The third battle in this chapter has one of my favorite tracks (entitled Battle on the Bridge). What are your thoughts on the OST so far?
It's Hashimoto, thus it sounds like everything else he has ever written.
He has such a distinctive style; many times I've said "oh, that's Hashimoto" within 10 seconds of seeing or playing a game for the first time. I already knew he had co-composed the score for Tactics before I started, but you get the point.
The good thing about his music is that it almost always fits the setting. It's very thematically consistent and never really irritates me. The bad thing about it is that I forget it almost as soon as I put the game down. Clash on the (small) Bridge? I honestly don't remember it, and I won't until I either play the game multiple times or listen to the soundtrack extensively. Then again, my memory is like a sieve...
This chapter really starts to get into the shifting or unclear loyalties/goals. What are your thoughts on the different parties' motives?
It was interesting seeing Delita again. When he left the party I thought he was destined to be a permanent antagonist, but now I'm doubting that. Screw Gaffgarion though. I'm glad to have made a habit of taking all the best equipment off my guest characters and giving them stuff that I don't mind losing in return. He went down in one hit.
Perhaps I missed something but I haven't really picked up on Mustadio's motives yet. He mentioned something about auracite when facing the "street dogs" which he then kept from Ramza and Agrias, but I don't know what auracite is, so I'm none the wiser. Being a Final Fantasy game, I'm expecting it to be some sort of super-powerful crystal which will become very important to the plot somehow.
If this is your first time, are you starting to gain some comfort with the game's systems? If you're a vet, are you trying some different character/job combinations?
I guess I'm half-rookie and half-vet since I know the system from TA and TA2. (I feel like I say that a lot.) I'm pretty comfortable with it now. Still learning new stuff though. TIL that if you press right on the D-pad when selecting a spell, it'll show you at what point in the turn order that spell will be cast. That's a useful feature which I was sorely missing until now. I discovered it by accident.
There was only one difficult fight in this chapter – the last one. Once again, it took me multiple tries, but I managed to beat it in the end without having to grind. My first two attempts ended prematurely when Mustadio was killed before I could even reach him.
On the third, he finally moved to a place where my white mage could cast shell on him. But then the white mage died before getting another turn and the whole fight was an uphill struggle of reviving and healing, which ended in defeat. After that I realised that Ramza's dialogue choice determines the mission objective and that it would probably have been easier to defeat all the enemies than keep Mustadio alive, but since I don't like things to be easy, I stuck with the harder objective.
The battle I ultimately won started with Mustadio getting stopped, which was a good thing, because it meant 1) his shell didn't wear off and 2) he stayed out of harm's way while my party drew the enemy's fire. Once again, the winning strategy was just to do as much damage as possible as quickly as possible and to worry about healing later. My party was made up of a black mage, a white mage with black as her secondary ability, an archer and a knight, whose job was basically to climb up on the right side of the wall (as viewed from the outside) and block the enemies from coming over that way. Pretty fun fight in the end, but as often seems to be the case with this game, you need luck on your side in the beginning or it'll be over before it's really started.