GREATREDSPIRIT'S PROFILE

author=Roden
Someone brought up a good point recently: Most people saw it and it was the highest grossing movie ever, but what do you actually remember about Avatar? I remember... Blue people. And some military robots. It's so hollow that it just blends out of existence after you watch it.

Clearly if nobody actually remembers going to see the movie then you can convince them to pay to see it again! Avatar nearly achieved this!

author=Bluefeathr42
I've been trying to solo Mount & Blade: Warband. Also I've started drinking heavily. I don't see any correlation between these two things. I've come to the realization that as much as I like Mount & Blade for it's total lack of story and complete freedom, I really hate having to drag around an army.

Also, I tried to get into Ultima 4 again, but I was put off by the random character class system. I don't wanna play a fighter, dammit, I like rangers!

Ultima 4 doesn't give you a random class, it's based on the answers to the test you're given at the start of the game. It pits two virtues against each other and you pick one, eliminating the other until you end up with one virtue and that determines your class. iirc the virtues to classes (and your starting city) are:
Humility: Shepard & Magincia
Valor: Fighter & Jhelom?
Compassion: Bard & Brittania
Honesty: Mage & Moonglow
Honor: Paladin & Trinsic?
Sacrifice: Tinkerer & ???
Justice: Druid & Yew?
Spirituality: Ranger & Skara Brae
(my memory of the cities is bad)

I'm a fan of Druid, but any spell caster is better than a non spell caster in U4. Plus you start on the main continent so you don't need to wait for moongates to appear to get off your starting island.

Don't forget this is FF2: Hitting yourself for stacks of HP and relying on it only worked for the first three quarters of the game. Once the HP draining enemies became common you'd find out how you fucked yourself over: HP draining enemies dealt damage proportional to your maximum HP and could hit multiple times, basically eating your HP like a kid with cookies. If you haven't trained up your evasion by rotating a frontliner with two shields to get dodge procs and ergo evasion stat improvements you could build yourself into a corner! And don't forget heavy armor was a trap since it crashed your dodge rate making it basically impossible to get those precious evasion gains!


I think one problem was how they did "do a thing and get better at it" by making what you improved way too narrow. A character should improve their ability at doing a role in general, not just get Swords+1. Stat gains to strength kinda counts towards this but it won't make up the difference when your axe stat is 1. Thankfully these kinds of games were usually safe investing in swords, iirc fists worked well too in FF2. The whole thing conceptually might work but it should be revised so characters improve in roles organically and have less slow grinding abilities up to make them useful. Casting any of Cure, Esuna, Raise, etc. would build healer role exp making them all more effective so when you do need to cast Raise all those times you cast the other spells mean that Raise isn't just a lv1 cast.


The plot is a mixed bag for me. I like some of the impact you had to the game. Mythril gear for example isn't unlocked by going to the next story town but it's an actual plot point. There is the classic farting around doing jack shit part basically involving the whole of Ultima that gave a wet fart of a spell. I do like the reasoning that Ultima is a super old spell and not necessarily better than modern high power spells. There's the last of real characterization, the war and empire are really underdeveloped, the world outside the early parts of the game feels really empty, and no character arcs or anything that really brings everything together. I'll blame NES era games.


The keyword system is something that could be expanded on easily, integrating it more into the game than a handful of plot triggers and a bit of token text. Ultima 4 & 5 were like this, although the game didn't remember them for you. You had a few basic key words you could ask people: NAME / JOB / HEALTH / BYE, and then anything that might catch your eye in the conversation and they might have hints to ask other people. Not all key words advanced the game but some people reacted differently to the same key words. Laser Lords is another general step forward (then a step back with word capacity and forgetting key words, LL has a lot of words): Remember key words NPCs said and say them to others and get different reactions.


I feel like FF2 has some of the same problems of FF3 in that other games have done everything FF2 tried to do better or completely discarded the worst aspects like the monster closets. What's left really isn't fun, while FF1 manages to rely on a more solid foundation that doesn't overstay it's welcome like 2 and 3 do.


oh yeah and magic dodge is hard as shit to get up too

If I tabulated time spent on the game and css and pages over the last week it would probably be about 10% game 90% gameprofile. It just came down to deciding it was done and nailing the coffin shut and moving on with life instead of finding another thing to update.

in retrospect putting emoji in a gamepage that I hadn't backed up in notepad++ maybe wasn't the smartest thing to do, thank god the back button kept everything I wrote!

(rest in piece alien emoji, hello png of said emoji!)