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

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maskedanddanger said:
Gotta post Jacob Gellar's video on how much Midgar fucks.
(Slight spoiler visuals)


View: https://youtu.be/hQAQ92dsOw4
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Ah, yes, another Jacob Geller appreciator. Beard Man does some of the best video game essays on YouTube.

CeBrudras said:
Somehow it's weird to see someone within our subculture here be openly horny about a woman who has, like, yet to commit any warcrimes.
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Look. Listen. I saw the Advent Children Tifa vs Loz fight and Mounty Oum's Dead Fantasy when I was young and it had a profoundly formative effect on me.

Etranger said:
Omi, did you not make the connection that the Avalanche trio were the ones who stole their clothes? Were you distracted by your Tifa appreciation?
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Pffft. What? Obviously I made the connection. It's obvious. Who would miss that? Hahaha.

McFluffles said:
I'll be honest, the main thought standing out for me in this entire sequence was just "Barry please you have a machine gun on your arm, just start spray and praying Mr President doesn't even have any guards." But I guess talking is a free action.
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As a matter of fact, one change the Remake does here is that President Shinra appears to Avalanche as a holographic projection from a bunch of drones, and Barret does in fact shoot said drones to disrupt his evil monologue.

illhousen said:
I think I would be OK if the whole "world map" for FFVII was just Midgar. Certainly, so far at least it feels big and deep enough to sustain a game.
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Which it does! In the Remake! :V

This is often said but this is the dual-edged sword of the Remake, its great idea and its great limitation. Pretty much the whole game takes place in Midgar. You run around the slum doing sidequests, seeing first hand how people live, you visit the top plate, you encounter a bunch of the social aspects of the society Shinra has shaped... It's a 40 hour game, and all of it is dedicated to Midgar. It's genuinely an incredible deep look at the city. And, also, it means the game ends pretty much where the original begins.

SerGregness said:
Three Seagrass is going to be so disappointed.
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I think this is genuinely the first time in my life someone gets me and Cheh mixed up. Fun fact: I actually never finished Memory of Empire!

Kadmus said:
I mean, SOLDIERs might just be not deployed within Midgar? You don't need your supersoldiers running around in your centre of power unless things have gone extremely wrong, you should have enough mook skullbreakers to do the job as-is. We see militarised police in the first Mako reactor, and a bunch of like, experiments and monsters and robots? In the second one, so it's implied there that the reactors are just, well, guarded by Not Supersoldiers. Which makes sense, given the reactors are supposed to be in the city Shinra runs as its private fief. You want your military pointed outwards, normally.

Plus it's sort of implied they aren't exactly, uh, reliable, given we've seen one confirmed traitor (Cloud) and a dude who murdered someone in the Mako reactor scene with TIfa and who President Shinra describes as 'too brilliant', so that's 2 for 2 on 'maybe not people you want near your headquarters'.
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Hmm, yes. Pending any further revelations later in the storyline, I have internalized this as my new headcanon.

Geckonator said:
Yeah, "magic is equipment" sounds cool as a way to sell the game's themes of modernity, technology, capitalism literally draining the magic from the world to make a usable product...

But it means that you kind of have to "make your own fun" if you want characters to have any kind of mechanical distinction beyond Limit Breaks and the vague suggestion of magic versus physical prowess. It's useful in that it means reconfiguring your party, or being forced into certain parties for story reasons, is low-cost and adaptable, but there's definitely a more advanced version of FF7 out there where maybe party members have different compatibility with Materia or ability to use them to nudge you into more role-playing.
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So, I've talked about the Remake's narrative, but not its mechanics (that was meant to go in the Fakeout First Update where I played through the Remake and pretended to be unaware that this was not in fact the original, which got scrapped when the actual update blew up to 10k words). And the Remake does that! Every character has a unique fighting style. Cloud has sword combos, a sword AoE move, and switches between Operator mode (highly mobile, attacks have more reach) and Punisher Mode (attack speed is faster, attacks deal more damage, Cloud's guard triggers automatic counters). Barret is a ranged fighter with massive HP and damage-reduction technique, who draws fire away from allies while flexibly targeting enemies over the battlefield, using a rechargeable Overdrive move to stagger enemies. And Tifa is a very fast, very mobile single-target attacker who uses melee combos to build up Chi and spend it on special moves, as well as using her incredible Speed stat to build ATB gauges so she can unleash special abilities, spells and items at a very fast rate.

It's interesting but it's also completely unlike anything within the era of Final Fantasy this LP is still concerned with, being effectively more of an Action RPG. This means player opinions on it are... divided on two axis, "Do I think this shift is a good idea in the first place" and "How well do I think this specific game executes that formula"?
 
Clearly the only materia you need is Crit and Direct Hit, maybe with some Determination.

Omicron said:
But it's interesting - the 'look in your eyes' President Shinra mentions is more explicit in later, 3D takes on the character, where Cloud's eyes have a particular, vivid blue-green color that you wouldn't necessarily think is unnatural on its own but which becomes obvious once you know to look for it in both Cloud and Roche. I take it this is their super-soldier program's secret - direct exposure to Mako energy providing enhanced capabilities.
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When I first played FFVII, I had the impression that Mako came from the ground, was supremely important to the basis of current civilization, gave people superpowers, and turned their eyes blue.

I was thus thinking of SOLDIER as some kind of corporate security Fremen.
 
Omicron said:
I think this is genuinely the first time in my life someone gets me and Cheh mixed up. Fun fact: I actually never finished Memory of Empire!
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A Memory Called Empire is pretty great, I actually borrowed it from the local library and read it based almost entirely on Cheh and Tenfoldshields talking it up in the Exalted thread. Makes the slip up all the more embarassing. >.<
 
Omicron said:
Barret is… I'm not sure to what extent the game intends him to be funny as opposed to cool. Like, he's a passionate guy who cares about the planet and has a machine gun for an arm, but also he has a very short temper that's regularly used for comedy in contrast to Cloud's Mr I Don't Care demeanor. I like him, but - the thing is, I played Remake before, and Remake Barret is the Most Charismatic Man To Ever Live. His modeling and voice acting came together in an absolutely outstanding way. If he took off his glasses, stared me in the eye and asked me to help him save the planet I'd be in an Avalanche outfit before I could finish saying 'Yes sir!'

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So I had other things I wanted to comment on but for me this was an interesting scene in the Remake so I'm choosing to focus on it for now, since we're discussing the Remake.

I won't deny at all that Barret is a skilled orator here and indeed quite inspiring. What I will also say is that his speech climaxing with "I will carry all your fears" and justifying the carnage around him, turning around the "my God what have we done" reactions of his followers...is perfectly synched with the crescendo of the Shinra theme. (His "But it's okay" line is said precisely as the crescendo begins!)

And I don't think that was at all a coincidence Square's part. Make of that as you will.
 
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Omicron said:
However, as soon as we are on the bridge above the lower city, Shinra pulls its trap.
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The existance of this trap puts that convenient airvent in a new light. Maybe Shinra added it or moved their security grid just to make sure Avalanche came in. Can't have the president observe them and then sic a giant robot on them if they're unable to get into the building.
 
somewhatLazy said:
Unlike Setzer's slot machine, you choose when to stop the Slot machine by pressing the Select button, so you can deliberately stop it on the "Yeah!" option, which turns it into a guaranteed critical hit, basically doubling Tifa's damage. Her later limit breaks also have a "Miss" option. If you stop on a "Miss" with no "Yeah!", the limit does normal damage and Tifa won't be able to move on to her next limit.
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Correction: what the PC port calls the [OK] button, which is set to X by default. I got it mixed up with the [Select] button because you almost never actually use the [Select] button for anything other than minigames but you use the [OK] button all the time to select commands.
 
Steve said:
I know this is one of the first games to have a huge shipping war involved but I just never felt it, I was always pro-Tifa on that regard, even before I knew what "shipping" was. Then spent years mocking the idea of shipping and plotting torpedo attacks upon them for sport before the Korrasami shippers made my heart grow three sizes one day, but that's another story.
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I was kind of confused to find out about it, because when I played the game

Tifa and Aeris spent all their time together at the amusement park and I ended up on a ride with Barret.

Not intentionally, so much as somehow by accident, I think. And I didn't realize it could have gone differently.
 
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SolipsistSerpent said:
I was kind of confused to find out about it, because when I played the game

Tifa and Aeris spent all their time together at the amusement park and I ended up on a ride with Barret.

Not intentionally, so much as somehow by accident, I think. And I didn't realize it could have gone differently.
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That's incredible. Do you know how hard that is to do organically

I had to get an online guide

Well done
Nottheunmaker said:
And I loved it to bits. That probably puts me in the minority, but I was more then happy to have a full game set in Midgard.
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I think that's more of a squeaky wheel situation.

Is it perfect? No. Is it a work of genius and love for a game-changing game that people have been begging for since the Playstation 2? Yeah.
 
The Airbuster in the Remake is probably one of the finest glowups any of the bosses the game has. It's so cool. It doesn't hurt that the Airbuster boss theme may be one of the best video songs I have ever heard.
 
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crankers said:
The Airbuster in the Remake is probably one of the finest glowups any of the bosses in the game has. It's so cool. It doesn't hurt that the Airbuster boss theme may be one of the best video songs I have ever heard.
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Mighty annoying to clean though, Guad Scorpion was easier to handle.
 
Flare said:
Mighty annoying to clean though, Guad Scorpion was easier to handle.
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I'm actually doing a simulplay of the original alongside this thread and walked into the Airbuster fight with Cloud and Barret on opposite sides of it and limit breaks prepped.

1000 damage each in back attacks. Poor guy.

Edit: Also, the Mako reactor music is absolutely killer.
 
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foamy said:
I'm actually doing a simulplay of the original alongside this thread and walked into the Airbuster fight with Cloud and Barret on opposite sides of it and limit breaks prepped.

1000 damage each in back attacks. Poor guy.

Edit: Also, the Mako reactor music is absolutely killer.
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I was actually talking about Powerwash SImulator, cleaning the Airbuster is one of the jobs in the FF7 DLC.
 
You know how it is; "this place must be cleaned" and "this place must be cleansed" only differ by one letter. Mispronounce it even a little and you have a minicrusade instead of a housecleaning.
 
Omicron said:
Wait, is Texas canon to the Final Fantasy VII setting?

I do not know what to do with that information.
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I mean, Texas has to be canon to Final Fantasy, right?

Ariana Grande is canon to the Final Fantasy multiverse, as is Adam Jensen. Both of these canon Final Fantasy characters plausibly have visited Texas in their lifetime, thus it has to be canon or else there would be a plot hole. I am glad that the intricate and interconnected lore of Final Fantasy explains even these small details if you pay attention to it.
 
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