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

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Kuja said:
The setting pivots around the legend of how a god manifests his power in certain women as revenge on humankind, but the god doesn't matter, and the persecution of sorceresses doesn't matter because its never lingered on.
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It's such a non-event that not only did I forget it before replaying the game, I also forgot after every single time it was brought up during this entire LP.

Omicron said:
When the game closed, and I sat watching through the ending movie, the credits movie, and the post-credit movie, every issue I had with the game almost seemed to fade away and not matter anymore.
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I've been thinking about this a lot, especially in terms of games like JRPG's that require large time commitments and narrative buy-in, yet have a higher possibility of shitting the bed or even just ending up moderately unsatisfying one way or another. Is it more fair to judge a game after it's acquired that sort of post-completion patina that occurs as a game recedes into the rosy mists of nostalgia, softening it's flaws and transforming it's missteps into charming quirks? Or should a game be judged more in the harsh light of its moment to moment experience, for good or ill? Who knows? Certainly not me. I mostly just wrote all that because my brain currently feels like cold oatmeal.

Omicron said:
Our next game will either be IX or Tactics
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I'm in the Tactics camp here. I think it'll be a nice mechanical change of pace to escape the ATB zone, while giving IX some breathing room to not be overwhelmed by VIII's maximalist approach to everything but completing a plotline.
 
I was rereading the Rinoa/Squall romance scenes and I came across something interesting.

Omicron said:
Rinoa: [She laughs.] "Gosh, you're such a pessimist. There are no guarantees in the future. That's why TODAY, the time we have now, is important."
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I think that Ultimecia's approach to time is another part of what makes her a foil to the protagonists. The game makes it tragically unclear what time compression actually means, but given the imagery of Ultimecia absorbing everything into herself, I imagine it'd be something like forcing the entirety of time — past, present, and maybe future — into herself. A moment preserved forever in amber, her childhood dragged up to replace the present, no future but only Ultimecia forever alone and unchanging.

It would be a miserable existence and also the most messed-up endpoint of Squall's loss aversion.
 
Another thing from rereading, a very good (but spoilery) analysis of President Deling's reaction to Ultimecia!Edea's speech that @GilliamYaeger wrote in the spoilers thread immediately after.

GilliamYaeger said:
Oh man, I'm rewatching Edea's big speech and this is really good if you've already beaten the game. Ultimecia's persecution complex is on full display here, and President Deling is extremely confused by how Edea's acting, and the way he goes "E-Edea? Are you alright...?" right before getting stabbed makes me think he knew her personally before the whole possession thing - Edea is probably the Sorceress who helped with developing Para-Magic after all - which is probably how Ultimecia managed to worm her way into his trust.

Seeing the woman who, alongside Odine, had launched the world's understanding of magic to unimaginable heights suddenly start talking about how the Sorceresses are persecuted would have been incredibly confusing to Deling. And she's the wife of the head of Garden, to boot. Sorceress Edea would have been the least persecuted Sorceress in history. Doubly so because everyone would have thought that Adel was still alive in space (which is probably why he chose to make the announcement over radio as a sign that the tyrant Adel was dead and a new successor to her power had appeared?).

Man, this makes me wonder what this whole thing would have looked like from Deling's point of view. Or from anyone's point of view. Edea Kramer suddenly shows up and offers her assistance in taking over the world, probably because she's mad at her husband for whatever reason and wants to fuck Garden over (why else would she approach Galbadia, who SeeD has a history of conflict with?), and then when you're about to make the announcement that she's teamed up with you her husband's personal army bursts into the studio and starts attacking people. Then, later on, she starts acting wildly out of character and going on about how she's about to begin a new age of terror.

Before the speech Deling probably would have waved off any odd behaviour as her just being angry at Cid for whatever drove her away from him and to Galbadia.
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don't you hate it when witches from the future show up and ruin all your your gritty realpolitik schemes

edit another funnier joke i thought of too late: don't you hate it when the hot divorced mommy witch is actually an incel time witch from the future
 
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Adloquium said:
I can't stop thinking about that interview clip where Kitase talks about the possibility of Rinoa turning into Ultimecia. Not so much about the topic itself, but rather what the context of the answer implies: there were three writers for the game script, and none of them bothered to make sure the overall game script was coherent and consistent. Instead, Nojima and Nomura (and probably Kitase himself) could go in and add all sorts of new story hooks and plot points and not tell the others.

The story of FFVIII needed an editor. One with enough authority to tell the writers "this doesn't work, rip it out" or "redo this bit to fit this other bit".
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Oh fuck. Oh fuck.

They tried to recreate FF6 but without the ensemble cast and in a PS1 era game.

Oh god no wonder 8 tears itself apart. Even 6 could only barely keep the plates spinning until the end and that's with simplified SNES storytelling.
 
Cypocryphy said:
President Deling was acting in his nation's best interest to address the Sorceress Gap, and in this house he's a hero and a patriot!
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Let's be honest the real gap Sorceress Edea was addressing was the Mommy Gap, crucial for the continued morale of all noble Galbadians. You know why Esthar was winning that world war? Because of its highly advanced technology creating the ultimate Mommy in Adel!

Tragically, Garden, in its schemes to create a continuously destabilized and multipolar world for its mercenaries, has killed Adel and destroyed Edea's Momminess by putting her back in a dab gray dress.

And that is why we must make Galbadia great again by destroying Garden. Thank you for listening to my speech.
 
Kuja said:
Oh fuck. Oh fuck.

They tried to recreate FF6 but without the ensemble cast and in a PS1 era game.

Oh god no wonder 8 tears itself apart. Even 6 could only barely keep the plates spinning until the end and that's with simplified SNES storytelling.
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Even FF6 had Sakaguchi managing the work of the different teams being assigned different scenarios and characters.
 
Ultimately FFVIII's cardinal sin is the gameplay, whatever flaws the story may have, it's the moment to moment gameplay.

I applaud the willingness to experiment, but the whole Junction system is a tedious and irritating one, and within the first disc, every player will be forced to make a choice:

Will you

A) Find one of the 17 different ways to crack the game's mechanics and proceed to fucking ignore combat because you have Enc-None on, and Squall now always goes first and deals one Norgillion damage to any boss

or

B) Try to restrain yourself due to a misguided sense of fair play and let the game return the favor by mangling your groin and forcing you to endure a system where the reward for playing like a sane person is to gradually become weaker.

And that's just no fucking way to build your core combat systems, even ignoring every other irritating little tweak of managing and exchanging your junctions every time the director decides we need to cut to a different location.
 
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I'm intrigued to see how a Tactics game can work out. IT can be pretty deep, but it seems like an interesting game to dissect. Though I wonder how Omi as a French person would feel about a game that's a fantasy version of the English collapse following the failed 100 years war.
AliasiSudonomo said:
What I'd like to propose is, "maybe it isn't?"

As I've grown older (and played more actual visual novel games), I recall the first disc is a hefty JRPG unto itself. Longer does not necessarily mean better, and unlike FF8 (or parts of 7, for that matter) there's nothing unclear or vague about Disc 2's story. It's just not delivered in the traditional JRPG way but after 40 hours of it maybe you'd just like to get to the damn end now.

I've definitely become more fond of games that know when to cut it short than games that want to promise 200 hours of gameplay, 180 hours of which is grinding or doing unsatisfying minigames.
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It's not so much the "more timewasting!" thing, it's how it was presented. It just felt rushed after how big the first disk was. Maybe 60-80% of the plot was on the first disk by some miracle of compressed coding and optimization, but the second disk was literally three dungeons in between massive walls of exposition, showing rather than telling.

I have a feeling that a piece of bullshit at the end was going to happen anyways (One of the ones responsible for the plot gets forgiven even though he has no right to be forgiven), but that's just story.
 
I stand by the idea that Junction Stats can be salvaged, but I also feel it is better suited to a more open world RPG game than FF8.
- Menus, the constant party member shuffle, and repeated locks to specific areas of the map all together make it so you can't really get any particular thing you need. All of these can be resolved with more modern methods and a less directed storyline.
- The lack of clarity in enemy design for things like elemental weaknesses and strengths, along with a lack of clarity in area design on that topic, means that you basically need to save scum to use the defensive systems properly. If it was clearer what you could commonly (but probably not exclusively) find in a place then it would be far easier to go "oh, time to equip the electric resistance".
- Long animation times in general along with ATB make drawing magic from enemies a pain more than anything. I'm certain that without those it would get far fewer negative comments due to simply not taking forever and a day to draw anything.
- The EXP system is entirely redundant to Junction, and probably should be dropped in favor of just having more difficult areas possess the higher end enemies that feature higher end spell. Alternatively tie spell and threat progression of monsters to story progression. Additionally this would make farming for drops an actual alternative to draw for the purpose of refine abilities.
- Elemental spells probably need a bit more variety, and the refine abilities to be spread to more GFs.
 
Spectral Waltz said:
Alright so I really need to ask, what's the matter with ATB? Why do people hate it so much?
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It kind of forces you to rush your actions, because if you don't act on your turn, the enemy will be free to keep swinging at you when their turn comes up. They don't wait for you to finish; once their (hidden) ATB fills up, they go whether you want them to or not.
 
It basically has all the downsides of real-time and turn-based, but none of the benefits of either (you can't use the time to move around and dodge like free-roaming battle systems, but you do have the being rushed of real time; you have the same-y lack of motion of turn based, but without the time to make decisions tactically).

The main advantage it has is it lets speedy characters take multiple turns for each turn slower characters take and visa-versa, but there are ways of doing that which don't take away the main "lets you stop and think" advantage of turn based systems.
 
E.I.G. said:
- Long animation times in general along with ATB make drawing magic from enemies a pain more than anything. I'm certain that without those it would get far fewer negative comments due to simply not taking forever and a day to draw anything.
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One solution for the draw system would be if the accompanying junction simply worked on a yes/no basis. That is, if you junction a Fire you instantly get the ideal stats for a Fire junction - stock is kept purely for casting purposes, and the only stat change is if you change to a Firaga, say, or Blizzard. Then you can design difficulty around yes/no stats instead of worrying about anything below 100 stock, players don't need to worry quite so much about drawing as many spells as possible, and it no longer disincentivizes the occasional use of magic.
 
It also doesn't really add anything - apart from one gimmick boss per game, there's never any reason to hold onto your actions, it's pretty much always best to take your action as soon as your turn comes up, which means you're really not getting anything out of it, and you might as well just have straight turn-based.

Plus, you wind up in situations, especially early on, where everyone's waiting to charge up their ATB guage, so you just spend a second or two sitting there staring at the screen, waiting for the game to let you play it again.

It's just a nexus of bad ideas and drawbacks, and adds. Really nothing at all to the overall experience.
 
Kuja said:
One solution for the draw system would be if the accompanying junction simply worked on a yes/no basis. That is, if you junction a Fire you instantly get the ideal stats for a Fire junction - stock is kept purely for casting purposes, and the only stat change is if you change to a Firaga, say, or Blizzard. Then you can design difficulty around yes/no stats instead of worrying about anything below 100 stock, players don't need to worry quite so much about drawing as many spells as possible, and it no longer disincentivizes the occasional use of magic.
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Honestly, I'm not even that upset with the push pull nature of casting spells lowering stats.
The main issue there is that the strongest magic is hard to get reliably, but also the best to use for junctions, so you don't really want to "waste" some by casting it.

If instead it was balanced towards enemies that are really dangerous to draw from repeatedly being the source of those spells, but those enemies being a known and accessible source, then I suspect it wouldn't be anywhere near as bad.

Also, magic in general probably needs to be more powerful than the physical attack you get from junctioning it. A risk reward system, where the risk is that you don't use the more powerful spell for the long term reward of overall better stats. Making it harder to get high end spells in that context sounds like it would work better.
 
It's not even that you can't make better use of an ATB system, too, just look at Chrono Trigger.
Chrono Trigger has the ATB system, but the smaller scale of the speed stat (iirc the maximum speed a character can get is 16) means speed can have a much more noticeable effect, the fact that special attacks have actual Areas or Lines of effect on the field sometimes incentivizes doing things like waiting until two enemies are in the right spot to hit both, and double/triple techs mean there's particularly strong attacks you can pull off but require having multiple characters with a full gauge at the same time to do so.
But that's just yet more reasons Chrono Trigger is one of the best RPGs on the SNES by far, really.
 
The Grandia games had a very ATB-like system, one that operated on everyone sharing the same bar and the ability to push enemies further back on the bar, and many consider it one of the best jRPG battle systems ever
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
The Grandia games had a very ATB-like system, one that operated on everyone sharing the same bar and the ability to push enemies further back on the bar, and many consider it one of the best jRPG battle systems ever
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Oh yeah, I vaguely remember those games having a neat ATB system as well. Sadly I only ever played maybe an hour or two of one of them. Maybe I should give them another shot one of these days.
 
ArlequineLunaire said:
The Grandia games had a very ATB-like system, one that operated on everyone sharing the same bar and the ability to push enemies further back on the bar, and many consider it one of the best jRPG battle systems ever
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Part of that, though, is Grandia both made interacting with that a priority of the battle system and gave it an easy to read visual UI element. I think ATB is better in potential than people make it out to be (A couple of TRPGs I favor use similar systems), but Final Fantasy in specific, Square in general was never great about maximizing the potential of it.

Saint_007 said:
It's not so much the "more timewasting!" thing, it's how it was presented. It just felt rushed after how big the first disk was. Maybe 60-80% of the plot was on the first disk by some miracle of compressed coding and optimization, but the second disk was literally three dungeons in between massive walls of exposition, showing rather than telling.

I have a feeling that a piece of bullshit at the end was going to happen anyways (One of the ones responsible for the plot gets forgiven even though he has no right to be forgiven), but that's just story.
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I do want to be clear here: I'm not saying Xenogears did it that way on purpose. But I am saying it's the sort of thing that makes me re-evaluate how CRPGs in general, JRPG-styled ones in specific deliver their stories and gameplay. Turning it into an action game (the newer Final Fantasies, FF7 Remake/Rebirth) is one way but it's also exactly not why I like RPG titles.

If a stretch is going to be linear and not offer even the illusion of choice, then maybe don't offer that illusion; make it exposition or a cutscene. Even allowing that JRPG-style games tend to be about precise characters that follow a very specific storyline (compared to the common 'make a character, there's a general arc but everything is wide-open' with Western CRPGs) most of the fun is found when you have some sort of mechanical or plotty option to act, be it swapping around equipment/materia/classes or being able to effect the goings-on in some minor ways.
 
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