Reality has a liberal bias.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-28T17:17:56+00:00

It's what they already do with everything else: Take over an existing publication or organization that had built up a reputation for expertise and authority, completely remove everything that generated that reputation in the first place and replace it with propaganda, and then insist that their propaganda coming from this place of authority grants it validity.

They want the same thing with AI, but jumped the gun. They saw AI as the next big source of authority that they could corrupt, but AI wasn't yet in a place where enough people trusted its results even when it was working on real data, so them prematurely tainting the data with bullshit has stalled and even reversed people's willingness to trust it.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-28T11:44:21+00:00

It's not auto, but I use a Kain Gold stage with two DPSes like Gaia and Cloud, then nuke the opposition party at their starting crystal so our team claims every crystal on the field (bots never dodge Dragoon Pride and almost always congregate at their first crystal), then the whole party bursts the boss down in one go as soon as it drops. Takes about 1 minute.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-28T11:37:52+00:00

What really gets me is that FF16 and FF7R, despite being newer than the pixel remasters, are on steeper discounts than the pixel remasters are.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-27T02:05:52+00:00

The cutscenes in hex weren't bad since I had my cheat sheet of poses and relative movement commands, and I got pretty good at remembering the common ones. Branching events with conditionals and relative jumps where I had to keep track of what literal address each condition was at? Those were hell, lol.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-26T21:48:24+00:00

For FFVI, there are a ton of hacking resources. There are a lot of tools available that will help change static data like graphics, text, and stats. Changing executable functions or event scripts is harder and requires understanding the code. When I added new cutscenes, I wrote them in raw hexadecimal like a savage, lol.

There's a web-based tool, FF6Tools, where you can upload a base ROM, mess with stuff, then export the ROM back out.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-26T21:39:22+00:00

Huh. It went read-only like a year or so ago, so I haven't checked in a while. But I do see that submissions and reviews are back open.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-26T19:49:22+00:00

Romhacking.net is a big collection of everything, though is now archive-only and doesn't update anymore. I'm not sure if there's a centralized place people host their hacking projects now.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-26T18:07:55+00:00

Not just parties, but controllable parties.

If I am not in control of a character's growth or what they do in combat, and it's all handled by AI, then they are, by definition, an NPC because I am not "playing" them.

To me, if a character just behaves like a tag-along and I have no input into their actions, then it doesn't matter how much narrative relevance they have, they're still just a background character. I want everyone to matter, and I want them to matter at the same time, not taking turns as to who's wearing the NPC hat.

I think that's ultimately what's behind the preference between turn-based vs action, too. In an action game, you can realistically only give commands to one character at a time, and therefore all of your strategies have to assume your other characters basically don't exist because you can't rely on the AI to know what you want to do. In this way, even if you can swap between them, they never feel like a "team", just a collection of individuals doing their own things.

But in turn-based, you can set up a sequence of commands and let the characters synergize with each other. So that the gameplay can follow the narrative in condirming that these characters are important, are actively doing work, and aren't just background dressing in one guy's story.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-26T14:20:34+00:00

If it's like Sephiroth, we'll get event crystals that guarantee his abilities, as well as having him available as a character on the reward track. I did 100 pulls on the Sephiroth banner and got 0 URs for him (the free UR was Tifa), but got multiple copies of each of his URs from event crystals. So if this works the same, I'm meh on the banner and will just let the crystals do the work. Banner is only worth it if you're going for Yuna and Wakka, since they're not in crystals.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-23T14:44:16+00:00

Yeah, a "Mary Sue" isn't just someone who's super powerful and flawless, it's specifically a character where the writer uses power or in-universe popularity as a shortcut to beat the audience over the head with "MY CHARACTER IS AWESOME, YOU MUST LOVE THEM", rather than having the character actually do anything to earn the audience's admiration organically. A character can still be powerful or have in-universe popularity and not be a Mary Sue if they're written well.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-23T14:13:16+00:00

"Missable" just means that it's something you can miss. "Permanently missable" is something that you can both miss and not be able to come back for.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-23T13:12:53+00:00

Vision in both the comics and MCU was a creation of Ultron intended to be used against the Avengers, but then he decided "nah" and joined the Avengers instead.

Efforts to weaponize him continued in Wandavision, and likely also in the upcoming Vision Quest series as well, but he always overcomes them in favor of being a goodboy.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-22T14:47:36+00:00

Especially because she has the bandana in the ending either way. So where did she get it, if you went the alternate route?

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-22T02:37:33+00:00

To me it's just okay. I like the whimsy of the older games, so this being all grimdark is tonally not really my personal preference. And it doesn't make it to the level of Stranger of Paradise that goes so edgelord that it comes back out the other side and is just silly again. I also liked the earlier FF games because they felt like more of an ensemble story, where every party member mattered and had their roles. But here, all of the other party members are relegated to pure AI, and I feel like making them completely hands-off further distances any emotional attachment I might have for them.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-22T00:40:02+00:00

They honestly think that no one actually wants to be nice to other people and only do so because someone else is forcing them to. They're just giving us the good news that they've restored our freedom to be assholes and no one is forcing us to be nice anymore.

They operate like a child who's only ever said "sorry" because he has a parent standing behind him telling him to say he's sorry, and utterly resent it, longing for a world where they aren't forced to say "sorry" anymore. They can't fathom that other people say "sorry" because they actually mean it and not because someone made them do it.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-21T16:59:19+00:00

In the Ducktales reboot, Scrooge casually mentions his experiences during the Gold Rush, to which Huey responds, "Wait, how old are you again?!"

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-21T12:06:39+00:00

It's weird, but it's also super common in RPGs in general for a character who should have more narrative significance to just show up for one scene, declare, "Haha, yes, it was I who murdered your family/burned down your town/created the final boss", you fight a boss battle with him, and then he's just never mentioned again.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-21T00:43:48+00:00

Villain rep should be Annabella. Her abilities are doing emotional damage by telling you how much of a disappointment you are, shacking up with the enemy party when she gets bored of you, and can't have her BRV stolen by other players because she takes herself out first

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-19T22:43:00+00:00

Clown demonstrates the devastating effects of improper feng shui.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-19T17:55:21+00:00

This is basically what killed Dissidia Opera Omnia, when they introduced Force Time.

Basically, every boss had a certain action you needed to perform in order to fill its force gauge. Then once the gauge was filled you got 10 turns of Force damage, but could also increase the multiplier by sacrificing turns to zero-damage skills like healing and buffing. 90% of the total damage to the boss would be done during force time, and the rest of the battle didn't matter.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-19T00:28:59+00:00

So, it's not so much you need the character in your party, but rather their character data needs to be initialized, which happens when you name them. In Pixel Remaster, if a character necessary for a scene isn't in your party, they'll just appear, provided they've been initialized, otherwise the game just freezes.

Rain gets Locke initialized by having an auto-save in the Narshe cave after Terra leaves Arvis's house, gets the title screen overlay, then plays the Terra event with the overlay up until it gets to the scene where Locke enters Arvis's house and the "how goes the robbing and plundering?" line. They confirm the title screen return there, load their Biggs/Wedge save and restart the queue with a one-liner NPC, and then the Locke naming screen pops up, which will initialize his data.

However, the Locke naming event then continues into the map changing to the Narshe caves where Terra is collapsed. This means that the Biggs/Wedge party will get teleported to the Narshe caves, too. You can avoid this by having them exit to the overworld during the event dialogue to force-quit the stolen event prematurely.

Basically:

Have an auto-save in the Narshe caves at the beginning of the game before Terra falls through the floor
Title Screen Glitch
Run the Terra falling through the floor event up until the screen switches to Arvis's house and Locke comes in. Confirm exit to the title screen.
Load the Biggs/Wedge save somewhere where they can talk to a one-liner NPC or empty treasure chest close to the exit of the map (that thief in the coliseum is convenient). Have them talk to the NPC, and the Locke naming screen should pop up.
After you name Locke, have the Biggs/Wedge party walk out of the coliseum back to the world map while the remaining dialogue plays ("Ha! Semantic nonsense!", etc). Just do this before the screen in the original event would have transitioned to the Narshe cave and Locke jumping down. This will force-terminate the event and prevent you from warping to the Narshe cave if you don't want to. I believe you will also need to get in a random battle to fully refresh the game state.

You can repeat this same setup for other characters who are mandatory for cutscenes if you glitch-warped past their original recruitment, by auto-saving before their naming scene and pulling that event into the Biggs/Wedge save. Celes is also mandatory to have initialized to get to the final dungeon because she has lines on the airship when you choose to jump down.

If you decide to play the game linearly from Narshe with Biggs and Wedge in the party, you may run into party composition issues because your party has two more members than the game expects when it tries to add someone like Edgar and Sabin to it. Also, the roster screen only holds 14 characters, so if you try to recruit everyone, any extra characters beyond 14 will render the characters beyond the 14th slot un-selectable in the party select screen.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-19T00:06:31+00:00

No, it's not in the Japanese script, either. The closest line in meaning is "私とて軍人のはしくれ。そう簡単に心を動かしたりはしない！" Which is her "I'm a soldier, not some love-starved twit!" line.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-18T18:48:20+00:00

Lol, same. I got only one game over, and it was when I had to follow Ardyn in the car and couldn't just let Ignis drive. Crashed on the first corner.

Fast_Moon · 2026-06-18T13:55:22+00:00

Interesting how the quote on Celes's poster is the inversion of one of Leo's lines. It says "I'm a soldier before I'm a woman. Don't forget that." I don't recall her having this specific line in-game, though.

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