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

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Zap Rowsdower said:
On Sephiroth in XIV, I'm just assuming that they're saving him (and the rest of the VII bosses they havent used yet) for a future raid series, probably one featuring XIV versions of the Turks or Shinra Executives as central cast the way the 2.0 raids did villains from 3. They didnt do IV bosses until EW years after the raid doing V bosses, they didnt do VIII until ShB raids a cycle after XII and Tactics, so they WILL do less popular games before more popular ones. Both 1 and 3 were split (1 between SB raids and ShB MSQ, 3 between ARR raids and ShB MSQ), and there've been other one off bosses isolated by years and continents from the rest of their game's shoutouts, so doing the storyline shoutout (as they did in 1.0) and boss cameo separately are also well precedented.
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Re: Shinra and the Turks appearing in FF14, the way I'd love to see them integrated into the story is for one of the Reflections to be a cyberpunk dystopia.

Edit: If I'm gonna fanfic up a plot...

Setting is Midgar, cyberpunk hellhole ruled by zaibatsu megacorp Shinra Inc, which is in turn led by Barret Wallace - a brilliant up and coming entrepreneur who recently took over the company after the tragic death of the old President Shinra in a meteoric rise to power and was definitely not a terrorist of any sort until recently...except he's not actually Barret. He's actually being possessed by Yoshikage Kira the Ascian, who after the whole Zodiark thing went tits up decided that he wants to live a quiet life of luxury as far from the Warrior of Light as possible, regardless of whose life he has to ruin to get it. In fact the entire Shinra board has been possessed by Ascian Yoshikage's black mask buddies. In addition the CEO hasn't actually changed - the Ascian just took over the body of the younger, fitter man after he'd killed the old President Shinra.

Joining the WoL's party are a teenage Marlene Wallace, whose simple yet heartfelt desire to get her adopted father back from the monster that took him from her is what draws the Warrior of Light into the fight against Shinra, and an impoverished Rufus Shinra, who as a loose end to Barret's unambiguous control over the company is hunted by Shinra's death squads.
 
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oh @Omicron something you might find enlightening about FFVI's writing (especially all the stuff with the Espers) is that even aside from the whole "damn we already finished the final dungeon ahead of schedule why not do a second half as well?" thing is that uh
Courtesy of a discord friend a few hours ago said:
So
the thing about FF6
is that every character's scenario and the main plot were all writen by different people working on the project
And not even writers, neccessarily. Like, Nomura did one or two, Amano did Setzer IIRC, Sakaguchi did one, etc. So everything is hella disjointed and tonally all over the place
because it was just the different people on the project doing whatever because it was kinda their "we wanna fuck around" game
It's worth noting that there were something like 8-10 party members that were considered and dropped at some point, and we know this because their jobs are still in the code (every party member has a listed job even though they're not relevant). It's quite possible they had stuff writen up for them and then polled the office on which ones to use.
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There was no main writer for the plot and characters, everyone was just fucking around writing their chosen characters and then apparently "collabing" together like some multi-million dollar TTRPG campaign.
 
1986ctcel said:
oh @Omicron something you might find enlightening about FFVI's writing (especially all the stuff with the Espers) is that even aside from the whole "damn we already finished the final dungeon ahead of schedule why not do a second half as well?" thing is that uh

There was no main writer for the plot and characters, everyone was just fucking around writing their chosen characters and then apparently "collabing" together like some multi-million dollar TTRPG campaign.
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Yeah, I would believe that.
 
Omicron said:
The reason is due to the peculiar way FF7's Random Generator Work. For reasons I couldn't begin to imagine explaining, when you reload and don't do anything 'significant,' the game will have already generated and saved a random number from before you saved and quit, and that number will be used on the next… thing that requires a randomly generated number, whatever. In order to change the result of the Chocobo Gender Reveal Party, you need to do something. Trigger a random encounter. Feed another Chocobo stat-raising food. Whatever. That'll prompt the game to issue a new number and you can then try your chance at the gender lottery again.
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This is actually fairly standard in video games, I'd point out. An awful lot of games don't have true RNG, but 'seed' RNG; the game doesn't roll dice for every action, rather it generates one number at the start of the run, then iterates that seed with a formula whenever a new value is called for. It is random, but it's random the way a deck of cards is random; given honest shuffling, you'll get a randomly sorted array of cards, but once you stop shuffling and start playing, the array won't change.

There's a few reasons games often do this. For many games, it's useful to be able to save the seed of a run in order to replicate it; speedrunning, replaying specific layouts of procedurally generated content, bug testing, etc. But the big one is that, on the scale of hours of content, generating a truly random number is actually pretty hard. No number produced by a mathematical formula is truly random, it's why lotteries still tend to use things like rotating tubs of numbered balls. To produce even pseudorandom numbers, computers need some starting value to calculate from, and a lot of 'random' values that you might pick either aren't actually random (the time of day sounds good, for instance, until you start thinking about how much a given person's living schedule might constrain their playing time to the same timeframe each day), or they're limited. Yes you can pull near-perfectly random cryptographical RNG from stuff like minute fluctuations in the OS' kernel, but there aren't many of those, so you end up either running out pretty quickly, or re-using them often enough that you're basically back to using a seed value.

Finally, seed RNG is just... easier. At least until recent years when some game companies seem to have started treating customer hard drive space as territory to occupy as thoroughly as possible to squeeze out the competition, games have generally tried not to bloat how much room they take up (due to hardware limits, if nothing else - the original Pokemon Red/Blue titles represent astonishing examples of digital craftsmanship to save enough space to squeeze so much content into a 1996 computer small enough to be hand-held), and the software to generate new pseudorandom numbers each time they're called for is just kind of wasted effort compared to generating one number at the run's start and iterating on it each time.
 
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ByzantineLover said:
As it turns out, Hojo was completely correct. Massive inbreeding and crimes against nature and decency are the way to create the ultimate creature, with which you can obtain absolute power.
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Well, not completely. He doesn't ever seem to have tried it with chocobos, does he? :D
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
That we know of.
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Hm. I suppose there is the question of whether he'd mess things up so much he just got more blob monsters, instead of turning FFVII's plot into the fight of the remnants of humanity against the Ubervögel of the Great Flock.

Cyn said:
Well, we know Hojo spent a fair bit of time in Neibelheim, Cloud's father is unknown, Cloud's hair is a particular shade of yellow, and the chocobos at the farm had a very interesting reaction to him the first time you go there...
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...
WHY DOES THIS MAKE SO MUCH SENSE?!
 
Imrix said:
This is actually fairly standard in video games, I'd point out. An awful lot of games don't have true RNG, but 'seed' RNG; the game doesn't roll dice for every action, rather it generates one number at the start of the run, then iterates that seed with a formula whenever a new value is called for. It is random, but it's random the way a deck of cards is random; given honest shuffling, you'll get a randomly sorted array of cards, but once you stop shuffling and start playing, the array won't change.

There's a few reasons games often do this. For many games, it's useful to be able to save the seed of a run in order to replicate it; speedrunning, replaying specific layouts of procedurally generated content, bug testing, etc. But the big one is that, on the scale of hours of content, generating a truly random number is actually pretty hard. No number produced by a mathematical formula is truly random, it's why lotteries still tend to use things like rotating tubs of numbered balls. To produce even pseudorandom numbers, computers need some starting value to calculate from, and a lot of 'random' values that you might pick either aren't actually random (the time of day sounds good, for instance, until you start thinking about how much a given person's living schedule might constrain their playing time to the same timeframe each day), or they're limited. Yes you can pull near-perfectly random cryptographical RNG from stuff like minute fluctuations in the OS' kernel, but there aren't many of those, so you end up either running out pretty quickly, or re-using them often enough that you're basically back to using a seed value.

Finally, seed RNG is just... easier. At least until recent years when some game companies seem to have started treating customer hard drive space as territory to occupy as thoroughly as possible to squeeze out the competition, games have generally tried not to bloat how much room they take up (due to hardware limits, if nothing else - the original Pokemon Red/Blue titles represent astonishing examples of digital craftsmanship to save enough space to squeeze so much content into a 1996 computer small enough to be hand-held), and the software to generate new pseudorandom numbers each time they're called for is just kind of wasted effort compared to generating one number at the run's start and iterating on it each time.
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Yes, I've run into this technique in games that were made only a few years ago.

Also, it does make it slightly harder to spam 'save and reload until the game goes your way' tactics.
 
Imrix said:
<snip about RNGs and seeds>
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That's really missing the point. All games use some kind of RNG seed, the big question is "is the state serialized as part of the save or not?" On most hardware, the closest you can get to a "true" RNG is usually "the state is actually stored in the kernel, not in the game, and is periodically reseeded." (RDRAND etc. are not reliable)

(side note, much RNG discussion is sloppy about distinguishing "seed" and "state" (and in some cases also "output"). Although in some published RNGs they are the same, this is bad; see the need for splitmix-based seeding, which is probably also the answer to the forking-stream question)
 
o11c said:
That's really missing the point. All games use some kind of RNG seed, the big question is "is the state serialized as part of the save or not?"
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Given that reasons 1 and 3 I gave, at least, are expressly in favour of saves preserving the seed state, I don't think it is missing the point, no.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
On Sephiroth in XIV, I'm just assuming that they're saving him (and the rest of the VII bosses they havent used yet) for a future raid series, probably one featuring XIV versions of the Turks or Shinra Executives as central cast the way the 2.0 raids did villains from 3. They didnt do IV bosses until EW years after the raid doing V bosses, they didnt do VIII until ShB raids a cycle after XII and Tactics, so they WILL do less popular games before more popular ones. Both 1 and 3 were split (1 between SB raids and ShB MSQ, 3 between ARR raids and ShB MSQ), and there've been other one off bosses isolated by years and continents from the rest of their game's shoutouts, so doing the storyline shoutout (as they did in 1.0) and boss cameo separately are also well precedented.
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To be pedantic, FFXIV did have a FFIV boss back in the Heavensward patches: Calcabrina, the boss of the Antitower.

I think a lot of it is a matter of the difference between a one-off reference, which can be sprinkled about in multiple places and have little to do with the plot context of the original game, and the story references, like Crystal Tower was to FFIII and the Endwalker patches were to FFIV. For a FFVII story reference, I do agree with the prior mention that FFXIV already did that with Nael van Darnus back in 1.0. So FFXIV would have to use another part of FFVII's story that has nothing to do with Sephiroth's role, or the Lifestream, or Meteor. As you say, Shinra and the Turks might be an option.

As for the one-off references, apart from the Weapon/Werlyt trial series, there's also the design of the Ultima Weapon in ARR, which I was surprised to learn from this thread was from FFVII; the previous "Ultima Weapon" depiction in FFVI was used for "Ultima Beast" in the Fractal Continuum (Hard) SB patch dungeon. And then there's the big cannon in SB which I hear is supposed to reference the Junon Cannon.

There's also the obvious Golden Saucer, complete with half-naked owner.

And the whole discussion made me wonder: what other non-Sephiroth and non-Weapon bosses are particularly iconic to FFVII, that a FFXIV player can see in that game and go "that's from FFVII"? Honestly, other than the Turks, the only other example I can think of is the Angry House, which isn't even a boss. Even the various Jenova bosses are variations on Weird Tentacle Monster; I'm not sure I could picture Jenova-BIRTH or Jenova-LIFE offhand, or identify them by name if shown pictures.

EDIT: I stand corrected. Looking them up in this thread, the various Jenova forms can be said to be recognizable, while also being difficult to tell apart. This is because they are palette swaps of the same basic model. Still, I don't know if I'm just unobservant, or if it proves my point that I can't really identify the Jenova forms other than "weird squishy tentacle monsters".
 
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SolipsistSerpent said:
Also, it does make it slightly harder to spam 'save and reload until the game goes your way' tactics.
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The new Firaxis XCOM games have this as a toggle option whether to save the Random seed on reload or not. It ends up with interesting positives or negatives for either way you go. I've had particularly fraught turns become kind of like a miniature puzzle with 'okay, I know I have a shit roll as my second action from this save point, so I'll have my rookie take his shot now, then my flanking assault can absorb the bad roll with his 98% hit chance...'.
 
Adloquium said:
And the whole discussion made me wonder: what other non-Sephiroth and non-Weapon bosses are particularly iconic to FFVII, that a FFXIV player can see in that game and go "that's from FFVII"? Honestly, other than the Turks, the only other example I can think of is the Angry House, which isn't even a boss
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The Guard Scorpion... which also already has been added to XIV, it's the first boss in the final SB dungeon.
 
Black Cauldron seems to have been more popular in Japan; at least per Defunctland there was an entire ride based on it, where at the end a kid from the crowd would be picked to take up a Sword of Light and defeat the Horned King. Occasionally I look back and forth between FF7 and Kingdom Hearts and this is one of those times.
 
I watched it occasionally as a kid and I was fairly ambivalent on it, I mostly remember being annoyed that the protagonist had to give away his cool sword.
 
Steve said:
And yet Final Fantasy VI is still one of the best games in the series and the superior to VII..... fight me. :p
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It's gonna be, huh, interesting to do my usual "assessment of the game compared to its direct predecessor" round-up post for FF7 and having to try and distinguish what are VI and VII's respective "inherent merits," so to speak, versus what is "the Steam version of VII is effectively the 1998 original in digital form while VI's nostalgia remake came out literally last year."
 
Omicron said:
It's gonna be, huh, interesting to do my usual "assessment of the game compared to its direct predecessor" round-up post for FF7 and having to try and distinguish what are VI and VII's respective "inherent merits," so to speak, versus what is "the Steam version of VII is effectively the 1998 original in digital form while VI's nostalgia remake came out literally last year."
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Don't forget that your version of the game is literally cursed, so that's gonna be fun to account for in your final judgement, and then there is the issue of whether the quality of translation should reflect on the game or not.
 
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