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

[nijhazer]

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 13 again.

When this game came out, I took the afternoon off in order to play it. I had been looking forward to it for years, and would still rank it among the top three biggest video game disappointments in my life. I never finished it, and though I’ve made multiple attempts over the years to go back and give it another shot, inevitably I fire it up and play for a few hours before hating it all over again.

But now I have the game on Steam. And there are some amazing mods available for it. With these, I’m now playing the game on a 4K display, at 4K, with a hi-res texture pack installed. It looks great!

In this most recent attempt, I’ve made it farther than I have in the past, which is a good sign. Maybe I’ll actually finish it this time…

 

[Sprite]

I think he does spam Quake in the Pixel Remaster, though I think he has a chance of doing other stuff, such as a single target physical attack. What's your highest Cure spell? You may be able to survive a few more rounds if your healer spams that while everyone else does as much damage as they can.

Also: the Famicom and Pixel Remake versions of the game have different HP totals for most enemies, as far as I'm aware (Famicom usually has lower HP totals), so sometimes a strategy for the Famicom version may not work as well on PR.

Yeah I just kept resetting and spamming cute spells until he went down. A distressing number of bosses in the back half of this game seem to come down to whether they spam AoE or not. Still having fun, though.

 

[JBear]

Man, it is hard to describe how much better it feels to play these without constantly fighting with a mini-map that refuses to away.

Anyway, while downloading those mods, I also found that one guy has been quietly modding all of the final bosses to be screen-filling and it's... kind of great?

Spoiler: BIG CHUNGUS

 

[Kazin]

Chaos looks a little weird, but I like the other two like that, especially Cloud of Darkness.

 

[Regulus]

I think the original "Emperor's upper torso" sprite was designed with a solid black BG in mind, so it bothers me that the Pixel Remaster BG wasn't adjusted to account for this. That mod sprite works better than the one in the actual game, but it still looks a little weird.

 

[Zef]

I think the original "Emperor's upper torso" sprite was designed with a solid black BG in mind, so it bothers me that the Pixel Remaster BG wasn't adjusted to account for this. That mod sprite works better than the one in the actual game, but it still looks a little weird.

Yup, I've always thought that he was just an upper torso because, from the perspective of the WoLs, that's all they can see as he leans over them so sharply he's basically on top of them (and the graphic artists did their best to represent that.) With a full background like he's had since the Wonderswan and DoS versions, he looks like... well, a torso

The Embiggened version helps out a LOT, though. I like it.

 

[Octopus Prime]

They got some real Octopath Boss energy to them this way

 

[SpoonyBard]

With that battle BG and larger sprite, CHAOS looks like he's so chonky he broke through the dang floor!

Not sure how I feel about these, but CHAOS in particular does do a better job of evoking that 'oh crap lookit THAT' feeling the original one did, where he was just so much larger than all the other monsters, even the FIENDS. In the Pixel Remaster (and FFO/DoS), CHAOS is not all that much larger than the FIENDS so he loses some of that punch.

 

[YangusKhan]

Anyway, while downloading those mods, I also found that one guy has been quietly modding all of the final bosses to be screen-filling and it's... kind of great?

What a wonderful idea that I would've never thought of on my own.

 

[conchobhar]

I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 13 again.

When this game came out, I took the afternoon off in order to play it. I had been looking forward to it for years, and would still rank it among the top three biggest video game disappointments in my life. I never finished it, and though I’ve made multiple attempts over the years to go back and give it another shot, inevitably I fire it up and play for a few hours before hating it all over again.

But now I have the game on Steam. And there are some amazing mods available for it. With these, I’m now playing the game on a 4K display, at 4K, with a hi-res texture pack installed. It looks great!

In this most recent attempt, I’ve made it farther than I have in the past, which is a good sign. Maybe I’ll actually finish it this time…

I'm actually in the middle of a XIII playthrough right now (my first!). It's been slow going, for various outside reasons not worth getting into, but I'm really enjoying it. I understand why this game would rub people the wrong way, but I think it's really clever and inventive when taken on its own terms. People love to talk about how IV uses its gameplay mechanics as part of its storytelling, but XIII has it beat; the entire structure of the game is in service of its narrative!

 

[4-So]

While Lightning may be my least liked protagonist in the series (insofar that each entry has a 'main character'), I thought FF13 was an overall Good Time. I played through it for the first time last year; I bought the game on PS3 when it came out but fell off fairly early on thanks to not quite grokking the Paradigm system and obsessively checking the Datalog, which stopped forward momentum frequently. Last year I bought the game for cheap on Steam, and this time the Paradigm system clicked, and I just ignored the Datalog entirely.

It feels like a pretty strange entry in the series. Even FF15, with it's open-world elements and quasi-action-y combat feels more like a Final Fantasy game to me than FF13 does. That strangeness is part of its charm. I haven't played anything else quite like it.

Great soundtrack, too.

 

[Octopus Prime]

I definitely liked FF13 a lot more when I revisited it, but I still didn’t enjoy it as much as the previous games. Never quite felt like I had the level of control over the combat as I wanted

 

[Lokii]

I had two false starts before trying again about a year or so ago and really loved it. Now it's one of my favs.

 

[nijhazer]

I'll weigh in again after I'm closer to the end. The conventional wisdom around the time this game was originally released was that there is a fabled Point Where It Gets Good, near the end, when all of your battle options are available to you and the game starts to open up a bit. But combat's always been the least of my concerns with this game-- it's the characters, and the dialogue...

Vanille: Gasp! Gasp!
Sazh: Pulse fal'Cie, huh? Hah. Huh. Hah.
Snow: Hah. Hah.
Lightning: Tch.
Snow: Huh? What?
Lightning: (walking away) Ugh.
Vanille: Awwww...
Me: ...what

 

[Peklo]

It's a wonderful story told, conveyed and acted very well with some of the most character-centric writing the series ever did. The game bets it all on a few key aspects of itself which encompass all of its hyperfocused scope, and does all of them as well as the rest of the best have managed to. If you don't accede to its priorities, it's the most unbearable thing imaginable--if you do, there's nothing else even remotely like what it offers.

I also don't entertain that premise of there being an uniquely transformative point for the game as either a narrative or mechanical experience. The part that's referred to is significant within the game's structure but largely in ways that contextualize why the prior design was worthwhile, necessary, and uniquely good, and further benefiting the rest from the contrast. It's a very cohesive game despite the reputation and documented development troubles.

 

[Sprite]

I definitely liked FF13 a lot more when I revisited it, but I still didn’t enjoy it as much as the previous games. Never quite felt like I had the level of control over the combat as I wanted

I think it’s interesting how the game gave so many people the impression that they weren’t in control, even though you make the same number of decisions that you do in regular JRPGs, just with fewer button presses. I’ve seen enough people express that opinion that it must be an issue of presentation.

I love the Paradigm system and wish more games cribbed off of it.

 

[Octopus Prime]

Presentation seems a likely culprit; The sheer number of, well, numbers that popped up all over the place during combat also made it hard to grasp if I was doing well or not in battles

 

[nijhazer]

Well, speaking of presentation: If you have the ability to play FF13 at 4K with some of the mods available, it's a real treat. I'm appreciating the design of monsters and environments more this go-round than I ever have before. Say what you will about story, characters, and dialogue (and oh, I will), but SE threw a ton of talented artists at this thing for many years, and it shows. I've wandered through Lake Bresha several times over the past eleven years, but this was the first time I paused frequently to just pan the camera around, take note of something in the distance, and imagine what might be over there.

 

[Peklo]

You don't even have to mod it to be observant of its ridiculous visual lushness. It's a game from 2009 and completely out of time for the level of obsessive fidelity it pulls off in that context. It's only more impressive now with hindsight painting a clearer picture of what its contemporaries were doing and what its legacy has been since.

 

[conchobhar]

I concur with Peklo; I'm playing it on PS3 and I'm still regularly taken aback by how good looking a game it is. The environments and all the vistas are impeccable, but even the character models— the thing you'd think would date the game the fastest— hold up surprisingly well. I can't even imagine how stunning and decadent this must have looked in 2009.

It feels like a pretty strange entry in the series. Even FF15, with it's open-world elements and quasi-action-y combat feels more like a Final Fantasy game to me than FF13 does. That strangeness is part of its charm. I haven't played anything else quite like it.

XIII is certainly bold but I don't think it's that out of step from the rest of the series; it has a lot in common with X and X-2. The "hallway" design certainly recalls to X (right down to similar narrative justifications), and the Crystarium is mechanically the same thing as the Sphere Grid; meanwhile, the battle system is extremely X-2, what with the lightning-fast pace, the idea that actions can interrupt actions, or the whole changing roles on-the-fly to account for the direction of the battle. Motomu Toriyama directed X-2, so I think you can really feel him taking those ideas and running with them,

 

[WisteriaHysteria]

FF13 was absurdly beautiful when it came out. It still holds up real well because Japanese game designers tend to maximize their polygon use in the smartest of ways, and SE's A-Teams are the crème of that crop.

FF13's battle system was fun. I get why you guys want to push back on the idea of the game "getting good" after a certain point, but being able to explore more open-ended areas was definitely a paradigm shift for the game that let a lot of the game designs decisions finally click with a lot of players in ways that I can't begrudge.

I don't mind the straight corridor nature of a lot of FF13's environments. Especially when I'm here more for the story than anything else in RPGs. And I don't mind the lack of NPCs and "towns" either, because you can still make good RPGs without those as long as you're doing things right. What I think is a legitimate knock against FF13 is that the events of the game and the environments that they're attached to have very little meaningful interaction. What you're doing in the plot very rarely feels like it could only happen in the place you are currently at, or that there isn't a lot of meaningful interactions with the environments. Very much it felt like you'd enter a cool looking place, maybe if you were lucky the characters would talk a little about the place but it wouldn't have much to do with whatever was happening in the plot. But you would mostly just run through the environment like an amusement park ride, and then leave that place behind having not really done anything in it besides beating up nondescript baddies/monsters. Compare that with other games in the franchise like where you're running around town trying to find drag for Cloud, or picking up the pieces of a town shredded by Sin and seeing off the dead, or unlocking the tomb of the Dynast King, or camping with your brothers in the countryside.

Also I love the cast in FF13 to bits, but I felt like they didn't get to spend nearly enough time with each other as a group, and barely interacted with npcs in meaningful capacities either. I loved FF13 when it came out and am a big apologist for it, but it's definitely a game with severe flaws.

 

[Kazin]

FFXIII was fun to play, nice to look at (even on a CRT, as I still was gaming on one of those when it came out!), and had a good soundtrack. I don't remember much of the story but I know I liked it well enough. I liked XIII-2 as well, though I couldn't get into Lightning Returns for some reason.

 

[4-So]

I disagree with the popular sentiment (of the time, at least) that the game got better when it opened up in That Area. That Area (Pulse) threatened to pull me out of the game entirely. After the cohesive 20+ hour experience, to be returned to something resembling an open world...it was not my favorite thing, to say the least.

I'm not fan of Lightning, Hope, or Snow. Vanille and Fang are fine. Sazh and his choco-chick should have their own game.

 

[MetManMas]

I don't mind the straight corridor nature of a lot of FF13's environments. Especially when I'm here more for the story than anything else in RPGs. And I don't mind the lack of NPCs and "towns" either, because you can still make good RPGs without those as long as you're doing things right.

While I agree that you don't absolutely need NPCs or towns, personally I'm more of an explorer* so I usually do miss those kinds of things when they're not present. Unless a game is really, really, really good at doing its setting without them.

That said, while story is not the absolute most important thing to me, having a setting and cast I care about is definitely still pretty important. The fastest thing to get me to drop an RPG is definitely if I can't stand the cast and/or the plot.

I should really get around to OG FF13 at some point. While I'm not thrilled about the tunnel, Square Enix is definitely still really skilled at making some pretty sights to see in it.

* It doesn't have to be specifically to find loot, though. Like, I'm happy just to discover an extra li'l bit of world building lore or a cool house or cave. And while linearity isn't the end of the world, I like it when a game doesn't push back too hard if I try to go left when the plot wants me to go right.

 

[Sprite]

III is down, juuuust in time for IV, ha. I liked it! I assumed I would dislike the job system for being so simple, but that simplicity ended up being a strength. While it rewards you for sticking with and leveling up a job, you can also just swap your party around willy nilly to fit the situation. Slot a character into Dragoon and they’ll immediately be viable as that job. It makes the lock-and-key design pretty fun.

In this version, anyway. I’m sure the other versions are great, as discussed above, but the CP and job sickness systems sound dreadful. I also never want to go through that slog of a finale without quick saves/save states.

 

[spines]

i think someone made the x-2 -> 13 connection in discord a while back, which i think had faintly crossed my mind at some point as well (particularly because, tracing backwards from LR, the job change mechanic in that game is literalized as outfits again, though i'd describe LR itself as one of the earlier predecessors to remake's combat more than a direct followup to the ideas used in 13 and 13-2), at least in a textural sense. of course, x-2's system is itself something of an adaptation of x's party member switching with a lot more compositional flexibility...while 13 introduces mechanics in a way that make it more like a "meta-jrpg" or something i still haven't seen very much, which leads to all of the bewilderment at the point of the game not being to pick hastega from the menu and stuff. (although i remember thinking the sentinel ai in particular never had much clue what was going on and that it was much better to control manually, especially because there was less urgency to rush actions out...)

i watched demi play it last year when i'd only rented it to rush through when it was new (on a crt). it still looks great but this was like a week or two after i spent 70 hours playing 7r so it didn't look mind-blowing next to that; outside of that single most unfair comparison possible it's technically masterful and a lot of the models for characters and monsters are fantastic, though i don't love the general soldier designs and i wish the mechs were less...rounded off. but that's just my aesthetic preference really, the mechs really look great in a cool and organic way in motion despite that.

i'd like to do my own playthrough again at some point, but i agree with a lot of what other people are saying. i think the story has a lot of really clever elements and some well-presented themes outside of the more specific plot stuff and the kind of backstory and world development they want you to read the datalogs for, but i also feel that the world's lack of a sense of geography or context for most locations is maybe the game's biggest weakness overall; feels like one of those things where they hoped the overall momentum of the game and appeal of the environments and music would keep people moving forward regardless, and i can't say that that wasn't true for me, but it does still stand out as one of the things i enjoyed less about the game.

 

[Kazin]

In this version, anyway. I’m sure the other versions are great, as discussed above, but the CP and job sickness systems sound dreadful. I also never want to go through that slog of a finale without quick saves/save states.

CP is absolutely not a problem at all, I never ever had to grind for it, just like JBear said. I changed jobs more often in that version than in DS or Pixel Remaster, as well.

The final dungeon is harder on Famicom, too, though, so yeah, you'd not like that part lol.

I wonder how long it'll be before someone is able to hack in a good font to FFIV. I'm going to start playing it today, but I am not looking forward to going back to that awful default font these games have.

 

[Mightyblue]

Font files have been the same between all versions, so it's (probably) mostly just dropping in one of the existing packs as a replacement or using the tools to build your own.

 

[ozacrot]

I've become increasingly convinced that much of XIII's reputation owes to the time period it was released into. AAA games were a much bigger proportion of the market in 2008-2010, and during that time (really, most of the 360/PS3 era) everybody wanted a sandbox. Fallout 3, Mass Effect 2, Borderlands, and GTA IV (to name a couple) aimed to give players a lot of freedom, and in that context, FFXIII - a tightly-designed linear game whose writing centered on the characters and their relation to each other - was out of step.

Nowadays, though, it's a real wonder. Thanks to the proliferation of indies, and especially iterations of genres like roguelikes, which focus more on the opportunities presented to you than the choices you make, the linearity of XIII is much easier to handle. I find it so compelling in part because it's a path nobody is likely to take anymore - we do see linear character-driven RPGs come out of the indie space pretty often, but I don't know that we're ever going to see one made with this much attention/time/money spent on how it looks and sounds.

 

[Regulus]

Eh. I like plenty of linear games, but I've tried to play FFXIII several times and the farthest I've made it is the Cid fight around 20ish hours in. By the time it finally took the training wheels off I had lost all motivation to play. I mostly just found it boring. The game design (at least to the point I've played) almost completely lacks tension -- the only progress you lose for failing a battle is the time you just spent on that battle, which you technically lose anyway by choosing to participate in the battle. There's no real resource management, either, since your characters' HP/TP is reset for every combat encounter. Because you don't need to worry about conserving dwindling resources, the only incentive to perform more efficiently in battles is the ranking system. But if I've already worked out an optimal or at least reasonably effective strategy for a particular encounter, it's hard to get excited about running it several more times. Why not just avoid the map encounters at that point?

This may not have been as much of a problem if the character building were more exciting, but in the portion I've played, the crystarium is mostly linear with small branches that ostensibly offer some choice. As I recall, the equipment system wasn't significantly better; there was more choice, but without much context the difference between different pieces of gear was hard to quantify. And on top of that there's a largely inscrutable upgrade system. Should I be upgrading things or should I hold onto my monster parts until I find a weapon I like? Is it worth it either way? Who knows?

While I was mildly interested in the character focused story, I'll also never get over how @#$%ing ridiculous the dissonance between Sazh's despair over Dajh and the battle with the Brynhildr Eidolon where he gleefully does donuts in his new magic Autobot.

In any case, I think the sheer amount of people (on this board and otherwise) who have had multiple false starts with XIII points to an issue with the game design beyond just player expectation. The gameplay loop just doesn't work for some players.