I’ll give you this, but Jean is kind of weak from the start. There shouldn’t be a whole lot of “realizing” that has to be done to figure that out :S
I disagree that what you had is a balanced party though. Jean is not a physical presence. He’s a jack-of-all-trades who kind of ends up being a jack-of-all-suck pretty quickly. And even if you got him to level 25 or 30 before realizing that, it’s not much of a loss to just drop him for someone like Rand, who happens to be pretty durable even at low levels.
In FF6 you could make your characters into almost anything you wanted, though. Sure, some chars, like Edgar and Sabin, had uber-powerful special attacks, but for the most part the characters were clean slates that could be powerful or weak depending on how you built them.
This is true to a certain extent, but I found myself using individual character skills a lot more than magic throughout the game. They’re basically free moves that improve on your physical attacks and they cost nothing. Sure, if you grind for a while and find the right relics, you can cast Ultima every round on every monster in the game, but that takes some of the fun out of it and isn’t the natural progression at all.
If you don’t powerlevel, skills like Tools, Blitz, SwdTech, and Throw are what separate wins from losses. And… they just LOOK cool too. And they build on the characters’ personalities through BATTLES in a way, which is something no games after VI have ever really been good at.
Yeah, I listened to it, and wondered whether I was supposed to think it was good or bad, because I didn’t really like it… at all.
Oh my god, XII was just such a fucking bad game for what it was. If it didn’t have the music and graphics that it did, there’s no way I would’ve made it through. After a certain point I was just playing to see more of the brilliant atmosphere.
Sten STARTS at level 8 with higher strength and stamina and only 6 less hp than Jean has two levels higher, a ridiculously higher agility and spells that actually DO shit. Needless to say, he’s never overtaken.
Katt doesn’t do just “good damage”, she has higher strength than either when she starts at level 6 and has about fifteen extra points in Str by level 10 over both, which isn’t even the real number since she’s always two or three levels ahead. It’s a bit difficult to keep her alive at first but nobody in the game ever does as much damage as her based on strength alone, Ryu alone only matches her because of equipment later on (Unless you decide to grind Bleu to Lvl RETARDED for whatever reason). She’s also the only other character aside from Ryu who can counterattack and the one with the second best chance to do a guts revive.
Rand has higher strength and about equal stamina as Jean by level 6 and beats him in anything (but a marginal difference in speed) including stamina and hp by level 10. He’s actually not that great later on because his equipment sucks, but he’s painfully superior at this point.
Nina has only like five points less of hp by level ten. NINA.
These numbers do not magically flip later on. No matter who you were using, Jean could NOT have seemed superior in anything other than having a couple more hp points. Other than that, he has lower strength, completely and utterly pathetic speed, no useful spells and a totally useless action command. He gains a lot of hp on the long run, but that mostly just serves to keep him alive longer so you realize he has absolutely nothing to do other than stand there and do pathetic damage.
To boot, the farther away a character’s level is from Ryu’s (Who ususally has the highest unless you keep Katt in the party at all times) the more exp they gain in order to let them catch up (If difference is >5, they get about 60% more), so by level 20 you were still in perfect condition to kick him out and bring anyone else in.
Which I loathe with passion because it’s basically saying “Well, screw any logic or planning, anyone can nuke God!”. It’s just really fucking lazy design. Even then VI was still to an extent trying to at least differentiate them via stats and skills, unlike XII where it really doesn’t matter at all who you pick.
I didn’t like it either, and I didn’t like it when they repeated the trend in subsequent final fantasys. I would have liked much more differentiated characters, and no teaching magic to everyone. It could have even added to the story, for instance, making Terra more powerful than everyone else so you understood why she was the ‘ray of hope’ for the Returners(which I never understood how this could be).
Sten STARTS at level 8 with higher strength and stamina and only 6 less hp than Jean has two levels higher, a ridiculously higher agility and spells that actually DO shit. Needless to say, he’s never overtaken.
You can have high STR but still suck at hitting things, and you can have high STA and still die really easily - both thanks to equipment. Guess which one Sten did.
Katt doesn’t do just “good damage”, she has higher strength than either when she starts at level 6 and has about fifteen extra points in Str by level 10 over both, which isn’t even the real number since she’s always two or three levels ahead. It’s a bit difficult to keep her alive at first but nobody in the game ever does as much damage as her based on strength alone, Ryu alone only matches her because of equipment later on (Unless you decide to grind Bleu to Lvl RETARDED for whatever reason). She’s also the only other character aside from Ryu who can counterattack and the one with the second best chance to do a guts revive.
Yeah yeah, bla bla bla. My bad for thinking there would be a different alternative to the all offense, no defense character.
Rand has higher strength and about equal stamina as Jean by level 6 and beats him in anything (but a marginal difference in speed) including stamina and hp by level 10. He’s actually not that great later on because his equipment sucks, but he’s painfully superior at this point.
I disagree, because Rand has shitty equipment at the beginning, too.
Nina has only like five points less of hp by level ten. NINA.
Yes, however Nina also has much worse defense, and rightfully so, being a caster.
These numbers do not magically flip later on. No matter who you were using, Jean could NOT have seemed superior in anything other than having a couple more hp points. Other than that, he has lower strength, completely and utterly pathetic speed, no useful spells and a totally useless action command. He gains a lot of hp on the long run, but that mostly just serves to keep him alive longer so you realize he has absolutely nothing to do other than stand there and do pathetic damage.
Jean gains HP pretty fast, that I recall. I still hold that none of the characters were obviously better or worse by this time, so I don’t really know what you’re getting at, other than to tell me a bunch of crap you’ve already told me. Instead of repeating myself, you can read all the things I’ve said before.
To boot, the farther away a character’s level is from Ryu’s (Who ususally has the highest unless you keep Katt in the party at all times) the more exp they gain in order to let them catch up (If difference is >5, they get about 60% more), so by level 20 you were still in perfect condition to kick him out and bring anyone else in.
Another argument based on some sort of information I couldn’t have possibly known without looking up, thus, outside of the scope of my playing experience.
The main thrusts of your argument thus far have been about things that I couldn’t have possibly known, other than the stats, which at level fucking 10, the differences are so infinitesimal that I couldn’t have possibly looked at that and given a shit at that point. If you have any better arguments, please bring them forth. Otherwise, I feel like this argument is becoming pretty pointless, and I don’t think anyone has convinced me why I should have magically known that Jean was going to suck.
No one expects you to magically know. They expect you to see that he sucks when you get him, and that he continues to suck when you use him, and eventually swap him out for someone who doesn’t.
I didn’t magically know that he sucked, nor did I look at stats or anything. I simply threw him into battle, saw that he was doing single digit damage, and scrapped the idea.
Didn’t Jean’s intro quest suck too? (And I mean more so than even Sten’s or Spar’s did.)
Besides who cares if Jean sucks in the beginning. Everybody sans Ryu sucked by endgame anyways. I ended up building my party to include Katt, Nina, and Rand namely since they left no Shaman behind. is shot for really bad pun
gets better I realize that Rand sucks for a healer (lack of AP, not much of a tank), but I was still able to grind my way through the final dungeon in the end.
As for FF VI, I mentioned in the other thread that I didn’t really care for everyone to have the ability to learn every spell. However this is a problem with every FF game since V is overcustomization i.e. Godmoding (though for XII it should be referred to as identity theft). VI is interesting in that it only allows half-godmoding in the magic department, whereas equipment and abilities are fixed (Merit Award not withstanding). However, since magic ended up being more powerful than strength was plus thanks to overly broken spells like Ultima, almost everything that wasn’t Ultima ended up being overshadowed by Ultima.
Every rerelease of this game keeps getting more and more broken too (Wind God Gau aside). No matter how challenging the new GBA dungeons were it’s undeniable that you could simply cheese your way through with infinite Ragnaroks and Illuminas among other things (like Genji Armor on anybody who didn’t have anything better to wear) and I’m not even counting the unlimited Gem Boxes and Offerings either (if you could get them before the Soul Shrine it would be a different matter).
Then again, my last game had me so bored that I made everyone have 255 strength via the cooking method. So even Nina was kinda hitting like a truck. But with a strength boost and the right shamans, even frogdude can actually dish out damage that won’t make you laugh at him. Plus he kinda looks neat after-fusion. It does leave you stuck with the Earth Shaman without any taker, but that’s life.
Jean - Water/Holy
Nina - Wind
Katt - Fire/Dark
Earth - Eating caik by herself and cutting herself at night.
For starters, he doesn’t do shitty damage right when you get him.
For two, you can’t ‘see’ that he sucks when you get him, for reasons I’ve explained in painful detail, nor could I have possibly known it wouldn’t be hard to swap him out far down the road, for reasons I’ve explained in painful detail. By saying this shit over and over again, you’re forcing the argument in circles. And before you tell me that I’m doing the same thing, remember that a lot of the best arguments you guys have brought to me require me to have some sort of knowledge of the game already, and shouldn’t even be used in this argument.
Lastly, it sounds like Zero validated pretty much exactly what I said in the beginning. “No, I think I had trouble because I didn’t use Shamans.”
Unless you were playing the GBA version (I haven’t, I’ve only played the SNES, so it’s entirely possible he was tweaked in the port) Jean does indeed do shitty damage when you first get him.
I suppose if you brought him back to the starting town and had him fight the weakest enemies possible he’d do alright. But when I used him against the enemies in the overworld in the area where he joins he never once did even double-digit damage. It was more than enough for me to think ‘yeah, screw this guy’ and swapped him out immediately. Then the fact that party members don’t level up with everyone else made him essentially useless.
If you WERE playing the GBA version, then ignore the above I guess. It was probably altered.
This is going to be wholly redundant, but just to hammer it in: We’re not exaggerating, Jean does an average of 6-11 points even after propperly outfitting him past the Sima Fort segment. Equipment included, that’s Nina’s average physical offensive power. Unless you were playing with everyone else naked, unarmed and somehow still at their absolute minimum level (Which is not possible), it’s literally impossible to not see just how unbelievably shitty he is as a fighter right away. The only possibility would be if you were expecting him to get better or to gain some useful magic much later on, which he obviously doesn’t.
And your argument fails at a little detail: YOU DIDN’T EVEN TRY. It’s not some obscure invisible variable that you’ll never notice. If you just fish out Katt, Rand or Sten still at lower levels and play a couple battles with them, you WILL notice that they’re getting much stronger suspiciously fast. Or won’t notice, but will have them decently leveled after a couple minutes regardless. The system for leveling underused characters is there, it only requires someone to actually TRY.
If you told me you did notice by level 20 that Jean couldn’t do shit, swapped him yet couldn’t stand to use a much weaker character because he wouldn’t catch up no matter what, then fine, but since that couldn’t have happened, your argument fails. You either missed a very blatant reality that’s clear from the get go (Jean can’t do anything but tank, ever) until endgame, or you saw it and just gave up instead of trying to see for a few minutes if the game offered another alternative, which it did.
I played the SNES version. I suppose you could be right, but I remember him not being a complete waste at first.
And is it really that strange that I would assume he’d get better? I liked him cos he took hits the best out of Katt and Sten - I didn’t try Rand very much, cos you couldn’t get very good equipment out of him. So, I stuck with him. Seriously, how is it so hard to imagine that I’d believe he’d get better?
And your argument fails at a little detail: YOU DIDN’T EVEN TRY. It’s not some obscure invisible variable that you’ll never notice. If you just fish out Katt, Rand or Sten still at lower levels and play a couple battles with them, you WILL notice that they’re getting much stronger suspiciously fast. Or won’t notice, but will have them decently leveled after a couple minutes regardless. The system for leveling underused characters is there, it only requires someone to actually TRY.
And this argument fails, as well. Think about it: It takes so long to level up characters in this game, that why WOULD I have tried? Why, oh why, would I have thought, “Maybe there’s a system in place that will give my underleveled characters 40-60% more experience! Let me see if I’m right”? The answer is: There IS no fucking reason, because nowhere does it ever indicate that this is the case. So yeah. I didn’t try; the game takes so fucking long to level up, that when I looked at switching characters, I went "Okay, Jean is at like level 25 or so, and man he sucks. But, Rand is at like level 9…he’s never going to catch up. Shitballs.¨This is the more likely thing to happen for most people. And even then, as Zero said, you can make Jean good if you use Shamans, which I didn’t.
If you told me you did notice by level 20 that Jean couldn’t do shit, swapped him yet couldn’t stand to use a much weaker character because he wouldn’t catch up no matter what, then fine, but since that couldn’t have happened, your argument fails.
Yes, however I just explained why I wouldn’t - and why probably hardly anyone would - try doing that. If you tried that - good for you! I bet you found out by using an FAQ, though.
Or do you have your empirical data you used to figure this out somewhere on a notepad file in your computer? If you do, I’ll eat my tongue, but I’ll bet that like hell you do, because it never says “Gained 1112 experience points, but Rand gained more experience points.” If you see Rand level up faster than other people, it’s easy to come up with an answer why - he’s at fucking level 9! The game makes no indication that characters get extra experience, so THIS would be the conclusion I’d come up with - as would you.
This leads me to believe that you got this knowledge from a FAQ. As such, this argument falls - yet again - into the issue of “couldn’t have possibly known by just playing the game normally.”
You either missed a very blatant reality that’s clear from the get go (Jean can’t do anything but tank, ever) until endgame
Nevermind the fact that I WANTED a tank, I also took my first impressions of Katt and decided she was worthless too, as I severely dislike fighters who can’t take a hit. According to you, this problem is mitigated by the end of the game, yet you’re giving me shit for having never tried to catch her up in levels to see for myself. So, I tried to see if Jean’s problems were mitigated by the end of the game - admittedly cos I didn’t know about the weird experience formula you told me about - and they weren’t. If that’s clear from the get-go, then why should I have assumed that, from the get-go, that Katt was going to be an all-powerful fighter who would die in one hit for the whole game?
…or you saw it and just gave up instead of trying to see for a few minutes if the game offered another alternative, which it did.
Which is what happened, and I’ve just given a completely reasonable explanation for why.
Of course, the funny thing about this is, it still proves the very original premise of this argument - Hades trying to tell me that the game isn’t grind-heavy - because if I don’t like a character, then I need to swap them out and grind the shit out of another character. I don’t care how much more experience they get - it will still take a good while to level up another character. And then! What if I don’t like the NEXT character I caught up? Grind another character? Que fuckin’ chido! Fuck this game.
Whoa, okay, I gotta call YOU on this one. There is NO WAY to know he won’t get a hell of a lot better. You could use him for a while and see that he’s not getting much stronger, but if it’s your first time playing, there’s no way to know for sure that there isn’t some Onionkid-esque powerups for him. I mean, that’s not a very safe thing to assume, but most games do try to balance things out in the end. All I’m saying is that I’m surprised SG didn’t abandon him before level 25.
Of course, the funny thing about this is, it still proves the very original premise of this argument - Hades trying to tell me that the game isn’t grind-heavy - because if I don’t like a character, then I need to swap them out and grind the shit out of another character.
The exp. difference between a level 1 and a level 35 is about the same as the difference between 44 and 45, I estimate. It’s not necessary to grind the shit out of anyone just because they’re lower for a while. Fight a few battles in an advanced area? Maybe. Grind? Actual grinding, the way you’d grind for the Tournesol? Fuck that shit. If I had to do THAT, I would’ve used Jean.
I still think the damage difference should have tipped you off. He’s not a bit weaker, he’s MUCH, MUCH weaker than any other fighter and only a bit sturdier. It was a pretty drastic margin.
Of course, you could think he’d get better. At level 10. By level 20 you were grasping at some far off hope, which leads to…
This would have value if it were some long, tiring process where the boost is helpful but not immediately evident.
As Hades said, the exp growth is set in such a way that grinding a low-level character in an already advanced area will put in levels extremely fast. This isn’t new. Most games already make training weaker characters easy simply by virtue of how the exp requirements for leveling are set (See ToP’s Chester for a good example, or FFXII for a contrary example of how the requirements are so fucked up that training lv30 or lv60 characters are essentially the same). This is really a basic feature in design, BoFII does that and just adds an extra boost to it.
But even if you didn’t know at all, it doesn’t matter. A couple minutes in the Sima Fort area are already plenty enough. I only noticed something weird about how weaker characters leveled after several playthroughs, that’s true, and I never knew the actual numbers until I saw a manual describing them, but that never mattered because I just knew and cared from the very first playthrough that characters caught up FAST.
So yeah, you think Rand is leveling quickly just because he’s level 9. And? Is that a bad thing? Why do you care? The escalating exp requirement is commonplace, it’s a given that making weaker characters catch up isn’t usually difficult. Why do you care WHY it’s happening? It’s working. Fight ten more battles in Sima Fort and you’ll probably have him around 12-14, at which point he’s already at excellent levels. Or stop right there because there’s no explicit message telling you he’s getting stronger faster, even though he’s getting stronger plenty fast enough.
Remember that solo fight Rand has. It’s difficult because his equipment at that time sucks and he’s not meant for solo, but I never used him in my first playthroughs and yet never had to spend more than five minutes grinding for him to have a high enough level to win that fight. The game itself presents you with an example of how easy it is to make weaker characters catch up.
[QUOTE=Hades Shinigami,post:54,topic:19789"]
Whoa, okay, I gotta call YOU on this one. There is NO WAY to know he won’t get a hell of a lot better. You could use him for a while and see that he’s not getting much stronger, but if it’s your first time playing, there’s no way to know for sure that there isn’t some Onionkid-esque powerups for him. I mean, that’s not a very safe thing to assume, but most games do try to balance things out in the end. All I’m saying is that I’m surprised SG didn’t abandon him before level 25.
[/quote]
Bad choice of words. By “obviously” I didn’t mean that he could tell right away. The Onion Kid principle is precisely the only reason I could figure for why anyone would try to use him intensively.
Though seriously, in a first playthrough with no additional metagaming knowledge, would you stick with a character like Jean hoping he’d get a magic boost at level 40 or so?
And you got the Tournesol? Why? I though you stopped before the bullshit level quests began.
I though you stopped before the bullshit level quests began.
I did. Which is why I said I would’ve used Jean if that’s the kind of shit I would’ve had to go through to level up someone else. But it’s not.
Oh, so now you’re on to thinking for me? No, in fact, most games only make an obvious distinction between fighters and casters at first. It takes a good long while, in my experience, before the real distinctions between characters in similar roles begin to surface. Thus, when I see something drastic like ‘Katt already dies in one hit’ or ‘Jean already takes hits notably better than all these guys’, I think to myself "Wow, this can only get better!’
This would have value if it were some long, tiring process where the boost is helpful but not immediately evident.
As Hades said, the exp growth is set in such a way that grinding a low-level character in an already advanced area will put in levels extremely fast. This isn’t new. Most games already make training weaker characters easy simply by virtue of how the exp requirements for leveling are set (See ToP’s Chester for a good example, or FFXII for a contrary example of how the requirements are so fucked up that training lv30 or lv60 characters are essentially the same). This is really a basic feature in design, BoFII does that and just adds an extra boost to it.
But even if you didn’t know at all, it doesn’t matter. A couple minutes in the Sima Fort area are already plenty enough. I only noticed something weird about how weaker characters leveled after several playthroughs, that’s true, and I never knew the actual numbers until I saw a manual describing them, but that never mattered because I just knew and cared from the very first playthrough that characters caught up FAST.
So yeah, you think Rand is leveling quickly just because he’s level 9. And? Is that a bad thing? Why do you care? The escalating exp requirement is commonplace, it’s a given that making weaker characters catch up isn’t usually difficult. Why do you care WHY it’s happening? It’s working. Fight ten more battles in Sima Fort and you’ll probably have him around 12-14, at which point he’s already at excellent levels. Or stop right there because there’s no explicit message telling you he’s getting stronger faster, even though he’s getting stronger plenty fast enough.
Remember that solo fight Rand has. It’s difficult because his equipment at that time sucks and he’s not meant for solo, but I never used him in my first playthroughs and yet never had to spend more than five minutes grinding for him to have a high enough level to win that fight. The game itself presents you with an example of how easy it is to make weaker characters catch up.
You know, just to humor both of you, I tried something.
I took my save at the very last dungeon, where all that was left to do was fight the last boss. And I switched out Jean for Katt and ground for about 20 minutes. FYI, Ryu was at like 57-58, and Katt was at level 34. After 20 minutes, she gained seven levels…at FRAMESKIP NINE!!! Imagine that, the game is over twice as slow as what I just tried out, and she only gained seven levels? Fuck that shit.
Imagine if she were only about seven levels behind - it would have still taken upwards to 1 1/2 - 2 hours to catch her up, since she wouldn’t be leveling as fast as before after two levels. Also, remember that everyone is leveling up at the same time, too.
Now, you could say “ohh it’s easier near the beginning of the game because the disparity between levels is lower”, but consider this:
Experience goes up proportionally as the game goes on, so I wouldn’t really be gaining levels much faster. “Nothing new”, as they say.
Near the beginning, it would even WORSE because of the disparity. Think about it; five levels is a lot at almost ANY time in the game, even near the end of the game, unless you’ve just ground so much that your levels are negligible. But, especially closer to the beginning of the game, every single level counts. So, you stop gaining extra experience when you’re within five levels of Ryu? That fucking SUCKS! Five levels is a life-or-death issue that early in an RPG.
2.5. In case you wanted to bring up how some characters level faster/slower than others naturally, there’s definitely no way of knowing that, unless they’re within the five level range of Ryu.
This is the most important factor: Breath of Fire 2 battles take a long fucking time, and gaining a level in Breath of Fire 2 takes a lot of fucking fights. This is what makes it grind heavy, even in spite of this super neat “Characters gain 40-60% more experience” factor…which I just proved clearly doesn’t help THAT much. More than anything else, what makes a game grind-heavy is not one character that I used - did I mention that I didn’t actually have a big problem finishing the game? I never once said the game was too hard, but that my experience with Jean was rough - No, what makes a game grind heavy is when you don’t gain enough experience from battles to begin with, and the fights are incredibly slow.
In the end, my arguments have always been that
The game is grind-heavy,
Characters being completely useless is bad game design, even in 1995, and
Having to use Shamans, which apparently would have taken Jean from sucky to not sucky, is also a bad choice of game design, due to the fact that finding them is completely optional.
The only really big rebuttal you guys have made is against my first argument, stating that I only had to grind because I used Jean. Pretty much everything else you guys have said is completely unrelated, but you somehow brought back that it is easy to catch characters back up if I didn’t wanna use Jean. Well, to sum up my own rebuttal, again:
I had to grind before I ever got Jean. I had to grind even after I got Jean. I didn’t even grind because of Jean - I ground because I wanted to see what spells I could get for Nina and Bow, and quite frankly, the enemies in the last dungeon can still hit all my guys - even Ryu - for stupidly large amounts of HP. I don’t think Jean lowered my guys’s defense, so I don’t think the problem was Jean. Even still, I didn’t have an incredibly hard time with the game.
I just showed that catching characters up still takes a long time in this game, due to the main reasons why the game is grind heavy to begin with.
Thus, your guys’s main arguments do nothing to disprove either of my points.
The reason why nobody challenges you on those last two points is because
a) Everybody knows that aside from Ryu everyone sucks which is why they need those Shaman who
b) suck even harder than the crappy characters themselves. Because they
a) have to be found as you said,
b) can only be fused at Granny’s place, and
c) will defu-sion-HA! as soon as your character’s HP drop to critical levels no matter where they are or what they’re doing.
And in reality the only difference Shamans make is if you want to beat the game before reaching level 55 or not. Once you reach past level 55 then Shamans become a moot point since your characters will now be able to get through the final dungeon without folding in than up to two hits.
Oh and complaining that BoF II didn’t explain the bonus EXP system or that Jean sucks is like cracking ‘All your base’ jokes while playing Zero Wing. We got it since 95 or whenever we played it.
I am in no way confused as to why people didn’t argue my other two points (although SE did for like one post, but whatever); these are undeniable truths about the game.
Oh and complaining that BoF II didn’t explain the bonus EXP system or that Jean sucks is like cracking ‘All your base’ jokes while playing Zero Wing. We got it since 95 or whenever we played it.
