Let's Play Every Final Fantasy Game In Order Of Release [Now Finished: Final Fantasy Tactics]
- Thread starter Omicron
- Start date
- Let's Play
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm forever miffed about that, because the original English version (the one localized as 'Final Fantasy II') did have dialogue-
Crew: Give us the crystal of water.
Elder: Why? What have we done to anger Baron?
Cecil: The crystal or your life!
Black Wizard: Never!
Cecil: Then, take the crystal by force!
the black wizards die
White Mage: No, don't!
Crew: Dare to defy us?
the white wizard dies
Elder: My! All right...take the crystal!
Crew: you should have said it earlier!
Cecil takes the crystal
Elder: Why is Baron doing this? Why do you pursue the crystals so eagerly?!
Cecil: ......
It's hacky English work (unsurprising for the time) but I wish they'd kept it if for no other reason than it has the line where Cecil gives the order to take the crystal by force, verbatim. (As opposed to a situation going out of control or the like.) I feel like it puts a much harsher emphasis on Cecil's confliction when the game confirms for the player that their main character does, in fact, have that on the record.
I'm similarly miffed about something here but we'll come back to it.
This is deliberate. I don't know if the line appears in the version you're playing, so I'll hide it, but it's a throwaway where Kain mentions his father died in a war against an Empire.
I'm not going to go over all my feelings for this game because I'll basically end up replicating the entire post. I love FF4, flaws and all. It's my favorite of the early FF games. I grew up playing it, it helped me learn to read, it's one of those games I played as a little kid and then came back to finally beat as an adult - all those classic nostalgia-baiting stories. Also the soundtrack. Just trying to imagine the intro without the Red Wings' theme is horrifying.
Cecil: And unlike Darth Vader, I get the force lightning! It makes killing mage younglings a lot easier, I must say.
Also, I think it's probably worth posting Cid's concept art because it's amazing.
~Slim Pickens well he does the right thing
And he rides the bomb to hell
Yeah he rides the bomb to hell
Watch the pulse, it quickens after every little sting
If you're gonna go to hell
Drinking up you might as well~
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Given the smoke (and the sail-like striped cloth) I think that's supposed to be an engine he's trying to fix
Well, it was an engine until he got to it, anyway.
- Location
- Phoenix
Yeah, FF4 was when square started to really develop their story beyond 'you're the heroes, go kill the bad guy' there were plenty of shades of this in FF2 and 3, but it was actually the transition to the SNES that allowed this, the increase in cartridge capacity allowed them to put in a lot more text than before to build the story up. Also the transition from the 'build your own character' gameplay from the first 3 to the fixed character mechanics of the 4th and beyond allowed them to spend less development balancing gameplay and more building the story and setting.
Also iirc 4 was the first FF game to get a major release outside of Japan.
Khona Moshr
Pink Flamingo Cabal Healer(they/them)
- Location
- Alabama
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Nah, 4 was titled FF II, 1 got a US release, and then they skipped 1 and 2.
Will also note they dumbed down FFIV's combat alot for the OG US release.
- Location
- Phoenix
I think you mean they skipped 2 and 3 there >.>
but yeah that explains a lot, the NES was when video games were making their big push back into the market following the crash because of the abomination that was the ET game, SNES was when they fully regained the lost ground and started pushing forwards.
Also I'll second what Baam_35th said in their post, I didn't get any sort of an alert that new content was posted in this story thread.
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Some subforums, including Gaming, don't support author notifications.
IIRC, the reasoning is that most threads there are meant to be more communal (general discussions and suchlike), so the status of OP is not important, and singling them out in notifs is not helpful.
In any case, yeah, it's not just you, and it's not even a bug.
- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I particularly appreciate how he's drawn like...
He's a big, muscular guy, with this dark outfit, this big dark bushy beard, his goggles and mask hide his face and leave only his teeth, he looks kinda like Krampus; he has a design that could very easily scan as 'evil.' If you put that guy as the antagonist evil airship designer - which is what he is, right now, to the rest of the world - it'd be like, sure, totally.
But also he's drawn in a fun way, with a wacky pose doing something ill-advised, smiling broadly, and generally just goofy enough that it makes his character immediately likeable and friendly.
Weird comparison because the art styles are very different, but his design reminds me of nuShe-Ra's Scorpia: designed to immediately visually code as "part of a villainous faction, but a likeable character who could easily turn coat to the good side."
Unfortunately it goes quickly enough that I totally missed it when it happens and only ran into the ATB system in my first actual battle 😔
This seems to be a known issue. My understanding is that this is because most threads in Gaming are assumed to be started by Some Rando about a general-topic discussion for a game, and there's no particular reason why everyone should be pinged every time the guy who happened to start the Hearts of Iron IV thread decides to post in the thread about whatever.
I don't know how to change this. I don't know if it's even possible.
- Location
- Phoenix
You could ask a site admin to move the thread over to creative writing, while this isn't a fanfic, I think it could arguably fit in there as a creative analysis of the game and world.
Khona Moshr
Pink Flamingo Cabal Healer(they/them)
- Location
- Alabama
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Yeah I did ment 2 and 3.
So abit curious on your opinions on some of the other concept art like say for cecil
The solution, of course, is to turn the LP into fanfic. A couple of paragraphs documenting the game followed by 3k words of narration based on speculations about ancient civilizations, the nature of Emperor's souls and so on.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
Speaking of that kid, in a funny bit of historic final fantasy trivia Kain's own father is apparently named Ricard, a call back to, well, Ricard the Dragoon in FF2.
The kid you mention, in turn, was named Kain in various remakes and so on, a call forward to this Dragoon.
Though these are presumably not the same Kain and Ricard, since those two were not directly related unlike Kain's father being Ricard here etc.
But it's a fun bit of trivia that it's now a recursive reference loop thinger.
Egleris
Vagrant Dragon
- Location
- Italy
I mean, while this is true, this is actually a bad thing, in my opinion. It's the reason why I can't honestly say that FFIV is a full improvement on FFIII; because, while everything else (characterization, story, theme, you name it) in FFIV is leagues above FFIII, mechanically speaking, FFIII is the superior game, and for a game, good mechanics should be weighed more than story. Like, if you can only play one once, yeah, FFIV all the way, but if you are in the fantasy situation of "these are the only two games you have and can play, nothing else", then FFIII would be my pick because it's the one with actual replayability and flexibility. I'll probably expand more on it once the mechanics have been explained a bit in the let's play itself, to avoid too much spoiler, but I think it's safe to say that, while FFIV's approach did a lot to add depth to the classes by tying them to a single character (as Omicron mentioned regarding the Dark Knight class), I firmly believe that it's the inferior choice from a gameplay standpoint, simply because of how simple and lacking in complexity this makes it. Future titles that copy the FFIV approach found ways to solve this issues, but in FFIV itself, this is perhaps the greatest flaw the game has. At least, that's what I think of it.
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- Location
- Brittany, France
- Pronouns
- He/Him
You know, there is a lot to be said about FFIV's music, but paradoxically I'm actually really impressed by its use of silence to emphasize dramatic moments.
Damn my dude looks sick.So abit curious on your opinions on some of the other concept art like say for cecil
- Location
- the Republic
- Pronouns
- He/They
As someone who started with FF7 and never really got into the pre-Playstation FFs, it's really cool seeing how they progress and improve moving forward, rather than my impression as a teenager, which is that they were a downgrade from my objectively superior polygon block mans.
Alectai
Speaks Words of Wisdom... On occasion
Yeah, Dark Knights in FF4 are--it seems--subjects of the magical equivalent of cybernetic enhancement to draw out superhuman capabilities--and it shows, Cecil is robust as all hell and can stand shoulder to shoulder with mages and other superhumans just on the weight of those enhancements alone. Unfortunately, the quality of life and general 'Shelf Life' of a Dark Knight is... Limited to put it lightly, which is why you don't really see any other Dark Knights other than him. Most probably go mad and need to be put down, and Cecil's one of the handful who can keep his shit together from sheer force of will.
Did that update feel like a sustainable pace?
Zap Rowsdower
Ex-cultist vagrant
- Location
- Bright lights, big city
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Rosa is something of a mystery, and the start of a major trend that continues to this day.
See, as she tells you, she's part of Baron's White Mage corps, which she joined so as to be able to support Cecil.
As you can see in both the attack on Mysidia and the Baron White Magic Research Lab, the universal standard white mage uniform continues from I and III - regardless of nation, white mages wear loose opaque white robes so covering and concealing that you can't even reasonably tell the mage's gender. Minwu didn't wear that, but he still had all-concealing loose white cloth covering all skin but his eyes and a brass breastplate.
Rosa, on the other hand...
is, er, not wearing the uniform. The tradition she represents, of course, is named female characters having designs waaaay more for sex appeal than for internal coherence of worldbuilding (its not until you get to the PS2 era really that you start getting male characters following suit consistently).
Why the Baron military allows this disregard for obvious in-universe uniform standards is, as I said, something of a mystery.
See, as she tells you, she's part of Baron's White Mage corps, which she joined so as to be able to support Cecil.
As you can see in both the attack on Mysidia and the Baron White Magic Research Lab, the universal standard white mage uniform continues from I and III - regardless of nation, white mages wear loose opaque white robes so covering and concealing that you can't even reasonably tell the mage's gender. Minwu didn't wear that, but he still had all-concealing loose white cloth covering all skin but his eyes and a brass breastplate.
Rosa, on the other hand...
is, er, not wearing the uniform. The tradition she represents, of course, is named female characters having designs waaaay more for sex appeal than for internal coherence of worldbuilding (its not until you get to the PS2 era really that you start getting male characters following suit consistently).
Why the Baron military allows this disregard for obvious in-universe uniform standards is, as I said, something of a mystery.
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- Location
- Te Ika-a-Māui
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Clearly she's only just joined and hasn't been issued the robes yet.
