Managed to very briefly check out Reverse Collapse. Hard to say anything about it yet because I only got to play it for 33 minutes before I had to go do some stuff, but the initial impression, aside from the character sprites being not so great and reminiscent of those horrible sprites from the recent Langrisser remakes, is quite good, as mechanically the game is both solid and interesting. Damage output seems to be extremely high for both the player and the enemy, which is interesting. Some digging suggests that the highest difficulty setting is insanely hard, which is probably a good thing. I did choose that setting, and maybe that was a mistake, but...
Sengoku Strider wrote: ↑Fri Jun 28, 2024 5:25 am
That does sound pretty minor. I guess I'll see what pops up, TBH I still have plenty of Saturn rpgs I haven't gotten through yet so I should probably chill on that front now that I think about it, lol.
I got it on Saturn just because it was cheaper than buying either of the MD games. I still want to get the MD games eventually because it's the MD, but Saturn is fine for now.
I do recommend avoiding the remakes on PC/Switch/PS4/etc. They added a lot of new routes, which is cool, but they're super unbalanced in a way that makes them way too easy. The best use case for these remakes is like... you specifically need a super easy entry-level SRPG for really young kids, but even then I probably wouldn't recommend these because I was playing stuff like Command & Conquer (admittedly RTS and not SRPG, but whatever) when I was like 6 with no problems. There is also Der Langrisser on SFC, but I don't know much about it other than that it's Langrisser II but way easier and with some extra routes.
Dramatic Edition on Saturn seems mostly identical to the MD versions but with the anime cutscenes and voice acting. The music is a bit different as well and I think the MD music is a little better, but the Saturn arranges aren't bad or anything. I don't remember if it's CDDA or using the SCSP, but the music on Saturn is acceptable in any case.
Steven wrote: ↑Fri Jun 28, 2024 6:09 am
I do recommend avoiding the remakes on PC/Switch/PS4/etc. They added a lot of new routes, which is cool, but they're super unbalanced in a way that makes them way too easy. The best use case for these remakes is like... you specifically need a super easy entry-level SRPG for really young kids, but even then I probably wouldn't recommend these because I was playing stuff like Command & Conquer (admittedly RTS and not SRPG, but whatever) when I was like 6 with no problems. There is also Der Langrisser on SFC, but I don't know much about it other than that it's Langrisser II but way easier and with some extra routes.
I played the demo on Switch back when it first came out, it looked like a mobile game so I passed.
My kid brother was beating the heck out of Final Fantasy Tactics when he was like 8, so kids can definitely handle srpgs. If I was ever looking for one for a kid, Langrisser with all the babes wouldn't be what I'd pick.
Reverse Collapse is not just good, it's very good, and potentially extremely good. I may have just discovered a new S-tier SRPG. It's currently my choice for best game of the year, even over Unicorn Overlord. Yes, it's that good. One caveat: stealth missions. If you don't like stealth missions, you probably ought to stay away. I think they're fine, and if they are not a problem for you, go buy it and play it. I think for at least some of the stealth missions you can just shoot everything, but you won't get an S-rank, and on the highest difficulty setting it is definitely on the difficult side if you attempt S-ranks.
The controls on Steam Deck also kind of suck. This game was clearly made for mouse + keyboard, but it's playable. The Japanese text is also very small sometimes. This is the first game I've ever played on the Steam Deck where I actually thought that the text is legitimately a little too small for my liking.
Sengoku Strider wrote: ↑Fri Jun 28, 2024 3:54 pm
My kid brother was beating the heck out of Final Fantasy Tactics when he was like 8, so kids can definitely handle srpgs. If I was ever looking for one for a kid, Langrisser with all the babes wouldn't be what I'd pick.
After some reconsideration, given how easy those remakes are you'd probably end up making a mistake giving it to anyone as an entry-level SRPG; they'd get bored too easily.
Oh god Reverse Collapse is getting very difficult. I am slightly over halfway through the game at ~22 hours of in-game time and it keeps delivering almost nothing but excellence. It also keeps getting harder.
Reverse Collapse is the hardest SRPG I have ever played aside from Fire Emblem Awakening on Lunatic (fuck chapter 2), which is hard because it's pretty much a poorly designed game, although I am playing Reverse Collapse on hard+ difficulty, which may be why, and its difficulty seems just right. In every single combat mission for everything after chapter 1, my response to seeing the map, enemy number and placement, and objectives has been "you want me to do WHAT?!?!". It's great and I love it. Nothing like a nice hour-long 4 vs ~150 defensive mission where you are guaranteed to get overrun, have a very limited stock of items, and every one of those 4 units you have dies in 2~3 hits at most, and probably immediately if they take a critical hit or get shot by a sniper, of which there are quite a few of.
Fortunately, this game doesn't have the whole modern Fire Emblem problems of every map being "route the enemy" and enemies not sitting around uselessly until you enter their attack range, allowing you to bait out individual units until you clear the map. This game actually has varied objectives (look how low we've fallen if having even just a handful of map objectives be something other than a simple "kill everything" is something to be celebrated... thanks, Fire Emblem) and every zako is a dangerous enemy that actively wants you dead.
The stealth missions are... well, they exist. If I didn't like Metal Gear and didn't mind the stealth missions I'd probably have refunded the game instead of playing it non-stop since I got it. If someone said that this game is irredeemable garbage because of the stealth missions, I'd understand 100% why they said that, even though I love the game.
Anyway, get it if you don't mind 40%~50% of the game being stealth.
Jeanne d’Arc suddenly got added to the PS4 and PS5 online stores without much of an announcement as far as I can tell. I guess this game is really good or something, but I've never played it somehow.
I don't think it's nearly as good as its reputation. The game is highly linear for a tactical rpg and much of the "strategy" involves exploiting the overpowered henshin forms to cheese encounters.
Maybe I will once I am done with Reverse Collapse, which is way longer than I expected. I might replay it once I am done, but I haven't decided. I'm also planning on playing the original Code Name: Bakery Girl once I am done, which is supposedly even harder than Reverse Collapse.
I have Super Stardust Portable on PS4/5, and Jeanne d'Arc is almost guaranteed to use the same PSP emulator. The emulator they are using for PSP games on PS4/PS5 has a rewind function, so you could completely break the game with that if you wanted... just like modern Fire Emblem! If RNG is seeded, it is at least an interesting way to see how the various possibilities in the seed play out.
Speaking of modern Fire Emblem, several days ago I remembered that Engage exists and that I still have not played it. I seem to remember a somewhat mixed reception for Engage, although I'm not sure if the mixed reception was because of problems with the game itself or people wanting and not getting more of the previous game.
Said previous game was... really odd at times, what with the fractured story that doesn't really explain itself without playing the other routes, the weird, very poorly balanced class system where everyone wants to be a Wyvern Lord, and all of that other stuff, but at least it was a pretty ambitious game. Perhaps too ambitious, as it didn't always manage to accomplish what it tried to do, but I liked it more than I disliked it, and the music was so good that I bought that huge limited edition soundtrack with the music box and whatever. It's still my #2 most played Switch game behind...
Done with Reverse Collapse. In-game timer on my clear save file is 77 hours, 43 minutes, and 5 seconds. Actual clear time was 141 hours due to lots and lots of resets for S rank.
This game was beautiful. Clearly, the devs really care about and love this game and you can see this in every aspect of it. What is there for me to say? The game speaks for itself. You get a well-written, edgy story with very little hope, a lot of despair, and refreshingly difficult but well-balanced gameplay with a shitload of variety in mission objectives. It deserved much, MUCH better than a shameful review bomb on Steam by a bunch of crazy losers who didn't even play it, and it will probably remain obscure until the planned Switch and phone versions are released, but it's probably my #1 favourite SRPG as of right now, currently the effortless winner of best game of 2024, and my favourite new game released since Sonic Mania in 2017. Go play it! It's great!
There are some unfortunate negative points, though. First, the text is really fucking small sometimes! Even on my 27 inch PC monitor from like half a meter away, some of the text is slightly small, but not unreadable. On the Steam Deck, good luck reading some of the numbers in the menus! If they don't fix this for the Switch version people will complain about it, and rightfully so because it's too small.
As an aside and speaking of the Switch, the significantly more powerful Steam Deck struggles and sometimes fails to run this at 60 FPS at 1280x720, and 90 FPS is mostly not happening outside of menus. Game gets good battery life, though! You actually should intentionally turn up the graphics quality on Steam Deck because text becomes blurry at lower graphics settings, making the already nearly microscopic text even harder to read! I highly doubt the Switch version will run at 60 FPS, which is too bad, but maybe they'll optimize the hell out of it. The controls when using a console controller also completely suck, so have fun with that, Switch humans. These things don't really matter that much unless you only have a Steam Deck, so I won't really condemn the game for this, but play it on a normal PC with a mouse and keyboard and you should be fine. I did play it on Steam Deck a little with mouse and keyboard at 1920x1080. The experience was not great due to low FPS, but it's perfectly playable if you're okay with that.
Second, the Japanese translation was a bit weird at times, namely in the second half, where there were some typos and instances where the voice acting did not match the text. It's a Chinese game, but I played it with the Japanese text because that's what it defaulted to because my computer OS is set to Japanese and I was too lazy to change it to something else lol. Japanese is also the only voice option anyway and I still haven't learned Chinese yet. Maybe the English translation is better. I might check it out eventually.
Finally, stealth missions and stealth sections. Some of them, well... suck, at least until you know what to do, and then they are easy. The only one that I would say is complete shit is the last one in the game. That one is frustrating and annoying. Even this last one is not that long or difficult when you know what to do, but it's hard to know what to do when you can't fucking see anything and yet you still have to play literally perfectly because if you don't you instantly game over.
Well, that's about all I have to say. I would really like to see a sequel to this game for various reasons. Until then, however,
NOT YET SNAKE! IT'S NOT OVER YET!!!!
Yep, we're not done yet. Reverse Collapse is a very different remake of Code Name: Bakery Girl, itself an extremely radically different remake of Girl of the Bakehouse. There is also a separate, different, and much more accurate remake of Code Name: Bakery Girl included as an unlockable game within Reverse Collapse because why not?
You get two separate remakes of the same game here, which is kind of crazy. Never seen that before. It's not the same as the original Code Name: Bakery Girl, which might be kind of fortunate because I played a small amount of that original game a short while ago and it's very, VERY rough, and it also gives you both distressingly low accuracy and a limited amount of ammo, a concept that was scrapped in both of its remakes, where you can shoot as much as you want, so you can't shoot a lot and when you do shoot you've got a good chance of missing and wasting your precious ammo. It's too bad that they didn't put the original Bakery Girl in here, but given how rough it is I think I can forgive them.
Well, that's it for now, I guess. Will probably do these two versions of Bakery Girl now, but Reverse Collapse introduces some cool and interesting new stuff on loop 2, so I'm probably going to replay that as well.
Blinge wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2024 6:16 pmI'm, I think, halfway through Shining Force 1
Man I'm having a great time
One of my favorite games.
The second game has much worse art and vibes imo, but is technically even better. (Maybe... could have toned down the number of battles on the worldmap. SF1 has a much better meat to gristle ratio.) SFCD feels like its lacking without the town segments, but is more of the same.
It's kind of a trip they released three games in the Shining Force 3 series.. One of their guys was right, it was such a love letter to the fans. There was no way to make a big profit on the thing, but they did it anyway to go out with a bang. I always feel bad about not getting to play it - by the time a translation of the later games and a Saturn emulator that didn't suck came around, my enthusiasm for it was already buried in a grave like a decade prior.
The 90's really kind of feels like the last time the corpos let their people be creative. These days the standards and competition is just so damn high - back then they sold Crazy Taxi as a full real game. These days, it's barely enough to be considered a minigame of a much bigger 'real' game.
The heart wants what it wants. I love Baldur's Gate 1 much more than Baldur's Gate 2. I value gameplay over story and don't like handholding. I like Suikoden 1 more than Suikoden 2.
Shining Force 1 is also one of my favorite games and I definitely prefer it to 2—the sequel is just too bloated and the exploration segments are unnecessary. The balance in the second game is also much worse.
That said, I probably replay SFCD the most because of the streamlining.
It's kind of a trip they released three games in the Shining Force 3 series.. One of their guys was right, it was such a love letter to the fans. There was no way to make a big profit on the thing, but they did it anyway to go out with a bang. I always feel bad about not getting to play it - by the time a translation of the later games and a Saturn emulator that didn't suck came around, my enthusiasm for it was already buried in a grave like a decade prior.
Oh man, it's definitely worth playing. The graphics are kind of painful at first, but you get used to it, and SF3 throws in way more tactical challenges, interesting win conditions, and optional bonuses than any of its predecessors.
We here shall not rest until we have made a drawing-room of your shaft, and if you do not all finally go down to your doom in patent-leather shoes, then you shall not go at all.
The art style shift is definitely my biggest disappointment with it - it goes from being a little bit of a dark 90's fantasy anime thing like Langrisser or the Record of Lodoss War, to being a Saturday morning cartoon. The wizards go from being these edgelords with spikey shoulder pads and swinging their weapons around using telekinesis, to being friar tuck with a stick. The werewolf goes from ripping reality in half causing sparks to erupt over his enemy, to being a little dude who just hops on people and gives them a hug with his claws.
it290 wrote: ↑Fri Nov 01, 2024 4:46 pmOh man, it's definitely worth playing. The graphics are kind of painful at first, but you get used to it, and SF3 throws in way more tactical challenges, interesting win conditions, and optional bonuses than any of its predecessors.
Urgh, it's not like it's not on the list but there's a literal mountain of other things I want to do with my free time ahead of it.
There was a time I would have played through the Last Bible 2 translation, had it been available in a remotely punctual manner.
Is that out now? Interested to hear your impressions — it's been on my radar for a while and looks solid but I feel like these Slug spinoffs have a pretty poor hit:miss ratio. If the gameplay has enough XCOM or Into the Breach DNA I'll bite for sure.
We here shall not rest until we have made a drawing-room of your shaft, and if you do not all finally go down to your doom in patent-leather shoes, then you shall not go at all.
It's good. It's not perfect, but good. You have to keep your units moving because it greatly reduces the damage that they take; stay in one place and you'll die very, very quickly. You can't move after attacking in most cases, so you always have to move first and then attack. I have doubts about the effectiveness of passive abilities and for the most part they seem too situational to be practical in most cases, so active skills seem better, but even most of those seem kind of not useful a lot of the time. Still, it's good and fun.
On PC it seems that there is no in-game v-sync, so if screen tearing bothers you you might want to force it externally, but it does support higher than 60 FPS, which is good, although I guess for this type of game it doesn't really matter that much. Steam Deck performance is weird due to odd framerate drops when moving the camera of all things, and it seems unable to maintain framerates that are higher than 60, but it's perfectly fine there too if you limit it to 60 or below. Controls on Steam Deck and probably also consoles are usable but kind of awkward, so play it on PC so you can use keyboard and mouse.
Steven wrote: ↑Sat Nov 09, 2024 2:26 am
Anyone besides me get Metal Slug Tactics? I haven't had time to play it because of work, sadly.
As I mentioned, I've been playing it on gamepass.
It's... okay. WAY more rough edges than I'd expect from something announced like two years ago. Very strange that failing missions causes it to pile on additional features, but success does nothing.
I ended up picking it up. I'm enjoying it so far, although I agree that it's pretty unpolished in spots.
Things I like:
Roguelike gameplay with zippy missions means it's easy to pick up and play. It's nowhere near the quality of Into the Breach, but feels more like a true tactics game vs. a puzzle box.
The 'always be running and gunning,' simplified cover, and rewind/revive mechanics allow for gameplay that is slightly less meticulous than the likes of an X-COM or a Triangle Strategy, at least in the early levels.
Good variety of unit abilities allowing for interesting team synergy.
The sync attack system builds on this and makes for some interesting tactics not often seen in this type of game.
I actually have no issues with the gamepad controls and found them just as usable as any other tactics game.
Things I don't love:
The art direction, while good overall, is still somewhat off model. Sprites have a Euro feel to them and none of them are nearly as detailed as the Nazca originals.
Agreed that the UI is pretty clunky. Ability effects are somewhat poorly explained, enemy damage zones are not well communicated, and sometimes explainer tooltips will show up and obscure the battlefield with no way to dismiss them (at least with a controller).
You don't start the game with Tarma unlocked! What the hell SNK, he's my main!
We here shall not rest until we have made a drawing-room of your shaft, and if you do not all finally go down to your doom in patent-leather shoes, then you shall not go at all.
Been replaying Final Fantasy Tactics. I didn't get too far in it as a kid as I remember making the mistake of wildly overlevelling, causing enemies to scale much faster than your equipment does. It's a game that benefits for sure from a bit of foresight and there's a LOT of experimentation needed or a game mechanics guide to tell you what skills interact in what way. It's fun when you have a decent grasp of what's going on though.
Auto Potion and deliberately selling off low tier potions has been an absolute godsend. With high Brave (it takes a while using Ramza and some Mediators to get to 97 natural Brave), it's amazing at keeping you alive, and you get enough money from fights that you're not hurting for cash. Teleport also rocks, it basically obsoletes a lot of movement skills, giving infinite vertical height and risky but somewhat reliable distance.
Just beat the infamous Rafa battle; honestly one of the worst levels in a game I think. If you haven't built a ninja team to outspeed the assassins, the next best thing is to bring a couple naked party members and hope to draw their attention away from Rafa. Rafa leaves the party shortly before this fight so you can't beef her up by setting her up as a Knight, and the enemies all use some ridiculous undodgeable attacks that make this protection mission less about realistic strategy and more about hardcore AI manipulation and a bit of luck (I only won because Rafa was completely ignored by the assassins for some reason).
It's the first time I've played around with Samurai and learning their skills are best transferred to a more magical class to use is a tremendous eye-opener. There are several classes with relatively poor base stats to use their main skills that benefit from transferring their skills over as a subclass.
I used to not like archers much, still not thrilled with them, but I've started to use the Auto-Battle option a lot, it takes the guesswork out of the complex aiming they use.
BareKnuckleRoo wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2024 3:08 pm
Been replaying Final Fantasy Tactics. I didn't get too far in it as a kid as I remember making the mistake of wildly overlevelling, causing enemies to scale much faster than your equipment does. It's a game that benefits for sure from a bit of foresight and there's a LOT of experimentation needed or a game mechanics guide to tell you what skills interact in what way. It's fun when you have a decent grasp of what's going on though.
Auto Potion and deliberately selling off low tier potions has been an absolute godsend. With high Brave (it takes a while using Ramza and some Mediators to get to 97 natural Brave), it's amazing at keeping you alive, and you get enough money from fights that you're not hurting for cash. Teleport also rocks, it basically obsoletes a lot of movement skills, giving infinite vertical height and risky but somewhat reliable distance.
Just beat the infamous Rafa battle; honestly one of the worst levels in a game I think. If you haven't built a ninja team to outspeed the assassins, the next best thing is to bring a couple naked party members and hope to draw their attention away from Rafa. Rafa leaves the party shortly before this fight so you can't beef her up by setting her up as a Knight, and the enemies all use some ridiculous undodgeable attacks that make this protection mission less about realistic strategy and more about hardcore AI manipulation and a bit of luck (I only won because Rafa was completely ignored by the assassins for some reason).
It's the first time I've played around with Samurai and learning their skills are best transferred to a more magical class to use is a tremendous eye-opener. There are several classes with relatively poor base stats to use their main skills that benefit from transferring their skills over as a subclass.
I used to not like archers much, still not thrilled with them, but I've started to use the Auto-Battle option a lot, it takes the guesswork out of the complex aiming they use.
Couple things to mention:
-If you grind too much and the random encounters outscale your gear, you can solve this problem very quickly and cheaply by bringing someone with Thief skills (if you're grinding this much, you should have them) and just pilfer the upgraded gear shops don't sell yet. Now you're even more broken, because you not only have levels and jp beyond what the story battles do, but you also have gear the story doesn't expect you to have.
-The way you're describing Auto Potion is the intended use. Always buy the best potions available to you for purchase in bulk. Sell the low-level potions you no longer need. Auto Potion isn't even broken or anything. That's the intended way to use it and you can still die. There are other reaction skills I personally prefer in mid and lategame. But for early game it is great. Chemist's Item skill is necessary for all characters to learn in early game, if only so they can swap to the Item subskill and use x-potion, phoenix down and remedy.
-Rafa's AI is so fucking stupid. It doesn't help that she and her brother are pretty squishy classes. It's really debatable if either of them are better than generic units imo. I don't remember if the assassins are vulnerable to status effects but status effects are a strategy I like to employ whenever possible in missions against boss characters.
-Samurai... As you say, you're discovering the intended use for Samurai. You can run Samurai in two ways. Either a physical unit who uses Samurai for the bulk and armor (like a Monk using Punch Art as their sub skill,) or a magic unit who takes Blade Grasp and katana magic skills for their subs. The simplest Samurai spellsword setup is Geomancer main class with Samurai blade arts. Geomancer is less squishy than Black Mage but still puts out solid damage. Or you could go with a class like Time Mage or Oracle for the status effect magic to buff your team. Generally speaking, the Samurai sword art is best either on the front lines or weaving the mid lines (most of the sword magic is short-ranged,) so I like to give the spellsword a main class with some amount of bulk. You can go pure Black Mage but I'd rather mix Black Mage with another subclass that also wants to be on the back lines, like Time Mage or White Mage.
Sima Tuna wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2024 7:23 pm-If you grind too much and the random encounters outscale your gear, you can solve this problem very quickly and cheaply by bringing someone with Thief skills (if you're grinding this much, you should have them) and just pilfer the upgraded gear shops don't sell yet.
I tried this back in the day but because this triggers counterattacks and success rates for steal are low, I never liked Thieves much. But, now that I know their success is boosted by Martial Arts, using that or having a Monk subclass as a Thief makes this a lot more workable! Also, I appreciate status effect classes like Oracle a LOT more, especially since you can use that to disable enemies you're stealing from. Those poles run off of their magic damage stat, and with 2 range don't trigger counters, making them rather effective melee attackers as well as casters! Though I do love having 3 Faith and taking no damage from all spells, ahahahah.
Now you're even more broken, because you not only have levels and jp beyond what the story battles do, but you also have gear the story doesn't expect you to have.
-Samurai...
I used to think it was a bit lame you could only get story characters like Agrias who had crazy powerful free attacks in her Holy Sword set, but man, Geomancy's range and handy occasional status effect along with Draw Out's more solid damage are both amazing. Give a Wizard the Samurai skills as a subclass and you destroy enemies quickly and easily. I oneshotted all the demons Velius summoned that way by charging in and Heaven's Clouding 'em. You don't miss, you hit all enemies, it hits "intelligently" (no team killing/enemy healing), it doesn't run off Faith... I have a Samurai with Equip Shield for extra defense and it works really, really well. May try swapping Auto Potion for Blade Grasp, it may well work better since physicals are more of an issue anyways and any spells that hit at minimal Faith will do hilariously low damage. But Auto Potion with X-Potions is still helpful when facing attacks with 100% accuracy rates you can't rely on evasion to dodge. So maybe mixing a few Blade Grasp characters would help too.
I remember as a kid I thought Counter Flood (auto counter nearly everything with Geomancy) was cool, but the reality is Auto Potion makes you way, way more survivable.
It took me forever to get Samurai because I couldn't remember the requirements and tried to trigger it without looking them up. As usual, neglecting the Thief class was my undoing, nobody had hit high enough to even unlock Lancer, haha. Lancer's pretty cool too, a strong 2 range attack, and enough PA to make good use of Punch Art. I use Attack Up as support which boosts Punch Art and the Lancer's spear attacks, but Martial Arts also works for just boosting Punch Art specifically. I could also use Item as a sub skill; you lose the extra range of Wave Fist and Earth Slash and the versatility of Chakra, but you don't have to deal with height restrictions affecting your ability to heal. If I do Item I'm not sure what I'd use as support, but it's between Throw Item, Defense Up, or Concentration.
BareKnuckleRoo wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2024 10:36 pm
I used to think it was a bit lame you could only get story characters like Agrias who had crazy powerful free attacks in her Holy Sword set, but man, Geomancy's range and handy occasional status effect along with Draw Out's more solid damage are both amazing. Give a Wizard the Samurai skills as a subclass and you destroy enemies quickly and easily. I oneshotted all the demons Velius summoned that way by charging in and Heaven's Clouding 'em. You don't miss, you hit all enemies, it hits "intelligently" (no team killing/enemy healing), it doesn't run off Faith... I have a Samurai with Equip Shield for extra defense and it works really, really well. May try swapping Auto Potion for Blade Grasp, it may well work better since physicals are more of an issue anyways and any spells that hit at minimal Faith will do hilariously low damage. But Auto Potion with X-Potions is still helpful when facing attacks with 100% accuracy rates you can't rely on evasion to dodge. So maybe mixing a few Blade Grasp characters would help too.
I remember as a kid I thought Counter Flood (auto counter nearly everything with Geomancy) was cool, but the reality is Auto Potion makes you way, way more survivable.
It took me forever to get Samurai because I couldn't remember the requirements and tried to trigger it without looking them up. As usual, neglecting the Thief class was my undoing, nobody had hit high enough to even unlock Lancer, haha. Lancer's pretty cool too, a strong 2 range attack, and enough PA to make good use of Punch Art. I use Attack Up as support which boosts Punch Art and the Lancer's spear attacks, but Martial Arts also works for just boosting Punch Art specifically. I could also use Item as a sub skill; you lose the extra range of Wave Fist and Earth Slash and the versatility of Chakra, but you don't have to deal with height restrictions affecting your ability to heal. If I do Item I'm not sure what I'd use as support, but it's between Throw Item, Defense Up, or Concentration.
Black Mage+Samurai works really well as you said, but again I find that Black Mage/Wizard is just too squishy to withstand sustained fire while standing on the front lines, and anyway they already have crazy high nuke damage potential for single targets and small groups with Black Magic. Mostly what Samurai gives them is the "no friendly fire" AoE magic damage plus some healing that they otherwise wouldn't get and of course these skills don't have any charge time (although charge time is rarely a consideration if you play well.)
Oracle is an amazing class. A 1-2 range weapon that scales off magic means you can put them in the flex line (middle to front) and move them back and forth freely. When enemies are disabled (Don't Move, Don't Act, Disable, Blind, Sleep, hell most of the status effects in this game are completely OP) then they have a harder time chasing squishies anyway. If you want the absolute best mid-liner, it's Oracle/Time Mage. Every turn is potentially game-winning with that combo, because you ALWAYS have something overpowered you can whip out. If enemies are too far away, you've got Haste, Shell, Reflect, Protect and all that good shit. Mid lines, Oracle Spells as well as Slow and Stop. Front lines, you've still got a strong 1-2 magic damage scaling weapon.
Geomancer is really solid if you just want a balanced character who can always do something. IF you know which Geo effects can inflict which status ailments, Geomancy can be a solid attack option. But it's usually not the most optimal use of your turn. One big advantage of Geomancers is they get access to Aegis Shields for 50% magic dodge chance and this combines with Blade Grasp. Makes you very tanky to everything except 100% accuracy class skills. Equip Shield really comes into its own AS a skill when you get Aegis Shields. There are elemental shields before that but it's situational.
Dragoon is another solid class if you build them right. They're a physical class so you want to stack physical damage. One meme build you CAN try is Jump Ninja. Equip Spear and Jump as skills on a Ninja. Deals high physical damage and moves around with Ninja's speed. Not as good as Punch Art Ninja imo. A proper Brawler+Punch Art Ninja is one of THE most overpowered class combinations in early-midgame. It requires no gear to get off the ground, has crazy high amounts of both healing and damage and will obliterate all of the early bosses.
Edit: Hell, base Monk with nothing except Punch Art and Focus/Accumulate is still extremely OP in early-midgame and for a while after.
I find a lot of classes get real durable with Auto-Potion active and the best shield and cape equipped that you've got. 150 HP damage will eventually get obsolete, hopefully by then I can load up on PA or MA and get healing from Monk or Samurai skills.
I do wish the game had communicated better how weapon damage works, I never bothered with trying to melee with Oracles before because I'm used to Wizard and Priest having iffy melee. Turns out they're totally different damage formulae, Priests actually deal decent damage as staves and poles run off of weapon power and magic attack, not physical attack (which is what rods use, hence why Wizards are so weak). There's actually a lot of generally bad stuff if you look at the damage data; flails and axes have extreme RNG in them, and while they can potentially hit hard they can also whiff badly, making them unreliable, which isn't what you want in a tactical game! Geomancers will generally work better with swords, equip spear, etc.
Axes and flails got totally ripped off in that game. Halving their actual damage smh.
The game did a good job of making lots of things overpowered, but in different ways. Tactics Ogre was rather bland on that front: you either picked an egg and got crushed or picked the rock class and everything broke itself against your large muscles. (Majin Tensei is completely broken on that front... infinite counter attacks, especially with RPG stats, are silly.)
Being able to quickly wither a target's speed down to moving 90% less often with Knight skills is zany, as are the infinite stacking buffs. You always have to wonder what living in this universe would actually be like: everyone screaming their lungs out for hours before a battle so they can move and hit at the speed and might of gods.
Turning everything into frogs and having them auto-battle to grind out infinite EXP and JP is also an iconic little trick.
Axes weren't too bad when I tried them, but that's because their base damage is quite high, so you roll on average better numbers than with a flail. Apparently Jump works pretty good as it just uses the WP value, and ignores the weapon's randomness. I still preferred a sword and shield though, or spear and shield. By the end of this playthrough I was pretty absurdly powerful. I missed a bunch of sidequests, will try a team without calculators and run it again perhaps. When I beat the game I had:
• Ramza as a Squire with two swords. Excalibur and Save the Queen/Ragnarok gives absurd damage and inherent haste and protect/shell. I preferred this over Ninja with Martial Arts by the end of this due to being able to wear heavier armor, but Ninja with Martial Arts and PA boosting gear was absurdly strong too.
• Lancer with 03 Faith and Item as a subskill. Very few things work to boost Jump damage, and I often had him poking things from two squares away to be tanky. My preferred heavy class in the game, though Geomancers having shields are nice too and their stats allow you to dip into more magical stuff like Draw Out or spells effectively. Apparently Jump works rather well on a Thief or Ninja with their high speed allowing you to stay in the air by jumping repeatedly, should try that.
• Wizard / Summoner with 03 Faith, using Draw Out for damage. Was quite fond of this setup, though katanas are expensive. Properly built, you hit ridiculously hard with them, and with Blade Grasp, Equip Shield, and a high tier mantle, you're very tanky. I had them wearing clothes rather than robes as I didn't need MP. Wizard looks cooler but can't use Golem, but honestly Golem can't block a lot of non-human attacks, so I stuck with Wizard for the look most of the time.
• Two Summoners/Time Mages with Math Skill secondaries, built to spam stuff like Holy spells with calculations. It's pretty crazy powerful. 3 characters were absorbing Holy thanks to Excalibur and Chameleon Robes, and my low Faith dudes could eat the hits with hilariously low double digit damage. If I couldn't get a good calculation lined up, I could manually cast spells decently enough.
Game's fun when you've had a bit of time with the combat system and know what to watch for (the Rafa fight on the roof requires some serious AI manipulation and luck... bringing several naked characters in seems to do wonders to distract the assassins). Story I'm not sure about though; Agrias doesn't ever bother to check in on Ovelia after she's picked up by Ramza (something the PSP version apparently added, though the scene is iffy to me, would she really trust Delita with her?), Rafa and Malak are bleh, Orlandeau has no meaningful story scenes, Meliadoul isn't fleshed out enough beyond being out for her brother's revenge... Ramza himself only really accomplishes things in the sense that he's constantly chasing after one bad guy to the next and arriving only in time to clean up whatever mess has already happened. He never had the guts to confront Zalbag over the order to shoot Teta or something? C'mon. It's dumb, I get that he ran away to become a mercenary and then gets swept back into his family drama as a now outsider, but it's still a bit unsatisfying. You also don't get much out of the ending, even if folks like Agrias, Mustadio, and Cid are all still alive and with you.
The political drama largely centers on Delita and Ramza's brothers; Ramza's really just involved in the cleanup of the Lucavi by the end of it and chasing after his kidnapped sister for a large portion of the game.
The knight sword supremacy is real. It's not enough to have the largest attack mulipliers in the game, but they had to throw permanent auto buffs like Protect or Haste on them, too.
I've mentioned the online PvP scene before; they're interesting to read and watch sometimes if you're in a FFT mood.
Always wished they had made a game in this series more in the spirit of the classic games. The sealed weapons in FF5 didn't have this amount of chauvinism in them - they were all awesome compared to ordinary weapons! And a lighter more fantastical storyline than trying to continue the dreary 'realistic' Tactics Ogre political theatre would have been cool.
But instead we got the Advance games and War Of The Visions.
Granblue Fantasy, a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy 6 (perhaps the only spiritual successor), always made me wonder what the heck is going on in that company. It costs the same amount of money to go with one aesthetic or another, so why not make something many of the fans want?
