i had a lot of work to do recently, and i made it a point to be done with all the media i had left unfinished beforehand so i could be fully focused on it. anyway i haven't completed the work yet but here's a new 60-hour RPG for me to get into and also i started watching a new TV show this morning. i've never played this! whenever i think about starting up a new Final Fantasy this one is always at the forefront of my mind so i'm very excited about it. the reason i never followed through with it was the aforementioned 60-hour commitment that for whatever reason i have now decided to be fine with. i played FFXIV for 38 pages but that's different

i've opted for an english patch of the PS2 International-But-Not-Really-Because-It-Was-Only-Released-in-Japan Zodiac Job System version instead of the remaster, which i looked into but didn't like the sound of some of the changes made. that paired with my preference for original(-ish) versions of games made it an easy choice. what's strange is that there's only english audio here? in this case it's fine because (most of) the dub is pretty good. but i don't know why they took out the japanese audio from a japan-only re-release of a japanese game. i guess that's what the International means

love the litany of badtime war cinematics followed by a seemingly important character telling me what all the buttons on my controller do. not to be "my immersion!" about it but it's never not funny to me when games do this. i wondered who this Reks dude i was controlling was as that's not a name i was familiar with through osmosis. well Reks dies at the end of this tutorial sequence so the secrets of the circle button die with him. i looked him up just now (stupid idea since i was only 90% sure he actually died) and turns out he's Vaan's brother. not sure if i was supposed to know that yet. look there's a lot of names thrown around in the beginning

whenever there's something resembling a difficulty setting i usually stick with the default. but Wait mode feels bad in this one since i'm still physically moving around during battles and it freezes me in doing that, so i eventually changed to Active. ironic since Active mode punishes indecision and yet i'm plagued with it when faced with these kinds of settings. as for speed, apparently because of how statuses work slower can sometimes make things more difficult? i don't know for now i've left it at the default. you have no idea how much i dislike designing my own difficulty in any capacity

i never use emulator speedup options, for the same weirdo OCD reasons i don't like exhaustive difficulty settings. but this version adds a 2x speed option and look if it's in the game itself then it's fair game and i am zooming. the remaster added 4x speed on top of that which sounds like far too much to me, i can't even manage 2x as you can clearly tell BUT that is because of this INVERTED CAMERA i CANNOT get a handle on oh my god there's no setting for it dude

i didn't know FF games were still doing this in 2007. the permanent job choice thing. i know that in saying this i'm only continuing to pile on the reasons i am a boring video game player but since i am indecisive and don't know what's what in this game yet i just looked up what the "canon" jobs for characters would be. had me slightly worried when everyone said to make Vaan a Shikari, a word i could not find anywhere on this screen. it's because this patch changes it to Hunter but you know i spent several minutes making 100% sure that was the case

um i want to point out. this game is so pretty!! i love Rabanastre and i can't believe this is a PS2 game. i am intrigued by this combat system also, even though i am still only in auto-attack city. so far it feels like playing FFXI, which i was considering going back to recently, but without any MMO headache. but yeah it's crazy i hope they make even more games based on FFXIV raids

walked in the wrong direction for a few seconds and got one-shot by a large man, so definitely feeling like XI now right down to losing a lot of progress. had video of it happening in double speed looking like a wacky cartoon but it got lost in the fall of Dalmasca

i have been taught about gambits, which i was worrying wouldn't happen since characters kept telling me "make sure to use your gambits!" meanwhile i could find literally nothing about it in the menus or help section. it's like writing a dang computer program huh i like it. i'll probably never use it well and most of the time resort to bruteforcing everything with the default gambits but it's a cool system

Balthier and Fran are here now. they are clearly a machinist and an archer respectively, they are depicted as such in their artwork and have their own unique animations for firing guns and bows. i assume i can't go wrong with those job choices right. well turns out they are actually terrible as machinist/archer as those unique animations take slightly longer than the default. the game has punished me for being boring

was ready to feel extremely owned during this cutscene where Vaan talks to Reks who was seemingly alive and not dead, but turned out to just be imaginary-alive as he faded away. wish he'd shared the secrets of the circle button with Vaan before he died because the amount of trouble i have getting in the right spot to interact with things is really bugging me

guess whoever did the subtitles decided it wasn't that unfortunate. there's a good amount of audio and text weirdness in this patch but i looked up this cutscene and not only are the errors still there, the font they originally used for subtitles is horrendous. so thank you patch creator "ffgriever" i am not grieving the unfortunate loss of that font

this game is absolutely going to take me longer than 60 hours on account of my having to talk to every random townsperson disease. townspeople who also have new things to say after minor story events. i simply have to soak up as much lore as possible for this world for whose story i have already had to read a plot summary. basically there's a rabbit girl named Fran who walks around with her cheeks way out and then there's some stuff with an empire or whatever

so far the only change i've made to the default gambits is casting Cure whenever an ally is under 50% HP and it's gotten me by just fine. i stopped by the gambit shop that lets me buy new if() statements and my eyes bulged at how long it took me to scroll through everything. they really account for every imaginable possibility, and they allll cost money. i'm very excited to be incentivized to experiment with them 30 hours from now

i don't think there was a gambit for "if (wildOrb.strength >>>>> everyOtherMonsterAroundHere.strength) flee(now)"