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

I feel like discussing mind control is potentially spoiler territory, so I'll put it under spoiler, although I don't think anything I'm saying here is actually a spoiler. I just want to be on the safe side.
As far as I can remember (and I might easily be misremembering, so don't take my word for it), there's exactly only one person in the entire game who claims that Golbez was using mind control on them. I would also point to Rosa, Cid, the need to replace the king with a fake, the choice of "create an army and use it to invade everywhere" as the means of obtaining the crystals rather than "just mind control people into handing them over", and many more contextual cues yet to come, as reason why the "mind control" theory, at this point in the game and without any spoilers, appears suspect. Especially when we had the perfect chance for it to be employed here, with Yang, only for the game to go "nope, no mind control here, that was a silly supposition".

So... just saying... I have my doubts about the mind control theory. Maybe the game will prove me wrong; my memory is known (to me) to be weak and I might just not be remembering a specific scene that made it fully unambiguous, outside of that one character. But from what I remember, no mind control was involved at any point in all of FFIV, and the likelihood that the character who claimed it was would be lying is so huge, I always took that as a given. After all, as we just saw last update: Cecil will believe anything, if it comes from somebody they have the tiniest reason to trust, and he's especially prone to seeing the best in people who really don't deserve the benefit of doubt.
Much as it's prooooobably skirting on the edge of spoilers to keep discussing it even in spoiler tags:
While I can't speak for the 2D versions, at least in the 3D remake version of FFIV said character who claims mind control does, in fact, show signs of being mind controlled. The FFIV 3D has this little feature where whenever you bring up the menu, whichever character is currently leading the party has a little thought bubble of "oh hey what are they currently mulling about" and said character has at two different points in the game, thoughts along the lines of "mrggagaggg get out of my heaaaaaad", one in particular right before a mind control scene.

So at that point it's more just an argument of "is this what the writers originally intended?" since I have no idea if it's the same writing cast decades later who made the 3D remake or anything like that.
 
Darn my empty wallet and not being able to even buy the base FFXIV past the trial. Imma gonna have to look up an LP to keep up with the spoilers eventually, don't I?

Zerban out here reminding me that there's totally multiple SNES RPG with a straight up "let's just cuck the player lmao" to the point that old Japanese forums apparently had a listing of "the three worst most eviliest women in Square RPGs" because they kept getting cucked. Which you know, on one hand kinda incel shit, but on the other, kinda hilarious that it happened multiple times. One in particular I guarantee you was even 110% the writer's fetish with how hard it goes.
Wait wait, this was a trend!?

... I'm glad I don't remember playing anything like that other than FFIV, but now I'm kinda curious, can you tell which games did this crap?

@Egleris @McFluffles
I distinctly remember at least the GBA version having some token confirmation that there was "some" MC. YMMV on how much you'd trust that version of the text, because by that time it might as well have been the translation team being told to confirm it because people didn't like the implications since SNES.
 
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I'm not hugely familiar with FFXIV. Are the multiple jobs thing a purely gameplay concept, or is there some lore attached to it? If the latter, perhaps you can play on it?

In any case, you probably want to carefully curate the available jobs to make them distinct both personality-wise and mechanically. Like, there is a bunch of different mage jobs, and they probably all can act as Encyclopedia when it comes to arcane matters, so you need something to make each truly unique and minimize the overlap.

(As an alternative, you can always lean into Dark Knight's tendency to cast shadows representing aspects of their psyche.)
So, the way FFXIV jobs work is that each one has a storyline exclusive to this class, featuring a job mentor and some NPCs who, while not necessarily unique to the job, are most prominently featured there and bit players in the rest of the game. The way it's designed is so that at least one of your character jobs is going to be levelled up at the same time as you progress the main story of the game, such that your class/job story and the main story of the game kind of blend together.

So for instance, Mimi Parmentier, my character, arrived in the forest nation of Gridania as an inexperienced Lancer just looking to become an adventurer. She applied at the Lancer's Guild, and started doing odd jobs around the forest to make a name for herself while having a rivalry with another, more evil Lancer. Eventually, she started getting real notice for her deeds, and to be a prime target for recruitment by the military companies of the continent. Having settled her rivalry in a final duel and learned everything the Lancer's Guild had to teach her (which incidentally involved being confronted with the institutional racism of Gridania and the perfectly legitimate anger of its minority under class and then failing to address it in a systemic level in any way because ARR isn't where the writing is good), she left for broader horizons, eventually making her way to Coerthas, a snowy landscape home to the Dragoons, an order of elite lancers trained to fight dragons, and changed from Lancer, a base class, to Dragoon, the advanced job version of it, and started a whole drama around a stolen dragon eye and a renegade Dragoon she also had to face in a final duel to prove herself the better Dragoon.

Every job has a storyline like this, and chronologically they're meant to take place at certain points in the story. For instance, if you're lv 80 on your main job and three expacs into the main storyline, when you pick up the Thaumaturge (later Black Mage) job at lv 1, you're meant to treat this as something that happened relatively early in your career, a few story arcs ago, when you were an adventurer of little renown. Meanwhile, the Dark Knight, a job which is only unlocked after lv 50, has a storyline written under the assumption that you've been through the whole storyline of the base game, but not much more than that - it's implicitly written to take place around the Heavensward expansion, and doesn't make as much sense if you treat it as having happened after Endwalker, the latest expansion.

So every job has its own storyline and its own emotional and thematic "vibe." White Mage is about tradition, the old ways, harmony with nature, bringing things into their proper order. Lancer is about the the thin line between courage and recklessness, due caution and timidity, while Dragoon is about how the pursuit of revenge makes of us monsters equal to the ones we sought to hunt in the first place. You could easily turn each of these into a Disco Elysium style "voice"... Provided you played every class in the game, which I absolutely haven't.
 
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... I guess I'm kinda glad I don't remember playing anything like that other than FFIV, but now I'm kinda curious, can you tell which games did this crap?
To be fair, only two actually come to mind, and both were Japan-exclusive games that never got translations so you probably wouldn't have played them. That said:
The main one I mentioned is Bahamut Lagoon. Which I haven't actually played, but oh boy does this article lay out how hard the game goes on "whoops your childhood friend fell in love with someone else and cucks you hard". The other is in one of the story scenarios for Live a Live, and I won't say much more there since it just got a remake and also got released in english for the first time, and is 100% worth playing and one of my favorite games of this year. Can probably look up details elsewhere if you don't want to play it yourself, just be warned it'll probably intersect with some major spoilers for the game.
 
(which incidentally involved being confronted with the institutional racism of Gridania and the perfectly legitimate anger of its minority under class and then failing to address it in a systemic level in any way because ARR isn't where the writing is good)
Yeah, LNC is definitely one of the weaker story-lines in the game.
 
Sadly, the only Final Fantasy I had before FFVIII was Mystic Quest, which I'm not particularly expecting to be played in this thread. Would be a fun interlude of sorts though since iirc it's a pretty short game, and it's fun seeing Square going "okay so Americans are like... really dumb, we gotta make a easy baby Action RPG game specifically for them right?"
I was seven years old and FFMQ was my first FF game, which in retrospect I appreciate, because I quite liked it and retain fond memories of it.

Replaying it was staggeringly disappointing. Just queue up the soundtrack and go step on an anthill.
 
So I have to spend nearly all the cash I have accumulated over the course of the game on equipping him in Light/Knight equipment that Mysidia's gear shop inexplicably sell.
I distinctly remember being excessively amused by the guy in the armour shop who mocks you for trying to buy stuff you'd need to be a paladin to use because clearly Cecil could never complete the trial, then when you show up as a paladin later he starts up the same spiel only to realize midway through that you actually have become a paladin.

Also, I suppose it's worth mentioning something in the original SNES localization that actually sorta approached being clever which is how the handled the names of the Dark Knight equipment. In that version the set you start with is listed as Shadow equipment, then the set in the waterway is the Darkness set, then the set at Fabul is called the Black set. So your gear gets thematically darker as it gets stronger.
It takes about fifteen seconds and a few feet's walk for Palom and Porom, the literal children, to split off and tell Baigan that his acting fucking sucks and no one is buying it.
Incidentally, in the j2e fan translation they say his acting's worse than William Shatner. Which was almost certainly them trying to be like Working Designs because that company's scripts were almost universally praised back in the day.

As you can see from these numbers, I hardly even broke a sweat.
I remember Cagnazzo being the weakest elemental lord in every version of this game I've played. Hell, even the DS version couldn't manage to make him threatening.
 
Seeing this backstory laid out for your character makes me feel bad, because mine is he got on the wrong coach.

I'm not kidding, I completely failed at basic English comprehension and somehow thought the Conjurer was the Black Mage path and wound up being a very neurotic healer. After finishing the Gridania stuff I decided I was going to do the Black Mage stuff now.

And wound up repeating the mistake with Arcanist.

R'atoh Kel should not be in charge of planning a holiday.
 
... We did neither of those things. Those were both done by Stephanivien, an entirely separate character.
Granted, MCH has the entirely separate issue of having its questlines all revolve around "guns... cool" despite half the job being about managing your turret / robot.
I thought heavensward said that the crystal was blank ? *shrug* but I never did much with the class so I clearly missremember that.
 
I thought heavensward said that the crystal was blank ? *shrug* but I never did much with the class so I clearly missremember that.
It is blank, as is the Blue Mage crystal. The WoL just didn't make it, it was gifted to us by Stephanivien so that we could fill it out with the techniques we learned and invented. One day it will be passed down to the next generation of Machinists and become just like a regular Soul Crystal.
 
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So with all these doppleganger monsters about, is this even Kain we've been seeing post Bomb Ring? I haven't played the game, but these monsters keep coming up enough to be a pattern.
 
So if I Dispel the central Reflect, Baigan then casts Reflect on his main body… And on both his arms, where Reflect bounces off Reflect, and applies to two random party members. At which point, healing spells targeted at these characters bounce off and apply to Baigan.
I have to wonder whether this was actually intended, or if they realized the coding worked out this way in playtesting and said "Sure, why not, roll with it."

I can't help but notice the only previous iteration of Reflect, in FF3, was so buggy it didn't work when cast on allies nor did the counterspell work to break it on enemies.
 
I am 90% sure he's not gonna make it past a dramatic fight with Golbez in which he sacrifices his life to use Meteor, which has dramatic effects but fails to actually kill his foe.

It's a classic bit.

Cecil: "Tellah, didn't you hear what the Mysidian elder said? Your body can't take casting Meteor!"
Tellah: "I'd handle it."
Cecil: "Handle it how?"
Tellah: "By intervening."
Cecil: "But what would you do?"
Tellah: "I'd step in."

Cecil's true power is not his connection to light or dark, but his immense Dad Energy.

And here we see one more thing FF14 borrowed from FF4 - Gaius, like Cecil, will see an unsecured minor and go "hm, I'm a father now"
And yet!

Look at his record on kids surviving his care!

As far as he's aware right now, he's batting 3 for 3 on dead children!

so as i was saying gaius is a lot like cecil-
 
Speaking of the Devil's Road, I distinctly recall at least one version of the game saying that it's named as such because it's very draining and exhausting to use, according to a NPC nearby.

Which made me worried about it, but as it turns out this has zero gameplay or story impact, and you can zip back and forth between Baron and Mysidia any time you want via the Devil's Road, should you wish. (There's no actual reason to do so, but it's an option.)

I don't know if this warning is still present in the Pixel Remaster. I think it was in the SNES translation and the 3D remake, but as mentioned, it's just flavour text.
 

Remember that song I'm posting verses of? It spoils that part as well. IIRC the 3d version introduced more context on it as well.

Yeah, it's going to be complicated.

@Adloquium IIRC, one of the scenes basically went 'you're a Paladin now so you'll be fine'. Which tbh, fits in with the fact Cecil's little class change becomes a straight upgrade even if starting at level 1.
 
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Hmmm.... Serpent Trench?
Ring a ding ding.

To be fair, only two actually come to mind, and both were Japan-exclusive games that never got translations so you probably wouldn't have played them. That said:

Damn, I actually remember playing a bit of BL. And the article is certainly interesting in so far as it explains how the game tries to use the NTRing as both a constructive life lesson and possibly a venting method for a Square staffer.

... When I woke up today I didn't expect to sincerely mix the words "NTR" and "constructive life lesson" but here we are and I guess there's no turning back.

Cecil: "Tellah, didn't you hear what the Mysidian elder said? Your body can't take casting Meteor!"
Tellah: "I'd handle it."
Cecil: "Handle it how?"
Tellah: "By intervening."
Cecil: "But what would you do?"
Tellah: "I'd step in."
And what did we learn today, children? Sometimes you can't convince a motherfucker of abandoning revenge. Sometimes you can't even stop them from enacting revenge. Remember to always nod politely to their arguments about the subject, and stay at a reasonable security distance when all shit goes down so you can pick the sad, sad pieces.
 
More reports from the FFI mines:

Nearly done, but I decided I wanted to 100% the achievements. This means I need to finish the bestiary. This means I needed to fight the Warmech. This means I spent literally hours and went from level 48 to level 62 looking for the blasted thing. Got 'em eventually though!

(Autobattle of 3 x Attack, 1 x Use Healing Staff is actually super effective grinding on the bridge, at least.)
 
More reports from the FFI mines:

Nearly done, but I decided I wanted to 100% the achievements. This means I need to finish the bestiary. This means I needed to fight the Warmech. This means I spent literally hours and went from level 48 to level 62 looking for the blasted thing. Got 'em eventually though!

(Autobattle of 3 x Attack, 1 x Use Healing Staff is actually super effective grinding on the bridge, at least.)
Every day I am thankful I was born immune to completionism and have never felt the urge to chase an achievement.
 
Every day I am thankful I was born immune to completionism and have never felt the urge to chase an achievement.

TBF the rest of the achievements are stuff you'd absolutely get during a typical game playthrough other than, like, the 'get all chests' one which you do need to backtrack after you get the key for.

(This is much better than the achievements for later games - I think FFIII has an insane one for maxing levelling every single job.)
 
I'll sometimes try for an achievement if it's about challenge and/or skill and I'm invested in the game. Probably the hardest one of those I've done recently was the 32 heat run in Hades, which there isn't even an actual Steam achievement for (and there is one for 16 heat if memory serves), you just get the last of Skelly's prizes.

Things like completing the bestiary or item catalog or other shit that's just grinding and RNG I find incredibly dull.

Though sometimes, that kind of thing can just serve as a kind of road map, like how in the Trails in the Sky trilogy, every single treasure chest has a snarky response if you check it again after looting it, and that's not made explicit anywhere in the game, but there is an achievement for getting them all.
 
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