Final Fantasy Tactics (and other TRPGs)

[NoSleep]

I've started replaying FFT (PSX), initially with the "FFT: Complete v0.50" mod, which pastes in the improved script of the PSP WotL version. But I've subsequently discovered an ("unofficial") fix of "Complete v0.50", which also makes a few other minor adjustments for improved enjoyment of the game, entitled "FFT: Prime". However, included with Prime was a bonus version entitled "Prime: Convenience", which halves the Job Points required for every job in the game, both for the player and the AI, so grinding is less of a chore but, somehow, it makes the game far more balanced as you go through the game. In the original version, by the time you have reached the end of the game, your team has become godlike, super-powered unstoppables, whereas "Prime: Convenience" creates a more challenging but fun balance.

Prime available here: https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/4611/

Episode 2 of ResonantArc's Podcast on FFT:

[NoSleep]

First western release of Front Mission 2 (originally released on PSX in Japan only) on Nintendo Switch.

May have to get a Switch for this. Are there many other turn-based RPGs (or other strategy-based games) on the platform?

[Pink Gregory]

First western release of Front Mission 2 (originally released on PSX in Japan only) on Nintendo Switch.

May have to get a Switch for this. Are there many other turn-based RPGs (or other strategy-based games) on the platform?

There's Wargroove, which is basically fantasy Advanced Wars from what I've seen

I would recommend Into the Breach which is utterly fantastic (and recently got the Advanced Edition update) but it's a bit more like a puzzle game at times, although there is a light shop/upgrade system.

[oggyraiding]

May have to get a Switch for this. Are there many other turn-based RPGs (or other strategy-based games) on the platform?

There's a bunch of Disgaea games if you like particularly grindy strategy RPGs. The stories are very stupid anime level shit, some people really like them, some people can't stand them. Triangle Strategy is currently a Switch exclusive, well made SRPG with (what I thought) a well told and relatively mature story. Tiny Metal and its sequel seem like competent Advance Wars clones from what I've played of them. Steamworld Heist is a 2D side scrolling turn based strategy RPG, I played through it a few times on 3DS as it's just really good.

[seepage]

Fort Triumph is available for the Switch [I've only played it on Windows]. Physics-based tactical combat e.g., pull or push trees on top of people. Kicking an object into an enemy stun them, so you can keep more powerful enemies at bay that way and kill them one-by-one, although later on some enemies are immune to the first stun. Heroes of Might & Magic-style strategic map - add buildings to towns and recruit.

The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos is available for Switch [again, I've only played it on Window]. Really, really good tactical combat and this shouldn't be missed. No grinding as each encounter cannot be repeated.

Other TRPG games I've played on Windows recently:

TroubleShooter: Abandoned Children: Absolutely fantastic tactical combat. Not to be missed. The continuous action time mechanic is interesting - actions have a 'casting delay' which delays your next turn but this can include blocking attacks etc. So if you wade into a group of enemies without support your next turn might not come around for a long time. Skills are a bit odd as enemies drop skills like equipment. You can craft extra copies of a skill but might have no knowledge yet of some skills in the recipe. Different combinations of 4 skills make up skills sets which grant extra bonuses and effects. Some brilliant artwork although the 3-D character models don't quite match e.g. the model for 'Ray' is a hard-faced 'sexy' figure which doesn't convey what the character is like. The developers regularly update the game, add extra missions and tweak the rules, and the first, large DLC was free. Some grinding as each time you defeat an enemy you gain an amount of knowledge about their skills but need 100% to know them all. Also, some enemies only appear on 'Hard' or greater difficulty. Another odd thing is the colour of items vs. their description: 'Blue' = green, 'Magenta' = blue, and 'Indigo' = magenta. Anyway, fantastic game.

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark: Nearly gave up because of the poor 2D artwork, but the pixel art on the maps is good and I persevered and enjoyed finishing this. Grinding, but some of that to build up a 'B' team of characters to send on off-map missions which probably wasn't necessary. 

Fae Tactics/Wildermyth/Banner Saga: couldn't get into these so need to give them another go at some point.

Wasteland 3: not really hooked at the moment and dislike each side taking their turn all at once instead of in initiative order, but I'll see if I get more into it.

[Timothy]

Diofield Chronicle demo was quite cool. I might buy that.

Triangle Strategy's combat was nice but the story a bit dull.

Loved Wasteland 3 and Desperados 3.

Banner Saga was fun until the final game which I didn't really enjoy.

[NoSleep]

Cheers for the recommendations everyone.
May get a s/h Switch next week. Cex have 32gb Switch Lites for around £150; any reason why iI shouldn't buy one of those?

[oggyraiding]

The Switch joycons on the normal and OLED models, and also the sticks on the Lite are prone to failure. Not so much of an issue with classic/OLED Switch - just use another controller, or buy new ones, or send them for repair. If they fail on the Lite, you have to send the whole console in to be repaired, and from what I've heard from people with Lites, they are prone to fail again even after repair.

[NoSleep]

Noted, thanks. Probably won't be a lot of button bashing going on, but worth considering if I'm buying s/h.

[badaids]

I had forgotten how great tactics ogre is, so now I'll have to dig it out and spend ridiculous amounts of time on it again.

My fave tactics is Disgaea. Genuinely funny but also completely bottomless, it urges you to ever greater levels of badassnessfor your characters. Dangerously addictive.

[Pink Gregory]

How much are PSPs and games going for these days?  I don't believe I paid loads for mine (admittedly 5+ years ago) and you've got FF Tactics War of thr Lions and Tactics Ogre right there.

[Memorex MP3]

Cheers for the recommendations everyone.
May get a s/h Switch next week. Cex have 32gb Switch Lites for around £150; any reason why iI shouldn't buy one of those?

Get a used switch from ebay that you can clearly see ©2017 on the back of, get an RCM loader and hack it. You'll be able to play backups of all your games you definitely own and you'll be able to use other controllers; it'll run all the hacked stuff off an SD card so you can still use the Switch for legal online stuff too.

I haven't used it for emulation at all but I gather the best route is to install Android on it and use Android Retroarch, no clue how the joycons work with that.

[NoSleep]

That's some useful information thanks. Will be looking for a ©2017 Switch. Emulation is something I'd be interested in, but does installing Android on it render it unable to do anything else, or is it just an alternate boot-up option?

[Memorex MP3]

That's some useful information thanks. Will be looking for a ©2017 Switch. Emulation is something I'd be interested in, but does installing Android on it render it unable to do anything else, or is it just an alternate boot-up option?

Basically you get a massive SD card and on the SD card you have partitions containing a clone of your Switch and another containing Android (or two separate SD cards for each, I gather it's not recommended to be swapping SD cards loads in the Switch though). You keep the Switch clone totally offline to avoid accidentally getting your machine blacklisted. Via the injected boot screen you can select which one you want to boot into and the default one to boot into.

It's probably worth watching some videos on the process to see if it's too much grief for you (there is a hardware step but it's pretty straightforward if you buy an RCM Loader); I found it pretty easy compared to some systems (Vita was def more of a pain) but I'm always hacking shit.


Downsides of a 2017 Switch include:
- worse battery life (without even accounting for the normal battery decline of it being 5 years old; replacing the battery is a bit of a pain from what I can see)
- joycon issues (drift, loose connectors; both very easy and cheap to fix)
- again, it's five years old
- lots of people seem to be aware of what they can do so you need to be watching Buy It Now auctions sorted by newest listed and kind of develop a good read for which ones are likely to be 2017 (I used the box design to simplify my search) to get any kind of deal

[NoSleep]

I got a Switch a couple of weeks back and have been looking at what TRPGs there are on offer. I think I'm going to get Triangle Strategy some time this week, as I've found a new one going for an extremely reasonable price, which may or may not be repeated for some time. Looks like it's a non-FFT attempt by Square-Enix at making another game in the mould of FFT.

Upcoming is Tactics Ogre: Reborn but I'm wondering if I should play one (or several) of the earlier versions (SNES/PSX/PSP; all of which I have in ROM form) first. Apparently Yasumi Matsuno has been involved in the tweaking of the new game and I know that FFT owes a huge debt to the earlier game.

I mentioned Front Mission 2 is in the making, but hadn't realised that there's a remake of FM1 for the Switch, that will arrive next month.

Talking about reasonably-priced: has anyone got any recommendations for places to find games to buy where you're more likely to find a bargain? Obviously avoiding Nintendo's shop for any of the big titles. Smyths seem to be good, as long as they have what you want (got non-TRPG Xenoblade Chronicles 3 from them), and I found a website called eneba.com that have some real bargains, if you're happy to go for just a download key (I'd prefer a hard copy for resale value). Has anyone had experience of buying from eneba?

Basically you get a massive SD card and on the SD card you have partitions containing a clone of your Switch and another containing Android (or two separate SD cards for each, I gather it's not recommended to be swapping SD cards loads in the Switch though). You keep the Switch clone totally offline to avoid accidentally getting your machine blacklisted. Via the injected boot screen you can select which one you want to boot into and the default one to boot into.

It's probably worth watching some videos on the process to see if it's too much grief for you (there is a hardware step but it's pretty straightforward if you buy an RCM Loader); I found it pretty easy compared to some systems (Vita was def more of a pain) but I'm always hacking shit.


Downsides of a 2017 Switch include:
- worse battery life (without even accounting for the normal battery decline of it being 5 years old; replacing the battery is a bit of a pain from what I can see)
- joycon issues (drift, loose connectors; both very easy and cheap to fix)
- again, it's five years old
- lots of people seem to be aware of what they can do so you need to be watching Buy It Now auctions sorted by newest listed and kind of develop a good read for which ones are likely to be 2017 (I used the box design to simplify my search) to get any kind of deal

Lots of help out there for this (websites and youtube). Will probably get an RCM Loader and possibly another large SD card (got one bundled with the 2017 Switch I acquired from a fellow CaBber, who shall remain nameless). I've overcome the joycon issues by buying an 8BitDo bluetooth adapter and using a PS4 controller, which (pretty much) plugged and played.
The only issue is my old TV, which has a multitude of ways to connect to it. When I connect my PS2 to it the "line out" phonos can be used to get audio to my hifi amp/speakers. However, the Switch's default HDMI out, when plugged into the telly doesn't seem to want to yield audio out to my hifi, only to it's tinny internal speakers. I've overcome this with an HDMI to SCART convertor, which is OK, but I detect a slight deterioration in the video by that means. Are there more than one kind of HDMI or HDMI cables or something? Seems odd that the audio is received via HDMI but can't be relayed elsewhere.

[NoSleep]

There's a bunch of Disgaea games if you like particularly grindy strategy RPGs. The stories are very stupid anime level shit, some people really like them, some people can't stand them. Triangle Strategy is currently a Switch exclusive, well made SRPG with (what I thought) a well told and relatively mature story. Tiny Metal and its sequel seem like competent Advance Wars clones from what I've played of them. Steamworld Heist is a 2D side scrolling turn based strategy RPG, I played through it a few times on 3DS as it's just really good.

As mentioned above, Triangle Strategy is on its way. And I grabbed Steamworld Heist from the online Nintendo shop for £2.99. Nice combi that's part TRPG, part Worms.

[seepage]

After about a dozen attempts, I finally completed the first mission in the new DLC, Crimson Crow, for Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children. It introduces a Rogue/Ninja as a playable character and I'm rubbish at stealth [it's turned-based stealth, but it took me a while to suss how the hiding & stealing skills work].

Nearly at the end of Wasteland 3, got into it after all, despite the arbitrary weapon damage and hit points [why has my pet cat got 10x the HP of my 25th level characters?]

Went a bit OTT in the Steam Halloween sale and bought Disgaea 4 & 5, Symphony of War, Chimera Squad, WH40K Chaos Gate, Stirring Abyss, and Hard West II. Should keep me going for a while. And there's a new DLC for The Dungeon of Naheulbeuk: The Amulet of Chaos

Oh, and Persona 5 Royal is out for PC on Game Pass. Only played a little bit but some of the graphics are amazing - I assume it's rotoscoping instead of 3D.

[seepage]

WH40K Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters OK so far, but the menus could be a lot clearer. Attacks always hit and cover reduces damage instead of chance to hit. 

[NoSleep]

I've commenced playing Triangle Strategy, up to the beginning of Chapter VII so far, which still seems early on in the game (just checked; that's 1/3 of the way), as the game system is still unfolding and being explained.
It seems to have taken all the best aspects of many of my favourite games (especially FFT, Vandal Hearts [flying archers!] and Suikoden [multiple recruitment opportunities]) and bundled them in together.
The story is not bad, in a sub-Game Of Thrones kind of way, but I can see that the story, more importantly in this case, is actually capable of taking different turns at many points, dependent upon the player's responses to various conversations they have throughout the game. This seems interesting compared to the linear route most RPGs afford you. Even when other games give you an opportunity to make a "choice", say, between doing something or not doing it, if you decide to say, "No!", then the response comes back, "But thou must!"*, and you proceed on to do it anyway. So the choices you make are actually a strategy element of the game, and probably make the game worth replaying a few times. On top of the actual battles being great (there's never just one way to defeat the enemy in a good TRPG).

*©HCBailly

[oggyraiding]

The thing that annoyed me about Triangle Strategy is that there is a "golden route" where everything works out for everyone, kind of eliminating the murkiness and compromise of the last few chapters of the game. It's not hard to get, once you know how to get it, but on a blind playthrough it's very easy to miss.

[NoSleep]

For the first run-through I'm simply saying the things I genuinely want to say (although I sometimes don't feel 100% about any of the choices), and I've taken the advice of other players that you need to talk to everyone (including the cats*), no exception, to be as informed as possible.

*Early on I thought they were doing a "Where's Wally?" with the cats, but a couple of more recent "talking areas" didn't have a hidden cat, so far as I know.

[seepage]

Triangle Strategy is currently 30% off at £34.99 on Steam. Still a bit more than I usually pay but I might treat myself.

Picked up Mutant Year Zero and Invisible Inc. on the cheap from Steam. Umming and ahing whether to get Into The Breach and WH40K: Battlesector.

I now appreciate why combat works the way it does in WH40K Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters. The base damage is constant, but the random elements include critical chance and resistance to debuffs. I usually turn off voices in these games but in this one I would have missed the cultists screaming "GET UP, GET UP, GET UP" or "Don't give up now" after your space marines have turned a colleague into a bowl of Chappie.

You can avoid a lot of boss fights in Wasteland 3 with high enough 'Kiss Ass' or 'Hard Ass' skills, but since most of the point of the game is the tactical combat, why would you? Also, if you haven't put enough points into 'Hard Ass' at the beginning, you can't recruit one of the characters so have to start over if you do want to recruit them.

[Pink Gregory]

Has anyone played 40K Mechanicus recently?  I think it got middling reviews when it came out but I liked the sound of some of it on podcasts, didn't know if there had been significant patches or anything.

That being said I find 40k dull as dishwater these days.

[NoSleep]

Never played it (or anything Warhammer-related), but a search reveals that it's on offer on Steam (75% discount = £5.74 for the standard game £6.74 for the Omnissiah edition) currently; on its own and in several bundles. It will even play under MacOS (back to OS X 10.9) although I'm not sure my graphics card will be up to the challenge (actually, might be OK, as said graphics card managed to play Bioshock Remastered).

Worth a punt? You seem torn. EDIT: Punted.

[Pink Gregory]

I keep approaching it but I'm trying not to buy games and not play them because I'm terrible for that.  Although all I feel like I've played for months has been Yakuza - Nier Automata - Bayonetta 3 so I'm a bit worn out on straight action games and am looking for something else.

[NoSleep]

Just tested the game and it was lurching (slightly) with all the graphics turned up full. Seems fine and playable with a lot of the boxes unticked and the screen resolution reduced.

I know what you mean about buying and then not playing games. After a brief bout of game purchasing recently, I'm heading into period of heavy work (which is atypical for this time of year, so I'm not complaining) which can often push gaming aside and then I forget the fine details of the game mechanics and can't be arsed going back to the start of the game to relearn, so it might be years before I take another look. I generally remember whether a game caught my fancy, though, so I definitely revisit eventually. Then my work suddenly takes an upturn and the cycle repeats.

[Pink Gregory]

That's exactly it.  The only strategy game I've ever found that I can dip in and out of easily is the Firaxis XCOM because there's so little stat-tracking and each mission is basically self-contained.

However if I go back to FF Tactics WOTL two years later (which is about when I drifted away from it) I would definitely have to start again, and boy that would be more work than I'm willing to put in at the minute.

[NoSleep]

That said, a game like FFT offers multiple ways to complete individual battles, which is why it has generated tourneys and forums dedicated to hacking it.

[Pink Gregory]

yeah and I can't figure any of them out :p :p :0

[seepage]

Chaos Gate: Daemonhunters seems a far more sophisticated version of basically the same game as Mechanicus. Deploy a small squad on self-contained missions, to gather 'seeds' required for research and upgrading weapons & armour. Far more attractive graphics [which might not be important for some], largish maps with destructible terrain and physics effects. Mutiple enemy squads per mission that will follow you around the map, so you can be faced with several at once if you don't defeat them in detail.