Final Fantasy Tactics OR4M Part II

I finished chapter 2 between October 7th and 11th. There were some rough patches, but it generally went well. After my first post, I also started a GameFAQs thread related to this.


The start of chapter 2 is odd. I took on Lavian, Alicia and Ladd (sp?) for the sake of doing errands but I also had Agrias and Gaffgarion. Thus, the battles feel not only on the easy side, but you barely notice that most of the characters are monsters. This was the case right away in Dorter the second.
 


Before continuing, I did a few random things. I made my generics complete the errands that were available early, and then realizing that that swamp that used to start with "Z" was coming up I thought I'd benefit from getting a floating enemy like a Bomb. I popped up to the Zeklaus Desert and recruited a Grenade.
 

In Araguay Woods, I thought the beastmastery thing to do was to protect Boco.

This was a very simple fight. I brought all non-Chocobo units thinking that Boco should count as a monster on my team. This probably didn't end up mattering as Boco mostly just stayed in his corner.


I went straight to Zeirchele Falls, after changing Gaffgarion's job to "nudist".
 
As I discussed before, you can't change guest characters' command abilities in this version, so he'll keep Item.
During this battle, one of my kids wandered into the room where I was playing. What was funny was, with Ovelia, Agrias, Delita and Gaffgarion around the fight didn't even look like one where monsters were particularly featured - like, it doesn't even resemble a variant playthrough.
 
It was fairly easy to keep things under control, although you can see one of my monsters was knocked out. Ramza kept a lot of knights and Gaffgarion asleep for much of the fight.


Zaland took two tries. There were some things that went well the first time, but I misjudged how high the Dragon could jump and sort of squandered a couple of early turns that I believe caught up with me. It definitely didn't help that a knight with Geomancy used Carve Model to turn my chocobo into a statue. The second try was fine, though.
 

Now, Balias Tor. This one took two tries. Again, getting opponents to sleep to just sway the action economy to our side was key.
 

There were a lot of cutscenes around this part. As I said before, a lot of things were easier to understand... or perhaps the meaning was even tweaked. I'm honestly not sure. Ovelia saying, "I was to be the adopted daughter of my late brother" was something I never understood previously.

There's also the part where, in other versions, Dycedarg says to Gaffgarion something along the lines of "your head can easily be removed" which I always thought was one of his coldest, coarsest, character-defining lines. It's very different now.


Well, now it's off toward Goug... with Tchigolith Fenlands next. I had been really mindful of this one coming up, and that's why I really wanted a floating enemy like Semele the Grenade. This still took me over 10 resets because I really wanted to recruit the early Swine.
 
Again, the restart option was fairly quick but when I picked "Restart the battle" it felt like the seed was always the same. I did this many, many times testing things out. Eventually, I got better luck after going back to the formation screen. That said, even my first battle with a Swine in it didn't go well because I split the team up too much.

Eventually, we got it! Samele's Flame Attack was pretty handy here.
 

In addition to getting the Swine, we recruited our first Ghoul here.


The Goug battle actually took two tries. On the second, successful attempt it was rather decisive. I don't even feel like I was doing anything particularly wrong in the first place, instead legitimately having bad luck.

I used Musa the Coeurl again here, which I really enjoyed. Blaster isn't very accurate (yet) but it's really nice when it works.

We crossed the sea to Warjilis and did the Balias Swale battle. We said geronimo to help Agrias, and it was pretty easy. You can see that Musa landed a Blaster to petrify an enemy here.
 

Well, this was fine. Really, though there were a few mis-steps and a few fights that've taken more than one try, I thought I'd attempt Golgollada Gallows.

It didn't go well. You can see here that Boco the Chocobo is level 12. I knew I'd need some preparation. I actually spent a fair bit of time levelling, reducing faith and buffing brave at Balias Swale only to realize: I never got an upgraded dragon! Oops. A Blue Dragon would probably be a serious asset.


Well... I don't have a ton of options for breeding here. I got rid of some of my lowest-levelled monsters and then... started walking back and forth on the longest safe route in the game.

Gross.
This took a while.
This sucked but it had some other benefits. Every so often a baby monster would be born with a higher level than its parents, so that sort of helped. Eventually, we got baby Typhon the Blue Dragon. I took this new recruit and my other highest-levelled mainstays to Balias Swale for some levelling and br/fa manipulation. I even managed to make use of this old standby grinding setup:

My monsters would whack each other while getting cured by Boco, and Ramza would repeatedly lower their faith and then attempt to raise their bravery. Ramza got much closer to the cap than everyone else; I decided we should be done when Ramza had attained level 17. You can see I also managed to recruit a Steel Hawk in this battle.

By the way: I'm fairly sure but not positive that doing this version of the fight before Golgollada Gallows was impossible in prior versions of the game. In this version, you can access the Golgollada battle and escape to approach Balias Swale from the west even before winning at Golgollada. It is somewhat peculiar that this ended up mattering, but it did.

We went back to Golgollada Gallows with our upgraded squad. It went much, much better.
 
Now, Typhon the Blue Dragon is very nice, but everyone truly got their moment in this fight. Musa's Blaster usage was essential. This next screenshot shows two knights stopped and one asleep! It was quite manageable.
 

Next was the gate at Lionel Castle. Check out the fancy screen they added for multi-battle areas.

This battle was tough, mainly because it was fairly essential that Ramza survive his cage match with Gaffgarion.

After finding it too hard when Gaffgarion came outside, I abandoned the idea of having Ramza heal himself repeatedly with Hi Potions and instead trying to put Gaffgarion asleep. The game told me that the odds of this working were over 70%, but I failed five times in a row and went back to the Hi Potions. On this second attempt just having Ramza heal himself instead of going for the Mimic Darlavon, we pulled through.
 
As a part of this, Ramza did eventually get Gaffgarion to have a nap, but it didn't matter too much.


For the interior, I decided to put a Protect Ring on Ramza. You can see he was level 19 here!
 
This took two tries, again, in part because my original formation was pretty bad and meant every single monster got put to sleep or condemned. It was hard to recover from. I also originally had Samele the Grenade in there, but Samele seems to have rather bad stats/brave and its damage was super low. I decided to bring back trusty ol' Musa the Coeurl. Regardless, even my eventual victory was a bit close for comfort.


And with that, we're done chapter 2! I don't have a bunch of tier 3 monsters ready yet, but I think I'd have trouble moving on from these monsters. I've gone easy on the bravery buffs just because of level gains, but also I recognize that it's hard to keep monsters adequately levelled and at some point spending the time buffing them won't feel worthwhile.

Despite this, I might be a little attached to Boco, Musa, Neil and Typhon! I sort of know that Musa and Neil will need to be replaced fairly soon.

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