Summary: Exploring errands. Ramza and Delita reconnect to help Princess Ovelia. Boco!
Errand Running
-While those party members of mine are out on an errand, I’ll go build up some of my lower level character.
-I want to like Orator, but I haaaate how low the chance of its abilities landing seems to be.
-NOOOOO!!! I was about to dismiss one of my two panthers from the party but they like me. I can’t bear to let them go. How dare you include these messages, game.
I can feel the sad kitty eyes staring at me as I shoo it away.
-I unlocked geomancer, and it seems waaaay different than prior geomancers. It’s more fighter than caster. Very interesting change.
-Finished my errand, and completed it with “resounding success.” Got treasure, about 13k gil, and a boatload of JP for the participants!
-It’s not repeatable. No more errands currently.
-Unlocked summoner! Just past time mage.
-Found an errand for “Mount Gulg Mother Lode.” Nice FFI/IX callback. (Though I suppose on release it only called back to FFI.)
-Not sure how to decide who to send on the errand. The job doesn’t show up in the errand select menu, so I assume job doesn’t have much to do with it. Maybe it’s purely level-based.
-The friendly beasts in my party mate like rabbits. A few days after a panther joined, there’s like a family of panthers flooding my roster.
-Found a “treasure beyond compare” from Gulg.
“BLACK MATERIA” WHAAAAAT
-Just landed “Traitor” for the first time with my orator. It’s a PERMANENT EFFECT HOLY SHIT. No wonder the chance for it to land is so low.
-The enemies in this game have a humongous blast radius, huge damage on their self-destruct, and oil to boot. Ow.
-The Tavernmaster calls me a “level 1 treasure hunter” now. I wonder if this is a joke or a real thing I can level up.
-The Black Materia is listed as an “artefact.” A stone developed by ancient Saronians to store knowledge for future generations. Said to enhance the abilities of the possessor. Not sure if this is just lore, or if I get, like, an attack boost from having it. I imagine it’s the former.
-I do another two errands: Miner’s Report and Shoreline Defense. Both successful.
-I like how errands build JP without building XP. It allows me to develop the characters in ways I care about without having them outlevel the others or increase the challenge of scaled fights.
-I’ve circled around a bunch to the different towns (all while leveling my party up to 11/12), but don’t see any more errands. I’ll bet you can only get a select group of errands based on how far you have gotten in the story.
The most eeeeeeevil penguin.
Errand Running
-While those party members of mine are out on an errand, I’ll go build up some of my lower level character.
-I want to like Orator, but I haaaate how low the chance of its abilities landing seems to be.
-NOOOOO!!! I was about to dismiss one of my two panthers from the party but they like me. I can’t bear to let them go. How dare you include these messages, game.
I can feel the sad kitty eyes staring at me as I shoo it away.
-I unlocked geomancer, and it seems waaaay different than prior geomancers. It’s more fighter than caster. Very interesting change.
-Finished my errand, and completed it with “resounding success.” Got treasure, about 13k gil, and a boatload of JP for the participants!
-It’s not repeatable. No more errands currently.
-Unlocked summoner! Just past time mage.
-Found an errand for “Mount Gulg Mother Lode.” Nice FFI/IX callback. (Though I suppose on release it only called back to FFI.)
-Not sure how to decide who to send on the errand. The job doesn’t show up in the errand select menu, so I assume job doesn’t have much to do with it. Maybe it’s purely level-based.
-The friendly beasts in my party mate like rabbits. A few days after a panther joined, there’s like a family of panthers flooding my roster.
-Found a “treasure beyond compare” from Gulg.
“BLACK MATERIA” WHAAAAAT
-Just landed “Traitor” for the first time with my orator. It’s a PERMANENT EFFECT HOLY SHIT. No wonder the chance for it to land is so low.
-The enemies in this game have a humongous blast radius, huge damage on their self-destruct, and oil to boot. Ow.
-The Tavernmaster calls me a “level 1 treasure hunter” now. I wonder if this is a joke or a real thing I can level up.
-The Black Materia is listed as an “artefact.” A stone developed by ancient Saronians to store knowledge for future generations. Said to enhance the abilities of the possessor. Not sure if this is just lore, or if I get, like, an attack boost from having it. I imagine it’s the former.
-I do another two errands: Miner’s Report and Shoreline Defense. Both successful.
-I like how errands build JP without building XP. It allows me to develop the characters in ways I care about without having them outlevel the others or increase the challenge of scaled fights.
-I’ve circled around a bunch to the different towns (all while leveling my party up to 11/12), but don’t see any more errands. I’ll bet you can only get a select group of errands based on how far you have gotten in the story.
The most eeeeeeevil penguin.
-I stumbled across a section in the chronicle of “past.” There are four sections, each with a summary of
details around the completed errands. It’s from Arazlam’s perspective in the future.
THAT’S SUPER COOL! I forgot until just now that the game’s storytelling conceit is that this is all happening in the past, and Arazlam, future scholar, is telling our story. So as our party undergoes more errands, he reports more lore.
Gonna take a look through those errand logs:
Molten Maiden: Mount Gulg hadn’t erupted for 5,000 years. When the party explored it, they found “a lady of flame” at the bottom, the Mount Gulg Maiden.
THAT MUST HAVE BEEN MARILITH!
Miner’s Tears: There was a gold rush by Mount Ourobos. The village became a ghost town after the rush ended.
Lilith’s Libation: The Bacchus Winery sells Bacchus Liqueur. They hired us to stop bandits from stealing the product, but it turned out to be monsters instead, drawn to the liqueur’s sweetness. Lilith was their leader.
Message in a Bottle: Some stuff washed up on the shore near Gariland, including a message in a bottle. It was a plea written in a foreign tongue. We couldn’t decipher it.
Very interesting! It must be luck/failure/partial success that we couldn’t decipher it. Maybe another party or attempt could have deciphered the message, leading to more lore.
-I’m ready to move on with the story I think, but I also think I might go a bit less hardcore in leveling up my entire party. It’s time-consuming as hell. Right now I’m approaching 30 hours in FFTactics, much of which is leveling my party.
I won’t lock myself into one way or the other. I won’t MAKE myself level up each party member equally. I’m just really afraid of ending up in a situation like I did in FFVII or FFVIII, where I had a core trio of party members and the others were just unable to fight their way out of a wet paper bag.
So I’ll err on the side of leveling up a bunch of characters, but won’t bind myself to that.
---
Wark! Wark!
-Going into the next battle with a chemist, monk, knight, and archer. Araguay Woods.
-IT’S THE WOOOORST – A GROUP OF GOBLINS ARE BEING MEAN TO A CHOCOBO
-I have the choice to move on and leave the chocobo alone or save the chocobo. And by “choice” I mean are you fucking kidding me I’m not leaving the chocobo how dare you even CONSIDER that I might leave it alone.
-Monk!Ramza’s Pummel ability seems to be a double or nothing kind of attack. Either massive damage or miss, with a higher than average miss rate.
-THE CHOCOBO IS NAMED BOCO
-We win. The battlefield is littered with goblin corpses. That’ll teach them to fuck with a chocobo.
---
Zeirchele Falls
-I love the look of this battlefield. The waterfall is pretty.
-Northern Sky Knights are here. The princess is here too with Delita facing off against them.
-Wait… are the Northern Sky troops trying to KILL the princess? I trust him way more than anyone in Northern Sky.
-So Delita right now is working for the Black Lion. The Northern Order knights claim they’re trying to save her, and… I kind of believe them too? Maybe they’re just pawns, not knowing what’ll happen if they reclaim her.
-Gaffgarion… joins the Northern Order. I mean, he’s their mercenary, so it makes sense.
The kidnapping WAS a ruse!
GAFFGARION: “The princess is an obstacle to the throne.” So long as she lives, the threat remains that someone could assert her claim above Prince Orinus’s. Two heirs are one too many.”
Boo. I really liked Gaffgarion, too.
I’ll be honest: I’m a bit confused right now. I don’t quite understand all the different sides in play or the intrigue being explained.
-I also think that’s kind of okay. Ramza is a bit confused too. But these background shenanigans don’t matter.
RAMZA: “She will not be another Tietra!” He won’t let this innocent person die for politics.
-Delita also claims that he just came here to rescue the princess. He says he’s not in anyone’s pay, not hired by one faction or another.
-My goal here is to protect the princess. I have to get to her and heal her up.
-Ramza feels so deeply betrayed by Gaffgarion. He and I are both in the same kind of position, where we should have known better – he’s never been shy about calling himself a sellsword – but still.
-Delita now has access to “Judgment Blade,” a new ability. Something I’ve previously only seen on Agrias, the Holy Knight. Perhaps a confirmation of where his heart is at.
-We defeat Gaffgarion, and he peaces out. We haven’t seen the last of him. Nor am I convinced he’ll stay a villain.
-By the way, major kudos to the game for the combat in this battle. Escort quests are notoriously bad in MMOs (my main genre). The NPC you’re supposed to protect is often supremely unhelpful. They run into the teeth of the enemy attack, don’t heal up, and die quickly.
But not Princess Ovelia! She’s great. She buffs us, casts regenerate on herself (and even Arise I think), moves to high ground away from Gaffgarion’s attack. Highly competent.
-Delita wants to keep Ovelia safe from Larg and the Black Lion both.
-Delita still feels Tietra watching over him.
-Awwww! Delita and Ramza depart here, but as friends still.
-Agrias thanks us. She acknowledges that the Order of the Northern Sky is pretty fucked.
-Lions to the left of me, lions to the right. Here I am. Stuck in the middle with Agrias, Ovelia, and Delita.
-Agrias has a plan. She wants to go to Cardinal Delacroix, with the Church of Glabados in Lionel. Perhaps he’s a reliable third party who can help us.
-Back to the map, the zone directly to our east disappears, and the path reroutes to the south. That eastern zone must be where the battle would have taken place if we hadn’t saved Boco.
---
Next time: south to see the Cardinal.
