Virus so that she could heal. She will also be healed if Condemned triggers, and you can feed her a Potion in a pinch as well (250 HP may sound lame at this point, but it could save your life if she's hit by Ninth Dimension, as you absolutely can't let her die with the Ghoul Medal). In her second relic slot, I used a White Cape to prevent Pig and Berserk without preventing Poison. Applying Shell and Protect to her is also necessary. Ronan got the Talisman, which prevented him from dying to Condemned. I can't remember what was in his second relic slot. I think it was the Eaglehorn, but it probably should have been the Griffin Eye. I guess you could swap the sets of Relics; I can't remember my rationale for who got what. Letting Zeke remain a zombie the entire fight is worthwhile. It's much better for him to absorb hits so your other characters don't have to. Leave him in the front; the damage he does to your party is low, so you will want the extra damage to the boss. For offense, I just used the standard Meteor Smash + Freeze. If you're really consistent with Beat Rush, it does slightly more damage. All of these attacks are long-range. This strategy was pretty consistent for me. I beat him twice in a row (the first time I was just testing strats with a save state before the fight, so it didn't count). Of course, it depends on your levels. I usually try to adopt a policy of "never run, never grind" for casual playthoughs. This usually leaves me underlevelled if anything, but may have left me overlevelled here because I fought all of the encounters in the solo Tifa section when the game encourages you to run. If you don't have ~2000 HP on your Ghoul Medal holder to survive Ninth Dimension, this gets a lot less consistent. Otherwise, I think this strat works four out of five times.
  8. @Zig Yup! I love the portrait that James made for my Moogle! Two more things that I saw: On the floating continent, during the cutscene with Zuriel, when the party regroups at the end, everybody walked the wrong direction. Instead of walking onto the same spot and having everybody disappear, they all walked into different places and then the characters disappear. It's a minor issue. When I go to an item shop and hover my cursor over the Holy Water, Otis starts cheering as if he could equip it. I'm in the WoR and I haven't recruited him yet, so I can't check if there's anything else to it, but I'm assuming this is a bug.
  9. I was spamming Psycho Blade, which is definitely what blinded him. He must have been blinded the first time as well, but since I never attacked him the variable never incremented to begin with.
  10. Man, I just realized how hard it is to give a list of great JRPG mods without just listing off everything in the forums section of this site. >.>
  11. So far this is mostly just going to be a possible bug report for the Sasquatch fight. On the first fight I had with him, he never used Primal Rage at all. I restarted because I wanted to use fewer items, and on the second fight, he used Primal Rage every single turn (after the first couple of turns). The only thing I remember doing differently was using some physical attacks on him to mug him. Does that increment a variable that isn't set back to zero or something? I haven't fully played through this game in while. It's amusing that it ends up being more nostalgic than a vanilla playthrough for me. If there are any specific aspects of the hack that you want feedback on, feel free to ask.
  12. RotDS v2.0 Released!

    Yay, time to download this and try it out. I'm excited to see all the things you guys have done since I last played.
  13. The Game Design Litmus Test

    I really like the section on Legend of Zelda here. It gives voice to a lot of the same things I've felt about the series that I haven't heard discussed as much. Weirdly, I'd give Skyward Sword some points here in comparison to most of the other games (haven't played the Oracle games). I remember not getting that feeling of "Why do I even need more Rupees" until about 75% of the way through the game, which might not be great, but is definitely better than most of the previous entries in this regard. BoTW went backwards here IMO, as it was a little too easy to sell a bunch of stuff and break the economy. I noticed that you mentioned Beyond Chaos as an example of something that makes FF6 "even more of a mess". I think it's an interesting case for this litmus test. When looking at a single seed, it's going to have just as many superfluous mechanics as in vanilla, if not more. Well, except for the fact that the Esper Allocator can prevent the game from being an Ultima spam-fest, which makes it a little better on average IMO. But taking a large number of seeds together, there's almost no mechanic that is useless. I'd bet that if you asked Cecil about any mechanic in the game, he could name a time where he actually made use of it. So in one sense, BC scores very low, but in another sense, it scores much better than vanilla, though not as well as BNW IMO. Octopath Traveler is a JRPG that I think actually scores very well on this litmus test. I found nearly every mechanic to be useful on some level. It's probably weakest in terms of equipment; for example, you can get Silent Bandanas fairly early and they invalidate every other piece of evasive headgear. But out of all the skills (active and passive) in the game, I'd say that there's only a small handful that I'd write off as useless or outclassed. Most of the debuffs and status effects that the game actually encourages you to apply to enemies are of the variety that only weaken bosses and work on all of them. Furthermore, Octopath is arguably the only JRPG I've seen that actually manages to strike a good balance between offense and defense. In almost all JRPGs, including even the versions of BNW that I've played, "turtle more" is pretty much always the way to solve a problem. This makes offensive strategies generally not worth using, even though I use them anyways just because they are fun. I'm not sure whether a like or an upvote is considered better. Maybe one of these is superflous?
  14. A Final Fantasy VII New Threat LP

    Let's Play FFVII NT - 21 - Crossing Those Mountains I actually felt pretty well prepared for this dungeon. Last time those Green Dragons took forever to kill. That said, I think their HP has also dropped, which is probably a good thing. The boss fight, as usual, was something that I started to figure out properly right as the fight ended and I never got to put anything into practice, so the actual result from my side is actually pretty mediocre.
  15. A Final Fantasy VII New Threat LP

    Let's Play FFVII NT - 20 - Death by Math This episode centres entirely around one boss fight: Lambda Calcule. I could probably have done better than I did at forming a good strategy, but all's well that ends well. I didn't abuse the second Vaccine in my inventory because I may be able to pull off some Vaccine abuse against a later boss that would be even more helpful. In hindsight, I also probably could have slowed the physical Calcule with a Molotov before dropping the Vaccine on him, leaving him with permanent Slow. That would have helped a lot. I'm also not sure what effect draining their MP has. I really should have tried that. If draining the Magic guy's MP allowed me to avoid seeing Ruin3, it would have been all I needed to win on that second run. It wouldn't even have taken long to pull off with Iris' staff.