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

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Kuja said:
I think FF7 has a perfect ending. That's not a troll, not an ironic statement, it is as the saying goes, my real unfiltered dogshit opinion.



Fun fact: when I replayed the end of FF7 with a friend to show them the final boss and ending, Cloud and Sephiroth did their square up, omnislash was ready...and they asked me a question. I turned to answer-

-and it turns out if you don't hit Omnislash quickly, Sephiroth will attack Cloud.

I never did the fight again to find out if Sephiroth can, in fact, kill Cloud here and result in a game over, because in my case Seph's attack brought Cloud down to a couple hundred HP.

And Cloud had Counter equipped.

And it turns out a single slash from Cloud will, in fact, trigger the ending cutscene.

The dumbest & funniest possible ending to their story:

All Cloud had to do was punch his sleep paralysis demon in the face.
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I've never finished the game myself, so I'm just going off what I've seen people say, but:
ZerbanDaGreat said:
It's so impossible to lose this fight that even if you do nothing or miss on purpose, Cloud has a hidden Counter effect on him that ensures he reflexively cuts Sephiroth in half the moment he gets a turn - bro is having none of it.
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I don't think you need to have Counter equipped.
 
Kuja said:
Fun fact: when I replayed the end of FF7 with a friend to show them the final boss and ending, Cloud and Sephiroth did their square up, omnislash was ready...and they asked me a question. I turned to answer-

-and it turns out if you don't hit Omnislash quickly, Sephiroth will attack Cloud.

I never did the fight again to find out if Sephiroth can, in fact, kill Cloud here and result in a game over, because in my case Seph's attack brought Cloud down to a couple hundred HP.

And Cloud had Counter equipped.
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ApocalypticFish said:
Fun fact, you don't actually need to limit break to win this. Heck, you don't even need to attack IIRC, I think if you have the Counter materia attached to Steal it'll still end the fight.
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It was mentioned earlier that Cloud has a hidden "Counter" power in that fight and will Counter Sephiroth even if they don't have the Materia equipped.
 
OneirosTheWriter said:
No wonder Sephiroth keeps appearing in other media, if going 0-2 against that blonde kid made him so apocalyptically mad he refused to die then going 0-3 was clearly enough to make him mad enough to transcend reality.
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wetodet said:
If you count Bizarro, Safer, and the mind battle as separate fights, he's 0 for 5 by the end of base FF7, actually.
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0 for 6 after Advent Children. Though that's just counting him personally and not the fights against the Sephiroth Remnants.

Though I suppose between Smash Bros and Kingdom Hearts, Sephy could have won back a couple...
 
Omicron said:
I would probably feel differently about Supernova and Safer-Sephiroth as a boss if the game wasn't so fucking easy that ol' Seph died after completing a single rotation and so I never had to look at Supernova a second time, but I can only give you the experience the game gave me :V
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Hm... Speaking from personal experience, he got to do it three times to me on my blind playthough, the first time was awesome, the second time was okay, the third time was 'get up from my controller and use the bathroom'. But it wasn't too terrible, because it was only three times. That said, I really do not think I would have liked a fourth.
 
Omicron said:
At some point early in this playthrough, I read somewhere that a difference between the 1997 PSX and the original 1998 PC port of the game was that, for some ungodly reason having to do with sound compression(?) or typical PC hardware limitations of the time(?), the PC port had substituted the original soundtrack with bad MIDI conversions. That was brought up in the thread, in fact; not only that, but it was joked about several times, because it was an old problem that had been fixed by a patch at least a decade ago. I found it a funny historical artifact to hear about and paid it no further mind.
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I ranted a bit about this on Discord, but here's the gist of it - MIDI was absolutely the appropriate choice here.

Back in 1997-98, the original soundtrack was written with a Roland synthesizer in mind. It would probably have been an Sound Canvas SC-88 - Nobuo Uematsu used the SC-55 and SC-88 pretty heavily in his career, and almost certainly used the SC-88 and friends to compose the FF7 soundtrack. He likely used an XP-80 for One Winged Angel and certain other tracks that required patches over and above the default SC set... and therein lies this issue.

For the PS1, the task of converting the music from an SC-88 or XP-80 was relatively straightforward - write a GS->SPU1 synth engine that can handle 16-20 voice polyphony (you *do* need to save some channels for game events, after all, and SPU1 has 24), sample the SC-88 and the custom patches, crush it down to fit into the 512KB RAM limit, done.

You, uh, can't really do that on PC.

First, nobody (who isn't already using ROMplers) is going to drop a couple hundred dollars in 1998 money for a ROMpler to play back one game's music on. Plus, neither Yamaha's MU-series modules nor the SC-55/88 have support for the level of custom patches required for this, as far as I know. Finally, Roland was very very tetchy about actually doing anything with softsynths - the SC-88 was still a valid product line and they were already really aggressive about not letting anyone use their tech without buying their hardware.

So when it came time to turn the internal PC build into a saleable game, they needed to replace the whole mess with something that people could actually, legally install on their PCs. Yamaha sold Squaresoft a license to their XG-compatible softsynth (XG is Yamaha's MIDI extension, GS is Roland's), converted the Roland files, made a custom patch bank (four, actually) to accommodate the game's wavetable soundfont needs, and that should've been the end of it, right?

Yeah, no. The XG softsynth is really good, but Yamaha didn't quite map the instruments correctly (remember, Uematsu used GS, and XG orders the extra instruments differently by default). The reason OWA sounds wrong is that parts of it are mismapped - some instruments are mapped to ones that don't exist in the soundbank, particularly the snare drum, and the vocal patch samples use the WoodBlock instrument. With a patched version of the song, it sounds a lot better, and with the softsynth, or a Creative Labs AWE-series card, or the XG-compatible YMF7xx chipset, it sounds more or less correct, right down to the vocal samples, because on those you have the soundfont loaded, preferably one of the 2MB versions or the 4MB version.

This means that basically the only way to get the intended soundtrack is to have a YMF744 PCI sound card (for somewhat less vintage machines) or an AWE32/64 or SB32 with at least 4MB of sample RAM, which requires a free ISA slot that you probably won't have after about the Pentium 3/AthlonXP era. If your system is up to snuff, you can also use the licensed XG softsynth included with the 1998 build, assuming you're running Windows 98.

I think you can also use an XG VSTi plugin with some hackery on later OSes, but don't quote me on that.

The one thing you don't do is try to play the game with the General MIDI set. The Microsoft GS set is okayish at replicating a budget SC-55, but its sample bank is 512KB. The stock Microsoft softsynth kind of understands GS and implements General MIDI as well. There's a reason the game was shipped with anywhere from a 1MB to 4MB sample bank - this game absolutely requires the custom SF2 soundfont to sound remotely correct, end of story. They do have a General MIDI variant of the tracks, which you should not touch because it's basically the XG version remapped poorly to GM with no soundfont support.

Guess which one the original Steam version took? That's right, they picked the Microsoft GS softsynth and compressed it to death! The patch, as I understand it, just uses a less-compressed version of that GS softsynth track.

In other words, of the five possible sources they could've picked for the 2012 Steam release (miniPSF dumps of the SPU1 soundtrack, the General MIDI fallback, the SoundBlaster AWE-series wavetable soundtrack, the XG-MIDI soundtrack, or the full-fat XG Softsynth), they picked the fallback emergency option.

Some of these issues like the incorrect note mappings would probably have been corrected if FF7PC had had a little more time in the oven, but somehow they managed to do worse than the original Square/Eidos release.
 
Avernus said:
It was mentioned earlier that Cloud has a hidden "Counter" power in that fight and will Counter Sephiroth even if they don't have the Materia equipped.
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Missed that.

Did double-check though, and yeah even if you do zero damage with your action, so long as it's done to Sephiroth, apparently Sephiroth will automatically 'counter' with the special action "Done In" which ends the fight.

Also apparently the attack that Sephiroth does in that fight is always coded to do 31/32 of Cloud's HP, so with the exception of maybe hacking yourself to 1 HP, you can never lose that fight.
 
Or you can just emulate the ps1 version and forget about all that PC noise. Notable that was a option even in 2012, so I bet much mockery exists in the internet archive about this port.
 
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I love that FFVII leaves the ending open, whether it was the result of a disagreement or not it's a bold decision that works to not let the player dodge the central question. Of course it couldn't last but that's art under commercial pressures for you.
 
Thematically, I think FF7's villain doesn't really change. I've been wanting to do this post for half a year now:

Omicron said:
Jenova is promising the destruction of the world because, once she has absorbed the power of the Planet, she will be free to once again roam the stars, finding her next target, her next world to devour.
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From part 6 back in July:

Omicron said:
These guys have stumbled on the possibility that fucking Atlantis may be real and they're planning to strip-mine it for more oil. Their big world-changing era-defining plan is build a bigger power plant. They've been exhausting the Mako supply of the planet, and their plan is to find a new place with more Mako and just move their industry there and do it all over again.
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Every so often in this thread I read about someone mentioning this thread
having a discord but when I attempt to search for the link I am unable find it.

Does anyone here know how to join this Discord server?
Is there some special criteria I have to fulfill in order to join it?
 
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SCO said:
Or you can just emulate the ps1 version and forget about all that PC noise. Notable that was a option even in 2012, so I bet much mockery exists in the internet archive about this port.
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The port comes from 1998, and as somebody who's actually *used* late-90s emulators, trust me, emulating FF7 reasonably was a non-starter in 1998. You're going to run Final Fantasy 7 on what, PSEmu Pro? Early PCSX builds? You're kidding, right?

Of course, by 2012 there were multiple entirely reasonable options for making the music work again. Fixing up the XG softsynth to run on NT-based systems (and fixing the notes), implementing their own miniPSF player, even using prerecorded post-PS1 OST rearrangements or remasters. They picked none of these, to the detriment of the 2012 port.
 
I think we can all agree on the best rendition of One Winged Angel.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-59sWasI98

Also man! How bout that. As far as I'm concerned, FF7 wrapped it up perfectly. Chef's kiss, no notes. I am admittedly, a sucker for bookends. I love that it ties into Remake as well; really reinforces that idea Remake's centering around of breaking the cycle of it's plot (and metaphorically, it's own legacy.)

If any of you want more FF7 forum review, I do like this one, which thankfully despite being a SA LP was as far as I remember not unbearable to read in the modern day. The author is Brazilian and makes comparisons thereby, and also shows off their 3D modelling chops in places, much recommended. It's neat seeing the shadows cast by two different perspective beams as Omicron and Elentor go their own ways through the story.

Finally...

Omicron said:
We transition away from the party, to a surprising place I wasn't expected to show up now of all times: an aerial view of Kalm.
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Extremely blindsided by eleventh hour evidence for my 'Cait Sith/Reeve bugged Kalm' theory. Admittedly, it's as shaky as he might have gone there at some point to hide Marlene but hey, I'll take it!

It is very funny that you could in theory revisit Kalm a thousand times and have no idea. But also in it's own way it makes sense. Kalm, in the game, has always been a refuge from which you can see the dangerous future oncoming.
 
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Connelly said:
I might be going too "controversial" here but boy. I really don't like any of this.

For years, I've always been pretty indifferent to the Sephirot hype, at most raising an eyebrow when he was introduced in unrelated things without seeming reason. I always reasoned "well, he's that popular, must be a reason behind it, whatever."

There are interesting details that Omi has fairly brought up and applauded (or criticized) through the whole of the game. But all of that concerned more the use the plot made of him than what he is as a character. Moreover when most of what we see of the actual Sephirot is a flashback, instead of Jenova's meatpuppet he's been except for the couple of moments where he came to the surface to seethe at Cloud. And there are very good moments there despite the roughness! But half of it is Jenova, and in the balance, my feelings about Sephirot as a character is... a very perplexed meh?

Supernova also falls flat for me, and I can't buy the comments about it. Sure, it is spectacular and we see similar cataclysmic scenes illustrating spells in many FFs. But it feels so much on the nose, trying so hard to drag the player into it, this isn't any continent, any planet, any solar system, it's Sol, mang! I don't know, it takes me out of the fantasy. The original JP cutscene might have been shorter and less of a show, but I feel it wouldn't stick so much like a sore thumb.

And if it was truly a vision of the past, how can one reconcile the image the game has built up of Jenova as a parasite with straight up destroying the Sol system? What does it win by destroying all resources in a place before anyone even knows they must defend themselves from something? Sure, Sephirova is waiting for Meteor to destroy this planet now, but that's with the intention open up that can of tasty tasty Lifestream soda and slurp it. It's a method, not the goal. No, it doesn't feel like the blocks are quite there to support that interpretation.

@GilliamYaeger 's "this is actually Jenova pulling the Cetra's memory of losing Sol to cosmic randomness before fucking out to FFVIIland" still doesn't quite work for to me, but it at least it sounds more plausible.

About the ending, I just prepared an essay here in which asdfsfagtarhgrashreshjargtarwehtrkrw45ryw6sadgfasggsfahdh. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.


I suspect that had I played the game right now instead of following this thread, my homicidal anger would have been strong enough to throw me through time at every moment anyone had hyped Sephirot at me to slap them shut TerminalMontage style, and barge into Sakurai's office yelling "Go on, put Sephirot in Smash. I dare you, I double dare you." Because that is not the great character I thought everyone was swearing up and down they were smashing their meat at. I keep a tally of all the times I'm disappointed on you and your tastes, Gamers, and your sins are many and horrendous. No Gamergates for you, marching into the casket down the secret basement for three decades, now.
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I think that's a rather premature opinion. We still have Advent Children to get through, after all. Surely the movie will be able to sell you on Sephiroth by showing just how much worse he could have been.
 
FallsSideways said:
Kalm, in the game, has always been a refuge from which you can see the dangerous future oncoming.
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I don't know, maybe the name of the town was a coincidence?

Anyway, I can second that I listened to the audio track for the battle theme of the first steam version of FFVIII, and I recoiled in horror at how much worse the quality of the soundtrack was. It's a really huge downgrade.

However, the remaster has problems of its own, not the last of which being that the "modernized" character models are undescribably ugly compared to the original, despite having "better" graphics; they've deformed the character's faces, and I don't like the redesigns. Also, more relevantly, the new models, being more detailed, aren't capable of emoting in the same way the old models were - they lose a lot of the expressiveness - and clash horribly with their surroundings. This can be easily checked by anybody who doesn't mind spoilers - just search for original to remaster character comparisons images or videos (the latter are especially useful to get across the emoting aspect I mentioned) and give your own judgment. I'm confident the fact that these aren't the same characters will be self-evident.

So, given that, whatever its situation in the late '90s, emulation works perfectly well now, my suggestions would be to go with using a psx emulator, and just experience the original version. Also, emulators have the benefits of save states, which is a big QOL feature. A psx emulator is also how I would suggest somebody to go about playing Final Fantasy Tactics, since it's easier to use modded versions of the game on it (due to not having to save the modded game on a fresh CD), and I've been very vocal about how much better Tactics get with the right mod.
 
And thank you for writing!

@silverpower:
So... the music is generated live by the game, in every version? It's not just a set or recordings the game plays, the audio equivalent of the prerendered graphics? Why; did they not have the space then?
 
Yeah, that's not unreasonable, especially since playing the port as intended means building a vintage computer with some pretty specific hardware. I'm personally down with that kinda thing but it's massive overkill just to play FF7PC.

ETA @Reese - yep! Redbook audio (like regular audio CDs) takes a bit over 10MB/min (you have 650-700MB to work with and it gets eaten up by game stuff fast!) and requires that you not seek between any music cues, *ever*, or it will skip. XA audio bitrates are an order of magnitude better, but that's space that cutscenes need and FF7 uses a lot of prerendered cutscenes. Besides, it's being mastered with MIDI hardware to begin with, and SPU1 is built for polyphony with sequenced tracks while still being competent for video and Redbook/XA audio playback. Nobuo Uematsu and other chiptune musicians are very used to the workflow, and the PlayStation's SPU1 is built for this use case. (The PS2's SPU2 has all these features, a second set of 24 voices, 4x the sample RAM, and two streaming voices that are independent.)

Besides, if you're a serious gamer in 1998 you were wanting a wavetable card - even if the game uses streaming audio from a CD you also want plenty of sound effect channels. A Pentium II is pretty impressive hardware for the time, but good luck finding CPU time to fluently decode MP3 audio. It's really not until late P3/Athlon kit where games start actually using pre-recorded music without involving CDs, so that's why it took so long for trackers and MIDI wavetable music to (mostly!) disappear from PC gaming.
 
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@silverpower:
Wow. I know little of the details of these things, and I guess it's easy to forget that even though they've gone 3D and are using disks, they're still actually pretty constrained in terms of storage space and processing power. Thanks!
 
I must admit that I feel the ambiguity of the end somewhere in me when I read of it? Like, maybe it's because this is a 90s environmental fable (before it got a bit distracted) being witnessed in the 2020s, but at least from the way it's presented it's, like.

I can't say, "The most optimistic you can be" but maybe hope or uncertainty is better than the alternative, if you feel like it's more likely to be a dread certainty.
 
So now that FFVII is effectively finished, it's the right time to go back to comparing FF character building options by the most important metric there is: how good is Blue Magic in this game, anyway.

FFV Blue Magic was very powerful and versatile but suffered from practically requiring a guide to actually get it to work. Even finding which monsters could give you spells would require a lengthy trial and error process, and getting them was a chore without a secondary Beastmaster character. It was an interesting proof of concept, but very, very unrefined.

FFVI Blue Magic was easier to make work since you just needed to have a particular character present in a fight where a Blue spell was used and to not die, but it suffered from attaching Blue Magic to that particular character, who was otherwise unremarkable. If you used him often, you would get some common spells even without a guide, but there was little reason to use him. With everyone getting all other magic, Blue Magic also became a lot less versatile by comparison. Every caster is a buffer/blaster/healer/utility anyway, so aside from a few standout spells (Big Guard, White Wind), Blue Magic didn't stand out that much.

FFVII is something of a return to FFV mechanics with "the character needs to actually be hit by enemy skill to learn it" and the ability to slap the relevant materia on anyone. Though, much like in FFVI, it's going to be just a part of your skillset rather than a full half of it. It's not a regression, though. The indicator of which enemies have learnable skills cuts down on trial and error significantly, and Enemy Skill being just one materia among many means you can keep it on someone without it being a hard choice the way being a Blue Magic or having Learn assigned to a character was. It's probably the first Blue Magic Omicron has actually consistently used in a game, speaking of its usability improvement, and while it's probably less potent overall than the FFV version (much like in FFVI, because you have a bunch of other materia active), it's still a pretty useful skillset to have. The only real flaw in its implementation is the whole "each enemy skill materia is independent" thing, meaning that having two characters with usable enemy skill takes twice as much effort. Though even that could be considered an advantage as it contributes to variety between character skillsets.

As for other, lesser concerns over character building... Well, I think there is no need to speak about FFI and FFIII as they were more rough proofs of concept that would be revisited and polished in later games. FFII was an abject failure, falling down the familiar pits of "learn as you use" RPG systems that encourage you to do counterintuitive things for the sake of rising stats (like beating up each other while enemies deal you zero damage) and making it so some often used skills advance more easily than situationally useful ones. It's also the first game to make characters completely interchangeable (even if they would likely specialize in different things over the course of a playthrough), a trend of FF series that I strongly dislike.

FFIV is pure in its simplicity: every character has unique mechanics, and you have no control over your party, they come and go as plot demands. The disadvantages are obvious as you have zero say in the game's strategic aspect, limited to tactical one, but the advantages is that it makes every character feel unique, connecting them to their in-game role. And, of course, it removes choice paralysis entirely: you may not be able to break the game, but you aren't going to agonize over which job to master and which are good only for their skills.

FFV is, overall, probably the most polished of the complex FF systems so far. Simple in concept (just pick four jobs you like and use their !Abilities), it allows for surprisingly deep customization (barefisted mages! Beastmaster + Blue Mage combo! Rapid Fire Dual Wielding!), which eventually leads into Freelancer/Mime ultimate builds, themselves an improved take on Onion Knight basic concept. It's also sensible enough to give you all the toys to play with halfway through the game, freeing you to experiment and fool around before committing to the endgame. It's not flawless, though: mastering jobs takes more time than optimal, with a lot of them being padded by +X% MP/HP abilities that don't even get inherited by Freelancers/Mimes, and some jobs are duds (nobody uses a Berserker outside of self-imposed challenges). If you do know what you're doing, the endgame somewhat falls apart with everyone running on the same baseline stat-boosting classes plus the best !Abilities, though I don't think it's necessary a flaw: if you've gotten to the endgame, you've earned being absurdly powerful. My personal complaint is that it's another entry into "characters are totally interchangeable" FF trend. They will end up different, of course, as you master different jobs on different characters, but their abilities have no bearing on their in-game personalities and lore, it's up to you to decide whether Faris is going to be a Summoner who gets to reunite with her dragon in the end or not.

FFVI did a lot of new, intriguing things, but just as many feelsbadman failures. I do like the balance between customization and bespoke mechanics: every character brings something unique to the table (if not always useful) even as they all learn magic and get to use summons. This gives players control without compromising character identities, which I feel is important and worth going out of your way to enable. And the customization is truly unprecedented in FF series, with everyone being able to rise their stats as they wish and learn any magic they fancy in thematic batches, allowing for clever combos and exploits. On the other hand, espers only rising your stats if they're equipped on level up, combined with the otherwise good autoleveling mechanic, leads to a truly bizarre meta where the most optimal way to play involves avoiding leveling up as much as possible until you get the good espers, then overleveling some characters at the expense of others so they wouldn't lose out on stats when rejoining the party. None of it truly matter in the end since optimization is deeply unnecessary to complete the game when Ultima exists, but it sure feels bad to realize how much you've missed if you went at it blind, souring otherwise very ambitious and interesting mechanics. Also, unlike FFV, FFVI throws new toys at you until the very end, but like FFV you need to invest time to make use of them, which leads to things like Meltdown falling by the wayside. In addition, for all that espers are super-important to the narrative (or half of it, anyway), summons are very undercooked and often forgotten, especially compared to excellent realization in FFV.

Finally, FFVII. It continues the interchangeable characters trend, unfortunately, with everyone being defined by the materia they have equipped that could be changed at a whim. While different characters do have different limit breaks, which even matters, especially in the endgame, I feel it's not enough to make them feel truly unique, especially compared to FFVI Blitz or Trance or Rage mechanics. While FFVI sometimes struggled to make different mechanics truly unique (Blitz and Tools are Magic by another name, basically), FFVII could have used its smaller cast to better differentiate the characters from one another, and it's kind of a shame they didn't go farther than just limit breaks. Taken on their own, though, materia are a great concept. As industrialized magic, it fits the setting, its attachment to equipment allows for interesting trade-offs, and the linkage system allows for a truly staggering amounts of combos where every materia not only gives you access to the skills contained therein, but also serves several different secondary functions like granting immunities, additional effects, serving as your counter, etc. It's just a very neat concept that was realized fairly well. The downside, though, is very much like in FFVI (though with less feelsbadman): the game throws toys at you until the very last moment, but demands investment of time to make use of them, leading to potentially great materia languishing in your backpack forever. Their biggest flaw, however, is the total absence from the narrative. Espers were important (at least in early-mid game), getting new ones was often a tragic event where you witnessed an esper die. Jobs in FFV were memories of past heroes empowering you aginst the coming darkness. FFIV skills were a reflection of characters wielding them (and, in the case of Cecil, actively changing with character development). Materia are... nothing. They're theoretically a part of the setting. They're referenced by characters, sometimes. But, aside from big plot-important items that bear little resemblance to what you actually slot into your sword, they don't exist. I feel this is connected to the trend of interchangeable characters: the mechanics are divorced from the world, giving player more tools and control at a cost of immersion.

Well, whatever else can be said about FF series, it was always characterized by ambition. It's not content to recreate a working formula, it always strives to try something new, something bigger, if not always better. For all their flaws and failures, for all that I personally disagree with many choices those games make, the mechanics of each game are always interesting and worth talking about, and I, for one, can't wait for the next entries to surprise us once again.
 
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