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

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Cypocryphy said:
The SB alliance raid plotline does a major disservice to FFT and the Ivalice setting as a whole, because it is exactly that, a bunch of great fights centered around an almost contextless speedreading of the original "text" and it's related games. It literally almost put me to sleep whenever I wasn't actually in the Raids.

BUT! That's not entirely what I mean. YoshiP and KojiFox are, respectively, the biggest Yasumi Matsuno and Alexander O. Smith fanboys ever. So when I say Like That, I mean it gives huge context on everything down to the very way XIV and XVI are written and translated, and the sort of stories and themes both titles are conciously trying to invoke for better and worse.
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Full many a time have I wondered whence came these FFXIV colloquialisms. Full glad am I to learn that much and more would be explained by playing Final Fantasy Tactics, it seems. The game must needs receive a modern remake ere long, for the benefit of mine own playthrough.
 
Omicron said:
Full many a time have I wondered whence came these FFXIV colloquialisms. Full glad am I to learn that much and more would be explained by playing Final Fantasy Tactics, it seems. The game must needs receive a modern remake ere long, for the benefit of mine own playthrough.
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Matsuno hasn't exactly been subtle that he's been consulting on a remake, if you read his twitter between denials that he's working on a remake.
 
Omicron said:
Full many a time have I wondered whence came these FFXIV colloquialisms. Full glad am I to learn that much and more would be explained by playing Final Fantasy Tactics, it seems. The game must needs receive a modern remake ere long, for the benefit of mine own playthrough.
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If you haven't picked up at least one outmoded and highly theatrical turn of phrase and had it forcibly insert itself into your everyday lexicon...then can you truly be considered a FFXIV fan at all?

Anyroads...
 
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Omicron said:

As for the ending, while I try to keep my experience of the game restricted to the game itself, it's impossible for me to fully separate Final Fantasy VII from the existence of the Final Fantasy VII franchise. I know this game has several sequels by now, which means that when I look at the ending, it feels... Well, I can think that having Barret work on an oil rig is a fucking stupid decision, but while every single point of detail and characterization in Advent Children or Dirge of Cerberus or whatever may be up for debate, what their existence spells out in the broad strokes is that canonically, there is a future for these characters, there is a world after Holy. And having that outside context helps swallow the pill of the ambiguous ending, for me.
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After Planet of the Apes was a success, there was pressure to create a sequel. The writers famously did not want to do that, so they ended the second movie with a bloodbath where the lead characters from the first movie were shot dead on-screen, and then blew the world entirely with thermonuclear superweapons.

Anyway then they made movies 3 - 5.

maskedanddanger said:
Alexander O Smith's Ivalice translations all were inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, and add a lot of "thous" and "thees" which certain people find annoying. It's just not something that Japanese does,
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A funny thing about this is that... Japanese does that. Their language has multiple levels of formality in their second-person pronouns. Bringing back the obsolete English second-person familiar form is about the closest this language comes to the hierarchy that you can embed in speech.

The funniest way to describe this is that English only has the formal mode "You", having dropped the informal "Thou", so it is grammatically impossible to be rude in English like you can in Japanese. English is just structurally a more polite language than Japanese.
 
While I haven't even made it to the first expansion, now that it's mentioned it's super easy to see the line between FFT and FF14.

There are times where the exploited poor underclass is shown as an example of the evil that the antagonists inflict on people in other FFs (6 and 7 specifically come to mind), but this is typically framed as 'they're terrible to everyone, and these are the worst hit' rather then examining the corrupting influence of politics and power have.

6 specifically had the optional parts of when you get to Vector, you can explore the two or three towns that aren't the capital and hear about all the war crimes the empire (and sometimes Celes) specifically did to them before using their resources to expand even further.

You could read a lot into the characters of Reeve and General Leo, but you have to read into them to get the nuance and depth the more ivalician-influenced games have just by default.

FFT and FF14 are interested in the actual politics of things, with an eye on class and hierarchy that is much more absent in the more character-focused games of the mainline adventure-story focused series.
 
sweetd said:
Additional information, every time we see sephiroth pre nibelheim, in japanese, he refers to himself as "Ore." Every time we see him post nibelheim he uses "Watashi." Throughout remake sephiroth uses Watashi, except the friendly sephiroth we see at the end, he uses Ore.
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My Japanese is pretty weak, so though I know there is some context to how these different versions of indicating oneself, I'm unsure of the details. Could you please explain the difference between Ore and Watashi beyond mere formality?
 
Ore is basically informal, casual way of referring to yourself, While watashi is much more formal. Ore is a masculine, outgoing, casual, teenageish way of speaking. Watashi is feminine, formal, professional way of speaking.
 
The best way I have seen the FFXIV raids for FFT described is "Cope Fanfiction written by [redacted]". It is recognizable at a glance and if you squint yeah certain events could be taken as relatively accurately portrayed, but it's also very much designed with an expectation that people who actually played FFT and / or have strong thoughts on its plot are a minority.

And throwing my hat again in the ring for which version I'd say it pretty much exclusively is "Do you want to see gorgeous sprite cutscenes or do you want to see gorgeous drawn / traditionally animated cutscenes?" Because regardless of your thoughts on the script and all that the original is pretty much the only version that retains the spritework cutscenes for everything and WotL replaces a number with more traditional cutscenes. Also I guess before that is the question "Can you even get the PSone version" as if you can't there's your answer.
 
For a potential third option, we can revisit the possibility of playing Chrono Trigger.

Which is definitely short enough to be completed by the end of the year (in one day, including all sidequests and grinding, if need be).
 
Drachyench said:
Also I guess before that is the question "Can you even get the PSone version" as if you can't there's your answer.
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Sadly, if you insist on honestly obtained shiny plastic, brand new PS1 games went out of stock on Square-Enix's online store ages ago, and by ages ago I mean earlier this year. Got FF9 that way myself a couple years ago. At least in North America Square's PS1 library has stayed remarkably accessible to fans of shiny plastic and there's plenty of ways to play PS1 disks, including a PC with a CD drive and an emulator. You can get most of them including Tactics for 20 bucks if you're not picky about Greatest Hits releases.

Only thing is FF Tactics on PS1 never released in PAL regions so none of this applies to Omi. What an import copy costs there may not be what a local copy costs here. Square just doesn't want Europeans to give them money.
 
Emulators on european computers can run iso files of the NTSC version of a game just fine. Speaking from personal experience here.
 
Egleris said:
Emulators on european computers can run iso files of the NTSC version of a game just fine. Speaking from personal experience here.
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How terrible that Square forces honest Europeans to seek out those filthy files. Who knows where they've been! (and in my experience PS1 files are usually bin/cue)
 
PSX files are usually .iso, as far as I've found, but yes, .bin is also a possibility. Of course, we all know that the only way to obtain those kind of files is to buy a NTSC version of a game and then use a program that copies the content of the CD and makes it into a legible file. Which is fully legal as a way to make backup of one's own legally owned games. Wouldn't want anybody to think any illegal actions were being supported or anything of the sort.
 
Omicron said:
The game must needs receive a modern remake ere long, for the benefit of mine own playthrough.
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Oh, does that mean you've made your decision to do VIII next here (unless possibly the remake actually comes out between now and when you'd be starting VIII)?
 
Reese said:
Oh, does that mean you've made your decision to do VIII next here (unless possibly the remake actually comes out between now and when you'd be starting VIII)?
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No, I haven't decided which one will be next, I just know I'll play Tactics eventually even if it's not the next one.

In fact, if there was official word of a remaster/remake, and a release date, it would make my job easier because I could just schedule it for when it actually releases and play the rest of the series until then, instead of having to make a choice between two differently-outdated version of FFT based on the last two pages of discussion of their relative merits and issues. Unfortunately we don't have that :V
 
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@Omicron:
To be clear, as it sounds like there's been some confusion, I wasn't asking whether you were planning to play Tactics at all, just about what you'd decided to play next (that is, after VII) for the thread; sorry about however much of the confusion was on my end.
 
Reese said:
@Omicron:
To be clear, as it sounds like there's been some confusion, I wasn't asking whether you were planning to play Tactics at all, just about what you'd decided to play next (that is, after VII) for the thread; sorry about however much of the confusion was on my end.
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Oh, yeah, that first sentence in my post went through three iterations and by the end the meaning got garbled, this is the perils of posting at 4am.
 
Oh, and I see you went back and edited said sentence! Yes, much clearer now, and thanks.
(I'm still hoping for VIII, personally, but almost everything I know about Tactics I've learned very recently in this thread or the spoiler thread... so I'm not sure I've that much ground to compare.)
 
Hopefully Omicron plays Final Fantasy VIII next.
I am really looking forward to his reactions about all of FF8s baffling storytelling decisions.
I'm also interested in how he will react to all the plentiful ways you can smash that game's difficulty to pieces.
 
Adloquium said:
For a potential third option, we can revisit the possibility of playing Chrono Trigger.

Which is definitely short enough to be completed by the end of the year (in one day, including all sidequests and grinding, if need be).
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As a person who dearly loves Chrono Trigger, I nevertheless have to point out that "a reasonable playthrough could be twenty four hours or less" is not necessarily equivalent to "a Let's Play style gaming session of one day or less".

Omicron said:
In fact, if there was official word of a remaster/remake, and a release date, it would make my job easier because I could just schedule it for when it actually releases and play the rest of the series until then, instead of having to make a choice between two differently-outdated version of FFT based on the last two pages of discussion of their relative merits and issues.
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After the pixel remasters coming out, you kind of have to figure that it's on their radar. It's definitely referenced in enough later games that they've not forgotten it exists. ...But WHEN exactly?

I suspect that you might save yourself some headache and heartache if you just leave FFT for a bit, since it's probably 'the next on the list' for a remaster by many standards. Never a guarantee, sadly, but that's how it is. And the Pixel Remasters demonstrate that they are at least theoretically willing to sand off some major rough edges courtesy of modern game design, quality of life features and updated hardware - while leaving other issues central to the experience and game mechanics untouched, for better or worse. (But will actually it be a definitively good remake/remaster, or just add a third option on how to frustrate yourself trying to experience it? Only time will tell.)

But all that being said, playing it now might well be less of an issue than some of your troubles with FF7! All a matter of perspective.
 
I have no idea how you could reasonably play CT in twenty-four hours or less for pleasure let alone for an LP, and double-especially for a first-look blind LP.

If I sat down to play it today -- even knowing the game pretty well -- I'd probably be looking at a hundred+ hours of playtime.
 
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So that's it, the ending I never saw. Or rather, I saw all the pieces elsewhere and just assumed there was more to it. After 7 I just lost all interest in FF, the games all sounded too big and obtuse for my taste. I'm still interested to read a take on 8 though.

Every time I tried to play Tactics I got so annoyed by its systems that I gave up early on. I just don't like that kind of tactics game, I guess. I absolutely love Firaxis's take on X-com, so it's not like I don't like tactics at all. I think part of the problem is the facing system, because choosing a facing sounds well and good until you see that any combat that devolves into melee becomes a series of back attacks.

Anyway just gonna leave this here.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3O2QnSvw-Y

EDIT: on second thought, if that really was Aerith at the end directing the fight against Meteor, then this should be her line in the Remake:

View: https://youtu.be/8kpHK4YIwY4?si=ouZXoBjPU2k5t11d&t=53
 
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Compellor said:
I think part of the problem is the facing system, because choosing a facing sounds well and good until you see that any combat that devolves into melee becomes a series of back attacks.
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There is an option, hidden in one of the many menus, to disable the "pick your facing" and just let the game autoconfirm that you're facing in the direction of the last action you took. Yes, this does opens your units to back attacks that could have been avoided, so it's not "optimal play", but a lot of people are happy to make that tradeoff just to not have to keep selecting facing.

Of course, the game doesn't tell you that you can do this. User-friendly, Final Fantasy Tactics is not.
 
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