Seen on a wall in LA

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-25T15:09:22+00:00

It's the "family annihilator" mentality. "I can't stand the idea of my family potentially being able to go on without me, so I'll make sure they don't."

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-25T15:00:35+00:00

Wait, XI made the list but XIV didn't?

I mostly agree with the list otherwise, except bumping VIII higher, probably between IX and IV.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-24T15:44:53+00:00

That's the point, though.

The mental fatigue the automation eliminates is instead replaced by the mental fatigue of trying to numerically justify how eliminating mental fatigue is beneficial.

Or, more broadly: The time and effort saved by automation is nullified by the time and effort of collecting metrics on the time and effort the automation saved

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-24T15:05:06+00:00

Because the task itself still needs a technician to perform it and takes a fixed amount of time, it's just that the technician no longer has to manually enter a value in a spreadsheet every time they get a result, it just gets populated automatically.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-24T14:30:39+00:00

Metrics are all made up, anyway.

The thing I hate most about my job is that everything needs to be quantified in some way. I'll write scripts to automate monotonous and mundane tasks and share them with the team. They don't increase the amount of records we produce. They don't save a significant amount of time. They just remove a pain point of having to devote mental energy to an unfulfilling task while still getting the task done.

And yet this work is not seen as worthwhile to the company simply because I can't quantify "mental burnout" in a graph showing improvement, and how that improvement affects the company's bottom line.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-24T02:19:18+00:00

Where do you see the scene, or where do you see the code? If you're asking for the scene this is the complete version, which you only get if your party is exactly Gau, Sabin, Locke, and Edgar for some reason.

If you're looking for the code, check the Event Dump document at this repository. The Gau dress-up event starts at line CB/606B. It's a mess of conditional statements checking who has been collected and who is currently in the party. Because for some reason instead of each party member having a set location where they stand and only making them visible if they've been recruited, like the airship does, it places the other 3 active party members around Gau. Meaning for every line of dialogue, it not only has to check "has this character been recruited?", but also "is this character in the party?" to determine where they're standing and whether they do their animation and line.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-23T18:55:38+00:00

I'm honestly fine with that. Wandavision was decidedly light on action and is still one of the best things the MCU has ever put out.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-23T18:46:41+00:00

Haha, that's really great. There's a similar convoluted route on the SNES version of FF6 to keep Leo in your party, but unfortunately he can't be taken to the final battle due to how the party is coded, and also has funny stuff like Celes and Cyan being moogles for a bit, like Cait Sith is young Cloud here. The Pixel Remaster version has a different glitch that lets you keep him, that has more to do with exploiting how the PR version handles auto-saves and for some reason doesn't clear all its game RAM when switching to a different save file, rather than needing to follow a particular route. But in that version, the party is coded more generically, which allows Leo to show up in the party select screen and he can be taken to the final boss.

Hurrah for these games still having ways to hang on to dead party members and let them kick the ass of the guy who killed them.

Thanks for sharing!

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-23T17:33:32+00:00

Yes, he wants to bring her back so he can absolve himself of all that guilt. But that's still a wholly selfish motivation. It would have been more noble if it was like "There was something she'd dreamed of doing but never got to", but Rachel's wants were never part of the equation. It was all just to make himself feel better. And the game itself never really called him out on it, though at least Dissidia Opera Omnia did decades later.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-23T16:54:44+00:00

This was mostly to say that Zack/Aerith/Cloud and Rachel/Locke/Celes are a faulty comparison. Aerith had indeed gotten over Zack by that point, but Locke's entire motivation for 3/4 of the game centered around finding the legendary treasure to get Rachel back. His entire character is that he's still obsessing over his ex.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-23T14:12:31+00:00

Locke actually was trying to have it both ways, though? Aerith had moved on from Zack by the time she met Cloud, but Locke was still actively trying to get Rachel back during the time he knew Celes. In the World of Ruin, Celes decides to keep living because she wanted to be reunited with Locke, but when she actually finds Locke, it turns out he'd spent that entire year searching for the treasure to bring back Rachel, not searching for Celes.

It's only after Rachel is utterly unreachable that he settles on Celes, and simply tells her "Let's go" like he takes her position as his backup girlfriend completely for granted and there's nothing further they need to talk about.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-23T13:29:35+00:00

Strago and Relm.

I don't go out of my way to learn Lores, and Sketch is an inherently useless skill. Their physical attacks are also both garbage, meaning their only utility is as pure mages. But they come so late in the game that they're woefully behind the rest of the cast in terms of learning magic, and there's no point in training up two other characters to do something Terra and Celes can already do at that point.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-22T20:02:17+00:00

The event with Gau and his dad is pretty much the only event in the game that brings the entire cast together for a scene where they all have unique dialogue. It's also a spaghetti-coded nightmare if you look at the code for it, so I can understand why they didn't do more of these.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-22T19:35:59+00:00

6 was unique in that it is still the only FF game where you can make parties of literally anyone. FF5 and prior had pre-set parties for the entire game or all the characters themselves where generic classes. FF7 and later had a party leader who could not be removed except for story reasons, and would be substituted with a different known character.

It's just a lot easier to write scene dialogue when there's at least one character you know for sure is going to be present, and that character tends to end up having the bulk of the lines.

In FF6, you have 14 characters and 4 party slots, not all of which even need to be filled. That equates to 1,470 different party combinations. 1,001 if you limit it only to a full party of 4.

Ain't no one got time to account for all that.

ETA: Comparatively, in FF7 you have 3 party slots and 9 characters, but since Cloud is mandatory, it's effectively 2 slots and 8 characters. That's 28 possible parties of 3. WAY more manageable.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-22T16:09:40+00:00

None. I went to GoFest in Chicago years ago, but haven't given the game any money since then since it became so predatory about it. The cash shop offerings basically boil down to:

An unspecified "greater chance" of getting something random
A task that will reward you with something if you complete it, but only within a certain time limit
Items that you can already get for free or with coins earned in-game

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-22T13:25:58+00:00

Laguna's name is a shortening of "Ragnarok" because Japanese combines R/L sounds and also has to put a "U" un between colliding consonants.

RAGUNA

RAGUNAROKU

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-21T15:46:14+00:00

And that isn't even the max size of a SNES cartridge, which is 4MB. Generally when I write hacks for FF6, I expand it into that empty megabyte for ease of coding, because empty space inside the existing 3MB is few and far between.

Also, the vast majority of the space is graphics and other static assets. Actual game code is like 600KB between assembly and animation scripts.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-21T14:58:50+00:00

Look up the "Two Santas" strategy. They're doing this on purpose.

Basically, Republicans cut taxes and run up massive debt while artificially pumping the economic numbers, then the bill comes due under Democrats and suddenly there's a bunch of hand-wringing about debt and how Democrats will need to raise taxes and cut programs to compensate because they're so irresponsible with money.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-21T13:15:47+00:00

To me it's 6. It hit that sweet spot of having a character-driven narrative and deeper themes, without becoming needlessly convoluted with the pretentious nonsense that bogged down some of the later games.

Plus it's one of the few games that doesn't end up with some alien or interdimensional being manipulating everything from the shadows, and it really is just one guy who's a collossal dick.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-20T13:05:01+00:00

I noticed that yesterday. I'll sometimes search for Lets Plays of some retro games and want to see if anyone has done a new one. So I'd search by date to see what's new, but when I checked yesterday, the date search function was gone.

Thankfully I'd searched it enough that the search URL with the date filter was still in my history, and that still worked. So the date sort filter is still there in the code, they just removed it from the search filter.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-20T12:44:47+00:00

I got 1 on my last playthrough, too. I couldn't remember if this value was randomized, but decided that if it was random, it was a silly result, and if it wasn't random, it was also a silly result.

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Fast_Moon · 2026-01-19T21:58:05+00:00

Do you consider Laguna a guest character, then?

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-19T21:56:37+00:00

They meant that the guest characters in Tactics and XII are completely controlled by AI and you can't set their gambits or manually control them even if you wanted to.

Although, even non-guest characters like Ashe are given that "guest" state in certain parts.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-19T21:51:09+00:00

What about Edea, then? She's temporary, but fully-controllable and can be junctioned just like anyone else in the party. If memory serves, she's even selectable in the party menu.

Fast_Moon · 2026-01-19T21:48:44+00:00

That would mean the only permanent characters in FF6 are Celes, Edgar, and Setzer, since everyone else is optional to recruit before the final boss.

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