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

My FF hot take of the day:

Revier (@dukerevier.bsky.social)

FF5 is basically FF3 done "right"...with the exception of its protagonists. I legitimately think the game would have been better swapping them out for nameless muppets of destiny, their "backstories" are so cliched and bland they barely add anything, and at best only kind of get in the way.
bsky.app bsky.app
 
I don't really think that's even lukewarm. FFV's narrative elements at large are overwhelmingly disregarded by most players, and very commonly by people who otherwise laud the game for its mechanics.
 
It really wasn't until FF6 that Square figured out how to both tell a good story and let the player customize their characters. It's hard for Bartz to have a deep personality when he could be a Knight or a Dancer or a Blue Mage or anything else at any time.
 
In terms of craft, Final Fantasy V was a large step forward in the intricacy of the direction of cutscenes. More of the story and character is conveyed through movements and posing than they ever attempted in Final Fantasy IV, much less earlier. It laid the groundwork not only for the operatic pathos of Final Fantasy VI, but also the nonverbal experiment of the prehistory chapter of Live A Live and the constant slapstick of Super Mario RPG. Although they were not able to convey the personalities of Bartz, Lenna, Galuf, Faris, and Krile through their differing performance in battle, it still comes through crystal clear through the visuals and animations, and that's the sort of thing that had the entire industry excited in 1992.

There's also the matter of genre. A light adventure fantasy is not as respected a narrative form as something with a lot of darkness and introspection, but I wouldn't call it inferior. It has much to say about the human condition, specifically in regards to legacy and connection. The complex reverberating problems inherited from the past are made right by a brave new generation who rediscover what was forgotten; the uniting of a divided world is the only alternative to oblivion. Bartz realizes he has taken up the very same mission that took his father from him; Lenna's self-sacrificing nature is connected with the pain of bereavement that she's felt again and again; Faris, in rediscovering where she came from and finding companions she can be honest with, at last attains the sense of freedom she had been seeking; and Galuf struggles to carry hope to the next generation, which Krile embodies. Don't let the fact that they're all goofing around and the villain literally goes "Muahahaha" distract you from realizing that this is all extremely solid stuff.
 
I should qualify my statement. I don't think FF5's story is bad, I just think the nature of the Job System causes a disconnect between the gameplay and story in a way that makes things seem slighter in comparison to the FF games surrounding it.

The class of the characters in FF4 and 6 are extremely important plot-wise. Cecil as a Dark Knight turned Paladin, for example, ties the gameplay to the story. Bartz is just kind of a vague adventurer, because the story can't be built around him as a Ranger or Black Mage or whatever. His personality can't be informed from the way you play him in battle, which limits his depth.
 
But every character in 7 and 8 is a blank slate in battle, and the story isn't harmed by it.
 
I think it's a little different. Their secondary abilities are blank slates, but they all have character-specific equipment and limit breaks that are informed by their character background. They can all use ability augmenting materia/drawn magic/guardian forces, but Barret is always a guy that had a gun grafted to the arm he lost.
 
Over the last month or so I've managed to drag myself through Final Fantasy XVI. I don't have a lot of nice things to say about it!

I cannot reconcile the game I played with the fact that there's so much FFXIV creative DNA on the development team. What on earth went wrong? If I didn't know any better, I'd have bet my shirt that this either began life as Unrelated Grimdark Fantasy Game and got rebranded to FFXVI at the eleventh hour, or else was the work of an outside team who weren't really that familiar with FF but definitely wanted to get some of that Game of Thrones money, seven or eight years too late. There's very little of the wonder, warmth and whimsy (the three W's) that one typically associates with the Final Fantasy brand here, and in fact the game seems somewhat embarrassed at times to be a part of the series. For example, mounting a chocobo gives you a two-second sting of their theme but then it's back to business as usual. The climax of the prologue section is a harrowing, viscerally upsetting scene where Ifrit tears Phoenix apart while Clive cries and screams I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU. I get that it's meant to be unpleasant to watch, but it reaches a level of adolescent, faux-mature edgelordiness that I don't really want in my Final Fantasy, and I honestly considered turning the game off there and then.

Valisthea is a grimy, grey world populated by miserable people who are sick of living there. Why should I want to save any of it? At no point is there any incentive to explore off of the critical path, because there's nothing interesting to see or find. Contrast FF7 Rebirth, which boasts a vibrant, expansive land stuffed with secrets and things to do, and charming, memorable characters to meet.

In lieu of interesting art direction we are given Spectacle in the form of the Eikon battles, which start with you turning into Godzilla and only ramp up from there until you're Shadow-of-the-Colossusing your way up the body of a screaming rock golem the size of a continent. During that sequence in particular I could practically feel the developers looking back at me every few seconds, going "isn't this the most fucking epic thing you've ever seen?!" when the scale and tryhard excess of it was so absurd that it actually became kind of boring. It's like the endless Obi-Wan vs. Anakin lightsaber fight in Revenge of the Sith, where it's so overblown and overdesigned that it just ends up feeling mind-numbing and artificial. I'm sure each such battle took thousands of man-hours to put together but I wish they hadn't bothered.

The characters don't fare much better. Clive's alright, I guess; he initially presents as Grizzled Hero Man #68721 but gradually reveals himself to be kind of an endearing dumbass.

Barnabas: My master awaits you in the capital... But I cannot allow you to attend him in your current state.
Clive, who's gotten his ass kicked to within an inch of his life by this exact guy twice now: And how are you going to stop us?!

You tell him, Clive.

Jill is almost completely flat and exists only to either agree with Clive or be put into peril, and might as well not be a Dominant at all given how underpowered Shiva seems compared to the rest of the pantheon. (There's not even a discussion of her accompanying the Menfolk into the final battle.) Benedikta probably should have been the Dominant of Ice instead, considering how quickly she gets fridged. She goes mad because Clive beats her and steals her power, is then accosted by a gang of men who clearly intend to rape her, and is last seen as a head in a box. Great stuff. Cid coasts quite a ways into my good graces on Ralph Ineson's gravelly deadpan performance alone, but he also only exists to dream so hilariously small as to make Clive appear visionary by comparison:

Cid: My dream is to build a place where people can die on their own terms.
Clive: What about a place where people can LIVE on their own terms?
Cid: ...My God. You're brilliant.

Mid, Byron and Gav are all pretty likeable but aren't going to be topping any "Best Final Fantasy Characters of All Time" lists. I quickly learned to hate Vivian, the geopolitical scholar who unveils an unskippable Powerpoint presentation dripping with overblown gravitas whenever someone asks her what time it is.

Clive: I need to know the current situation in Waloed.
Vivian: In order to understand that, you first must know the history of the region!
Clive: What? No. Just tell me what's going--
Vivian: IT ALL BEGAN SIX THOUSAND YEARS AGO, AMIDST FIRE AND TURMOIL MOST FOUL
Clive: No. No!!!!!!

Torgal is a good boy and you can pet him whenever you want. 10/10, no notes. Later he suddenly morphs into a glowing blue wolf deity and everybody's like "Huh! Anyway,"

Ultima's calm, cold detachment from everything is kind of an interesting note for a villain. He seems genuinely puzzled as to why humans wouldn't all just agree to be turned into LCL or whatever is supposed to happen when his plan reaches fruition. I'm not sure I understand the timeline as he explains it, though. He first gave the world magic as a gift, which then caused the Blight, so he created mankind in order to eventually produce Mythos. So... who was using the magic before that? The chocobos, I guess.

I don't really have anything to say about the rest of the cast.

The game got one (1) good laugh out of me, when Barnabas/Odin stomps Clive for the second time: the victory fanfare plays and up pops the message CLIVE BESTED. Finally, a sign of life, some 35 hours in. Unfortunately it turned out to be an isolated incident.

I will not be engaging with the DLC and I cannot see myself ever wanting to revisit this world or these characters.

Yoshida's aim was for a dark fantasy storyline that would have broad appeal and reinvigorate the series.
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Jesus.
 
Vaeran said:
I quickly learned to hate Vivian, the geopolitical scholar who unveils an unskippable Powerpoint presentation dripping with overblown gravitas whenever someone asks her what time it is.
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The thing that absolutely blows my mind about these sequences is that she's always always always communicating something that could be explained in about two sentences of exposition for all the info it actually contains but she somehow always manages to stretch it out to multiple minutes, the game is desperate to give the impression of complex world building and has nothin' for actual complexity.
 
It' incredible, how every time I read anything about FF16, I get less interested in playing it. But I think seeing what the prologue shows, that grimdark stuff you mentioned, is the worst thing I read. I can't watch stuff like this, when the artstyle is realistic.

And really, absolutely nothing I ever read or heard, aside from this being an FF, ever motivated me to give it a try.

I hope 17 will seem more like something for me.
 
Vaeran said:
I cannot reconcile the game I played with the fact that there's so much FFXIV creative DNA on the development team.
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I have very little to no firsthand experience with XIV, but it does scan to me. XVI's lead writer and creative director is Kazutoyo Maehiro, who came up at Square pretty much exclusively working alongside Yasumi Matsuno on his projects, usually in a level and battle designer capacity... but also event planning, where the writing aspects come in. The XIV team at large are by public expression, the nature of their work, and through explicit collaboration avowed Matsuno fans, so to have someone of Maehiro's background and pedigree on the team in a prominent creative position (being the main scenario writer for XIV's relaunch and its first expansion Heavensward) undoubtedly had an influence on shaping that game as well... and this is where I can't comment on anything directly, but all the criticisms that XVI and Maehiro's work in it receives are things that have been said of the XIV material as well, particularly in how a misogynistic leaning and themes are present in both. All the most passionate fandom for XIV's writing revolves around Shadowbringers and Endwalker, the two expansions which Natsuko Ishikawa held the role of lead writer on, and she did not take part in XVI's development at all. For all of Matsuno's strengths as a writer, he also writes women fairly poorly as a rule, and that is a sensibility that has been passed on and magnified by his successors.
 
I find that take rather strange, Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen was surprisingly very egalitarian for a dark fantasy, with women often showing up as both soldiers and high ranking officials with little weirdness about them, and the player getting to choose the revolutionary commander's gender. Tactics Ogre(the original Super Famicon/PS1 game) also had a decently egalitarian society, though of course Kachua's portrayal does make her not endear herself to many players because, well, she's a teenager who has been left adrift by a harsh war and thus desperately in search of anything that could validate her.

I've definitely heard of FFT and Vagrant Story having some sexist writing though, albeit I haven't experienced either game much, so can't comment on the specifics.
 
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finally back to ff8, early on disc 3. when i started off this game last year i thought there was a chance i'd totally lose the plot and just play a ton of triple triad all the time. that ended up not happening as the story momentum really kept me driving forward through almost all of disc 1 and 2, so i might hit a challenge or two in a new town (and i spent a while during the prison trying to play since that was one place it seemed like might just become unavailable later) but i mostly stayed on the ride...

until now, when i spent about 6 in-game clock hours in a row (and i've reset a lot, so it's considerably more than that overall) traveling the world, catching up on places i might've overlooked (i found a couple more timber maniacs in hotel rooms, for example), talking to npcs again, and trying to collect cards. i've got most of the first 7 pages of cards now, which by my count is 69 out of 77 of those? plus a handful of cards from the last few pages. this has become kind of a hassle as i accidentally taught everyone to play random which means that, even with burning off as much junk as i can from my collection, i still usually end up with really weird decks that can be really scuffed to play, and opponents don't always play what i'm hoping to see either.

i don't think i'll specifically try to complete the whole card log. i did also think about doing it in final fantasy xiv before i took another hiatus from the game halfway through endwalker...there it's similarly an excuse to wander the world and check out things you might not have paid much attention to before. or you could use a guide i guess, but to me that'd defeat the purpose. i'm not trying to get The Perfect File or The Achievement; i'm mostly interested in continuing to explore the space that this game represents. and by that i mean both the "physical" one and its strange systems. you can farm monsters for cards to play triple triad, or farm triple triad battles for items, or do both, and there are even more kinds of interchanging alchemy between items and spell stocks than that which feel convoluted, but in a kind of charmingly empty way like legend of mana, since for as famously "breakable" as the game is, it's not really hard enough (at least to this point) that playing through the story requires much more than raising hp and engaging with the systems in good faith.

the result has a circuitous design that feels like there are many ways to enter and exit the system, and combined with the ability to stack up the gfs and the way assigning menu commands works (you can even overwrite "item"! in fact i've rarely used them as a result! that's really strange for a final fantasy!), it excels even among final fantasy games in feeling to me like there's no "edge" to the system, no point i would expect to reach where the game would seem to run out of ideas to enjoy playing with. i think maybe only 12 surpasses it in that sense, and both are games where the character customization systems reach so far that they fundamentally allow the player to define how they interact with the game in the first place. (even "boost," which encourages you to hide the normal UI to play a minigame, is an example of this.) this also combines nicely with the game's unusual resources; health and magic points don't work in the ways they usually do, and using powerful spells weakens your characters (assuming you have them junctioned, which there are strong incentives to do). it all lends a really interesting sense to the reality-warping concept of the guardian forces. they affect the player too.

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though on that note, i still hardly have an idea of what nojima was cooking with this one...in the context of ffx and stranger of paradise (which i'd regard as probably my two favorites of his top line story/scenario credits) it's clear to me he's greatly interested in these dreamlike concepts that are sweepingly emotional at the expense of a more logical kind of plot and worldbuilding development. (this is good. it's a story, not a history essay.) the revelations around edea in the first half of the game seemed to be setting up a kind of inversion of the usual rpg thing where a mother figure is the villain instead of a father (as in ffx, lol), but the beginning of disc 3 shifts away from that at least a bit. the other undercurrent of squall's need for vulnerability and emotional release being crushed under the increasing burdens he's forced to shoulder-the strength of a leader and all that-is probably even more central either way.

i really love selphie though. like, at this point, she's probably in the running for my favorite party member in the series. she almost comes off as out of place at first, but she's really impassioned and serious even with her cheery and positive demeanor. i thought that was really great...and then i learned about her little garden festival website on the balamb computers with custom graphics, where she writes about the places you find timber maniacs magazines and laguna's articles, and cajoles the other party members into giving her material to post too. i like them too, but i really don't want to take her out of my party...hahaha

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in their own ways, a lot of the older games i've played since resident evil 1 a couple years ago keep leaving me thinking, "gosh, i'm so glad to be playing this right now." but i have a real soft spot for this era in particular, and over and over these square games and their unique sensibilities keep drawing me all the way in. this is about the closest they really got to making a contemporary-setting kind of game (along with racing lagoon, i suppose) on the platform, and the retro feeling that springs from that 90s style, merging with a different sense of magic and surrealism than preceding games in the series turns into something i find really intoxicating, even as it feels like it's pushing back against the concept of final fantasy itself. even the music, despite all uematsu's hallmarks on display, really shows that off, heavier on melancholy and uncanny moods than his usual fare.

i'm totally in love
 
Precisely manipulating Triple Triad rule-spreading across regions is probably the most ridiculously oblique process one can undertake in the series to game under-the-hood mechanics. Total soft reset mayhem, and definitely only for sickos.

Selphie's blog is the kind of ancillary text that singularly elevates a character and a setting in ways that unimaginative, codified vectors of supplying players with diary entries in games almost never do. The stock context for me is the apocalypse log of whoever's final moments that never come across like they exist for any other reason than the player's benefit--written for them even if it's supposed to be a personal journal--but Selphie's context having the format of an ongoing diary where she does a mix of public addresses and figuring out her own feelings does a lot to impress that you are invited to her space, and there isn't going to be any material gain involved. Maybe you're a dedicated reader, or maybe you'll miss some updates when things get too hectic--Selphie is still going to be writing.
 
When playing it last time, I just played it as a regular rpg. Meaning I would just fight battles as they came, without grinding, just normal leveling. Playing a it of Triple Triad, getting some magic to junction. Just as that stuff came up.

Turns out, it is a really well balanced game, and the difficulty was always fine (a bit on the easy side, I guess). Until the final battle, which was brutal.

Also, yeah, Selfie is great. With all her weirdness, she is also really competent.

I never interacted fairly with TT, always used a guide to spread sensible rules.
 
I also played it like a normal RPG and was so unable to progress in the final dungeon as a result that I ended up starting it entirely over. I probably could have refined some cards to get spells I needed and boost my stats to where they needed to be, but I didn't think of it because I never refined cards.
 
I really enjoy FF8, but have only beaten it I think 3 times and never by primarily playing Triple Triad. I should really do a Triple Triad heavy run one of these days.
 
i cheesed my way through ff8. I got the Zell card from his mom, played triple triad to get cards and turned it into magic to boost my stats. I barely cast spells. I know I did use some limit break spamming to get through the last fight or two. And I won the final battle by the very skin of my teeth with only Squall left on his feet. Using Triple Triad to break the game open was a fun way to go through the story and its a fun card game.
 
Sarcasmorator said:
I also played it like a normal RPG and was so unable to progress in the final dungeon as a result that I ended up starting it entirely over. I probably could have refined some cards to get spells I needed and boost my stats to where they needed to be, but I didn't think of it because I never refined cards.
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When I first played it, I played it like a normal RPG. The final dungeon kicked my butt hard too. Mostly on account of the fact that because of the leveling system, and Squall almost always being in your party, he had way higher levels than some of the others. So when the party gets divided up, I was going up against like, level 80 monsters in the final dungeon with like, level 40 Selphie and stuff. Pretty brutal. FF8 is still a top-3 FF for me.
 
I cheesed the hell out of FF8 - When I could, I put on no-encounters, went to the spell-drawing islands (Islands Closest to Heaven and Hell!) and drew a ton of powerful spells to get max junctions, and then used Aura and turn-skip to use primarily limit breaks against the late-game enemies and final boss. I...have no regrets, and have yet to find the desire to replay it, much less in any different way.
 
The great thing about FF8, though, is that you can approach it in so many different ways. Your mileage will vary. Find Your Way.
 
I've been playing Persona 5 and Metaphor lately and FF8 is kind of the opposite of those. In FF8 you generally don't cast spells; you hoard them, use them for stats, and mostly use normal attacks. Maybe cast spells that aren't junctioned sometimes. Whereas in Persona games you are constantly casting spells and your MP is basically a soft limit on how long you can dungeon delve because MP-restoring items are scarce, and your standard attacks are crap.
 
I DID also cast spells, in that regular run. Having one or two less charges junctioned doesn't have that big of an impact on your stats.

The simplest way of breaking the game is to get Diabolos and card enough monsters to get non-encounter. You will never level up, so everything is super weak, and together with abusing limit breaks, everything dies easily. Those were my first two times playing the game.
 
I had no idea FF8 had level scaling (if you want to call it that) until years after it was released. I just played it like I would normally play a FF. Having said that, I "abused" the shit out of junctioning and basically never used spells, and certainly didn't bother with summoning GFs.

Summoning is a cool concept in the Final Fantasy series that I never engage with if I don't have to.
 
FelixSH said:
I DID also cast spells, in that regular run. Having one or two less charges junctioned doesn't have that big of an impact on your stats.

The simplest way of breaking the game is to get Diabolos and card enough monsters to get non-encounter. You will never level up, so everything is super weak, and together with abusing limit breaks, everything dies easily. Those were my first two times playing the game.
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That's what I did the first time but because I didn't fight anything I didn't draw spells and so I was also super weak.
 
Hmm, I did draw from draw points you find in the wild. And you can't avoid a handful of battles at the start, I think I drew some there, as a start.

Oh, right, you can transform items into spells, that's were I got them from, mostly.
 
I really like when summons are integrated into the story in meaningful ways. I didn't come into FF4 or 6 until well after the fact, so FF8 was the first time that summons were meaningfully and tangibly part of the narrative. I thought they were really dope, and they looked incredible back in 1999. I abused the eff out of them because they felt like win-now-buttons. And it wasn't until the missile silo mission that forced me to really reevaluate how I played the game. Since that section's time limit really makes using GFs unwise. The way FF8 skill-checks the player at multiple points is very interesting, if a bit brutal at times.
 
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