Love/hate #35 Final Fantasy V Pixel Remaster on Steam

 Intro

I have the other version fron 2014 I believe with the wacky graphics and the ridiculous amount of achievements but will save that for another time. I'm kind of looking forward to playing those 2014 versions at some point.

FF5 is the jobs system game, while jobs/classes have been in plenty of them so far this is the definitive one and it was pretty damn good.

Main characters/cast

Bartz/Buttz is a bit slow, and that’s OK. That’s all I knw going into it and sure enough there are a bunch of dialogue scenes where he has to have stuff repeated to him. It actually suited me as I’m an idiot so having them explain the wacky plot twice was useful. I started him out as a Knight and gradually worked through all the physical classes with him.

Lenna is a princess and we’re introduced to her right away. She has an affinity with animals which is fun as she regularly makes allies with dragons and Moogles. Good thing to have! She was a white mage to start and would almost always have White Magic as her secondary ability no matter what job she had.

Galuf is the funny older guy and was a member of the Dawn Warriors so despite having amnesia initially he remembers everything eventually and is integral to the plot. I had him serve as a secondary fighter and he graduated into lighter fighter classes like Monk and Thief faster than Bartz.

Faris/Sarisa is a princess pirate captain who briefly imprisons the group but ultimately decides to align with them and help them restore the crystals. She is aided for a time first by her pirate crew and also the water beast Syldra who I loved. She was my first Blue Mage but would later serve mainly as Black Mage and so on but would usually have the Blue Mage ‘Learn’ ability equipped in case the right magic was cast at us.

Battle

Much the same, though more ATB than previous entries. I had the battle speed at very high and I say that probably worked against me a lot as enemies would get shots in while I was trying to figure out what option to select between Attack-Ability 1-Ability 2-Item usually. Once I had a nice set up I would just auto battle and they would repeat whatever I told them to do.

I did like how it required even more intervention on my part, there were many things to consider certain enemies would punish you for using magic or hitting them physically. Very very few enemies required me to Steal from them, Gilgamesh one of the handful.

Many battles in the midgame required me to Control the enemy with Beastmaster ability then have them use their special Blue Magic on the party to get the ability myself.

Minigames

None as usual! Maybe in 6?

Music/Graphics

Now 1,3 and 4 had decent soundtracks nothing particularly memorable but nice all the same; 2 I quite liked to listen to while prepping DND and stuff there were some good ones in there. 5 is the best soundtrack I’ve heard of the lot so far! The overworld themes were good to great, the dungeon themes were cool, the final two dungeon themes were awesome as well as the boss and battle themes. Not to mention the Big Bridge of course, which I think 12 did better but here is the original one, remastered. Also the Chocobo theme slapped.

The pixel sprites for all the jobs are ridiculously charming.

Plot/Villain/Allies/NPCs

This is the longest FF I’ve played in a while, certainly of the pixel remasters. About 50 hours and only the last 5 hours maybe were me grinding. So it’s hard to recall precisely but basically the 4 crystals we know and love are being harnessed for power and making life better for the citizens of this FF world (sound familiar). But then they start to break. The wind stops blowing, seas go calm etc. Your team are summoned by destiny to restore the crystals which are mysteriously shattering.

And then the villain is introduced! Well, not really. Exdeath is sort of hinted at and then eventually revealed but he is manipulating events and people to destroy the crystals. He wants to harness the power of the Void, which I presumed would be some sort of final boss space flea and I was right! Exdeath would appear a lot more in the second half of the game so he developed himself into a worthy foe. He also had an interesting background as being from the Forest of Moore, which would play into the final battles.

Your allies are more consistent, Bartz is from the tiny town of Lix which I believe is optional but they all like him there. Lenna as a princess is regularly hassled by the Chancellor of her kingdom to stay and stop adventuring and on numerous occasions you have to go back and spend a night in the castle to advance the plot. Galuf has his granddaughter who is vital to the plot later and his fellow Dawn Warriors to assist him. Faris is an outlier in that her pirate crew don’t really come up again. And just like FF4 the NPCs of the various towns and cities are interesting and their dialogue changes over time, a little bit but its appreciated.

The gooey

Here we go. Jobs. I did really like them in fairness. The hardest part about them was some didn't’ hold up on their own for me unless combined with other abilities learned from another job, and just grinding them to master level.

There are so many different possibilities but as I stated above I would have characters as a job say Lenna as a Chemist so she was locked into using Mix/Drink, but her secondary ability would be White Magic. Faris I might have been doing the same job but my secondary ability would be Learn/Blue -Black-Time Magic. The two fighter characters might have the passive ability Two Handed so when they attacked they would do more damage.

So while there were near infinite combos available I stuck to a fairly reliable set of moves. As I said above, Steal wasn’t vital but the passive abilities like Sprint, Vigilance and First Strike from various jobs were useful. Summon was very powerful as many bosses were vulnerable to particular types of summon. Dual Wield and Rapid Fire were very powerful and are and maybe when I play the original Steam version I will need them to beat the bonus dungeon, which is not in this remaster. For my playthrough they were a bit slow and underpowered at times to be using all the time so with only one or two slots free for abilities choices had to be made.

Most battles and situations had me attacking with the two warrior characters, Lenna casting White Magic and Faris using some sort of offensive magic. This could change depending on the situation. Also the auto battle was smart - if you made one character chuck a single Hi Potion or target a single ally with Cure for example they would throw it at the weakest party member HP-wise. So if an enemy attacked Bartz Lenna would heal him on her turn and so on. Usually I just targeted the group but this was handy in the late game when MP was short and enemies were tough.

The best classes were the Mimic and the Freelancer; Mimic allowed you to pick a whopping three abilities you had learned as well as having access to Mimic, which I learned from my FF7 playthrough is near god mode level good. Just don’t forget to give yourself ‘Attack’ or ‘Item’ if you need them, they are not defaults! The Freelancer was good as every job you mastered a bonus would carry over to it, so by mastering them all you powered up your Freelancer a load. The default sprite of each character is the Freelancer model too, while if you are currently a Black Mage the sprite is that of a Black Mage. The sprites were gorgeous in this one and some very cute/thoughtful models were used.

It was funny - there was a ‘see hidden passages’ ability in this game and there are only a fraction of the hidden passages as the previous entries. Could have used that in FF3!

Mix is like Rikku Mix in that there are a number of extremely potent combos that could decimate the strategies of high-level bosses but it's just not necessary. Maybe in the bonus dungeon (the other version of the game on Steam) but not here.

Blue Magic by contrast is very fun to collect in my opinion, some frustrating ones but rewarding when you get them all the same. Some of them are very powerful like Mighty Guard and White Wind (old faves of mine) but not essential. You’re often better just whipping the enemies to death the old fashioned way than using any of them for long.

Conclusion

Definitely the best of the bunch so far from 1 onwards. While the plot and characters are arguably weaker than 2 (I really liked 2) and certainly weaker than 7 onward, it had such a charming OST, world and job system that pushed it into the lead.

I got all the achievements 100% once again thanks to lylat and prius’ guide. I don't mind saying, life is short and mine is busy so I can’t and won’t spend it figuring out every little thing to get everything out of the game.

I got to level 50 after a few hours of grinding in the rift castle passage, then spent a few hours mastering the remaining jobs for my characters. 2 of them had most of the mage classes down while 2 had the warrior ones so I just had to switch it around. The Mover enemy in the rift at the second last screen before the final boss granted loads of money and ability points so it was a breeze when I got things sorted. I could just use Zeninage over and over and throw money at enemies to win.

In sum I'm definitely looking forward to playing 5 again via the 2014 Steam version after looking over these screenshots. I have also finished 6 recently so will upload a post about that in a few weeks.

Sample DND session roll20 Doomstones WFRP converted to DND 5e Session 7 Book 1 Minotaur Cave

 

Love/hate #25 Civilization V (part 1)

I've been playing a lot of Civilization V recently. I was aware of it for a long time obviosuly but Civ 4 occupied much of my Civilization experience from roughly 2011 to 2018. I only booted up Civ 5 for the first time properly in September 2019 apparently, which is ridiculously late in the game. Civ 6 is out a few years now and 5 has been out since 2010, with its final DLCs coming out in roughly 2015. Oh well!

It's mostly been Civ 5: BNW. It's difficult to remember my first experiences with Civ 5 back in September 2019 but easy as well due to a common theme: I settled on the Shoshone as my go to civilization and they became my fave by far.

Yep, their capital is Moson Kahni. So lots of playing quite peacefully and being so indisputably powerful through land and tech that I just won naturally. They have an ability I loved in Civ: they started with twice as many tiles pre-bought when you settle a city. Thus your first city has huge potential and is ready to develop quick, with workers. Each city you found can just claim more valuable land than the enemy.

One of the toughest things is the switch from stacks of doom to one unit per tile (1UPT). It takes some getting used to and am honestly still getting around it. No more Waterloos to decide the fate of empires in one turn, no more glorious three pronged advances, no more tactical parties here and there while one big stack does the business. Nope, now its a whole lot of traffic jams. Seriously. It didn't affect me too much in my first playthrough back in 2019 as I played very peacefully. In addition to ending stacks of doom, it pushed the focus away from war. Huge.

The focus now seems to shift more toward diplomatic, science, cultural and if it comes to it, time victories. Conquest/domination by capturing all enemy capitals is less encouraged. Mainly the huge penalty associated with conquering cities. With a global happiness stat instead of by-city as it was in Civ 4,  you need to be just as careful if not more so. In 4 if happiness dropped in a city you could always just whip the population down or hurry a happiness building or whatever. Here it can be fatal empire-wide.

Didn't stop me from killing people!

Irresistable Shoshone. They were almost too good. Haven't played them at all in 2020, opting to play various different civs for experience AND the achievements, of course. The Shoshone get two unique units - a scout that can choose what benefit it gets from tribal huts (sorry, ancient ruins) and a cavalry that was decent but upgraded into really fast tanks.

Haven't seen this guy in a while. Seemed I was always fighting him before. Here he is bowing down to my culture. Way more fun to develop in this game by some margin compared to Civ 4, which was only fun for its challenge. 3 cities to max culture took a long time and care. Here, in 5, it also takes a lot but there are more routes.

Had to start playing a lot of Archipelago maps as the laptop was slowing even in 2019.

Getting Merchants of Venice as the Shoshone. Instead of civics in Civ 4 its all about policies and just like them they are my fave part of Civ 5! I used to always go Liberty but am seeing the benefits of Tradition as I get better and more experienced, but it is generally thought of as more boring and safe. I usually shun Piety but have had very fun games with Honor, killing barbarians for culture and later gold. Later I usually get Patronage to court city states, independent AI players on the map that provide a host of benefits if befriended. Exploration and Aesthetics are good trees too, but Rationalism like Tradition is considered S tier but I find it boring.

Ah, my Venice game. I tried to win a duel versus Germany and lost eventually. Note the smoking ruins of my improvements.

Gods, the citadel creep in the lower left by Germany. Disaster.

Attempts to play differently in 2020.

They did a really good job of replacing the events of Civ 4. I still miss them slightly, but they were a mixed bag. These are more take it or leave it. One replacement is the competition to build the World's Fair, International Games and the International Space Station. Nice rewards if participated in.

Killing spies. Good to see soem things never change.

Interesting ways to measure power and other stats. Like in 2 and 4, it pays to keep a close eye on demographics and these alerts.

I do really like the World Congress. I usually participate and take over as best as I can. Can be a bit annoying when all the good stuff is gone and you just spend your time proposing meaningless stuff. Can be extremely useful if playing more aggressively, I can see that. An embargo on one player you plan on attacking next could be huge.

Love the end of transport ships at last and replacement with embarkment. Makes way more sense. Feel like I saw it a long time ago. Empire Earth?

My Brazil game. Though a culturally strong civ, there's an achievement for going diplomatic. It seems I have 34 votes but need 35. I think this is the game I gave Rio de Janeiro to somebody so they'd vote me over the line on the last turn.

March-April 2020. Trying my hand at the scenarios. Here I am as Japan in the conquest of Korea.

Really cool as you start with a pile of units and Korea is empty. Reminded me of Britannia.

Trying to capture Beijing. They kept wiping out my melee units before I could get them in range. Eventually managed to surround and take it, winning the scenario.

April 12th 2020. I had to play as the Confederacy first. The Union let met sit outside DC and shell it without retaliation.

Played the Chinese side on Deity difficulty. Was never very tough but consistently challenging nonetheless. Lot of this - taking out Japanese embarked units with my navy.

Using my triremes to defend the Chinese coast, running Caravels through embarked units and slowly but surely reconquering Korea for the Koreans.

I managed to hold the line all game, even against this massive Manchurian attack. Liaoyang never fell but Seoul did, sadly, very late in the game. I won anyway!

One of the last scenarios I played for the moment is the Paradise DLC with 4 Polynesian civs vying for control. All you have to do is amass enough cultural policies (3 full trees) to win. The game devolved pretty quickly into just building the Moai improvement everywhere and as many cities as possible.

The almost-full trees.

My fave win in this was being constantly a policy behind the leader until I got the Honor one that lets you get triple culture from killing units. Just killed a load of enemy soldiers in a world war of sorts to win.

Moai everywhere on the coast. I got every achievement in this DLC anyway.

What does the future hold? This scenario, for one. There's also a rake of others I have to give a go. It is a whole new way to play: I tend to like the regular gameplay of Civ4 too much to bother with the scenarios in that. Also, the lure of achievements. Also also, tiring of Civ 5 regular gameplay a bit.

Though it's very good, Civ 5 still outshone by Civ 4. But there is plenty, PLENTY of great new stuff added. I have Civ 6 in my library so will probably end up giving that a go in a few weeks/months.