Exploring Monster Taming Mechanics in Final Fantasy XIII-2: Dogfooding

This is it―the last post of this series on exploring the monster taming mechanics of Final Fantasy XIII-2 is finally here, and in it we're actually going to do what the title says. Now that we've integrated all of the tables of data that we extracted from the FFXIII-2 FAQs into a functional website, we're ready to use that website to explore how to optimize the monster taming as we play through the game. This exercise is known in the tech industry as dogfooding, where we proceed to eat our own dog food, so to speak, to see whether or not the product we're building is any good. During the course of using the website, we may find opportunities for improvement, missing features, and other things that could just be done better. It's an excellent way to iterate on a product to improve it.

Exploring Monster Taming Mechanics in Final Fantasy XIII-2: Monster Characteristics

We've done something with just about all of the data we've extracted on monster taming in this series on exploring Final Fantasy XIII-2 monster taming mechanics—except for the monster characteristics. Last time we finally integrated the monster materials table into our website, so now we're ready to tackle the last orphaned data. But what should we do with these monster characteristics? They each consist of only a name and a description, so it seems kind of boring to just link their names in the monster table to the monster characteristics table. We should be able to do something more useful with them. Conveniently, Bootstrap has a tooltip component that would be a perfect use for this data, so we're going to explore that idea.