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

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Final Fantasy IV, Epilogue, Part 1
  • Threadmarks
    • It's time for the epilogue, and this part, at least, has no faults.

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    The Lunar Whale returns to its slumber beneath the waves. What plays out next is a series of individual vignettes in a sweet "where are they now" montage of all the characters and where they are now in life.






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    Palom is being irresponsible, Porom whacks him on the head, the Elder scolds him and says "it will be years before you're half the sage Tellah was" and assigns him extra training.

    Meanwhile, Edge is being a shit:

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    He promises (unconvincingly) to shape up, but remarks to himself that he can't stop thinking about Rydia.


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    Edge.

    Meanwhile, Leviathan and Asura are doting over Rydia while she's providing guidance to monster kids:






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    I get what she's going for but it's pretty funny in the context of how Cecil's atonement literally came with a change from spooky terrifying dark knight to shining bishounen paladin.

    Meanwhile, Yang has found his wife again, and the King of Fabul actually stepped down to give him the throne:







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    As for Edward, he appears to have recruited the help of the Troian clerics (you can see them in the upper side of this image) to help rebuild Castle Damcyan with whatever survivors are left:







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    Edward is one of my favorite characters in this game for what little screentime he has overall, and one of my big regrets is not realizing earlier that he had more dialogue if you kept him updated about your journey during his convalescence in Troia.

    As for the dwarves, they've decided to make a huge decision in the wake of newfound peacet:






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    Ooooh, crowning ceremony.

    Kain apparently still isn't over his betrayal of Cecil and Rosa, and has decided to take some time off to reflect - and the game decides to be cheeky; Kain is the only party member who's spent his entire time with a helmet concealing his features, so we never saw his face, and in the epilogue he finally takes off said helmet, only…




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    Lmao. He's just staring out at the world with his luxurious hair flowing in the wind without turning his face to the camera. Funny as shit.

    And then we have this absolutely baffling development:



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    The Red Moon leaves Earth's orbit and flies off into outer space, to seek out what I assume to be new horizons. It was foreshadowed by the prophecy and I expressed my disbelief then, but this is still kind of baffling.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • Final Fantasy IV, Epilogue, Concluded
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    • Split for length again...









    The exchange "Come on, Rosa!" "Please, just call me Rosa." makes me think someone fucked up in the translation.






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    Cecil and Rosa head down and stand before Baron's throne, its new rulers by popular acclaim, and the final scene of the game plays out entirely without dialogue. In a genuinely impressive feat of blocking, the games use the character sprites to convey everyone's entrance one by one in a way that befits them. It's hard to reproduce with limited screenshots, though, so I'll do my best to describe them, but I encourage you to look for that scene online:


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    Edge enters, greets Cecil, greets Rosa, then immediately pivots to take Rosa aside and talk to her one-on-one like the flirt he is before Cid drags him forcibly into line.

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    The King of Dwarves addresses the new king and queen, but his daughter goes off to the side, no doubt to hear Edge's self-aggrandizing tales of his own heroics, before going up to Cecil and Rosa and spend too long talking to them, until her father has to get her and bring her in line to free up the monarchs.

    Yang arrives in a sober fashion and greets the monarchs without fanfare, which is appropriate to his character but also kind of echoes the fact that there wasn't much going with him in the story.




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    Porom and Palom enter the room, Porom restrained and gracious as usual, Palom as hyperactive as ever, jumping and doing loops and finally ending up standing on the throne before his sister whacks him over the head and drags him into line. They are followed by the Mysidian elder, who looks around the room to greet everyone and/or take stock of how far the Dark Knight of old has come, before Palom once again veers off-track to go chat up the dwarven princess and Porom has to get him back again.

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    Edward, always the popular bard wherever he goes, enters the room, greets the monarchs, and then turns around to face and waves at the crowd.

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    Rydia enters the room, greets Cecil first, then does a little twirl around Rosa communicating a kind of "Giiiirl!" excitement that this is Her Big Day and she looks splendid. Then she goes over to greet Edge, who turns away in flustered embarrassment, his crush having apparently escalated to the point where he is no longer capable of dopey flirting and instead struggles to even talk to Rydia or look at her directly.

    And with Rydia taking her place, everyone moves to the center of the room, turns around to face the camera, and raises their hands into acclaim - for the new monarchs, the new era of peace, and you, the player.


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    And that, my friends, is the last frame of Final Fantasy IV.

    So long.


    Conclusion

    What a beautiful mess of a game.

    Final Fantasy IV is a wildly ambitious work. It was clear ever since FF2 that the series' developer had grand ambitions to tell epic, world-spanning stories of war and loss, with strong characters, great sacrifices, constant twists and turns, and cosmic scales. They were severely curtained in their ambitions by limited hardware, perhaps lack of experience, perhaps lacking the right creative minds at the time. With FFIV, they step into a new generation of console gaming and deliver on that dream, even if they sometimes trips on rakes in the process. It fails in part because it succeeds in so many places, because it attempts so much. The character writing is completely beyond any of the previous games, even where it falters - Edge is irritating, Rosa's character is "woman," Yang's stoic forthrightness doesn't have much else going for it, Kain's not nearly as cool as he could have been, but Tellah's wrath, Edward's struggle with grief and finding his courage, Cecil's journey to Paladinhood, Palom and Porom's dynamic, Rydia's introduction all more than make up for it. Mechanically we're entering a brave new world; I'm still not sold on ATB adding much worthwhile, but the new depth of gameplay in the bosses and their unique mechanics is just what the series needed to shake up a formula that was growing stale by the end of FF3, even if it doesn't always work. The Lunarians are fascinating in how huge of a concept they are, even if their integration into the plot is messy and half-baked and leave a thousand questions (who the hell built all this Lunarian stuff we keep tripping over if only three Lunarians in history were ever active, etc) that the game doesn't seem like it's really considered would arise.

    I would say that FFIV is a game that starts stronger than it ends. That could be a damning criticism, but it starts so strong that by the end, it still lands on "pretty good."

    I don't have as unambiguously positive feelings about it than I do about FF3 If Everything Between Xande And Cloud Of Darkness Was More Sensibly Handled, but a lot of the negative feelings I have are about stuff that wouldn't even be there in FF3 (Edge kind of sucks but the fact that he kind of sucks is directly tied to him being an actual character instead of a blank slate), or that were bold for even being attempted. And the game is full of iconic story moment, whether that's entering battle with Rydia, Cecil's transformation into a Paladin, Tellah beating Golbez's ass, and so on.

    It's good. I liked it.

    Next up: Final Fantasy V.
     
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    • Yeah that's about where I fall on the game. It has a lot of moments of genuine ludokino that exceed what many games accomplish now but it also has some incredible, truly embarrassing misses. FF3 may force you to eat an entire block of unsliced cheese all in one sitting right at the very end, but FF4 dripfeeds you baffling insanity and then does a Family Guy Death Pose like half its cast at the very end - bad, but in a unique and novel way that doesn't ruin it so much as make it taste real weird on the way down. And also I still think ATB is the Devil and the game would've been better with a normal turnbased system but I guess we'll both see if ATB gets better in subsequent entries.
     
    FFIV seems like it's about 70-80% "good plot, good game, good mechanics" and 20-30% "why the fuck would you do this," which are the two general experiences I associate with Final Fantasy (in varying percentages per game).

    Great run, though. I love the ruminations on the plot.
     
    Its been interesting seeing the earlier games. But I can't lie and say I'm not more excited to see you get to my first final fantasy now. See how well the ol memory holds up.
     
    Omicron said:
    ROSA IS NOW THE STRONGEST WHITE MAGE IN THE UNIVERSE
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    It's what she deserves.

    Also: Cecil and Rosa in matching outfits, dawww.

    ...

    Look.

    Is Final Fantasy 4 a perfect game? Yes. No.

    Do I care? No. I love this game, it shaped the kind of games and stories I liked as a kid, through the D&D games I played as an adult. Cecil and Golbez are still two of my favorite hero/villain combos in videogames. I have a tremendous nostalgia for FF4 even now, such that within moments of the announcement that the Lunar Whale was coming to FF14 my entire discord started pinging me screaming to come look (much as he went through, at least Cecil never had to deal with an orbital whale bus full of 7 passengers spamming memes and arguing about the latest movies while on the way to the next treasure map, although I'm sure Edge and Kain and Palom and probably Rydia would if given half a chance).
     
    That was an interesting go. It's impressive how much this title in the series innovates in terms of storytelling and depicting emotional intensity, and even now the start has some really efficient storytelling and very effective use of game mechanics to deliver elements of the narrative. Of course later it has all the increasingly convoluted character decisions and sike deaths, but it's still really cool.

    It's very curious to compare this game to elements in FF XIV's Endwalker expansion borrowed from it, actually, but what stands out to me is everyone coming back for a hurrah in the climax of IV contrasted to
    the sequence of sacrifices that precede everyone coming back in the climax of the Ultima Thule zone.
     
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    Fun Fact- depending on the version of The After Years you play, Rosa may or may not have been pregnant in that final scene, and possibly even the final battle (which certainly casts the stay in the kitchen moment in a new light).

    See, the sequel takes place 17 years later. Its viewpoint character (more of a supporting protagonist than a main character) is Ceodore, Cecil and Rosa's son, who was almost certainly named after Golbez' real name. He is, in the Japanese cell phone and Wii versions of the sequel, 17 years old.


    At some point between the Wii and PSP releases they realized what a 17 year old protagonist after a 17 year timeskip implied, and quietly pretended he (and Yang's daughter Ursula, also originally 17) were 14 this whole time and stuck with the 14 age for later releases I think.
     
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    Ah, FF5. The first time I tried it, I bounced off it hard. Maybe because I over-focused on the Blue Mage. So when I tried again, I read a guide to building characters, which I think in retrospect was based on the assumption that you'd just grind a class to max level before you did anything else, and I have no idea why anyone would play a game that way. Besides, Monks are boring. Regardless, I got to a certain point in the early game and found I had no idea how to use my current characters to complete the next dungeon. I wasn't technically soft locked, but I cared little enough about the story thus far that I quit.

    The third time I tried the game, I started by skimming the wiki and some speedrunning guides. Learning how a mechanic works by trial and error can be fun some of the time, but not at the scale of FF5, not for me. I suspect Omicron's experience with other FF games like 14 means he won't be as clueless about what various abilities do as I was at the time. Regardless, I'll summarize what I learned in a spoiler:

    There's basically zero reason to level up White Mage, because you can get through almost every fight without healing spells, the heal staff is OP, out of combat healing doesn't require a leveled White Mage, and in the late game Chemist is pretty great.
    Having a 'tank' who can use the knight's cover ability to protect near-death allies is nice, but not required.
    You'll want multiple characters to level Black Mage a bit, because equipping black magic boosts your casting stats for other kinds of magic, especially Ninja scrolls.
    Having one character play Thief for most of the game is nice because you're probably going to want to skip some random battles (though the Ninja can do the same thing), hidden passages are a thing, there's plenty of stuff to steal, sprinting saves you time wasted walking around towns, and of course all that combat speed is nice for using items.
    As soon as you can get a Time Mage, do so, and keep them for most of the game. Haste, slow, cutting enemy HP by 3/4, the untyped comet spell? Time magic is amazing. You can also cheese certain battles by casting Mute so that no one is allowed to cast spells.
    Blue magic isn't worth the trouble unless you really want to dedicate yourself to it. It's only powerful if you know exactly where and when to get the spells you need.
    The Samurai's Gil Toss ability is basically paying money to skip boss fights when you get it, and is still pretty powerful later on. It's usually more cost-effective than beating a boss by spending a bunch of Phoenix downs. The same cost-benefit ratio applies to Ninja throw and breaking mage staves.
    Switching one character to Freelancer so they can use all your best stuff is a reasonable solution to some boss fights, just don't forget to switch classes again afterward.
    You're going to want to use Bard in places with a lot of undead.
    Seriously, the Chemist's Mix ability makes it an amazing class.
    If you're killing yourself, you might be wearing the Bone Mail.

    Anyway, I got maybe 2/3 of the way through the game before I got bored. There were some fun moments, but I liked FF4 better. I hear a lot of people really like the game's final boss, but somehow I just got to a point where I didn't care. To be fair to 5, I quit 6 shortly after the midpoint and I never bothered beating the final boss of any FF game, so I think maybe I just don't care about the endgames of jRPGs in general - not sure why.
     
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    Do you want to be spoiled on how the sequel goes, or are you masochistic enough to want to play it?
     
    Proposal: sequels get played only when they can stand in for an MMO. So, X-2 in place of XI, and XIII-2 and -3 in place of XVI, but not, say, IV-2, or XII-2.

    Dissidia is right out.
     
    Compellor said:
    Blue magic isn't worth the trouble unless you really want to dedicate yourself to it. It's only powerful if you know exactly where and when to get the spells you need.
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    Compellor said:
    Seriously, the Chemist's Mix ability makes it an amazing class.
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    These are both true statements, but it's weird to me that you have such different opinions on the two. Both Blue Magic and Mix are bonkers powerful if you look up the mechanics of how to work them, and incomprehensible nonsense if you're just playing the game.
    Compellor said:
    Anyway, I got maybe 2/3 of the way through the game before I got bored. There were some fun moments, but I liked FF4 better. I hear a lot of people really like the game's final boss, but somehow I just got to a point where I didn't care. To be fair to 5, I quit 6 shortly after the midpoint and I never bothered beating the final boss of any FF game, so I think maybe I just don't care about the endgames of jRPGs in general - not sure why.
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    I only beat the final boss because I was participating in the Four Job Fiesta. The ending is pretty uninteresting, and frankly the story is fairly bland in general. Though the GBA translation at least brings some life to the characters.

    It's the mechanics of 5 that I really love.
     
    Zap Rowsdower said:
    Do you want to be spoiled on how the sequel goes, or are you masochistic enough to want to play it?
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    After Years retreads so much ground that it doesn't seem worth adding to the LP except for yep, Calcabrina, and some of the more deranged endgame spoilers

    Onto FFV, however. This one might be objectively inferior to its successor (IMO), but it's the nearest and dearest to my heart of all the FF games until VII. It's just... really neat what the game does.
     
    Amidatelion said:
    After Years retreads so much ground that it doesn't seem worth adding to the LP except for yep, Calcabrina, and some of the more deranged endgame spoilers

    Onto FFV, however. This one might be objectively inferior to its successor (IMO), but it's the nearest and dearest to my heart of all the FF games until VII. It's just... really neat what the game does.
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    It's also worth mentioning (and on my mind) because the villains feel relevant in a "so this is where XIV got it from" sense.

    Literally nothing until those details is in any way distinct from the original, but that part of the last chapter was apparently interesting enough for Yoshi-P to reference

    Namely, the Meteia are a clear shout out to the Maenads, with echoes of The Creator in Hermes, though with some role trading between the two for the reference version
     
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    Warclam said:
    These are both true statements, but it's weird to me that you have such different opinions on the two. Both Blue Magic and Mix are bonkers powerful if you look up the mechanics of how to work them, and incomprehensible nonsense if you're just playing the game.
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    To me, Blue magic seems hard to use effectively unless you're following a guide for the entire game, whereas the Chemist becomes very powerful even if you only learn a handful of recipes by glancing at a guide the one time.
     
    Could we get some end game stats in the last post of each game? Play time, levels, equipment, that sort of thing, stuck in a spoiler maybe?
     
    Omicron said:
    Let me tell you the story of the Flan Princess.
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    ...

    Omicron said:
    And if you encounter that enemy and defeat it, there is a small, small chance that it will drop an item called a 'Pink Tail.'
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    ... Oh no...


    Omicron said:
    This is going to take up the next two hours of my life.
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    Omi no, why do you hate you-

    Omicron said:
    Do it.

    Over.

    And over.
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    - so much. D:

    Omicron said:
    And then, finally, it drops.
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    *record scratch* Wait. Only after two hours!?

    ... Sweet baby Satan, that's a hell of an improved change. Not that I complain but...

    Omicron said:
    …

    Ha

    Ha

    Hahahahahahahaha
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    PFFFFTFFFFFFT-

    [CONNECTION LOST]

    ps: no notes

    Omicron said:
    Everyone except Edge is at max HP.
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    Shameful dispray, Edge!

    Omicron said:
    Zeromus is just making this up. There is no reason why some Lunarian dude would also be some kind of inherent avatar of human evil who can't perish as long as humanity (not even his own species!) has evil in its heart. He's just saying this to spite us, that dude is 100% dead and I don't care what any sequel says.
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    He salty

    Omicron said:
    Yeah I think the Lunarians are just kind of poorly integrated into the story and its themes. And it's going to become even weirder.
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    Yeah, all that. I might give them the benefit of the doubt and suggest that maybe their intention was less on humans in particulars and more on sapient life at large and it got lost in translation... But dunno. Maybe it's just writing growing pains.

    Omicron said:
    FuSoYa announces that it's time for him to "go home," whatever that means.
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    But why tho, he's not the Poochie here. :V

    Omicron said:
    It's a weird scene, man. I don't know how I feel about it.
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    Yeah, it doesn't sit well with me that the one who was mind-controlled since their earlier teens has to go in self imposed exile because a vague "the evil in all of us" vaguerieness. This is no fucking "Griffith did nothing wrong", man.

    Omicron said:
    Yeah I'm Golbezpilled at this point. I am 100% on the conspiracy theory that Golbez not becoming a playable character was a late-game decision that left a bunch of artifacts in the writing.
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    One of us, one of us...

    Omicron said:
    What a beautiful mess of a game.
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    ^ tl;dr here

    Omicron said:
    Next up: Final Fantasy V.
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    Here it comes, boys, it's "grind yo jobs and love it" time!

    Zap Rowsdower said:
    Fun Fact- depending on the version of The After Years you play, Rosa may or may not have been pregnant in that final scene, and possibly even the final battle (which certainly casts the stay in the kitchen moment in a new light).
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    what the frack

    Compellor said:
    I read a guide to building characters, which I think in retrospect was based on the assumption that you'd just grind a class to max level before you did anything else, and I have no idea why anyone would play a game that way.
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    I am so sorry they took advantage of you like that. Monsters!

    Compellor said:
    Regardless, I'll summarize what I learned in a spoiler:
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    The thing with magic is... that you don't need to grind the jobs from zero to max from the start, because you can only buy magic tier by tier. So you level one character as white magic to WHMlv1, then swap to a different class with the white magic command. You don't need to level it up again until you get to the next magic tier.
    And it's the same with all the classes and their skills.

    Compellor said:
    Having one character play Thief for most of the game is nice because you're probably going to want to skip some random battles
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    Reminder that the Brave Blade vs Chicken Knife is a very real consideration (even if more in a meta minmax sense than anything story wise) for not fleeing from a battle, ever.

    Warclam said:
    I only beat the final boss because I was participating in the Four Job Fiesta. The ending is pretty uninteresting, and frankly the story is fairly bland in general. Though the GBA translation at least brings some life to the characters.

    It's the mechanics of 5 that I really love.
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    Yeah. V was their "let's exercise our mechanics muscles for a while" moment before they went full plot in VI. That said, V benefits a lot from a much more focused cast of characters and not so meandering plot, and that produced quite a number of stellar story moments.
     
    Connelly said:
    Reminder that the Brave Blade vs Chicken Knife is a very real consideration (even if more in a meta minmax sense than anything story wise) for not fleeing from a battle, ever.
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    I guess that's technically another spoiler because I didn't even know that mechanic existed. Quit the game shortly before it became relevant.

    I think where I quit was some dungeon level where almost every encounter was multiple dragons and I struggled to even kill one dragon with my party as it was, unless I wanted to start spending bossfight kinds of money.
     
    FF4 is a damn good game. It suffers on replays because of its rigid structure and how it hooks the player with encounters*, but the first playthrough of it is something else. This is also ATB at its best, as far as I'm concerned, because getting a feeling for correct timing is both harder and more rewarding** than it is in any other iteration of the system and since it's a new system Square went well out of their way to show off and make it a centerpiece of design. Plot-wise, it's not just better than the previous FFs overall, but it had caught up and surpassed boundary pushers like Dragon Quest IV that left FF3 in the dust. Not calling FF4 perfect by any means, but IMO it's one of the only FFs to sport both solid mechanics and a solid plot at the same time and none of the hiccups on either side are bad enough to ruin them.

    * Wander into new area with potentially a new party, get your face kicked in by the new mobs, piece together how to counter specific packs of enemies on the fly while also figuring out any new tools you have, proceed to take them down more and more efficiently as you go through the area. The execution is still fun on a second playthrough because it requires some effort, but it's not the same.
    ** Spells have different delays so picking the right spell for the occasion is huge and most importantly, timing your commands so that you're on guard for enemy attacks as opposed to sitting there waiting reduces your damage intake. It would have been better if enemies had a visible ATB bar so you didn't have to work off of intuition alone, but it is what it is and that was most likely impossible with FF4 due to VRAM considerations.
     
    Omicron said:
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    Omicron said:
    FuSoYa tells the group that he and Golbez are off to spend many years in slumber, and hope the blue planet will be peaceful forevermore (...the implication is that this is on a generational scale, waiting for humanity to evolve, but also he just said that he's looking forward to meeting Cecil again, so???) and the two of them turn away to leave.
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    Wait, why are FuSoYa and Golbez going to sleep, rather than working on waking up the other Lunarians? If you don't want to deal with introducing new characters at this point you could imply it would take a while or whatever, but what reason to the Lunarians have to remain asleep?

    This is probably wrapped up in the thing where the writers apparently got their wires crossed with "the evil in men's hearts" versus "the evil in Lunarian hearts", but it kind of seems like if Golbez wants to atone for... whatever he's responsible for, he could at least try to convince FuSoYa that maybe the good Lunarians might want to contribute something to the rebuilding efforts of all the people who just got attacked by an evil Lunarian.

    Omicron said:
    It's totally understandable that Cecil, on an emotional level, has a hard time forgiving his brother for all the stuff he suffered at his hands even if Golbez wasn't truly responsible, but the way his entire friend group (including Rydia and Edge, who frankly have suffered quite a lot more at Golbez's hands) is just fine with everything and egging Cecil on to just mend bridges it's just…
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    ...Here's a weird question.

    Did Rydia ever explicitly forgive Cecil?

    Like, when kid!Rydia left the party, her and Cecil's interactions still had a lot of meaningful silences on both sides. She returned in the middle of a battle, and cut off Cecil's initial greeting with a line about how they had bigger things to focus on.

    Sure, it's obvious the intent is that they made amends at some point, but it just seems a little striking that essentially all of the character writing focused on Cecil and Rydia's relationship is about her holding him accountable over the wrong he did her, and then this same character just instantly forgives Golbez in the space of one sentence about mind control.
    Omicron said:
    I get what she's going for but it's pretty funny in the context of how Cecil's atonement literally came with a change from spooky terrifying dark knight to shining bishounen paladin.
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    Maybe no one ever explained to Rydia the whole Dark Knight / Paladin thing, and she assumed he just switched armor sets while she was gone.
     
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