Lockirby2

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Posts posted by Lockirby2


  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. On 2/23/2020 at 11:18 AM, Zig said:

    I could see Aurora being a smoker.  Either cigarettes or crack cocaine.

    I really, really don't see this.

    On 3/1/2020 at 1:10 PM, Zig said:

    I have some comments and questions about the fight with Drakazul.  I don't mean to criticize your product.  After playing through the hack several times now this is one of those fights that I really dread.  Passing him up is not an option for me so I have to just grit my teeth and bear through it.   I don't mean this as a snide comment I am curious if this fight was designed to be so irritating to the player that they are intended to just stop trying and move on out of frustration. There is no one thing he does that makes it so bad but all together you end up with a fight where it is such an uphill battle to even be able to get a turn where you can safely attack that it really disheartens me to have to start all over again.  He also seems to be impossible to scan unless I'm missing something so finding an elemental weakness is just trial and error.   How would you, the person reading this comment, go about maximizing damage output on this boss?  Back row for everyone seems mandatory so physical attacks are weak. 

    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.


  3. @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.


  4. 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. :P

    If there are any specific aspects of the hack that you want feedback on, feel free to ask.


  5. Let's Play FFVII NT - 21 - Crossing Those Mountains

    Spoiler

     

    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.


  6. Let's Play FFVII NT - 20 - Death by Math

    Spoiler



     

    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.


  7. Let's Play FFVII NT - 19 - Spooky Scary Ghosts

    Spoiler

     

    Let's head off to the Nibelheim mansion, which I somehow forgot comes before Mt. Nibel.  I'll put the footage of Lambda Calcule in the next video because I think it will fit better there.  I seem to remember this dungeon being harder.  I think it had nastier status effects like Confuse before?  If enemies here still have Confuse, I haven't seen it.  I somehow make a complete trainwreck of a battle against Mirrors, so look forward to that.


  8. Let's Play FF7 NT - 18 - This is why I Wanted a Bird Wing

    Spoiler

     

    This episode is all dungeon. The dungeon enemies are pretty easy because they don't really hit that hard and can't do much else to scare me either. The boss needs to be taken down quickly since he can be healed for massive amounts by the gravity attacks that he absorbs, but this is fairly easily done, especially if you wait until the "flames" possess you before launching everything you have at him.


  9. Let's Play FFVII NT - 16 - Hiss, Hiss...

    Spoiler

     

    In this video, we have another completely custom boss, and it's a fun one.  He's still fairly slow thanks to the Slow/Haste combo, but the fact that he puts countdown on you still makes the fight tricky.  With no steps taken to deal with it, the countdown can easily kill several people at the same time, which is basically a death sentence in this game.  I didn't remember the countdown, so I didn't have my Safety Bit equipped either.  I assumed he was weak to fire thanks to the "undead" gimmick, but he wasn't, which made for a fairly poor use of a Fire Veil.  I should have chucked my Bolt Plumes instead.

    I also curbstomp Reno and Rude again, but they didn't really do much, as per the usual.


  10. Let's Play FFVII NT - 15 - Silent but Deadly

    Spoiler

     

    95% of the time, I do a test recording before I record the actual video to make sure that the audio is working. Somehow, every time I don't, the audio decides not to work. This was one of those times. :( Dyne was interesting. Because I poisoned him, he used Psyche Up to remove it. However, I believe that Psyche Up applied the Resist status to him, preventing him from using Haste later on. Because of this anti-combo, he ended up costing himself a ton of turns.


  11. Let's Play FFVII NT - 11 - Jormungander Loses by Doing Absolutely Nothing

    Spoiler

     

    This time around, I cheat my way to victory in the Fort Condor minigame. It's so slow and time-consuming that I really didn't want to do it again. For some reason, Bottomswell's replacement didn't do a whole lot. I'm still not really sure what's up with that.

    No, I will not bother fixing the spelling in the title, even though it would take less time than typing this sentence.