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

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I've actually read @Adloquium's own attempt at a Let's Play Final Fantasy XI (I meant to leave a comment, but I am easily distracted and bad at putting together commentary more interesting than 'cool thread, keep it up!') since XI isn't in my plans to play and so I didn't mind spoilers, and I have to say that while I greatly appreciate (and enjoyed) their effort at delivering this fascinating piece of history to a more modern audience, it has absolutely cemented my conviction to never even attempt to touch the damned thing.
 
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As someone who tested out XI relatively recently with some friends, I can certainly attest that it's A THING. It's a frustrating THING, but it has a lot of charm, even in it's jank controls and lack of modern quality of life. Sadly, that lack of modern QoL and some baffling design decisions also made the frustration greater than the reward, as it were, and I didn't get too far before I called it quits.

Mind, I don't know if that was ill advised, I play XIV and everyone will tell you that the start of that is a bit of a slog. It could turn out the gameplay is amazing as you get further in, but what little I've seen from the wiki didn't really foster confidence.
 
The first thing I heard about XI gameplay was that getting KO'd can make you lose EXP and you can even get deleveled from it, which was enough for me to say No Thank You
 
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fun fact I just noticed this thread officially has 1000k words in threadmarks also known as over a million words.

At the rate things are going by the time Omi has covered the entire series it'll be probably well over 2 million words.
 
Terrabrand said:
fun fact I just noticed this thread officially has 1000k words in threadmarks also known as over a million words.

At the rate things are going by the time Omi has covered the entire series it'll be probably well over 2 million words.
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That means it's probably not past the million yet! The way SV does it is it rounds to two significant digits but lists the right "scale". 1000k words probably is 995,000+, but a million-plus rounds to 1m words. You can see both sizes next to each other if you go to User Fiction and sort by wordcount.
 
Gun Jam said:
Speaking of - what's the best way to play FFIX? Steam (straight out of the box) good enough?
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I've basically just booted it up and played the first five minutes so far, but Steam version of FFIX seems like a decent port, especially after slapping on the Memoria Launcher which adds a bunch of extra QoL choices (Cheats, how fast the game accelerates when you hit speed up, skipping the 30 seconds of unnecessary intro screens when you boot the game, etc) and a built-in mod downloader (though Omi probably doesn't need to play with that, I only used it to grab Moguri to upscale the game backgrounds).

Of course, Omi also already has a functioning PSX emulator, so nothing stopping him from sticking with that option if he wants.
 
Gun Jam said:
Are you going to do all of xiv in one go, or will you take breaks in between? (say, publishing order - putting 15 after heavensward, for example)
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That's a tough question to answer, because every option has its issues. Trying to do all of FFXIV would basically turn this thread into "Let's Play Final Fantasy XIV" - new expansions would probably come out faster than I can finish old ones, and even the existing backlog would take years. On the other hand, covering only ARR would mean covering only the weakest part of the game and concluding just before it actually "gets good." Going up to the end of Heavensward might be the best alternative, but it's kind of awkward to just do one expac.

Ant way we slice it probably ends in me not covering ShB and EW, which is a shame because they're two of my favourite video game stories of all time, but we have to make allowances for reality. If we even get there; VIII took eight months to complete, I really need to find a way to bring down completion time. I can't be spending a full year on each future game.
 
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Oh are we doing XIV at all? I thought both MMOs were off the table for this LP.

If you are planning on it, maybe a greatest hits kind of experience for XIV? Go through the MSQ in NG+ to refresh on the plot and you could probably cover ARR in just a couple of posts, same with most of the expacs.

Because yeah, as much as I do love XIV it would absolutely take over the thread if you tried to cover each story beat from a fresh character.
 
Omicron said:
That's a tough question to answer, because every option has its issues. Trying to do all of FFXIV would basically turn this thread into "Let's Play Final Fantasy XIV" - new expansions would probably come out faster than I can finish old ones, and even the existing backlog would take years. On the other hand, covering only ARR would mean covering only the weakest part of the game and concluding just before it actually "gets good." Going up to the end of Heavensward might be the best alternative, but it's kind of awkward to just do one expac.

Ant way we slice it probably ends in me not covering ShB and EW, which is a shame because they're two of my favourite video game stories of all time, but we have to make allowances for reality. If we even get there; VIII took eight months to complete, I really need to find a way to bring down completion time. I can't be spending a full year on each future game.
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Get a new acount, start making Videos about them as you play, be the V-tuber version of

T B Skyen

 
I vote skipping XIV. I love it, but you're already far too familiar with it to get the same "have never seen this"/"have not seen any part of this in decades" fresh eyes that's been a hallmark of the thread so far

I'm far more interested in what a fresh set of eyes has to say about XV than I am in seeing a greatest hits roll of XIV by a fan - I read self insert and crossover fanfics for that, of which there are dozens of ongoing options, while fresh eyes on single player Final Fantasy games are far rarer
 
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I'd really be interested in your overall opinion of FF14 in the new context of played the previous ones, how the game mines it's series huge range of lore and ideas.

But I remember you tried to do that for advent children and ended up going scene-by-scene.

As someone who just finished stormblood and is doing other stuff before hitting the next bit, it's interesting how having played (or read let's plays) of all the previous games influences how you see what they straight up lift, what they reference, and what they take an idea from and go another direction, where nothing feels totally new, but usually is doing something new.
 
Omicron said:
If we even get there; VIII took eight months to complete, I really need to find a way to bring down completion time. I can't be spending a full year on each future game.
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I think I mentioned that FFVII was the longest game in the series (MMO obviously excluded), didn't I? FFVIII is the second longest, FFIX is third, and FFX is about the same length as FFV / FFVI. FFXII is shorter than FFX, and if you decide to do FFX-2, that one's probably shorter than FFXII unless you go through New-Game plus, in which case it's still shorter than FFX.

So, you should probably be able to go through the upcoming Final Fantasy titles faster than you did for FFVIII - which you spent one more month than FFVII on, but wrote substantially less about - since most of the extra length for FFVIII compared to FFVII was, I imagine, due to you needing to take two breaks through it for non-game-related reasons (second half of February and then from mid-March to mid-April). Right?

Of course, FFXII has a lot of busywork meant to make the players waste time, and FFX does as well; FFIX doesn't but it has a minigame that is both more addictive and more time consuming than Triple Triad. Those aspects might lengthen your playtime, so it might be time to start considering whether you want to go through as much of a completionist playthrough as you've done thus far, but I still think you'll be able to finish them much faster.
 
I agree- I am interested in a writeup or series thereof about XIV but given the length, less so a playthrough of however much content you're already familiar with and already played before. As for bringing down completion time... perhaps completionism is no longer viable? Like, side content and optional goals are cool and all but maybe instead of doing everything you could aim for specific goals from the beginning. Story completion and doodah doodah. I suppose that requires some amount of foreknowledge, though.
 
Wait, I have the solution! If Omi needs to play FFXIV, but needs to make sure they don't keep adding content, Omi just needs to play the 1.0 version!
 
There's also Tactics to consider, but I've been replaying it recently and it's surpisingly short for the story it tells. Of course I'm speaking as veteran, so a first-time could take more time, but even at double my playtime it's way shorter than FFVII/VIII.
 
Zap Rowsdower said:
I vote skipping XIV. I love it, but you're already far too familiar with it to get the same "have never seen this"/"have not seen any part of this in decades" fresh eyes that's been a hallmark of the thread so far
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This is true, but on the other hand-
RubberBandMan said:
I'd really be interested in your overall opinion of FF14 in the new context of played the previous ones, how the game mines it's series huge range of lore and ideas.

But I remember you tried to do that for advent children and ended up going scene-by-scene.

As someone who just finished stormblood and is doing other stuff before hitting the next bit, it's interesting how having played (or read let's plays) of all the previous games influences how you see what they straight up lift, what they reference, and what they take an idea from and go another direction, where nothing feels totally new, but usually is doing something new.
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Right. FFXIV is extremely referential, constantly looting the rest of the franchise for inspirations and homages, and most of those references completely passed me by on my first playthrough, so I kind of want to replay it being freshly informed by the rest of the series leading up to it. In particular having just finished FF8, I have a new outlook on the Eden raids!
Egleris said:
So, you should probably be able to go through the upcoming Final Fantasy titles faster than you did for FFVIII - which you spent one more month than FFVII on, but wrote substantially less about - since most of the extra length for FFVIII compared to FFVII was, I imagine, due to you needing to take two breaks through it for non-game-related reasons (second half of February and then from mid-March to mid-April). Right?
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Maybe, but that's assuming I don't end up having to take breaks in the future, which seems like a dubious proposal :V Especially since "took more time to finish, yet ended up writing less" isn't exactly a great sign.
 
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Flare said:
There's also Tactics to consider, but I've been replaying it recently and it's surpisingly short for the story it tells. Of course I'm speaking as veteran, so a first-time could take more time, but even at double my playtime it's way shorter than FFVII/VIII.
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Tactics is shorter when you're playing it for yourself, but it would be considerably longer in the context of a let's play - you cannot really skip describing any of the battles you fight in it, and while some fights can be won quickly if you know how, figuring out how isn't always easy, and other battles will eat half an hour no matter how good you are. Considering how many mandatory fights the game has, the burden of describing each one would add up quickly, and if you skip battles, that immediately diminishes the experience of the let's play since, unlike in other Final Fantasy titles where the fights are part of the game, in FFT the fights are the game.

Even if we average the duration of a fight to 15 minutes per fight, which is absolutely a low-balling estimate, considering the out-of-battle team-building and pre-battle preparations that every single battle requires, no matter how quick you then win the fight once it starts, with 54 mandatory fights, that's still over 13 hours of gameplay to make a detailed report of. And, of course, this is with absolutely no resetting whatsoever, and if you want to tell me that a fresh player who's never played FFT before can go through the two Orbonne sequences or, worse, the Riovanes sequence without losing characters, you'll need to be very convincing. The fact that you need to go through the game without permanently losing characters substantially changes the equation of what it means to "win" a fight in FFT.
 
I actually played FF9 on the PlayStation. However my disc kept glitching and eventually I gave up. I look forward to seeing how the game actually goes it had a lot of promise.
 
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