Imagine the kind of 'Omi make sure to talk to X in Y after Z happens'-posts we would get during a LP about the crystallized narrative hubris that is DQ7. The usually quoted number is 70'000 pages of script.
Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
- Location
- Amman, Jordan
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
Which makes it kind of a shame the DQ series is only mildly known internationally. I mean, it was initially released globally since Squaresoft and Enix were rivals, but then after the 200X merger, Final Fantasy became the "wildly popular abroad" product while Dragon Quest was the "popular at home" one. I mean, a lot of the isekai genre has numerical values and skills taken from JRPGs partially because I think SAO did it first (mostly because it was a MMO, so it at least fit), but then everyone used the same ideas of stats and abilities for their isekai/wish fulfillment fantasy series.
I think I heard it was because the audience that watched or read those kinds of shows tended to be big fans of DQ growing up, and thus would easily recognize the stats-and-abilities system being used, thus making it easier for them to accept the settings presented.
I think I heard it was because the audience that watched or read those kinds of shows tended to be big fans of DQ growing up, and thus would easily recognize the stats-and-abilities system being used, thus making it easier for them to accept the settings presented.
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Enkida
Full Cyborg
- Location
- Germany
Just popping into this thread to say much respect if you're still doing it. With much the same background as you, except I'd finished a couple of games (FF1, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, X-2, 12, Tactics) I tried this years ago, and I stopped on either FF2 or FF3. I don't remember which, except it wasn't a PSP game, it was a PS2 game CD. That meant no getting around the grind. I survived for a while by making funny screenshot comics about the grinding, but it quickly wore me down way too much and I had to stop. Getting through the titles to either 5 or 7 - the first ones that I felt were not just absolute punishment for people who had lives - without a PSP or other modern gaming conversion is a real hats off moment.
To be fair to this LP's continued health, if all the Pixel Remasters had added was the quicksave function that alone would be a massive boon to sidestepping said absolute punishment. FF3 is probably the easiest example, as always: With quicksaves, if you wipe to Dark Cloud you just shrug, reload, and switch up your strategy/hope for better RNG.
Without quicksaves, the last save point is back at the bottom of the Crystal Tower. So you get to spend half an hour going through the hardest dungeon in the game with nonsense like random dragon encounters, fight Xande, get even more nonsense encounters while fighting your way through the dark realm to deal with four more bosses, and then finally wipe to Dark Cloud and lose hours of your life.
Actually, that's going to be a change for Omi to get used to, going forward. From now on the games don't have a quicksave, so losing is always "back to the last save point with you". And to be fair, I think the games are generally pretty good about save point locations (it's certainly no Fromsoft boss runs), but still something of a factor to keep in mind.
Without quicksaves, the last save point is back at the bottom of the Crystal Tower. So you get to spend half an hour going through the hardest dungeon in the game with nonsense like random dragon encounters, fight Xande, get even more nonsense encounters while fighting your way through the dark realm to deal with four more bosses, and then finally wipe to Dark Cloud and lose hours of your life.
Actually, that's going to be a change for Omi to get used to, going forward. From now on the games don't have a quicksave, so losing is always "back to the last save point with you". And to be fair, I think the games are generally pretty good about save point locations (it's certainly no Fromsoft boss runs), but still something of a factor to keep in mind.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Re: Dragon Quest in general, this is kind of unfair of me, but, how to put it...
Even at my most interested in JRPGs (and I've always been a pretty big fan!), I have never managed to muster a shred of interest for DQ. Like, these are massively popular games that have had a tremendous influence on manga/anime that often completely flies past Western audience who haven't played the original source material, they co-evolved with Final Fantasy such that you would really need to play DQ in parallel with FF to really capture the evolution and mutual feeding-on-each-other cycle of Japanese RPGs, and all that, but like...
I hear "The Hero must defeat the Demon Lord!" and I kind of immediately fall asleep. I realize it's not very fair to the games; I've watched Tim Rogers' mammoth Kotaku review of Dragon Quest XI, and it sounded pretty fun! But I closed that review with barely so much as an uptick in my interest in the series. I don't know. I just keep mentally asking where are the mentally troubled teenagers with unreliable backstories, I guess.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
I think they also have a system to marrying waifus? And they pay Toriyama for the art?
I don't know much either, but I also suffer of a case of "but does it has anything interesting at all?"
I don't know much either, but I also suffer of a case of "but does it has anything interesting at all?"
I have this vague feeling that the PC version of FFVIII has quicksaves but I may be wrong.
Geckonator
Occult Materialist
The consistent Toriyama artwork and tonal commitment to the most generic JRPG fantasy worlds possible also turn me off of Dragon Quest. Once you get to VI Final Fantasy becomes famously aesthetically varied which does a much better job conveying "you can get in on any of these even if another one didn't appeal to you."
Funny enough, in the same vein as this thread I sat down a year or two ago thinking about how I'd only ever played DQV and DQIX and decided "hey, what if I binged the entire series start to finish, most of them are on mobile anyways it'll give me something to do." Petered out early in in DQIII sadly, since the early games especially are real light on story and don't have quite the gameplay variety of early Final Fantasy.
The games... aren't exactly generic, I guess, since they're the source of a lot of those tropes that made it generic, but kind of a big batch of vanilla ice cream. Well made games, comfy games, but especially nowadays the market is absolutely saturated with so many other options that put their own unique spins on the premise while you can put Dragon Quest 1 and Dragon Quest 11 side by side and see "yup that sure is still Dragon Quest." The games have a formula, and they pretty much stick to that formula for better or for worse.
I'll hard shill for adding DQV's remake party talk feature to every single JRPG in existence though. Like, holy shit would 99% of the complaints about FFVI characters joining the party then sitting in the background doing jack-all for most of the plot (poor Cyan) be alleviated by "oh yeah here's a button you can press to have party members chime in on the current situation and your surroundings any time you want in the field". Added so much character to my party members, to the point that for the entirety of Act 3 I had "generic guardsman Thomas" in my party just for the commentary of this rando soldier being dragged around to worldshaking events.
Can't speak for others, but yeah part of the main plot of DQV involves the MC getting married, though I can't recall the exact circumstances that turn it into a "but thou must get married to continue the plot". So there's your waifus.
As for the art, yep Toriyama's been drawing everything for... decades, by this point. It's pretty apparent with one glance at some of the character designs. Just look at the Luminary from DQXI, totally just brown-haired Trunks.
Among those few I played:
DQ5 is pretty much FF4 with a less ambitious story and cool timeskips.
DQ9 is just a genuine hole in my memory in a way that is genuinely scary. I could tell you more about the books I didn't read in my classes back then than about this game.
DQ7 has a bunch of cheerful kids continuously stumble into self-contained vignettes where they are just along for the ride.
Not really homogenous, but maybe I got lucky.
Kadmus
Dragon's teeth are surprisingly hard to sow
- Location
- Devon
- Pronouns
- He/Him
DQ is, like, the 'standard fantasy' that Final Fantasy riffs off of to get some of its wilder ideas, IMO. You couldn't have FF without DQ, I don't think, but the conversation is mostly, well, one-sided? You do get some mechanical evolution of the formula - some of the DQ games definitely draw from the Job system, for example, and DQ11 draws a bit from FFX/XIII - but they tend to be much less twisty-turny and far more straightforward and cartoony. Which, you know, they're pretty explicitly marketed for kids first, so that's fine? Final Fantasy really isn't a kids franchise, it's a teen-up franchise.
And that's without getting into other JRPGs that start to come out in this period; the first Star Ocean, for example, released 1996, has mechanics obviously inspired by FFVI's failure to give most of the large cast characterisation. When you enter a town, you can split your party up and go around talking to all of them as they do their own thing. You even get different bits of the ending depending on who you recruit and what your affection levels are like with them.
(Dragon Quest Builders II, on the other hand, is one of the best Minecraft-likes that's been made yet, and most of its ideas should be imported into all other similar games. Yes, I'm still angry whenever I get 90 hours into whichever similar game I'm playing and I still have to go and cut down trees myself, instead of simply having unlocked infinite wood at like hour 2.)
And that's without getting into other JRPGs that start to come out in this period; the first Star Ocean, for example, released 1996, has mechanics obviously inspired by FFVI's failure to give most of the large cast characterisation. When you enter a town, you can split your party up and go around talking to all of them as they do their own thing. You even get different bits of the ending depending on who you recruit and what your affection levels are like with them.
(Dragon Quest Builders II, on the other hand, is one of the best Minecraft-likes that's been made yet, and most of its ideas should be imported into all other similar games. Yes, I'm still angry whenever I get 90 hours into whichever similar game I'm playing and I still have to go and cut down trees myself, instead of simply having unlocked infinite wood at like hour 2.)
GilliamYaeger
M'crazy.
The two that I enjoy the most and the ones that I'd generally recommend anyone to play, 5 and 8, aren't what I'd call stereotypical at all. 5's...kind of hard to explain in detail without spoilers but it's basically about the protagonist's life story as they grow up, get married, start a family etc etc and it's really, really good, and 8 is about a castle guard and the bandit he befriended on the way guarding a cursed king and princess (who were transformed into a goblin and horse respectively) as they all chase down the asshole jester-wizard who pulled a Sleeping Beauty on their castle.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
7 was mentioned earlier, and I definitely recommend it. As mentioned its essentially a series of short stories, but its a well done series of short stories and the party members do get their own story involvement eventually (the protagonist in particular being the strangest changeling fantasy I have ever read). Its also what introduced the party chat feature where party members can chime in with their own opinions on whats going on at any time, and does it quite well.
All the Dragon Quest talk is actually making me mildly curious.
I only played a little bit of IX back on the DS, where I remember being impressed by the production values, but my adventure got derailed by grinding and alchemy mind goblins.
If I were a braver person I might try my own retrospective Let's play series, but I don't know if I have the skills, cash, and guts...
I only played a little bit of IX back on the DS, where I remember being impressed by the production values, but my adventure got derailed by grinding and alchemy mind goblins.
If I were a braver person I might try my own retrospective Let's play series, but I don't know if I have the skills, cash, and guts...
- Location
- Nunya, Arizona
Welp, FF6 down, now omi gets to play the ugly one 
... it's actually kinda' interesting, 'cause it's struck me that I think FF7 is arguably the only mainline FF game where the aesthetics take a notable step backwards in quality. Every one before it, each game was either substantially prettier, or at least not substantially worse, than its predecessor. Same for every one after it. But FF7? It did pretty good relative to its peers, but that's like saying pol pot was better than hitler. Much of it was very much not a pretty game except relative to the even uglier work surrounding it.
It's kinda' hard to put in words how stark the difference between late stage SNES/Genesis spritework and early-era 3d was, back when that was the only choices around, though. There were a few examples that did okay (Super Mario 64 being one of them, as an example), but "okay" compared to late SNES era spritework kinda' sucked. Without having other options, without being able to look to the years of development afterwards, being stuck in the period where devs were transitioning to new hardware and techniques and it largely looked like crap... it was something of a low point in gaming history from the perspective of the player('s eyeballs), at least to me.
It'll be neat to see how that falls out in the LP. I don't think FF7's aged super terribly graphics wise, but that's mostly due to it already being in the sump when it came out, heh.
... it's actually kinda' interesting, 'cause it's struck me that I think FF7 is arguably the only mainline FF game where the aesthetics take a notable step backwards in quality. Every one before it, each game was either substantially prettier, or at least not substantially worse, than its predecessor. Same for every one after it. But FF7? It did pretty good relative to its peers, but that's like saying pol pot was better than hitler. Much of it was very much not a pretty game except relative to the even uglier work surrounding it.
It's kinda' hard to put in words how stark the difference between late stage SNES/Genesis spritework and early-era 3d was, back when that was the only choices around, though. There were a few examples that did okay (Super Mario 64 being one of them, as an example), but "okay" compared to late SNES era spritework kinda' sucked. Without having other options, without being able to look to the years of development afterwards, being stuck in the period where devs were transitioning to new hardware and techniques and it largely looked like crap... it was something of a low point in gaming history from the perspective of the player('s eyeballs), at least to me.
It'll be neat to see how that falls out in the LP. I don't think FF7's aged super terribly graphics wise, but that's mostly due to it already being in the sump when it came out, heh.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
My seemingly-not-shared-by-the-public hot take is that Xenogears, despite the at times awkward camera movement, aged better than FF7, graphics wise. But people seems to prefer the semi-shiny shoebox aesthetic over elaborated sprite work with bieg 3D robocs.
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
People remember FF7 graphically for its FMVs more than its in-engine graphics I think
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think if things were so simple as FFVII and early 3D games looking objectively worse in every way than games late in the previous generations, they wouldn't be remembered so fondly. But I'll have a lot to say on that particular topic when I post my first update, hopefully later this week.
RogueIce
Noctis Æternæ
- Location
- New Lunar Republic, Equestria
I'll disagree with FF7 being ugly. I think it's unfair because IMO it mostly gets stuck with that because of the polygonal character models. The backgrounds hold up well and are quite pretty*, the battle graphics are still good (with the battle sprites being nicely detailed) and the FMVs do their job even if FF8's upped the ante.
I mean sure, compared to the spritework at its pinnacle with late-SNES those blocky characters seem like a downgrade. But the rest of the artwork holds up and is if not better at least on the same level as the spritework, especially with the backgrounds.
*When they want to be. Midgar isn't pretty but then the industrial reactors and slums aren't supposed to be pretty. But they are visually interesting, nonetheless.
I mean sure, compared to the spritework at its pinnacle with late-SNES those blocky characters seem like a downgrade. But the rest of the artwork holds up and is if not better at least on the same level as the spritework, especially with the backgrounds.
*When they want to be. Midgar isn't pretty but then the industrial reactors and slums aren't supposed to be pretty. But they are visually interesting, nonetheless.
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- Location
- England, unfortunately.
- Pronouns
- She/They
FF7's visuals, like a lot of FF7, are the developers working around the limitations of the engine as best they can, and often finding very neat workarounds to it.
7's aesthetic is that of a fantasy based on reality, which was pretty crazy at the time. It wasn't like JRPG's hadn't experimented with these ideas before, or that people didn't want to (Takahashi of Xeno fame having one of the prototype plots for FF7 is well known), but it was the first time where it was made blatant form the word go.
I do have thoughts on the consequences this has had decades on, but I'll be saving those for now.
7's aesthetic is that of a fantasy based on reality, which was pretty crazy at the time. It wasn't like JRPG's hadn't experimented with these ideas before, or that people didn't want to (Takahashi of Xeno fame having one of the prototype plots for FF7 is well known), but it was the first time where it was made blatant form the word go.
I do have thoughts on the consequences this has had decades on, but I'll be saving those for now.
Connelly
As useless as a penguin with mittens
- Location
- Salamanca, Spain
I'd like to say there's a difference between something being ugly/pretty and how well/badly it ages, and their correlation to other aspects of that something to be remembered one way or another.
I'm sure FFVII has a fair number of non-graphical aspects that led people to remember it fondly, and there are graphical aspects like the CGI and background that do look good, and the rest are a consequence of having to work around limitations. But I don't think pointing out that its non-combat 3D models aren't the best thing in the game, even after considering the previously mentioned points, is a grave offense or anything.
I'm sure FFVII has a fair number of non-graphical aspects that led people to remember it fondly, and there are graphical aspects like the CGI and background that do look good, and the rest are a consequence of having to work around limitations. But I don't think pointing out that its non-combat 3D models aren't the best thing in the game, even after considering the previously mentioned points, is a grave offense or anything.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Alright, that's enough now, we can talk about it after FFVII is actually current to this thread
Alright, that's enough now, we can talk about it after FFVII is actually current to this thread
OK, so, based on your experience with FFV-VI, how would you have done the blue magic? What would be the ideal that still preserves the basic idea behind it without being frustrating to play?
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
A fascinating question!
I guess it depends how experimental I'm willing to go with it, and also, like... I'm not a game designer. I don't know what works, I can only take shots in the dark.
The least disruptive change I would make is this: Add to Libra the extra function that it reveals if the target knows any Blue Magic, and if it does, its name. Then add Libra to the Blue Magic list as a default spell known by all BLU. That way, you have an in-game, lore-appropriate, convenient way of checking if any enemy has something worth learning.
It doesn't fix the "you have to know that you're going to want to learn Blue Magic going into a boss fight" issue, so it's not completely ideal, but especially with FFV's flexible ability system it's a good start - you can just put Learn on your White Mage, since they also know Libra.
Going one step further, I would introduce a Coax command; its effect is that, if the target has a Blue Mage spell, it must use its next turn casting it. This means you don't need the complex setup with a Blue Mage and Beastmaster/Relm with Control, your BLU is self-sufficient, and it also has a secondary function as battle control, since you can force the enemy to use a certain spell on a certain turn. Not sure how to make it interact with blue magic like White Wind that heals the other side instead of targeting yours, though.
If I were doing a more in-depth rework, I'd just change the spread and signaling of Blue Magic spells. Instead of being a secret treasure hunt that you need luck or a guide for, blue magic spells are constrained to specific, recognizable opponents in each region and strongly signaled; so for instance you walk into a town and you read the legend of Cactuar, the living cactus that throws a thousand needles, which can be mastered. Then you know whether that's a blue spell you want and so equip your BLU going into the desert, or it's not and then you don't. The key is that I would put this signaling in focus, and everywhere. Every town has some variant of a "Hunting Board" that tells you exactly what Blue Magic is in the region, which monster has it, and at least a hint of what it does.
The truly radical alternative is Dark Souls Boss Souls. Simply put, blue magic does not in any way work the way it currently does where a smattering of bosses and random monsters have blue magic spells you must be hit by to learn. Instead, bosses (and boss-type special random encounters like the Warmech) drop a "boss soul" type item which you can then forge into a blue magic spell which corresponds to that boss's most iconic ability, and which a Blue Mage can equip/learn.
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- Location
- Sweden
One way could be to have learning work like how XIV does it, where you just need to see the enemy cast a given attack during a fight to learn it after beating them, rather than needing to actually get hit by it. Would also alleviate the issue of learning spells like Lv 5 Death where you suddenly need to keep the party at staggered levels to acquire it.