FreshFeeling Gaming

I played chapter 3 of Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles under wpot's OR4M rules between October 12th and October 19th.



At the end of the previous entry, I said that Neil the Minotaur and Musa the Coeurl might not be on my team for long. Wandering around for some errands indeed got me a reasonably-levelled Sekhret, Thamyris, and so Thamyris joined up. For the moment, there were no other big shifts in my team's composition despite having most of the tier 3 monsters now available.

Chapter 3 starts out with the battle where Orran joins you. If you're lucky, he casts Galaxy Stop or whatever it's called now and you have an easy time. That is... precisely what happened. Ramza started to lower Thamyris' faith and otherwise the battle was a piece of cake.


Next, we did the battle leaving Lesalia where Alma joins us. If I recall correctly, I took a second attempt at this one. It was about a week ago so I don't actually recall perfectly; it may have been because an important monster perma-died or something. I decided to bring a Squidraken for some reason and I don't know if it even got to land a hit.

Thamyris squished Zalmour.


The Ivalice Chronicles version of the game has delightful notifications when the shops get upgraded. I took a walk down to Goug to get Ramza an upgraded gun.


Next up was the multi-stage battle at Orbonne. Again, these segments of the game have a pretty neat little map screen which I think looks fantastic.


The first battle, in Vaults - Second Level, was actually kind of hard on my first attempt. My monsters are mostly several levels below the enemies in story battles, given the level 20 cap at the end of chapter 2, and Musa has had some trouble keeping up. Blaster is still very useful when I can set it up! But its utility in these fights made it more apparent that I would benefit from recruiting a Vampire Cat.

On the attempt where we won it was pretty decisive.

The next battle was against Isilud. This also wasn't done on my first attempt. I situated the team pretty badly in formation the first time; clearly it was important to get my stronger, less mobile units up on the walls and closer to Isilud. Instead, I had one of them move toward the summoner, and that generally didn't go well.

On the winning attempt, I treated it much more like the assassination-style battle it is. Ramza shot Isilud and then the monsters got him down to critical. You can see I brought a Steel Hawk - and it was fairly useful, actually, although it was down at the end of the fight.

Next up was exiting the vaults, where we encountered Wiegraf. It's funny, because in perusing the board for this game on GameFAQs, I saw Sharebear420 having trouble with this fight and nobody else seemed to sympathize. It was rough! Now, admittedly, I am operating under a lot of constraints that Sharebear and the other posters don't have. I found that, regardless of formation, Wiegraf would move forward before I could act and use Hallowed Bolt, killing at least one monster and significantly weakening others. This screenshot, for example, was from before my first action:

You can see there are some problems there. Since he can 100% OHKO Ramza before Ramza's movement, I had to set the formation in such a way that he couldn't resist hitting someone else. I would accept him killing a Chocobo and/or Musa the Coeurl, and then hope that Ramza (whose Pisces sign made his gun quite effective against Wiegraf) and the bulkier monsters could pull it out.


What was really frustrating was one occasion where it was barely coming together... and my remaining Malboro had a shot on Wiegraf's back... but couldn't actually attack because a Malboro's Tentacles attack only has a vertical tolerance of 1. It can't attack up stairs!


Eventually though, it came together. The team was Boco the Chocobo (dead instantly), Musa the Coeurl (dead instantly), Ramza (dead on turn 2), Thamyris the Sekhret, and Typhon the Blue Dragon. It ended up with Typhon as the only unit remaining, just above half health but without enough to withstand another attack from Wiegraf, getting one attempt at an Ice Breath from the front. It had a 75% chance to end the fight, and a 25% chance to be another defeat. This one came out on my side.

What's kind of funny in all this is how amazingly irrelevant Wiegraf's several mages and archers were. They basically didn't matter at all. The other thing that sort of startled me a bit is, at some point after, I checked the tips for this fight from wpot's O4RM guide and it practically just says, "Just beat him.", as if this were super easy! It was not.


The next part of my quest would eventually take me to the challenging fights at the end of the chapter, and I knew I'd need some preparation. My monsters were breeding as I walked, and this was sort of an okay way to get higher-levelled units in general. (The generic humans I had been keeping, one of whom was level 4, worked against this effort, but it wasn't too bad.) Despite all the breeding, I still wasn't getting a Mindflayer or a Vampire Cat... but Balias Swale quickly yielded a Mindflayer and a Gobbledygook, which is pretty great.

I figured a Gobbledygook could eventually be pretty important against a boss using its Beastmaster ability, although I also had a revenant now.

I had trouble locating a Vampire Cat regardless, and Musa wasn't having babies. I looked at a couple of guides but finding exhaustive lists of where to find monsters with which chapter it became available was... inconsistent. I ended up just doing Grogh Heights. Kapys the Mindflayer was an enormous asset in this fight, and my Malboro's Bad Breath was amazingly useful at one point as well.


I really wanted that Vampire Cat, so after consulting yet another guide - this one by QuMarsh - I went back to Balias Swale. This got really annoying. I got into a really stupid rhythm of starting and resetting battles again and again. Despite reloading being a lot easier than it was in the PS1 era, it's kind of silly that you can't exit a battle from the formation screen.

It probably took 20+ instances of this nonsense, but eventually we met and befriended Erato the Vampire Cat.


I should say: with all of the breeding and recruiting I've had a lot of monsters. When I get a lot of extras of a species, I eliminate the lowest-levelled ones and in some cases the ones with the lowest brave. I like renaming monsters sometimes to make their names meaningful or silly or just generally more relatable than the default nonsense syllables. One of my kids has walked in and asked to see my team and when he learned monsters could be renamed, he renamed several of my monsters for me.

If you see monsters being added/removed or possibly just under different names, this is why.
For the most part, I haven't been renaming the core team so I can refer to them with some continuity.

Yardrow Fort city took a few tries, mostly based on how stupid Rapha decided to be. I will say, in the winning attempt (my third, I believe) she also got really lucky with a Heaven Thunder one-shotting one of the ninjas.

Thamyris was too slow to be particularly effective in this fight, but those idle turns meant using a lot of Beef Up. Consequently, when Thamyris went to land the final blow it was for 264 of this summoner's 7 HP. This somehow made Thamyris the greatest contributor.


The Yuguewood was actually simple, and was a first try with no issues.


Next up was the three-part battle at Riovanes Castle, where the second and third part are among the most frustrating battles in the game. It surprised me that the first wasn't great either, in part because my monsters kept getting poached!

This is something I might never have observed in prior playthroughs. Even on my winning attempt, my Chocobo got poached, but it was Dadameia instead of Boco so I kept on trucking. I was very glad to have gone back to get a Vampire Cat, as Erato was able to petrify one archer and keep another stop-locked.

Eventually we won. It's funny the way these battles can swing, because often - but not always - it feels like I lose and it's not even close or I win and it's not even close.


Unsurprisingly, Wiegraf was a big jerk. This battle generally requires a specialized setup, and with my forced orator job and my level constraints I expected it to be bad. Here was my initial setup for Ramza.

This was my initial formation. Yes, this Gobbledygook was named by my son. I am very proud.

This would turn out to not be ideal for several reasons. For one minor thing, I should've put Thamyris the Sekhret closer to the action. For another, I forgot to replace Ramza's Item command with Mettle. Despite this, I beat Wiegraf and moved into the Belias phase on my first attempt!

This level of success did not continue.


On my next attempt, I remembered Mettle and fixed up the formation a bit. Ramza even dodged Wiegraf's first Aurablast! I pumped his speed up to 22 or so with Tailwind and shot down a demon or two. The bad part of this was I was pushed up to level 30.

The even worse part was that I didn't win anyway because all of my monsters were dead/petrified before Ramza could win regardless.

On the winning attempt, I buffed Ramza's speed but to a greater extent and then - using my brain here - I targeted Belias instead of the goons. Sure, the team took a lot of damage, but this was a damage race. With help from Talaos the Revenant, we won that race!
 
 

Of course, chapter 3 isn't quite over yet. We've still got the stupid rooftop battle.
Now, I need you to know that I really like this game, but this part was completely idiotic game design. I can't imagine any intelligent player ever who didn't eclipse level 50 who ever beat this battle first try. It's such a fickle battle, and you can't prepare Rapha for it if you wanted to. I truly wonder how this was tested and considered okay by the original developers. It's awful.
I can't imagine with this pre-amble that you would think this was going to go well, right?

Well, it didn't go well.
On a couple of early attempts, Rapha walked down the castle roof, and I thought everything was going to be cool. Unfortunately, Celia joined her there and tore her apart.

This all happened before Ramza could even act. The only control I had over this was boosting his speed by 1 additional point with Hermes Shoes, so I did that.

Now I could do things, but it seemed like most of the actions Ramza took made Rapha even more suicidal. Over maybe ten attempts, she was two-shot in so many spectacular ways. I tried controlling the battle using Ramza's orator abilities, but Lettie and Elmdore can't be put to sleep anyway.

Somehow, eventually, Lettie decided to throw (literally or figuratively lol) instead of attacking directly and this gave Erato the Vampire Cat a single shot at Celia. I chose for Erato to use Cat Scratch and, with it rolling slightly on the high side, it was enough to put Celia into critical status and end the fight.
 
Elmdore's characterization in this part of the game is an awful lot better than earlier versions, by the way. It really makes the point that he's not just a monster, and that in fact he's thankful to Ramza for what happened in chapter 1. I guess he's still monstrous, but reluctantly, and that's sort of interesting.

With that, we're done chapter 3! Those last few fights sure were stupid.
With chapter 4 incoming we have access to a lot of new and interesting monsters now! I'll be starting to recruit some of those soon. In fact, I already started chapter 4 but let's end this entry here.

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As I wrote just two days ago, Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles was released earlier this week. I took some personal time and sacrificed a bit of sleep to play it, which frankly felt really good. Games are my favourite way to make my brain relax, and it's much more effective when I'm not streaming! Plus, time is at a premium right now and playing FFT on my Switch makes it really easy for me to pick it up and play regardless of how much time I've got, when I can be interrupted (which happens a lot!) or which other systems my kids think they need to use. Consequently, after starting to play it mid-day yesterday, October 4th, I was actually able to put in a few hours before bed last night.

There's a poster on the Final Fantasy Tactics board on GameFAQs - where I'm not particularly active - named wpot, who is at least mildly obsessed with a challenge called MR4M or OR4M. This stands for "Mediator/Orator Ramza 4 Monsters", where Ramza plays the role of the "beastmaster" and leads four different monsters at all times. wpot's posts have caught my attention a few times, and I do mean a few times because I've found discussion of the challenge from May 2013, October 2016, November 2016, February 2017, October 2017, January 2024 and November 2024. Not every one of these topics was created by wpot, but most were, and it's not like having a monster-focused party wasn't explored before May 2013! That quantity of separate board topics is also probably a bit inflated and silly-looking because the FFT PlayStation board used to be separate from the FFT PSP board, and now they're merged. I don't consider wpot to be completely unhinged with regards to this challenge.

wpot eventually created a posted guide to the OR4M challenge for the War of the Lions version of the game. It's great!
My intent is to follow wpot's established rules for O4RM during my inaugural playthrough of this new version of the game, even though with some of the balance changes it may have differences in terms of difficulty, strategy... or perhaps whether it's even possible or not.

Mostly pulled directly from wpot's guide, here are the rules, the way I'll be following them - which ignores the optional rules:

Rule 1:

•      10 during Chapter 1
•      20 during Chapter 2
•      30 during Chapter 3
•      50 during Chapter 4

Rule 3:

Rule 4:

• Tier 1 monsters during Chapter 1
• Tier 1 & 2 monsters during Chapter 2
• All available monsters during Chapter 3 EXCEPT the Red Chocobo, Red Dragon, Cockatrice, and Behemoths
• ALL monsters (except the Tiamat and Greater Hydra) during Chapter 4

 
Rule 5:

• Must ONLY fight in the Orator class during story battles. During random battles he may fight as a Squire or Chemist to gain JP (or other jobs as needed to open Orator in the first place). 
• May ONLY equip Mettle or Item as a secondary skill. [...]
• May only equip Squire or Orator Reaction skills. Yes, this means only Counter Tackle or Earplug (should even you bother learning them). No Auto-Potion!
• May only equip monster-themed Support skills (Beastmaster or Tame). JP Boost is only allowed during random battles to avoid gaining too many levels. No Throw Items!
• Must only equip Squire or Orator Movement skills. So: Move+1 it is! Be glad you have it.

Rule 6:

Rule 7:

Rule 8:

---

And that's the end of the rules! There are two optional rules that generally make things easier or allow more choice, but I'm not going to use either of those.

As I said, I'm intending to follow these rules as strictly as reasonably possible. I don't agree with every aspect of them, like the Stoneshooter being overpowered - I think it's got a good enough tradeoff. I also find the Chapter 3 monster restrictions a little on the arbitrary side, but I respect the intent so I'll go along with these rules as written.

When you start Final Fantasy Tactics: The Ivalice Chronicles, you get a choice of playing the "classic" version of the "The Ivalice Chronicles" version. I wanted to see the new stuff and spot the differences, so I went with "The Ivalice Chronicles".

When it describes the version differences, it mostly sounds like modernization and quality-of-life improvements... but it does say "optimized game balance" and that does make me wonder if there will be an impact on the gameplay related to this challenge.

There's also a difficulty selection.

I went with "Knight", for something close to the traditional difficulty and balance although I don't know the specifics of how any of these work. I didn't want to be too casual, and I didn't select "Tactician" because I worried that my dependence on monsters was more likely to render the game unwinnable on a higher difficulty setting. At wpot's advice, I picked a Pisces birthday: February 19th.


This new version of the game has very nice presentation. The voice acting all sounds pretty same-y, and maybe a little monotone in places where the actors struggle to deal with the weird choice of words, but on the whole I like it. The little animated mouths are fun. I didn't skip too much... especially when I saw a bizarre word or phrase that I really wanted to hear.

For the introductory battle at Orbonne, I literally just had Ramza sit still and wait every turn while my OP friends slaughtered everyone.


I'd use the forced plot battle in Mandalia Plains to grind a bit to unlock mystic (née oracle) and a second random battle there to unlock orator! I got it all done in these few battles, as wpot had prescribed.


The version difference presented itself in a few minor ways this early in the game. For one thing, Reequip/Equip Change now cost 50 JP to learn, whereas in the original FFT it was a completely free ability.

For another, a chemist is now able to find items as if they have Move-Find/Treasure Hunter without learning or equipping the ability. This actually happened to me twice on Mandalia Plains by total accident.


Anyway, I unlocked orator for Ramza at the low, low level of 4, and learned Entice.


I did two more random battles in Mandalia Plains before heading to Eagrose. In the first one, I recruited a Chocobo and a Goblin and in the second I recruited a Red Panther.
  
It was very fun that my first Entice ever was successful, and with 28% odds.
 
Now that I had three monster allies, plus Delita and Argath, I didn't really need so many humans anymore. I'm not really sure how the rules handle carrying generics around to do propositions later so I just kept the humans around barely equipped and unused.

This version of the game sort of still has random encounters; if you're on a combat space and you select it, you can choose for a fight to happen at all... and if you cross a space and a random battle pops up, you've got the option to just leave. This ended up being somewhat abusable to keep my levels low enough for chapter 1 without the awful, time-consuming process of resetting the original FFT game.

I did Sweegy Woods/Siedge Wield with my new monster squad and my guest characters. There were Bombs, but I failed to recruit them before my team slaughtered them and Ramza didn't have Item on.

I did a second battle here immediately thinking it would be an asset to get a Bomb on the team, and instead in the random battle there was... nothing useful. I had noticed in the pause menu that there was an option to exit the battle and return to the world map, so I tried that out. It's literally just a cost-free escape option. Amazing. I had been worried as I don't believe I'd saved before this low-reward battle popped up.

With another crack at it, I got a battle in Siedge Wield that included Skeletons and a Wisenkin/Minotaur! Now that's useful. I was able to recruit both, although this battle ended up quite on the chaotic side. At some point I guess my Chocobo died? But it had laid an egg so I didn't even notice until later. I realize now, from these screenshots, that the original Chocobo died in the previous battle. I guess I hadn't grown very attached yet.
  

Now Ramza had a Goblin, a Skeleton, a Red Panther, a Chocobo, and a Wisenkin as allies before the first real battle of this (or nearly any other) challenge format for this game. I was level 6 though, so I knew I'd need to do fewer random battles to stay under the cap.

Time for Dorter! While this is often sort of a wake-up call fight in this game, it wasn't too hard for us. Our Chocobo and Wisenkin allies were both very tough. I knew I could take advantage of the Chocobo's mobility... and in fact, since you save quite a bit of money by not outfitting humans and fighting multiple random battles I had bought Delita and Argath both some Battle Boots, so crossing the battlefield was pretty easy.

Speaking of Delita and Argath though, here's a funny thing about this game version: You cannot change a guest character's job or equipped job ability. Delita and Argath are both squires with Item no matter what. It doesn't matter too much, but it's a change I noticed.

The Chocobo used its mobility to climb up toward the archer, supported by Delita and Argath, while the Wisenkin, Skeleton and Ramza crossed the bottom. The Skeleton got hit with Fire eventually but otherwise it was very manageable.
  

This takes us to the sand ra-a-a-a-ats. It was a good fight - on the easy side. The Chocobo supported Delita and everyone else blocked up the door where Argath starts. It was great.


Next up, Thieves' Fort or whatever it's called. This one actually took me three tries. Milleuda was pretty mean on a few occasions with Rapid Fist/Pummel. Ramza had been saving up to learn Mimic Darlavon as his second Speechcraft ability, so it was fun and useful to put some of the enemy thieves to sleep. The victory was a bit squeezed-out, though, with Ramza dead and the Chocobo and Wisenkin ganging up on Milleuda to end the fight with about one round of leeway.

I happened to learn during this stormy battle that my Skeleton's Thunder Anima wakes up sleeping opponents. I was under the impression that it behaved more like a magic spell, so this was disappointing.

I stripped Argath before he left. In Lenalia Plateau, Mimic Darlavon was again sort of the MVP move. Keeping some of the enemies down managed the threat level and allowed my Wisenkin and Chocobo to do their best work. The first Mimic Darlavon came in clutch stopping a Fira spell that Milleuda's black mage friend was aiming at us.
  
I don't know if it's the translation or the voice acting in this new version of the game, but I find the plot easier to follow and the characters easier to understand. The ones the game wants you to like, like Milleuda, feel more likeable, and the despicable ones, like Dycedarg, feel more despicable. I've been enjoying the general presentation a lot.

Next was the windmill battle at Fovoham. This one didn't go well at all. I believe I needed four runs at it, and after the first two I actually adjusted my formation a bit to make my monsters more effective.

It generally started out well enough, but Wiegraf had a nasty habit of targetting Ramza with a Cleaning Strike/Split Punch that did more damage than Ramza's max HP. This happened in three battles. There were also an annoying number of times that my Wisenkin ally was insta-killed by Northswain's Strike/Crush Punch.

Each time, with Delita being unable to learn Phoenix Down, the only option left is for every monster to full-out attack Wiegraf to see if they can end the fight. Eventually this exact methodology is what worked, with my Skeleton bringing Wiegraf into critical HP and ending the fight. This is one of those scenarios where the in-battle dialogue will bring a character from 0 HP to 1 HP, I think, but this battle was already over.


I thought carefully about options before heading the next fight at Fort Ziekden. After all, after Ziekden I'd lose access to some of these areas. I'm glad I did this, because there are Dragons in Lenalia Plateau! I escaped one fight where there were no useful enemies and then recruited a new Dragon buddy.
 
I also did one extra battle in Fovoham and there were squid fellas and eyeball guys. I got a new eyeball guy but I'm not sure whether it'll be useful or not.

Anyway, onto Ziekden! I had one false start where I quickly realized I had left Ramza in the squire class after the random battles I was just doing. I won on the second try, but there were a lot of close calls! We had some good luck with putting the enemies to sleep, in some cases cancelling some nasty spells! Others were less avoidable.
I did a move here a few times where Ramza was being targetted with a black magic, so he would use his recently-learned Enlighten ability to lower his faith and then stand beside the caster, who would substantially damage themself while Ramza survived. Then my Chocobo would go over to him and use Choco Cure. It was great.

This is also the first battle where Ramza's Beastmaster ability mattered, at least somewhat. My Wisenkin was able to use Beef Up, and my Dragon used Tail Whip a few times which did pretty great damage on at least one occasion.

It was the Dragon who eventually took Argath down.


With that... we're all done chapter 1 already! Wow, this sure seems to be moving along a lot faster than my last Final Fantasy Tactics playthrough! We didn't violate any rules, although many of us were around level 9.

This is pretty fun so far! I'm appreciating the differences between the different monsters and I can see how their varying expendability is going to change the way I play. It's still possible that the rebalancing in this version will throw me a nasty curve ball, I suppose.

Here's the team thus far:


Index | Next >

I concluded this Side Quest Challenge playthrough on September 6, 2025 - although I guess it was actually September 7th in the end.


I haven't really noted it, but in addition to doing these write-ups as usual, I've also been posting to this GameFAQs thread throughout. It's not bustlin', but there have been some reactions and a small number of new quests. Between the prior session and this one, we've ended up with six new quests... meaning we now have quests to unlock every single weapon, armor and spell in the game! Many of the new ones didn't have the "stories" that all of the older ones did, but that's okay.

I started out with some wandering around in lava to lower our HP. This was intended to make it so that Vivi was the only surviving character, although had some other effects, too.