The Ultimate Final Fantasy Thread: This Guy Are Knock You All Down

[Cadenza]

Rikku's is pretty easy to power up, it requires you to go back to Bikanel Desert and hunt for some cactuars; put on a weapon with No Encounters and you can do this in probably 20 or 30 minutes. You play red-light green-light with each cactuar you find and winning against all 10 gets you an extra item, but it's not necessary to do so to complete the quest.

Kimahri's requires you to complete two butterfly-catching minigames in Macalania Woods. It's annoying, but much more consistent than most of the other minigames. With some practice you could probably get this in an hour or so.

Lulu's requires you to dodge 200 lightning bolts in a row on the Thunder Plains; a No Encounters weapon is essentially required to do this so you aren't messed up by a random encounter happening during the process. There's a pretty easy exploit you can use that makes this much more doable; I do not recommend trying to do it on your own.

Wakka's requires you to play, at minimum, 26 games of blitzball, because of the way unlocking the Jupiter Sigil works; first you have to win a tournament (3 games) to receive his Attack Reels overdrive as a prize, then a league (10 games) to receive Status Reels; then another tournament for Auroch Reels and finally another league for the Sigil. Wakka's weapon is by far the most tedious to power up, but Wakka using Attack Reels with a fully-powered World Champion is the single biggest source of damage in the entire game, which is very useful against most of the superbosses.

FFX has a lot of strengths, but personally it has my least favorite end/postgame content in the series, even only having done it for the first time last year. There are guides out there you can use to make the remaining Celestial Weapon sidequests easier, but it's up to you how far you want to go with it.

 

[Bongo]

Yuna, Rikku, and Auron can fully power up their celestial weapons by just playing the game. All of the others require you to win minigames. For Rikku your score doesn't matter, Yuna just has a regular sidequest, and Auron's just consists of doing a bunch of regular battles.

Fortunately, that's still enough people for a full party.

 

[R.R. Bigman]

I wish everybody had a unique sidequest to get their best weapon, like in Chrono Trigger. I suppose one could wish most games were more like Chrono Trigger, if you think about it.

Playing FFX again has got me thinking about the plot some more. I found it strange how there was no moral dilemma around the fact that destroying Sin would erase millions of sentient dream people in Zanarkand. I mean, “real” people in Spira seem to be nothing more than clumps of magic fireflies, so people composed of the stuff dreams are made of have a fair argument to continue existing. I guess nobody in the group outside of Tidus and possibly Auron knew the truth.

FFX has a weird, interesting world.

 

[Torzelbaum]

FFX has a lot of strengths, but personally it has my least favorite end/postgame content in the series, even only having done it for the first time last year.

Did 10 start the trend of end/post game content being really obnoxious or did that start in one of the earlier games?

 

[Cadenza]

I'm not about to make an objective statement about that sort of thing. I said "personally" for a reason!

 

[Torzelbaum]

True but I thought most people were of the opinion that the endgame content in 10 was tedious/obnoxious (and from everything I have heard about it I agree with them). And I vaguely remember hearing similar grumblings about 12. (But nothing after that. I wonder if Square had gotten it out of their system by them.)

 

[FelixSH]

I don't think that's true - if I remember, the setup varies, so the number of balloons isn't always the same.

Okay, I got the Sun Sigil. You can totally get hit by birds once or twice and still get into negative time if you get a whole lot of balloonage. I got sixteen balloons with two bird strikes.

Now Tidus, Yuna and Auron have fully powered up Celestial Weapons. Is there much of a need to go after any of the others?

Huh, I stand corrected. Well done, Bigman.

I remember Wakka being a monster, with a fully powered up weapon. And many people like Blitzball, maybe that's the case for you too, when you get a team that is actually beatable. There should be a faq on gamefaqs, how to ensure Wakkas upgrades. Still took me a whole Saturday afternoon, though. But it wasn't hard at all, just took time.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

Playing FFX again has got me thinking about the plot some more. I found it strange how there was no moral dilemma around the fact that destroying Sin would erase millions of sentient dream people in Zanarkand. I mean, “real” people in Spira seem to be nothing more than clumps of magic fireflies, so people composed of the stuff dreams are made of have a fair argument to continue existing. I guess nobody in the group outside of Tidus and possibly Auron knew the truth.

The people of Spira aren't 'nothing more than clumps of magic fireflies' - they're flesh and blood with 'pyreflies' being a proper noun for their souls that take off once people pass. It's very much a Lifestream thing, where life is made up of souls, souls are tangible things, and they return to the planet once creatures die.

The 'sentient dream people of Zanarkand' are basically souls taken out of the cycle of life and kept in perpetual stasis. They're not allowed to die, they don't get to pass on, they're just kind of in limbo. I think you're right that there's an argument to be made. But the way I read the game, it's a strong theme of the game hidden between the lines that Zanarkand, and its people, belong to the past. And sometimes the past is something that's best left behind, so that people in the future can flourish unburdened. Because while the people of Zanarkand have been alive and in stasis for who knows how long, it's come at the expense of the rest of Spira, that have been brutally oppressed and murdered en masse for centuries. It's sad that they're going, but it's also both done with the blessing of Titus and the Fayth that was dreaming them, but all those people will still get chances at new lives in the whole cycle of resurrection. There is a very strong undercurrent of what's natural vs what's unnatural in FFX, and FFX tends to always come down on the side of natural being better. And the people of Zanarkand live an unnatural life that should have ended hundreds of years ago. And that they don't move on, they're hurting the rest of the world in the process. It's fascinating stuff to contemplate imo.

I dunno why we're spoiler tagging this, but I'll jus keep up the momentum.

 

[Bongo]

Yeah, fayth are people who've been ritually entombed in rock to prevent them from proceeding to the afterlife so that their dreaming soul can power an aeon. Dream Zanarkand, and all the people in it, are basically an enormous aeon. But the fayth that are sustaining Dream Zanarkand are the actual people, and their deaths have been interrupted. They can dream into existence people who want to go on living, but they themselves want to finish dying, and when they do, the dream will end. It's unclear exactly how much of the population of Dream Zanarkand have, like, personhood, as opposed to just being basically images, but the two who clearly were people both chose to sacrifice their lives, too.

 

[gorha]

Did 10 start the trend of end/post game content being really obnoxious or did that start in one of the earlier games?

If minigames are what makes it obnoxious, FFVII started that trend by putting the strongest attacks behind chocobo racing and battle square. If it's the grinding that's obnoxious, FFX started that; it doesn't take too much non-minigame grinding to beat the optional bosses in the previous games, but in X you have to grind quite a bit before you're even allowed to fight them all.

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

FF8 took grinding to get that game's ultimate weapons. You had to have so many specific rare drops from hard and rare monsters to upgrade your weapons to the highest tier.

 

[Torzelbaum]

Couldn't you refine some of those from cards or something like that? I don't remember that being too bad but it's been a very long time since I've played it.

 

[Mightyblue]

You can get a lot of it through cards, yeah, but that's just swapping straight combat for either turning things into cards or farming said cards out of Triple Triad games.

 

[gorha]

Also, most of the ultimate weapons don't make that much difference compared to your junctions. Squall's is an exception, but you still don't need it to beat FFVIII's superboss.

 

[Sprite]

FFII is down. I can’t imagine slogging through that absolute gauntlet in the original without save states, and especially without the gameplay tweaks that make this version pretty darn easy. I didn’t grind at all but my party ended up feeling over-leveled about halfway through and only got more ridiculous until it dismantled everything it came across.

I was impressed by the narrative gut punch of destroying like 80% of civilization without so much as a cutscene while you’re in the middle of a dungeon. You just show up to town and see that it’s gone. I’m also glad this remake kept that narrative restraint and didn’t add a big cutscene for that bit.

 

[R.R. Bigman]

I’ve obtained and fully powered up Rikku and Kimahri’s Celestial Weapons. The butterfly minigame was excruciating to do on the Vita’s good, but nearly big enough screen to see which of those tiny little specks are good or bad ones.

I’ll give Blitzball a fair go, but I don’t know if I can realistically do the 200 lightning bolt dodge.

I didn’t think this game would hook me like it has. Having clinically diagnosed OCD probably has something to do with it, yet I’m not driven to fully or almost fully complete every game I play.

One other thing is that some of the help videos and walkthroughs online I’m using are surprisingly recent for a twenty year old game. A video guide for Wakka‘s Celestial Weapon I saw went up yesterday.

 

[Kazin]

Played a bit of the Final Fantasy III DS remake last night when I couldn't sleep, and a little this morning. Having played through the Pixel Remaster twice last month, the DS version isn't as difficult as I remembered it being (though still much, much slower paced). It's pretty clear the 3D remake was intended as a kind of "hard mode" for FF3 veterans, which would have been fine if it wasn't the only official release we'd had until the Pixel Remaster.

Now that I know FF3 much better than I ever did, it's much easier to sort of fly through it. Ended up with getting the Enterprise. The mini dungeons don't give a very good impression to start with, but at least they're (mostly) over for now until much later in the game.

 

[Paul le Fou]

I loved my time with FF3 DS (never having played any other version before or since), but I distinctly remember a specific moment of hitting a wall and walking away: While three of my characters switched jobs around a decent amount, my one dude was a monk for pretty much all the game. By the time I got the Black Belt job, which seemed very close to the end of the game(?), he was something like job level 80 with monk and a total powerhouse. I finally switched him to the "upgraded" job and...he had to start over at job level 1? He went from a god-killer to a weenie because I got the better job? Was there any permanent benefit at all to spending so much time with the earlier job?? I'm sure there was more to it mechanically, but it still made me frown so hard I ended up landing at "I enjoyed the time I put into this game and now I am done with it. Goodbye, game."

 

[JBear]

That's a good example of one of the problems with the changes that the DS version makes to the job system, and is unique to that version of the game.

 

[SpoonyGundam]

PR job levels work the same as they do on DS, so it's not exactly unique to that version. PR does revert jobs back to where you acquired them on FC, so you aren't going to run through 80% of the game as a Monk with no reason to upgrade. You'll probably just end up with a Black Belt that's too strong for Ninja to be worth it though.

 

[Kazin]

I just beat Garuda on DS. I'm having a good old time with the remake, but it is very much a "hard mode" (or maybe a difficult remix) of vanilla FF3 (says the guy who has only played the Pixel Remaster lol). Currently rolling with two Dragoons, a White Mage, and a Black Mage, which probably won't change until I get the final crystal (I think, anyway. I know a mini dungeon is coming up soon, but I bought the rods that you can use to cast Fira, Blizzara, and Thundara, so hopefully those carry me through that dungeon).

I'd had one character on Monk until I unlocked Dragoon, and with a few job levels (and getting rid of that pesky job change penalty, which is still dumb), he's been doing more damage as Dragoon, so I'm glad I switched. Granted, I haven't really been grinding, so maybe if I'd had more job levels as Monk, I'd have been more inclined to keep him with that job.

 

[ozacrot]

Final Fantasy XIII is coming to Xbox Game Pass tomorrow. Xbox & PC are currently the only ways to play this game on modern systems. I happened to buy a download of it six weeks ago to revisit it - I have wrestled with doing a big long post about it, but suffice to say it 1) is much better than I had remembered 2) has aged much better IMO, aesthetics AND design-wise, than certain other widely-beloved titles in the series* 3) benefits from a replay when you half-remember it from a playthrough in a previous decade**.

My two main pieces of advice to speed along the (good but long) first act: Avoid battles as much as you can before the Crystarium opens up, and don't even think about equipment upgrades until Chapter 9.

* Not out here to rain on anybody's parade, but in the interest of transparency, FFIX is the only game in the series I've replayed in the past 4 years that I was impressed less by in the redo.
** Fal'cie - gods, L'cie - humans chosen by gods to do their bidding, Cie'th - former L'cie that got turned into demons for not doing what the gods say. There! You're caught up!

 

[Kazin]

Final Fantasy III DS down. I had a good time with it - it really is a sort of "hard mode" of vanilla FF3. I prefer the Pixel Remaster, but it was neat to see what they did with the game to make it in 3D. The final dungeon isn't too bad, though I did grind for it (ended up beating the game with my characters at level 56/57/57/57, first two were Ninjas, second two were Sages, since that was the party I beat the Pixel Remaster with, and I wanted to see if they were still viable. Yes, it turns out, they are).

I like what they changed with the final boss - she does more than just Particle Beam over and over again, including Bad Breath which would be terrifying if I'd not gotten all four Ribbons lol. Still, she made me nervous - turn orders are random as ever, and she did kill two of my characters at different points. Was able to Arise them both. I ended up buying a TON of Shurikens and spammed them while the Sages healed/cast Flare/cast Firaga. Wasn't too bad.

I've still got a couple days before Final Fantasy IV Pixel Remaster comes out... and I have a long weekend this weekend. I'm thinking I'll play the Famicom game, finally... I have the English translation on my hacked 3DS, which is probably the ideal way to play it for me (portably, basically).

 

[R.R. Bigman]

I got food poisoning, and have been making use of that down time to play the absolute hell out of Blitzball. I’ve gotten the Jupiter Sigil and all of Wakka’s Overdrives. If you recruit the right people, things are so much easier in the early games. After just one league I was dominating every match, except against the Al Bhed Psyches, who remain pretty tough until your main crew‘s stat’s eventually shut them out. It sure gets monotonous fast with there being only five teams to face!

 

[MetManMas]

One big reason why I would love a for-real "not a HD spit-shine of the PS2 game" remake of Final Fantasy X to happen is 'cuz I know a modern do-over for Blitzball would at the very least make the sport look as exciting as it did in that opening CG movie.

 

[Kazin]

Just got to Canaan in Final Fantasy III Famicom. It plays extremely well and should have come to the west on NES. Utterly charming game, with surprisingly advanced QoL stuff for an 8-bit RPG - you can buy 1, 4, or 10 items at a shop! You can sell 1 or all of whatever items at a shop! You can organize your inventory easily! There's a text speed option! The walking speed isn't infuriatingly slow! The spell list automatically sorts itself so the most powerful spells are at the top of the list in battle! And of course (how could I have forgotten this in my original post) - if an enemy is killed, your party automatically targets a different enemy when it's their turn, so you're not whiffing against nothing every battle!

I don't know why I've absolutely fallen head over heels for Final Fantasy III - I hated it before the pixel remaster came out - but I have. Every version of it is good (some better than others, of course). I hope to beat the Famicom version this weekend before FFIV PR comes out.

Play Final Fantasy III, y'all

 

[Patrick]

I liked the PSP version! Looking forward to the PR version being ported to Switch (hopefully).

 

[Torzelbaum]

Play Final Fantasy III, y'all

OK but do you mind if I wait for a sale first?

 

[Kazin]

I mean, sure, as long as you play it

 

[JBear]

Just got to Canaan in Final Fantasy III Famicom. It plays extremely well and should have come to the west on NES. Utterly charming game, with surprisingly advanced QoL stuff for an 8-bit RPG - you can buy 1, 4, or 10 items at a shop! You can sell 1 or all of whatever items at a shop! You can organize your inventory easily! There's a text speed option! The walking speed isn't infuriatingly slow! The spell list automatically sorts itself so the most powerful spells are at the top of the list in battle! And of course (how could I have forgotten this in my original post) - if an enemy is killed, your party automatically targets a different enemy when it's their turn, so you're not whiffing against nothing every battle!

I don't know why I've absolutely fallen head over heels for Final Fantasy III - I hated it before the pixel remaster came out - but I have. Every version of it is good (some better than others, of course). I hope to beat the Famicom version this weekend before FFIV PR comes out.

Play Final Fantasy III, y'all