arduino Monthly digest for 2023-05

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1. I need to solve my electricity situation ASAP. I got a freezer jampacked to the brim with frozen meats and stuff. I found a generator but have no clue how to make it work. I know I have to find a magazine but I haven't yet, and there is a book store I found but in front of it there is like 50 zozos.
2. I need to level up carpentry one more level to make the crappy rain collector. How does one do this? I don't really know how I upped it to level 3 to begin with. I keep reading books but they don't give xp. I don't understand. I think they just give xp multiplier but not xp. And even then, how will I purify water from the rain collector? I can't set up the "collector from above goes down > to sink" design because I don't have a terraced house, it's a normal urban house.
3. How do you do absolutely anything in this game XD How will I find sustainable food? I sowed some potatoes I think 1 week ago. When my character inspects the menu it all just says ??????? as she doesn't have a clue wtf is going on, but I see them grow. I also have broccoli seeds. Should I just go wild and plant everything?
4. Are weapons terrible? My character ain't exactly a shooter, but I found 3 guns and 4 boxes of ammo for the semi auto one. But I'm too scared to shot off a round because I think wherever I do it is gonna draw like 1000 zombies.

• The ATB system, more and more towards the end of the game, exhibits a huge amount of queueing problems, as more and more you have full charge bars just sitting around waiting for some other shit to get done. More than once I'd finish casting something while a fat tonberry was waving his knife around, only to sit there staring at him for several seconds, and then have him attack again. Against multitarget fights (like Major Numerous) it feels particularly punishing as it seems easy for your actions to clump up after quite a few of the enemy's. Some clarity on the turn ordering would have helped a lot (perhaps an FFX-style display). As it is, it's very hard to make multipart strategies work. Which you need to do, because...
  
• The job system is, like, not really a job system. It's a weird beast, because most of the jobs feel like they're pretty locked in to a role, but then there isn't any credible way to benefit from more than one job at a time. (Yes, hang on, I'm getting to that.) So clearly the sphere change system is meant to pick up that slack, and the idea of strategically laying out jobs on a board to move between was really cool, up until the first time I needed to traverse the whole board (Paine's special sphere, maybe?) and it became obvious that there wasn't any cost to doing so; if you spam the sphere changes you can get everyone through all of their boards before the enemy does anything in 90% of cases. There's no other cost to changing spheres, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be doing here, but it feels like any board with some powerful effect behind "hit all the gates" is just saying "to continue character progression you're going to have to do thirty seconds of mindless button mashing before every fight." Okay, so I leave that behind, but then, if you don't swap jobs, it's back to overrestricted roles again.
  
• As you progress, items try to address this, as you get accessories (and boards!) that let you access skill sets from another job. By and large these are pretty terrible, for the next few reasons (which also hurt the game as a whole).
  
• The jobs are clogged up with way too much useless gimmick garbage. Almost every job has one or many HP-percent attacks (think Demi), and they have the same problem they've always had, which is that against enemies it would work against you're almost always better off just, like, hitting them. The fat guys you might actually want to try this on are all immune to it, guaranteed. Every single one of these skills is a waste of design and a waste of space, and I resent having to scroll past them looking for something that might work. Except, I can't, because...
  
• Almost all of the stuff that isn't HP-percent is instead normal-attack-plus-status-effect. Anyone who's spent any time playing RPGs knows this issue, and it's the same one as above; against stuff that it would actually work on, you should just get to killing it; it doesn't matter if you put some weak-ass poison on it (and, despite the FFX poison being ridiculously good, the FFX2 poison is so trivial that I stopped bothering to get it off my team halfway through the game). Jobs are absolutely riddled with this shit. For half the classes, literally everything they learn that you can click on is "normal attack plus something that every strong enemy is immune to". And that's what makes the other-job accessories so bad, because getting access to a bunch of ways to pay MP to do a normal attack with a fancy "GUARD" shield over it isn't useful.
  
• Just to cap off these lists of useless moves, the "best" skills in jobs will frequently be some kind of instant death (there are dozens of these). Same problem as above except moreso, because even more stuff will be immune. Like, seriously, some jobs have multiple instant death attacks, and none of them ever work.
  
• But what about magic? I've been a black magic fan for decades. Well, the designers hate me specifically, because magic in this game sucks shit. I mean, it's absolutely awful. The black mage class learns three levels of the elemental spells and nothing else (power spells like Flare and Ultima are unlocked on sphere change boards and aren't specific to any job), and they do horrible damage. Without context maybe this isn't useful, but a max level black mage (99) with max magic (255) and the pay-more-for-stronger-spells ability (Magic Booster) can come up to Shiva, weak to fire, and hit her with the strongest fire spell right in the face, and it will do less than 2000 damage. At those stat levels normal attacks are expected to hit the 9999 cap regularly, to say nothing of -- well, I'm getting to that.
  
• Okay, but what about other jobs? BLM sucks, what else is there? Okay, there's White Mage -- no Holy, just heals. And... well, that's it. All the other classes are variants on fighters with only a couple gimmick exceptions (the Songstress doesn't use stats, and the Alchemist only uses items). Someone is about to bring up the Gun Mage -- the Blue Mage of FFX2, but check it out -- quite a few of the blue magics are physical, all of them are kind of bleh, and the other menu the Gun Mage gets is the ability to do a physical, strength-based attack that will do quadruple damage if you can pick the enemy's type from a list. Seriously, for physical dealers we have Fighter, Gunner, Samurai, Dark Knight, Berserker, Trainer, and Thief, explicitly strength jobs (oh, did Dark Knight fool you because it's sphere grid gives bonuses to Magic for some reason? The darkness command doesn't use strength, the spells they cast all inflict status and don't care about Magic, and also don't work, and the capstone Black Sky does magic damage but is based on your strength). Even the oddballs have no use for magic, even as a simple "attack" command (strength, natch) never goes out of style.
  
• Okay, but magic lets you hit elemental weaknesses? No. This is another big filler for classes -- not as much as status and fraction, but just about as useless, many physical jobs will have attack commands for each element. Why spend MP to cast a spell to hit a weakness for 2000 when you can hit a weakness with a physical attack for four times that? But by the latter parts of the game, elemental weaknesses are becoming very rare, and a bit hard to guess at, meaning playing the elements is really asking for it.
  
• Doesn't this mean the magic stat is useless and magic-users suck shit? Yeah, that's what I said above.
  
• But even most of the physical stuff gets gimmicked out of the room; there are a handful of physical abilities that ignore defense. FFX2 uses a smooth percentage based defense-based system, and higher-level mobs have more defense, so ignoring defense is a HUGE deal, especially against bosses and superbosses (for instance, an attack might do 1200 on a hard target, but ignoring defense would do more like 15,000 with the same power.) So you can try to overpower enemies with strong defense-affected attacks, and lose the game, or you can use... well, let's give it its own bullet point.
  
• Allow me to introduce the bread and butter of the game. The strongest, defense-ignoring, hit-everything attack. It's a specialty of the Samurai, so you know it's going to be good. What happens is, you swing your sword, and use it to... launch a little firecracker at enemies, which lands at their feet and merrily pops, dealing basically the most damage you can deal, easily growable into tens of thousands. Yeah, it's called Fireworks, and it being the strongest move in the game is ridiculous. And there's not even any contest; you can set someone up with max magic (inadvisable, see above) and magic boost and Ultima and get everything right and blow all your MP and -- you'll hit almost not quite as hard as a samurai just randomly using Fireworks. Sometimes enemies have much lower magic defense, but remember, Fireworks ignores defense. It's exactly as good against everything, it hits everything on the field. (One might note there are not any player-accesible spells that ignore magic defense.)
  
• Seriously. Fireworks. And yes, I know that gunpowder, and rockets, and all that jazz, and if the thing had a little more oomph to it I might like it, or if it made any sense at all, but to completely outclass actually using the sword you're holding in every possible way? FFS.
  
• There is one decent alternative for damage-ignoring, and it's on the Mascot sphere -- a "super" job you unlock by doing everything perfectly. They're different for each person, but they come with a pile of status and fraction attacks (...) and Yuna and Paine's can use a powerful single-target defense-ignoring attack. Arguably Fireworks is still better, but you can mix it up with these. Not that they look any cooler; the Mascot job puts each girl in a huge fluffy costume (a Moogle, a Cait Sith, and a Tonberry) with big goofy details, and the moves for all of them are all cartoony jokes. I hate when games do this -- make the strongest stuff these kinds of joke items -- but whatever.
  
• Ok, so, whatever, that all sucks. What about the special dressspheres? These turn one of the three into a super-powered version that chases off the other party members and replaces them with parts of their new huge form. In principle this is badass, and the idea of three pieces designed to work together is cool, and it's a powerful moment to go completely... well, whatever they're going. If the things were ever useful it'd be great. Unfortunately, they have stats that are fixed to your level, and don't gain the effect of any equipment you have, and don't get the benefit of the sphere grid you used (apart from a small HP bonus for larger ones), and their stats are not great. They accelerate at high levels, but by then you'll have accessories that increase your power dramatically, and losing those for the special spheres means they're going to struggle to do any damage at all. Oh, and they're clogged to the gills with status attacks, and instant death, and all that, of course. They woulnd't really be usable even if you didn't have to play fox-and-hound on your controller for thirty seconds to unlock changing into them.
  
• I'm getting too worked up, let me segue. Equipment consists entirely of two accessories per person, and any bonus effects on your sphere grid. There aren't any weapons and armor; the aesthetics (and, nominally, the stats) are built into the jobs themselves, so you're always using the same weapon. I found this really boring, especially since most of the accessories for most of the game are simple stat bonuses or immunity to one specific status effect. Later you start getting more interesting options, but then those get blown away again by the late-game stuff; massive stat bonus items and needing to use an accessory to break the damage cap. (And another to break the HP cap, if that's your thing.) You can't really get this stuff intrinsically, creating a "tax" on a resource you only have two of. Notably, the special spheres I mentioned above can learn to break the damage cap automatically, which is hilarious because typically it doesn't matter, they can't do 9999 anyway. And if that wasn't enough, you have to unlock that ability with FFX-flavored finding key items in random places everywhere.
  
• Areas? The outdoor environments are beautiful and varied, and while the new "jumping" (read: "hold B to keep going") is a bit cheesy and obstructionist at times the areas are interesting to navigate and explore. Of course, then you go in a dungeon and everything is murky square corridors forever. It's kind of a jarring change.
  
• Oh, that reminds me. You know how sometimes in RPGs they'll make dungeons that have just ridiculously long, featureless corridors, obviously there just to make you get in more fights? Via Infinito is 100 floors of that, and it's an absolute grind, and it's needed for completion. I mean, this thing is worse than the Chrysler Building, or the Karma Palace. It's just... ugh.
  

• "Duck soup!"
  
• "Duck what?"