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

This apartment is also full of 'Source' Items - Mind Source, Luck Source, Guard Source. These are items which permanently enhance the stats of a given character. I… haven't been using them, since I don't have a clear idea who I mean to be my 'endgame' party, if such a thing applies to this game, so they're just piling up in my inventory.

I'm sure it's fine to spend on whoever you like. It's not like the game's going to kill off important characters for real without provodong a mechanically identical replacement or anything.

You know it's weird that Cloud made SOLDIER at 16, right? Like, there have been a lot of subtle implications here and there that SOLDIER candidates are one of two things - non-Shinra individuals with particular potential who've been scouted (and potentially abducted?) by the Turks, and standard Shinra troopers who've trained/graduated to take part in the SOLDIER program. But Cloud can't really be either of those things. First, he's the one who went to Midgar and sought out Shinra, he wasn't scouted by the Turks or identified as having a particular potential. Second, he was sixteen when we saw his flashback with Sephiroth, and while there have been many times in history when armies did recruit 16-years old, this isn't really a feature we associate with modern volunteer armies, so it would be really weird if Cloud had become, like, standard soldier at 14 or 15 and then got all the way to the SOLDIER program through a graduation procedure.

Eh, it's animeland. You can have multiple PhDs at the ripe age of 14 and such. I'm sure it's nothing.

There's no answer. This doesn't make sense, and cannot have happened. It is a pure plot contrivance. You simply have to ignore it and roll with it.

Cloud called them on the phone.

Hmm. Barret is ranting about "How can he be laughing like that"

Horse laugh gets to everyone.

And it only leaves us with more questions.

Our man here just levitated up through the floor. He rose through the ship, hovered in place for a second, and then landed down on the ground.

Levitation I can explain easily. Our dude probably has the Float Materia. Being able to hover dramatically a few feet above the ground is a crucial supervillain skill, and he wouldn't be caught dead without it.

But phasing through floors? Is Sephiroth a ghost? I mean, that would explain some things - the reports of his death were not so exaggerated after all, and he merely stuck around after death. It would be an interesting twist, considering that 'lingering as a spirit to impact the plot' has so far mostly been a Good Guy feature in FF history - we have plenty of undead foes across the series, but their shtick doesn't tend to be 'what if Galuf's ghost was evil.'

But that sword in President Shinra's back looked very much physical. And all the reports we've had of Sephiroth since then have hinted as a man who is extremely powerful, but still bound by the physical limitations of human existence. He goes places, he is seen by people, he engages guards in combat (whom he trivially kills, but he has to fight them), he can be tracked in his movements…

This here is a lot weirder and more disturbing.

What I'm getting out of this section is that Sepiroth is a Dracula.
 
Now, I know what you're thinking: How?

Cloud went up that tower alone. The entire infiltration was Cloud's solo work. He put on a Shinra uniform, he snuck through multiple layers of security, until he got to the heart of Junon Harbour and boarded Rufus Shinra's personal ship, which immediately departed. At which point did he find any way to sneak the other party members onto the ship?

There's no answer. This doesn't make sense, and cannot have happened. It is a pure plot contrivance. You simply have to ignore it and roll with it.
I choose to headcanon that the rest of the crew were also in New Junon doing comedic infiltrator things. It's funnier that way.
I've hit 110 points on the "President's Mood Gauge," which is enough to get the best reward: Force Stealer, a sword which is better than Cloud's previous weapons and appear to have the hidden functionality of providing double AP growth.

Of course 'best' is relative. It's what the game considers 'best', but if we'd merely had 'medium' success, our reward would have been the first HP+ Materia in the game, which as its name says, increases maximum HP. I might have preferred that instead of a weapon that will eventually become obsolete. Ah, well. FF7 minigames: even when you win, you lose.
Here's a question I seriously considered: material rewards aside, would Cloud prefer to mess up on purpose in order to ruin Rufus's day? On one hand, the thought of trying to please that bastard is unpleasant. On the other hand, it could be argued that the potential for added scrutiny falling on cloud and his squadmates if they stand out is a big risk. What if Cloud gets caught out because the President goes, "Who the hell is that incompetent?" What if the whole squad gets punishment duty? I think what I would do in that situation is to simply seem unremarkable (i.e. not bring out my coolest, SOLDIER-tier poses). Indeed, medium success is the way to go.
Rufus orders Heidegger to find and crush the protagonists, Heidegger agrees with booming laughter, Rufus tells him he already told him to knock it off, Heidegger punches a soldier in frustration, it looks like these two have fully settled into a particular comedy routine. In the followup, the soldiers talk about how Heidegger has been on edge lately after Hojo disappeared, leaving only a letter of resignation.

Okay. That cannot be good. The only safe thing for Hojo to be doing at any given time is 'nothing.' Whatever he's up to, it's going to bite us in the ass later. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it.
This game is great at filling me with dread. I cannot guess what that slimy tunicate might be doing. Was control of Shinra's high-tech labs not enough for him? Was there some mad operation that not even their nonexistent standards and infinite budget would enable him to do?

Okay, I can guess. Starting from the assumption that, whatever his options are, Hojo will always choose what is most horrible, most transgressive, most likely to make God cry...I think he might be in league with Sephiroth.

No, really. We never found his body after Sephiroth rampaged through the labs, right? Jenova was his prize specimen, and if it was stolen from him he should be doing his best to get it back (read, whine at the other board members to get it back for him). The fact that he's not here, making a huge scene about how Sephiroth trashed his lab and set back his genius plans makes me think that it's not a setback for him at all.

Hojo LET Sephiroth in. Hojo LET Sephiroth take Jenova, probably handed him a plastic garbage bag to carry her body in, too. Then he scribbled a quick note and skipped out, carrying everything he needed with him, while Sephy did whatever he wanted to the people and things remaining inside the building. Hojo never gave a shit about Shinra; his job was just the source of funding for bigger and madder science projects. As soon as he found a way to advance SCIENCE by betraying them, he did so. Sephiroth, a combination of human and Ancient DNA, is quickly developping strange and terrifying new powers now that he's in possession of Jenova's corpse(? Is she actually dead, in body and mind?). Sephiroth is Hojo's new project, and he only wishes to observe what kind of monster he becomes.
 
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I think my favorite would be if Baldy there was also a Cloud-esque superweapon in human skin.

ShinRa misplacing one of its elites/science projects, and the AWOL guy setting up his shop in a company town would be hilarious and on-brand for ShinRa.

Of course, it would also be on-brand for ShinRa to learn of this, probably by accident through Rude's off-hours carousing, then set fire to half of Junon trying to get that guy. Hundreds dead.


ShinRa would be zany Captain Planet villains, if they didn't manage to kill so, so many people.
 
This store above is staffed by several women who act cutesy, call Cloud 'cutie' and say flirtatious stuff to him; the guy behind the counter explains that this is the only way he can compete with the other stores in Junon, but that he's bothered because the girls actually make more than him.

I mean. My guy. I get 'trying to entice clients' but are you paying wages to three employees whose sole purpose is, like, advertising? Your profit margins have got to be abysmal. Although the way he's saying it sort of implies that the girls are getting money from the clients, which suggests either there is sex work involved or they just get money from the clients they're flirting with (which is kind of sex work, I guess?) in which case he is literally employing three women to stand around and redirect money to themselves instead of to his shop.
Pretty sure that's a bar, given the stools. Maybe a diner. Those women are probably waitresses, meaning that he's complaining that they make more off tips than he does from sales.
Or this dude's lying to make himself look cooler. Either/or.
That, or an issue with the translation. Maybe he was a soldier, rather in SOLDIER.
 
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The Jenova segments had all sorts of horror vibes and I loved it

Of course its a RPG so the fear amounted to worrying am leveled enough for an inevitable boss fight but I still enjoyed it
 
Pretty sure that's a bar, given the stools. Maybe a diner. Those women are probably waitresses, meaning that he's complaining that they make more off tips than he does from sales.
Could be a "hostess club" kind of thing, too where the waitresses sit with the patrons and try to convince them to buy lots of expensive drinks. I've never seen one, but apparently they're big in parts of Japan.
 
They are. I can at least vouch for Chocobo Mystery Dungeon, the chibi recap of XV, and the half-dozen predatory gachas. It's kind of impressive how many they have, really.
The Monster Hunter knockoff was Final Fantasy Explorers.

Also, not exaggerating on the half dozen predatory gacha.
1. Final Fantasy Dimensions 2
2. Final Fantasy All The Bravest
3. Final Fantasy Record Keeper
4. Final Fantasy Brave Exvius
5. The prequel to Brave Exvius, War of the Visions: Final Fantasy Brave Exvius
6. Mobius Final Fantasy
7. Dissidia Final Fantasy: Opera Omnia

Not all of them still running, granted, but literally all predatory gacha

Could be a "hostess club" kind of thing, too where the waitresses sit with the patrons and try to convince them to buy lots of expensive drinks. I've never seen one, but apparently they're big in parts of Japan.
See also, those infamous Maid Cafes
 
Okay. That cannot be good. The only safe thing for Hojo to be doing at any given time is 'nothing.'

Hojo is barely on the reservation to begin with, and he leaves it almost immediately. It's amazing.

Also, the Jenova boss theme is yet another incredible banger, and a great way to get that godawful Shinra parade music out of your head.

J-E-N-O-V-A is indeed a gem, but nothing can make the parade music leave at this point.
 
Incidentally, while Shiva's etymology has always been kinda weird (Shiva is a male god and not related to ice, 'Shiva' is how you would pronounce 'Shiver' in Japanese, it's not clear which side was more important to Shiva's original naming) I… think there may have been an actual effort at making her features look kind of Desi, within the limitations of the engine?

Shiva is traditionally said to live in the Himalayas, specifically at the summit of Mt. Kailash (a.k.a. Meru) which is over 6000 metres (over 21,000 ft) so naturally is pretty icy, and has been portrayed as intersex in the form of Ardhanarishvara. So technically there's a mythical basis... if you squint really hard.

On a completely different topic, arriving at Costa del Sol makes the Sun Reaction appropriate... even if it's about to go away soon
 
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Again: So far, Sephiroth has abided by the restrictions a super-powerful human being would have. Whatever he plans on doing on the new continent, he had to actually go through the trouble of hiking to Junon Harbour on his own two legs, killing guards when spotted, then going into hiding, avoiding constant searches by the local troops, and then finally sneaking onto the cargo ship as a stowaway.

This, right here, indicates a sudden and massive expansion in capabilities on Sephiroth's part. The only way he's making it to shore if he's capable of either trans-continental flight, or teleportation. And if these were capabilities he had all along, then he wouldn't have needed all the cloak and dagger stuff to get onto the ship.

But I get the feeling he didn't. I can't really explain why but I feel like being found out on the ship triggered something in Sephiroth somehow, probably because he's acting so loopy.

Anyway, we have other priorities. Because while flying away from the scene, Sephiroth dropped something… A tentacle? And combat immediately starts.
It's also rather interesting that right after such an apparent change in Sephiroth, you fight something called Jenova・BIRTH.

I mean, "birth" is the start of a life. Maybe something about the fighting or being found...spawned something. And perhaps that's why Sephiroth suddenly changed, he was infected/overwritten/subsumed or something like that by the spawn.
 
At least one of Junon's problems - being locked in with no battles to replenish cash - could have been fixed if they had just added a small area with random encounters. Wouldn't need to be much - maybe just a few sewers with some mutated sea life- and it wouldn't even need a connected subplot. Just somewhere you can go if you want some battles (and extra money) while you're stuck in the city.
 
Cloud went up that tower alone. The entire infiltration was Cloud's solo work. He put on a Shinra uniform, he snuck through multiple layers of security, until he got to the heart of Junon Harbour and boarded Rufus Shinra's personal ship, which immediately departed. At which point did he find any way to sneak the other party members onto the ship?
I'm just imagining Shinra setting up tons of security for passenger access to the ship while crew access is controlled by just having the right uniform. Cloud, being trained by Shinra, plots out an elaborate sequence of events to get into the ship while everyone else is like "Should we tell him? But he seems so happy with his plan."
 
At least one of Junon's problems - being locked in with no battles to replenish cash - could have been fixed if they had just added a small area with random encounters. Wouldn't need to be much - maybe just a few sewers with some mutated sea life- and it wouldn't even need a connected subplot. Just somewhere you can go if you want some battles (and extra money) while you're stuck in the city.
But if they did that, they might not have had time to program in all those ~delightful~ minigames, and isn't that what really matters?
 
Rufus orders Heidegger to find and crush the protagonists, Heidegger agrees with booming laughter, Rufus tells him he already told him to knock it off, Heidegger punches a soldier in frustration, it looks like these two have fully settled into a particular comedy routine. In the followup, the soldiers talk about how Heidegger has been on edge lately after Hojo disappeared, leaving only a letter of resignation.

Okay. That cannot be good. The only safe thing for Hojo to be doing at any given time is 'nothing.' Whatever he's up to, it's going to bite us in the ass later.


You'll want to put a pin in that one.
 
Why was the translation so bad? Reading the LP and some relevant comments now, I'm thinking it may have been part of why I had so much trouble understanding the plot. And I'm not remembering VIII's being anywhere near this bad, certainly not IX's, nor have I gotten the impression VI's was bad.
 
From what the thread's brought up before, it was due to a lack of any time, manpower, or assistance from above needed to give the translation more polish. That and Square distrusting more experienced translators for making too many changes
Huh. So, something like: they didn't do what they'd done before because they were dissatisfied with how many changes that resulted in, they thought the bad translation would still be good enough and didn't see a reason or have the ability to get more resources to do a better job, and they didn't do that again because once VII's popularity exploded they had both the motivation and resources to do better with VIII and IX (probably in part out of the hope that one of them would be The Next FFVII and a good translation would only make that more likely)?
 
Huh. So, something like: they didn't do what they'd done before because they were dissatisfied with how many changes that resulted in, they thought the bad translation would still be good enough and didn't see a reason or have the ability to get more resources to do a better job, and they didn't do that again because once VII's popularity exploded they had both the motivation and resources to do better with VIII and IX (probably in part out of the hope that one of them would be The Next FFVII and a good translation would only make that more likely)?
There's a very good article about the history of Square translations I found in Wikipedia citations... and it's unfortunately on a dead site only preserved by the Internet Archive.

web.archive.org

The Rise of Squaresoft Localization from 1UP.com

How Richard Honeywood helped the house of Final Fantasy go from incoherent to incomparable.

It means we now have a name for the lone translator over at the North American office working on a tight (according to the common story only like two weeks, although I can't find a citation for that) deadline with the only help being asking the Japanese offices stuff over '90s email: Michael Baskett. Combined with a lack of QA feedback and primitive tools (memory constraints were tight and apparently there was an "interesting" quirk where the engine could only take Japanese characters; all the text in the translated game is actually a kind of fixed-space Rōmaji that word processors don't recognize as English and thus don't run spelling and grammar checks on, and they had to write directly in that because they didn't have quick conversion tools for it), it became a very unpolished translation. Final Fantasy Tactics was apparently handled by Baskett in the same harried way, but then he left and Xenogears happened with only two new rookie translators to take it on. The resulting mess, and the feeling of wanting to recapture the international sales lightning of VII, meant that an overhaul was led by an Australian programmer working on the Japan team named Richard Honeywood. They apparently improved their code tools and communication significantly over the next few years and led into the "golden age" of Square translations with Final Fantasy IX.
 
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Huh. So, something like: they didn't do what they'd done before because they were dissatisfied with how many changes that resulted in, they thought the bad translation would still be good enough and didn't see a reason or have the ability to get more resources to do a better job, and they didn't do that again because once VII's popularity exploded they had both the motivation and resources to do better with VIII and IX (probably in part out of the hope that one of them would be The Next FFVII and a good translation would only make that more likely)?
Well, partially that, but my understanding from other posts in this thread is that the main problem is that when two of the three people the American subdivision of the company put on translation duty quit, they neither hired more nor gave the remaining worker more time to do it in. If that's accurate, it's actually pretty amazing how good the translation actually is.
 
There's a very good article about the history of Square translations I found in Wikipedia citations... and it's unfortunately on a dead site only preserved by the Internet Archive.

web.archive.org

The Rise of Squaresoft Localization from 1UP.com

How Richard Honeywood helped the house of Final Fantasy go from incoherent to incomparable.

It means we now have a name for the lone translator over at the North American office working on a tight (according to the common story only like two weeks, although I can't find a citation for that) deadline with the only help being asking the Japanese offices stuff over '90s email: Michael Baskett. Combined with a lack of QA feedback and primitive tools (memory constraints were tight and apparently there was an "interesting" quirk where the engine could only take Japanese characters; all the text in the translated game is actually a kind of fixed-space Rōmaji that word processors don't recognize as English and thus don't run spelling and grammar checks on, and they had to write directly in that because they didn't have quick conversion tools for it), it became a very unpolished translation. Final Fantasy Tactics was apparently handled by Baskett in the same harried way, but then he left and Xenogears happened with only two new rookie translators to take it on. The resulting mess, and the feeling of wanting to recapture the international sales lightning of VII, meant that an overhaul was led by an Australian programmer working on the Japan team named Richard Honeywood. They apparently improved their code tools and communication significantly over the next few years and led into the "golden age" of Square translations with Final Fantasy IX.
This is deeply fucked up, it's a genuine miracle that FF7 survived to achieve the international longevity and impact it has today. 'The game is hostile to non-Japanese language on such a fundamental level you have to turn your script into Deformed Japanese that can't be spellchecked before inserting it' is just so much to deal with.

I hear this is how NISA localises Falcom games-
 
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