Lockirby2

Let's Play FFVII New Threat - 8 - Boss Gauntlet

In this episode, I fight several bosses in a row. Thousand Gunner, Airhawk Gunner, and Thunder Gunner were quite the difficulty spike, as the bosses before and after them are a great deal less powerful. That said, the fight was quite fun. I didn't realize that Thunder Gunner was as frail as he was until it was too late to exploit. Using Limit Breaks to bring him down fast is certainly worthwhile, especially since Pily can heal more by doing more damage. Matra Magic would have probably been a solid pick if I had remembered that it existed. My final mistake is that I should have ditched the Restore Rod for the Full Metal Staff and just healed with Cure instead; I think I would have had better healing and better defenses for no real cost. This is probably the best use I'll ever find for these Bolt Plumes, as this is a fight where I want to get damage off quickly and I have a foe weak to Bolt.

Against Rufus, it took me longer than it probably should have to figure out (remember?) that Light Nation is invincible. Despite this, Rufus was no real threat since his damage output is so low.

Barbariccia GT was fairly straightforward once I remembered that I need to switch rows to deal with the forced Back Attack. As far as I can tell, there isn't really a gimmick here.

Let's Play FFVII New Threat - 7 - I Survive 4-digit damage

This took a while to make because my headset died before I was able to make this video, and I needed to get a new one before I could record.

This episode covers the majority of the Shinra tower. I fight Sample whatever-it-is in this episode, and he is fairly easy. It's definitely less straightforward now that I need to kill his cronies, but he can't do damage fast enough to be threatening as long as I don't let everybody fall to low HP at the same time.

Let's Play FFVII NT - 6 - The Mooks were Harder than the Boss

I arrive at the Shinra building and make it past a few floors. There were a couple sticky situations, but things worked out in the end.

@Nesouk I'm really glad that I happened to talk to Aeris first then.  I'd much prefer the extra safety, and I don't expect that Tifa would be really outpacing her damage much considering Aeris' super-effective spells, especially since I only had Tifa's first level Limit break in that episode.

Let's Play FFVII NT - 5 - Reno is Wrecked Rudely

This episode is mostly combat. The sewers and train graveyard are pretty laid-back, as the monsters there don't really hit me that hard. I take the time to Morph/Steal some goodies while I can. The Graviballs aren't fantastic Morph prizes (unless they work on a boss I fight before I get a Gravity Materia), but the Ethers I got are pretty nice.

Those propeller guys are pretty brutal in comparison. I suppose it's warranted since the area they appear in is short. Tifa fared surprisingly well despite being in the front, which I don't entirely understand. Either Defense is more important than I gave it credit for on my last playthrough or the row mechanics have changed. I didn't see a mention of the latter in the documentation.

Reno went down like a wet noodle because I had a Cross-Slash saved up and I chucked my Deadly Wastes that I got from the Air Busters. Arguably, I should have saved one for Rufus, but it would be proportionately less useful, and I may find a real Bio Materia (or more Deadly Waste) by then for all I know. If Reno was given a gimmick, I have no clue what it is.

Let's Play FFVII NT - 4 - I Accidentally Fight a Boss Without Saving

In this video, I complete Wall Market and jump down into the sewers.  This is a case where my commentary style doesn't work particularly well; I'm sure some people would have a lot of funny things to say in Wall Market, but I am not one of them.  To that end, I set up some skip icons in the video to allow you to skip some of the parts that you might find boring (you'll have to do it manually since YouTube doesn't allow us to use annotations anymore).  The video is your burrito!

Those Houses are really powerful at this point.  I guess it's a metaphor for vandalism being a poor decision.

Scotch and his lackeys are weak and easy, so I can use my newly acquired Morph Materia to get some great loot from them.

Aps' new gimmick is that Tifa doesn't join the fight.  This is more of a blessing than a curse.  The idea of keeping a frail front row fighter alive through MT physical attacks every single turn doesn't sound super appealing.  Though I suppose that I could always have done a 180 and avoided using magical attacks, as he only uses the tsunami when attacked magically (or at least that's how it worked in vanilla).  However, with Cloud and Aeris I decided to take the devil I knew over the devil I didn't.  If Aeris defends before every tsunami that hits her from behind, she'll be healed by the Geo-Stance, so you don't even really need to spend any resources healing her if you do everything right.

Let's Play FFVII NT - 3 - Air Busters

In this video, I complete the Sector 5 Reactor raid and defeat two Air Buster enemies for the price of one.  I never particularly figured out why their attacks hit for 2x damage sometimes.  Something to do with weird Pincer Attack mechanics, I guess? IDK, I was throwing around a ton of wild theories throughout the video.  Regardless, figuring that out is less important than using the menu to manipulate the turn order so that they never attack together.  Then I just need to heal Cloud/Tifa when they go below ~220 HP.

My first attempt at Air Buster was more of a scouting run than a serious attempt.  I tend to do that a lot with bosses unless they're far from a Save Point.  Knowing the fight you are going into opens up a lot more possibilities.

I like this N. Cross mod.  Now you always have a chance to remove it if you plan well, assuming your party isn't mostly dead.

I totally forgot Dark Nation had Bolt.  It's not like he gets the chance to use it all that often.

Let's Play FFVII NT - 2 - Visit the Beginner's School in Sector 7

I would put the title in all caps for the sake of the joke, but that would just seem like clickbait, now wouldn't it?

This episode is mostly just shopping and the Beginner's House.  Feel free to skip if you're not interested.  Oh yeah, and I kick Guard Scorpion's butt again, apparently.

Wow, he sure jumped ship fast.

9 hours ago, BTB said:

ANYWAY... more changelog updates. Big one as of now is an update to the Regen formula which relies less on the character's max HP. It's a minor change for most characters, but it's a significant buff to high stamina squishies (Relm/Strago) and a huge kick in the nuts to 25 Terrato Sabin.

Ooh, Letha's not going to be happy about that one!

It always felt a little weird that HP did almost as much for Regen as Stamina when Regen ticks are the closest thing to a "main effect" that Stamina has.  I'm glad that's being changed.

Alright, I'll make sure to keep tabs on that.

Dealing 1400 damage with those stats is pretty hilarious.  If you're going to be picking between defense and offense, I'm guessing that you can also split the difference and devote a character to each?

I'd imagine that this will begin to look more and more like a "normal" Level 1 challenge as you approach the endgame.  Are there any restrictions on damage dealing items?  They seem like they'd be incredibly powerful in this run.

Finally, after several years of school and other stuff, I'm starting to make videos for YouTube again.  I explain a bit of the context behind the LP in the first few minutes, so I won't write it all down here.

I think I said most of what I wanted to say in the video, so I'll keep the description fairly brief. I should have used Defend instead of Row during the Guard Scorpion fight so that he'd put me in the back (where I want to be) every other time he used Magnetic Scope. There's enough margin for error that I was in pretty good shape regardless. Hopefully the sound is loud enough. I can't be too loud if I record during the week.

EDIT: I just realized there was a separate LP forum.  This thread should probably be deleted.

There looks like a lot of "not Final Fantasy-ish" stuff in this game, which will make it interesting to play through. I definitely want to try this out.

So, I finally got the chance to try this thing out.  Some general thoughts:

Randomizing characters/Esper allocations/Espers/Magicite: This works out extremely well, and it ends up being the core of what makes BNW Gaiden fun to play.  Although I doubt that many individual seeds offer the build variety that vanilla BNW does, I had a few builds to choose from even within the single seed that I played (even though the replay value is *supposed* to come from playing through different seeds >.>).  That said, some of the more restricted characters ended up being really fun to play as well.  One issue is that some of the game mechanics are more than likely to become unbalanced.  Sabin's Blitzes are supposed to be held back by a mediocre, unboostable Magic stat, and Throw is no longer attached to a piece of paper by necessity.  On the other side of the coin, Umaro is less likely to have access to his special Relics, and Sketch probably won't be able to benefit from having a brush equipped.  Regardless, I'm happy with how this has turned out.

Randomizing equipment: This worked out less well IMO.  The biggest issue I had with this flag is that changes to Evade and Magic Evade were all over the place.  Since the evasiveness of equipment doesn't really scale much over the course of vanilla BNW, this means that any helmet that gets an evasion boost can be combined with Relics and armour that got evasion boost as well.  My brother tells me that his seed isn't like this (and he would be as quick to jump on this as I would), but I suspect that it happens more often than not.  As defensive and evasive stats tend to be even more powerful when they are already high, this often pigeonholed me into slamming the most evasive armour on everybody and calling it a day.  By the Cave of the Sealed Gate, I already had a Terra with perfect evasion and 100+ Magic Evasion.  This fits in fine with the janky vanilla BC, but not as well with BNW.  That said, the monsters are generally tougher when they are randomized, and there is a better spread of adversarial evasion piercing moves than in vanilla BC (thanks to the prevalence of moves blocked by Stamina), so my main issue is the equipment vs. equipment balance and not the player vs. enemy balance.

The good news is that the amount of "random" for each flag can be customized separately, so I can drastically reduce it in this case.

Randomizing treasure/shops: I thought that the sense of progression was weakened slightly more than I want, so I will slightly turn down the "random" on the treasure flag for next time.  For the most part, it does what you expect it to.

Randomizing monsters: One thing to note is that monsters typically get tougher in BC randomizations, but the changes are mostly to stats.  I haven't played BNW recently enough to know exactly how much monsters have changed, so it's hard to do a good comparison (especially thanks to this being my first playthrough with n-ATB).  One thing that I can say is that many of the WoR bosses, which were already teetering on the edge of dragging on for too long, now take ages to kill.  Special mention goes to Guardian, who went from being a buffet where you can snack on previous bosses to a set of six three-course meals that you have to eat in sequence.

Bugs:

If Gau uses a special move with the Omega Weapon, the game can do this:

EDIT: Dang it, I can't figure out how to fix the spoiler box.  I wish there was a way to edit the source version of the post.  Or maybe I just can't find it?

The Beyond Chaos Discord also thought it was an April Fool's joke.

On 1/16/2018 at 3:14 AM, Kaffe Myers said:

The logical balance would be that you could turn off overworld random battles, but all caves, castles, dungeons, whatever -- "zoomed-in places" -- still have them. If that is anything that they can code without spending 1000 hours of reverse-engineering? 
Is bob you uncle, @Synchysi?

I don't think this would really help this problem (even if we consider this to be a problem worth fixing).  For maybe half the game total, you can park the airship right next to where you want to enter.  Other overworld travels tend to be short, unnecessary to repeat, and/or skippable by chocobo.  This might make it less tedious to return to the Veldt to farm Rages at some points though.

I choose to blame the unintelligible lyrics on Google's poor translation services.

Thanks for the gift @Polaris!  The image is great and unique, and it fit nicely on my Desktop after I tweaked a couple settings on Windows.  There are quite a few nice little details in this picture.  No worries about it being a bit late, as I was visiting relatives without internet for the last few days.

If you're going to change something, maybe you could move Goddess away from the rubble?  It's a bit hard to see her down there.  Other than that, it looks perfect.

It really depends on your playstyle.  A 100 000 GP pricetag won't discourage everybody from respeccing often, but it would discourage many, including me.  And I don't think that anybody will grind 400 000 GP before every dungeon to respec for that dungeon/boss, which is the main issue that this system is trying to eliminate.

I don't think you are pigeonholed into choosing between repeccing/ignoring characters either; a character with no Esper levels whatsoever is perfectly viable in BNW, and a poorly built character for a particular part of the game is more viable than that.  It's not like older games like Dragon Warrior where the only options are grind or fail.

My affront to humanity gift is for @Kaffe Myers.  Unenjoy!

Could you alleviate the pressure to immediately draw 100 of everything by limiting the number of spells that you can draw from each enemy?  Grinders gonna grind, but at least this way it's more like EXP in that it will build up slowly over the course of a dungeon if you're not explicitly grinding.  Of course, it would probably have the issue of making the player even more reluctant to actually cast things.

I, for one, would ignore any paragraphs written, unless I didn't have any ideas.  Half the fun is trying to piece together what somebody might want, even if it's harder and I might make a mistake.