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Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Playing: Final Fantasy IX]

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I will say, I think the Pixel Remasters and FF7 Remake really help define the two terms that for a while were used almost interchangeably.
Remaster = take a game, update it, keep it as you remembered it through the nostalgia glasses.
Remake = take a game, update it, re-imagine it.
I think both have their place, and that you could do both with the same game. The Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee games were Remakes of Red and Blue/Green, but I'd still like a Remaster of the 1st gen games. I'm not sure emulation/ports count as a remaster.
 
I won't lie, all the talk of the Remake that is literally based on an interrogation of the original game's text seems like it should go in that shiny new spoiler thread that got put up recently.
 
Egleris said:
That indeed seems like the best approach, yes. I am a bit surprised at the sheer amount of information there, but there's still plenty which you didn't mention, and I think at least a couple surprises, so I'll be looking forwards to those. Plus, experiencing the game is always different from having heard from it, like the FFVI issue with knowing in advance that Kefka's destroys the world proved.
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The thing about my knowledge of FF7 is that while I never played the game in full, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children came out back when my teenaged self thought the idea of a fully CGI movie was inherently peak cinema and was also desperately hungry for high-octane anime battles in something that looked relatively close to live action, so I immediately pounced on it. If you've seen Advent Children, you'll know that the film is pretty much incomprehensible without knowing the plot of FF7, and so I was constantly asking for details and explanations to my friend who was also watching it at the same time and had played the game. So I learned a lot of things that were necessary to understanding AD's plot, such as it is, and little else. Add in just existing within the periphery of JRPGs as a medium and their fans, which taught me a bunch of other, disparate details, and then FF7 Remake, which I bought at launch thinking it was a straightforward remake of the first parts of the original and was blindsided by the metatextual aspects - although I did find it a very satisfying experience even with that factor - and you have my selectively in-depth and very shallow knowledge of the game's plot.

Space Oddity said:
I won't lie, all the talk of the Remake that is literally based on an interrogation of the original game's text seems like it should go in that shiny new spoiler thread that got put up recently.
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But also, this, in case my previous post hinting at this wasn't clear enough.
 
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Worth noting is that Advent Children, IIRC, draws as much on fanon interpretations of characters as it does the OG itself, so don't necessarily take it as a 1:1 guide to what to expect
 
Omicron said:
If you've seen Advent Children, you'll know that the film is pretty much incomprehensible without knowing the plot of FF7
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I bought it when it came out, yes, mostly because I just like anime fights and the graphics were more than good enough; I do think there was less fighting then the price tag promised, but it's fine for what it is. This does explains your knowledge pretty neatly, although I think that means you know FF7 most famous spoiler, since that's a plot point in Advent Children; you didn't mention it in your summary though.

And of course, if you played the Remake, then you'll also know most of what happens in the first few parts of the game... although, that might make for an interesting angle you could take! I've said in this thread before that I disagree that the Remake added enough to the original game to justify itself, so I'd love it if you could do a comparison as you went along, to determine whether I'm right that the additions (in terms of characterization and narrative, primarily) were minimal, or whether the people who say that it expanded a lot on the original are correct.

It seems like a great chance to explore the meaning of remaking an old title, and considering this thread was given birth by the remaster of the old titles, it might even fit with the thread's theme, right?

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I agree with this:

Zap Rowsdower said:
Worth noting is that Advent Children, IIRC, draws as much on fanon interpretations of characters as it does the OG itself, so don't necessarily take it as a 1:1 guide to what to expect
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Alternate character interpretation was strong in that movie, but then, it's very common in the whole FFVII compilation; nearly all of the spin-offs, prequels and sequels take liberties enough with the original characterization that I feel it contributed to a lot of misunderstanding about the game. I'm really looking forward to see what you'll make of it when you compare what you've overheard about the characters from pop cultural osmosis with what they're actually like.
 
Egleris said:
I bought it when it came out, yes, mostly because I just like anime fights and the graphics were more than good enough; I do think there was less fighting then the price tag promised, but it's fine for what it is. This does explains your knowledge pretty neatly, although I think that means you know FF7 most famous spoiler, since that's a plot point in Advent Children; you didn't mention it in your summary though.
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Common knowledge of it is so widespread that I utterly forgot it was even worth mentioning, yes. Although for the sake of consistency we'll treat it as any other spoiler within this thread.
 
Omicron said:
If you've seen Advent Children, you'll know that the film is pretty much incomprehensible without knowing the plot of FF7
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Having played FF7 I could argue this is still the case. :V

Zap Rowsdower said:
Worth noting is that Advent Children, IIRC, draws as much on fanon interpretations of characters as it does the OG itself, so don't necessarily take it as a 1:1 guide to what to expect
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Probably a little off-topic, but I wonder how much of that is the translation vs. the original Japanese. Because it's fairly well known that FF7 had an interesting translation, at least for the initial release which most US fans of that generation would know it the best.
 
I guess now's as good a time as any to drop my favorite little bit of FF7 development trivia. Very early in production, the game was actually intended to be a detective story based in New York City. This was obviously shelved, but the idea lived on. Midgar is a big fantasy noir dieselpunk city, FF8 has scrapped characters from 7's development and leans even harder into the "modern fantasy" aesthetic, and Parasite Eve is essentially the initial concept of a scifi horror fantasy detective story set in modern day NYC and it's amazing.
 
My own favourite bit of FF7 trivia is how the dev team listened to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless so much while working on it than they named an in-universe theatre play after it.
Makes me wonder why the game's soundtrack didn't have more Shoegaze influence then? Though I suppose Shoegaze would be a pretty difficult music genre to imitate with just PS1 MIDI
 
While I try to carve out some time out of my holiday preparation to do my last couple effort posts on FFVI, I just remembered that I linked 8-bit music theory earlier on in the thread, and he also had a three video series about FFVI, but we were pretty early in the LP then and I didn't want to spoil anything.

No problem with that now, though!


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBFD1Oqbhg0


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyKxKagJ4UM


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbeXHTDVX8c

These videos are from before the Pixel Remaster, so it's exclusively using the SNES version of the soundtracks.
 
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I'm now all caught up to the FF3 LP, and noticed you speculated that Moebius could've been a likely influence on Amano. It wouldn't be a surprise if he was, since Moebius was apparently pretty popular in Japan back in the 80s, e.g., Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), and Hisashi Eguchi (Stop!! Hibari-kun, an early transgender manga) all took heavy influence from him, to the point where Moebius named his daughter Nausicaa. So Amano being inspired by him would be no surprise.

Though just looking through Moebius' Wikipedia page, it might be quicker to list the people not influenced by him
 
FF 7 is where I have heard enough of the game's story, enough that I imagine what would be incredible moments of plot have been spoiled years in advance.

I'm not sure how much of that (spoilers simply through internet osmosis) affected the prior games.
 
Huh, in a weird bit of... what's the term for that thing where you learn a new word and then hear it again in 24 hours? Anyway, this came across one of my socials today:



Can anyone with knowledge of the Deep Lore of Final Fantasy back this one up or not? Neat that those games were finished in my hometown if true. :V
 
SerGregness said:
Huh, in a weird bit of... what's the term for that thing where you learn a new word and then hear it again in 24 hours? Anyway, this came across one of my socials today:



Can anyone with knowledge of the Deep Lore of Final Fantasy back this one up or not? Neat that those games were finished in my hometown if true. :V
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Yeah, dude's got a wikipedia page and the anecdote is cited:

Article:
Mielke, James; Hironobu Sakaguchi. "Interview with Hironobu Sakaguchi". Electronic Gaming Monthly. No. 232. [...] So for Final Fantasy II and III, our staff actually brought all the equipment, everything that was necessary to finish those games, to Sacramento, because (Gebelli) couldn't come back to Japan. [...] We finished Final Fantasy II and III in Sacramento, California. [Laughs]


Pretty cool!
 
Having finished reading the FFIV LP here, you know who Edward reminds me of? Shinji from Evangelion, although mostly in terms of fan reception (though I guess there are a couple of in-universe similarities). Both Edward and Shinji were loathed back in the day for similar reasons, only for people in hindsight to realise that neither character is actually that bad when you consider the situation they're in.
Granted, there's also the issue of Edward in gameplay (though I hear this is remedied depending on the version you're playing).

Huh, you know what I just realised? Tobias from Animorphs is also kinda similar to Shinji, being a shy and unconfident child soldier (a term I use since both NGE and Animorphs explicitly make that comparison), yet he was beloved by fans from the start, unlike Shinji or Edward who only later got re-evaluated. Well, re-evaluated in the US in Shinji's case, as I hear he was always popular in Japan, not sure about how Edward/Gilbert was received back in FF's home country
 
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ArlequineLunaire said:
Having finished reading the FFIV LP here, you know who Edward reminds me of? Shinji from Evangelion, although mostly in terms of fan reception (though I guess there are a couple of in-universe similarities). Both Edward and Shinji were loathed back in the day for similar reasons, only for people in hindsight to realise that neither character is actually that bad when you consider the situation they're in.
Granted, there's also the issue of Edward in gameplay (though I hear this is remedied depending on the version you're playing).

Huh, you know what I just realised? Tobias from Animorphs is also kinda similar to Shinji, being a shy and unconfident child soldier (a term I use since both NGE and Animorphs explicitly make that comparison), yet he was beloved by fans from the start, unlike Shinji or Edward who only later got re-evaluated. Well, re-evaluated in the US in Shinji's case, as I hear he was always popular in Japan, not sure about how Edward/Gilbert was received back in FF's home country
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Tobias was also a really cool bird, which likely outwieghed any other character traits in the minds of the predominantly young target audience..
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
Having finished reading the FFIV LP here, you know who Edward reminds me of? Shinji from Evangelion, although mostly in terms of fan reception (though I guess there are a couple of in-universe similarities). Both Edward and Shinji were loathed back in the day for similar reasons, only for people in hindsight to realise that neither character is actually that bad when you consider the situation they're in.
Granted, there's also the issue of Edward in gameplay (though I hear this is remedied depending on the version you're playing).

Huh, you know what I just realised? Tobias from Animorphs is also kinda similar to Shinji, being a shy and unconfident child soldier (a term I use since both NGE and Animorphs explicitly make that comparison), yet he was beloved by fans from the start, unlike Shinji or Edward who only later got re-evaluated. Well, re-evaluated in the US in Shinji's case, as I hear he was always popular in Japan, not sure about how Edward/Gilbert was received back in FF's home country
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Tobias wasn't aimed at anime fan teenage boys, that's a huge distinction between the two situations. Angry 15 year old boys who wanna see explosions do _not_ want their power fantasy ruined by someone pointing out how fucked it is.

nor do angry 40 year olds who should know better but I am being charitable and assuming most of the rage was from actual teenagers.

Tobias was written for kids aged 10 to 15, who are choosing to read for fun, not because they're being forced to, in a series marketed as being fundamentally about the child soldier stuff, kids fighting aliens and getting worn down by violence was part of the pitch. Animorphs was Red Dawn for kids, making a point about warfare and stress and being a cool alien conspiracy series.

It wasn't aimed at a demographic primed for the same sort of toxic masculinity, it wasn't aimed at people who would refuse to think on sheer principle because they want their cartoons shut up stop preaching, it wasn't aimed at people who had gotten a million similar meals before and expected the recipe to be followed to the letter.

Make an R-rated 90s Animorphs anime series in the same target zone and audience, and you'd have those same people hating Marco for being such a coward, why's he bitching, turn into the gorilla and rip more arms off, dammit, that's why we're here!
 
Kaiya said:
Tobias wasn't aimed at anime fan teenage boys, that's a huge distinction between the two situations. Angry 15 year old boys who wanna see explosions do _not_ want their power fantasy ruined by someone pointing out how fucked it is.

nor do angry 40 year olds who should know better but I am being charitable and assuming most of the rage was from actual teenagers.

Tobias was written for kids aged 10 to 15, who are choosing to read for fun, not because they're being forced to, in a series marketed as being fundamentally about the child soldier stuff, kids fighting aliens and getting worn down by violence was part of the pitch. Animorphs was Red Dawn for kids, making a point about warfare and stress and being a cool alien conspiracy series.

It wasn't aimed at a demographic primed for the same sort of toxic masculinity, it wasn't aimed at people who would refuse to think on sheer principle because they want their cartoons shut up stop preaching, it wasn't aimed at people who had gotten a million similar meals before and expected the recipe to be followed to the letter.

Make an R-rated 90s Animorphs anime series in the same target zone and audience, and you'd have those same people hating Marco for being such a coward, why's he bitching, turn into the gorilla and rip more arms off, dammit, that's why we're here!
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Heh. It's kind of funny how said demographic missed the point of Shinji - hell, of Evangelion as a whole. Yes, the whole thing was Hideaki Anno having a prolonged nervous breakdown and going into equal parts emo mode and existential philosophizing, but Evangelion was meant to be a deconstruction of the Giant Mecha genre as a whole. The hero isn't a hot-blooded badass who quickly gets into the stride of things, he's a messed up kid with family issues up the ass that mess him up more than help him along. The mecha are basically Super Robots (Mazinger, Grendizer, etc...) in the sense of being rare combat Mcguffins in themselves, but are used and treated as Real Robots (Gundam, Full Metal Panic!) in terms of repairs, logistics, and assorted support required to run them.

Of course, the audience that watched said show in the 1990s missed the point because they too were young teenagers, who were too young and/or immature to get the point, so naturally got pissed off at Shinji for being a whiny bitch (which, to be fair, he totally is, but that was the point).
 
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Evangelion being a "deconstruction" of mecha is sort of a bad fan hype pitch that's persisted as a very surface level take for decades now.

The mecha genre had been exploring more nuanced psychological consequences to the fantasy of a young boy piloting a war machine for years before Eva. Years before Gundam even, in some readings. Evangelion was less a refutation of tradition than a fulfillment of it, spending way more time on Shinji's psychological condition and having a finely honed aesthetic and directorial vision to sell that concept.
 
I wouldn't say people went into NGE not expecting a deconstruction, given the series being called a deconstruction (regardless of how well that term may apply) is one of the first things people hear about the show. That said, I could easily picture people hearing 'deconstruction' and expecting a protagonist more along the lines of Rorschach (or their imagined version of Rorschach anyway), whereas Shinji's more Nite Owl if he's any Watchmen character.

Anyway, reading back through the FF4 LP, I now have a whole new Doctor Who comparison. Namely, how Dark Knights are described weirdly made them sound a lot like a medieval fantasy version of Cybermen to me, in how their armour's grafted onto them, how they eventually lose their flesh body (more in FF3 than FF4, but still), and especially how they end up losing all their emotions, even if Cecil's more resistant than most (though we've seen people resist the emotionless of Cyber-conversion in DW too). And Zemus mind controlling Golbez and others through him could be compared to the Cybermen being a hive mind, and like Cybermen trying to convert everyone Zemus/Golbez wants to make more Dark Knights as they're more susceptible to mind control.

The 'anything to survive' part of the Cybermen doesn't quite come through with Dark Knights, as while they're more self-serving compared to Paladins, their main ability damaging them doesn't feel very survivalist. The other big thing about the Cybermen is that they're predicted to be the next stage in humanity's evolution, a big part of what makes them so scary, but that's hardly the case with Dark Knights.

Likely all a coincidence of course, I doubt the Cybermen were an influence on FF's portrayal of Dark Knights, the Borg if anyone would've been a more likely inspiration given the time. I can't think of that many DW influences in Japanese media since while liked it's more a niche show over there, I guess the Time Gate in Sailor Moon sorta looks like TARDIS doors a bit, there's Kyon calling himself 'John Smith' (...even though he's in Japan) in Haruhi, and there's that one Tokusatsu villain (in Godzilla I think?) clearly modelled after the First Doctor.

Edit: Also, while there are definite similarities, to me it's weird to compared Animorphs and Red Dawn given the works are otherwise on the opposite ends of the political spectrum
 
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Geckonator said:
Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Evangelion being a "deconstruction" of mecha is sort of a bad fan hype pitch that's persisted as a very surface level take for decades now.

The mecha genre had been exploring more nuanced psychological consequences to the fantasy of a young boy piloting a war machine for years before Eva. Years before Gundam even, in some readings. Evangelion was less a refutation of tradition than a fulfillment of it, spending way more time on Shinji's psychological condition and having a finely honed aesthetic and directorial vision to sell that concept.
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A theme showing up in earlier works in the genre doesn't prevent a deconstruction that focuses on said theme from being a deconstruction. (Especially as most of the 'mech pilot is traumatized' storylines were contained within episodes or story arcs, and even perhaps the most sustained look at it, the original Gundam, still had Amuro regularly overcoming his problems to beat his foes.)
 
Talking about Evangelion and FF7 does make me think of Xenogears, what with how much that game's compared to Eva. I once heard Xenogears was based on what FF7 was at one point planned to be, which makes me wonder how different gaming history would've been if Xenogears had ended up being the seventh FF instead of what we got?
 
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ArlequineLunaire said:
Talking about Evangelion and FF7 does make me think of Xenogears, what with how much that game's compared to Eva. I once heard Xenogears was based on what FF7 was at one point planned to be, which makes me wonder how different gaming history would've been if Xenogears had ended up being the seventh FF instead of what we got?
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Well, the cracks about JRPGs all being about killing God would be more accurate, given how deeply and thoughly Xeno draws from Gnosticism for its plot and symbolism.
 
By the way Omi, for PC ff7 I suggest downloading a controller layout from steam as the PC version does not have native controller support. Also the keyboard layout is just awful.
 
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