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

nataeryn said:
My girlfriend, who has a history with games, but not really much familiarity with RPGs wanted to try a final fantasy, since she knows i'm a fan of the series. So, i set her up on FF10.

I felt like the lack of an ATB system means she can take all the time she wants. The voice acting makes the game approachable. With the standard grid, you can't really make any mistakes in leveling. The story is sweet and sad and the characters are well written. The world is easy to navigate and you can't get lost. Most of the random encounters have a simple mechanic like Wakka beats flyers.

In short, i felt like if she only played one FF, 10 would encapsulate a pretty good example of the whole and doesn't really have landmines for people who don't have history with RPG type games.
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I can't at all agree with your logic here. There are certainly games out there which expect you to be coming in with a hell of a lot of genre familiarity. Shooters just assuming you already know how to do weird esoteric movement tech and expect you to constantly be hunting for obscure secrets, Souls-likes assuming you get the rhythm of managing stamina and tight parry windows, fighting games expecting you to know about cancels and common special inputs and all that, but every Final Fantasy game or damn near has always been designed with the assumption it's going to be a lot of people's first RPG, and they generally err on the side of being super easy as the genre goes. You really don't need to worry about easing people in at all, I'd say.
 
I understand that the strategy of blitzball is rarely more involved than "pick the bigger number" but as an in universe sport management sim I enjoyed it to a fairly big degree. While the previous card game minigames did manage to integrate them into the real world as a living component, this is the only one I can think of that allows rpg team building outside of your main cast. That's a really neat feature. I'm a sports management dude so I don't think it's a bore anyway. It's relatively undercooked, as an active game, but it's feasibly interesting if you play to the aspect of stat building. I think the primary difference is whether you are caring about the game as it is itself or if you are caring about it in a stage of team building and levelling players. Real case of "you get out what you invest into".
 
I mostly didn't like blitzball, but I didn't really like Wakka either, so that worked out fine. (Nowadays I can definitely see the piece of narrative perspective we get from having him around, but I still don't really like him.)
 
I don't care for Drownball but I wouldn't call it one of the worst minigames in the franchise. It's not even the worst minigame in FFX!

The chocobo race in the Calm Lands remains one of the worst things I've ever played in my life.
 
Lightning dodging is easy, like a trek through the Calm Lands. Chocobo racing is harrowing, like crossing the Thunder Plains.
 
There is a spot where you can essentially farm lightning bolts to strike on command, which makes the challenge somewhat doable. Both Chocobo games are RNG torture machines. Locking the main character’s best weapon behind a jank-ass mini-game instead of, say, a sidequest of some kind, was a bizarre idea.
 
FFX was where I learned to stop caring about "ultimate weapons" and top-tier gear. Yeah, those minigames were bullshit, and so was locking the best gear behind them. But you don't need them to experience the full breadth of the narrative, or to finish the game. I am a much happier person for having learned that hard lesson back in 2001, even if the way I learned that was straight malarkey.
 
there's absolutely no need to defend the lightning bolts, other minigames can also be bad

the matter at hand is "what's worse than Blitzball," and while I only did a bunch of Blitzball once, I did a bunch of lightning bolts zero times (gave up around 30; even if you can farm it, the world's slowest rhythm game sucks!)
 
Is stuff like this common in the pre-X Final Fantasy games? I’ve had my eye on playing IV and maybe the PS1 entries, and it would be nice to know how much bullshit is in these games, as someone with clinical OCD that felt compelled to obtain and fully power up every Celestial Weapon in FFX.
 
In the traditional sense of the word minigame, they really didn't start in earnest until FF7, which has several. I suppose technically you could call the bits in FF6 where you control multiple parties at once a kind of minigame, but that's not usually what people mean by the term.
 
The only ultimate weapons I've ever gotten in FFX are Yuna's, Auron's, and Rikku's. This is because those are the three that you acquire by actually playing the game.
 
Minigames were not a significant factor in Final Fantasy before FF7, but I believe they all did have something like one, such as the hidden sliding tile puzzle in FF1, or catching fish in FF6.
 
FFVII was very "we've got a new platform and TONS of disc-medium storage space, let's see what we can do" when it came to minigames

And then VIII scaled the random minigames way back (not gone, but fewer) but introduced the "one big mini-game" thing
 
R.R. Bigman said:
Is stuff like this common in the pre-X Final Fantasy games? I’ve had my eye on playing IV and maybe the PS1 entries, and it would be nice to know how much bullshit is in these games, as someone with clinical OCD that felt compelled to obtain and fully power up every Celestial Weapon in FFX.
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Deep in my memory I recall there was a room in FF4 that had Pink Things in them. These Pink Things have Something Good at an absurdly low drop rate. There's lots of that sort of thing, but minigame futsing around is either inoffensive or non-existent pre-7.

However, for your own sanity maybe skip 12. Don't listen to what anybody tells you about a Zodiac Spear. Don't even look it up. Just pretend it doesn't exist.
 
Collecting all of the blue magic is bullshit in 5. But it's absolutely not necessary, like the Pink Tail in 4. I'm actually replaying 9 right now and, umm, it's got some bullshit. I actually really love Chocobo Hot and Cold, but I always, always manage to miss a Mognet letter. And I'm shit at Tetra Master.
 
V and VI both have some ultimate-type gear where you have to *choose* between two things, which gave me undue amounts of anxiety. (In VI I think you can get the unchosen item randomly in the Coliseum, which helped, although obviously I was never actually able to get it to drop.)
 
Isrieri said:
Deep in my memory I recall there was a room in FF4 that had Pink Things in them. These Pink Things have Something Good at an absurdly low drop rate.
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The chance that the Pink Things even appear is also low. (They don't directly have the good thing as a drop - they drop something that you can use to get the good thing.)
 
I like Blitzball. In fact, I think it's my favorite of the FF minigames - it's the only one I've ever continued playing for fun after getting the rewards, although never to the point where late bloomers like the original Aurochs get good. I go straight for Ropp and Brother.

Lokii said:
Yall don't know how to appreciate a fine kawazuism
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I blame Matsuno for the Zodiac Spear more than Kawazu, really. It reminded me a lot of Move/Find Item in FFT randomly giving you trash items if your Brave was too high. But I can imagine Matsuno taking Kawazu out to lunch and being like, look, if I have to resign as director of FFXII, I'm gonna need you to step in and I'm gonna need you to keep the Zodiac Spear exactly the way it is. And Kawazu being like, oh yeah, of course, I wouldn't have it any other way. Wish I'd thought of it myself!
 
The Zodiac Spear itself is likely a callback to the stronger "Javelin" from FFT, which is similarly missable (and is indeed a Move-Find Item), so probably.
 
Blitzball may have been a misfire in execution, but conceptually I still like the idea of FF protagonists each having a sport that they're really into, that keeps distracting them from their quest to save the world or whatever. None of these people have any fucking hobbies! Like maybe Cecil Harvey could be a secret hockey fanatic.

Klu-Ya: My son, you must first face your own dark side. Only then can you receive the holy power of the Paladin.
Cecil: Damn.
Klu-Ya: What?
Cecil: Well, I was kind of hoping for some sort of hockey-based challenge. Look at this crystalline floor in here! This would make a great rink.
Klu-Ya: ...I'm really going to need you to focus up here.
 
gorha said:
I blame Matsuno for the Zodiac Spear more than Kawazu, really. It reminded me a lot of Move/Find Item in FFT randomly giving you trash items if your Brave was too high. B
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So does that mean that Mastsuno is also responsible for hidden items in FFTA?
 
Torzelbaum said:
So does that mean that Mastsuno is also responsible for hidden items in FFTA?
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I had to look up the credits to confirm that Matsuno worked on it, but he was the producer, so yeah, I guess so? Although to be honest I don't even remember hidden items in FFTA... which probably just means I never found them.
 
gorha said:
I had to look up the credits to confirm that Matsuno worked on it, but he was the producer, so yeah, I guess so? Although to be honest I don't even remember hidden items in FFTA... which probably just means I never found them.
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In this case I'm referring to rare weapons you can steal from enemies. They are rare because you need to steal from the enemy and then hope they re-equip the rare hidden item they have instead of the common one you just stole. (The enemy does need to act in order for this to happen.)
 
Oh, that's wild. I did do some stealing in FFTA, but I don't think I ever saw enemies re-equip themselves after getting their stuff stolen.

Wait, so are there hidden abilities, too? That you can only learn from the hidden weapons?
 
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