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Here's the big Final Fantasy Anima Valoris retrospective plurk
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WE DONE IT
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First, a quick summary of the campaign
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It took place over two worlds -
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Elzeal, the World of Light, where humanity is united against the endless monster armies of the Shadow King,
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and Vaalgarn, the World of Darkness, where the powerful Empire of Azerol leads a campaign of terror against the fractured Coalition
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The game began when two people from Vaalgarn were chased through a portal to Elzeal by a mysterious woman with crystal horns, and soon allied with two people from Elzeal to chase after a man in black with plans of destroying the kingdom of humans known only as Subject 99
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They eventually learned that he was working for one of the Shadow King's four elemental fiends, and the party eventually began bouncing back and forth between worlds to challenge the two major enemy forces
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In Elzeal, they fought the Four Fiends as they summoned Eidolons to crush human settlements and destroy the crystals that power them, before flying north on a floating island of ancient technology to face the Shadow King himself
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and in Vaalgarn, they sabotaged imperial plans while facing and toppling the massive, unstoppable machines of Project WEAPON, ultimately defeating Emperor Merovech in hand to hand combat
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Throughout all this, they gradually uncovered a secret conspiracy linking the world - scientists and soldiers from both worlds, committing crimes against humanity in the name of bringing peace to their respective worlds.
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Their ultimate creation, the altered human Ultima Weapon, broke free from their control, and was plotting to cast Twin Meteor and destroy both worlds.
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After learning of the horrors she was subjected to that led her down the path of destruction, the party infiltrated her floating castle to stop her before she could bring about the apocalypse.
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BUT EVEN THEN, she wasn't the true mastermind! Seven legendary weapons scattered throughout the world had been manipulating human history for millennia, in order to bring about a final event where a human would ascend to godhood, alongside the creator of the universe.
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That creator, Solanima, created the cosmos and countless others before it as attempts to create a second godlike being in order to not be the only entity of its magnitude in existence.
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With Ultima's ascension thwarted, Solanima decided to destroy the universe and start again from scratch
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But the power of the Crystals at the hearts of each world gathered the hopes and dreams of all of mankind and granted our four heroes the power to face Solanima in battle
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and they won!
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The universe was saved, only a few named characters died in the process.
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https://images.plurk.com/2CHDDf4hD2XI1MdL4D0csp.png woop woop
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first some quick ARTS
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like that one
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https://images.plurk.com/1KnNCvNWoUjtVRKO4hNy6A.png Here's Ultima, the main antagonist
Rama
The face of a woman who did nothing wrong
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https://images.plurk.com/2uUR1qrCZdwPPCzQvhxZzB.png https://images.plurk.com/62KNb3pl8DFu6gERQEvq6n.png https://images.plurk.com/2SVOrLj93Hy5AQ6xGXz9HC.png
And here's Solanima's three forms
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Ultima drawn by this person and Solanima drawn by UsagiSquared
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I DID A LOT OF EXPERIMENTAL SHIT WITH THIS ONE
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I started with gil tracking, items, and materia, but eventually pared it down to just usable items since it was too complex for too little reward
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the dungeon crawling also got simplified as I got overstressed but I think the basic idea of it was solid
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dungeon split into rooms, which can contain monsters or puzzles or lore
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and after each room of monsters cleared, the party recovers one increment of stamina, but otherwise there's no recovery between scenes
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to keep going, you need to use items, which heal fixed amounts of HP or ST (halved if used during a battle), or find a Sanctuary and use a tent to heal the full party
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Most dungeons were pretty small, the biggest and most interesting was probably the Shadow King's Citadel
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just because I had an actual spatial puzzle and also didn't give the party a sanctuary until right near the end
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talking about the story --
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the core theme that eventually emerged throughout the story was isolation
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Ultima was isolated from the world by the inhuman cruelty of the Crystal Braves
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The Shadow King was trapped alone in the void for 3000 years and it drove him mad
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and isolation drove Solanima to create and destroy worlds for eons trying to create a companion
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Elzeal was more standard FF faire, with heroes and monster villains and Four Fiends and ancient technology and shit
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Vaalgarn was more based on FFT, with a chronology taking heavily from the Napoleonic Wars, with Emperor Merovech as Napoleon
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(she's in jail on an island somewhere now. don't worry, I don't think she'll cause any more trouble)
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With the plot developments in each gradually showing the worlds to be more similar than they believed
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good and evil exist in vaalgarn, human cruelty exists in elzeal
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something that never came up was that the king of Elzeal knew about the Crystal Braves and had signed off on their work
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Any Means Necessary
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One thing I was actually worried about while running and did my best to minimize
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was that I was running this game alongside University Excalibur
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and the final bosses of each are actually really similar
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both are alien entities that only reveal the extent of their meddling in human affairs right at the end, where it turns out they've destroyed hundreds of planets that they seeded with life in order to achieve some impossible goal
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the two main rewrite points I did to make them more distinct were
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- Have Logos show up and be more active in the story from early on, albeit under false pretenses
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- Don't focus on the endless, impossible nature of Solanima's task, instead focusing on how much suffering it was causing in THIS world
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I had plans originally for an Optional Bonus Dungeon at the end of the game but I cut it for time, both because I was exhausted and because I wanted to get to Lorica and Soleil sooner
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it was gonna be a boss gauntlet of classic FF endbosses plus lore about the worlds that preceded these two
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with a ghost talking to the party who eventually turned out to be this guy
https://images.plurk.com/s2JfVC81212FNkysQeCqV.png
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anyway that was a campaign! woo
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That's all I've got unless anyone has questions
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for Ultima's art I made a point of specifying a couple unnecessary belts
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for the aesthetic
Princess Emily
in the video-game-form of FFAV, which NPCs were recruitable party members,
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Yuri, Eliath, Edmont, Trandafir, Tethath
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A LOT OF DARK SIDE REP,
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makes sense though
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maybe Halla and Felix to round it out
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I went back and forth a lot on Ultima's final fate but I like where it landed
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somewhere between a redemptive death and a tragic self-destruction
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