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

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What I'm getting out of this threat is that, while I mostly agree with what everyone is saying (The game needed more time, it has good ideas it mishandles, it also just has some flat out bad ideas that where the style at the time, characters are good), I'm in the minority that has come out of this with a firmly negative opinion.

I don't care for mind control or time travel plots. The former always feels cheap, the latter opens way to many cans of worms. I'm very changeable on the art style, with mostly hating the look of places like Balum Garden and Edea/Ultimecia and everywhere else feeling okay-ish. The battle system as implemented sounds awful to deal with, with the minigames not helping. Some of the plot holes and contrivances are atrocious. If I was younger and dumber, I'd have probably dropped the LP at some point and just waited for the next game.

But I'm not that dumb, and the game has some strong points. The characters are deep and usually fun, the world is lived in and interesting. A lot of the emotional moments missed for me, but that was because of the surrounding plot, not the moments themselves. There's stuff in this game that could've been amazing, held back by misteps from the hazards of video game development. But for me, this is not enough. Too much of the game hit me in too much of the wrong way, and I wasn't even playing the darn thing.

Most people are saying that a Remake could fix a lot of this. I wonder how much of the bad design is in the game's DNA, that if you removed it all then the game would stop feeling like FF8? I think the better route would be more along the lines of a spiritual successor. Build something with similar characters and similar world. Heck, make a similar plot. Just don't leave such big holes in the plot and don't try to string everything together with vibes.

And don't make important character and plot information, much less critical character building moments, misable content! That's like half the game's problem right there!
 
Nottheunmaker said:
And don't make important character and plot information, much less critical character building moments, misable content! That's like half the game's problem right there!
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Instructions unclear, made it possible to skip every explanation that mentions Ultimecia if you don't take a specific party composition to an unmarked spot on the world map.
 
I joked about this before, but my main problem with the Ultinoa theory, as fun as it would undoubtedly be in a game with actual parallel timelines instead of a timeloop, is that the end result is still "party kills mentally disturbed Rinoa" in at least some timelines\endings. I don't hate Rinoa or anything but that's a bit too far for square enix I think... and I was one of the few that loved the ff7 post ending because it's hilariously nihilistic. And maybe it should be a bit far, considering the audience, sure you can make a optimistic and good story, after a lot of suffering and a expanded scope, with this idea, but consider a 13 year old.

I don't think Square ever intended Ultinoa, at most the storyboard director was being far too metaphorical with the ending fmv and decided to overlay fading Rinoa with Ultimecia to imply squall feared that the end boss was successful at absorbing Rinoa or the memories of her. Helped along by Squall having no face slightly later.
 
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To me, the funniest part of the LP was when Omi lost SeeD points after Squall was tortured, increduously asking if SeeD had someone uncover in the prison to tattle on you for not acting the right way under torture, then finding the person SeeD had undercover to spy on the prison.
 
I'm going to go against the grain here and say that any theoretical FF8 Remake should just cut the unjustified persecution of sorceresses entirely, honestly.

It's entirely superfluous, we never get any evidence for it, it never actually matters to the plot at all. And frankly, 'the persecuted minority end up being the worst tyrants and world-ending threats' is a trope that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

My preference would be to just focus on Ultimecia as a version of Rinoa who ended up utterly alone and went mad. Lean in on the romance and chivalric tropes, but also on Ultinoa losing literally everyone and everything in the future, not just Squall.
 
Hot take: I'm not sure that Ultimedea actually had mind control powers at all.

In her first appearance, she teleports into a room, sees Seifer, and instantly clocks him as a Tier Three Sub on sight.

We later learn that "being a Sorceress's knight" was Seifer's dream all along, but we also know that Ultimecia had no access to Edea's memories and no reason to recognize Seifer or know anything about him. Which means that either Ultimecia coincidentally mind-controlled Seifer into doing exactly what he always wanted to do, or she literally just locked eyes with him and said "Come with me and I'll make you an adult, little boy" (practically her exact words!) based purely on vibes, and that worked.

Later on, during the takeover of Galbadia, there's an implication of mind control that exists purely in the weirdly positive reaction of the Galbadian public to Ultimecia murdering President Deling and giving an ominous speech. There's no SFX of a sparkly wave of magic covering the crowd, Ultimecia never exerts herself at all. After supposedly mind-controlling the entire city into cheering as she conducts a coup, she never bothers to give the personal touch to the General of her new military whose daughter recently attempted to assassinate her. General Caraway is even able to get Rinoa freed from prison after this.

There are a few lines from random Galbadian citizens after defeating Edea that claim they've broken out of a long-term trance, sure... except they haven't changed course at all, they're still doing the exact same thing under the command of Seifer, now in the name of the absentee Sorceress Ultimecia, who no one in Galbadia would have ever met but they sure do seem fine with. As it turns out, the Galbadian populace care a lot more about power and being on the winning side than they do about whether they're led by a President or a Sorceress or a different Sorceress, who cares, it's all the same to them.

And aside from recruiting Seifer and the Galbadian Accession, this supposed mind control power never comes up again.
 
I agree that Ultimecia probably doesn't have mind control powers. However, I'm just saying that Ultimeciedea is specific about saying seifer is a boy and she'll make him into an adult, never specifying man.

Seifer might just be a very specific type that is shockingly vulnerable to steppy women.
 
On a completely unrelated note, I just had a thought.

When Squall was a kid, Matron Edea inherited the powers of post-Time Kompression Ultimecia, right, on top of Edea's pre-existing Sorceress powers inherited from somebody else unnamed. It was some time after this that pre-Time Kompression Ultimecia first possessed Edea.

When Edea was defeated, she bequeathed her Sorceress powers to Rinoa. And when Adel was unsealed, the first thing she did was start trying to absorb Rinoa.

Which means that all three of the people who Ultimecia possessed in the past, already had Ultimecia's Sorceress powers at the time Ultimecia possessed them. Ultimecia, the "last Sorceress", only ever possessed her own successors.
 
Except Rinoa is right there on stage as well during Edea's speech to the masses. If she weren't mind-controlled/entranced, why wouldn't she have run away already, especially after failing so hard at her attempt with the Odine bangle?
 
silentorphan said:
Except Rinoa is right there on stage as well during Edea's speech to the masses. If she weren't mind-controlled/entranced, why wouldn't she have run away already, especially after failing so hard at her attempt with the Odine bangle?
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That looks a lot more like a Stun effect to me than Charm. Rinoa is wobbling in place, head lolling, not paying attention to anything going on around her, until she snaps out of it when she gets attacked by monsters. It seems like a stretch to look at that and say it's clearly the same thing as seamlessly editing the emotions of an entire nation.
 
This week a small thread planning and discussing the logistics of doing the thing Omi is doing here popped up over on Resetera and one thing that stood out to me is that they've got people both confidently defending the solo-playability of modern XI and praising its storytelling as a highlight within the franchise.
Maybe arguments like that have already been taken into account here and Omi is (iirc) skipping XI despite them, but to me seeing positivity for XI was interesting and surprising.
 
Yeah, to chime in on the '8 seems like a bad game' side, 8 seems like a generally bad game with some standout moments? It has a battle and level system that seems to have two settings, 'overpowered' and 'miserably struggling to survive', and you can flip between them seemingly at random. The story is both thin and mostly poorly-executed. There's so much stupid missable content that you need for context. There's a great big pile of dropped major plot threads to the point it genuinely feels like 8 is the result of at least two completely separate stories being rammed together in a hurry to get a product out the door in time. The size and complexity of the world also seems to come with the massive downside of several seconds of loading screen every time you change location. Omi seems to have genuinely found it unpleasant to play at several points, too.

And on a personal taste level, the card game is obnoxious and I despise it (and all card minigames, I don't know why, they just really rub me the wrong way), the last dungeon does a thing I loathe with taking away your abilities, and the final boss does that but worse.

On the plus side, the FMVs are legitimately revolutionary and contain some moments of excellent cinematography, and the ending is a fun and sweet conclusion for the most part. The romance is mostly well-executed except for some real head-scratchers (Galbadia vs Balamb Cliff Hang Upper Body Endurance Workout being a big one, as is the 'let's walk while my team hops in a boat and gets there eight hours before I do' bit). The art direction is generally pretty good, the world is lavish in comparison to the relative simplicity of 7, and there are some fun characters.

It's definitely not one of the FFs I'm interested in playing through myself.
 
To be honest, it's not even that much more characterization.

To steal another bit:

"Isn't Ultimecia Sad and lonely all the time?" FFDOO asks me, unprompted.
"I guess? You mean like when she helps the shadow Locke or Zidane?"
"Yeah."
"Yes...?"
"Okay, good. Anyway, she's doing Time Kompression and ranting about accursed SeeDs again."
 
CeBrudras said:
This week a small thread planning and discussing the logistics of doing the thing Omi is doing here popped up over on Resetera and one thing that stood out to me is that they've got people both confidently defending the solo-playability of modern XI and praising its storytelling as a highlight within the franchise.
Maybe arguments like that have already been taken into account here and Omi is (iirc) skipping XI despite them, but to me seeing positivity for XI was interesting and surprising.
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These days XI is absolutely playable solo and an enjoyable enough experience, if you have a tolerance for a very specific flavor of old MMO jank - I've been playing it off and on the past couple of years and I've largely enjoyed it.

With that said, I do question its suitability for this let's play thread specifically. I think the main issue is that while it's playable solo and has some fun storytelling, it's spread out over a great deal of MMO gameplay that I think would risk burning Omi out real bad. There's only so much content you can milk out of "and then I spent four hours grinding worms so I could do the next story mission," especially as an MMO, there are no fast forward options or the like that can be used to make the experience faster.

It also has a side issue in that for the most part expansion stories are not strictly linear and can be picked up whenever you want to, so if you wanted to experience them in release order you basically need a guide to make sure you aren't triggering the wrong expansion's quests.

I'll absolutely sing XI's praises and recommend it to anyone interested in a very interesting piece of FF history, but I don't know if this thread is the place to do it.
 
xthetenth said:
Hey how's it going Seifer, did you enjoy your fishing trip?
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Listen.

You can't dangle "Lonely Christmas Cake Witch with Cringe Personality in her Haunted Castle at the End of Time" before me and not expect me to make a fool of myself.

StormyEyed said:
FFXI
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Someday SE will do the smart thing and bundle the XIV and XI subscriptions together. I *love* stuff based on longform exploration and questing, so XI sounds like catnip for me...but unfortunately it's prehistoric payment system puts me off. Which is a shame, because it looks like the vibes are immaculate.
 
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Yeah the actual payment system of XI is something I try to touch as little as possible in fear of breaking something - it works now and that's what matters.

Though I will say the XI launcher itself is just delightfully antiquated. It's got its own background music and everything! Plus a whole list of social features that I'm sure they were very excited about at the time.
 
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