kradeelav | (no subject)

got to meet editoress and melody IRL today! :D absolutely delightful, 10/10 time eating sushi, signing YRMR, and geeking out about unsounded. we're not far from each other so we will absolutely doing more visits.

also happily still playing through FF12!

* went into the sandsea section right about time when shit hit the fan for me in work/personal life so it was actually really great timing for me to just be a zombie while watching pretty numbers Go Up as i grinded through. was a little over-long but at least the timing was right. raithwall tomb was super pretty too, though i felt like on a level design aspect they could have scaled down the place by like 10-20%; a lot of walking, enough to turn on the x2 speed.

* i love ashe as a red battlemage since maces are their primary physical weapon and i think it's like therapy for her to smash stuff <3

* belias was like the easiest boss fight ever; then again i knew to come prepared with firing off a bunch of quickenings + then spamming aqua.

* clued into vossler's shtick slighly early when he started mysteriously leveling up slightly faster than the rest of the party LOL. went 'he'd make for a good boss fight at this state-ohhhhhh shit lol'.

* first time i fought vossler, got to 5% of his health and got a game over, second time, i sicc'd ashe's belias on him and god damn i didn't expect him to go down that fast lol. ashe was pissed apparenly? T_T at his final scene though.

* kind of loving all of these 'balthier has Some Legitmate Beef with nethcite' hints ... i know it's adding up to something big but content to wait.

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The sandsea is so soothingly grinding for me, idk what it is about that place! Maybe it's stockholm syndrome because there's one rare game monster that needs a 999 chain of urutan-yensa lol.

Some of the boss fights can definitely be very easy, especially if you've a tendency to grind along the way. Even when I played through ultra fast with the least grinding possible for job fiesta February, some of those bosses absolutely melted, it was hilarious.

Oh Vossler... that whole bit with him hurts so good!! Poor fool of a man, so misled by his own assumptions about Ashe. Ashe/Basch/Vossler is one of my biggest ot3s and oughhh it gets me every time. All that loyalty and entanglement! Basch's return too late (not that he could help it!!!)! It always baffles me how unpopular the ship is (literally 4 fics, 3 of which are mine LOLSOB), like it's right there?! Story of my xii fandom life!

999???? damn you have the patience of a SAINT. highest i got was 70 or so and that was still tedious wowww. honestly also love that though?? i feel like some of the zany rewards/out of the way sidequests give it that sense of pre-internet depth where you had to seriously play the game a ton to even know that they're there.

SUCH a good ship ot3 tooooo omg ;a;;; the best part is that Vossler really *was* betraying them out of good intentions, feeling like there was no better move in a collection of terrible moves - he just made the wrong one is all. and I can't imagine how the guilt and his shadow would/will weigh on the other two as well, there's some DELICIOUS guilt to go along with it.

Filling out the bestiary completely is a mammoth task, but by jove I came armed with a tickybox spreadsheet and a hell of a lot of patience! The hidden/obscure spawn criteria combined with them unlocking cool world lore via the bestiary is like catnip to me haha.

And Vossler man, it's all about the way he makes that decision for Ashe, thinking that she's unable to make it herself as Queen. Like he sees her as something to protect and not a woman growing into her role in her own right, which we see Basch being very good with later. Ough feelings.... what could have happened if Vossler had been there to see that growth too!! Insert endless sobbing here

omg.... ff12's world just keeps getting exponentially deeper and deeper with every new tidbit you tell me...

there's actually a really specific *deepness* (depth i guess lol?) to games from that era, i'm thinking of SSBM too which had a shocking amount of gameplay nuances for what it was evidenced by the long shelf life - but it's just all in the *details* and also the effort in the devs of going the long way in order to flesh it out in a human way, it doesn't seem slapdash at all.

RIGHT ABOUT VOSSLER?? augh. in some ways it's still possible to have an enormous amount of sympathy for him considering he too is caught between an immensely hard place, but it's that arrogance in talking for her instead of taking the time to feeling her out. kind of a neat subversion of the usual knight/princess dynamic in that style of game ngl, with them not being able to see beyond that explicit protector duty.

Yeah it's one thing Matsuno is kinda famous for, all the lore-within-lore kinda vibes! It's why I love the Bozja storyline in xiv so much (it was written by him, and it's an Ivalice story!! :DDD), but in xii especially it's real evident. If you notice the little numbers in the bestiary entries, that's how many of each monster u gotta kill to fully complete the entry - and the extra pages you get are usually just seemingly random lore stuff, it's really fun! Just the little details that really add to the depth, like you say, everything feels intentional even if the lore isn't relevant to the main plot, you know?

And big agree on the knight/princess subversion!! I agree on the sympathy for him as well, because you kinda get a glimpse into how he's been dealing with all the Resistance stuff when Basch returns (Vossler's line about his return being late) - kinda makes me wonder about how much of an adjustment it was for him, moving to organising such a complex underground movement like that. He's so juicy, ugh.

As an aside, I'm SO glad you're having so much fun with the game!! I love getting to see people's reactions to the story and especially love when people have a similar reaction to me with how damn rewarding it is for complex characters and plots :D

<333 i need to thank YOU again for getting me into ff12 in the first place considering it was you floating bergan's glorious thighs in my view that sealed the deal XD

that is honestly a brilliant way of implementing gameplay/storytelling with filling out the bestiary like that ... like logically it can be read as the crew getting more familiar with the critter's habits the more they journey around them (foods, fears, wants, etc), but also a neat way to encourage the player to stick around an area more rather than zooming through. :D

always delightful to meet ppl in the corporeal realm :D

also i am *chinhands* at your balthier observations, as you might expect lmaoooo

(i do think the "sliiiightly overlong & a lot of walking sections" is a pretty consistent FF12 flaw yeah. i think it's by design? something something make you feel the Weight of the journey or whatever. but i was personally pretty glad i was playing the remastered version; og game did not have the 2x speed option and it really helped sometimes hahaha)

haha sometimes even just meeting meetspace friends after a looong time otherwise is enough to ground one for a while. :D

oh shit that's a /fabulous/ point with the walking-as-a-metaphor. heck, suddenly got a lot more patience with it. i suppose related as that it helps this game feel a lot more *expansive* - like walking over the sandsea legitmately feels like a trek over half of tatooine or some shit. (star wars games other than one starfighter game were more cramped than you'd think)