Final Fantasy I-VI Pixel Remaster Series

Gavinmad said:

It's also a 15+ year old game that was designed for a handheld three generations ago. Having played it when it was first released, I consider it the best version of 4 and the best of all that era of FF titles.

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FF4 3D has got potential for sure. I like that it has New Game Plus and pushes the game to new levels for people who want to get the most out of it. It'd probably kick the ass of the average person who just wanted to revisit FF4 and hadn't played it since the SNES version in the 90's though. Like absolutely whoop their ass, quit within two hours at the most type of crushery. But for hardcore people who steamroll these games in their sleep, it offers something new.

The augment system is the best addition IMO and is super fun to tool around with and customize. However they fucked that up by making so many of the augments missable, and locking so many of them behind "give X amount to a character before they leave the party". It's completely un-intuitive. No FF4 veteran is gonna give augments to a character they know is leaving soon. But you have to, in order to get better augments / missable augments! Between that and not being able to move augments around (so you're losing them forever every time a character leaves), this system that could be a ton of fun ends up being frustrating. Basically have to follow guides to do it right, or else you're starting over 6 hours in cause you missed one thing.

Once you figure all that out and do it right, it's probably pretty awesome though. Augments not being transferrable also means your decisions matter and have weight. It has positives so I'm looking forward to doing more with it later.

Gavinmad said:

The original English translations of 2(4) and 3(6) were wildly inconsistent in quality and 6 is particularly notorious for Ted Woolsey taking lots of artistic license with the translated dialogue. Square is doing the exact opposite of what you're accusing them of, they're replacing artistic license with translations faithful to the original Japanese.

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Ah yes, see I'm glad I asked. Of course I'm aware of all of this, that's why I qualified my statement with "George Lucas" and "nostalgia" rather than use a much more generic unclear statement.

In fact that's exactly why I compared it to George Lucas specifically, because in the wake of his atrocities being almost universally panned, he added a post-hoc rationalization of "this is how it was always meant to be." Believe him or don't, it doesn't matter -- he still ruined good versions of movies that people grew up with. I was aware of the reason the SNES versions of the games had goofy translations in parts, although I'm not aware of any reason to outright break Poison, Scan, or several other things in the process of remastering. (side note, as far as I can tell, Poison now does nothing in battle, and Bio does what Poison used to do in battle i.e. 1hp/tick. Bio used to be fucking VICIOUS on the SNES version, ticking incredibly fast for multiple hitpoints per tick, probably some % of total hp calculation. Although to be fair, the spell cast on players was Virus so maybe there were two different spells on SNES -- I can't actually remember if the players had access to "Bio" or "Virus" as I did not use the spell myself, I was dumb in that regard. Fire3 / Lit3 all the way).

It's also why I used the phrase "rustles my nostalgia," because I was lucidly aware of the fact that it was simply my cherished memories of growing up playing the SNES version that was causing me to be annoyed to find, for instance, that Yang's wife now hands me a kitchen knife instead of a spoon to throw at the final boss for 9999. My friends and I absolutely LOVED the fact that you could have Edge throw a spoon at Zeromus and do 10k damage to him, we thought it was fucking hilarious. We were also proud that we organically came upon this, because we were aware it was optional content that was pretty out of the way, and required visiting NPCs in a specific order -- that the result of our diligence was a hilariously overpowered spoon was icing on the cake.

There is no irony here. What instead happened here is your midwit brain jumped at finding a tenuous link between two things, and you leapt at the chance to white knight someone/something (bonus points for a forum gotcha), while tripping over your dick in the process. Sad.

Seananigans Have you platinumed all of the first four PRs now? Pretty sure you've at least beaten them.

What's other people's progression status on FFs beaten and/or platinumed (if Playstation) so far?

Rajaah said:

Seananigans Have you platinumed all of the first four PRs now? Pretty sure you've at least beaten them.

What's other people's progression status on FFs beaten and/or platinumed (if Playstation) so far?

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Yes, plats on Pixel Remasters 1-4. Just started 5, looking forward to a revisit to the job system in a better fleshed out overall character paradigm. I also have never played this one so yay!

I'm playing each of these with no boost until the end, so it's taking a bit longer than your posted playtimes. I clocked 25 hours (2-3 hours of idle time likely) for FF4, by far the longest so far, because I didn't crank the boost up beyond base 1x until the final dungeon farming Flan Princesses for levels and pink tail(s). Party was 55-58 when I started that 4x farming, which is quite high in general but that's due to committing to bestiary completion as I went. The only thing I didn't manage to do prior to end game was get Bomb and Mindflayer summons (which btw, fuck that useless shit). The result of only 1x for the playthrough for this one was a challenging experience for some bosses, especially the special summons. Odin and Bahamut I had to step back and analyze or try to remember how the fuck to beat them. I remembered Odin's "hit with lightning when he raises his sword" but forgot it was simply a dps/speed check. On Bahamut I was stumped, and upon looking it up was frustrated to remember the key was completely unintuitively using reflect to make him nuke himself. Fucking dumb, because the entire time I was thinking "well reflect won't help" since enemies can't reflect summon spells, and in my mind his Mega Flare was a summon spell thus not reflectable.

TLDR- on normal 1x EXP/GIL gains, FF1-3 were still pushovers with next to zero challenge, while FF4 had me working hard for many boss encounters. I found that satisfying!

Definitely plan to continue the 1x-until-final plan for FF5 and 6, pending looking up some trophies and seeing any cases where I'd really want a head start on some things. Even FF4's Level 70 trophy only took me another ~1.5 hours when cranked to 4x farming Princess Flans.

Seananigans said:

Yes, plats on Pixel Remasters 1-4. Just started 5, looking forward to a revisit to the job system in a better fleshed out overall character paradigm. I also have never played this one so yay!

I'm playing each of these with no boost until the end, so it's taking a bit longer than your posted playtimes. I clocked 25 hours (2-3 hours of idle time likely) for FF4, by far the longest so far, because I didn't crank the boost up beyond base 1x until the final dungeon farming Flan Princesses for levels and pink tail(s). Party was 55-58 when I started that 4x farming, which is quite high in general but that's due to committing to bestiary completion as I went. The only thing I didn't manage to do prior to end game was get Bomb and Mindflayer summons (which btw, fuck that useless shit). The result of only 1x for the playthrough for this one was a challenging experience for some bosses, especially the special summons. Odin and Bahamut I had to step back and analyze or try to remember how the fuck to beat them. I remembered Odin's "hit with lightning when he raises his sword" but forgot it was simply a dps/speed check. On Bahamut I was stumped, and upon looking it up was frustrated to remember the key was completely unintuitively using reflect to make him nuke himself. Fucking dumb, because the entire time I was thinking "well reflect won't help" since enemies can't reflect summon spells, and in my mind his Mega Flare was a summon spell thus not reflectable.

TLDR- on normal 1x EXP/GIL gains, FF1-3 were still pushovers with next to zero challenge, while FF4 had me working hard for many boss encounters. I found that satisfying!

Definitely plan to continue the 1x-until-final plan for FF5 and 6, pending looking up some trophies and seeing any cases where I'd really want a head start on some things. Even FF4's Level 70 trophy only took me another ~1.5 hours when cranked to 4x farming Princess Flans.

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FF4 is full of little tricks like that, which make the game pretty fast/easy when you know them. Depending on the version (since there are so many versions of FF4 now), Wall/Reflect can also wear off before Bahamut uses Meganuke. If you start the fight by putting Wall on everyone, it'll poof by the time he actually attacks. So I tend to start putting it on at the 5 count, and generally only get it onto my two weakest characters, which is enough. I think it's a lot better to do this fight with Fusoya rather than Kain, especially at lower levels (which also gives you Bahamut for the Giant). Then later you've got Wyvern/Dark Bahamut which opens with Meganuke. Maybe it's intended to be the game's kind of optional superboss (since one of FF5's two superbosses does the same thing, opens with the big AOE). So Reflect doesn't help on that one, it's just a straight HP check. When I played FF4: The After Years on Wii in 2010, I got to the end at a pretty low level and got HP-checked when Dark Bahamut was the 2nd to last boss and just annihilated my party in seconds. That pissed me off. That whole game kinda pissed me off. Cool idea, poor execution with the 8 hour long final dungeon with an HP check at the end. Either way, I've played so many FF4s now that it's probably why FF4 3D intrigues me, cause the usual tricks don't entirely get the job done there.

Back to PR, I handled boosts in different ways depending on the game. Some I barely used them until the lategame clean-up. Others I flipped them on and off. I like to turn encounters off, which does speed things up a bit, but I also have to do the Bestiary, and raise levels. So I might put everything on 4x and clear an area's bestiary entries, then turn encounters off after that. This results in getting through things a bit faster, while the levels tend to even out and not overlevel unless a rare spawn refuses to show up, which happened a bunch of times in 3 and 4.

I also got to level 99 in all four of them (9999 HP in FF2) and tried to "do everything". Like clearing every trapdoor in the Sealed Cave. So that added some time back on, especially in FF3.

FF5 is the first one where I'm trying to "do everything" as I go, rather than missing a lot and going back to get all of it in the endgame. Since FF5 is split into 3 versions of the world (much like FF6 is split into two) it'd be a pretty bad idea to not do everything as you go if you're going for a completionist run. Tons and tons of missable stuff in FF5 with entire areas disappearing at the two big world changeovers. I guess that's a spoiler but not really and it's pertinent info.

FF5's the one I've played the least by a lot so I was pretty excited for it too. So far FF5 isn't nearly the challenge I remember it being, nothing has put up any kind of a fight yet and I'm playing this one on 1x with encounters on due to trying to do it as "normally" as possible. IIRC from the distant past, even when bosses do put up a fight, nearly all of them have a trick to obliterating them, usually involving Blue Magic or an element weakness or even Gil Toss. Which is pretty cool. They did a good job with FF5 bosses.

Gavinmad said:

I'll just ignore you being a vicious cunt for no good reason at the end.

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When poisoned, characters' skin turn a purplish hue and falls to a crouching position. Enemies gain no visual appearance when poisoned. Poison damages a character periodically during battle for 1/8 of their max HP and may last outside of battle, removing 1 HP for every step taken on the field.

All Poisoned characters also lose 42 HP if Teleport is cast. Higher Stamina slows the frequency. Haste accelerate the effect, while Slow delays it. The status disables Yang's Focus command.

All the SNES versions, the original Japanese GBA port, and the North American Advance release, contain a bug where resistance to Poison is ignored for both player characters and monsters. Poison still fails in boss battles, because all status spells are made not to work on bosses. The bug is fixed in the second Japanese GBA port and the European Advance version.

Spoiler

Venom/Poison
Casting Time: 1
MP Cost: 2
Status Effect: Poison
Elemental: n/a
Spell Power: 0
Targeting: one/all targets, default one enemy
Hit Rate: 90
Boss Bit: Yes
Solo Multiplier: No
Ignore Reflect: No
Notes: Poison resistance was not fixed until FF4A Euro/1.1 version.
Initial damage will always be 1 due to spell power, and damage from poison
in battle will deal 1/8 of the target's maxHP with a minimum damage of 1.
A high magic stat for monsters or high Vitality/Stamina slows
down the poison damage timer.
Poison timer length is Vitality(Stamina) or monster Magic stat + 20.
It can be affected by speed modifiers.

I'm not sure I ever used poison in any of the old versions of the game, apparently I was missing out. I read a review of the Pixel Remaster changes and it says the hp drain from Sap (the status effect from Virus/Bio) has been halved.

What specific problem are you having with Libra? iirc it was changed at some point so now instead of it pausing the game to tell you all the information for the scanned monster, now it should display all the relevant information for you somewhere on the screen (the bottom I think) when you place the cursor on a monster that you've scanned.

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Come on man, you're a bit of a vicious cunt yourself so I was just responding to your snipe with you as a known quantity on these forums. But fair enough, it probably wasn't necessary as this particular snipe wasn't vicious. So, apologies.

Whatever you posted about Poison is absolutely not true for FF4 PR. It does zero damage in battle to players. Turns them purple/green bubbles, gives you the status icon you can Antidote/Esuna away, but it has no effect so it's pointless to cure until back on the world screen when you'll take 1hp per tile moving. The thing about Virus/Bio's damage on players being reduced is true though, although I'll disagree with their exact description. It appeared to work exactly how I remembered Poison working in SNES FF4 -- 1hp per tick. Guess I could be wrong on that exact memory though. But it definitely wasn't just "halved" since SNES original Virus did crazy damage quite fast, it wasn't just 2hp/tick (halved would be the 1hp/tick I observed).

On Scan/Libra in FF4 PR, it just flat out did not work on bosses in the 15-20 times I tried it against 10-15 different bosses. The result was "No Effect" every single time. Never in battle did I see any indication of boss hp, weakness, etc. The only time I was able to get a boss reading was by using the "Bestiary" items. Those worked as advertised, giving HP current/max and any weaknesses.

There are so many versions of FF4 at this point that you can't take any information from the internet as gospel unless it specifies which version it pertains to. Each of these has a variety of differences at this point in mechanics, spell effectiveness, stat effectiveness, drop rates, and even mob HP:

-FF2 on the SNES
-FF4 on the Super Famicom
-FF Chronicles on the PS1
-FF4 Advance on the GBA
-FF4 Complete on the PSP
-FF4 3D on the DS
-FF4 3D on phone/Steam
-FF4 Pixel Remaster on phone/Steam
-FF4 Pixel Remaster on PS4/Switch

And I'm probably forgetting some.

When I was working on FF3 PR it got a tad confusing looking up info for it because most of it was pertaining to FF3 DS, the only other major release FF3 ever got here. Luckily FF3 DS doesn't have any huge differences from FF3 NES/PR in terms of where things are and whatnot. FF4 on the other hand is a bit of a nightmare. Trying to look up info on it and I'm finding all these droprates and mobs that only pertain to the Advance version, which it seems most of the info online is for. Mob drops from "Lunar Ruins" isn't gonna help me in PR or 3D where Lunar Ruins don't exist.

Gavinmad said:

Eh sounds like our memories are disagreeing with each other. I can fire up an old FF4 rom at some point and test exactly how poison works in the old version with the "poison resistance bug" but I'm definitely never gonna shell out for the PRs, especially considering it sounds like they made them absurdly easy. 3D version always feels challenging every time I pick it up.

Rajaah does Libra not do anything for you in FF4 either?

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PR versions are absurdly easy yes. Even 3 and 5 which I always considered the hardest of the series in their original forms.

I never used Libra, have all the boss weaknesses stored in my head along with all the other useless info in there. Don't know if I'm on the spectrum or not but I retain information I read. Which is one of the reasons why all of the different info on different FF4 versions causes me to blue screen a bit. I've got all this retained information that conflicts with itself as far as FF4 goes. At least boss weaknesses isn't one of those things.

I'll say this though, it's pretty cool that this PR remaster has gotten people into the old FFs again. A few people I know are playing them for the first time in ages right now and talking shop with me. Even seeing a resurgence of people interested in FF3 3D and FF4 3D, or the PSP one with After Years included. It's pretty cool after all these years to have early FFs seem to matter again.

Oh, another thing... am I going crazy or did they re-order the four Elemental Lords battle? I could have sworn in FF2 on the SNES, Rubicant was the second of the four for some reason and Valvalis was the last one. I just played that version a couple weeks ago too so I'm fairly sure of this. Now in the PR they're in the "correct" order with Rubicant at the end. Not sure when they changed that if it was before now.

Only one I really cared about was 3 since the original hasn't had a 2D English version and it's been 20+ years since I beat the translated rom.

I went ahead and started 1 on psp for the bonus bosses and dungeons. Not having the exp multiplier or PR made it more of a grind but at one point you can encounter warmechs all over so went from level 60 to 99 in an hour or so. Got the most powerful form of that dungeon's boss and squeaked out a win. Went and beat Chaos in 3 or 4 rounds after that.

Thought about getting the rest of bestiary but felt it wasn't really worth it to go through that place 7 more times and the rest of the bonus stuff multiple times.

Gonna start on the psp version of 2 then will go to the PR of 3. I've already beat 3 on DS along with it's optional boss.

Rajaah said:

I'll say this though, it's pretty cool that this PR remaster has gotten people into the old FFs again. A few people I know are playing them for the first time in ages right now and talking shop with me. Even seeing a resurgence of people interested in FF3 3D and FF4 3D, or the PSP one with After Years included. It's pretty cool after all these years to have early FFs seem to matter again.

Oh, another thing... am I going crazy or did they re-order the four Elemental Lords battle? I could have sworn in FF2 on the SNES, Rubicant was the second of the four for some reason and Valvalis was the last one. I just played that version a couple weeks ago too so I'm fairly sure of this. Now in the PR they're in the "correct" order with Rubicant at the end. Not sure when they changed that if it was before now.

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On DS Rubicant is last I think when you fight them one after the other. He was 2 out of 4 in the older 2D versions.

Order on 3D DS version

Order on older 2D versions

Rangoth said:

FF2 finally done!

lost 1st pass to final boss. It wasn’t a wipeout, but more like a 30 minute battle of attrition. I’d damage him for 2k and he’d hit me and heal for 1.8 or the other way around. Basically making each round a wash unless I got lucky and he cast a useless spell and I’d gain on him. eventually got irritated and let me people’s die

next attempt, read online to equip blood sword. Zero other changed factors and I hit for 9-10k, two shot him and it is over……wtf

anyway, disliked the mechanics of this one big time. May take a break before starting ff3 /sigh.

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Blood Sword absolutely obliterates the final boss of FF2. Not just that, but also the other four endgame area bosses. Astaroth is practically an uberboss so that helps. I always find him to be a stronger opponent than the Emperor himself. Said bosses also have the HP absorb component to their attacks so you're fighting fire with fire essentially.

FF2's box art also gives away this substantial clue by showing Firion with the Blood Sword: