o, I have no idea what sort of turn based games you are talking about that need to do that much computation each turn on modern systems. I didn't think they made turn based high detail simulation games to that degree.
May I introduce you to Stellaris in a very large galaxy in the late game, then!
All of the Clausewitz Engine games - Stellaris, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, etc - are turn-based under the hood, it's just they automatically advance the turn if nothing much is happening pausing when certain events occur or when you manually do so.
And all of them chug pretty bad the later in the game you go. Not strictly RPGs, but Crusader Kings and Stellaris both have some roleplaying elements to them, so if you meant "RPGs with simulation elements", yeah, they aren't quite a fit but if you were speaking to turn-based simulations in general, that's off the top of my head.
May I introduce you to Stellaris in a very large galaxy in the late game, then!
All of the Clausewitz Engine games - Stellaris, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, etc - are turn-based under the hood, it's just they automatically advance the turn if nothing much is happening pausing when certain events occur or when you manually do so.
And all of them chug pretty bad the later in the game you go. Not strictly RPGs, but Crusader Kings and Stellaris both have some roleplaying elements to them, so if you meant "RPGs with simulation elements", yeah, they aren't quite a fit but if you were speaking to turn-based simulations in general, that's off the top of my head.
Ah, right, I was actually thinking about those:
As "those real time with pause games that probably would be a lot better if they were turn based".
I've firmly decided I prefer going back to the old Space Empires games over trying to get Stellaris to be fun, precisely because it has the exact same problems I think ATB has in FF8. A whole lot of waiting for things to happen, punctuated by moments where there is too much to do all at once. Resulting in a game that has all the problems of real time and turn based, but few benefits to actually counteract that issue.
Also, and belatedly, I'd like to extend special thanks to @Adloquium and @Egleris for their breakdowns of the Japanese text and the Italian localisation throughout this months-long playthrough; they were very interesting and illuminating, and I'm only sorry it ended up being too much extra effort for me to continue my breakdown of the FR version alongside my updates.
Since we're entering an intermission period, I want to bring up my thoughts on several things that I wish had been explored/expanded in Final Fantasy games - either for singular titles or for the saga in general - based on some of @Omicron's observations.
Anyway, the Waterfall Cave is also where we find something really interesting, that I am hoping we'll see more of in the game:
We find a room full of crystals that is a safe spot to rest inside the dungeon, which is a cool new addition to dungeoneering to bring to the game, but even more importantly…
…resting there triggers a campfire cutscene in which the characters just stop and chat to each other.
This is great, and I'm really hoping this isn't a one-and-done. This idea is one that's been kept all the way to modern RPGs; Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the most recent game I can remember playing with a mechanic where resting triggers random interactions between characters, and I think Dragon Age had a whole 'resting at a camp lets you talk to your companions' system? Obviously this is much simpler and more scripted - this cutscene is simply part of the normal storyline progress of FFIV - but if we have more bits where characters rest and talk to each other around a campfire during their travels or their dungeon exploration, I will be very pleased.
It would have been really interesting if there were more cutscenes when resting at save spots or inns, and I appreciated @Omicron's idea for such a thing after observing that instance in FF4. It could have created the opportunity for extra conversations and bonding between characters. Unfortunately, Final Fantasy really didn't follow through with that concept here or in future titles. The closest thing was probably in FF8:
Squall's bed functions as a free inn at which we can rest. I've never used that function before, because Tents are cheap and faster to use from the save screen, so I never noticed that there was a secondary rest function: "Leave me alone," which dismisses the party.
There isn't a massive use for this, except this: With the party dismissed, they (normally) return to their various locations in the Garden, so we can go around and get unique dialogue from them!
This seems like an interesting concept for having extra dialogue and banter between the characters. If the game had made this mechanic clearer, and expanded it to other locations in the game, it could have been a lot of fun to explore.
…A Magitek sequence, huh. I genuinely thought we'd seen the last of those. As before, we have access to Magitek attacks, and we fight a series of unique, 'nightmare' versions of Magitek armor plus this sick-looking Io robot (love me a good crab mech). In terms of difficulty this is fairly trivial; as ever, Thunde Beam one-shots everything. Incidentally, Terra still has access to all her special Magitek moves while everyone is limited to the three elemental beams, which is a nice callback to the start of the game.
…
I gotta say that while I get that within the context of the game, Magitek is bad, both in the sense of being the weapon of the evil empire and in being unethically source from esper suffering, I'm kinda sad that in the game which introduced Magitek and made it such a prominent feature of its plot and in which we have two characters literally called Magitek Knight/Elite, the closest we get to a character actually using Magitek is Edgar's Tools (which aren't actually Magitek but fill the niche of being advanced quirky tools that do cool effects). I'd like a chance to have Magitek-using characters - maybe in another game.
I agree, I would have liked to see Magitek be a more relevant system in FF6, as it was really cool. Actually, though it would mean significantly reorienting the whole plot for the game, I thought of a way to make Magitek a bigger part of the game. Give each character their own personal Magitek Armor that they can access throughout the game. More than that, rather than equipping Esper summons to characters, you absorb them into your Magitek Armor, giving that individual Magitek the related ability of said Esper. And once you've fused a Magicite onto a character's Magitek Armor, that Esper's gone, forever.
This would solve multiple problems beyond simply making Magitek more relevant. It would let you essentially customize each character's ability set, sort of like the jobs in FF5 in a way. And since each Esper could be used only once - rather than exchanging it between party members to teach them all the related magic - it would reduce the similarities between character builds in your party as a whole. Plus, I feel that it would make the Espers' sacrifices feel more poignant; when the Magicites could summon the full-fledged visages of said Espers for their moves, it took away from the feel that they died.
Those opponents are 'Iguions,' and Scan warns us that somebody has given them the Reflect power. At first, I worry that this means they have passive Reflect, and this is the case… But the first thing I do is check out their Draw options and find they hold Carbuncle, the Summon that traditionally casts Reflect on everyone when cast; Drawing it strips the Iguions of their Reflect, as evidenced by testing the water with a quick Tier 1 spell.
Bosses utilizing the game's summons has been something underutilized in many of the games. In many cases like FF4, it's limited to summoning a monster rather than something akin to the party's summons. Kefka seizes a bunch of Magicite midway through FF6, , but we don't really see him using them against the party unless they're part of his Dancing Made gauntlet. FF9 and FF10 give summons a larger role, but I really want to see more instances of summons being directly utilized by boss opponents, as we got a couple glimpses in FF8.
Most of the time, the GFs pulled from bosses don't have much relevance to the boss itself. But with the Iguions, Carbuncle actively assists them by covering their elemental weakness with Reflect until you steal it away. Similarly, Fujin uses wind magic in her battle until you take Pandemona from her. It creates an extra element to the battle and livens up the otherwise purely mechanical draw process.
This could have been really interesting to explore with the other bosses as well. For instance, Elvoret's attacks would also inflict Silence until you take Siren. Leviathan will heal NORG until you draw it away. And Eden enables Ultima Weapon to use a special move to devour a fallen party member, which boosts the boss in different ways (depending on the character) and permanently removes that character until the end of the fight.
Not only that, but remember how the endgame dungeon bosses would carry the GFs if you didn't grab them the first time? Maybe they could also play up the time travel mechanic in that manner. Those bosses will likewise be empowered by the GFs unless you claimed them in the earlier battles, creating an extra reward for drawing them out the first time. On the flipside, if you wait to draw them until the endgame, the GFs will have already reached their maximum potential.
Any feedback on these ideas, or thoughts on other concepts that have come up in the course of the thread? In any case, I want to thank @Omicron deeply for their detailed, wordy playthroughs of these games - not only for taking us on vivid dives through these adventures,but also offering thought-provoking insights. Maybe by the end of this saga, we'll have a better understanding on what elements could make the ideal Final Fantasy game.
Since we're entering an intermission period, I want to bring up my thoughts on several things that I wish had been explored/expanded in Final Fantasy games - either for singular titles or for the saga in general - based on some of @Omicron's observations.
#1. Resting Scenes/Conversations
It would have been really interesting if there were more cutscenes when resting at save spots or inns, and I appreciated @Omicron's idea for such a thing after observing that instance in FF4. It could have created the opportunity for extra conversations and bonding between characters. Unfortunately, Final Fantasy really didn't follow through with that concept here or in future titles. The closest thing was probably in FF8:
This seems like an interesting concept for having extra dialogue and banter between the characters. If the game had made this mechanic clearer, and expanded it to other locations in the game, it could have been a lot of fun to explore.
#2. Magitek
I agree, I would have liked to see Magitek be a more relevant system in FF6, as it was really cool. Actually, though it would mean significantly reorienting the whole plot for the game, I thought of a way to make Magitek a bigger part of the game. Give each character their own personal Magitek Armor that they can access throughout the game. More than that, rather than equipping Esper summons to characters, you absorb them into your Magitek Armor, giving that individual Magitek the related ability of said Esper. And once you've fused a Magicite onto a character's Magitek Armor, that Esper's gone, forever.
This would solve multiple problems beyond simply making Magitek more relevant. It would let you essentially customize each character's ability set, sort of like the jobs in FF5 in a way. And since each Esper could be used only once - rather than exchanging it between party members to teach them all the related magic - it would reduce the similarities between character builds in your party as a whole. Plus, I feel that it would make the Espers' sacrifices feel more poignant; when the Magicites could summon the full-fledged visages of said Espers for their moves, it took away from the feel that they died.
#3. Bosses Using Summons
Bosses utilizing the game's summons has been something underutilized in many of the games. In many cases like FF4, it's limited to summoning a monster rather than something akin to the party's summons. Kefka seizes a bunch of Magicite midway through FF6, , but we don't really see him using them against the party unless they're part of his Dancing Made gauntlet. FF9 and FF10 give summons a larger role, but I really want to see more instances of summons being directly utilized by boss opponents, as we got a couple glimpses in FF8.
Most of the time, the GFs pulled from bosses don't have much relevance to the boss itself. But with the Iguions, Carbuncle actively assists them by covering their elemental weakness with Reflect until you steal it away. Similarly, Fujin uses wind magic in her battle until you take Pandemona from her. It creates an extra element to the battle and livens up the otherwise purely mechanical draw process.
This could have been really interesting to explore with the other bosses as well. For instance, Elvoret's attacks would also inflict Silence until you take Siren. Leviathan will heal NORG until you draw it away. And Eden enables Ultima Weapon to use a special move to devour a fallen party member, which boosts the boss in different ways (depending on the character) and permanently removes that character until the end of the fight.
Not only that, but remember how the endgame dungeon bosses would carry the GFs if you didn't grab them the first time? Maybe they could also play up the time travel mechanic in that manner. Those bosses will likewise be empowered by the GFs unless you claimed them in the earlier battles, creating an extra reward for drawing them out the first time. On the flipside, if you wait to draw them until the endgame, the GFs will have already reached their maximum potential.
Any feedback on these ideas, or thoughts on other concepts that have come up in the course of the thread? In any case, I want to thank @Omicron deeply for their detailed, wordy playthroughs of these games - not only for taking us on vivid dives through these adventures,but also offering thought-provoking insights. Maybe by the end of this saga, we'll have a better understanding on what elements could make the ideal Final Fantasy game.
I mean your first point is just tales of skit system why this isn't a industry standard is beyond me.
I think a affinity system might be the best way to handle the unique vs customization tension. Sort of a you can do this on this character but... which encourages certain builds or force you to work hard toward specing into certain things if you want to spec to something specific due to a perceived need or synergy. Probably needs to be more heavy handed then you'd think tho anyone familiar with fire emblem three houses will know why(I could use a variety of classes or stack 10 wyverns with some support mages and laugh as I bulldoze my way through fodlan). Combining character specific stack growth with a class system could prove novel.
Curious if we get fft next there's a lot to be said on fft job system which well its a trip in both good and bad ways imo. Regardless If we get tactics next I am so ready for the British historiography segment imao.
Summon very nature kinda fights against this unless you have variety for them, without that there's not much point due to them mechanically just being a bigger number, maybe you could have boss use one as a preview. Tactics is the exception but there summons that aren't zodiac are basically commodities.
It would have been really interesting if there were more cutscenes when resting at save spots or inns, and I appreciated @Omicron's idea for such a thing after observing that instance in FF4. It could have created the opportunity for extra conversations and bonding between characters. Unfortunately, Final Fantasy really didn't follow through with that concept here or in future titles. The closest thing was probably in FF8:
I think one of the issues preventing more of this in later Final Fantasy titles is something we've seen in FFVIII: the desire to create large and expansive and beautiful settings, colliding with technical limitations and long load times. So during downtime in FFVIII when the party splits up to do their own stuff, the player-controlled character has to navigate through however many screens and load times just to check in with them.
Keeping it to cutscenes (or Bonding Events, where the primary player interaction is clicking through dialogue boxes and occasionally choosing dialogue options, no movement necessary) is a way to work around that, but it does still count as downtime and "no gameplay", so there needs to be restraint in adding these; either make them quick and snappy (and thus lose longer-form character introspection), or make them rare. And for particularly long segments of these cutscenes, the player might spend half an hour in one cutscene alone. Sometimes the player gets back-to-back cutscenes, and the only reason they are not one extra-long cutscene is to give the player a chance to save the game before continuing.
A lot of praise has been given to these downtime segments in FFXIV; the one most players will likely mention (due to being the first obvious one encountered) is the campfire scene in Heavensward. So I do think it's a good idea we need to see more of, but I have also seen complaints from part of the playerbase, in that it ends up being "cutscene only, no gameplay" for extended periods of time. So this might be a divide between people who play the game primarily for the story, and people who play the game primarily for the gameplay.
Also various attempts at this in other series have had mixed results. The Tales games were mentioned, and the idea of skits or mini-cutscenes has been a staple there, in both the Tales games by Namco and the Star Ocean games by Tri-Ace. However, they added the Tales-esque issue of making them bonus and missable, so a player just going through the games without an open guide might miss up to 80% of the skits and events. FFVIII was already bad with missable scenes of character development, but Tales Of Vesperia (among others) is made almost entirely of missable scenes. Base concept is fine, implementation is questionable.
Which I suppose is the main obstacle to having more such downtime character scenes. There are a number of ways to do it, and even more ways to add extra features to it, so nobody has yet figured out how to strike the balance of providing meaningful character exploration and not boring or annoying the player.
Bosses utilizing the game's summons has been something underutilized in many of the games. In many cases like FF4, it's limited to summoning a monster rather than something akin to the party's summons. Kefka seizes a bunch of Magicite midway through FF6, , but we don't really see him using them against the party unless they're part of his Dancing Made gauntlet. FF9 and FF10 give summons a larger role, but I really want to see more instances of summons being directly utilized by boss opponents, as we got a couple glimpses in FF8.
I do wonder if a part of this might be how Final Fantasy has summoning be different through every instalment, whether in mechanics or in lore, or both to varying degrees. In many games, Summon Magic is essentially an AoE attack that doesn't have AoE damage fall-off. Sometimes the limitation is in how many times you can summon per battle, sometimes the limitation is something unique to the game, sometimes there is no limitation compared to casting magic per usual.
So mechanically, is there much of a difference between Sephiroth casing Supernova, and the player party casting Bahamut Zero? Lore-wise, there could even be arguments that they're essentially the same idea, and Sephiroth's "summon" is that comet-like thing blowing up planets. Personally, I think it's not that there's a meaningful difference between the two, and more that it doesn't seem to matter if there's a difference. Summons in FFVII don't have any backstory either (other than "is in Materia"), so whether or not Supernova is a Summon is irrelevant.
Meanwhile, in FFXIV, there is all that background and lore and story behind the Summoner class, and within that framework, enemies do use summons against you, in both "I summon an add" and "I summon an AoE attack". But it's tied up in FFXIV's particular interpretation of summoning, both in the initial "this is what Summoner does" tutorials and the much later "this is what the concept of summoning actually means" story revelations.
Thus, every new Final Fantasy game has to have its own lore for Summons, and the main reason a Final Fantasy game has Summons in the first place is because it's a Final Fantasy series staple. I suspect whether Summons will be particularly meaningful in a given game will depend entirely on whether the writers of that game want to make it meaningful; FFVIII gestures towards it, like it gestures towards a lot of things, but never really does anything else with it. FFVII doesn't even bother.
(Sorry, had missed out on a few updates, so I missed this post before)
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeelll, I boil it down to two things....
Basically, it was a combination of FF7's breakaway success and Evangelion's phenomenal presence that shaped a lot of the pop culture, video games included, post 1998. The former basically set the bar so high for things like identity, trauma, and navel-gazing that now it became the job of every FF team to outdo it if they ever wanted to be The Next Big Thing(TM). FF7 set the bar so high that everyone had to work extra.
As for Evangelion, it took philosophical introspection to an art form, and they're still talking about its messages to this day. It was not only a hit among anime fans, but Japanese culture and globally as well. It became THE thing to emulate, especially when it came to philosophical questions and human identity.
Alternatively, by the 2000s some devs came to see videogames as more than simple entertainment, and some, like Masato Kato, sought to make their masterpieces. Remember, this was when Spirits Within was in production, and the FF brand was in full swing - before the failure of Spirits Within almost caused Square's bankruptcy. Basically, the Final Fantasy series, and indeed, Square JRPGs, had gone from simple entertainment to a (pretentious) artform. After that, though, they had to scale back their ambitions and work with more modest goals but just replaced philosophical introspection with spectacle.
Alternatively, by the 2000s some devs came to see videogames as more than simple entertainment, and some, like Masato Kato, sought to make their masterpieces. Remember, this was when Spirits Within was in production, and the FF brand was in full swing - before the failure of Spirits Within almost caused Square's bankruptcy. Basically, the Final Fantasy series, and indeed, Square JRPGs, had gone from simple entertainment to a (pretentious) artform. After that, though, they had to scale back their ambitions and work with more modest goals but just replaced philosophical introspection with spectacle.
It's something I've been pondering about as well, yes. Final Fantasy went from "games which gesture at other games that might possibly have a narrative" (FFI), to "games which have a story" (FFIV), to "games which have a story that means something" (FFVI onwards). It's not enough to just have a story, but that story now needs to have Messages and Themes, and hopefully ascend into Art.
And Evangelion (presumably) gave the impression of needing to be Deep and Philosophical and Mysterious in order to be Art. The Message does not just need to be present, it needs to be ambiguous enough to be debated and discussed.
My wild speculation is all this was coincidentally happening at the same time technological improvements in hardware allowed for the larger, more expansive presentation in games. Suddenly Final Fantasy had all this space for pre-rendered cutscenes and vast environments and character sprites with a huge range of movement, with more space left over to add in lots of dialogue and minigames.
So dev teams got way larger, more ambitious, and more willing to experiment, and Squaresoft didn't quite figure out that project management should also keep pace at the least.
And it would take them time to learn this, because as we've seen, even with the Playstation 1 era games being kind of messes when seen in hindsight, at the time they were still really popular and sold extremely well, far beyond, say, FFIV. So since things seemed to be working out for them, why not continue doing the same.
Thus, we have what we've seen, of all sorts of disparate individual portions of each game (both story and narrative) that might work well on their own, but when put together it all undermines each other.
Spirits Within kind of betrayed what Square was after. In many ways, video games devs are trying to copy what they were familiar with: movies. Films had gone from a novelty to an art form in its own right in forty years; compare A Trip to the Moon (1902) to Gone with the Wind (1939). Meanwhile, Video games can be officially traced to Pong (1970), but even by the year 1999 they hadn't yet "evolved" enough. So the devs tried to copy what worked from other media forms. Plus, most of them had grown up with television and cinema as their main influences growing up, so in many ways, the cutscenes and story development of JRPGs in the late 1990s was an attempt to copy films and how they're made in order to feel more "real" in terms of storyline and immersion.
As you can imagine, they didn't quite work. To this day, we can cite Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Chinatown, and many other unforgettable classics of cinema. I don't think we have any video games that command the same level of respect.
As you can imagine, they didn't quite work. To this day, we can cite Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Chinatown, and many other unforgettable classics of cinema. I don't think we have any video games that command the same level of respect.
I think that's a result of video games' greater breadth. Gameplay creates much more variation. There are some games I would argue are timeless classics (Off the top of my head, Undertale, Super Smash Bros Melee, the original Super Mario for blazing a trail and either Super Mario World or Super Mario Brothers 3 for being the most memorable iterations on such, I'm sure I could think of more given time), but each of those games will likely never capture as many gamers as a timeless classic film will capture filmgoers. Simply because of the greater breadth of genre combinations.
As you can imagine, they didn't quite work. To this day, we can cite Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Chinatown, and many other unforgettable classics of cinema. I don't think we have any video games that command the same level of respect.
I think we do, but video games aren't movies. It's one of the great oddities that games that share nothing in common beyond 'falls within the category of video game' are considered to be different genres of the same thing. It's like instead of categorizing movies as comedies, drama, horror, and so on we instead categorized them as "black and white, color, 3D" as well as "film, VHS, DVD, streaming" and considered these the primary defining characteristics of a movie, as opposed to "things that matter, but you're probably going to care more about the experience the movie is out to give you".
The upshot is 'unforgettable classics of video games' depends very highly on what you value in video games. Tetris is going to outlive every single person posting in this thread, but nobody's looking to Tetris for a story. If we're specifically looking for "games with stories and Deep Meanings up there with classic movies"... games aren't movies and they tell stories a different way. I think we definitely do have games that qualify, but we're at the beginnings of the study of video games being considered a valid academic topic.
Note that the earlier LiveALive was basically a collection of playable movies from different genres at a time when the graphical fidelity wasn't as impressive (1994 was Super Famicom, Chrono Trigger in 1995 was the SNES). Interviews describe it as putting multiple stories in one game, but I would describe it as multiple loving adaptations of movie genres to the video game medium. It was a minor financial failure at the time, I believe.
The movie thing was simmering before FF7, though I can't trace the specifics down much more than that.
each of those games will likely never capture as many gamers as a timeless classic film will capture filmgoers. Simply because of the greater breadth of genre combinations.
I think this has nothing to do with the merits of either medium and everything to do with timing. The monoculture used to exist and you used to assume that everyone, literally everyone, at least knew the important bits of the stuff that was popular with The Mainstream. Video games' popularity wasn't Mainstream until the monoculture started dying off anyway. If The Godfather or The Matrix had to come out today I think they would become as popular as, say, Undertale, and fail to become the timeless classics they now are. If video games had become mainstream earlier and Undertale came out earlier, in the 90s or whatnot, then Undertale would probably be considered a timeless classic today.
I think we do, but video games aren't movies. It's one of the great oddities that games that share nothing in common beyond 'falls within the category of video game' are considered to be different genres of the same thing. It's like instead of categorizing movies as comedies, drama, horror, and so on we instead categorized them as "black and white, color, 3D" as well as "film, VHS, DVD, streaming" and considered these the primary defining characteristics of a movie, as opposed to "things that matter, but you're probably going to care more about the experience the movie is out to give you".
The upshot is 'unforgettable classics of video games' depends very highly on what you value in video games. Tetris is going to outlive every single person posting in this thread, but nobody's looking to Tetris for a story. If we're specifically looking for "games with stories and Deep Meanings up there with classic movies"... games aren't movies and they tell stories a different way. I think we definitely do have games that qualify, but we're at the beginnings of the study of video games being considered a valid academic topic.
(Sorry, had missed out on a few updates, so I missed this post before)
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeelll, I boil it down to two things....
Basically, it was a combination of FF7's breakaway success and Evangelion's phenomenal presence that shaped a lot of the pop culture, video games included, post 1998. The former basically set the bar so high for things like identity, trauma, and navel-gazing that now it became the job of every FF team to outdo it if they ever wanted to be The Next Big Thing(TM). FF7 set the bar so high that everyone had to work extra.
As for Evangelion, it took philosophical introspection to an art form, and they're still talking about its messages to this day. It was not only a hit among anime fans, but Japanese culture and globally as well. It became THE thing to emulate, especially when it came to philosophical questions and human identity.
Alternatively, by the 2000s some devs came to see videogames as more than simple entertainment, and some, like Masato Kato, sought to make their masterpieces. Remember, this was when Spirits Within was in production, and the FF brand was in full swing - before the failure of Spirits Within almost caused Square's bankruptcy. Basically, the Final Fantasy series, and indeed, Square JRPGs, had gone from simple entertainment to a (pretentious) artform. After that, though, they had to scale back their ambitions and work with more modest goals but just replaced philosophical introspection with spectacle.
I would disagree a lot of the scripts for ff7 and xenogears the games the take the most seeming cue's from Eva were well in development while Eva was being cooked, up the will ambition of the ps1 era is very much a continuation of the ambition of ff6 they where not emulating Eva. While squaresoft crashed and burned monolith soft xenosaga was very much carriers of that wild storytelling ambition(tho they somewhat forgot the game part).
Heavy Gears spoilers: The origins of a good bit of ff7, plot have a fair few vestigial elements of the gear script prompt. Eva and gears both owe a lot to childhoods end, and the psychological focus of xenogears owes a lot to the Freud and Lacan psychology and while ff7 doesn't have that persay you do see a lot of the vestiges influencing it . Its perhaps a better question to ask how studio trigger and square where smoking the same sort of things. The smiliarites feels like the creative writting equivelent of 1913 Vienna.
Also, and belatedly, I'd like to extend special thanks to @Adloquium and @Egleris for their breakdowns of the Japanese text and the Italian localisation throughout this months-long playthrough; they were very interesting and illuminating, and I'm only sorry it ended up being too much extra effort for me to continue my breakdown of the FR version alongside my updates.
Thank you for the kind words! I'm happy that you found the effort useful.
I don't know if I'd be able to do the same for FFIX - that game has the best Italian localization I've ever seen, using dialects correctly to great effect and in a way that I wouldn't know how to render back in English - but for Final Fantasy Tactics, I can probably go through whichever translation you end up not choosing; seeing as it's the most talked about thing about the WotL version, it probably ought to be presented for comparison's sake. As I said, LFT can be played with both, and I'm always up for going through the game once again.
Speaking of which, would you like for me to make a more holistic case for why I think that applying the LFT mod to the game would be a best way to play FFT, and be equivalent to having a remaster, or have you already made up your mind to go with the original PSX version of the game?
I can provide a complete overview of why I think that using the mod be a good idea while keeping the discussion of mechanics minimal so that it doesn't spoil anything, while also including a detailed analysis under spoilers so that people who have played the original but not the mod can judge for themselves the merit of my arguments and chime in with a "that sounds legit" or "that's nonsense" that would give you a larger opinion pool without spoiling stuff. However, it'd be a bit of a long post requiring some effort, so I'd rather be sure that it would matter before doing the work - there's no point to it if it's not going to affect the decision of what will be played.
As you can imagine, they didn't quite work. To this day, we can cite Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Chinatown, and many other unforgettable classics of cinema. I don't think we have any video games that command the same level of respect.
I think we do, but video games aren't movies. It's one of the great oddities that games that share nothing in common beyond 'falls within the category of video game' are considered to be different genres of the same thing. It's like instead of categorizing movies as comedies, drama, horror, and so on we instead categorized them as "black and white, color, 3D" as well as "film, VHS, DVD, streaming" and considered these the primary defining characteristics of a movie, as opposed to "things that matter, but you're probably going to care more about the experience the movie is out to give you".
The upshot is 'unforgettable classics of video games' depends very highly on what you value in video games. Tetris is going to outlive every single person posting in this thread, but nobody's looking to Tetris for a story. If we're specifically looking for "games with stories and Deep Meanings up there with classic movies"... games aren't movies and they tell stories a different way. I think we definitely do have games that qualify, but we're at the beginnings of the study of video games being considered a valid academic topic.
Grand Theft Auto V was, at its release, the fastest-selling entertainment product of all time. The term 'entertainment product' makes you sound like some corporate accountant but it's the only way of saying that it was beating every movie, every book, every song ever released. In the field of entertainment, which contains almost the entire field of art, it beat everything. It was, for a while, the best selling video game of all time. It was one of the most profitable products ever created, bringing in a lifetime total of over 8 billion dollars, towering vastly above every Hollywood movie ever made, and hanging out in the company of pillars of human culture like the Bible. Its sequel, Grand Theft Auto VI, will come out in 2025, twelve years later, and based on the overwhelming success of the previous entry, is rumored to have cost over a billion dollar. That is more than twice the budget of the most expensive film ever made (Star Wars: The Force Awakens). The budget of GTA VI may well be larger than the revenue of all but the top 10 highest-grossing movies ever made.
In any discussion of media, of entertainment, in any discussion of art, we should be talking about GTA V. Yet approach the average 50 year old and ask them their opinion on GTA V and how likely are you to get any kind of answer? How many people, even among people who've played GTA V to completion, actually consider it a meaningful part of their lives, and of the artistic landscape of the world?
I take GTA V as an example because it occupies a particular space; it is part of a franchise that has a long history of being treated as a 'crime simulator' without purpose higher than just doing random wacky crimes, but it's a game that's actually interested in telling a story, it received widespread critical acclaim, and it has a little 'considered one of the greatest video games of all time' on its Wikipedia page. It is an object of art as well as a mass media entertainment product. The highest selling video game of all time, with half again as many copies sold as GTA V, is of course Minecraft, which has... A different set of priorities (but does also have a 'considered one of the greatest video games of all time' on its wiki page).
I think there is a tendency that comes from three directions to dismiss video games as both an object of art and a major part of our modern economy. One is that people who aren't into video games as a medium tend to dismiss them as if 'video games' was a genre. If you say that you're "not into movies" or "not into books" at a relatively high society gathering, you're going to come off as a boorish idiot. But nobody would think that of someone who says they're 'not into video games'; for the person of refined interest, distaste for video games is the assumed default. So there's an elite disdain for the medium, which is reflected in the political class and thus our legislation. But the other two directions are more pernicious; one is that a lot of video game companies don't particularly want their product to be treated as both an object of art and a massive economic driver; they're content to be overlooked, because actual interest from elites might lead to, say, regulation of their predatory gambling practices, or of the abuse workers in the video game industry regularly suffer (or are even incentivized to actively put themselves through). And the third, of course, is gamers themselves; it's an odd phenomenon but where gamers as a group once seethed at the lack of recognition of their preferred artistic medium and ranted against elitist disdain, today they actively reject the label of art, because with artistic recognition comes artistic critique, and the dread specter of 'politics in our video games,' so now they've formed up ranks as dutiful soldiers of social disdain for video games.
All of this is to say, we should be looking at Grand Theft Auto V and interrogate its artistic message, its aesthetics, its production, its marketing, with as much, indeed with more intensity and social interest as we do The Godfather or (perhaps more directly analogous) Avatar 2: The Way of Water. And the same is true of any and all video games. They are both objects of art showing incredible innovation, and objects of economics shifting around gargantuan amounts of money, money for which they are vastly overlooked and under-regulated.
But of course, this is not just a matter of social disdain, old people stuck in backwards attitude, and corporate attempts at passing under the radar. The simple fact is, to experience 2001: A Space Odyssey (widely considered one of the best films of all time), all you have to do is sit your ass down for 139 minutes and not get distracted by your phone, and you will get to experience the entirety of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, down to its last detail, in full and regardless of your abilities (not accounting for disabilities such as blindness, of course). But in order to fully experience what I personally consider to be one of my top 3 best games of all time, Disco Elysium, you would need to commit to at least 20 hours, probably more like 30 hours, to immersing yourself into it and actively participating in the game by registering inputs and making character-based decisions. This is a significantly taller ask! And Disco Elysium is (for all that it will crush your heart in its gentle grip) one of the easier ones to actually engage with, because it lacks combat and is pretty much an isometric visual novel with skill rolls that the game handles for you. If you want to experience, say, Final Fantasy VII, you will actually have to execute commands and follow a strategy of battle in order to win fights, and doing so will take you dozens of hours. To us in this thread, FF7 is mostly incredibly easy, but for someone who doesn't play video games at all? This could be a pretty significant obstacle! To say nothing of, say, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which may be literally impossible to see the fullness of for people who can't meet a certain level of required mechanical execution (like me; I never beat Sword Saint Isshin). But even for games we'd consider 'easy', there are people who have literally never held a controller in their life, and for whom the concept of 'holding the stick forward moves forward, you must press a key to interact with an object,' or at a more abstract layer, 'it is desirable to enter, and win, fights', is completely novel and unprecedented, and will require active effort to deal with an adjustment period. (Razbuten has an interesting video about watching his wife play through Hollow Knight after essentially never touching a video game in her life; it is really interesting).
Anybody can watch The Godfather in an afternoon, regardless of their background. Having a film education will likely increase what you get out of the experience of watching it, but 'watching the entirety of The Godfather' is an experience that is available to anyone who can meet the financial requirements of owning a screen device. All video games, however, have a basic layer of interactivity that puts up a much higher requirement to experience them - you have to actually register inputs required by the game to advance through its experience. Some will even require specific skills, and some may effectively be gated by some nebulous capacity that has never mattered in your life before, like your 'reaction speed.' And to top it off, most video games will require five times, ten times, a hundred times the amount of time investment that watching The Godfather requires!
Completely outside of any considerations of social standing and artistic recognition, there is an intrinsic obstacle standing firmly in the way of greater permeation of video games in our culture, and slowing down the aforementioned artistic recognition, and it's that barrier to entry. And it's likely unsolvable - with the caveat that it seems like, increasingly, streamers are becoming a means for people who won't or can't play certain video games to experience them vicariously; it's an interesting development, but for demographic reasons most people who do that are already video game players who happen to be unable to play that particular game, rather than 60-year old grandmas who are getting into The Last of Us by watching anime girls play it on YouTube.
But it's frustrating, to me, because there are a few video games that I will hold out as belonging among the pantheon of the greatest works of modern art made by human hands. Perhaps not equal to the Sistine Chapel, but easily able to stand alongside The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. And it is not, to my mind, those games that are trying to be movies - I absolutely did enjoy The Last of Us, and I think it was a great video game, but it's a video game that's trying so hard to be a movie that it ends up being a great story, an okay game, and a bad film. No: I'm talking about games that are actually fully embracing being video games and are excelling as video games, as ludic experiences, as stories told through interaction. And I know that I will never be able to convince a high art critic that a short video game about weird blue people rendered in simple graphics using starships made out of wood planks to hop between tiny toy planets is a work of art that deserves to stand as an equal to Casablanca or Apocalypse Now, but it doesn't matter.
Oh yeah. Dragon's Lair, 1982, LaserDisc in an arcade machine. Night Trap appeared on the Sega Genesis CD in 1992 for home consoles. They're very much the predecessors to Quantic Dream's "interactive stories."
Thank you for the kind words! I'm happy that you found the effort useful.
I don't know if I'd be able to do the same for FFIX - that game has the best Italian localization I've ever seen, using dialects correctly to great effect and in a way that I wouldn't know how to render back in English - but for Final Fantasy Tactics, I can probably go through whichever translation you end up not choosing; seeing as it's the most talked about thing about the WotL version, it probably ought to be presented for comparison's sake. As I said, LFT can be played with both, and I'm always up for going through the game once again.
Speaking of which, would you like for me to make a more holistic case for why I think that applying the LFT mod to the game would be a best way to play FFT, and be equivalent to having a remaster, or have you already made up your mind to go with the original PSX version of the game?
I can provide a complete overview of why I think that using the mod be a good idea while keeping the discussion of mechanics minimal so that it doesn't spoil anything, while also including a detailed analysis under spoilers so that people who have played the original but not the mod can judge for themselves the merit of my arguments and chime in with a "that sounds legit" or "that's nonsense" that would give you a larger opinion pool without spoiling stuff. However, it'd be a bit of a long post requiring some effort, so I'd rather be sure that it would matter before doing the work - there's no point to it if it's not going to affect the decision of what will be played.
Tactics has a lot of jank that mods fix ,it feels against the spirit of things to try an change it like that. Its part of why tactics has so many mods. Tho the jank is less apparent if you don't grind, tbh but that causes its own problems arguably.
Thank you for the kind words! I'm happy that you found the effort useful.
I don't know if I'd be able to do the same for FFIX - that game has the best Italian localization I've ever seen, using dialects correctly to great effect and in a way that I wouldn't know how to render back in English - but for Final Fantasy Tactics, I can probably go through whichever translation you end up not choosing; seeing as it's the most talked about thing about the WotL version, it probably ought to be presented for comparison's sake. As I said, LFT can be played with both, and I'm always up for going through the game once again.
Speaking of which, would you like for me to make a more holistic case for why I think that applying the LFT mod to the game would be a best way to play FFT, and be equivalent to having a remaster, or have you already made up your mind to go with the original PSX version of the game?
I can provide a complete overview of why I think that using the mod be a good idea while keeping the discussion of mechanics minimal so that it doesn't spoil anything, while also including a detailed analysis under spoilers so that people who have played the original but not the mod can judge for themselves the merit of my arguments and chime in with a "that sounds legit" or "that's nonsense" that would give you a larger opinion pool without spoiling stuff. However, it'd be a bit of a long post requiring some effort, so I'd rather be sure that it would matter before doing the work - there's no point to it if it's not going to affect the decision of what will be played.
Knock yourself out, but do be aware that it may still end up in me reading it and still deciding I value the original experience of the game as released over an objectively more enjoyable gameplay experience and going with the unmodded game anyway.
(I did play the Pixel Remasters, rather than emulated versions of the original NES/SNES games, so it's entirely possible I *do* decide to go with mods that improve quality of life, but also the PSX era is right into my nostalgia striking zone and I find it valuable to revisit games of that era as they were as a kind of like, personal retrospective.)
Knock yourself out, but do be aware that it may still end up in me reading it and still deciding I value the original experience of the game as released over an objectively more enjoyable gameplay experience and going with the unmodded game anyway.
(I did play the Pixel Remasters, rather than emulated versions of the original NES/SNES games, so it's entirely possible I *do* decide to go with mods that improve quality of life, but also the PSX era is right into my nostalgia striking zone and I find it valuable to revisit games of that era as they were as a kind of like, personal retrospective.)
Mods have a tendency to change tactics a fair bit in practice due to what they do, it would likely create a different experience that alters the retrospective, psx vs wotl also has quite a few balance changes in its own right. The mods changes are also more impactfull for veterans of the game then first timers. Not sure how much the thread should say about certain mechanics tbh too given the game has a hard time of explaining the rules.
Mods have a tendency to change tactics a fair bit in practice due to what they do, it would likely create a different experience that alters the retrospective, psx vs wotl also has quite a few balance changes in its own right. The mods changes are also more impactfull for veterans of the game then first timers. Not sure how much the thread should say about certain mechanics tbh too given the game has a hard time of explaining the rules.
Tbf, a lot of the WotL balance changes are reverting back the changes that PSX FFT made when they released the foreign versions.
Not that either game is particularly grindy imo, it mostly depends on your opinion on difficulty of tactics games (and your tolerance for game over screens) for how much grinding you do.
Tbf, a lot of the WotL balance changes are reverting back the changes that PSX FFT made when they released the foreign versions.
Not that either game is particularly grindy imo, it mostly depends on your opinion on difficulty of tactics games (and your tolerance for game over screens) for how much grinding you do.
Moreso, that grindings allows for combos that snap the game in half, the xp difference is notable if you play it like fire emblem game.
True, only really 3 really notable combat balance change in the game the removal of summoner buff , the nerf of magic guns and the buffing of the charecters you get at the end of chapter 3 into something resembling usability, in practice only the first matters to most people. Wotl does add more barrier to changing classes in increasing requirements across the board.
Additionally, in the psx version you can steal the equipment of a certain lategame boss due to the steal restriction being removed for some reason which is cute.
Outer Wilds is a super interesting example to end your post with, because even I as a seasoned veteran of video games didn't manage to fully experience it.
Its design philosophy of 'No quicktravel, no quicksaves and only a single respawn point on the entire map' simply proved to be too tedious for my brain.
I managed to get far enough that I can recognize its beauty, though, and I really hope that there will be a remaster with some QoL changes (that will probably all be hated by the original fanbase) at some point in the future.
Honestly, the closest thing I've hears to a game being quoted is memetic popularity of Undertale's version of Megalovania. Which is not quite the same.
