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

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McFluffles said:
I know, just cut off the rest of the description for the joke. And you'll never see me say McDonalds in general is the pinnacle of fast food, I worked there for five years I know how that garbage is made, it mostly exists as "usually the cheapest fast food option that won't kill you".

There's just something about those fries that's addictive though, been to many a higher class restaurant (ie literally anything that isn't McDonalds) but very few can compare for me.
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McDonald's has the luxury of being a fast food chain that has French fries as one of their most important staple, so they have an entire infrastructure dedicated to their fries, and in the US that includes a proprietary flavored oil blend.

A nicer restaurant can put a lot of love into how they select their potatoes and how they cut them and what temperature they fry them at, and that will get them a French fry that on some hypothetical scale of culinary 'goodness' is a 'better made fry,' but at the end of the day if you're frying your French fries in canola oil and salting them at the end and McDonald's is frying theirs in a blend of five vegetal oils infused with beef fat-derived wheat/milk derivatives that gives them a kick of umami and meatiness that salt alone can't bring (though MSG might help), one of the two is going to taste like crack and it's not the one that would satisfy a more snobbish sensibility towards 'well made' food.

Or a vegetarian diet. McDonald's fries: not vegan or vegetarian (at least in the US).
 
Omicron said:
Like, I hadn't realized how much my expectations of media had changed over time, but having the paratext tell you "this character may look gruff, but he actually has a heart of gold" before you actually meet the character and get to see for yourself that they have a heart of gold used to be standard for the fiction I consumed but feels like it no longer is? Maybe that's related to the rise of 'spoiler culture,' but, hm. "There's a sniper called Irvine who looks like he has a devil may care attitude but is in reality sensitive and serious" isn't spoilers, but it's something a modern story would let you experience firsthand rather than just tell you in the booklet?
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Yeah, old school is right. It comes from the time when games were so much smaller and simpler that they pretty much had to tell you stuff through the manual. I'm talking about all the way back in the old Atari generation and the first steps into the 8bit era when games were so abstract that the developers had to illuminate their world and story more or less directly to you, lest players be forced to figure out every single mechanic for every single game on their own. Creative types, naturally, ran with it.



Over time, games got bigger and more involved, and pair that with the way videogame companies cut out stuff like manuals in the years leading from the brick and mortar stores to digital distribution we just stopped seeing it. And yeah, stuff in the manual could be inconsistent due to miscommunication or changes in development* - a good reason to let increasingly complex game stories tell themselves.

*= or just lying to you, objectively the most funny and correct reason for a manual to be wrong
 
Omicron said:
Skyrim's crafting system is very good at simulating an end-to-end job from mining the ore to selling the finished dagger yourself, and I do enjoy it. For the first five levels.

At some point it just gets tedious, and that point is really early. Unfortunately, there is vanishingly little way of not doing so if you want the rewards of high skills in the system.
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You can skip most of the crafting sequence with money. No need to mine ore or pick herbs just buy it with money looted out of Tombs or gotten from one of the many money making methods at least one of them should feel fun.

Or just rob the stores directly.
 
Omicron said:
Also, I guess Laguna is a whole 27 years old, huh. And every other character is specifically, exactly 17 except for Seifer and Quistis, both 18.
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Kind of shows how big an @$$h0le he is then when he's a senior and still not an instructor like Quistis. Or how he's picking on someone younger/lower ranked than him. I know it's not that big an age difference, but in a high school (like, you know, Balamb Garden), that's like a General trying to give a Major shit just because he doesn't like him.
 
Squaresoft Strategy Guides were also an entirely different beast in this era: A lot of them contain major lore and post-game spoiler epilogues as well as assorted minor NPC character profiles and such. This goes for their non-Final Fantasy games as well: For example, Brave Fencer Musashi's manual not only includes epilogues for all the surviving major characters but also includes a developer's personal speedrunning tips / exploits as well as a bunch of unused concept art and narrative hooks.

Most of this is confined to the Japanese versions of the walkthroughs, but is still wild. Absolutely a different era.
 
The best manual, of course, comes from the game Vermis.


Half Moon said:
Quistis is the same age as Squall? I thought she was just a bit of a cougar.
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Omicron has already commented on it. At first, Quistis comes across as a character who really should be older and is only as young as she is because of the usual animu nonsense that gives us 18 years old generals and 15 years old professors. As her backstory is revealed, however, her youth becomes a plot point: she really is too young to be an instructor, and in truth is a gifted child on the verge of mental breakdown.
 
I wonder if that 27 is as-of-flashbacks or as-of-present. I would expect flashbacks.

Also, there's no way the uniformity of age in the rest of the cast is coincidence.
 
foamy said:
Also, there's no way the uniformity of age in the rest of the cast is coincidence.
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I mean, of the 17/18 year olds, the only ones to not be in the same graduating class are Rinoa and Quistis.

Well, and Irvine, but I could easily see Galbadia Garden deliberately foisting a recent grad on the team of recent Balamb grads.
 
Hey, if we don't have to have a 9-16 year old to balance out an 'over 30' character, that means the average age of the cast has to skew in a very very narrow range to keep the math working.
 
Omicron said:
Also, I guess Laguna is a whole 27 years old, huh.
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As of when, though? Haven't the Laguna flashbacks already spanned a period of multiple years?

Also, unrelatedly, I can't help but find it funny that Rinoa's height is listed as 5'3" and a half. Rinoa, honey, you're seventeen, not seven. No one's going to bust out the tape measure if you just tell people you're 5'4".

It's genuinely odd, no one but the most insecure 5'11" short king would give their height in inches using fractions. I wonder if giving her and Selphie that treatment was actually intended to make them seem less mature. Especially since presumably all of these characters had their actual height given in centimeters, which the localization team converted to inches; no one's height should line up exactly, but it's only those two that get the fractions.
 
pedanterrific said:
I wonder if giving her and Selphie that treatment was actually intended to make them seem less mature.
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I can believe that Selphie would in fact use 1/2, 3/4, 5/8 inches. After all, she needs to know precisely how much moomba skin she's using for her disguise, wouldn't want it to look all baggy or anything. Measure twice, cut once and all.
 
Given talk of Selphie, one problem I have with her is her yellow dress character design is surprisingly bland (funny, given FF is usually accused of the opposite). I guess that'd be fine if it suited her character, but it really doesn't. You could argue the Gardens have limits on what you can wear, but Selphie doesn't seem like she'd care about a dress code
 
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Omicron said:
Also random fun fact I found out looking for this: In French, Edea is not referred to as a "sorceress," but, of all things, as a priestess. Which is weird considering she has yet to show any kind of religious inclination!
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I have a possible explanation for that , LACITE!
Consider how you had noted that Hyne who granted them their Power according to the ingame stuff is refered to as god/deity if I remember the translation used right, so of course she is a priestress.
 
Omicron said:
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"The friends, rivals, and beautiful women whom they encounter" makes it sound like a rather different genre of game.

I suspect this is how the manual categorizes characters like Julia, Raine, and Ellone, but that raises the question of why they are mentioned separately from "friends" and "rivals".
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
Given talk of Selphie, one problem I have with her is her yellow dress character design is surprisingly bland (funny, given FF is usually accused of the opposite). I guess that'd be fine if it suited her character, but it really doesn't. You could argue the Gardens have limits on what you can wear, but Selphie doesn't seem like she'd care about a dress code
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Because there is a feint about the dress. Depending of circumstances, you can see her panty, which makes her the wildest girl in japanese standards. :V
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
I mean, of the 17/18 year olds, the only ones to not be in the same graduating class are Rinoa and Quistis.

Well, and Irvine, but I could easily see Galbadia Garden deliberately foisting a recent grad on the team of recent Balamb grads.
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I'm saying there's something motivating that, given the wider age ranges Square has been using in prior FFs. It's a deliberate departure.
 
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foamy said:
I'm saying there's something motivating that, given the wider age ranges Square has been using in prior FFs. It's a deliberate departure.
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Narratively, everything flows from the decision to set the game in school with the protagonist being from the graduation class.

So, Squall is 17, so are Selphie and Zell because they're from the same class. As established, Quistis' youth is a major component of her character, on top of which she tries to bond with Squall because she sees him as more of a peer to her than Garden Faculty*. Making her slightly older than Squall is natural, but the older she is, the less resonant her themes become. Rinoa's naivety is a major part of her character, plus she's a love interest, so she needs to be around Squall's age. Making her a year younger could work, but that's about it. Irvine could have been somewhat older, potentially, I'd grant that.

Now, could the game have used a different cast of characters where it would've made sense for them to have a broader age range? Yeah, sure. Quistis could have been an appropriately aged instructor, Selphie or Zell could have been replaced with the resistance members, etc. But, well, that would've been a different game with different characters and plot.

*Afterwork drinking with coworkers was always awkward to her because she couldn't actually drink and because NORG insisted on bringing his gamer chair to the bar.
 
Plus changing ages would change character dynamics. Quistis has already been mentioned (though I still firmly maintain without solid proof that she was originally designed to be thirty and her being a teen came later in development after her design had been set), but considering how Squall's whole character arc is about his aloofness being a cover for immaturity and his growth beyond that immaturity, making him older and more experienced than "recent grad" would change the fundamental nature of his character. And as mentioned, Rinoa needs to be of similar age to him for Idealized Romance reasons.

And once Squall is a recent grad, Zell and Selphie need to be as well, because can you imagine if Zell and Selphie were older established SeeDs that Squall looked up to and was trying to prove himself to?
 
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Zap Rowsdower said:
And once Squall is a recent grad, Zell and Selphie need to be as well, because can you imagine if Zell and Selphie were older established SeeDs that Squall looked up to and was trying to prove himself to?
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"Say it."
"No."
"Say it."
"No."
"Say it or be real wary who goes to the cornfield next."
"..."
"..."
"Yes, senpai."
"Ehehehehe~"
 
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The Garden transfer was in fact a ploy to get her away from harming the sensitive and soft flesh and minds of other non GF-powered SeeDs'.

The Selphie can not be stopped or denied, but it can be... redirected.
 
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