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Ahead On Our Way - The Top 21 Numbered Final Fantasies Countdown
- Thread starter Positronic Brain
- Start date
It's not that inaccessible a game if Steam's an option; I've never had anything beefier than a GTX 1060-line GPU and it was never anything but a stable 60fps throughout with no issues that I encountered. I've been wanting a console compilation of the XIII trilogy for a while now though, if only to facilitate wider revisitation and estimation of them.
My trouble is more that I'd want to replay FFXIII and play XIII-2 for the first time before getting to it, and those are from a much rougher era of Square Enix PC ports where for each I'd want to do some patching both for stability and to give me the language options I want, and it creates just enough inertia to play something else instead whenever I consider it. I'll probably do it some day, either when I feel like doing the work on the current versions, or if they do release new/updated PC versions if/when they get around to repacking them for consoles as well. And that does feel like an inevitability, given that they're trapped on the PS3 on the Sony side of things.
I would love a current/last gen console port of the 13 trilogy, I think 13 is worthy of a second look, and I never played anything past it.
Join me in being pretty sure I’d love something sitting beside my Xbox but never actually touching the disc
So you think you can ride this chocobo?
#18
Final Fantasy XIII-2
a.k.a. The one with all that time travel.
125 points • 6 mentions • Highest rank: #10 (Juno)
#18
Final Fantasy XIII-2
a.k.a. The one with all that time travel.
125 points • 6 mentions • Highest rank: #10 (Juno)
Released on December 15, 2011 (Japan)
Producer: Yoshinori Kitase
Director: Motomu Toriyama
Composer: Naoshi Mizuta (with Masashi Hamauzu and Mitsuto Suzuki)
It’s funny to think XIII-2’s existence is largely due to its predecessor’s faults..
I mean, I can't prove it, but after all the money and time invested in XIII’s engine, to develop a second game with that engine recycling as many resources as possible makes monetary sense. And it was developed in a year and a half, so someone was in a hurry. Tri-Ace and Eidos were brought in - the former as contractors to keep the internal staff slim and save costs, the later to borrow development methodologies to keep the team in track.
The design of the game also feels like a reaction to XIII. Since XIII was criticized by its linearity, XIII-2 has wider, open areas, plenty of sidequests, a somewhat non-linear story system, mini-games and a shopkeeper. It still uses the Paradigm battle system, but one of the members can be one of several recruitable monsters, which can be switched when changing paradigms, which gives extra flexibility for the system.
Everything in XIII-2 feels like a reaction to XIII, but it also feels like XIII but louder. It's weird, but not necessarily bad. But then there's the story.
XIII-2 will forever be the one FF that lost me. The story is a bit of a mess - is like anime overdose. The first warning sign is that it involves a bonkers definition of time travel where changing the future also changes the past, and then it sprinkles god’s guardians and rivals and oracles and god knows what else over the already pretty dense mythology of XIII’s world. Which is a pity because the premise - Lightning goes missing so Serah sets out to find her by traveling through time, correcting what once went wrong - is solid, but the execution feels messy. So I got a bit fed up, I spoiled myself how the game ended and…. Yeah. Maybe the development of the story was rushed too much.
But I don’t want to drag the game, and the story is only one of the myriad facets the game has - it’s really busy. And it has plenty of fans, as its ranking demonstrates. And the battle system is still delightful. If you felt like you didn’t get enough of FFXIII, FFXIII-2 exists to fulfill your cravings.
Something Old
A lot of XIII’s resources and lore were recycled, of course, but XIII-2 has more references to Final Fantasy lore than its antecessor, mostly as answers from the trivia minigames. Also one of the characters is a scantily clothed Chocobo who used to live in Sazh’s afro.
Yeah, don’t ask.
Oh, it also supported DLC. Maybe it was the first FF to do so? And some of the monsters you could download were classic FF foes like Ultros or Omega....
Uh, why does that name sound so familiar?
Something New
Can you say Quicktime Events? Sorry, I mean Cinematic Actions. As part of is theme of “XIII but louder”, battles were intended to be more “interactive” and "cinematic" so you could get button prompts during battle that, when correctly executed, would grant you extra damage or status bonuses, and maybe even a trophy! They would come back in other titles, like XIV.
Something Blew
Monster recruiting was not new in the series, but this was the first time they were party members in the main series. Up to this point they had been either just fancy attacks, like in FFV. Which is strange because many other jPRGs had gone through their monster recruiting phase already and FF was late to the party. That said, is a mechanic we haven’t seen in the main games since.
Score
65/150 paradigm monsters
I haven't finished this game but I've really enjoyed what I've played. It has this mythic weirdness that I find very compelling, inscrutable as it is, and I like Serah a lot as the main character. It's a strange one, but one I feel would be lesser if it was less weird.
TIME / AND / SPACE / TIME / AND / SPACE (RIP Origa)
You can throw a moogle at out-of-reach treasure orbs so XIII-2 is fine by me. It was probably also the franchise peak saturation for Liam O'Brien, who'd by this point hammed it up for years with his Kain baritone via IV DS and Dissidia, and here got a starring role as Caius Ballad, the oft-overlooked sadman antagonist of the piece. They occasionally go for this kinda character in the series and Caius for me works in spite of his archetype because both the aural performance and Yusuke Naora's character design in its Amano-inflected accessorizing convincingly sell him as a sort of amalgam of many franchise tenets, in a game so concerned with criss-crossing timelines and universes.
You can throw a moogle at out-of-reach treasure orbs so XIII-2 is fine by me. It was probably also the franchise peak saturation for Liam O'Brien, who'd by this point hammed it up for years with his Kain baritone via IV DS and Dissidia, and here got a starring role as Caius Ballad, the oft-overlooked sadman antagonist of the piece. They occasionally go for this kinda character in the series and Caius for me works in spite of his archetype because both the aural performance and Yusuke Naora's character design in its Amano-inflected accessorizing convincingly sell him as a sort of amalgam of many franchise tenets, in a game so concerned with criss-crossing timelines and universes.
FelixSH
(He/Him)
As mentioned before, my pc couldn't handle XIII-2. I remember a tutorial battle at a beach, with a ton of characters running around (NPCs and monsters, I think?), and the game turning into a clipshow. A shame, because the start seemed interesting. At some point, I will have a new PC, and replay the whole trilogy.
Serah sets out to find Lightning, but she finds Lightning after a few hours of adventuring and goes on to do her own thing.
Noel is a new character whose deal is he comes from the end of time. Noel is a good character. Serah may as well be a new character, since she spent the last game as a statue. She's also a good character.
Your third character is a monster. Usually, anyway. You can do the whole Pokémon deal here. I don't love this system, because you'd ideally like to use lots of different monsters, but leveling a monster requires resources. But this is one of just a handful of Final Fantasy games that lets you field a Chocobo or Tonberry or whatever, so it's still good and fun.
Serah bumps into Snow (her fiance, in case you've forgotten), who has lost his toque to reveal the world's goofiest hairstyle. Snow pals around with Serah for like half an hour but also doesn't bother sticking around, and I don't remember if he had a reason. Snow occupies the monster slot. Don't read too much into it, even if Snow is a bad character.
It's been about a decade since I played this game, so I wouldn't be surprised if half of the above were inaccurate to one degree or another, but that's what I remember about FFXIII-2. I liked it.
Noel is a new character whose deal is he comes from the end of time. Noel is a good character. Serah may as well be a new character, since she spent the last game as a statue. She's also a good character.
Your third character is a monster. Usually, anyway. You can do the whole Pokémon deal here. I don't love this system, because you'd ideally like to use lots of different monsters, but leveling a monster requires resources. But this is one of just a handful of Final Fantasy games that lets you field a Chocobo or Tonberry or whatever, so it's still good and fun.
Serah bumps into Snow (her fiance, in case you've forgotten), who has lost his toque to reveal the world's goofiest hairstyle. Snow pals around with Serah for like half an hour but also doesn't bother sticking around, and I don't remember if he had a reason. Snow occupies the monster slot. Don't read too much into it, even if Snow is a bad character.
It's been about a decade since I played this game, so I wouldn't be surprised if half of the above were inaccurate to one degree or another, but that's what I remember about FFXIII-2. I liked it.
You forgot that at the end everybody dies! They wanted to pull an Empire Strikes Back but the game lacked the pathos to sell it so instead it just feels like a cheap cliffhanger.
Which is a pity - despite the story, the battle system is still good! If I could divorce the gameplay from the plot this would have ranked higher in my list. I really enjoyed the Paradigm system.
Which is a pity - despite the story, the battle system is still good! If I could divorce the gameplay from the plot this would have ranked higher in my list. I really enjoyed the Paradigm system.
Actually, though, most of my gripes with the game are mechanical. I mentioned the monster leveling, but the biggest problem is the uneven difficulty. Because it was so linear and gated, 13 was able to finely tune the difficulty, but 13-2 is much more open, and it suffers for it. Jump to a hard area and capture a strong monster, and you're set for the next several hours. For me, it was one of the bombs in the snowy area. A very good Ravager, if I'm not mistaken.
This is a shame, because 13-2 attempts to rein in the most abusable abilities in the original to give you a more balanced experience. The human characters won't learn Hastega, for example. Maybe things balance out in the postgame, but I didn't make it there.
This is a shame, because 13-2 attempts to rein in the most abusable abilities in the original to give you a more balanced experience. The human characters won't learn Hastega, for example. Maybe things balance out in the postgame, but I didn't make it there.
Purple
(She/Her)
13-2 is one I wanted to play but never got around to since I was dealing with console failures at the time and kinda missed the window, but I think I'd legitimately have ranked it higher all the same if I remembered it having the real risk taker of a chocobo theme.
The first upload of "Crazy Chocobo" that turns up on YouTube when you search for it has a pretty affirming comment from Shawn "Shootie HG" McPherson, the track's arranger and vocalist:
People who did not like the track used it as ammunition to dismiss all the rest of the soundtrack, which was an additional shame the game did not deserve.
People who did not like the track used it as ammunition to dismiss all the rest of the soundtrack, which was an additional shame the game did not deserve.
I made myself a little ranking here but got so wrapped up in trying to write blurbs for everything that I never submitted my votes. Whoops!
FFIIIDS (unranked) was a fun take on the most historically-overlooked FF, but as others noted the mechanical changes weren't a strict upgrade. I think I stalled out around the fight that requires four dragoons, but had a fine time playing through the PSP port (as with a lot of older FF games, a fast-forward button is a huge help.)
FFXI, alongside Revenant Wings, is the only mainline game/direct sequel I've never played. The closest I ever got was buying a network adapter for my PS2, but when I found out I also had to get a hard drive, I guess I spent the following two years playing other RPGs instead (Shadow Hearts: Covenant, Star Ocean Til the End of Time, Disgaea).
Lightning Returns (#14) is the weirdest game in a weird trilogy in a weird series. I bounced hard off this the first time I played it because I don't engage well with in-universe time limits. I came back to it last year, though, and did enjoy it, albeit less than the other games in the trilogy. The stories of each XIII game barely hold together on their own terms and make nearly no sense in relation to each other - about half the cast are well-served by where they find themselves at the end of the world (Snow, Vanille, Fang, Noel), but without the group dynamics that were so central to XIII, Lightning herself is reduced to begrudgingly going along with whatever the story requires. Weirdest feeling in this one: Completing every major & minor quest 3 days before the end of the world, and spending the last 15% of the game walking around the biomes trying to kill every monster in existence. I think this is also the only game in the series where I have reached the final boss but haven't been able to beat them?
FFXIII-2 (#12) is also something special. The whiplash I felt from LR wasn't really present here - Serah and Noel don't have the expectations of prior games' characterizations weighing on them so the tonal/experiential difference from its predecessor came off as a welcome departure. XIII (about which I have a lot to say) got a lot of backlash, as all post-X FFs have and will, and XIII-2 feels like a response to those complaints. Too little interaction with the world and the people in it? Okay, now most of the game involves changing the future for the towns you visit. (There are towns now!) Too linear? Okay, you can now travel to a dozen locales and explore as you like. Too convoluted a plot to follow? Don't worry! None of the stuff from XIII really matters! The game has its flaws, to be sure - the shift to a more open-exploration environment made it easy to get in over your head, and I don't think the monster recruitment really works - but it's a genuinely fun game. It also has what might be one of the best soundtracks in the entire series. I will fight & die for Crazy Chocobo.
Side programming note: With the upcoming release of the pixel remasters on Switch/PS4, the XIII trilogy are the only offline games in the series that aren't readily available to Sony/Nintendo console owners, and the PC ports are quite old. However, all three games are available for the Xbox series of consoles, and have received a couple upgrades to graphics and loading times. All 3 games are still beautiful and really worthwhile experiences - LR is even available through Gamepass right now.
FFIIIDS (unranked) was a fun take on the most historically-overlooked FF, but as others noted the mechanical changes weren't a strict upgrade. I think I stalled out around the fight that requires four dragoons, but had a fine time playing through the PSP port (as with a lot of older FF games, a fast-forward button is a huge help.)
FFXI, alongside Revenant Wings, is the only mainline game/direct sequel I've never played. The closest I ever got was buying a network adapter for my PS2, but when I found out I also had to get a hard drive, I guess I spent the following two years playing other RPGs instead (Shadow Hearts: Covenant, Star Ocean Til the End of Time, Disgaea).
Lightning Returns (#14) is the weirdest game in a weird trilogy in a weird series. I bounced hard off this the first time I played it because I don't engage well with in-universe time limits. I came back to it last year, though, and did enjoy it, albeit less than the other games in the trilogy. The stories of each XIII game barely hold together on their own terms and make nearly no sense in relation to each other - about half the cast are well-served by where they find themselves at the end of the world (Snow, Vanille, Fang, Noel), but without the group dynamics that were so central to XIII, Lightning herself is reduced to begrudgingly going along with whatever the story requires. Weirdest feeling in this one: Completing every major & minor quest 3 days before the end of the world, and spending the last 15% of the game walking around the biomes trying to kill every monster in existence. I think this is also the only game in the series where I have reached the final boss but haven't been able to beat them?
FFXIII-2 (#12) is also something special. The whiplash I felt from LR wasn't really present here - Serah and Noel don't have the expectations of prior games' characterizations weighing on them so the tonal/experiential difference from its predecessor came off as a welcome departure. XIII (about which I have a lot to say) got a lot of backlash, as all post-X FFs have and will, and XIII-2 feels like a response to those complaints. Too little interaction with the world and the people in it? Okay, now most of the game involves changing the future for the towns you visit. (There are towns now!) Too linear? Okay, you can now travel to a dozen locales and explore as you like. Too convoluted a plot to follow? Don't worry! None of the stuff from XIII really matters! The game has its flaws, to be sure - the shift to a more open-exploration environment made it easy to get in over your head, and I don't think the monster recruitment really works - but it's a genuinely fun game. It also has what might be one of the best soundtracks in the entire series. I will fight & die for Crazy Chocobo.
Side programming note: With the upcoming release of the pixel remasters on Switch/PS4, the XIII trilogy are the only offline games in the series that aren't readily available to Sony/Nintendo console owners, and the PC ports are quite old. However, all three games are available for the Xbox series of consoles, and have received a couple upgrades to graphics and loading times. All 3 games are still beautiful and really worthwhile experiences - LR is even available through Gamepass right now.
I had a good time with XIII-2. In XIII, the battle system grew on me a bit after it opened up, and I got into it enough to roll credits but not to tackle the postgame. XIII-2’s refinements are where it really clicked for me and I enjoyed battling so much that I beat everything in the game, including much of the DLC. I also remember enjoying the monster recruiting and don’t feel like I did a *ton* of grinding, though it’s likely I did look at guides for hints on which ones were really good.
The plot is absolutely hot nonsense, but whatever. I do enjoy a good plot in other FF games, but that’s not what this one is here for.
Crazy Chocobo is great and one of the secret best super-bosses in the franchise (speaking of course of its appearance in Theatrhythm). The rest of the soundtrack is quite fun too, a lot of very different stuff that wouldn’t fit in most FFs.
The plot is absolutely hot nonsense, but whatever. I do enjoy a good plot in other FF games, but that’s not what this one is here for.
Crazy Chocobo is great and one of the secret best super-bosses in the franchise (speaking of course of its appearance in Theatrhythm). The rest of the soundtrack is quite fun too, a lot of very different stuff that wouldn’t fit in most FFs.
You made me realize that if get IX on Switch then I'd have all the main game in the series in one console from 1 to 12 (skipping XI, of course, but still sweet). Oh, to have time to play all of those. Maybe after civilization ends....
Anyway. time for today's entry.
Theodor...That's a fine name.
#17
Final Fantasy IV DS
a.k.a. The one where Kain is a bobblehead.
150 points • 6 mentions • Highest rank: #6 (Daikaiju)
#17
Final Fantasy IV DS
a.k.a. The one where Kain is a bobblehead.
150 points • 6 mentions • Highest rank: #6 (Daikaiju)
Released on December 20, 2007 (Japan)
Producer: Tomoya Asano
Director: Takashi Tokita
Composers: Junya Nakano and Keinichiro Fukui (based on Nobuo Uematsu’s work)
So after the success of FFIIIDS, they decided to remake the next game in the series using the same template: change the graphics to a polygonal model and add extra material. IVDS is the result of that and I’ve found it’s a very divisive game.
Takashi Tokita, the original scenario writer, directed the remake, so you know it was made lovingly. Characters designs were carefully ported to the new 3D medium. Cut material from the original SNES release made its way back, so the backstory of Golbez was considerably expanded (so much that he got his turn in the spotlight in the new game logo). A new translation was written (and despite all the fears at the time, *that* one line was kept!). New enemies and bosses and abilities were added in. It was an entirely new game.
However the game was constricted by two things - for starters, maybe it was too different. The augment system changed the rules of the game, and it was full of weird limits (like a hard limit on the number of Game Plus you could do) and the overall difficulty was much higher. It also shrunk the vast expansive world of FFIV into a tiny DS screen - just like IIIDS before it, there was a limit on how much the game could render, so not only you had a repeat of the rebalancing issue of IIIDS, having five characters in your party made the tiny game window feel extra crowded.
The game was very well reviewed, but it also had very vocal detractors. For some people is the peak of IV, for some others is a lesson on what not to do when remaking a game
In any case, it was enough of a success to trigger the development of a direct sequel, Final Fantasy IV The After Years, but tellingly it was a 2D game instead of a 3D one - probaby Square had hit the limit of this medium. Also tellingly, FFV never got a 3D remake - Bravely Default much likely started as one but became something completely different. For as much as we all love the DS, maybe it was too small to contain the ambitions of a polygonal Final Fantasy,
Something Old
It’s IV! All your favorite characters and references are here. We also get references to other games, though - for example, the Ultima spells makes an appearance. Oh, and Summoned Monsters are now called Eidolons. Guess where they got that reference from?
Something New
This was the first Final Fantasy with New Game Plus - which is weird to think about since the feature was created by Square and had been in use for a decade, but it had skipped FF so far. To be fair, IVDS had a much more strict skill adcquisition system than other Final Fantasies (it was literally impossible to have a character acquire all skills in one playthrough) so it makes sense it was included here (although with a limit on how many times you could use it). New Game Plus would reappear in select main titles later, in one way or another.
Something Blew
IVDS featured the augment system - you could get one-use items that allow characters to learn abilities that they didn’t have access to in the original game. This was cool in principle, but had two issues: you couldn’t undo the action so you could botch builds and, to get most out of them, you had to use them in temporary party members so they’d drop more Augments when they left, and there was no in-game indication you should do that. This was mitigated somewhat by the New Game Plus mechanics, but it still could feel arbitrarily restrictive. We haven’t seen this system since.
Score
2/2 parents with horrible child-naming skills
As a personal aside, this will always be The Honeymoon Game - when I got married, I remember this game was everywhere during my honeymoon.
No, I didn't buy it then. I didn't even packed my DS for the trip.
I know, I'm history's greatest monster ;_;
No, I didn't buy it then. I didn't even packed my DS for the trip.
I know, I'm history's greatest monster ;_;
4-So
Spicy
I remember liking this game quite a bit. It was more difficult than the original but I never felt it was punishing until I found myself in the Lunar Subterrane, where even normal encounters could kill me quickly. I was so taken aback by the difficulty spike that I actually put the game down and scoured the Internet to see if maybe I had missed something along the way and I was trying to bite off more than was intended. But I came up empty and the only recommendation people could offer me was to turn down the battle speed. By that point I was so demoralized to have come such a long way to run into a wall, I decided to stop playing it. Maybe one day, when I'm bored and I remember the DS is a thing, I'll return to it.
Hard to go wrong with FF4's OST and the DS take is quite lovely.
Hard to go wrong with FF4's OST and the DS take is quite lovely.
FFIV is my favourite video game, and as someone who likes challenging games and novelty, this remake should have been made for me, but unfortunately it never quite clicked. I played it through, and I enjoyed it (and I never cared one bit about the New Game+ limitation that everyone seemed to be up in arms about at the time), and I loved how it turned the original game on its head and specifically toyed with the expectations of existing fans, but to me, its greatest sin was that it was slow. FFIV is a fast, breezy game. I can blow through it in a day. Battles feel urgent and frenetic, but here, everything just feels... bogged down, and crowded. In an effort to make every random encounter non-trivial, they created a much slower, more considered experience, and on paper, that sounds great to me, but in practice, I was mostly just bored, staring at bars filling up. And I feel like they knew this was an issue, which is why they included a robust auto-battle system, which was fun to engage with in the same way as FF12's Gambits, but it feels like they included a problem and a solution instead of fixing the problem itself. Anyway, I still liked it, and I'll always go to bat for ambitious or interesting efforts that don't quite hit the mark, but I can't help but wish I'd enjoyed my time with it more.
I enjoyed playing through FFIVDS exactly once and then trading it for TWEWY. A fun take on a stone-cold classic. I loved the 3D rendering of all the classic enemies, and I was probably alone in thinking the difficulty was right where I wanted it.
I enjoyed FFIV DS, but going back to it has never crossed my mind. Its a neat experiment, but its not the original.
I’m not going to say FF4DS is my favourite version of the game, but I’m not saying it’s not