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Any FF that uses real-time combat is not a real FF game. The series died with X.
Are those two separate, unrelated statements? XII and XIII both had turn based combat.
Yknow what, I can get behind this. Only FF I’ve played through since X was XIV.
FF7 is laughably overrated.
The best Final Fantasy game is the one Final Fantasy game I played as a kid.
Not for me, I was already on my 5th FF game and well into my 20’s when 9 came out and that one is by far my favorite.
It matured the 3Dish visual style to a point it’s still perfectly playable today (while 7 just looks awful and klunky now) and I enjoyed the gameplay and story above all others.
Every time I try to play 8, I abandon it after a few hours. The story and characters just don’t do it for me at all. And not that they just don’t do it for me, most of them annoyed the shit out of me. Only game worse in that regard is X.
It’s literally my least favorite of the mainline games that I’ve played.
This is just true
FF7 is immensely overrated.
Final Fantasy 8 is clearly the best.
The junctioning system is super fun!
It is totally not impossible to find General Caroway under that arch to continue the dialogue to progress the game. I definitely wasn’t stuck that way for years!
I don’t know if 8 is the best. It is really good, but I think 9 and 12 are up there too.
12 is pretty good for reals, but fight me!
I press x a bunch.
I press Square a bunch.
It really is good. I should play it again. Even got the remaster on PC.
Yeah that’s the one I like to play. I fucked up thinking I preferred the talent board from original PS2 version and used a mod to get it back. Then I realized the zodiac thing is so much better and started all over. I’ve never gotten the chance to finish the game though and don’t even have a PC now.
IIRC I finished it back in the PS2 days. I haven’t managed to play through the Zodiac version yet and am currently playing Octopath Traveler, which I want to finish before starting to play another JRPG.
I don’t mind the job boards of either version, both is absolutely fine with me.
The games are soundtrack simulators. Nobuo Uetmastu is heart and soul of the series. The rest is just packaging for it.
Jobs and materia are fun to play around with though.
Soken is good, idk about this other guy though.
It really is a core part of the vibes and tone of the series. Even the ones with no story to speak of and/or bad old turn-based gameplay had the good music, design, etc.
Well that certainly is a hot take.
All Final Fantasy games have bad writing and cringe inducing dialogues. Which was fine when the games had no voice audio, but I just can’t stand it in the modern FF with voice overs. Square Enix really needs to hire competent writers that aren’t solely influenced by manga.
FF9 had better characters and story than FF7
FF8 was underrated and deserved better
100%
My problems with IX are slow combat. My problems with VII are everything else.
agreed; this doesn’t mean i hate 7 though (it’s only of my favourites); i just think the emotional depth and growth of the ff9 cast - both antagonists and protagonists - is that good.
plus freya is probably the best character in ff history
The real combat is handling the hours of screen swirls and camera flying uselessly around the battlefield along the way. Otherwise, it would be a fantastic game.
Final Fantasy 2 (actual 2 not the one with Cecil) is way underrated. Its got a dialogue system like Morrowind, skills that get better as you use them, a fantastic villian, and great story beats. Its also the first game to have Cid. Also also people love FF for the mix of fantasy and tech and 2 is the first game to really embrace that theme. 1 has a one off robot and the airship, but 2 really shows the empire abusing technology to retain power.
SPOILERS SPOILERS [people love 6 because the world gets messed up, but 2 did it first with the empire destroying several cities] END OF SPOILERS
And you have talking beavers and I think thats great.
The music is also great! I think people hate it because they try and min-max the combat and not just enjoy it for what it is.
I enjoyed it more after I played SaGa, felt like an earlier version of that idea, really underrated, the only people that really have genuine hate are probably japanese since it was quite bugged at release, but westerners played the mobile or psp ports of it that are fixed, it’s a good game.
I had to scroll a bit but I found a fellow cultured fellow. I have FF2 on multiple platforms and not only do I agree with everything you said, but it makes me very sad that its system never got to be developed further in FF games. I love replaying it because I can focus on different play styles each time. Beyond some moments of grinding (like getting certain spells to drop or leveling select spells) the game/story is short and sweet. Also, one of the things I love so very, very much about FF2 (and 3 for this reason): so many enemies in one battle. I love prioritizing enemies or just AOEing, sometimes unloading just to survive or being very methodical so to conserve spells/MPs (depending on the version). Lastly, I love how good support is: control, buffing, debuffing - it’s all solid. If I hated anything, I’d say that some versions has odd status healing/preventing.
The last good Final Fantasy game was 9.
That is a hot take because X is great.
Ever since they changed to square enix, they started sucking,
Emet-Selch isn’t hot. Y’all just have shitty taste in men.
Romanticising his pain over losing Amaurot and those he loved. You know, even though he played a part in sacrificing Amaurot and its citizens, and the untold damage he’d done since with his machinations, never mind part played in the Seven and further attempted Calamities/Rejoinings. But yeah, knock-off Captain Ardyn Sparrow is hot.
Lightning Returns is a great game.
I mean, it should have been called Second Strike for one thing.
FFXIII was best on its own and should not have been a trilogy, but agreed.
Nostalgia creates some massive rose-tinted glasses.
I’ve used to love FFVIII as a teenager and decided to buy it again for the Switch last year, but I legit couldn’t progress more than a ten-minute-interval without either cringeing at the characters or being angry about them in some way. Why are they all so edgy? Why are their decisions always so incredibly stupid? I eventually realized that the characters are basically what a 12 year old would consider to be cool adults when in reality they’re absolutely immature in every aspect.
I really really tried to complete at least one playthrough again in the hopes that it would eventually get better, but snapped when the oh-so-mighty martial arts character, who had been showing off his melee skills in every effing cutscene, flat-out forgot that he has been fighting literal demons with his bare hands for the entire effing game only to realize AFTER a multiple day long imprisonment that he could just slap the guards around without having to get a weapon first. FFS how do you forget such a thing for longer than a week?!
I guess the same kinda applies to FFVII because everyone I know who had played the game when it initially released still thinks it’s THE best FF game to date and they’re usually very very vocal about that opinion, and everyone who didn’t play it “back in the day” just couldn’t understand what was so great about it. I’m in the latter group BTW. I’m all for letting people enjoy what they want and I won’t try to ruin anyone’s fun with a game they like, but I am convinced that a huge portion of that hype is nothing more than nostalgia.
I feel the same way. Loved it as a teen. Possibly because the characters were just like teenagers.
It’s pretty cringe as a 38 year old trying to play through them again. And I definitely am not going to play for the gameplay. Even as a teen, I only played these for the stories because the combat is boring as fuck.
And yet… Nostalgia hits like crazy. And, uh, Chrono Trigger still holds up, unlike most Final Fantasies.
Edit: Final Fantasy 7’s remake is still kinda cringe with the dialogue and made for teens, but the gameplay is so different and there is also a cool twist going on with the story that it’s actually more fun than the original to me, and I loved it when it was new.
Chrono Trigger is an absolute classic ♥ even today it’s still one of my favorite SNES games, along with Secret of Mana, Lufia, Terranigma and A Link to the Past. I still replay some of these every other year.
I guess the same kinda applies to FFVII because everyone I know who had played the game when it initially released still thinks it’s THE best FF game to date and they’re usually very very vocal about that opinion, and everyone who didn’t play it “back in the day” just couldn’t understand what was so great about it. I’m in the latter group BTW. I’m all for letting people enjoy what they want and I won’t try to ruin anyone’s fun with a game they like, but I am convinced that a huge portion of that hype is nothing more than nostalgia.
As someone who was around then, it’s hard to explain just how revolutionary the game was at the time to someone who wasn’t there to witness it first hand.
Though, FFVII is my favorite of the FFs, so there’s that too.
I feel similar about Ocarina of Time. Still one of my favorite Zelda games, and absolutely revolutionary for the time it was published in, but horribly outdated compared to basically everything that exists today. Since almost every 3D game today has stuff like Z-targeting and companion NPCs giving in-game hints and context-sensitive buttons and the like, there is nothing new and baffling about that game to someone who is already used to these gimmicks and concepts being the bare minimum standard.
To be fair Squall was handled badly here, I think legends of localization had a piece about it. Localization wasn’t great back then, it was actually even worse, we just didn’t have original voiced dialogues to confirm discrepancies.
I have two. First, I’m in the VIII > VII camp. To be fair, I played FF8 before playing FF7 (though I’ve been playing FF since V), so the downgrade in visuals really hurt. I also don’t get what’s the deal with the Squall hate. Sure, he’s a bit whiney at the beginning, but you can really feel his growth. Same with his relationship with Rinoa (that’s her name, right?). I could see those two falling with each other in a more believable way than other jrpg ships.
Second one, V is better than VI. Sure, VI has higher production value, and arguably a better story, but the class system in 5 was top jrpg system in the snes era. I also felt more closely attached to the small cast of V rather than with the gigantic cast of VI (I honestly cried in the aftermath of Galuf vs Exdeath). Again, V was my first FF, so that may be nostalgia talking. Though I recently replayed with a patch that improves the class system, and it was a banger of a game. Plus, Battle on the Big Bridge.
Feel free to fight me.
ATB is the worst turn based system in any game.
My people.
It really is the worst of both worlds.
I’ll accept ATB as a compromise and an attempt to jazz up a basic turn based system, a product of its time. I think X2 had a fun take on it with attack chains and different abilities having different casting/cool down times to consider. My ideal is deep turn based combat I need to take my time thinking about.
The worst for me are the action games, personally. I play Devil May Cry and like it, but that’s not what I want the flagship JRPG series to be. There are lots of places to get great action games, I don’t need Final Fantasy to chase trends.
I haven’t seen anything done with ATB a simple dynamic turn order wouldn’t do better. Not only do I strongly dislike any kind of time pressure, you also get rid of the wait time between turns.
Maybe X2 does something a simple dynamic turn order could not, I honestly don’t know. I got the game for free when buying X and only played it for like 10 minutes. After coming out of X thinking it had the best battle system out of any FF yet, I quit X2 after the first battle just for going back to ATB. That being said, I’d rather go back and try X2 again instead of playing XVI. I completely agree on action gameplay in FF being worse.
It’s not turn based
FF12 had the most incomprehensible story in all the main lines.
I like to refer to it as “the Star Wars one”. I could never keep all the Judges straight, the static in all of the voice actor recordings was horrible, and the main cast felt pointless. They were just an audience to the political intrigue and I couldn’t care less. Legitimately couldn’t tell you what the plot is about. Fran’s buttocks carried me through to finishing it.
VIII > VII
I don’t know if I’d quite go that far, but VIII is hella underrated.
100%!
I haven’t played all of them, but I am still obsessed with VIII. I don’t think I have played an RPG more than that game. Closest is probably Baldur’s Gate 3, but I have a long way to go still. I could never bring myself to play a game more than once, if I finished it at all, and that was the first RPG as a kid, and as an adult, I had the patience to sit and play all the way through and then some.
